When Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin died on January 29th 1837 from wounds sustained in a duel two days earlier, the nation mourned the loss of its poet, dead at the early age of 37. The wayward, young, impoverished nobleman who had worked as a minor government employee had in reality been a political exile touched too closely by the taint of the Decembrists almost 20 years earlier. As the authorities would not dare execute him, he was subsequently tolerated. Those same authorities were seriously alarmed by the widespread signs of national grief when he died - largely as a result of his own bizarre handling of a personal situation.
It is true he irritated many who knew him, not merely Tsar Nicholas I and his successor Alexander. Friends were betrayed, women abused, his family embarrassed, and in-laws outraged. If Italian academic Serena Vitale - author of Pushkin's Button, an investigative, quasi-biographical study based on the writer's final year - is to be believed, no one liked him, and she certainly does not. A report compiled by a member of the Tsar's secret police referred to the excessive attention "being paid of a kind only suitable for people who had displayed exceptional merit, whereas the principal part of this poet's work, as everyone admits, is both freethinking and immoral".
There had always been resentments. There were rumours about Pushkin's African heritage, which he never disguised. His mother was the daughter of a black slave adopted by Peter the Great; he wrote about his ancestor in the story, The Moor of Peter the Great. Pushkin's indolence, rakish behaviour and pathological womanising earned him disapproval.
Not surprisingly, there were those who delighted in the scandal surrounding his beautiful young wife, 12 years his junior, and her alleged lover, Baron Georges-Charles D'Anthes, a French exile, man-about-town and professional soldier. His blatant pursuit of Natalya, Pushkin's wife, was barely criticised, as society was occupied in jeering the betrayed husband. Contradictions surround him, just as the eerie circumstances of his death are almost foreseen in the death of Lensky, the young poet who stakes all for honour and jealousy in Yevgeny Onegin. But as a poet Pushkin was loved - and still is. Commenting on the remarkable Russian capacity for universal feeling, Dostoevsky in a famous speech of 1880 saw the epitome of this universality in the work of Pushkin. Pushkin's story, The Queen of Spades, must have had a seminal influence on Crime and Punishment. Both stories feature anti-heroes striving to be supermen but failing because they are weak and inadequate. His influence goes beyond Russia. The Indian writer Vikram Seth's verse novel, The Golden Gate, is a hymn to Pushkin.
At the beginning of the 19th century, there was a conscious struggle to develop a modern Russian literary language, and this new language reached a dazzling level of perfection in the lyric genius of Pushkin, who combined a rare literary sophistication with a natural understanding of the rich folkloric legacy he inherited, a passionate interest in the emerging work of fellow poets, and an extraordinary grasp of human psychology.
While for most non-Russian readers, the surest testament to Pushkin's genius is the magnificent, long, narrative poem or verse novel, Yevgeny Onegin, and a collection of perfect short stories, he wrote many poems, before turning increasingly to prose from about 1830.
The Bronze Horseman is regarded as one of the greatest - possibly the greatest - long poem written in Russian. It is irrelevant whether Yevgeny Onegin is seen as novel, or a poem. It is both, and its quality lies in its being as intense a study of a young woman's passion as it is a portrait of Russian life.
Few patriarchal figures have sustained so lengthy a hold over a national literature. His influence may be seen on every major Russian writer - from Gogol, to Lermontov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and into this century with Bely. Indeed, the ruling presence of Bely's great city novel, Petersburg(1916), is of course Pushkin. Anna Akhmatova revered him, (and brought him through translation to a wider audience). Bulgakov strove for the master's lightness of touch and subtle surrealism, itself drawn from fairy tales. It is no coincidence that Andrei Bitov named his powerful satire on the Soviet betrayal of Russian culture Pushkin House (1978); for Bitov, and for many Russian artists, Pushkin personifies Russian culture. So often hailed as the Russian Byron, that description in fact pays scant justice to Pushkin, who was a far greater poet than his English counterpart. Yevgeny Onegin is no Byronic satire. It is a study of humanity; for all the humour and sharp observation, it is as compassionate as it is elegant. It is also highly moral. Aside from the strength of the story which preoccupied Pushkin and his readers for eight years - the work was written, and appeared, in sections - it displays the never-complacent Pushkin's absolute mastery of craft. The work became a national treasure. When Tchaikovsky decided some 50 years after Pushkin's death to base an opera on it, there were fears that a musical version would dilute the profoundity of the original. The libretto draws from the second half of Pushkin's narrative. The novel survived the treatment, and Tchaikovsky - and Russia - were rewarded with a superb opera.
The range of emotions described in Yevgeny Onegin are as human as the situation and the characters. Few individuals are perfect. Pushkin by all accounts was more flawed than most. Yet his circumstances offered him little. His parents had no interest in him when he was a child. All he appears to have gained from his early years was a highly developed sense of literature, thanks to listening to his father discuss books with his friends. Pushkin's lack of physical beauty left him open to taunts, even from his mother. When during her final months, they finally established a relationship, she died when he was at his most vulnerable in the public gossip surrounding his wife.
The life was scrambled, the unnecessary death almost farcical. But Pushkin's stature as an artist is unchallenged. The 19th-century Russian novel remains one of literature's most enduring achievements. That great tradition began with Pushkin and his mercurial verse-novel. Above all, he gave his country its literary voice.
Tomorrow night the Kirov Opera will perform excerpts from operas based on libretti by Pushkin at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast. These include the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Gudonov, as well as excerpts from Eugene Onegin, The Queen Of Spades, Mazeppa, The Golden Cockerel and Russlan and Ludmilla. (Tel: 08-01232-334400)
The NSO celebrates the anniversary with a special commemorative lunchtime concert on Tuesday, June 15th at 1.05 p.m. with Bosco Hogan reading a selection of his works. (Tel: 01- 2082977)
The Complete Works Of Pushkin is being pub- lished in English for the first time in a subscibers' edition by Milner. (Tel: 00-44-1366-384767)
