‘Gift in Vain, Gift of Chance’: how Pushkin responded to Philaret

The poetic dialogue between Pushkin and Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, began with ‘Gift in Vain, Gift of Chance…’, written on 26 May 1828, continued with Philaret’s response after its publication, and concluded with Pushkin’s ‘In Hours of Amusement or Idle Boredom…’ in January 1830. The central shift is evident in the words themselves: a question about the pointlessness of life becomes a reflection on personal responsibility, while the final poem takes the form of an address of gratitude. This sequence demonstrates the power of a literary response, but does not in itself establish a definitive change in the poet’s convictions.

How did the discussion of the ‘gift in vain’ begin?

Pushkin’s 1828 poem raises the question of life’s meaning without offering a ready answer. Dated 26 May, the poet’s birthday according to the Old Style calendar, it consists of three quatrains. It speaks of a ‘gift in vain, gift of chance’, a ‘hostile power’, an empty heart and an idle mind. The final line conveys a sense of life’s burdensome repetition.

The second stanza brings together passion and doubt; the third turns them into a state of inaction. ‘There is no goal before me’ directly expresses the speaker’s inner impasse. The text provides no basis for either a medical diagnosis of the author or a comprehensive account of his religious beliefs: those would require other evidence, while the poem retains the artistic form of a question. Pushkin’s text in the Russian Virtual Library allows readers to check the exact wording and the date given by the author.

What is known about the title and manuscript

The scholarly commentary to the third volume of Pushkin’s complete works adds an important detail: in a list of works the poet compiled in late May–early June 1828, the poem later known as ‘Gift in Vain…’ is listed as ‘On My Birthday’. In a later list, prepared no later than September 1831, it appears under its opening words. The date of 26 May therefore has documentary significance: it is not an arbitrary guess by a biographer, but a notation associated with Pushkin’s text.

The manuscript of the poem in Pushkin’s own hand has not survived. Commentators describe a copy, believed to be in E. M. Khitrovo’s hand, bearing an annotation by Pushkin, as well as the printed text. Without a manuscript showing the sequence of revisions, we cannot confidently reconstruct how each line was drafted. We can, however, verify the date assigned by the author, the early title and the poem’s path to publication: these are precisely the details provided in the scholarly note in the Fundamental Digital Library.

Which words defined the subject of the debate?

In the opening quatrain, Pushkin brings together two distinct reasons for doubt: life is described as ‘vain’, as though it had no purpose, and ‘a matter of chance’, as though it had no meaningful origin. General words of comfort are therefore not enough here. Both the origin of the gift and its purpose need to be explained; it is along these two lines that Filaret begins to rework the original phrase.

The grammar of Pushkin’s question matters too. The speaker addresses life as ‘you’, but leaves an unnamed ‘who’ beyond it. ‘Hostile power’ describes a force as it is experienced, rather than identifying a person. The reader is given no definitive theological framework; instead, we hear a challenge to the very nature of existence. Filaret therefore could not respond simply by pointing to the author’s low spirits — he needed to offer a different account of causes and responsibility.

The final stanza introduces the pairing of ‘heart — mind’. Emptiness of feeling and idleness of mind are not synonymous: the former concerns emotional life, the latter intellectual activity. Filaret will retain this pairing in his own closing lines, but change the qualities attributed to each. This direct verbal echo shows that we are reading a response to a specific text, rather than a conventional sermon on the benefits of faith.

‘Life’s monotonous noise’ closes the poem with an image of movement experienced as repetition with no way out. Filaret’s response ends differently: it turns to an appeal and the hope of a transformation of heart and mind. The contrast between the closing lines of these two texts of equal length reveals the direction of the debate without retelling the authors’ life stories.

Does the Book of Job help us understand Pushkin’s question?

