SOURCE: “‘Persten’: Baratynskii's Fantastic Tale,” in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 26, No. 4, December, 1984, pp. 296-306.

In the following essay, Grau analyzes “Persten,” Baratynsky's only completed work of prose fiction, and suggests three different ways of interpreting the tale: as a fashionable tale of the fantastic, as a parody of the fantastic genre, or as a depiction of an artist searching for his place in society.

In the fall of 1831 the poet Evgenii Baratynskii wrote to Ivan Kireevskii, promising to send him, among other things, a short story in prose for his journal Evropeets: “It is all mediocre, but it will do for a journal.”¹ The story, “Persten',” appeared early in 1832 in the second issue of Evropeets, and was soon forgotten, contemporary critics apparently agreeing with the author's assessment.² But although the story is Baratynskii's only complete work of fictional prose, and although it has been disparaged by the few...