The article is an attempt to demystify Secret Notes from 1836-1837, which were published by Mikhail Armalinski in the United States in 1986 as an authentic text by Aleksandr Pushkin. There are a number of argument in favour of the diaries having been fabricated and intellectual fraud committed, with the most important being: 1. Secret Notes from 1836-1837 are not on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; 2. the hoax-author thinks in terms of a person educated in the 20th century, rather than in the 19th one; 3. descriptions of sexual behaviour bear resemblance to contemporary style of a pornographic production; 4. there is too much narrator’s distance from himself and depicted events in the analysed work; 5. the structure of Secret Notes ...shows classical creative behaviours, including the hoaxer’s attachment to definite leitmotifs.
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