Untitled - Doria

The Text as a Kaleidoscope – Summary
This thesis is a thematic analysis of A. S. Pushkin’s fairy tale poem ”Skazka
o tsare Saltane” (“The Tale of Tsar Saltan”) from 1831. The aim of my work
is twofold: on the one hand, I will present an interpretation of it and, on the
other, I will place the fairy tale in the context of Pushkin’s poetic mythology.
To begin with, I will give an account of a selection of the research on
Pushkin’s fairy tales that has been relevant to my work, thereafter the aim
and the methodological point of departure will be specified in more detail.
The position of the fairy tales is relatively minor in the more or less
limitless field of Pushkin research. When they have attracted academic
attention, they have usually been treated as a single cyclic entity – Skazki
Pushkina (”the Pushkin fairy tales”). Russian and Soviet research has mainly
focused on elucidating possible original models, relating the texts to Russian
and European folk tale traditions, as well as on providing a commentary on
the language of the tales. The development of the literary tale in Russia has
also been explored and, in connection with this, its ideological content has
been discussed. Finally, his fairy tales are also referred to in a large number
of books and articles about Pushkin’s poetics – usually they are used for
comparative purposes to illuminate other texts. Outside of Russia, the
interest in Pushkin’s fairy tales has been relatively small compared to his
other works.
To sum up then, two main lines of enquiry can be discerned in the
study of Pushkin’s fairy tales. The first is concentrated on tracking sources
and revealing the presence of folk tale elements from both oral and written
traditions. The second focuses on the tales as literary texts with specific
meanings and within textual contexts. The present thesis provides a new
reading of one of the tales and thus forms a complement to the existing
research into this particular text. The point of departure is my unpublished
licentiate thesis from 1991 in which I commented on the text of this tale
verse by verse. The aim of that study was to explore what Pushkin achieved
by using the compositional pattern and characters of the wonder tale in
combination with a folk poetry metre and literary convention. The overall
conclusion of my analysis was that “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” recounts a
story that can be read both as pure entertainment and as an allegory. The text
is a synthesis of different genres from both oral and written traditions and, at
the same time, a development of these. Within this synthesis, old is
contrasted with new, passive with active, isolation with openness, stagnation
with progress, the public with the private, life with death. Against the
backdrop of Russian history in combination with folk belief, the fairy tale
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