Word: pushkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suddenly occurred to Haldane that the official Soviet position on the vexed matter of genetics was nonsense. "I am a Mendelist-Morganist," he was later to exclaim plaintively. He had accepted the stifling grip of dictatorship on the spirit of a people who had given birth to Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoevsky. But Haldane finally choked on what was essentially a split hair-a technical scientific point...
...literary matters, Pushkin had a touchy vanity that was often justified but was no more attractive for all that. In personal affairs, he never forgave a slight, keeping a list of people who had insulted him and carefully noting the date when he considered that he had repaid them. He dueled often, one time so disdainfully that he ate cherries out of his cap and calmly spat the pits in his opponent's direction...
Subject to Suppression. Pushkin's strange shape and nature were the products of a bizarre lineage. On his mother's side, he was great-grandson of an African slave originally presented to Czar Peter the Great. His father's family, as he put it, was "the detritus of a decrepit aristocracy" that went back 600 years into feudal times. Born in 1799 in Moscow, Pushkin was left largely on his own by indifferent parents. As a boy he was impressed by French liter ature, especially the savage wit of Voltaire, and absorbed Russian folklore from his peasant...
Such restraints hurt. Pushkin depend edon his writing for a living and, in fact, became Russia's first really pro fessional writer. But restraint could not temper his flamboyant mode of life, which was Byronic - though not in the usual sense. Pushkin's affinity was for the rational, irreverent side of Byron's temperament, and he delighted in mocking the romantic conventions of his day. In an early poem, The Caucasian Captive, he had a maiden fall into a stream and the hero refuse to jump in and rescue her. "I've swum in Caucasian streams...
...years went by. At 30, he was old-looking and exhausted. Thinking that marriage would settle him down, as well as pay his debts, he wed a Mos cow beauty 13 years his junior. "My hun dred and thirteenth love," he called her - a very modest estimate. Ironically, Pushkin's wife became a favorite at the Czar's court, and her flagrant flirtations threw him into fits of jealousy. Finally he challenged the boldest of her courtiers, the French-born Baron Georges D'Anthes, to a duel. Pushkin was shot in the stomach and died two days...