Forty years after Pushkin's death, Dostoyevsky wrote: 'Everything we have comes from Pushkin'. This is no exaggeration. When Pushkin started writing, Russian poetry was either composed from the lofty, solemn language of the old Church Slavonic, or from elements of French and German poetry, with a characteristic abundance of barbarism and cliché. Pushkin cast aside the conventional poetic language of his time, stripping it of pompous embellishments and incorporating into his work everyday words and expressions that his predecessors had regarded as vulgarisms. This transformation revitalised Russian literary language and opened the way for a new generation of poets to experiment further with new forms and subject matter. This book traces the development of Pushkin's verse from the Romantic poetry of his youth to the more mature and original style of his later works. With prose translations at the foot of each page, John Fennell's selection is designed to appeal to the general reader as well as the student of Russian language.
Author
Works of Russian writer Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin include the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1831), the play Boris Godunov (1831), and many narrative and lyrical poems and short stories. See also: Russian: Александр Сергеевич Пушкин French: Alexandre Pouchkine Norwegian: Aleksander Pusjkin Spanish:Aleksandr Pushkin People consider this author the greatest poet and the founder of modern literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated ever with greatly influential later literature. Pushkin published his first poem at the age of 15 years in 1814, and the literary establishment widely recognized him before the time of his graduation from the imperial lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. Social reform gradually committed Pushkin, who emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals and in the early 1820s clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern Russia. Under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous drama but ably published it not until years later. People published his verse serially from 1825 to 1832. Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into ever greater debt amidst rumors that his wife started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later. Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry. Tsarskoe Selo was renamed after him.
