The first time I went to Russia, many years ago when I was an undergrad­uate, I remember being amazed at the sight of little children walking the cold, snowy February streets carrying cut flowers—and being even more amazed at the news that these children were headed to the local Pushkin monument to commemorate the great poet’s death.

In his study Social Functions of Literature, Paul Debreczeny does a number of things, and does them well. Among his desires is to calibrate the true meaning of Pushkin for those Soviet schoolchildren, for their parents and grandparents, and for their ancestors under the tsarist regime. This impressive work becomes, in its way, a summing up of a lifetime of study­ing Pushkin, literature, and society, and not merely Russian society. Debreczeny brings to bear in this volume methodologies and approaches gleaned from Russian and American scholarship in myriad arenas—psy­chology, semiotics, social history and anthropology, among others, in addi­tion to traditional literary analysis. His readings of Pushkin’s poetry are a welcome and perceptive supplement to the main content of the work—a reading of Russian society and of the relationship between society and its literary tastes. Debreczeny’s book is a tour de force of Pushkinistika, hu­manistic scholarship, and the study of the interaction of Culture and culture.

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"Pushkin and Shakespeare," Mikhailovskoe, 24–30 September 2001

This fall, from September 24 to September 30, there was a conference at Mikhailovskoe on Pushkin and Shakespeare. It was sponsored by St. Petersburg University and the group Piligrim.

The conference announcement suggested various intriguing panel ti­tles, including: “History in Literature,” “Drama: The Problem of Genre,” “Lyricism in Drama,” “The ‘Russian Shakespeare’ and ‘English Pushkin’: Problems of Translation and Reception,” “Problems in Studying and Teaching the Classics,” “Mass Culture as a Form of Commentary on Classical Texts,” “Pushkin and Shakespeare: Theatrical Interpretations.” Because of what I saw as the larger focus of the conference on issues of canon, reception theory, and teaching the classics to a broader audience, I did not give part of my research on Pushkin and Shakespeare but instead wrote up notes I had made for a course I taught last year, “Shakespeare on Film.” This turned out to have been an unnecessary consideration on my part, since the other participants spoke mainly on familiar scholarly issues of close readings, philosophy of history, etc. In a sense this was disappoint­ing because the issues of canon, of “accessibility” and indeed relevance of the classics are such burning topics in US academic discussions these days. Yet on the other hand, the fact that Russian academics, like European academics, are still deliciously research-driven, respected, and untroubled by such identity crises, was of course refreshing and encouraging.