Russian Literature LIII (2003) 13-24 www.elsevier.com/locate/mslit North-Holland

D I S I L L U S I O N M E N T , I S O L A T I O N , A N D I D E N T I T Y IN V J A Z E M S K I J ' S L A T E R L Y R I C S

L U C B E A U D O I N

Towards the end of her essay entitled 'Lidija Ginzburg, russkij demokrat na rendez-vous', Sarah Pratt describes Ginzburg as occupying an intermediate critical place between those staked out by Michail Bachtin ("militant") and Jurij Lotman ("analytical"), two of Ginzburg's great contemporaneous lite- rary thinkers. To Pratt, Ginzburg's writings reveal her love for broad con- cepts, structurally grounded in life itself. It is, perhaps, self-evident that when discussing the cutting-edge literary critics of the early Soviet Union we should compare one with the other. It serves to place work in context and to create a meta-narrative of literary thought. It is part of the game of literary research, one that flows from the need to make sense of our literary pseudo- world.

As we age, we seem to follow roughly the same pattern, questioning what we might have done, reminiscing on those whom we have left, and wondering about life's purpose. When we engage in this type of self-reflec- tion, we are viewing our lives from a vantage point outside the chronological continuum that makes up our sense of self and comparing our youth with our old age as nostalgically as we are that of those around us. We are, in a sense, exhibiting an anxiety of influence of ourselves on ourselves, an anxiety of a past self exerting remorseful pressure on our present incarnation. That anxiety will be tinged by all we could have been but did not become, and will carry with it the distorted representations of those with whom we toiled and breathed. We will compensate by gazing upon it with a melancholy reverence of all we might have done and all whom we have outlived. We will seek to

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14 Luc Beaudoin

maintain our sense of who we are by selectively recreating our past and clinging to the mythology we have constructed for ourselves - our sense of location and transcendence.

Harold Bloom, in his classic of literary theory, (1973), examines the nature of this poetic influence one poet's influence on another, and that other's fluence. 2 In his introduction, he traces what he sees of poetry as it is locked in an ever-diminishing reaction - a decline, at least, from the perspective of the greater poet who initiates the process in the first place. (In his later A Map of Misreading, however, Bloom refers to the process of poetic dualing as "eternal".) 3 Bloom in fact begins his theory of poetry in an earlier collection of works, The Ringers in the Tower, first published in 1971. Here Bloom uses Sigmund Freud to first establish the temporal connections that exist within the creative self. Quoting Freud, Bloom writes:

The Anxiety of Influence through time, looking at reaction to the said in- as the inevitable decline dialectic of action and

Freud thought that even romance, with its element of play, probably commenced in some actual experience whose "strong impression on the writer had stirred up a memory of an earlier experience, generally belonging to childhood, which then arouses a wish that finds a fulfillment in the work in question, and in which elements of the recent event and the old memory should be discernable". [...] Freud's em- bryonic theory of romance contains within it the potential for an ade- quate account of Romanticism, particularly if we interpret his "memory of an earlier experience" to mean also the recall of an earlier insight, or yearning, that may not have been experiential. 4

His extension of Freud's theory allows for literary experience - the act of reading another poet's work, for example - to be the instigator of yet more poems. Here we see the kernel of Bloom's blossoming views on poetry. When Bloom expands his theory into his two later works, he has finetuned it considerably. Bloom's thi'ee works tend to present his thesis, then prove it through demonstration in English literature. Indeed, in The Ringers in the Tower, Bloom discounts much of the applicability of his model to "Con- tinental Romanticism", where, he maintains, "there lay very little in the way of a congenial native tradition of major poets writing in an ancestral mode, particularly when compared to the English Romantic heritage of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton". 5 It seems, however, that the Russian tradition holds enough of a heritage of mythologizing Aleksandr Pu~kin that Bloom's model might indeed be worth applying in some sense to Russian Romanti- cism. 6

