Beschreibung:
In an event acknowledged to be a watershed in modern Russian cultural history, the elite of Russian intellectual life gathered in Moscow in 1880 to celebrate the dedication of a monument to the poet Alexander Pushkin, who had died nearly half a century earlier. Private and government forces joined to celebrate a literary figure, in a country in which monuments were usually dedicated to military or political heroes. In this richly detailed narrative history of the Pushkin Celebration and the developments that led up to it, Marcus C. Levitt explores the unique role of literature in nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life and puts Russian literary criticism, and Pushkin's posthumous reputation, into fresh perspective.