John Brown Russwurm

Brown Russwurm (1799-1851) was an American abolitionist from Jamaica, known for his newspaper, Freedom's Journal. He moved from the United States to govern the Maryland section of an African American colony in Liberia, dying there in 1851. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed John Brown Russwurm on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[1]


[edit] Biography

[edit] Early years
Russwurm was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica to a white merchant father and an unknown black slave.[2] The family stayed in Jamaica until 1807 when Russwurm was sent to Quebec for his education. In 1812, father and son moved to Portland, Maine, where the elder Russwurm married widower Susan Blanchard in 1813. Blanchard (now Russwurm) insisted her husband grant 'John Brown', as he was then known, his full birth name. His father did so, and the now named 'John Brown Russwurm' lived with his father, stepmother and her children from a previous marriage, accepted as part of the family. The elder Russwurm died in 1815 but his son stayed close to his stepmother, even after she re-married to become Susan Hawes.


[edit] Education
Russwurm attended Hebron Academy in Maine, focusing on his studies to finish his education and earning the nickname "Honest John". Graduating in his early twenties, he taught at an African-American school in Boston. Several years later he re-located back to Maine to live with his stepmother and her new husband, and they helped Russwurm pay for further education when he enrolled in Bowdoin College in 1824. Upon graduation in 1826,[3] Russwurm became first African American to graduate from Bowdoin College and third African American to graduate from an American college.[4]


[edit] Career
Russwurm moved to New York City in 1827. On March 16 of that year, Russwurm, along with his co-editor, Samuel Cornish published the first edition of Freedom's Journal, an abolitionist newspaper dedicated to opposition of slavery. Freedom's Journal was the first newspaper in the United States to be owned, operated, published and edited by African Americans.[5] Upon becoming senior editor in September 1827, Russwurm used his position to change the paper's initially negative stance on the colonialization of Africa by African Americans to a positive advocacy for this position. These strong views forced Russwurm's resignation in March 1829, after which he emigrated to Liberia.[3]

Upon emigrating to Liberia, Russwurm started work as the colonial secretary for the American Colonization Society between 1830 and 1834. He worked as the editor of the Liberia Herald, though he resigned his post in 1835 to protest America's colonization policies. Russwurm also served as the superintendent of education in Liberia's capital, Monrovia.[6]


[edit] Personal life
In 1833 he married Sarah McGill, the daughter of the Lieutenant-Governor of Monrovia, with whom he had a daughter and three sons.[3] In 1836 he became the first black governor of the Maryland section of Liberia, a post he held until his death, encouraging the immigration of African-Americans to Maryland and supporting agriculture and trade. In 1850, shortly before his death, Russwurm returned to Maine for a visit, bringing two of his sons with him. They were enrolled at North Yarmouth Academy between 1850 and 1852 where they lived with their step-grandmother, Susan Hawes.[6]

During his time in Liberia, Russwurm learned several of the native languages, encouraging trade and diplomatic relations with neighboring countries as well as whites. There is a statue of John Russwurm at his burial site at Harper, Cape Palmas, Liberia.[2]


[edit] References

PierreToussaint

Venerable Pierre Toussaint (1766 – June 30, 1853) was born a Catholic slave in Haïti. His master taught him to read and write and he came to New York from Haiti in 1787. In New York, he became an apprentice to one of the city's leading hairdressers.

Pierre Toussaint quickly became a popular hairdresser. He was freed from slavery when his owner died in 1807 and later became quite wealthy. He fell in love with another slave, Juliette Noel, and purchased her freedom when she was only fifteen years old. Noel married Toussaint and together they set out to help those in need in New York City. They opened their home as a shelter for orphans, a credit bureau, an employment agency and refuge for priests and poverty stricken travelers. Toussaint also funded money to build a new Roman Catholic church in New York, which became Old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street. After the death of his sister Rosalie, he and his wife adopted her daughter Euphemia and raised her as their own.

