Strolls with Pushkin

In a playfully irreverent, esoteric portrait of Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Sinyavsky (who writes under the pseudonym Abram Tertz) spoofs the idolization of the 19th-century bard in Soviet Russia. Pushkin ``gave Russian literature a swift kick into the future,'' but retreated himself into an ``eternally flowering past,'' argues Sinyavsky ( A Voice From the Chorus ), the once exiled Russian writer who teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris. He presents Pushkin as an explorer of eros, a ``Russian Virgil'' who ``simply managed to write about everything for everyone.'' Pushkin (whose greatgrandfather Ibrahim Hannibal was said to be an Abyssinian prince's son) ``seized upon his negroid appearance and his African past'' with which he forged ``a spiritual kinship . . . in fantasy,'' asserts Sinyavsky. Written in a Soviet labor camp and first published in France in 1975, this study created a furor when an excerpt ran in a Russian journal in 1989. (Feb.)