Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) was born on 6 June 1799 (26 May, Old Style) in Moscow, into the Russian nobility. His mother’s family included Ibrahim Hannibal, an African-born page who had been a favourite of Peter the Great — Pushkin was proud of his African ancestry and wrote a historical novel, The Moor of Peter the Great (unfinished), based on his great-grandfather’s life. He was educated at the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, near St Petersburg, the most prestigious school in Russia, where his poetic gifts were recognised before he was fifteen.

Life and Career

Pushkin was already famous by the time he left the Lyceum in 1817. His early poems — brilliant, irreverent, politically daring — circulated in manuscript and earned him the suspicion of the Tsarist authorities. In 1820, at age twenty, he was exiled from St Petersburg for political poems; he spent six years in the south of Russia and at his family estate of Mikhailovskoye, a period of enforced isolation that was also one of extraordinary creative productivity.

The southern exile produced the “Byronic” narrative poems — The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1824) — that made Pushkin the most popular poet in Russia. But his greatest work, begun in 1823, was Eugene Onegin, a “novel in verse” published in serial instalments between 1825 and 1832 and collected as a single volume in 1833. Onegin is simultaneously a love story, a social panorama of Russian life, a literary meditation, and a virtuoso display of verse technique (the “Onegin stanza,” a fourteen-line form of Pushkin’s invention). It is the foundational text of Russian literature — Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov all descend from it.

Boris Godunov (1825, published 1831), a historical drama modelled on Shakespeare, marked Pushkin’s turn toward a more austere, classical style. The Tales of Belkin (1831), The Queen of Spades (1834), and The Captain’s Daughter (1836) established Russian prose fiction. The late lyrics — “I Loved You,” “The Prophet,” “Autumn” — achieve a perfection of form and depth of feeling that Russian readers regard as unsurpassed.

In 1831 Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova, celebrated as the most beautiful woman in Moscow. The marriage was troubled: Natalia attracted admirers, and Pushkin was tormented by jealousy. In January 1837 he challenged Georges d’Anthès, a French officer he believed was courting Natalia, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later, on 10 February 1837 (29 January, Old Style). He was thirty-seven. All of Russia mourned; his funeral was a national event.

Major Works and Themes

Pushkin created modern Russian literary language. Before Pushkin, Russian literature was imitative, provincial, and linguistically uncertain — torn between Church Slavonic, French, and the colloquial speech of the educated classes. Pushkin forged from these elements a literary Russian of extraordinary flexibility, clarity, and beauty that became the foundation of all subsequent Russian writing.

Eugene Onegin (1833) is his masterpiece: the story of a bored, cynical St Petersburg dandy who rejects the love of the provincial Tatiana, only to fall in love with her years later when she has married another man. The poem’s deceptively light surface conceals profound meditations on love, art, time, and the Russian soul. Its most famous passage — Tatiana’s letter to Onegin — is known by heart by virtually every educated Russian.

The Bronze Horseman (1833) is his greatest shorter poem: a narrative about the 1824 St Petersburg flood that becomes a meditation on the conflict between the individual and the state, embodied in the figure of Peter the Great’s equestrian statue.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Pushkin is to Russian literature what Shakespeare is to English and Dante to Italian — the founding figure, the supreme artist, the national poet. His reputation has never wavered. Every major Russian writer from Gogol through Nabokov has acknowledged him as the essential predecessor. His birthday is a national holiday in Russia.

For non-Russian readers, Pushkin presents a notorious translation problem: his poetry depends on effects of sound, rhythm, and tone that are difficult to render in English. Nabokov’s literal prose translation of Eugene Onegin (1964, four volumes, with commentary) is a monument of scholarship; other translators (James Falen, Stanley Mitchell) have attempted verse translations that preserve more of the original’s music.

Key Works

• Ruslan and Ludmila (1820)
• The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822)
• Eugene Onegin (1825–1832; collected 1833)
• Boris Godunov (1831)
• The Tales of Belkin (1831)
• The Queen of Spades (1834)
• The Captain’s Daughter (1836)
• The Bronze Horseman (1837, posthumous)

Collecting Pushkin

Pushkin is one of the rarest and most important collecting authors in European literature. Russian first editions from the 1820s and 1830s are genuinely rare — survival rates for early nineteenth-century Russian printing are much lower than for their English or French contemporaries.

Eugene Onegin was published in serial chapters between 1825 and 1832; the first complete edition (1833, St Petersburg) is the primary collecting target. Complete copies are extremely rare; prices when they surface exceed $50,000. Individual chapter first editions are also collected.

Boris Godunov (1831) first editions are scarce and bring $10,000–$30,000.

The Tales of Belkin (1831) and The Captain’s Daughter (1836) first editions are also rare and prized.

Pushkin manuscripts and letters are in institutional collections — primarily the Pushkin Museum and the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinsky Dom) in St Petersburg. Any autograph material that surfaces on the open market is of extraordinary value. His handwriting is distinctive: small, rapid, and often decorated with marginal drawings and doodles.

English-language first translations are a secondary but growing market. The Nabokov Eugene Onegin (1964, Bollingen/Pantheon, four volumes) is collected both as Pushkin and as Nabokov; fine sets bring $500–$2,000.