Образ Неаполя в творческом сознании А. С. Пушкина. Статья III. Антропологический концепт Неаполя: «я неаполитанский художник…»

The third paper of the cycle is devoted to Egyptian Nights, which is one of the selected A.S. Pushkin's narratives featuring the toponym of in the open text of an anthropological manuscript where one of the main characters is a Neapolitan improvisator. By presenting the main character as a native of rather than a mere Italian, Pushkin provided the text with essential characterological meaning, which, in its turn, did not impede further generation of meaning in its various forms. The paper focuses on reconstruction of meaning concerning associative overtones of the toponym of in creative consciousness of the Russian poet. Therefore, ethnographic and folkways descriptions of Russian travelogues can serve as reliable and expressive evidence of psychological characteristics of Pushkin's hero. As to the ideological aspect, automatically assumed in a merely political context where the first associative chains of meaning were generated in connection with the sound of the word Naples in Pushkin's consciousness, it is necessary to explain the historical time of creation of Egyptian Nights. This question may help to shed light on this unfinished piece of Pushkin's writing, at least, in the hypothetical modality, which, for some reason, seems to be avoided by contemporary researchers. It is a question of principle with reference to Pushkin not only as a person keen on iteming time in the calendar but also as the author operating the category of historical time as an important associative sense-bearing factor. Characterological details of the image of the Neapolitan communicated in Pushkin's narrative and analysed against the associative background of folkways fragments of the Russian Neapolitana of 1800-1825 (Ch. Dupaty's, F.P. Lubyanovsky's, V.B. Bronevsky's, A.A. Shakhovskoy's itineraries) reveal undeniable conformity to the common opinion of Russian travellers about the Neapolitan variant of the Italian national character. On the basis of the dates of time of action in works of Russian Pushkinists, the text analysis of Egyptian Nights (comparing it to Chapter 1 of Eugene Onegin) and mentions of Angelica Catalani's tours in the Russian periodical press, (whom Pushkin knew as reports bout her tour were published in the Syn Otechestva (The Son of the Fatherland) in the issues the poet read to follow the polemics concerning his poem Ruslan and Lyudmila), the article makes the conclusion that the time of action is likely to be limited to the time interval between 1824 and 1826. Thereupon, the autobiographical data of the Neapolitan improvisator make it possible to interpret him as a political insurgent compelled to emigrate after the Carbonari defeat (in particular, he informs Charsky that he has been compelled to leave his homeland and desperately needs money to improve his financial situation). Thus, the image of the Neapolitan topos personified in Pushkin's hero having unambiguous social and political denotation in its primary version and organised by the concept of political freedom in the middle of 1830s, comes back through its aesthetic representation in freedom of creativity to the same political motive at an incomparably higher anthroposophical level, which makes it possible to establish bilateral ambivalent connections among the character, the topos and the epoch, where all components are regarded as interdependent and inseparable structural elements.