SOURCE: "Fallibility and Perfection in the Works of Alexander Pushkin," in Problems of Russian Romanticism, edited by Robert Reid, Gower Publishing Company, 1986, pp. 25-45.

In the following essay, Briggs presents a critical survey of Pushkin's works, concentrating on Pushkin's relation to romanticism.

I

There is every reason to associate the name of Alexander Pushkin with the artistic movement known as European romanticism. This movement, notoriously difficult to circumscribe either by general definition or by dates, arose from a dissatisfaction with the traditional constraints imposed by classical and neo-classical art, assisted as these were by the widespread devotion to rationalism which characterised eighteenth-century European sensibility. An impulse towards greater freedom, originality and imagination, by no means limited to the arts alone, gathered momentum and soon spread itself among the literate people of many countries, exciting men's and women's minds by its new possibilities. Each European literature, jealous of its...