PUSHKIN’S TITLES AS A TEXTUAL PROBLEM

Abstract

This article discusses the problem of Pushkin’s titles and subtitles, which were lost in the last two academic editions of Pushkin’s works. This loss resulted from a decision made by Pyotr Pletnyov, who, while preparing “The Poems of Alexander Pushkin,” published in 1826, 1829, and 1832, transferred all subtitles and some titles from the body of the texts to the tables of contents. This decision concerned not the content of the texts but their editorial presentation. The results of the analysis (which incorporates autographs and authorized copies of the works, their publications in periodicals, the censored manuscript of the 1832 collection, and the manuscript of the unfinished 1836 collection of poems, as well as collected editions of Pushkin’s works from the 19th and 20th centuries) show that in a critical edition, the titles and subtitles moved by Pletnyov to the tables of contents should be restored as part of the main text.