Who Was Pushkin?

Kiprensky painted him in 1827 with a crossed arm and a gaze that already knew it was being looked at. The portrait hangs in the Tretyakov. It is how schoolrooms still meet him: the side-whiskers, the dark coat, the slightly theatrical calm. Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the life by Dimitry Blagoy, calls him poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer — “often considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.” The sentence is large. What it names is not a marble founder. It is a voice that learned to carry a joke and a wound in the same breath, and a language that, after him, could do the same.

The life is shorter than the books he made possible. He was born in Moscow on 26 May 1799, 6 June New Style, into old Russian nobility on his father’s side. His mother was a granddaughter of Abram Hannibal, who, according to family tradition recorded in the same Britannica account, was an African man purchased as a slave in Constantinople and later taken into the circle of Peter the Great. Pushkin began an unfinished historical novel about him. At home, as in many aristocratic houses of the time, French was the language of books and polite speech. Russian came through his grandmother, through peasants in summer, and through his nurse Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, a freed serf whose storytelling Britannica links to the nurse in Yevgeny Onegin. The two kitchens matter more than the dates. The work is what happens when they share a table.

Tropinin painted him the same year in a dressing gown, a book in his hands, less of the public poet and more of a man who has stayed up. Two likenesses in one year is already a clue. Pushkin’s pages keep both rooms: the drawing-room where people watch you, and the private voice that can turn from a fairy tale to a street quarrel without changing clothes. Later Russian prose would live in that double room. It did not invent it. It inherited the furniture.

The Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, outside St Petersburg, was the first public stage. He published verse while still a student. In January 1815 the aged Gavrila Derzhavin came to a public examination; the schoolboy recited, and the old poet, Pushkin later wrote, took notice. Ilya Repin reconstructed that morning a century later, in 1911, with light pouring across a hall that never quite existed that way. Use the canvas as a later nation’s memory of a blessing. Then put it aside. The important fact is smaller: by the time he left the lyceum, the literary capital already knew a voice that did not sound like a copy of the eighteenth century. Political verse later led to banishment from St Petersburg. Years in the south, then at the family estate of Mikhailovskoye, were painful and productive. The exile is not the story. The story is what the exile made light enough to move.

Ruslan and Ludmila had already broken the expected smoothness of verse. In the south he wrote the Byronic narrative poems that made him famous in a way that later embarrassed him: The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. He was learning how far a plot could be stretched before it became an excuse for tone. Then he began the work that would outlast the fashion. Yevgeny Onegin, often Eugene Onegin, occupied him from the 1820s until 1831 and appeared as a whole in 1833. Britannica calls it the first Russian work to take contemporary society as its subject, and a path toward the realistic novel later in the century. That is the critic’s map. The book itself is more intimate. A bored, clever man moves through drawing rooms and a country estate. A poet is killed in a duel. A young woman writes a letter she should not write, is refused, and later, married, refuses in turn. Nothing in that outline is new. The stanza is.

Pushkin invented for the novel a fourteen-line stanza of iambic tetrameter, with a rhyme scheme that can turn from joke to wound in a breath. It is not a decoration. It is how the book thinks. A couplet can shrug. The next quatrain can open a window onto a whole province of feeling. The narrator talks to the reader as if the reader were in the room, then steps back into the plot as if nothing had been confessed. Vissarion Belinsky, writing when the book was still new, called it an encyclopedia of Russian life. The phrase has been repeated until it sounds like a museum label. Read the stanzas and the encyclopedia is not a catalogue. It is weather: balls, boredom, a country garden, a name-day, the particular cruelty of being young and already tired.

I write to you — what more is needed? / What else is there that I could say?

