Pushkin fandom

[igenlode]

I'd forgotten I used to have such a passion for Pushkin. All the symptoms of teenage fandom, with hindsight: I was hankering after Collected Editions, translating poems, failing to write essays because I was busy reading in Russian(!), reading historical novels and literary critiques about him and bringing his work into all sorts of unrelated conversations, and feeling immense excitement when someone else in England had actually heard of him. Exactly the way people behave over mangas or superheroes nowadays.

Funny how all that enthusiasm can simply be wiped away or redirected. I mean, I understand how it happened, but it seems in hindsight like somebody else's parallel life -- the person I might have been. The person I was probably intended to be.

Comments

[erimia]

I used to feel this way about Oscar Wilde and then Federico Garcia Lorca (and, to the lesser extent, Mikis Theodorakis) and still kinda feel this way about Howard Lovecraft. I was doing this way before I got into actual fandoms. :D It was the toughest with Wilde because I didn't have internet then and no one in my class even liked reading.

I wouldn't be suprised if the actual Pushkin fandom is a thing (like, you know, with fanfics on ficbook.net and all). There definitely is the classic literature fandom of this kind in the Russian part of the Internet, and, from my experience, RPF with historical figures is more common there than in English-speaking fandom too.

I used to consider Pushkin too simplistic but he definitely grew on me with time. Still, I rarely read our authors and not very interested in poetry in general, so I didn't read much of him. :( I really enjoyed Eugene Onegin, though.

[igenlode]

A quick check suggests that there are "Eugene Onegin" fics on AO3 at least (a lot of Lensky/Onegin slash, plus the odd fix-it), plus a Pushkin/Lermonov real-person-slash fic on Livejournal :-(


I actually own a copy of Ivan Novikov's "Pushkin v izgnanii", which I was reading avidly at the point when I was limited to getting it out of the library for one week at a time -- I never did finish it and haven't looked at it in twenty-five years.

[igenlode]

I wouldn't be suprised if the actual Pushkin fandom is a thing (like, you know, with fanfics on ficbook.net and all)

Yes, it seems there are lots (and now I know why I never heard of ficbook.net -- it's a Russian archive :-D)

They even have them for Oleg the Wise... https://ficbook.net/fanfiction/books/pushkin_aleksandr___pesnj_o_veshjem_olege

[erimia]

Ficbook fics have quite a bad reputation, but it's the largest and most well-known Russian fanfiction archieve so most fan writers upload their stories there anyway. :D And it is very big - Russian-speaking fandom is probably one of the largest fandoms in the internet.