“The majestic ode”. Gogol about Pushkin's poem “To N***”

A careful study of the author's manuscripts, new discoveries, always contribute to a better understanding of the classical heritage. However, it happens sometimes that a success of the authors' textual researches enables them to make their conclusions more acute and assertive. This substantially concerns the history of the study of Pushkin's poem, published under the title “To N***” after the poet's death (“You spent a long time talking to Homer face to face...”). Who was an addressee of “Iliad” - the translator Nikolai Gnedich or Emperor Nicholas I? Gogol insisted that Pushkin's poem had a sublime, “educative” sense. Thanks to the latest findings of the textual critics they have managed to find more evidence of “gnedich” origins. Who is right? It turns out that the truth resides somewhere in the middle, and that hypercriticism in studying Pushkin's poetry, as in many other areas, may pose a challenge to understanding the complex nature of the phenomenon under study. The article studied in detail the problem of destinees and genre affiliation of Pushkin's poem, traced the history of provenance of Gogol's two different statements about this literary work.