Pushkin's Button

A bit uneven in its narrative style yet endlessly fascinating, I found this work more entertaining and thought-provoking than T.J. Binyon's recent comprehensive biography of Pushkin. Also, it gave interesting insight into the pleasure-filled life of the Russian aristocracy.

In her excellent _Pushkin's Button_, Serena Vitale doesn't attempt an exhaustive biography of the Russia's most famous poet. She limits herself to describing the puzzling and distressing events of the last year of his life, and in my opinion succeeds wonderfully. From the very beginning, Vitale creates a sense of suspense, excitement, and atmosphere by quoting from contemporary diplomatic dispatches. You'd think this could be dry; instead the effect is electrifying, giving the reader the sense of the scandal and distress that these reports spread to all the courts of Europe (in an age before television and email). Having shown us how the story will end, Vitale next builds up her narrative piece by piece, sketching out not just a chronology of events but also the culture of the court at St. Petersburg. We feel privy to drawing-room conversations, summer balls that last until the early hours, state dinners and royal ceremonies. We're also ushered into Pushkin's household, a place so real you feel you can see its interior, and whose inhabitants you come to know. But Vitale has not written the kind of history that impinges on fiction's territory. There are no reconstructed conversations here; everything is documented. It is true that she sometimes speculates about the parties' possible motives, but when she does so she clearly indicates to the reader that she is exploring possibilities, offering her opinion and her opinion alone. Indeed, without Vitale's thoughtful insights, the book would be impoverished; having the benefit of her experience and immersion in the material is essential.I strongly disagree with the previous reviewer about Vitale's style, which is hardly that of "Vanity Fair." Vitale is a serious Italian historian, well-versed in the period and the subject, and she has done impressive original research. The cache of letters she discovers is _not_ intended to reveal to us that Georges d'Anthes was shallow; in fact, Vitale's contention throughout the book is that d'Anthes has been maligned by history, blamed for the death of Russia's great man when responsibility did not lie solely with him, or even with Pushkin's beautiful wife (and d'Anthes purported paramour) Natalia, but also with Pushkin himself, whose actions in those last months troubled and distressed his friends. Luckily, there's no law that says history must be written without verve and flair. Vitale in Pushkin's Button has managed to pull off a nearly impossible task: to write a popular history that's not only an insightful and innovative piece of scholarship, but also a compelling and beautifully-written story.

In her work on the events surrounding the duel that killed famed Russian writer Pushkin, Vitale weaves a literary web of both his contemporaries' accounts of the events leading up to the duel and its repercussions, and the often tangled motives of the players and those who reported their actions. Similar in its reconstruction techniques to Charles Nichols' "The Reckoning" (dealing with the murder of Christopher Marlowe), "Pushkin's Button" reads like a great mystery, and a window onto upper class Russian society of the day

A stunning tour de force of scholarship and literary style. Truly a suspenseful page-turner, somehow not slowed down by the author's use of liberal quotations from primary sources. Some of the credit must go to the translator, Anna Goldstein.