The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Almost alone in the scholarly literature on Chulkov (which tends to condemn both Martona and her milieu), Alexander Levitsky develops this thesis of The Comely Cook as a mock novel targeting literary pretensions rather than social injustice. See Alexander Levitsky, “Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook: The Symmetry of a Hoax,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 2.21 (1988): 97-115.

Olia Prokopenko, “The Real-Life Protagonist of Mikhail Chulkov’s Comely Cook: A Hypothesis,” Slavic and East European Journal 48.2 (Summer 2004): 225-46.

Gitta Hammarberg, “The Literary and Intellectual Context,” ch. 1, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially pp. 10-12.

See Brown, “Russian Prose of the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century,” A History of 18th Century Russian Literature, pp. 544-47.

5 Romanticisms

For the convincing case that Pushkin partook only sparingly of European Romanticism and not at all of “Realism” (a term that appeared on the continent and in Russia in its present literary meaning only in the late 1840s), see Boris Gasparov, “Pushkin and Romanticism,” in The Pushkin Handbook, ed. David M. Bethea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 537-67.

For this transition from court patronage to professionalism via familiar associations, salons, and booksellers, see William Mills Todd III, “Institutions of Literature,” ch. 2, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 45-105.

Yu. M. Lotman, “Liudi i chiny” [People and ranks], Besedy o russkoi kul'ture (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1994), pp. 18-45, esp. 20.

For a fascinating prehistory of Pushkin’s duel and the intricacies of his outraged honor, see Serena Vitale, Pushkin’s Button, trans. Ann Goldstein and John Rothschild (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), especially ch. 6.

This reading of the Onegin-Lensky duel was first laid out by Yury Lotman in his Commentary to Eugene Onegin, 1980. See Yu. M. Lotman, “Evgenii Onegin. Kommentarii,” Pushkin (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1995), p. 679.

Notes to pages 103–16 257

Arthur Krystal, “En garde! The history of dueling,” New Yorker (March 12, 2007), 80–84, esp. 81.

For more on “insult” and “honor” as they evolved in Russia from the eighteenth century on to the twentieth, see chs. 1 and 2, in Irina Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999).

See Ian M. Helfant, “Pushkin as a Gambler,” The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 51.

James E. Falen, Introduction to his translation of Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xii.

Capital letters indicate feminine rhymes (double or two-syllable rhymes with stress on penultimate syllable); small letters are masculine rhymes (single-syllable and stressed). See Vladimir Nabokov, “The ‘Eugene Onegin’ Stanza,” in Alek-sandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse, trans. Vladimir Nabokov, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), vol. I, pp. 9–14; and Michael Wach-tel, “The Onegin Stanza,” ch. 3, The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 119–22.

For an intriguing scene-by-scene exegesis of this pyramidal symmetry, see Irena Ronen, Smyslovoi stroi tragedii Pushkina “Boris Godunov” (Moscow: Its-Garant, 1997), esp. the chart on p. 128.

Alexander Pushkin, “On Prose,” in Pushkin on Literature, ed. Tatiana Wolff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 43–44. Translation adjusted. This useful anthology is marred by translation errors and must be used with caution.

See Irina Reyfman, “Prose Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, ed. Andrew Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 90–104, especially 96–99.