ABSTRACT
More than one hundred fifty years ago Pushkin sketched the bright future awaiting Russia but hinted that it might take five hundred years to accomplish. After Tatanya had been jilted by Eugene Onegin, she and her family rode by horse-drawn sleigh from their country estate to Moscow. Contrasting Russia’s future with its early nineteenth-century reality, Pushkin exclaimed: When we expand further our frontiers to beneficent enlightenment, In time (calculated by philosophic tables about five hundred years), Our roads will surely change beyond measure: Paved high ways uniting Russia will in tersect at this point and that. Iron bridges will stride forward across waters in a wide arc. We shall part mountains, under water dig daring tunnels, And the christened world will establish a tavern at each station along the road. For now our roads are bad; forgotten bridges decay. A t road stations the bedbugs and fleas don’t stop biting for a minute. No taverns. In a cold log hut pompous but meager, there hangs a price-list for show, tempting the appetite in vain, While the rural Cyclopes repairs with a Russian hammer the light carriage made in Europe, Blessing the ruts and ditches of the native land. 1
