Alexander Pushkin

"Pushkin" redirects here. For other uses, see Pushkin (disambiguation).

File:AlexanderPushkin.jpeg

Aleksandr Pushkin by Vasily Tropinin

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин ) (June 6 [O.S. May 26] 1799 – February 10 [O.S. January 29] 1837) was a Russian Romantic author whom many consider the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers.

Life

Pushkin's father descended from one of the Russian gentry's oldest families who traced their history to Khutyn Monastery in the 12th century, while his mother's grandfather was Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, an African who was abducted and enslaved when he was a child. He was brought to Russia and became a great military leader, engineer and nobleman after his adoption by Peter the Great.

Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen. By the time he finished as part of the first graduating class of the prestigious Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg, the Russian literary scene recognized his talent widely. After finishing school, Pushkin installed himself in the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of the capital, St. Petersburg. In 1820 he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, amidst much controversy about its subject and style.

1 rouble, 1999

Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals. This angered the government, and led to his transfer from the capital. He went first to Kishinev in 1820, where he stayed until 1823 and—after a summer trip to the Caucasus and to the Crimea—wrote two Romantic poems which brought him wide acclaim, The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. In 1823 Pushkin moved to Odessa, where he again clashed with the government, which sent him into exile at his mother's rural estate in north Russia from 1824 to 1826. However, some of the authorities allowed him to visit Tsar Nicholas I to petition for his release, which he obtained. But some of the insurgents in the Decembrist Uprising (1825) in St. Petersburg had kept some of his early political poems amongst their papers, and soon Pushkin found himself under the strict control of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will. He had written what became his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov, while at his mother's estate but could not gain permission to publish it until five years later.

Alexander Pushkin by Orest Kiprensky

In 1831, highlighting the growth of Pushkin's talent and influence and the merging of two of Russia's greatest early writers, he met Nikolai Gogol. The two would become good friends and would support each other. Pushkin would be greatly influenced in the field of prose from Gogol's comical stories. After reading Gogol's 1831-2 volume of short stories Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Pushkin would support him critically and later in 1836 after starting his magazine, The Contemporary, would feature some of Gogol's most famous short stories. Later, Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, became regulars of court society. When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, the poet became enraged: He felt this occurred not only so that his wife, who had many admirers—including the Tsar himself—could properly attend court balls, but also to humiliate him. In 1837, falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel which left both men injured, Pushkin mortally. He died two days later.

The government feared a political demonstration at his funeral, which it moved to a smaller location and made open only to close relatives and friends. His body was spirited away secretly at midnight and buried on his mother's estate.

Critics consider many of his works masterpieces, such as the poem The Bronze Horseman and the drama The Stone Guest, a tale of the fall of Don Juan. Pushkin himself preferred his verse novel Eugene Onegin, which he wrote over the course of his life and which, starting a tradition of great Russian novels, follows a few central characters but varies widely in tone and focus. "Onegin" is a work of such complexity that, while only about a hundred pages long, it required translator Vladimir Nabokov four full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Unfortunately, in so doing Nabokov, like all translators of Pushkin into English to date, totally destroyed the fundamental readability of Pushkin in Russian which makes him so popular, and Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to English readers.

Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was conveniently pictured by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry. They renamed Tsarskoe Selo after him.

Pushkin's works also provided fertile ground for Russian composers. Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila is the earliest important Pushkin-inspired opera. Tchaikovsky's operas Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (1890) became perhaps better known outside of Russia than Pushkin's own works of the same name, while Mussorgsky's monumental Boris Godunov (two versions, 1868-9 and 1871-2) ranks as one of the very finest and most original of Russian operas. Other Russian operas based on Pushkin include Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka and The Stone Guest; Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, Tale of Tsar Saltan, and The Golden Cockerel; Cui's Prisoner of the Caucasus, Feast in Time of Plague, and The Captain's Daughter; and Nápravník's Dubrovsky. This is not to mention ballets and cantatas, as well as innumerable songs set to Pushkin's verse.

Influence on the Russian language

Pushkin is credited with developing literary Russian. Not only is he seen as having originated the highly nuanced level of language which characterizes Russian literature after him, but he is also credited with substantially augmenting the Russian lexicon. Where he found gaps in the Russian vocabulary, he devised calques. His rich vocabulary and highly sensitive style are the foundation for modern literary Russian.

