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HOW THE IMPROVISOR’S PANTS WERE MADE: The cultural genealogy of the epigraph to the fi rst chapter of Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”

In the present essay I want to broaden the sphere of potential textual and ideological sources of the epigraph to the first chapter of Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” to make precise the genealogy of the French witticism that reached the Russian poet and served as the basis for his epigraph, and to offer a social and cultural interpretation of it in the context of Pushkin’s work. I argue that the witticism does not have a direct relationship to the genre of the verse epigram but rests on a humorous prose tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which included jokes about the pants of hapless musicians, which in turn derived from Renaissance anecdotes and Italian commedia dell’arte