Today, the Free For All celebrates the birthday of the Shakespeare of Russian Literature, would-be revolutionary, and all-round romantic, Alexander Pushkin!

Pushkin was born on this day in Moscow, 1799.  His parents were part of the extensive Russian nobility, but his great-grandfather was Abram Gannibal, a slave who had been brought to Russia from what is now Cameroon, and had been freed by Peter the Great, and who had grown up within the Tsar’s household.  Pushkin would attribute not only his love of freedom to his great-grandfather, but also his dark, curly hair.

From a young age, Pushkin knew he wanted to be a poet, as well as a social reformer.  He was inspired by the Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire (the same revolution in which Byron died), and, though a civil servant, eagerly wrote and spoke out on the most radical of issues, including revolution, which quickly got him transferred to all the backwater areas of Russian government.  Though bored out of his wits by his work, and increasingly lonely without the balls and parties of Russian high society, these isolated posts gave Pushkin plenty of time to write, to join the Freemasons (in 1820), and to become good friends with the Decembrists (not the musical group…the revolutionary group that was plotting to overthrow the Tsar.

Pushkin never took part in the 1825 Decembrist Uprising (legend says as he was leaving to join them, a black cat crossed his path, and the highly superstitious Pushkin decided it was an omen and stayed home).  However, his comrades within the Decembrists kept handwritten copies of many of his political poems, and when they were arrested, Pushkin’s name was immediately linked to the group.  Though he was allowed to return to St. Petersburg after having a face-to-face meeting with Tsar Nicholas I, Pushkin was placed under police watch, was unable to travel, and could publish nothing without extensive police censorship for the next five years.

Nevertheless, Pushkin’s star was on the rise.  His plays and poems were winning him fame across Russia, and his charming wit, ribald jokes, and shameless flirting made him the first person to be invited to any event in Russian society.  It was at one of these parties, in 1828, that Pushkin met Natalya Goncharova, then 16-years-old, and reportedly one of the most beautiful women in Moscow (one of Pushkin’s sketches of her is to the left).  He fell in love immediately (granted, he seemed to have done that fairly often), but it took a great deal to convince the very hesitant Natalya to marry him, in 1831.

Like all good 19th century artists, Pushkin was falling deeper and deeper into debt, and his frequent clashes with the Powers That Be made his life a bit of a topsy-turvy one.  He was willing to deal with it all with his customary charm, style, and bawdy good humor.  But the one thing he couldn’t tolerate was his wife’s unhappiness–even when it came as a result of a potential affair with another man.

Romantics say that there is no one more devoted than a reformed rake, and Pushkin is the man who proves that saying.  Though he called Natalya his “113th love”, and wasn’t above gently mocking her in his letters, she was his muse, and the person he held above all others.  “Without you,” he wrote Natalya, “I would have been unhappy all my life.”

So when Natalya’s heart was broken by Georges D’Anthes, her brother-in-law, and reportedly one of the best shots in the Russian Army, Pushkin very publicly challenged him to a duel.  D’Anthes fired first, hitting Pushkin in the abdomen.  Pushkin–who had already fought a few duels in his time–managed to get up and fire, but only lightly wounded D’Anthes in the shoulder.  Though honor may have been served, Pushkin’s wound was a fatal one, and he died after two days of agony.

Even in death, Pushkin proved to be a threat to the establishment–his funeral, and the public mourning over his death was so strong and widespread that the government feared widespread unrest, and abruptly moved his funeral into a smaller church in order to discourage the crowds.  It wasn’t until 1880 that a statue to the great man was unveiled in Moscow.

Today, though, we get to celebrate all of Pushkin’s genius, from his deeply romantic side, embodied in Eugene Onegin, perhaps the most famous poem in Russian literature, to his love for the dark, gothic, and mystical, to his prolific and utterly enchanting letters.  I, personally, cannot recommend Pushkin highly enough (I was a Russian major in college because I had…have…an enormous literary crush on the man), but there is plenty of pleasure to be found, even for the uninitiated.  Here are some super places to get started:

Eugene Onegin:  I know I have brought up this book one too many times around here already, but seriously….it’s wonderful.  Onegin is a jaded, cynical, self-absorbed Byronic hero who wins the heart of Tatiana, an innocent, but fiercely independent and free-spirited young woman (Pushkin writes some darned good heroine, particularly considering the time period in which he was writing).  Their meeting becomes a catalyst for tragedy and self-revelation in rhyme that is so emotional and so smart and so moving that you’ll get swept away by it.  Also, thanks to a passage in this poem that gave rise to a long-standing rumor that Pushkin had a foot fetish.  You’ll have to read it to judge for yourself!

Collected Stories: Pushkin was a gifted story-teller no matter the medium, and his short stories still have the power to captivate, to intrigue, and to scandalize to this day.  Some of these stories deal with elements of Russian folklore and mythology, some make fun of Russian society in Pushkin’s day, particularly the hypocrisy of the upper classes and government (and many of which still ring true today), and some are out-and-out, NSFW romps that gave a number of people in my Russian language classes fits of hysteria.  The really fascinating part is that even these ribald tales are so well-written and clever and funny that it’s impossible not to cherish them.

