BIOGRAPHY: In 1965, Aleksandr Pushkin was the cause of one of the fiercest battles in the Anglo-American literary world. Justin Quinn reviews Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon.
Vladimir Nabokov published his translation of Eugene Onegin, and was attacked by his friend, Edmund Wilson, for the perverse literalness of his version that gave no idea of the brilliance of the original. By remaining so faithful to the original, Nabokov felt he did the greatest honour to Pushkin's poem. Robert Lowell, John Bayley and Anthony Burgess, among others, also joined in, and arguments raged about the nature of poetry translation and more particularly translations from Russian. Some school French will help you through Verlaine or Rimbaud in the original, but Slavic languages, with their distant etymologies and complex grammar, are not so amenable. The result is that most of us have had to take the greatness of their poets on trust. Pushkin is perhaps the best example of this.
But from Pushkin to 20th-century luminaries such as Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and Brodsky, the lives of Russian poets, whatever about their poetry, have exerted a mesmeric force on Western imaginations. The reasons for this are perhaps the intimacy with power at the highest levels (Stalin phones up Pasternak to discuss what he should do with Mandelshtam) - which entails great favour but also on occasion crushing despotism - along with the impression that Russia cherishes its poets more deeply than other European countries.
Pushkin's death in 1837 from a wound suffered in a duel embodies this paradox. On his deathbed, he sends an apology to Nicholas I for breaking the law that banned duels and for breaking his personal promise to the emperor that he would not engage in them. Nicholas replies immediately, forgiving this and instructing him: "Do not worry about your wife and children. They will be my children and I will take them in my care." The Tsar fulfilled this promise with great generosity. However, immediately after Pushkin's death, the imperial bureaucracy moved to suppress all public expressions of grief for the poet, fearing that they would lead to civic disturbances and protests against the monarchy.
The emperor had reason to be worried. After the Decembrist revolt of 1825 was suppressed, Pushkin's name continually cropped up in the investigations. Not that Pushkin was privy to the conspiracy (he was considered too volatile and flighty, a judgment that Pushkin himself agreed with), rather that his poems had, like ashes and sparks, ignited the minds of young officers. "Who among the youth with anything of an education has not read and been carried away by the works of Pushkin, which breathe freedom!"
To an extent, the manner of Pushkin's death was fitting. In his younger years he was notorious for imagining affronts to his honour. To his intense pleasure an officer who had seen much action once complimented him that he stood up to bullets as well as he wrote poetry. He could be wonderfully blithe about the solemnity of the duel: on one occasion, as his opponent was about to take his shot, he shouted to the opponent's second: "Stand where I am, it's safer here." The opponent was so enraged by this that he shot his second's hat off in error.
Such dashing sangfroid was coupled with an occasional cynicism in affairs of the heart. "The less one loves a woman," he advised his brother, "the surer one is of possessing her."
Unsuccessful with one particular woman, Anna Kern, he crudely teased her cousin who was in love with the famed poet, treating her to witty obscenities. Three years later Anna succumbed to him, and this fact is reported in passing by Pushkin in a letter when he mentions "Mme Kern, whom with God's help I managed to fuck the other day". Indeed, a friend remarked early in Pushkin's career that he only managed to find time for a long poem he was engaged upon when he was recovering from venereal disease: "If he were to have three or four more doses of the clap, it would be in the bag."
The story of the life of Aleksandr Pushkin is in many respects the story of the beginning of Russian literature. The young Gogol makes a cameo appearance, and one encounters the girl who would later provide Tolstoy with the model for Anna Karenina. In the stories of the two women above, one catches a glimpse of the plot of Nabokov's Ada. But most importantly of all, Pushkin invented the idiom of Russian poetry out of nothing: in truth, there was no Russian poetic tradition before him.
T.J. Binyon has told this story with all of the verve and wit of the great masters of Russian prose. Deeply sympathetic to his subject, he provides a full and balanced portrait of the man and poet. He follows the vicissitudes of his love affairs, his professional life as a poet, and then later his marriage, with all its joys and difficulties. We see the depth of Pushkin's interest in the history of Russia, and Binyon sensitively treats the poet's passage from young radical to intelligent conservative. Pushkin: A Biography is an utterly compelling work about one of the finest figures of European literature.
Justin Quinn works at the Charles University in Prague. His third collection of poems, Fuselage, is published by Gallery this autumn
Justin Quinn
Pushkin: A Biography. By T.J. Binyon. HarperCollins, 688
pp. £30