“The Orthodox Encyclopaedia” notes echoes in “Gift in Vain…” of the third chapter of the Book of Job. The biblical sufferer curses the day of his birth and asks: “Why is light given to those who suffer?” In Pushkin’s poem, dated 26 May 1828, the question of life’s meaning becomes personal. The similarity in tone recalls a long tradition of reflection on suffering. It does not turn Pushkin’s twelve lines into an adaptation of the entire book: Job is not named in the poem, nor does the poet retell the sequence of events in the biblical narrative.

This comparison also sets limits on the interpretation of Filaret’s reply. At the beginning of the Book of Job the protagonist is described as righteous; at the end, God rebukes his friends: they had not spoken of Him as truthfully as Job had. Filaret’s repeated “I myself…” should therefore not be presented as a ready-made biblical explanation that attributes every misfortune to the sufferer’s guilt. The Metropolitan reworks a specific statement by Pushkin about passions and doubt. The difference between the two narratives allows us to assess the precision of his objection without turning it into a universal formula for human suffering.

How did the poem of 1828 reach Filaret?

Elizaveta Mikhailovna Khitrovo acted as an intermediary between Pushkin and Filaret, according to accounts compared by A. V. Kurochkin in the journal Russian Literature. She drew the Metropolitan’s attention to “Gift in Vain, Gift of Chance…” and informed the poet of the reply. The exact date on which she passed on the news is unknown: Pushkin wrote the poem on 26 May 1828, and it was published in the almanac Northern Flowers for 1830 in late December 1829.

There are limits to how precisely this episode can be dated. Some chronologies place Filaret’s first encounter with the poem earlier, before its publication. Kurochkin shows that this dating is difficult to reconcile with the subsequent silence of the sources and Pushkin’s letter to Khitrovo. The sequence “publication in late 1829 — a reply around the turn of the year — Pushkin’s response in January 1830” seems more convincing. This is the scholar’s argument, rather than a surviving record of the day on which the Metropolitan picked up the almanac.

Pyotr Bartenev’s recollection, quoted by Kurochkin, credits Filaret himself with confirming Khitrovo’s role as an intermediary. But this later account cannot take the place of a dated letter, nor does it establish exactly where each participant first read the other’s text. The article in Russian Literature is valuable because it compares the accounts rather than weaving them into an unquestioned legend.

What the publication chronology can establish

The scholarly commentary allows the history to be traced through verifiable evidence. The first publication of Pushkin's poem is dated 1829 and appears in an almanac for 1830. According to the dates accompanying its publication, the poet's reply to Filaret dates to 19 January 1830; it first appeared in issue No. 12 of Literaturnaya Gazeta. The scholarly commentary and the study by M. N. Virolainen date the issue's publication to 25 February, while A. V. Kurochkin gives 15 February. The former date is adopted here, as it is supported by two independent studies. Between the original poem and ‘Stanzas’ comes the metropolitan's reworking, known from manuscript copies and a later publication. The precise date of its composition cannot automatically be equated with the publication date of Pushkin's reply.

The January letter to Khitrovo and the timing of the composition of ‘Stanzas’ establish the sequence of events more reliably than the story that ‘the poet saw the verses and immediately turned to faith’. The letter confirms an invitation to read the unexpected reply; the poem's date marks the point at which Pushkin was working on it. These two pieces of evidence do not reveal how many times Filaret's text was copied or how long Pushkin reflected on it. This gap does not prevent us from understanding the sequence, provided we do not fill it with an invented scene of a conversation in person.

In 1832, Pushkin included both of his own poems, ‘Vain Gift…’ and ‘In Hours of Amusement…’, in the third part of his Poems. The scholarly edition records the first on pages 194–195 and the second on pages 47–48, in different sections of the volume. The preservation of both is significant: the reply to Filaret was not accompanied by the destruction or removal of the original question. Pushkin left the reader both positions, separated by time and a new experience of writing.

What exactly did Filaret change in Pushkin’s lines?

