The sources of D. S. Merezhkovsky’s article “Pushkin”: the authentic and the “unreliable”

The research considers the sources of D.S. Merezhkovsky’s article “Pushkin”. As with other articles comprising “The Eternal Companions” (1897), Merezhkovsky relied on the works of his character and someone else’s work about them. A.O. Smirnova’s “Notes” (1895) were an important source of this article. Their authenticity was questioned shortly after their publication by L.Ya. Gurevich. V.D. Spasovich argued that the “Notes” could not be used as a historical reference to characterize Pushkin and his age. Merezhkovsky drew 22 quotations from this text, which made up his mythopoetic framework of Pushkin: the poet and the monarch; the Russian poet and the European; the Russian poet and world literature; the poet and high society; the poet and free will; the poet and God; the contemplating and the acting character (Pushkin and Peter the Great). Merezhkovsky was concerned with the alignment between Pushkin’s image in the “Notes” and that shaped by the poet’s works, with the mythopoetic capacity of the testimony rather than its authenticity. As a historical source, A.O. Smirnova’s “Notes” distort the traits of Pushkin’s character, his works and the literary retrospective surrounding them. Yet as the building blocks of a literary myth of Pushkin they are in fact authentic, in the same sense as any myth is psychologically authentic. This conclusion is significant for the publication of the digital edition of Merezhkovsky’s works: we are able to point out the quotations that he drew from A.O. Smirnova’s unauthentic “Notes” and provide the full text of their first part. Thus the modern reader could personally evaluate the role of the “Notes” in the article “Pushkin”.