Tuesday Book: Love, art and fatal pride

PUSHKIN'S BUTTON

BY SERENA VITALE, TRANSLATED BY ANN GOLDSTEIN AND JON ROTHSCHILD, FOURTH ESTATE, pounds 16.99

IT IS difficult to know another nation's poets. Translation, as Cervantes cleverly put it, is the reverse side of the tapestry. Pushkin, the greatest name in Russian literature according to his fellow countrymen, had the extra problem of being active just before the arrival of the first truly modern medium - photography.

Byron laboured under the same disadvantage but put himself scandalously about Europe whereas Pushkin, despite pleas, was never allowed to travel beyond the territories of the tsar. His name largely came to the west through the works of the many famous Russian composers he managed to inspire. Yet his life was extraordinary, as a recent spate of biographies has reminded us. His death was more extraordinary still, and this is the subject of Serena Vitale's painstaking examination.

Born into a dishevelled aristocratic family, Pushkin was the great-grandson of Peter the Great's African favourite, Hannibal. This tincture of blackness appearing in St Petersburg, the snowy babylon of the north, set him aside from all his contemporaries. Literary genius - the prose is hardly less wonderful than the poetry - enhanced his misfit status at every turn. And acclaim came quickly. Rude, passionate, anxious, charming, he easily managed to get himself exiled to remote provinces for his irreverent views. Economically as well as socially he was insecure, and like many such men was over-sensitive about his honour, and frequently issued duel-challenges for negligible slights. The strutting world of continental counts and barons is always slightly absurd to the English, but even Pushkin's peers found his behaviour somewhat excessive. At the same time, like Hamlet, he was a prototype of "the alienated modern", something this book strongly conveys.

Eventually, the tsar invited Pushkin for a private interview and decided to become the poet's personal censor. Far from being an advantage, Pushkin found this even more suffocating while, being an aggressive snob, he also felt he should have been accorded a higher rank than he was. Obviously, his personality also had allure: after a womanising youth he married "the most beautiful woman in St Petersburg," the 19-year-old daughter of a businessman and the youngest of three sisters. The tsar took a great liking to her, too. She was in constant demand, and Pushkin's court expenses rocketed accordingly.

Enter Baron Georges d'Anthes, a French adventurer in the Russian army and adopted son of the Dutch ambassador to St Petersburg. He fell ecstatically in love with Mrs Pushkin. Anonymous letters were sent (but not by d'Anthes) to the poet, welcoming him to the Order of Cuckolds. Pushkin challenged d'Anthes to a duel but was calmed by intermediaries.

The Frenchman, in a strange twist to the story, now married Mrs Pushkin's sister to be closer to his beloved. Two weeks after the marriage, Pushkin issued another challenge, though Mrs Pushkin and the Frenchman had never been alone together except once for a few minutes (and Pushkin himself was occasionally sleeping with the third of the sisters). The poet was wounded in the duel and died two days later, aged 37. D'Anthes, aged 25, was banished from Russia.

Serena Vitale's account of the final days is the most moving and effective part of the book, probably because it is the least fussy. Elsewhere she can be very confusing and sometimes degenerates into claptrap. "The Muse is a clever prima donna, seldom yielding to mortals, carefully timing her forays into the world and savouring their effects in advance." Can one conceive of a sentence with less meaning?

Like all Italians, she has an instinctive empathy with the artist: "When he wasn't writing, Pushkin was always on edge." But she is not very good at convincing us of Pushkin's greatness. At one point she remarks "He stuns us with his maxims," following this with four dreadful examples. Her own are much better: "Being in the centre of things does poets no good." And the best quip in the book is not from Pushkin but from his friend Delwig: "The closer one gets to heaven, the colder it is."

The chief drawback is that, in coming so close to her subject, she vapourises it. All is reduced to speculation. But this does mean that she knows her sources backwards and builds up her dossier in episodic form that has a pungent immediacy.

Her particular achievement is the discovery, in the Paris attic of one of the Dutch ambassador's descendants, of letters from d'Anthes to his adoptive father which reveal that they were long-term lovers, thus modifying all future biographies of Pushkin. More archival material is still coming and Pushkin studies are very lively. There is a further archive, held by another of the Dutch ambassador's descendants, which remains firmly closed. Serena Vitale might well have to produce another book before long.