Filaret reworked Pushkin's poem. He retained the opening formula and the progression of the three stanzas, but reversed the meaning: ‘Not in vain, not by chance…’. In place of an undefined ‘hostile power’, a speaker emerges who declares, ‘I myself…’. In the final stanza, a pure heart and a clear mind are proposed in place of an empty heart and an idle mind. The rebuttal works within the recognisable form of the original text.

The opening of the reply survives in different versions. A widely circulated version reads ‘Life was given to me by God’; Kurochkin quotes a variant that scholars consider closer to the original manuscript copy: ‘Life was given to me by fate’, followed by ‘Not without justice, secretly by fate / Condemned to sorrow’. The entire analysis therefore cannot rest on one familiar line, as though there were indisputably only one text by Filaret. Both versions reject chance, but name the source of meaning differently; the variant quoted by Kurochkin also contains a religious appeal at the end.

The closing appeal, ‘Return to my memory, you whom I have forgotten!’, changes the tone of the reply. The reworking ceases to be merely an accusation against the poet and becomes a plea for the return of the one the speaker has forgotten. In this way, Filaret combines human responsibility with hope for help from above. The textual variants in the first quatrain do not alter this progression, though they call for care when quoting.

Why did Filaret speak in Pushkin’s own voice?

Filaret chose a form in which the lyric ‘I’ appears to correct its own earlier assertions. A. V. Kurochkin gives the title of the reworking as ‘Pushkin, Having Turned from Reverie to Reflection’. The title itself invites the reader to imagine a different reply from the same speaker: yesterday he called life a matter of chance; now he must recognise its meaning and his own share of responsibility. This wording signals a literary device: the actual author of the original lines did not put his name to it.

According to a retelling of N. V. Sushkov’s recollections, Filaret described his work as ‘a reworking of Pushkin’s poem’. This description is more accurate than the later view of it as an abstract theological debate. By preserving the metre and the sequence of the original motifs, he makes his rejoinder recognisable from its opening words. Filaret does not write a separate sermon quoting the poet; he takes the trouble to enter into the artistic structure of another’s question.

The second stanza is particularly revealing because of the repeated use of ‘I myself’. Pushkin asked about the ‘hostile power’ that troubled the mind and filled the soul with passion; Filaret locates the source of evil within the speaker, repeating the words ‘soul’, ‘passion’, ‘mind’ and ‘doubt’. This changes the explanation for the origins of the pain expressed in the original poem. Filaret’s response cannot be read as a simple denial of suffering: his version retains the reference to sorrow but offers a different account of its cause.

The third stanza does not conclude this progression with a command to mend one’s ways through one’s own efforts. The plea ‘Return to my memory’ means that the speaker acknowledges having forgotten and addresses the one he has lost sight of. Combined with the repeated ‘I myself’, this creates a tension between personal responsibility and the need for help. It is this tension that Pushkin will have to accept, challenge or reinterpret in his own reply.

Where does the ‘pure heart’ in Filaret’s closing lines come from?

The final lines of the reworking draw on the biblical language of prayer. In Psalm 50, the speaker asks God to create a pure heart within him; Filaret writes, ‘And by you shall be created / A pure heart, a clear mind’. A comparison with the text of the psalm explains why the third stanza does not break off after the admission ‘I myself’. The speaker takes responsibility for his actions, but links spiritual renewal to the one he addresses. Filaret retains Pushkin’s pairing of ‘heart — mind’ and introduces into it the act of prayer.

The biblical echo also clarifies the first textual variation in the reply. Whether the opening reads ‘by fate’ or ‘from God’, the final ‘by you’ identifies the recipient of the plea within the poem itself. The variant in the first stanza nevertheless matters: naming the giver of life at the outset is one thing; leading the speaker to address that giver through an acknowledgement of his own actions is another. The sequence of the utterance changes, although the religious meaning of the ending remains.

Why does the letter to Khitrovo complicate the simple story of a ‘conversion’?

