Word: russian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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 than attempt to re-create in English the Russian poet's verbal music...
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...
...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 nurse - both basic strains in his later writing. He proved erratic in school, but by the age of 18, he had already published 30 poems and begun lifelong associations with Russia's progressive thinkers and writers...