Description
At the very time he was becoming Russia’s first and only national poet, Alexander Pushkin spent nearly six years in exile (1820-26). This book explores the meanings of exile for Pushkin’s changing sense of himself and for his poetic practices. Sent out of Petersburg but confined within Russia’s borders, Pushkin saw both the southern expansion of the empire and the isolation of country life in the North. Exile thus shaped his politics, and because he was separated from his readers and fellow writers, it defined the rhetorical patterns within which he wrote.
The author reads a small but varied group of texts from the years of exile: lyric poems, long narrative poems, the verse novel, Eugene Oregin, and the drama, Boris Godunov. By exploring Pushkin’s representations of distance from his audience, she demonstrates how he created that audience. Rather than narrating Pushkin’s “growth” into greatness, the author develops a theory of reading Pushkin’s shifting conceptions of himself, his work, and his country during the years of exile. His rhetoric of apostrophe, quotation, and figuration is considered carefully in each text. Quoted texts are given in Russian and in English translation.
The analyses range across several methodological and theoretical perspectives: biographical and historical information is frequently brought in, formalist and Bakhtinian frameworks are used for several texts, and the lessons of deconstruction and feminist inquiry are particularly important as Pushkin’s rhetoric of distance and politics of pleasure are read.
Stephanie Sandler was Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College.
Cover illustration courtesy of the Pasternak Trust.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the 1989 Stanford University Press edition (ISBN: 0804715424).
Tags:
stanford press, biography, Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, russian, exile, 19th century, politics, poetry, verse novels, drama 