Pushkin’s letter to Khitrovo from the first half of January 1830 proves that the poet learnt of Filaret’s reply before writing his own ‘Stanzas’. Writing in French, he says that he cannot visit that day, although curiosity about the news is already drawing him there: he calls the bishop’s verses in response to his ‘sceptical couplets’ a great stroke of good fortune. The Russian Virtual Library publishes both the original letter and a translation.

These words can be read as expressing polite social surprise and perhaps irony. The letter records a reaction to the unusual fact of a reply from a senior church figure, but does not reveal the full impression the text made once read. It contains no admission that Pushkin had already come to agree with Filaret. Nor is there any basis for claiming that the poet’s subsequent reply was merely mockery: shortly afterwards, he chose the serious form of an address in verse and later published it.

These two pieces of evidence show why this biographical episode cannot be reduced to a single tone. Pushkin as Khitrovo’s correspondent, Pushkin as the author of a public lyric reply, and the lyric speaker within that reply are closely related but distinct figures. The letter to Khitrovo should be read alongside the poems, rather than in their place.

What did contemporaries call the exchange of poems?

In a letter to Alexander Turgenev dated 25 April 1830, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky wrote that Filaret had ‘parodied or, rather, palinodised’ Pushkin’s verses on life. “The Orthodox Encyclopaedia” cites this comment and compares it with Bartenev’s account. Here, ‘palinode’ means a retraction in verse of an earlier statement: this is precisely the kind of speech the author of the reworking placed in the mouth of an imagined speaker. This definition describes the literary device, but does not establish that the historical Pushkin accepted every proposition it contained.

Vyazemsky portrayed the poet as someone who had been stung by the metropolitan’s verses. Pushkin’s own January letter to Khitrovo records his curiosity about the unexpected response; this was followed by the verse epistle dated 19 January and its publication in February. These documents do not allow the author’s reaction to be reduced to a single verb describing a psychological state. They show how a private literary episode became a public exchange of texts that contemporaries were already trying to interpret.

How did Pushkin respond to the metropolitan’s voice?

In ‘In Hours of Amusement or Idle Boredom…’, Pushkin shifted the focus of his address. In the 1828 text, the speaker questioned the origins of his own life and faced his doubts alone. In the 1830 poem, a ‘you’ appears: the addressee extends a hand ‘from spiritual heights’, his voice interrupts the sound of the poet’s lyre, and his words soothe the ‘wounds of conscience’. This is now an expression of gratitude for words addressed to him personally.

Filaret repeated ‘I myself’ to make the individual complicit in his own error. Rather than repeating the self-reproach, Pushkin chooses images of an encounter: a voice, a hand, speech, fire. This shift does not resolve the question of life’s meaning through logical proof. It shows that, in dialogue with another person, the author found a language for a different emotional and moral response.

The closing lines, ‘And the poet listens to the seraph’s harp / In sacred awe’, portray the addressee in exalted poetic imagery. Filaret is not named in the poem; the connection is established by the circumstances of its composition and scholarly commentary. T. G. Tsyavlovskaya explicitly identifies ‘In Hours of Amusement…’ as a response to the metropolitan’s moralising objection. The text of ‘In Hours of Amusement…’ And Tsyavlovskaya’s commentary make it possible to distinguish the poet’s words from the historical explanation.

How time and direct address work in ‘Stanzas’

In the first two quatrains, Pushkin uses the past tense: ‘used to’ indicates the habitual activity of his own lyre, while ‘would interrupt’ conveys the recurring effect of the voice of the person he addresses. ‘And now’ in the fourth stanza places the new response alongside earlier experiences of listening. If we take the poem’s sequence literally, January 1830 was not the first time the Metropolitan had influenced the speaker. Yet the poem provides no chronology of these earlier encounters with his sermons.

In Pushkin’s poem, the two instruments play different roles. His lyre is initially associated with madness, idleness and passion; the harp at the end belongs to the exalted figure of the person he addresses. Between them comes the ‘majestic voice’, which the poet first interrupts, then listens to. This can be traced through the nouns and verbs of the poem itself, without assuming that Filaret gave a particular address on a particular day.