As Toussaint aged, he continued his charity. His wife, Juliette died in 1851. Two years later after his wife's death, Pierre Toussaint died on June 30, 1853, at the age of eighty-seven. He was buried alongside his wife and daughter, Euphemia in Old St. Patrick's on Mott Street. In 1941, his grave was discovered by the Rev. Charles McTague. In 1990, John Cardinal O'Connor, then Archbishop of New York had Toussaint exhumed and reinterred in the crypt below the altar at St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Because of Toussaint's charity and piety, he was strongly supported for sainthood by O'Connor.

In 1996 Toussaint was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II, the second step toward sainthood

Edward Soriano

Lieutenant General Edward Soriano (born November 1946) was the highest-ranking, currently serving, Filipino American in the United States Army until his retirement in 2004. He remains the highest ranked Filipino American to have served in the United States Military, as of April 2009.[1]

Kalpana Chawla was born in a Punjabi family in Karnal, Haryana, India.[1] Kalpana in Sanskrit means "imagination". Her interest in flying was inspired by J. R. D. Tata, a pioneering Indian pilot and industrialist.[2][3]


[edit] Education
Kalpana Chawla did her earlier schooling at Tagore Public School, Karnal. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh in 1982. She moved to the United States in 1982 and obtained a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington (1984). Chawla earned a second Master of Science degree in 1986 and a PhD in aerospace engineering in 1988 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Later that year she began working for NASA Ames Research Center as vice president of Overset Methods, Inc. where she did CFD research on V/STOL.[2] Chawla held a Certificated Flight Instructor rating for airplanes, gliders and Commercial Pilot licenses for single and multiengine airplanes, seaplanes and gliders. She held an FCC issued Technician Class Amateur Radio license with the call sign KD5ESI. She met and married Jean-Pierre Harrison, a flying instructor and aviation writer, in 1983 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1990.[4]


[edit] NASA career

Chawla in the space shuttle simulatorChawla joined the NASA astronaut corps in March 1995 and was selected for her first flight in 1998. Her first space mission began on November 19, 1997 as part of the six astronaut crew that flew the Space Shuttle Columbia flight STS-87. Chawla was the first Indian-born woman and the second person of Indian origin to fly in space, following cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma who flew in 1984 in a Soviet spacecraft. On her first mission Chawla travelled over 10.4 million miles in 252 orbits of the earth, logging more than 360 hours in space. During STS-87, she was responsible for deploying the Spartan Satellite which malfunctioned, necessitating a spacewalk by Winston Scott and Takao Doi to capture the satellite. A five-month NASA investigation fully exonerated Chawla by identifying errors in software interfaces and the defined procedures of flight crew and ground control.

After the completion of STS-87 post-flight activities, Chawla was assigned to technical positions in the astronaut office, her performance in which was recognized with a special award from her peers.

In 2000 she was selected for her second flight as part of the crew of STS-107. This mission was repeatedly delayed due to scheduling conflicts and technical problems such as the July 2002 discovery of cracks in the shuttle engine flow liners. On January 16, 2003 Chawla finally returned to space abroad Columbia on the ill-fated STS-107 mission. Chawla's responsibilities included the SPACEHAB/FREESTAR microgravity experiments, for which the crew conducted nearly 80 experiments studying earth and space science, advanced technology development, and astronaut health and safety.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Chawla's last visit to India was during the 1991–1992 new year holiday when she and her husband spent time with her family. For various reasons, Chawla was never able to follow up on invitations to visit India after she became an astronaut.


