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
