Pushkin as a Cultural Myth: Dostoevskii’s Pushkin Speech and Its Legacy in Russian Modernism Alexandra Smith It has become commonplace to suggest that Russian Modernists replaced the notion of cultural tradition with the notion of cultural myth. In a Bergsonian manner, Boris Gasparov describes it as ‘mythological simultaneity’. Yet Michel Foucault’s definition of the modern period as 1 an era of the simultaneous seems to better fit the dialogic nature of the modernist mindset. Foucault maintains that the great obsession of the nineteenth century with history was replaced in the twentieth century by ‘an era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered’. The emergence of the Pushkin myth 2 might be seen as a manifestation of the Russian modernists’ attempt to overcome the sense of fragmentation marked by their strong interest in mythologized notions of the return of history and simultaneity explicable by their highlighting of Pushkin’s eye for the permanent within a rapidly changing society. Dostoevskii’s 1880 Pushkin Speech underpinned a new wave of mythologizing of Pushkin’s life and works. Alfred Bem in his 1931 article ‘Dostoevskii as a Reader of Genius’ welcomes the Pushkin Speech as an invitation to seek a new meaning in Pushkin’s works and life during the period of disparity. In response to Gerhard Gesemann’s statement that the Pushkin Speech replaced the historical figure with a cultural myth, Bem writes: We can only be happy about this development because there is no such thing as Pushkin the historical figure. We are dealing only with Pushkin as the source of endless creative possibilities. The transparent waters of his genius conceal so many depths that it takes another genius of equal merit to uncover them. 3 With the help of Freudian analysis, Bem presents Dostoevskii as a writer who experienced the anxiety of influence and who took from his teachers the ideal basis of an artistic image in order to transform it. In attempting to mould a unity in national literature, Bem sidesteps Dostoevskii’s 1880s