25. Russia’s Greatest Poet
Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 – 1837) was also an outstanding novelist, short story writer, playwright, and dramatist. He is deemed the founder of modern Russian literature. His verse and prose addressed conflicts between personal happiness and duty, the rebellion of loners against the system. They teemed with vigorous life-affirming themes such as the triumph of human goodness over oppression, and of reason over narrow-minded prejudice. A born aristocrat, Pushkin was a descendant of Abram Gannibal, an African kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child, who ended up in Istanbul. From there, he was taken to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great. The Tsar adopted Gannibal and raised him in the imperial household as his godson. He rose to prominence as a general and courtier in the reign of Peter’s daughter Elizabeth.
Gannibal led an extraordinary life, which was described in Alexander Pushkin’s biographical novel The Negro of Peter the Great. Precocious, Pushkin published his first poem at age fifteen while a student at the elite Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. While still at the Lyceum, he began his first major work, the romantic poem Ruslan and Ludmilla, which used folkloric Russian themes of an epic hero overcoming numerous obstacles to rescue his bride. It flouted accepted genre rules, rejected the traditional Russian style of classic poetry, and broke barriers against the use of colloquial speech in verse. It was violently attacked, but it brought Pushkin fame and cemented his place as an innovator. A rising star, his life was cut tragically short, as seen below, at the hand of his slimy brother-in-law, Georges d’Anthes, a French officer in Russian service.
