Russia's Don Juan Darling

REICH, REBECCA

Russia's Don Juan Darling Pushkin: A Biography By T.J. Binyon Knopf. 768 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Rebecca Reich Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard; staff member, the...

...Stating at the outset that he is not out to interpret Pushkin's work, he nevertheless supplements the poet'sbiography with details fromhis verse...
...In fact, his primary achievement in this biography is the care with which he brings the myths together...
...Contemporaries began recording their impressions of the flamboyant young prodigy the moment he began putting his own pen to paper...
...through them Pushkin frankly conversed with a literate society so small that he probably knew most of its members by name...
...Whether this image is itself a reflection of our age only time will tell...
...It became the anthem of the underground movement that culminated in the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825...
...As Russian society changed, subsequent generations picked and chose as they saw fit from a poet who had already been scraped clean once by censorship during his lifetime...
...The letters and poems continued from Mikhailovskoe, his parents' northern estate, where his exile went on for another two years...
...Far more personal, Binyon effectively shows, are the poems...
...Brassy in attire and witty (though often insulting) in conversation, his tireless gambling and whoring were carefully entered in the diaries and letters of the amazed St...
...One of the pitfalls of chronicling a writer's life is the confusion between the invented public persona and the author as he really was...
...This is especially relevant in the case of Pushkin, who, like Lord Byron, fashioned himself and his poetry according to Romantic ideals...
...Binyon's tale is at its best when Pushkin is on the road and writing letters back home...
...To Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov he was Russia's folk bard...
...The Petersburg through which the hero of Eugene Onegin moves in the first chapter of the poem is not fictional: It is the Petersburg of Pushkin," hedeclares...
...By order of the Mayor, storefronts and kiosks were also plastered with posters: Pushkin in Moscow, Pushkin in love, Pushkin fighting for his wife's honor in me duel mat killed him at the age of 3 7. His catchy verse was turned into jingles for spring water and chocolate companies, while an Internet provider featured a photo of a scantily clad e-mail user captioned with the famous first line of Tatiana's lovesick letter in Eugene Onegin: "I write to you—what more can I do...
...Against this menacing background, Pushkin's foolish bravado in the buildup to his duel with Baron Georges d'Anthès comes off as the death wish of a man driven to material despair...
...Under their tutelage, Pushkin wrote his first famous poem, "Liberty...
...What emerges is a many-sided portrait of a poet made all the more impressive for his endless interpretability...
...Certainly there is no shortage of original material...
...Pushkin had become Russia's Don Juan darling, a marketable blend of romance novel and national spirit...
...What first appears to be a tedious recitation of Pushkin's finances on Binyon's part turns, over the final 200 pages, into the terrifying thump of imminent ruin...
...Absent, too, was the depression that preyed on Pushkin during his last decade, when, beleaguered by debts and jealousy of his wife's admirers, he fell into the Tsar's disfavor and lost the support of much of his reading public...
...My Pushkin" essays then became a rite of passage for 20thcentury writers seeking public recognition...
...With the ascension of a Tsar who, in his view, respected Russian law, Binyon argues, Pushkin's political opinions were not altered, they were fulfilled...
...staff member, the Moscow "Times" The countdown to Aleksandr Pushkin's 200th birthday, in 1999, began several months ahead of time with the kind of billboard campaign only the Moscow city government would muster...
...Eugene's friends and acquaintances, his amusements and diversions, his interests and infatuations are also Pushkin's...
...Despite the colorful paper trail Pushkin left, though, his years away from the capital were often deeply unhappy...
...Binyon accomplishes the difficult task of sifting previous findings from their accompanying myths...
...The exile ended in 1826, a year after Nicholas I assumed the throne, and Pushkin was so thankful for his freedom that he willingly submitted to the Tsar's personal censorship...
...Probably no other Russian literary lion has been—and continues to be—poked and parsed as much as Pushkin...
...Petersburg that was both more nationalist and more Europeanized than ever before...
...I can't stand Holy Russia much longer...
...Missing was Pushkin's longing for city lights during his six-year exile to the provinces and, later, his ache for the country after Nicholas I confined him to St...
...But Pushkin never joined his friends in the streets, for by 1820 his verse had already caught the attention of the authorities, who packed him off to an exile down south...
...Binyon waited to publish his monumental and poignant biography until the hoopla faded away...
