Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet

by Stephanie Sandler

Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia's cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin's image. Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia's relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin's self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia's myth of a national poet.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Stephanie Sandler is Ernest E. Monrad Professor and Chair of the Slavic Department at Harvard. She has written about the Pushkin era and about modern myths of Pushkin, including Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford University Press, 2004). She is a co-author of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018), and a co-editor of Ol’ga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia (NLO, 2017), an English-language version of which should appear just before Your Language My Ear commences (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). She has translated several contemporary poets, including Elena Fanailova, Elena Shvarts, Olga Sedakova, Mara Malanova, and Alexandra Petrova. She is someday hoping to complete The Freest Speech in Russia: Poetry After 1989.