LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

      By now it is not so much Pushkin, our national poet, as our relationship to Pushkin that has become as it were our national characteristic.

      ANDREY BITOV, 1986

      â€˜PUSHKIN IS OUR ALL,’ declared the critic and poet Apollon Grigorev in 1854.¹ His famous remark is perhaps the best expression of Pushkin’s significance, not merely for Russian literature, or even for Russian culture, but for the Russian ethos generally and for Russia as a whole. At the time, however, his was a lone voice. Though Pushkin had been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet during his lifetime, his reputation had begun to sink during his last years. The decline continued after his death in 1837, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the 1850s. In 1855 a petition, noting that monuments to a number of other writers – Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Koltsov, Karamzin and Krylov – had been erected, called for Pushkin to be added to their number. It met with no response. In 1861 Pushkin’s school, the Lycée – which had moved from Tsarskoe Selo to St Petersburg and been renamed the Alexandrine Lycée – celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In conjunction with this a public subscription was opened to erect a statue to Pushkin in Tsarskoe Selo. Three years later less

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