Pushkin's Button Book

In telling the story of the duel that killed Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, Serena Vitale is trying to do something more exciting than simply put together a biographical chronology of the man's life. In place of the usual dull plod through life and works, Vitale focuses on the extraordinary events of the end of Pushkin's life, and works backwards and sideways, as it were, to provide a quirkily rich portrait of the great man. Partly she is able to pull this off because she writes like a novelist instead of an ordinary biographer; partly it is the connections Vitale makes, connections worthy of the lively mind of Pushkin himself. Take her title: an anecdote about Pushkin's clothing noted by a contemporary ("Pushkin's bekesh was missing a button at the back, at waist height ... clearly they were not looking after him") leads Vitale not into obvious contemplation of the adequacy of the many servants who attended the poet, but rather into the way the missing button "resembles the stress accent that suddenly breaks loose from the iamb and vanishes into the void" in a typical Pushkinian line of verse. Pushkin's Button is bursting at the seams with surprising and illuminating perspectives such as this. --Adam RobertsRead More