PUSHKIN, the Wellspring of Russian Opera

In this pair of podcasts, Dramaturg Jonathan Dean discusses the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin with Dacia Clay of the Classical Classroom Podcast. And here’s a list of (some) works by Pushkin (poems, plays, stories, novels, in the order he wrote them) that then inspired operas:

1820: Ruslan & Ludmila (Narrative Poem)
Made into Opera: Ruslan & Lyudmila (1842) by Mikhail Glinka

Literature and Legacy of Alexander Pushkin

Located in central Moscow, this famous statue of Alexander Pushkin was dedicated in 1880 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The wild story of Alexander Pushkin’s life resembles characters from dramas written by the author himself. Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799 to a family with a long and complicated history in Russia. His father descended from an ancient aristocratic line who had fallen on hard times. On the other side, Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather was the nobleman and military leader Abram Petrovich Gannibal. Kidnapped as a child from present-day Cameroon, Gannibal was brought to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great, who ended up adopting him as a godson. When Peter’s daughter Elizabeth assumed power, Gannibal served as a member of her court. Pushkin celebrated his storied lineage, even as his African heritage at times alienated him from Russian society.