“Is Pushkin our everything”? A.S. Pushkin as a national hypertext

Abstract

The article deals with the interdisciplinary problem of A.S. Pushkin’s creative biography (life and texts in their common genesis) as a Russian national hypertext. The article considers the possibility of using the concepts of “hypertext” by Ted Nielson, “dialogism” by M. Bakhtin, “intertextuality” by Y. Kristeva, “text without shores” by R. Barthes and J. Derrida, etc., “opera aperta” – an open work by U. Eco and “palimpsest” by J. Genette to describe the space of Pushkin’s text. The stages of formation and development of Pushkin’s hypertext are defined: from manuscripts as protohypertexts and published texts, from the phrases “the sun of our poetry” (V. Odoevsky) and “Pushkin is our everything” by Ap. Grigoriev, which have become memes in modern context, from the image of Pushkin in the memoirs of his contemporaries to the emergence of the Pushkin canon and its later reinterpretation in the critical articles by V. Khodasevich and others; and, furthermore, from the discussions of the first half of the 1920-s between V. Veresaev and V. Khodasevich about how to write about Pushkin and how to write biographies of the poet, from discussions about how to read Pushkin (“slow reading” by M. Gershenzon and the perception of this method in the historical and literary context of the 1920-s and 1930-s) to the formation of Russian Pushkin studies and the formation of the Pushkin cult during the Pushkin Days timed to the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1937, from using his works in the ideological and cultural discourse of the USSR era to rethinking them in the Russian segment of the Internet. Possible strategies of studying Pushkin’s image in modern cinema, TV series and digital environment – small genres of Internet folklore – are suggested.