Pushkin's Heroines and the Life-Art Connection - by Amanda F Murphy (Hardcover)

About the Book

Traces the development of Pushkin's heroines from his youthful Southern Poems to his last published work The Captain's Daughter, placing them within the context of the author's dominant genre models

Book Synopsis

This book traces the development of Pushkin's heroines from his youthful Southern Poems to his last published work The Captain's Daughter, placing them within the context of the author's dominant genre models and his own life circumstances.

Though Pushkin's innovative depictions of female characters were to alter the course of Russian literature and lead to the development of the "strong woman" in Russian literature, the extensive scholarship of the poet's oeuvre has remained largely herocentric. While Tatiana Larina from Eugene Onegin has received a significant degree of scholarly attention, his other heroines have not been studied in a systematic way. As a corrective, this book traces the development of Pushkin's heroines from his youthful Southern Poems to his last published work The Captain's Daughter, placing them within the context of the author's dominant genre models, focusing specifically on Byron, Shakespeare, and Scott, and his own life circumstances. The overarching purpose of this revisionist feminist study is to examine the ways in which Pushkin broadened the possibilities for heroines within his art and used the freedom he found in inhabiting the female frame to escape from the social norms that constrained Russian noblemen in order to puzzle through his own personal concerns.

Review Quotes

""Pushkin's Heroines is a groundbreaking and rigorously researched study that yields new insight not only into the life and work of Russia's national poet, but also the relationship between life and literature in general. This is a necessary work for Pushkinists and a thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the mysteries of the artistic process."" --Emily Wang, Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA

""This book is a real tour de force: it addresses the surprisingly understudied topic of Pushkin's heroines (beyond Tatiana) and offers a new and exciting reading of Pushkin's oeuvre. Focusing on the female protagonists in works of several genres and periods, Amanda Murphy adroitly synthesizes the vast existing Pushkin scholarship while simultaneously drawing on feminist literary approaches to provide invaluable readings that illuminate both the individual texts and the overall trajectory of Pushkin's development."" --Svetlana Grenier, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages, Georgetown University, USA

""Amanda Murphy offers a lucid, well-researched, and innovative discussion of Pushkin's heroines, going well beyond Tatiana of Eugene Onegin to focus on less frequently analyzed female protagonists from the Southern poems, Boris Godunov, The Belkin Tales, and The Captain's Daughter. She argues that the heroines of these works embody Pushkin's own anxieties, as he plays with established prototypes such as the provincial maiden in order to model the disruption of norms he desired for his own romantic, social, and artistic pursuits. Murphy's study eloquently demonstrates Pushkin's ability to create heroines whose imagination and resourcefulness enable them to challenge their male counterparts and to transcend social expectations for nineteenth-century women."" --Alexander Burry, Professor of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University, USA

About the Author

Amanda F. Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.