Quotations
Always contented with his life,and with his dinner, and his wife.
Ch. 1, st. 12
Habit is Heaven's own redress:it takes the place of happiness.
Ch. 2, st. 31
Moscow... how many strains are fusingin that one sound, for Russian hearts!what store of riches it imparts!
Ch. 7, st. 36
Sad that our finest aspirationOur freshest dreams and meditations,In swift succession should decay,Like Autumn leaves that rot away.
Ch. 8, st. 10
The clock of doom had struck as fated;the poet, without a sound,let fall his pistol on the ground.
Ch. 6, st. 30
Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.
VI
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Encyclopedia
Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin was a
Russian
Romantic author who is considered to be 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 a distinguished family of the Russian nobility which traced its ancestry back to the 12th century, while his mother's grandfather was Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an
Eritrean who was abducted as a child by the Turks during their rule of the coast of
Eritrea. A less popular theory, however, posits that Gannibal might have been from an ancient sultanate near or around the present day
Chad. He was brought to Russia and became a great military leader, engineer and nobleman under the auspices of his adoptive father
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.
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 became a
Freemason. Here he joined the
Filiki Eteria, a secret organization whose purpose was to overthrow the Ottoman rule over
Greece and establish an independent Greek state. He was inspired by the
Greek Revolution and when the war against the Ottoman Turks broke out he kept a diary with the events of the great national uprising. He stayed in
Kishinev 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 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.
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'Anthčs, 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.
There were 4 children of Puskin's marriage to Natalya: Alexander, Grigory, Maria, and Natalia .
Literary legacy
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. His poetic short drama "Mozart and Salieri" was the inspiration for Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Pushkin himself preferred his verse novel
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse [i] written by Aleksandr Pushkin [i]. ...
, 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, translator
Vladimir Nabokov needed four full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Unfortunately, in so doing Nabokov, like all translators of Pushkin into English prose, 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.kin's works also provided fertile ground for Russian composers.
Glinka's
Ruslan and Lyudmila is a 1820 poem by Aleksandr Pushkin [i] and an opera [i] in five acts based on t ...
is the earliest important Pushkin-inspired opera.
Tchaikovsky's
operas
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse [i] written by Aleksandr Pushkin [i]. ...
and
The Queen of Spades became perhaps better known outside of Russia than Pushkin's own works of the same name, while
Mussorgsky's monumental
Boris Godunov 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 is a 1834 poem by Alexander Pushkin [i] and an opera [i] in three acts by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov [i] ...
;
Cui's
Prisoner of the Caucasus is an opera [i] in three acts, composed by Csar Cui [i]. ...
,
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 usually 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
- Remembrance
- Translated by Maurice Baring
- When the loud day for men who sow and reap
- Grows still, and on the silence of the town
- The insubstantial veils of night and sleep,
- The meed of the day's labour, settle down,
- Then for me in the stillness of the night
- The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
- And in the idle darkness comes the bite
- Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
- Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
- Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
- And Memory before my wakeful eyes
- With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
- Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
- I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
- Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
- But cannot wash the woeful script away.
Works
...
- Povesti Pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina The Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin
- The Tale of Tsar Saltan
- Dubrovsky
- The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights is a 1833 fairy-tale poem [i] by Aleksandr Pushkin [i] ...
- Pikovaya Dama The Queen of Spades later adapted as an opera
- The Golden Cockerel is a 1834 poem by Alexander Pushkin [i] and an opera [i] in three acts by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov [i] ...
- The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish is a 1835 poem [i] by Aleksandr Pushkin [i]. ...
- Yevgeniy Onegin Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse [i] written by Aleksandr Pushkin [i]. ...
- Mednyy Vsadnik The Bronze Horseman
- The History of Pugachev's Riot
- Kapitanskaya Dochka - The Captain's Daughter a romanticized historical novel of "Pugachevshchina," the life and times of Pugachev.
- Kirdzhali Kircali
- Gavriiliada
- I Have Visited Again
- Istoriya Sela Goryukhina The Story of the Village of Goryukhino
- Stseny iz Rytsarskikh Vremen Scenes from Chivalrous Times
- Yegipetskiye Nochi Egyptian Nights
- K A.P. Kern To A.P. Kern
- Bratya Razboyniki The Robber Brothers
- Arap Petra Velikogo The Negro of Peter the Great
- Graf Nulin Count Nulin
- Zimniy vecher Winter evening
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. In 2006 a bilingual Russian-English edition was published in Russia by .
See also
References
Further reading
- T. J. Binyon has written an English biography: Pushkin: A Biography .
External sources
- Elaine Feinstein : After Pushkin: versions of the poems of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin by contemporary poets. Manchester: Carcanet Press; London: Folio Society, 1999 ISBN 1-85754-444-7
- Serena Vitale: Pushkin's button; transl. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998 ISBN 0-374-23995-5
- Markus Wolf: Freemasonry in life and literature. With an introduction to the history of Russian Freemasonry . Munich: Otto Sagner publishers, 1998 ISBN 3-87690-692-X
External links
- includes Eugene Onegin and other points
- — FEB-web's Digital Scholarly Edition of A.S. Pushkin
- From the Russian Virtual Library.
Further reading
- Yuri Druzhnikov, Prisoner of Russia: Alexander Pushkin and the Political Uses of Nationalism, Transaction Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-56000-390-1
