Jason Brooks
The
‘Mud Not the Fountain That Gave Drink to Thee’?: The Rape of Lucrece and Alexander Pushkin’s Shakespearean Project
This paper is an intertextual study of literary empire and revolution. Focusing on Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and Pushkin’s Graf Nulin, my analysis uses recent Shakespeare criticism to understand and re-situate Pushkin’s poema. Nulin functions very much like Patrick Cheney’s Shakespearean Lucrece as a means of countering cultural authority. For Shakespeare this cultural authority was Spenser; for Pushkin it was the Western literary tradition. Cheney argues that Shakespeare’s Lucrece is a counter-epic of empire, making clear that through its “self-reflexive language…and complex Virgilian ekphrasis…Shakespeare is seen to process not so much a clear political organization as a decisive authorial representation.” With Pushkin’s parody of Lucrece, we find the same counter-imperialist move in the name of authorship, and that Pushkin embeds an explicit political program in Nulin that extends beyond the trite social commentary that critics have hastily attached to the poem. Pushkin uses Nulin to comment on the Decembrist uprising he knew was on the horizon and predicts its failure. Scholars have failed to make the historical connection between the poem’s composition and the 1825 revolution in terms of a Pushkinian comment on the events. This paper not only makes this connection, but also looks to open new doors in the room of literary imperialism.