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- His many narrative poems, epics, and lyrics are mainstays of the Russian literary tradition and widely memorized. His works have inspired countless song cycles, ballets, and other artistic interpretations.
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- He created the modern Russian language. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is rightly considered to be the founding father of the modern Russian language. He rejected the high-blown style of classic Russian poetry, breaking down the barrier between colloquial speech and the elevated odes of the past.
- He mastered a wide range of genres. Pushkin had an unbelievably broad scope as a writer. He wrote classical odes, romantic poems, love and political verse, novels in verse, historical drama, realist prose, novellas, short stories, fairy tales, travel journals – and much more, besides.
- He set the tone for future greats. Pushkin identified the main themes that would keep Russian writers busy well into the 20th century. The suffering of a humble individual of low rank, the confrontation between an exceptional character and society, the painful choice between duty and personal happiness, a loner's rebellion against the system – all these subjects were first raised by Pushkin, before becoming central ideas in works by other great Russian authors such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Bunin.
- He created an “encyclopedia of Russian life” One of Pushkin's key works is the verse novel Eugene Onegin. A prominent mid-19th-century literary critic called it an “encyclopedia of Russian life,” reflecting its comprehensive coverage of the country’s life and culture at the time.
- Overview
- The early years
- St. Petersburg
- Exile in the south
- At Mikhaylovskoye
Aleksandr Pushkin (born May 26 [June 6, New Style], 1799, Moscow, Russia—died January 29 [February 10], 1837, St. Petersburg) Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.
Pushkin’s father came of an old boyar family; his mother was a granddaughter of Abram Hannibal, who, according to family tradition, was an Abyssinian princeling bought as a slave at Constantinople (Istanbul) and adopted by Peter the Great, whose comrade in arms he became. Pushkin immortalized him in an unfinished historical novel, Arap Petra Velikogo (1827; The Negro of Peter the Great). Like many aristocratic families in early 19th-century Russia, Pushkin’s parents adopted French culture, and he and his brother and sister learned to talk and to read in French. They were left much to the care of their maternal grandmother, who told Aleksandr, especially, stories of his ancestors in Russian. From Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, his old nurse, a freed serf (immortalized as Tatyana’s nurse in Yevgeny Onegin), he heard Russian folktales. During summers at his grandmother’s estate near Moscow he talked to the peasants and spent hours alone, living in the dream world of a precocious, imaginative child. He read widely in his father’s library and gained stimulus from the literary guests who came to the house.
In 1811 Pushkin entered the newly founded Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo (later renamed Pushkin) and while there began his literary career with the publication (1814, in Vestnik Evropy, “The Messenger of Europe”) of his verse epistle “To My Friend, the Poet.” In his early verse, he followed the style of his older contemporaries, the Romantic poets K.N. Batyushkov and V.A. Zhukovsky, and of the French 17th- and 18th-century poets, especially the Vicomte de Parny.
While at the Lyceum he also began his first completed major work, the romantic poem Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), written in the style of the narrative poems of Ludovico Ariosto and Voltaire but with an old Russian setting and making use of Russian folklore. Ruslan, modeled on the traditional Russian epic hero, encounters various adventures before rescuing his bride, Ludmila, daughter of Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, who, on her wedding night, has been kidnapped by the evil magician Chernomor. The poem flouted accepted rules and genres and was violently attacked by both of the established literary schools of the day, Classicism and Sentimentalism. It brought Pushkin fame, however, and Zhukovsky presented his portrait to the poet with the inscription “To the victorious pupil from the defeated master.”
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In 1817 Pushkin accepted a post in the foreign office at St. Petersburg, where he was elected to Arzamás, an exclusive literary circle founded by his uncle’s friends. Pushkin also joined the Green Lamp association, which, though founded (in 1818) for discussion of literature and history, became a clandestine branch of a secret society, the Union of...
