2002 Articles

PROTEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND: The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee and Literature in the Soviet Schools

Platt, Jonathan Brooks

A certain dilemma lurks persistently beneath the suface argument of the official documents (newspaper and journal articles, laudatory poems revolution: a Pushkin who could physically witness and and speeches, etc.) surrounding the 1937 jubilee marking celebrate the glorious achievement of the path to the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death—a dilemma intimately associated with the problem of time. What communication is possible between the living reader and the dead author? What significance can a text that is perceived as a mere artifact of a bygone era have for the supreme moment of the revolutionary present? If the dead are to live again, must time be made to stop, compressed into an eternal present composed of live, beautiful truths freed from the binds of historical context and the dead, dastardly lies that could not make the leap into the now? What price must one pay for such hubris, such a reckless distortion of temporal laws?