Friday, October 21, 2022

Pushkin - Russia's poet who belongs to the world - in Museums, statues, streets and stanzas



Pushkin's self-portrait.


Alexander Pushkin

Where can you see Pushkin?

1 Statue of Pushkin in Odessa, Ukraine.

2 Pushkin Memorial Apartment, Arbat Street, Moscow

He lived here with his pretty wife, Natalia. 



He wrote the poem, My Monument, including the lines, 

The poet is gone but his poem lives on. (My half-remembered translation. The version I read was the poet is gone but his poems live forever.)


3 Alexander Pushkin Apartment-Museum, 12 Moyka River Embankment, St Petersburg, Russia, where he died after a duel.

You can see his study with its shelves of books.

Lovely statue of Pushkin seated on a bench.


4 Statue in Bachkhysaria, Crimea, SW Ukraine (Annexed by Russia) 

5 Mexico

Statue in Pushkin Park, Mexico city, Mexico.



I could not find anything quotable in Wikiquotes.

Elsewhere I found these:


Write for pleasure and publish for money.


Never despite the translator. He is the mailman of human civilization.


Sad that our finest aspiration

Our freshest dreams and meditations

In swift succession should decay

Like autumn leaves that rot away


I've lived to bury my desires

And see my dreams corrode with rust

Now all that's left are fruitless fires

That burn my empty heart to dust


Struck by the clouds of cruel fate

My crown of summer bloom is sere

Alone and sad I watch and wait


From The Queen Of Spades and other stories, on playing cards for money,

'Play interests me very much,' said Hermann, 'but I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous.'

From Eugene Onegin, 1833


Love passed, the Muse appeared

The weather of mind got clarity new found

Now free, I once more weave together

Emotion, thought, and magic sound.


Let us end on a happy note.

Moscow - how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts

What store of riches it imparts


I am married and happy. My only wish is that nothing will change.


Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.


It is better to have dreamed a thousand dreams that never were than to have never dreamed at all.

When I read his life story at first I blamed his wife for his death.

She was a flirt and her relationship with another man was a scandal and many people thought the man who married her sister did so to get closer to her and to justify being seen in her company. 

However, when I read that her husband had already fought more than twenty duels, I felt that he was playing a game of Russian roulette, as they say, an accident waiting to happen.

I looked up when duels were banned in Russia, the USA and UK. Unfortunately there is no simple exact date, because efforts were made to ban duelling but it still continues sparoadically.

 Useful Websites

TRAVEL DESTINATIONS

RUSSIA, St Petersburg

http://www.saint-petersburg.com/museums/pushkin-museum-memorial-apartment.asp

https://www.thinkchina.sg/impressions-moscow-pushkin-influenced-whole-generation-chinese-part-3?

Vutm_source=Outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Remarketing_Singapore&utm_term=MailOnline

QUOTATIONS

https://www.azquotes.com/author/11939-Alexander_Pushkin

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