A Troublesome Life

No, will not wholly die-my soul in sacred lyre Will outlive my dust and will conquer decay And will be famous as long as A single bard remains alive on earth. News of me will spread throughout great Russia And my name will be spoken in every language there... Aleksandr I Have Created a Monument to Myself [la pamiatnik sebe vozdvig] Even might have been surprised at how accurate a prophecy these lines had become by late 1890s, for preparations leading up to 1899 centenary celebration of his birth were unlike anything Russia had seen before. New editions of Pushkin's works were printed and widely distributed on a steadily increasing scale throughout decade.1 Festivities were organized by literary scholars and enthusiasts, but their efforts couldn't begin to match extraordinary attention lavished on by Russian government. It endeavoured to have plays featured in imperial theaters in April and May of 1899, to create special Jubilee medallions for students, and to convince Orthodox religious leaders to hold a special series of services for Pushkin.2 There seems little reason to argue with Levitt's conclusion that the state created a literary holiday of unprecedented proportions.3 The festivities leading up to 1899 Jubilee were accompanied by a flood of new articles about and his relevance to Russian culture. The civic critics of 1860s and 1870s with their sometime disparagement of were little more than a bad memory in exuberant adulation heaped on in 1890s. The critical approach to literature was itself in transition. Russian literature needed a fresh start, argued Dmitry Merezhkovsk in Reasons for Decline of, and New Developments in, Contemporary Russian Literature (O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techenakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury): a more subjective, even psychological, approach to literature was required, he contended, because truth of a work is sometimes more accessible to a poetcritic than to an objective scientific researcher.4 Aikhenval'd's thinking was moving in a similar direction as he developed his theory of intuitive criticism and argued that cultural context and biography were largely irrelevant in literary criticism.5 Religious critics of time participated in move toward a more approach, adopting an openly moralistic set of criteria in their literary endeavours and treating with rapturous admiration, even idealization.6 Merezhkovsk took his own advice in 1896 essay Pushkin, reaffirming value of subjective criticism and arguing that was a fully realized being who was able to resolve within himself binary oppositions which others could not synthesize: art and life, spirit and flesh, paganism and Christianity.7 The Nietzschean undercurrents of this argument reflected a broader fascination with Nietzschean ideas and helped catapult into a position of unprecedented popularity, while also providing framework for later Symbolist appropriations of Pushkin. Here Symbolist notion of uniting one's life with one's art (zhiznetvorchestvo) finds a resonance with Merezhkovsk's argument that was able to transcend life/art or poet/man dichotomies by forming within himself a united whole. The Symbolist appropriation of did not go unopposed, however, and debate over Pushkin as poet versus Pushkin as human became a focal point for key literary debates of 1920s.8 One scholar who played a key role in establishing terms of this debate was Vladimir Solov'ev. From 1889 until his death in 1900 Solov'ev spent a great deal of time writing on aesthetics and literature. The first part of this period dealt primarily with attempts to establish a theoretical aesthetic framework, while later part found Solov'ev applying his aesthetic principles to works of authors including A

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Government (linguistics · Literature · Political science · Relevance (law · Soul · State (computer science · Theology · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Soviet and Russian History