Indisputably Russia's greatest poet, Pushkin changed literature forever. But his literary genius was matched by his talent for drama and upset. Brilliant but rebellious, he suffered official and personal disapproval - and years of exile - for his political and religious beliefs, his dwelling and his many love affairs. Married to one of the most beautiful women in St. Petersburg, Pushkin was just 37 when he was killed fighting for her honor. Bristling with the poet's energy, talent and passion, Tim Binyon's definitive and prize-winning biography displays a deep understanding of a remarkable man and his truly extraordinary times.
Editorial Reviews
"Pushkin has finally found the biographer he deserves. Here in all its splendor is his rebellious, flamboyant personality and his world of tenuous finance, imperial balls and sexual adventure...Pushkin lives again." -Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mail on Sunday
"One of the great biographies of recent times." -George Walden, Sunday Telegraph
"Dr. Binyon is our leading and outstanding Pushkin scholar. No other work on Pushkin on the same scale, and with the same grasp of atmosphere and detail, exists in English, or in any other language apart from Russian." -John Bayley, Literary Review
"English's Pushkin will surely be Binyon's Pushkin for a long time to come." -James Wood, London Review of Books
About the Author
Timothy John Binyon was an English scholar and crime writer. He was a distant relative of the poet, Laurence Binyon. T.J. Binyon was born in Leeds, where his father was a university lecturer. When, aged 18, he was doing National Service, he was assigned to the Joint Services School for Linguists in Bodmin, Cornwall, to learn Russian. There, in 1954, the young soldiers, among them Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and Dennis Potter, were trained to serve as translators and interpreters in the Cold War. It was there that Binyon's interest in Russian language and literature was kindled. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, but read German and Russian instead of History, which had been his original plan. After graduating he spent a year at Moscow State University. On returning to England, he took up teaching Russian literature at the University of Leeds. Eventually, in 1968, he became a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and taught in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. He served as Dean of Wadham during the 1970s and 80s and retired in the early 2000s. Apart from his academic career, Binyon had a great interest in crime fiction. He worked as a reviewer of detective fiction for The Times Literary Supplement and the London Evening Standard and, more importantly, wrote a theoretical book—"Murder Will Out": The Detective in Fiction (OUP, 1990)—and two crime novels, Swan Song (1982) and Greek Gifts (1988). As emeritus, Binyon became a prize-winning author with a biography of Aleksandr Pushkin, Pushkin: A Biography (2002), it was the Samuel Johnson Prize winner of 2003.
