Bottone di Puškin

Serena Vitale, Serena Vitale

Pushkin's Button is a narrative about the four months of Pushkin's life leading up to the fatal duel in the snow on January 27, 1837, when a young French officer in the Russian Army shot and killed Russia's greatest living artist. Ever since, Russian leaders, critics, and poets have advanced theories about the terrible deed, none of them wholly satisfactory. Serena Vitale has opened the archives and studied the case more closely, and more imaginatively, than anyone before her; her account of the Pushkin "dilemma" is also a wonderfully astute, original assessment of the poet's literary and national importance. Vitale has unearthed family secrets, diaries, courtroom records, and a cache of letters found in a Paris attic ten years ago; she shows us how a pawnbroker's slip and even a button missing from Pushkin's Kamerjunker uniform are significant details in the story. Her close...

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