[edit] Awards
Posthumously awarded:

Congressional Space Medal of Honor
NASA Space Flight Medal
NASA Distinguished Service Medal
Defense Distinguished Service Medal

[edit] Memoria
Kalpana Chawla

Arturo Schomburg

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Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso (1874-1938)
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Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, writer, activist, collector, and important figure of the Harlem Renaissance was born in Saturce, Puerto Rico. His mother, a black woman, was originally from St. Croix, Danish Virgin Islands, and his father was a Puerto Rican of German ancestry. Schomburg migrated to New York City in 1891. Very active in the liberation movements of Puerto Rico and Cuba, he founded Las dos Antillas, a cultural and political group that worked for the islands’ independence. After the collapse of the Cuban revolutionary struggle, and the cession of Puerto-Rico to the U.S., Schomburg, disillusioned, turned his attention to the African American community. In 1911, as its Master, he renamed El Sol de Cuba #38, a lodge of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, as Prince Hall Lodge in honor of the first black freemason in the country. The same year, he also founded the Negro Society for Historical Research. In 1922 he was elected president of the American Negro Academy.

Schomburg was an avid collector of materials on Africa and its Diaspora, amassing over 10,000 documents. In 1926 his personal collection was added to the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints of the Harlem branch of The New York Public Library and he served as curator from 1932 until his death. Today, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of The New York Public Library is one of the foremost research centers on Africa and the Diaspora, with more than 10 million items.

Sources:
Jesse, Hoffnung-Garskof, “The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto Rican in New York, 1891-1938,” Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 21, no 1 (November 2001): 3-49; Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Black Bibliophile and Collector: A Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

Contributor

Alexander Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born in the village of Villers-Cotterêts in the department of Aisne, northeast of Paris, France, Europe.

Dumas' paternal grandparents were Marquis Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Général commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, and Marie-Cesette Dumas, an Afro-Caribbean former slave.[2][3] Their son, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, married Marie-Louise Élisabeth Labouret, the daughter of an innkeeper. Thomas-Alexandre was a general in Napoleon's army, who fell out of favor, rendering his family impoverished.

By the time young Dumas was born, his family had lost all pretensions to wealth; and his widowed mother struggled to give him a decent education. General Dumas died in 1806, when Alexandre was three and a half years old. Although Marie-Louise was unable to provide her son with much in the way of education, it did not hinder young Alexandre's love of books; and he read everything he could get his hands on.

While Dumas was growing up, his mother's stories of his father's brave military acts during the glory years of Napoleon I of France spawned Alexandre's vivid imagination for adventure and heroes. Although poor, the family still had the father's distinguished reputation and aristocratic connections; and in 1822, after the restoration of the monarchy, twenty-year-old Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris, where he obtained employment at the Palais Royal in the office of the powerful duc d'Orléans (Louis Philippe).


[edit] Writer
While working in Paris, Dumas began to write articles for magazines as well as plays for the theater. In 1829 his first solo play, Henry III and His Court, was produced, meeting with great public acclaim. The following year his second play, Christine, proved equally popular; and as a result he was financially able to work full time at writing. In 1830 he participated in the revolution, which ousted Charles X, and which replaced him on the throne with Dumas' former employer, the duc d'Orléans, who would rule as Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King. Until the mid-1830s life in France remained unsettled, with sporadic riots by disgruntled Republicans and impoverished urban workers seeking change. As life slowly returned to normal, the nation began to industrialize; and with an improving economy, combined with the end of press censorship, the times turned out to be very rewarding for the skills of Alexandre Dumas.

After writing more successful plays, he turned his efforts to novels. Although attracted to an extravagant lifestyle, and always spending more than he earned, Dumas proved to be a very astute marketer. With high demand from newspapers for serial novels, in 1838 he simply rewrote one of his plays, to create his first serial novel, titled Le Capitaine Paul, which led to his forming a production studio, that turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal input and direction.

From 1839 to 1841 Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history, including essays on Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, and more recent incidents, including the cases of executed alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine François Desrues.

Dumas also collaborated with his fencing master Augustin Grisier in his 1840 novel, The Fencing Master. The story is written to be Grisier's narrated account of how he came to be witness to the events of the Decembrist revolt in Russia. This novel was eventually banned in Russia by the Czar, Nicholas I, causing Dumas to be forbidden to visit Russia until the Czar's death. Grisier is also mentioned with great respect in both The Count of Monte Cristo and The Corsican Brothers, as well as Dumas' memoirs.

