Pushkin

In this first full-length biography, in English, of the greatest poet of Russia, Ernest Simmons presents a brilliant account of a stormy career. Pushkin’s love affairs, his years of exile, his persecution by the tsar’s secret police, and the final tragedy of his death in a duel with one of his wife’s reputed lovers, are all told with vividness and restrained emotion. At the same time Simmons has not neglected the more purely literary side of his story. He traces the genesis and development of Pushkin’s great works, gives enough of the story of each one to enable the reader to feel familiar with it, and at the same time places them all in the background of the intellectual development of the time. It will henceforth be impossible to underestimate Pushkin’s great contribution to world literature. PREFACE CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS TRANSLITERATION Introduction CHAPTER I. “Russian Scribblers Call Me an Aristocrat” CHAPTER II. Childhood CHAPTER III. An Emperor Establishes a Lyceum CHAPTER IV. Literature and Love in the Lyceum CHAPTER V. In the Great World CHAPTER VI. Among the Conspirators CHAPTER VII. A Russian Childe Harold CHAPTER VIII. “Accursed Qty of Kishinev” CHAPTER IX. A Russian Ovid Among the Goths CHAPTER Χ. Odessa CHAPTER XI. The Exile of Mikhailovskoe CHAPTER XII. “I Choke Him with a Tragedy” CHAPTER XIII. The Tsar Commands CHAPTER XIV. Moscow Again CHAPTER XV. “Pompous City, Wretched City” CHAPTER XVI. Marriage CHAPTER XVII. Honeymoon and Wormwood CHAPTER XVIII. A Prisoner of the Tsar’s Court CHAPTER XIX. Coadjutor of the Order of Cuckolds CHAPTER XX. The Last Duel Epilogue NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX