Text gravitation, or Once more about A. Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter [Kapitanskaya dochka] and W. Scott’s novels

Abstract

Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter [Kapitanskaya dochka], similar in plot, could not be more different in speech organization. Pushkin’s speech genre is unique as a lightly gravitating text: short and verb-dominated sentences, compressed action, and a fast-paced narration that avoids lengthy descriptions of material objects. The implied reader’s role in both authors’ novels also differs. While Scott’s reader experiences the events in progress, Pushkin’s ‘incomplete present’ (Bakhtin) does not take shape. The reader of The Captain’s Daughter does not live the time through with its characters but uses their analytical skill to relate symmetrical episodes and images. The light gravitation of the text prevents the reader from immersing themselves into the novel’s progress, but allows to conceptualize the philosophy of history. Part of the article is dedicated to French translations of English novels in Pushkin’s days. The statistical data of the average sentence length in Pushkin’s works and other writers’ output demonstrates that The Captain’s Daughter holds a truly unique place.