Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia's Best-Loved Writer by A. D. P. s> Briggs Pushkin's Hiostrical Imagination by Svetlana s> Evdokimova Pushkin on Literature by Tatiana s> Wolff (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 311 the travestyfrom Scarron(pp. IO8-27), and second, in his use not so much of native Russianmaterialbut a complex systemof recurrentRussianfolkmotifs (PP. 13I-50). The specific nature of Maikov'sburlesque should be sought in these two developments. In general the lexis of Eliseiwith its popular speech and vulgarismsbelongs to the traditionof the travesty,whereas its rhetoricin the sense of its stylistic resourcesand formal structurescomes from the mock heroic (p. 12 i). Hence as well as the burlesquecontrastbetween the elevated and the debased caused by an incongruity between subject and style, Eliseiexhibits an intra-stylistic burlesquecontrast,arisingfroma non-correspondencebetween itslexical and rhetoricallevels (p. I56). Dr Schrubaoffersnew solutionsto severalproblemsof fact and interpretation . The date of Maikov's introduction to masonry is advanced from the beginning of the i770s to the early I76os on the groundsthat symbolismfrom masonic ritual can be recognized in Igrok(pp. 21-28). The composition of JNaloi, which L. N. Maikov and G. A. Gukovskiipresumed to have followed the publication of Elisei in I77I, is assigned instead to four months of the preceding year,January to April I770, firstbecause it refersto V. P. Petrov's tranislationof the Aeneid,which came out in January I770, and second, because, as ProfessorMaria Di Salvo has pointed out, it contains an allusion to Emin's novels inappropriateafterEmin's death in April 1770 (PP. 30-3I). The anonymous verse epistle Poslanie kg. izdateliuTrutnia should be attributed to Maikov rather than to Emin or D. I. Fonvizin on the basis of numerous verbal parallels with Maikov's own poetry (pp. 40-41). A skilfully argued discussion of the date of composition of Eliseirefutes A. V. Zapadov's view that it was alreadycirculatingin manuscriptin I769 (pp. 44-58), and a whole clhapterexplores Mlaikov'sindebtedness to the manuscriptcollection associated with the name of I. S. Barkov(pp. 83-107). W'iththis fresh, penetrating and comprehensive study, Dr Schruba has made a valuable contribution to a too rarelyinvestigatedfield of eighteenthcenituryRussianliterature . Iniiperial College C. L. DRAGE London Briggs,A. D. P. (ed.),Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration ofRussia's Best-Loved Writer. Hazar Publishing,London, 1999. 208 pp. ? I6.99. Evdokimova, Svetlana. Pushkin's Hiostrical Imagination. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. xviii 300pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00. W'Volff, Tatiana. Pushkinon Literature(revised edition). Athlone Press, London, 1999. xxxViii + 554 pp. Footnotes. Bibliographies. Index. k4 .95. THE bicentenary is over and these books, like a score of others, are the spent cartridges left from the battle to get the English-speaking world to recognize Pushkin as a luminary of the same magnitude as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe. They have been backed up by the heavy artillery of translators (some 312 SEER, 79, 2, 200I of whom give an account of their fight in Briggs'celebratoryvolume) and if, afterAntony Wood'sLittleTragedies and BorisGodunov (not to mention the lyrics shortlyto appear)or the FalenEvgenii Onegin, victory is stillnot achieved, and Flaubert'slament 'yournationalpoet is so flat'stillsumsup the reactionof the English- and French-speakingpublic, we shall have to wait for the campaign of 2037 and maintain our faith that the untranslated is not forever demonstrablyuntranslatable. The Briggsvolume may seem a light-weighttome better suited for a radio programme or a series of weekly magazine articles: certainly none of the twenty-threecontributorsevergetsnearthe depthorpersuasivenessof Marina Tsvetaeva's Moi Pushkin(Paris, I937). The preface by Mikhail Gorbachev is sadly preposterous: if he had read more attentively the ten-volume set he claims to have had on his bookshelf,then he might not have connived at the killingsin Vilnius and Tbilisi and could have come back from Forosnotjust unbloody but unbowed. The afterword, compiled from Isaiah Berlin's utterances (Berlin died before a contribution could be commissioned from him) is the complete opposite:nothing the other contributorssay makesquite the impact of his declaration of love for Pushkin, the cross between Racine and a fox. In between these great men one's fellow academics and dilettantes (the contributors are mostly Anglo-American, with one Hungarian and a couple of Russian emigres)are best at providing an opening into themselves, especially interesting, even endearing for the readers of SEER: how they driftedinto Russian studies by accident, throughparentage, in flightfrom pack-drill,mathematics...