Alexander Pushkin
Prince of Poets (1799-1837)
Letters from Vienna #137
Alexander Pushkin
Prince of Poets (1799-1837)
“Poetry is always the exclusive passion of a few who are born poets;” Alexander Pushkin once wrote “it grasps and consumes all observations, all efforts, all impressions of life.” [1]
And the Muse had a powerful effect on his life: “In those days in the shadows of the vaulted woods, near waters flowing in the stillness, in corners of the Lycée corridors, the Muse began to appear to me. My student cell, which knew no gaiety till then, was suddenly flooded with light – in it the Muse opened a feast of her fancies. Farewell cold studies! Farewell, games of my first years! I was changed. I was a poet. Within me only sounds overflowed, lived, ran into sweet measures. Everywhere by my side, tireless, my Muse would sing and sing again to me…”[2]
It is interesting to compare and contrast Alexander Pushkin with Thomas Mann (see letter #124) who wrote: “Art as sonorous ethics, as fuga and punctum contra punctum, as a cheerful and serious piety, as a building of non-profane purpose, where everything interlocks, everything is intelligently connected without mortar and held by “God's hand” – this l’art pour l’art is truly my ideal of art.”[3]
Connection, construction and combination, “building” if you will, was also vitally important to Pushkin: “If everything has already been said, why are you writing? And when that which has already been said, been said simply? Pitiful endeavor! No, we don’t wish to slander human reason, which is inexhaustible in the combination of concepts, inexhaustible like language in the combination of words.”[4]
Again, and again both Alexander Pushkin with Thomas Mann showed a predilection for a “classical” approach. “Accuracy and brevity – these are the most important qualities of prose”[5] Pushkin opined, and again: “True taste doesn’t lie in the rash rejection of a word or phrase, but in a sense of proportion and harmony.”
It was no accident that Pushkin was a contemporary of Goethe or that Mann was so fascinated by the “agility and precision...the rhythmic magic”[6] of Goethe’s prose.
“All poems whose forms were known to the Greeks and Romans or for which they left us models must be counted as classical poetry” Pushkin stated “...I think it superfluous to talk about the poetry of the Greeks and Romans; every educated European should have a sufficient conception of the immortal creations of sublime antiquity.”[7]
Yet today, one encounters little, in the realm of Social Media at least (something which truly beggars belief) that betrays even a fleeting knowledge of the classics. The vast majority of inchoate, inarticulate, bodiless and brainless voices one is forced to read or listen to pontificating in pompous fashion (as though they had a grain of education or even knew what they were writing or talking about) and spreading pure BS (for which disinformation or even misinformation would be too charitable a term) are unbelievably verbose, garbled or simply confused. And this phenomenon is not confined to Social Media. I ceased reading “legacy media” newspapers long ago because the “journalists” were quite incapable of patching a few sentences or even words together.
This is no accident. As Dean and Jill Henderson recently noted the Illuminati have long had, as one of their chief aims, the dumbing down of the masses: “…we shall emasculate the first stage of collectivism – the universities…any form of study of ancient history…we shall replace with the study of the program of the future. We shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable for us. Each…life must be trained within strict limits corresponding to its destination and work in life…”[8]
Instead of being critical of the ongoing “Genocide by Jab”, the “Hospital Holocaust” or the “Collapse of the Financial System by Design” (all of which is commonly descried as “conspiracy theory”) we are to “think positively”. And rather than studying history in a critical fashion and seeing how the world actually works we are politely nudged in the direction of a “social science”. Yet, as Steve Keen has pointed out, the “social science” of economics, for example, is not without its deficiencies:
“Part of that strength (of economic theory) has come from the irrelevance of economics. You don’t need an accurate theory of economics to build an economy in the same sense that you need an accurate theory of propulsion to build a rocket. The market economy began its evolution long before the term ‘economics’ was ever coined, and it will doubtless continue to evolve regardless of whether the dominant economic theory is valid. Therefore, so long as the economy itself has some underlying strength, it is a moot point as to whether any challenge to economic orthodoxy will succeed.”
