Alexander Pushkin

 

Alexander Pushkin was, by common consent, Russia’s greatest poet. He was also the heroic ideal of the Romantic poet.

He was born in 1799 into a noble Russian family. Brilliant and precocious, his first poetry was published at the age of 14. His romantic narrative “Ruslan and Ludmila”, written six years later, was a runaway success and was recognised as breaking every literary convention of its day.

He displayed huge energy and drive that had the effect of transforming Russian literature. He did this by rejecting the traditional constraints of religion and censorship to create highly original works.

He revolutionised the way Russians thought about their history and drama, and especially the way they thought about their writers.

Among his best-known works was “Eugene Onegin”, written between 1825 and 1832, this being a verse novel that is regarded by some as the finest Russian novel ever written. It was a decisive move away from the allegorical tradition and towards the realism later displayed by writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Nabokov.

Pushkin was a radical in political as well as literary terms. He sympathised with the aims of the aristocratic set known as the Decembrists, who conspired to reform the oppressive autocracy of the Tsars. These sympathies attracted the attention of the autocrats and led to Pushkin’s exile from St Petersburg to some of the more remote parts of Western Russia. In 1825 he had to look on from the outside as a Decembrist uprising was put down and his generation’s dreams of liberty were smashed.

However, Pushkin was allowed back into imperial favour when Tsar Nicholas I made promises of reform that turned out to be less than promised. His radicalism was still very much to the fore, which meant that he fell increasingly out of favour at court. He wanted to retire to a life of literary seclusion, but this escape was denied him. The result was that he gave way to drinking and gambling.

One reason why Pushkin was not allowed to leave the court was that he had married an extremely beautiful woman named Natalya. By flirting with several of the men about the court, including the Tsar himself, she had unwittingly encouraged lustful ambitions that she had no intention of satisfying.

One of these would-be suitors was a French social climber named George d’Anthes. After insulting her in public he challenged Pushkin to a duel, and his challenge was accepted. Pushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days after the event at the age of 38.

The nature of Pushkin’s death, at such a young age, only served to cement his reputation as a Romantic icon. He has therefore gone down in literary history as the epitome of creativity triumphing over the dead hand of bureaucracy and philistinism.

© John Welford