Alexander Pushkin (1799 - 1837) was a Russian poet, playwright, and prose writer widely regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature. [1] His verse novel Eugene Onegin, the historical drama Boris Godunov, and narrative poems including The Bronze Horseman established a literary language that combined educated speech with vernacular Russian and set the direction for the writers who followed him. [2] He was mortally wounded in a duel in St Petersburg in 1837 at the age of thirty-seven. [1]
Early life and education
Pushkin was born in Moscow on 26 May 1799 into an old but no longer wealthy noble family. His maternal great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, was an African brought as a child to the Russian court, where he rose to become a general and engineer under Peter the Great; Pushkin took a lasting interest in this ancestry and began an unfinished novel about him. He was raised largely by French tutors and by a serf nurse whose folk tales he later credited as a formative influence. [1]
From 1811 he attended the newly founded Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, an elite school established to train state servants, where he began publishing verse while still a pupil and formed friendships that lasted his life. On graduating he entered the foreign service in St Petersburg. [2]
Exile and early work
Political epigrams and an ode celebrating liberty brought him to official attention, and in 1820 he was transferred out of the capital in what amounted to internal exile, spending years in the Caucasus, Crimea, Moldavia, and Odessa. The southern poems of this period, including The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, show the influence of Byron and made him the leading poet of his generation in Russia. [1]
He was subsequently confined to his family estate at Mikhaylovskoye, where he completed the tragedy Boris Godunov, on the Time of Troubles, and continued work on Eugene Onegin. After the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825, in which several of his friends were implicated, Tsar Nicholas I recalled him and took personal charge of censoring his work, an arrangement that constrained him for the rest of his life. [3]
Major works
Eugene Onegin, written over some eight years and published in full in 1833, is a novel in verse whose intricate stanza form became known by his name. Its portrait of a bored aristocrat, the woman he rejects, and the friend he kills in a duel established character types that recur throughout nineteenth-century Russian fiction. [2]
An intensely productive autumn spent at Boldino in 1830 produced the Little Tragedies, the prose Tales of Belkin, and other work. His later writing includes the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, the novella The Queen of Spades, the historical novel The Captain's Daughter, verse fairy tales drawn from folk sources, and a documentary history of the Pugachev rebellion, for which he was granted access to state archives. [1]
Death and legacy
In 1831 Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova. Court gossip concerning his wife and the French officer Georges d'Anthès led Pushkin to challenge him, and in the duel fought on 27 January 1837 he was shot in the abdomen. He died two days later in St Petersburg. The authorities, fearing public disorder, moved the funeral and had him buried near Mikhaylovskoye. [3]
Pushkin's language became the standard of literary Russian, and his works have supplied the basis for operas by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, among many other adaptations. Monuments, museums, and institutions across Russia carry his name, and his birthday is observed as a national literary anniversary. [4]
