Sculpting a persona: The path from Pushkin's Caucasian Journal to Puteshestvie v Arzrum

Russian Review

Volumn 56, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 366-382

  Helfant, Ian M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53149120279     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/131749     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. I borrow the terms from Bakhtin, "Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti," in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, comp. S. G. Bocharov (Moscow, 1979), 12
2. The work has been well translated by Vadim Liapunov as "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," in M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin, 1990), 4-256. I will cite this translation in further references. Bakhtin explores the relationship between author and hero as one predicated upon the author's "outsidedness" - aesthetic, ethical, temporal and spatial - in relation to the hero. He examines autobiography as a subcategory of this relationship (pp. 150-66)
3. N. V. Gogol', "V chem zhe, nakonets, sushchestvo russkoi poezii i v chem ee osobennost'," in his Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. S. I. Mashinskii and M. B. Khrapchenko (Moscow, 1986), 334. One of Pushkin's most perceptive contemporary readers, Monika Greenleaf, comments: "Moreover, in his generic shifts and his heterogeneous publishing modes Pushkin seems deliberately to have cultivated an image of youthful, gentlemanly, amateurish, improvisational unpredictability. Each text, each appearance before the public pushed off from the last, as it were, and deflected the reader's projection of a single, consistent authorial persona and system of values."
4. See her Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 1-2. In his probing treatment of Pushkin's authorial persona in Eugene Onegin, William Mills Todd III comments: "And so, Pushkin, as the primary historical personage in his own novel, establishes himself with biographical details familiar to his readers. And few of these relate to the historical, political, and economic causality of realistic fiction. . . . [T]he author-narrator (the persona of a living, contemporary poet) can exercise considerable freedom in making his life, yet at the same time he observes his historical responsibility, for the importance of that life to his audience resides precisely in its creativity, which history has not yet terminated."
5. See Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, 1986), 123-24
6. See, for example, P. Bitsilli, "Puteshestvie ν Arzrum," in Belgradskii Pushkinskiisbornik, ed. E. V. Anichkov (Belgrade, 1937)
7. For an excellent recent exploration of the Journey that sedulously avoids this pitfall see Monika Frenkel Greenleaf, "Pushkin's 'Journey to Arzrum,' " Slavic Review 50 (Winter 1991): 940-54. Greenleaf situates the Journey within the context of orientalist discourse in Pushkin's day and argues that he was attempting to clear himself a space amidst this overcrowded textual terrain. She also discusses in passing the relationship of the Journey to certain of Pushkin's Caucasian lyrics. The article has been incorporated into chapter 3 of her book on Pushkin, where she discusses Pushkin's Southern poems as well
8. For a recent study that analyzes one of these poems, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," as a self-canonizing example of Russian literary imperialism see Katya Hokanson, "Literary Imperialism, Narodnost' and Pushkin's Invention of the Caucasus," Russian Review 53 (July 1994): 336-52
9. Susan Layton, in Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, England, 1994), provides the best overview of Russia's contribution to orientalist discourse. Drawing upon material from travelogues, oriental studies, ethnography, memoirs, poetry, and other literary genres, she explores the profound tensions between the imperialist ideology which fueled Russia's campaigns to pacify and "civilize" the Muslim mountain peoples and romantic fascination with these tribes as noble savages whose pacification had lamentable aspects
10. Ia. L. Levkovich, Avtobiograficheskaiaproza i pis'ma Pushkina (Leningrad, 1988), 118-20
11. Iu. Tynianov, "O Puteshestvii v Arzrum," Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, vol. 2 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), 61. The issue of Literaturnaia gazeta was 1830, no. 6
12. See Wachtel, "Voyages of Escape, Voyages of Discovery: Transformations of the Travelogue," in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, ed. B. Gasparov et al. (Berkeley 1992) 128-49
