Unknown Pushkin. Notes 1825-1845.. Smirnova-Rosset A. O.

This book was first published in the journal Northern Herald in 1894 under the name “Notes by A.O. Smirnova, nee Rosset (from 1825 to 1845). " She was prepared by Olga Nikolaevna Smirnova - the daughter of the maid of honor of the Russian Imperial Court A.O. Smirnova-Rosset, who was a friend and interlocutor A.S. Pushkin, V.A. Zhukovsky, N.V. Gogol, M.Yu. Lermontov. Immediately after the release, the book aroused great interest among readers, then disputes began around it, and in Soviet times the book was actually banned. In modern Pushkinism, she is by silence, and not a single serious scientific publication refers to her. Nevertheless, the “notes” had and remain hot fans. One of them was Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky.

“Modern Russian Society,” he wrote, “did not appreciate this book, which in any other literature would compose an era. Smirnova was not believed, since they could not imagine Pushkin, like Goethe, discussing world poetry, of philosophy, religion, about the fate of Russia, about the past and future of mankind. ” And our contemporary, Satirist poet and journalist Alexei Pyanov, wrote about her: “Before us the work is unusual, largely mysterious. He brought with him so much not just a new, but unexpectedly new about the great poet, so thoroughly supplemented the famous in moments.

from the pages of the “Notes” looked at the reader not a textbook, but although a familiar, but at the same time some new Pushkin. ”