DAVID M. BETHEA

Introduction

It is difficult if not impossible to put into words what the Puškin phenomenon means to the Russian national psyche. Discourse on “Puškin” (the cultural myth) can soon be overcome by a kind of abulia or loss of bearings—what has prevented more than one Puškinist, having spent a lifetime preparing for the task, from writing the book. Simple verbal constructs no longer seem adequate to the task; they either descend into platitude and sweeping generalization or—probably the wiser approach—they avoid the subject altogether. Phrases such as “national poet” and “fountainhead of modern Russian literature” are by now so de rigueur that one employs them with reverse, Aesopian logic: they are worked into one’s argument as straw men, but they are worked in nonetheless. Here the most prudent strategy is to let others speak for you. As M. O. Geršenzon, one of the most brilliant of early twentieth-century Puškinists, once remarked in a letter to the poet V. F. Xodasevič, “In difficult days I know of no greater joy than to read Puškin and to make little discoveries about him.”¹

In a word, Puškin is not merely a multi-faceted writer whose experiments at the boundaries of genre have never been equaled, or a historical figure whose fate became for all educated Russians coming after the quintessential “life of the poet,” or an ever-emerging cultural myth and point of origin to which other writers have had to return, almost hypnotically, in order to resolve the “anxiety of [his] influence.” More than all this, Puškin has been the haven, the safe port, where the intelligentsia has gone to protect its sanity during the periodic inclement weather that has marked Russian politics during the last two centuries. Geršenzon meant to say that his world, which could be (and was) falling apart on the outside, was kept intact by “the little discoveries” that went on inside his mind and in those of his fellow puškinisty. This was the salubrious “wisdom” of Puškin that entered into the title of Geršenzon’s finest book, Mudrost’ Puškina (The Wisdom of Puškin, 1919). And one has to assume that, perhaps more than anything, it was the special joy of finding some nugget buried deep within the seemingly inexhaustible lode of Puškiniana that inspired, and continues to inspire, generations of Russian/Soviet scholars, including such names as M. P. Alekseev, D. D. Blagoj, S. G. Bočarov, S. M. Bondi, M. A. Cjavlovskij, G. A. Gukovskij, N. V. Izmajlov, N. O. Lerner, Ju. M. Lotman, B. S. Mejlax, B. L. Modzalevskij, P. E. Ščegolev, A. L. Slonimskij, B. V. Tomaševskij, Ju. N. Tynjanov, V. E. Vacuro, S. A. Vengerov, V. Veresaev, V. V. Vinogradov, and numerous others.

Volumes such as this usually begin with the requisite topos: Puškin’s genius is real, but it is linguistically grounded and therefore virtually untranslatable; our study aims to clarify a historically skewed Western perspective by chipping into this verbal bedrock and exposing it as if “for the first time” to non-native eyes and ears. Fortunately for us, this preemptive appeal to the non-specialist reader is at long last becoming an anachronism, for American Puškin studies have, as these essays richly demonstrate, fully come of age over the past thirty-five years. The amount of criticism and scholarship on Puškin done in this country has been, especially recently, increasing in an almost geometric progression, as have the number and quality of translations of his works; moreover, the approaches to Puškin have become more diversified and theoretically adventuresome.

The occasion for our collection was a national conference held in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 24-26, 1987, to mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Sergeevič Puškin (January 29, 1837).² The conference, entitled “Puškin Today,” was generously supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Knapp Bequest, and the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin. Its senior director was Professor J. Thomas Shaw of the University of Wisconsin, a scholar who has devoted more than forty years to the study of Puškin and whose concordances, rhyme dictionaries, multi-volume edition of Puškin’s letters, and numerous articles are well known to both the American and the Soviet scholarly communities. The ostensible reason for our gathering was the sesquicentennial celebration, but its genuine raison d’être was to take stock of where American Puškin studies had come over the post-war period and, equally important, where it seemed to be going, that is, which approaches to Puškin distinguished our national undertaking from others and how our contributions could be seen to define themselves against those of, say, our Soviet colleagues. It is the underlying premise of the conference and of the papers issuing from it that there is something to be said for studying the central figure of a national literature from a position “on the outside.”

