February 8 (which in 1837 was actually January 27) is the anniversary of Pushkin’s duel. Last February I went to St. Petersburg to participate in a few events commemorating his death, and my first stop was the famous dueling grounds.

I had heard that it was an out-of-the-way location which was no longer the romantically remote and quiet field that it was in 1837. True, now it’s a park surrounded by busy roads, railroad tracks and apartment blocks. I admit it wasn’t easy to channel the stillness and drama of Pushkin’s fatal duel. In fact, I admit that the location itself made little impact.

But of course it’s the people who often make the most impact, and a chance encounters here made the visit memorable.

While filming the monument, two workers in their uniforms emerged from the snow and quietly approached the base of the monument. Together they peeled away the paper wrapper from two red carnations. They placed their flowers on the heap of other red carnations, crossed themselves turned to us.

“I don’t suppose I need to tell you whom we’re honoring today, do I?” one joked. They were both a little tipsy, their speech a tiny bit slurred and their eyes a tiny bit watery. It was so cold out that my speech was a little slurred and my eyes were a little watery too. But one of the men made that well-known Russian gesture of flipping his fingers across the side of his throat, and the twinkle in his watery eyes confirmed it.

“Where are you from?” the shorter, twinklier one asked. I answered: “I’m from America. I’m making a documentary film about Pushkin.”

Surprised and happy, he thanked me. Many times. And then we time-warped back to the glasnost era as he grabbed my hand and insisted that Russians and Americans are not that different, that we need to be friends, that he and I on that frozen spot were basking in the warmest international friendship.

As he and his friend left us, he raised his fists in cheerful encouragement. “Your work is very important! Thank you!” He pointed at the sun: “Pushkin is the sun of Russia. That sun is for you!”

While visiting friends in Puschino, a couple hours south of Moscow, we made  short pilgrimage to the nearby village of Melikhovo to visit Chekhov’s estate. He lived there from 1882-1889, and famously wrote The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. It was a beautiful crisp and snowy day, and the warm house couldn’t have been cozier.

Chekhov, like most Russian writers, owed a debt to Pushkin. He acquired a portrait of Pushkin. From that time forward, the room where the portrait hung became knows as the Pushkin Room.

Behind the house stands Chekhov’s doctor’s office. Clean, cozy and neat, but somewhat frightening if you look closely at the implements and potions that he employed to treat people.

The traditional, national dish of Buryatiya is called “boozy” – a delicious mix of beef, pork and lamb in a juice-filled dumpling. While in Buryatia, I ate it twice a day, lunch and dinner. It was always homemade. Lina’s mother made the best ones, and attempted to teach me her secrets. By the third try I had caught on, basically. As Lina’s sister Galya said, “the more imperfections in the dumpling, the better it tastes.”

On my journey to find out how Pushkin is still taught in the schools, I visited School No. 171 in St. Petersburg. This is one of the better schools in the city, located in a prestigious neighborhood (along Liteiniy Prospekt) in the center of town. The teacher had her students prepare for the occasion.  One by one the students went to the front of the room (where “My Pushkin” was written on the blackboard) and quoted a verse by heart, and then discussed the meaning of what they had just quoted.

Although I didn’t get the spontaneity of a regular classroom, watching the students excitedly quote Pushkin was worth seeing. Afterwards, they bombarded me and I autographed each student’s notebook.

This scene from a stage adaptation of “The Bronze Horseman” underlines Pushkin’s attack on the tyranny of Peter the Great.

Posted on February 12, the anniversary of Pushkin’s death. His grave is located in the Pushkin Hills area several hours south of St. Petersburg, in the Svyatigor Monastery.

The idea for this film was conceived in a tacky Hollywood bar. I had been complaining to a Travel Channel producer about their program “Top 10 Toilets” and wondered why there are no intelligent shows about Russia on American TV.

I asked myself: What is the most interesting lens through which to view Russian culture? What about Russia can inspire an audience?

The answer is literature. Sounds dry, but for anyone who has spent an evening around a cramped Moscow kitchen table with friends drinking tea and talking about books, you know what I’m talking about.

This film, Pushkin Is Our Everything, is a visual representation of what we discussed on all those evenings in all those kitchens. I want to show how invigorating it is when Russians talk about literature and their lives, and how inspired one is afterwards.

As I began to dig through the enormous field of classic Russian literature, I was amazed (but not surprised) at how Pushkin is still Number One.

He’s still fresh, as historians find new information about him in archives and frame his life in different perspectives.

He’s still fresh because his image changes depending on the political and societal situation in the country. There’s always a “new” Pushkin to uncover.

He’s still fresh because it’s cool to be a dandy! Pushkin was one of the most colorful figures of the 19^th century: debt-ridden noble, famous poet, friend and enemy of the tsar, husband of a society knockout, fighter of 24 duels, drinker, card player, perpetual patient (he wrote some of his best stuff while recuperating in bed from venereal diseases) and victim of one last duel. Dead at 37.

Who doesn’t look back on Pushkin in the early 1800s and think, wow, what a life!

But really, more about Pushkin? Pushkin is Number One, but he’s also Old Hat. His statue is everywhere. Everyone knows his biography. Everyone heard his fairy tales as children, read his love poems as teenagers, and read his short stories and erotic epigrams as young adults.  Everyone can quote the opening lines of his novel in verse, Evgeniy Onegin.

Enough already! It’s Pushkin overload! Isn’t it?

By examining the relationship between Russians and their Pushkin, we get a view into many aspects of Russia past and present: the role of literature in people’s lives, the Kremlin’s use of national symbols, the process of re-building the post-Soviet Russian nation, the fashionable views of the Russian intelligentsia, and the ongoing effort to uncover the real Pushkin.

All great topics for a kitchen-table conversation, and for this film.

Part of St. Petersburg’s public service campaign promoting “Customs, Morals and Traditions.” This quote from Alexander Pushkin extols the need to respect others. “If you want others to be pleasant toward you, then you have to be pleasant towards others.”

St. Petersburg journalist Lida Bereznyakova accompanied me on my recent trip to Pushkin’s country estate at Mikhailovskoe, and her article (in Russian), “Pushkin: American Remarks,” appeared in the newspaper Nevsky Times.

One of the first things she mentions in the article is my surprise at how beautiful the countryside there is, and the view from Pushkin’s estate in particular. I went there mainly for background research: I wanted to see his father’s Mikhailovskoe estate, where he had spent two years in exile, and the nearby Trigorskoe estate, where Pushkin often visited Praskovia Osipov and her family, and which became the setting for Evgeny Onegin’s neighbors.

Lida wrote that I “greedily filmed the views,” which is true. The vistas across field, lake and forest were stunning, and although the film doesn’t require much explanation of his time spent here, I will find a place for some of that b-roll.