Herr Panzerbitter: An Episode From the History of Russian Collaborative Poetry From the Late 18th Tthrough the First Third of the 19th Century

The present article analyzes a playful collective poem “Commemoration” (“We have to commemorate certainly and for sure..”, 1833) which was co-authored by Petr Vyazemsky, Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Myatlev and addressed to their friend, one of the founders of Russian nonsense poetry, Vasily Zhukovsky. The article focuses on the name of “the former poet Panzerbitter, the venerable elder of our parish,” which opens the epistle, and argues that it serves as the interpretative key to the entire text. Who was this poet who has been left unnoticed by all compilers of dictionaries of Russian writers of the 18th century? Was he a real person? What does his name signify and why did the authors of the playful epistle start their commemorative missive to Zhukovsky with the reference to this “Herr”? The author recontructs the “corpus of literary works” attributed to Panzerbitter, including the text of the unpublished play Five Thousand Roubles, and analyzes the allusive semantics and the pragmatics (a mischievous poetic consolation of Zhukovsky and parodic “wake” for ultra-royalism) of the “Commemoration,” considering the latter in the context of Russian frivolous “underground” poetry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.