The contributors to this volume represent the full spectrum of American Slavic studies: they come from different generations, gender perspectives, academic backgrounds, institutional affiliations, geographical areas, and critical methodologies. A number have devoted significant portions of their academic careers to date to the study of Puškin; they have produced the books and articles that have in large part defined the field of puškinovedenie (Puškin studies) to the American audience. Others, mainly from the “younger” generation, have written dissertations and articles on Puškin, and several of these have books in press. To cite only the major publications of our group with a Puškin “focus”: Paul Debreczeny’s (University of North Carolina) The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (1983) and his translations of The Complete Prose Fiction (1983); Caryl Emerson’s (Princeton University) Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (1986); Simon Karlinsky’s (University of California-Berkeley) Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (1985); Leslie O’Bell’s (University of Texas-Austin) Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”: The Biography of a Work (1984); Stephanie Sandler’s (Amherst College) Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989); J. Thomas Shaw’s (University of Wisconsin-Madison) The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (1963, 1967), Pushkin’s Rhymes (1974), and Pushkin: A Concordance to the Poetry (1985); William Mills Todd Ill’s (Harvard University) The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (1976) and Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (1986); and Walter Vickery’s (University of North Carolina) Pushkin: The Death of a Poet (1968) and Alexander Pushkin (1970). Several of these works are generally regarded as being “seminal” (not only to Puškin studies but to Slavistics in general) for the theoretical and conceptual issues they raise.

Puškin Today is divided into two parts. Part One (“Puškin: Contemporary Critical Views”) is intended to introduce the American audience to the wealth of critical methodologies now being applied to the study of Puškin. Here the reader finds chapters centering around a text or texts and a dominant methodology: Eugene Onegin/literature as social institution (William Mills Todd III); “The Queen of Spades”/reader response criticism (Caryl Emerson); religious poems of 1836/structuralism (Sergej Davydov); Eugene Onegin and Bestužev-Marlinskij’s Journey to Revel/intertextuality (Simon Karlinsky); Bronze Horseman/psychoanalysis (Daniel Rancour-Laferriere); Eugene Onegin/rhetoric (William Harkins); Bronze Horseman/cultural mythology (David M. Bethea). None of these methodologies is assumed to be sufficient (or hermeneutically “totalizing”) in its own right; only when counterposed and read “against one another” do they indicate the sense of healthy pluralism and dialogue (perhaps “round table” is the more operative term) now present in our field. Needless to say, this pluralism is the beneficiary of the solid scholarly accomplishments of the early and intermediate post-war years.

Part Two of Puškin Today is entitled “Puškin: Text and Context.” It is here that some of the most vexed issues—what medievalists call temnye mesta (dark spots/obscure passages)—in the “text(s)” of the poet’s life and works are thoroughly and ingeniously broached, if not in every case resolved: Puškin’s “African heritage” in the context of his life and art (J. Thomas Shaw); the Odessa love lyrics and their troubled poet-persona (Walter Vickery); the complex design of Eugene Onegin (Leslie O’Bell); the use of soliloquy and its implications for the “loneliness” of Puškin and his play Boris Godunov (Stephanie Sandler); the ambiguous notion of “politics” as it relates to Puškin’s famous poem “Stanzas” (George Gutsche); Puškin’s growing reputation as “national poet” as seen through the optic of his nineteenth-century journal reception (Paul Debreczeny); and Puškin’s legacy as the “father” of Russian realist prose (Victor Terras). If the focus in Part One was largely methodological, then the focus in these essays is more practical and “contextual,” and demonstrates the extent to which these American Slavists have mastered (and in their own ways “domesticated”) the enormous secondary literature on Puškin.

PART ONE

In “ ‘The Russian Terpsichore’s Soul-Filled Flight’: Dance Themes in Eugene Onegin,” William Mills Todd III builds on the methodological assumptions found in his Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: (I) that the various orders of a culture (aesthetic, intellectual, behavioral) may be analyzed as institutions in terms of their conventions, functions, and signifying processes; (2) that these cultural orders may interact with each other in ways that are accessible to semiotic analysis; and (3) that an individual work of literature may incorporate other cultural orders, using the resources of literary conventions and devices, not as isolated items in a thematic repertoire but as strategies for guiding the reader’s production of meaning. Todd traces dance developments in early nineteenth-century Russia, paying particular attention to its multiplicity of forms (balls, ballets, popular dances) and growing professionalization. He then shows how these contextual issues function within the syncretic world of the novel, how they shape the reader’s understanding of both the “fictional level” (characters performing the rituals of their culture) and the “fiction-making level” (the author-narrator’s artistic maturation).

