Russian literature. A short introduction

Aleksey Remizov, ‘A Dream of Pushkin’ (1937). For the different communities of Russian émigrés forced to settle abroad after the Revolution, Pushkin and his works had poignant significance. Émigrés wanted to defend the writer from the distastefully tendentious attention that he was receiving inside the Soviet Union, but were frustrated by lack of access to Pushkin’s manuscripts. However, B. L. Burtsev’s call in 1934 for ‘the publication abroad of a new edition of Pushkin’s Complete Works, or at the very least, of individual editions of his major works’ had a belated response in Vladimir Nabokov’s commentary on Evgeny Onegin, one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century interpretive scholarship. And anniversaries (particularly the centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937) were celebrated by conferences and exhibitions, while Pushkin’s writings remained, as always, an important inspiration for writers and artists. This fantasy sketch by the writer Aleksey Remizov shows Pushkin as a benevolently demonic presence, in tune with Symbolist emphasis on demonism in his writings.