| This dissertation examines the beatus ille topos in three early Russian pastorals: Derzhavin's "To Eugene: Life at Zvanka," Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Goncharov's Oblomov . This thread of pastoral, in the tradition of Horace's second epode, describes a longing for country life that encompasses peace, autonomy, and mindfulness toward the ordinary. It invokes a juxtaposition between nostalgia for this idyllic world and a distanced, potentially comedic, awareness that full retreat is not possible. Pastoral writing, Paul Alpers has argued, is characterized by this inherent capacity for commentary. The novelized pastoral in particular permits a nuanced and partial unraveling: idyllic moments are embedded in the novel's pluripotence and irretrievability, imparting joy but also making visible the press of time. Around this pastoral that is and also is not undone, there gather the revelatory details of the ordinary: harvests that gladden, dismay, or go neglected; cabbage soups that signal seduction, privation, exile, or self-sufficiency.;Pastoral writing offered a congenial arena in which to examine questions of identity, autonomy, and coming of age in the early decades of Russia's canon. The first chapter examines the tension between prolongment and teleology in Derzhavin's domestic poetry. Derzhavin's natural world becomes luminous in his ecstatic rendering, but time refuses to remain suspended. The second chapter examines limitations of the lyric through a rehabilitative reading of Vladimir Lensky. The third chapter examines the problem of prosaic maturation, with reference to Pushkin's own movement toward prose: Onegin, I suggest, is a novel on what is not possible, a novel of resilience, attentiveness, and even wit in the face of constrained circumstances. The fourth chapter examines the puzzle of Goncharov's unsentimental tenderness, how Oblomov undermines both awe and idyllic hibernation even as its nostalgia remains uncorroded. |
