Facets of the Pushkin Myth in the Poetry of Sergei Stratanovsky

This study deals with the problem of the functioning of the Pushkin myth in Russian culture. The relevance of the research is connected with the further development of the Pushkin myth as the “main myth” of Russian culture. The study is based on the poems of Sergei Stratanovsky, which are directly related to the image of Pushkin. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that most of the texts included in the analysis have not yet been the subject of extensive literary analysis (“Shark Art Camera”, “In the Pushkin Reserve”, “Boldinsky’s Reflections”, “Yes, merciless, but not at all meaningless...”, “The Great Pushkin is Ours...”). The study reveals the logic of the functioning of the Pushkin myth in poetry in 1980–2010. In the Soviet era, Pushkin's work became one of the ideological instruments through which the Soviet system ensured its legitimacy. Already in Stratanovsky's first poems dedicated to Pushkin, the subject of poetic reflection is not the image of the poet, but the existence of this image within the framework of Soviet ideology. In the post-Soviet period, the image of Pushkin as a free thinker, cultivated by the previous era, was replaced by the image of a poet inclined to philosophical and religious reflection. In the programme poem “Boldinsky Reflections” (2000), the problem of the correlation between culture and religion, which is the most important for the “history of the Russian state», is raised. In the 2010s, another transformation of the Pushkin myth took place, which is reflected in Stratanovsky’s later work. The image of Pushkin as a poet of the empire is developed in such poems as “Yes, merciless, but not at all meaningless...”, “The great Pushkin is ours...”. The study concludes that the viability of the Pushkin myth is ensured by its ability to be integrated into any, sometimes opposing, ideological systems.