Young Pushkin

Pushkin, like Shakespeare, is a protean writer of changing aspect. He is not to be defined by any one work; he is everywhere and nowhere. Yet who has not wished to lay hold of this Proteus and wrest from him the secret of his power? Every school of criticism has offered its own approach to pinning Pushkin down. Recently, interest has arisen in penetrating what is called Pushkin's poetic mythology, and we have seen attempts to discover the persistent elements of an imaginative universe inherent in his works.1 Glimpses of a synthesis are beginning to emerge, but the approach through the poetic image seems to overlook one important consideration: Pushkin is a lyric-epic writer, and the poetic mythology being reconstructed leaves aside the framework of action and character, the story element which, following Aristotle, we might call the soul of literature.2 This mythos is important, too, not to speak of identifying the pathos and the ethos which inform it. To grasp Pushkin we also need to peer into the kaleidoscopic patterns of his works in search of their angles of correspondence and mutual relationships. This is a complex undertaking, but it has a definite beginning: Pushkin's first important verse narrative Ruslan and Liudmila and its lyric context in his early verse

Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Literature · European Linguistics and Anthropology · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies