Pushkin - The Man and His Age

On the second centenary of his birth, in 1999, Alexander Pushkin will be celebrated in Russia both as one of his country's greatest poets and as a national hero. Outside Russia he still remains comparatively litle known, except through the distorting lens of two of Tchaikovsky's operas, and even in Russia - where he has become a mythical figure. Born at the watershed between the 18th and 19th centuries, Pushkin grew up during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. This was a crucial period of Russian history, which brought the Russian Army as liberators to Paris in 1814 and ended, eleven years later, with the Decembrist Revolt, when three thousand troops in St Petersburg refused to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I. The leaders of this revolt, five of whom were hanged, were among Pushkin's friends. Pushkin was not a political radical, but his outspokenness was liberal enough to cause his banishment and dismissal from the Imperial Service by Alexander I. In 1826, his tete-a-tete meeting in the Kremlin with Nicholas I, who rescinded this punishment, marked the start of an uneasy and constrained relationship that would mar both his professional and his private life. A man for whom creative work was a necessity, Pushkin tried to combine earning his living by his pen with the controversial pursuits of a Russian nobleman, including wine, women and cards - a lifestyle that brought him to the brink of ruin. How much more might he have achieved had his life not been tragically cut short, at the age of 37, by a duel fought in his beloved St. Petersburg? In this biography, Robin Edmonds takes account of evidence uncovered in the last 50 years as well as of assessments recently published by Russian Pushkinists. His analysis of Pushkin the man combines familiarity with the vast array of Russian sources and a dispassionate view of the controversy that still surrounds much of Pushkin's turbulent life and the bizarre circumstances of his death. Edmonds recreates both the paradoxical character of this extraordinary man and the historical significance of the age in which he lived.