Lermontov as the "Russian Mozart"?

[Peter Scotto]

>From the program notes to yestersday's performance of "Mozart and Salieri"  by
the American Symphony Orchestra in New York:

"Pushkin himself, not unlike many of the greatest artists and writers, was
profoundly self-critical. In Mozart and Salieri, the tension between the two
figures has an autobiographical dimension. One might assume that Pushkin
represented the Mozart of Russian letters. -->But Pushkin thought his
contemporary, the romantic poet Mihail Yurievich Lermontov (1814-1841; author of
the seminal novel A Hero of Our Times) was actually the true Mozart of
poetry.<-- It was Salieri, the hardworking, politic also-ran, deprived of the
spontaneous genius of a Mozart, with whom Pushkin identified."

Anyone know where Pushkin expressed the opinion attributed to him above?

Peter Scotto
Mount Holyoke College
pscotto at mtholyoke.edu


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