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What did Pushkin not appreciate in Batyushkov’s ‘heart memory?’
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2025-6-34-53
Abstract
It is most likely that exiled to his family estate Mikhaylovskoe in 1825 Pushkin, with pen and pencil in hand, read and marked the second volume of Konstantin Batyushkov’s breakthrough works (1817). The 2-volume collection (with verse in the second one) summed up a literary career of a mentally deceased poet, Pushkin’s immediate predecessor in ‘light verse’ and the genre of elegy. At that moment, for Pushkin working on the first collection of his lyrics Batyushkov’s achievement served to test his own experience. A question in the title of this paper should be assessed in the context of this moment in Pushkin’s career and a turning point in the development of Russian elegiac genre. In his estimation of Batyushkov’s lyric ‘My Genius’ [‘Moy Geniy’], Pushkin discarded what was to hum a worn out elegiac convention and enjoyed what Batyushkov’s elegy had introduced to the verse technique and sensitivity of Russian poetry. Pushkin appraised as ‘charming’ a vivid recollection of the beloved, far away at the moment, but added: ‘with the exception of the first 4 [lines]’. The ‘first 4’ in their melancholy declaration of lonely sadness stood out for him as an out-of-place reminder of a genre that used to be in fashion but good for parody only in 1825.
About the Author
I. O. Shaytanov
Russian State University for the Humanities;
Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Igor O. Shaytanov Doctor of Philology
6 Miusskaya Sq., Moscow, 125047
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Review
For citations:
Shaytanov I.O. What did Pushkin not appreciate in Batyushkov’s ‘heart memory?’. Voprosy literatury. 2025;(6):34-53. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2025-6-34-53
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