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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.

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  Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

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  Alyssa Dinega Gillespie has written the book that English-language readers of Pushkin have long needed: a biography in which the poems do not illustrate the life but constitute it. She tells that life without reverence and without the appetite for exposure – simply as the life of a man who was gifted, passionate, contradictory, and not always worthy of his own lines. The particular achievement of the book is the translations, which are the author’s own and which accomplish what is usually held to be impossible: they let one feel in English the lightness and precision of Pushkin’s verse. A reader who knows nothing of Pushkin but the name will find a lucid and living account; a reader who knows a great deal will appreciate the tact with which the author handles what remains disputed.

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  Igor Nemirovsky, founder and director of Academic Studies Press, and author of Pushkin: Libertine and Prophet

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  A superb new ‘creative biography’ of Russia’s most celebrated poet, Alexander Pushkin. The author takes into account the best scholarship of the past while consistently offering sensitive new readings of the poet’s works from different periods and personal situations. The telling of Pushkin’s life is everywhere both highly informed and psychologically sophisticated, especially in how it captures his vibrant sexuality and his urge to challenge the boundaries of propriety, be they social, political, or artistic. A welcome addition in this biography of the poet, when compared to earlier ones, is Gillespie’s clear-eyed treatment of the ‘Pushkin myth’: how it has been manipulated for ‘imperial’ purposes, how Pushkin’s own views, and poetic words, are complicit in this process, and how other national literary traditions, including the Ukrainian and Polish ones, are revising their cultural pasts that have been written over by Russian hegemonic practices. Also, Gillespie has provided her own luminous translations of the poet’s works throughout. Finally, the book is lavishly illustrated.If you want the best new ‘essential Pushkin’, this is it.

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  David Bethea, Professor Emeritus in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin–Madison

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.