The Gypsies (Tsygany) was written in 1824 and published in 1827. It is one of Pushkin’s “Southern poems” — written during his exile from Petersburg to southern Russia. Aleko, a young man fleeing “civilized” society (the word implies disillusionment with the urban world of artifice and constraint), joins a band of Romani wandering the Bessarabian steppe. He lives with them, loves a Romani woman named Zemfira, and for a time appears to have found the freedom he sought.
But Aleko is not transformed by his new life: he brings the possessiveness, jealousy, and violence of the world he claims to have left. When Zemfira takes another lover (as is her right within the freedom of the Romani community), Aleko murders her and her lover. The old Romani father — who had himself been abandoned by a faithless wife but chose not to pursue vengeance — expels Aleko from the community: “You want freedom only for yourself.”
The poem is Pushkin’s decisive rejection of Byronic Romanticism: the idea that a disillusioned man can regenerate himself through contact with “primitive” peoples, that the natural world offers redemption from civilization’s corruptions. Pushkin demonstrates that the Romantic hero carries his disease with him — his possessiveness is not a product of civilization but of his own character, and no change of scenery can cure it.
Collecting The Gypsies
First edition (Moscow, 1827): Russian-language.
Market values:
- Original Russian editions: Extremely rare
- Fine translations: $10–$30