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You have to read the uploaded images and answer the questions below

****1. at least five of his/her own substantial literary critical comments based on the discussed stories. Each comment should be min. one paragraph – max. two paragraphs long; and*****

Why didn’t Herman win even though he knew the secret of three cards? 

What features of the human nature does Pushkin describe in Herman?

What is the author’s own attitude to his protagonist? How do you understand the comparison of Herman to “a small Napoleon”?

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837)

Review

1. In 1799, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin was born into an aristocratic family in Russia’s

ancient capital of Moscow. His father and paternal uncle were descendants of ancient Russian

aristocracy. Pushkin’s mother was a descendant of a Moor from Africa whom Tsar Peter the

Great had brought to his court, then educated to become an officer in the Russian Army. Heavily

under the influence of 18th-century French language and culture, they spent long hours reading

French poetry (Russian was the language of the serfs), often in the presence of young Aleksandr.

Pushkin’s nurse, a serf woman by the name of Arina Rodionovna, spoke to him in the Russian

language used by non-aristocrats at that time. She had a vast store of folk poetry that she would

recite to him for long stretches.

2. St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by a Russian tsar, Peter the Great. By the end of the 19th

century, it became the center of an expanding empire, a city of great mansions and glorious

residences, and a glittering jewel of Russian and European culture.

3. In the beginning of 19th century, tsar Aleksandr I established a new school for the young

aristocrats, the Lyceum (located at Tsarskoe Selo – The Tsars’ Village – near St. Petersburg).

Among its first group of highly talented youths from Moscow came Aleksandr Pushkin. At the

Lyceum, the staff, who numbered among the finest teachers in aristocratic Russia, did not take

long to realize that they had a genius on their hands – as well as one of the most mischievous and

sometimes ungovernable brats in Russia.

4. Pushkin’s schoolmates, many of them future famous leaders in Russia, found in him a loyal

and staunch friend, although one with a passionate and unpredictable temper. Neither did it take

long for Pushkin’s brilliant poetry to be recognized, in the Lyceum and beyond.

5. When this talented but rebellious and mischievous youth came out of school into the

supercharged aristocratic life of early19th-century St. Petersburg, he showed neither interest nor

promise as a “top-drawer” bureaucrat. During his absences from work, he spent a great deal of

time at the gambling tables, balls, theaters, and, most especially, the ballet. At a theatrical

performance, he circulated the portrait of a famous French assassin of a high-ranking aristocrat.

The caption, in Pushkin’s handwriting, read: “A lesson to tsars!”

6. When this episode inevitably came to the attention of the St. Petersburg chief of police,

Pushkin did not remain long in the Russian capital. He was exiled, first to the southwest, to the

town of Kishinev in Bessarabia, near present-day Romania, then to Odessa and Mikhailovskoye,

Pushkin’s exile lasted for six years including – virtually, his entire youth. When Pushkin was

leaving the capital, his first long poèma, “Ruslan and Liudmila” (based on the Russian fair tales

and folk motifs) was being prepared for publication.

7. In Kishinev, Pushkin created his famous Sothern Poems, including “The Gypsies” and “The

Fountain of Bakhchisarai.” His fame was growing as he had already become famous for his

“Ruslan and Liudmila.” He also managed to amaze the local residents with his eccentric

costumes and his heavy, metal walking stick, which he used to keep his pistol-shooting hand

strong and supple. This strengthened hand was necessary for the duels that he so often fought,

often in response to insults purely imagined by the poet. Not only did he produce some

wonderful lyrics of love, but he was actively engaged in a life that would produce a famous “Don

Juan list” of women whose favors he had enjoyed.

8. In 1823, the exile continued in Odessa, a thriving port city on the Black Sea, where Pushkin

managed to irritate the local governor. He wrote a quatrain that made devilish fun of the

provincial governor, whose wife the poet had seduced. The poem gained immediate notoriety,

and the governor, who did not deserve this treatment, became the laughing stock of Russia. He

had Pushkin exiled further north to the estate of his parents’ country estates in the north of

Russia, the village of Mikhailovskoye.

