Pisarev on pushkin biography
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Russian Views of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
Introduction
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When we in the West think of nineteenth-century Russian literature, we think of the Russian novel, and we associate it with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Russians, however, are quick to point out that Alexander Pushkin created the Russian novel and that Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s works are an extension of his genius. They regard Pushkin as their greatest writer, their Shakespeare. Why is this so? In order to understand Pushkin’s unique role in the history of Russian culture, we must remember that Russian literature was late to mature. Only in the eighteenth century, in the wake of the reforms of Peter the Great, did a secular literature begin to emerge, and only in the nineteenth century did Russian literature truly come into its own. Pushkin was Russia’s first great writer in the modern tradition. After self-consciously practicing europeisk literary genres for almost one hundred years and groping for a national literary langua
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Boris Tomashevsky
Pushkin: A Marxist Interpretation
Author: Boris Tomashevsky;
Written: ;
First published: in Encyclopedia Granat, Volume 34, pp. ;
Source:
Translated by: Anton P.
Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich, the greatest Russian poet of the 19th century. Born in Moscow on May 26 (June 6, n.s.), His father, Sergei Lvovich, belonged to an old family of service nobles, who had in the 18th century amassed considerable wealth (they once owned large land holdings in the Nizhny Novgorod province, from which the poet&#;s father inherited the village of Boldino). His mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, descended from Abram Gannibal, &#;the Moor of Peter the Great&#;, the colored ancestor of the new service nobility created by Peter. Nadezhda Osipovna owned an estate in the Pskov province, Mikhailovskoye (Opochetsky district). The Pushkin family led a comfortable, open life in Moscow, maintaining close ties with representatives of the Moscow literary intelligentsia, to which Sergei Lvovi
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Pisarev, Dmitry Ivanovich
(&#x;), noted literary critic, radical social thinker, and proponent of "rational egoism" and nihilism.
Born into the landed aristocracy, Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev studied at both Moscow University and St. Petersburg University, concentrating on philology and history. From to , Pisarev served as the chief voice of the journal The Russian Word (Russkoye slovo ), a journal somewhat akin to The Contemporary (Sovremennik ), which was published and edited by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov (&#x;). In Pisarev was imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk Fortress for writing an article criticizing the tsarist government and defending the social critic Alexander Herzen, editor of the London-based émigré journal The Bell (Kolokol ). Ironically, Pisarev's arrest marked his own rise to prominence, coinciding with the death of Nikolai Dobrolyubov in and arrest of Nikolai Chernyshevsky in During his incarceration for the next four and one-half years, Pisarev co