Critical Pushkiniana in His Jubilee Year

Abstract

The title of our survey defines its scope, and the epigraph, the criteria for evaluation. This means that all Pushkin studies published before 1974, including republications in the jubilee year, are outside the limits of the survey, as are works of a reference, methodological, purely popular, geographic (1), or any other strictly specialized nature. So far as the approach to evaluation is concerned, for all its rigor, which may even seem captious, we have always borne in mind the considerable difficulty of saying a "new word" about Pushkin, the debatability of a number of questions, and the fact that answers offered are not final. We add that we do not, under any circumstances, offer our own judgments as ultimate truth.