Untitled - Doria

character as a family saga. Pushkin spent his first summer as a wedded
husband in Tsarskoye Selo. Finally, in his memoirs of Pushkin, Lotman
notes that those few times when the poet looked back at the beginning of his
life, it was always the period at the lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo that was
mentioned. In the poet’s memory, the place is associated with harmony, joy
and concord. Thus Tsarskoye Selo appears as a lost paradise or, to put it
another way, a utopian abode.
Poetic creation thus requires a return to the beginning, as Pushkin
describes the process in his poem “Osen’”. There, the poet takes the reader to
the past in the form of a dream of childhood in order to then set off towards
the present and beyond. The last lines of this unfinished poem depict a ship –
the poem that will plyvet (‘sail’) towards unknown destinations. As we have
seen, there is an analogous situation in “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”, where the
barrel holding the mother and her child sails across the sea at night through
the universe towards an unknown fate. On a symbolic level, “the bottomless
abyss” corresponds to “the bottomless space”, the image that Gogol used to
characterise the quality of the word in Pushkin.
At the same time, in being a wonder tale and utopia, “The Tale of Tsar
Saltan” can be seen as a prologue. The final lines of the text are laconic. The
day passed and the tipsy Tsar was put to bed. This is a realistic description of
a course of events in the world of the tale. At that point, the narrator
stealthily leaves his narrative in a past present, while the “present” of the tale
itself is endless in accordance with the utopic convention. The significance
of the last lines of the tale: “I drank beer and mead there – yet/ Only got my
whiskers wet” is comparable to the usual final formula of fairy tales: ”and
they lived happily ever after” or ”if they are not dead, they are living still”.
In other words, the ending is open. The last stanza of “The Tale of Tsar
Saltan” relates an arrival, a reunion and a reconciliation feast. Evil has been
banished and the setting of the events is the new kingdom where life is only
beginning. Utopia is endless like the open-ended tale. Thus folk tradition
takes hold of the novel. Now, another series of events can begin - but that is
another story.
The Russian expert on Pushkin, V. Nepomnyaschy has described the
classic fairy tale as a kind of “code of existence”. In light of the observations
made during the reading of “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”, it, in that case,
appears as part of the code of the kaleidoscopic existence in Pushkin’s poetic
mythology.
Translated by Heidi Granqvist and Sarah Bannock
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