PROBLEM - Exploring the works of Alexander Pushkin as texts that are celebrated as popular, nationalist literature at one end, and on the other as heralding the genre of historical fiction in the Russian Literary Tradition.
HYPOTHESIS - To examine Alexander Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze horseman’ and as literary text that is both heavily popular, and at the same time, documents both fiction and history in the Russian Romantic Tradition.
INTRODUCTION –The practice of fictionalising history and on the reverse historicising fiction is not a new phenomenon in literary traditions of the world. From T.S Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Shadow Lines’, Girish Karnad’s play ‘Tughlaq’ to Dan Brown’s ‘The DaVinci Code’, a lot many authors, in a lot many genres ranging from poetry to novels have made use of certain historical incidents in order to fictionalise them and in the process attach new meanings and dimensions to both the literary text as well as to history itself. In fact almost all of Shakespeare’s plays are based on history. This constant engagement of fiction and lived history has lead to the establishment of a new genre in modern literary studies called The Historical Mystery.
This new genre operates at the level of being both ‘popular’ and ‘classicist’ in one sense. It reaches out to a large number of readers through the medium of the so called pulp-novel and through it popularises, as well as revisits the notion of ‘dead history’. But when we are to understand and explore the work of a poet of Pushkin’s stature who is a good 200 years away from us in time, we have to probably keep aside the modern notions of the dichotomous split between the popular and the classical. Hence through this paper I suggest to explore Pushkin as a remarkable literary phenomenon who is loved and admired as a People’s Poet of Russia, than as merely the ‘Literary predecessor’ of Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev within the Russian cultural tradition.
Alexander Pushkin – Brief Account of Life and Works-
Pushkin was born in Moscow in --- from a distinguished family of the Russian nobility which traced its ancestry back to the 12th century. By the time he was 14, he had installed himself in the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of the capital, Saint Petersburg. In 1820 he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, amidst much controversy about its subject and style.
With that, we are able to examine readings and can ask ourselves if this really could have taken place exactly how it is being portrayed. Although the books seem as if they are written as an autobiography or “diary”, they are actually fictional books and should not be used as stand-alone text in a classroom. Even though these books do bring much knowledge to a classroom and allow students to learn about historical events they otherwise may not have, they only provide one insight to the
Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” allow a deeper view into the history and lifestyle of St. Petersburg. Both stories exhibit the ambivalence that exists in many aspects of St. Petersburg.
In her novel The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey looks at how history can be misconstrued through the more convenient reinterpretation of the person in power, and as such, can become part of our common understanding, not being true knowledge at all, but simply hearsay. In The Daughter of Time Josephine claims that 40 million school books can’t be wrong but then goes on to argue that the traditional view of Richard III as a power obsessed, blood thirsty monster is fiction made credible by Thomas More and given authenticity by William Shakespeare. Inspector Alan Grant looks into the murder of the princes in the tower out of boredom. Tey uses Grant to critique the way history is delivered to the public and the ability of historians to shape facts to present the argument they believe.
The short story, “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”, explicates the life of a man named Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka. We see him briefly in his young years, followed by his life in the army, and his return to the farm where his strong characterized aunt resides. We can see immediately that this man lives in constant cleanliness and dutiful paranoia; these are some of his desires that he wishes to exhibit to others. We can also see his fears, which reside in the confiscation of his masculinity and independence. This short story has many elements that resemble others in the Nikolai Gogol collection.
...s tale turns into an attack on the ridiculous, heartless nature of Russian society – especially Russian in civil service. Gogol portrays the trivialness of this through the use of distinct contrasts, mostly between how the poor official in this tale sees his prized overcoat, and how his fellow workers view it, and him, with scorn and mocking laughter. It is not a pleasant tale, and there is no happy ending. But it is effective in how well it presents the absurdities of life at this time in St. Petersburg.
In these texts Appollonius and soviet Moscow society function inimically to the forces of imagination and negative capability. These characters represent sobriety and reason. They attempt to limit and control the narrative and the forces of the imagination-which often exceed their powers. A systemic vision of knowledge binds both the Muscovites and Appollonius. Both parties rely on the certainty of this knowledge to inoculate them from the more frightening and unstable aspects of existence. Through categorization they hope to contro...
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Hansen, Bruce. “Dostoevsky’s Theodicy.” Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1996. At . accessed 18 November 2001.
Nikolai Gogol was a prominent dramatist, novelist, and short story writer in 19th century Russia. Born in Ukraine, much of Gogol’s writing was satirical of the Russian government during his time. Gogol wrote short stories, plays, poems, novels and more. Through Gogol’s writing prominent themes arise. These themes are relevant to and occur throughout Gogol’s short stories in his Petersburg Tales. Masculinity is shown through the character’s constant need to increase their social standing and their inability to cope with the reality of their positions and how they internalize this. Gogol’s short stories acknowledge the protagonist's dilemmas with their masculinity that emerge from the societal and continue to the individual level.
Seyersted, Per. "Kate Chopin." Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Eds. James E. Person, Jr. and Dennis Poupard. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984. 60 vols.
de Maupassant, Guy. "The Necklace." Understanding Fiction. 3rd ed. Eds. Clanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hill, 1979. 66-72
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Heritage of American Literature. Ed. James E. Miller. Vol 2. Austin: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.487.Print.
In order to see how cultural and historical situations affect literature throughout history, it is important to get a brief history on each era discussed in this paper. The first era we will be reviewing will be writings from 1865-1914. The Civil War was just ending in 1865. America lost over a half of million Americans in the war. The nation was in a state of disorder and the south was devastated. Nevertheless, the country prospered. America became industrialized and saw innovations such as; the railroads, telegraph, telephone, and electricity. The population of the United States had also started to increase due to immigration.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, also spelled Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was born in Votkinsk, in the city of Vyatka, Russia, May 7, 1840. Second in a family of five sons and one daughter, to whom he was extremely devoted. Once in his early teens when he was in school at St. Petersburg and his mother started to drive to another city, he had to be held back while she got into the carriage, and the moment he was free ran and tried to hold the wheels.
“Tharoor's quest for novelty continues in Riot”, states a review (Ramlal Agarwal WLT, 141). The narrative techniques that Tharoor employs are methods that an author consciously uses to tell his story because an author “cannot choose whether or not to affect his reader’s evaluation by his choice of narration, he can only choose whether to do it well or poorly.” (Booth, 69). Nevertheless in Riot, the author uses his narrative techniques not to solely tell his story but more so to communicate his concerns to his audience. The context chosen may be fictional but the discursive mode of expression involving opposing viewpoints in specific relation to the historical events offers the historical