“When he visits Russia, he tells me, he is swarmed by the locals. ‘Crowds of people assemble and fight for a chance to touch me,’ he says. The last surviving male in the long family line, this Alexander Pushkin, seventy three, a retired ITT engineer, will take the name with him when he goes, and the Russians know it. He is a virtual saint to them. Why? Because his great-grandfather Alexander was the fountainhead of Russian letters and lives on today as a near-sacred cultural icon in his homeland.”
Open Letters Monthly on the rising interest in the poet Alexander Pushkin outside Russia.
