Untitled - Doria

– that the poet uses in creating his artistic world. Gasparov reveals a
mythical pattern in Pushkin which is characterized by three different stages
in the poet’s activities and in which, among others, Tsarskoye Selo, the
figure of the poet, the exile (in isolation), the desert or similar landscapes,
statues, Peter I, inspiration – fate in the form of a female shadow – and a
solitary person in water, form recurring motifs. Several of these also appear
in “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”.
In Jakobson’s definition of the poetic myth, the concepts of
“individual” and “poetic” are inseparable. Gasparov, for his part, notes that
the biography of the poet is also part of the poetic mythology. Furthermore,
it provides material for the deciphering of the mythology. However,
elucidating an authorship by means of biography always entails a balancing
act. Biography is characterized by documentary claims; it is a form of
historical writing focusing on an individual, while it is also always inevitably
a reconstruction after the event. The author of a biography thus appears both
as a chronicler and also, to a certain extent, as the creator of myths. In my
work, I particularly consider P. V. Annenkov’s 1855 biography of Pushkin
and Yuri Lotman’s life history of the poet from 1980. Using these two in
parallel gives the advantage of the double time perspective that they offer.
Three narrative genres, their conventions and aims have informed my
present reading of “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”. The first is myth as
“explanation” and sacred narrative, with reality claims but without
documentation. The second is the fairy tale as one of the original forms of
secular narrative: fictitious stories with no reality claims and with the aim of
amusing, comforting and entertaining. The improbability of the narrative
does not, however, exclude the possibility of the tale functioning as a
commentary on or statement of reality. The third genre is biography: a
documentary life story, which, like myth, is characterized by reality claims.
My reading of the tale further brings up individualized forms of these three
genres: the poetic myth and the autobiographical element which is expressed
in the fairy tale form. Thus the attention is also turned to the narration itself
and the composition of the text. The explicit simplicity that often
characterizes Pushkin’s texts conceals a seemingly endless complexity. In an
article from 1927, Yuri Tynyanov quotes Gogol who, in turn, has described
“the word” in Pushkin as “a bottomless space”. Tynyanov notes that this
bottomlessness results in a word not having just one concrete meaning but,
rather, existing in an oscillation between two or more meanings. It is
ambiguous.
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