A.S.Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was the son not a very wealthy aristocrat. He came from an old Boyar family. Great-grandson (from his mother’s side) of Abyssinian I.P. Ganibal, military of the time of Peter the Great. Pushkin’s earliest poetic trials ,which has survived, go back to his childhood. In 1811 Pushkin attended the Lyceum of Tsarskoye Selo, where the education concept was inspired from the free thought of Enlightenment and the liberal tendencies of the early years Alexander I’s reign. The years Pushkin has spent at the Lyceum were a creative period for him and wrote a series of poets of great perfection. (“Memories of the Tsarskoye Selo”, “A small state”, “The Rose” etc.).
In 1817 Pushkin graduated from the Lyceum and started working as a secretary to the Council of Foreign Affairs. His poems from the 1817-1820 period reflect the stormy life of the young poet in Petersburg, his participation in the literary club “the green lamp”, and the Revolutionary liberalism of the time (“To Kriftsov”, “To Zhykovsky”, “To Chaadayev”, all the year of 1819 “Dorinda”, “The Renaissance”, 1819 “I have become acquainted with the battle”, 1820 etc.). Pushkin while respecting the poetry of 18th and 19th century he tries to achieve in his poems the freedom of expression. That same direction he also followed in the poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, which has caused enormous debates and marks a turning point in the Russian poetry. With his political poems of the 1817-1820 period (“Freedom”, “To Chaadayev”, “the village” etc.) Pushkin becomes the exponent of the aspirations of the entire generation of the noble revolutionaries. In May 1820, Pushkin, under the pretext of clerical transfer, was practically deported to southern Russia.
After visiting Caucasus and Crimea, Pushkin lived in Kishinyov and Odessa, he met with the Decembrists B.F. Raghevsky, P.I. Pestell, M.F. Orlov et.al. The revolutionary and freedom movements in Europe, the peasant and military uprisings in Russia strengthened the tendency for revolutionary action, which is reflected in the “Dagger” and other poems of 1821. The poem “Gabrieliad” is imbued of an atheist spirit. The displacement period in the South marked the for the poet , the development of his romanticism, which strongly manifested in the narrative poems he wrote there and which imposed him as a prominent Russian poet. Among these very important poems are “The captive of the Caucasus” (1820-1821), which prepared “Evgeny Onegin”. The “revolutionary will” and law themes were expressed in “Brother robbers” (1821-1822) and the contrast of mildness and passion, “angelic” and “satanic” first appeared in “The fountain Bahce sarai” (1823).
In May 1823 Pushkin begins to write the rhythmic novel “Evgeny Onegin”, where historically and socially two opposite types of consciousness are incarnated, the skeptic (Onegin) and the dreamy romantic (Lensky), while Tatiana represents the idial of the harmonious wordview. The individuals and society, the boundaries between the individual’s freedom and the arbitrariness, are the central theme of the poem “Gypsies” (1824), which is the climax and last Pushkin’s romantic creation. “Gypsies” posed the acutely the question of happiness as a tragic philosophical theme, the theme of the man and the World.
In July 1824 Pushkin, due to his dispute with his superiors, he is fired from the public services as an unreliable person and confined to his family estate Pskov (village Mikhailovskoye), under the supervision of the local authorities. Here he writes a series of masterpieces among them the powerful and faithful “Imitations of the Koran”. Pushkin writes the central chapters (3-6) of “Evgeny Onegin”, the satirical narrative poem “count Nulin”, studies the history of Russia and chronicles, records folk songs and fairy tales. In the poems “The burnt letter”, “the lust of glory”, “I remember the exquisite moment”, “The forest sheds its purple costume”, etc. are prevailed the new principles of poetry: the lyric emotion is not an already made and statistic object of description, but a living psychic energy, Power Creator, born in the poet’s contact with reality.
A milestone in Pushkin’s creative evolution, is the tragedy “Boris Godunov” (1825). The tragedy’s subject is history and man. At the center are not so much the persons as the historical process, life with its objective laws, not the “works” of the persons, but their destinies.
In his historical novel “The Captain’s daughter”, he continues the study “of human and popular fate”, which had begun with “Boris Godunov”. The objective view here is expressed by the honest narrator – witness , who likes Pugachev, who embodies the people’s power and gifts, yet stays loyal to his duty as an aristocrat. On 1 October 1833, Pushkins visits for the second time Boldino. The second “autumn of Boldino”, which lasted a month and a half, it’s the period of a new creative upsurge. Here Pushkin finishes “The story of Pugachev”, writes the poem “Angela”, the series “Songs of Western Slaves”, “the fishman’s tale and the fish”, “The tale of the dead Tsarina”, and some of his best works, such as “The Bronze Horseman”, the novel “Queen Dama”, the poem “Autumn”. In these works he studies the tragic contractions of life in the light of the objective laws of existence. In the “Bronze Horseman”, the themes of the state and the individual, history and separate faith, the relations of man and his World, acquire universal importance. In the symbolic level of the eternally tragic conflicts that these relationships create, the theme of insanity takes a deeper philosophical level. (“The Bronze Horsman”, “Queen Pika”, the poem “May God keep me from going insane” etc.). However the tragedy is interpreted, not some grim despair, but as a dynamic quality of life itself: In the poem “Autumn”, with the tragedy of the central theme of “death”, is revealed the relationship of the creative human spirit with the immortal forces of nature and the universe.
