The Nest of Gentlefolk and the “Poetry of Marriage and the Hearth”

Abstract

In my study on Pushkin, “Poetry of Marriage and the Hearth,”¹ I attempted to show that certain motives in the many-sided, yet preeminently lyric and autobiographic poetry of Pushkin express, indeed ground and affirm, the poet’s view of absolute truths and the laws which derive from these truths and, in the poet’s opinion, govern man’s life inexorably, beyond possibility of any compromise. One such law which in the poetic (and, although of less importance, also in the practical) concepts of Pushkin had just such a religious, imperative significance, admitting of no modification and no reduction, was the principle of the inviolability of marriage. I pointed out that this view, this “truth,” this social-religious principle of Pushkin’s ideology was expressed at once more eloquently and more cogently in The Snowstorm and Dubrovsky than in the famous reply of Tatyana:

...But I am given to another— And shall be eternally faithful to him...²