1. A selected bibliography of the extensive critical literature on The Tales of Belkin may be found in B. O. Unbegaun's excellent edition of the Tales (Oxford, 1960), pp. xxvii-xxx. This may in turn be supplemented by references to less important and more recent investigations to be found in the study by der Eng, Jan van, van Holk, A. G. F., and Meijer, Jan M., The Tales of Belkin by A. S. Puskin (The Hague, 1968).Google Scholar Since the thematic and integrative approach which I use here has little in common with the structural, stylistic, and comparative analyses of earlier scholars, my references to their work—much of it of great interest—will necessarily be limited.

2. I say “embedded” advisedly: in “The Shot,” for instance, the Count's courtship, though a part of the fabula, occurs offstage. The expression “successful courtship” as used in this article is basically a shorthand term to denote that common narrative core which I have just described.

3. It may be argued that there is no unequivocal proof that Dunia eventually becomes Minsky's wife. Her appearance at the end of the story in the company of her three children and their nurse has, however, nothing of the courtesan about it. Moreover to assume that she is still Minsky's mistress blunts one of the basic points of the story: the ironic tension between Vyrin's pessimistic expectations for Dunia and her improbably happy fate. If, as the story ends, Minsky has yet to make an “honest woman” of her, her father's belief that she would end her days as a streetwalker might still come true!

4. I use the term here and elsewhere in the loose sense of a person who seems to be dogged by chronic bad luck, or whose happiness has been sacrificed for a person less deserving than he.

5. As examples of literary works which use the seasonal cycle one could cite—to go no further than the field of English poetry—Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, Thomson's Seasons, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and Eliot's Four Quartets.

6. Technically, of course, early or middle June (the time indicated in the third and fourth episodes) belongs to spring, not summer. In the popular mind, however, June is a summer month, just as September is an autumn month and December a winter month. In English, for instance, the old expression “midsummer day” was used to denote June 21, the first day of summer. That Pushkin thought in similar terms is suggested by the fact that although the Count and Countess arrive in the countryside in the first week of June—that is to say, well before the beginning of summer in the technical sense—he says they came to the country “for the summer.“

7. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1968), pp. 131–239.Google Scholar

8. Frye: “The four mythoi that we are dealing with … may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth,” which he then briefly describes (p. 192). Later he hypothesizes that “romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy are all episodes in a total questmyth“ (p. 215). In both cases the order is the same: romance (summer) first, comedy (spring) last.

9. Frye's elaborately documented theory of the mythoi is probably in no need of additional evidence. On the other hand, his hypotheses that each mythos is associated with a particular season and that joined together all four mythoi form an overall plot are suggested rather than demonstrated. This being the case, evidence that a great writer had more than a century earlier worked in accordance with these formulae cannot but be of interest.

10. Frye, , Anatomy of Criticism, p. 192.Google Scholar

11. Frye: “The mode of romance presents an idealized world: in romance heroes are brave, heroines beautiful, villains villainous” (p. 151).

12. Frye, See, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 187–89.Google Scholar

13. Frye, See, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 189.Google Scholar

14. The following words or expressions are used in connection with Silvio: sldi iazyk, ot slosti, slorechie, neobkhodimoe slo, liotnenie sloby, dobstiioval, and slobnaia mysl'.

15. The narrator's remark that “we considered him art old man” connects Silvio with the notion of advanced age. Silvio's association with darkness is implicit in the fact that he is never seen in broad daylight. His Satanic overtones are explicit in the narrator's remark that his “somber pallor, blazing eyes, and the thick smoke issuing from his mouth lent him the aspect of a true devil.” His solitary bachelor's life, lack of Vocation, and destructive and vacuous pastime (firing at the blank walls of his room) all indicate a sterile mode of existence. His association with death is self-evident.

16. For a recapitulation of the various interpretations of the end see Eng, van der, Tales of Belkin by A. S. Puskin, pp. 61–80.Google Scholar My own view is that Silvio's refusal to shoot at the Count is an acknowledgment of the moral bankruptcy of a life dedicated to vengeance.

17. One misses in “The Shot,” for instance, the motif of the quest to which Frye attaches considerable importance (pp. 187 ff.).Google Scholar It is also noteworthy that it is the “monster“ Silvio, not the “hero” Count ***, who is the true protagonist of the story. This of course reverses the emphasis found in the traditional romance.

18. Frye, See, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 223–39.Google Scholar

19. The italics are mine.

20. Frye, , Anatomy of Criticism, p. 224.Google Scholar Nerval's famous line of ironic frustration and futility, “Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie” (alluded to by Frye, p. 239), admirably expresses Vladimir's situation.