Indeed, the role that Prince Petr Andreevi6 Vjazemskij took with respect to his colleague Pu~kin deserves a Bloom-esque approach. Ginzburg details, in her introduction to the Biblioteka poOta collection of Vjazemskij's

Disillusionment, Isolation, and Identity in Vjazemskij's Later Lyrics 15

poems, the intensity of their friendship, and the fact that it had its colder and more distant periods, some of it stemming from Vjazemskij's at times playing the role of the elder poet with regard to Pu~kin. 7 Certainly even this type of association plays into Bloom's theory of poetry, as we will see short- ly. What further complicates the relationship between the two poets, how- ever, is the utter disparity in the length of their lives. While Pu~kin was killed comparatively young in his notorious duel, Vjazemskij lived for over eighty years, outliving even all of his children save one son.

It is at least partially for the reason that the two poets' lives overlapped more in memory and reputation that this paper will examine their chro- notopical representations of a poetic symbol of place and aspiration. It will also examine a third chronotopical perspective on the same place, to further the exposition by analogy. The place? This paper will examine the role that Bach6isaraj has played in this anxiety of influence in Russian poetry, from its inception with Pugkin to its uptake by Vjazemskij and its abandonment in the twentieth century by the 6migr6 poet Galina Kuznecova. It is Vjazemskij's peculiar take on the myth that Pu~kin creates for the Russian public that is intriguing and that leads to the use of a classic of literary thought such as Bloom. Vjazemskij was intimately involved in the initial publication of 'Bach~isarajskij fontan' and then took it upon himself to refer to it in his later poetry. In his work, Vjazemskij performs an odd praise of Pu~kin the poet and paean to love, but the effort seems at best half-hearted and deflates the original myth. The role of his poem, and indeed of all the works referred to in this paper (of which Kuznecova's is not poetic but in prose), is what Bloom calls kenosis:

[...] a breaking-device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition and compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul, where it means the humbling or emptying-out of Jesus by himself, when he accepts reduction from divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's poem- of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems. 9

This paper argues that Vjazemskij's kenosis is the reduction of Bach~isaraj as (poetic) symbol in both the realm of Russian letters and Vjazemskij's own poetic universe, as it became increasingly isolated later in life. But let us set the foundation with Pu~kin's famous Southern Poems.

His 'Bach6isarajskij fontan' ( 'The Fountain of Bach6isaraj', 1821- 1823) was first published within a number of framing texts: an introduction by Vjazemskij, 'Razgovor me~du izdatelem i klassikom s Vyborgskoj storo-

16 Luc Beaudoin

ny ili s Vasil'evskogo ostrova' ( 'A Conversation Between an Editor and a Classicist from the Vyborg Quarter or from Vasil'evskij Island') and an epigraph by the thirteenth-century poet Saadi preceded the poem, whereas two prose pieces, the 'Vypiska iz putegestvija po Tavride I. M. Murav'eva- Apostola' ('Extract from I.M. Murav'ev-Apostol's Journey Through the Tauride', 1823) and a portion of a letter written by Pu~kin to Anton Del'vig in 1824. l° Stephanie Sandler says that these framing texts suggest that any interpretation of the poem with regard to its two heroines remains under male control. 11 However, the male gaze resides not only on women as masculine poetic constructs, but also as the locus of a masculine anxiety of influence, a self-referential need to refer to, and supersede, one's predecessors. Indeed, the Saadi epigraph,

Mnorne, TaK :~(e KaK H fl, n o c e m a ~ H cei l ~OHTaH; HO I, IHbIX y m e HeT,

;Ipyrne ca'pa~cTBy~OT ~ia.rieqe. (Many, Iike myself, have visited this fountain, but others are no longer here, and still others are traveling farther.) 12

makes it clear that the fountain, and its feminine poetic associations, remains an oasis in both physical and temporal senses - a beacon of Romanticism, if one likes, that beckons beyond its contextual location. But the epigraph and framing texts also point to a Pushkinian tour de force: Pugkin has removed himself from the process of the various anxieties of influence to which, Bloom contends, every poet must succumb (though Bloom makes an exception for poets of the first stature, such as Shakespeare, since Shakes- peare is the original initiator of the anxiety in English, just as Pugkin could be considered in Russian), in Pugkin's case by creating the myth of Bach6isaraj and setting it within realistic and literary constructs, as well as the poetic exclamation - shortened and reset as it is - that serves as an Orientalist triumph of the Russian poetic will and of Pugkin's incarnation of the peak of Russian poetry.

