Strolls with Pushkin (Russian Literature and Thought Series)

Andrei Sinyavsky, who writes under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, is one of the most eminent Russian literary figures of the post-Stalin period, and his Strolls with Pushkin is among the most controversial Russian literary texts of the past three decades. When it was first published in France, it was hailed by Western scholars as a brilliant critical work on Pushkin, but it was also violently attacked by Russian critics for its irreverent portrait of their country's greatest and most beloved poet. Now, with this first English translation, English-speaking audiences can judge the merits of this book for themselves.Sinyavsky wrote Strolls with Pushkin while he was imprisoned for his writings in a Soviet labor camp, smuggled it out in letters to his wife, and published it in emigration in 1975. Fourteen years later, during the glasnost period, an excerpt was published in Russia, unleashing a storm of outrage from conservative nationalists for whom Pushkin was a symbol of Russian identity. In the book, Sinyavsky challenges the solemnity of official discourse on Pushkin by musing whimsically on the relationship between the poet's real life and his poetry, drawing on street anecdotes and caricatures to discuss the sources of his art in eroticism and his lighthearted acceptance of all kinds of people and behavior. Translated with great literary flair and enriched by an informative introduction and notes, the book not only provides a new, livelier portrait of Pushkin but also illuminates the ideology of the Russian literary culture for which he is the chief icon.