"Погасло дневное светило..."

My first response paper in graduate school. I would like to think it's not totally all over the place, but I think I'm fooling myself. Oh, well. There will most certainly be others. This is not particularly polished, but I think that is all right, considering it is supposed to be a "reading diary" of sorts.

A good portion of this entry was brought to you by my notes from Intro to Polish Lit at UCL. Thanks, Romanticism and Mickiewicz!

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As opposed to the dominance of reason we would expect in the philosophy of many pre-Pushkinian writers, in Pushkin's "Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo," we observe the preeminence of emotion and the senses characteristic of the Romantic style: "ia vizhu ... s volnen'em i toskoi ... i chuvstvuiu." The inclusion of "slezy," the physical manifestation of powerful emotion, underlines this point. The speaker does not hesitate to mourn his "poteriannaia mladost'" in the most colorful of extremes, appealing to such terms as "stradan'e," "zhertvoval," and "ran" in order to express the depths of his misfortune. There is no attempt on the part of the poet to appeal to his rational faculties -- instead, "dusha kipit i zamiraet" before memories of "bezumnuiu liubov'."

Explicit expressions of the speaker's feelings are accompanied by an example of pathetic fallacy. A complex interplay between the speaker's own person and the environment around him unfolds from the very first couplet: daylight has faded and a mist has descended upon the dark blue sea, setting an appropriate scene for -- or perhaps reflecting -- the poet's melancholic musings in a way reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer. The sail and the ocean of the repeated couplet are, in a sense, given life by their attributions of "poslushnoe" and "ugriumyi"; in particular, the waters are explicitly linked to the speaker's memories of "vse, chto serdtsu milo, / zhelanii i nadezhd tomitel'nyi obman" with the speaker's plea to his ship to transport him "po groznoi prikhoti obmanchivykh morei." Juan Eduardo Cirlot, in his Dictionary of Symbols, provides that "the stormy sea, as a poetic image or a dream, is a sign of an analogous state in the lower depths of the affective unconscious"; it is possible that the poet, amidst the mysterious, even mystical air of darkness, mist, and the open ocean, is using direct address of "vetrilo" and "okean" as an attempt to achieve a dialogue with himself in which he confronts the regrets of his past and his desires for the future.

Although Kahn states that he "will emphatically not argue that Pushkin's aesthetic evolves from the classical to the Romantic," Pushkin's use of the term "muzy" in reference to "bregam pechal'nym / tumannoi rodiny moei" may constitute a subtle indication of a desire on his part to dispense with classical tradition. Since the imagery throughout the poem is powerfully evocative of Romantic tendencies, "Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo" might, in fact, foreshadow a movement in Pushkin's aesthetic to the Romantic -- even in such an early work -- but that claim cannot be substantiated without a deeper acquaintance of his oeuvre.

There also exist links between this poem and the idea of moving "per realia ad realiora" in the thought of future symbolists, e.g. in Konstantin Bal'mont's "Na raznykh iazykakh." It might be argued that Bal'mont, in his use of the imagery of "ty pesok na mertvykh beregakh" in opposition to "vozdushnyi sad ispolnen aromata ... moia dusha bogata" evokes the Pushkin of this poem, located in the liminal geography of the sea between "otecheski kraia" and "bereg otdalennyi, zemli poludennoi volshebnye kraia" and desiring to leave behind the "napersnitsy porochnykh zabluzhdenii" and "prezhnikh serdtsa ran, glubokikh ran liubvi" of his past in favor of regaining "sebia, pokoi, slava, svoboda, i dusha." The speakers of both poems aspire to absolution, the sea serving in both cases as a mediator between two shores, one representing an ideal and the other enshrouded in the darkness of vice.