Fake for the gullible
As evidence, the photograph itself is attached - a very bad image of a certain subject, vaguely similar to the Sun of Russian poetry.
Moreover, the user who posted the sensational photo on the Internet even describes the technology for producing this photo as proof of its veracity. I must say, quite reliably, with a mention of Mr. Daguerre himself, who is truly the father of photography.
What is surprising is not that such a photo appeared on the Internet. It is surprising how easily and naturally hundreds, if not thousands of people believed in the “Pushkin photograph”.
Although, it would seem, having the entire Internet at hand, one can easily establish where is truth and where is fiction, and why there are no photographs of either Napoleon Bonaparte or Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin in nature.
In the 18th century, chemists discovered that solutions of iron salts change color when exposed to light. Then the German physicist Johann Schulze, while trying to prepare a luminous substance, accidentally mixed chalk with nitric acid, which contained some dissolved silver. The scientist noticed that when sunlight hit the white mixture, it became dark, while the mixture, protected from sunlight, did not change at all. Then he conducted several experiments with letters and figures, which he cut out of paper and placed on a bottle with the prepared solution - photographic prints were obtained on silver-plated chalk.
However, neither Schulze nor his contemporaries even set themselves the task of obtaining what we now call photography.
Pushkin's youth photo
Today marks the 221st anniversary of the birth of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, the most famous poet of our country, who laid the foundations of realistic drama in Russian literature and became a legend during his lifetime.
The biography of Alexander Sergeevich is well known to most of us since school, so today we will not repeat it. We present to your attention ten portraits that allow you to take a fresh look at the founder of the modern Russian literary language.
“Pushkin the Child”, Xavier de Maistre, 1801 - 1802
The first portrait from our selection was unknown for a long time. It appeared in the exhibition of the Moscow Pushkin Museum only in 1961 - it was given by the artist Vsevolod Yakut, who in turn received it from a spectator. She explained: the portrait was kept for a long time in the Mudrov family, whose ancestor, Moscow doctor Matvey Yakovlevich, treated the Pushkin family.
Some Pushkin researchers doubted that the portrait showed the great poet as a child. The museum's deputy director for scientific work, Natalya Vladimirovna Baranskaya, asked criminologists to study the image. They worked for two years and eventually confirmed that the portrait was indeed Alexander Sergeevich.
“Sasha Pushkin, lyceum student”, Yuri Ivanov, 1984
Another childish image of the poet, but here he is easily recognizable by his hairstyle, and the pen in his hand hints at a literary future. Graphic artist Yuri Ivanov created a whole series of postcards with portraits of the poet and his famous contemporaries.
“Pushkin at the Lyceum exam in Tsarskoe Selo on January 8, 1815”, Ilya Repin, 1911
On January 8, 1815, at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, Pushkin’s first ceremonial exam and first performance before the public took place, which students, according to custom, took when moving from the first year to the second. The poet has been here for 15 years. His friend Ivan Pushchin left a warm memory of the exam:
“At our public examination, Derzhavin, with his sovereign blessing, crowned our young poet. All of us, his friends and comrades, were proud of this triumph. Pushkin then brilliantly read his “Memoirs in Tsarskoe Selo.” In these magnificent drains, everything alive for the Russian heart is touched. I read Pushkin with extraordinary animation.”
Ilya Repin painted this picture at the request of the Pushkin Lyceum Society, which was preparing to celebrate its centenary.
Unhappy Niepce and lucky Daguerre
Only at the beginning of the 19th century did the Frenchman Joseph Niepce seriously set out to obtain a photographic image. Having spent a lot of money, in 1822 he achieved his goal - he received the first relatively clear image, which the author called “The Laid Table”.
However, this photo has not survived, and therefore the first photo in the world is considered to be the “View from the Window” photograph taken by Niepce in 1826.
It should be noted here that to obtain this extremely blurry and unclear photograph, the inventor maintained an exposure for eight hours in bright light. It is clear that it was absolutely impossible to film people in this way.
Niépce spent a lot of money on his invention, went bankrupt, and died in 1833 without achieving any significant results.
But Niepce’s cause was taken up by Louis Daguerre, a talented artist and inventor. Daguerre worked with Niepce in the 1820s, and after his death he tried to develop a technology that would make this invention practical.
This took Daguerre eleven years of experimentation, and only in 1837 did the artist and inventor achieve the result he was striving for.
But it took Daguerre another two years to finalize his invention, and only in 1839 did he present it to the French Academy of Sciences.
This is how daguerreotype appeared - the first practically applicable method of photography.
Daguerre's invention created a sensation and made him a rich and famous man.
Service and career
Pushkin was released from the Lyceum in June 1817 with the rank of collegiate secretary (10th grade, according to the table of ranks) and assigned to the College of Foreign Affairs. He becomes a regular visitor to the theater, takes part in meetings of Arzamas (he was admitted there in absentia, while still a student at the Lyceum). In 1819, he became a member of the Green Lamp literary and theatrical community, which was led by the Union of Welfare. Without participating in the activities of the first secret organizations, Pushkin nevertheless had friendly ties with many active members of the Decembrist societies, wrote political epigrams and poems “To Chaadaev” (“Love, hope, quiet glory ...”, 1818), “Liberty” (1818 ), "N. Ya. Pluskova" (1818), "Village" (1819), distributed in lists. During these years, he was busy working on the poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” which began at the Lyceum and corresponded to the program guidelines of the literary society “Arzamas” on the need to create a national heroic poem. The poem was published in May 1820 (it was known earlier from lists) and evoked various, not always favorable, responses.
