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Abstract:

In 1829–1830, people expected Pushkin to glorify the Russian victory in the Caucasian War that he had witnessed. The opening octaves of “The Little House in Kolomna” were a paradoxical reaction to the imposed theme. In poetry that glorifies war, the signifier is the poetic word, the signified is an event (a battle, a victory, etc.), and the denotation is the meaning attributed to the event (for example: “The victory of Russian arms gives peace and serenity to the peoples”). Pushkin defiantly swapped the signifier and signified. The denotation became the poetic word, while the signifier became war: military vocabulary was used as a language to describe the workings of the poetic word. The signifier was the assertion of the regal freedom of poetry. In the initial octaves of the poem, the self-creation and self-reflexivity of the poetic form present it as a power capable of inverting the relationship between the word and its object: what everyone sees as the signifier fulfils the auxiliary role of signifying the life of poetic speech. It is no accident that such a major semantic revolution was produced within the framework of a humorous poem.