Why did Dostoevsky name Pushkin “the main Slavophile of Russia”?

Pushkin’s presence was inevitable in Vladimir Meshchersky and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”) (1872-1874). In addition to media news, the weekly published articles that were of exceptional importance in the literary concerns of the editor and publisher Dostoevsky. In the articles of 1873-1874, the critics of “Grazhdanin” expressed the general position of the editors. In assessing current events in art and literature, they proceeded from the fact that Pushkin’s artistic discoveries were a measure of the talent and creativity of contemporary authors. Dostoevsky insisted on Pushkin’s national and global significance. Of great importance in the development of the Pushkin theme was Mikhail Pogodin’s article “On the Question of the Slavophiles,” in which the critic gave an original answer to the question of who the Slavophiles were and what their achievements consisted of. Slavophilism was not a doctrinaire teaching; the Slavophiles did not demand unanimity in their judgments. Sometimes they argued, but this did not negate the general direction. Slavophile Pogodin called many outstanding poets, critics, philosophers and publicists Slavophiles: not only Khomyakov, the Kireevsky brothers and Aksakov, but also Pushkin and his associates, Gogol, Dahl, Fet, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and others. From his point of view, they all shaped Slavophilism as an ideology and a literary and philosophical school. Over the course of his life, Dostoevsky had different attitudes towards the Slavophiles. In the 1840s, he looked at the Moscow Slavophiles through the eyes of Belinsky. In penal servitude, his convictions were transformed. He developed his own ideology - pochvennichestvo. In the magazine polemics of the early 1860s, Dostoevsky sharply argued with the Westernizers and Slavophiles. A decisive change in his attitude towards the Slavophiles occurred in the 1870s. In “The Citizen” and later in “The Writer’s Diary,” Dostoevsky admitted that he shared Slavophile beliefs. In order to admit that he was a Slavophile, he had to identify himself with Khomyakov and the Aksakovs. In his notebooks for “The Writer’s Diary” for 1876, Dostoevsky summarized Pogodin’s polemics about the Slavophiles with the judgment that Pushkin was “Russia’s most important Slavophile.” He later developed this judgment in his Pushkin speech, presenting the poet and prophet as “the universal man.” Dostoevsky emphasized that the ideas of the new word in his speech belonged not to him, but to all Slavophilism. At the moment of his and Pushkin's triumph, the Slavophiles themselves recognized him and Pushkin as Slavophiles.