In 1833-34, begins the last extremely difficult period of Pushkin’s life. The glamour of the first Russian poet stays in history, but only as a highlight of the romantic Pushkin of the 1820s. Mature Pushkin’s achievements are considered as signs of “decline” by the public, critics, and even s9me of his friends. Only a few people, like N. B. Gogol, understand the importance of these works. In the meantime, his work’s censorship becomes bigger and bigger. His social duties, the maintenance of a larger family, required large expenses. Loans from the Treasury bring Pushkin into humiliating dependence on the authorities in his request to be allowed to resign from his Civil Service and live for a while “in the village”, in order to to settle his assets. Tsar’s reply was a threaten of disfavor and he prohibited Pushkin to study the historical records. At the end of 1833, Pushkin was given the rank of Kameryunker, a rank that was diminutive for his age and his social status, and which put the poet in a minor position. Soon Pushkin learns that the authorities are reading his correspondence. His liberty and contempt for the “new aristocracy” provoke the hostility of the “good society”, while the independence of his perceptions and his refusal to cooperate in cheap opposition actions provoke the attacks of liberal groups. Since the early 1830s he was constantly under attack from the reactionary press, which were directed by Fr. B. Bulgarin.
During this tragic period Pushkin kept his central attention into the historical fate and contemporary problems of the country, the people and society, to the development of national culture, to the philosophical meaning of life and History. He prepares material for “the History of Peter the Great”, plans to write “the history of the great French Revolution” and “the story of Russian literature”, studies the ancient Russian literature’s masterpiece “The history of Igor’s campaign”, tries to influence the social consciousness, he reminds in various forms the Decembrists bad luck. In 1836 Pushkin begins to publish the magazine “The Contemporary”, which carried on the traditions of progressive Russian journalism on to a new level. He gathered around him the best literary forces, published many critical and publicist works, which promoted the social and moral role of literature and opposed outdated, reactionary aesthetic conceptions. Pushkin’s artistic creation the last years has shown to have some bending, giving way to criticism, journalism, theoretical and historical work. Poetry is set aside by nonfiction and Pushkin writes the philosophical novel “Egyptian nights” (1835), where the theme of history is linked to the question of the essence of poetic creation. He edited nonfiction works, many of which (“we spent an evening in the country”, “Ceasar was travelling”, etc.) are important for the inner perfection, depth, density and prepare the future Russian prose. Pushkin finished the “Captain’s daughter” (1836), where the themes of Russian folk history and state life, are combined with the study of the moral problem of the human behavior in complex historical conditions, and the philosophical problem of fate. The relation of fate to conduct in life is the subject of the philosophical grotesque “Tale of the golden cockerel”, which is Pushkin’s last tale and the only poetic “fruit” of the third “Autumn in Boldino” (1834).
In November 1836, Pushkin and some of his intimates, received an anonymous libel by mail, which was insulting for his wife’s honor and for the poet himself. The result of a planned plot by the secular circles, was to provoke a duel between Pushkin and an admirer of his wife, the French émigré VII. Dantes. On January 27 (February 8) 1837 in the duel that took place on the outskirts of Petrograd, near the Chernaya river, Pushkin was wounded in the abdomen and died two days later, after suffering with stoicism, extremely pains. His house on the waterfront of the Moika river, was visited by crowds of people from the most diverse strata. In the poetical commentaries M. C. Lermontov, F. I. Tiuchef, A. B. Koltsov et. al., is described the mourning of people, who considered Pushkin’s death a national tragedy. The government, afraid of the “noise”, demanded strict control over the press. The funeral took place to a different place from the originally designated and the body was secretly transferred at night and hastily interred the Svyatogorsky monastery (present – day Pushkinskye Gori village in the Pskov region).
The importance of Pushkin’s work and his genius dimensions place him in the line of outstanding figures of World Culture. In 25 years of his writing life, Pushkin assimilated the achievements of Russian World culture and the traditions of older Russian writers and folk literature. It proceeded from the conventional systems of the 18th century, to developed realism, which attributes life to its inexhaustible diversity. Pushkin’s language, which combines literary types with vernacular, remains to this day the foundation of the Russian literary language. His novelties predestined the development of not only Russian literature (works by Gogol, Lermontov, N. P. Nekrasov, M. E. Saltikoff-Sedrin, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoyevsky et al.) but also of most all expressions of Russian art and intellectual life of the 19th – 20th centuries.
Pushkin’s works were translated to almost all languages in the world.