This is the first single volume in either English or Russian on the
representation of Pushkin in Yuri Tynianov's novels. It demonstrates the
percipience and originality of Tynianov's concept of Pushkin's
personality and assesses Tynianov's contribution to the Soviet
historical novel. The approach re-orients the angle of investigation
from the study of his novels as historical biographical works with their
adherence to chronology and factuality to their study within the generic
frameworks of other genres, which allowed Tynianov to create a new,
artistically viable form of novel. The author investigates how and why
an esteemed Formalist scholar, initially strongly anti-biographical,
turned to biographical fiction; contextualizes the significance of his
choice of genre and hero in the Soviet literary process of the 1920-30s;
and examines theoretical approaches that enabled him to create an
illusion of authenticity unprecedented in Pushkin novels. Building her
analysis on the theoretical conclusions, she investigates Tynianov's
artistic methods of interpreting the formative influences on Pushkin
while focusing on the Formalist techniques of enhanced literariness.
Exploration of each of Tynianov's novels demonstrates what Tynianov
believed to be true about the origins and originality of Pushkin's
genius, the nature of historical understanding, and Pushkin's own
historical thinking. Appraising the mythopoeic techniques that Pushkin's
forebears, family and the poet himself employed as means of
reconstructing their origins, Rush demonstrates how Tynianov explodes
some of the myths of self-representation in which Pushkin's paternal
great-grandfather - and his offspring after him - indulged throughout
their lives, and reveals how these myths paralleled Pushkin's anxieties
concerning race and class. The study reveals the ways in which Tynianov,
while grappling with and overrunning the monumentalizing national
Pushkin myth, subverted the generic expectations of the historical
novel, broke away from established tradition and elevated his novel to
the level of «serious» literature.
