REVIEWS 345 — Russian writers’ preoccupation with borders and crossings of them, their critique of nineteenth-century European civilization, Herzen’s juxtaposition of a supposedly moribund West and fresh, youthful Russia, the deliberate disorderliness of Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes and so forth — have already been quite well ploughed. However, in its focus on nomadism, itinerancy and psychological homelessness and in its claim about the centrality of these Romantic tropes to the agitated discussion among Russia’s golden-age writers about national identity this monograph does have considerable originality, and it makes an important contribution to scholarship on classical Russian literature and thought. Department of Russian Studies Derek Offord University of Bristol Gillespie, Alyssa Dinega (ed.). Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations. Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2012. xix + 482 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback). Peschio, Joe. The Poetics of Impudence and Intimacy in the Age of Pushkin. Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2012. xi + 160 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95 (paperback). At the time of writing (2014) it is already fifteen years since the bicentenary of Pushkin’s birth in 1799. That anniversary unsurprisingly saw a renewed surge in interest in Russia’s foundational and still greatest writer. Then postSoviet Russia was still less than a decade old, with its future direction very uncertain, so, again unsurprisingly, part of that surge was a lively contestation of exactly who and what Pushkin was for Russia and, indeed, for the world. Although Apollon Grigor´ev had written as long ago as 1859 that ‘Pushkin is our everything’ (Pushkin — nashe vse), various critics and factions sought to claim that Pushkin is this and not that. In some ways these two volumes from The Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies, both published in the same year, hark back to those debates and, indeed, continue them. As the titles imply (‘taboo’ and ‘impudence’) their shared primary goal is to present a certain version of Pushkin, Pushkin the transgressor, in life as in literature. In detail and scope, however, the volumes are enormously different. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie’s expertly edited volume brings together fifteen scholars primarily from North America, but also some from Russia and Great Britain, who write imaginatively and creatively about the taboo in SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 346 Pushkin, in three ways (and sections): ‘Taboos in Context’, ‘Taboo Writings’ and ‘Taboo Readings’. Growing out of a three-day international conference in January 2009 the work has genuine coherence, in no small measure due to the considerable interchange, even dialogue between the fourteen principal essays. As Gillespie proposes in her fine and lucid Introduction, the ‘book represents a collective effort to recover some of the messages that have remained sealed in the bottle of time, whether because of the overt political and social prohibition on reading and discussing them, because of scholars’ own squeamishness at venturing into uncharted and often uncomfortable realms, or because the very existence of the messages has simply remained unknown and undetected until now’ (p. 4). As becomes very clear very quickly, ‘who’ and ‘what’ Pushkin is, especially in twenty-first century Russia, remains a deeply politicized issue, perhaps more intensely so than at any other juncture in the last 200 years. As Gillespie notes later in her Introduction: ‘Taken together, the chapters of this book demonstrate how potent a challenge the unofficial, tabooed, “alternative” Pushkin has proven to be across the centuries, not only for the Russian political establishment but for the literary establishment too’ (p. 25). The volume proper opens with ‘Taboos in Context’ and Irina Reyfman’s essay ‘Pushkin the Titular Councillor’. In her typically measured and very rational way, Reyfman does an excellent job of subverting the usual ‘story’ that Pushkin was uninterested in and demeaned by his official roles, especially his relatively tardyappointmentasakammerjunker.IgorNemirovsky’s‘WhyPushkindidnot become a Decembrist’, while informative and well argued seemed less ‘taboobreaking ’ in that the facts and arguments were mainly already well established. Joe Peschio’s ‘Lighting the Green Lamp’ investigates some ‘unpublished and unknown’ poems, by others as well as by Pushkin, and covers much the same...
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Sep 18, 2016
David Owens 
Open Access
