Poet and profligate: the secrets of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin’s (1799–1837) personality and maladies

Introduction

Aleksandr Pushkin, Russian poet and prose writer, was among the foremost figures in Russian literature.

Biographies of famous Russian writers, artists and scientists written in Russia by Russian authors were often tendentious and one-sided, especially in Soviet times, and were subject to severe censorship by the state (the Central Censorship Office, known in short as Glavlit), and this led to the removal of data that disagreed with the established canonic version. ² The Glavlit had absolute authority to censure the performing arts and all publications. Infamous examples include biographies in the Soviet Encyclopedia. Censorship reform began in Russia in a single decade of tolerance (1855–1865) during the reign of Tsar Alexander II, and the Press then enjoyed greater freedom. However, censorship laws were re-imposed in 1866, in effect reversing the reform. Only half a century later, censorship was abrogated in the law of 1905–1906. Finally, all censorship was abolished in April 1917 by the Temporary Government. This freedom was short lived however, since the decrees were in force only until October 1917.

Concerning Pushkin, the famous documentary biography by V Veresaev Pushkin in his Life ³ became a revelation for many readers. Although many adverse facts concerning Pushkin’s private life were ignored or removed from the book, the cult of Pushkin’s admirers knew that their hero — the genius — suffered from many flaws in his character.

Hundreds of books have been written about Pushkin’s life, adventures and creative work. However, little has been written about his illnesses including his character, his mental state and the condition of his wound during his fatal duel.^4–15 There is only scarce mention of his sexual illnesses and little discussion of their nature. This paper attempts to lift the veil from this mystery.

Pushkin’s family

Pushkin’s father was a descendant of one of the Russian gentry’s oldest families that traced its history back 600 years, while his mother was the grand-daughter of Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, a slave from Abyssinia who was sent as a gift from Constantinople and became the adopted godchild and the Black General of Peter the Great. ¹⁶

Pushkin’s paternal grandfather suspected his first wife of adultery, hanged her lover and locked her in a home jail where she died. He killed his pregnant wife in a fit of madness and died young. Pushkin’s maternal grandfather and his children had severely unbalanced characters. ¹⁷ Pushkin inherited a repulsive character and one of his friends indicated that one had to make a serious effort to like Pushkin as a man (rather than as a poet). ¹

Pushkin was born in Moscow, the second child, and showed promise as a poet during his years as a student in a lyceum for young noblemen. In his childhood the future poet was entrusted to nursemaids, French tutors and governesses. He learned Russian from household serfs and from his nanny, Arina Rodionovna.

Early poetry

Pushkin started to write poems from an early age. His first published poem was written when he was only 14. While attending the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo (1811–1817), he began writing his first major work, Ruslan and Ludmila (1820), a fairy story in verse. It was based on Russian folk-tales told him by his grandmother — in French. Years later, at his father’s estate, he heard legends and fairy tales told by his old nanny, Arina Rodionovna, commenting that it made up ‘for the defects in his accursed education’.

The foreign office in St Petersburg in 1817

In 1817 he accepted a post at the foreign office in St Petersburg. He became associated with members of a radical movement who participated later in the Decembrist Uprising in 1825. Several of Pushkin’s liberal friends were involved in the affair. Some were hanged or exiled to Siberia for life but apparently Pushkin did not take part in their conspiracy and he was absent from the south at the time of the insurrection.

In May 1820 Pushkin was banished from his town because of his promiscuous behaviour and his political poems, among them Ode to Liberty. However, his friends did not consider him a political person. Pushkin was sent south to Ekaterinoslav, a mild form of exile, and during this time he discovered the poetry of Lord Byron. Then he was moved to Kishinev and, in the Summer of 1823, to Odessa. Throughout his exile in different parts of Russia, Pushkin continued to write poems, rising in eminence until he was considered the leader of the Romantic Movement.

Eugene Onegin in 1833

In 1823 Pushkin started his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, a novel in verse, appeared in 1833 and is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Russian literature. This novel has served as a rich source of character types for Russian writers. He established a modern Russian poetic language using Russian history as the basis of many works including the poems Poltava (1828) and The Bronze Horseman (1833), glorifying Peter the Great. Pushkin’s great historical tragedy, Boris Godunov, was published in 1831 and was based on the career of Boris Fyodorovich Godunov, the Czar of Russia from 1598 to 1605. Boris was haunted by guilt over the murder of the Tsarevich Dmitriy. When an ambitious young monk claims to be Dmitriy, Boris tries to defend his throne but he falls ill and dies.

