The Captain's Daughter

by Alexander Pushkin

  2. Ibid, 334.

  3. Zametki o proze russkikh klassikov (Moscow: Sov. Pisatel', 1955), 53.

  4. “Grinev, the Trickster: Reading the Paradoxes of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter,” Slavic and East European Journal 51, 1 (2007).

  5. The connection between the sound play and the two variants of Palasha’s name has never, I believe, been remarked on. It was only with the help of time, chance, and a great deal of prodding from a graduate student, Olia Grebenyuk, that I noticed it. Another Russian friend had promised to check through our translation but had, in the end, only been able to check the first half. Olia took over and checked the second half. Thinking that the difference between “Palasha” and “Palashka” was so slight that English readers would see it merely as an irritating inconsistency, I had decided to call the maid “Palashka” throughout the whole novel. Olia was indignant. Why, she asked, did I always use the disrespectful “Palashka” when Pushkin always called her “Palasha”? It took me some time to work out that the narrator neither (as Olia insisted) always calls her “Palasha” nor (as I insisted) shifts between the two variants entirely randomly. Only after realizing that the narrator calls her “Palashka” throughout the first seven chapters and “Palasha” throughout the last seven chapters (in chapter 12 the priest’s wife calls her “Palashka,” but the narrator himself, after the encounter in Masha’s room, calls her only “Palasha”) did I take in the beauty and significance of the turning point I have discussed above.

  6. This list of words, taken from Sergej Davydov, “The Sound and Theme in the Prose of A.S. Pushkin,” Slavic and East European Journal 27, 1 (1983), is abbreviated. Davydov refers to what Pushkin does with p-l-t as a “logogram.”

  7. See David Bethea, “Slavic Gift-Giving, The Poet in History, and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter,” in Russian Subjects, edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (Northwestern University Press, 1998), 259–77.

  8. “Let him be a true soldier—not some fop of a turncoat in the Guards!” Here the phrase “fop of a turncoat” translates shamaton, an uncommon word that appears, in the late eighteenth century, to have meant “turncoat” and, in the 1830s, to have meant “fop.” See M.I. Gillel'son and I.B. Mushina, Kapitanskaya dochka: kommentarii (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1977), 77–78.

  9. “May God grant you an honorable man for a husband, not a disgraced turncoat.” Here we use “turncoat” for izmennik.

  FURTHER READING

  BIOGRAPHY AND ANTHOLOGIES

  Chandler, Robert. Alexander Pushkin. Hesperus, 2009.

  Chandler, Robert, ed. Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Penguin Classics, 2012.

  ———. Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida. Penguin Classics, 2005.

  Chandler, Robert, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski, eds. The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Penguin Classics, 2015.

  TRANSLATIONS

  Boris Godunov: The Little Tragedies. Translated by Stephen Mulrine. Oberon Books, 2002.

  Dubrovsky. Translated by Robert Chandler. Hesperus Press, 2003.

  Eugene Onegin. Translated by James Falen. Oxford World Classics, 1995. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. Penguin Classics, 2008. Falen’s translation is better than any of its predecessors but is superseded by Mitchell’s brilliant translation.

  The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems. Translated by Antony Wood. Angel Classics, 2013.

  The Letters of Alexander Pushkin. Translated by J. Thomas Shaw. University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.

  BOOKS ABOUT PUSHKIN IN ENGLISH

  Bethea, David. The Pushkin Handbook. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

  Binyon, T.J. Pushkin. HarperCollins, 2002. Authoritative and detailed.

  Dunning, Chester, et al. The Uncensored Boris Godunov. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. This argues the case for Pushkin’s earlier version of the play, which is included both in the original and in Antony Wood’s fine translation.

  Kahn, Andrew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

  Mirsky, D.S. Pushkin. Dutton, 1963.

  Sinyavsky, Andrei. Strolls with Pushkin. Translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy. Yale University Press, 1995.

  ARTICLES IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN

  Bethea, David. “Slavic Gift-Giving, The Poet in History, and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter.” In Russian Subjects. Edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally. Northwestern University Press, 1998, 259–77.

  Davydov, Sergej. “The Sound and Theme in the Prose of A.S. Pushkin.” Slavic and East European Journal 27, 1 (1983).

  Emerson, Caryl. “Grinev’s Dream: The Captain’s Daughter and a Father’s Blessing.” Slavic Review 40, 1 (1981): 60–76.

  Gillel'son, M.I., and I.B. Mushina. “Povest’ A.S. Pushkina.” In Kapitanskaya dochka: kommentarii. Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1977.

  Rikoun, Polina. “Grinev, the Trickster: Reading the Paradoxes of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter.” Slavic and East European Journal 51, 1 (2007).

  ———. The Trickster’s Word: Oral Tradition in Literary Narrative. Harvard University doctoral thesis, 2003.

  Terts, Abram. “Puteshestvie na Chernuyu Rechku.” In Puteshestvie na Chernuiu Rechku i drugie proizvedeniia. Moscow: Sakharov, 1999, 425–78.

  Tsvetaeva, Marina. “Pushkin i Pugachev.” In Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Edited by Anna Saakiants and Lev Mnukhin. Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1994, 498–524.