Xavier de Maistre e Aleksandr S. Puškin: un’insolita “parentela” letteraria

Taking its starting point from Piero Cazzola’s article Coïncidences et influences de l’œuvre de Xavier de Maistre sur celle de A.S. Pouchkine, V.A. Joukovsy et L.N. Tolstoi (“Revue des Études Maistriennes”, 1977), this paper aims at deepening the lines of analysis regarding the possible juxtapositions between the work of Savoyard writer Xavier de Maistre and that of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. In particular, de Maistre’s “Russian novellas” The Prisoners of the Caucasus and The Young Siberian will be examined in parallel with Pushkin’s almost homonymous poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus, the short novel The Captain’s Daughter, the poem The Bronze Horseman and some lyrics. After an introductory framework providing biographical and contextual references on two seemingly very different authors in terms of age, origin and education, the convergences and differences detectable between their works will be investigated through the texts, unveiling a similar aesthetic.