Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS op The present study was undertaken with sabbatical and research funds from the College of Letters and Science, the Graduate School, and the Vilas Trust at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All ofthese bodies, which have enabled me to fulfill my various research plans over the years in more ways than I can tell, have my sincere thanks. Realizing Metaphors was also made possible with the generous help of a visiting fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1994-95. It gives me particular pleasure to thank the master (then Peter Gray) and fellows of Caius for their support, goodwill, welcoming table, comfortable lodgings, and the loan of such a beautiful and historic setting at the initial stages of the project, when my mind so needed to "unplug" from pressing duties at my home institution and to roam about freely in other times and other places. Among the British colleagues who arranged talks and presentations and otherwise took me under their wing are Neil Cornwell (Bristol), A. G. Cross (Cambridge), J. A. E. Curtis (Oxford), Malcolm Jones (Nottingham), Arnold McMillin (London), and Valentina Polukhina (Keele). As the Russians say, "mir tesen," which translates into English as something close to "it's a small world": by the end ofour stay in England we were feeling very much at home thanks largely to these and other new friends. Either in part or in whole, this book has benefited immensely from challenging readings by various colleagues, many of whom are themselves distinguished Pushkinists and/or specialists in Russian literature (and in one case a practicing poet): Clare Cavanagh, Anna Lisa Crone, David Danaher, Sergei Davydov, Alexander Dolinin, Natasha Reed, Irina Reyfman, Gary Rosenshield , Stephanie Sandler, Olga Sedakova, J. Thomas Shaw, Yuri Shcheglov, William Mills Todd, Dan Ungurianu, and Michael Wachtel. Their corrections and suggestions have been quietly incorporated throughout the text; any inaccuracies still remaining are, either through stubbornness or some other more glaring weakness by now invisible to its bearer, entirely my own. Several graduate assistants, including Megan Dixon, Donald Loewen, and Clint Walker, have suffered my last-minute requests gallantly and have helped by xv Copyrighted Material XVI Acknowledgments taking an active part in the editing and proofing process - without them it is hard to imagine what state of chaotic unreadiness the manuscript would still be in. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my good colleagues at "Pushkin House" (Pushkinskii dom) in St. Petersburg, especially Vadim Vatsuro, Sergei Fomichev, and Tatiana Krasnoborodko, as well as Vladimir Markovich (St. Petersburg University) and Galina Sergeeva ("Piligrim"), all of whom have aided me in different ways throughout the course of this project. And Allen Fitchen of the University of Wisconsin Press has been not only a source of wise counsel as acquiring editor, but more than that, a supportive and trusted friend. Several sections of Realizing Metaphors have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in modified form elsewhere: "lurii Lotman v 1980-e gody: Kod i ego otnoshenie k literaturnoi biografii," Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie no. 19 (1996): 14-29 (also forthcoming as "lurii Lotman in the 1980'S: The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography," in Russian Literature in the 1980'S, ed. Arnold McMillin [London: Harwood Academic Publishers]); "Bakhtinian Prosaics versus Lotmanian 'Poetic Thinking,''' in forum on "prosaics," ed. Clare Cavanagh , Slavic and East European Journal 41.1 (1997): 1-15; "Where to Begin: Pushkin, Derzhavin, and the Poetic Use of Filiation," in Re-Reading Russian Poetry, ed. Stephanie Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and "Why Pushkin?" in Why Pushkin? Essays in Appreciation, ed. A. D. P. Briggs (forthcoming under auspices of Pushkin Bicentennial Trust in Great Britain). I am grateful to Professor Briggs for the suggestion ofthe title "Why Pushkin?" which I have used as the heading for the first section in this book. Last but not least, I'd like to acknowledge the real presence in these pages of my daughter Emily and, especially, my wife Kim, to whom the book is dedicated . Thanks to them metaphors and metamorphoses are, for me, not what life may be about, but what life, centrally, is. Copyrighted Material ...