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.