Pushkin's Button

A riveting narrative about the last few months of the Russian poet Pushkin's life before his fatal duel is an astonishing tour de force of cultural history that reads like a thriller. The rich international, yet very Russian, world of St. Petersburg in the 1830s comes wonderfully to life with its imperial balls, political and literary gossip, and beautiful women, notably Natalya Pushkin, the poet's wife.

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