9. In Odessa, Pushkin began a long work that would become Russia’s greatest poem, a “novel in

verse,” Eugene Onegin. Its central plot involves the title character, who is a strange combination

of sensitivity, intelligence, and perversity. He recognizes the unusually high human value of the

central female figure, Tatiana Larina, but rejects the love she offers when she is a young woman

in the country. Later, when he sees her as a grande dame in St. Petersburg, it is his turn to

experience rejection. The novel also deals with dueling and the death of the poet, perhaps a

foreboding of the author’s fate.

10. One of Pushkin’s great works is a tragedy, Boris Godunov. Pushkin read William

Shakespeare’s works in French translation. He was particularly impressed by the plays written

about the guilt-ridden Henry IV, and he decided to respond in Russian. The result was Boris

Godunov, concerning events surrounding Russia’s early-l7th-cenfury “Time of Troubles.” The

tragedy involves a Russian tsar who made his way to the throne by means of a murder and

suffered the pangs of conscience. Naturally, the play had considerable political resonance on the

Russian scene, which had just witnessed an attempted regime change. The resonance of the play

was made even more powerful two generations later, when one of the greatest Russian

composers, Modest Mussorgsky converted the tragedy into one of the world’s greatest operas,

Boris Godunov.

11. An astounding example of Pushin’s lyrical poetry is the poem, “I remember that wondrous

moment…” While Pushkin was living on his mother’s estate, he received an unexpected visit

from a woman he had known in St. Petersburg – Anna Pavlovna Kern, who inspired what may be

the most remarkable lyric in the Russian language: “I remember that wondrous moment, when

you appeared before me…like the genius of pure beauty.”

12. In December, 1825, in St. Petersburg, under the influence of the American and French

Revolutions, a few aristocratic would-be revolutionaries banded together. One of their members,

Pestel, envisioned the creation of a republic in Russia. During an interregnum between tsar

Aleksandr I and his brother, who followed him as Nikolai I, Pestel and his followers attempted a

naively conceived demonstration in a public square. They were arrested by armed troops and

sent to the Siberian salt mines.Pushkin knew members of Pestel’s group, or the Decembrists,

who were fellow students at the Lyceum, but failed in his attempt to join them.

13. When it was discovered that Pushkin had known some of them, he was ordered back to

Moscow from his exile in Mikhailovskoye to appear before tsar Nikolai I. According to later

reports, Nikolai asked the poet what side he would have joined if he had been in St. Petersburg

during the uprising. Pushkin replied that he would have been together with his Decembrist

friends. The tsar praised him for his bravery and honesty and asked him if he would change his

ideas. He said he would try, and the tsar promised to serve as Pushkin’s personal censor in the

future. Not long before his death, he erects his own monument, “not touchable by human hands,”

to be Admired by countless future Russian generations.

14. In 1837, Pushkin, who felt he had to live in Russian high society, perished from a blow

brought about by the Byzantine turnings of that same society. A French officer serving in the

Russian army, Georges d’Anthes, virtually stalked Pushkin’s beautiful wife, Natalia. Pushkin’s

enraged reactions, and a nasty anonymous letter, led to a duel that ended with a bullet in the

poet’s abdomen and a hideously painful death – a death that Russia mourns to this very day.

15. The tsar was so frightened at the prospect of large demonstrations that he ordered

Pushkin’s body swiftly removed from St. Petersburg. He was buried in Sviatogorsky

Monastery near the ancient city of Pskov, near his mother’s estate. To this day, the grave is

surrounded by flowers, brought fresh every day. Russia still mourns the early loss of its

greatest and most eloquent poet. The most powerful memorial is a poem Pushkin himself

wrote in 1836; the epigraph is from Horace, “Exegi Monumentum.” It finishes with the lines:

To the orders of God, oh Muse, be obedient.

Don’t be afraid of insult, don’t demand the laurel wreath.

Slander and praise receive with equal indifference

And don’t argue with a fool.