The New Academy Pushkin: Toward a Definitive Text

Abstract

A definitive critical edition of the works of Aleksandr Pushkin is one of the scholarly holy grails of Russian literature. In normal circumstances, the principles governing a critical edition follow laws of scholarly logic and attempt to exclude extraneous factors from the key procedures of collation, emendation, and conjecture. In the case of a national poet, and perhaps nowhere more visibly than with Pushkin, status in the canon has also been a matter of politics, and ideology has therefore impinged heavily on the fundamental activity of producing an accurate record of the poet's words. The political incorrectness of certain texts or parts of texts has inhibited editorial aspirations. The censorship to which Pushkin was subjected was not relaxed for editors of the imperial period, beginning with the first posthumous edition produced by Vasilii Zhukovskii in 1841. This was equally true during periods of Soviet rule, where the superb team of scholars entrusted with a definitive edition were thwarted from above (as the foreword to this new edition explains). But censorship is of course not the only important factor. Textual criticism becomes dynamic with the discovery of more sources and with the stripping away of old mistakes. Despite its flaws, chief among which was the absence of the projected commentaries, the greatest milestone in Pushkin scholarship remains the indispensable edition (193759), which made historical curiosities of many earlier editions, including those edited by P. V. Annenkov (1855) and Semen Vengerov (1907-15). Based on a more comprehensive knowledge of manuscript sources, the Jubilee edition has been a scholarly vade mecum for Pushkinists and, indirectly, as the source of most trade editions of Pushkin, an important influence on his popular appeal. The aim of a critical edition is to establish a correct text of each poem with reference to the most reliable sources, an operation that is subject to their availability, verifiability, and reliability. In the case of modern authors, these sources ought to include authorial manuscripts, contemporary copies, and contemporary printed editions; as a corollary, where no autographs obtain, then the adjudication of variant readings with reference to a scholarly consensus is also an imperative. Necessarily, textual critics are often compelled to clear the ground by eradicating errors that earlier editors have introduced due to oversights or lapses in judgment. This first