Alexander Pushkin - Novels,Tales,Journeys

Alexander Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel on the afternoon of January 27, 1837, at Chernaya Rechka, just outside Petersburg. It is thus that the figure of Pushkin remains in our memorywith a pistol, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote in Strolls with Pushkin. Little Pushkin with a big pistol. A civilian, but louder than a soldier. A general. An ace. Pushkin! Crude, but just. The first poet with his own biographyhow else would you have him up and die, this first poet, who inscribed himself with blood and powder in the history of art?

Pushkin was just thirty-seven when he died, but he had already been acknowledged as Russias greatest poet, a title that has since been defined and redefined but never disputed. In the decade before his death, however, he had also become the true originator of Russian prose. Sinyavsky is right to say that Pushkin lives in Russian memory as more than a writer, more than a poetas Pushkin! In a speech delivered at a commemoration in revolutionary Petrograd in February 1921, the poet Alexander Blok said: From early childhood our memory keeps the cheerful name: Pushkin. This name, this sound fills many days of our life. The grim names of emperors, generals, inventors of the tools of murder, the tormented and the tormentors of life. And beside themthis light name: Pushkin. Yet his personal presence is in marked contrast with the essential impersonality of Pushkins art. It is not that he celebrated himself and sang himself: he never did. In a letter to his friend Nikolai Raevsky, written in July 1825, Pushkin criticized Byron (whom he generally admired) for the constant intrusion of his personality: Byronhas parceled out among his characters such-and-such a trait of his own character; his pride to one, his hate to another, his melancholy to a third, etc. And he contrasts Byrons practice with the multifarious receptivity he had come to admire in Shakespearehis negative capability, as Keats called it. Sinyavsky intensifies Keatss paradox: Emptiness is Pushkins content. Without it he would not be full, he would not be, just as there is no fire without air, no breathing in without breathing out. Impersonality, openness, and lightness are the essential qualities of his prose.

Our collection includes Pushkins few finished and published works of fictionThe Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, The Queen of Spades, Kirdjali,The Captains Daughtereach different and all masterpieces. It also includes his experiments in various forms, borrowing from and parodying well-known European models, consciously trying out the possibilities of Russian prose. The closest he came to a self-portrait is perhaps the character of Charsky in the fragmentary Egyptian Nights; otherwise he appears in person only in the nonfictional Journey to Arzrum, where, as D. S. Mirsky wrote, he reached the limits of noble and bare terseness.

Pushkins family on his fathers side belonged to the old military-feudal aristocracy, the Russian boyars, dating back some six centuries to the founding of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. He proudly refers to their six-hundred-year standing more than once in his letters. He was also proud of the rebelliousness of some of his ancestors, one of whom was executed by Peter the Great for opposing his political reforms, another of whom (his grandfather) was imprisoned for protesting against the usurpation of the throne by the Prussian-born Catherine the Great. The new gentry that arose in the eighteenth century as a result of Peters reforms more or less eclipsed the old boyars, and Pushkins father was left with relatively modest means.

On his mothers side, Pushkins ancestors bore the name of Gannibal, from his great-grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal. It was long thought (by Pushkin among others) that Ibrahim was the son of a minor Ethiopian prince, though recently it has been argued that he came from the sultanate of Logone-Birni in Cameroon. In any case at around the age of five he was sent as a hostage or slave to the court of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, and a year later was either ransomed or stolen by Sava Vladislavich-Raguzinsky, advisor to the Russian ambassador, and brought to Petersburg, where he was presented to Peter the Great. Peter was very taken with the boy, stood as godfather at his baptism, gave him the patronymic Petrovich from his own name, and had him educated in the best European fashion. Ibrahim rose to the rank of general, was granted nobility, and had a long military and political career in the reigns of Peter and his daughter Elizabeth. While serving in the French army in his youth he adopted the surname Gannibal, or Hannibal, after the great Carthaginian general.