Who was the Author of the First Book (Or Rather Booklet) on Pushkin?(Essay‪)‬

Introduction The publication of Pushkin's Boris Godunov gave rise to a heated polemic in the criticism of the time. In May 1831 one of the first negative responses to the tragedy--and an especially severe one--appeared in the form of an anonymous pamphlet, On Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov, subtitled A Conversation between a Landowner Passing from Moscow through a Provincial Town and a Private Teacher of Russian Literature, Practicing in the Same. (1) Contrary to literary custom at the time, A Conversation did not appear in the pages of a journal, but came out in a separate edition from the printing house of Moscow University and was cleared for publication by the Moscow Censorship Committee. The characters in the pamphlet--a landowner, Petr Ivanovich, and a teacher of Russian literature, Ermil Sergeevich--engage in a discussion of the merits and demerits of Pushkin's latest literary production. The provincial teacher gives a critical reading of Boris Godunov to the Moscow landowner, who agrees, for the most part, with the teacher's vitriolic remarks. The general stylistic mode of A Conversation is one of parody or pastiche. The teacher, who does most of the talking, is a bit of a caricature; his turns of phrase are often grotesquely pedantic and he is not averse to parading his Latin on occasion. The laconic and straightforward landowner is running late and is therefore obliged to rush along his grandiloquent interlocutor.