“Ruslan and Lyudmila” was Alexander Pushkin’s first poem, through which the Russian public discovered him in 1820 and which made the young poet famous. For a long time, until the publication of his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, Pushkin was called the singer of Ruslan and Lyudmila. Never again in his ardent life was he to have such a unanimous and broad success with readers

The debutante’s poem had a stunning success even by present- day standards. Publisher Nikolai Gnedin hardly delivered a new batch of the book from the printing office to the stores, as it was snatched up. Moreover, when the entire circulation was sold out, speculators rose the price, offering the poem at 25 roubles! And fans who could not afford it, began copying the book by hand, and that is several thousands of verses!

Pushkin was not going to have such a unanimous and broad success with readers till the end of his ardent life.

Meanwhile, this is a young genius’s test of pen. The poet started composing the poem by fits and snaps when still at the Lyceum, at the age of 17, and completed it three years later, in 1920, when he was a 20-year-old official of the Foreign Ministry. He completed the draft, and then elaborated on separate parts in South Russia, at the beginning of his exile in Chisinau, after he had caused Emperor Alexander I’s anger with his Ode to Liberty, which the czar interpreted as a call for regicide.

Over the past two centuries, the fame of Pushkin’s first long poem has only increased, and thinking of its phenomenon today, makes one wonder. The story of Ruslan and Lyudmila is far from perfection, it has a lot of student naivety, some things are superfluous, some things are obviously off, the poet learns as he goes, but still the poem is so charmingly delightful, full of so much beauty, so ethereal and captivating that it is impossible not to fall in love with Pushkin’s verse.

Most importantly, Pushkin freed our language from the bonds of church phraseology. Before him, poetry was expected to be pretentious and affected. Suddenly, the sun was out, the spring came, the ice broke up, and the rigid language transformed, becoming the language of Pushkin…

Ruslan and Lyudmila is the Russian inspiration’s first travel eastwards.

At the time, Pushkin worshipped Byron and, selecting a plot for his epic poem, he looked at the Englishman’s oriental poems. But a genius cannot be another genius’s servant, and Pushkin turned his plot towards the Russian epos, our national fairy tales.

He dreamed of creating a heroic and romantic epic, something in the spirit of The Song of Roland, therefore filling up the void in the history of our literature. Well, his dream came true!

There is an intriguing secret in the poem, which should long have been disclosed.

The poem has a brilliant prologue, which all of us remember by heart since childhood.

There’s a green oak-tree by the shores Of the blue bay; on a gold chain, The cat, learned in the fable stories, Walks round the tree in ceaseless strain: Moves to the right – a song it groans, Moves to the left – it tells a tale…

This prologue was written only three years after the first publication of the poem and was the result of the poet’s travel in South Russia, first in the steppe, then along the seashore, and then at sea, along the Crimea peninsula towards the peaks of the Caucasus.

This prologue has become the flesh of our history. Pondering on its impact, the role of pioneer Pushkin can be compared to the deed of Moses who brought Jewish people out of Egypt and to Sinai.

Before Pushkin, Russians were forest people, our collective unconscious, using Jung’s terminology, knew nothing about the sea. The sea was far, far away, in a far way kingdom. Although Peter the Great’s era brought the country to the Baltic Sea with the cannon smoke of battle, Russians took a subconscious dislike for the cold northern sea. The warm Black Sea, to which Russia got access after the endless and exhausting war with Turkey was a different thing.

Why was this piece of the coast so important to us? Because only here the Russian civilization finally met Hellas and the Balkans, the cradle of its religion, and got rid of the animal wilderness of the satyr forest. It was on this seacoast that Russia became part of the amazing Mediterranean culture, with its cult of harmony and proportion.

What cultural explosion was connected to the empire’s southern borders! Pushkin’s genius grew stronger in the southern exile, Lermontov’s genius shaped in the south; it was in the Caucasus, in the village of Starogladkovskaya, that young Count Tolstoy created his first work, Childhood, and Chekhov was born in Taganrog at the sea. And there were also Valentin Katayev, Yuri Olesha, Eduard Bagritsky, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov… a galaxy of Odessa talents that enriched the Russian culture during the Soviet era.

In short, travelling in the south for the first time, sailing around the Crimea, admiring the Caucasus, Pushkin intuitively felt the need to bring to these wild eastern expanses some Russian spirit and erected a formidable oak-tree on the seashore, the symbol of the endless forest, and with it, brought there the forest’s invisible army of mermaids, satyrs, wolves and Baba-Yaga… In his poem, the Russian forest with its darkness went out in the sun, to the longed-for shore of a warm sea.

There are the strangest creatures’ traces On the mysterious paths and moors; There stands a hut on hen’s legs, hairless, Without windows and doors; There visions fill a vale and forest; There, at a dawn, come waves, the coldest, On the deserted sandy shore, And thirty knights, in armors shone, Come out the clear waves in a colon, And their sea-tutor – them before…

Pushkin’s oak on the sea shore tamed the spirit of the forest, calmed down the country’s unconscious and lit the border with Hellas’s light. This crystallization of darkness with a sunny contour touched even upon Pushkin himself.

Before him, there were no professional writers in St Petersburg, those who lived on earnings from their literary work. Pushkin put a decisive end to the past practice. Considering himself a writer of the new type, he did not want to be an amateur and demanded a “European” attitude towards poetry. This is just one example of the crystallization of Russia, which, finally, got a natural border along the seacoast.

There was another important consideration. Access to the Mediterranean meant for Russia the long-awaited link to the East. It was no coincidence that Pushkin chose lines from the great poem Bustan by the Persian poet Saadi as an epigraph for his new work, Bakhchisarai Fountain…

Many, just like myself, Have visited this fountain; But some are already gone, Others travel farther still.

At this symbolical moment of quenching thirst with water from the fountain we can start the count of cultural merger of two continents of spirit, Russia and the East.