Aleksandr Pushkin’s „Secrets Notes from 1836-1837" as a postmodernist hoax Cover Image

Tajne notatki z lat 1836-1837 Aleksandra Puszkina jako postmodernistyczna mistyfikacja
Aleksandr Pushkin’s „Secrets Notes from 1836-1837" as a postmodernist hoax

Author(s): Grzegorz Ojcewicz
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warmińsko-Mazurskiego w Olsztynie
Keywords: Aleksandr Pushkin;Mikhail Armalinski;postmodemism;hoax;

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to demystify Secret Notes from 1836-1837, which were published by Mikhail Armalinski in the United States in 1986 as an authentic text by Aleksandr Pushkin. There are a number of argument in favour of the diaries having been fabricated and intellectual fraud committed, with the most important being: 1. Secret Notes from 1836-1837 are not on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; 2. the hoax-author thinks in terms of a person educated in the 20th century, rather than in the 19th one; 3. descriptions of sexual behaviour bear resemblance to contemporary style of a pornographic production; 4. there is too much narrator’s distance from himself and depicted events in the analysed work; 5. the structure of Secret Notes ...shows classical creative behaviours, including the hoaxer’s attachment to definite leitmotifs.

  • Issue Year: 2008
  • Issue No: XIII
  • Page Range: 111-121
  • Page Count: 11
  • Language: Polish
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