SOURCE: "Lyric Poetry—1820-1836," in Alexander Pushkin, Twayne Publishers, 1970, 211 p.

In the following excerpt, Vickery studies Pushkin's mature lyric poetry.

The term lyric is sometimes used in Russian criticism to denote any poem belonging to the shorter genres—from the epigram to the elegy, from the personal theme to the patriotic or civic (anything, in effect, that can be listed under stikhotvoreniya or short poems, as opposed to the longer poemy). There is also the more limited and specific meaning of the word which envisages a lyric as a short poem in which the personal feelings of the author stand in the foreground: objective reality may well serve as a basis for such a poem, but it is the subjective feelings of the poet which receive the primary emphasis. It is in this latter narrower sense that Pushkin's lyrics are mainly treated in the present [essay]. Our concern...