Did Pushkin write that the tsar’s motto is “Steal and lie”?

In recent years, on the Internet you can find a quatrain by Pushkin, in which autocracy is sharply criticized. We checked whether Alexander Sergeevich wrote this.

On November 9, 2021, Russian opposition figure Gennady Gudkov posted on his Twitter demotivator the following content:

"Frightened by external enemies,
We are being killed from within.
But it doesn't change over the years
The king's motto is “Steal and lie.”

A. S. Pushkin, 1830.”

This quatrain, in which many see parallels with the current state of affairs in the country, has gained great popularity in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. Gudkov's tweet was shared by more than 500 people. On the social network "VKontakte» Pushkin is quoted by at least 220 users and public pages (including popular pages), on Telegram corresponding publications read by tens of thousands of users. Lines with attribution to the poet can also be found on the resources “I cried», "AyDaPrikol», Sports.ru And Lragir.am. Quote leads in one of his books, State Duma deputy of three convocations from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Ivan Nikitchuk, it can also be seen in the business magazine “Directors Club».

Similar lines cannot be found in any of Pushkin’s collected works. However, with all the depth of analysis to which literary scholars have subjected the poet’s texts over the past two centuries, there are many works that over the years have been erroneously attributed to him in a variety of authoritative publications. That's just in list The indicated quatrain is also not included in such creations. It was not possible to find it in the “gray zone” - among poems whose authorship has not been fully established, and Pushkin is one of the candidates. Not to mention the fact that, according to the promoted views, the said quatrain sharply contrasts with the poem “To the slanderers of Russia”, which Pushkin wrote the following year, 1831.

Moreover, a simple search shows that until 2020, these lines, if they existed, were not published anywhere. In July 2020 in "VK", in December of the same year in comments to the news and in January 2021 in Telegram the quatrain did not yet have an author. In September 2021, in a slightly modified form, he posted it on his website page “Poems.ru» writer writing under the pseudonym Yar Velesov. The attribution to Pushkin will appear a little later - in particular, as we see, on November 9, Gennady Gudkov, in his tweet, allegedly used an already existing demotivator. And although in some revealing articles the authorship of the lines attributed to Yar Velesov, we see that his version, not so slender, was first posted on the Internet many months later than the first cases. Well, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin certainly didn’t write anything like that.

Cover picture: I. Tomilov. Conversation between Emperor Nicholas I and A. S. Pushkin in the Miracle Monastery of the Moscow Kremlin, held in 1826.

Incorrect quote attribution

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