(In order to rescue his beloved Lyudmila, who has been abd...)
In order to rescue his beloved Lyudmila, who has been abducted by the evil wizard Chernomor, the warrior Ruslan faces an epic and perilous quest, encountering a multitude of fantastic and terrifying characters along the way.
(Pushkin's incomparable poem has at its center a young Rus...)
Pushkin's incomparable poem has at its center a young Russian dandy much like Pushkin in his attitudes and habits. Eugene Onegin, bored with the triviality of everyday life, takes a trip to the countryside, where he encounters the young and passionate Tatyana. She falls in love with him but is cruelly rejected. Years later, Eugene Onegin sees the error of his ways, but fate is not on his side. A tragic story about love, innocence, and friendship, this beautifully written tale is a treasure for any fan of Russian literature.
(The Bronze Horseman is a narrative poem written by Alexan...)
The Bronze Horseman is a narrative poem written by Alexander Pushkin in 1833 about the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg and the great flood of 1824.
A Tale Of The Old Fisherman and The Little Gold Fish
(The tale tells a story of the old fisherman who catches a...)
The tale tells a story of the old fisherman who catches a magic goldfish. The old man is very kind to the goldfish and chooses to let her go. His old lady, however, is not so kind.
(An aging King Dadon is struggling to defend his kingdom f...)
An aging King Dadon is struggling to defend his kingdom from invaders. A stargazing wizard comes to the king and gives him a special gift, a magic golden cockerel to help guard the kingdom against the enemies. The King promises the wizard anything he wishes in exchange, but when the time comes to settle, the wizard wants something that the king is unwilling to give up.
(This historical novel is dedicated to the events of the P...)
This historical novel is dedicated to the events of the Pugachev’s Rebellion in Russia in 1773-1775. It tells the story of a 17-years-old officer, Peter Grineff, sent by his father into military service. Peter was assigned to a small fortress of Belogorsk, where he fell in love with Maria, the daughter of the commandant.
(Dubrovsky gives a sweeping picture of the life and habits...)
Dubrovsky gives a sweeping picture of the life and habits of the landed gentry in Russia in the first quarter of the 19th century. The tragedy of the Dubrovsky family, ruined by the rich landowner Troyekurov, is unfolded against a background of peasant risings, called forth by the oppressive rule of the serfholders, and the cruelty and tyranny of the landlords and corrupt officials of the time.
Aleksander Pushkin, in full Aleksander Sergeyevich Pushkin, was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. He has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Among his writings are The Bronze Horseman, Eugene Onegin, Ruslan and Ludmila, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Boris Godunov, The Captain's Daughter, and A Feast in Time of Plague.
Background
Aleksander Pushkin was born on the 26th of May, 1799; the son of Sergei Lvovich Pushkin and Nadezhda Ossipovna Hannibal. Pushkin’s father came of an old boyar family, his mother was a granddaughter of Abram Hannibal, who, according to family tradition, was an Abyssinian princeling bought as a slave at Constantinople (now Istanbul) and adopted by Peter the Great, whose comrade in arms he became.
Like many aristocratic families in early 19th-century Russia, Pushkin’s parents adopted French culture, and he and his brother and sister learned to talk and to read in French. They were left much to the care of their maternal grandmother, who told Aleksander, especially, stories of his ancestors in Russian. From Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, his old nurse, a freed serf, immortalized as Tatyana’s nurse in Yevgeny Onegin, he heard Russian folktales. During summers at his grandmother’s estate near Moscow, he talked to the peasants and spent hours alone, living in the dream world of a precocious, imaginative child.
Education
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.
Career
After finishing school, Pushkin led the reckless and dissipated life of a typical nobleman. He wrote about 130 poems between 1814 and 1817, while still at school, and these and most of his works written between 1817 and 1820 were not published because of the boldness of his thoughts on political and erotic matters.
In 1820 Pushkin completed his first narrative poem, Russlan and Ludmilla. It is a romance composed of fantastic adventures but told with 18th-century humor and irony. Before Russlan and Ludmilla 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.
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 poetic work during the 4 years that he spent in the south was rich in output and characterized by Lord Byron's influence, which can be seen in "The Caucasian Captive" (1820-1821), "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" (1822), and "The Gypsies" (1824). These poems are mellifluous in verse and exotic in setting, but they already show the elements of Pushkin's classic style: measure, balance, terseness, and restraint.
On August 9, 1824, Pushkin arrived at Mikhailovskoye. His relations with his parents were not good. The father felt angry at his son's rebelliousness and on one occasion spread a story that his son had attempted to beat him. The family left the estate about mid-November, and Pushkin found himself alone with the family nurse, Arina Rodionovna, at Mikhailovskoye. He lived fairly much as a recluse during the next 2 years, occasionally visiting a neighboring town and infrequently entertaining old Petersburg friends. During this period he fell in love with a Madame Kern, who was married to an old general and who encouraged the attention of many men. Also at this time the nurse told Pushkin many folk tales, and it is generally believed that she imbued him with the feeling for folk life that manifested itself in many of his poems.