David Bethea, in his Realizing Metaphors. Alexander Pushkin and the Life o f the Poet, trenchantly dismisses the singularity of Bloom's argument as not relevant, arguing that it is premised on the act of naming in order to create, that, in effect, no poet lives his or her life fantasizing about emptying out before a predecessor's work, but rather that poets "want to be real men and women as well as poets, want to live in real nations or be banished from them as well as belong to the 'un-real estate' (Nabokov) of art, want to possess real families and real lovers that cause them pain and joy as well as 'perform coitus upon the Muse'", etc. 13 With the case of Pugkin, Bethea argues, we should be looking for Pu~kin the man - and how that man chang- ed his opinions over time - in order to understand the act of poetic creation and bring its relevance back to contemporary society. Bloom points out that

Disillusionment, Isolation, and Identity in Vjazemskij 's Later Lyrics 17

the trend in poetic circles of the time was "poetic generosity". 14 Pu~kin needs to be seen and understood in the context of not onty his Russian, but also his European, contemporaries and the world-views they represent. ~5

What Bethea is grappling with is the nature of Aleksandr Pu~kin, the poet who lived a short life but defined, self-confidently so, the nature of Russian poetry to come. Vjazemskij, on the other hand, outlived his contem- poraries. With him we have a poet who is split into two selves - a Romantic critic and a post-Romantic poet, the former participating and supporting the mythos of Pu~kin the master, the latter attempting to restore its luster and meaning to a non-poetic world, and in both instances not creating a life - he lived an extraordinarily long one - but creating a poetic cosmology.

This cosmology is centered, for the purposes of this paper, on the fountain of Bachrisaraj i t s e l f - a fountain constructed to serve as eternal symbolism for the deaths of Zarema and Marija, both of whom were loved, as Pu~kin states, by the Khan. As a source of poetic myth-making, its most potent force in Pugkin's poem is as a nexus of recollection and fantasy for the narrator:

r-Ibto TeHI,, 0 )IpyrH, BH~ea ~? CKam14Te Mne: ae~ o6paa He:~HbI~ TorRa npecJ~e~oBa~ MeH.q HeoTpa3riMi, ifi, i~en36exHia~? Map14n at, Y14CTa~ ayma ~BJI~JlaCb Mite, 140118 3apeMa Hoc14JlaCb~ peBHOCTblO ~bnlIa,

916 bpe~, onycTezloro rapeMa.

(Whose shadow, O friends, did I see? Tell me: whose gentle image Haunted me then, Irresistible, inescapable? Did Marija's pure soul Appear to me, or did Zarema Come, breathing jealousy, Amidst the deserted harem?)

The reader is permitted to decide whether it is the archetype of woman as possessively jealous or the saintly Marian archetype who is inspiring the poetic outburst. Yet what is most significant is the melancholy longing that almost brings to life the passion of the women as represented in the fountain.

