"Proud Man" vs. "Peaceful Natives": Pushkin’s The Gypsies as Anticipation of the XIX Century

In his poem The Gypsies (1824), Alexander Pushkin used various lexical means to polarize the system of characters: the proud Aleko is opposed to the peaceful Gypsies. The author clarifies the origin of the savage and peaceful types in Russian literature using the method of diachronic typological comparison. The proud man was a romantic hero in the Byronic context of the 1820s. In the traditional Russian Christian context, however, pride was a sin. As a result, Pushkin counterweighed the proud man by the meek personages, i.e., the Gypsies. This character system turned out to be paradigmatic for the Russian classics of the XIX century: its structure corresponded to the essential aspects explored in the nineteenth-century literature. Naturally, it was picked up by the most important literary texts of that epoch, which was widely recognized by the literary criticism of the 1850s, e.g., by Apollon Grigoriev and Pavel Annenkov, who made the greatest contribution to the preservation of Pushkin’s literary heritage. Pushkin’s model manifested itself in the classical texts by Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. The model proved so effective it entered the Russian literature of the XX century.