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Pushkin's subsequent "encounters" with Derzhavin, now no longer in the flesh, fall neatly into three temporal clusters, each one important for his development as writer and thinker: 1825-26, 1830-31, and 1836. The first of these clusters, played out against the background of the poet's northern exile and the Decembrist uprising, is associated with Delvig and Kiichelbecker; the second with Pushkin's turn to prose on the eve of his marriage; and the third with his 1830S friendship with Nashchokin and with his final attempts to understand the mysteries of biography, or what I call the role of the "poet in history." From 1825 until well into the 1830S Pushkin is in the middle phase of the process ofself-definition vis-a-vis the precursor: his statements about Derzhavin are in every instance complicated by irony and by ambivalent feelings toward the power of the originary myth. This is the phase where Pushkin has already lived a substantial portion of his creative life, knows of Derzhavin's human foibles (the man versus the myth), and sees his turning from Derzhavin -to artistic prose for example-as a range of options. But those options are not unlimited-the roles of Man of History, poet-statesman and poetwarrior , advisor to tsars (even though Pushkin tries this, after his fashion 72) and beneficiary of patronage are closed to him. Here is the focal point of the irony, for in these subsequent encounters with Derzhavin's "shade" Pushkin, while exercising his protean gifts, understands precisely where he is not free and where he must pay. Pushkin's final meeting with Derzhavin comes in 1836, several months before his death, in the writing ofthe Stone Island cycle and in the publication of two works, The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka) and "My Hero's Genealogy" (Rodoslovnaia moego geroia), which the poet has been working on since the early 1830S but which now, in their appearance, become part of his "final word" on the issue of Derzhavin and biography. These texts, particularly "Exegi monumentum" and The Captain's Daughter, show Pushkin coming full circle on his own beginning and using a different sort of 72. In, e.g., "Stansy," the controversial 1826 poem addressed to the new tsar Nicholas. 173 Copyrighted Material 174 PART II. Pushkin, Derzhavin, and the Life ofthe Poet irony, one tinged with cosmic wisdom and humility, and hence one less "anxious " and "territorial" than that displayed in earlier encounters. Two of Pushkin's most explicit statements about Derzhavin came in letters, both written at the same time: the first to Bestuzhev (of late May/early June 1825), the second to Delvig (between 1and 8 June 1825). The letter to Bestuzhev has more of a coolly cordial or "professional" tone; in it, Pushkin responds to Bestuzhev's article "Glance at Russian Literature in the Course of 1824 and at the Beginning of1825," 73 which argued the case that the first age of a literature has always been that of geniuses. Pushkin disputes this contention, using several traditions, including Latin, Italian, English, and Russian, to foreground certain inconsistencies in Bestuzhev's thinking. Assertions or criticisms on Bestuzhev's part such as "We [Russians] have criticism, but we do not have literature ," "Why have we no geniuses and so few men oftalent?" or "We have no literary encouragement - and thank God!" are, point by point, turned on their heads and shown in reality to be the opposite. Derzhavin is a leading figure in Pushkin's rebuttal: if his "idol, 14 gold and % lead, has not yet been assayed," it is the fault ofthe critics (or the lack thereof), not of Derzhavin's genius. At the same time, the fact that the poet uses the sculptural image of the idol (kumir), now partially undermined because of the alleged proportions of the metals (Derzhavin refers to his immortal likeness as being "harder than metals" in his "Monument"), already suggests how Pushkin's thinking has changed and become a complex amalgam of the positive (gold) and the negative (lead). In the second half of Pushkin's career kumir will come more and more to represent something pejoratively pagan, something potentially "un-Christian" in its insistence on three-dimensional reification. He then goes on to mention those works of Derzhavin - "Felitsa," "The Grandee" (Vel'mozha), "God," "On the Death of Meshchersky," "On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia" - that remain to be properly presented to the public. He retorts that Russia does have geniuses, beginning...

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