| This dissertation is an attempt to develop an approach to literary history, focused on a systematic analysis of individual taste per se, rather than the analysis of literary works, explicit aesthetic programs, or writers' and critics' declarations. The individual taste of Alexander Pushkin, the most influential taste in Russian literary history, is chosen as a case study for a taste-centered approach. The material for the analysis of Pushkin's taste is constituted by the body of his marginal notes to literary works.;The Introduction proposes a methodology for the reconstruction of taste mechanisms and discusses a typology of evaluative judgments, concepts of intertaste and evaluative model, taste rhetoric and taste lexicon.;The first chapter is a necessary preliminary elucidation; it discusses the probable date of Pushkin's undated Marginalia to Batiushkov.;The second chapter discusses various intertastes linking Pushkin's Marginalia with Batiushkov, Pushkin's own texts, as well as writings by Coleridge, Mandel'shtam and others.;The most important methodological division in the proposed model is the separation of taste content (what is liked, disliked, or reacted to) from taste mechanism (how, by what particular means it's being done). The methodological novelty of this dissertation consists in the almost exclusive concentration on a system of classificatory schemes, rhetorical devices and evaluative lexicon constituting Pushkin's taste mechanism.;The third chapter makes a transition from the issues of individual taste to the issue of canon formation. It discusses the canonical history of one line by Batiushkov that was strongly disapproved of by Pushkin in the marginal notes, but which nevertheless achieved the highest canonical status in Russian cultural memory.;The fourth and the fifth chapters concern comparative judgments of taste and rhetoric of canon formation. The fourth chapter analyzes rhetorical evaluative models used by Pushkin and his contemporaries. The fifth chapter presents an attempt to apply the taste-centered approach to traditional problems of literary scholarship. On the basis of taste-centered analysis it is proposed that the important anonymous anti-Pushkin pamphlet, "A Conversation about Boris Godunov," was authored by Faddei Bulgarin, Pushkin's literary archenemy. |
