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Marina Lapenkova
MOSCOW, June 5: Pushkin portraits are everywhere. Verse after verse of Eugene Onegin is read on television. Small chocolate Pushkins and Pushkin puppets are for sale in the shops.
In short, `Pushkinmania' has taken hold all over Russia on the eve of the 200th anniversary of the poet's birth.
The curly-haired Alexander Pushkin, familiar to most Russians since childhood, these days decorates nearly every store window from pharmacies to butcher's shops and graces match boxes, vodka bottles and even credit cards. Huge billboards on every street corner carry the poet's verses. ``Long live the sun! The night disappears! Signed Alexander Pushkin,'' can be read on one highway billboard as motorists enter Russia's capital. Elsewhere other signs simply say, `Pushkin Passion' and `Pushkin Love'.
``The profile of Pushkin serves as a commercial logo and his verses as publicity slogans,'' complained a literature professor in the weekly newspaper Argumenty I Fakty. ``Pushkin is our everything,'' say Russians who canrecall in the tiniest detail the life and tragic death of the poet, dramatist and romantic who was also a philanderer and gambler. If D'Anthes, a French dandy who killed Pushkin at the age of 37 in a duel in 1837, had put on other trousers before going to fight the poet, the fate of Russia would not have been the same, said the weekly Ogonyok. Nearly all Russians know that Pushkin who fired the first shot failed to kill his rival when the bullet ricochetted off the button of D'Anthes' trousers.
In Moscow, the caretakers of four houses are arguing over the right to be designated the place where Pushkin was born -- and the subsidies that go along with such an honour -- and about 10 others want to be called ``a house visited by Pushkin.'' In the far eastern city of Vladivostok, a man who had not written a single verse until recently, shut himself away for 20 days to write 200 poems glorifying Pushkin.
President Boris Yeltsin will look to get closer to the new national symbol by signing the preface of a finaledition of Pushkin's complete works which appeared recently. To this, Argumenty I Fakty commented sarcastically, ``To live in a country without heroes would be far more difficult than living without wages.''
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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