The A. S. Pushkin Concept of Political Worldview (S. L. Frank’s Etude ‘Pushkin as a Political Thinker’)

Abstract

In the cycle of “Etudes on Pushkin” by S. L. Frank, the 1937 article on the poet's political worldview occupies an exceptionally important place and is unusually relevant for our time. Few Pushkin scholars have managed to consistently, multi-layered, conceptually construct a political biography of Pushkin, and then systematize the conservative and liberal tendencies in his work, taking into account the spiritual and psychological state of the poet, without straying into the obviously ideological commitment of the current historical moment. But at the beginning, back in 1933, Frank analyzed Pushkin’s religiosity. As befi ts a philosopher and religious thinker, the author recognized the poet’s spiritual world in all its integrity, formation and development, in the contrast of contradictory feelings, “excitements” and events of his creative life, and came to an understanding of the simultaneity of Pushkin’s spiritual and political maturation. The analyzed essay by Frank contains complex realities of Pushkin's text, not fully clarifi ed by literary historians, in which (in relation to them) the difference in approaches of pre-revolutionary and Soviet Pushkin studies is visible. This concerns textual problems (Frank reads Pushkin, quotes him from the editions of P. O. Morozov, S. A. Vengerov, V. I. Saitov and himself writes according to the old spelling), dating, addressees of letters, but most importantly — the philosopher looks differently at the usual questions of studying the “Soviet Pushkin”: freedomloving and anti-religious motives, the poet and the tsar, Pushkin and the Decembrists, historicism, nationality, tsarism and the revolutionary movement. For Frank, such concepts as spiritual type, religiosity, conservative tendencies, political radicalism, monarchy in the national consciousness, state maturity, nationally minded historical figures, hereditary nobility, the cult of the hearth, “family inviolability”, and freedomof cultural and spiritual creativity come to the fore.