Pushkin's Button, By Serena Vitale, Translated by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild, Fourth Estate, 398pp, £16.99
An aura of doomed romance has always surrounded Alexander Pushkin, the father of modern Russian literature, who died at 37 following a duel. It was not his first: the poet, whose bicentenary this is, had made a habit of challenging those who offended him. Although himself an habitually unfaithful husband involved in a long affair with his sister-in-law, Pushkin could not forgive Georges d'Anthes, the young French man who dared to publicly woo his wife and married her elder sister to deflect attention. Never the calmest of individuals, Pushkin was intent on revenge.
The drama created by the arrival of a brazenly dashing young rival and Pushkin's subsequent death from his wounds is the source of Serena Vitale's lively and opinionated investigation, Pushkin's Button. It is a great story sustained by bad temper, ambition, an impossibly beautiful - if none too bright - woman and the gossiping rich who have little to do except report on, and analyse, the sexual intrigues of others.
Pushkin's death continues to inspire debate and theorising; d'Anthes, his rival, who was to live on until 1895, dying as a greatgrandfather aged 83, became known as the man who killed Pushkin. There were those who always referred to Pushkin's "murder", despite the fact the duel was his idea.
This is an extremely European narrative; its tone is one of clever scepticism while the leisurely prose is often lush, approaching at times the language of romantic fiction. Vitale, an Italian academic and translator whose work includes the translation of several Russian writers, never attempts any defence of Pushkin. On the contrary, her obvious hostility hovers neatly, if pointedly, on this side of polite. The Pushkin who emerges is edgy, rude and prone to depression - and one might wonder why he became so incensed by another man's interest in his wife, Natalya Nikolaevna Goncharova, as the poet, preoccupied by debts and slights (imagined and otherwise), and his sister-in-law, seldom seemed to converse with her.
Vitale's Pushkin is the man rather than the poet during his final year of a troubled life. Earlier, Vitale reports on Pushkin's young wife, who was still only 24 but the mother of four children at the time of the duel; "beauty trailed in her wake like a radiant shadow. . . "
This theme of her beauty becomes an almost disembodied concept. Natalie the woman is overshadowed by her physical beauty. "We know all there is to know about her bewitching body, every detail of her incomparable allure, but all we can do is guess when it comes to what stirred her heart, basing our thoughts on the words of others . . . Thus fate has left her forever: a voiceless, aphasic icon of beauty . . . " For the reader, as well as possibly for those who beheld her, there is some relief from all this perfection in the discovery that there was "a vagueness in her gaze". The lovely Natalie "had a very slight squint, perhaps the result of a touch of nearsightedness . . . "
Vitale is generous with description and has also used her sources well. Despite the wealth of information and the tenacious research, the narrative has the texture of a novel, and much of this richness comes from the world of 19th-century St Petersburg society. Although Vitale's style is oldfashioned, courtly, even censorious, and she enjoys authorial asides, Pushkin's Button reads with the pace of a thriller, from the poet's developing rage at d'Anthes to the graciousness of his final hours. If nothing else, Pushkin died well with a dignity and generosity seldom apparent in his behaviour in life.
Early in the book Vitale, scholar turned sleuth, describes the thrill of discovering a store of long-forgotten material which contained so many clues to finding the truth behind the dramatic duel. "Paris, early Summer of 1989, 152 winters and 153 Springs since Georges d'Anthes mortally wounded Pushkin . . . a worn grey case, old business papers belonging to the apartment's distinguished elderly owner, photographs, postcards, prints, personal letters. Then all at once what you dream of yet dare not hope for: a bundle of old letters, from another era, another world."
Included among Baron Claude de Heeckeren's family archive were letters from d'Anthes to an earlier Heeckeren, Jacob, the Dutch diplomat who adopted him and encouraged him in his conquest of St Petersburg society. For Vitale, this cache is "a gift from the winged herald of the gods". By January 1836, d'Anthes is writing to his patron, "I'm madly in love". The relationship between the men is well chronicled and Vitale appears quite sympathetic to them as she is to most of the players, except Pushkin. Nor does he appear to have endeared himself too widely; revered as a national poet, his work was popular and the fact that he died at the hand of a Frenchman irked the Russian sensibility, yet most commentators agreed his death was his own fault, caused by a "frenetic hatred well worthy of his Moorish origins".
Vitale proves an interested, intelligent, and curious detective, less reporter than willing voyeur, and this colourful, unsentimtenal book is a stylish literary thriller in pursuit of the truth.