Marriage and death

In 1829 Pushkin fell in love with the 16-year-old Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova who he married two years later in 1831. They became regulars of Court Society after Pushkin was given the lowest Court title by the Tsar. Her family was as impoverished as Pushkin’s but she became a known beauty in the Imperial Court. The marriage was unhappy and Pushkin had little peace of mind for intense creative activity. His wife was invited to every ball at the palace and her frivolous social life led Pushkin into debt and eventually to his early death. The gossip of an affair between Baron Georges d’Anthès and Pushkin’s wife started to spread. An anonymous note informed Pushkin that he had been elected to ‘The Serene Order of Cuckolds’. Although d’Anthès married Natalya’s sister, the scandal did not really end.

Pushkin defended his wife’s honour in a duel with d’Anthès who fired first, fatally wounding Pushkin. Though seriously wounded, Pushkin shot his opponent who received a slight wound. Pushkin died on 10 February 1837. The government feared a political demonstration at his funeral which was moved to a smaller location and made open only to close relatives and friends. His body was spirited away secretly at midnight and buried at his mother’s estate.

It has been left for later generations of Russians to appreciate Pushkin’s true worth. It is significant that he was practically the only writer of pre-revolutionary Russia who escaped the Bolshevik’s general condemnation of everything that smacked of aristocratic culture.

Pushkin’s personality and his unstable moods

Pushkin suffered from mood fluctuations. According to the memoirs of his schoolmates from his childhood, he was a very irritable, hot-tempered person with uncontrollable infatuations. He had periods of dysphoric moods accompanied by apathy, anhedonia and sometimes an inability to create. ⁴

Pushkin was famous for his temper and for unstable and unpredictable behaviour. His state of mind was subject to sudden changes from gloomy melancholy to glowing joy and sometimes, he was childish and noisy. One moment he was cheerful and the next he was like the sea before the storm. One moment he was shy, the next arrogant and intense.^1,3

The dysphoric mood state occurred more frequently in his later years — he would pace around his room, his hands in his wide pockets, and present his complaints, groaning: ‘I am so sad — what a burden!’ Sometimes he felt as if his head was filled with hot blood and then he felt the need to cool it quickly with cold water. Although he was impulsive and temperamental, when he had to cope with dangerous situations he would remain cool.^1,3

His mood swings appear to reflect the disorder cyclothymia with seasonal fluctuations. Autumn was a time of near hyperactivity and in his 1833 poem Fall, he describes the awakening of his creative seasonal passion. In the Spring and Summer, however, his mind tended to decline. Pushkin the poet describes his love for the Fall and how his writing would flow like a river:

Autumn (the first eight verses, translated by M Eastman, Nation. New York, 1924. 4, v. 119, p. 570)

I

October has arrived - the woods have tossed

Their final leaves from naked branches;

A breath of Autumn chill – the road begins to freeze,

The stream still murmurs as it passes by the mill,

The pond, however's frozen; and my neighbour hastens

to his far-flung fields with all the members of his hunt.

The winter wheat will suffer from this wild fun,

And baying hounds awake the slumbering groves.

II

This is my time: I am not fond of spring;

The tiresome thaw, the stench, the mud – Spring sickens me.

The blood ferments, and yearning binds the heart and mind.

With cruel Winter I am better satisfied,

I love the snows; when in the moonlight

A sleigh ride swift and carefree with a friend.

Who, warm and rosy ‘neath a sable mantle,

Burns, trembles as she clasps your hand.

III

What fun it is, with feet in sharp steel shod,

To skim the mirror of the smooth and solid streams!

And how about the shining stir of Winter feasts?

But in the end you must admit that naught but snow

For half the year will even bore a bear

Deep in his den. We cannot ride for ages,

In sleighs with youthful nymphs

Or sulk around the stove behind storm windows.

IV

O, Summer fair! I would have loved you, too,

Except for heat and dust and gnats and flies.

You kill off all our mental power,

Torment us; and like fields, we suffer from the drought;

To take a drink, refresh ourselves somehow.

We think of nothing else, and long for lady Winter,

And, having bid farewell to her with pancakes and with wine,

We hold a wake to honour her with ice-cream and with ice.

