Pushkin biography binyons eye

Pushkin

September 1, 2010
The best biography I have ever read, totally absorbing. Pushkin was always falling in and out of love.

His most famous lyric:

I loved you: love still, perhaps,
Is not quite extinguished in my soul;
But let it no longer alarm you;
I do not want to distress you in any way.
I loved you silently, hopelessly,
Tortured now by shyness, now by jealousy;
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,
May God grant you be so loved by another.

Another of my favourites is quoted in the book:

What good is my name to you?
It will die, like the melancholy sound
Of a wave breaking on a distant shore,
Like night’s noises in the dense forest.
On the album page
It will leave a dead trace, like
The pattern of an epitaph on a tombstone
In an unknown language.
What good is it? Long forgotten
In new, stormy emotions,
It will not evoke in your soul
Peaceful, tender memories.
But... on a day of grief, in the silence
Pronounce it, pining;
Say: someone remembers me,
There is in the world a heart, in which I live...

There are plenty of drawers and albums in this world stuffed with ol

Pushkin A Biography

Industry Reviews

*'Only a biographer of the first rank could show how the poet's brilliant spirit was extinguished, not just by a regime, but by elements in that regime that to some extent reflected his own personality. That is true tragedy, and that is Russia.' George Walden, Sunday Telegraph *'A weighty biography in every sense, Binyon's book is poignant, brisk and at times downright funny: the best possible tribute to the changeable and elusively fascinating character of its subject.' Catriona Kelly, Guardian *'A grippingly entertaining and magnificently authoritative account of the poet's life, which is, almost unbelievably, the first to appear in any language since 1937.' Alan Marshall, Daily Telegraph *'In T.J Binyon [Pushkin] has finally found the biographer he deserves. Here in all its splendour is his rebellious, flamboyant personality and his world of tenuous finance, imperial balls and sexual adventure... Pushkin remains immortal and he certainly lives again in this book.' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mail on Sunday *'Binyon's Life gives a marvellously

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Александр Сергеевич Пушкин

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

 

London Review of Books

 

Vol. 25 No. 4 dated 20 February 2003 |

The rake's progress

A lecher, heavy gambler and committed seducer with a terror of being cuckolded, Pushkin's life and death bore more than a passing resemblance to the fictions he created in Eugene Onegin, writes James Wood in this latest essay from the LRB

Thursday February 20, 2003

Pushkin: A Biography by TJ Binyon HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002,

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It is in some ways unfortunate that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to TJ Binyon's remarkable biography, became 'addicted' to Rossini while living in Odessa, where an Italian opera company was visiting, and thoug

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