Comments on: Tea with the Pushkins in Brussels

By: Grace Bello

Grace Bello — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:23:40 +0000

[...] look at the omnipresent cultural status of Pushkin in [...]

By: Gabor Kristof

Gabor Kristof — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 02:40:59 +0000

Very poor piece of work. More of gossiping then exploring. Kind of sad actually.

By: Cabinet | Notes from 21 South Street

Cabinet | Notes from 21 South Street — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:51:20 +0000

[...] Johnson unpacks the myth of Alexander Pushkin: a delightful piece of [...]

By: JustASideNote

JustASideNote — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:32:05 +0000

Enjoyed reading this article. Reading about Pushkin is always interesting, but this piece also solved a longtime puzzle of mine. When I came to the States (from China) in 2006 for graduate school, I was shocked to find in a casual chat with an American classmate that she had never heard of Pushkin. That was a graduate program in humanities/social science, not engineering. I supposed that my classmates should have been familiar with major literary figures, at least from major European literary traditions. Now I understand how little exposure Pushkin had received in the US. He is definitely a huge name in China. There is a statue of him in my home city, like in many other cities in the world.

By: Igor Adelman

Igor Adelman — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 07:21:52 +0000

Russian does not drink tea from glasses. This is a myth.
In a glass of tea is served only in the trains.

By: Zapiens

Zapiens — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:34:39 +0000

Vladimir Nabokov, [...] a young writer-zoologist in the 1950s.

Nabokov was born in 1899.

By: bewhatwedo

bewhatwedo — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:37:32 +0000

Interesting article – am recently re-discovering Pushkin and enjoying it (in Russian and English). There is also an interesting chapter on Pushkin and all of the various shenanigans he got up to in Odessa, in the book Odessa by Charles King.

By: The Pushkin industry | bewhatwedo

The Pushkin industry | bewhatwedo — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:34:50 +0000

[...] was an interesting article on Pushkin, talking about the industry of Pushkin, and giving a good biography of [...]

By: Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 11:22:01 +0000

What a lively round-up of recent Pushkin activity. The range of projects mentioned in the article is astonishing. And the West African connection was a real surprise to me. It makes one wish that there was an ongoing Pushkin blog that tracked all of this activity. It does indeed seem like there is a revival going on.

By: Andrei

Andrei — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:24:39 +0000

To me as a Russian familiar with Ukrainian and Polish, Jirka is obviously right. There’s nothing so special about our grammar as compared to other Slavic languages.
What’s more, I’m sure ‘a Mozartian fluidity’ hardly explains why Pushkin is ‘our everything’ to Russians from every walk of life.
The answer lies in the notorious Russian soul, often called ‘mysterious’ by non-Russians. Westerners who have Russian friends may grasp it if they realize that the Russian idea of true friendship is somewhat different. It’s more than just a matter of trust, or mutual liking, or whatever you mean by calling someone your friend. It can be described as a union of souls, a kind of soul-to-soul intimacy rarely found even between long-time friends who were not raised on the Russian soil.
When a Russian reads Pushkin’s lines, s/he gets the feeling that the author finds the most precise words to speak his mind and heart to him/her personally, as he would to his closest and dearest friend, tete-a-tete. This unique manner of Pushkin’s best writing is extremely heart-moving, but you must have (or somehow develop) at least a “Russian streak” in yourself to fully appreciate its intensity. And this is why Pushkin is so hard to translate.
No wonder Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, as well as other Russian literary giants, are so famous worldwide for their mastery in expressing the subtlest nuances of the inner lives of human souls. It was Pushkin who taught us all, and the classics were just the best students.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Actually, I’m pretty sure the Belgian Alexander Pushkin is the poet’s great-great grandson, and not great grandson.

By: Jirka

Jirka — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:48:21 +0000

Ben Dickinson:
You may be right.
My native language is Czech and it is also a very flective language – e.g we have seven cases for nouns and adjectives, verbs are also highly inflected, though not quite in the same way as in Russian.

There seems to be no particular difficulty in translating Pushkin to Czech. and he has always been quite popular here. Of course, Czech is a Slavic language just like Russian and knowledge of Russian was widespread even among Pushkins literary contemporaries in Bohemia. Translating from Russian has a long tradition where I live.

Btw. “Russophilia” in our country is quite unrelated to the attitude to the former Soviet Union. Some noted russophiles were fiercely antibolshevik.

By: Ben Dickinson

Ben Dickinson — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:35:48 +0000

Why, unlike his fellow world literary giants, is Pushkin so “locked” inside the Russian language and tradition? I believe it comes down to grammar: Russian is so highly inflected—with six grammatical cases governing the endings on both nouns and adjectives, plus a variety of gender endings on same, and different inflections for singular and plural number in each case—that Russian poetry can achieve a Mozartian fluidity of meter and rhyme while yet preserving vast subtlety and nuance. And because it is so highly inflected, its syntactical flexibility is also much more commodious than, for example, English–so word orders that achieve perfect rhymes can sound utterly natural and unaffected in Russian, while appearing hopelessly stilted, archaic, or clumsy in their closest English approximation. I recommend listening to a few recordings of shorter Pushkin works just for the sound of the language. Here are a couple of Wikipedia entries that provide something of a gloss on what I’m talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_grammar

By: Jirka

Jirka — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:46:54 +0000

“Although a free-thinker, he owned serfs.” – “Pushkin was one of the first Russians to live entirely on earnings from his writing, and therefore was perpetually in debt”

These two sentences seem to be in contradiction.

I am no expert in the life of Puschkin but I seem to recall that at the time he lived at the main family estate of his family, Boldino, he owned a nearby village of Kistenevo including its two hundred “souls”. He finished Onegin in Boldino and wrote other important works there.

By: Bruce Lewis

Bruce Lewis — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:03:01 +0000

I think that one of the main reasons that Pushkin has been ignored in the English-speaking world is that oeuvre does not seem to be in the same spiritual vein as the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Bulgakov. In the early 20th century, and, in particular, among the British critics, it seems that it was decided that Russians are a spiritually tormented race. Pushkin may have been “tormented” by many aspects of life, but he does not seem to have been, ever, on any kind of spiritual journey–but to have been purely a child of the European Enlightenment, like Byron–and like Nabokov himself (and we know what Nabokov thought of Dostoevsky!)

By: Michael Beckelhimer

Michael Beckelhimer — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:45:45 +0000

Wonderful piece! As a late-80’s Soviet studies major, I spent more time memorizing the names of Politburo members than I did reading Pushkin. Pushkin was (I thought) a flat, state-sponsored focus of propaganda. Recently, when I set out to research and write a film about Russians’ connection to their literature, I discovered that Pushkin is a far more interesting subject than I ever knew. Mainly, though, I found it extremely satisfying to dive into Pushkin’s works and realize that he was a genius, just like the Russians always say. In the beautiful article above, Michael does a fantastic job of conveying the excitement of Pushkin’s biography and his writings.

By: Mary L. Tabor

Mary L. Tabor — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:54:28 +0000

Extraordinary scholarship, research and humor in this article that reveals the elusive Pushkin with fervor and in so doing gives us a glimpse into writer Johnson’s mind and heart and his art: what a fabulous sketch of Pushkin by the author Johnson, himself. This piece was a pleasure to read and sends me searching for tea and Pushkin—and more articles by Mr. Johnson.