Slot: 29D-1 Dec. 29, 3:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.
Panel: In The Shadow of Pushkin’s Statu(r)e
Chair: Julie Buckler, Harvard University
Title: Talking From Around Pushkin’s Statue:
Dostoyevsky’s 1881 Speech
Author: Maksim Klymentiev, University of Southern
California
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous speech at the
1881 Pushkin anniversary has long been a subject of critical analyses, both
because of its purported bombshell effect on its audience and because of its
symbolic status as the novelist’s literary testament. Dostoyevsky’s final
public appearance coincided with, and perhaps contributed to, the return of
Pushkin to his position of the founder of modern Russian literature, as well as
with the rise of poetry and symbolism.
The literary and
ideological aspects of Dostoyevsky’s speech have been extensively studied by
scholars, as was its relation to the overall organization of the anniversary.
However, little attention has been paid to how deeply the novelist’s Pushkin
address could be affected by more extra-literary factors, for example, by
another “staple” of the event – the non-attendance of it by Dostoyevsky’s
eternal “other”, Leo Tolstoy.
A close textual
analysis to which I subject Dostoyevsky’s speech, especially its discussion of Eugene
Onegin, reveals an
uncanny tendency on the novelist’s part to talk not so much about Pushkin’s
classic but rather about the recent literary sensation that was creating uproar
among the Russian public of the time, that is, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. By presenting the love triangle in Eugene
Onegin as including an
old man (Tatiana’s husband is actually Onegin’s age in Pushkin) and by
exploring at length the moral and psychological dilemmas of a much younger and
passionate Tatiana, Dostoyevsky appears to be engaged in a complex
communication with Tolstoy. In this way, he signals to the absent Tolstoy both
his unmistakable awareness of Anna Karenina’s immediate literary sources, and,
indirectly but effectively, involves its author to participate in the Pushkin
anniversary event. Thus Dostoyevsky’s career closes in a strikingly similar
manner to which it started in Poor Folk, that is, by drawing on characters and themes developed by
others (Bocharov) in order to exploit his own literary and ideological agenda.
Title: Of Monuments and Men: Statues of Pushkin
in the 1937 Jubilee
Author: Jonathan Brooks Platt, Columbia
University
The mass celebrations of Pushkin’s death centenary
in 1937 made great use of statuary.
Demonstrations were held at the Pushkin monument in Moscow and at the
site of a planned monument in Leningrad.
Statues adorned the Pushkin exhibit in the State Historical Museum and
the stage of the Pushkin concert in the Bolshoy Theater. Images of the poet in stone or bronze
appeared again and again in the pages of the press, frequently as illustrations
to poems or articles that featured Pushkin in monumental form. Many of these images, including
reproductions of photomontage posters and paintings, depicted Pushkin’s
monument among the Soviet people, as they celebrated their recently
rehabilitated national poet.
This essay
examines the jubilee’s various sculptural representations of Pushkin in terms
of their temporality.
Traditionally monuments, like funerary sculpture, serve to counteract
the effects of time and transience by substituting an enduring, sculptural
symbol for the dead man represented.
Such monuments promise the individual an inorganic, metaphorical
immortality, “living on” after physical death in the memory of the collective
(ancestors, nation) that preserves the statue’s symbolic power through the
generations.
However,
depictions of Pushkin’s statue in the jubilee repeatedly test the limits of
this metaphorical life after death, endowing the sculptural image with
sentience, motility, and other attributes of a real, organic existence. Analysis of the different means of
achieving this animation of Pushkin’s monument—ekphrastic descriptions, sculptural
representations of motion, portrayals of the statue as a participant in the
celebrations—serves to illustrate the jubilee’s fusion of the traditional
temporality of commemoration with the more extraordinary vision of a world not
subject to transience, yet still teeming with creative activity. The normal boundaries between past,
present, and future become permeable in this world, and the endurance of
monuments comes to be indistinguishable from the vitality of men.
Title: The Pushkin Sub-text in Timur Kibirov’s
“Двадцать Сонетов к Саше Запоевой”: “Я помню чудное мгновенье” and Руслан и
Людмила
Author: Christine Dunbar, Princeton University
Timur Kibirov’s cycle “Двадцать Сонетов к Саше Запоевой” defies expectation. The sonnet form
itself leads the reader to expect either a philosophical work with high
register vocabulary or a love poem.
Kibirov is well aware of this tradition and explicitly mentions both
Dante and Shakespeare within the cycle.
However, the inspiration for the choice of precisely
twenty sonnets likely stems from Joseph Brodsky’s 1974 cycle “Двадцать сонетов к
Марии Стюарт.” Moreover, Kibirov also borrows the decision to
rewrite a famous Pushkin lyric in sonnet form, as Brodsky does in the sixth
sonnet of his cycle, “Я Вас любил. Любовь ещё
возможно.” Alexander Zholkovsky has shown how this sonnet “follows
in the footsteps of” Pushkin’s 1829 lyric “Я Вас любил. . .” but then “subverts
it, and comes out as a distinctly Brodskian text” (Zholkovsky 117-146).
Kibirov’s use of
the Pushkin lyric “Я помню чудное
мгновенье,” follows a similar trajectory, but it encompasses the
entire first half of his cycle.
Likewise, the second half is dominated by references to the preface to Ruslan
i Liudmila, “У лукоморья дуб зеленый.”
With these two extended sets of references, Kibirov plays with the
reader, both creating and undercutting the expectations of love poetry and
fairy tales.
Zholkovsky, Alexander. Text Counter Text. Rereadings in
Russian Literary History.