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Taboo and the Family Romance in The Captain’s Daughter
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321 Taboo and the Fam ily Ro mance in The Captain’s Daugh ter David M. Bethea It is a rel a tively easy mat ter to iden tify places in Pushkin’s early works where ta boos are being chal lenged and broken. After all, this is the ad o les cent who con stantly got into hot water with his mates and the au thor ities at the ly ceum for par tic i pat ing in pranks (the gogol’-mogol’ epi sode) or say ing some thing rude or pro voc a tive. It is not so sur pris ing then, given this start ing point, that Push kin would come to pen works like “Lib erty: An Ode” (“Vol’nost’: Oda”), “Fai ry Tales: Noël” (“Skazki: Noel’”), “The Countryside” (“Der ev nia”), “The Dag ger” (“Kin zhal”), and even tu ally the in cred ibly blas phe mous The Ga brie liad (Gav rii li ada), which took the sa cred sto ries of an nun ci a tion and vir gin birth to pre vi ously un ex plored (be cause so drenched in taboo) realms. Thus, let us begin by ad mit ting that Push kin the bra zen taboo tra ducer is more in ev i dence from his ad o les cent days up to his Mik hai lovs koe con fine ment (1824–26) and wa tershed poem “The Prophet” (Pro rok [1826]). That being said, how ever, I would like to argue that it is the later Push kin, the Push kin of the 1830s, who may pro vide more inter est ing, and more far-reaching, ex am ples of how the ta boos of Rus sian cul ture are to be nego tiated if one is to grow as a his tor i cally self-aware con scious ness. 322 Taboo Readings Ta boos by defi ni tion set boun dar ies; how does one ex peri ment at those boun dar ies with out be com ing tainted? Back ground Broadly speak ing, the post-romantic, fa mi lied Push kin re en gages the no tion of taboo but does so by mov ing away from the ge neric realm of poetry, es pe cially light verse in the form of sa la cious anec dote or anti-establishment po lit i cal tease, and mov ing to ward an at ti tude and a genre ex pec ta tion (prose) that see Russia’s his tor i cal ten sions in terms of ep o chal turn ing points, mo ments when the sa cred bonds hold ing the na tion to gether are about to be vi o lated and the fu ture is threat ened by that vi o la tion. To take the two most ob vi ous ex am ples, in The Bronze Horse man (Med nyi vsad nik [1833]) we have the taboo of a gra ven (pagan) image sub sti tut ing for the spirit of a Chris tian God and, as awe some totem, claim ing au thor ity for a city’s (and a new en light ened country’s) crea tion myth, and in “The Queen of Spades” (“Pi ko vaia dama” [1833]) we have the “new man” with the “pro file of Na po leon” who is will ing to com mit mur der, and pos sibly in cest—and who thereby cyn i cally side steps the gam ble of true love—to ob tain the cap i tal he cov ets. That under ly ing these two works are Pushkin’s very com pli cated 1830s re la tions to Peter I and Cathe rine II and the mean ings for Rus sia of their re spec tive epochs gives the sa cred pro hi bi tion as pect of their plots a broader sig nifi cance. As ob ject of schol arly in quiry, The Captain’s Daugh ter (Kap i tans kaia dochka [1836]) has been no stranger to Freu dian and quasi-Freudian read ings.1 In this re spect the his tor i cal novel is a log i cal ex ten sion, within the same time frame (1833–36), of the vi o lated pro hi bi tions of The Bronze Horse man and “The Queen of Spades.” Per haps the main de par ture to be ob served in this later work is Pushkin...