Russian Literature · 3 books
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on June 6, 1799, in Moscow, and died on February 10, 1837, in St. Petersburg, two days after being wounded in a pistol duel. He was thirty-seven years old. He died as the acknowledged founder of modern Russian literature, having in the space of two decades produced poetry, drama, prose fiction, and criticism that established the standards and the direction of everything that followed. Every major Russian writer of the nineteenth century — Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky — measured himself against Pushkin. He was, and remains, the central figure in the Russian literary tradition.
His family background gave him complexity that went beyond the social contradictions of his time. His father came from an old Russian noble family. His mother was the granddaughter of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an African man — the historical record suggests he may have been from what is now Cameroon or Ethiopia — who had been brought to Russia as a child and became a favorite of Tsar Peter the Great, eventually rising to the rank of general. Pushkin was proud of this ancestry and wrote about it, leaving unfinished a historical novel, The Moor of Peter the Great, that drew on Gannibal’s life directly.
He attended the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, an elite school for the sons of the nobility, between 1811 and 1817. The six years there were formative: he formed friendships that lasted his life, began writing seriously, and by the time he left was already known within the school and in Petersburg literary circles as an exceptional talent. Ruslan and Ludmila, a long narrative poem in a fairy-tale mode that he had been writing since his Lyceum days, was published in 1820 and was greeted with enthusiasm.
But the first years after the Lyceum also brought political trouble. He wrote poems with liberal and subversive content that circulated in manuscript, came to the attention of the authorities, and in 1820 resulted in his exile from St. Petersburg — a transfer to posts in southern Russia, in Kishinev and then Odessa, that lasted four years. The exile gave him the landscape and cultural material for what became his Southern Poems — a series of narrative poems, including The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, influenced partly by Byron and received by Russian readers as the founding works of Russian Romantic poetry.
A further episode of exile — this time to his family estate at Mikhailovskoye, in northwest Russia — ran from 1824 to 1826. The two years there were among his most productive. He completed the historical tragedy Boris Godunov, a play about the Time of Troubles at the turn of the seventeenth century, written in deliberate contrast to the French classical dramatic tradition; and he made substantial progress on the novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, that would occupy him from 1823 to 1831 and that is considered his masterpiece.
Eugene Onegin tells the story of a fashionable young St. Petersburg man — bored, cynical, and incapable of recognizing what is valuable until he has destroyed it — and the provincial young woman, Tatyana, who falls in love with him and is rejected, transforms herself, and becomes someone Onegin cannot reach. The novel’s form is as remarkable as its content: it is written in a specific fourteen-line stanza form — the Onegin stanza — that Pushkin invented and sustained for the entire work, using its flexibility to accommodate lyrical passages, digressive commentary, irony, and narrative momentum simultaneously. It has been translated many times, and every translator has faced the same insoluble problem: the verse form, the music, and the sense are inseparable, and capturing all three in English is impossible. The best translations acknowledge this honestly.
His prose fiction belongs primarily to the 1830s. The Tales of Belkin, published in 1831, is a collection of five short prose narratives attributed to a fictional narrator, combining realism, irony, and literary parody with the compression of a writer who had been trained in verse. The Queen of Spades, published in 1834, is a psychological and supernatural story about a young officer obsessed with learning a secret gambling formula from an old countess; it influenced Dostoevsky directly and is one of the most accomplished short stories in Russian literature. The Captain’s Daughter, published in 1836, is a historical novel set during the Pugachev Rebellion of the 1770s, narrated in the straightforward, unadorned prose that Pushkin had theorized in his critical writing as the proper medium for Russian prose fiction.
He died on February 10, 1837, from wounds received in a duel on January 29 with his wife’s brother-in-law, Georges-Charles d’Anthès, a French officer serving in the Russian army. The circumstances of the duel, and the role of court society in bringing it about, were understood at the time and have been analyzed since as a tragedy in which the pressures of a court environment and a culture of gossip and honor destroyed a writer at the height of his powers.
The difficulty of translating Pushkin into English has been discussed so extensively that it has become a minor subject in itself. The verse forms he used — and the Onegin stanza in particular — are resistant to English equivalents, and the qualities of his prose (its ease, its speed, its exact calibration of tone) depend on properties of the Russian language that do not transfer directly. Every major English translation of Eugene Onegin has been made by a significant writer or scholar and has produced a version that captures some aspects while sacrificing others. This situation, familiar to any reader who works with Russian literature in translation, is not an argument against reading Pushkin in English; it is an argument for reading him with awareness of what translation can and cannot do — and for finding a translation that is honest about the choices it has made.
At Classics Retold, we have published new translations and editions of Pushkin’s major prose works and narrative poems — editions aimed at bringing English readers into direct contact with the clarity, wit, and emotional precision that have made him irreplaceable in Russian culture. His best work requires nothing from a reader except attention; it gives back more than that in return.
