Tsar’ or ‘Prince’? Towards the publication history of the poem ‘The Upas Tree’ [‘Anchar’]

Abstract

The article deals with the alteration of the wording in the two known holographs of Pushkin’s poem ‘The Upas Tree’ [‘Anchar’]: the 1828 draft refers to the cruel African ruler as the ‘prince,’ whereas the first publication in the almanac Northern Flowers [Severnye tsvety] at the end of 1831 uses the word ‘tsar.’ The same variance in line 33 of ‘The Upas Tree’ persists between the Big and Small academic collections of Pushkin’s poetry: the Big anthology has ‘tsar,’ while the Small one ‘prince.’ In this regard, the paper offers a concise review of the arguments used by Soviet scholars of Pushkin to justify either of the versions of the problematic line and considers those facts of Pushkin’s personal life and work from the period of the poem’s writing which were ignored by scholars in the Soviet era. In addition, certain details of the poem’s publication were set straight following the newly printed commented collection of Poems from ‘Northern Flowers’ (2016) under the general editorship of David M. Bethea, which enables the scholar to form a final opinion about the wording of line 33 of the poem.