The familiar form of address, ‘you’, makes the response personal, but does not imply that the two are equal in status. Pushkin emphasises the addressee’s ‘spiritual height’ while also showing him reaching out: he extends his hand. The stanza’s meaning lies in the action, as well as in the title. What matters to the listener is that the churchman did not remain a distant critic of another’s verse, but entered its world with a poem of his own.

The final word, ‘poet’, returns the speaker to his craft. Filaret had offered him a new form of reflection; Pushkin responds with a work that does not abandon poetry for moral instruction. His recognition of the conversation’s moral seriousness is expressed in distinctly poetic terms: through shifts in voice, tense and imagery, rather than a restatement of another’s religious doctrine. Thus ‘Stanzas’ says more about the power of words offered in response than about a fully formed system of beliefs.

Was ‘Filaret’s harp’ in the closing lines?

In the version published during his lifetime, Pushkin wrote ‘to the seraph’s harp’. A later account by M. D. Delarue, relayed by G. S. Chirikov, refers to a supposed early version that named Filaret explicitly. “The Orthodox Encyclopaedia” explicitly states that the account is unsubstantiated. The same entry notes a second supposed difference: ‘the soul is warmed’ rather than the published ‘the soul is aflame’. Treating these two lines as an authenticated draft by Pushkin would be an error in textual scholarship.

The scholarly note provides a different, reliable basis: the text of ‘In Hours of Amusement…’ appeared in the 1832 collection unchanged from its publication in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Any analysis of the artistic choice should therefore use the published wording, ‘the seraph’s harp’. The possible early version is significant as evidence of how readers later interpreted the identity of the addressee, but it cannot be set against the author’s chosen printed wording as an equally valid final text.

Why do anointing oil, fire and ‘sacred dread’ appear together in a single reply?

The three images describe different effects of the spoken word on the listener. ‘Anointing oil’ in the lines about the wounds of conscience evokes relief and healing; ‘fire’ conveys the power of transformation; ‘sacred awe’ at the close marks a profound response to spiritual authority. Pushkin leads the speaker from consolation through inner tension to reverent listening.

In his study ‘Listening to the Seraph’s Harp’, the scholar A. A. Bely compares these motifs with Filaret’s sermons. For example, one of the metropolitan’s sermons features the image of oil used to heal wounds, while another evokes wonder verging on terror. Reading these passages alongside Pushkin’s response helps illuminate its language, but the shared motifs do not in themselves prove that the poet borrowed each metaphor from a particular sermon. Bely explores the possibility of a connection and acknowledges the limits of what can be proved.

The ending also has a distinctly literary meaning. The ‘seraph’s harp’ elevates the metropolitan’s response into a sound to which the poet listens attentively; the verb ‘heeds’ conveys active listening rather than the automatic repetition of what has been heard. This allows the ending to be read as an acknowledgement of the power of another’s words without necessarily treating the poem as a formal profession of faith. Bely’s study within the project run by the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences offers a broader interpretation of the religious context; it is not a record of Pushkin’s inner experience.

How does comparison with Pushkin’s other poems change our understanding?

Alongside ‘A Gift in Vain…’, it is useful to read ‘Remembrance’, dated 19 May 1828 in the scholarly commentary, meaning it was written a week before the birthday poem. Here too, sleeplessness, troubled thoughts and moral self-judgement are at work; the speaker weeps as he rereads his own life. These shared motifs show that the ‘wounds of conscience’ and tears in the reply to Filaret did not emerge from nowhere in 1830. Pushkin had already mastered this language before the metropolitan’s intervention in verse.

The speaker’s position differs. In ‘Remembrance’, he contemplates the scroll of the past unfolding before him and cannot erase its sorrowful lines. In ‘A Gift in Vain…’, the source of suffering broadens into a question about life itself. In ‘In Hours of Amusement…’, an interlocutor appears whose words ease his conscience. Comparing the three poems reveals a change in the addressee and manner of speaking; it does not make them a trilogy planned in advance by the poet.