Caryl Emerson is well known for her studies of Mixail Baxtin and their application to one of Puškin’s most vexed works, the drama Boris Godunov. Her central thesis in “ ‘The Queen of Spades’ and the Open End” is that Puškin intended to attract precisely “decoders and system-builders” as readers of his tale. She identifies four basic categories of reader-critics in the literature on “The Queen of Spades”: those that concentrate on the mechanics and ideology of gambling (Lotman, Rosen); psychological and generational treatments (Murray and Albert Schwartz, Burgin); linguistic and syntactic studies (Vinogradov, Faletti); and numerological analyses (Leighton). Although each of these approaches succeeds in decoding part of the puzzle, the integrating move that will crack the code forever is always missing, leaving the reader in the role of Germann. Emerson’s conclusion is that in “The Queen of Spades” Puškin was in fact exploring the true spirit of gambling, namely, that there is no system. The reader is provided neither with a code nor with total chaos, but with fragments of codes, codes that tantalize but do not quite add up and cannot therefore be “solved.”

Few scholars have written more intelligently about the structure of Puškin’s poetic and prose language, especially in its paronomastic guises, than Sergej Davydov. “Puškin’s Easter Triptych: ‘Hermit fathers and immaculate women,’ ‘Imitation of the Italian,’ and ‘Secular Power’ ” is no exception. In the first part of his essay, Davydov argues ingeniously for a version of the Stone Island cycle of poems written in the last year of Puškin’s life that is based on the events of Holy Week. The “forbidden” subject of Puškin’s religious beliefs after 1825 is here addressed in a straightforward manner that, historically at least, has been glaringly absent from Soviet treatments.³ Davydov then analyzes the three middle poems of the cycle as a “triptych” united formally and structurally by the theme Easter. Projected on the calendar of Easter events, “Hermit fathers,” with its Lenten prayer of Efrem Sirin, brings the reader through the “sad days of the Great Fast” [i.e., Lent] to Holy Week (Wednesday); “Imitation of the Italian” takes us to the betrayal of Christ and the suicide of Judas (Thursday and Friday morning); and “Secular Power” reenacts the crucifixion scene (Friday) and exposes the subsequent betrayal of the divine mystery by worldly powers.

Simon Karlinsky has written widely on leading figures and epochs of Russian literature, including celebrated studies of Gogol’, Čexov, Marina Cvetaeva, and Russian drama. His contribution to Puškin Today is primarily intertextual and involves the discovery of a little-known, though significant, subtext for Eugene Onegin and Poltava. Aleksandr BestuževMarlinskij’s Journey to Revel' was first published in February 1821 in the journal Contender (Sorevnovatel’) and then reissued in book form in the summer of the same year. Although the work was patterned on the then popular travelogues of Sterne, Dupaty, and Karamzin, it differed from its forebears by its interlarding of prose passages with verse. Karlinsky demonstrates elegantly that not only did Journey to Revel’ bear the imprint of Puškin’s work written prior to 1821 (e.g., Ruslan and Ljudmila), but, more intriguing, its early verse portions provided lexical, syntactic, and rhyming models for some of the poet’s mature works, including Eugene Onegin and Poltava.

Puškin studies and psychoanalysis are joined in the provocative work of Daniel Rancour-Laferriere. Rancour-Laferriere admits that a basic rule (Grundregel) of psychoanalysis is frequently broken in its application to the study of literature: if the deep meaning of an utterance is to be sought in a speaker’s spontaneous/uncensored/”free” associations, how are a dead poet and his carefully conceived (and “concealed”) artistic discourse to be “psychoanalyzed”? The answer, according to Rancour-Laferriere, is to resort to a “compensatory tool”: awareness of the various phonological, morphological, syntactic, subtextual, narrational, and rhetorical devices that function, like the clinical knowledge of a patient’s patterns of free association, to point the way to unconscious motivation. “The analysand’s stories and those found . . . in literary works of art contain intricate mixtures of revelation and concealment. . . . [A] structural parallel [therefore exists] between the material investigated by the clinical analyst and the subject matter of the worker in applied analysis” (Kohut). Thus, for example, in The Bronze Horseman the acoustic “encoding” of poln (full)/voln (waves) rhymes contains the theme of couvade (male childbirth, paternity-maternity) that is central to both Peter’s undertaking (the creation of a city out of the “waters”) and Puškin’s undertaking (the creation of a poem about Peter).

