Pushkin - Tapa dura

A major new biography of one of literature’s most romantic and enigmatic figures.

‘It was the devil’s idea that I should be born in Russia with a soul and with talent!’(Pushkin in a letter to his wife).

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was possibly Russia’s greatest poet – the nearest Russian equivalent to Shakespeare – and his brief life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work.

Born in Moscow in 1799, Pushkin was expelled from St Petersburg at the age of twenty as a result of his satirical writings. He remained in internal exile, under the supervision of the Emperor, for the next seven years, and throughout his life he continued to excite official disapproval for his political and religious beliefs. In 1832 he married a young beauty, Natalia Goncharova. Five years later he became jealous of the attentions paid to her by a French nobleman, and challenged him to a duel, in which he was fatally injured.

Pushkin’s life and writings have inspired generations of devotees, and his influence continues to be felt in the present day. His best-known works include The Bronze Horseman, the blank-verse historical drama Boris Godunov, the verse novel Eugene Onegin and Queen of Spades.

'Pushkin is our all', exclaimed poet and critic Apollon Grigorev in 1854. His famous remark is perhaps the best expression of Pushkin's significance, not merely for Russian literature and culture, but for the Russian ethos generally, and for Russia as a whole. His sentiments echoed those of Gogol, who described Pushkin as 'an extraordinary and perhaps unique manifestation of the Russian spirit.'

Born in Moscow in 1799, Pushkin was expelled from St. Petersburg at the age of twenty as a result of his satirical writings. He remained in internal exile, under the supervision of the Emperor, for the next seven years, and throughout his life he continued to excite official disapproval for his political and religious beliefs – and many love affairs. In 1831, despite mounting debts from his gambling and an uncertain income, he married the eighteen-year-old Natalya Goncharova who soon became recognised as one of the most beautiful women of St. Petersburg society. The attentions paid to her by a Guards officer, the French émigré d'Anthes, roused Pushkin to fury. In the subsequent duel, fought on 27 January 1837, Pushkin was fatally injured. He died in agony two days later.

Pushkin is, indisputably, Russia's greatest poet. His vital, passionate poetry changed literature forever. The author of a large body of magnificent lyrics, amazingly diverse in theme and treatment, he also composed a number of great narrative poems – 'Ruslan and Lyudmila', 'The Gypsies', 'Poltava' and 'The Bronze Horseman' – an extraordinary work, which vies with his novel in verse, 'Eugene Onegin', for the title of his masterpiece.

But Pushkin's brief life was more dramatic and turbulent than the figures of his literary imagination. With a childhood coloured by Russia's painful defeat of Napoleon, he was very much a product of his own time and noble background. A brilliant but rebellious figure, he was capable of writing exquisite love lyrics one minute, and epigrams of shocking crudity the next. He reformed Russian poetic language: in his hands it became a powerful, yet flexible instrument, with a diapason stretching from the solemnly archaic to the cadences of everyday speech.

Since his death, Pushkin has attained a mythical status. The aim of T.J. Binyon's scholarly and multi-layered biography is to free the complex and interesting figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth. Binyon's biography is the first full-length and authoritative account of Pushkin's life and times since 1937, and it bristles with the poet's energy and talent. In these pages Pushkin the poet lives again, and captures our hearts once more. Binyon tells his story with perfectly-judged pace, elegant wit, exacting scholarship and deep compassion. Pushkin himself could not have wished for a better biographer.