Another closely related text is ‘The Prophet’ of 1826. In it, a six-winged seraph transforms a human being, and the final call commands him to ‘heed’. This image, fire and listening recur in the 1830 reply to Filaret. These words allow the reader to hear a connection within Pushkin’s poetry before looking for it solely in church sermons. Yet the shared image does not make the metropolitan the literal protagonist of ‘The Prophet’, nor does it prove that Pushkin was preparing his reply in verse in advance.

The later ‘Elegy’, dated 8 September 1830 in the scholarly commentary, brings life, thought and suffering together differently: its speaker wants to live, although he expects toil and sorrow. This marks a striking difference from ‘There Is No Goal Before Me’ of 1828, but attributing it solely to an encounter with Filaret’s verses would be an overstatement. Two years separate the texts, during which both the circumstances and the purposes of the lyric utterance changed. The text of ‘Elegy’ reveals a new formulation of life without inventing a causal link.

Can Pushkin’s reply be considered a renunciation of his 1828 poem?

The texts suggest a shift in poetic stance within this particular exchange, but provide no grounds for declaring ‘A Gift in Vain…’ repudiated for ever. Pushkin accepted Filaret’s challenge and wrote a reply acknowledging the influence of his words. The fact that this dialogue took place, however, does not mean that questions of suffering, doubt and the meaning of life never returned to the poet.

Pushkin’s decision to make the poem public also matters. He did not confine ‘In Hours of Amusement…’ to private correspondence: the poem appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta in February 1830 under the title ‘Stanzas’ and was later included in his collected poems. Its publication undermines the suggestion that the poet replied purely out of drawing-room politeness. Yet publication alone does not turn a literary gesture into proof that his spiritual journey was complete.

Kurochkin’s analysis shows that even the evidence concerning when Filaret’s reply appeared needs to be compared and assessed. Bely, in turn, proposes reading Pushkin’s imagery through the language of sermons. Both approaches are useful, provided the distinction between established facts and interpretations is maintained: the letter, the texts and the publication can be verified; the extent of Pushkin’s personal agreement with each of the metropolitan’s assertions remains a matter of interpretation.

What traces of the dialogue remained after the publication of ‘Stanzas’?

Following the exchange of poems, Khitrovo, according to the ‘Orthodox Encyclopaedia’, wrote to Pushkin again on 20 March 1830 at Filaret’s request. The part of the letter concerning the news conveyed has been lost; its contents cannot be reconstructed with confidence. The document is significant in a more limited sense: Khitrovo continued to act as an intermediary after the publication of ‘Stanzas’, so the January exchange was not the last recorded contact between the participants.

Pushkin later also offered his own public assessment of the Metropolitan’s oratory. In his 1836 Sovremennik review of the collected works of Georgy Konissky he compared two ceremonial speeches and preferred Filaret’s simplicity to more elaborate rhetoric. One of the speeches he compared was a welcoming address delivered by Filaret in Moscow in late 1830, rather than the verse response to ‘Gift in Vain…’. This attests to Pushkin’s sustained interest in Filaret’s eloquence, but it does not retrospectively explain the poet’s state of mind in January 1830.

Which documents allow us to verify this story?

The first level consists of the works themselves, as published during the authors’ lifetimes and in scholarly editions. These confirm the wording, the sequence of motifs and the dating of Pushkin’s ‘Stanzas’. Of particular importance for the original text is the note on the lost authorial manuscript and the surviving copy. The absence of a manuscript in the poet’s own hand limits what can be said about how he revised a particular line before publication.

The second level is the letter to Khitrovo from the first half of January 1830. It preserves Pushkin’s own words, but only about his anticipation of reading the Metropolitan’s reply and the unexpected nature of this literary situation. The third level consists of the recollections of Bartenev and Sushkov, recorded considerably later. They are valuable for tracing how Filaret’s text was passed on and who acted as intermediaries, but they need to be checked against contemporary letters and publications.

