Pushkin in Yuly Aykhenvald's philosophical and aesthetic system

The article raised the question of the role of the Pushkinian principle in the philosophical and aesthetic system of Yu. I. Aykhenvald, one of the leading critics of the Silver Age. The given review of Aykhenvald’s publications on Pushkin and Pushkin studies of the first quarter of the twentieth century and analysis of Aykhenvald’s attitude to V. G. Belinsky’s and D. S. Merezhkovsky’s statements about Pushkin allowed defining more clearly the position of the literator, his approaches and methods. Aykhenvald’s articles about Anna Akhmatova, V. Bryusov, I. Bunin demonstrate that the involvement in the Pushkin tradition was for Aykhenvald the most important aesthetic criterion in assessing the modern literary process. Besides, the article regards the question of perception of Pushkin’s studies of Aykhenvald by his contemporaries - writers (B. Zaitsev, B. Sadovskoy, V. Khodasevich), literary scholars (S. A. Vengerov, B. M. Eichenbaum, A. P. Skaftymov), cultural historians (P. M. Bicilli) and representatives of Russian religious philosophy (S. L. Frank, A. F. Losev). It is concluded that, in contrast to literary historians, the phenomenon of Aykhenvald was for philosophically minded admirers of his critical talent a confirmation of the unity of national culture, the irreducibility of the nation to nationality and Pushkin as its main symbol.