James Wood’s books include The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, The Book against God, a novel, and, most recently, How Fiction Works. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.
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Biography and memoirs, Biography, 1800-1899, 1800-1819, 1820-1839, Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, Aleksandr Pushkin
Vol. 25 No. 4 · 20 February 2003
pages 13-15 | 4863 words
Bobbery
James Wood
- Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon
HarperCollins, 731 pp, £30.00, September 2002, ISBN 0 00 215084 0
It is in some ways unfortunate that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to T.J. Binyon’s remarkable biography, became ‘addicted’ to Rossini while living in Odessa, where an Italian opera company was visiting, and though Binyon makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so often do (Joyce’s love of Puccini, for instance, or Auden’s dislike of Brahms).
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 5 · 6 March 2003
From Tim Summers-Scott
In his laudatory review of T.J. Binyon's biography of Pushkin (LRB, 20 February), James Wood makes much of Binyon's enthusiasm for his subject and his attention to detail. I have not read the book but Wood mentions 'a naughty poem' of Pushkin's, 'in which he promised, today, to kiss her like a Christian, but tomorrow, if requested, to convert to Judaism just for another kiss, and even to put into her hand "That by which one can distinguish/A genuine Hebrew from the Orthodox"'. Since the poem is entitled 'Christ is Risen' one must presume the member, circumcised or not, is erect. What I would like to know is how, in the erect state, you can tell. I realise this may say less about my ignorance of Pushkin than about my ignorance of life – and it is a detail, I agree – but if the book is as strong on detail as Wood makes out I think Binyon ought to tell us.
Tim Summers-Scott
London W8
Vol. 25 No. 6 · 20 March 2003
From David Pollack
Tim Summers-Scott (Letters, 6 March) admits to an 'ignorance of life' regarding erect penises. I am happy to inform him that many uncircumcised examples remain fully covered when erect.
David Pollack
Leicester
Vol. 25 No. 7 · 3 April 2003
From Valentin Lyubarsky
Tim Summers-Scott (Letters, 6 March) wonders 'how, in the erect state, can you tell' whether 'the member is circumcised or not'. I suppose it is not impossible, but Pushkin's original doesn't present such a dilemma anyway. What Binyon translates, too literally, as 'to put into her hand' should have been 'to offer' or 'present', and the following lines are not so graphic as to suggest 'erect'. Also, Wood's review mistakenly places the final romantic struggle between Onegin and Tatiana in Moscow, although Binyon correctly places it in Petersburg.
Valentin Lyubarsky
Brooklyn, New York
