Viareggio Prize (Premio Viareggio / Premio Letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci)
Pushkin's Button
A biographical non-fiction work that reconstructs Pushkin's final four months and the truth of the duel by weaving together letters, diaries, and court records. By joining fragments of evidence, it explores what the poet's death meant for Russian cultural history.
Work Information
It pieces together the secret history that led to Pushkin's death.
Serena Vitale follows letters, diaries, court records, and testimony to build a precise narrative around Pushkin's death. The result has the drive of a detective story while remaining a biographical study.
Review Summaries
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The layered use of documents is praised for making Pushkin's final days feel vivid and immediate. It reads with the tension of history while still working as a biographical reconstruction.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Chicago Pr
- Published
- 2000-05-15
- Pages
- 355 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 2.03 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780226857718
- ISBN-10
- 0226857719
- Price
- 10380 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Historical
Pushkin's Button recreates the four months of Pushkin's life leading up to the fatal duel in the snow on January 27, 1837. Many theories have been advanced about the death of one of Russia's greatest artists, none of them wholly satisfactory. Serena Vitale has opened the archives and studies the case more closely, and more imaginatively, than anyone before her. Her brilliant detective work unearths fascinating, revealing details, including a button missing from Pushkin's Kamerjunker uniform. "Pushkin's Button will keep all constituencies of reader fastened to their seats, as they watch Petersburg's lofty denizens leave no moment of the hurtling Pushkin scandal unrecorded or not speculated on."--Monika Greenleaf, Los Angeles Times "[A] deliciously entertaining whydunit, a book in which every page seduces with a riddle. . . . Vivacious, seductive, original."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post "A delightful combination of retrograde pleasures (court balls, the demise of a doomed genius) and primary sources. . . . Illuminating."--Richard Lamb, New York Times Book Review "A book almost impossible to put down."--George Steiner, New Yorker
Serena Vitale is a professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Pavia, Italy.
Reviews
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Wonderfully written. Just read it.
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Arrived way ahead of promised time. Wonderful.
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Really good background setting the scene, poor old Pushkin what a dreadful thing to happen and so unfair as he was quite right to defend his honor,
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Delivery was on time but quality of book disappointing with both front and back cover being badly creased. Will be returning purchase