ALEKSANDER PUSHKIN
The creative
literature work of the Great Russian poet, Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin, has
accompanied us on the course of our whole lives. His work unites people of all
ages, faiths, nationalities, and is translated into tens of languages in the
world. Aleksander Pushkin is often called the founder of the modern
literature language in Russia. No matter how difficult it was to translate his
work, the poet has his admirers almost in all the corners of our world. We are
introduced to his fairy tales not yet having learnt to read.We practically know
by heart many of his works and even in our daily lives frequently quote him. We
greet the seasons of the year with Pushkin’s lines: “Frost and sun! Wonderful
day!” or “melancholy time, enchantment of the eyes…” We approach the mirror
with the phrase, “am I the prettiest on earth?” and even, when a strict boss
reproaches us for not having handed in a report on time, we say to our
colleagues: “Let us drink from grief, where is the jug?”
On this day -6th
of June 1799 Sasha Pushkin was born in Moscow. In the soviet times this
celebration was known as the Pushkin’s poems celebration. This occasion always
attracted the attention of the public and even during the Stalinist terror was
accompanied by luxuriant and festive events.It is notable that on the 6th
of June 1880, a monument for A.S Pushkin was unveiled. Pushkin’s poetry
festival still takes place and it has the status of an All-Russian event. As
was done in the past in the Pushkinskiye hills and Mihailovsky, thousands of
people gather to listen to the poetry performed by the young or the already
accomplished poets. Usually famous musicians and actors participate in the
celebration.Pushkin’s day is celebrated every year in Russia. The poet’s birthday
received a status of state recognition in 1997 in reference to the Russian
Federation president’s decree, “about the 200th year since the birth
of A.S Pushkin and the establishment of Pushkin’s day in Russia.”
In 2011, the
Russian president signed the decree of the annual celebration of the 6th
of June, the Day of the Russian language. The document states that this
memorable date was established “with the aim to preserve, support and progress
the Russian language as a common national achievement of all the people in the
Russian Federation, means of international communication and an inherent part
of cultural and spiritual heritage of the world’s civilization.”
As part of the support and promotion of multilingualism and
cultural diversity, the Russian Language Day is celebrated in the UN. The
decision to conduct the Russian Language Day on the 6th of June was
recognized by the Department of Public Information, United Nations on the eve
of International Mother Language Day, celebrated annually on 21st of
February, the initiative of UNESCO.The birth anniversary of Alexander
Pushkin, the Russian poet whose works beautifully reflected the spirit of the
people of that country in his works, was observed by the Russian Cultural
Centre here as the Day of the Russian Language.The event was organised on
Thursday in association with the Russkiy Mir Foundation. Puthusseri
Ramachandran, who translated many poems of Pushkin, inaugurated a seminar.In
his inaugural speech, Mr. Ramachandran said Pushkin was a treated as the father
of Russian poetry because he opened Russian literature to the rest of the
world.“Pushkin believed in the strength of poems but he did not believe in the
right spirit of love. He lost his life because of it. Otherwise, world
literature would have got a treasure of good poems from him. His poetic novel,
Evgeniy Onegin, was a unique initiative in literature,” Mr. Ramachandran said.The
guest of honour, poet D. Vinayachandran, said the decision of the Russian
government to observe the birth anniversary of Pushkin as the Day of Russian
Language was ideal because it was due to the poet that Russians started feeling
proud of their language and literature.
Aleksandr
Pushkin is considered Russia's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian
literature. Pushkin was the first to use everyday speech in his poetry, fusing
Old Slavonic with vernacular Russian. This blend gave his works their rich,
melodic quality. Aleksandr Pushkin was born in Moscow on 6 June 1799 into a
cultured but poor aristocratic family, with a long and distinguished lineage.
On his father's side, he was a descendant of an ancient noble family; his
mother was a great granddaughter of Gannibal, the legendary Abyssinian, who
served under Peter the Great. Pushkin's mother took little interest in the
upbringing of her son, entrusting him to nursemaids and French tutors. Pushkin
got acquainted with the Russian language through communication with household
serfs and his nanny, Arina Rodionovna, whom he loved dearly and was more
attached to than to his own mother. In 1811, along with 30 other distinguished
young men, Pushkin was admitted to the Lyceum, an exclusive school for the
nobility, located outside St. Petersburg in Tsarskoe Selo. It provided the best
education available in Russia at the time. An unofficial laureate of the
Lyceum, in no time, Pushkin drew the acclaim of his teachers and peers for his
poetry. His first publication appeared in the journal The Messenger of Europe
in 1814. In 1815, at the public examination at the Lyceum, the audience was
swept by his poem "Recollections about Tsarskoe Selo," which was
highly praised by Gavriil Derzhavin, the most influential poet of the time. At
the Lyceum, Pushkin formed rock solid friendships with many other students, and
cherished this "Lyceum brotherhood" for the rest of his life.
