Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is universally revered by Russians as their most beloved and greatest literary genius.  In critic Apollon Grigoriev’s famous phrase, “Pushkin is our all”. He is the very lodestar of the Russian culture and the creator of the Russian literary language. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Nabokov, (the Russian literary geniuses best known in the West) all  revered Pushkin and acknowledged themselves Pushkin’s heirs and literary debtors. To Gogol, “Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps the only true expression of the essential Russian spirit”; to Dostoyevsky, Pushkin was “the height of artistic perfection.” Tolstoy praised Chekhov by calling him “Pushkin in prose.”   For Russian poets, a deep devotion to Pushkin is something almost akin to religion. Pushkin is the “Prophet” of Russian literature; countless phrases of his entered the Russian language as Shakespeare’s phrases permeate English. Yet, while Russians revere Pushkin as English-speakers do Shakespeare, the West knows Pushkin far less well than it knows his literary heirs. The incomparable mastery of Pushkin’s verse has eluded translation, and much of his wit and wisdom is surprisingly unknown, although, in many ways, Pushkin was by far the most Western of all great Russian writers.

The purpose of this Website is to help make Pushkin and his work more accessible in every way, not just to scholars and aficionados, but to the general public. This Website features Pushkin’s works in English and Russian, links to the major institutions in the world that study and honor Pushkin’s life, works, and legacy, as well as news, books and media, a literary blog, and other resources.