Alexander Pushkin
1799–1837 · Russia
“But I am given to another, and I will be faithful to him forever.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Alexander Pushkin
Inspired(5)
who Alexander Pushkin shaped
via Dead Souls
- Pushkin literally handed Gogol the plot — the scheme of buying up dead serfs came from him in the mid-1830s
- His novel-in-verse is the formal blueprint for Gogol's "poema": the wandering authorial digressions, the social X-ray, the narrator's eye for poshlust all start here
- The fountainhead of the Russian novel passing the torch to its first great prose comedy
- For Dostoevsky this was scripture — in his 1880 Pushkin Speech he called Onegin the place where "real Russian life is embodied with creative power and perfection"
- Onegin is the original Russian "superfluous man": brilliant, restless, useless — the type Dostoevsky would turn into his intellectual antiheroes
- Raskolnikov's clever paralysis starts here, in Pushkin's bored aristocrat
via Anna Karenina
- Pushkin's Tatiana is the seed of Tolstoy's Anna — Tolstoy even named his heroine "Tatiana" in the earliest drafts before the woman became her own
- The proximate spark was Pushkin too: Tolstoy reread a Pushkin prose fragment in March 1873 and the novel poured out
- One Russian masterpiece handing the next its central woman and its opening momentum
via Oblomov
- The whole sad pedigree of the Russian superfluous man starts with Onegin: the gifted, educated nobleman who cannot be bothered to do anything with himself, and Pushkin's bored aristocrat is the seed Goncharov grows to monstrous, unforgettable proportions.
- Where Onegin at least gets up and travels and duels, Goncharov asks the crueler question — what if the type just never got out of bed? Oblomov is Onegin with the energy switched off, the prototype taken to its logical, dressing-gowned conclusion.
via Fathers and Sons
- Pushkin was an inescapable idol for Turgenev — who helped unveil the poet's statue in 1880, alongside Dostoevsky
- The "superfluous man" Pushkin created in Onegin is the type Turgenev reworks in Bazarov and Odintsova: gifted, modern, and quietly stranded
Portraits
The single most reproduced likeness of Pushkin — the bust-like Napoleonic pose, arms crossed, tartan cloak over the shoulder; Pushkin owned it and kept it in the family. Tretyakov Gallery; high-resolution Google Art Project scan (3455x4000).
Orest Kiprensky, 1827
Alternate high-resolution Commons scan of the same Kiprensky 1827 oil — the definitive Pushkin portrait every textbook and stamp reprints.
Orest Kiprensky, 1827
Famous Quotes
“I love you (why should I dissemble?); but I am now another's wife, and I'll be faithful all my life.”
“Habit is given to us from above; / It is the substitute for happiness.”
“Habit is Heaven's own redress: it takes the place of happiness.”
“My uncle—high ideals inspire him; but when past joking he fell sick, he really forced one to admire him— and never played a shrewder trick.”
About Alexander Pushkin
Russia's national poet and the father of modern Russian literature. Pushkin transformed the Russian literary language and produced poetry, drama, and prose of extraordinary range — most notably the verse novel Eugene Onegin, which shaped every Russian novelist who followed. He died at thirty-seven from wounds sustained in a duel defending his wife's honor.