Strolls with Pushkin
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Andrei Sinyavsky wrote Strolls with Pushkin while confined to Dubrovlag, a Soviet labor camp, smuggling the pages out a few at a time to his wife. His irreverent portrait of Pushkin outraged émigrés and Soviet scholars alike, yet his "disrespect" was meant only to rescue Pushkin from the stifling cult of personality that had risen up around him. Anglophone readers who question the longstanding adoration for Pushkin felt by generations of Russians will enjoy tagging along on Sinyavsky's strolls with the great poet, discussing his life, fiction, and famously untranslatable poems. This new edition of Strolls with Pushkin also includes a later essay Sinyavsky wrote on the artist, "Journey to the River Black."
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In a playfully irreverent, esoteric portrait of Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Sinyavsky (who writes under the pseudonym Abram Tertz) spoofs the idolization of the 19th-century bard in Soviet Russia. Pushkin ``gave Russian literature a swift kick into the future,'' but retreated himself into an ``eternally flowering past,'' argues Sinyavsky ( A Voice From the Chorus ), the once exiled Russian writer who teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris. He presents Pushkin as an explorer of eros, a ``Russian Virgil'' who ``simply managed to write about everything for everyone.'' Pushkin (whose greatgrandfather Ibrahim Hannibal was said to be an Abyssinian prince's son) ``seized upon his negroid appearance and his African past'' with which he forged ``a spiritual kinship . . . in fantasy,'' asserts Sinyavsky. Written in a Soviet labor camp and first published in France in 1975, this study created a furor when an excerpt ran in a Russian journal in 1989.
