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Pushkin: Poet and Lover
237 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
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September 14, 2013
Another find from the Allen County Public Library’s 25-cent discard rack, a North Little Rock Library discard from 1946 (how books do travel!). As the title indicates, it is kinda trashy...and yet I couldn't put it down (and I did not have any particular urge for Pushkin biography). It comes off as kind of breathless, but there is this Continental cool, or something, that saved it, somehow.
For a literary biography it is terrifyingly short (276 pages) and almost entirely without footnotes and entirely without a bibliography which barely keeps it in the nonfiction category these days. But it felt solid to me, somehow. Sure, virtually all the verbatim conversations were made up, but checking things against Wikipedia (the extent of my critical reading efforts), I found nothing factually amiss. And for the first time ever I now feel I somewhat comprehend the Decemberists. And the peculiar relationship the Czar had with his people. And the way the Czarist secret police and censorship policies and patronage system worked (and pervaded and pretty much ruined everything). The intensity and high school silliness of Pushkin's love life are presented by Lambert with a good-humored lack of mercy, yet with some sympathy and wisdom (I picture her around 48 smoking a cigarette over her typewriter, a little sad about the folly of young men, and her own past follies, and yet a bit sorry they are past her now but thinking if the right young handsome and emotionally incontinent Russian poet came along she might give it one more go).
I suppose my only real complaint is that there is far more “lover” than “poet” here. Pushkin’s precocity and fame are deftly handled, but we are not given much verse - the chunks that are provided strike me the way most early 19th century romantic verse does - overblown and overlong. Lambert makes no effort to lit crit anything, or establish Pushkin’s legacy; she’s just doing a biography here. Which is to say I have not rushed off to Eugene Onegin. The shade of Nabakov (and Edmund Wilson) will no doubt haunt me now, threatening to pester me until I learn Russian. Boo!
For a literary biography it is terrifyingly short (276 pages) and almost entirely without footnotes and entirely without a bibliography which barely keeps it in the nonfiction category these days. But it felt solid to me, somehow. Sure, virtually all the verbatim conversations were made up, but checking things against Wikipedia (the extent of my critical reading efforts), I found nothing factually amiss. And for the first time ever I now feel I somewhat comprehend the Decemberists. And the peculiar relationship the Czar had with his people. And the way the Czarist secret police and censorship policies and patronage system worked (and pervaded and pretty much ruined everything). The intensity and high school silliness of Pushkin's love life are presented by Lambert with a good-humored lack of mercy, yet with some sympathy and wisdom (I picture her around 48 smoking a cigarette over her typewriter, a little sad about the folly of young men, and her own past follies, and yet a bit sorry they are past her now but thinking if the right young handsome and emotionally incontinent Russian poet came along she might give it one more go).
I suppose my only real complaint is that there is far more “lover” than “poet” here. Pushkin’s precocity and fame are deftly handled, but we are not given much verse - the chunks that are provided strike me the way most early 19th century romantic verse does - overblown and overlong. Lambert makes no effort to lit crit anything, or establish Pushkin’s legacy; she’s just doing a biography here. Which is to say I have not rushed off to Eugene Onegin. The shade of Nabakov (and Edmund Wilson) will no doubt haunt me now, threatening to pester me until I learn Russian. Boo!
Displaying 1 of 1 review