Prince Petr Andreevi6 Vj azemskij was a champion of Romanticism and its passions, liberally taking cue in his role from Lord Byron, who himself affected a generation of writers, though he himself was not really as Ro- mantic in his work as his poetic inheritors. Vjazemskij's respect for Roman-

18 Luc Beaudoin

ticism's liberty and artistic freedom is shown in his preface to Pugkin's 'Fountain of Bachrisaraj'. This work is a key to Vjazemskij's anxiety of self- influence with respect to the trope of Bachrisaraj. It is here that he plays one of his most important roles during the Golden Age of Russian poetry: defending the emotional, introspective, and personal stance of Romantics as a reaction to (neo-)classical imitation. With this work, however, Vjazemskij is also at the service of the master Pugkin in the Russian creation of the myth of BacMisaraj. Vjazemskij is a stage-hand to Pu~kin's production, and the shadow of this production begins to cover Vjazemskij himself, for his work can only serve, as do the other framing works, to buttress the radiance of Pugkin's self-conscious poetic self, where he unmasks the falsity and eternal possibility of his own creation. Vjazemskij's point, however, is to defend this type of Romantic self-conscious play (Romantic irony) and poetic freedom it bestows - an author who can express feelings rooted in the spirit of the moment.

Vjazemskij's poem 'Bachrisaraj (at Night by Illumination)' of 1867 is an ode to Pugkin's earlier creation, reflecting in mythic form Vjazemskij's isolation and (self-)anxiety of influence, his kenosis of the master's work. In it, he unmasks the process of poetic creation more fully than does Pu~kin - it is, in a way, a type of atonement for the inability to be a supporting player any longer. Unlike Pugkin's work, which begins with a description of Girej's power and "vzor" (glance), Vjazemskij refers to the Orient with the broadest convention of Orientalism: a reference to One Thousand and One Nights and the quality of a dream (the stuff that ends Pugkin's poem). By this token, Vjazemskij reduces Pu~kin's work and its symbolic locale to one of a tapestry of poetic, Orientalist involvement, as opposed to harnessing Orienta- list fantasy (so present in Pu~kin's work) to the creation of poetry. Is Vjazemskij attempting to begin where Pu~kin leaves off?. Vjazemskij is un- able to compete, perhaps because of his longevity and the awareness of other talents:

3jIec~, ~pKo 6:~emeT 6acHoczoBn~,~ H no~THqecK~ BOCTOK; CBO~ pa~ npeKpacHb~, XOTb r pexoBH~I~, Ce6e yCTpOHJI 3Aecb rlpopoK.

(Here brightly shines the mythical And poetic east, His wonderful paradise, though sinful, For himself built the prophet here.)

This is not to say that Vjazemskij does not apply Orientalist fantasy to his recollections: in fact, he seems quite titillated by the passion of the Muslim Zarema and the Christian Marija, even rhyming, as had done Pu~kin

Disillusionment, Isolation, and Identity in Vjazemskij's Later Lyrics 19

before him, "Zarema" with its obvious intent "garema" ("harem"; ~anja , evidently, needing no such reinforcement). Vjazemskij's remembrance, how- ever, is that of child-like enchantment - both at the place and its history, and at the fact that Pu~kin immortalized it. He takes the reader on a tour of the palace and places the fiction together with the fact:

3jIecb, B IlapCTBe HerI4, 6ytueaaao HeMaJIo CMyT, ;IOMaInHI4X rpo3; 3AeCb cqacT~,e 6J~ara pacToqa~o, Ho MHOrO rlpOm4TO I4 c~e3.

BOT CTeHbl TeMHOFO FapeMa!

OT cTpam~IX ~yM He oTpenlacb, Eme ajIecb nocnTc~ 3apeMa, 3arpo6Ho~ peBHOCTI, tO TOMaCb.18

(Here, in a kingdom of abundance, stormed Not a little discord, home terrors; Here chance showered blessings, But many tears were shed too.

There are the walls of the dark harem! Not rid of terrible thoughts, Still here drifts by Zarema, Pining with jealousy from beyond the grave.)

