His further development as an artist was abruptly terminated by his death in a duel at the age of 38.

In both his poetry and his prose Pushkin was a profound innovator. He brought to its successful conclusion the revolt against the tenets of French neoclassicism, which, with its rigid divisions and classifications of genres, had dominated the literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Life, in Pushkin’s view, was wilder and more various than these conventions would allow, and, although he always retained a rather classical respect for balance and proportion in art, he introduced into his native literature a new sense of artistic freedom. His formal experiments encouraged a vigorous inventiveness in the writers who followed him, and his modernization of the diction and syntax of literary texts with infusions of living contemporary speech pointed the way to a perennial renewal of the literary language. In the area of literary subject-matter as well his influence was far-reaching: he introduced a host of suggestive themes that later writers would explore more fully, and he greatly enlarged the cast of characters in serious literature. No topic or person lay beyond the reach of his interest; his poetry and prose are filled with life’s essential concerns and activities—with love, work, art, history, politics, and nature; with all the mundane trivia of everyday existence and with the more rarefied realm of dreams and thoughts. He virtually created and shaped modern Russian literature and in countless ways determined the course it would follow after him.

Those who seek labels have made numerous attempts to define and categorize this astonishing writer. He has been called variously a romantic and a realist, the poet of freedom and the bard of Russia’s imperium; he has been dubbed in political terms a radical, a liberal, and a conservative, a revolutionary critic of the Czarist regime and its loyal defender. Persuasive arguments can and have been made in support of each of these characterizations, but a poet of genius always in the end evades our efforts to tame and contain him.

This brief assessment of Pushkin’s place in Russian literature, although it provides a reasonably accurate recital of established critical views, ignores certain anomalies and paradoxes that are part of the Pushkin story. Rather curiously, for example, all the prolific and prodigious achievement of this ‘father of Russian literature’ was the work of a man whose chief public mask in his own day was that of a gadfly and wastrel. Disciplined in his art, he was often irresponsible and profligate in his social behaviour. There was about him, as the reminiscences of contemporaries observe, something of the eternal schoolboy and prankster, a bit of the renegade always at odds with the respectable adult world. For several years he played the roles of dandy or bohemian; he loved to shock with outlandish dress or outrageous behaviour, and he enjoyed flirting recklessly with the dangers of a dissolute and dissident life. Upon leaving school he put on, briefly, the mask of political rebel and quite consciously provoked, with several courageous poems of liberal sentiment, the displeasure of the emperor, for which he was punished with removal from the centres of Russian culture and power. Even then, in banishment, he courted further punitive action from the authorities by circulating verse of blasphemous, if humorous, content.

Exile seems to have been a defining experience of Pushkin’s young manhood. He deeply resented his enforced absence from the social scene, yet he gained through his distance from the centre of events a clearer vision of the society he craved to rejoin. When he was permitted, eventually, to reside once again in St Petersburg and Moscow, he quickly set about to re-establish his nonconformist credentials, indulging once more in a dissipated style of life, although it now seemed less appropriate to his advancing years. Even after his marriage (at almost 32), when he had ostensibly settled down, he continued to provoke outrage, antagonism, and even ridicule with his endless literary feuds, his increasingly touchy pride in his ancient lineage, and his utter contempt for the circles of the court. Yet another cause for the contradictory impulses of his spirit was the black African strain in his ancestry, a heritage that he saw as both a source of uniqueness and a mark of his alienation from the society whose acceptance he simultaneously rejected and craved. At times he revelled in his ‘African strangeness’ and spoke of his ‘moorish’ features as the emblem of an elemental and primordial side of his identity, while on other occasions he lamented the racial characteristics that set him apart from those around him. In any case, whatever his ambivalences, it seems clear that Pushkin relished as well as resented his estrangement from society; and certainly his marginal position in it helped him to see all the triviality and hypocrisy of the monde. If he continued to live by its codes, he also studied it keenly as an artist and depicted it matchlessly in his work.

Even by the standards of his time and circle Pushkin’s appetite for dissipation was large. He was an inveterate gambler and a famous seducer of women, behaviour that he was reluctant to relinquish, not merely out of a mindless adoption of available social roles, but because of the special powers that he attributed to chance and sensuality in his creative life. His youthful anacreontic verse with its playful eroticism, several narrative poems of refined ribaldry, and his more mature love poetry all testify to a deeply sensual nature; and his passion for gambling figures prominently in some of his finest prose works. He was always fascinated, on behalf of his art, in the play of the fortuitous, in the luck of the draw, in the creative possibilities of life’s contingencies. He was willing as man and artist to trust in chance, to submit to it as the mechanism that, while it might condemn him to an outwardly undefined and precarious existence, would also assure his inner artistic freedom and his poetic destiny. Chance, in Pushkin’s view, was the servant of the greater thing that he called fate, and his reverence for fate as the ultimate shaper of human destinies haunts his work at almost every stage of his career. Essentially buoyant and optimistic in his youth, perceiving fate as the artist’s benign and essential guide, he would never distrust it, not even when later in his life it took on an ominous and threatening aspect. Opposition to the tyranny of human institutions was an essential element in Pushkin’s conception of the free artist, but resistance to fate, he believed, was a perilous course of action for any individual; for himself he was convinced it was the surest way to destruction as a poet. These elements of Pushkin’s character—his sensuality, his courting of chance, and his trust in fate—are essential clues to his artistic nature and to his conception of creativity.