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Alexander Pushkin devoted the last five years of his life to research in the imperial archives in St. Petersburg publishing a number of works dealing with such historical figures as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Boris Godunov, and the rebel leaders Mazepa and Pugachev. This thesis examines Pushkin's historiographical methodology and conclusions and considers Pushkin's writings from the viewpoint of the historian rather than the literary critic. It offers a chronological study of the four fictional and non-fictional works in which Pushkin analysed major figures and events in Russian history and traces the importance he attributed to them for the development of the Russian national consciousness. The themes of rebellion against the state and political legitimacy predominate in this investigation and shed light on how Pushkin's study of history reinforced and, in some instances altered, his own fundamental political and social beliefs.

The purpose of this study is to present in a concise form information concerning the extent and quality of Slovenian translations of Pushkin's poetry and prose. The author has investigated as fully as possible the renderings of all the known Slovenian translators of Pushkin, who were active during the second half of the nineteenth century. Particular attention has been focused on the authorship of the published translations, collection of full bibliographical data and evaluation of the quality of the Slovenian renderings. A brief survey of the contents of the chapters will show broadly how the author has approached this task. Chapter I provides a short descriptive history of translation, explores in general terms the traditional and customary approach to translation and reviews the commonly accepted criteria and agreed upon principles governing translation. Furthermore, a brief comparative evaluation of existing resemblances and diversities of the Russian and Slovenian languages has been included. Chapter II provides a historical review of the Slovene-Russian cultural contacts, which date back to the sixteenth century, and then discusses the socio-cultural development of the Slovenian nation in the nineteenth century, taking especially into account the influence of the Slavophiles and Russophiles on the development of the Slovenian literature. Chapter III is devoted to the examination of the existing Slovenian renderings of Pushkin's poetry and prose; it provides short sketches of their authors, analyses the available bibliographical data, compares some of the renderings with the original texts, examines their language and attempts to assess their poetic failings or merits. Finally, added is a list of articles about Pushkin and translations which appeared in the Slovenian periodical publications. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

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Divided into six chapters, our thesis examines the translation of Evgenyi Onegin, a novel in verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, in France and Japan in the 20th century. In Chapter 1, we introduce our methodological approach, including the eight elements of our translation analysis: the by-who, the who, the what, the for-who, the when, the why, the where, and the how. In Chapter 2, after a brief biography of the Russian poet, we examine his central work Evgenyi Onegin, and its unique structuro-phono-semantic synthesis. The first French mention of Pushkin was in the 19th century, and the 'transfer-related discourse' of that period is the focus of Chapter 3, particularly its creation of the myth of the poet's untranslatability, which would influence translators of the Pushkinian novel into the 20 th century. In Chapter 4, we examine the 11 French translations produced between 1902 and 1996. Because the Japanese discovery of foreign literature---and Pushkin---was the product of political changes during the Meiji period (1868-1912), it is paramount that we examine the pivotal role of 19 th century ideological discourse in which translation is viewed as a means and a condition for the country's modernization. Finally, in Chapter 6, we turn our attention to the 8 Japanese translations of the Pushkinian work produced between 1921 and 1996. Our aim is to demonstrate how the spatio-temporal change influenced the view of translation in general, and translations of Pushkin in particular.

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This Master's Thesis presents and analyses the problems involved in the transfer1 of the name and the works of Alexandre Pushkin in nineteenth century France. Pushkin, Russia's national poet and its most revered author, is little known in France, where his works are often considered untranslatable. The reasons for this phenomenon lie in the first non-translational transfers of Pushkin, followed by the first attempts of translational transfers that came only to raise the existing stereotypes into dogmas, which were reinforced by the theoretical thoughts on the art of translation developed by the translating subjects of the time. The present study analyses the influence of the para-text and of empiricism on the transfer, reception and perception of Pushkin and his works, as they evolved in the course of nineteenth century France. / 1"Translation" in French. For a definition see A. Berman, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (Gallimard, 1995), p. 17.

