Word: pushkins
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Elusive Simplicity. Some of the problem is that Pushkin's reputation for greatness stems in part from his historical significance. Much Russian writing of his age cloaked itself affectedly in secondhand French elegance. In such superb tales as The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin fashioned a new native style-spare, exact, free of rhetorical flourish-which set the tone for the epic prose era that was to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. In rich, full-blooded dramas like Boris Gudunov, he helped to free the Russian stage from its prim, Racine-engendered formalities. Poems...
Even as a poet's poet, though, Pushkin is still very special and-in translation-frustrating. His verse is elusively simple, unadorned by such easily translatable characteristics as splashy imagery or intellectual abstractions. Its strength lies rather in subtly suggestive tones and rhythms. No less a language snob and stylist than Vladimir Nabokov labored on and off for almost a decade to translate Pushkin's acknowledged masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin. Nabokov's rendering of this romantic (and mock romantic) panorama of Russian society was brilliant; yet even he decided to settle for strict literalism rather...
Spitting the Pits. Pushkin's life was no less odd and puzzling than his works, as this solid, sometimes pedestrian biography by Russian-born David Magarshack makes clear. As a founding father of Russian literature, Pushkin behaved more like a rakehell uncle. A tiny (5 ft. 3 in.), edgy man with fingernails as long as claws and half-simian features, Pushkin pursued all the known excesses with prodigious energy. Though he was ugly, he exerted a vast sexual attraction through his sheer intensity. A fellow student recalled that at the touch of a dancing partner's hand...
...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...