The Poetics of Impudence and Intimacy in the Age of Pushkin

Notes

125 Introduction 1. I discuss the provenance of this legend – which is now very widespread – in detail later. This story was first put to paper by Aleksandr Herzen in his memoirs , Byloe i Dumy (Past and Thoughts, 1852). His account is at least partly apocryphal – Herzen, for example, names the minister of popular education as Liven, who didn’t take over from Admiral Shishkov until 1828. He also gets the date of the audience wrong. On the whole, though, Herzen’s account has been amply corroborated. A. Gertsen, Byloe i Dumy: Chasti 1–3 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), 1:157–60. 2. Ronald Hingley, The Russian Secret Police (London: Hutchinson, 1970), 30. 3. A. Arkhangel’skii, “Aleksandr Polezhaev,” in Russkie poety: Antologiia russkoi poezii v shesti tomakh, ed. V. I. Korovin (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1996), www .litera.ru/stixiya/articles/631.html. 4. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, 1:158. 5. D. Riabinin, “Aleksandr Polezhaev,” Russkii arkhiv 1 (1881): 314–65. 6. P. Efremov, Pamiati A. I. Polezhaeva: 16-ogo ianvaria 1838–1888 gg.; Biogra- ficheskii ocherk po vnov’sobrannym materialam P. A. Efremova (Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii literaturnyi muzei, 1888). 7. I. Voronin, A. I. Polezhaev: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1954). 8. No doubt, as Vladimir Alexandrov notes, the premium put on the act of debunking and on dubious “interpretive novelty” in recent literary scholarship is counterproductive . See the introduction to his Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of “Anna Karenina” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 4–9. Accordingly, my goal in this book is not to debunk existing interpretations, but to reveal literaryhistorical facts long neglected in the scholarly literature for non-scholarly reasons, the “ethical considerations” referred to by one important editor (see E. Larionova’s survey responses in my epilogue). 9. B. Eikhenbaum, “Literaturnaia domashnost’,” in Moi vremennik: Slovesnost’, nauka, kritika, smes’ (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1929), 82–86. 10. Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka, s. v. “domashnost’,” http://feb-web.ru/feb/ ushakov/ush-abc/default.asp. 11. See Joseph Peschio and Igor Pil’shchikov, “The Proliferation of Elite Readerships and Circle Poetics in Pushkin and Baratynskii (1820s–1830s),” in The Space of the Book: Print Culture in the Russian Social Imagination, ed. Miranda Remnek Notes 126 Notes to Pages 6–10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 82–107. See also I. Pil’shchikov, “O ‘frantsuzskoi shalosti’ Baratynskogo (‘Eliziiskie polia’: literaturnyi i biograficheskii kontekst),” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, Literaturovedenie, Novaia seriia 1 (1994), reprinted in Tartuskie tetradi, ed. R. G. Leibov (Moscow: OGI, 2005), 55–81. 12. Witness Time magazine’s cover just after the World Trade Center attacks: “The Age of Irony Comes to an End” (http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010924/esroger .html). See also Fred Inglis’s take on postmodern pedantry and the death of irony: “A Better Class of Irony,” New Humanist 118, no. 4 (November 2003), http://newhumanist .org.uk/657/a-better-class-of-irony-fred-inglis-novemberdecember-2003. 13. M. Shapir, “Barkov i Derzhavin: Iz istorii russkogo burleska,” in A. S. Pushkin , Ten’ Barkova: Teksty, Kommentarii, Ekskursy, ed. M. Shapir and I. Pil’shchikov (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2002), 397–457. Chapter 1. Roots and Contexts 1. “By the way, dear Pushkin has been sent off to his father in the country for his recent shalosti. You know he was assigned to [Mikhail] Vorontsov, well then, the latter gave him an order which required that he depart without fail; he did nothing , and he composed a satire on Vorontsov. How do you like the boy now? I am certain that he will create new poems in his retreat that will be even more piquant.” Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), f. 33, op. 2, ed. 35, ll. 23–24, catalog no. 26427. In his Russian translation of this letter, Modzalevskii renders “folies” as “shalosti.” B. Modzalevskii, “Pushkin, Del’vig i ikh peterburgskie druz’ia v pis’makh S. M. Del’vig,” in Pushkin i ego sovremenniki: Izbrannye trudy, ed. B. Modzalevskii (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1999), 234. 2. A. S. Strudza, “Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova i Arzamas v tsarstvovanie Alekandra I i moi vospominaniia,” in Arzamas: Sbornik v dvukh knigakh, ed. V. Vatsuro (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), 1:54. In his book Tvorchestvo Pushkina i problema publichnogo povedeniia poeta (St. Petersburg: Giperion, 2003), Igor Nemirovskii documents Strudza’s observation, arguing that Pushkin was exiled not for political reasons, but because of his erratic and provocative behavior. 3. P. Shchegolev, “Delo o zamechanii...