...And with plots so simple that they border on unimportant, the reader's attention shifts to Pushkin's trademark voice: a sparkling flow of rhyme, meter and wit that could never be translated to another language with the easy breeze of the original...
...Moving back to St...
...Petersburg's back-stabbing social world...
...The poet's swarthy features, framed by his trademark sideburns, were stretched two stories high across the walls of construction sites and facades of government buildings...
...That dramatic switch from revolutionary icon to card-carrying conservative would be mirrored by Fyodor Dostoevsky's about-face upon his own release from exile some 30 years later, and has been at the heart of nearly two centuries of squabbling over Pushkin's political beliefs...
...After chasing Napoleon back to France, the officers of the Russian Army had returned to the capital infused with liberal ideas...
...Indeed, IT is the author's masterful delivery that justifies this new 700-odd page biography of Russia's favorite poet...
...He was inhismid-30s when he began to keep a diary, but the entries shed little light on his life...
...In February 1824, following four years of civil service in exile, Pushkin wrote to his brother that he had thought of "taking my hat and stick and going to have a look at Constantinople...
...The miscommunications and love intrigues that ensued are the stuff of thrillers, and Binyon, who has written two crime novels, spins them skillfully into a tragic web...
...But as the city's center was cleared of traffic for two days of concerts and parades, the personal tragedy of Russia's national poet fell by the wayside...
...Petersburg society...
...And, thanks to his African great-grandfather, Pushkin even appears on lists of prominent black figures in world history...
...Anxious to make money from his writings, Pushkin nevertheless left his haunting "The Bronze Horseman" unpublished by refusing to yield to the Tsar's red pen...
...Rather, he writes, Pushkin had always adhered to "a conservative liberalism, defending the monarchy, provided that the monarch respects the law that binds him as well as his subjects...
...Binyon's difference is not the material he has collected—he rarely adds anything that wasn't known—but his highly readable presentation and analysis of past scholarly discoveries...
...After the 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks cast Pushkin as an opponent of the Tsar and an emancipator, despite his actually owning several hundred serfs and assiduously making use of them to buoy his ailing finances...
...As Binyon points out, substantial portions of longer narrative works such as Eugene Onegin are devoted to authorial digressions in which real-life characters—often Pushkin's friends—appear...
...An Ode...
...Short in stature, Binyon writes, Pushkin "had pale blue eyes, curly black hair, usually disheveled, and extraordinarily long, claw-like fingernails— often dirty—of which he was inordinately proud...
...If the Sovereign Emperor were pleased to make use of my pen," Binyon quotes Pushkin as writing to the head of the secret service in 1831, "I would strive with punctiliousness and zeal to fulfill the will of His Majesty and am ready to serve him to the best of my abilities...
...Set to music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Pushkin came off as a Romantic hero...
...Yet regardless of how much that conflation detracts from Pushkin's creative license, it ends up being warranted...
...Morbidly jealous of his wife's admirers, Pushkin became convinced that the Frenchman, who had been courting her without success, was smearing their name...
...With the onslaught of commemorative publications catering to the poet's postSoviet image, it is fortunate that Oxford lecturer T.J...
...Binyon shows that Pushkin was none of these and all of these simultaneously...
...Winner of this year's Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, Binyon's Pushkin turns a critical eye on its subject's chimerical treatment and lets the sources—the poet and his peers—speak for themselves...
...When Dostoevsky brought his audience to tears at the dedication of Pushkin's statue in 1880, he invoked the poet as conservative monarchist and Christian prophet...
...But the Tsar's personal interest proved more of a burden than the poet had expected...
...Pushkin's death sparked a scholarly obsession in Russia that rivals Shakespeare studies worldwide, but it also jumpstarted a series of distorted myths that continually reinventedthepoetto suit the changing times...
...Petersburg in 1831 with his beautiful young wife, Natalya Goncharova, Pushkin's courtly expenses plunged him into a debt so perilously steep that he owed nearly 140,000 rubles upon his death six years later...
...Binyon takes the centrist stand that Pushkin had never been a radical to begin with...
...Cautious in all other respects as to whose side he believes, Binyon sees very little difference between the man and his writings...
...Others drew attention to the ribald verse, so studiously underplayed by both the Tsarist and Bolshevik regimes...
...Upon finishing the court-sponsored Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo in 1817, Pushkin was thrust into a St...

Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5


 
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