Writing the Story of Pushkin's Death

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 58, Heft 2, S. 393-406

Abstract

Biography would seem to be firmer ground than literary criticism: at least we like to think that biography has a factual basis in the writer's life. But of course, when we deal with biography, our sources turn out to be yet more texts (memoirs, diaries, letters, and the like), and for this reason we often discover that the documentary evidence for the writer's life is less than objective and in fact displays its own biases and is governed by its own conventions of representation.