By doing so, Vjazemskij is implicitly repeating the process by which Pu~kin recreates his poem, though in reverse, beginning with the building and continuing with the characterization. His goal, though, is not to retell the story, but to stand in awe at the act of poetic creation. He seems overtaken with emotion at the act of poetic creation that Pugkin was able to achieve - at the distillation both of the emotion of love and of what he would see as the great poet's identification with it:

OH noI-lI/JI paa~Ipa,-KeHHo~ TeHI, I

JItO6OBb, rlo3HaBmyIo o6MarI, Ee vi x~aYlO6BI, H FIeHH,

19 Id 6ore, HenCl2e~InMblX pall.

(He understood the irritated shadow's Love, having known deception, And her complaints, and reproaches, And the pain of incurable wounds.)

20 Luc Beaudoin

Not only is Pu~kin's creation praised, but also what Vjazemskij sees as what must have been his reaction - ascribing emotions to Pugkin's characteriza- tion:

O~ uJmKaa HaA MapHefi 6eAHO~: H o6pa3 y3rlnt~bi MJIa)Io~, TOCKO~ I?I3MyqeHHblH I4 6~e;IHbI~, Ho CBeTJIf, Ifi qtlCTO.~ KpacoTo~. 2°

(He cried for the poor Marija: And the young image of the prisoner, Exhausted and pale with longing, But light with a pure beauty.)

Vjazemskij is undoubtedly praising his former contemporary, friend, and now predecessor. By doing so, however, he is removing the divine from the poetic - both of his own work and of Pu~kin's - performing the kenosis that Bloom describes in his theory. By humbling himself before Pu~kin, and while acknowledging the ruined state of the Khan's palace, and by ascribing true emotion to Pu~kin the poet, Vjazemskij is tearing away the veil of poetic creation - of his own and of Pu~kin - and replacing it with myth-making. Vjazemskij's later poetry is filled with bitterness at having outlived his friends and his poetic movement. One could read his 'Bach~isaraj' as a praise of what is gone, but ultimately, on a deeper level, that praise reinforces his own removal of it and his own isolation and irrelevance to the time: the poem is a monument remaking the myth of poetry and love at a time of its in- creasing irrelevance, a signpost that, much like a guidebook, or a tour through one of the ubiquitous muzej-kvartiry in Russia, points the reader to at least acknowledge the poetic spark that was Romanticism. Whereas Vjazemskij defended the perceived excesses of Romanticism in his dialogue appended to Pu~kin's original 'Bach6isaraj', here he is left to explaining what Romanti- cism meant in a time when Romanticism had passed.

Vjazemskij undoubtedly felt the pain of his poetic isolation quite deep- ly. He had a quite long productive life and seemed, as a result, to be always attempting to find his true poetic voice and defend, simultaneously, his place in the poetic universe itself. During the first great flowering of Russian poetry, Vjazemskij was known more for satire and critical works: indeed, he had been involved, through his preface, with the genesis of Bach~isaraj - he, a poet, had written a critical piece to accompany it. Only in between the two greater periods of Russian poetry in the past two hundred years did he find a voice, one that fused abstractions with folkloric speech. But by then it was too late - though his poetry was to be appreciated during the Silver Age. Vjazemskij's travel poetry, using landscape and location to express com- mentary or feeling, is emblematic of his isolation (for what is more isolating

Disillusionment, Isolation, and ldentity in Vjazemskij's Later Lyrics 21

than travel!). But his poetic contribution to the myth of Bachgisaraj came from the perspective of the alienation of time more than from the exile of a political dissident or the travels of a love-lorn poet mythologizing the Romantic tropes of ruins, past splendor, and lush sexuality from what might now be called an Orientalist point of view. Vjazemskij's poem, like much of his later work, betrays a sense of being haunted by the loss of one's own contributions and an attempt to maintain a false reality. As he says in 'Svoj katechizis splo~' prile~no izura' ('Studying Your Catechism Quite Diligent- ly', 18727):

)t(I,13HB eAKO~ F0peqbK) npoHtlKHyTa JIO )IHa, HeT K 6m~HeMy mO6BH, HeT KpOTOCTII B HOMttHe, I/I llylIp¢ MpaqHyIO o6ypeBalOT n b l s e O ~ s o OTqa.q[Hbe n HenaBrtCTl, O)ISa.

