The Pushkin Project: Russia’s Favorite Writer, Modern Evolutionary Thought, and Teaching Inner‐City Youth by DavidBethea. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2003, 206 pp. $24.95. ISBN 979‐8‐8871‐9202‐4

This book is the story of an ambitious and proudly idealistic project, the Pushkin Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a six-week residential program for high school students of Chicago-area minority communities.The program offers instructions in Russian language and culture with the focus on Pushkin.It prepares students for the demands of college life by developing critical thinking and writing skills, but its true aspiration is to recreate the atmosphere of Pushkin's Lyceum, or at least, "something approaching the Lyceum experience for today's kids in need" (p.17).The Lyceum's curriculum, based on the humanistic principles of the Enlightenment and taught by professors of talent and integrity, determined Pushkin's and his classmates' life paths.David Bethea and his team aim to provide kids from Chicago's Hermosa neighborhood with the same transformative experience.The parallel story, in the opening chapter, is the scientific grounding of the project's objectives in modern evolutionary thought because culture and biology share developmental processes and patterns.Bethea establishes similarities between a text and a cell as tightly structured autonomous units, in which the whole and its parts must interplay.Cultural and biological evolution-what deserves to survive-inform each other.Bethea considers Pushkin's texts "life lessons in light of evolutionary theory and practice" (p.134).Pushkin, thus, "is a unique artistic talent, one whose Russian/African heritage can inspire our students, but also, and no less important, he is a representative of a primate species, and species evolve" (p.128).Pushkin's works at the center of the curriculum are "The Shot, "The Station Master," The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, and "The Queen of Spades."Each excellent chapter gives a detailed background against which the stories should be read: the semiotics of the duel and of the card game, Pushkin's family history, and so on.There are close readings, and analysis of how Pushkin's language reveals the text's psychological and philosophical underpinnings.Each chapter focuses on the texts' relatability: contemporary students recognize in Pushkin's storylines the dilemmas they face in their own lives, such as the male competition and macho posturing of "The Shot," or the conflict between filial devotion and sexual attraction faced by Dunia in "The Station Master."The Blackamoor of Peter the Great is a perfect text to explore the intertwining of race, ethnicity, and group identities.This chapter provides a detailed story of Pushkin's ancestry and his family as the background for Pushkin's unfinished novel; the space between the real and the fictional is where Pushkin, and PSI students, ponder the issues of racial identity and mate choice.And, finally, reading "The Queen of Spade" prompts considerations of risk versus reward, and also of what matters more in terms of survival skills, acquiring wealth or building relationships.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.