The Moscow-based daily Tribuna interviewed the researcher on the renowned poet's opinions of history and contemporaneous Russian political developments.
Known as "Russia's most intelligent person", Pushkin (1799-1837) had interests and education of tremendous versatility. However, Pushkin studies have always been the lot of literary scholars, so his profoundly original ideas of Russian statehood and national self-awareness remained in the background.
As Pushkin saw it, the hereditary nobility was sole custodian of cultural traditions passed from generation to generation, and sole guarantor of social and political balance and stability. He had outstandingly high standards of noble birth. That was why he loathed the two most gifted and industrious of Russian monarchs-Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, who introduced civil and military ranks attaining which commoners were knighted.
The researcher points out Pushkin's loathing of violent revolutionary coercion-in particular, his harsh appraisal of the French Revolution.
In Pushkin's time, Poland was a part of Russian empire. The freedom-loving nation repeatedly rose in arms. One of the most dramatic risings broke out in Warsaw on November 17, 1830. Emperor Nicholas I ordered the Russian army that was returning from its Turkish campaign to suppress the insurgents. Poland was steeped in blood to the indignation of a European majority. Here, Pushkin found himself in the opposite camp with heartfelt support of cruel action, which he extolled as wise and justifiable severity.
Pushkin regarded the Polish rising and its suppression as "mere argument between Slavs", and fulminated against the West as its top-notch political activists were interceding for Poland. He regarded that active diplomatic intervention as blatant encroachment on Russian sovereignty. Meanwhile, Russia became known in the West as "all-European gendarme" and "a prison of nations".
Underlying Pushkin's stances on the Polish tragedy and on a heated controversy round it was impassioned protest against whatever attack on Russia, which he regarded as humiliating and degrading it, argues Academician Petrakov. He proves his point by drawing a parallel between dramatic developments in the 19th century's first half and today. We now discern Pushkin's perspicacity and political insights as we see the West turning to its ideas of that time now to repeat them in the context of Chechnya, Georgia and the post-Soviet Baltic countries, says the author.
