Volume 50, Number 20 · December 18, 2003
Chameleon Genius
By John Bayley
Pushkin: A Biography
by T.J. Binyon
Knopf, 727 pp., $35.00
As a poet himself W.B. Yeats felt the need for a poet to make his choice. He could not single-mindedly both pursue his gift and become a man of action and of the world as well. 'Perfection' must be sought in one sphere of living or another. This was by no means the opinion of the poets of the Romantic Revival a hundred years before. It was not the belief of Shelley or of Byron, and neither was it that of Russia's greatest poet. Pushkin passionately believed in what Dostoevsky was to call Zhivaya Zhizn, 'a living of life,' and living it to the full. Byron, whose work Pushkin knew in a French translation, would certainly have been in full agreement. Byron also had what his French admirers called un besoin de fatalité. Pushkin, too, was a great believer in Fate and in a poet's need to acknowledge and pursue his own individual destiny.
Review, 2694 words
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