“However, while to some extent irrelevant, economics is not ‘mostly harmless’. The false confidence it has engendered in the stability of the market economy has encouraged policy-makers to dismantle some of the institutions which initially evolved to try to keep its instability within limits. ‘Economic reform,’ undertaken in the belief that it will make society function better, has instead made modern capitalism a poorer social system: more unequal, more fragile, more unstable. And in some instances, as in Russia, a naive faith in economic theory has led to outcomes which, had they been inflicted by weapons rather than by policy, would have led their perpetrators to the International Court of Justice.”[9]
Pushkin’s education was at once “classical” and “modern”:
“Pushkin’s younger brother Lev, who was born in April 1805, has this to say about Pushkin’s childhood: “My brother’s education had very little Russian about it: he heard only French spoken; his tutor was a Frenchman, a rather intelligent and educated man; my father’s library consisted only of French books. The young child spent sleepless nights in his father’s study, devouring one book after another. Pushkin had a prodigious memory and at the age of eleven he knew the whole of French literature by heart.”
“Pushkin’s sister Olga is a little more accurate in her description of her brother’s childhood:”
“It goes without saying, that the children spoke and were taught only French. Alexander was rather lazy, but he early showed his love for reading. At the age of nine he loved to read Plutarch, the Iliad and Odyssey in French translations. Not satisfied with the books given him, he often stole into our father’s study and read other books: my father’s library consisted of French classics and the writings of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century.”
“Between the ages of nine and eleven Pushkin was also reading the large collection of pornographic books in his father’s library which were hidden in a “secret” bookcase. They were mostly by French and Russian erotic writers, such as Alexis Piron who, Pushkin wrote in a footnote to the Second Canto of “Eugene Onegin”, “is only good in those poems which cannot even be hinted at without offending propriety.”[10]
It was through a French translation that Pushkin first encountered Byron.
Byron and Pushkin
Dorothy Butchard writes: “Pushkin expert Derek Bethea suggests that Pushkin “fell under the spell of Romanticism” during his time in southern Russia, and the English poet’s influence is evident in the Romantic styling of Pushkin’s narrative poems “A Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1820-1821) and “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” (1822), both of which were directly influenced by Byron’s “Oriental Tales.””
“By the time his masterpiece “Eugene Onegin” was published in 1833, however, Pushkin had developed a more critical approach to Byron’s work. Byron expert Peter Cochran jokes that “a possible subtitle for ‘Onegin’ would be ‘reading Byron will ruin your life,’” and the changing tone of Pushkin’s views offers a fascinating insight into the development of the great Russian poet’s literary craftsmanship.”[11]
In the same way that all literature and all culture is interconnected so are we all interconnected. Excluding or banning Pushkin or Dostoyevsky (see letter #121), as the less than democratic and less than liberal regime in Kiev is currently doing, is sheer madness; every language and every culture, ancient or modern, “primitive” or “sophisticated” has its place.
[1] p.25 Alexander Puschkin, Gesammelte Werke 5, Aufsätze und Tagebücher
[2] p.50 Pushkin, A Biography, David Magarshack
[3] p. 319 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Thomas Mann
[4] p.51 Alexander Puschkin, Gesammelte Werke 5, Aufsätze und Tagebücher
[5] p.18 Ibid
[6] p.180 Goethe, Thomas Mann
[7] p.31 Alexander Puschkin, Gesammelte Werke 5, Aufsätze und Tagebücher
[8] p.21 Illuminati Agenda 21, Dean and Jill Henderson
[9] p.4 Debunking Economics, Steve Keen
[10] p.21 Pushkin, A Biography, David Magarshack
[11] https://www.rbth.com/literature/2015/01/28/tracing_lord_byrons_influence_on_pushkin_43213.html
“…sheer madness” ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️