SOURCE: "Pushkin and Neoclassical Drama," in Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 312-38.

In the following essay, Karlinsky characterizes Pushkin's works as "the culmination of Russian eighteenth-century neoclassicism."

"Pushkin is our first classicist and romanticist, which makes him a realist." … (The latter definition depends upon the epoch, and also the temperament of the commentator.)

Igor Stravinsky¹

It has been the fate of many a great Russian writer to acquire in Western countries an image that is the very opposite of what he has actually stood for and believed. Ultraconservatives, such as Gogol and the mature Dostoevsky, are venerated as fearless indicters of tsarist tyranny. The humanitarian activist Anton Chekhov, with his wide-ranging program of social betterment and environmental concern, is seen as a gloomy prophet of despair and doom. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who detested anything bucolic and put his hopes...