The evolution of Aleksandr Pushkin's ideology and poetics in the 1830s has long been the most controversial issue of Pushkin studies, the greatest stumbling block to biographers and literary critics. Grigorii Gukovskii's simple scheme, which construes Pushkin's "path" as a steady progression from romanticism toward realism and historicism, though not yet totally refuted, is gradually falling out of favor, for it ignores, contradicts, or misinterprets obvious "archaic," retrograde trends in Pushkin's late writings. Repudiating and subverting contemporaneous romantic codes, Pushkin, as a number of recent studies have shown, does not replace them with innovative prerealist or realist ones but tries to rejuvenate certain outdated eighteenth-century systems.

(And slowly, as his mind and feeling / descend into a languid dream, / Imagination takes up dealing / her motley Faro game to him.)

At a card table at the beginning of "Pikovaia dama" (The queen of spades), Tomskii recounts a tale about his flamboyant grandmother, an avid Faro player. In her youth the Countess once lost a large sum to the Duke of Orleans aujeu de laReine at Versailles. When her husband refused to pay off her debt, the Countess turned to the adventurer and wonderman Count Saint-Germain for help.

As is well known, "influence" studies have fallen into disrepute in recent decades in western literary criticism. Linda Hutcheon rightly points out that this development constitutes an inevitable corollary to Roland Barthes's announcement of the "death of the author" in 1968,' shifting the site of meaning away from the flesh-and-blood author onto the interaction between text and reader, placing at issue "the locus of textual appropriation.

In his Materialy dlia biografii A. S. Pushkina, Pavel Annenkov first formulated what is now a critical commonplace: that Aleksandr Pushkin's 1816 elegies marked a turning point in the young poet's work, the rapid first steps toward poetic maturity and individuality.

Generations of Pushkinists have marveled at the writer's adroitness in adopting literary personae appropriate to a wide range of genres. His performances in social spheres, on the other hand, have elicited mixed reactions. Some contemporaries, like the censor A. V. Nikitenko, lamented Pushkin's desire to cut a figure in society rather than relying upon his artistic achievements. Others stressed his mastery of social etiquette, as well as his vanity.

Biography would seem to be firmer ground than literary criticism: at least we like to think that biography has a factual basis in the writer's life. But of course, when we deal with biography, our sources turn out to be yet more texts (memoirs, diaries, letters, and the like), and for this reason we often discover that the documentary evidence for the writer's life is less than objective and in fact displays its own biases and is governed by its own conventions of representation.

A nation's shared culture reflects its status as an "imagined community."1 Different sections of the imagined community, however, have their own ideas about what the shared culture should include and what ought to be excluded from it, and this incessant debate over the cultural canon affects the nation's sense of identity. The rise of the civil rights movement and feminism in the United States in the 1960s, for example, challenged the dominance of "dead white males" in the American literary canon. Political as much as aesthetic considerations, then, dictate what the canon of works that constitute any shared culture should include. Similarly, political circumstances often determine the "correct" interpretation of these works.

Iurii Lotman authored nearly forty books and articles about Aleksandr Pushkin's works, life, and personality; there is little doubt, therefore, that the poet was central to Lotman's scholarly interests. Nonetheless, Lotman turned to Pushkin's legacy relatively late in his scholarly career: while his first article was published in 1949, his first article on Pushkin appeared only in 1960. Both Lotman's kandidatskaia and doktorskaia dissertations were devoted to far more marginal figures and issues of Russian literary development: the former to Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Karamzin, and the latter to early nineteenth-century literature.

The advent of the world wide web and electronic publishing has increased the number of resources available for Pushkinists and their students. Search engines, when asked to return lists of sites containing the keywords "Aleksandr Pushkin" offer hundreds (and often thousands) of potential matches; these hits range from websites including the more traditional scholarly apparatus of bibliographies and footnotes to reader-responses and grade school projects.