24. An Anonymous “Certificate of a Cuckold”
By the time he graduated, Alexander Pushkin was a committed social reformer. That upset the Tsarist authorities and secret police, who placed him under surveillance for the remainder of his life. At age twenty-one, he was exiled from St. Petersburg to southern Russia. In exile, he traveled through Crimea and the Caucasus. The impressions gained furnished material for his “southern cycle” of romantic poems, such as The Robber Brothers and Prisoner of the Caucasus. Pushkin’s literary outflow often alarmed the authorities, who frequently censored his work and prohibited or otherwise impeded its publication.
Despite officialdom’s ham-handedness, Pushkin kept writing. His poetic novel Eugene Onegin revolutionized Russian literature as the first to take contemporary society as its subject matter and led a wave of realistic Russian novels. His use of the Russian language was both simple and profound. It became the foundation of the style adopted by novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev. Pushkin’s tragic end began in 1836, when he received an anonymous “Certificate of a Cuckold”, which alluded to the infidelity of his wife, Natalia Pushkina, nee Goncharova.