Cult of Poetry and Cult of Revolution: Friendship as Explored Through Alexander Pushkin and Bhagat Singh’s Handwritten Letters

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the underlying intimacy in selected handwritten letters of two figures of history originating from separate geographical lands. Resistance - in the heart of a revolutionary, Bhagat Singh and a poet, Alexander Pushkin - conveyed separate personalized intimacies, fraught with imperial state structuring, dogma and varied indigenous sensoria for both protagonists of this research. Prescribing nouveau legitimacy to any research is a slippery slope in the extensive academic scholarship, however, this paper perspicaciously traces the truisms of Singh and Pushkin’s times á la their voluble words as written to friends in different times: at ease, in prison, weary of surveillance and policing and in need of comfort.