Pushkin’s Monument and Allusion

In August 1836, Alexander Pushkin wrote a poem now popularly known simply as "Monument." In the decades following his death in January 1837, the poem "Monument" was transformed into a statue in central Moscow: the Pushkin Monument. At its dedication in 1880, the interaction between the verbal text and the visual monument established a creative dynamic that subsequent generations of artists and thinkers amplified through the use of allusion, simultaneously inviting their readers and spectators into a shared cultural history and enriching the meaning of their original creations.

The history of the Pushkin Monument reveals how allusive practice becomes more complex over time. As the population of literate Russians grew throughout the twentieth century, both writers and readers negotiated increasingly complex allusions not only to Pushkin’s poem, but to its statuesque form in Moscow and the many performances that took place around it. Because of this, the story of Pushkin’s Monument is also the story of cultural memory and the aesthetic problems that accompany a cultural history that grows ever longer as it moves into the future.