Life and Death of Alexander Pushkin

Description

That I was born in Russia with feeling and talent is the devils curse! Alexander Pushkin wrote in the last letter to his wife. Eight months later he died. This new scholarly book on Russias greatest poet is an electrifying reinterpretation of the official Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Pushkin studies. While investigating the last and unhappy period of Pushkins biography (1830-1837), e.g. the end of Pushkins life, the author restores paradoxical circumstances that eventually led to the poets death. In this book the author constructs a new scholarly version of Pushkin as an artist profoundly at odds not only with his society but also with himself. The author is by no means the first to expose the weak points of Russian traditional myths, Pushkins enrollment into historic and social studies of Russian tyranny, a comparative analysis of Pushkins recognition in France, as well as some untouchable aspects of the biography of the poet, paradoxes of a Russian umber one classic who considered himself in his diary a Russian Dangeau. Genius constitutes the domain of freedom, whereas any political body (such as the totalitarian state) is an area of constraint. Conflict between genius and authorities is treated as metaphysically inevitable. Pushkins final drama and his mental problems were a network of intrigues that inextricably and tragically entangled his personality. Finally in the book, this recognized Pushkin scholar offers a new documented evidence for his paradoxical version of Pushkins duel as suicide. The idolization of the poet in his own country and even abroad raises some troubling issues. What lies behind the need to create national heroes and falsify their biographies, and to what lengths must a country go to discover its national identity and goals? Being an original and provocative analysis of the unknown Pushkin, this monograph will be in many respects an eye-opener to both Slavic scholars, students, and the well-educated general readers.