Yazykov or Pushkin? (About Three Poems Attributed to Pushkin)

The article examines the case of the poems by a poet of Pushkin’s time, N.M. Yazykov, which were attributed without sufficient grounds to A.S. Pushkin. Dedicated to the famous Gypsy singer T.D. Demyanova, the poem “Elegy” (“Blessed is who could on the lodge of the night...”) was published as Pushkin’s poem in the journal Polar Star for 1859 (Severnaia Zvezda) by Iskander (A.I. Herzen) and N. Ogarev in London. In 1992, the same poem was republished in Japan under the name of Pushkin in the collection Smile of Venus. Russian Obscene Poems. The paper raises the question of attribution to Pushkin of Yazykov’s poem, which has been already published under his name in the Odessa Almanac for 1831, as well as subsequently in Yazykov’s first book Poems (1833) and the posthumous edition of 1858. The poem “To a Friend” (“Do not tempt me fruitlessly...”), which was published in 1830 in the Moscow almanac Rainbow (Raduga) with the pen name ***, has been attributed to Pushkin in relatively recent times in the newspaper Soviet Culture (1984) by I.T. Trofimov, who interpreted it as an unexpected find, and then in his monograph Searches and Finds in the Moscow Archives (1987). However, the article shares the point of view оf M.K. Azadovsky, according to which the author of the poem “To a Friend” was Yazykov. It gives several additional arguments in its favor. The third one of the poems under consideration is “Platonism” (“To fall in love only with one’s soul, that is the law…”). A list of this poem with the signature “(A. Pushkin ?)” has been found by the author of this paper in an unnamed album stored at the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House). The autograph of the same poem stored in the Russian State Library (Moscow) proves the undeniable authorship of Nikolay Yazykov.