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As the Caucasus was being conquered by the Russian empire, images of the Caucasus as a place were being consolidated in the imagination of both Russians and westerners. The poetry and prose of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy painted vivid portraits of Russia's southern borderland. Travel and tourism brought new visitors, including European mountaineering enthusiasts such as Douglas Freshfield, who made the first recorded ascents of many of the region's peaks. Even in European erotica, the Caucasus and its peoples were portrayed as intriguingly vestigial versions of humanity, as wild and untamed as the landscape the inhabited.

Staël travels via Austria and Eastern Europe with Schlegel and her children; they enter Moscow as the last Westerners to see the old city intact before it is destroyed by fire. The Muscovites fête her (though Pushkin writes with some irony about her stay there), but she quickly moves on to St Petersburg. All the time she is gathering material for what will become Dix Années d'exil, probing national character, investigating the nature of Russian culture, discussing politics, and finally meeting Tsar Alexander. She remains unable to dissociate travel from her purpose as a writer, welcoming culture shock on account of the fresh vision it brings her despite her taste for all things French: to write, she says, she has to see with new eyes. She moves on to Sweden.

This introductory chapter begins by discussing the objectives and theoretical background of this book. The book aims to show how Pushkin wrote poems about fundamental aspects of his creative and intellectual identity in response to the ideas and aesthetic questions of his age. Building on earlier achievements, the book seeks to add a further critical dimension by importing methods more usually applied in the area of French and British Romanticism and Romantic theory. It uses a combination of history of ideas and literary criticism to take aim at an assumption that has operated in Pushkin studies — the belief that intellectual content in Pushkin is somehow incompatible with the perfection of his formal accomplishment. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

During the first decade of his career, Pushkin often represented poetic composition as a matter of craft and imitation rather than visionary inspiration. By addressing other writers, including prominent figures with whom he discussed the meaning of a poetic career, and by means of imaginary conversations with dead poets in which he debunked predecessors while imitating them, Pushkin subsumed numerous voices in his work. The result is that at times Pushkin cultivated an anonymous lyric, and intermittently wrote his poetic persona out of the centre of his creative text. The chapter addresses questions about Pushkin's view of originality and poetic identity. It argues that he read his predecessors with a sense of superiority free from anxiety about literary influence and informed by aspiration.

This chapter explores the influence of invention on Pushkin's idea of expression. Specifically, it focuses on invention as the creative principle that regulates poetic enthusiasm consistent with the canons of taste. Like imitation, it is a key element in Pushkin's self-description of poetic talent and underpins his classical elegance. At a time when his contemporaries hailed him as a Romantic, Pushkin was drawn to the theory of creativity and poetic invention advocated by the 18th-century theorists Jean-François La Harpe (1739-1803) and Jean-François Marmontel (1723-99). It is argued that both La Harpe and Marmontel were significant for Pushkin because their theory of the classical ideal focused on literary art as a powerful expression of sensibility, rather than on linguistic or stylistic rules. These ideas are at work in Pushkin's representation of poetic enthusiasm, where the vocabularies of craft and invention serve as touchstones of poetic taste.

Towards the end of his life, Pushkin returned to classically inspired forms, including a cycle of Anacreontic imitations, poems about statuary, imitations of Horace, and an impassioned defence of Boileau. The resurgence of classicism in Pushkin in the 1830s has caused bafflement. In fact, his poetic practice reflects a context in which aesthetic theories actively discussed the relation between form and creative power. This chapter explores Pushkin's ostensible conservatism, and even archaism, against the backdrop of European and Russian thinking about art, in which the meaning of the classical is no less dynamic and innovative than the Romantic.

This chapter explores the meaning of concepts such as subjectivity, imagination, and mimesis that from the late 1820s provided a counter-current to the classical ideal. Although Pushkin was inherently conservative as a lyricist, he understood how the classical could become the Romantic. His approach to innovation as a type of creative recycling met the Romantic revolutionary ideal halfway. But from 1826, the path to Romantic subjectivity through imagination also lay open to Pushkin. Issues once given little urgency in his poetry became more critical from 1826. It is shown that the transition to a greater Romantic lyric was tentative, and that Pushkin only intermittently transposed his reading about the imagination and subjectivity into poems that are statements about the creative mind.

