In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Given the temporal limitations ofany biography, there are just three stances or orienting attitudes that a poet can have toward a predecessorP If a poet is beginning a career, he can experience the model as a point from which to commence his "creative path" (tvorcheskii put'); here the future is maximally open, to the extent that the younger poet himself has no biography of literary significance (in Tomashevsky's terms, no usable "biographical legend") and can imagine himself distinctly emerging from the shadow of the precursor . Young meets old or, as it often happens, dead, and it is natural that the young, if sufficiently confident, would experience itself as a vast field of creative possibility, while the other, having exhausted its potential for biography and entered the realm of myth, is viewed as fixed. The second stance occurs at any point in the poet's career when he has "defined himself" but is not yet seriously involved in composing his epitaph: when he now turns to the older model, he can start over but he can never begin for the first time. He knows he has some ofhis creative life behind him and he believes he has some of his creative life before him. From this vantage, the precursor, though dead, is bound to appear more complicated, more human, less mythical, as the younger man's understanding of "life" fills in and roughens the contours ofthe original meeting . The psychological operations of this second stance are such that, for the strong personality at least, irony shadows each confrontation with an earlier model ("I am and am not he"). The third stance is when the poet, now substantially older or old, turns to the original model to write his epitaph. Now the turning is final and recapitulative; the distinction(s) between the two poets involves not an irony of multiple potentials but a last sweeping gaze and affirmation that "this, and not that, is mine." Here the poet is maximally attuned 22. Two important and by now "classic" studies of how poets engage and reshape the traditions given them by precursors are the already discussed Bloom (see Part I of this study) and Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Lipking's triad of initiation, harmonium, and tombeau has been particularly useful in the argument that follows. 154 Copyrighted Material to the understanding that his potential for creative biography is limited, perhaps even exhausted, and that he is close to entering mythical space. This general scheme will serve us as we examine four "turning points" in Pushkin's creative life, referred to for simplicity's sake by their temporal coordinates: 1814-15 (beginning), 1825-26 (first ironic midpoint), 1830-31 (second ironic midpoint), and 1836 (ending). The ways in which the psychological dominanta of Pushkin's personality engage and challenge the myth of Derzhavin are fascinating, fraught as they are with the younger poet's special brand of serious playP As I suggested in 23. Important modern treatments of Pushkin's engagement of Derzhavin include: M. P. Alekseev, "Stikhotvorenie Pushkina 'Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig ... :" Pushkin i mirovaia literatura (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), 200-210; Dmitrii Blagoi, Literatura i deistvitel'nost' (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959), 212-31; Sergei Davydov, "Pushkin's Merry Undertaking and 'The Coffinmaker: " Slavic Review 44.1 (1985): 4148 ; B. P. Gorodetskii, Lirika Pushkina (Moscow-Leningrad: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962), 45-53; G. P. Makogonenko, "Pushkin i Derzhavin," in Derzhavin i Karamzin v literaturnom dvizhenii XVIII-nachaia XIX veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), 113-26; G. S. Tatishcheva, "Pushkin i Derzhavin," Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta 14.3 (1965): 10616 ; and A. Zapadov, Masterstvo Derzhavina (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1958), 237-58. But see also S. Bondi, 0 Pushkine. Stat'i i materialy, 2d ed. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1983), 446-67; G. A. Gukovskii, Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia (Moscow : Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1957), 112-13; B. Meilakh, Khudozhestvennoe myshlenie Pushkina kak tvorcheskii protsess (Moscow-Leningrad: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962), 165-67; and Walter Vickery, "'Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele' (1814) i 'Pamiatnik ': K voprosu 0 strofike:' in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovski (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 485-97. Tatishcheva identifies two primary schools ofunderstanding the Pushkin-Derzhavin connection in Soviet scholarship: the Blagoi-Zapadov approach , which sees Pushkin as gradually turning away from what Derzhavin stood for as a proidennyi etap (concluded stage), versus the Gukovsky-Makogonenko approach, which stresses Pushkin's turn toward the later "Anacreontic" and "protorealist...

Share