2012: Public Festivities and the Making of a National Poet: a Case Study of Alexander Pushkin's Biography in 1899 and 1937 (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Politics and Idiosyncrasies: The Global Parsing of Alexander Pushkin."
In: A Companion to World Literature, edited by Ken Seignurie, vol. 4: 1-12 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell), 2019
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), national poet and cult figure, has long been at the center of literature and politics in Russia. In the multi-ethnic tsarist empire (later Soviet Union and Russian Federation), Pushkin has represented the Russocentric state and its educational system and has been seen as the pinnacle of “national” (imperial, Soviet) tradition and identity. His fame extended abroad along diverse and multiform paths, via personal networks, operatic productions, waves of emigration, and so on. A key product of Soviet “world literature” (mirovaia literatura), Pushkin was forcefully promoted in the years around 1937, the centennial of his death. Many cultures around the world became better acquainted with the Russian national poet as a result, though it is the peculiar openness of the Pushkinian text to individual readings and the dedication of specific readers, often linked in surprising configurations, that guarantees his continuing global relevance.
Pushkin Review/ Пушкинский вестник, 2020
Vladislav Khodasevich is known not only as a poet who idolized Pushkin, but also as a Pushkinist. Yet, when the issue of Pushkinian influence in his poem "Не матерью, но тульскою крестьянкой…" (Not by my mother, but by a Tula peasant woman…, 1922) comes up, only one parallel is noted: Khodasevich depicted his wet nurse, the Tula peasant Elena Kuzina, in such a way as to make the name of Pushkin's wet nurse Arina Rodionovna come to mind for the reader. The present article aims to demonstrate that Pushkin permeates literally every cell of this poem, all the more so since Pushkin is made into an index of Russianness in it. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the poem was created, the issue of Russianness was front and center: a new Soviet dictatorship and internationalism had supplanted "Old" Russia. Khodasevich, who was planning to emigrate, had to come to grips with his identity. He felt his almost filial attachment to "Old" Russia acutely, and he saw in Pushkin its personification. A monographic analysis of Khodasevich's poem is needed to demonstrate how this set toward Russianness and the concomitant veneration of Pushkin found their embodiment in the poem’s generic range, lyrical plot, intertextuality, rhetoric, and word choice.
Ryleev, Pushkin, and the Poeticization of Russian History
Russian Review, 2019
The historical poetry of Kondratii Ryleev–in particular, the lyrics he called dumy, or meditations–reveals how central emotion was to the Decembrist worldview. In particular, these poems promote an attitude towards political feeling that I call “civic sentimentalism.” Influenced by thinkers like Rousseau and organizations like the Freemasons, the Decembrists divided emotion into positive sentiments and negative passions: the former fostered virtue and, eventually, improved society, while the latter did just the opposite. Ryleev strove to improve Russian society by using a poeticized version of the nation’s history to inspire patriotic feelings in his readers. In addition, this piece examines how Alexander Pushkin–a writer whose worldview has historically been elided with that of the Decembrists–actually critiqued Ryleev’s historical poetry for the way its civic sentimentalism simplified complex historical issues.
The phenomena of power and freedom in the political worldview of A. S. Pushkin
SHS Web of Conferences, 2018
The article discusses the place and role of A. S. Pushkin in the history of Russian culture and political thought. Such a feature of the Russian picture of the world as “literary-centrism”, which is the primacy of the word, confidence in the word. Like other Russian writers, Pushkin’s works present a moral ideal, but he does not try to teach something, does not construct an ideal model, but simply shows an ideal in the unity of form and content. Further, the article traces the main stages of the evolution of the great poet’s political views: the Lyceum-Petersburg period; the period of the southern exile; the period of exile in Mikhailovsky; and the period of creative maturity in the last decade of his life. The ideological evolution of Pushkin is a transition from liberalism and revolutionism to conservatism and monarchism, combined with the idea of personal freedom. The author concludes that the political worldview of Pushkin organically combined the phenomena of power and freedom....