13 - Pushkin filmed: life stories, literary works and variations on the myth

Summary

Beginning with the earliest examples of Russian silent film, Alexander Pushkin and his work have remained popular subjects throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Pushkin films, which number more than 100, vary in aesthetic quality, but they contain impressive achievements and telling experiments. As an art form, cinema has performed the pedagogical labour of transmitting Russian culture’s fascination with Pushkin, and it has also contributed a large body of interpretive work about him. It is the latter that interests us here. How has cinema read Pushkin’s life, his writings and the myths about him?

This chapter will treat three kinds of Pushkin films: life stories, literary adaptations and films alluding to Pushkin or his work. In their different ways, they extend and complicate the myth of Pushkin’s foundational place in modern Russian culture. As a result, these films make new myths about poetic and cinematic inspiration. Confidence that an audience in Russia would know Pushkin’s works well enough to catch both passing allusions and fully fledged allegory marks them all. Biographical films, many of them focused on Pushkin’s fatal duel in 1837, have regularly retold the story of his life. The life stories make Pushkin’s biography into an exemplary Russian life. They may also offer allegorical narratives about how Russia treats its poets and how poets should live their professional lives.