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The Little House in Kolomna

1970; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/127539

1467-9434

Alexander Pushkin, Walter Arndt,

Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

Pushkin's note under the last octave of Little House in Kolomna tells us that it was completed on October 9, 1830, in Boldino. In the years before the poem appeared in the almanac Novosel'e (vol. I, 1833)-offered to Pushkin's publisher, A. F. Smirdin, for the housewarming of his new shop on Nevsky Prospect opposite the Kazan Cathedral-the original forty-eight octaves were reduced to forty by Pushkin himself. Of the original forty-eight stanzas, fully one third had been devoted to the metaliterary introduction, Pushkin's playful musings about the attractions and pitfalls of the octave form, which had then barely attained citizenship in Russian verse. In the succinct forty-stanza version submitted in 1833, this portion, which the formalists considered the essence of the poem, still makes up one fifth (eight stanzas) of the whole. If one realizes that the plot does not really begin to develop until the thirteenth stanza, the proportion becomes thirty percent, much of what it was at first. Annenkov records that most contemporary literati regarded Pushkin's contribution as a mild jest, but also as an embarrassing sign of his irrevocable decay as a poet. Even Yazykov thought all the verse contributions to Novosel'e except Zhukovsky's and Krylov's were fit only for the wastebasket. This set a tone of patronizing neglect for some time and prompted absurd efforts to improve Pushkin's redaction by salvaging all the discarded workshop stanzas. But soon, perceptive hints were dropped by Belinsky, V. J. Bryusov, and M. L. Gofman, which went some way toward restoring the author's intentions and placing the puzzling work in the proper context of its literary associations, both ephemeral and lasting. The later formalists, while supplying little direct criticism of the poem, frequently drew upon it to illustrate their ideas about art as device, about self-conscious literature, and about form as content. They made it the occasion for adducing much illuminating contemporary material. Foremost