V

The latter days of Fall are often cursed,

But as for me, kind reader, she is precious

In all her quiet beauty, mellow glow.

Thus might a child, disfavoured in its family,

Draw my regard. To tell you honestly,

Of all the times of year, I cherish her alone.

She's full of worth; and I, a humble lover,

Have found in her peculiar charms.

VI

How can this be explained? I favour her

As you might one day find yourself attracted

To a consumptive maid. Condemned to death,

The poor child languishes without complaint or anger.

A smile plays upon her withering lips;

She cannot sense as yet the gaping maw of death;

A crimson glow still flits across her face.

Today she lives, tomorrow she is gone.

VII

A melancholy time! So charming to the eye!

Your beauty in its parting pleases me.

I love the lavish withering of nature,

The gold and scarlet raiment of the woods,

The crisp wind rustling o'er their threshold,

The sky engulfed by tides of rippled gloom,

The sun's scarce rays, approaching frosts,

And gray-haired winter threatening from afar.

VIII

When Autumn comes, I bloom anew;

The Russian frost does wonders for my health;

Anew I fall in love with life's routine:

Betimes I'm soothed by dreams, betimes by hunger caught;

The blood flows free and easy in my heart,

Abrim with passion; once again, I'm happy, young,

I'm full of life - such is my organism

(Excuse me for this awful prosaism).

Pushkin has always provided a source of intense debate. Concerning his personality, for example, there were psychiatrists who saw Pushkin as an exemplar of a mentally healthy person. ¹⁸ Others were more impressed by Pushkin’s problematic and difficult personality and, in his mood fluctuations, they saw signs of manic depressive psychosis. ⁴

We assume that some personality components were more related to the severe deprivation in Pushkin’s childhood which led to a significant increase in mood swings rather than indicating a diagnosis of major affective disorder. His contemporaries were already aware of the complexity in his manner and behaviour. ¹⁹

Pushkin’s gambling

Pushkin started to gamble at a young age, usually with playing cards and, like most professional gamblers, he lost large sums of money. Sometimes gambling led to the loss of manuscripts of his works. For example, in order to pay a gambling debt Pushkin had to give up the manuscript of a poem estimated to be worth the huge sum of 1000 rubles. Four years later, when he wanted to publish this poem, Pushkin sent his brother to ransom the manuscript. The generous creditor asked Pushkin to pay only 500 rubles but Pushkin insisted he pay the full amount! Because of his frequent losses, Pushkin was at the mercy of his creditors. In relation to his habit of losing money at cards, one of his friends wrote a short epigram — ‘The poet’s long fingernails, are unable to protect him from lack of luck in the game!’ ³

There are many anecdotes about his gambling: when Gogol tried to meet with him during his visit to St Petersburg, Pushkin’s servant told him that his master could not see him because he was asleep. Gogol, thrilled, asked the servant whether it was true that Pushkin wrote all night. ‘What do you mean?’ asked the astonished servant, ‘Pushkin played cards all night!’ ²⁰ Because of constant, sizable losses (he lost sums as large as 17,000 rubles in one night), Pushkin was almost always in debt and tried constantly to obtain money. After he received money he immediately went to pay off debts but on the way he would stop to play a bit, hoping that this time he would win a large sum and eliminate all his debts. Inevitably he lost money, both earned and borrowed, and created new obligations.

According to a list of known gamblers and card players made by Moscow’s police in 1829, Pushkin was numbered 36 among 93 players. ³

Pushkin’s long love history

Physical affection for women became apparent at a relatively young age. Pushkin himself wrote that, when he was very young, he was exposed to his father’s collection of French pornographic literature. At the time, he was probably aged between six and eight years. There exists a list of the books he read from this collection and the pictures he saw. As a child he was exposed to his father’s friends who used to talk freely in his presence about women conquests while also relating dirty jokes and sexual vulgarisms. It appears that the early premature sexual exposure led to the development of a low-sexual threshold with a need to receive multiple and immediate sexual gratification. When Pushkin was only 10 years old, he fell in love with a younger girl. ²¹ He liked women so much that even when 15 or 16 years old he was like a puffing, wheezing, fired-eyed mettlesome horse among the herd when he merely touched the hand of a woman with whom he danced. ²² According to the memoirs of another friend, ‘Pushkin, when 18 thought like a 30 year old’. ¹ This remark related not only to his intellectual maturity but also to his virility.

