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

94 It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Pushkin’s Ruslan i Liudmila (Ruslan and Liudmila, 1820; hereafter RL) in the history of Russian literature. For nearly 170 years, it has been almost universally recognized as one of the most important works of the Russian Golden Age. It is no coincidence that Pushkin opens his masterwork, Eugene Onegin, with an appeal to “the friends of Liudmila and Ruslan!” For him, RL, his first great literary success, was the seed from which sprang a literary career that remains a cornerstone of Russian civilization to this day. RL is still a philosopher’s stone of Russian literary history – the key to Pushkin , an avenue to “lay hold of this Proteus and wrest from him the secret of his power.”1 Oleg Proskurin, for example, opens his book on Pushkin’s poetics by marveling at the significance of RL in the scholarly tradition: “Pushkin’s first published narrative poem, a pubescent prank [shalost’], ‘a poetic plaything’ ... has been the subject of far more numerous and far more contradictory interpretations than all of Pushkin’s other narrative poems.... And this is not by chance: the intense scholarly interest in this text, which is quite straightforward as regards form, reflects the entirely valid notion that to ‘solve’ ‘Ruslan and Liudmila’ is, in some sense, to get to the very essence of Pushkin’s oeuvre.”2 Upon its publication in 1820, RL was greeted by critics as “a marvelous event in our literature” (Izmailov), “a sublime poem, with which Pushkin’s masterful quill has enriched our literature” (Perovskii), “one of the best literary works published this year” (Zykov), and so on.3 Certainly, not all the critics agreed, and Pushkin also came in for a lot of very harsh criticism. Indeed, the critical debate about the poem that broke out in the Russian periodical press was the single most voluminous , spirited, and even vicious literary polemic of the late 1810s and early 1820s. Whether one liked the poem or not, though, there was no denying the novelty of Ruslan and Liudmila. This was something completely new to Russian literature, and it had a huge impact. In 1844, the critic Vissarion Belinskii recalled, “Nothing can compare with the delight and consternation aroused by Pushkin’s first poema, ‘Ruslan i Liudmila.’ Too few works of genius have managed to make such a splash as was made by this childish poema utterly lacking in genius.... Be that as it may, but one cannot but understand and approve of the [readers’] delight: Russian literature offered nothing like it. Everything was new in this poema: the verse, the poetry, the jokes, and the fairy tale, together with the serious pictures.”4 As Tomashevskii put it, “the defining characteristic of [RL] is its novelty.”5 This novelty fueled not only the lightning-quick development of Pushkin’s career – for this is the point at which, as Avram Reitblat says, he “joined the ranks of 4 Ruslan and Liudmila Rudeness and Sexual Banter Ruslan and Liudmila 95 geniuses” – but also important evolutionary shifts in Russian prosody and style, not to mention the institutions of Russian literature.6 It was the first large-scale literary shalost’ published in Russia, and its phenomenal success had a lasting impact on the course of Russian literary and cultural history. The writing of RL was an unusually open process. Pushkin most certainly did not follow Karamzin’s directive to spend his time in the kabinet. To the contrary, by Pushkin’s own profession, it was written “amidst the most dissolute life.”7 And he was most certainly not interested in keeping his work to himself. Pushkin read draft excerpts from the poem periodically in various fora while it was still unfinished: at Zhukovskii’s soirees, at nonliterary social gatherings where Pushkin sometimes fielded requests to recite his poetry, at Arzamas and the Green Lamp, and even at the theatrical soirees of the Arzamasians’ arch-nemesis, Prince Shakhovskoi. This was not typical of the period, when authors usually presented only finished works in public. Of his poemy, Pushkin “released” only RL in this fashion. True, RL itself is somewhat untypical. At over 2,800 lines (depending on what one regards as the definitive text), it is Pushkin’s largest verse work after Eugene Onegin. In any case, Pushkin received feedback on the poem as he wrote it, and this feedback shaped the poem. Just as a stage actor or musician can gauge the mood of the audience...

Share