reader falling behind

This process, Pushkin feels, can lead the poet to greater isolation even as the work becomes more insightful and accomplished:

He creates for himself, and if his works are still published from time to time, he encounters coldness or inattention, and he finds an echo of his sounds only in the hearts of a few admirers of poetry, who, like himself, are secluded and forgotten by the world.

Akhmatova takes this for a description of Pushkin as much as for a description of Baratynsky. "All of Pushkin's contemporaries enthusiastically recognized themselves in the hero of The Prisoner of the Caucasus," she writes, "but who would agree to recognize himself in Eugene from The Bronze Horseman?" While she doesn't overtly compare the drop in her literary reputation to the drop in Pushkin's, she draws a broad conclusion with her own situation clearly in mind: "Thus, it is not so much that poetry is static, as that the reader does not keep pace with the poet."

—Kevin Frazier, “A Posthumous Collaboration: Anna Akhmatova’s Relationship with Puskin,” review of My Half Century: Selected Prose (The Overlook Press; reprint edition 2012) by Anna Akhmatova (Ronald Meyer, trans.), bookslut, January 2013.

central planet

The unique domination of literature over life, and of one man over the entire consciousness and imagination of a vast nation, is a fact to which there is no precise parallel, not even in the place occupied in the consciousness of their nations by Dante or Shakespeare, Homer or Vergil or Goethe. And this extraordinary phenomenon, whatever may be thought of it, is, to a degree still unrecognized, the work of Belinsky and his disciples, who first saw in Pushkin the central planet, the source of light in whose radiance Russian thought and feeling grew so wonderfully. Pushkin himself, who was a gay, elegant, and, in his social life, an arrogant, disdainful, and whimsical man, thought this embarrassing and spoke of the angular and unfashionable Belinsky as ‘a queer character who for some extraordinary reason seems to adore me’.

—Isaiah Berlin, “Vissarion Belinsky”, Russian Thinkers (Penguin, 2008)