While in the Lyceum and after graduating from it, Pushkin plunged into dissolute behaviour. He spent nights and days in an uninterrupted succession of gambling, bacchanals and orgies. He had only two passions, carnal pleasure and poetry. He succeeded in both and even his friends gave him the well-suited nickname of ‘the cricket’. ¹ Naturally, such a modus vivendi led to frequent venereal illnesses.

There is lot of evidence about Pushkin’s promiscuous and disruptive behaviour. For example, his lyceum schoolmate Baron Korff commented ‘… eternally without a kopeck, eternally in debt, sometimes even without a decent frock-coat, with endless scandals, frequent duels, closely acquainted with every tavern keeper, whore and trollop, Pushkin represented a type of the filthiest depravity’. ²² Even the Madam of one famous brothel in St Petersburg complained that Pushkin, in his sexual behaviour and demands, ‘debauches and degrades her lambs’. ⁴ Pushkin’s profligate scandals were the reason he was deported to Kishinev (1820) but there, his behaviour deteriorated further, and every week he was involved in a new scandal or duel. For example, he fell in love with Ludmila Shekora, the wife of a well-known landowner. The husband became suspicious and suddenly returned home and surprised them but Pushkin and his lover escaped. The wife returned later but the furious husband locked her at home and invited Pushkin to a duel. Pushkin agreed but one of his friends recommended the Governor who arrested Pushkin for 10 days in order to send the wife with her husband abroad.^3,17,22 Pushkin spent his nights drinking, playing cards and fornicating. In the morning he would visit acquaintances to catch a few hours sleep and compose obscene and filthy verses. Pushkin used to have multiple simultaneous affairs, and the deserted and jealous ex-lovers harassed him and even tried to manipulate their husbands to take steps against him, perhaps claiming that he insulted them. They urged their husbands to protect their honour by inviting him to a duel.

In 1829 Pushkin wrote in his own hand a Don Juan List of his many lovers in the album of Elizaveta Ushakova. This celebrated list gave the initials of the forenames of the women with whom Pushkin had relations. The list was divided into two parts — in the first part were serious loves, in the second lighter attachments. ²³ However, this list is unlikely to be complete. How many lovers Pushkin had precisely is not known. Before he married, he claimed that his future wife was number 113. ²¹ His inventory included women from all walks of life, noble-women, servants and serf-actresses, prostitutes and virgins, mothers and theirs daughters, acquaintances and strangers, relatives and wives of his best friends and so on. ²¹

Pushkin’s Don Juan’s list continued to be replenished with new names. His meeting and adultery in 1820 with the dissolute Aglaya Antonovna Davidova, who died later from syphilis, changed Pushkin’s behaviour towards women and later became a pattern for his love life. This was his first affair with a married woman. Before this event, Pushkin’s sexual life was enacted only in brothels and with actresses (unmarried women) out of the public eye. ²¹

His preoccupation with sex and his persistent visits to brothels led one of Pushkin’s contemporaries to comment that Pushkin looked ‘exhausted and withered’.

Pushkin’s illnesses

Relatively little information is available about Pushkin’s health during his childhood. Until age seven, he was a stout and clumsy child and thereafter he became playful and frolicsome. ¹ During his Lyceum period, he saw a physician 16 times and in seven of the visits, the diagnosis was ‘common cold’. Other diagnoses include ‘headache’ and ‘sick’. ¹¹ It is difficult now to clarify these states from the physicians’ reports, except only one, a ‘swelling from a cheek injury’.

In the years when Pushkin stayed in St Petersburg, there were two episodes of fever. At the beginning of December 1817, Pushkin fell ill and was diagnosed with ‘rotten fever’. Jacob Leighton, the Chief Russian Navy Doctor and the Emperor’s Personal Physician, was called in. He prescribed bathing in ice and ‘in spite of this treatment’ Pushkin recovered. ¹¹ In June 1819 he again fell ill with fever for two or three weeks. On 25 June 1819 his uncle wrote from Moscow to Vyazemsky in Warsaw ‘Pity our poet Pushkin. He is ill with a severe fever’. Some of his friends assumed that the cause of the fever was typhus while others speculated it was malaria. ¹⁷ After six weeks Pushkin recovered but he had to wear a wig while his own hair grew again. ¹¹ In 1820, when he was sent South, he suffered again from ‘severe fever’ that continued for about two weeks. Pushkin himself thought the cause of the illness was a cold: ‘bathed and caught a cold as usual…’. ¹¹

