Titans of History

PUSHKIN

1799–1837

The poet is dead: a slave to honor

Felled, by slanderous rumor

With a bullet in his breast, and thirsting for revenge

His proud head now bowed down.

The poet’s spirit could not bear

The shame of petty calumnies …

Mikhail Lermontov, from his homage to Pushkin, circulated secretly a few days after the great poet’s death

Alexander Pushkin is the heroic ideal of the romantic poet. A genius of exuberance, versatility, wit, poignancy and originality, a passionate and promiscuous lover of women, a victim of tyranny who remained true to his art—he personifies the triumph of creativity over the dead hand of bureaucracy. He helped create modern Russia—its culture, its language, its very image of itself. He also wrote history and short stories.

Pushkin is generally considered to be Russia’s greatest poet. Translation cannot do justice to the extraordinary way in which he molded the Russian language to his art, mixing archaic with modern, vernacular with formal, and readily inventing new words when old ones did not suffice. The profound simplicity of Pushkin’s poetry transformed the way that Russians—writers and ordinary people—use language.

The precocious son of an old noble family, Pushkin became renowned when, as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, his first poetry was published. His romantic narrative poem Ruslan and Ludmilla, written six years later, broke every literary convention of its day and was a runaway success. The leader of Russian poetry’s old guard, Vasily Zhukovsky, gave Pushkin a portrait of himself inscribed: “To the victorious pupil from the defeated master.” Barely out of his teens, Pushkin was already recognized as Russia’s preeminent poet.

Pushkin’s astounding energy and drive transformed Russian literature. He cast off the stifling blanket of religion and censorship, creating works of extraordinary originality that laid the foundations of the modern Russian literary tradition. Eugene Onegin (1825–32) his great novel in verse, is considered by many to be the finest Russian novel ever written. Set in a Russian landscape with Russian characters, it was a decisive step away from the allegorical tradition and toward the realism later employed by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov and Bulgakov. This is the story of the doomed love between Tatiana, provincial beauty, and Onegin, cynical nobleman and foppish, bored intellectual. He flirts with her; she falls in love; he rejects her and kills her sister’s fiancé in a duel (foreshadowing Pushkin’s own death). Many years later, Onegin meets her again. She is now a St. Petersburg grande dame, a society beauty, a princess married to an aristocrat. He realizes he loves her—but she replies, “I love you but I am now another’s wife.” Onegin is heartbroken—he “stood seared as if by heaven’s fire. How deep his stricken heart is shaken. With what a tempest of desire.” The characters remain eternal but nothing is so timeless as the tragic sadness of Onegin’s love for the married Tatiana—and her undying love for him, loves that cannot ever be.

The poet-revolutionary was the image of the romantic hero. He was a sympathetic and social, rather than active, conspiratorial member of the aristocratic set later known as the Decembrists, who conspired to reform the oppressive autocracy of the tsars. The group’s members were famed for their drinking, gambling and womanizing as much as for their liberal views.

Pushkin’s work revolutionized the way Russians thought about their history and their drama, and especially the way they thought about their writers. Never one to play down his own achievements, Pushkin was one of the first Russian writers to make a collected edition of his various writings. Within a year of his death, a critic was able to declare: “Every educated Russian must have a complete Pushkin, otherwise he has no right to be considered either educated or Russian.”

Russia’s oppressive autocrats tried to break the will of the fiery radical. Pushkin was, in his own words, “persecuted six years in a row, stained by expulsion from the service, exiled to an out-of-the-way village for two lines in an intercepted letter.” It was not all bad: he adored the exotic romance of Odessa, Moldavia and the Caucasus, which inspired him. He also managed many affairs, keeping lists, sketches and poems to record his conquests, who included Princess Lise Vorontsov, wife of the viceroy of New Russia, Prince Michael Vorontsov and a great-niece of Catherine the Great’s minister Prince Potemkin. They probably had a child together (brought up as Vorontsov) and he wrote a poem to her called The Talisman.

But Pushkin was keenly aware of the oppressive hand of censorship and surveillance—and its potential to get worse. During the abortive Decembrist uprising of 1825, he could only look on helplessly as his generation’s dreams of liberty were ruthlessly smashed by the dreary martinet Tsar Nicholas I. Finally, beaten down by almost a decade of censorship and exile, Pushkin was wooed into Nicholas’s service with the illusory promise of reform. The tsar appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor.

Imperial favor broke Pushkin even more effectively than imperial displeasure. Personally censored by the tsar, Pushkin was rendered almost speechless. The volatile radical poet fell increasingly out of favor at court, but, despite his increasingly desperate pleas to retire to a life of literary seclusion, he was not allowed to leave. His popularity meant he was still viewed as a loose cannon. Besides, half the court, including the tsar, were infatuated with Pushkin’s beautiful wife Natalya. His misery, drinking and gambling increased.

Pushkin’s romantic death, the result of a simmering romantic crisis, turned the hero into a legend. In February 1837 the creepy and sleazy French social climber Georges d’Anthès, having been frustrated by Natalya’s decisive rejection of his approaches, publicly insulted her and challenged her husband to a duel. Pushkin, who had been itching to fight for months, accepted with alacrity. In the ensuing duel, Pushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days later at the age of thirty-eight.

The volatile, charismatic poet-radical who fought for liberty and died for love is revered in Russia almost as a god. His statue stands in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, decked out with flowers even in deep winter. Pushkin had decreed in his great poem “Monument” that “My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness / My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay … ” In this he proved a prophet too.