On 1 February 1840 he married an actress, Ida Ferrier, born Marguerite-Joséphine Ferrand (1811—1859) but continued with his numerous liaisons with other women, fathering at least four illegitimate children. One of those children, a son named after him, whose mother was Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay (1794—1868), a dressmaker, would follow in his footsteps, also becoming a successful novelist and playwright. Because of their same name and occupation, to distinguish them, one is referred to as Alexandre Dumas, père, the other as Alexandre Dumas, fils. His three other children were: 1) Marie-Alexandrine Dumas (5 March 1831—1878) who later married Pierre Petel and was daughter of Belle Krelsamer (1803—1875), 2) Micaëlla-Clélie-Josepha-Élisabeth Cordier, born in 1860 and daughter of Emélie Cordier, and 3) Henry Bauer, born of an unknown mother.

Dumas made extensive use of the aid of numerous assistants and collaborators, of which Auguste Maquet was the best known. It was Maquet who outlined the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo, and made substantial contributions to The Three Musketeers and its sequels, as well as several of Dumas' other novels. When working together, Maquet proposed plots and wrote drafts, while Dumas added the details, dialogues, and the final chapters. See Andrew Lang essay, Alexandre Dumas - in his Essays In Little (1891) - for an accurate description of these collaborations.


Alexandre Dumas, photo by Nadar.Dumas' writing earned him a great deal of money; but Dumas was frequently broke or in debt, as a result of spending lavishly on women and high living. The large and costly Château de Monte-Cristo that he built was often filled with strangers and acquaintances, who took advantage of his generosity.

When King Louis-Philippe was ousted in a revolt, Dumas was not looked upon favorably by the newly elected President, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. In 1851 Dumas fled to Brussels, Belgium, to escape his creditors; and from there he traveled to Russia, where French was the second language, and where his writings were enormously popular. Dumas spent two years in Russia, before moving on to seek adventure and fodder for more stories. In March 1861 the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel II as its king. For the next three years Alexandre Dumas would be involved in the fight for a united Italy, founding and leading a newspaper, named Indipendente, and returning to Paris in 1864.

Despite Alexandre Dumas' success and aristocratic connections, his being of mixed-race would affect him all his life. In 1843 he wrote a short novel, Georges, that addressed some of the issues of race and the effects of colonialism. He once remarked to a man who insulted him about his mixed-race background:

"My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."[4][5]

In June 2005 Dumas' recently-discovered last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, went on sale in France. Within the story Dumas describes the Battle of Trafalgar, in which the death of Lord Nelson is explained. The novel was being published serially and was almost complete at the time of his death. A final two-and-a-half chapters were written by modern-day Dumas scholar Claude Schopp, who based his efforts on Dumas' pre-writing notes.[6]


[edit] Panthéon
Buried where he had been born, Alexandre Dumas remained in the cemetery at Villers-Cotterêts until 30 November 2002. Under orders of the French President, Jacques Chirac, his body was exhumed, and in a televised ceremony his new coffin, draped in a blue-velvet cloth, and flanked by four Republican Guards (costumed as the Musketeers - Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan) was transported in a solemn procession to the Panthéon of Paris, the great mausoleum where French luminaries are interred. In his speech President Chirac said:

"With you, we were D'Artagnan, Monte Cristo, or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles — with you, we dream."[7]

In that speech President Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed, saying that a wrong had now been righted, with Alexandre Dumas enshrined alongside fellow authors Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.[7] The honor recognized that although France has produced many great writers, none has been as widely read as Alexandre Dumas. His stories have been translated into almost a hundred languages, and have inspired more than 200 motion pictures.[8]

Alexandre Dumas' home outside of Paris, the Château de Monte-Cristo, has been restored and is open to the public.

The Alexandre Dumas (Paris Métro) station was renamed in his honor in 1970.


