Official culture

A widespread observation is that a great talent has a free spirit. For instance Pushkin, regarded by some scholars as Russia's first great writer, infuriated Russian officialdom and particularly the Tsar, since

instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants.