Why literary scholars still explore Pushkin manuscripts

“Another minute – and my verse will freely flow,” Russia’s main poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in his poem, ‘Fall’ (1833). However, it's a myth that his creative work was that easy. In fact, he worked long and painstakingly on his texts, making dozens of edits, often very messy. 

“Pushkin's notebooks reflect a creative laboratory of the writer. Poetry and prose, drawings and notes for memory or calculations harmoniously neighbor on the pages. Materials for the same creative idea can be scattered not only on different pages within one notebook, but even on different notebooks,” says Vladimir Turchanenko, one of the curators of Pushkin's manuscript collection at the Pushkin House. 

Soviet literary critics did a great job of analyzing the poet's edits when they were preparing the publication of Pushkin's collected works. But, they left no explanations: why they chose one version of the text over another. And this raises questions for today's researchers.

Today's Pushkinists turn to the original manuscripts and literally reconstruct the history of the text's creation. Sometimes, even the shade of the ink can help determine when a particular edit was made. 

“Svetlana Fedotova, editor of fiction prose in the new academic Full Collection of Pushkin's Works, has convincingly shown that, in accordance with the writer's artistic intent, the protagonist of the story ‘The Station Master’ (from ‘The Belkin Tales’) is named not Samson Vyrin, as is commonly believed, but Simeon Vyrin. And this is a colossal interpretative difference. How many works have been written about the “small”, “humiliated” hero with such a rich heroic name as Samson! But, the name Simeon opens up a completely different field of interpretation, a different depth of Pushkin's image,” explains Turchanenko.

Such discoveries show that Pushkin's manuscripts are not only historical artifacts, but also the key to the living, moving meaning of his works.