This chapter explores how invention and imagination marked Pushkin's lyric thinking about nature. It argues that it is not until the 1830s that Pushkin's lyric treatment of nature finally aligns him with Romantic subjectivity. The chapter begins with a discussion of the role of nature in his first collection of poems, a patently important moment when Pushkin, the famed author of narrative, achieved comparable status as a lyric poet. It considers two examples of the Pushkinian Greater Romantic Lyric, which are among his greatest poems, ‘Autumn’ and ‘I visit once again. . . ’, the latter a revision of Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). It is because nature is more prominent for its absence than presence in Pushkin's lyric that these poems mark an exceptional trial of a Romantic mode for Pushkin.

This chapter examines strategies of self-presentation in the literary marketplace, drawing connections between poems about censorship, commercial pressures, and art for art's sake, and the prophetic power that Pushkin arrogates to the poet. It argues that Pushkin's path to the confidence manifested in ‘The Prophet’ lies through his imitation of the French poet André Chénier whose life and poetry demonstrated the perils and rewards of poetic authority.

This chapter examines Pushkin's fascination with Napoleon expressed in poems on Napoleon's escape from Elba and his death. His approach to defining and embodying the heroic was to change again. By 1830 admiration became a question of judgement and who is entitled to make it. Two of Pushkin's greatest poems ponder the question of how such valuation can be made. The final parts of the chapter focus on ‘The Hero’ and ‘The Commander’, paying close attention to the role of portrait painting and historical canvases by David, Gros, and Dawe that Pushkin invokes in articulating an ambivalent message about the heroic ideal.

This chapter returns to the intersection of poetry and ideas. It refocuses on a theory of sensibility that is an important part of the pre-Romantic legacy of Pushkin's view of individual identity. In exploring the impact of materialist thought, it considers works that are not usually read together because they fall into separate thematic groupings. When seen as structural or stylistic invariants, Pushkin's motifs often seem static and suggest an apparent lack of development over the course of his career. This impression is illusory. We can better appreciate how his thinking evolves by seeing motifs in terms of ideas that are dynamic links between poems.

The interplay of water, power, feminine sacrifice, and magic, a major theme in Russian nineteenth-century operas, is central to Rusalka, by Pushkin and Dargomyzhsky. Unlike her cousins—sirens, lorelei, naiads, undines, and mermaids-rusalka, once a mortal woman betrayed by a lover, in afterlife becomes a vengeful spirit. Her versatile singing and dancing, her sensuality unleashed the imagination of poets and musicians. While the heroine provides the title for the Dargomyzhsky’s opera, it is her lover (the Kniaz) who causes her demise yet receives a memorably lyrical vocal part. On the other hand, the composer throughout the opera undermines his heroine—by giving the live girl no distinct musical characteristics, then isolating her, a peasant, from the folk, reducing her to an invisible voice, and failing the tsarina-rusalka vocally. In the operatic finale, the male lead is captured by a khorovod (chorus) of dancing rusalkas, the traditional operatic folk chorus replaced with silent, dangerously sensual, otherworldly shadows—reminiscent of Adam’s Giselle, another ghostly ever-bride that conquered Russian stage before Rusalka.

The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising dualities, doubles, pairings penetrate both Pushkin’s tale and Tchaikovsky’s score. Gherman, by his very name linked to St. Germain (the original owner of the secret of three winning cards), repeats, reverses and distorts his predecessor’s story. Young Liza is paired with the countess (her grandmother in Tchaikovsky) and at the same time with her friend Polina. Liza replays the tale of the shepherdess, which unfolds in three fragments performed (in reverse time) by three female characters—the love arietta borrowed from Grétry and sung by the countess (scene 4), the shepherdess’s idyllic union enacted by Liza and Polina in a play within a play (scene 3), and Polina’s elegiac romance (scene 2). In a story collapsing times and confusing identities, a riddle between creators and spectators, the female circle is extended and empowered by one more person, a silent monarchical shadow at the falling curtain of the third scene.

