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Napoleon and Alexander I in Pushkin’s Pre-exile Poetry
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Journal Article
Napoleon and Alexander I in Pushkin’s Pre-exile Poetry
2019
Overview
The historical and mythical Napoleon plays a significant role in Pushkin’s work from his first published poem, “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” (“Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele,” 1814) to his famous poem about Napoleon of 1830, “The Hero” (“Geroi”). However, the works of the pre-exile period in which Napoleon plays an important role have not received the attention they deserve. Critics have passed over these early poems because they view the image of Napoleon in these works as borrowed, unoriginal, and imitative. But this view overlooks the different function of Napoleon in each of these poems, and, most important, the changing relationship between Napoleon and Alexander which these poems delineate, culminating in the surprising comparison in the ode “Freedom” (“Vol´nost´”) of Alexander to Napoleon as a regicide. I hope to show that the less than enthusiastic eulogy of Alexander—as well as the relatively restrained condemnation of Napoleon—in the first of these poems, “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo,” led Pushkin, in later poems, to compensate for this oversight by creating more derogatory images of Napoleon and more eulogistic images of Alexander. When in “Freedom” Pushkin was under no external constraints, and writing for no occasion, he took a very different direction, using Napoleon not to enhance Alexander as the victor over Napoleon and the liberator of Europe, as in the previous poems, but to post a warning to Alexander about his future actions. Pushkin is not writing in a historical mode in the pre-exile poetry, but his use of the past to make political judgments about the present is already in place. He can employ, for example, the age of Catherine to formulate an implicit critique of Alexander in one poem and to praise him in another.
The pre-exile poems are significant not only because of the light they throw on Napoleon and Alexander—and their relationship—but because they are important for understanding the image of Napoleon in Pushkin’s later works, a task that has been undertaken before but needs to be revisited in light of these earlier poems.
Publisher
Slavica Publishers,Slavica Publishers, Inc
Subject
