A Twofold Gift: Extraneous Words as Pushkin's Own, His Own Words as Extraneous

Alexander Pushkin had a unique gift of seeing himself in the extraneous and the extraneous in himself. With equal enthusiasm, he would create his own version of a commonly known fact or incorporate the highest human achievements into his creativity, enriching them with the flavor of his own worldview. Translations, imitations, interpretations are the samples of "proteismus", "transmutations", while the poet's original works represent the "second aspect" of the same gift. Still, in "his own" we always see the "extraneous", something that had already existed in the culture, yet was endowed by Pushkin with a new, more vivid color.