O poeta e seu público: crítica e fragmento na obra de Aleksandr Púchkin

Abstract

This thesis examines Aleksandr Pushkin’s (1799–1837) critical practice, dispersed across prefaces, notes, letters, articles, and his own narratives, and highlights the fragment as a central instrument of expression. It argues that the fragmente – both an aesthetic device and a strategy for circumventing censorship – produces a form of critique immanent to the work itself. By addressing primarily his peers as empirical interlocutors, Pushkin projects and shapes an imagined audience out of a readership not yet fully constituted, establishing new modes of reading and the conditions for the formation of a Russian literary tradition. His work becomes a space of debate: controversies of the period are absorbed and reconfigured within the texts, especially through digressions that shift themes from periodicals into fiction. This gesture reveals an ambivalent relationship with the public, oscillating between specialized dialogue and the desire to reach common readers. The analysis also considers the tensions between literary movements that shaped these practices. Conceptually, it discusses the notions of criticism and fragment in light of German Romanticism and their adaptation to the Russian context. Textually, it describes the concrete manifestation of the fragment in Pushkin’s critical and fictional work and its role in the formation of the reader. It is shown that under censorship, exile, and ongoing disputes with journal critics, Pushkin – through ruptures and digressions – transforms fiction into a space of reflection and redefines the place of criticism. The hypothesis is tested in finished and unfinished texts – some translated here for the first time into Portuguese – as well as in reviews and articles from the 1820s and 1830s.