In the words of Andrew Kahn, the aim of his book is “to show how Pushkin wrote poems about fundamental aspects of his creative and intellectual identity in response to the ideas and aesthetic questions of his age” (1). Kahn’s study clearly demonstrates that Pushkin’s distinct idiom and con­ceptual vocabulary can be better understood if evaluated in the context of the history of ideas and in conjunction with the views on creativity and inspiration that were prevalent in eighteenth-century Europe. By under­lining Pushkin’s closeness to eighteenth-century Russian literature, Kahn establishes a vantage point that enables him to read Pushkin’s lyrics as a semi-veiled dramatization of ideas and to reassess Pushkin’s links with European Romanticism. Kahn’s holistic approach to the evolution of Push­kin as a lyric poet stands in sharp contrast to the Structuralist approach which, in Kahn’s opinion, reduces the analysis of Pushkin’s ideas to a dis­cussion of “synchronic invariant motifs” (2). Kahn’s ambitious undertaking to recover Pushkin’s aesthetic vocabulary together with his artistic and professional concerns is subordinated to a desire “to address a Pushkinian sense of the creative mind that informs his understanding of mimesis” (2). Such an approach hinges on the problematic claim that Pushkin’s poetic thinking can be straightforwardly historicized, i.e., that the lyric hero al­ways acts as a mouthpiece for Pushkin himself.