И время и место | страница 84

Полное собрание сочинений: В 30 т. Л., 1976. Т. 15. С. 488.

Pushkin’s biographers have often pointed out that the Lyceum played a special role in the poet’s psychic development, as a place (and a time) where a troubled youth’s better angels could be appealed to and where lifelong friendships based on shared experience and bonds of trust could be cemented.^>1 From Annenkov to Lotman to Bin yon, these six years of structure and routine become the “family life” that the young Pushkin did not have at home with Sergei Lvovich and Nadezhda Osipovna: “Nam tselyi mir chuzhbina;/ Otechestvo nam Tsarskoe Selo.” But the Lyceum was crucial to Pushkin’s development in another respect: it was a place that lent itself almost magically to poetical musing. As we learn from the famous opening to chapter 8 of Eugene Onegin:

The valleys that are “secret, mysterious” (tainstvennye) because they first gave birth to private reverie; the lakes and the swans (swans being a Derzhavinian metaphor for poetry to Pushkin and his Lyceum mates); the Apuleius whose adventure stories and sexual license are much more the attractive forbidden fruit for these teenagers than stern Cicero; the notion of withdrawal into the gardens (“v sadakh”) and into the student cell (kel’ia) that somehow miraculously opens out into an illumination called the Muse – all this is integral to the “blooming” (“ia bezmiatezhno rastsvetal”) of the future poet. In the essay to follow I propose to first give a brief sketch of the young Pushkin against the background of his Lyceum experience and then to examine aspects of his earliest attempts at verse in an effort to catch glimpses of the mature poet in the boy wonder. My point is not to raise the status of the juvenilia, but rather to see the latter as the creative laboratory wherein, regardless of initial artistic success or failure, different genre-specific “voice zones” are crystallizing and a consistent uniting