[edit] Works

[edit] Fiction
Alexandre Dumas, père wrote stories and historical chronicles of high adventure, that captured the imagination of the French public, who eagerly waited to purchase the continuing sagas. A few of these works are:

Charles VII at the Homes of His Great Vassals (Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux, 1831) - drama, adapted for the opera The Saracen by Russian composer César Cui
The Fencing Master (Le Maître d'armes, 1840)
Georges (1843): The protagonist of this novel is a man of mixed race, a rare allusion to Dumas' own African ancestry.
The Nutcracker (Histoire d'un casse-noisette, 1844): a revision of Hoffmann's story, later adapted by Tchaikovsky as a ballet
the D'Artagnan Romances:
The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires, 1844)
Twenty Years After (Vingt ans après, 1845)
The Vicomte de Bragelonne, sometimes called "Ten Years Later", (Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard, 1847): When published in English, it was usually split into three parts: The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere, and The Man in the Iron Mask, of which the last part is the best known. (A third sequel, The Son of Porthos, 1883 (a.k.a. The Death of Aramis) was published under the name of Alexandre Dumas; however, the real author was Paul Mahalin.)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 1845–1846)
The Regent's Daughter (Une Fille du régent, 1845)
The Two Dianas (Les Deux Diane, 1846)
the Valois romances
La Reine Margot (1845)
La Dame de Monsoreau (1846) (a.k.a. Chicot the Jester)
The Forty-Five Guardsmen (1847)
the Marie Antoinette romances:
Joseph Balsamo (Mémoires d'un médecin: Joseph Balsamo, 1846–1848) (a.k.a. Memoirs of a Physician, Cagliostro, Madame Dubarry, The Countess Dubarry, or The Elixir of Life)
The Queen's Necklace (Le Collier de la Reine, 1849–1850)
Ange Pitou (1853) (a.k.a. Storming the Bastille or Six Years Later)
The Countess de Charny (La Comtesse de Charny, 1853–1855) (a.k.a. Andrée de Taverney, or The Mesmerist's Victim)
Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (1845) (a.k.a. The Knight of the Red House, or The Knight of Maison-Rouge)
The Black Tulip (La Tulipe noire, 1850)
The Wolf-Leader (Le Meneur de loups, 1857)
The Gold Thieves (after 1857): a play that was lost but rediscovered by the Canadian Reginald Hamel, researcher in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2004
The Companions of Jehu (Les Compagnons de Jehu, 1857)
The Whites and the Blues (Les Blancs et les Bleus, 1867)
The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, 1869): This nearly completed novel was his last major work and was lost until its rediscovery by Claude Schopp in 1988 and subsequent release in 2005.

[edit] Drama
Although best known now as a novelist, Dumas earned his first fame as a dramatist. His Henri III et Sa Cour (1829) was the first of the great Romantic historical dramas produced on the Paris stage, preceding Victor Hugo's more famous Hernani (1830). Produced at the Comédie-Française, and starring the famous Mademoiselle Mars, Dumas' play was an enormous success, launching him on his career. It had fifty performances over the next year, extraordinary at the time.

Other hits followed. For example, Antony (1831) -a drama with a contemporary Byronic hero - is considered the first non-historical Romantic drama. It starred Mars' great rival Marie Dorval. There were also La Tour de Nesle - 1832, another historical melodrama, and Kean - 1836, based on the life of the great, and recently deceased, English actor Edmund Kean, played in turn by the great French actor Frédérick Lemaître. Dumas wrote many more plays and dramatized several of his own novels.

It is worthwhile to note here that Dumas founded Théâtre Historique at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, which later became Opéra National (established by Adolphe Adam in 1847). That in turn became Théâtre Lyrique in 1851.


[edit] Non-fiction
Dumas was also a prolific writer of non-fiction. He wrote journal articles on politics and culture, and books on French history.

His massive Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (Great Dictionary of Cuisine) was published posthumously in 1873. It is a combination of encyclopedia and cookbook. Dumas was both a gourmet and an expert cook. An abridged version (the Petit Dictionnaire de cuisine, or Small Dictionary of Cuisine) was published in 1882.

