Pushkin defined the November Uprising and the Russian suppression of it as “a quarrel of Slavs among themselves.” At the center of that conflict was the Russian program of the unification of the Slavs. “Will the Slavic streams merge in the Russian sea? Will it dry up?”—that is how Pushkin formulated the main question to be resolved in the conflict between the “bumptious Pole” and the “faithful Russian.” Unlike Zhukovsky, Pushkin was not just building the empire but also defending the pan-Russian nation and creating a pan-Slavic one. For him, the Russo-Polish struggle was about the future of
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