Pushkin House - Soviet Era

Soviet Era

The Pushkin House was originally a non-governmental organization specializing in Pushkin studies, which have been recognized by Russian authorities as a separate branch of scholarly inquiry. The Russian Revolution led to the shutdown of all non-governmental institutions, but the Pushkin House was spared and put under the umbrella of the Russian Academy of Sciences (in 1918). Such "honorary" directors as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lev Kamenev and Maksim Gorky ensured its safe passage through the hardships of the Revolution.

This entailed the extension of its scope to encompass all Russian classical writers of the 19th century. In 1920 the Pushkin House was renamed the Institute of New Russian Literature to reflect its new purpose. Its main object was to prepare highly authoritative "academic" editions of works by Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and other luminaries of the previous century.

In 1927 Pushkin House moved from the crammed rooms in the Academy of Sciences building to the magnificent neo-Palladian Customs House, built after Giovanni Francesco Lucchini's designs in 1829-32 and situated just around the Strelka. It was to the original Kunstkamera rooms that Alexander Blok referred in his last poem To Pushkin House, celebrating Pushkin's heritage as a gleam of hope during the chaos and confusion of the post-revolutionary years:

The Pushkin House remained open during the gruesome Siege of Leningrad, although most of the staff and manuscripts were evacuated to other cities. Following the war the institute continued as a prominent academic centre for Russian literature, employing such leading scholars as Boris Eikhenbaum and Dmitry Likhachov.