Forty years after Pushkin’s death, Dostoyevsky wrote: ‘Everything we
have comes from Pushkin’. This is no exaggeration. When Pushkin started
writing, Russian poetry was either composed from the lofty, solemn
language of the Old Church Slavonic, or from elements of French and
German poetry, with a characteristic abundance of barbarism and cliche.
Pushkin cast aside the conventional poetic language of his time,
stripping it of pompous embellishments and incorporating into his work
everyday words and expressions that his predecessors had regarded as
vulgarisms. This transformation revitalised the Russian literary
language and opened the way for a new generation of poets to experiment
further with new forms and subject matter.

This book traces the
development of Pushkin’s verse from the Romantic poetry of his youth to
the more mature and original style of his later works. With prose
translations at the foot of each page, John Fennell’s selection is
designed to appeal to the general reader as well as the student of
Russian language.