GENDER POETICS AND THE STRUCTURE OF PUSHKINS LITTLE HOUSE IN KOLOMNA

Various readings of Alexander Pushkin's comic poem ''Little House in K olomna'' [''Domik v Kolomne,'' 1830] have revealed different kinds of meaning on many levels of the work, from the biographical to the psych ological, from the metapoetic to the absurdist.(1) This paper will pre sent yet another reading of the poem, with the intention of making sev eral contributions toward an understanding of Pushkin's enigmatic text : first, it will account for the structure of the poem as a whole, wit h both its outspoken formal perfection and its single mysterious irreg ularity; second, it will reveal in the poem an experiment in the unifi cation of form and meaning perhaps without precedent; third, it will s how that Pushkin's celebrated practice of paronomasia is taken in this poem to the structural level; finally, it will suggest a radical, if playful, expression of construction of gender in the work.