Pushkin and Fenelon: To the Statement of the Problem

The article characterizes Pushkin’s attitude to Fenelon, including his reviews of the French author, facts testifying to his interest in the editions of Fenelon’s works available to him, Pushkin’s poetic impromptu “The Boring role of Telemachus...” (1824), which allows us to discuss not only some biographical facts reflecting Pushkin’s stay in the south of Russia, but also his worldview, correlated with the “spirit of the era” and reflected in a number of works. The problem of identifying hidden quotations from Fenelon’s works in the works of the Russian poet is considered to be of secondary importance, and the most significant is the complexly organized sphere of reflected influences on the literary and ideological space of the Pushkin era, in which poets and thinkers of the past were irrevocably present as those who set the religious, philosophical and ideological “agenda”. An important element of this space was the spiritual heritage of Quietism, interest in which persisted throughout the 18th century, especially in the Masonic environment, and intensified in the 1810s. In parallel to the Quietist doctrine of the possible descent of grace into a soul that has renounced the world and itself, its own inescapable sinfulness without favor from above, Pushkin created the contours of his concept of poetic creativity, which was based on the theme of the “divine word”, which “touched” someone who “dragged” in spiritual devastation “the gloomy Desert” (“The Prophet”, 1826), combined with the theme of silence (“Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet”, 1824) and a number of other motifs, including those related to the poetry of V.A. Zhukovsky, who relied, in particular, on Fenelon and the Quietism.