Representation of the Yemelyan Pugachev image in Viktor Bagrov’s poem “Yemelyan Pugachev”: Revisiting the problem

Abstract

This article explores the representation of Yemelyan Pugachev in the poem “Yemelyan Pugachev” by Viktor Bagrov (Bestemennikov), a forgotten and little-studied Middle Volga writer of the 1920s-30s who died tragically during the Great Terror. The poem was influenced by the novella “The Captain’s Daughter” and the historical narrative “The History of Pugachev” by A. S. Pushkin and A. Yesenin’s poem “Pugachev”. The poet draws extensively on the facts from “The History of Pugachev”, but imbues the events and the characters with the artistic expressiveness of a folk historical song. Bagrov also sets the tone of a distinctly epic quality in his work, using the epigraphs from “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” to create the epic vector and introduces the character of the storyteller Alyosha Bayan who could have become a chronicler of the peasant war and the Pugachev rebellion. The poem makes extensive use of artistic parallelism to convey the complex, contradictory, fickle, and protean character of Pugachev, simultaneously a tsar of hope and a free Cossack, a peasant tsar and a fugitive thief, a “wanderer”. Compositionally, the poem’s plot is influenced by Pushkin’s story “The Captain’s Daughter”. Pugachev does not appear from the very start, not under his own name; he is characterized indirectly, “through hearsay”. The first six chapters of the poem lead the heroes to Cossack freedom; the remaining five chapters lead them to defeat and disillusionment.