To E N Ushakova - Analysis

Exorcism as a Love Poem’s Opening Joke

Pushkin builds the poem on a sly reversal: the language meant to drive away evil becomes the language he reaches for when desire overwhelms him. The first stanza treats the supernatural with amused distance. In the old and good times, a ghost or apparition was basically an address where Satan could be found, and a plain, almost folksy formula—Amen, amen, break up!—could shove him out. The tone here is dryly confident, even a little teasing: the spell is described as simple composition, as if the occult were just a bit of verse anyone could recite.

That confidence then dissolves into a modern shrug: In our days there are not a lot of imps, and Just Heavens know where they’ve gone. The casualness matters. The speaker pretends to live in a disenchanted present—no demons to bother with, no need for spells—until the poem reveals what he actually means by haunting.

The Turn: The Beloved Arrives as the New Apparition

The poem pivots sharply on But you. The supernatural hasn’t disappeared; it has simply changed its face. Ushakova is addressed as my genius, kind or vicious, already a contradiction: she is inspiration and torment at once, a protective spirit and a threat. As the speaker lists what he perceives—your profile, sweet eyes, curls of pure gold, your gentle voice—the haunting becomes intimate, bodily, almost painterly. The old ghosts were vague shapes; this one is close enough to count eyelashes.

From Prayer to Heat: Enchantment as Loss of Control

Where the first stanza claims spiritual mastery, the second confesses helplessness. The speaker says I’m charmed; I burn, and the two verbs clash on purpose: to be charmed is to be acted upon, while to burn is to flare up from within. The result is a spiritual short-circuit—cannot pray. The very word Amen, which should close a prayer, becomes unavailable as actual devotion. The beloved doesn’t lead him upward; she blocks the route, replacing worship with heat.

The “Ghost-Goddess”: Worship and Fear in One Figure

The poem’s most telling invention is the compound ghost-goddess. A ghost is insubstantial and unsettling; a goddess is radiant and authoritative. By combining them, Pushkin captures the speaker’s mixed response: he shudders before what he also adores. Even the mind’s refuge—fancies gorgeous—isn’t a safe, rational place; it’s a lush inner theater where she rules. The old spell used to eject Satan; now it’s spoken to the heart itself, as if his own imagination were the haunted room.

The Spell Repeated, Now Pointed Inward

When the speaker repeats Amen, amen, break up! at the end, it no longer sounds like a confident exorcism. It sounds like a plea for distance, a desperate attempt to disperse an image that keeps forming. The poem’s central tension is that the beloved is both the miracle and the menace: he names her genius, yet wonders if she is vicious; he is charmed, yet he shudders. In the first stanza, religion is a tool that solves the problem; in the second, the very vocabulary of religion is recruited to name a problem it cannot solve.

A Sharper Question the Poem Leaves Hanging

If demons have vanished and only Heavens know their whereabouts, why does the speaker still need an exorcism formula at all? The poem quietly suggests an unsettling answer: the modern “apparition” is not an intruder from outside but an attachment from within—desire so vivid it behaves like possession. The spell, spoken to my heart, is really aimed at the self that cannot stop seeing her.