Scandal! Russian literature -- despite its long-winded heroism through sordid centuries of tyranny -- is as much known for scandal as for idealism. Gogol scandalized his progressive admirers when he published "correspondence" seemingly supporting the czar. Osip Mandelstam scandalized Soviet writers when he slapped a well-established official Soviet novelist. The revolutionary poet Mayakovsky was a shouting, strutting, garish scandal in and of himself.

For Russians, Alexander Pushkin is not only the Shakespeare of Russia, he is also a combination of Jefferson and St. Francis. His monuments and medals are everywhere, and both Marxists and czarists have bowed down before his image.

His influence on poetry and prose has been unremittingly beneficial, as if the whole future of Russian literature were constantly being formed in Pushkin. Without Pushkin, there would have been no Dostoevski, Chekhov, Akhmatova or Nabokov. But Pushkin's rather jokeless worshipers forget that his own life was scandalous and even humiliating, amid all the music of his genius.

Resembling his near-contemporary Mozart in more ways than one, Pushkin himself admitted that the exhilarating perfection of his art was the product of an "utterly vulgar" heart. It would be fairer to say that Pushkin, though an aristocrat, was earthy, a sadly lucid exuberant human who could let the long tricky breezes of this planet sweep him anywhere through the realms of reality and fantasy.

He was killed in a duel over his wife's honor in 1837, before the age of 40. Before this "romantic" climax, his life was considered by many to be either foolish or scandalous. Political and sexual escapades more than once got him exiled. The czar personally censored the popular poet. After his death, Pushkin became, for most Russians, a hero of liberty and justice, an ardent singer praising the Russian land and its many peoples. As long as they had Pushkin -- who outdid the West in both elegance and energy -- Russians could claim that Russia, after all, was not backward.

Yes, Pushkin is perfect, endlessly effervescent yet as truthful as gleaming mud. All possibilities are contained in him, both for realism and for visionary experiment. But Russians have too often forgotten that part of Pushkin's greatness comes from his naughtiness, perhaps even from his squat oddity, his blessed marginality. Soviet statues of Pushkin pose him like Lenin. He did not look like Lenin.

Vladimir Nabokov did not forget any of this in his translation and commentary on Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." Nabokov produced an inspiring scandal of unchained scholarship. Less well known is that Nabokov used Pushkin in what must be one of the great novelist's few moments of political activism.

In 1942, Nabokov lectured on Pushkin in Atlanta at Spelman College, a black college for women. Charmed with the college's president and the student body, Nabokov delighted in emphasizing Pushkin's Ethiopian ancestry: "Pushkin provides a most striking example of mankind at its very best when human races are able to freely mix."

The Pushkin ironies and scandals continue. Pushkin is really too alive even for his admirers. The most recent Pushkin scandal involves "Strolls With Pushkin," a sinfully enjoyable essay by the Russian-born novelist and critic Andrei Sinyavsky, who now lives in exile in Paris.

"Strolls With Pushkin" is a piece of literary criticism -- or, at least,meditation -- though it is signed with Mr. Sinyavsky's carefully outrageous pseudonym "Abram Tertz," the name of a legendary Jewish bandit. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Mr. Sinyavsky was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp for publishing books abroad without permission, using this pseudonym.

"Strolls With Pushkin," astonishingly, was sent to Mr. Sinyavsky's wife in the form of letters from the prison camp. Apparently, high literary meditation is what soothes Russian writers in jail. Far from using brutality as an excuse to be brutal oneself, Mr. Sinyavsky, in another volume of prison letters titled "A Voice From the Chorus," contends that "when all is said and done, a camp gives the feeling of maximum freedom."

Since the publication in Russia recently of the insufficiently reverent "Strolls With Pushkin," Mr. Sinyavsky has been attacked for nihilistic frivolity and heartless aestheticism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn attacked him for daring to "shake Pushkin's altar," for having the criminal audacity to treat Pushkin like a mere human.

Yet Mr. Sinyavsky, though he adores art and celebrates the triumph of artistic freedom in Pushkin, is neither frivolous nor an "aesthetic nihilist." It is prison, it is near lethal humiliation, that has taught him the redemptively elusive nature of art. Art is where we meet what is not us! And what is not us will save us: "In a fairy tale about beauty and love there is the phrase: 'He was not himself any more.' We long to be not ourselves. This is what matters most."

This is why Pushkin is great -- because Pushkin is not Pushkin! And this is why Mr. Sinyavsky's irreverence is really religious, far more religious than the grim-lipped piety of Mr. Solzhenitsyn. In "Strolls With Pushkin," Mr. Sinyavsky wishes to free Pushkin from Pushkin, to free the spirit of the artist from idol-worshipers such as Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The artist must be freed even from his own greatness.

Pushkin can give us the shock of the vividly dull: "An old woman was crossing the dirty yard." Or he can reveal Apollo himself to us: "His eyes shine . . . His countenance is terrifying." Both images liberate the poet and the poet's readers. Both free us from ourselves. Mr. Sinyavsky, in the long run, equates the freedom of art with the freedom of the soul: "Pure art . . . is a force that was born in the heart . . . like love, like religious feeling . . . impervious to control . . . The spirit wafts where it will."

Mr. Sinyavsky scandalized the priests of Pushkin by telling of Pushkin's unattractiveness to women, by expatiating on his excessively long fingernails and odd dress, by relating his vulgarity as well as his sublimity. Worse than all that, Mr. Sinyavsky insists upon the needful coexistence of the sublimity and vulgarity. In terms of Pushkin's masterpiece, "The Bronze Horseman," Pushkin is the frighteningly monumental statue of Peter the Great and the pathetic poor clerk who hallucinates that he is being chased by the statue. Mr. Sinyavsky knows that scandal can be sacred. After all, in the New Testament, Jesus is called "a scandal."

Mr. Margulies is a poet and a curator at the Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Title: "Strolls With Pushkin"

Author: Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky); translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

Publisher: Yale University

Length, price: 175 pages, $25