Abstract
When, in his poem ‘An Evening of Russian Poetry’, Vladimir Nabokov sought to convey a quintessential image of Russia’s most celebrated poet, he conjured up a vision of that poet on the road:
Let me allude, before the spell is broken, to Pushkin, rocking in his coach on long and lonely roads; he dozed, then he awoke, undid the collar of his traveling cloak, and yawned, and listened to the driver’s song.1
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Notes and references
Vladimir Nabokov, ‘An Evening of Russian Poetry’, The New Yorker, 3 March 1945, p. 23.
Carl Thompson writes that Romantic literature rendered travel as ‘an act of enormous existential significance and a crucial route to wisdom, self-knowledge, and authenticity’; because of this, it is not surprising that ‘travel becomes one of the master-tropes of Romantic writing’; see Thompson, ‘Travel Writing’, Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 563. Critical discussions of travel in individual Romantic authors are extensive; some of the more notable general discussions of the travel topos in Romanticism include
Bernard Blackstone, The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme with Variations (London: Longmans,1962)
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973)
Roger Cardinal, ‘Romantic Travel’, Rewriting the Self, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 135–55
George Dekker, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
Carl Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
W.H. Auden, The Enchaféd Flood, or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 19, 23.
Chloe Chard, ‘Introduction’, Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830, ed. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 25.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan X: 72, in Jerome McGann, ed., Byron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 717.
On Byron’s image as a traveller himself, and on his influence on other travellers, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways of Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 119
Catherine B. O’Neil, ‘Childe Harold in Crimea: The Byronic Sea Voyage in Russian and Polish Romanticism’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 56 (2007), 78–99.
On the phenomenon of Russian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, see Theofanis G. Stavrou and Peter R. Weisensel, eds, Russian Travelers to the Christian East from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 2006), a massive bibliography of primary sources;
Martin Tamcke and Michael Marten, Christian Witness Between Continuity and New Beginnings: Modern Historical Missions in the Middle East (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2006)
Thomas Hummel, ‘Russian Pilgrims: A Russian Army Invades Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 44 (2010), 39–40. On the role of pilgrimage for Russian women, see
Christine D. Worobec, ‘Russian Peasant Women’s Culture: Three Voices’, Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture, ed. Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), pp. 41–62. An English traveller’s charming eyewitness account of Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem in the early twentieth century is
Stephen Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (London: Macmillan, 1913).
Abram Tertz, Strolls with Pushkin, trans. Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 73.
Andrew Wachtel, ‘Voyages of Escape, Voyages of Discovery: Transformations of the Travelogue’, Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 131.
Ernest Simmons, Pushkin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 236.
John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 72.
Iurii M. Lotman, ‘The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture’, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 70.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.
Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems, trans. D.M. Thomas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 112. Translations for The Gypsies are from this edition. All other references to Pushkin’s works, except as indicated, are to my translations from the following Russian edition:
Alexander Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), ed. B.V. Tomashevskii (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1949; 10 vols).
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981), p. 12; Tertz, Strolls with Pushkin, pp. 147–8.
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© 2016 Nicholas Warner
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Warner, N. (2016). From Transport to Transgression: Alexander Pushkin’s Literary Journeys. In: Henes, M., Murray, B.H. (eds) Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543394_9
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