Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brevity by Svetlana s> Evdokimova (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I 2 I Framingthe translationis a brief introductionand an extended afterword, which is a scholarlystudyofjust under one hundredpages. The introduction provides useful context on Russia's cultural and political landscape in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Karamzin's place in it, and the publicationhistoryof hisLetters. The referencein its subtitleto the 'creationof a readership'seems misplaced, however. Not only are issues of reading and readershipstouched only in passing, Kahn seems content with well-known generalizations about Russia's lack of a public sphere in comparison to the rest of Europe. The afterword, entitled 'Nikolai Karamzin's discourses of Enlightenment', is likewise contradictory. While demonstrating Kahn's erudition regardingeighteenth-centuryliterary,culturaland intellectual life, it also tends to reifysuch abstractconstructionsas Enlightenment,and public and private. Both contain minor factual slips not Catherine II but her husband Peter III emancipated the nobility from mandatory state service duringhisbriefreignfromDecember I76I toJune I762 (p. 9);PeterI died in 1725, not 1724 (p. 546). This admirabletranslationof Karamzin'sLetters ofa RussiaTraveller will be of interest to teachers, students and scholars. Excerpts could be usefully integrated into courses on Russian and European history, especially as the extensive annotations provide the necessary background information and context. Similarly, it provides rich material for scholars working in diverse disciplines, especially the cultural, intellectual and literary history of eighteenth -century Europe, the Enlightenment, and the history of travel writing; these areasare explicitlyaddressedin Kahn's studyof Karamzin's'Discourses of Enlightenment'.Despite some shortcomings,thisis an impressiveworkthat deservesa wide readership. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies SUSAN MORRISSEY University College London Evdokimova, Svetlana (ed.). Alexander Pushkin's LittleTragedies: ThePoeticsof Brevity. Winsconsin Center for PushkinStudies. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2003. ix + 396 pp. Notes. Appendices. Select bibliography.Index. /22.50 (paperback). ISOLATED at Boldino by the cholera quarantine, on the point of marriageto Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin, at this crucial turning point in his life, confronted not only the ultimate questions of human destiny death, love, rebellion,conformity but also his own identity,his culturalinheritanceand his place as a poet in Russian society. The fourLittleTragedies, part of the fruit of thatextraordinaryBoldino autumnof I830, werewrittenin a barefortnight between 23 October and 6 November. Perhapson account of the haste with which they were written,perhapsbecause he was writingat that moment in a kind of shorthand for himself, the LittleTragedies by their very brevity, their 'breathtaking conciseness' (Akhmatova, p. 43), their 'verbal compression' (Emerson,p. 266) in otherwordsby theirrefusalto spellout the issuesthey are concerned with have not alwaysreceived the kind of criticalattention given to Pushkin's other major works. It was in order to remedy what the I22 SEER, 83, I, 2005 editor of the volume describes as this 'glaring lacuna in Western criticism' (p. 28) that a small conference on the Little Tragedies was held at Yale in October I998. The present volume is based on the papers given on that occasion; it is supplemented by James E. Falen's translations of the plays (pp. 305-64), as well as translationsby Janet Tucker of Anna Akhmatova's 'Pushkin's StoneGuest'(pp. 41-57), and by Angela Livingstone of Marina Tsvetaeva's 'Artin the Lightof Conscience' (pp. 58-66). This splendid volume represents as thorough an 'unpacking' of the Little Tragedies as one might hope for. Seven contributions shed light on the texts from a wide variety of contexts, including Pushkin'sown inner dynamic as a writerand his emergentphilosophy of life, the literaryand culturalinfluences on him, as well as the events and the leading ideas of the times in which he lived. In another four contributions the texts are illumined by setting them against future works literary in the cases of Suzanne Fusso's comparison with Dostoevskii'sA RawYouth (pp. 229-42) and of Sofya Khagi's fascinating account of the influence of Pushkin on the oeuvre of Albert Camus (pp. 243-62), operatic in the case of Caryl Emerson's thorough study of the opera settingsof the tragedies(pp. 265-89), and cinematographicin the case of Stephanie Sandler's of the film versions (pp. 290-30I); while Vladimir Markovich surveys the history of Russian and Soviet criticism of the plays (pp. 69-Ios) in an important summarizing article marred by a somewhat unsatisfactorytranslation. Svetlana Evdokimova,the editor...