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Surely there are more monuments erected to the memory of Alexander Pushkin than to any other Russian cultural figure – or of any other Russian, period. I can’t imagine who could beat him at this point. Lenin, perhaps? Stalin must have had more at one point, but, like the monuments to Lenin, the Stalin statues were pulled down at a high rate for about 60 years following his death in 1953. True, he’s making a comeback as Russian cities rush to show their support for Vladimir Putin’s re-Stalinization of Russia. So, maybe this little topic requires a bit more research.
Somebody else will have to do that, however, because, frankly, I don’t give a damn about monuments to Lenin and Stalin. And, anyway, I digress.
Pushkin. What is there left to say about Pushkin? I have a whole stash of photos of Pushkin monuments in my archives but I never get around to posting them because I have no desire to repeat myself and I have kind of exhausted my thoughts on this be-all and end-all of Russian everything. It doesn’t mean I love him any less, maybe I love him all the more for that – how many writers have taken you all the way to the end of your thoughts? But it doesn’t make me want to rush to my computer to squeeze a few new words out of my increasingly addled brain.
But I just happened to pass through Sofia, Bulgaria, a week or two ago, and I had the good fortune to encounter still another monument to Pushkin. This one is located behind the Russian church in the center of the city on Tsar Osvoboditel (The Liberator Tsar) Boulevard at the intersection with Georgi S. Rakovski Street. Seeing as how this will be my first post originating in Bulgaria, I didn’t want to delay posting it.
There are at least three monuments to Pushkin in Bulgaria – the one you see here, another in Burgas and another in Pliska. There may have been a fourth addition just recently that Wikipedia hasn’t found yet – I ran across an article from 2016 about a new sculpture unveiled at the A.S. Pushkin Middle School in Sofia, just few blocks from the Russian Church.
The Wikipedia article about monuments to Pushkin is chock full of fun information. We won’t take its numbers as absolutes, but it definitely provides an impressive picture of the world’s attempts to further the memory of Russia’s greatest and favorite poet.
There are nearly 290 monuments to Pushkin around the world. Around 142 of them are in Russia, 145 more are spread out among 45 other countries. There are over 60 such monuments in Ukraine alone. Several Ukrainian cities, such as Kiev (4), Kamenka (2), Lugansk (2), Mariupol (3), Odessa (3) and Ternopol (2) have multiple monuments.
Moldova comes in a distant second to Ukraine with 9 statues, busts, what-have-you spread out over 7 cities. Of course, Moldova, known as Bessarabia in Pushkin’s times, was the site of Pushkin’s first period spent in exile in the early 1920s – he was there for three years – so it makes sense that people there would feel a strong connection to him. Two of his most popular works were written there – The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchysarai. An article by Anastasia Fletcher in the International Identities online journal , “Alexander Pushkin in Bessarabia: literature and identity politics in the periphery,” offers a great deal of information about Pushkin in Moldova/Bessarabia:
“Memory of the great Russian poet’s exile in Bessarabia has been inseparable from the identity collisions in the region. Pushkin matters as heritage both as text and as context. The category of ‘text’ includes Pushkin’s own writings and the various texts of his contemporaries. The poet invented Bessarabia as a romanticized and exotic land of released authentic freedom. Various memoirs authored by people who met, or pretended to have met, Pushkin in Chisinau, reinforced this image of the region. This urban mythology is an auth- entic piece of the intangible cultural heritage of the city and of the region. The category of ‘context’ includes scholarship of local origin, a monument, topography and two museums.”
Pushkin, of course, never traveled to Bulgaria, as he did not travel to almost all of the “foreign” countries that now offer monuments to his memory. Most of the statues erected in relatively recent times (the Sofia monument was unveiled in June 2001) have had some sort of political undertone to them – they are usually attempts by cities and governments around the world to find common ground with Russia and Russian culture – and who better than Pushkin to embody such a thing? (A few years ago in this space I wrote about a monument to Leo Tolstoy that went up in Budapest just before Putin visited that gorgeous city, and was specifically intended to make the Russian leader feel “at home” in Hungary.)
Some of the monuments, however, were probably not expressions of political expediency. A few are very old, thus predating the era of contemporary global politics. Some of the oldest outside Russia include a bronze bust in Tbilisi, Georgia (1892); Chișinău, Moldova (1885); and Ashgabat, Turkmenia (1911). I am fascinated to see that there are three Pushkin statues in the United States – one each in Washington, D.C., Jackson, New Jersey, and Monroe, New York.
The oldest object memorializing the poet is no longer in existence. It was erected August 12, 1817 in Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg by Pushkin’s fellow classmates. Pushkin had just turned 18 at the time. It was a marble block engraved with the words “genus loci.” It was moved into the city in 1844 then lost. The oldest extant monuments appear to be the one in Moscow on Pushkin Square – it was unveiled in 1880 – and one on Pushkin St. in St. Petersburg – it went public in 1884.
For the record there are 9 monuments to Pushkin in St. Petersburg (not counting the lost marble block), and 11 in Moscow.
The monument in Sofia was created by Russian sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov (1939-2006). He is known for his monumental sculptures, often on patriotic topics. He was a monarchist in his later years and was involved in numerous right-leaning political movements. His likeness of Pushkin – a more or less human-sized work – is perfectly passable, though, to my eye, not distinguished in any way. It’s a vision of Pushkin that we recognize and have seen a million times or more. According to one Russian blog post, the idea for erecting the monument belonged to the Pushkin Fund, while the mayor of Sofia covered the local costs that were incurred in putting it up. Klykov appears to have donated his work to the city free of charge.
Russian Culture in Landmarks 