This Day in Literary History

February 10, 1837 – Alexander Pushkin—poet, dramatist, fiction writer, the Russian equivalent of England’s Shakespeare and Germany’s Goethe—died two days after being fatally wounded in a duel with a French émigré officer who paid inordinate attention to the writer’s beautiful younger wife.

Dueling—a stupid way to die that also claimed the lives, closer to home to us here in America, of Alexander Hamilton and War of 1812 naval hero Stephen Decatur. It was a particular crime in that we’ll never know how much more might have been achieved by Pushkin had he lived.

I first became aware of the Russian through the work of an American: The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth, a novel in verse that takes as its form the tetrameter sonnets used by Pushkin in his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin. (For examples of Seth’s mastery of this form, click here; for Puskkin’s, here.)

A good place to start in learning about Pushkin’s life is the 2003 T.J. Binyon biography. I emphasize “life” because you won’t get much critical analysis here of his lyric verse, short stories, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov, or Eugene Onegin.

What you will find is an understanding of the world that made the writer: country houses, salons, theater, gentlemen’s clubs, and brothels. From Pushkin’s correspondence – especially enormous given that he never reached his 40th birthday—as well as a continual pattern of love affairs, gambling debts and stormy quarrels, Binyon justifiably concludes, I think, that Pushkin may have suffered from manic depression.