Akhmatova’s Article Pushkin’s Last Fairy Tale: The History of Creation

The article is devoted to the history of the creation of the first Pushkin-related article by Anna Akhmatova, published in the journal Zvezda in 1933. The article examines the reasons that prompted Akhmatova to professionally study the problems of Pushkin’s work, including, among others, her forced poetic silence. The stages of Akhmatova’s study of Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel” are described in detail, and it is also mentioned who helped her in writing the study: namely, Grigory Georgievsky and Sergey Bondi advised Akhmatova on Pushkin’s manuscripts stored in Moscow, Mikhail Nikitin helped to get acquainted with the Pushkin’s protein manuscript in Leningrad, Nikolay Khardzhiev helped her to master the scientific style of writing, and Dmitry Yakubovich and Tatyana Tsyavlovskaya got her involved in the projects of the Pushkin Committee of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. The article also considers the issue of Akhmatova’s familiarization with the Pushkin’s original manuscripts. For the first time, we present Sergey Bondi’s letters to Akhmatova for 1931–1932, preserved in her personal archive at the Manuscripts department of National Library of Russia, in which he talks about Pushkin’s manuscripts and outlines the history of filling Pushkin’s notebook No. 2374. The appendix contains the Protocol of the session of the Pushkin Committee dated February 15, 1933, when Akhmatova first spoke to academic scientists, presenting them the results of her research.