Pushkin's "To the Slanderers of Russia": The Slavic Question, Imperial Anxieties, and Geopolitics

Abstract

The article analyzes Pushkin's view of Polish-Russian relations and their impact on European politics, as reflected in his ode "To the Slanderers of Russia" (1831). It argues that key to Pushkin's presentation of these relations is Poland and Russia's imperial rivalry over shared borderlands in Eastern Europe, and that Pushkin's imperial swagger attempts to mask certain insecurities about Russia's imperial project there. Despite that, the ode powerfully argues that Russia should be Western Europe's sole diplomatic counterpart in East European affairs and denies East Europeans any independent voice. The article focuses on the poem's fluvial imagery (the idea of the "Slavic streams" flowing into the "Russian sea") and its discourse of kinship, which the poem has popularized as a metaphor coding Russia's relations with other Slavs. Pushkin's masterful modeling of political affect is given special attention, as it has been crucial for the poem's lasting relevance in Russian culture.