Pushkin's Button [Paperback]

Serena Vitale more than does this story justice, and you certainly don't need to know anything about Pushkin or Russia in order to enjoy it. She unearths new materials that let the dead speak. She unravels the plot as if she's writing a thriller, piecing together Pushkin's insane but seemingly unstoppable drive towards the fateful duel. She lets some of her materials speak for themselves, like Pushkin's roundtrips to the pawnshop versus the unecessarily bountiful gifts from Danthès' repressed and obsessive sugar daddy. Where she does add her own shamelessly opinionated interpretations - witness her exuberant reflection on the missing eponymous button from Pushkin's coat, for example - she might be flamboyant and idiosyncratic, but I bet nobody ever accused her of being boring.

One final irony - the two duellers and Pushkin's second are sentenced to death for their involvement in the illegal but traditionally Russian sport of duelling. All three sentences are commuted, Pushkin's for the splendidly Russian reason that he is already dead.

1)middlebrow intentions 2)lots of anecdotes 3)non-serious "serious" books for the non-reader

but... I was wrong. It's very good, minus a slight whiff of purple that has got into the translation. What happened in 1836/37? Well, we don't really know: Vitale turns the available sources in her hand like a crystal, facets briefly catch the light then disappear. Truth? Who knows? The past remains multivalent, fluid, and the characters in the drama refuse to hold their poses for history's final snapshot. Compelling, and it got me reading Pushkin: Eugene Onegin is brilliant!

The main drawbacks to Pushkin's Button are stylistic. Instead of marshaling her facts and presenting them in a forthright manner, Vitale instead resorts to a kind of breathy, gossip-laden, Dominick Dunne for "Vanity Fair," type exercise. She also scatters tidbits of information that she claims will have some significant import later in the story, yet in most instances, this turns out not to be the case. If she is trying to write a mystery, there are way too many red herrings. She claims that a series of letters found in a trunk in Paris in 1989 and viewed for the first time by her, reveal some startling information concerning the events leading up to the duel. Written by D'Anthes to his patron Barron Heeckeren (the Dutch Ambassador to Russia, who later adopted D'Anthes and may have had a more-than-fatherly love for his charge), they convey nothing particularly startling. To those familiar with the background behind the main characters, the fact that the letters reveal that D'Anthes and Heeckeren were shallow, supercilious hedonists is hardly news. Though she constantly hints that "all will be revealed," concerning the identity of the perpetrator of the "cuckold letters" that were disseminated amongst the Petersburg aristocracy, and that directly led Pushkin to challenge D'Anthes to the fatal duel, the identity behind the letters is never established. This is but one example of myriad unsubstantial queries the author leaves hanging.

For those looking for a more carefully reasoned, and infinitely better written book that covers much of the same material, I would recommend Henri Troyat's biography of Pushkin. Troyat, unlike Vitale, doesn't engage in empty conjecture and he has a thorough understanding of Russian history and literature, as he has authored several great biographies, ranging from Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Tolstoy, Elizabeth II, Alexander I, etc.