Some of these texts have seen the light of day before, either in English, or in Russian or French.  Others are new to the general reader.  It is to be hoped that, gathered together in this way, they create a coherent, if partial picture of Pushkin's úuvre.
   The tendencies in my own reading of Pushkin can be summed up as a focus on the poet's voice -- dialoguing with a myriad of other poets Russian and foreign, communing with different addressees on different levels of intimacy, addressing his native land in its travails, but above all dialoguing metapoetically with his own art in acts of subtle poetic consciousness.  That the dominant timbre of that voice is ironic is a testimony to Pushkin's total lack of self-indulgence and absolute sense of æsthetic taste.
   At the same time the irony is deeply felt as a rift that penetrates to the heart of the poet's existence.  "God grant that I not go insane' he writes in one poem, and we feel how closely he walked to the abyss along which the rarest poetic blossoms grow.

Ruslan and Liudmila is typical of the relationship of Pushkin to his immediate elders in the literary and, perhaps, in the career world: he acted as a 'gad-fly', imitating the conventions, then mocking them -- deforming them, as Tynianov called it.  We must beware of the idea that Pushkin was necessarily promoting some program to reform the language and make it more 'national'.  His art was eclectic inasmuch as it used whatever material came to hand.  The colloquialisms and tone-breakers were a convenient antidote to the literary bromides of a stale literary tradition.  The goal is a subtle and ironic dialectic of literary modes, not a democratization of the written word.  The 'struggle' -- and to be sure Pushkin did have one -- was to maintain his artistic and literary integrity in the face of a public which was debased in its literary tastes, a naïve and petulant cohort of critics, and a patronizing circle of older writers.  The commonest solution which he found to this problem was to manipulate the poetic form to his own purposes.  If we view Pushkin's activity in this light we get a picture of an artistic integrity largely managing to transcend the eclecticism of genre and style that is the most difficult feature of the Pushkinian manner to reconcile.
 
  

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