Pushkin biography binyon

In his magnificent, prizewinning Pushkin, T. J. Binyon lifts the veil of the iconic poet's myth to reveal the complexity and pathos of his life while.
In his magnificent, prizewinning Pushkin, T. J. Binyon lifts the veil of the iconic poet's myth to reveal the complexity and pathos of his life.
A biography of one of literature's most romantic and enigmatic figures.

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John Bayley

As a poet Pushkin is almost too good. By which I mean that, like Dante in Italy, and Goethe for the Germans, he brought a language and the essential or absolute nature of it poetry definitively together. Every literate Russian literally owns him. Not for nothing did a minor Russian poet of the early twentieth century, Valery Bryusov, write a book – and a good book, too – simply entitled My Pushkin. There is no English equivalent of this. We don’t talk about ‘My Chaucer’ or ‘My Shakespeare’, although a character .in Jane Au ten, a rather louche fellow as it happens, remarks that Shakespeare is in our blood, and we don’t actually have to read him to understand and to love him.

Unfortunately, it seems an equally essential part of Pushkin’s absoluteness as a poet that his poetry can’t be translated. In another language it be comes something quite different, and quite banal. ‘I’m afraid he’s just flat, your great poet,’ exclaimed a perplexed Flaubert, when Turgenev tried to translate some wondrously graphic bits of the Russian master for him. The cunning Nabokov s

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Pushkin

A major biography of one of literature’s most romantic and enigmatic figures, published in hardback to great acclaim: ‘one of the great biographies of recent times’ (Sunday Telegraph).

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is indisputably Russia’s greatest poet – the nearest Russian equivalent to Shakespeare – and his brief life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work. T.J Binyon’s biography of this brilliant and rebellious figure is ‘a remarkable achievement’ and its publication ‘a real event’ (Catriona Kelly, Guardian).

‘No other work on Pushkin on the same scale, and with the same grasp of atmosphere and detail, exists in English… And Pushkin is well worth writing about… he was a remarkable man, a man of action as well as a poet, and he lived a remarkable life, dying in a duel at the age of thirty-seven.’ (John Bayley, Literary Review)

Among the delights of this beautifully illustrated and lavishly produced book are the ‘caricatures of venal old men with popping eyes and side-whiskers, society beauties with long necks and empire curls and, most touchingly, imag

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Pushkin: A Biography

September 1, 2010

The best biography I have ever read, totally absorbing. Pushkin was always falling in and out of love.

His most famous lyric:

I loved you: love still, perhaps,
Is not quite extinguished in my soul;
But let it no longer alarm you;
I do not want to distress you in any way.
I loved you silently, hopelessly,
Tortured now by shyness, now by jealousy;
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,
May God grant you be so loved by another.

Another of my favourites is quoted in the book:

What good is my name to you?
It will die, like the melancholy sound
Of a wave breaking on a distant shore,
Like night’s noises in the dense forest.
On the album page
It will leave a dead trace, like
The pattern of an epitaph on a tombstone
In an unknown language.
What good is it? Long forgotten
In new, stormy emotions,
It will not evoke in your soul
Peaceful, tender memories.
But... on a day of grief, in the silence
Pronounce it, pining;
Say: someone remembers me,
There is in the world a heart, in which I live...

There are plenty of drawers and albums in this world st