In “The Rejected Image: Puškin’s Use of Antenantiosis” William Harkins examines one of the lesser-known rhetorical figures in Eugene Onegin. As opposed to the more common litotes and antithesis, antenantiosis involves an elaborate construction that is at once negated: “the poet’s fantasy is let loose, so to speak, on a chain of inappropriate images or characterizing epithets.” Harkins’s rhetorical approach is particularly useful for the insight it provides into Puškin’s characterization in Eugene Onegin. Whereas antenantiosis is found relatively infrequently in those passages depicting Onegin and Lenskij (to present the protagonist and antagonist through a negative trope would be, for Puškin, too obvious), it is strategically foregrounded when the author’s favorite heroine, Tat’jana, enters the narrative. Telling us that the young Tat’jana is not like other provincial maidens in the early scenes of country life creates a state of suspense at the prospect of this absence; on the other hand, telling us that she lacks something in the climactic scene describing her salon and her triumph as grande dame serves only to reinforce her moral superiority and heroic stature.

David M. Bethea’s “The Role of the Eques in Puškin’s Bronze Horseman” is the last essay in Part One. It is a study of the cultural mythology of Falconet’s equestrian statue and the latter’s role in the symbolic structure of Puškin’s poem. Bethea begins with a contextualization of Falconet’s work within the Western European tradition of Reiterstandbild. The main issue here is that the eques, at least in the West, was a symbol of imperial control, of “reining” and “reigning” the “body politic,” whereas in Russia this same symbol was fraught with contradictions and not so easily transplantable. Indeed, implied in Falconet’s concetto, which was borrowed from Bernini, another Westerner, was an unconscious parody of one of “old” Russia’s most sacred iconographic and heraldic images—St. George. In the second half of his essay Bethea adduces several related Puškin texts to show that an earlier confrontation between “heraldic lion” (emblem of Jurij Dolgorukij, founder of Moscow) and “democratic ass” (parody of the new social structure under Peter) is in fact a rehearsal for the tragic duel(s) between Evgenij and Peter, “sacred” Moscow and “pagan” Petersburg, in The Bronze Horseman.

PART TWO

One of the perennial problems in dealing with biographies, particularly Puškin’s, is that much of the material is based on memories written down decades after the event. How accurately did anyone come to know Puškin, who remained chary about revealing himself even to those closest to him? “Puškin on His African Ancestry: Publications during His Lifetime,” by J. Thomas Shaw, examines the references to the poet’s black ancestry in works that he published, or attempted to publish, during his lifetime: “To Jur’ev,” Eugene Onegin (verse and note), “To Jazykov,” “To Dawe, Esq.,” “Chapter IV” and “Assembly” of the uncompleted The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, the note on Poltava, “My Genealogy,” and “Table Talk.” It is interesting that during 1828-31 Puškin wrote and published (or republished) all the allusions to his great-grandfather (Peter’s “blackamoor”) that appear in his works, a fact of considerable import in light of the journalist Bulgarin’s unprincipled attacks (1829-31) on the literary “aristocrats” in general and on Puškin in particular. Thus, as Shaw concludes, the theme of Puškin’s African heritage is not only fascinating in its own right, a vital element of the poet’s “exotic” nature, but it is also a revealing index of how that “genealogy” was perceived, depending on who the speaker was (friend vs. foe) and the forum he had chosen (public vs. private).

