Pushkin’s “Winter Evening” in the genre context of the era

Abstract

The analysis of a textbook Pushkin poem is aimed primarily at identifying how the lower levels of its structure are organized. Phonetic repetitions and rhythmic patterns simultane ously reproduce the monotony and chaotic unpredictability of the winter cataclysm: the first verse, thanks to its instrumentation, not only names, but recreates the sounds of the storm; alliteration forms a spiral movement built on return and shift — like the moving tornadoes of a snow blizzard. The meaning of words is projected onto the general musicality of their sound structure and forces the reader to correlate phonetic repetitions and imagery of the text. The identified rhythmic form, imitating the tonic verse of a folk song, makes it possible to clarify the genre orientation of the first half of the text: it is the folk song at the level of rhythm and figurative structure that declares itself from the first verses. The “voices” of a ballad, a folk song, a friendly epistle, an elegy, a “Bacchic song” are co-present in the poem as a whole, not only as its sources, but as equal participants in the formation of meaning. This chorus of genre voices, the diversity of rhythmic and sound organization, the unexpected intonation of recognizable motifs, the diversity of names of the addressee, the variability of the compositional division of the text give rise to such semantic inexhaustibility that excludes an unambiguous “minor” or “major” reading of the poem. A paradoxical effect arises — the “madeness” of the text, proven by the analysis, not only does not refute, but provokes an inescapable “biographical” reading of it: techniques and genre traditions “extinguish” each other, challenging the literary quality of “Winter Evening”. The pragmatics of the poem is aimed at ensuring that the reader sees in the lyrical hero an exiled poet, whiling away the evening alone with the nanny, consoled by her songs.

Keywords:

A. S. Pushkin, lyrics, “Winter Evening”