“Verse and Prose” in an Epistle to A.N. Wolf: on the Nature of Pushkin’s Poetic “Litter”

The aim of this study is to analyze Pushkin’s epistle < Iz pis’ma k A. N. Vul’fu > (, 1824), with a focus on identifying the strategies that allow everyday language to penetrate poetic discourse. The text reveals a clear tendency toward prose, made possible both owing to genre specificity of a “friendly epistle” and in spite of it. On the one hand, this genre in Golden Age lyric poetry occupies a borderline position between art and everyday life, which makes it easily saturated with mundane details. On the other hand, the prosaic quality of the poem clearly violates the laws of high poetry (it is no coincidence that the poem was part of a letter to Wulf and not intended for print). However, the analysis of the work also reveals the opposite tendency, showing that Pushkin’s text is built on subtle literary play. The analysis leads to the following conclusions: The everyday imagery of the poem grows out of traditional motifs of a “friendly epistle”, which undergo a deep transformation; the artistic structure of the work incorporates an implicit reception of the poetic techniques of N.M. Yazykov, who was among its intended readers; as a result of combining opposite strategies, “prose” enters the lyrical discourse, expanding the sphere of high poetry. A vivid example of such a combination is the toponym Troegorskoe : by adapting the name of the estate to the metrical norm of the text, Pushkin subject everyday language to the laws of poetic speech. These tendencies can be traced in a number of Pushkin’s poems not intended for publication. Here, on the periphery of the lyrical system, is the precise locus of development of the poetics, which Pushkin in Eugene Onegin refers to as Flamandskoy Shkoly Pestryy Sor (The Flemish School’s Variegated Dross). This very designation is based on the artistic principles outlined above: the “prosaic” word “dross” simultaneously becomes a poetic metaphor, where everyday life is interpreted through the aesthetics of the Minor Dutch masters.