In praise of Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet in history bar none (and whom I know in the original Russian, sadly, only from Eugene Onegin and The Bronze Horseman), would have celebrated his 219^th birthday today.

Pushkin was born in 1799 in Moscow, to a Russian nobleman, Sergei L’vovich Pushkin and his wife Nadya Osipovna Gannibalova – a woman of mixed Scandinavian and Central African heritage (through her grandfather Abram Gannibal). The Pushkins belonged to that same class of poor-but-lettered boyars from which the early Slavophils were drawn, and indeed, some of the Slavophils belonged to Pushkin’s literary circle. Aleksandr was well-educated and highly gifted as a youth, and had his first poem published at the age of fifteen. His poetic talents were already well-recognised upon his graduation from the Lyceum outside Saint Petersburg (where he made several very close friends and established the first links in his literary circle). However, he also very quickly fell foul of the authorities. His poetry tended, after all, toward the subversive side.

Like the Chinese poet Wen Yiduo a century later, Pushkin combined a tight, disciplined verse structure with certain vernacular Russian usages. Actually it’s probably better to say that Pushkin’s influence on Russian was close to that of Shakespeare’s on English – Pushkin himself being an avowed fan of Shakespeare, this comparison is probably a little more apt. But Pushkin’s political views may have likened him more to Wen: the former sympathised with the constitutional-minded noble youth who would go on to stage the Decembrist Uprising, even though he did not join the Uprising himself or support it in a material way. In any event, a copy of one of his poems – an ‘Ode to Liberty’ – found its way into the hands of the Tsar, who sent the young poet into a six-year exile.

Pushkin travelled around the south of Russia – the Caucasus and the Crimea in particular – and later landed in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, before finishing his exile in Mikhailovskoe village, where his mother lived. It was during his sojourn in the south that he entered the broad Romantic stream with verse narratives of the life in those parts, and became influenced in particular by Lord Byron. The Decembrist Uprising happened around this time, in 1825, and several of Pushkin’s friends from the Lyceum were implicated. The new Tsar Nikolai I, however, did not seem to hold as strong a grudge against Pushkin as his father had, and he allowed Pushkin to return to Saint Petersburg from exile, conditionally. (The condition, it seems, was that the Tsar be allowed to censor all of Pushkin’s works.)

Pushkin then embarked on courting Natalie Goncharova, a famed Moscow beauty. Natalie would only agree to marry him, on the condition that his position with the government be resolved beforehand (which it was). Pushkin’s engagement to Goncharova oversaw his most creative period, including a break with Lord Byron (which happened to concern the history of Ivan Mazepa); the two of them married in 1830 and sought to settle in the Tsarskoe Selo (where Pushkin had attended school), but it was not to be. An outbreak of cholera in the city drove the imperial court there, and the Pushkins had to settle in an apartment within city limits, where Aleksandr Pushkin spent the rest of his life.

On account of his wife, Pushkin was made a low-ranking courtier and obliged to attend Nikolai I, a duty which he both resented and found himself hard-up to afford. Natalie Pushkina was essentially obliged to be a Saint Petersburg hostess, and with that obligation came a raft of expenses which in turn made her husband write for money and patronage rather than for art’s own sake. In addition, the Pushkins hosted Natalie’s two unmarried sisters, which attracted further troubles upon the poet.

Pushkin savaged the court practices of seductions and duels in his ‘verse novel’ Eugene Onegin, which makes the end of his life a rather bitter irony. Natalie Pushkina had been on the receiving end of various attentions from a certain French white émigré bachelor in the Tsar’s service, Georges d’Anthès, which resulted in a public scandal with Pushkin at the centre. Even though d’Anthès was eventually married to Natalie’s sister Catherine in order to settle the affair, he continued to press his attentions on Pushkin’s wife until the poet challenged him to a duel. During the duel, d’Anthès shot Pushkin in the stomach, fatally wounding him. Pushkin died two days later, but not before sending d’Anthès a letter forgiving him for all he had done.

Pushkin’s death was immediately and publicly mourned by thousands – and not least by the people within his literary circle, including the literary Slavophils Ivan Kireevsky and Fyodor Tyutchev. Pushkin was not a direct martyr to a political cause the way Wen Yiduo was, and the two of course belong to vastly different eras and social milieus. Wen Yiduo decidedly wasn’t given to a romantic turn of mind, and Pushkin decidedly was. Wen Yiduo lived a ‘clean life’, and his deepest and most abiding regret was the fact that he couldn’t be there for his daughter when she died. Pushkin, like several other of his contemporary Russian poets (including Tyutchev), was a notorious rake and libertine, particularly during his exile. And yet for some reason I cannot help but link the two poets, Pushkin and Wen, together in my mind, in ways that the mere surface similarities of their shared use of vernacular language, tight verse structure and œconomical phrasing cannot entirely account for. For both poets the ‘national idea’ looms large, and the national problems even more so. Within Pushkin’s poems there is the same kind of deep and intensely-personal searching after life-truths as there is in Wen’s that is reflected and magnified in their use of the tongue of the common folk. And in many of his poems Pushkin militated against the falsities of the (Westernised) court culture in his own way – the same court culture whose rules and honour code took his life from him.

Even limited as my exposure to Pushkin’s verse is, it is little wonder to me that the Russian people have taken Pushkin to an astoundingly unanimous degree as their great poet-laureate, the very first of the Russian poets. May his memory long live, and brightly.