Rudolf Slánský's arrest in November 1951 by Statni bezpecnost (StB), the Czechoslovak secret police, his Kafkaesque trial a year later, and his execution caused a sensation during the early years of the Cold War. For a full week, the trial could be followed live on the radio in Prague. The transcript of the proceedings was published and widely distributed. Yet the affair remained a mystery. Slánský, until recently the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), and thirteen of his colleagues, all of them lifelong party members, confessed to crimes of high treason against the Prague government, espionage on behalf of the west, and sabotage of the socialist economy. In tired, monotonous voices, they described their lives as being motivated by their hatred of the CPC and loyalty to such sponsors as the Gestapo, Zionism, western intelligence services, and international capital. In their final speeches, all the defendants demanded that the court impose upon them the death penalty. The judge disappointed only three—they received life sentences. Slánský and ten others were executed in December 1952.

Iurii Lotman authored nearly forty books and articles about Aleksandr Pushkin's works, life, and personality; there is little doubt, therefore, that the poet was central to Lotman's scholarly interests. Nonetheless, Lotman turned to Pushkin's legacy relatively late in his scholarly career: while his first article was published in 1949, his first article on Pushkin appeared only in 1960. Both Lotman's kandidatskaia and doktorskaia dissertations were devoted to far more marginal figures and issues of Russian literary development: the former to Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Karamzin, and the latter to early nineteenth-century literature.

The advent of the world wide web and electronic publishing has increased the number of resources available for Pushkinists and their students. Search engines, when asked to return lists of sites containing the keywords "Aleksandr Pushkin" offer hundreds (and often thousands) of potential matches; these hits range from websites including the more traditional scholarly apparatus of bibliographies and footnotes to reader-responses and grade school projects.