BOT qeM ~i IIpOMblC~IOM Ha cTapOCTb Harpa,,KlleH, BOT B qeM ~BnJI CBOrO npeMy~IpOCTI, OH H 6~arocTb: OH ;~KIt3Hb MOtO npoam~, qTO6 mrtaH~ 6~Ina Mne B TnrOCTb,

21 qTO6 npov.~zJ~ ~ TOT JIeHb, B KOTOpBIH/I po)I~IeH.

(Life is permeated with a caustic bitterness to its core, There is no love of one's neighbor, not a mention of gentleness, And my gloomy soul is seized now By only despair and hatred alone.

That is how I have been rewarded by Providence for old age, That is how it has shown its wisdom and goodness: It has prolonged my life, so that it might be a burden to me, So that I might curse that day, on which I was born.)

This is perhaps typical of the bitterness that can arise in old age. But it does refer to the loneliness ofVjazemskij 's position, to his inability to do anything but participate in his own anxiety of (self-)influence, as one who looks in a mirror and sees his relevance past.

Finally, we can use Galina Kuznecova (1900-1976) to place Vja- zemskij's kenosis of Bach~isaraj and his own critical creation in perspective. Kuznecova, an accomplished poet, published her first collection of short stories, Utro (Morning), in 1930, in which she included a work entitled 'Bachrisaraj'. In this story, Kuznecova recounts her flight from Russia during the Civil War. The palace seems like an obligatory excursion by a writer during a flight from the motherland. The tour guide, surprised by their presence, gives her and her husband a laconic tour of the place:

22 Luc Beaudoin

Here were the Khan's chambers [...] Here the Khan accepted petitioners [...] The fountain of tears, about which the poet Pu~kin sang [...] The chambers, where the wives were located [...] They looked at the carpets, at the low, narrow sofas, covered with old silks of rotting brocades with loose gold threads, at the ancient weapons; they walked along broad stone slabs toward a small poor bowl of marble which had turned green in color - and it was the famous fountain of tears. 22

Not only does Kuznecova perform the ultimate kenosis, she, a poet, does it in prose. The refraction of poetry to irrelevance is now complete. Kuznecova's depiction of Bach6isaraj undoes what Vjazemskij attempts, albeit perhaps unsuccessfully, to do. The mystique of poetic creation as represented in the trope of B ach~isaraj, and by extension, the genius of the mythologized Pu~kin (and by Vjazemskij's own inference, his defense of poetry and his own poetic recreation and exaltation of Baehgisaraj and Pugkin the master) is unmasked, the burqa torn away. The Orientalist passions of the two women, the clash of religions, is reduced to a mention of the women's quarters and a laconic guide.

Vjazemskij, a poet straddling the turmoil of the nineteenth century, had neither Kuznecova's perspective of fleeing one's country nor Pu~kin's (or, later, Lermontov's) creative inspiration resulting from exile in the Caucasus. It is because of his lengthy life, one that gave him the chance to ruminate on the phases of his poetic and critical output, that he was compelled to exhibit his anxiety of influence on his own former self. Bach~isaraj is a symbolic trope that acts as a locus for this Bloom-esque questioning, a formula that ultimately brings him to pessimism. Petr Andreevi~ Vjazemskij, a man known for his wit, for his innate sense of what was right, was unable to sustain, in his self-scrutiny at least, the value of his own poetic legacy.

NOTES

Sara Pratt, 'Lidija Ginzburg: russkij demokrat na rendez-vous', Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 49, 2001, p. 399. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York, 1973. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, New York, 1975, p. 5. Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in the Romantic Tradition, Chicago, 1971, pp. 13-14. See also p. 324. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 15.

