22. The Codes of Romance That Got a Great Poet Killed
When he was twenty-one, Pushkin was exiled from St. Petersburg to southern Russia. In exile, he traveled through the Crimea and the Caucasus, and the impressions gained furnished material for his “southern cycle” of romantic poems, such as The Robber Brothers and Prisoner of the Caucasus. Pushkin’s literary outflow was frequently interrupted by the authorities, who often censored his work and prohibited or otherwise impeded its publication. Despite officialdom’s ham-handedness, he kept writing. His poetic novel Eugene Onegin revolutionized Russian literature as the first to take contemporary society as its subject matter, and led a wave of realistic Russian novels.
Pushkin’s use of the Russian language was both simple and profound and became the foundation of the style adopted by novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev. Pushkin’s life was the embodiment of romance, and romance eventually did him in. In 1837, he discovered that his brother-in-law had attempted to seduce his wife. The code of honor of the day compelled Pushkin to challenge the offender to a duel, in which he was fatally wounded. Thus, his life was cut short at the height of his literary career, but the tragic ending was somehow fitting for a man who embodied the Romantic movement.
