Pushkin : The Man and His Age Book

Born at the watershed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pushkin came of age during the vast upheaval of the Napoleanic Wars, a crucial period in Russian history that was instrumental in shaping the young artist's poetry and politics. Though not particularly radical, Pushkin's beliefs--and his passionate articulation of them--were liberal enough to twice cause his exile from his home in St. Petersburg, largely due to his opposition to Tsar Nicholas I. Granted permission to return in 1826, Pushkin met his second wife, the sixteen-year-old Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831. Six years later, his jealousy over her relationship with military officer General Georges d'Anthes led to the most famous literary duel of the nineteenth century--one in which Pushkin was fatally wounded.

In this new biography, Robin Edmonds, a historian with a deep understanding of Russian literature and culture, draws on newly uncovered material and recent publications by Russian Pushkinists. His analysis of Pushkin the man combines familiarity with Russian sources and a dispassionate view of the controversy that still surrounds much of Pushkin's turbulent life and the bizarre circumstances of his unfortunate death. Edmonds vividly re-creates both the paradoxical character of this extraordinary man and the historical significance of the age in which he lived.