#21 - JRL 8036
Washington Profile interview
www.washprofile.org
Preserving the Pushkin Heritage
An Interview with Kenneth Pushkin of the Pushkin Fund.

Kenneth Pushkin, a [relative of] A.S. Pushkin, is President of the Pushkin Fund, created to promote the poet’s heritage. He is also an art historian specializing in Eskimo antiques and Russian art. He spent several years living with Eskimos in Alaska and Siberia.

Q: Did you always know that you were [related to] Pushkin? How did you come into the family?

Oh, we realized it. When I was born, Stalin was still alive. My family left Russia with a lot of pain and horror ­ the ones who remained died. By the time I was born, it was absolutely not possible to have anything to do with Russia in America. It was a very dark age. That’s why my parents named me Kenneth ­ they wanted me to be American. There was such strong propaganda against Russian in the 1950s and 60s, that anything to do with Russia was bad ­ they were the big monsters that were going to come in and kill us. It was a source of schoolyard fights. I could not escape the name Pushkin. We knew who we were, and we knew we had some relation to the family, and I was always interested in it, and as soon as the wall came down, I went to Russia ­ in March 1992.

In the deep arctic winter I traveled from Alaska to Chukotka. Because I was a scholar, I spent a good deal of my life in Eskimo antiquities. I spent many years up in the northwest coast of Alaska, and had gone illegally along the eastern coast of Siberia, hunting walrus with Eskimos. So as soon as they opened it, I was on the second flight to Siberia. That was my first trip to Russia. It was cold, and I was stranded for a month, because there were no flights back once I got into Chukotka. Finally the weather got better, but the runway was too soft, because it was made of gravel and mud. So week after I week I traveled in vezdekhods across the tundra and the mountain ranges all over Chukotka, going to the remote Eskimo villages, where I met with them and looked at their cultural artifacts. I learned their language ­ and it’s true that they have fifty different words for snow, because their life depends on the different character of the snow. And it’s true that Eskimo women rub noses ­ the nose is a very sexual, sensual organ, it has lots of nerve endings. So, I learned a lot from the Eskimos.

Q: How did you become interested in Eskimo culture?

In 1974, my mother died. I just took the little bit of money I had after college and went on a soul-searching quest. I went to the most remote part of Alaska, because it was intriguing to me. And I became immersed in Eskimo culture, collecting Eskimo antiquities, and earning a very nice living by selling my collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other places.

Q: And then how did you go from Eskimos to Pushkin, which seem completely unrelated?

Well, when they opened the borders, I was immediately captivated with the possibility of returning to Russia. I went to Chukotka twice. While I was there, I met Russian ethnographers, and one of them was a famous ethnographer from Moscow ­ Misha Bronstein from the Orient Museum. He invited me to come see their collection in Moscow. As I was leaving for Moscow from America, someone who knew I was going asked me to deliver a package ­ a lady named Countess Rita Ludsdorf ­ a ballet outfit of a child. As it turned out, the outfit was for a granddaughter of Admiral Pushkin. It was too unbelievable, but it was true.

I went to Moscow and called Admiral Pushkin. He came to the flat where I was staying, knocked on the door and came in. He had dressed up for the occasion ­ he was wearing his admiral’s outfit. He looked at me up and down with a very serious, flat face, for about thirty seconds, which seemed like forever. Then he broke into a big smile and said “Ah, you’re a Pushkin!” He came up and lifted me off my feet and started carrying me around the room. Then we drank vodka and looked at all his pictures. Basically he adopted me into the circle of the Pushkin family, and identified me in the family tree. I’m not a direct descendant of the poet, but I’m from the same family tree. And that’s how I got into recognizing my Pushkinness.

Q: What does your organization do?

The Pushkin Fund is a non-profit charitable corporation started in 1997 with Stanford University. Over the past few years, we have worked on supporting Russian Pushkin heritage projects. The mission of the fund is to promote the legacy of the great poet ­ his life, his work, and to disseminate it around the world as Russia’s greatest export, and to raise money to support Pushkin museums, publications, translations, and restorations. We promote international good will under the banner of Pushkin ­ that’s our mission. That is a big mission, and it encompasses many things ­ galas, balls, get-togethers, fund-raising events and so on.

Our offices are in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we also have the Pushkin gallery. My background is in art ­ I’m an art historian. I started going to Russia in 1992 ­ in 1995 I was able to acquire some Soviet-era paintings, an opportunity I jumped into whole-heartedly. Based on that, I then opened a gallery on the famous Canyon Road, known as Gallery Road in Santa Fe. We sell Russian art ­ not expatriates, but Soviet-era painters, most of whom are now dead.

But I would like us to become a harbinger of good will, to transcend my life after I die. I’d like it to preserve the integrity of the family name, for my children and for posterity and for humanity, and to disseminate Pushkin’s work and promote humanitarian values.

Specifically, what we would like to do next is to create the International Pushkin Cultural Center in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as a very tangible large-scale concrete project. That will be something that will take 5 to 10 years to do. For me it’s a life’s work now.

Q: What is you view on the state of culture in Russia?

My qualifications to answer that question are limited, since I was not born in Russia. But I think contemporary culture in Russia is re-emerging. Culture suffered greatly in the Soviet era, in my opinion. I know there were poets and writers and composers who were persecuted, and out of their struggle and their tortured state they produced some great stuff. Bit it was suppressed, but now it’s re-emerging. I don’t see any particular school of thought ­ it’s very eclectic, there’s lots of different kinds of artists and writers. But it’s growing ­ popular music in Russia, for instance, which is growing, is one area that is very interesting to me ­ I like it very much. I’m not talking about bubble-gum pop like Tatu ­ there’s more meaningful Russian pop music. I like groups like Mark Schneider Kunst, and these obscure pop groups, and I’m following them because I’m a songwriter myself.

Also, I think the Russian education system had been badly hurt since the demise of Communism, and young children aren’t getting the kind of education that the previous generation had, and as a result, they are not being acquainted with the most important aspects of Russian culture, including Pushkin. So part of our mission in Russia is to support education about Pushkin.