Pushkin's 2 years at Mikhailovskoye were extremely rich in poetic output. He completed "The Gypsies," wrote the first three chapters of Eugene Onegin, and composed the tragedy Boris Godunov. In addition, he composed many important lyrics and a humorous tale in verse entitled Count Nulin. Boris Godunov is a chronicle play. Pushkin took the subject from Karamzin's history, and it relates the claims of the impostor Demetrius to the throne of the elected monarch Boris Godunov.
After the end of his exile at Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin was received by the new czar, Nicholas I, who charmed Pushkin by his reasonableness and kindness. The Czar placed Pushkin under a privileged tyranny by promising him that his works would be censored by the Czar himself. The practical consequences of this arrangement were that Pushkin was placed under an honorable promise to publish nothing that was injurious to the government; in time this "privileged" censorship became increasingly onerous.
Pushkin continued his dissipated life after 1826 but with less gusto. Although he was still in his 20s, he began to feel the weight of his years, and he longed to settle down. On April 6, 1830, he proposed to Nathalie Goncharova for the second time and was accepted. She came from a noble family that had fallen on hard times financially. The Goncharovs were dissatisfied with Pushkin's standing with the government and were unimpressed by his reputation as a poet. Pushkin had to ask for economic favors for the Goncharovs from the government, and he persuaded his father to settle an estate on him.
Pushkin's output in the years 1826-1829 was not so great as in the years 1824-1826, but it was still impressive. He continued to work on Eugene Onegin, wrote a number of excellent lyrics, worked on but did not finish a prose novel entitled The Nigger of Peter the Great, and wrote Poltava, a narrative poem on Peter the Great's struggle with Charles XII which celebrates the Russian victory over the Swedes. This poem shows the continuing development of Pushkin's style toward objectivity and austerity.
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. During that autumn at Boldino, Pushkin wrote some of his greatest lyrics; The Tales of Belkin; a comic poem in octaves, "The Little House in Kolomna"; and four small tragedies; and he virtually finished Eugene Onegin.
Eugene Onegin was begun in 1824 and finished in August 1831. 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 four little tragedies are models of spare, objective, and compact drama. 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 Covetous Knight has as its theme avariciousness and contains the famous monologue of the baron on his treasures.
The Tales of Belkin 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.
After 1830 Pushkin wrote less and less poetry. "The Bronze Horseman" (1833) is 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 (1833) 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 (1837), a short novel about the Pugachev rebellion.
Pushkin married Nathalie Goncharova on January 19, 1831. She encouraged the attentions of Baron George d'Anthes, an exiled Alsatian Frenchman and a protégé of the minister of the Netherlands at St. Petersburg. Pushkin provoked D'Anthes to a duel on January 26, 1837, and the duel took place the next day. Pushkin was wounded and died on January 29. There was great popular mourning at his death.
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.
Pushkin’s use of the Russian language is astonishing in its simplicity and profundity and formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. His novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin, was the first Russian work to take contemporary society as its subject and pointed the way to the Russian realistic novel of the mid-19th century.
In 1937, the town of Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Pushkin in his honour.
There are several museums in Russia dedicated to Pushkin, including two in Moscow, one in Saint Petersburg, and a large complex in Mikhaylovskoye.
A minor planet, 2208 Pushkin, discovered in 1977 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh, is named after him. A crater on Mercury is also named in his honour.
Aleksander Pushkin was always an atheist. He was raised in a family indifferent to religion.
Politics
Aleksander Pushkin did not participate in major political events of his time, he was either carefully kept out of a seditious talk by his friends or was thought to be too irresponsible and fragile to be trusted with secrets. The ideas of civic freedom and political rationalism which soared in the air that time reflected in Pushkin's poems and in the behavior of the young poet. In 1820 he was told to leave the capital and forced to a kind of glorified exile first in the Caucasus, then in Odessa, and finally on his family estate at Mikhailovskoye near Pskov. He was only allowed to return after the Decembrist uprising had been put down, one important condition being that he would submit anything he wanted to publish in future to Czar Nicholas I beforehand for personal censorship.
Views
Even as a child, Pushkin supported the ideas of the French enlighteners. He was influenced by the idealistic philosophical movements of Schelling, Fichte, and especially Voltaire. Pushkin's atheism is an integral part of his materialistic worldview and his healthy moral image.
Quotations:
"I want to understand you, I study your obscure language."
"A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths."
"If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason."
"My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you."
"My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?"
"I was not born to amuse the Tsars."
"Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts."
"Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth."
Membership
Alexander Pushkin was a Member of the Russian Academy. He was also a Freemason and a member of Filiki Eteria.
Personality
Aleksander Pushkin had a keen sense of humor and loved sneaking swearwords into his verse. He was a notorious rogue, womanizer and gambler, something the Russian people seem to love about him. He liked to dance with gypsies, eat smoked sturgeon, get drunk in local taverns; listen to Rossini, challenge authority, and take steam baths on trips to Georgia. Pushkin was so temperamental and unpredictable that he would likely be described as manic depressive if he were alive today. He could be offensive just as easily as charming. He flew off the handle with the slightest perceived offense, heckled actors on stage, and accused strangers of cheating at cards. He was regarded by many as a snob and others as s great patriot and a sort national prodigal son. Some have compared his relatively short, precocious, tempestuous life to that of Mozart.
Physical Characteristics:
Pushkin was short, only 5 foot, six inches. He had pale blue eyes, a protruding jaw, and curly unmanageable hair and once described his looks as a true ape by his face.
Quotes from others about the person
"For the very first time, he gave us the artist models of Russian beauty which come directly out of the Russian soul, living in our national truth, on our national soil." - Dostoevsky.
"The unusual thing about Russia is that it reached cultural maturity in the nineteenth century. Russia didn’t have the Middle Ages of Dante and Chaucer, the Renaissance of the Italians, or the Elizabethan age of the British. They weren’t even sure what language to write in. Pushkin more or less created the Russian literary language, and Pushkin was born in 1799. They were doing for the first time what other cultures had been doing for hundreds of years." - Richard Pevear.
"Pushkin is a unique expression and perhaps even the only expression of the Russian soul." - Gogol.
"His terrible side-whiskers, his long nails which looked like claws, his short stature, his mincing manners, the impudent way in which he stared at the women whom he found attractive and his natural unlimited vanity." - Anna Olenin, a woman who once considered marrying him.
Connections
Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova on January 19, 1831. She bore him three children, but the couple were not happy together. She was beautiful and a favorite at court, but she was also somewhat uneducated and not free of vulgarity. She encouraged the attentions of Baron George d'Anthes, an exiled Alsatian Frenchman and a protégé of the minister of the Netherlands at St. Petersburg. Pushkin provoked D'Anthes to a duel on January 26, 1837, and the duel took place the next day.
Father:
Sergey Lvovich Pushkin
Sergey Lvovich Pushkin was born on the 23rd of May, 1770 and died on the 29th of June, 1848.
Mother:
Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkin
Nadezhda Osipovna was born on the 21st of June, 1775 and died on the 29th of March, 1836. She was a granddaughter of Abram Petrovich Hannibal.
great grandfather:
Abram Petrovich Gannibal
Abram Petrovich Gannibal was born in 1696 and died on the 14th of May, 1781. He was sold into Turkish slavery and brought as a black servant to Czar Peter I, known as Peter the Great. He became one of the royal favorites, a general-in-chief, and one of the best-educated men in Russia in his era. His great-grandson was Alexander Pushkin, the famous Russian writer who later glorified the deeds of his black ancestor in his book, The Negro of Peter the Great.
Daughter:
Maria Pushkina
Maria Pushkina was born on the 31st of May, 1832 and died on the 7th of March, 1919.
Daughter:
Natalia Alexandrovna Pushkina
Natalia Alexandrovna Pushkina was born on the 23rd of May, 1836 and died on the 10th of March, 1913. She was the morganatic wife of Prince Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau.
Son:
Grigory Pushkin
Grigory Pushkin was born on the 14th of May, 1835 and died on the 15th of August, 1905. He was a military judge.
Son:
Alexander Alexandrovich Pushkin
Alexander Alexandrovich Pushkin was born on the 6th of July, 1833 and died on the 19th of July, 1914. He was a Russian general, who participated in the Crimean War. He retired from military service in 1891 and was assigned the rank of secret advisor.
Wife:
Natalia Nikolayevna Pushkina-Lanskaya
Natalia Nikolayevna Goncharova was born on the 8th of September, 1812 and died on the 26th of November, 1863.
References
Montaging Pushkin
Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights.
2006
A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836
Michael Wachtel’s book, designed for those who can read Russian comfortably but not natively, provides the historical, biographical, and cultural context needed to appreciate the work of Russia’s greatest poet. The purpose of this commentary is not to offer a new interpretation, but to give sufficient linguistic and cultural contextualization to make informed interpretation possible.
Pushkin: A Biography
This superb, authoritative biography, frees the complex figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth, making palpable the poet’s rare energy, talents, and spirit. Telling Pushkin’s story with exacting scholarship, elegant wit, and acute insight, T. J. Binyon gives us a revelation of the poet and the man.
