Pushkin Turns 200, but Never Grows Old

MOSCOW — In Russia, a country rich with writers, one literary figure towers above the rest--above Dostoevsky, above Chekhov, above Tolstoy.

These days, he literally towers. His picture is draped from the top of skyscrapers, his verses strung across the capital’s boulevards. His writings are recited on every stage, from the Bolshoi to the corner soapbox to national news broadcasts.

And if you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably never heard of him.

He is Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. But he’s so much more. Like Shakespeare in English, Pushkin is considered the greatest master of the Russian language. Like Thomas Jefferson, he is honored as a founding father of Russia and its culture. And like Elvis Presley, he inspires popular devotion, both lofty and kitschy.

“Pushkin is our everything,” says President Boris N. Yeltsin, repeating what has become a popular aphorism.

Russia marks the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth Sunday, and the celebration has convulsed the nation. Candy makers are molding Pushkin chocolates. Distilleries are bottling Pushkin vodka. Smokers are lighting up with Pushkin matches.

“He’s an idol. He’s a god,” says Yuri G. Bogucki, deputy director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. “Why do people believe Elvis is still alive? Because people don’t want their gods to die.”

It may seem odd that Russians can get so worked up over a writer born in 1799. But one of the many ironies surrounding Pushkin is that the older he gets, the more mighty his legacy grows.

Especially now. For people living in a country whose name, borders and leadership have changed irrevocably in the last decade, Pushkin is an important touchstone of national identity. If nothing else, Russia remains the land of Pushkin.

In fact, no matter how many superlatives one uses, it is impossible to overstate the power Pushkin still exerts on the Russian mind.

“He just gets bigger and bigger,” says Vyacheslav S. Skotorenko, secretary of the national Pushkin commemoration commission. “He is a part of our life, our heart, our soul.”

Stop a Russian on the street and he or she can rattle off at least a few verses, maybe a few hundred. Although Pushkin wrote in all genres, he is best loved for his poetry, which is marked by an unnerving simplicity, clarity and precision of sentiment.

That helps explain why he is little known to the rest of the world: He is practically impossible to translate. When his verse is rendered into English, it comes out sounding exactly the opposite--fusty and trite.

As a result, outside of Russia his works are best known secondhand, after they were turned into operas by various composers. These include Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and “The Queen of Spades,” Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila.”

Some of these stories are based on history, some on folklore; others are pure fiction. But what they all have in common is quintessentially Pushkin: a graceful, romantic sentimentality combined with a profound understanding of tragedy.

This combination was eerily repeated in Pushkin’s own life and death, which only enhanced his literary legacy. After a life of high society, political exile and contemplative solitude, he was shot in a duel in 1837 defending his wife’s reputation. He died a day later of his wounds, a martyr for the ideals of honor and romance.

Westerners will have a fresh opportunity to experience Pushkin later this year when a new film version of “Eugene Onegin” is released in English, starring Ralph Fiennes. The movie, titled “Onegin,” is also the first movie produced by Fiennes, who says he fell in love with the novel-length poem while he was in drama school.

“I was mesmerized by the emotional intensity of the story,” Fiennes said of the story of a bored Byronic hero who spurns the simple-hearted Tatyana and lives to regret his caddish behavior.

“Pushkin’s verse-novel was such a powerful narrative about love and loss, and it completely took me over,” Fiennes explained as he headed to St. Petersburg for a special screening in honor of the anniversary. “It was his wisdom and humor that drew me--that and the great tragedy at its core.”

An Influence on Every Writer Who Followed

Pushkin’s influence on the rest of Russian literature also cannot be exaggerated. His words and ideas are the spring from which all the rest of Russian literature flowed. At one time or another, most of Russia’s great writers took a turn at praising Pushkin.

“For the very first time, he gave us the artistic models of Russian beauty which come directly out of the Russian soul, living in our national truth, on our national soil,” wrote Dostoevsky.