This chapter shows how Pushkin in his epistle ‘To Ovid’ first projects his memory of the spatial story of Ovid's exile onto his own experience of exile as a mental event. The texts from Tristia and Ex Ponto that he has read and memorized over the years are activated by the sensory input of his own exile, not least by his encounter with places associated with his predecessor. But from perceiving the landscape through Ovid's texts and from his point of view of a southerner banned to the North, in the course of the poem Pushkin re-describes it, projecting onto it his mental images of a wintery Russian December. The Moldavian landscape is transfigured into an image of the South, and from this contrastive juxtaposition the poem's nature theme receives its originality. What was first perceived in analogy to Ovid's portrayal of their common place of exile is now represented in contrast to it. The poem's ‘here’ is opposed to the ‘there’ of Pushkin's northern background. Pushkin's reworking of the North-South axis, whereby the northerner encounters something from the South, is often cited as a feature of the Romantic attraction to the classical known also from German and English Romantic poetry. What makes Pushkin's text so unique, however, is exactly this superimposition of the memories of his own past onto his memory of Ovid's poetry.

The youthful Pushkin’s poem ‘To Ovid’ (1821) takes up the Ovidian tradition of self-conscious reflection on exile. This chapter considers the poem’s literary and historical context and rhetorical strategies. Tomis, the place of Ovid’s exile, was ceded by the Ottoman Empire to Russia in 1812, shortly before Pushkin was exiled there; Pushkin approached this unknown and exotic area with the models of Byron and Ovid. Pushkin’s poem indicates how his expectations of exile were moulded by Ovid’s poetry, though the reality he experienced was very different. In developing the Romantic tropes of poetic presence and personal alienation, his poem pays tribute to the enduring power of Ovid’s poetic voice to beguile its readers, whilst enabling Pushkin to distance himself from what he sees as the historical Ovid’s negative response to the experience of exile—a judgement he tempers a few years later in one of his last works written in exile, ‘The Gypsies’.

This chapter considers the reasons for our unwillingness to forgive Nabokov for his vanity and airs, when the opposite is true for the failings of Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. It argues that it is unfair to deny Nabokov his true rank among the great simply because he was a truly modern writer, taking credit for his artistic miracles and mirages, putting no stock in heavenly blessings.

Immediately following his repatriation in 1936, Prokofiev composed his second film score, this one for a screen adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. Although the film was never finished, the chapter shows that Prokofiev's completed score demonstrates a continued interest in economy and minimal means. Further considered in the chapter is Prokofiev's intentional politicization of his aesthetic goals: the composer positioned his new simplicity as an ideal musical answer to the ideological goals of state-sponsored events planned for the centenary of Pushkin's death.

Alexander Pushkin's story on Potemkin, as retold by Walter Benjamin in Franz Kafka, is said to storm like a herald two hundred years ahead of Kafka's work. Not only is Potemkin characterized as an ancestor of the somnolent and unkempt holders of power in Kafka's work, but the world of offices and registries in the story is held to be no different from that of Kafka's world, and Pushkin's character Shuvalkin is considered the same as K. More precisely, what makes Pushkin's story the forerunner of Kafka's world and work for Benjamin, is that the enigma which beclouds this story is Kafka's enigma・. However, to associate the flocculating enigma in both Pushkin's story and Kafka's works with the question of the law, as this chapter does here, may seem precipitate considering Benjamin's reservations concerning the very notion of the law.

That Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed two of his greatest works in 1877 speaks to the separation of his artistic and worldly spheres, a phenomenon he later described to Nadezhda von Meck in 1878. The Fourth Symphony, the composing of which spanned the entire year, had no overt program until Tchaikovsky wrote one at Meck's insistence. That Tchaikovsky's striking themes, unusual key patterns, and vivid sonorities could be justified as mere invention would seem to stretch a point. The problem, instead, is one that shall be seen again: the music is too strong to make credible Tchaikovsky's contention that the feelings are undefined; but rather, the impression is that he is not sharing them. The reasons for this are beyond retrieval, yet need not be confessional. The other great work of 1877 was Evgeniy Onegin, op. 24, based on Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse; the opera was begun in May and completed in January 1878.