The consistently elegiac timbre of Pu&shachek;kin's Crimean poems
is significant not only for examining, on the one hand, the poet's
esthetic biography and, on the other, the development of the Russian
elegy—subjects on which a great deal of scholarship has
focused. Pu&shachek;kin's use of the elegy is also of particular
interest for the archeology of the literary identity, and the larger
cultural mythology, of the Crimea. The fundamental role of
Pu&shachek;kin's poetry in forming the paradigms of an esthetic and
experiential perception of the Crimea as a geopoetic phenomenon in
Russian culture has obscured, and helped to erase from cultural
memory, the earlier poetic visions of the peninsula which had affected
Pu&shachek;kin's perception of the Crimea's esthetic potential. Among
these were works well known to the Russian reading public by 1820,
when the poet undertook his Crimean journey—most notably,
Batiu&shachek;kov's elegy
From Der&zhachek;avin's 1784 sublimations
—deflections of the Imperial
sublime
(Harsha Ram, 1998) which seek to negotiate the
boundaries of Paradise and Inferno, Elysium and Tartarus within an
elegiac Tauric Hades. Appropriating the esthetic myth(s) of his
predecessors, Pu&shachek;kin reinvents the Crimea as a poetic space in
which the paradoxes of individual experience reverberate in the
nostalgia for the murky realm where Heaven can only be found by
descending into an abyss.