Reading Pushkin
Literary cultures uniquely concentrated messages in time and space: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, and many others, all within the first rank of human treasures and all, initially at least, focused on the misery of “the people” and the travesties of the social institutions which prolonged their misery.
In 1845, one year after leaving the Army, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote his novel Poor Folk to the acclaim and approval of Nekrasov, Belinsky, and many others.
People, are “always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book, but never for a pernicious one”, wrote Belinsky to Gogol, when the latter produced a volume that failed .
In 1877 Dostoyevsky delivered a speech at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, causing great controversy. Three years later, shortly before his death he held an equally famous speech in front of Pushkin’s monument.
Who was the real Russian literary messiah ?
Comments