Elena Samokish-Sudkovskaya drew the novel for a 1908 edition: stairs, a bow, the social weather of a scene. The drawing is later and sweet. The book is not. Tatyana’s letter is not a confession poured out because the author needs a climax. It is a girl using the only serious language she has — the language of novels — to tell a man something the drawing-room has no form for. Onegin’s refusal is not cruelty in a cape. It is the voice of a man who has read too much and felt too little, explaining himself as if explanation were a kindness. When they meet again in St Petersburg, she has learned the other language of that world — composure — and he discovers, too late, that he has a heart. Russian readers have been arguing about her ever since, which is a way of saying the verse made a person.

Lensky, the young poet Onegin kills, is easy to mock and dangerous to dismiss. He believes in friendship and in verse the way a person believes in weather: as if it will go on. The duel is not a set piece about honour. It is what happens when two kinds of emptiness share a field at dawn — Onegin’s practised boredom, Lensky’s untried sincerity — and neither knows how to stop the machinery they have started. Pushkin had fought duels. He knew the social script. The stanza, though, does not thrill to the pistols. It notices the ordinary morning, the fuss of seconds, the stupid speed of a death. Later Russian fiction would return to this field. It would rarely make the morning so quiet.

If Onegin is society looking at itself, The Bronze Horseman, written in 1833, is a city looking at a man. St Petersburg, a flood, Falconet’s statue of Peter I, and Evgeny, a “little man” whose sweetheart is lost in the water. The poem opens with a hymn to Peter’s city that is also a hymn to will: stone forced onto marsh, a capital commanded into being. Then the water comes. The hymn does not vanish. It sits beside a ruined private life and refuses to cancel it. Evgeny shakes his fist at the bronze emperor and then is hunted, in his mind, by the statue itself. The poem does not decide whether Peter’s will was glory or violence. It holds both in the same flood. That double vision — the great historical force and the ruined private life — is one of the gifts later Russian prose never quite repaid.

I love you, Peter’s creation.

The line is famous enough to be printed on souvenirs. In the poem it is not a slogan. It is the speaker’s love for a city that will, a few pages later, drown a clerk’s hope. Love, here, is not permission. It is the admission that beauty and harm can share a street. Readers who want Pushkin simple — the sunny national poet — have to stop before Evgeny’s mind breaks. Readers who want him only tragic have to skip the hymn. The poem asks you to keep both. That is harder, and it is why the bronze horse still rides through later books: Gogol’s clerks, Dostoevsky’s stairwells, the Petersburg that is never only a backdrop.

The autumn of 1830, spent at Boldino because cholera had closed the roads, is the legend of his speed. In a few weeks he finished chapters of Onegin, the Little Tragedies, The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda, and a sheaf of lyrics. Speed, here, is not carelessness. It is a man who had already made the language light enough to move. The Little Tragedies squeeze a moral knot into a few scenes. Mozart and Salieri is envy as a chamber play: a craftsman who has given his life to rules, and a genius who seems not to need them. The piece is not a detective story about poison. It is a study of what happens to a soul that cannot forgive another person’s ease. The Stone Guest and The Miserly Knight work the same way. A passion is given just enough room to reveal that it has no other room.

The Queen of Spades is a short story that behaves like a fever. An engineer, Hermann, hears of an old countess who knows a secret of three cards. He does not want love. He wants the system. The tale gives him the secret, or seems to, and then the last card is not the one he counted on. Britannica’s account of Pushkin’s prose places the story among the works that showed Russian could tell a modern plot without the old Slavonic swell. The scare is not the ghost, if there is a ghost. The scare is a mind that has mistaken luck for knowledge. Later writers of Petersburg — Gogol’s nose in uniform, Dostoevsky’s student with an axe — walk out of this weather. The city, in Pushkin’s late prose, is already a place where an idea can hunt a man.

The fairy tales in verse — Tsar Saltan, the fisherman and the fish, the golden cockerel — are not a side hobby. They are Pushkin finding how folk cadence and literary wit can share a line without one eating the other. A child can follow the plot. An adult can hear the irony that never quite winks. Arina Rodionovna’s stories are in the grain of these poems, but so is the Lyceum: the tales know they are being told in a literary language. That double hearing is the same gift as Onegin, only in a different key. Schoolchildren still reciting him are not being given a patriotic vitamin. They are being taught that Russian can be sung and spoken at once.

