The poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Pushkin’s school-friend, suffered twenty years of imprisonment and Siberian exile for his part in the ill-fated Decembrist rising of 1825 against the Russian autocracy. His largely forgotten life and work are vividly recreated in Küchlya (1925), a pioneering historical novel by the eminent literary scholar and Formalist theorist Yuri Tynianov. Writing at a time when Stalin was tightening his grip on Soviet culture and society, Tynyanov implicitly brings together the disquieting experiences of the 1820s and the 1920s. In a lively, innovative style, his gripping and moving narrative, here translated for the first time, evokes the childhood, youth, beliefs and often absurd adventures of a Quixotic, idealistic protagonist against the richly complex backdrop of post-Napoleonic Russian society.
Table of Content
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Characters
Küchlya: Decembrist Poet: A Novel
Willie
The Bechelkückeriad
Europe
Caucasus
In the Country
Sons of the Fatherland
December
Peter’s Square
Escape
Fortress
The End
Some Poems by Wilhelm Küchelbecker
Endnotes
About the author
Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943) was a Russian writer and literary theorist, and a central figure among the revolutionary-era scholars who came to be known as the Russian Formalists.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
751,632 Ebooks in this category
