Petra scandali: History, fiction and myth in Pushkin's narratives on Peter the Great

Pushkin's preoccupation with the history of Russia and especially with Peter the Great and his epoch made him the progenitor of a Russian national mythology which shaped the historical discourse of generations of Russian writers and intellectuals. Yet to date there exists no integrative study of Pushkin's Peter the Great narratives and his philosophy of history. This dissertation, therefore, offers a close analysis of Pushkin's major Peter the Great fictions, as well as exploring the problems of the relationship between history and fiction, history and myth and some broader aspects of Pushkin's historical vision.;Chapters One and Two discuss Pushkin's theories of history and his attitude toward contemporary historiography as extrapolated from his essays, letters, notes, and some of his metahistorical fictions, that is, fictional works which involve the subject and method of historiography (Count Nulin, A Journey from Moscow to Petersburg, "The Hero"). The examination of Pushkin's philosophy of history includes discussion of the following issues: the nature of historical truth, the principles of causality, the relationship between legend and fact, between historiography and fiction, and between conceptions of historical process and the shape of the narrative. The dissertation explores three main aspects of Pushkin's historiographical program: (1) consideration of the accidental in history; (2) selection of historical material that would help to define the specifics of Russian history; (3) a contextualist mode of argument. I discuss Pushkin's approach to the relation between history and fiction, on the one hand, and between fiction and myth, on the other, and suggest that these relations could be viewed in terms of the theory of complementarity.;Chapters Three, Four, and Five deal with close analyses of The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, Poltava, and The Bronze Horseman--three fictions by Pushkin that form the matrix of his historical thought involving Peter the Great. These chapters focus on Pushkin's use of historical sources in his fictional narratives and his mythologization of history in general, and of the figure of Peter the Great specifically. Each work demonstrates how Pushkin's artistic representations of the past transform history into myth, and thereby create archetypal ideas and images from actual events and historical figures.