Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech” as the Archetext of English Pushkin Studies of the 20th Century

The article highlights the problem of the influence of Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech” on the development of English Pushkin studies in the period from the 1910s to the 1960s. It is argued that this speech became an archetext for English works on Pushkin, that is, a text to which the common vector of interpreting Pushkin’s work largely originated. It is demonstrated that the significance of the “Pushkin Speech” for the English intellectuals’ ideas about Pushkin’s works was determined by the formation in England in the 1920s and 1930s of the “cult of Dostoevsky” in the context of positive attention to everything Russian as simultaneously exotic, primitively spiritual, alien – and as well as close to English culture, mystical and Christian, forgotten over the centuries. It is determined that in English works on Pushkin written during this period, Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech” is invariably used as an authoritative and key characteristic of the poet’s work. It is argued that the combination of the characteristics “national” and “omni-human,” borrowed from Dostoevsky, against the background of ideas about the religiosity of the Russian national consciousness and sympathetic humanity as the highest truth of the Russian person, acted as a special sign of Russianness. It is concluded that the imagological context associated with the perception of Russia and the Russian people was closely intertwined in the English consciousness of that time with aesthetic and political contexts, which gave rise, among other things, to various ways of understanding Pushkin’s work through the prism of the “Pushkin Speech.” The interpretative field of perceiving Pushkin’s work in the vector of this text among English Pushkin scholars included the association of the realism of Pushkin’s poetry with “common sense” of the Russian people (M. Baring); the concept of Pushkin’s works as a living connection between Russian and European cultures, and Dostoevsky’s idea about “universal unity” – as thoughts about the aspiration of Russian culture to European (Ya. Lavrin); and also, recognition of the highest degree of spiritual maturity in Russian literature, beginning with Pushkin (R. Hare).