“At Plato’s Feast in Time of Plague”: on Interpretations of A.S. Pushkin’s “Little Tragedy”

Abstract

The article attempts to place “A Feast in Time of Plague” by A.S. Pushkin, as well as the immediately preceding poem “Hero” (1830), in an eschatological perspective. The question of possible “pre-texts” of Pushkin's “Feast” is raised; considering the seemingly insignificant shifts of the Russian text relative to the English original, one can come to the conclusion that A.S. Pushkin, as if over the head of J. Wilson, consistently returns to the banquet ritual, reproducing the elements of archaic Dionysianism. The tragic “insoluble contradiction” of the finale of A.S. Pushkin's work is emphasized by the truncated concluding verse: the iambic tetrameter is cut off at the second foot; it is noteworthy that the metric scheme of the ending of the poem “Hero” is the same.