After
graduating from the Lyceum in 1817, Pushkin was given a sinecure in the
Collegium of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg. The next three years he spent
easily sailing through life, welcome both in literary circles and at bacchanal
Guard parties. Despite this frivolous lifestyle, Pushkin nevertheless was still
committed to social reform. Like many of his Lyceum friends, he became
associated with members of a radical movement, responsible for the Decembrist
uprising of 1825, but Pushkin himself was never a part of the plot. Between
1817 and 1820, his ideas were vocalized in "revolutionary" poems,
namely his "Ode to Liberty," "The Village" and a number of poems
about Emperor Alexander I and his conservative minister Arakcheev. At the same
time, Pushkin took up his first large-scale work, "Ruslan and
Ludmila," a fairy tale in verse."Ode to Liberty" angered the
Russian Emperor, and he banished Pushkin from St. Petersburg for six years. Pushkin
left for Ekaterinoslav on 6 May 1820. Soon after his arrival there, Pushkin
traveled around the Caucasus and the Crimea. He was then transferred to
Chisinau, Moldova, for three years. In the meantime, Pushkin fell under the
spell of George Byron's work, and eventually became the leader of the Russian
Romantic Movement. He wrote a series of narrative poems, featuring exotic
southern settings and tragic romantic encounters: "The Prisoner of the
Caucasus" (1820-1821), "The Bandit Brothers" (1821-1822), and
"The Fountain of Bakhchisaray" (1821-1823).
With the aid of
his influential friends, in July 1823 Pushkin was transferred to Odessa,
Ukraine, where he engaged in going to the theater, social outings, and love
affairs. His literary creativity thrived, as he completed "The Fountain of
Bakhchisaray," began "The Gypsies" and the first chapter of
"Eugene Onegin," his big-name novel in verse which provided a
dazzling yet insightful portrait of a world-weary young member of the nobility
who fails to appreciate a woman's love until it is too late and she is married
to another person.After postal officials intercepted a letter which revealed
his thinly-veiled support of atheism, Pushkin was exiled to his mother's estate
of Mikhaylovskoye in northern Russia. The next two years, from August 1824 till
August 1826, he lived at Mikhaylovskoye under surveillance. However unpleasant
Pushkin might have found his virtual imprisonment in the village, the years at
Mikhailovskoye saw the maturation of his talent, as he moved away from the
sensuous flavor of his southern poems toward a more austere and incisive form.
While at Mikhaylovskoye, he completed "The Gypsies," wrote the dramas
"Boris Godunov" and "Count Nulin" and the second chapter of
"Eugene Onegin." His sweeping historical tragedy, "Boris
Godunov," was published in 1831. It was based on the controversial reign
of Boris Godunov, the Russian Tsar from 1598 to 1605. When the new Emperor,
Nicolas I, allowed Pushkin to return to Moscow, the poet openly abandoned his
revolutionary sentiments. When the Decembrist Uprising took place in St.
Petersburg on 14 December 1825 (the failed conspiracy organized by a group of
aristocrats to overthrow the legitimate Emperor Nicolas I and to replace him
with their protégé, the Emperor's brother Konstantin), Pushkin, still at
Mikhailovskoye, was not involved, but greatly sympathized with the rioters,
many of them being his Lyceum friends. In the late spring of 1826, he sent the
Tsar a petition that he be released from exile. After the uprising had been
suppressed and many of its participants sentenced to the death penalty,
Pushkin's friends among them, Pushkin's activity was subjected to a meticulous
investigation to establish his plausible connection with the rioters. After a
very detailed interview with the Emperor himself, Pushkin was ecstatic to find
out his appeal had been allowed, however, with the Emperor personally censoring
all of his works.
Later, Pushkin
was to discover that his freedom was not entirely unconditional. Count
Benkendorf, Chief of the Gendarmes, let Pushkin know that without prior
permission he was not to make any trip, participate in any journal, or publish
- or even publicly read - any of his works. He was questioned several times by
the police about poems he had written.Meanwhile, Pushkin, still light-hearted
and at the stage of matrimony, engaged in searching for an appropriate wife. He
sought no less than the most beautiful woman in Russia for his bride. In 1829,
he found her in Natalya Goncharova, and plighted his troth to her in April of
that same year. She finally agreed to marry him on the condition that his
ambiguous situation with the government be clarified - and it was. As a wedding
gift, Pushkin was given permission to publish "Boris Godunov" after
four years of waiting for approval. He was formally betrothed on 6 May 1830.
