The Cloak of Genius

PUSHKIN by David Magarshack. 320 pages. Grove. $7.50.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. --Robert Frost

In the case of Alexander Pushkin, not only his poetry but his whole essence seems to be lost in translation. Russians--from schoolchildren to arcane critics--still devour Pushkin's poems, plays and stories. His work is viewed at home as the headwater of the great streams in Russian literature. Tolstoy admitted that the idea for Anna Karenina flowed from an unfinished Pushkin story. Dostoevsky once said: "If Pushkin had not existed, there would have been no talented writers to follow." Even the modern Soviet state claims him as a comrade, maintaining that many of his best lines were premature party lines.

Yet Russia's Shakespeare does not travel well. Chekhov and Tolstoy are read and loved elsewhere. But most Western readers, confronted by examples of Pushkin's genius, can only nod politely--or, in the case of the worst translations, nod off.

Elusive Simplicity. Some of the problem is that Pushkin's reputation for greatness stems in part from his historical significance. Much Russian writing of his age cloaked itself affectedly in secondhand French elegance. In such superb tales as The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin fashioned a new native style--spare, exact, free of rhetorical flourish--which set the tone for the epic prose era that was to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. In rich, full-blooded dramas like Boris Gudunov, he helped to free the Russian stage from its prim, Racine-engendered formalities. Poems like Ruslan and Liudmila, Memory and The Bronze Horseman grandly exploded the prevailing notion of the day that poetry should be either didactic or sentimental. "Good lord," said Pushkin impatiently, "the aim of poetry is poetry."

Even as a poet's poet, though, Pushkin is still very special and--in translation--frustrating. His verse is elusively simple, unadorned by such easily translatable characteristics as splashy imagery or intellectual abstractions. Its strength lies rather in subtly suggestive tones and rhythms. No less a language snob and stylist than Vladimir Nabokov labored on and off for almost a decade to translate Pushkin's acknowledged masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin. Nabokov's rendering of this romantic (and mock romantic) panorama of Russian society was brilliant; yet even he decided to settle for strict literalism rather than attempt to re-create in English the Russian poet's verbal music.

Spitting the Pits. Pushkin's life was no less odd and puzzling than his works, as this solid, sometimes pedestrian biography by Russian-born David Magarshack makes clear. As a founding father of Russian literature, Pushkin behaved more like a rakehell uncle. A tiny (5 ft. 3 in.), edgy man with fingernails as long as claws and half-simian features, Pushkin pursued all the known excesses with prodigious energy. Though he was ugly, he exerted a vast sexual attraction through his sheer intensity. A fellow student recalled that at the touch of a dancing partner's hand at a ball, Pushkin's "eyes blazed, he panted and snorted, like an ardent horse in the midst of a herd of young mares."

In literary matters, Pushkin had a touchy vanity that was often justified but was no more attractive for all that. In personal affairs, he never forgave a slight, keeping a list of people who had insulted him and carefully noting the date when he considered that he had repaid them. He dueled often, one time so disdainfully that he ate cherries out of his cap and calmly spat the pits in his opponent's direction.

Subject to Suppression. Pushkin's strange shape and nature were the products of a bizarre lineage. On his mother's side, he was great-grandson of an African slave originally presented to Czar Peter the Great. His father's family, as he put it, was "the detritus of a decrepit aristocracy" that went back 600 years into feudal times. Born in 1799 in Moscow, Pushkin was left largely on his own by indifferent parents. As a boy he was impressed by French liter ature, especially the savage wit of Voltaire, and absorbed Russian folklore from his peasant nurse -- both basic strains in his later writing. He proved erratic in school, but by the age of 18, he had already published 30 poems and begun lifelong associations with Russia's progressive thinkers and writers.

Such restraints hurt. Pushkin depend edon his writing for a living and, in fact, became Russia's first really pro fessional writer. But restraint could not temper his flamboyant mode of life, which was Byronic -- though not in the usual sense. Pushkin's affinity was for the rational, irreverent side of Byron's temperament, and he delighted in mocking the romantic conventions of his day. In an early poem, The Caucasian Captive, he had a maiden fall into a stream and the hero refuse to jump in and rescue her. "I've swum in Caucasian streams," Pushkin explained to a friend. "You can easily drown without finding a damn thing."

Budgeted Misfortunes. He found such a spirit harder and harder to main tain as the years went by. At 30, he was old-looking and exhausted. Thinking that marriage would settle him down, as well as pay his debts, he wed a Mos cow beauty 13 years his junior. "My hun dred and thirteenth love," he called her -- a very modest estimate. Ironically, Pushkin's wife became a favorite at the Czar's court, and her flagrant flirtations threw him into fits of jealousy. Finally he challenged the boldest of her courtiers, the French-born Baron Georges D'Anthes, to a duel. Pushkin was shot in the stomach and died two days later.

He was 37.

The mass public mourning that swept over Russia at the news of the poet's death surprised the fashionable people who had known him mainly as a strange, seedy aristocrat, a facile versifier, and a nuisance. "We were acquainted with him," one foreign diplomat wonderingly observed to a Russian friend, "but none of you ever told us that he was your na tional pride."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.