Pushkin. Ethics and ideal in a relativizing context

Abstract

The article considers the specifics of the functioning of relativizing and auctorial elements in some texts of Alexander Pushkin on the example of the poem “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and the tragedy “A Feast in Time of Plague”. It is shown that relativistic tendencies in those works coexist with auctorial tendencies, as if “without noticing” each other. It avoids both the dictate of auctoriality and the ethical indifference characteristic of consistently relativistic aesthetic models. We see parts of a single meta-relativistic composition that deliberately contradicts the seemingly incompatible. Thus, a sympathetic description of the Circassians and an enthusiastic description of their military exploits in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” neighbors an equally enthusiastic glorification of the punitive actions of the Russian army in the Caucasus. Particular attention in this article is paid to transgressive forms of representation of everyday life in the tragedy “A Feast in Time of Plague”. At the forefront of such a context is not Walsingham’s explicit dispute with the priest but the hidden representation of the ideal in Mary’s song, in which the heroine, Jenny, opposes both the relativizing actant of the vulgar feast and the normatively abstract moralizing of the priest by the very possibility of her existence. Jenny calls to nothing and nowhere, but the very presence of her tragic image in the partially relativizing actant of the play introduces a very significant metarelativist counterbalance and meaning to what is depicted.