N. N. Strakhov and Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech”

Abstract

The article considered three versions of N. N. Strakhov’s essay on the Pushkin Celebration of June 6–8, 1880 and Dostoevsky’s Speech delivered there. A comparative analysis of the texts published in 1880, 1883 and 1888 reveals the evolution of their author’s consciousness and fills in the existing gap in the history of his attitude to Dostoevsky, which has led to the infamous letter to Tolstoy dated November 28, 1883. According to Strakhov, the artistic flair manifested in Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin speech”, originates directly in God, whose mouthpiece the artist becomes aside from his own earthly personality, which does not only lack a connection with the meanings being transmitted, but may also directly contradict them. This is the ideological ground (combined with personal antipathy) on which the “aversion” to Dostoevsky ripens. As he revises his essay, Strakhov arrives increasingly closer to explaining the triumph of “Pushkin’s speech” solely as a victory of the “party,” and ultimately explains it by the insignificance of the event itself. The article draws a conclusion on the ambivalent nature of Strakhov’s thinking. One and the same phenomenon — in this case, Dostoevsky’s “conciliatory attitude” — is “exaggerated” by the critic alternately in a positive and in a negative sense. In regard to the significance of “Pushkin’s speech” in the history of Russian culture, Strakhov moves from unconditional approval to destructive doubt (from I. Aksakov to K. Leontiev).