Rich Notebooks of Poet Pushkin Brought to Life : Russia: Britain’s Prince Charles sponsors publishing. Manuscripts are window on writer’s mind, scholars say.

Notebooks in which Alexander Pushkin doodled, daydreamed and scratched out epic poems with a goose-feather quill will be published for the first time this year in a charitable venture sponsored by Britain’s Prince Charles.

Scholars say the rarely seen manuscripts will provide a glimpse into the mind behind the myth of Pushkin, the poet revered as the richest in the Russian language.

“More than all others, he has pushed back the boundaries of the Russian language and shown all its spaciousness,” fellow writer Nikolai Gogol said of Pushkin in 1834.

Eighteen large notebooks, about 2,000 pages in all, will be photographically reproduced and published in London in an eight-volume set, with financial backing from the Prince of Wales’ charity, the Business Leaders Forum. Private philanthropists have pledged $450,000 in contributions for the project, which will be announced when Prince Charles visits Pushkin House on Wednesday as part of a two-day visit to St. Petersburg.

Charles will be the first Prince of Wales to visit Russia since 1894. Queen Elizabeth II never set foot in the Soviet Union, whose founding Bolsheviks murdered her relatives, Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, but President Boris N. Yeltsin has invited her to visit Russia.

Charles’ visit to St. Petersburg is intended to promote foreign investment and aid to the arts, health care and tourism in the elegant but somewhat neglected former capital. Pushkin’s papers are stored in St. Petersburg, where he died after a duel in 1837.

Pushkin’s verses can be found on most Russian bookshelves--35 million copies of his works were printed from 1917 to 1947 alone--but only a handful of scholars with access to the Institute of Russian Literature have set eyes on the raw stuff those books are made of.

The institute stores nearly all of his original writings: 12,000 pages, letters and scraps.

“There are about another 10 pages of Pushkin manuscripts in museums and libraries around the world,” said Sergei Fomichev, a scholar at the Pushkin House, as the St. Petersburg institute is known. “The rest is here.”

The papers are largely intact because of a 1930s decree by Josef Stalin that all Pushkin manuscripts be kept at the institute--a decree that sent Pushkin House scholars scurrying about the Soviet Union and even abroad to round up the works. Many had made their way into private hands despite a similar ukase issued by Czar Nicholas I immediately after Pushkin’s death impounding the poet’s papers as state property.

The eight-volume set will be published with an initial print run of 500 copies, each set selling for $3,000. Volumes one and eight--with an index and commentary--will be available by December, 1994; volumes two, three and four by December, 1995; and volumes five, six and seven by June, 1996.

Despite the price tag, Fomichev said, interest is strong.

“(Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra Conductor Mstislav) Rostropovich was here to look the notebooks over. He said they were charming and promised he’d be the first to buy one,” he said. “There are several excellent American Pushkin scholars who are interested, and we’ve had feelers from the Japanese.

“We even got a letter from a woman in Bermuda whom none of us had ever heard of,” Fomichev said.

Some of the profits will go toward fixing up the decrepit Institute of Russian Literature, a 160-year-old building that houses letters of Napoleon and manuscripts of Feodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain and Honore de Balzac, in addition to the Pushkin notebooks. Roof leaks threaten these literary treasures, and the book-choked building is such a firetrap that off-duty firefighters have been hired to wander the halls and sniff for smoke.

The notebooks, which contain such beloved Pushkin works as the fairy tale “Ruslan and Lyudmila” and the poet’s seminal epic, “Yevgeny Onegin,” are stored in cardboard folders in a red wooden filing cabinet--in a room where humidity is controlled by placing wet rags on the radiators.

Pushkin crossed out as much as he wrote, and the notebooks reveal the mind-bending toil that produced his ethereal lyrics.

“With what labor he wrote his light, flying verses,” poet Vasily Zhukovsky remarked after seeing some of the agonized-over drafts. “There is no line that has not been scribbled several times over.”

In the early 19th Century--the golden age of Russian literature that Pushkin himself ushered in--artists customarily tried their hands at various media. Painters dabbled in poetry, and Pushkin wove sketches both dreamy and draftsman-like around the text of his notebooks.

Some verses take on new meaning in the light of accompanying illustrations. One poem-drawing, for example, begins, “I could (also) have . . .” A sketch shows young men hanging from gallows, and then the line resumes, “like a fool.” The reference is to the Decembrists, a group of radicals who tried to overthrow the czar in 1825. They failed and were executed or exiled to Siberia.

Although Pushkin was a sympathizer, the revolutionaries deemed him too volatile to be trusted with their secret plot and too valuable a literary figure to endanger. The passionate Pushkin died in a duel 12 years later, at the age of 37. Lionized in his lifetime, the writer was elevated to a national hero after his romantic death.

In the hungry 1920s, the cash-starved Soviet government allowed publication of Pushkin letters revealing details of the dispute that led to the fatal duel, sparking lively interest in the century-old scandal.

“They provided a great deal of entertainment in a very bleak time,” said Paul Debreczeny, a co-founder of the North American Pushkin Society.

Pushkin remains the undisputed father of Russian literature, but his works recently have been replaced on sidewalk and subway booksellers’ tables by pornography and pulp novels.

“Pushkin is not popular; ‘Santa Barbara’ is popular,” said Valentin Nepomnyashchy, chairman of the Pushkin Commission at the Institute of World Literature in Moscow, referring to the defunct U.S. soap opera now shown on Russian TV. “But Pushkin is the poet of the Russian people.”

Yet it is unclear whether this edition will make Pushkin’s notebooks any more accessible to the average Russian--or even to scholars in the provinces.

“I’m sure universities in cities like Saratov, Rostov and Tver would dearly love to have them,” Debreczeny said of the $3,000 tomes. “Unfortunately, Russian universities are in a very dire financial condition.”

Colin Byrne, a spokesman for the Business Leaders Forum, said he hoped some of the proceeds could be used to donate editions to Russian universities and libraries.

But the main goal of the project is to show Russian cultural institutions how to use their treasures to support themselves as Soviet-era state subsidies dry up, Byrne said.

Dmitry S. Likhachev, the Pushkin House director, said that what matters most is that “in case of a disaster, a copy--at the very least a copy--will be left in the world.”