Alexander Pushkin
Between Passion and Measure
Alyssa Dinega GillespieA fresh, uncensored portrait of Pushkin and the price of creative freedom
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) was the founder of the modern Russian literary tradition and the first to fully develop Russian as an expressive literary language. Passionately and irrepressibly creative, he lived under the constraints of imperial censorship and repeatedly clashed with the Tsarist regime. This biography traces the dramatic events of Pushkin’s life while revealing the personal and psychological forces that shaped his work, from the wounds of childhood and his evolving political sympathies to his intense emotional life and uncompromising sense of honour. Drawing on the latest scholarship, Gillespie challenges the sanitized, official ‘Pushkin myth’ in Russian culture and offers a more complex portrait of the poet. At its heart is the story of a writer whose pursuit of inner freedom transformed Russian literature and continues to resonate today.
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Pushkin bequeathed to Russia more than a transformed literary language. His life became a myth. Alyssa Dinega Gillespie has an eloquent grip on all parts of it: Pushkin as genius, rebel, prankster, prophet, highly disciplined transgressor of taboo. All served his inspiration. The one role he rejected was martyr. Thus could Pushkin become a free creator under an unfree empire that revered the poetic word.
'Caryl Emerson. Princeton University
Author’s Note
Prologue: Pushkin in Russian Culture
1 ‘Raised in Wild Simplicity’:
Family Origins and Early Childhood (1799–1811)
2 ‘My Student Cell Turned Incandescent’:
The Lycée Years (1811–17)
3 ‘That First Blush of Sacred Freedom’:
Youth in St Petersburg (1817–20)
4 ‘Through Spacious Steppe, On Rugged Ground’:
Exotic Travels and the Byronic Muse (May–September 1820)
5 ‘As an Equal with the Age’:
Poetic Maturation in Southern Exile (1820–24)
6 ‘In Bleak Despair and Isolation’:
Northern Exile and the Pull of History (1824–6)
7 ‘Suffused with Turbulence and Sounds’:
Return to Society (1826–30)
8 ‘Presume That We Shall Live’:
Marriage, Entrapment and Death (1831–7)
Chronology
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
Alyssa Dinega Gillespie is a prize-winning translator and scholar of Russian and Ukrainian literature, the editor of Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (2012) and translator of Vega’s Fugitive: Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (2026). She lives in Brunswick, Maine.