''The Fountain of Bakhchisaray'' (, ''Bakhchisaraiskiy fontan'') is a

narrative poem Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need to rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may ...

Alexander Pushkin Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin () was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era.Basker, Michael. Pushkin and Romanticism. In Ferber, Michael, ed., ''A Companion to European Romanticism''. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. He is consid ...

, written from 1821 to 1823. Pushkin began writing ''The Fountain of Bakhchisaray'' in the spring of 1821, after having visited The Fountain of Tears at the

Bakhchysarai Palace The Khan's Palace (; ) or Hansaray is located in the town of Bakhchysarai, Crimea. It was built in the 16th century and became home to a succession of Crimean Khans. The walled enclosure contains a mosque, a harem, a cemetery, living quarters an ...

in 1820. The bulk of the poem was written during 1822. In spring 1823, the entry draft was completed. During the autumn of 1823, Pushkin made his final changes to the poem and prepared it for printing. The first edition of ''The Fountain of Bakhchisaray'' was published on 10 March 1824. Fountain of Bakhchisarai

The poem has inspired multiple works. In 1899, composer

Anton Arensky Anton Stepanovich Arensky (; – ) was a Russian composer of Romantic classical music, a pianist and a professor of music. Biography Arensky was born into an affluent, music-loving family in Novgorod, Russia. He was musically precocious and ha ...

wrote a five-part cantata, including an aria for Zarema. In 1909–1910, a short film based on the poem was created by

Yakov Protazanov Yakov Alexandrovich Protazanov (; 4 February (Old Style, O.S. 23 January ) 1881 – 8 August 1945) was a Russian and USSR, Soviet film director and screenwriter, and one of the founding fathers of cinema of Russia. He was an Honored Artist of the ...

. In 1934,

Boris Asafyev Boris Vladimirovich Asafyev (27 January 1949; also known by pseudonym Igor Glebov) was a Russian and Soviet composer, writer, musicologist, musical critic and one of founders of Soviet musicology. He is the dedicatee of Prokofiev's First Symp ...

composed a ballet of the same name, also inspired by Pushkin's work, and Alexander Ilyinsky composed an opera in 1911 based on the poem.

Alexander von Zemlinsky Alexander Zemlinsky or Alexander von Zemlinsky (14 October 1871 – 15 March 1942) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher. Biography Early life Zemlinsky was born in Vienna to a highly diverse family. Zemlinsky's grandfather, Anton ...

's 1897 opera ''Sarema'' is based on the poem and takes its name from one of its characters. In the 1840s, artist Karl Briullov painted a painting on the subject.

Plot

In the

harem A harem is a domestic space that is reserved for the women of the house in a Muslim family. A harem may house a man's wife or wives, their pre-pubescent male children, unmarried daughters, female domestic Domestic worker, servants, and other un ...

of the

Crimean Crimea ( ) is a peninsula in Eastern Europe, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, almost entirely surrounded by the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov. The Isthmus of Perekop connects the peninsula to Kherson Oblast in mainland Ukrai ...

khan Giray, one of the concubines, the Georgian Zarema, is sad because the khan has fallen out of love with her. His mind is occupied by Maria, a Polish nobleman's daughter who was kidnapped during one of the Tatars' raids. Maria is inconsolable and spends all her time in prayer to the Virgin Mary. She prefers death to the fate of a non-believer's concubine. At night, Zarema enters Maria's room and tries to convince her with threats to reject the khan so that he will regain his love for Zarema. Soon after, Maria dies, and Zarema is drowned by the guards of the harem. The khan leaves the harem and goes to war to forget his troubles, but he is still tormented. After his return, he orders a fountain to be erected in the palace in memory of Maria, which the young maidens of Crimea, having learned of this sad legend, call the "fountain of tears". In an epilogue, the narrator recounts how he wandered through the abandoned palace of Bakhchisaray. He saw a woman's ghost and wondered if it was Maria's or Zarema's. He recalls a love for whom he yearns, then contemplates on the beauty of Crimea and wishes to return there.

Analysis

The poem is made up of 578 lines and is written in freely rhymed iambic tetrameters. Pushkin scholar Sergei Bondi writes:

The poem most closely resembles the canon of Romantic poems with its fragmentary form, the sometimes deliberate incoherence of the story, some deliberate ambiguity of content (for example, the fate of Zarema and Maria), the lyricism that permeates the entire poem, and the special musicality of the verse. In this respect, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is a remarkable phenomenon: the musical selection of sounds, the melodic flow of speech, the extraordinary harmony in its development, and the alternation of poetic images and pictures distinguish this poem from all of Pushkin's poems.

Regarding the characters of the poem, Bondi considers the character of Khan Giray to be underdeveloped, but he views Zarema as an improvement over the Circassian heroine of Pushkin's ''The Prisoner of the Caucasus''. He describes the exchange between Zarema and Maria as "unusually diverse in its feelings, tone and content". Pushkin himself spoke almost only negatively about his poem. He wrote to Pyotr Vyazemsky in October 1823, "''The Fountain of Bakhchisaray'', between us, is rubbish, but its epigraph is charming". Elsewhere, he described the epigraph—a quotation from the Persian poet Saadi—as better than the entire poem. However, he considered the exchange between Zarema and Maria to "have dramatic merit".

Plot

Analysis

References

Further reading