Walter Vickery’s study “Odessa—Watershed Year: Patterns in Puškin’s Love Lyrics” is based on a close examination of sixteen Puškin love lyrics written in the seven-year period of 1823-30. These lyrics are all believed to be addressed to (or implicitly to refer to) women in whom Puškin became interested during his stay in Odessa (1823-24). Most scholars have been interested primarily in the identity of the addressees, but Vickery takes a different approach. He divides the poems into four groups, according to their dates of composition: 1823-24 (Odessa), 1824-26 (Mixajlovskoe), 1829 (Caucasus and probably Petersburg), and 1830 (Boldino). It is his contention that, irrespective of the addressees, a pattern in the poet’s attitude toward love emerges: 1823-24 (current love), 1824-26 (past love remembered), 1829 (sublimation and release), 1830 (farewell). Two allied points also surface during discussion, namely, that the poet’s diverse emotions appear to be “non-viable” from the standpoint of enduring love, and that he repeatedly performs the role of “supplicant” seeking to prolong a relationship which the woman addressee is breaking off. Thus Puškin’s feeling that he was not made for love (or rather, that love was not made for him) may be more accurate than heretofore acknowledged.

Leslie O’Bell takes Jurij Lotman’s provocative mot as the starting point for her essay on Eugene Onegin: “Onegin was begun by the writer of Baxčisaraj Fountain, continued by the creator of Boris Godunov, and completed by the author of the Little Tragedies.” The “magic crystal” metaphor of Onegin is for O’Bell more than a figure of speech: the novel is in a real way embedded in the larger and slowly developing crystal of Puškin’s other works which accompany and nurture it. The ideal reader, which O’Bell implicitly posits, should take Onegin chapter by chapter, retelling it against the counterpoint of the works that form its context. This, then, is the first sustained attempt to bring together all previous studies which relate Onegin to one or another of Puškin’s individual works with the aim of seeing what latent picture they form and of coordinating them with our best understanding of the inner dynamic of the novel. O’Bell identifies four major thematic or conceptual nodes into which Onegin has alternately been fit: the demon, the man of the world, the journey, and the farewell and homecoming. In fact, the four elements continually dovetail as aspects of Puškin’s ongoing preoccupation with one character, the man of the world in his demonic hypostasis, compelled to wander but doomed to nostalgia for his lost home. What the “magic crystal” ultimately reveals is that Onegin is a long farewell and the slow preparation of a nemesis.

One of Puškin’s most problematic works is the subject of Stephanie Sandler’s essay “Solitude and Soliloquy in Boris Godunov.” In an approach which resonates with Caryl Emerson’s study of the “open end” in “The Queen of Spades,” Sandler is interested in why so many scholars, while explaining away the play’s lack of popular success with reference to stage construction, political climate, or audience, have themselves failed to penetrate to its deeper indeterminacy. She submits that Boris Godunov keeps readers “at a distance” in ways that are themselves worthy of analysis, and she focuses on those scenes or speeches (especially Boris’s soliloquies) where language obstructs communication. In the Tsar’s first soliloquy, for example, he places rhetorical obstacles before himself that undermine his attempts to speak with emotional authenticity; and in the second he uses images which, if taken literally, identify him with his adversary, the Pretender, and thus further erode his authority. Finally, Sandler considers Puškin’s own situation in exile during the time Boris Godunov was written (1824-25); in her reading, the discontinuities, isolated utterances, and failed instances of communication in the play are representative of Puškin’s “anxieties of audience” during the last stages of his exile.

The precise nature of the poet’s political convictions in the post-Decembrist era has always been a controversial issue in Puškin studies, especially when those convictions are read against the background of his earlier “freedom-loving” verse. In “Puškin and Nicholas: The Problem of ‘Stanzas,’ ” George Gutsche investigates a much-analyzed poetic text in light of the September 1826 meeting between Tsar Nicholas I and Puškin, at which time the poet was “forgiven,” allowed to return from exile, and “liberated” from official censorship. Puškin indeed had reason to believe that Nicholas would soon be embarking on far-reaching reforms to rival those of Peter the Great, and it is in this spirit of hope that he composed his poem. Throughout his study Gutsche manages a delicate balance between text and context. He points out the ways in which the work has left itself open to diverse interpretation, and he analyzes its competing voices—on the one hand, the hope that Nicholas will achieve the “glory” and “good” associated with Peter’s reign (panegyric); on the other, the counsel on how this process of emulation is to come about (didactic). In Gutsche’s view, “Stanzas” is above all a pragmatic solution to concrete problems facing Puškin at this critical time in his career. Puškin could not remain Puškin if he broke entirely with the liberal ideals of his youth, yet neither could he help those Decembrist friends in exile without finding some still-dignified modus vivendi for dealing with the tsar and his government.

