A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836

Preface

xvii The purpose of this book is less to fill a lacuna than to bridge a gaping chasm in the existing scholarly literature. Given the centrality of Pushkin’s work to the Russian literary tradition and the virtually hagiographical reverence that attends any object or location associated with him, one can only marvel that to this day no adequate commentary to his lyric poetry exists in any language. This regrettable situation cannot be attributed to a lack of qualified scholars or to their insufficient devotion to the task. Rather, it is the result of a very peculiar set of historical circumstances . The team that oversaw the first Academy edition of Pushkin’s works (the Jubilee Edition of ) was probably the most formidable group of Pushkinists ever assembled. However, Stalinist watchdogs overseeing the project forced them to limit themselves to textological questions, to determine for each poem a “definitive” text (with variants) and to trace its publication history. No other form of explanation or gloss was allowed to intrude on Pushkin’s words. After Stalin ’s death, some of these same scholars (notably Boris Tomashevskii and Tatiana Zenger-Tsiavlovskaia) were allowed to produce their own Pushkin editions; yet they were again severely constrained in their commentaries, with no single poem ever warranting more than a few lines of explanation. The detailed source study and contextual work (historical, biographical, etc.) that informed numerous articles and books were reduced to a bare minimum or simply passed over in silence. Russians love to say – usually with eyes heavenward – that Pushkin’s verse is remarkable for its simplicity and transparency. Insofar as this platitude has any validity whatsoever, it concerns syntax and lexicon (and there are striking exceptions even then). Such claims of simplicity are not only superficial, but also fundamentally misleading, for few poets so consistently and so consciously embedded their verse in the literary culture of their time and, for that matter, of previous times. Pushkin’s lyric poetry is teeming with references to other poets and poems; his mind was constantly alert to their accomplishments and to possibilities that they had left unexplored. To an extraordinary extent, Pushkin’s own achievement is in rewriting rather than writing. To appreciate his verse, it is essential to reconstruct his poetic context. A commentary is not an interpretation, but rather a framework that makes informed interpretation possible. It is not merely literary, but concerns anything in the text that may require elucidation for readers of a later era – whether historical, biographical, or cultural (in the broadest sense of the word). For this reason, any serious commentary runs the risk of becoming so ambitious as to be unfinishable. To avoid this fate, I concentrate on some elements at the expense of others. My Preface xviii Preface emphases largely reflect my own interests and the needs of my anticipated readership , but they also were chosen to complement the Russian commentary that does not yet exist, but – with luck – will be produced in the not-too-distant future. The present commentary is written primarily for an audience of students and scholars who can read Pushkin in the original, but whose native language is not Russian. Such readers require a different type of help than Russian native speakers, who, for example, require no assistance in deciphering “simple” syntax or in determining where an accent falls. Other aspects of my work, while traditionally omitted from Russian commentaries, may well be of value to Russian scholars. First, I consider the metrical and stanzaic form of each poem and, where possible, conceptualize it historically in terms of genre and theme. As Tomashevskii has shown in one of the greatest Pushkin studies ever written (“Strofika Pushkina”), formal questions were for Pushkin always also semantic questions. Second, I pay especially close attention to Pushkin’s Western sources, citing wherever possible (in the original French, English, and – when relevant – Italian, Polish, Serbian, and Latin) the specific edition that Pushkin was using. As far as Russian sources are concerned, I have been far less scrupulous about searching out the exact version Pushkin knew. Pushkin was acquainted with his contemporaries’ verse through published versions, hand-written copies, and recitations. Given the propensity of Soviet editors to modernize spelling and unify punctuation, it would require immense bibliographical and archival efforts to find editions of these poems in the precise form that Pushkin knew them. Moreover, it is not clear that the rewards of such labors would be significant. Following the standard practice of Russian commentaries, I cite other...