Finally, scholarly commentaries help clarify the discrepancies. Kurochkin compares proposed dates for Filaret’s first encounter with ‘Gift…’ and variant versions of his poem; Tsyavlovskaya identifies the addressee of Pushkin’s reply; Bely proposes reading the imagery of ‘Stanzas’ against the background of Filaret’s sermons. These studies address different questions. Their conclusions need to be read alongside the letter and the published texts to avoid attributing a scholarly hypothesis to Pushkin himself.

What is the main difference between the three poems?

The difference lies above all in how the voices are assigned. In 1828, Pushkin asks why life has been given to him seemingly by chance and for suffering. Filaret retains the question form, but makes the speaker acknowledge his own part in his inner turmoil and ask for help. In 1830, Pushkin no longer seeks to resolve the dispute through the same chain of reasoning: he shows that another person’s words have been heard and have changed the way he speaks about himself.

This sequence explains why the third poem cannot be taken out of context. Without the first, the question loses its force; without the second, it is unclear what prompted the gratitude; without Khitrovo’s letter and the publication history, it is easy to imagine a face-to-face meeting between the two authors or an instant change in all their convictions. The documents confirm her role as an intermediary in this exchange of poems conducted at a distance. They provide no evidence that the poet met the metropolitan specifically to discuss these poems.

Published on 9 February 2025, the bureau’s report describes a school project about Pushkin and Filaret: at the request of a participant’s mother, the route was shortened, and the discussion concluded at the Church of the Great Ascension. The ‘Alexander Sergeyevich’s Moscow’ tour takes visitors through places associated with Pushkin in central Moscow to his memorial flat on Arbat Street. According to the State Museum, the poet lived there after his wedding in 1831; there is no evidence linking this address to the writing of the poems or a meeting with the metropolitan.

Sources

1. A. S. Pushkin. ‘A gift in vain, a gift by chance…’ — Russian Virtual Library
2. A. S. Pushkin. ‘In hours of merriment or idle boredom…’ — Russian Virtual Library
3. T. G. Tsyavlovskaya. Commentary on ‘In hours of merriment or idle boredom…’
4. A. S. Pushkin. Letter to E. M. Khitrovo, first half of January 1830
5. A. V. Kurochkin. ‘Previously Unknown Views of Pushkin by Members of the Clergy’ — Russian Literature, 2017, No. 1
6. A. A. Bely. ‘Listening to the Seraph’s Harp’: Pushkin’s Dialogue with Filaret — Institute of World Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences
7. ‘The Poetic Dialogue between Pushkin and St Filaret’ — Pravmir
8. A. S. Pushkin Memorial Apartment on the Arbat — A. S. Pushkin State Museum
9. Scholarly Notes to Volume Three of the Complete Works of A. S. Pushkin — Fundamental Digital Library
10. A. S. Pushkin. ‘Remembrance’ — Russian Virtual Library
11. A. S. Pushkin. ‘The Prophet’ — Russian Virtual Library
12. A. S. Pushkin. ‘Elegy’ — Russian Virtual Library
13. ‘Little explorers on the path of Pushkin’ — a report published by Radius Tour Bureau, 9 February 2025
14. ‘Alexander Sergeyevich’s Moscow’ tour — Radius Tour Bureau
15. Orthodox Encyclopaedia. Pushkin: a dialogue in verse with Metropolitan Philaret
16. The Book of Job, Chapter 1. Russian Synodal Translation
17. The Book of Job, Chapter 3. Russian Synodal Translation
18. The Book of Job 42:7. Russian Synodal Translation
19. Psalm 50:12. Russian Synodal Translation
20. A. S. Pushkin. On the Collected Works of Georgy Konissky, ‘Sovremennik’, 1836
21. M. N. Virolainen. ‘Pushkin’s Titles as a Problem in Textual Criticism’ — Annals of the Pushkin Commission, 2026