This paper is intended to investigate A. Pushkins's historical views manifested in his 'historical' literary texts. especially in 《Kapitanskaia dochka》 and the problem of 'receding' as a necessary mechanism for registering and transmitting the aut...
This paper is intended to investigate A. Pushkins's historical views manifested in his 'historical' literary texts. especially in 《Kapitanskaia dochka》 and the problem of 'receding' as a necessary mechanism for registering and transmitting the author's views in the texts. Pushkin's views on history can be defined as 'deconstructed' in that he refuses point-blank Romantic historicism with its well-known idioms such as the law of historical necessity. hidden connections between seemingly unrelated events, onward progressive movements of history, etc. This' deconstruction' of history substitutes "endlessly playful self-repetition" for the traditional sense of continuum and reduces historiography to a parody on it and by doing so equates Pushkinian and Postmodern perspectives on history. In order to question the very notion of history, Pushkin makes almost without exception dual coding system. namely the historical code and literary code operative in the texts. The opposition and correlation of these two codes. the 'receding' of one into the other are basic structural elements for creating sui generis Pushkinian sense of history. In 《 Kapitankaia dochka》 non-historical recoding of history is observed in style and the device of 'ostranenie'. The simple and precise language of narration dissociates the novel from the conventional historical narrative and the 'ostranenie' comically distorts the important historical facts. As a result of receding. history and non-history in the text achieve equivalence and thus significance of history becomes nullified.