The Pushkin celebrations of 1880 not only became a milestone for the educated secular circles in Russia but also evoked a noticeable response in the Russian church milieu. For preachers, however, it turned out to be difficult to reconcile the admiration for the national genius and bearer of the Russian “all-human” idea with the poet’s obvious deviations from the norms of Christian morality in his private life and works. While most authors tended to focus on the former rather than the latter aspect, Archbishop Nikanor (Brovkovich) developed a different approach. In his sermon on the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death, the archbishop recognized Pushkin’s importance for Russian culture but also emphasized the sinfulness of the poet’s life. Three years later, however, when Archbishop Nikanor attacked Leo Tolstoy’s cultural nihilism, this approach to Pushkin proved to be a problem because the archbishop had to appeal to the poet’s cultural significance. This intertwinement of positions and ideas allows us to raise the question of the formation of the theology of culture in the last decades of the 19th century, which was unintentionally inspired by Dostoevsky’s Pushkin Speech.
Pavel Khondzinskii (Wed,) studied this question.