메아리로서의 시인 = Poet as an Echo

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The study has two objectives: first, to closely read Pushkin's 1831 poem "Echo"; second, to overview the import of Pushkin's role as an "echo" within the history of Russian literary thoughts.
Pushkin wrote two other poems that deal with the word "echo", but it is the 1831 poem which delves deeply into the tragic fate of a poet as a quintessentially lonely being who responds to all, but receives no answer for himself in return. The poem, although it is based on the famous mythological narrative of the nymph Echo, does not relate her fate; nor does it pretend to be a poetic allegory.
Even though Pushkin's poem has an unmistakable intertextual link to Cornwall's "A Sea-shore echo", a brief comparison of the two poems reveals the distinctive voice of the Russian version, rather than its indebtedness to the English subtext. Pushkin's "Echo" is none other than a manifesto of poetic principles, which the mature poet so desperately felt and repeatedly pronounced through his numerous metapoems.
Despite the fact that Pushkin deplored the poet-echo's absolute loneliness, the actual fate of the poem "Echo", not to speak of the fate of the poet himself, proved to be contradictery. Writers-commentators such as Gogol', Dostoevsky and Tsvetaeva defined Pushkin's all-encompassing genius in the metaphor of the "poet as an echo" who "responds to all". They saw Pushkin's echo-like receptiveness as a sign of his genuine merit, not as a fatal defect, as some tried to criticized.
For Gogol it was the ultimate character of Pushkin's identity as a realistic poet; for Dostoevsky it was the missionary fate of Russia's "all mankind-ness" which Pushkin embodied with all of his being; for Tsvetaeva it was the absolute prerequisite for the primary poet such as Pushkin.
The poem itself might be a miniature, but its "echo" has been rather enormous. We come to admit it, when we read the poem in the large context of Russian literature, which so stubbornly relies its raison **** on the figure of Pushkin. Pushkin said that there is no echo to the poet, but the poem certainly raised its own echoes, and came to function as a "pre-echo(*****)" which makes things really exist.