December 9, 2021
“[I]s it a biography? an adventure story? a historical novel about the period in Russian history at a pivotal moment – its first attempted and abortive revolution, the Decembrist uprising of 1825? Or is after all the mainspring of the novel Russian literature played out by characters conjured up by the author’s imagination? Characters familiar by name to every Russian schoolchild (Pushkin, Krylov, Zhukovsky) leap off the page as live people, fascinating, memorable. And of course, the protagonist of the novel, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, hardly known to Tynianov’s contemporaries, a long-forgotten poet and Pushkin’s lycée friend, is in particular, Tynianov’s tour de force.”