New York, 1963).

Edmonds, Robin, Pushkin. The Man and His Age (New York, 1994).

Shaw, J. T. (ed.), The Letters of Alexander Pushkin (Madison, 1967).

Troyat, H., Pushkin, trans. N. Amphoux (London, 1974).

General Critical Studies

Barta, P., and Goebel, U. (eds.), The Contexts of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (Lewiston, NY, 1988).

Bayley, J., Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge, 1971).

Bethea, D., Pushkin Today (Bloomington, Ind., 1993).

——(ed.), The Pushkin Handbook (Madison, 2006).

Briggs, A., Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study (Totowa, NJ, 1983).

Debreczeny, P., The Other Pushkin: A Study of Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (Stanford, Calif., 1983).

Driver, S., Pushkin: Literature and Social Ideas (New York, 1989).

Greenleaf, M., Pushkin and Romantic Fashion (Stanford, Calif., 1994).

Kahn, Andrew (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin (Cambridge, 2006).

Kodjak, A., and Taranovsky, K. (eds.), Alexander Puškin: A Symposium on the 175th Anniversary of his Birth (New York, 1976).

____Alexander Pushkin Symposium II (Columbus, Oh., 1980).

Lavrin, J., Pushkin and Russian Literature (London, 1947).

Proffer, C. (ed. and trans.), The Critical Prose of Alexander Pushkin (Bloomington, Ind., 1969).

Richards, D., and Cockrell, C. (eds.), Russian Views of Pushkin (Oxford, 1976).

Sandler, S., Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford, Calif., 1989).

____Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, Calif., 2003).

Tertz, A. (Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin, trans. C. Nepomnyashchy and S. Yastremski (New Haven, 1993).

Todd, W., Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

Wolff, T., Pushkin on Literature (London, 1971).

On Boris Godunov

Clayton, Douglas, Dmitry’s Shade: A Reading of Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (Evanston, Ill., 2004).

Dunning, Chester, with Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fomichev, Lidiia Lotman, and Antony Wood, The Uncensored Boris Godunov. The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy, with Annotated Text and Translation (Madison, 2006).

Emerson, C., Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington, Ind., 1986).

____and Oldani, R. (eds.), Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov (Cambridge, 1994).

O’Neil, Catherine, With Shakespeare’s Eyes: Pushkin’s Creative Appropriation of Shakespeare (Newark, Del., 2003).

Ronen, Irena, ‘The Compositional Pattern of Boris Godunov and Freytag’s Pyramid’, Elementa, 3 (1997), 195–224.

On The Little Tragedies

Evdokimova, S., Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies (Madison, 2003).

Pushkin, Alexander, The Little Tragedies, trans., with Critical Essays, Nancy K. Anderson (New Haven, 2000).

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin, trans. James E. Falen.

____The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers, introduction by Andrew Kahn.

A CHRONOLOGY OF ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

All dates are given in the Old Style. Russia switched from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar only after the 1917 Revolution.

1799

Alexander Pushkin is born on 26 May in Moscow to Major Sergei Lvovich Pushkin (1771–1848) and Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkina (1775–1836). On his father’s side Pushkin was descended from a somewhat impoverished but ancient aristocratic family. The poet’s maternal great-grandfather, Abram Hannibal, was an African princeling who had been taken hostage as a boy by the Turkish sultan. Subsequently brought to Russia and adopted by Peter the Great, he became a favourite of the emperor and under later rulers enjoyed a distinguished career in the Russian military service.

1800–11

He is entrusted in childhood to the care of governesses and French tutors and is largely ignored by his parents. He does, however, avail himself of his father’s extensive library and reads widely, especially in French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

1811–17

Attends the prestigious Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo near St Petersburg, an academy newly established by Emperor Alexander I for the education of young noblemen and their preparation for government service.

1814

Makes his debut in print (20 June) with the publication of two poems in the literary journal The Herald of Europe.

1815

His lyric poem ‘Reminiscences of Tsarskoe Selo’ draws the attention of the poets Derzhavin and Zhukovsky, who admire his talent and predict a great future for him.

1816

He meets the historian and writer Nikolai Karamzin as well as Prince Vyazemsky, a poet and critic who will become one of his closest friends and literary allies. He joins Arzamas, the most innovative of the St Petersburg literary societies.

1817

He finishes the Lycée and secures an appointment in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Decembrist conspiracy, calling for the abolition of serfdom and a constitution for Russia, is in its initial stages.

1818

The first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State are published.

1820

The Emperor Alexander I orders Pushkin’s arrest for seditious behaviour (specifically for the poet’s politically inflammatory ode ‘Liberty’). In July, after the poet’s arrest, his mock epic Ruslan and Lyudmila is published to considerable acclaim.

1820–4

He is exiled to serve under military supervision in the south of Russia (Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, Odessa). He travels in the Caucasus, Crimea, and Bessarabia.