Wachtel M. A Commentary to Pushkin's Lyric Poetry, 1826-1836

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. — 404 p. — ISBN: 978-0-299-28543-2.The purpose of this book is less to fill a lacuna than to bridge a gaping chasm in the existing scholarly literature. Given the centrality of Pushkin’s work to the Russian literary tradition and the virtually hagiographical reverence that attends any object or location associated with him, one can only marvel that to this day no adequate commentary to his lyric poetry exists in any language. This regrettable situation cannot be attributed to a lack of qualified scholars or to their insufficient devotion to the task. Rather, it is the result of a very peculiar set of historical circumstances.
The present commentary is written primarily for an audience of students and scholars who can read Pushkin in the original, but whose native language is not Russian. Such readers require a different type of help than Russian native speakers, who, for example, require no assistance in deciphering “simple” syntax or in determining where an accent falls. Other aspects of my work, while traditionally omitted from Russian commentaries, may well be of value to Russian scholars. First, I consider the metrical and stanzaic form of each poem and, where possible, conceptualize it historically in terms of genre and theme. As Tomashevskii has shown in one of the greatest Pushkin studies ever written (“Strofi ka Pushkina”), formal questions were for Pushkin always also semantic questions. Second, I pay especially close attention to Pushkin’s Western sources, citing wherever possible (in the original French, English, and – when relevant – Italian, Polish, Serbian, and Latin) the specific edition that Pushkin was using. As far as Russian sources are concerned, I have been far less scrupulous about searching out the exact version Pushkin knew.True PDF