A Brilliant Mind’s Pauses: The Fiction of Russia’s Greatest Poet

Bob Blaisdell praises the prose of Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin: Pushkin is a terrible model for writers: the prose is lively, amusing, idiomatic, clear, charming. Nobody can write as beautifully as he, so why bother? When Tolstoy reread Pushkin’s tales, novellas, and “fragments” (as they’re called), in March 1873, he immediately abandoned a painstaking historical novel and started one that became Anna Karenina. Okay, for Tolstoy, Pushkin was a wonderful model. Pushkin’s fictional fragments, by the way, are only incomplete, not unfinished; they’re brilliant up to their last phrase.
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