Russia’s national poet presents scholars with a paradox. In Russia, he looms large, literally in the form of ubiquitous statues, mentally as a poet whose works must be not only read, but memorized by schoolchildren, and scholastically as the subject of near-Biblical exegeses. Soviet-era views of Aleksandr Pushkin as a “poet of freedom” still linger, as in Feliks Umarov’s 2025 Hamilton-inspired (and state-funded) musical extravaganza Prorok. Istoriia Aleksandra Pushkina.Footnote ¹ Elsewhere, the poet’s footprints are fainter. Some corners of the United States remember him as not merely Russian, but also as one of the rare members of the African diaspora recognized as a genius in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote ² Others have a vague sense that he serves as a symbol of Russia, though his works are less widely read than those of Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii, thwarted in their transatlantic passage by the problem of poetic translation. A stray copy of Eugene Onegin may find its way onto the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble, and this novel’s form did manage to give shape to Vikram Seth’s 1986 Cold War comedy of manners, The Golden Gate, but more often Pushkin lurks in the back corners of the increasingly rare used bookshop, where he may or may not be discovered by the curious reader. Indeed, the American Pushkin might not even be a poet, but rather a cat.Footnote ³ Meanwhile, in the former republics of the USSR, Pushkin, like Vladimir Lenin (two ubiquitous presences whose statues are now being dismantled), is regarded as a symbol of Russian imperialism, especially in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Footnote ⁴ Beqa Tsirekidze, one of the two Georgian thieves responsible for stealing rare editions of Pushkin from European libraries to sell them on the Russian market, plainly stated his buyers “were Moscow auctions, I think. It’s very likely. These are Russian books, and, moreover, Pushkin books. Who the hell else needs them? It’s pure Russian imperialism, chauvinism, that he is ‘our great one.’ If they think so and pay tens, or hundreds of thousands [of dollars]—let them pay, what’s wrong with that?”Footnote ⁵ Pushkin scholars, particularly in the west, have been aware that Pushkin himself used poetry to assert imperialist views since the 1990s.Footnote ⁶ How might one write about a figure whose reputation is so radically different for different audiences? Who is this poet, really?

Two eminent scholars, David M. Bethea and Ilya Vinitsky, writing for different audiences, tackle this problem differently, by creating two very distinct works of experimental scholarship. Bethea’s The Pushkin Project is the culmination of an ambitious, years-long endeavor introducing underprivileged high school students to Pushkin, and to the Russian language, for the first time. A seasoned veteran of the battle with declining language enrolments at one of the finest Slavic programs in the US, Bethea has considered carefully how to entice distracted teenagers to study the humanities. His book, written in English for a non-specialist audience, with an appealing illustration of a dark-skinned Pushkin driving a white convertible on the cover, is designed to appeal to the uninitiated (that is: most Americans), although even seasoned scholars will find pleasant surprises between its pages.Footnote ⁷ Vinitsky, on the other hand, admits (under the guise of his pseudonym V. I. Shchebenʹ, the author of the preface) that for the sophisticated Russian-speaking readers of the New Literary Observer’s publications, “as an object of study Pushkin has long ago gone stale” (6). Indeed, the title of this book makes it clear that Vinitsky’s subject is not merely Pushkin, but his “ghosts,” or rather the way in which Pushkin has been received, translated, imagined, and (mis)understood across a range of contexts. Vinitsky’s witty Prizraki Pushkina (The Ghosts of Pushkin), which sets aside the poet’s most famous writings but dives enthusiastically into dubia and the infamous Gabrieliada, seems designed to appeal to the Pushkinist who has already read everything. The cover, featuring a hand with long fingernails writing with a quill pen, depicts not Pushkin, but a spiritualist conveying messages from the poet from beyond the grave. (The title told us there would be ghosts, after all.)

Let us start with The Pushkin Project, which is part memoir and part manifesto; it also serves as an excellent introduction to the life and works of the poet, since Bethea takes readers through the stories that he teaches his students. Moreover, it offers a primer into what Bethea refers to in the title as “modern evolutionary thought,” or an approach to the human condition that regards cultural exchange and especially art as not just ornamental, but essential to the survival of our species. This book tells the story of Bethea’s “Pushkin Summer Institute,” a summer language program for high-achieving students of Russian from underprivileged backgrounds at the University of Wisconsin. By building personal relationships with these students and inspiring them to improve their Russian skills, Bethea helps prepare them to win entrance to top colleges like the University of Wisconsin. In turn, by learning what sorts of approaches resonate most with Black and Latinx students, Bethea—who is by his own admission “a white professor who has spent forty years in college classrooms”—learns how to present the treasures of his discipline to a new generation of diverse Americans (xi). This is a wise strategy, given the fact that the US population stands to become majority minority within the next two decades.