Sample of Pushkin's Work

Here are the opening lines from Pushkin's most famous poem, "Eugene Onegin":

My old uncle, an upstanding don,

Lay on his deathbed like a king.

And we, like poor servants, waited on

His whim . . . 'twas such a clever thing.

He so nobly knocked on Heaven's door,

Yet, my God! It was an awful bore,

To hover o'er him day and night

Without the chance of rest of flight.

And it was low treachery laid bare

As we, for his half-dead delight

Would set his every pillow right

And, solemn, tote elixers there

While wondering, with a whispered rue:

"When will the Devil come for you?"

-- translated from the Russian by Andrew C. Miller

Works

The famous Pushkin Monument in Moscow, opened in 1880 by Turgenev and Dostoyevsky.

• Ruslan i Lyudmila Ruslan and Ludmila (1820) (poem)
• Kavkazskiy Plennik The Captive of the Caucasus (1822) (poem)
• Bakhchisarayskiy Fontan The Fountain of Bahçesaray (1824) (poem)
• Tsygany Gypsies (1827)
• Poltava (1829)
• Little Tragedies (including Kamenny Gost' "The Stone Guest", Motsart i Salieri "Mozart and Salieri", "The Miserly Knight, and "A Feast During the Plague") (1830)
• Boris Godunov (1825; publ. 1831; officially approved for perf. 1866) (drama)
• The Tale of the Priest and of his Workman Balda (1830) (poem)
• Povesti Pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1831) (prose)
• The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831) (poem)
• The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights (1833) (poem)
• The Golden Cockerel (1834) (poem)
• The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (1835) (poem)
• The Station Master (short story)
• Yevgeniy Onegin Eugene Onegin (1825-1832) (verse novel)
• Mednyy Vsadnik The Bronze Horseman (1833) (poem)
• Pikovaya Dama The Queen of Spades (1833)
• The History of Pugachev's Riot (1834) (prose non-fiction)
• Kapitanskaya Dochka The Captain's Daughter (1836) (prose) a romanticized historical novel of "Pugachevshchina," the life and times of Pugachev.
• Kirdzhali Kırcali (short story)
• Gavriiliada
• I Have Visited Again (poem)
• Istoriya Sela Goryukhina The Story of the Village of Goryukhino (unfinished)
• Stseny iz Rytsarskikh Vremen Scenes from Chivalrous Times
• Yegipetskiye Nochi Egyptian Nights (poem)
• K A.P. Kern To A.P. Kern (poem, one of the most beautiful love lyrics ever written in the Russian language)
• Bratya Razboyniki The Robber Brothers (play)
• Arap Petra Velikogo The Negro of Peter the Great (historical novel, unfinished, based on the life of his great-grandfather)
• Graf Nulin Count Nulin
• Zimniy vecher Winter evening

==Further reading==

File:Pushkin Goncharova Arbat 2005.jpg

The Arbat Monument to Pushkin and his wife.

T.J. Binyon has written an English biography:

• Pushkin: a biography London: HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN 0-00-215084-0 (US edition: New York: Knopf, 2003 ISBN 1-4000-4110-4)

Hoaxes and other attributed works

In the late 1980s, a book entitled "Secret Journal 1836-1837" was published by a Minneapolis publishing house, claiming to be the decoded content of an encrypted private journal kept by Pushkin. Promoted with little details about its contents, and touted for many years as being 'banned in Russia', it was an erotic novel narrated from Pushkin's perspective. Some mail-order publishers still carry the work under its fictional description.

See also

• Pushkin Prize

References

• Elaine Feinstein (ed.): After Pushkin: versions of the poems of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin by contemporary poets. Manchester: Carcanet Prees; London: Folio Society, 1999 ISBN 1-57544-44-7

• Serena Vitale: Pushkin's button; transl. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998 ISBN 0-374-23995-5

External links

• Pushkin's poems (English translation) includes Eugene Onegin and other points
• Complete works (in Russian) — FEB-web's Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE) of A.S. Pushkin
• Complete works in ten volumes. (In Russian) From the Russian Virtual Library.
• Works by Aleksandr Pushkin at Project Gutenberg
• The family history of Aleksandr Pushkin
• Autumn leaves