The Belkin Tales [Povesti Belkina]: The literature of ‘everyday life’ and mass literature

Abstract

‘Which way will Russian literature go?’ is the question at the centre of The Tales. It was in the mid-1820s to early 1830s that an argument arose about the popular (genre) stream, which resonated so well with mass audiences. Pushkin creates the persona of Belkin as the collective image of a commercially driven author who utilizes popular subjects of local and foreign origin, much like the writer in A. Pogorelsky’s The Double [Dvoynik]. Having pinpointed the typical features of moral descriptions and transferred them into Belkin’s stories, Pushkin devises various combinations of moral descriptions through depictions of ‘everyday life’, ranging from utter rejection to creative adaptation of the more effective elements of commercial writing. The stories offer three ways for analysis: from the viewpoint of Belkin, who reworks borrowed subjects in the manner of his idol F. Bulgarin; of Pushkin’s Double, who produces the ‘everyday reality’ context; and of Pushkin himself, who weaves those strands together and is responsible for the overall architectonics and subtext of The Tales.