A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Russian 19th century author who often has been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. He established the norms of classical Russian versification, and he laid the groundwork for much of the development of Russian prose in the 19th century. His work is distinguished by brilliance of language, compactness, terseness, and objectivity. He 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. Pushkin's Romantic contemporaries were Byron (d. 1824) and Goethe (d. 1832), but his ironic attitude can be connected to the literature of the 18th century, especially to Voltaire. Pushkin wrote some 800 lyrics with a dozen narrative poems. Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, the son of a family of the middle nobility. On his father's side he was a descendant of one of the oldest lines of Russian nobility. Pushkin's mother Nadezhda was the granddaughter of Abram Gannibal, an African slave. Abram had been brought from Africa as a gift for Peter I, who favored him and sent him to Paris for military education. With the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, Abram rose through the ranks to the status of general, but was retired following Elizabeth's death. Pushkin took pride in his African heritage, referring to it often in his lyrics. Pushkin himself had black hair and swarthly complexion. Hen was brought up in an atmosphere that was predominantly French, and at a very early age he became acquainted with the classic works of 17th-and 18th-century French literature. He learned Russian from household serfs and from his nanny, Arina Rodionovna. Pushkin started to write poems from an early age. His first published poem was written when he was only 14. Between 1811 and 1817 Pushkin attended a special school established at Tsarskoye Selo (later renamed Pushkin) by Czar Alexander I for privileged children of the nobility. Pushkin was an indifferent student in most subjects, but he performed brilliantly in French and Russian literature. While attending the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo (1811-1817), he began writing his first major work, Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), a kind of fairy story in verse, composed of fantastic adventures but told with 18th-century humor and irony. It was based on Russian folk-tales which his grandmother had told him - in French. Years later at his father's estate he listened to legends and fairy tales told by his old nurse Arina Rodionovna. Pushkin graduated from the Lyceum in 1817. From there he moved to Petersburg, where he spent his days sleeping late, taking walks, and attending parties in the evenings. Erratic and excitable, he made public scenes at the theater on several occasions. He frequented houses of prostitutes and had a number of romantic affairs. He was a member of the literary circle "The Green Lamp," whose members, including Pushchin and Delvig, were also involved in secret political activities aimed at reform. Before Ruslan and Ludmila was published in June 1820, Pushkin was exiled to the south of Russia because of the boldness of the political sentiments he had expressed in his poems. His "Ode to Liberty" contained, for example, a reference to the assassination of Paul I, the father of Czar Alexander I. Pushkin left St. Petersburg on May 6 and he did not return to the capital for more than 6 years. During this time Pushkin discovered the poetry of Lord Byron . Pushkin spent the years 1820-1823 in various places in the Caucasus and in the Crimea, and he was at first charmed by the picturesque settings and relieved to be free of the intoxications and artificialities of the life of the capital. Subsequently, however, he felt bored by the life in small towns and took up again a life of gambling, drinking, and consorting with loose women. He was always short of money, for his salary in the civil service was small and his family refused to support him. He began to earn money with his poetic works, but these sums were seldom sufficient to permit him to compete comfortably with his affluent friends. In 1823 he was transferred to Odessa, where he found the life of a large city more to his liking. The poet's life in Odessa in 1823-1824 was marked by three strong amorous attachments. First, he fell in love with Carolina Sobansky, a beauty who was 6 years older than he. He broke with her in October 1823 and then fell violently in love with the wife of a Dalmatian merchant, Amalia Riznich. She had many admirers and gave Pushkin ample cause for jealousy. Amalia, however, inspired some of Pushkin's best poems, such as "Night" and "Beneath the Blue Sky of Her Native Land, " and he remembered her to the end of his life. His third love was for the wife of the governor general, the Countess Eliza Vorontsov. She was a charming and beautiful woman. Vorontsov learned of the affair, and having no special liking for Pushkin he resolved to have him transferred from Odessa. He was aided in this endeavor by an unfortunate letter that Pushkin had written to a friend in which he had questioned the immortality of the soul. The letter was intercepted, and because of it Pushkin was expelled from the service on July 18, 1824, by the Czar and ordered to the family estate of Mikhailovskoye near Pskov. Pushkin's father tried in vain to keep his son under his control, but the result was, that the poet's friends applied to the Czar, and Pushkin père was exiled from his own estate. When the new Czar, Nicholas I, allowed Pushkin to return to the capital. Due to the Czar's patronage, he openly abandoned revolutionary sentiments. In 1829 he made a four-month visit to Transcaucasia, witnessing the action with the Russian Army against the Turks. Although living in exile in different parts of Russia, Pushkin continued to write poems, rising gradually as the leader of the Romantic movement. In 1823 he started his major masterpiece, Eugene Onegin (1833). This novel in verse is without doubt Pushkin's most famous work. It shows the influence in theme of Byron's Don Juan and in style of Laurence Sterne's novels. It is a "novel" about contemporary life, constructed in order to permit digressions and a variety of incidents and tones. The heart of the tale concerns the life of Eugene Onegin, a bored nobleman who rejects the advances of a young girl, Tatiana. He meets her later, greatly changed and now sophisticated, falls in love with her. He is in turn rejected by her because, although she loves him, she is married. Pushkin's novel has been a rich source of character types for Russian writers. Tatiana has been regarded as the ideal of Russian womanhood. She is faithful, generous, sincere, and considerate. Among others Turgenev modelled his heroines after her. "Onegin" is a work of such complexity that, while only about a hundred pages long, translator Vladimir Nabokov needed two full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Because of this difficulty in translation, Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to English readers. Even so, Pushkin has profoundly influenced western writers like Henry James. In the fall of 1830 Pushkin left the capital to visit a small estate by the name of Boldino, which his father had left him, with the intention of spending a few weeks there. However, he was blocked from returning to the capital by measures taken by the authorities because of a cholera epidemic, and he was forced to return to Boldino. This was a very productive literary period. He wrote a group of plays, among them The Avaricious Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, and The Feast During the Plague. Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1831) was possibly inspired by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and consists of five short stories: "The Shot, " "The Snowstorm, " "The Stationmaster, " "The Undertaker, " and "The Peasant Gentlewoman." The stories are models of swift, unadorned narration. Pushkin published the work anonymously and surprised Russian readers. However, the tales did not gain the popularity of his poems. Proper Mérimée, who admired Pushkin's light touch, translated Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin into French. The Queen of Spades (1834), Pushkin's most famous short story, was later made into an opera by Tchaikovsky. The plays are short and vary in length from 240 to 550 lines. The Feast During the Plague is a translation of a scene from John Wilson's The City of the Plague ; The Stone Guest is a variation of the Don Juan theme; Mozart and Salieri treats the tradition of Antonio Salieri's envy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's effortless art and the injustice of Nature in dispensing her gifts; and The Avaricious Knight has as its theme avariciousness and contains the famous monologue of the baron on his treasures. 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. 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. Pushkin's great historical tragedy, Boris Godunov, was published in 1831. It was based on the career of Boris Fyodorovich Godunov, the Czar of Russia from 1598 to 1605. Boris is haunted by guilt over the murder of the Tsarevich Dmitry. When an ambitious young monk claims to be Dmitry, Boris tries to defend his throne, but he falls ill and dies. In 1833 Pushkin travelled east to the Urals for historical research. Next year he received an appointment as a functionary at the court, but his minor status was considered a humiliation. His debts were mounting and he was worried about his wife's possible infidelity. After 1830 Pushkin wrote less and less poetry. In his last years Pushkin started to write a historical work on Peter the Great, which was left unfinished. The Tsar had been a central figure in his narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (1833), considered by many to be his greatest poem. The setting is the great flood of 1824, which inundated much of St. Petersburg. The theme of the poem is the irreconcilable demands of the state and the individual. The Golden Cockerel (1834) is a volume of Russian folktales. Pushkin's masterpiece in narrative is the short story The Queen of Spades (1834), about a gloomy engineer who is ruthless in his efforts to discover the secret of three winning cards. Mention should also be made of his The History of the Pugachev Rebellion (1834) and The Captain's Daughter (1836), a short novel about the Pugachev rebellion. In 1829 Pushkin fell in love with 16-year-old Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova, whom he married two years later. Her family was as impoverished as Pushkin's, but she become a beauty of the Imperial court. The marriage was unhappy and Pushkin had little peace for intense creative activity. His wife was invited to every ball at the palace, and her frivolous social life led Pushkin into debt and eventually to his early death. The gossip of an affair between Baron Georges d'Anthès and his wife started to spread. An anonymous note informed Pushkin that he had been elected to "The Serene Order of Cuckolds". Although A'Anthès married Natalya's sister, the scandal was not quite over. Pushkin defended in a duel his wife's honor with her brother-in-law. D'Anthès fired first his pistol. Fatally wounded, Pushkin fired also his shot and his opponent got a slight wound. Pushkin died on February 10 (New Style), 1837. The Czar buried him in the monastery near Mikhailovskoye, in secret for fear of popular risings at the funeral. He also paid all the remaining debts of the poet. Natalya received a pension. D'Anthès was expelled from Russia. He died in 1895. Pushkin had four children from his marriage to Natalya: Maria (b. 1832, touted as a prototype of Anna Karenina ), Alexander (b. 1833), Grigory (b. 1835), and Natalya (b. 1836) the last of whom married, morganatically, into the royal house of Nassau to Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau and became the Countess of Merenberg. As an essayist Pushkin was prolific but most of his writings remained in draft form and over half were published posthumously due to repressive censorship. Chiefly Pushkin concentrated on literature and history, but he did not develop a systematic philosophical view - it has been said that Pushkin lacked "central vision". He saw that overwhelming use of French by the upper classes delayed the progress of Russian literature. In this matter Pushkin was not speaking without his own experience - his first language was French, he read French writers well on into adolescence, and his characters, such as Onegin, spoke French. The responsibility of the Decembrist Rebellion Pushkin shifted onto foreign influences. He was fascinated by democratic republicanism but perceived the tendency to idealize the natural state of life, as exemplified both in the work of James Fenimore Cooper and in political discussion in the United States, as was shown in his essay Dzhon Tenner (1836). Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry. In 1937, the town of Tsarskoe Selo was renamed Pushkin in his honor. Many of Pushkin's works provided the basis for operas by Russian composers. They include Ruslan and Ludmila by Mikhail Glinka, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky, The Stone Guest by Aleksandr Dargomijsky, and The Golden Cockerel by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. |
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