21. Frye, See, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 209–10.Google Scholar

22. In discussing this moment of tragedy Frye comments: “The discovery or anagnorisis which comes at the end of the tragic plot is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him … but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken. The line of Milton dealing with the fall of devils, ‘O how unlike the place from whence they fell 1, ’ referring as it does both to Virgil's quantum mutatus ab illo and Isaiah's ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer son of the morning, ’ combines the Gassical and the Christian archetypes of tragedy” (p. 212). If in Vyrin's fall we do not find the first kind of anagnorisis, there is in the besotted old man's maundering about his past happiness a great deal of the quantum mutatus ab illo.

23. “The Stationmaster” and the tragic mythos share other, less important points. Frye observes that “tragedy is much concerned with breaking up the family” (p. 218), and that “the central female figure of a tragic action will often polarize the tragic conflict“ (p. 219). Elsewhere he notes the importance of the figure of the suppliant “who presents a picture of unmitigated helplessness and destitution” (p. 217). The relevance of these remarks to the dissolution of Vyrin's family, the key role that Dunia plays in “polarizing” the conflict between her father and her lover, and Vyrin's role as suppliant in St. Petersburg is obvious.

24. Frye, for instance, notes that “the tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated” (p. 165).

25. Frye: “Comedy often includes a scapegoat ritual of expulsion which gets rid of some irreconcilable character, but exposure and disgrace make for pathos, or even tragedy” (p. 165). Coupled with the remark immediately preceding it (see note 24) this suggests that the “purity” of a comedy is diluted precisely to the extent that its villains and victims remain unreconciled.

26. That Pushkin wrote a quartet of stories in order to illustrate a theory of archetypal plots which he had evolved is, to say the least, most unlikely. On the other hand, Pushkin's familiarity with the seasonal theme is attested in a letter to his friend Delvig: “Write a splendid long poem, only not about the four times of day or the four seasons“ (Pushkin-kritik, N. V. Bogoslovsky, ed., [Moscow and Leningrad, 1934], p. 13). And, as Richard Gustafson has shown (in his “The Metaphor of the Seasons in Evgenij Onegin,” Slavic and East European Journal, 6 [1962]: 6-20), the poet himself had already made effective use of the device in a major work. Nonetheless it seems doubtful that he composed the Tales according to a preconceived seasonal pattern. For one thing, he did not write them in the order in which they later appeared (“The Coffinmaker” was written first, followed by “The Stationmaster,” followed by the “Preface,” etc.). For another, he did not, as we have just seen, observe the exact calendar order of the seasons, since he put the autumnal story, “The Stationmaster,” after the winter story, “The Blizzard.” From an artistic standpoint the reason for this is clear: in order to maintain the crescendo of melancholy (the first three stories of the quartet appear in order of increasing sadness), as well as to observe the familiar dramatic principle of making things darkest just before dawn, he chose to place the gloomiest story of the group, the “tragic” “Stationmaster,” immediately before the happiest story, the comic “Lady-Peasant.” But. had he intended at the outset to observe the strict calendar order, he would, one suspects, have found a way to do it. Common sense, then, suggests that it was only after he had completed all five stories that the’ problem of their ordonnance presented itself. At this point (one conjectures) he recognized the pattern in the materials at his disposal and rearranged the stories in the Order in which we are analyzing them.

27. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 192.

28. The “dictatorial” note is sounded in the’ ironic epigraph from Viazemsky: “Kollezheskii registrator, / Pochtovoi- staritsii diktator.“ 29. Unbegauri, Tales, p. xV. Unbegaun applies this term to “The Blizzard” and “The Stationmaster,” but “The Shot” and “The Lady-Peasant” deserve it quite as much.

30. An effort to relate the “Preface” to the rest of the stories has recently been made by Meijer, Jan M., “The Sixth Tale of Belkin,” in The Tales of Belkin by A. S. Puskin (pp. 110–34)Google Scholar. Meijer's preoccupation with structural and stylistic problems is, however, unrelated to my own. The same article contains a useful summary of earlier interpretations of the “Preface,” the most important of which point out the parodic and mystificatory aspects: the satire on the prefaces of Scott's novels and Pushkin's desire for at least temporary anonymity.

31. According to the “Preface” Belkin did not invent his heroes. The stories were all true and told to him by others. The manner of narration actually employed, however, makes little use of oral narration or the eyewitness report. If Pushkin did not want the reader to accept Belkin as the author—in some meaningful sense—of the Tales, he would not, obviously, have chosen the title he did.

32. The author of the “Preface” writes that Belkin resembled him “neither in his habits, in his way of thinking, nor in his mores [nravom].”

33. The verb nenaradovot'sia means “to rejoice greatly.” The juxtaposition of Goriukhino and Nenaradovo has been noted by Unbegaun (p. 8), who also notes that this is the village of Masha in “The Blizzard.”