Pushkin’s ‘Golden Cockerel’: A Critical Re-Examination

Abstract

‘The Tale of the Golden Cockerel’ is one of Pushkin’s most enigmatic works. Completed at Boldino in the autumn of 1834 (the fair copy is dated 20 September) and published in Senkovsky’s journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Reading Library) in April 1835, Pushkin included the work in the list of his ‘folk fairy-tales’ (prostonarodnye skazki).¹ The poem, indeed, has a folk aura about it as is evident from the lexicon and the traditional fairy-tale formulae with which it opens:

Negde, v trideviatom tsarstve, V tridesiatom gosudarstve, Zhil-byl slavnyi tsar’Dadon.(Somewhere, in a far-away kingdom,/In a far-away realm,/Lived glorious Tsar Dadon.)

Moreover, it was written in trochaic verse, that metre deemed in the nineteenth century most appropriate for literary renderings of folk poetry.²