Information about the author:

Abstract:

M.O. Gershenzon’s works on Pushkin are often considered in the context of the Pushkin Myth of the Russian Silver Age. The general statement is true, but at the same time it represents a certain conventionality, namely: it assumesthat commenting Pushkin’s work was, for Gershenzon, only an opportunity to express his own philosophical ideas, thus ignoring the concept of personal vision proposed by the scholar, and the problem of research subjectivity in general. In a sense, individual position, especially in humanities, can be represented as a kind of “mythology”; however, this approach does not help to clarify specific cases of individual position. This article deals primarily with the research principles of Gershenzon as a Pushkinist, his individual approach to studying and commenting the poet’s works, which enabled him to view Pushkin’s works as an important part of the World Wisdom, where the word of revelation appeals to the “primal myth”. The Wisdom of Pushkin (1917–1919) reveals a universal Wisdom in the continuity of ideas and images traced in the history of language. From this point of view, Gershenzon’s studies on Pushkin are a multilayered commentary on some conceivable original text, which includes everything was ever created and things yet to come. Here can be found an energy that Gershenzon called “Streams of Spirit” (in his book about Pushkin and Heraclitus, Gulfstream, 1922), circulating in universal Thought and connecting the “primal myth” with ideas and images of the present and foresight of the world to come. In this unity, the original text continues to be written incessantly, by every word of the poet, scholar, commentator, or reader.