Word: pushkin
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...PUSHKIN by David Magarshack. 320 pages. Grove...
...case of Alexander Pushkin, not only his poetry but his whole essence seems to be lost in translation. Russians-from schoolchildren to arcane critics-still devour Pushkin's poems, plays and stories. His work is viewed at home as the headwater of the great streams in Russian literature. Tolstoy admitted that the idea for Anna Karenina flowed from an unfinished Pushkin story. Dostoevsky once said: "If Pushkin had not existed, there would have been no talented writers to follow." Even the modern Soviet state claims him as a comrade, maintaining that many of his best lines were premature party...
...Russia's Shakespeare does not travel well. Chekhov and Tolstoy are read and loved elsewhere. But most Western readers, confronted by examples of Pushkin's genius, can only nod politely-or, in the case of the worst translations...
...Petersburg (Russia's capital until the honor was ceded to Moscow in 1918) and its cosmopolitan, cultural effervescence, which stirred not only Adolf Hitler's ire but the enduring suspicions of a xenophobic Georgian peasant, Joseph Stalin. The Paris of the Baltic, the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Leningrad stood, in Salisbury's words, as "the invisible barrier between the end of Russia and the beginning of Europe." It was a prime military and propaganda target for Hitler's surging armies when, in June 1941, the Germans suddenly loosed Operation Barbarossa against their erstwhile Russian allies...
Third for the Chair. But the champagne (which the poet drinks exclusively) flowed on, and pretty girls flocked to him, like so many pigeons around the statue in Moscow's Pushkin Square. His poetry began to show the strain of his public posturings. Increasingly facile and bombastic, his work declined in quality in proportion to his rise as a political personality. It gave him some moments of self-doubt, as when he wrote...