PUSHKIN’S CODE IN THE EPISTOLARY HOAX OF I. S. TURGENEV

In the article, the letter of I. S. Turgenev to P. V. Annenkov dated October 14 (old style), 1853, is for the first time considered as a “cryptographic text,” as a kind of response to Annenkov’s completion of preparations for the publication of Pushkin’s biography and writings. Although Pushkin’s name is not mentioned in the letter itself, “Pushkin’s presence” is encoded in different ways: in the initial “prosaic” part of the letter — in the form of associatively concealed hints about Pushkin’s work and the facts of the poet’s biography, and in the second part, in the Easter poem, it receives its explicit designation by an intertextual reference: “The past has opened up before me.” In the article, the Easter poem is analyzed not from the point of view of the problem of its authorship, which has not been completely solved, but as a manifestation of Turgenev’s artistic consciousness. The writer uses cryptographic hints to evaluate Annenkov’s contribution to the salvation of Pushkin’s name, “among other names doomed to oblivion” (as he will recall in a speech about Pushkin in 1880), in the categories of Paschal, “great and joyful news,” in the light of which the event of the Resurrection of Christ becomes an “emblem” of Pushkin’s fate, and the image of the poet is perceived as the image of the Resurrected.