Aleksandr Pushkin

From Philosopedia

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergyevich (6 June - 10 February 1837)

Hailed even in his own time as Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin was known for his fairy romance, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), and his novels, Eugene Onegin (1828) and Boris Godunov (1831).

His ancestry is disputed. On the one hand, some claim that his father could trace his ancestry back to 12th century nobility and his mother's great grandfather was Abram Petrovich Gannibal [[1]], an Ethiopian who was abducted as a child by the Turks. Others claim that Gannibal (also written as Hannibal, the Carthaginian general that schoolchildren are told somehow led his troops across the Alps Mountains around 220 B.C.E.) was from an ancient sultanate near where the country of Chad now is and that he was brought to Russia as a military person, an engineer, and a nobeleman by courtesy of his adoptive father, Peter the Great. Still others referred to Pushkin’s mother’s grandfather as being Abram Hannibal, Peter the Great’s Africa-born and black general, “the blackamoor of Peter the Great” in Pushkin’s words.

Pushkin’s African heritage, however, is only occasionally mentioned [[2]].

Pushkin was born in Moscow, had a poem published when he was fifteen, and in 1820 published Rusian and Lyudmila, considered a controversial work because of its subject and style. He became a spokesperson for fierry radicals, leading in 1820 to his transfer to Kishinev, where he became a Freemason, according to Markus Wolf's Freemasonry in Life and Literature, in which case he would know about Deism. Pushkin read Voltaire and Byron, authors whose outlooks he liked. After the accession of Nicholas I (1826), he was allowed to return to Moscow.

Hugh McLean claims that Pushkin was an atheist when young. An energetic and self-consciously Byronic type of person, according to Serena Vitale’s Pushkin’s Button (1999), “When, as a youth, he pirouetted in a waltz or mazurka, provincial ladies took him for a foreigner, a demon, or a Freemason.” In Odessa he once wrote that he was taking lessons in atheism from a deaf English philosopher. However, most Russian authors of his time were nominally Orthodox, attending services only when they had to and remaining generally unconcerned about religious matters.

Although he denied writing the blasphemous Gavriiliada (The Gabrieliad), in which God and Zeus are depicted as sexual creatures, intellectuals at the time claimed he was the author.

In 1829 Pushkin fell in love with 16-year-old Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova, marrying her two years later. She was invited to balls at the palace, and observers claim that her becoming the beauty of the Imperial court led her into a frivolous social lifestyle that Pushkin could not afford. Georges d’Anthès - a Frenchman who was formally adopted by a wealthy and homosexual Dutch Ambassador to the court of Czar Nicholas I, Jacob van Heeckeren - publicly showed affection for the poet’s wife, possibly to hurt van Heeckeren, and Pushkin began receiving anonymous letters concerning their intimate dance-floor conversations. But whether or not anything more than some stolen kisses was concerned, Pushkin and d’Anthès scheduled a duel on a snow-covered field outside St. Petersburg. A skilled duelist, Pushkin had the strategy of allowing d’Anthès to fire first in order that he would have to stand without moving when it was Pushkin’s turn to fire. But it was Pushkin who received the mortal shot and, carried home, he died two days later in what The New Leader ’s assistant editor Richard Lamb has called “the most tragically unnecessary death of any great writer.” Tsar Nicholas wrote Pushkin on his deathbed, expressing his “forgiveness.” However, Lermontov, among others, accused government officials of complicity in the affair.

Pushkin’s large debts were paid by the government, his children’s education was paid for, and his widow was given a pension. She, in fact a brief favorite of the Tsar, later married a general. D’Anthès was expelled from Russia but had a successful political career in France and died in 1895, at eighty-three, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Pushkin's 12-volume complete works have been published. A rationalist admirer of Voltaire, the deistic writer is considered the founder of Russian literature.

Pushkin Statue

{BDF; CE; EU, Hugh McLean; FFRF; JM; D. Lamb, The New York Times Book Review, 7 March 1999; RAT; RE}