Alexander Pushkin: Alexander Pushkin: nobleman and poet in the public Service

Abstract

The article examines the public service of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). The author considers the uneasy relationship between Pushkin and the public service, in his role as poet and as a hereditary nobleman and the conflict with Count, M.S. Vorontsov, arising on the basis of such relationship. The author delves as to the role of the poet as an informal adviser to Emperor Nicholas I, as well as his role as a court historian. The poet was thought of as a man endowed with a special status, but did such status for the Russian writer correspond with his social status of hereditary nobleman, and of the poet's dignity corresponding with his personal honor and noble identity. The honor of the poet or the scholar, not of the hereditary nobleman, according to Pushkin, shall not be damaged if it is found within the auspices of patronage, but he acknowledges himself that such patronage as unacceptable for a nobleman emanating from a noble family. By way of exception is the - patronage of (“encouragement”) by the Tzar. The ranking of nobility for Pushkin in this instance is not significant. Pushkin was guided by such relationships as between the Tzar and monarch which had developed with the courtier historian N.M, Karamzim and Alexander I. Consideration is given by the author herein of the work of A.S. Pushkin in his discourse “On the national education” (1826), which is one of the examples of his work in the public service.