“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners…and make them, as a part of the human species…For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same… Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.”
(Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication on the Rights of Women, Chapter III)

Today we celebrate one of the first feminists in modern Western history, a woman whose remarkable life and impressive intellect were forgotten for nearly a century, and woman whose work is still surprisingly relevant to this day–Mary Wollstonecraft, who was born this day in 1759.

In her most famous work, A Vindication on the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft essentially argued that men and women were born and meant to be equals, but that society, and its refusal to train women’s brains and bodies properly, were forcing women into a subservient role, and ensuring that they would never be anything more than a pretty face.  It wasn’t appreciated until much later how much of her writings were inspired by her own life, and her incredibly difficult childhood.

Wollstonecraft was the the second of the seven children of Edward John Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Dixon.  Though the family was initially financially comfortable, her father squandered most of the money on speculative investments and, later, alcohol, including inheritance money that should have gone to Mary.  He was abusive, as well, and Mary as a teenager often lay on the floor outside her mother’s bedroom at night to ensure that her father couldn’t get inside.  Things changed for the better when Mary was introduced to Frances (Fanny) Blood, who encouraged her to improve her life through education, and gave her all the personal and intellectual support she could not get at home.

Mary determined to become self-supportive around the age of nineteen, and, after working as a ladies maid for several years, opened a school with Fanny Blood in Newington Green in London (that’s right…Mary Wollstonecraft and I were neighbors!).  The school was a rousing success, but Fanny and her husband soon moved to Portugal in the hopes of improving Fanny’s health, and Mary abandoned the school to help care for her until her death in 1787.

Though a gifted educator, Mary decided that she was done scrabbling for money and being at the mercy of other people to provide her with a living.  Taking an enormous financial and social risk, she decided to become an author, a career that very few women chose at that time.  She moved to London, and became a trusted and valued member of a number of intellectual circles, making friends with Samuel Johnson and Thomas Paine, among others.  Following the end of an affair with the (married) artist Henry Fuseli, Mary moved to France, eager to be a part of the intellectual, as well as the political revolution that was fomenting there (she had proposed to share Henry, but apparently Mrs. Fuseli was not agreeable to such a proposal.).

It was around this time that Mary penned A Vindication on the Rights of Women, published in 1792, which was a follow-up to her 1790 pamphlet A Vindication on the Rights of Man, in which she argued against class divisions and the aristocracy and championed the Republican sentiments that were spreading across the newly-founded United States and France.

It was her passionate argument for women, however, that made Mary famous.  In A Vindication on the Rights of Women, she rejected outright the notion that women’s minds were incapable of rational thought or unfit to be educated, and that their bodies were too weak to allow them to work, or be independent from men.  As she describes, “Fragile in every sense of the word, [women] are obliged to look up to man for every comfort… I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantile airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise, and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed, and their powers of digestion destroyed.”

She argued that “females…are made women of when they are mere children”, meaning that girls were taught from a very young age that their only worth lay in physically attracting a man.  The result was that women were forced to remain like children for the rest of their lives.  It was not their natural inclination to be so, but the way in which they were brought up:

False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness…and thus weakened …how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?—where find strength to recur to reason and rise superiour to a system of oppression, that blasts the fair promises of spring? This cruel association of ideas, which every thing conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or, to speak with more precision, of feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for themselves; for they then perceive that it is only through their address to excite emotions in men, that pleasure and power are to be obtained. Besides, the books professedly written for their instruction, which make the first impression on their minds, all inculcate the same opinions. Educated then in worse than Egyptian bondage, it is unreasonable, as well as cruel, to upbraid them with faults that can scarcely be avoided…when nothing could be more natural, considering the education they receive, and that their ‘highest praise is to obey, unargued’—the will of man.

This is not to say that Wollstonecraft’s work was and remains utterly unassailable–A Vindication on the Rights of Women is full of class and gender assumptions, many the result of religion, that date the work considerably.  But her argument for the absolute equality of human beings remains a remarkable and moving statement that, largely, is still relevant today.

Mary had her first daughter, Fanny, with an American named Gilbert Imlay, whom she met in France.  They were never married (though they claimed to be so that Mary could escape the Revolutionary government in France), and Imlay soon dropped out of Mary’s life, leading to a very serious battle with depression.  Several years later, in 1797, she married the writer and philosopher William Godwin (pictured at left), and the two moved into adjoining houses so that they could maintain their complete independence, and frequently corresponded by letter.  Their marriage, by all accounts, was a happy one, but it was also brief.  Mary died of septicemia following the birth of her second daughter, Mary (who would become the author of Frankenstein).  

Following her death, Godwin published Mary’s unfinished memoirs, titled Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  Though Godwin honestly believed that Mary’s shockingly honest memoirs were the best way to memorialize her, the book was considered so scandalous (talking, as it did about her love affairs, single motherhood, depression, and suicide attempts, in very frank and thoughtful terms), that her reputation was demolished.  It would be nearly a century before anyone seriously studied Mary’s works.  However, in 1892, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a prominent suffragette, wrote in an introduction to A Vindication on the Rights of Women, calling Mary the founder of the women’s movement.   But don’t take her–or my–word for it.  In honor of her birthday, have a look through Mary Wollstonecraft’s surprising and insightful work today (you can find the full transcription of the work here) and see for yourself!

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”

So wrote Nikolai Gogol in his novel Dead Souls, and I can think of no fitter tribute to him that his own observation.  Gogol, born on this day in 1809, is considered one of the pioneers of Russian letters, who brought Surrealism and gothic horror to the nation’s literature in a way no one had before, and continues to inspire writers, composers, and readers to this day for his ability to make you laugh, cry, and squirm, all at the same time.

Gogol was born the Ukrainian village of Sorochyntsi, to parents of Polish descent.  His father, who passed when Gogol was 15 was an amateur playwright, which may have given Gogol the idea to begin writing himself.  He was not popular by any means as a young man (his fellow students apparently referred to him as a “mysterious dwarf”), but he came away from those years with the resolve to keep writing, and to achieve lasting fame through his works.

His wishes were very soon achieved.  His short stories, which first documented life in rural Ukraine, and his poems, which were Romantic idylls by and large, met with enormous public success.  Gogol had always loved history, and worked as much of his homeland’s past into his stories as possible, eventually enrolling in University at St. Petersburg to study history.  He wrote several successful plays during this time, but it was after he left Russia to travel around Europe (especially Italy) that he began to produce the masterpieces for which he is remembered today.  These writings, including Dead Souls, which was intended to be a re-telling of Dante’s Inferno, are deeply satirical, viciously funny, and deeply, sometimes painfully insightful.

Gogol suffered from severe depression (it is assumed that he may have suffered from manic depression or bipolar disorder), and it took an enormous toll on his person, his relationships, and his work.  He burned large portions of his writing more than once–towards the end of his life, he burned the entire manuscript for the second part of Dead Souls, and later said that the Devil played a practical joke on him and made him destroy the book.  Soon after this, he took to his bed and refused all food, finally dying nine days later in agony.

What he did leave us, however, is a body of work that changed Russian literature.  Gogol had a unique ability to take the events, the people, and the stories of the day, and present them in the most fantastical light possible, turning the mundane into something fascinating, wonderful, and, often weirdly unsettling.  Though his work fell into relative obscurity in the 19th century, he was ‘rediscovered’ after the First World War by modernists who realized just how progressive and powerful his work really was.  Since then, his work has remained at the forefront of Russian–and, indeed, world literature.

So, if you’re looking for something definitely different to read this week, I can’t recommend Gogol more highly.  Be sure to wish him a happy birthday as you do.  I have a feeling he’d appreciate it knowing he finally achieved his goals.

Here are some suggestions to get you started:

Dead Souls: Gogol’s only surviving novel is one of the most significant–and oft-debated–works of 19th century literature.  This tale follows the journeys of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, an enigmatic traveler who calls on a number of landowners and civil servants in order to add to his collection of “dead souls”.  The story, you see, is set just after the emancipation of serfs in Russia, and Gogol’s book is very much a commentary on what the practices of slavery and ownership can do to society.  But for all that it is a political satire and a truly odd, picaresque novel, it is also quite readable and, in some places, genuinely funny.  It might not be the easiest of reads, but it absolutely worth the effort.

The Overcoat: This is probably one of Gogol’s most accessible stories, and thus is the first introduction many students of literature have to Gogol (it certainly was for me).  It is also a perfect example of his later style: satirical, utterly impatient with bureaucracy and willful ignorance, and deeply empathetic with the people who are almost always overlooked by The System.  This story introduces us to one Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, an underpaid, overworked government clerk who spends his entire salary on the finest overcoat, dreaming of the day when he can stride through St. Petersburg in all his wintery glory.  But tragedy strikes…and then things get really weird…..

Diary of a Madman:  This is my favorite of Gogol’s works, and the story that is guaranteed to make me curl up in a corner and hum quietly to myself after reading.  Trying to explain this story just doesn’t do it justice…A man who has been generally overlooked all his life gradually becomes convinced he’s secretly the King of Spain…and that he can communicate with a dog.  But Gogol makes his descent into madness so subtle, so realistic, and so…normal that by the end, you’re forced to wonder who, in this story, is really the crazy one…As you read this, keep an eye on the dates in the diary.  I’ll be over in the corner.

The Nose: Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the foremost composers of the Soviet Era (indeed, of the 20th century in general) used Gogol’s bizarre little story about a man whose nose runs away and has adventures all around St. Petersburg as the inspiration for a short light opera.  Which is equally as bizarre, and surprisingly fun.  This opera was specifically written so that Shostakovich could prove that classic literature, and the medium of opera could be entertaining for the Proletariat, and it turns out he was right.  I took my Dad to see this opera once, and yes, it featured a six-foot-tall man wearing a giant nose costume dashing around the stage.  He says he enjoyed it.  He’s a really good sport that way.