Pushkin's Works Research Articles

Opera in Pushkin's Life and Works

Journal Article Opera in Pushkin's Life and Works Get access DAVID A. LOWE DAVID A. LOWE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 1, Issue 4, Winter 1983, Pages 44–49, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/1.4.44 Published: 01 January 1983

Eugene Onegin: An Inverted Byronic Poem

LEXANDER PUSHKIN'S most significant work, Eugene J\A Onegin, has as recently as 1971 been called by John Bayley most glitteringly of poems, and yet as full of 'felt life' as the most richly conceived work of fiction.l Written over a period of eight years (1823-1831), its genre has puzzled critics from the appearance of the very first chapter in February 1825.2 Many of Pushkin's contemporaries were disturbed by Onegin's subtitle, A Novel in Verse. Acutely aware of the digressive quality of Pushkin's work and of its improvisatory nature, intrigued not by the plot or the characters but rather by the virtuosity and wit of the poet-narrator, they could not accept Onegin as a novel, nor could they place it in any other commonly recognized literary tradition. The early critics, most notably Nikolay Polevoy and Nikolay Nadezhdin, concluded that Onegin lacked unity and wholeness and that it was nothing more than a poetic album of lively impressions.3 Little more than a decade later, in what proved to be perhaps the single most influential piece of Pushkin criticism,4 Vissarion Belinsky declared that Eugene Onegin was a novel because it depicted contempo-

The Great Innovator

No poet in Russia had so enviable a lot as Pushkin…. His name had an almost electric quality. Gogol's words have been supported by history, for they are true even today. The very name Pushkin has become a symbol of struggle and hope, of faith in the great mission of Russia; his poetry has been a beacon at all the most critical turning points, and people have turned to it both in the darkest years and in the days of victory. In our minds Pushkin's works and his personality, heroic and tragic, have merged into an indissoluble unity as a standard of the wisdom of life, of fidelity to a chosen path, of moral purity. Pushkin has become a part of the spiritual biography of everyone, has become a constant companion; and we inevitably think of the past, the present, and the future through his poems. We find in them answers to our difficult questions and comfort in our tribulations. Reading Pushkin, we hear his voice. He was the first poet to demolish the artificiality of the authorial voice — in Ruslan and Liud...

Deciphered Lines

Among the works of Pushkin there is a fragment dated 1835 which remains uninterpreted. The first eight lines are as follows: If it chance that you should go From **** to *, There where the L. flows Between its sloping banks, - To the right of the main road [Between the village and the field], You will see a grove of oaks, On the left a garden and the master's house.

Italy's Interest in Pushkin: The First Stage (1828-1856)

Interest in the works of Pushkin has grown without pause in modern Italy. In our time knowledge of his life and work in Italy has developed at various levels. Such scholars as E. Lo Gatto, who devoted almost all of his fifty-year career in Slavic studies to the Russian poet, focussed their attention on Pushkin. (1) At the same time, it is noteworthy that since the 1950s a number of Pushkin's poems have been included in appendices to anthologies of Italian literature intended for upper classes in Italian gymnasia. In 1969, thanks to the efforts of the publisher Bompiani, Pushkin even entered the middle level of the Italian school system: in the series Modern Artistic Prose for high-school students, The Captain's Daughter appeared along with works by Moravia, Saint-Exupery, and others. (2) The introductory essay by M. Menichetti included in this edition is an adequate and accurate description of the life and work of Pushkin. In concluding her essay this author emphasizes the contemporaneity and worldwide si...

Soldier of Freedom

In 1835, one of Pushkin's most remarkable creations appeared in print: a cycle of sixteen poems under the general title Songs of the Western Slavs. There is a substantial amount of literature about the Songs, but it is all of a specialized nature (on the connection of most of the songs with Merimee's La Guzla, on their verse form). But the songs remain even now one of a relatively small group of Pushkin's works whose genuine and very considerable worth has yet to be thoroughly described.

