­I understand that everybody loves Pushkin. Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman has said that he celebrates the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin as a Jew.  I understand this completely. We all love Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin. But would Pushkin approve of just any kind of activity?

On June 6, 212 years since the birth of Aleksandr Pushkin, an odd meeting took place in Helsinki, Finland, my fatherland. A somewhat older Finnish gentleman, well-known as a Finnish translator and an authority on Pushkin, went to admire a peculiar entourage, whose aim was retribution against Russia. Beside him sat the well-known owner of a web hosting company, which advertises the terrorist Doku Umarov. Edvins Snore also gave a speech at this event. Edvins is known as the film director of “The Soviet Story”. He used metaphorical rhetoric in his film and manipulated the horrible pictures. Present-day Russians and the Russian government were depicted as fascists.   

 I have noticed that “in the name of Slavic culture” some foreign revanchists want to support separatism against Russia. So they present Moscow oddities as great cultural men to us, Western readers, who already know computers better than the classics of literature. These new heroes, i.e. oddities, would write modern stories in the spirit of Onegin and Pushkin. The message of such writers is dark – close to the style of Edvins Snore in his propaganda film: Russia's reputation is catastrophically bad, because Russia is such a shameful nation. I have to ask: how can our cultural “Establishment” rape Pushkin so badly? Should we not read more of Pushkin’s books?

Felix Raskolnikov has argued exquisitely that after the collapse of the Soviet system in Russia the works of Pushkin have been re-published and re-interpreted by Russian religious philosophers and bishops. Dozens of articles and conferences have attempted to prove that Pushkin was a deeply religious Orthodox poet. But it would have been only Russian law, which required incantation of Church rites. The attitude of the Orthodox Church to Pushkin would have begun to change in 1880 after the famous speech of Dostoyevsky. In 1887, Archbishop Nikanor Brovkovich created the idea of Pushkin as a “prodigal son”. “He, like the biblical prodigal Son, finally returned to the bosom of the Church: repented and died a Christian”.

I am not sure that it would be right to speak only of “mechanical” religion and ethos – when we speak about the Russian Orthodox Church or about Russian mentality – when we make our modern interpretations of Pushkin’s real message. We should talk about a multi-faceted life. This is a key issue, even for the present day: Pushkin didn’t like religious intolerance or xenophobia. Therefore I wonder again, why modern interpreters and predictors would think that a human life could be blessed only through religious isolation from others. By contrast, in reality, the hero of Russian culture could guide us to better tolerance for religious, cultural, racial or national mutual acceptance.  

Pushkin’s life’s work was not just a few poems. He created the foundation for modern fiction style, and, above all, for philosophical and psychological in-depth reflection in Russian literature and culture. Pushkin provided powerful creative inspiration for Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, too. This living power of Pushkin comes from the depths of his honest reflection, when he tried to be sincere with himself and with his readers. Pushkin was not only a poet, he was also a man: constant agitation, passions, dissatisfaction with his financial situation, clashes with the government and hostile critics.

Against this background his vitriolic pamphlets and blasphemous poems offended the obsolete religious demands of believers of his time. Through anti-religious and immoral literary performances, Pushkin deliberately hid his true deep spiritual experience, which he shyly did not want to share with others. But in a letter to his own wife, he confessed: “I pray to God a little, and I hope that your pure prayer is better than mine, both for me and for us” (August 3, 1834). I have heard several stories about ex-wives and ex-husbands who have confessed to praying to God better than to their partners. Their spiritual arrogance was never good at predicting the sustainability of their marriages.

For Russian and Eurasian religious and national understanding, it was a great stroke of fortune that Pushkin was a universal man, as Dostoyevsky wrote perfectly, “Being a true Russian, becoming completely Russian, can only mean becoming a brother to all men, a universal man”.    Dostoyevsky saw Pushkin as a writer, a patriot and a highly religious man. Pushkin was a national patriot with Christian cosmopolitanism.

­The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.