Pushkiniana

T.J. Binyon's Pushkin, a Biography, is a heavy book. Not heavy going but heavy on detail. One wonders if we need it all but the cumulative effect is probably the point. Byron is mentioned several times as a contemporary, a model and a comparable figure as that kind of Romantic poet that enjoys an adventure or two.

He's never knowingly not in love, whether it's with a teenager, somebody else's wife, a countess or all three, often an Ekaterina. The gambling debts, from being an apparently terrible card player, recur in increasing proprtions, his poems have to go through censors, he's suspected of being a Decembrist and did have revolutionary sympathies and he has a more crowded fixture list at duelling than I'd like. In due course, I understand, he comes second but I haven't officially got that far yet.

While I thought Eugene Onegin was impressive, many of the faults of Romanticism are present in other poems quoted, singing hymns of praise to beauty for its own sake without telling us much about it. And the book is generously illustrated by Pushkin's own drawings, done in the margins of manuscripts, of both male and female associates. All in profile, they must be caricatures of a sort because early C19th Russian noses only vary slightly in their sharpness.

Pushkin's not easy to like but he is coming out of it ahead of Baudelaire, for a start. And then one wonders how many poets - betting without all other vocations- do come across as attractive people. Auden, maybe Keats, in some ways Edward Thomas but they are valued for what they produced, not for their gorgeous personalities. In some cases we can sympathize with their perceived shortcomings but whereas our miseducation 45 years ago had told us there was only the text it now seems perverse, impractical or almost impossible to read a poet properly without the context of their life.