Paul Debreczeny, the first American scholar to write a comprehensive book on Puškin’s prose, turns his broad knowledge to the question of the poet’s reception in “Puškin’s Reputation in Nineteenth-Century Russia: A Statistical Approach.” The underlying assumption of his study is that it is possible to measure an author’s reputation by counting associative references to him in literary periodicals (Rosengren). “Associative references” is used here in the sense of a “mention” of the author in articles or essays not directly devoted to him or to his work. Hence the fact that a critic cites one author in connection with another suggests that the first is viewed as a “standard,” that his name is sufficiently in the foreground of cultural consciousness to be called up from memory through certain associations. The combined references of a number of critics can add up to a network of codes shared by at least a segment of society. Debreczeny examines five Russian journals from differing ideological camps and periods spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: European Herald, 1820-28; Son of the Fatherland, 1820-29; Contemporary, 1862; Annals of the Fatherland, 1882; and Russian Treasures, 1902. His statistical survey shows that Puškin was much more in the forefront of his own and later (ideologically inimical) periods’ cultural consciousness than other Russian “classics” and that by 1902 he had become an integral part of the “personality” of the educated class.

Victor Terras’s “Puškin’s Prose Fiction in a Historical Context” takes stock of Puškin’s legacy in prose from the viewpoint of a distinguished Dostoevskij scholar. It is a deliberately provocative attempt to put the contents of our volume “in perspective” by a member of the “opposition party.” Quoting Belinskij, Terras advances the argument that Puškin’s prose (i.e., the stories) was mainly a “post horse” en route to the novel form, and that judgment of it by subsequent generations was unavoidably colored by the fact that Puškin was (or was fast becoming) Russia’s national poet. Such writers as Dostoevskij, in his reaction to “The Stationmaster” (in Poor Folk), and Apollon Grigor’ev, in his thesis of the seminal role of Ivan Petrovič Belkin as prototype of the “meek Russian,” were ultimately, according to Terras, responsible for the discovery of Puškin as prose fiction writer. Terras also links Puškin’s progress from committed poet of the aristocratic Decembrist movement to uncommitted litterateur of the 1830s to certain qualities of his prose: its terse and objective narrative style, irony, and “dummy narrator.” Perhaps, concludes Terras, Adolf Stender-Petersen was correct to suggest that Puškin’s stories were “stages on the road to a great realistic novel”: the notion that Russian realist prose “came straight from Puškin” is at least as suspect as that according to which it “came straight out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’ ”

In sum, Puškin Today is the first systematic attempt by non-native scholars to evaluate and analyze the remarkable variety and compass of a figure who by all accounts is absolutely central to Russian culture, even “Russianness” itself. It has been written and compiled with several audiences in mind: Puškinist, specialist in Russian literature, non-specialist Western reader. Its primary aim is to demonstrate the current state of American Puškin studies, including the latter’s hard-earned “maturity.” Its unity lies in its diversity, in the many ways it approaches and rediscovers what, in the Soviet context, has often become a monolithic cultural icon. This seems right and necessary for many reasons, not the least of which is the acknowledged “protean” nature of Puškin himself. To study Puškin’s religion or his African heritage without resorting to ideology or to apply a Freudian lens to certain of his problematic works could—and probably will—be seen by our more traditionalist Soviet colleagues as something bordering on lèse majesté. Be that as it may, this pluralism and willingness to engage multiple viewpoints and disciplines in order to get closer to a real “Puškin” is precisely what distinguishes our endeavor from the otherwise fine historical and textual studies of Soviet Puškinists. The reader will surely recognize in the pages that follow some of the most prominent names in American Slavistics. Fortunately, however, each voice does not participate as coloratura soloist, but rather performs “in concert” as a member of a chorus whose unique vocalizations gather past, present, and perhaps even a little of the future in Puškin Today.