PUSHKIN’S TATIANA AS PERCEIVED BY BULAT OKUDZHAVA

The article considers the role of inspiration derived from Pushkin’s novel in verse for an image of perfect femininity in Okudzhava’s works. The main object is the story Brand New (1962), which interprets the author’s teaching experience gained in the early 1950s. We show how Okudzhava transforms biographical facts, bringing the plot of failed love between a teacher and a schoolgirl closer to Onegin’s model: the writer creates the fictional world with allusions to Pushkin’s novel, presents his heroes as readers of Eugene Onegin and characters of the eternal collision. We clarify Okudzhava’s attitude to the current cultural context by reconstructing the logic of the writer’s polemics with the image of Tatiana Larina, presented in educational and methodological thought and school practice since the reorientation to conservatism in the second half of the 1930s. Taking into account this background and the school tradition of “literary courts”, we consider the key episode of the story — a literature lesson dedicated to the image of Tatiana Larina: we identify the role of this event in the sentimental education of the main character, and characterize the author’s concept of the recurrence of fate. We pay special attention to the poetics of the image of “new Tatiana”: the dreams and fantasies of the narrator make the heroine of his imagination as unattainable as Blok’s Beautiful Lady. At the end of the article, we outline the stages of Okudzhava’s creative reflection on Pushkin’s “dear ideal”, thereby determining the perspective of the study.