Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xm8r8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-23T20:42:50.069Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Pushkin’s lyric identities

from Part I - Texts and Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

Andrew Kahn
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Whatever else he was writing, Pushkin’s energy for lyric poetry rarely seemed to dim. If he wrote for a coterie of friends and poets in early life, he looked forward in his late poems to a time when he would be a truly national poet, and many of his more than 700 lyrics have become canonical works of Russian literature. The corpus encompasses a wide range of genres, displaying Pushkin’s mastery of the song, the poetic epistle, the elegy, epigram, the political ode, the landscape poem, the soliloquy, the poetic cycle, the fragment.

Poetry is often both a pragmatic and imaginary assertion of the self. The relationship between the first-person speaker and the author in Pushkin’s lyric poems is no less complex than in Evgenii Onegin (see Chapter 3). Whatever the connection to the lived life, lyric poems project the sense that identity is continuous but also highly precarious. Lyric poetry also projects alternative senses of identity to different, sometimes overlapping readerships. By moving through Pushkin’s career, this chapter discusses the shape of self-representation in his lyric works with a focus on the connection between poems that project the identity of a poet and poems where an inner and more private self speaks.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×