The image of the Russian ‘golden age’ (the Pushkin era) is considered in the context of the general patterns of nostalgic mythmaking. It is shown that the idealization of the national past at different historical stages remains isomorphic to the generalized image of Antiquity, which is a contamination of the ‘golden age’ and the ‘century of heroes’. The literary criticism of the late Soviet nostalgia for the Pushkin era is an example of the combination of the ‘golden’ and ‘heroic’ centuries under the name of ‘golden’.