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  • Essay / Analysis of Romanticism in Pushkin's "The Coup"

    A theme that immediately appears in Pushkin's The Coup is "the noble man with a romanticized view of life." This theme was common in the Romantic era, the period in which Pushkin wrote, but it is important for reasons other than historical; in many ways, such “romanticization” guides the entire experience of reading Pushkin’s screenplay. As is often the case, this theme unfolds in an emotionally charged, descriptive narrative. Yet the real importance of Pushkin's romanticism here lies in the way romantic ideals guide the life of Silvio, the central character of The Shot.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay From the beginning of the story, Pushkin makes his protagonist a foreigner. While he lives in a military outpost surrounded by Russian men, his name is "Silvio", which is obviously not of Russian origin. He is older than the rest of the men and has mysterious qualities. His personality traits are paradoxical; he invites and keeps the door of his house open to all, but mentally he is isolated from others. This distance causes other men to respect and fear him at the same time. Pushkin wrote that "no one knew what his situation was or what his income was, and no one dared to inquire about them" (23). While Silvio keeps his life separate from the others, the other men all struggle to understand what makes him so powerful. Pushkin arouses the reader's curiosity about this distant character when he writes that Silvio's walls "were riddled with bullets and resembled a nest of bees" (23). The idea of ​​a noble stranger is already romantic and embodies the more romantic theme of the isolated, heroic man. The reader knows from the beginning that there is something heroic about Silvio. Even his name seems subjectively heroic. Pushkin writes that "no one knew the reasons that led him to resign his commission and settle in a miserable little town" (22), making it clear that Silvio's life was once much more important. Silvio also rejects material wealth; his “rich collection of pistols was the only luxury in the miserable mud-walled cottage in which he lived” (23). Even before the Romantic period, dating back to the religious philosophy of Buddhism and Christianity, people who rejected their material wealth were historically considered heroic. Heroism arising from individuality was an important theme in Romantic era literature because it paralleled the environment that Romanticism had experienced. Many authors writing in the Romantic era, like Pushkin, experienced oppression from their government and expressed their free will through writing. Writers often brightened up their bleak reality by writing imaginative stories in which an outsider, just like themselves, opposed a formal and oppressive lifestyle to live with passion. The setting of this novel parallels Pushkin's own struggle to achieve this; a group of men are trapped in a monotonous military outpost where "there was nothing to look at except each other's uniforms" (22) and they create a more exciting life for themselves by viewing Silvio as " the hero of a strange story” (24). Silvio is a hero to them because he practices individuality in an otherwise conformist setting. Pushkin continues to slowly reveal more details about Silvio's life to the reader. The reader discovers that Silvio once engaged in a duel that ended in an unusual way. Pushkin romanticizes this duel in his.