Customer Reviews

Pushkin

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4 star:		(1)
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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."

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.