Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) has passed through the vagaries of fashion and served succeeding generations of literary, political, and intellectual factions as a cultural icon in which they could find support and embellishment for their respective ideologies. Although the poet was wildly popular in his own lifetime, the Russian cult of Pushkin was not launched until the publication of his collected works in 1855, nearly two decades after his death in a duel at the hands of his wife’s admirer. The cult then faded until 1880, when Dostoevsky re-ignited it with a fervent speech at the unveiling of the first statue of the poet. By the mid-twentieth century, Pushkin had become a sacred cow, an untouchable symbol of Russia’s cultural heritage and sense of identity.
The extent of modern Russians’ almost fanatical devotion to Pushkin in domestic and émigré cultural circles alike was revealed by the uproar that greeted Andrei Sinyavsky’s roguish Strolls with Pushkin. Although published in France in 1975 under Sinyavsky’s pen name Abram Tertz, it was not widely known to the Russian cultural community until it was excerpted in a Moscow newspaper in 1989. When the reaction came, it was furious. Sinyavsky’s occasionally preposterous claims about Pushkin, and his use of prison-camp jargon, overstatement, and ironic asides, earned him accusations of aesthetic nihilism even from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
“Abram Tertz” first appeared in the West in 1956 as the author of “On Socialist Realism,” an ironic dismantling of the official Soviet literary genre.
“Abram