🇷🇺 Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on June 6, 1799, into a noble family of mixed African and Russian ancestry — his great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African page brought to Peter the Great's court who rose to become a general. This heritage, which Pushkin referenced frequently and with evident pride, gave him a perspective slightly outside the pure Russian nobility into which he was born, and may help explain why he spent his entire life chafing against the restrictions of that world. He died at thirty-seven, killed in a duel, having compressed into those years an output of poetry, prose, drama, and fairy tales that would shape every Russian writer who came after him.

His genius was apparent from childhood. Educated at the elite Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum near St. Petersburg, he was writing accomplished verse by fifteen and was recognized by the established poets of his day before he had graduated. His earliest long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), drew on Russian folklore to create something simultaneously traditional and entirely modern — playful, irreverent, technically dazzling. The older poet Vasily Zhukovsky presented him with a portrait inscribed "To a victorious pupil from a defeated teacher." He was twenty-one years old.

The political authorities were less enthusiastic. Pushkin's early verse circulated in manuscript and was full of liberal sentiment — freedom, equality, attacks on tyranny — that brought him to the attention of Tsar Alexander I. In 1820, he was exiled from St. Petersburg, spending years in the south of Russia and later in his family estate at Mikhailovskoye under what amounted to house arrest. The exile gave him time, and time gave him some of his greatest work: the narrative poems of the southern period, the tragedy Boris Godunov (1825), and the first chapters of Eugene Onegin, the verse novel he would work on for eight years and which would become his supreme achievement.

Eugene Onegin (completed 1831) is the work that established Pushkin's permanent place not just in Russian literature but in world literature. Written in a complex fourteen-line stanza that Pushkin invented for the purpose — the "Onegin stanza," a variant of the sonnet that allows for extraordinary variations of tone — the novel tells the story of a bored St. Petersburg dandy, his encounter with the passionate and sincere Tatyana Larina, and the catastrophic consequences of his inability to value what is genuine. It is a story about emotional intelligence — or rather, its absence — and it diagnosed a Russian social type so precisely that "superfluous man," the term later applied to Onegin and his literary descendants, became one of the organizing concepts of nineteenth-century Russian culture.

Tatyana, the novel's true center, is among the greatest female characters in world literature. She writes Onegin a letter confessing her love — a letter of extraordinary boldness and vulnerability — and he rejects her with condescension. Years later, she has married a general and become a great lady; he falls in love with her; she rejects him, not because she does not love him (she admits she does), but because she has given her word to her husband and she will not break it. It is an ending of breathtaking moral seriousness, and it defines a certain Russian ideal of integrity under pressure that runs through the entire literary tradition that followed Pushkin.

Beyond Eugene Onegin, Pushkin's range was extraordinary. His prose tales — "The Queen of Spades" (1834), "The Captain's Daughter" (1836), the "Belkin Tales" (1831) — established the template for Russian prose fiction. His verse tales, fairy tales, and lyric poems are so deeply embedded in Russian consciousness that educated Russians can quote pages of them from memory; certain phrases have passed into the language as proverbs. His historical drama Boris Godunov provided the libretto for Mussorgsky's opera and shaped Russian historical writing for a century. His unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great, about his own ancestor, inaugurated Russian historical fiction.

His personal life was as turbulent as his artistic production. He was a gambler, a duelist (fought and survived numerous duels before the last one), a relentless pursuer of women, and a man whose political unreliability was a constant source of anxiety to the court of Tsar Nicholas I, who appointed himself Pushkin's personal censor. In 1831 he married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova, who moved in the highest court circles. In January 1837, a French émigré officer named Georges d'Anthes — who had been courting Natalia — provoked Pushkin to a duel. Pushkin was shot in the abdomen and died two days later on February 10, at the age of thirty-seven. All of St. Petersburg mourned. The government, fearing a public demonstration, had his body removed secretly at night.

His legacy is foundational in a way that few writers in any tradition can match. Dostoyevsky said that all Russian writers "came out from under Pushkin's overcoat." Tolstoy modeled the episodic structure of his early fiction on Pushkin's prose. Chekhov's compression and indirection trace their lineage to the Belkin Tales. Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin as an opera. Mussorgsky set Boris Godunov. Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Glinka drew on his verse. He did not merely found Russian literature; he founded Russian artistic culture as a whole.