«Самостоянья щит» Был лИ ПушкИн нацИонал - слоВотВорцем?

For understandable historical reasons, the role of Pushkin as a symbol of Russian imperial culture has been actively discussed recently. In particular, some have justly spoken about the “weaponization” of Pushkin (I would choose as the iconic representation of this phenomenon the destroyer “Alexander Pushkin,” built in 1943 with money collected by a single Pushkinist). In the political sphere the battle with the state idol of Pushkin has been expressed in the iconoclastic destruction of numerous monuments to him in Ukraine (it is worth recalling that the first to call for the destruction of the sanitized image of Pushkin were the Russian futurists, and Mayakovsky — himself a state poet after his death — advocated for blowing up his monument with dynamite). In the scholarly sphere it has been expressed in attempts at deconstructing Pushkin’s imperial ideology, examples of which scholars have found in his works from “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” to “I raised a monument” (at the center of such deconstructions one often finds the anti-Polish and anti-Western poems of the early 1830s). Of course, Pushkin was and considered himself an imperial poet (just as Ovid, Horace and Catullus were poets and translators of the ideas of imperial Rome), but the scholarly task of Pushkin studies is at the moment, in my view, to read his work in new, nuanced, and topical — both for him and for us — historical, cultural, aesthetic, and international contexts. The solution to Pushkin’s question is in turn inseparable from the study of various scenarios of the mythologization of Pushkin, whether for motives of state propaganda or for liberal and educational purposes. The present lecture represents such an attempt and is dedicated to the genealogy of one word in Pushkin (samostoian’e — literally “self-standing”), which is alleged to have been invented by the poet and has been appropriated by his interpreters in various periods and from various perspectives.