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This dissertation traces the development of Alexander Pushkin's sense of the tragic in the context of Russian and European Romanticism. Pushkin was a self-proclaimed skeptic in matters of literature: though deeply influenced by Romantic poets and theorists, he never subscribed to any one school or creed, experimenting in a range of genres to express his changing tragic vision. Many of his works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama; and yet, they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. My study explains Pushkin's idiosyncratic approach to tragedy by re-situating his works within their literary, historical, and philosophical contexts. In my readings of The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, and The Little Tragedies, I connect Pushkin's works to those of a range of European writers, including Shakespeare, Racine, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, the Marquis de Sade, and Hugo; and I examine such topics as tragedy and the tragic, the sublime and the grotesque, the relationship between literature and history, irony and tragic ritual. While I ground my work in traditional Russian philology, I use recent Western scholarship to help frame my study theoretically. In particular, I aim to contribute to the ongoing debate between scholars who claim that Romanticism marked "the death of tragedy" and those who see the change less as a death than as a redefinition.

This dissertation examines commemoration of Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin from the late Soviet period to the present, as a study of the nature and function of literary commemoration in a time of social, political, and economic instability. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the Pushkin cult has been Russia’s largest-scale government-sanctioned literary cult, showing remarkable endurance through the transitions from imperial to Soviet rule and then from Soviet to capitalist rule. In the post-Soviet context, Pushkin-related commemoration and the resulting debates address a key question in Russian culture: can old literary “heroes” continue to play a central role in national identity in a society that no longer grants central political importance to literature? If they do retain a broader political and social significance, how are they used to navigate nostalgia, on one hand, and a sense of cultural exhaustion, on the other? Scrutiny of the Pushkin myth today demonstrates how postmodernism and irony have been turned to the re-stabilization of an authoritative discourse about identity, which nonetheless continuously provokes parody and satire. I also examine the recently formed “cult” of Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), a late Soviet prose writer who was unable to publish his work at home and immigrated to the US, under government pressure, in 1979. Pushkin is central to Russia’s image of Dovlatov, who spent time working as a tour guide at the Pushkin estate museum in Pskov oblast in the 1970s and wrote a satirical novel about the experience, which I analyze alongside real-life accounts of the estate museum. Dovlatov achieved huge posthumous popularity in Russia almost immediately after his death, and is now the object of a distinctively post-Soviet literary cult, which I discuss in relation to the evolving Pushkin cult. In this way, I illuminate the peculiarities of Russian writer cults during a period when the social status of literature declined dramatically. I conclude that the Dovlatov cult serves as a vehicle for a carefully circumscribed variety of Soviet nostalgia, one that admits the many failings of the Soviet Union while also recalling many of its aspects with fondness and regret. As with Pushkin, the Dovlatov cult is used to create the impression of reconciliation among discordant political epochs and ideologies. My study of the Pushkin and Dovlatov cults is organized around two types of literary commemoration, both of which have deep roots in European culture: the jubilee, or anniversary celebration, and the literary house museum. I begin with a detailed study of the almost-forgotten 1999 Pushkin jubilee, the first large-scale post-Soviet Pushkin celebration. My analysis of the jubilee and the reactions it provoked from the press and the intelligentsia shows that while the jubilee was widely derided, it unintentionally united diverse factions of the press and intelligentsia, who banded together to defend Pushkin against exploitation by Russia’s new political elite. However, many writers also saw the jubilee as a confirmation that the possibilities of Russian literature had been exhausted: I explore some literary responses to this fear in my second chapter. I then move to Pushkin house museums, showing how they express different aspects of the Pushkin myth and Russian “national idea.” I show how the recently founded Dovlatov House museum, like the Dovlatov cult more broadly, parodies the Pushkin cult while also reinforcing many of the basic practices and purposes of Pushkin worship.