He was also a well-known travel writer, writing such books as:

Impressions de voyage: En Suisse (Travel Impressions: In Switzerland, 1834)
Une Année à Florence (A Year in Florence, 1841)
De Paris à Cadix (From Paris to Cadiz, 1847)
Le Caucase (The Caucasus, 1859)
Impressions de voyage

Alexander Pushkin

[edit] Biography

A young Pushkin, by Xavier De Maistre. Oil on metal plate. The State Pushkin Museum, Moscow.Pushkin's father Sergei Lvovich Pushkin (1767–1848) descended from a distinguished family of the Russian nobility which traced its ancestry back to the 12th century.[8][9] Pushkin's mother Nadezhda (Nadja) Ossipovna Hannibal (1775–1836) descended through her paternal grandmother from German and Scandinavian nobility.[10][11] She was the daughter of Ossip Abramovich Gannibal (1744–1807) and his wife Maria Aleksejevna Pushkina, and her paternal grandfather, i.e. Pushkin's great-grandfather, a page raised by Peter the Great, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who was born in Logone-Birni, Cameroon, Africa.[12][13][14][15][16] After education in France as a military engineer, Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually General-en-Chef for the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.


The 16-year old Pushkin recites a poem before Gavrila Derzhavin. Painting by Ilya Repin (1911).Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen. By the time he finished as part of the first graduating class of the prestigious Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo near Saint Petersburg, the Russian literary scene recognized his talent widely. After finishing school, Pushkin installed himself in the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of the capital, Saint Petersburg. In 1820 he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, amidst much controversy about its subject and style.

Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals. This angered the government, and led to his transfer from the capital (1820). He went to the Caucasus and to the Crimea, then to Kamenka and Chisinau, where he became a Freemason. Here he joined the Filiki Eteria, a secret organization whose purpose was to overthrow the Ottoman rule over Greece and establish an independent Greek state. He was inspired by the Greek Revolution and when the war against the Ottoman Turks broke out he kept a diary with the events of the great national uprising. He stayed in Chisinau until 1823 and wrote there two Romantic poems which brought him wide acclaim, The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. In 1823 Pushkin moved to Odessa, where he again clashed with the government, which sent him into exile at his mother's rural estate in Mikhailovskoe (near Pskov) from 1824 to 1826.[17] However, some of the authorities allowed him to visit Tsar Nicholas I to petition for his release, which he obtained. But some of the insurgents in the Decembrist Uprising (1825) in Saint Petersburg had kept some of his early political poems amongst their papers, and soon Pushkin found himself under the strict control of government censors and unable to travel or publish at will. He had written what became his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov, while at his mother's estate but could not gain permission to publish it until five years later. The drama's original, uncensored version would not receive a premiere until 2007.


Pushkin's wife Natalya GoncharovaIn 1831, highlighting the growth of Pushkin's talent and influence and the merging of two of Russia's greatest early writers, he met Nikolai Gogol. After reading Gogol's 1831–2 volume of short stories Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Pushkin would support him critically and later in 1836 after starting his magazine, The Contemporary, would feature some of Gogol's most famous short stories. Later, Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, became regulars of court society. When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, the poet became enraged: he felt this occurred not only so that his wife, who had many admirers—including the Tsar himself—could properly attend court balls, but also to humiliate him. In 1837, falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel which left both men injured, Pushkin mortally. He died two days later.

The government feared a political demonstration at his funeral, which it moved to a smaller location and made open only to close relatives and friends. His body was spirited away secretly at midnight and buried on his mother's estate.

Pushkin had four children from his marriage to Natalya: Maria (b. 1832, touted as a prototype of Anna Karenina), Alexander (b. 1833), Grigory (b. 1835), and Natalya (b. 1836) the last of whom married, morganatically, into the royal house of Nassau to Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau and became the Countess of Merenberg.


