Annually on June 6, in the birthday of the great Russian poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, in Russia we celebrate Pushkin’s Day and the International Festival of the Russian Language is celebrated all over the world. This holiday is dedicated to the work of the great poet.
…My soul of cherished singing…
You will be first love in a youthful breast:
In Russia’s heart eternally dear!..
And here it is again on June 6th. All of us: students, teachers, engineers, designers, philologists and mathematicians know this name and know his poems since childhood:
On seashore far a green oak towers,
And to it with a gold chain bound,
A learned cat whiles away the hours
By walking slowly round and round…
And having become a little older, already at school, we read by heart:
Storm has set the heavens scowling,
Whirling gusty blizzards wild,
Now they are like beasts a-growling,
Now a-wailing like a child…
Or this:
I write to you - no more confession
Is needed, nothing's left to tell…
And every autumn this lines comes to mind by themselves:
Skies breathed autumn air out,
By then the sun did not abound,
Time of a day was getting short,
The fogs to meadows were brought,
The secret canopy of boughs
Was stripped bare with sad sighs…
And almost every winter, in our “famous” Leningrad-Petersburg climate we remember:
That year the season was belated
And autumn lingered, long and slow;
Expecting winter, nature waited –
Only in January the snow,
Night of the second, started flaking…
But first of all, we who were born, or live, or only students in this city remember the immortal lines:
I love thee, city of peter's making
I love thy harmonies austere
And Neva's Sovran waters breaking
Along the banks of granite sheer
…ĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦĦ
And when I write within my room
Or Lampless, read - then, sunk, in slumber
The empty thoroughfares, past number
Are piled, stand clear upon the night
The admiralty spire is brigh
We all remember, that on the 150th anniversary of the poet's death, in 1987, at the Commandant's airfield, which had just begun to be built up, the wonderful Russian actor Mikhail Kozakov read his poems at the site of the fatal duel, and the crowd gathered, froze, listened, and many had tears in their eyes…
And every year, on February 10, the day of Pushkin's death, on the 12, Moika River embankment, in the courtyard of the house where his last apartment was, poets and ordinary people gather to remember and to hear his poems again…
But today is his birthday, a bright, "moonless" June, and we turn to his poems again and again:
Hail, muses! Hail, reason! In song let us praise them!
Thou, bright sun of genius, shine on!
Like this ancient lamp that grows dimmer
And fades with the coming of dawn,
So false wisdom pales at the first flash and glimmer
Of true wisdom's ne'er-fading light...
Live, radiant day! Perish, darkness and night!
Belinski wrote about Pushkin: “…Reading his creations, you can perfectly educate a person in yourself…”
Young man! if my notes fall into your hands, remember that the best and most lasting changes are those that occur from the improvement of morals, without any violent shocks. A.S.Pushkin “The Daughter of the Commandant”.
