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“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... Of all great writers Pushkin left the greatest number of incomplete or fragmentary works. Even when something is finished it still has an air of potential, of development that might have been carried on had not the author felt that his art had done its mysterious job and that it was not for him to press it further ...”

“... verse rendering of Eugene Onegin established itself immediately as the best English translation of Pushkin’s great poem there had yet been. It was an impressive performance even to those who could not read the original. To those who could, it was simply astonishing, not least from the technical angle: Johnston had cast his Onegin in the Onegin stanza, a form ...”

“... about Rudolf’s character (‘a kind, honest and loving son’), as had his ballet master, Alexander Pushkin, and Pushkin’s wife, Xenia: Rudik’s act of treachery had not been premeditated; he never talked politics and was not a dissident of any kind. A character report noted, moreover, that there had been no ...”

“... Who do you think will close the door after you? Pushkin?’ The question, which Elaine Feinstein quotes in her introduction to this excellent biography, is one which apparently might still be asked by a Russian mother of a careless child. No British mother would say anything like it, if only because she could not think of a figure with comparable evocative power: writers here are hardly household names ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I have never regretted’. In 1900 he went, as Third Secretary, to Denmark; here he met Count Alexander Benckendorff, then the Russian Minister in Copenhagen, who, with his wife and son, became his close friends. The following year a visit to the family’s estate near Tambov marked the start of that fascination with Russia that was to colour much of his ...”

“... that before there can be solidarity, a little humility would help.Towards​ the end of 1826, Alexander Pushkin was playing chess with a friend who, as he put it, ‘knew a lot of the kinds of thing they study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and ...”

“... were heirs of Mars and more invincible than Achilles’. ‘The worst thing about the duel,’ Alexander Herzen observed, ‘is that it justifies any blackguard either by giving him an honourable death, or by making him an honourable man-killer.’ (He had just turned down a challenge by his wife’s lover.) In his novel The Duel, Conrad fictionalised the ...”

“... understood at least half depends on them. The formulation is very much that of Blok’s day, but Pushkin, Baratynsky and Tyutchev had also, in different ways, recognised this duty, as did, in a sharper and more painful situation, his successors, Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and Pasternak. At the same time as Blok was experiencing the ‘torture and hell’ of his ...”

“... much idea who controlled the organisation – many aspirationally speculated that it might be Tsar Alexander. A year after its foundation in 1814, it had no more than fifty members.Few moments in Europe’s history have seemed less conducive to the success of a secret society conspiring for ‘national liberation’. The Pentarchy ...”

“... I am satisfied with Alexander and he ought to be satisfied with me,’ Napoleon wrote to the Empress Josephine in 1807. ‘If he were a woman, I think I would make him my mistress.’ Within five years, the tsar would repay Napoleon’s condescension by rolling back his conquests all across Europe, driving him to Paris and then St Helena, and finally building the Concert of Europe on the remains of his empire ...”

“... A.N. Kulomzin, the liberal-minded President of the State Council; and the two Obolensky princes, Alexander and Aleksei, super-aristocrats, part-time politicians. A final chapter considers the role of the ruling élite in the downfall of the old regime. Russia’s Rulers is a labour of love, and only Dominic Lieven could have written it. He does, after ...”

“... Eugene Onegin. Characters take their cues from romantic fashions, and from writers like Scott, Pushkin, Byron, Rousseau and Marlinsky (a producer of Caucasian adventures and the most popular Russian novelist of the 1830s). This is how Pechorin is first described: He was of medium height and well proportioned; his slim waist and broad shoulders indicated a ...”

“... some of which reached those who had known him. Mirsky was supposed to have given 45 lectures on Pushkin in the camps, without notes. Or he had written an entire book somehow, entitled ‘Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Fet’ (no trace of this has been found, if it ever existed). Or he had returned and, as late as the ...”