Disillusionment, Isolation, and Identity in Vjazemskij's Later Lyrics 23

10

11

Catherine O'Neil of the University of Denver states that the situation in Rus- sian Romantic letters is such that the antagonistic model of Bloom's poetic anxiety is difficult to detect: "In the Russian poetic tradition there is less 'anxiety' from poetical generation to another and a good deal more friendly adulation and love than is described by Bloom. In Pushkin's case this is probably because his greatest Russian 'precursors' (Derzhavin, Karamzin, Zhukovskii) were still alive when he started writing, and he had personal contact with each of them; indeed, he was quite close to both Karamzin and Zhukovskii" (Forthcoming manuscript). Lidija Ginzburg, 'P.A. Vjazemskij', in: P.A. Vjazemskij, Stichotvorenija, Leningrad, 1986, pp. 18, 31. Even at the beginning of Pugkin's poetic career, Vjazemskij was at pains to find out what Pu~kin was writing and what he (Pugkin) thought of the elder poet's work. See D.P. Ivinskij, Knjaz' P.A. Vjazemskij i A.S. Pu~kin: Oderla" lidnych i tvordesla'ch omo~enij, Moskva, 1994, pp. 25-47. Ginzburg, 'P.A. Vjazemskij', p. 23. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, p. 15. Kenosis is one of six "revisionary ratios" Bloom uses to describe the associations a poet- descendent might have with his or her poet-predecessor. The six are: clinamen (a purposeful misreading of the earlier poem), tessera (poetically rereading the earlier poem and thereby furthering its meaning in the new direction), kenosis, daemonization (attributing to the earlier poem a power that is within its reach, but not attained in the poem - the younger poet therefore has seen more than the original poet had), askesis (permitting the earlier poem to disempower some of the younger poet's creative power, thereby also limiting the original poet's and his or her poem's), apophrades (the younger poet replaces the earlier poem and poet in the position of original inspiration, though the nuance is that it is done at the mercy of the younger poet). David Bethea, in his Realizing Metaphors." Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet, Madison, 1998, p. 70, dismisses to some degree the universal applica- bility of Bloom's "ratios". Bethea writes: "Needless to say, such prefigurings of a poet's stance toward those coming before him have no historical basis in any reality that can be identified and reliably documented - they are as free- floating and primordial as Freud's shadowy accounts of the panhuman psyche. In this Bloomian world, poets 'swerve' from or 'empty themselves out' before a precursor in order to position themselves to get, for a moment they need to imagine as permanent, the last word." Lidija Ginzburg, in her introduction 'P.A. Vjazemskij', writes that Vja- zemskij's 'Conversation' was the clearest theoretical defense of Romanticism at the time, and that, indeed, it was received as a manifesto of the new artistic movement. See p. 20. Stephanie Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile, Stanford, 1989, p. 170. See also Luc Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins: Russian Romantic Verse Tales and the Idealized Woman, New York, 1997, chapter 9.

24 Luc Beaudoin

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20

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All quotations of Pu~kin are from A.S. Pu~kin, Polnoe sobranie sodinenO', t. 4, PoOmy: 1817-1824, Leningrad, 1937. Here p. 153. David Bethea, Realizing Metaphors." Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet, p. 72. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., pp. 74-88. Catherine O'Neil indicates convincingly in her upcoming monograph that Bloom's theories were anticipated by Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe (Unpublished manuscript). Pu~kin, Polnoe sobranie sodinenij, p. 170. L.D. Strachovaja (sost.), K. Batju~kov, E. Baratynskij, P. Vjazemskij: Stichotvorenij'a i poOmy, Moskva, 1997, p. 517. All quotations from Vjazem- skij's 'Bach6isaraj (at Night By Illumination)' are from the same edition. Ibid., p. 518. Ibid., p. 519. Ibid. P.A. Vjazemskij, Stichotvorenija, pp. 403-404. Galina Kuznecova, 'Bakhchisarai' (Trans. Luc Beaudoin), in: Christine D. Tomei (Ed.), Russian Women Writers, Vol. 2, New York, 1999, p. 1188.