From his earliest publications onwards Pushkin has been the source of inspiration, and imitation, for other writers, as well as composers, painters and, more recently, film-makers. This book seeks to explore the different relationship his followers have sought with the ‘founding father’ of modern Russian culture. Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin takes a variety of approaches. Some contributors to the collection trace the way Pushkin’s works provided the template for the characters and stories which were produced in the first decades after his untimely death in 1837. Others reveal the impact the myths surrounding Pushkin’s tragic life were used (and abused) by followers, as well as governments of various hues. Yet other studies explore the very precise ways Pushkin’s successors used his texts as source material for their own works. ‘Pushkin’s Secret’: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin offers a series of fascinating insights into the impact that Alexander Pushkin has had on Russian culture over the last 200 years. Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin will be followed by two further volumes devoted to Pushkin within the SSLP series, Pushkin: Myth and Monument and Pushkin’s Legacy.

Pushkin’s status as the founding father of Russian literature owes much to his stylistic and linguistic innovations across a wide range of literary genres. But equally important is the influence he exerted on his successors via his exploitation of myth in its widest sense. His poetry, prose and drama frequently draw upon myths of classical antiquity, myths of modern European culture – grand narratives such as the Don Juan legend and Dante’s Inferno – as well as uniquely Russian myths, particularly those associated with St Petersburg and its founder Peter the Great. It was through the elaboration of such myths that Russia attained to a sense of both its cultural uniqueness and its inscription in the broader context of European culture. The contributors to Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument explore these myths from a variety of critical viewpoints and highlight the specific ways in which Pushkin uses myth – among these his recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of monuments and statuary, famously referred to by Roman Jakobson as Pushkin’s ‘sculptural myth’. Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument is the second volume devoted to Pushkin published in the SSLP series, the first being Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin. A third volume – Pushkin’s Legacy will follow.

Puskin's poetry, prose and drama frequently draw upon myths of classical antiquity, myths of modern European culture - grand narratives such as the Don Juan legend and Dante's Inferno - as well as uniquely Russian myths. The contributors to this volume explore these myths from a variety of critical viewpoints and highlight the specific ways in which Pushkin uses myth - among these his recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of monuments and statuary.

Pushkin's status as Russia's national poet rests as much on the breadth of his cultural influence as on the intrinsic quality of his works. Pushkin's Legacy reflects in various ways the areas in which this influence has been felt. Part I considers some of the key factors in defining Pushkin for posterity, in particular the crucial role played by the critic Belinskii and the problematics of periodising Pushkin. Part II examines the richness of Pushkin's poetics, including the ways in which his work challenged the established boundaries between poetry and prose. Part III examines Russian music's debt to Pushkin and vice versa: Russian music's role in popularising his works. Part IV examines Pushkin's influence abroad via studies of his influence on Mérimée and Henry James and, on a more personal level, through his descendants in England. Pushkin's Legacy offers a variety of approaches to Pushkin and his oeuvre and to the nature of his complex impact on Russian and European culture. Pushkin's Legacy is the third volume devoted to Pushkin to be published in the SSLP series, under the general title Two Hundred Years of Pushkin. It follows volume I, Pushkin's Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin, and volume II, Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument.

A Study Guide for Alexander Pushkin's "The Bronze Horsemen," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Alexander Pushkin stands in a unique position as the founding father of Russian literature. In this Companion, leading scholars discuss Pushkin's work in its political, literary, social and intellectual contexts. In the first part of the book individual chapters analyse his poetry, his theatrical works, his narrative poetry and historical writings. The second section explains and samples Pushkin's impact on broader Russian culture by looking at his enduring legacy in music and film from his own day to the present. Special attention is given to the reinvention of Pushkin as a cultural icon during the Soviet period. No other volume available brings together such a range of material and such comprehensive coverage of all Pushkin's major and minor writings. The contributions represent state-of-the-art scholarship that is innovative and accessible, and are complemented by a chronology and a guide to further reading.

Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin's cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas. "Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's astonishing legacy" CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University) "Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It views Pushkin as a "reference obligee" of contemporary urban poetry" VERONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne IV)