T.J. Binyon: PUSHKIN: A Biography

Reviewed by KAPKA KASSABOVA


In every Russian town, there is at least one school or street named after Alexander Pushkin. There is no one else in Russia's cultural landscape who can compete for prominence with him. Forty years after the poet's violent death, Dostoyevski pronounced him "a unique manifestation of the Russian spirit", and his colleague-in-genius Turgenev said Pushkin "created our poetic and literary language".

Famous as well as infamous in his lifetime, Pushkin became, by the end of his century, a gilded icon of Russian culture. His legend has been used for the agendas of royalists, nationalists, communists and post-communists.

So much for the legend. This biography, the first to come out in English in 60 years, and the most authoritative to date in any language other than Russian, is concerned with the man and his times. And what a fabulously rich life he had, in one of the most eventful periods of European history — while he was still at school near St Petersburg, Napoleon made an incursion into Russian territory.

It was by no means an easy life and, in addition to being short, was often brutish as well. Much of the brutishness, however, was a direct consequence of Pushkin's extraordinarily volatile nature.

Born in the last year of the 18th century in Moscow to faded nobility, Pushkin inherited his parents' passion for extravagance and literature, coupled with a disastrous lack of business sense. His mother was descended from an African slave to Peter the Great called Abram Gannibal, who eventually became a general; his father was a genteel, ineffectual aristocrat.

Alexander turned out a short, unprepossessing young lad with curly black hair and vaguely Moorish features; he wore his nails long and dirty, like talons, and liked to shock polite society with pranks, such as turning up at a dinner party in see-through pants. He joked about his ugliness, and rightly so — it wasn't an obstacle in his love-life which was always frantic; so frantic that by his early 20s he had had two close brushes with death from venereal disease. But it was during his bouts of illness, away from social distractions and attractive women, that he wrote his most famous works.

He also loved offensive language, and composed many an obscene epigram about his contemporaries, including Tsar Alexander I, whom he called "a wandering despot" — sufficient grounds for a one-way trip to Siberia, except that he was by now too famous to be deported. But his liberal views, combined with his well-known connections with the Decembrists, a secret organisation of officers and intellectuals who attempted an unsuccessful coup against the Tsar, led to his early exile to the provinces, and life-long problems with the regime.

While this fate was a breeze compared to that of his friends who were executed or exiled to Siberia, provincial life depressed him and, melodramatically, he compared himself to Ovid. But again, it was during his melancholy existence in the backwaters that masterpieces like Eugene Onegin and Prisoner of the Caucasus were composed.

However, it was something less noble than Pushkin's sporadic politics that constantly undermined him. He was a compulsive gambler, and constitutionally incapable of managing his finances. He gambled away his first collection of lyrics, and would regularly sell his new manuscripts short in order to pay off gambling debts. Most of his life's earnings sank into a black hole.

Emotionally, he gravitated towards older, married, and usually unavailable women. Up until his marriage, his life was a dizzy revolving door of infatuations. But those were also his happiest times, when he travelled extensively around Russia and was responsible only for himself.

His marriage to 17-year-old beauty Natalya Goncharova, a vacuous creature who "had nothing in her head besides finery and gossip", was in many ways the beginning of the end. The chapters thereafter are tellingly headed "Married Life", "The Tired Slave", "A Sea of Trouble", "The Final Chapter". While their union is described by Binyon as almost harmonious, Natalya was an ambitious and vainglorious socialite with endless appetites. She bore him three children, insisted on living in enormous apartments in St Petersburg, where all the fashionable society of Russia was, and mismanaged the household.

The last years of Pushkin's life are marked by constant financial strife, manic-depressive swings, a bitterness about his writing career and what he saw as lack of recognition (some critics compared him unfavourably to Byron), a frustrating struggle for creative space, and a love-hate relationship with Tsar Nicholas I who admired the poet, but was wary of him.

The latter appointed him, to Pushkin's horror, "junior gentleman of the chamber", which tethered him to the court; this was mainly because the Tsar was infatuated with Natalya, who after Pushkin's death might have been his mistress. A Romantic hero until the end, Pushkin died a stupidly tragic death.

After a drawn-out public scandal involving his wife's courtship by an unstable French nonentity called Georges d'Anthes, who was simultaneously the adopted son and lover of the Dutch envoy to Russia, an apoplectic Pushkin challenged the chevalier guard. Fatally wounded in the stomach, Pushkin died two days later in agony, aged 37. His death mask, shown in the book, is that of a very tired man.

Binyon's sympathetic portrait is down-to-earth, even humorous, and displays monumental scholarship, peppered with Pushkin's sketches of friends and family. It would have read like a great novel if it wasn't for the numbing detail. Sometimes I wished for more commentary on the gestation of immortal works such as Eugene Onegin, rather than a plot summary, but then Binyon states clearly that literary analysis was not his aim.

What remains beyond the petty squabbles and jealousies of the day, the glittering royal balls, the "unbelievable waist" of his wife, and the forgotten lives of his wealthier contemporaries, is the pure beauty of his verses:

I recollect a wondrous moment:

Before me you appeared,

Like a fleeting vision,

Like a genius of pure beauty.


* Kapka Kassabova's most recent book is Someone Else's Life.

* HarperCollins, $39.99