Pushkin's lyric intelligence

Alexander Pushkin (1799 to 1837) is a central figure in Russian literature, often regarded as one of its founders, and his influence reaches well beyond Russia. His poems and prose reshaped Russian culture, and his stories have inspired composers including Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky, as well as the playwright Peter Shaffer in Amadeus. He experimented constantly: he wrote a major body of lyric poetry, a novel in verse, early Russian prose fiction, and psychological and historical drama, and he also worked as a historian with serious aims. His own life was dramatic enough to become Romantic legend, and he admired Byron, whose writing and persona inspired him.

This study examines what Kahn calls Pushkin's lyric intelligence, his ability to turn philosophical and aesthetic ideas into verse. Critics have often read Pushkin's poems as simple on the surface, and this book challenges that view. It is presented as the first major study of this body of work, tracing how his writing responded to English and European literature and to wider cultural movements, and how those currents shaped his views on creativity and the purpose of art. Kahn reads the poems through the history of ideas rather than through questions of style and genre, which he argues have been overstated. The poems emerge as positions on the originality, the imagination, the status of the poet, the value of commercial success, the nature of genius, the representation of nature, the figure of the hero, and the immortality of the soul. The book draws on Pushkin's library and his reading, and the source text ends mid-sentence at that point.