Memory and historicity as existential motifs of Pushkin's poetry (Pushkin and Jaspers)

The main existential motifs of Pushkin's poetry are not the themes of death, loneliness, fear and despair. Although these traditional categories of existential literary criticism are present in the poet's work, they do not form the root of his philosophical and artistic outlook. The basic existential motifs of Pushkin's poetry are historicity and memory. The existential value of the memory phenomenon can be broadly defined as the orientation on the living presence of the past in the present, as the will to renewal and eternal repetition of the once gone, once seen and experienced. Memory is not a dead weight, but the determining method of the existence of man in time. Jaspers identifies three types of recall: 1) psychological recall; 2) historical recollection; 3) existential recall involving the unity of the past and the existence of the recalling person. Formally Pushkin represented all three types of recall. The first type - psychological recall - is almost never given in its pure form as a mere indifferent and objective memory of past events. It is difficult to imagine that this memory could even find its place in poetry. Any Pushkin's recall - be it the memory of the events of his personal life or of the historical past - is existentially colored. That is the third type of recall - existential recall - emerges through the first two in Pushkin's works. In remembrance the poet is free: he is to find himself, his own source, his choice, his self in the external and in the past. The past becomes the present, the external becomes internal. This constant search for the origins of his spiritual formation, ongoing commitment to active living and the resumption of self-experience permeates all the works of the poet. Memory here is existential freedom and at the same time an existential necessity. Having made an existential choice himself once, at some point in the past, he must make efforts to resume and maintain this option for the time again and again. Otherwise, the time that opens up new opportunities, new adventures will ruthlessly dissipate the generated image of oneself. The flow of time has to be transformed, brought together by the creative will of the poet. The present must always be threaded by the rays of the past in the mode of existential recall. In Memoirs in Tsarskoye Selo (1829), we find one of the most striking examples of a situation where existential recall is closely interlaced with historical recollection. In this recollection "I" perceives what goes beyond the temporal limits of his own real being as its existential source. There is an association of "I" and The Other, and "I" finds itself in The Other.

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