Portrait of Alexander Pushkin. THE BETTMAN ARCHIVE tion in 1815, recognized sixteen-year-old Pushkin as his poetic successor.
Pushkin graduated from the Lyceum in 1817. From there he moved to Petersburg, where he spent his days sleeping late, taking walks, and attending parties in the evenings. Erratic and excitable, he made public scenes at the theater on several occasions. He frequented houses of prostitutes and had a number of romantic affairs. He was a member of the literary circle “The Green Lamp,” whose members, including Pushchin and Delvig, were also involved in secret political activities aimed at reform. Pushkin was not invited to join in the secret meetings, but he did write lyrics challenging the tsarist autocracy, including his ode “Freedom” (1817), “Noelles” (1818), and “The Village” (1819). The lyrics caused a stir; Pushkin was ordered to appear before Count Miloradovich, governor- general of St. Petersburg. Following that meeting in 1820, the tsar sent Pushkin into exile in the form of military service in South Russia under Lieutenant General Inzov.
Pushkin’s exile was in many ways pleasant. He befriended General Rayevsky and his family and traveled with them around Caucasus and Crimea. He then spent nearly three years in Kishinev, where he wrote the verse tales “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1820-1821), “The Bandit Brothers” (1821-1822), and “The Fountain of Bakchisaray” (1821-1823). In addition, he wrote the scathing, mock-religious “Gavriiliada” (1821) and began his novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823-1831). During this time Pushkin was captivated by Lord George Gordon Byron, particularly his Childe Harolde.
In July 1823 he was transferred to Odessa, where he had a lively social life, attended theater, and had affairs with two married women. He finished “The Fountain of Bakchisaray” and chapter one of Eugene Onegin, and began “The Gypsies.”
From 1824 to 1826 he was exiled to his mother’s estate of Mikhailovskoye in North Russia. There he finished “The Gypsies” and wrote the historical play in verse Boris Godunov, “Graf Nulin,” and chapter two of Eugene Onegin.
In November 1825, while Pushkin was still in Mikhailovskoye, Alexander I died. The confusion over the successor provided the opportunity for secret political societies (called the Decembrists after the event) to rise up in armed rebellion against the aristocracy before Nicholas was proclaimed emperor. The uprising took place in Petersburg in December 1825 and involved poet Kondraty Ryleev, Colonel Pavel Pestel, Pushchin, Kyukhelbecker, and others. Pushkin, while not present or involved, was implicated, as some Decembrists quoted his poetry in support of their movement. Ryleev and Pestel were sentenced to death, Pushchin and Kyukhel-becker to hard labor.
In the spring of 1826 Pushkin petitioned Tsar Nicholas I for a release from exile. He met with the tsar and was granted release, but restrictions continued as before. He was under constant scrutiny, and his most minute activities were reported to the tsar.
In 1829 Pushkin met and proposed to Natalia Goncharova, a society beauty. They were formally engaged on May 18, 1830. Pushkin was given permission to publish Boris Godunov. In September 1830 Pushkin went to Boldino in east-central Russia to make wedding arrangements. Because of the outbreak of asiatic cholera, he was forced to stay three months there. This time was the most productive of his life. As part of an overall transition from poetry to prose, he wrote the magnificent Tales of Belkin, a collection of stories in taut, swift-moving prose, revolving around mistaken identity
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and, according to Andrej Kodjak (1979), containing an encoded message concerning the Decembrist uprising. Other works during this period include his “Little Tragedies” (“The Avaricious Knight,” “Mozart and Salieri,” “The Stone Guest,” and “Feast in the Time of the Plague”), as well as “The Little House in Kolomna,” “The Tale of the Priest and his Workman Balda,” the last chapter of Eugene One-gin, and some of his finest lyrics, including “The Devils.” He married Goncharova in February 1831, shortly after the unexpected death of Delvig, his closest friend after Pushchin.
Pushkin’s marriage to Goncharova proved unhappy. She had little appreciation for his work, and he was unable to finance her extravagant lifestyle. Pushkin was beset with financial worries, and wrote little (including “Tale of the Golden Cockerel” (1834), the cycle of poems “Stone Island” (Kamenny ostrov, 1836) and his novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836). He published a quarterly journal The Contemporary, which added to his troubles and did not fare well.
Natalia Goncharova loved mingling with the high aristocracy and playing society coquette; her many admirers included the tsar. The flirtation took on more serious tones when Baron Georges Charles d’Anth?s, a French exile living in St. Petersburg under the protection of the Dutch ambassador, began to pursue her in earnest. A duel between d’Anth?s and Pushkin took place on February 10, 1837. Pushkin, severely wounded, died two days later.
Of Pushkin’s works, Eugene Onegin is the best known in the West, though by no means his sole masterpiece. Written over the course of eight years, it consists of eight chapters, each chapter broken into numbered stanzas in iambic tetrameter. Narrated by a stylized version of Pushkin himself, it portrays a Byronic antihero, Eugene Onegin, a bored society dandy who rejects the sincere and somber Tatiana. Onegin then flirts casually with Tatiana’s sister Olga, provokes a duel with his friend Vladimir Lensky, a second-rate poet infatuated with Olga, and kills Lensky in the duel. After some travels, Onegin returns to Petersburg to find out that Tatiana has married a wealthy general. He falls in love with her, but she rejects him out of loyalty to her husband. The work holds immense popular and scholarly appeal thanks to the playfulness and perfection of the verse, the layers of confession and commentary, the appeal of the heroine, and the complex element of prophecy of Pushkin’s own death. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; DERZHAVIN, GAVRYL ROMANOVICH; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; PUSHKIN HOUSE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bethea, David M. (1998). Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Binyon, T. J. (2002). Pushkin: A Biography. London: HarperCollins. Evdokimova, Svetlana. Pushkin’s Historical Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Greenleaf, Monika. (1994). Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich. (1983). Complete Prose Fiction, tr. Walter W. Arndt and Paul Debreczeny. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich. (1991). Eugene Onegin, reprint ed., tr. Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vitale, Serena. (1999). Pushkin’s Button, tr. Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Pushkin House (Pushkinsky Dom), the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (abbreviated in Russian IRLI RAN), was founded in St. Petersburg, in 1905 and named after Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837).
The idea of creating a new monument to Russia’s premiere poet came about during the celebration of his centenary in 1899 and the Pushkin Exhibit organized by the Academy in May of that year. By 1907 the task of this monument supported by literary societies, theaters, and other groups from around Russia had evolved into gathering manuscripts, artifacts, and collections of works of prominent Russian authors. The acquisition of Pushkin’s personal library in 1906 with government funds laid the foundation for the institute’s library. At this time Pushkin House occupied temporary space at the Academy’s main building while the search for a permanent location continued. World War I and the February and October Revolutions delayed the process but also increased the institute’s holdings, especially those of the manu1253
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script department. Among important additions were the archives, saved from the burning building of the gendarmes’ headquarters in February 1917, of the tsar’s secret police, documenting police surveillance of Pushkin and other nineteenth-century writers; Pushkin and Lermontov museum collections transferred in 1917 from the Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo for safekeeping; and the Paris museum collection of A. F. Onegin contracted for in 1909 and transferred to Pushkin House in 1927, after the owner’s death. Pushkin House became a member institute of
