3 jokes by Alexander Pushkin
Most of Pushkin’s anectodes are based on Russian word play, so we picked out the three of them that are the easiest to understand in any language.
1. Delvig in the other world
Anton Delvig
Baron Anton Delvig, who studied in the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum together with Alexander Pushkin, shortly before his death, began to lead a very dissolute life (he was ill with typhoid fever, from which he, subsequently, died at the age of just 32 in 1831). One day, he went to visit Pushkin while being heavily intoxicated. The poet began to persuade his companion to stop drinking, but, for all the arguments, Delvig replied in despair that the earthly life was not for him, "but in the other world, I will pay my dues.”
“Have mercy,” Pushkin replied, “but look in the mirror, will they let you in there with such a face?”
When Delvig died, Pushkin was devastated. “Nobody in the whole world was closer to me than Delvig,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Pyotr Pletnyov.
2. The poet and the sun
Someone, wishing to embarrass Pushkin, once asked him in public: "What is the same about me and the sun?" "Neither you nor the sun can be looked at without wincing," the poet quickly replied.
3. Income from 36 letters
Alexander Pushkin by Nikolay Ulyanov, coal, pencil, 1936
Pushkin was acquainted with young soldiers from the Imperial Guard – the scions of the wealthiest families, daredevils who loved to brawl and drink. One day, he invited several guardsmen to a popular restaurant in St. Petersburg and treated them all to a meal. Count Zavadovsky, a high-ranked civil servant and a renowned rich man, entered the restaurant and noticed Pushkin:
“Well, Alexander Sergeyevich, it seems that you have a tightly stuffed wallet!”
“But, I am richer than you,” Pushkin replied, “you sometimes have to live and wait for money from the villages, but I have a constant income with thirty-six letters of the Russian alphabet (exactly how many of them were in the pre-revolutionary alphabet)!”
It is known that Pushkin, having sometimes amassed large debts at a card table, could quickly cover them by literally writing a magnificent piece of work overnight and sell it to a publisher the following morning. The poem ‘Count Nulin’ was almost written in this fashion (not in one night, but in two mornings).
