Pushkin, Literary Criticism, and Creativity in Closed Places

Abstract

For the Russian-speaking world, the approaching bicentennial of their greatest poet is easily as significant as the new millennium. Precociously gifted, prodigiously restless, Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow of noble and exotic parentage in 1799, less than a century after Peter the Great had opened his still medieval country to Western Europe. Pushkin's life had little slack in it. Politically suspect and financially strapped for much of his maturity, he married the most beautiful woman in the empire and was killed defending her honor (and his own) in a duel in St. Petersburg in January 1837. During these decades, the salon and patronage system that had sponsored high art gave way to a literary market?and Pushkin, adapting to the transition with ingenuity and uneven success, became Russia's first fully profes sional writer. In a trajectory that appears incomprehensible from the perspective of cultures with more leisurely literary development, Pushkin both created the modern Russian literary language and within two decades raised it to a peak that his countrymen slowly came to realize was not to be surpassed. Leaping over the baser metals, we now call his era Russia's Golden Age.