SOURCE: "On Pushkin's Evolution as a Poet in the 'Thirties (The Tale of the Golden Cockerel)," in Soviet Literature, No. 6 (315), 1974, pp. 141-67.

In the following essay, Nepomnyashchy examines Pushkin's verse fairy-tale, The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, acknowledging its significance to Pushkin's work of the 1830s.

The Tale of the Golden Cockerel is one of the strangest of Pushkin's compositions in the 'thirties.¹ Even alongside such works as The Queen of Spades or The House at Kolomna it is marked out by its mysterious, "hermetic" quality, by what you might describe as the difficulty of approaching it. Inseparably belonging to Pushkin's cycle of Russian fairy-tales, it stands on its own, markedly different from the previous ones in the structure of its imagery, its stylistic features and its whole sombre-grotesque, puzzling and oddly unusual character.

For a long time the source of the plot was unknown. Almost a century...