In an engaging biography of Russian literary genius Alexander Pushkin, whose life was as dramatic as any story he invented, poet and novelist Feinstein explores the paradoxes of the unruly writer. 8 illustrations.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Considered Russia's greatest poet as well as the spiritual father of its prose literature, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837) is best known to English-speaking readers for the Tchaikovsky opera based on his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, and for his turbulent personal life. British poet and novelist Elaine Feinstein devotes plenty of time to the latter, displaying an almost Russian gusto for the details of Pushkin's many love affairs and the circumstances leading to the duel to defend his wife's honor in which he died. Among the recently uncovered material her biography includes are letters suggesting that the man who shot Pushkin had a homosexual relationship with a Dutch diplomat who protected him after the fatal event. But Feinstein also quotes extensively from various translations (including her own) to give a vivid sense of a writer with "the facility of Byron, the sensuous richness of Keats and a bawdy wit reminiscent of Chaucer." These English renderings do better justice to his sexy, light lyrics than to more serious efforts, and Feinstein's thorough biography does not entirely convey to Western readers Pushkin's epic importance in Russia. It certainly offers a vivid sense of his volatile personality--good-natured yet quarrelsome, witty yet painfully sensitive--and of the intricate social world in which he moved, that of the Russian empire at the height of its power. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Shackled by police surveillance and czarist censorship, Alexander PushkinAarguably the Russian Shakespeare, although few realized it during his lifeAcould publish little that was both safe and up to his standards. Despite penury and political banishment, he produced works like Evgeny Onegin (1823-1831), the Byronic saga of a rake something like his young self, as well as Boris Godunov and The Bronze Horseman. As poet and novelist Feinstein (A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva) implies in her accessible biography, Pushkin was his own worst enemy. The impulsive, reckless, disheveled great-grandson of an African slave who was a favorite of Peter the Great, was his own worst enemy. He died, at 37, in a probably unnecessary duel, defending the honor of his wife, a frivolous, flirtatious St. Petersburg court beauty unworthy of his jealousy. The bicentennial year of Pushkin's birth in 1799 will spur other books, but very likely none in English will be more up-to-date in exploiting still-emerging documents about Pushkin's life and death. Feinstein's well-chosen extracts from the poet's writings illuminate his bawdy wit, his lyric intensity, his sensitivity to his attenuated but obvious African heritage, and his melancholy introspection. He once described a passionate woman he had bedded as "A Comet without laws among/ The calculated round of stars"; in Feinstein's biography the words apply just as aptly to the great Russian writer himself. 22 b&w illustrations. (May) FYI: Serena Vitale's Pushkin's Button, one of Feinstein's sources for her account of the fatal duel, was reviewed in Forecasts, January 11.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful!,
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This review is from: Pushkin (Hardcover)
It is hard to believe that the man regarded by most Russians as the cornerstone of their literature is not better known in the West; trying to understand Russia without knowing anything about Pushkin smacks of trying to understand the English-speaking world without knowing anything about Shakespeare. Ms. Feinstein does an excellent job describing the life and work of this extrordinary man and his effect on his times and the Russian people. The chapter on the events leading up to the fatal duel reads like Greek tragedy and I was alternately fascinated and horrified by the attitudes of Russian high society and the government towards Pushkin and his inevitable confrontation with d'Anthes. My two quibbles are that the epilogue really doesn't tell us much about what happened to the major characters in Pushkin's life after he died and that Ms. Feinstein's proofreader did not catch that Ibrahim Hannibal was Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather, not his maternal grandfather; the relationship is misstated a number of times in the book. These two fairly minor points aside, this is a book I would recommend to anyone wanting to know more about Russia's greatest writer, Blok's "one bright name: Pushkin."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, passionate and thorough,
By A Customer
This review is from: Pushkin (Hardcover)
Loved the book. Apart from minor inconsistencies, the facts are all straight.Given my native language is Russian, I found the book much more passionate, logical, journalistically straightforward, and impartial than most of the fatherland's writers. This is a good book about the strange life of one of the greatest poets of all times. And it brought me closer to understanding his personality, his affections, his art.
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