[edit] Literary legacy

Pushkin Statue in Arts Square, Saint Petersburg.Critics consider many of his works masterpieces, such as the poem The Bronze Horseman and the drama The Stone Guest, a tale of the fall of Don Juan. His poetic short drama "Mozart and Salieri" was the inspiration for Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Pushkin himself preferred his verse novel Eugene Onegin, which he wrote over the course of his life and which, starting a tradition of great Russian novels, follows a few central characters but varies widely in tone and focus. "Onegin" is a work of such complexity that, while only about a hundred pages long, translator Vladimir Nabokov needed two full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Because of this difficulty in translation, Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to English readers. Even so, Pushkin has profoundly influenced western writers like Henry James.[18]

Pushkin's works also provided fertile ground for Russian composers. Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila is the earliest important Pushkin-inspired opera, and a landmark in the tradition of Russian music. Tchaikovsky's operas Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (1890) became perhaps better known outside of Russia than Pushkin's own works of the same name, while Mussorgsky's monumental Boris Godunov (two versions, 1868-9 and 1871-2) ranks as one of the very finest and most original of Russian operas. Other Russian operas based on Pushkin include Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka and The Stone Guest; Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, Tale of Tsar Saltan, and The Golden Cockerel; Cui's Prisoner of the Caucasus, Feast in Time of Plague, and The Captain's Daughter; Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa; Rachmaninov's one-act operas Aleko (based on The Gypsies) and The Miserly Knight; Stravinsky's Mavra, and Nápravník's Dubrovsky. This is not to mention ballets and cantatas, as well as innumerable songs set to Pushkin's verse. Suppé, Leoncavallo and Malipiero, among non-Russian composers, have based operas on his works.[19]


[edit] Pushkin and Romanticism
Although Pushkin is considered the central representative of The Age of Romaticism in Russian literature, he can't be labelled unequivocally as a Romantic: Russian critics have traditionally argued that his works represent a path from neo-Classicism through Romanticism to Realism, while an alternative assessment suggests that "he had an ability to entertain contrarities which may seem Romantic in origin, but is ultimately subversive of all fixed points of view, all single outlooks, including the Romantic" and that "he is simultaneously Romantic and not Romantic".[1]


[edit] Influence on the Russian language

Alexander Pushkin by Orest KiprenskyAlexander Pushkin is usually credited with developing Russian literature. Not only is he seen as having originated the highly nuanced level of language which characterizes Russian literature after him, but he is also credited with substantially augmenting the Russian lexicon. Where he found gaps in the Russian vocabulary, he devised calques. His rich vocabulary and highly sensitive style are the foundation for modern Russian literature. Russian literature virtually begins with Alexander Pushkin. His talent set up new records for development of the Russian language and culture. He became the father of Russian literature in 19th century, marking the highest achievements of 18th century and the beginning of literary process of 19th century. Alexander Pushkin introduced Russia to all the European literary genres as well as a great number of West European writers. He brought natural speech and foreign influences to create modern poetic Russian. Though his life was brief, he left examples of nearly every literary genre of his day: lyric poetry, narrative poetry, the novel, the short story, the drama, the critical essay, and even the personal letter. Pushkin's work as a journalist marked the birth of the Russian magazine culture, including him devising and contributing heavily to one of the most influential literary magazines of 19th century, the Sovremennik (The Contemporary, or Современник). From him derive the folk tales and genre pieces of other authors: Esenin, Leskov and Gorky. His use of Russian language formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. Pushkin was recognized by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, his successor and pupil, the great Russian critic Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, who produced the fullest and deepest critical study of Pushkin's work, which still retains much of its relevance. Alexander Pushkin became an inseparable part of the literary world of the Russian people. He also exerted a profound influence on other aspects of Russian culture, most notably in opera. Translated into all the major languages, his works are regarded both as expressing most completely Russian national consciousness and as transcending national barriers. Pushkin’s intelligence, sharpness of his opinion, his devotion to poetry, realistic thinking and incredible historical and political intuition make him one of the greatest Russian national geniuses.


[edit] List of Works