Several times in his letters from 1820, Pushkin wrote that he suffered from an ‘aneurysm’. Evidence to confirm or rule out this condition is lacking. Some interpret this as indicating varicose veins. In those times the diagnosis of aneurysm was fashionable, and it may be that Pushkin only used it as an excuse to ask for permission to go abroad. ¹¹ OPEN IN VIEWER

Pushkin’s venereal maladies (1817–1820)

There is solid evidence that Pushkin suffered from recurrent venereal disorders. Among his friends’ correspondence on 18 December 1818 it is noted, ‘The Cricket hops around the boulevards and whores’. Despite his licentious way of life, Pushkin finished the fourth song of Ruslan and Ludmila. If he will catch illness two or three more times, it will be surely accomplished. The first prick illness was also the first wet nurse of his poem. ²⁴

Effective antimicrobial medication did not exist and these ‘notorious illnesses’ were treated with mercury which even in low dosages leads to hair loss.^25,26 Pushkin probably received several courses of treatment although the only evidence for this is his verse

By destiny I have been punished for old sins

In anguish for eight days, with drugs in intestines,

With Mercury in blood, with penitence in senses

I suffer - Aesculapius is guarantee for this, ¹⁶ p.349.

(translated by V Shapiro, unpublished).

Turgenev’s letter of 12 February 1819 includes ‘Venus once again pinned him to his bed. New illness joined the old one, now he is forced to work on the poem’. ²⁴ Pushkin caught a cold waiting near the door of a whore who did not let him enter in order to not infect him with her illness. What a battle between generosity and love and licentiousness. ¹ In July 1819 again he recovered from a routine and possible venereal illness, and another verse appeared:

I have escaped from Aesculapius

Thin and shaven – but alive. ¹⁶

On 26 August 1819 Turgenev wrote ‘Pushkin read… fifth song of his poem Ruslan and Ludmila… He has returned to his previous style of life. He does not have hairs, looks pale, but not sad’. ²²

In his memoirs Russian Tsar Nikolay I described Pushkin after his first audience in 1826: ‘I first saw Pushkin after my coronation, when he was brought from his exile to me in Moscow, quite ill and covered with sores (from a notorious disease)’. ²⁷

However, his venereal illnesses also had beneficial effects and with them he could at last devote some time to poetry: ‘Venus pinned Pushkin to bed and to his poem’ wrote Turgenev in his letter to Vyazemsky on 22 February 1819. ²⁸

Pushkin’s duels and death

From the early 17th century, duels were illegal in parts of Europe. The European tradition of dueling and the word duel itself was brought to Russia in the 17th century by European adventurers in the Russian service. It quickly became so popular that in 1715 the Emperor Peter the First was forced to forbid dueling under threat of hanging the duelists because it caused so many casualties among officers. Despite an official ban from the 17th to the 19th centuries under penalty of death for both duelists, dueling was a significant military tradition in the Russian Empire with a detailed unwritten dueling code.

Suffering from a deep inferiority complex, Pushkin seems to have been obsessively preoccupied with the code of honour that he guarded constantly. He fought at least 29 duels, challenging many prominent well-known figures.^29,30 Each time Pushkin felt disrespected he would challenge the other to a duel. On one occasion Pushkin and his friends were talking about literature and one of his friends quoted a phrase from a famous book. Pushkin asked him to lend him the book and the friend remarked ‘How come a famous poet like you does not recognize this book?’ The remark sounded insulting to Pushkin and immediately he challenged his friend to a duel but fortunately other friends intervened. The solution suggested was that Pushkin borrow the book and after a short time send it back with a comment that he already knew the book very well. There are many such episodes that demonstrate the absurdity of Pushkin’s tireless preoccupation with protecting his ‘insulted honour’ and the insufferable ease with which Pushkin participated in duels. ³

Was Pushkin consciously aware of the danger of dueling? It appears that he related to them recklessly and denied the huge dangers faced on such occasions. Many scholars claim that, while on the surface it appeared Pushkin underestimated the dangers, deep inside he had a premonition of what could happen to him. Pushkin expressed this deep sense in his poem Eugene Onegin when describing how the aristocrat Onegin killed the poet Lensky in a duel:

XXX

'Now march.'' And calmly, not yet seeking

to aim, at steady, even pace

the foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking,

each took four steps across the space,

four fateful stairs. Then, without slowing

the level tenor of his going,

Evgeny quietly began

to lift his pistol up. A span

of five more steps they went, slow-gaited,

and Lensky, left eye closing, aimed

but just then Eugene's pistol flamed…

The clock of doom had struck as fated;

and the poet, without a sound,

let fall his pistol on the ground.

