“But you can sell the manuscript”. Book review: Belykh A.A. (ed.). Pushkin and finance: collection of articles. Moscow, Delo, RANEPA Publ., 2022. 584 p

The article is a review of the collection of articles “Pushkin and Finance”, published in Moscow in 2022. It is shown that the need to study the economic side of Pushkin’s life is long overdue. The collection includes both fragments of classical works on this topic by PE. Shchegolev and S.Ya. Gessen, as well as first published articles by A.A. Belykh, S.V. Berezkina and I.S. Sidorov. It can be recognized as a good decision that the work opens with an article by its scientific editor, in which various financial hypostases of Pushkin’s life are analyzed: an official, a writer and publisher, a player, a landowner, a city dweller and a family man. It is shown that in the first two hypostases it was primarily about Pushkin’s income, and the last three were budget expenditure items. The calculations carried out in the book require a revision on the part of the research community of ideas about the financial failure of “The History of Pugachev” and the “Sovremennik” magazine. The work under review convincingly shows that Pushkin’s income from the sale of “The History of Pugachev” significantly exceeded expenses, which, however, did not allow the poet to repay the loan taken from the state for this publication. However, the failure to repay the loan was not explained by the failure of the publication, as was still believed in the history of Pushkin studies, but by the misuse of the loan, only 16% of which was spent on the publication. The “Sovremennik” magazine, indeed, did not bring the dividends that Pushkin had hoped for, but it was by no means unprofitable, as was previously believed; the break-even point was overcome. The disadvantages of the publication include the fact that the content of the book is somewhat narrower than its title, because the problem articulated in the title involves not only calculating the poet’s income and expenses, but also other, no less important issues of interaction between economics and literature: the influence of the market price of printed production and the amount of royalties for the poetics of literary works (from volume and genre to language and style), the dependence of the economic conditions of a writer’s existence on his art, etc.