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This article is reprinted from FIDELIO Magazine, Vol. VIII, No. 2 Summer 1999
See also extensive coverage of "Pushkin and Schiller" in FIDELIO , Vol. VIII, No. 3 Fall, 1999 Fidelio Table of Contents |
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Three Poems on Imprisonment and Freedom "Vo glubine sibirskikh rud..." This year, 1999, is the Pushkin Year, the bicentennial of the birth of Russia's great poet, language-maker, dramatist, and historian--Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. He lived from May 26 (Old Style), 1799, to January 29, 1837, his death from wounds suffered in a duel being an irreparable loss to the Russian nation and the culture of all mankind. "Patriot and world citizen," as Schiller would say, Pushkin is the central genius of the Rusian language and its literature. When he died, his friend Prince Odoyevsky lamented the loss of "the sun of our poetry." The poet Alexi Koltsov exclaimed, " The sun has been shot!" Pushkin wrote sparkling gems of verse in Russian, and a clear prose-- in his stories, as well as historical researches-- that opened up a new era for the Russian language, in a period where not only aristocratic ladies, but even many Russian diplomats, spoke Frnch better than their mother tongue. Pushkin's lucid and flexible Russian drew upon every part of his heritage: his family traditions (his father and uncle were men of letters from an old noble family, while his mother's grandfather was an Ethiopian prince, kidnapped and given to Tsar Peter the Great, for whom he then worked as a military engineer); his own eduaiton at the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee, with its Classical curriculum; the special sounding Old Church domain of Slavonic domain of Russian vocabulary; world literature from antiquity to his contemporaries; and athe fairy tales of his nursemaid, arina Rodionovna. As Dante had done with the Italian language five hundred years earlier, Pushkin transformed the Russian vernacular into a language capable of expressing profound and impassioned ideas. Later this year, FIDELIO will feature works celebrating the universal genius of Pushkin. In honor of his birthday, we now publish three of Pushkin's many poems on the theme of freedom: |
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Three Poems on Translated by Rachel Douglas Ptichka"Ptichka" ("The Little Bird") dates from 1822, when the young Pushkin, Baron Anton Delvig, and other poet friends contrived a poetic contest--"a sort of wager, or a steeple-chase, by our young poets," as Countess Yevdoksiya Rostopchina later noted down the recollection of Pushkin's brother--on the theme of "the little bird, set free." The image came, as Pushkin wrote in a letter to Nikolai Gnedich, from "the Russian peasant's touching custom of setting free a little bird on Easter." Away from home, I reverently observe Uznik"Uznik" ("The Prisoner") was written the previous year. From April 1820 until July 1823, Pushkin lived in quasi-exile as a foreign ministry employee in Kishinyov (Chisinau, today the capital of Moldova), where he was sent by administrative transfer after being interrogated about certain political poems. I sit behind bars in the dankest of blocks. "Vo glubine sibirskikh rud...""Vo glubine sibirskikh rud..." ("In far Siberia's deepest soil...") is a later poem. Several participants in the Decembrist revolt of December 14, 1825, when young army officers staged an armed uprising in St. Petersburg, demanding a constitution for Russia, were friends of Pushkin. Five of the ring-leaders were hanged, and the other Decembrists were exiled to Siberia for life. Pushkin's poetic message to them was written in early 1827, when, visiting a friend's house in Moscow, he learned that the wife of one of the Decembrists was about to follow her husband to Siberia. He improvised the verses, which were sent and received, and answered by several of the exiles, in verse. "Vo glubine sibirskikh rud..." was not published in full inside Russia until 1876. |
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