Shelley's first putative impact on Russian literature occurred just two years after his death, fittingly in the context of an encounter between a rebel poet and an autocratic ruler. The nineteenth-century literary critic P.V. Annenkov (1813-87), who was working on Aleksandr Pushkin's biography at the height of Shelley's Russian fame in the 1870s, speculates that the English poet's early effect on the curse of Russian literature may have been decisive, though indirect. In the spring of 1824, Pushkin told his friend Petr Vyazemsky what he was working on: 'I am writing motley stanzas of a Romantic poem - and am taking lessons in pure atheism. There is an Englishman here, a deaf philosopher, the only intelligent atheist I have ever met.' The Englishman was William Hutchinson, a physician, who, Annenkov speculates, was 'in all probability an admirer of Shelley, who taught our poet the philosophy of atheism and made himself into an unintentional instrument of his second catastrophe.' When Pushkin's letter became known to the authorities, it prompted his second sentence of exile, to his father's state at Mikhailovskoe.
Where he wrote most of Eugene Onegin.
Nothing I'm writing about. One drifts sideways around dawn.
It's an interesting book - I hadn't known Stendhal made up a meeting with him.
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