Davydov, A. P. Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Piligrim’ (‘Once wandering along the wild valley…’) and Fedyor Dostoevsky’s Comments Thereto

Abstract: The author of the present research article disproves of Fedyor Dostoevsky’s appraisal of Pushkin’s poem ‘Piligrim’ after the novel of an English writer and preacher John Bunyan ‘The Piligrim’s Progress’ that Dostoevsy shared during his ‘speech devoted to Pushkin’ on June 8, 1880. Dostoevsky interpreted Pushkin as an ideologist of the empire, church, religious nation and Russian roots. From this point of view, his speech devoted to Pushkin was an ‘anti-Pushkin’ speech that actually distorted Pushkin’s word of values. The author of the present article proves that in his poem Pushkin did not create the image of a religious Protestant but based on English cultural works Pushkin created the image of a typical Orthodox person with a slavish philosophy of life and hysterical way of believing. ‘Piligrim’ does not have any signs of Pushkin’s universal narodnichestvo (populism). In this poem Pushkin created the Russian poetry. The researcher uses a comparative socio-cultural analysis of Pushkin’s and Dostoevsky’s writings and also compared to the two types of religion, Orthodoxy and Protestantism. For the first time in the studies of Dostoevsky the researcher proves the failure of Dostoevsky’s point of view on Pushkin’s ‘Piligrim’ based on the comparative analysis of Orthodox and Protestant values. Therefore the conclusion about Dostoevsky distorting the meaning of ‘Piligrim’ can be considered to proved. This allows to progress in our understanding of the speech devoted to Pushkin as an objectively anti-Pushkin speech.

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