13. Tynianov, "O Puteshestvii v Arzrum," 63. The seventeen-volume edition of Pushkin's complete works provides Pushkin's journal and variations among the manuscripts and published texts
14. See A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS), ed. Bonch-Bruevich et al. (Moscow, 1937-59), vol. 8, pt. 1:441-83; pt. 2:1002-76
15. The lyrics are collected in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 3
16. V. L. Komarovich, "K voprosu o zhanre Puteshestvii v Arzrum," Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, vol. 3 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1937), 326-28. Komarovich is not alone, of course, in noting these parallels. I shall refer to other commentators when I address individual lyrics below
17. Quoted in N. Ia. Eidel'man, Byt' mozhet za khrebtom Kavkaza (Moscow, 1990), 207. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own
18. Bulgarin's criticism should also be viewed as a salvo in his ongoing feud with Pushkin over Karamzin's legacy. For details of this debate over the "literary aristocracy" see Todd, Fiction and Society, 84-93
19. Pushkin, PSS 4:113-14 ("And I will sing of that glorious hour when our two-headed eagle, smelling bloody battle, rose over the indignant Caucasus. . . . Submit, Caucasus: Ermolov comes"). Critics from Pushkin's time until now have puzzled at the contrast between the body of the poem, which tends to privilege the native tribespeople in accordance with romantic poetics, and the chauvinistic tone of the epilogue. Greenleaf provides the most sophisticated reading of this disjunction
20. She contrasts to these major figures a group of secondary and tertiary writers, dubbed the "little orientalizers," who unabashedly underwrote Russia's campaigns to the South (Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 156, passim)
21. See the chapter entitled "Feminizing the Caucasus" in Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, 175-91
22. See also Stephanie Sandler's incisive and detailed discussion of the literary subjection of native women in the Southern poems in her Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford, 1989), 140-211
23. T. Roboli, "The Literature of Travel," Russian Prose, trans. and ed. Ray Parrott (Ann Arbor, 1985), 46
24. For the original version see T. Roboli, "Literatura puteshestvii," in Russkaia proza, ed. B. Eixenbaum and Iu. Tynianov (1926; reprint ed. The Hague, 1963), 42-73
25. Levkovich, Avtobiograficheskaia proza, 234
26. Williams Mills Todd III, The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (Princeton, 1976), 8
27. Levkovich, Avtobiograficheskaia proza, 235, 248
28. Pushkin, PSS 8:pt.2:1033
29. The phrase also occurs in Eugene Onegin (PSS 4:22), where the narrator declares, "Liubite samogo sebia/ Dostopochtennyi moi chitatel'." (In the Journey, the Russian is, "Liubite samogo sebia/ liubeznyi milyi moi chitatel'.") Pushkin could assume that many of his readers would notice the self-quotation (chapters 4 and 5 were first published together in early 1828), adding an additional nuance to his authorial persona in the journal. I am indebted to William Todd for noting the connection with Eugene Onegin
30. Roboli, "Literature of Travel," 48
31. Pushkin, PSS, Ibid., pt. 1:443
32. Robert Elliott, The Literary Persona (Chicago, 1982), 32
33. Robert Elliott, The Literary Persona, Ibid., x
34. Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 141, passim
35. Wachtel, "Voyages of Escape," 133
36. In this and the following discussion I am weaving together threads that run throughout Bakhtin's immensely complicated essay, and for that matter much of his work. See Bakhtin, Art and Answerability
37. Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. and ed. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton, 1991), 9
38. The Russian edition is L. Ginzburg, O psikhologicheskoi proze, 2d ed. (Leningrad, 1977)
39. Anthony Olcott, "Parody as Realism: The Journey to Arzrum," Russian Literary Triquarterly 10 (Fall 1974): 254
40. Olcott A., Russian Literary Triquarterly, Ibid., 256-57
41. Roboli, "Literature of Travel,", Ibid
42. See Harry Levin, "Romance and Realism," The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York, 1963), 51
43. Philippe Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Contract," French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge, 1982), 192-222. In exploring what he calls the " autobiographical contract," Lejeune asserts that autobiography must fulfill each term of a set of conditions: it must take the form of prose narrative; deal with an individual's personal history; maintain the identity of author, narrator and protagonist; and be retrospectively oriented. Lejeune excludes such related genres as the diary and essay, which deviate from one or more of these conditions