Pushkin's Button - Softcover

Vitale, Serena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226857719 ISBN 13: 9780226857718

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2000

Synopsis

Pushkin's Button recreates the four months of Pushkin's life leading up to the fatal duel in the snow on January 27, 1837. Many theories have been advanced about the death of one of Russia's greatest artists, none of them wholly satisfactory. Serena Vitale has opened the archives and studies the case more closely, and more imaginatively, than anyone before her. Her brilliant detective work unearths fascinating, revealing details, including a button missing from Pushkin's Kamerjunker uniform.

"Pushkin's Button will keep all constituencies of reader fastened to their seats, as they watch Petersburg's lofty denizens leave no moment of the hurtling Pushkin scandal unrecorded or not speculated on."—Monika Greenleaf,Los Angeles Times

"[A] deliciously entertaining whydunit, a book in which every page seduces with a riddle. . . . Vivacious, seductive, original."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"A delightful combination of retrograde pleasures (court balls, the demise of a doomed genius) and primary sources. . . . Illuminating."—Richard Lamb, New York Times Book Review

"A book almost impossible to put down."—George Steiner, New Yorker

About this title

Review

In telling the story of the duel that killed Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's great poet, writer Serena Vitale does something more exciting than simply putting together a biographical chronology of the man's life. In place of the usual plod through life and works, Vitale focuses on the extraordinary events of the end of Pushkin's life, and works backwards and sideways, as it were, to provide a quirkily rich portrait of the man. She is successful in part because she writes like a novelist instead of an ordinary biographer and she makes connections and assessments worthy of the lively mind of Pushkin himself. Take, for instance, the book's title: an anecdote about Pushkin's clothing noted by a contemporary ("Pushkin's bekesh was missing a button at the back, at waist height ... clearly they were not looking after him") leads Vitale not into contemplation of the adequacy of the many servants who attended the poet, but rather into the way the missing button "resembles the stress accent that suddenly breaks loose from the iamb and vanishes into the void" in a typical Pushkinian line of verse. Pushkin's Button is bursting at the seams with surprising and illuminating perspectives such as this. --Adam Roberts

About the Author

Serena Vitale is a professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Pavia, Italy.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0226857719
• ISBN 13: 9780226857718
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 355