Volume 17, Number 5 · October 7, 1971
Genius
By Helen Muchnic
Pushkin
by Henri Troyat, translated by Nancy Amphoux
Doubleday, 696 pp., $10.00
Pushkin on Literature
translated and edited by Tatiana Wolff
Barnes & Noble, 454 pp., $24.00
Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary
by John Bayley
Cambridge University Press, 369 pp., $13.50
The essence of Pushkin is simplicity. He always said and wrote exactly what he meant, and, within the limits of the official restrictions that fettered his comings and goings, behaved as he pleased. Concealment was foreign to his nature, obscurity repellent to his sense of art. His actions and opinions were in the open, and the story of his life has been told many times. If his poems are untranslatable, it is not that their meaning is veiled but, on the contrary, that it is so plain and unadorned, so precisely worded, so musically given, that it cannot be translated without irreparable loss. It is his clarity that baffles critics and biographers. There is nothing about him to discover, and yet everything to explain. All is clear in him except his genius.
Review, 2621 words
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