After the Decembrist uprising of 1825, Nicholas I allowed Pushkin to return, while keeping him under watch. In 1831 he married Natalya Goncharova. Court life, debt, and surveillance left little quiet. The creative path in those years does not look like a straight climb. It looks like a man using whatever form would hold the next problem. Boris Godunov, written on Shakespearean principles, as Pushkin himself framed the experiment, is history as a play of crowds and conscience. The tsar who has taken a throne by crime cannot sit still inside his own success. The people, in the famous last stage direction, are silent. History, here, is not a lesson delivered from the wings. It is a noise that suddenly stops.

Prose came late and clean. The Tales of Belkin offer a series of voices — a stationmaster, a shot, a blizzard — as if the language were practising how to tell a story without a poet in the frame. The Captain’s Daughter (1836), a historical novel of the Pugachev rebellion, showed that Russian could walk through a disaster without the old swell and without a lecture. A young officer, a fortress, a peasant war, a love that is not an allegory: the book is quiet on purpose. Britannica’s claim is careful: his Russian — simple and deep at once — became a basis for later prose writers including Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. He could sound like folklore and like a European ironist on the same page. That range is why a visitor who learns a few lines is not doing a tourist trick. They are touching the instrument later literature plays.

I loved you; love still, perhaps, has not quite died away in my soul.

The lyric is eight lines and a whole education in tone. No scenery. No name. A love that is still there and already being laid down like a coat. Pushkin’s mature manner is this: the feeling is large, the diction is almost ordinary, and the rhyme does the extra work so the speaker does not have to shout. Later writers who wanted “realism” often started from that quiet. They did not all keep the music. To read the lyrics after Onegin is to see that the novel in verse was not a detour from poetry. It was poetry learning to walk through rooms. The short lyric is the same walk, with the furniture removed.

In 1836 he founded Sovremennik, The Contemporary, and printed Gogol. The magazine is part of the same work as the poems: making a room where Russian could be modern without ceasing to be Russian. He had introduced, Britannica and later critics agree, a diction that could carry Church Slavonic weight, French ease, and the talk of a household in one instrument. Nabokov, listing the ingredients, was describing a kitchen. Schoolchildren, reciting him, are tasting the soup. The two descriptions are not at war. What the later novelists inherited was not a set of plots. It was permission: to be clear without being thin, to be tender without being soft, to let a joke arrive a line before the sorrow it was protecting.

Naumov painted the last duel in 1884, snow and pistols, almost fifty years after the fact. On 27 January 1837, 8 February New Style, at the Black River outside St Petersburg, Georges d’Anthès fired first. The bullet entered at the hip and reached the abdomen. Pushkin died two days later, on 29 January, 10 February New Style, of peritonitis. Britannica, in Blagoy’s wording, says he was fatally wounded in a duel forced on him while defending his wife’s honour. The rumours, the insults, the seconds, the barrier walk — later tellings love the mechanics. The work does not need them. It was already done. A literature that still introduces itself with his birthday is not being sentimental. It is admitting where the instrument was tuned.

What remains is not a monument that asks to be saluted. It is a way of hearing. Open Onegin for Tatyana’s letter, and for the stanza that can mock a ball and then, without a change of clothes, mean it. Open The Bronze Horseman for the flood that will not choose between the city and the clerk. Open the lyrics if you want the whole of a feeling in the time it takes to drink tea. Then, if you still have an hour, read The Captain’s Daughter and notice how quietly a historical disaster can be told. The later giants — Tolstoy’s patience, Dostoevsky’s fever, Chekhov’s pauses — all write in a Russian he had already made large enough for ordinary life. UN Russian Language Day falls on his birthday, 6 June, which is a bureaucratic honour and also a fair map: the language and the man are still introduced together.