Pushkin

In this first full-length biography, in English, of the greatest poet of Russia, Ernest Simmons presents a brilliant account of a stormy career. Pushkin’s love affairs, his years of exile, his persecution by the tsar’s secret police, and the final tragedy of his death in a duel with one of his wife’s reputed lovers, are all told with vividness and restrained emotion. At the same time Simmons has not neglected the more purely literary side of his story. He traces the genesis and development of Pushkin’s great works, gives enough of the story of each one to enable the reader to feel familiar with it, and at the same time places them all in the background of the intellectual development of the time. It will henceforth be impossible to underestimate Pushkin’s great contribution to world literature.