"Smith’s thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin’s life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin’s astonishing legacy" – Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University
"Smith’s innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry… It views Pushkin as a ‘référence obligée’ of contemporary urban poetry" – Véronique Lossky, Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature, Université de Paris-Sorbonne IV