Alexander Pushkin as a Romantic

This chapter maintains that Pushkin’s artistic project illuminates a paradoxical convergence of nationalism and internationalism at the core of both European and Russian Romanticism: the period’s concurrent commitment, on the national as well as individual scale, to creative solipsismandto circuits of intellectual exchange opened up by the Enlightenment across Europe; its introspection and extroversion; its vitalizing yet ambivalent comparatism. Pushkin’s formal and stylistic versatility appears to revel in, but also critically interrogate, the creative possibilities inherent in a country fashioning its modern national culture by means of appropriation. This investment in comparative cultural (de)construction, at once playful and serious, persists as a unifying thread throughout Pushkin’s otherwise insistently versatile oeuvre and could be productively singled out as the defining feature of his Romanticism.