The first two chapters, “Origins” and “PSI: Implementation,” describe the project’s intellectual and historical foundations. Bethea begins with his own life studying Russian in Officer Candidate School during the Cold War and then as an exchange student in the USSR. There, he learns to see the world from the perspective of the “other”; he especially cherishes the intellectual and ethical fortitude of the intelligentsia. Moving back to the present, Bethea realizes that he wants to spark a similar passion in young people growing up in today’s world. In the terms of evolutionary biology, his discipline must adapt to survive, “because if biology teaches us anything, it is that any species can disappear” (9). Working with a team of instructors at the University of Wisconsin and Pritzker College Prep in Chicago, Bethea plans a modern-day Lyceum on the shores of Lake Monona. Along the way, Bethea also studies evolutionary biology in order to make a case to the students (and the world) about the fundamental necessity of art to human life.

The remaining chapters of the book detail Bethea’s approach to teaching classic works from Pushkin’s prose oeuvre through the lens of evolutionary biology. They include anonymized student responses to the lessons and to a questionnaire Bethea designed to draw out the students’ personal connections to the themes of the works studied (reproduced on 179–211). It is hard to imagine receiving more thoughtful (or more positive) feedback. This book makes it clear that Bethea’s ambitious program has indeed managed to translate the romantic writer’s elusive charms to twenty-first-century teenagers. Part of Bethea’s success derives from his decision to lean heavily into Pushkin’s compelling biography, as he did in his classic monograph Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison, 2008). Though strict formalists might reject this approach, this book reveals how effective personal connection with the object of study can be. Reading this work, one envies these students’ access to such a gifted and enthusiastic teacher.

Though Bethea’s curriculum does include some poetry, most of the literary works studied are prose works from Pushkin’s mature period. “The Shot,” “The Stationmaster,” The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, and “The Queen of Spades” each receive a chapter. In his lesson on “The Shot,” Bethea introduces the students to the notion of “conditioned arising,” or the idea that the free choices individuals make (including the choice to create art) arise partially in response to biological pressure. This chapter includes an introduction to both the students’ backgrounds and Pushkin’s biography, with an emphasis on areas of commonality. (It also includes a vivid introduction to the poet’s life suitable for classroom use.) Next, a section on “The Stationmaster” considers gender and sexual selection, both in the story and in the students’ own lives, and introduces students to the idea that art serves an evolutionary function. Later, his essay on The Blackamoor of Peter the Great turns to the questions of race and difference, with an evolutionary focus on in-group and out-group thinking, along with an excellent introduction to the matter of race, Pushkin, and the Gannibal family summarizing the best relevant scholarship. Finally, the chapter on “The Queen of Spades” considers the relationship between risk and reward. Bethea’s interpretations are lucid, original, but, most importantly, engaging to readers who have grown up beyond the great poet’s long shadow. Throughout, Bethea foregrounds his students’ personal relationship to all these subjects; these students’ voices appear, anonymized, in this volume’s appendix, and their thoughts about life, love, and Pushkin are some of the most compelling parts of this excellent book. His goal is not to train them to be future literary scholars, but to use literature to learn how to think and explore what it means to be a human being. The image of Pushkin that emerges in the Summer Institute is neither the outspoken liberal of “Volʹnostʹ,” nor the crude imperialist of “Klevetnikam Rossii,” but rather a wise and circumspect humanist, a potential role model for young people. In this, Bethea’s approach resembles that of Iurii Lotman, who also devoted much of his energy to addressing a non-scholarly audience.

Ilya Vinitsky’s volume is a very different work. Prizraki Pushkina Natsionalʹnyi poet na rendezvous (The Ghosts of Pushkin: A Rendezvous with the National Poet) consists of ten chapters, along with a preface, an epilogue, and an index of names. Rather than a monograph, this book is a series of essays, many of which have previously appeared in The New Literary Observer. They are united only by their author’s literary-historical methodology, exuberant style, and subject matter relating (sometimes rather tenuously, as in the case of the epilogue) to Pushkin. Vinitsky (as Shchebenʹ) makes it clear in the introduction that his goal is neither to celebrate, nor to excoriate Pushkin’s “imperialism” (8), which he nevertheless acknowledges (particularly in the book’s last three chapters), but rather to explore the poet’s intersections with not only Russian, but also English, Moldovan, Ukrainian, French, and American cultures. All the aforementioned languages (as well as Latin) mix together over the course of more than three hundred dense (but delightful) pages, and the epilogue (on American Slavist Lauren G. Leighton’s pseudonymous pastiches of Vladimir Nabokov dedicated to life in bohemian Leningrad) is practically bilingual. This fact stands as further evidence that Vinitsky’s book is not for the average reader. Each chapter examines Pushkin from a different angle, and the poet is hardly recognizable from one to the next. Overall, the book shows the extent to which context shapes the poet’s reception; we are all living with different Pushkins in our own heads.