N. F. Bunakov — A Popularizer of Pushkin's Works

Nikolai Fedorovich Bunakov (1837-1904) is remembered today only as a prominent teacher, but the fact is that like many figures in Russian scholarship he was not simply a specialist in a single field of knowledge. Historian and economist, writer of fiction and publicist, theater critic - Bunakov left an extensive literary heritage. His views on education and on literature and esthetics took shape during the period of the democratic upsurge of the 1860s. Even in those years Pushkin had become something of a constant companion of the young teacher. Bunakov's early evaluations of the poet's work reflect a noticeable influence of the critics of Russkoe slovo, to whose editors he was close at the time. His "Note on Classroom Analysis of Pushkin's poem ‘Poet’ " [Zametka o klassnom razbore stikhotvoreniia Pushkina "Poet"] deals, at first glance, with a specialized question - analysis of a poem in the gimnazium curriculum. But the choice of this work is not accidental. It was in fact one of Pushkin's programmatic poems. In the 1860s, his cycle of verses about the poet was taken as the most vivid confirmation of the notion that Pushkin stood for "pure art." At that time, Bunakov shared this point of view entirely and subordinated his analysis of the poem to demonstrating that Pushkin had a contemptuous attitude toward life, society, and the people, and was devoted to "pure art." In this regard, Bunakov contrasted Pushkin to Lermontov, who regarded a writer "as… a public figure having a definite role in the life of the people as a whole." Therefore, his erroneous view of Pushkin as a "pure artist by nature and convictions" naturally led to his mistaken interpretation of the poet's most important work. (1) With his article on Pushkin, Bunakov entered the polemic over the Pushkinian and Gogolian trends in Russian literature, but his position was contradictory. While standing for a socially effective and genuinely popular art, at the same time he rather indifferently surrendered Pushkin to his chief opponents. By the 1880s he understood his mistake and reexamined his attitude toward the creator of Evgenii Onegin. It was now clear to Bunakov that Pushkin had not only forged a wonderful form of Russian poetry, but had given it a most profound content by being the first to unite "sober realism" with "lofty idealism," i.e., a true comprehension of the ideals and longings of the best part of Russian society of the period. (2) These thoughts were heard for the first time in the public lectures on Pushkin and Nekrasov that he delivered in Voronezh in 1881. The syllabi of the lectures and their texts were first examined by the governor and the overseer of the educational district, but Bunakov "had acquired enough skill in drawing up outlines" to "make it possible to introduce, when presenting the lectures, a thing or two not envisaged by the authorities granting permission." Bunakov recalls that the delivery of the lectures was at first forbidden, and that only after the explanation of a number of passages and expressions, "particularly about Nekrasov," which were subject "to doubts and false interpretations," was permission granted. (3) The lectures on Pushkin and Nekrasov open a new period in Bunakov's literary and critical activity, and not only because Pushkin's work was here examined for the first time in indissoluble connection with "the constant succession and perfection of ideals in life and literature." (4) Nekrasov, "working on behalf of a definite program" (5), and Pushkin, "a pure artist by nature and convictions," were, in the mind of Bunakov as he saw things in the 1860s, divided by a gulf; they belonged to mutually exclusive trends in Russian literature. In the 1880s the critic intensively reconsidered the properties of the development of Russian literature, as is evidenced by his cycle of public lectures "Major Moments in the History of Russian Literature," and in many respects he revised his views. By the 1880s, a considerable number of Pushkin's secret verses had been published both abroad and, in part, in Russia, with the result that his opposition to the absolute monarchy became considerably clearer. Pushkin's reputation as a poet under a political cloud was enhanced in the 1870s by Nekrasov himself, who, in his "To Princess M. N. Volkonskaia" [Kniagine M. N. Volkonskoi] (1872), depicted the poet in the role of a fighter sympathetic to the cause of the Decembrists. (6) Thus, in Bunakov's new perception of Pushkin one can see a reflection of a well-known feature of the Russian literary and historical process in the 1870s and 80s.

One Pushkin Sentence

In the collected works of Pushkin there is a plan for a ballet story. The first sentence of that outline has caused researchers to title it "Two Ballerinas" [Dve tantsovshchitsy]. We hope to offer the reader, in the very near future, some commentaries on this most interesting undertaking. Here we will merely consider Pushkin's second sentence in the plan. It reads: "Didelot's ballet in 1819."

The New Literature Reader for the 7th Grade

The literature syllabus for the 7th grade differs from those of the preceding grades. In the 7th grade we begin (and in the 8th grade continue and complete) a more or less systematic study of such works of Russian pre-October and Soviet literature as the schoolchildren are able to understand. The 7th grade pupils read in chronological order several works of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol which are more difficult than the ones they had read before. At the end of the year they become acquainted with the verse of the great Ukrainian poet Shevchenko. The 7th graders receive elementary knowledge about the lives of the greatest classic writers, about their ties with the social and political life of our country, and about the concrete historical content of the works they have read. Without studying the history of Russian literature, the 7th grade pupils nevertheless receive the simplest historical and literary knowledge necessary for an understanding of these works. In the same grade the pupils review and consolidate the knowledge they have previously acquired on the theory of literature, and they master a small amount of new theoretical and literary knowledge. The reader for the 7th grade has been organized in accordance with the new syllabus: it includes, in addition to the texts of works, the biographies of the writers, the necessary commentaries on literature and history, everyday life and culture, lexical and phraseological commentaries, as well as concepts on the theory of literature.

The Upas Tree: Pushkin and Erasmus Darwin

In 1828 Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem “Ančar,” usually rendered in English as “The Upas Tree.” Because of the obviously derivative theme of the lyric, scholars have been searching for the exact place where the poet learned of this tree and its terrible powers. At first the searchings were random. Professor Sumcov, writing around the turn of the century, claimed that Pushkin had read of the tree in some of the popular “travels to the east.” Not convinced by Sumcov's argument, P. O. Morozov proposed a stanza (iv, 126) from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Valerij Brjusov, the scholarly Symbolist poet who edited a collection of Pushkin's works (1919), thought that a poem by Millevoye, apparently “Le Mancenillier,” was the real source. In the collection of essays entitled Pushkin in World Literature (1926), N. Jakovlev showed that a proposed epigraph for the poem was from Coleridge; ten years later the Academy edition of Pushkin's works had this note: “the poem is thematically related to Coleridge's work Remorse.” In an interesting short study Professor Jakubovič has shown a certain parallel with Pushkin in a passage from Colman's play The Law of Java; the passage, however, could hardly be the only direct source.

Pushkin's Parody on the Rape of Lucrece

fr-HE influence of Shakespeare upon the work of Pushkin has generally been lrecognized, the historical plays particularly having left their deep mark on Boris Godunov (1825) and through Boris Godunov on later Russian drama.' Shakespeare's example of objectivity and realism helped free Pushkin from remnants of Byron's influence. In fact, one main period of Pushkin's work has been called the Shakespearean period. In addition to this general influence, however, there is one minor example, the too little known piece, Count Nulin, which is a delightful, if not serious, parody on The Rape of Lucrece. It is of interest both on its own merits and because it is one of the few comments on Shakespeare's non-dramatic works by a major Continental figure.2 The occasion of writing Count Nulin arose when the poet was spending some time in the country towards the end of 1825.