Financial
arrangements in connection with the recent acquisition of part of the family
stead required that he visit the neighboring estate of Boldino in east-central
Russia. Pushkin had only planned go be there for a few days but to his dismay,
he got stranded by an Asiatic cholera outbreak for three months. These three
months in Boldino, however, turned out to be the most fruitful period of his
life in terms of creativity. During the last months of his exile at
Mikhaylovskoe, he did produce two more chapters of "Eugene Onegin",
but in the four subsequent years he had only written "Poltava"(1828),
his unfinished novel "The Blackamoor of Peter the Great" (1827), a
narration about his Abyssinian ancestor Gannibal, and chapter seven of
"Eugene Onegin" (1827-1828). During the autumn at Boldino, Pushkin
wrote the five short stories of "The Tales of Belkin"; the versed
tale "The Little House in Kolomna"; four "little
tragedies": "The Avaricious Knight," "Mozart and
Salieri;" "The Stone Guest", and "Feast in Time of
Plague"; fairy tales in verse, the last chapter of "Eugene
Onegin" and a great number of poems. Pushkin finally married Natalya
Goncharova on 18 February1831 in Moscow. In May, the Pushkins moved to Tsarskoe
Selo, to settle for a more frugal life and enjoy the peace and tranquility of
the countryside. They never found what they wanted, as a cholera outbreak in
St. Petersburg drove the Emperor and his court to take refuge in Tsarskoe Selo
in July. In October of 1831 the Pushkins moved back to St. Petersburg to an
apartment where they spent the rest of their lives.Natalya's beauty immediately
made a sensation in high society, the Emperor himself being one of her
admirers. Because of her popularity, Pushkin was forced to spend more time in
the capital than he wished. On 30 December 1833, Nicholas I made Pushkin a
Kammerjunker, a low court rank usually granted to the youngsters of high
aristocratic families. Pushkin was deeply offended and all the more convinced,
that, apart from being worthless in terms of career, the rank was merely an
excuse for his wife to frequent court balls.
Pushkin could
ill afford the expense of gowns for Natalya for court balls, required for
performing court duties. His troubles further increased when her two unmarried
sisters came to live with them in the autumn of 1834. In addition, in the
spring of 1834, he had taken over the management of his father's estate and
agreed to settle the debts of his heedless brother. His financial situation was
so aggravated that he applied for a substantial loan to cover his most pressing
debts, and for the permission to publish a journal. He received the loan and a
little later, in 1836, was permitted to publish a quarterly literary journal,
The Contemporary. The journal was not a financial success; in addition, it got
Pushkin involved in endless editorial and financial debates and in trouble with
the censors. Short visits to the country in 1834 and 1835 resulted in the completion
of his fairy tale in verse, "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel"(1834)
while in 1836 he completed his novel, "The Captain's Daughter," about
Pugachev's peasant uprising of 1773-1775, and a number of his finest lyrics.
By the mid 30s,
many critics began to refer to Pushkin's works as outdated and obsolete, which
was a disastrous thing for Pushkin to hear; it dispirited him immensely. In
addition to that, his family life had hit the rocks as well. In 1834 Natalya
Pushkina met a handsome French royalist émigré in Russian service. Young
d'Anthes had been pursuing her for two years, and eventually, his claims became
so open and unabashed, that in the fall of1836, it led to a scandal. Pushkin
challenged d'Anthes to a duel. He retracted the challenge, however, when he
learned from rumors that d'Anthes was "really" in love with Natalya's
sister, Ekaterina Goncharova. On 10 January 1837, their marriage took place,
but Pushkin refused to attend the wedding or to receive the couple in his home.
After the marriage, d'Anthes resumed pursuing Natalya Pushkina with doubled
tenacity. A duel between Pushkin and d'Anthes finally took place on 27 January
1837. D'Anthes fired first, and Pushkin was mortally wounded. He died two days
later, on 29 January. Thousands of people of all social levels came to
Pushkin's apartment to express sympathy and to mourn him. Fearing a public
outcry over the senseless loss of this great figure, the authorities falsely
declared that a funeral service would be held in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St.
Petersburg, with admission only granted to members of the court and diplomatic
society. The real service, however, was held in secret a day before it was
announced, and Pushkin's body was smuggled out of the capital in the dead of
night.
Pushkin was
buried beside his mother at dawn on 6 February 1837 at Svyatye Gory Monastery,
near Mikhaylovskoye. This place, with exquisite Pushkin family estates snuggled
in the picturesque landscapes, has become a Mecca for all those in love with
Pushkin's works and literature in general.
Prof.
John Kurakar
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