The Poet’s Love Plot within the Context of the Pushkin Myth: Bulat Okudzhava’s “Counting Rhyme for Bella”

This article builds on Yury Shatin’s powerful concept of a close connection between 20th-century lyrical Pushkiniana and the personal myths of the poets who shaped it. Within this framework, Okudzhava’s poem “Counting Rhyme for Bella” is examined for the first time. The poem presents Bella Akhmadulina as the heroine of the timeless poet’s love plot: an “immortal woman of St Petersburg” who appears to the lyrical hero and to the poetic figures of the past – “Alexander and Mikhail” (Pushkin and Lermontov). The heroine evokes various literary archetypes: Blok’s Mysterious Stranger, Poor Eugene’s modest beloved, the Madonna of a Poor Knight. In Okudzhava’s poetic world, the poets do not reflect on Her transformations, which leads to the exclusion of Blok from the narrative system. By contrast, the lightheartedly portrayed lovestruck poets, including the lyrical self, find their place beside Pushkin: both the humorous and the elevated versions of the poet’s mythologized love life stem from Pushkinian origins (on the one hand, self-ironic Pushkin’s monologues about his own amorousness, and “Don Juan’s Register”, on the other hand, sonnet “Madonna” and ballad about The Poor Knight that is presented in Okudzhava’s text by metrical quotations). At the core of the poets’ kinship lies Okudzhava’s cherished belief in the brevity of life granted for serving the immortal beloved. While maintaining the traditional value hierarchy with Pushkin at its pinnacle, Okudzhava boldly renews the context in which the Pushkin myth is actualized.