Classics of Russian Literature | St. Petersburg Glorified and Death Embraced (Lecture 7)

Lecture 7: Pushkin was well aware that Russian greatness and power were built on the suffering and labor of tens of millions of serfs and lower-class, urban serving people. In his narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, he contrasts the most famous invocation to the beauty of St. Petersburg—known as well by Russians as we know Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”—with the misery of those who live and perish under the yoke of Russia’s imperial establishment. Later, not long before his death, he erects his own monument, “not touchable by human hands,” to be admired by countless future Russian generations. In 1837, Pushkin, who felt he had to live in Russian high society, perished from a blow brought about by the Byzantine turnings of that same society. A French officer serving in the Russian army, Georges d’Anthès, virtually stalked Pushkin’s beautiful wife, Natalia. Pushkin’s enraged reactions, and a nasty anonymous letter, led to a duel that ended with a bullet in the poet’s abdomen and a hideously painful deatha death that Russia mourns to this very day.

Suggested Reading:
John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary.
Ilya Kutik, Writing as ExorcismThe Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol.
Aleksandr Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman in Pushkin Threefold, poems translated by Walter Arndt.