Title

Abstract

The article examines the tradition, among first-wave Russian émigrés of celebrating the Day of Russian Culture each year as a national holiday on A. S. Pushkin’s birthday. Many publications devoted to the Day of Russian Culture stressed that the spiritual life of the emigration was inconceivable without Pushkin, who had become a symbol of Russian culture. It was through Pushkin that the émigrés recognized the value of their cultural heritage, and in Pushkin that they found a foothold for their entry into Europe. The image of Pushkin was equally close to most émigrés regardless of their political and religious views, as was the idea of the Day of Russian Culture, which drew support across the most varied socio-political strata of the Russian emigration, including churchmen. From the late 1920s, émigrés began to include in the program of the Days of Russian Culture events devoted to the memory not only of Pushkin but also of other Russian writers, composers and scholars whose anniversaries fell in a given year. Some anniversaries and commemorative dates became points of cultural contact between the emigration and the homeland: thus the centenary of A. S. Pushkin’s death was marked both in the USSR and in Russia Abroad.