Who Was Alexander Pushkin?
On the afternoon of 8 February 1837 (27 January Old Style) at the Black River on the St Petersburg–Pavlovsk road, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès — adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, second lieutenant of the Chevalier Guard, husband of Pushkin’s sister-in-law — fired a pistol at twenty paces at the poet’s body. The ball entered the right side of the abdomen, lodged in the pelvis, and was not extractable. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin died two days later, at 2:45 p.m. on 10 February (29 January O.S.), in his apartment on the Moika. He was thirty-seven years old. The killing was the product of a year-long open campaign of public insults by d’Anthès against Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkina; the duel’s note of intent is preserved in the Pushkin archives in the Institute of Russian Literature in St Petersburg (see Tiazanov, Duel and Death of Pushkin, 1996; Bethea, Realizing Metaphors, 1998).
Pushkin’s body was carried out at night, by sleigh, on the personal order of Nicholas I, and buried at the Svyatogorsk monastery near his family estate at Mikhailovskoye. Nicholas wrote to his successor’s widow: “Yesterday Pushkin died at 2:45. All the documents and the poet’s archive are at your disposal.” A court official had previously inspected the apartment; the originals of the Gavriliada, of Tsarskoye Selo, and of the Ten Pictures were removed.
Origins and Lyceum
Pushkin was born in Moscow on 6 June 1799 (26 May O.S.) to Sergei Lvovich Pushkin, a minor poet of the old dvoryanstvo, and Nadezhda Osipovna Hannibal, granddaughter of Abram Petrovich Gannibal — the African boy kidnapped to the court of Peter the Great, baptised into the Orthodox Church, and later general in chief and godson of the emperor. Abram was the model, in biographical reverse, for the title character of Peter the Great’s Negro (1837, published posthumously).
Pushkin entered the Imperial Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, founded by Alexander I in 1811, in October 1811. The Lyceum’s inspector was the historian Karamzin, its most influential teacher the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. The first printed poem, “To a Poet Friend” (Vestnik Evropy, 1814), appeared when Pushkin was fifteen.
The Romantic works
The first great success was Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) — six cantos of mock-epic in ottava rima, drawing on folkloric sources collected by Vladimir Dal. In May 1820 Pushkin was exiled to the south for an epigram on Alexander I and a letter intercepted in 1819 by the Third Section. The southern years (Kavkaz, Crimea, Kishinyov, Odessa) produced the long poems The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1821), The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1824), and the gipsy romance Tsigani (1827). The Chapter Two stanza of Eugene Onegin — “I met you on the slope of the Urals” — was drafted in 1825, and the novel in verse was published serially in Sovremennik between 1825 and 1833 (Tiazanov, 1996).
The historian, the dramatist
Boris Godunov was completed at Mikhailovskoye on 7 November 1825, twelve days before the Decembrist Square revolt. The play was rejected for the stage by the censorship of 1826 and was published as a book in 1831. It was the first Russian drama to follow Shakespearean form and the first to draw an important figure of Russian history from the primary chronicles. The Little Tragedies of 1830 — The Miserly Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, A Feast During the Plague — were written in thirty-six days during the cholera quarantine at Boldino.
The duel and what followed
The duel was fought despite two attempts at reconciliation brokered by the poet Vasily Zhukovsky and the writer Pyotr Vyazemsky. Nicholas I, on hearing of the death, sent a personal physician and paid the family’s debts (about 138,000 roubles). The censorship order that banned any public mourning was disobeyed — by his own count, forty thousand people filed past Pushkin’s body in the Konyushennaya Church before it was taken out at night. D’Anthès was court-martialled (he had left his post and his uniform without permission for the duel), stripped of his commission, and expelled from Russia; he died in 1895 in France (Bethea, 1998).
Place in Russian letters
By the time of his death Pushkin had published a body of work — over 800 lyric poems, a dozen long poems, nine verse dramas, the prose Tales of Belkin, Dubrovsky, The Queen of Spades, The Captain’s Daughter, the History of Pugachev — that the rest of the nineteenth century would measure itself by. Mikhail Lermontov’s first published poem (1835) was addressed to Pushkin. Gogol, in his 1832 essay, called him the “poet not only of Russia, but of the Slavic world.” Dostoevsky’s 1880 Pushkin Oration identified him as a “writer of the great gift of universal sympathy” and remains the founding document of the Russian literary messianism. Nikolai Strakhov called his death “the end of a great era” (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002; Tiazanov, 1996).