The People's Poet - A Writer's Footnotes

Discarded Text from my upcoming manuscript - Love Poems to Aphrodite.

Considered Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin was also known as a novelist and dramatist. His work expresses the uniqueness of Russian national consciousness, and they are seen as the first works of modern Russian literature. Through the efforts of Pushskin, Russians heard their collective voice for the first time. His beautiful writing first established the tradition of Russian romanticism. In a day of autocracy and tyranny, he spoke out eloquently for liberty and justice and his quick wit always involved him in duels.

Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on June 6, 1799. While at home, he learned to speak fluent French, but also learned Russian from his grandmother and heard Russian folktales from his nurse. In 1811, he entered the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, where he was trained to enter the civil service. While positioned there, Pushkin began work on his first major poem. The poem, "Ruslan and Lyudmila," published in 1820, was his first work to break with literary tradition of the day. The poem is written in the accepted style of the Romantic writers, but it has an Old Russian setting and draws upon Russian folktales.
In 1817 Pushkin took a post in the foreign office in St. Petersburg. He became involved with several literary societies; one of which became a branch of a secret society called the Union of Welfare. A favorite of the Czar, he was sought for his insight and wisdom. Idolized by the masses, Pushskin always thought of himself as a black man. He wrote:

An ever idle scapegrace, hideous descendant of Negroes,
brought up in savage simplicity, I pleasure the young beauties
with the unbridled furies of my African passion.

When Pushkin first heard African music it was as if his flesh remembered some fabulous long, long ago...In his poetry, Pushkin adhered to a model that seems to be rootedly African. He became the spokesman for those who later participated in the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825. Due to these activities, he was politically exiled in 1820 to a remote southern province.
During his exile Puskin traveled extensively in the northern regions of Caucasus and the Crimea. These travels provided the material and inspiration for his "southern cycle" of Romantic narrative poems, which firmly established his reputation. In 1826, Pushkin was allowed to return to Moscow. Although his work was censored and the police put him under secret observation, it was here that he wrote his most mature works. In 1831, Puskin married a young woman by the name of Natalya Goncharova, and they settled in St. Petersburg, where he again acquired a position in government service. His desire to continue writing came into conflict with his court position and his petitions to be allowed to resign were all denied. He died in February 10, 1837 (Jan 29, according to the old calendar), in St. Petersburg from wounds suffered in a duel, which was an attempt to regain his honor due to a slight directed towards himself and his wife.

Puskin’s major works are an _expression of his interest in the common people of Russia, their folklore, and their way of life. As such he broke dramatically with the forms of the day and established an entirely new tradition. In both "Eugene Onegin" (1833) and "Boris Gordunov" (1831), Puskin writes in a realistic, objective style about typically Russian themes in Russian settings.