His head slightly bowed, the bronze Pushkin on the eponymous square in Moscow stands condemned to stare endlessly across Tverskaya Street at his young compatriots who throng McDonald's.

Nowhere is the clash between the old and new Russias more striking. Behind Pushkin's back the Rossiya cinema has been turned into an entertainment complex with flash restaurants and a risque night club. To his left is the Galereya Aktyor, an elegant shopping mall for those far too rich to be affected by the economic downturn; to his right in the middle distance is what he would have known as the English Club or the "House with Lions at the Gate" as he described it in Yevgeny Onegin. It is now the museum of the Bolshevik Revolution.

In less affluent St Petersburg, the coffee and confectionery shop of Wolf and Beranger where Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin sipped a lemonade before setting out on his journey to duel with Georges d'Antes on January 29th 1837 has been reborn as a tourist trap.

On his way to his death Pushkin passed his wife Natalia on the street and avoided her short-sighted gaze. They were a strange couple: she tall and haughty, he short, stocky and dark-skinned from his black African ancestry. Pushkin, while inordinately proud of his great-grandfather's rise from Ethiopian Blackamoor to high officership in the Imperial army, was extremely self-conscious of his wife's greater height.

He was always reluctant to stand beside her in public lest his inferior stature be accentuated. That reluctance has been posthumously, if insensitively, overcome with the recent opening of a fountain to "Alexander and Natalia" in front of the Church of the Ascension on Bolshaya Nikitskaya street in Moscow where they were wed. In the spray of Moscow's latest "water feature" Alexander and Natalia are depicted, for once, standing side by side. Miraculously in this bicentennial structure Pushkin appears to have grown to a height not a centimetre less than that of his spouse.

Ordinary Russians, many of them aware of the smallest details of Pushkin's life, stand, stare and grin at this new piece of statuary in a city where Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has dotted the centre with works ranging from the bizarre to the hideous. Alexander and Natalia do not, at least, begin to rival the appalling Peter the Great who towers 300 metres above the Moscow River, his grotesque head apparently entangled in the rigging of a sailing ship.

Literature, no more than sculpture, has seen better days in Russia. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's latest work, Russia in the Abyss, had a print run of just 10,000 last year in a country of 150 million. Imported thriller writers, their names phonetically rendered in Cyrillic as Dzhems Khedli Ches, Agata Kristi, Dzhon Grishm and so on, dominate the market. The organisers of the Russian Booker Prize have been forced to shortlist unpublished manuscripts.

Moscow's city fathers appear to lag behind the public in their erudition. In the past week banners and posters marking the bicentenary of Pushkin's birth have begun to appear all over the city. The carry quotes from his works and reproductions of the thumbnail sketches he drew in the margins of his manuscripts.

They have also engendered controversy. One of the "Pushkin Quotes" on Kutuzovsky Prospekt is actually from Nikolai Nekrasov. Another, on Leningradsky Prospekt, is from Alexei Tolstoy. Newspapers and broadcasting stations have been inundated with phone calls pointing out the errors. The independent NTV channel considered the mistakes worthy of their Itogi current affairs programme, the equivalent of RTE's Prime Time.

It's clear that Pushkin still holds an extremely important place in the Russian psyche. He is revered like no other writer. He stands above Tsar and Commissar in the public memory. He is quoted in the conversations of the mighty and the humble. Four years ago, when a new edition of his complete works was published, it was bought quickly in its hundreds of thousands, outselling the foreign interlopers with ease.

There are obvious reasons for this. For one thing, he is every Russian's contemporary. Children read his fairy tales, adolescents his romantic verse and the more mature are attracted to his later works in prose.

Above all he, with some help from lesser souls, virtually invented the Russian literary language at a time when French had taken over as the tongue of the educated and privileged classes in St Petersburg, if not in Moscow, which was Pushkin's birthplace and a city far more Russian to its core.

Pushkin owes much of his continuing importance to the very Russianness of his writing and of his artistic focus. He was, according to the 19th-century critic Vissarion Belinsky, "the encyclopaedia of Russian life".

His work, particularly his poetry, has never been satisfactorily translated into another language. In the eternal Russian struggle between "Westernisers" and "Slavophiles" Pushkin managed, at the same time, to be the mainspring of Slavic tradition and, through the influence of Byron and other foreign contemporaries, a link with the West.

Onegin, a film starring Ralph Fiennes and based on Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin, premiered in St Petersburg this week and will be released here in the autumn