ABSTRACT
The first edition of Alexander Pushkin in the Memoirs of His Contemporaries, an anthology of contemporary texts related to Pushkin’s biography, removed the phrase “of his well-known disease.” Veresayev’s collection Pushkin in life, omitted “covered with sores” as well, and further editions of Pushkin in the Memoirs of His Contemporaries made no mention at all of Korf’s memoir. Nicholas “condescended” to Pushkin’s level in order to point out some difficult aspects of governing the country, perhaps to divert the poet away from childish raillery and turn him towards more serious pursuits. Numerous biographers indicated that the poem had been completed on the way to Moscow, prior to his audience with the tsar. Sergey Sobolevsky, a contemporary, claimed that “‘The Prophet’ arrived in Moscow folded into Pushkin’s billfold.” Another common interpretation is that the poem was based on a biblical allusion: poets, like prophets of the distant past, are destined to become messianic figures and augurs of societal change.
