A Short
Biographical
Notice of Alexander Pushkin.
Pushkin - Eugene Oneigin
London, May 1881.
CONTENTS
Mon Portrait
A Short Biographical Notice of Alexander Pushkin
Eugene Oneguine
Canto I: "The Spleen"
Canto II: The Poet
Canto III: The Country Damsel
Canto IV: Rural Life
Canto V: The Fete
Canto VI: The Duel
Canto VII: Moscow
Canto VIII: The Great World
Mon Portrait
Written by the poet at the age of 15.
Vous me demandez mon portrait,
Mais peint d'apres nature:
Mon cher, il sera bientot fait,
Quoique en miniature.
Je suis un jeune polisson
Encore dans les classes;
Point sot, je le dis sans facon,
Et sans fades grimaces.
Oui! il ne fut babillard
Ni docteur de Sorbonne,
Plus ennuyeux et plus braillard
Que moi-meme en personne.
Ma taille, a celle des plus longs,
Elle n'est point egalee;
J'ai le teint frais, les cheveux blonds,
Et la tete bouclee.
J'aime et le monde et son fracas,
Je hais la solitude;
J'abhorre et noises et debats,
Et tant soit peu l'etude.
Spectacles, bals, me plaisent fort,
Et d'apres ma pensee,
Je dirais ce que j'aime encore,
Si je n'etais au Lycee.
Apres cela, mon cher ami,
L'on peut me reconnaitre,
Oui! tel que le bon Dieu me fit,
Je veux toujours paraitre.
Vrai demon, par l'espieglerie,
Vrai singe par sa mine,
Beaucoup et trop d'etourderie,
Ma foi! voila Pouchekine.
Note: Russian proper names to be pronounced as in French (the nasal
sound of m and n excepted) in the following translation. The accent,
which is very arbitrary in the Russian language, is indicated
unmistakably in a rhythmical composition.
A Short Biographical Notice of Alexander Pushkin.
Alexander Sergevitch Pushkin was born in 1799 at Pskoff, and was
a scion of an ancient Russian family. In one of his letters it is
recorded that no less than six Pushkins signed the Charta declaratory
of the election of the Romanoff family to the throne of Russia, and
that two more affixed their marks from inability to write.
In 1811 he entered the Lyceum, an aristocratic educational
establishment at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, where he was
the friend and schoolmate of Prince Gortchakoff the Russian
Chancellor. As a scholar he displayed no remarkable amount of
capacity, but was fond of general reading and much given to
versification. Whilst yet a schoolboy he wrote many lyrical
compositions and commenced _Ruslan and Liudmila_, his first poem
of any magnitude, and, it is asserted, the first readable one ever
produced in the Russian language. During his boyhood he came much
into contact with the poets Dmitrieff and Joukovski, who were
intimate with his father, and his uncle, Vassili Pushkin, himself
an author of no mean repute. The friendship of the historian
Karamzine must have exercised a still more beneficial influence
upon him.
In 1817 he quitted the Lyceum and obtained an appointment in the
Foreign Office at St. Petersburg. Three years of reckless
dissipation in the capital, where his lyrical talent made him
universally popular, resulted in 1818 in a putrid fever which
was near carrying him off. At this period of his life he scarcely
slept at all; worked all day and dissipated at night. Society was
open to him from the palace of the prince to the officers'
quarters of the Imperial Guard. The reflection of this mode of
life may be noted in the first canto of _Eugene Oneguine_ and the
early dissipations of the "Philosopher just turned eighteen,"--
the exact age of Pushkin when he commenced his career in the
Russian capital.
In 1820 he was transferred to the bureau of Lieutenant-General
Inzoff, at Kishineff in Bessarabia.
