Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations

Bawdy and Soul: Pushkin’s Poetics of Obscenity

185 Bawdy and Soul Pushkin’s Poet­ ics of Ob­ scen­ ity­ Alyssa Di­ nega Gil­ les­ pie De­ spite the tomes and tomes of schol­ ar­ ship that have been ­ penned about vir­ tu­ ally every as­ pect of ­ Pushkin’s writ­ ing, his poet­ ics of the ob­ scene re­ mains an al­ most un­ touched and un­ touch­ able field of in­ quiry. True, some ex­ cel­ lent stud­ ies can be ­ listed that treat in­ di­ vid­ ual works by Push­ kin that may be ­ counted in the cat­ e­ gory of the ob­ scene or the bawdy, such as Mstis­ lav ­ Tsiavlovsky’s com­ men­ tary on The Shade of Bar­ kov (Ten’ Bar­ kova) and two re­ cent anal­ y­ ses of Tsar Ni­ kita and His Forty Daugh­ ters (Tsar’ Ni­ kita i sorok ego do­ che­ rei). Other rel­ e­ vant stud­ ies in­ ves­ ti­ gate the gen­ eral phe­ nom­ e­ non of bawdy the­ mat­ ics and/or ob­ scene lan­ guage in ­ Pushkin’s works, in­ clud­ ing key works by An­ thony Cross and Mak­ sim Sha­ pir, and sev­ eral an­ thol­ o­ gies ­ present com­ pi­ la­ tions of­ Pushkin’s ­ erotic pro­ duc­ tions in dif­ fer­ ent media.1 Yet even schol­ ar­ ship that ­ touches on the ra­ cier em­ a­ na­ tions of ­ Pushkin’s pen tends to focus on par­ tic­ u­ lar in­ stances of ob­ scen­ ity in ­ Pushkin’s writ­ ings, to re­ main­ rather con­ ser­ va­ tive in meth­ o­ dol­ ogy and out­ look, and to side­ step con­ sid­ er­ a­ tion of the im­ por­ tance of ob­ scen­ ity for ­ Pushkin’s poet­ ics as a whole.2 Thus, Tsi­ av­ lov­ sky, who was one of the first schol­ ars to rec­ og­ nize the lit­ er­ ary bril­ liance of The Shade of Bar­ kov, nev­ er­ the­ less very del­ i­ cately 186 Taboo Writings lim­ its him­ self in his ex­ traor­ di­ nar­ ily use­ ful com­ men­ tary on this work of glee­ ful ­ poetic rib­ aldry to the stan­ dard tex­ to­ log­ i­ cal meth­ ods, in­ clud­ ing­ source work and lin­ guis­ tic anal­ y­ sis, ­ rather than ap­ proach its ef­ fu­ sive sex­ ual con­ tent too ­ closely; he con­ sid­ ers the ­ poem’s “‘juvenile’ or­ i­ gins” (“mal’chisheskoe” pro­ isk­ hozh­ de­ nie) to be the ex­ pla­ na­ tion for its over­ abun­ dance of scur­ ri­ lous lin­ guis­ tic ma­ te­ rial.3 Vo­ cab­ u­ lary de­ not­ ing gen­ i­ talia and other cat­ e­ go­ ries of ob­ scen­ ity has, ­ wherever pos­ sible, sim­ ply been ex­ punged from ­ Pushkin’s poems and let­ ters in the fas­ tid­ i­ ous Acad­ emy of Sci­ ences edi­ tions of his works in the So­ viet and, now, ­ postSoviet pe­ ri­ ods, by the sub­ sti­ tu­ tion of a row of ­ dashes in place of the of­ fend­ ing terms—or, more se­ ri­ ously, by the omis­ sion of en­ tire works. Sur­ pris­ ingly, even Ser­ gei ­ Denisenko’s re­ cent an­ thol­ ogy of ­ Pushkin’s­ erotic writ­ ings omits The Shade of Bar­ kov, with the ex­ cuse that it has al­ ready been pub­ lished else­ where; as De­ ni­ senko ex­ plains, this poem is not wel­ come in his vol­ ume, as it might shock read­ ers “by rea­ son of its ex­ traor­ di­ nar­ ily ­ strong ob­ scen­ ity.”4 This punc­ til­ ious con­ cern for ­ readers’ pu­ ri­ tan­ i­ cal squeam­ ish­ ness im­ pli­ citly goes hand in hand with the de­ lin­ ea­ tion of an imag­ i­ nary boun­ dary ­ between the ­ erotic and the por­ no­ graphic in ­ Pushkin’s ­ oeuvre.5 While ­ Pushkin’s ­ erotic sen­ sibil­ ities, in ­ Russia’s cur­ rent cli­ mate of super­ fi­ cial sex­ ual open­ ness, may be cel­ e­ brated, the sug­ ges­ tion of any­ thing por­ no­ graphic in the works of the Great Poet must at all costs be sup­ pressed, and the tra­ di­ tional means of doing so is era­ sure, si­ lence, and de­ nial. It goes with­ out say­ ing that la­ tent gen­ i­ tal im­ agery some­ times ­ present in ­ Pushkin’s less ex­ pli...