About the author:
Lyudmila G. Shakirova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
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Abstract:
The article re-resolves the question of why Pushkin turned to Radishchev and his book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” in the 1830s. There is a traditional opinion in the research literature that Pushkin wanted to lift the ban on Radishchev’s name and gain the right to write about him. To achieve this goal, he stated his point of view on Radishchev as if it were official, deliberately strengthening the critical part in the article and thus aggravating his differences with the author of “Journey...”. Following this logic, it remains to admit that there had been no changes in the system of views of the mature Pushkin since the eighteen-year-old poet wrote the ode “Liberty” after Radishchev’s. Along with the article about Radishchev, Pushkin attempted to lift the ban on the publication of Karamzin’s note “On Ancient and New Russia...”, the existence of which he had known already in 1820 and the significance of which he accepted and appreciated not immediately, but only after 1825, like all of Karamzin’s journalistic work, which is consistently argued in the article. It was Karamzin’s journalism that had a huge impact on the formation of Pushkin’s political views and on his spiritual formation in the late 1820s–1830s. And it was through the prism of Karamzin’s ideas that he would evaluate Radishchev’s activities in the 1830s. The proof of these provisions is the task of this article.