Pushkin: A Biography
by T.J. Binyon
Summary
Alexander Pushkin is the writer Russians put where the English put Shakespeare, and Binyon's biography opens with the problem that position creates: the man disappeared into the monument almost immediately, his death curated into martyrdom, his faults into legend. The book's project is to get the man back.
The man, recovered, is magnificent and impossible: a descendant of an African great grandfather ennobled by Peter the Great, a schoolboy prodigy whose verses circulated before he graduated, an incorrigible gambler, duellist and lover whose police file opened early and never closed. Binyon walks him through southern exile for liberal verses, years confined to his mother's estate, the terrible tightrope after the Decembrist rising, friends hanged and exiled while the new Tsar appointed himself Pushkin's personal censor, and the court society that petted and cage kept him. Through it all the work accumulates, Eugene Onegin above all, and Binyon, unusually for a biographer this scholarly, keeps the poetry's greatness legible to readers who cannot reach it in Russian, quoting generously and explaining exactly what Onegin's stanza does that nothing before it did.
The end is the most famous in literary history and loses nothing for that: the beautiful wife, Natalya, the persistent French cavalry officer d'Anthès, the anonymous letters electing Pushkin to the order of cuckolds, and the duel at Black River in January 1837, the poet dead at thirty seven.
Around seven hundred and fifty pages, dense with the texture of Nicholas's Russia.
Best for readers who want the definitive English life of Russia's founding writer, scholarship worn as narrative.
Historical Context & Significance
Pushkin: A Biography won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003, a win with a pleasing shape: the year of the prize's own Johnson, a scholar's decades on a single great subject arriving as the standard life. John Bayley's verdict stood for the reviews generally, that nothing on this scale and with this grasp existed in English or any language but Russian.
T. J. Binyon was an Oxford Russianist of the Cold War formation, taught his Russian at the Joint Services School alongside Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn, and moonlighted, agreeably for a Pushkin biographer, as a crime novelist and historian of detective fiction. The biography was his life's central work; he died in 2004, the year after the prize.
For Anglophone readers the book remains the door to a national poet notoriously locked inside his own language, and its portrait of a writer managed, censored and finally destroyed by his society has kept its edge.