Volume 47, Number 8 · May 11, 2000
Pushkin's Shakespearean Lover
By John Bayley
In England and Russia, Shakespeare and Pushkin are the two great writers, the national writers. There has never been any doubt about that; nor has any change in literary fashion or in cultural attitudes done anything to alter what has always been taken for granted. In one sense this is the equivalent in literature of the tradition of kingship or of tsardom in the national politics: the icon of the country's special version of sovereignty. It may even be the case that where no such unifying tradition existed, as it did not exist in Germany and Italy, the national writer assumes an even greater cultural and spiritual importance, as do Goethe in Germany and Dante in Italy. And it may well be of significance also that in democratic America the requirement of such an absolute cultural figurehead has never been felt or recognized. America has its own great writers, whose status remains, as it were, permanently unchallenged, but they live together in the national pantheon on honorably equal terms.
Feature, 5380 words
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