For these political poems, Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), he was there taken ill and, while convalescing, traveled in the northern Caucasus and later to Crimea with General Rayevski, a hero of 1812, and his family. The impressions he gained provided material for his “southern cycle” of romantic narrative poems: Kavkazsky plennik (1820–21; The Prisoner of the Caucasus), Bratya razboyniki (1821–22; The Robber Brothers), and Bakhchisaraysky fontan (1823; The Fountain of Bakhchisaray).
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Although this cycle of poems confirmed the reputation of the author of Ruslan and Ludmila and Pushkin was hailed as the leading Russian poet of the day and as the leader of the romantic, liberty-loving generation of the 1820s, he himself was not satisfied with it. In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece, the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833), on which he continued to work intermittently until 1831. In it he returned to the idea of presenting a typical figure of his own age but in a wider setting and by means of new artistic methods and techniques.
Yevgeny Onegin unfolds a panoramic picture of Russian life. The characters it depicts and immortalizes—Onegin, the disenchanted skeptic; Lensky, the romantic, freedom-loving poet; and Tatyana, the heroine, a profoundly affectionate study of Russian womanhood: a “precious ideal,” in the poet’s own words—are typically Russian and are shown in relationship to the social and environmental forces by which they are molded. Although formally the work resembles Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Pushkin rejects Byron’s subjective, romanticized treatment in favour of objective description and shows his hero not in exotic surroundings but at the heart of a Russian way of life. Thus, the action begins at St. Petersburg, continues on a provincial estate, then switches to Moscow, and finally returns to St. Petersburg.
Pushkin had meanwhile been transferred first to Kishinyov (1820–23; now Chişinău, Moldova) and then to Odessa (1823–24). His bitterness at continued exile is expressed in letters to his friends—the first of a collection of correspondence that became an outstanding and enduring monument of Russian prose. At Kishinyov, a remote outpost in Moldavia, he devoted much time to writing, though he also plunged into the life of a society engaged in amorous intrigue, hard drinking, gaming, and violence. At Odessa he fell passionately in love with the wife of his superior, Count Vorontsov, governor-general of the province. He fought several duels, and eventually the count asked for his discharge. Pushkin, in a letter to a friend intercepted by the police, had stated that he was now taking “lessons in pure atheism.” This finally led to his being again exiled to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoye, near Pskov, at the other end of Russia.
Although the two years at Mikhaylovskoye were unhappy for Pushkin, they were to prove one of his most productive periods. Alone and isolated, he embarked on a close study of Russian history; he came to know the peasants on the estate and interested himself in noting folktales and songs. During this period the specifically Russian features of his poetry became steadily more marked. His ballad “Zhenikh” (1825; “The Bridegroom”), for instance, is based on motifs from Russian folklore; and its simple, swift-moving style, quite different from the brilliant extravagance of Ruslan and Ludmila or the romantic, melodious music of the “southern” poems, emphasizes its stark tragedy.
In 1824 he published Tsygany (The Gypsies), begun earlier as part of the “southern cycle.” At Mikhaylovskoye, too, he wrote the provincial chapters of Yevgeny Onegin; the poem Graf Nulin (1827; “Count Nulin”), based on the life of the rural gentry; and, finally, one of his major works, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov (1831).
Upon graduation from the Lycée, Pushkin recited his controversial poem "Ode to Liberty", one of several that led to his exile by Emperor Alexander I. While under strict surveillance by the Emperor's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov.
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is of all poets Russia’s most beloved, widely quoted and extensively set to music. Hot tempered and apparently conceited in person, in his writing he displayed a deft if often sardonic wit, keen and often compassionate observation and a worldliness which recalled the English poet he most admired, Lord Byron.
Alexander Pushkin was a revolutionary 19th-century Russian poet and novelist who toiled with exile while changing the face of Russian literature.
Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin was born into one of Russia’s most famous noble families. His mother was the granddaughter of an Abyssinian prince, Hannibal, who had been a favorite of Peter I, and many of Pushkin’s forebears played important roles in Russian history.
Dec 27, 2023 · Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, whose poems and works still delight and inspire, not only established his place in the history of literature, but also made a revolution in its meaning and form. His life, work and influence reveal a complex picture not only of Russian, but also of world culture.
