Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (6 June 1799 – 10 February 1837) was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short story writer whose work created the foundation upon which all subsequent Russian literature was built. He is to Russian literature what Shakespeare is to English and Dante to Italian: the writer who established the language as a literary medium, who set the standard of excellence against which all subsequent writers are measured, and whose influence is so pervasive that it is practically invisible. Every major Russian writer from Gogol to Tolstoy to Chekhov to Nabokov has acknowledged Pushkin as the origin point, and every significant development in Russian literature has been, in some sense, a response to what Pushkin made possible.

Early Life

Pushkin was born in Moscow into the Russian nobility. His mother was the granddaughter of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an African-born courtier and general who had been a favourite of Peter the Great — a heritage of which Pushkin was proud and which he explored in his unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great. He attended the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, where he received an excellent classical education and began writing poetry that was admired by the leading literary figures of the day, including the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, who recognised Pushkin’s genius while the boy was still in school.

Exile and Early Poetry

Pushkin’s political poems — epigrams mocking the Tsar and the court, odes to liberty, celebrations of the Decembrist movement — earned him the suspicion of the government and, in 1820, a form of internal exile: he was posted to southern Russia and subsequently to his mother’s estate at Mikhailovskoye, where he spent two years under surveillance. This exile was productive: it gave Pushkin time to read Byron, Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets, and it produced some of his most important early works, including the narrative poems The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1824), and The Gypsies (1824), and the beginning of Eugene Onegin.

Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), Pushkin’s first major narrative poem, is a fairy-tale romance that demonstrated his mastery of verse technique and his ability to combine Russian folk material with European literary forms. The poem established Pushkin as the leading poet of his generation.

Eugene Onegin (1825–1832)

Pushkin’s masterpiece is a verse novel in fourteen-line stanzas (the “Onegin stanza,” a form of Pushkin’s own invention) that tells the story of Eugene Onegin, a bored, cynical young St. Petersburg aristocrat who rejects the love of Tatyana Larina, a provincial girl of passionate literary sensibility, and later regrets his rejection when Tatyana has married a general and achieved the poise and social authority that Onegin lacked the vision to recognise in her youth.

The plot is simple; the achievement is not. Eugene Onegin is simultaneously a love story, a social satire, a portrait of Russian society in the 1820s, a meditation on the relationship between literature and life (Tatyana’s character is shaped by the novels she reads; Onegin’s is shaped by the Byronic pose he adopts), and a demonstration of what Russian verse can do. Pushkin’s language — lucid, musical, precise, and apparently effortless — created the standard of Russian literary prose and verse that all subsequent writers would either emulate or react against.

Nabokov’s English translation of Eugene Onegin (1964), with its four volumes of commentary, is itself a major work of literary criticism and a monument to the novel’s inexhaustible richness.

Boris Godunov (1825)

Pushkin’s historical drama — written in blank verse modelled on Shakespeare’s history plays — dramatises the succession crisis following the death of Ivan the Terrible and the rise and fall of Boris Godunov, the boyar who may have murdered the legitimate heir and seized the throne. The play was a deliberate attempt to create a Russian equivalent of Shakespeare’s political dramas, and while it has been less successful on stage than Eugene Onegin in the study, it established the Russian historical drama and provided the libretto (adapted by Modest Mussorgsky) for one of the greatest operas in the Russian repertoire.

Prose Tales

In the 1830s, Pushkin turned increasingly to prose fiction, producing a body of short stories and novellas that established the Russian prose tradition. The Tales of Belkin (1831) — five stories attributed to a fictional narrator — are models of compression and irony. The Queen of Spades (1834) — about an officer who learns the secret of a winning card combination from an old countess, with fatal consequences — is one of the most perfect short stories in any language, combining supernatural suggestion with psychological realism. The Captain’s Daughter (1836) is a historical novel set during the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–1775, and it established the model for the Russian historical novel that Tolstoy would develop in War and Peace.

Death

Pushkin died on 10 February 1837, two days after being shot in a duel with Georges d’Anthès, a French officer in Russian service who had been pursuing Pushkin’s wife, Natalya Goncharova. The duel was the culmination of months of social intrigue and anonymous letters, and Pushkin’s death at thirty-seven was mourned as a national catastrophe. Tens of thousands attended his funeral, and the government, which had persecuted him in life, attempted to minimise the public response in death.

Legacy

Pushkin’s influence on Russian literature is absolute. Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Nabokov all acknowledged him as the fountainhead. His achievement was not merely literary but linguistic: he created the modern Russian literary language, demonstrating that Russian could do everything that French, English, and Italian could do, and more.

Collecting Pushkin

First editions of Pushkin’s works in Russian are among the most significant collectibles in world literature. Eugene Onegin in its serial publication (1825–1832) is extremely rare. Early English translations — particularly the first complete English Eugene Onegin — are also collected. Nabokov’s translation (1964, Bollingen/Princeton) in first edition is a significant modern collectible.