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    A Short Life of Pushkin
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    A Short Life of Pushkin
    Unavailable
    A Short Life of Pushkin
    Ebook171 pages1 hour

    A Short Life of Pushkin

    By Robert Chandler

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A short yet fascinating account of Russia's most celebrated writer

    Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is widely regarded as Russia's greatest poet. In this short, exquisite biography, Robert Chandler - award-winning translator of Grossman, Platonov and Teffi - examines Pushkin as writer, lover and public figure. From the poet's early years, through his disagreements with politics and the law, to his untimely death in a duel, Chandler describes both the man himself and his turbulent period of history with elegance and erudition.

    Robert Chandler is an acclaimed and award-winning translator of Russian literature. As well as translating works by Teffi for Pushkin Press, including her collection of short stories Subtly Worded and her memoir Memories - From Moscow to the Black Sea, he has edited three anthologies for Penguin Classics and translated a number of books by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He runs a monthly translation workshop at Pushkin House and has published poems in the TLS and Poetry Review.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPushkin Press
    Release dateAug 10, 2017
    ISBN9781782273455
    Unavailable
    A Short Life of Pushkin
    Author

    Robert Chandler

    Robert Chandler is an acclaimed and award-winning translator of Russian literature. As well as translating works by Teffi for Pushkin Press, he has edited three anthologies for Penguin Classics and translated a number of books by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov.

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    Reviews for A Short Life of Pushkin

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    • 5/5
      This is a fantastic biography of Alexander Pushkin, widely considered Russia’s greatest poet and founder of modern Russian literature. Even if you’re familiar with his story, you’ll probably learn something, but Chandler doesn’t overwhelm us with superfluous detail or a tome. In fact, since Pushkin was known for his concision and restraint, it seems Chandler’s concise history is perfectly tuned to his subject. I appreciated his care in stating when there were areas of uncertainty or conjecture, making clear his sources and reasons why they might be doubted when that was appropriate. Most of all, I appreciate his insight into a truly gifted man, including his flaws. It’s hard to state just how big an impact Pushkin’s writing had on Russian’s of his day, as it was so clever, full of grace, and advanced the national language, though Chandler relates anecdotes that help us understand. He explains meanings, or possible meanings in Pushkin’s prose and poetry. He gives a very interesting account of the tragic duel that took his life at 37, including the humiliations both men inflicted on each other, and in Pushkin’s case, even after D’Anthes had relented relative to Natalya and had married her sister instead. Pushkin’s reputation which would grow over the years, particularly after Dostoevsky’s speech to commemorate a statue of him in Moscow in 1880, and Chandler includes a great summary of the attempts various groups have made over to appropriate his legacy. Some additional tidbits…- “By the age of ten, according to his sister, Pushkin had read Plutarch, the Iliad and the Odyssey in French, and much of the eighteenth-century literature in his father’s library. In other respects, however, he was a poor student, and he seems to have failed, even as an adult, to master basic arithmetic.” Also: “By the end of his life he had acquired a library of 4,000 volumes, in fourteen languages.”- His African great-grandfather Abram Gannibal’s story is fascinating as well – taken by Islamic slave-traders to Constantinople as a boy, then taken to Moscow by Peter the Great who would become his godfather, and befriending Diderot and Voltaire after being sent to France to study.- Chandler describes an inkwell that Pushkin was given as a gift by Pavel Nashchokin and treasured, showing a black man leaning against an anchor in front of two bales of cotton; I recall seeing this in my favorite room of his house museum in St. Petersburg, the library.- Pushkin was quite a womanizer, chasing all sorts of women and occasionally prostitutes, and suffering bouts of venereal disease as a result. In one amusing line, Chandler says “It is uncertain whether Pushkin ever slept with Praskovya [a neighbor in her 40’s], but we know that he had sex with a startling number of her daughters and nieces.” His affair with Karolina Sobanska, a Polish woman who was sophisticated, intelligent, and sexually experienced – everything his eventual wife Natalya Goncharova was not – makes for an interesting comparison.- Pushkin’s writing on freedom and his association with the Decembrists (personally knowing at least 12 of them) would get him exiled to the south of Russia for four years by Alexander I, and monitored closely and censored by Nicholas I – and yet, he was so careless that revolutionary groups never let him into their inner circles. His relationship with Nicholas was apparently more nuanced than many reduce it to.- He was irascible and showed a lot of bravado; in one of his many duels earlier in life, he arrived with a hatful of cherries and ate them while his opponent took the first shot.- “While living in St. Petersburg, he would sometimes get up early, walk the sixteen miles to Tsarskoye Selo, have lunch, wander about the parks and then walk back home again.”- Pushkin’s ‘Mozart and Salieri’ from his ‘Little Tragedies’ gave Peter Shaffer the idea for Amadeus, and while Pushkin has often been compared to Mozart because of his genius, Chandler makes the point that he was also diligent and hard-working, like Salieri. To research his work on Pugachov, he read over a thousand pages of documents over eleven days, summarizing some and copying others down in full, and then later travelled to Kazan, Orenburg, and the Urals to interview eyewitnesses who were around in the early 1770’s.- Fascinating, and cringe-worthy: “To be a good husband, he had to banish thoughts of the Polish Karolina Sobanska; to get his ‘Comedy’ published, he had to excise from it any elements that could be seen as pro-Polish; to become Historian Laureate, he had to defend the Russian invasion of Poland. Lastly, his enemy Bulgarin, was of Polish origin. In a letter of December 1830, Pushkin wrote that he hoped that the coming war against Poland would be a ‘war of extermination’. It is possible that, at some deeper level of his mind, he might have meant ‘a war against all elements that might threaten his new position in the world’ – but these are dangerous words, no matter how one interprets them.” It’s hard to take the more forgiving view Chandler offers, when Pushkin would also later say that “it is as futile for the Poles to rebel against Moscow as for Yevgeny to threaten the Bronze Horseman,” referring of course to his famous poem.