“Pushkin is a unique expression--and perhaps even the only expression--of the Russian soul,” wrote Gogol.

In some ways, Pushkin might seem an odd choice for a Russian hero. For one thing, he was hardly a moral paragon in his short lifetime, known as a flirt with the ladies and a hothead with the lads.

In addition, he was part African--his great-grandfather was an Eritrean sent to St. Petersburg as a youth and adopted as a godson by the czar, Peter the Great.

Pushkin was proud of his African heritage, passed on through his mother, although he bristled at insinuations that his forebear was a slave. He repeatedly pointed out that on his father’s side, he was descended from one of Russia’s oldest and noblest families, the Pushkins.

While Russians are not generally known for racial tolerance, Pushkin’s Africanness is an exception to the rule. One reason is that in his time, Africans were so rare in Russia they could have been Martians. Pushkin was--and remains--outside of Russian conceptions of race. And whatever his bloodlines, Russians do not doubt his Russianness.

“It’s not clear how Pushkin would describe himself in terms of what we call ‘race,’ ” says Stephanie Sandler, a Pushkin scholar at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “For Russians, his ancestry is regarded more as a curiosity. It gives him a tinge of the exotic.”

Pushkin’s collected works take up 16 volumes. And in them, nearly anyone can find a few lines that speak to them. Nationalists consider Pushkin an advocate of a strong central state. Liberals revere his odes to freedom and Western ideals. Romantics find songs of love and passion. Believers find a deep, abiding spirituality.

The enormous breadth of Pushkin’s work has meant that in every epoch, he has been redefined to suit a new Russia. In fact, over the years, commemorations of his birth and death have also served to redefine his nation. In 1899, he was held up as the exemplar of Russian spirituality. In 1937, the centenary of his death and the height of Josef Stalin’s political terror, he was revered as a martyr and political visionary whose works inspired some of Russia’s earliest revolutionaries.

Pushkin “made literary Russian accessible to millions of workers, giving them the most important weapon of cultural growth and development,” Pravda, the Soviet regime’s main newspaper, wrote at the time.

This year’s commemoration is also politically freighted, coming in a post-Soviet period in which old idols have fallen and new ones are yet to be raised.

Indeed, Russia is in the midst of an identity crisis so severe that the national anthem still has no words. A government commission set up a few years ago to generate a “national idea” has made no apparent progress. One of the only things that still unites Russians is a reverence for Pushkin.

“It’s hard to live in a country without heroes,” the weekly Arguments and Facts newspaper wrote recently, commenting on the excesses of the Pushkin cult. “It’s harder to live without heroes than it is without a paycheck. So let us have something honorable and virtuous! Let us fall in love with something of substance, something powerful!”

Cities Duel to Have Biggest Celebration

The national importance of the commemoration is evident in sparring between political figures and Russia’s two largest cities--Moscow, where Pushkin was born, and St. Petersburg, where he died.

St. Petersburg will have Fiennes, but it will be hard for even a Hollywood star to outdo Moscow’s powerful mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, who is turning the capital into one big Pushkin fest, with gala performances in the Kremlin and Red Square and a “ball” in the city streets.

Luzhkov, a likely presidential candidate who is adept at reinventing prerevolutionary symbols, has plastered the city with so many slogans and images of Pushkin that it brings to mind the Soviet-era worship of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin.

Luzhkov has said Yeltsin will attend the capital’s ceremonies. But the capricious president, apparently reluctant to appear to support Luzhkov politically, has still not said where--if at all--he will mark the occasion.

As for ordinary Russians, they are likely to commemorate the day simply, by attending small-scale readings or school performances, or by watching Pushkin-related films on TV.

“As long as there is one heart on Earth where I still live, my memory will not die,” reads one banner in central Moscow, quoting the poet.

There may not be that many hearts in the rest of the world that hold him so dear. But in Russia, with 147 million on his side, Pushkin’s memory seems safe from oblivion for a good long while.