The standout chapters of the book are also the longest. “Obschestvo mertvyikh poetov: Tenʹ Pushkina and spiriticheskaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka” (The Dead Poets’ Society: Pushkin’s Shade and Spiritual Poetry from the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century), a translated and updated chapter from Vinitsky’s celebrated 2009 monograph Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism, considers what we can learn about Pushkin by studying spiritualist attempts to communicate with him from beyond the grave. This virtuosic chapter is full of bad verse and useful insights, such as the fact that Pushkinists came to occupy the same cultural role as mediums who tried to bring the poet and his readers closer together (45–46). The end of the chapter has been slightly updated to address the spiritual perils and promises of ChatGPT, which speaks to us today by means of a new kind of tablet.

“‘Priem Gavriila’ i amerikanskoe eroticheskoe voobrazhenie” (Gabriel’s Reception and the American Erotic Imagination) takes as its starting point English translations of Pushkin’s most famous erotic poem and the question of exactly how the Angel Gabriel overcomes Satan in this work’s thrilling climax. Then it moves on to the lavish illustrations to this poem commissioned by Playboy Magazine from the Japanese-American artist Kinuko Craft in the style of a religious triptych, with a Pushkin-like face given to the devil. Vinitsky goes on to take us from the ideology of Playboy to romantic-era anticlericalism, to apocrypha, to the love lives of Pushkin’s illustrious translators. For those with a particular interest in this topic, Gavriliada is also the subject of two additional chapters in this book.

“Falshivyi pesnopevets: Istoriia odnoi poeticheskoi oshibki” (The False Singer of Songs: The Story of One Poetic Mistake) offers one of Vinitsky’s most political chapters under the guise of a rather banal title. In it, Vinitsky (following Michael Wachtel), asks why Pushkin’s 1827 “Refutation of Monsieur Berenger” actually reworks a Bonaparte-era song by a different French poet, Paul-Émile Debraux. This poem—which scholars until recently preferred not to attribute to Pushkin—shows the poet full-throatedly “in line with the emerging state-nationalizing militaristic turn in Russian culture” (266), one that resonates grimly with current events. Berenger and Debraux were similar ideologically, and the scholar L. M. Arinshtein has suggested that the name “Berenger” alludes to another trisyllabic name starting with B, “Bulgarin,” Pushkin’s Polish rival who fought on the French side in 1812. In an impressive feat of literary sleuthing, Vinitsky meticulously traces the line from anti-Russian French and Polish poetry about the Napoleonic Wars to Pushkin’s own expression of nationalistic ressentiment. For those who are interested, the second-to-last chapter also treats Pushkin and nationalism; in this case, it shows how nationalist thinkers like Ivan Ilʹin have interpreted the poet’s language out of context to advance their own agendas.

Finally, “Cherepeitsy i kamukintsy: Katalog gorskikh narodov v etnologicheskom voobrazhenii russkogo romantizma” (Cherepeitsy and Kamukintsy: A Catalog of Mountain People in the Ethnological Imagination of Russian Romanticism), shows how Vasilii Zhukovskii’s 1814 poem “To Voeikov,” which included a list of apparently imaginary Caucasian mountain peoples, gave rise to a widespread literary trope of the “ethnic list,” which has left its mark on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature. Vinitsky shows that Zhukovsky did not invent the people he described, but rather transliterated their names in a way that made them hard to identify. Moreover, he shows how this literary trope is also tied up with the millenarian fantasies that early nineteenth-century Russian thinkers had about the Caucasus (315–18).

Although both Bethea and Vinitsky take Pushkin as their starting point, these talented scholars have given us a pair of volumes that are as methodologically and stylistically different as two works in the same subfield could possibly be, one revealing the pleasures of this poet to young students for the first time, and the other revealing surprises to those who have already heard everything. These works will not necessarily convince those who see Pushkin primarily as a personification of Russia’s brutal imperialist aggression. They do not resolve the contradictions surrounding this writer’s reputation, but, rather, allow us to understand the poet better by seeing him from different perspectives. Such works of scholarship are a finer tribute to this poet than any statue.