Aleksandr Pushkin

Biography

On a spring morning in 1799, Moscow’s Svyatogorsky Street echoed with the first cries of a boy whose blood mixed African military mettle with Muscovite aristocracy: Alexander, son of the half-crippled Major Sergei Pushkin and Nadezhda, whose grandfather Hannibal had marched from Abyssinia to the tsar’s own guard. By his twentieth birthday the youth had traded drawing-room compliments for verses sharp enough to wound; the Union of Welfare took him in, and the emperor’s police answered with a one-way ticket south. In the Caucasus, between icy rivers and Cossack patrols, Pushkin sharpened quills instead of sabres, letting ink run wild across manuscripts no censor yet dared to touch. Six winters later Nicholas I, fresh to the throne, shortened the sentence and summoned the poet home—Moscow’s prodigal, now bearded and watched by secret spies. Fame, marriage, debts and court balls followed in a giddy whirl. At twenty-eight he wed the eighteen-year-old Natalia Goncharova, whose laughter fluttered like silk handkerchiefs among officers and diplomats. Rumours settled on the French émigré d’Anthès; honour, that stubborn Russian deity, demanded a reckoning. At four in the afternoon of 27 January 1837 pistols cracked on the St Petersburg snow. One bullet clipped d’Anthès; the other buried itself near Pushkin’s hip, shredding arteries. Forty-eight hours later, in a rented flat littered with unfinished pages, Russia’s greatest voice bled out, thirty-seven candles snuffed at once.