Pushkin’s Heroines and the Life-Art Connection: Freedom in a Female Frame

This book traces the development of Pushkin’s heroines from his youthful Southern Poems to his last published work The Captain’s Daughter, placing them within the context of the author’s dominant genre models and his own life circumstances.

Though Pushkin’s innovative depictions of female characters were to alter the course of Russian literature and lead to the development of the ＂strong woman＂ in Russian literature, the extensive scholarship of the poet’s oeuvre has remained largely herocentric. While Tatiana Larina from Eugene Onegin has received a significant degree of scholarly attention, his other heroines have not been studied in a systematic way. As a corrective, this book traces the development of Pushkin’s heroines from his youthful Southern Poems to his last published work The Captain’s Daughter, placing them within the context of the author’s dominant genre models, focusing specifically on Byron, Shakespeare, and Scott, and his own life circumstances. The overarching purpose of this revisionist feminist study is to examine the ways in which Pushkin broadened the possibilities for heroines within his art and used the freedom he found in inhabiting the female frame to escape from the social norms that constrained Russian noblemen in order to puzzle through his own personal concerns.

Amanda F. Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.