Pushkin Review/Пушкинский вестник 20: ##–##, 2018. On Pushkin. Letter to G. M. Fridlender, 8 April 1938 Mikhail Lifshitz 1 One would have to write an entire dissertation to answer your theoretical question. I am not sure if I can succeed in briefy laying out my “ideas,” as you wish to call them. For a long time now, we have had two ways of approaching Pushkin. Some have categorized him as a progressive writer of the bourgeois-demo- cratic epoch (“enlightenment,” rationalism, abstract love of freedom, a sim- ilarly abstract historical optimism, folkish democratic ideals, and so forth). Except, as it turns out, Pushkin was “not particularly towering” in all of these regards, his nature was conficted—he had his good moments as an enlightener, but otherwise did some rubbish on the sly. Meanwhile, others, who are today the majority, have been nudging Pushkin into the mold of a democratic enlightener, or at the very least a liberal, contrary to all patent evidence. Both of these tendencies converge around the same conclusion. Both the vulgar-sociological perspective and the vulgar-humanist one can only come up with just one kind of conception of positive heritage, just one type of criterion for judging a writer’s progressiveness and spiritual depth. However, Chernyshevsky’s, or rather Belinsky’s genius (since Cher- nyshevsky was his follower), was to understand absolutely clearly that Pushkin’s epoch was singular and fnished, and that any demands of dem- ocratic enlightenment were inapplicable to it. In other words, theirs was precisely a dialectical understanding of a qualitatively different nature of a phenomenon, as opposed to the vulgar mind’s attempts to look for all kinds of Allmählichkeiten, all sorts of minor quantitative transitions, measured through terms like “underestimation,” “overestimation,” etc. Belinsky in his later period and then especially Chernyshevsky did indeed reject Pushkin’s method as outdated, but this is irrelevant. They actually left Pushkin untouchable. In fact, they were the frst to determine and to place limits on his singularity. This is why we should respect these great enlighteners for rejecting Pushkin—they did so as a result of a far deeper understanding of the Pushkinian principle than the one elicited by 1 Published in Pushkinist 1 (Moscow: 1989), 403–14 <<Is this a journal? Pub- lisher? Editor? Is this the full title or is there a subtitle?>>. I would like to thank Hammam Aldouri for his expert philosophical consultation and the invalu- able corrections that have made this translation possible.