Between Nation and Empire: Alexander Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter

This article investigates tensions between national and imperial discourses as reflected in Pushkin's novel The Captain's Daughter, in which the novel's author and its protagonists cannot fully identify with either the "national" community of the people or with the imperial state. The novel uses familial metaphors, presenting such unlikely figures as the leader of the uprising, Pugachev, and the empress, Catherine the Great, as proxy parents to the novel's protagonists, Petr Grinev and his future wife, Masha Mironova. Despite their problematic historical roles, Catherine II and Pugachev act as true benefactors to Masha and Petr, thereby establishing generational and historical continuity in Russian history. Pushkin uses familial imagery to provide a national identity for imperial Russia, and the imagined family that encompasses several social classes becomes a powerful image that helps him creatively shape a national myth. While the horizontal, fraternal ties of the nation fail to develop in this scenario, they are replaced by the vertical, paternal ties representative of an empire.