The Loneliness of Russia’s First Poet

Free-minded dissidents in the Soviet era—or today, in the climate of constrained freedoms in twenty-first-century Russia—may recall the stories of Chaadaev, Herzen, Pushkin: people who, too, confronted the oppression of thought. They may draw from their example strength for life and for resistance in the present. But how, in his turn, did Pushkin—the first great poet of Russia—find the strength to defend freedom? With what great image could he identify himself, in order to find respite from his inner contradictions?