Titans of History полностью

Pushkin’s romantic death, the result of a simmering romantic crisis, turned the hero into a legend. In February 1837 the creepy and sleazy French social climber Georges d’Anthès, having been frustrated by Natalya’s decisive rejection of his approaches, publicly insulted her and challenged her husband to a duel. Pushkin, who had been itching to fight for months, accepted with alacrity. In the ensuing duel, Pushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days later at the age of thirty-eight.

The volatile, charismatic poet-radical who fought for liberty and died for love is revered in Russia almost as a god. His statue stands in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, decked out with flowers even in deep winter. Pushkin had decreed in his great poem “Monument” that “My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness / My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay … ” In this he proved a prophet too.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÈRE & FILS

1802–1870 & 1824–1895

His successes … resound like a fanfare. The name of Alexandre Dumas is more than French, it is European; it is more than European, it is universal … Alexandre Dumas is one of those men who can be called the sowers of civilization.

Victor Hugo

Alexandre Dumas’s soaring imagination holds us spellbound. As vividly drawn in life as one of his own characters, this master storyteller scorned literary pretension. Irrepressible to the end, he swaggered through a life that might have sprung straight from the pages of his books.

Dumas’s rip-roaring historical novels are crammed with romance, adventure, courage and daring. At one moment comical and poignant, the next mysterious and terrifying, they induce every emotion except boredom. In The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask, Dumas created some of the most thrilling stories ever written. He wove together history and fantasy, using scraps gleaned from old books to embroider timeless characters and gripping plots. His fecund imagination has rendered the names d’Artagnan and Dantès as familiar as Louis XIV and Richelieu.

He was the son of a swashbuckling Creole general (himself the illegitimate son of a marquis) and an innkeeper’s daughter. Given his ancestry, it is hardly surprising that Alexandre Dumas père specialized in tales of romance, derring-do, betrayal and intrigue. The fatherless boy who grew up in the small French town of Villers-Cotterêts was the son of the “Black Count,” a flamboyant and eccentric Napoleonic general whose integrity brought him only disgrace and provoked an early death.

Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was the Creole son of a black slave girl and a minor Norman marquis. Born in French Saint-Domingue in 1762 and raised by his mother’s family after she died when he was twelve, at eighteen Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France to be educated as befitted a nobleman. But when he joined the army as an ordinary soldier in 1786, he assumed his mother’s surname Dumas in order to avoid embarrassing his father’s family.

As the French Revolution overturned the strict hierarchy of France’s ancien régime, he rose up the army ranks. Dumas’s daring and skill in campaigns in the Vendée, in Italy and in Egypt had earned him the rank of general by the age of thirty-one. But in 1802 he was ordered to put down the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, and when he refused, Napoleon made his displeasure all too clear.

Politically disgraced, Dumas retired to the countryside, to the wife he had first met when he was billeted at her father’s inn in Villers-Cotterêts in 1789. Dogged by poverty and ill health, in 1806 the giant of a man died, leaving behind a widow and a small son and daughter.

The Black Count died in his forties, leaving his indigent widow to bring up two children on her own. When Dumas finally made his way to Paris, the mixed-race, rambunctious provincial was mocked for his frizzy blond curls and his antiquated dress. His father’s erstwhile friends evaded his pleas for patronage. Only a stroke of luck prevented an ignominious return to the countryside. Dumas’s beautiful penmanship secured him a position as a clerk in the office of the Duc d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe, 1830–48). It gave him enough money and plenty of time to pursue the writing that he believed would make his fortune. His faith was vindicated. In 1829 his play Henry III and his Court made him famous overnight.