Pushkin's Poltava: A Literary Structuralist Interpretation

In Pushkin's "Poltava", Virginia M. Burns provides a detailed literary structural analysis and reading of Aleksandr Pushkin's long narrative poem "Poltava," through analysis devices of characterization, narrative structure and poetic structure, providing a new interpretation of its meaning. Past critical approaches to, and interpretation of the poem are described, and the traditional accepted views of the poem, as structurally defective, and the categorical condemnation of the rebellion of the Ukraine against the Russia of Peter the Great are questioned. The poem is demonstrated to have a unique structural organization, which unifies the poem and gives it meaning.