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How the Russian bard wrote many of his greatest works under lockdown in 1830

Alexander Pushkin thrived on confinement. At the start of his career, a friend’s elderly and obstinate valet once locked him into a room, saying he would release him only when he completed a narrative poem for which he had already been paid but had long been procrastinating over; once past his initial indignation, Pushkin duly got carried away and wrote all through the night.

Something similar — but on a grander scale — happened around 10 years later. In autumn 1830, Pushkin was confined by a cholera outbreak to the village of Boldino, his father’s remote country estate in southeastern Russia. Desperate to return to Moscow to marry, he wrote to his fiancée: “There are five quarantine zones between here and Moscow, and I would have to spend fourteen days in each. Do the maths and imagine what a foul mood I am in.”

Pushkin went on complaining bitterly but, with nothing else to do, he produced an astonishing number of masterpieces — short stories, short plays, lyric and narrative poems, and the last two chapters of his verse novel Eugene Onegin — in a mere three months.

Almost all Russians take it as read that Pushkin (1799-1837) is their greatest writer. To others this can seem puzzling: are Russians not aware of the greatness of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Flaubert famously complained to Turgenev that Pushkin was “flat” — “il est plat, votre poète.” And this complaint is understandable — most translations of Pushkin fail. Apparent simplicity is far harder to reproduce than obvious complexity; Pushkin demands more of a translator than Dostoyevsky.

Today, however, we are more fortunate than Flaubert. After publishing the late Stanley Mitchell’s outstanding translation of Onegin in 2008, Penguin Classics have now published a comprehensive Selected Poetry, translated by Antony Wood. Both Mitchell and Wood — unlike previous translators — have been able to bring into English all the important aspects of the original: not only the paraphrasable content, but also Pushkin’s grace, wit and musicality.

The result is a more rounded picture of Pushkin — in many ways the most universal of poets. Russians see him as supremely Russian, yet he was receptive to other cultures, translating and adapting passages of Shakespeare, Dante, Walter Scott and many others. His poetry is full of thought, but his own beliefs never obtrude; almost every Russian literary and political movement — modernist or traditionalist, Communist or anti-Communist, democratic or authoritarian — has tried to claim him as their own.

In his later work, Pushkin treats dark, difficult material (obsessive madness, insoluble sociopolitical conflict) with grace and clarity. And he has written with unparalleled understanding about the vicious schisms brought about by every attempt to modernise Russian society. His perceptions are as applicable to the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin as to those introduced by Peter the Great.

These splits follow a similar pattern. Russia’s vastness impedes communications, breeding general social and cultural inertia; attempts at reform from above meet with resistance; the authorities then resort to force, alienating much of the population. In the 17th century, Patriarch Nikon’s attempts to reform Russian Orthodox ritual led to the first such split. In his historical novel The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin writes sympathetically about Yemelyan Pugachev, the leader of a major peasant rebellion that drew much of its support from the breakaway sects known as “Old Believers”. At the same time, he vividly evokes the rebellion’s ghastly consequences. The novel’s most famous sentence is a prayer: “God spare us from the sight of Russian revolt — senseless, merciless Russian revolt.”

The next schism was occasioned by Peter the Great — a figure Pushkin returned to repeatedly throughout his life. In his narrative poem “Poltava”, Pushkin presents Peter as a warrior-hero, winning a decisive victory over the Swedish empire in 1709 and so ensuring Russia’s survival as a European power. The unfinished novel Peter the Great’s African contains witty accounts of the old nobility’s imaginative ways of circumventing Peter’s reforms. And in the mini-epic The Bronze Horseman, Peter is still oppressing Russians, even a century after his death. In the prologue we hear Peter say, on the banks of the Neva river:

The poem is often seen as a study of the conflict between historical necessity and the rights of the individual. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Bolshevik commissar for enlightenment, insisted that Pushkin was on the side of Peter the Great and progress. The great Soviet prose writer Andrei Platonov retorted that the everyday values represented by Yevgeny, a minor civil servant, mattered no less to him. Without Yevgeny, he wrote, we would be left with “nothing but bronze [ . . .] and the Admiralty spire would turn into a candlestick beside the coffin of the now-destroyed poetic human soul”.

Platonov understood that Pushkin is — above all — a mediator. He defended the rights of the individual, yet understood the need for a powerful state. He was both a westerniser and a patriot. He wrote at a time of fierce linguistic controversies. Was it acceptable to “Frenchify” one’s Russian, or should a writer use the fossilised language known as Church Slavonic? Pushkin’s response was to make inspired use of every tone and register available to him. Similarly, his positive heroes — like Pyotr Grinyov, the young aristocrat befriended by Pugachev — are those able to move freely between different worlds.

To Russians, Pushkin’s heroes and heroines are enduring images, a part of everyday discourse. Now at last, anglophone readers, too, are in a position to appreciate Pushkin’s greatness. Just as Mitchell’s Onegin supersedes previous Onegins, so this Selected Poetry by Anthony Wood supersedes all previous translations of Pushkin’s other verse narratives. Wood’s The Bronze Horseman gives us Pushkin at his most tragic. Count Nulin, a witty parody of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, shows him at his most light-hearted. The Tale of Tsar Saltan — one of Pushkin’s verse fairy tales — bounces along with delightful vitality. Even with the delicately musical short lyrics — still harder to translate — Wood’s success rate is remarkable.

More than any other Russian writer, Pushkin offers the hope of freedom and reconciliation. His life and work show us that one can be both patriotic and open-mindedly European, loyal to tradition yet receptive to the new. And his legendary “Boldino Autumn” tells us what inspiration can be released by unaccustomed and unwanted confinement.