Pushkin's lyric intelligence is his capacity to transform philosophical and aesthetic ideas into poetry that questions the creative process. This first major study of his lyrics reveals the links between Pushkin's conceptual vocabulary and his intellectual life, and between his writing and the influences of French and English authors and movements.

• Introduction


• 1: Tradition and Originality


• 2: Invention and Genius


• 3: The Meaning of Beauty


• 4: A Reticent Imagination


• 5: Nature and Romantic Subjectivity


• 6: Genius and the Commerce of Poetry


• 7: The Hero


• 8: Body and Soul

Andrew Kahn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford in Russian and Classics. His scholarly research draws on his wide-ranging interests in European literature, most especially Greek, Latin and French, and displays a broad learning. In addition to writing about Pushkin, he works on Enlightenment literature in Russia and Europe, on the history of ideas, the comparative reception of European culture in Russia, travel writing, the history of translation, and twentieth-century poetry.