Pushkin : A Biography

Rating:
Summary: Makes mildew of Pushkin- no easy task, that...
Review: One of my former professors for Russian Lit gushed and gushed to me in a massive email how fantastic this book is. That should have been my first clue. I mentioned it to my grandmother and danextthingya'know- I get it as a gift.

...

I never thought I would encounter a tome that could make beloved Pushkin a chore... Admittedly, most Russian poetry simply does NOT work in translation. Pushkin is fatally demonstrative of this- I can't think of one good translator of his works. In other words, you need to know Russian to get it. There's no way around that. The able-bodied pedant who compiled this massive belch is certianly no exception (one clue to his agenda and bad faith is that he only uses his own translations, which I will kindly describe as among the worst I have ever perused). It's sad because during my internment at the state vomitorium I expected having to work through dry, long-winded academic treatments of Bely, Blok, Babel, Bulgakov... (and kept hearing Malcolm McDowell intone in my skull, "I've suffered the tortures of the damn sir, the tortures of the damned") But Pushkin's legend, his death, his black heritage, his violently tempestuous life- it all seemed to me to be as boredom-proof as his poetry.

I now stand corrected.

I recently read a review of this on the exile.ru's online zine. I cannot improve upon Dr. Dolan's critique, I'm just pointing you in the right direction... Seek and ye shall find.

I defy you to read through this sludge. The first page alone will make you feel as if you have aged ten damn years, like the torture machine in The Princess Bride. The only good thing I can say about this is that it is thoroughly, insidiously, well-researched. It should appeal to all manner of white-washed-pious, whinging right-wing literary sophisticants who cannot bear to behold greatness without dragging it to the ground.

Ecce Homo.

Rating:
Summary: Lacking insight but interesting for detail
Review: The book defies quick overall assessment. On one level it provides an extraordinary level of detail: one could learn, for example, how much, to the pound, the manager of the family Boldino estate was granted of: salt, peas, oatmeal, rice, butter etc. On the other hand, some basic information of the main protagonist remains unquestioned. For example as a child he is portrayed as having read mostly French books, but by the age of 13 he is assessed by one of his Lycée teachers as well read in Russian literature. The book is interspersed with Pushkin's drawings of the people from his milieu which, although mostly simple profiles, are good character sketches of their subjects. No comment accompanies them: neither, for example, on the origin of this skill, nor on what insight into Pushkin's personality they present. At the age of 7, it is said, Pushkin's character changed dramatically, but the book chooses not to reveal what exactly that dramatic change was. The book is rife with seemingly paradoxical statements. It is the transformation of a boy brought up by French tutors, who moreover wrote his first poem in French and had a nickname "French" in the Lycée into the preeminent Russian poet in Russian language. It is Pushkin's notorious laziness in the childhood and at school, which nevertheless did not prevent him from being remarkably educated in literary matters and displaying it in such works as "Onegin" or "Tales of Belkin". It is the source of inspiration for most of his major works. The reader is trusted to fill in the gaps on his own.

Marina Tsvetaeva, a "poet of genius" in Nabokov's words, in her essay "My Pushkin" wrote about the deeply intimate affect Pushkin had on her. Similarly, "my Pushkin" is the epithet that the emperor Nicholas I applied to Pushkin after meeting him in 1826, at the moment when he felt especially close to the poet. By comparison with Tsvetaeva and the emperor, the book lacks certain degree of ownership of its subject. The author chose to stay in the shade, bringing none of his own coloring to the facts of the poet's life. The reader, as well, is left a bit wanting, not quite able to lay the claim of "His Pushkin" to the sketchy image pieced from the book's pages.

In the preface, the author lays bare his approach to Pushkin's biography: the focus is on "the events of his life", rather than on his works. He scrupulously follows this line and if a book could be, if imperfectly, summarized in one word it would be "chronology". The most detailed part of the book, some 90 pages, relates to the fatal duel and the conflict that preceded it. By comparison, very little could be gleaned about the first 18 years of Pushkin's life from the 42 pages devoted to it. The narration, mostly quite palatable, at times feels like a ride in a city cab: bolting ahead into a gap and coming to a maddening crawl if the traffic gets thicker. True to the form of fact gathering, accounting, in the form of the exact ruble amount and nature of Pushkin's obligations and revenues, is mentioned on 78 pages. The book would have benefited from more insight into Pushkin's character and lower granularity of his finances.

Perhaps due to the author's choice of mostly staying away from analysis of Pushkin's works, the book does not really present a case for why Pushkin occupies the unrivalled place in Russian literature.

What is left? An eccentric dresser with extraordinarily long nails, who by many was considered ugly. An ardent pursuer of women, from princesses to prostitutes. A proud nobleman who fought in duels at the slightest provocation. An avid reader in several languages. A lover of exquisite drink and food. A gambler with poor arithmetic skills to boot (but an avid chess player!) who accumulated an enormous debt by the time he died. A lifelong friend with many schoolmates. A poet canonized early in his life.

The book does not contain any revelations about Pushkin and at times lacks coherency, but could be of interest for the level of detail.