Alexander Pushkin: Selected Poetry
Translated by ANTONY WOOD
(PENGUIN CLASSICS, 336 PP, £10.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9.89 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s first great writer, is revered by Russians as a quasi-divine figure and the “Jesus Christ of our Poetry”, according to one contemporary. His glittering verse-novel of 1823-31, Eugene Onegin, is the most hallowed work in the nation’s literature. Vladimir Nabokov devoted more time to his English translation of Onegin than he did to writing Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada combined. (“To be Russian means to be love Pushkin,” Nabokov flatly declared.)

Pushkin’s life was short but full of drama. Stony broke for much of the time from ­gambling, he was not always able to pay his servants. On 27 January 1837, in the snowy wastes outside St Petersburg, Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel. His death at the hands of a jealous French cavalry officer was a drama that echoed down a generation of writers. Joseph Conrad’s short story The Duel offers a parody of Pushkinian gallantry, where an aristocrat sucks nonchalantly on an orange before levelling his pistol at his opponent.