XXXI

Vladimir drops, hand softly sliding

to heart. And in his misted gaze

is death, not pain. So gently gliding

down slopes of mountains, when a blaze

of sunlight makes it flash and crumble,

a block of snow will slip and tumble.

AS Pushkin. Eugene Onegin, p.169 (translated by Charles Johnston) ³¹

Four years after publishing the poem, Pushkin was killed in a duel. On the morning of 27 January 1837 Pushkin rose at eight. At 10, a letter arrived from d'Archiac demanding the name of his Second. Fearing delay would allow the news to leak round the city, Pushkin wrote back hastily to say that he would accept any Second of d'Anthes’s nomination. Pushkin decided to invite his schoolmate from lyceum days, Konstantin Danzas, as a Second and he appeared at Pushkin’s apartment at 12 o’clock on 27 January.^1,3,6,20

‘The conditions of the duel were then drawn up. The two adversaries were to be twenty paces away from a notional barrier making a kind of no man's land. Both were to be armed with a pistol. When the signal was given they could fire as they advanced towards one another so long as they did not pass the barrier. Once a shot was fired neither of the two adversaries was allowed to move so that the one who fired first would meet the shot of his opponent from the same distance. Both seconds signed the document of agreement. To Pushkin the conditions were immaterial’. ²⁰

Pushkin then was waiting for Danzas, who had gone to fetch his pistols. The meeting with d'Anthes had been arranged for 5 o'clock at a lonely spot near the Black River on the outskirts of St Petersburg. The two Seconds arranged a concealed place where the fight could take place without the coachmen witnessing it. The snow was deep. Pushkin sat on a mound of snow as the place was cleared and levelled in readiness. He was impatient to begin and, when the signal was given with Danzas’s hat, he rushed towards the barrier, marked by their Seconds’ capotes, to fire at his opponent. D'Anthes was an excellent shot and a military man.^3,6,11,20

d'Anthes fired first, Pushkin dropped, seriously wounded by that first shot. Both seconds ran to him but Pushkin raised himself on his elbow and said ‘Wait. I have enough strength to take my shot’. ³

d'Anthes remained exactly where he was, as the code of dueling required, sideways on to Pushkin’s shot and holding a pistol upwards in his hand to protect his head and raising his other arm to protect his breast. Pushkin took his own pistol from his Second and fired with a firm right hand. He knew himself to have a trained aim and, indeed, d'Anthes fell to the ground. Seeing as much and believing his adversary dead, Pushkin shouted ‘Bravo’ and threw his pistol aside. In fact, the bullet had gone through d'Anthes’s right arm and been deflected by a button — his main injury proved to be bruised ribs. It was Pushkin who was seriously wounded, with a bullet lodged deep in his lower abdomen.^3,11 Pushkin was losing a great deal of blood. The coachmen made a litter to carry him to his home and to await the doctors. There was little the doctors could do for him and they told Pushkin that there was little hope of recovery.

Pushkin asked their family physician not to give his wife any false hopes as she was not a dissembler. Although there was a brief improvement in Pushkin’s condition, the following day, towards evening, gangrene set in and the pain returned. For two days he was in agony and pain. On 29 January he opened his eyes wide and said his last words: ‘Life is ended. It is hard to breathe. Something is weighing me down’.^3,6,11,20 At 2.45 in the afternoon the greatest Russian poet Pushkin died.

Without doubt Pushkin was one of the great figures of Russian poetry and literature and yet his several personality defects including unstable moods, impulsivity and aggression, low-frustration threshold, a constant need for stimulation, an irresistible need to prove his masculinity and a preoccupation with taking revenge on his insulted honour, may have acted as a stimulus to his thinking and writing. This lethal combination of personality traits also led him to unsurprising premature and tragic death.