Between the visible and the vision: towards Pushkin's ideology of harmony

The article suggests returning to the long-standing issue of the phenomenon of Pushkin’s harmony. The author’s viewpoint is that for Pushkin the idea of harmony is associated with the idea of a union between the “real” and “ideal” plans of being achieved through creative inspiration in exclusively fictional world. This statement is argued with the help of the specific features of the ideological semiosphere of the Romantic era, which were vividly expressed in the works of V.A. Zhukovsky. For this poet the question of the character of the relationship between the “real” and “ideal” was set and solved in a way fundamentally different from that of Pushkin. The starting point for comparing the two attitudes - Pushkin’s and Zhukovsky’s - was the poem “To***” (“I remember a wonderful moment”), referring directly to several precedent texts of Zhukovsky - to the poems “Lalla Ruk” and “I am a young muse, it happened...”, as well as to his article “Raphael’s Madonna. (From the letter about the Dresden Gallery)”, where the “genius of pure beauty” is the same as that of Pushkin, in direct conjunction with the vision - both the vision of Raphael himself, and the vision captured in his picture. Living in conjunction with a dream-memory, Zhukovsky’s vision can never get tangible visuality, and, from the point of view of semiotics (“cosmological” and “impersonal”) is absolutely a closed sign. Therefore, for Zhukovsky, what is here (visible) can never be equated with what is there (invisible). In Pushkin’s case, however, it turns out not to be possible to separate the “ideal” from the “real” and to say if it is only about the “visible” or only about “vision”. And this aspiration of the “ideal” and “real’ to interpenetration is relevant for the fundamentals Pushkin’s world, as well as for the key components of the global narrative programs of his work. The desire to achieve such harmony is one of those deep-seated modalities which predetermine the collisions of various Pushkin works. This article shows that dramatic collisions and peripeteias often occur in Pushkin’s world precisely when for some reasons the pre-established harmony of the “ideal” and “real” is broken or destroyed.