After Pushkin’s expulsion, controversy flared up around the poem. Some critics were outraged by the decline of the high canon. The mixing of Russian-French methods of verbal expression with vernacular and folk stylistics in “Ruslan and Lyudmila” caused reproaches from defenders of democratic nationality in literature. Such complaints were contained in a letter from D. Zykov, a literary follower of Katenin, published in Son of the Fatherland. In the spring of 1820, Pushkin was summoned to the military governor-general of St. Petersburg, Count M.A. Miloradovich, for an explanation about the content of his poems (including epigrams on Arakcheev, Archimandrite Photius and Alexander I himself), which were incompatible with the status of a government official.
There was talk of his deportation to Siberia or imprisonment in the Solovetsky Monastery. Only thanks to the efforts of friends, especially Karamzin, was it possible to achieve a mitigation of the sentence. He was transferred from the capital to the south to the Chisinau office of I.N. Inzov. On the way to his new duty station, Alexander Sergeevich falls ill with pneumonia after swimming in the Dnieper. To improve his health, the Raevskys took the sick poet with them to the Caucasus and Crimea at the end of May 1820. On the way, the Raevsky family and A.S. Pushkin stop in Taganrog, in the former house of mayor P.A. Papkov (Grecheskaya St., 40). On August 16, 1820, Pushkin arrived in Feodosia. He wrote to his brother Lev: “We came from Kerch to Kafa and stayed with Bronevsky, a respectable man for his impeccable service and poverty. Now he is on trial - and, like Virgil’s old man, he is planting a garden on the seashore, not far from the city. Grapes and almonds constitute his income. He is not a smart person, but he has a lot of information about Crimea. The important and neglected side.
Two days later, Pushkin, together with the Raevskys, left by sea for Gurzuf. Pushkin spent several weeks in Gurzuf in the summer and autumn of 1820. Together with the Raevskys, he stayed at the house of the Duke of Richelieu; the poet was provided with a mezzanine facing west. While living in Gurzuf, the poet took many walks along the coast and into the mountains, including a horseback ride to the top of Ayu-Dag and a boat trip to Cape Suuk-Su.
In Gurzuf, Pushkin continued to work on the poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus” and wrote several lyric poems; some of them are dedicated to the daughters of N.N. Raevsky - Ekaterina, Elena and Maria. Here the poet conceived the idea for the poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” and the novel “Eugene Onegin”.
In mid-September, Pushkin spent about a week in Simferopol, presumably in the house of the Tauride governor Alexander Nikolaevich Baranov, an old friend of the poet from St. Petersburg. Pushkin also used his impressions from visiting Crimea in the description of “Onegin’s Travels,” which was first included in the poem “Eugene Onegin” as an appendix. In September he arrives in Chisinau.
The new boss treated Pushkin’s service leniently, allowing him to be away for a long time and visit friends in Kamenka (winter 1820–1821), travel to Kiev, travel with I.P. Liprandi around Moldova and visit Odessa (late 1821). In Chisinau, Pushkin joined the Ovid Masonic Lodge, which he himself wrote about in his diary. If the poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila” was the result of the school of the best Russian poets, then Pushkin’s first “southern poem” “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1822) put him at the head of all modern Russian literature and brought him the well-deserved fame of the first poet, which invariably accompanied him to the end 1820s Later, in the 1830s, he received the epithet “Russian Byron.”
Later, another “southern poem” “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” (1824) was published. In July 1823, Pushkin sought a transfer from service to Odessa in the office of Count Vorontsov. It was at this time that he recognized himself as a professional writer, which was predetermined by the rapid readership success of his works. Courtship of the boss's wife, and possibly an affair with her and his inability to perform public service, strained his relationship with Vorontsov. Pushkin's four-year stay in the south is a new romantic stage in his development as a poet. At this time, Pushkin became acquainted with the works of Byron and Chenier.
The “sun of poetry” has set too early
The first Russian master to master the methods of daguerreotype and calotype (technology of the Englishman William Talbot) was the Moscow engraver and inventor Alexey Grekov. In June 1840, he opened the first “art cabinet” in Russia for portrait photography, using a chair with special cushions to support a person’s head. This made it possible to obtain sharp photographs, while other photographers failed - the shutter speed when photographing in the sun lasted 23 minutes, and in cloudy weather it reached 45 minutes.
And what about Pushkin? If someone does not remember the details of the biography of Alexander Sergeevich, then he was mortally wounded in a duel with Dantes on January 27, 1837 and died two days later.
Article on the topic
A duel with fate. Pushkin knew that he would be killed, but accepted the challenge
At that time, Louis Daguerre continued to conjure chemicals in his laboratory, trying to achieve the desired result, and could not photograph the poet.
Pushkin was probably the last of the Russian celebrities whose appearance is familiar to us only from portraits. Contemporaries of Alexander Sergeevich were already making full use of the new technology for capturing images, but he himself was only a couple or three years away from this.
As for Napoleon Bonaparte, whose “photographic portraits” also sometimes appear on the Internet, he died in exile on the island of St. Helena in May 1821. And even if Joseph Niepce wanted to experiment on the deposed emperor, it is unlikely that the English guards would have allowed him to do so.
So, it’s a pity, but neither photographs of Pushkin nor photographs of Napoleon exist in nature. They appear exclusively in the heads and computers of lovers of all kinds of fakes.
Carefree childhood
The future poet was born on Nemetskaya Street in Moscow on June 6, 1799. He was baptized two days after his birth. Alexander had a brother Lev and a sister Olga. He spent his entire childhood in the village of Zakharovo with his grandmother Maria Alekseevna Hannibal. It was she who decided to hire Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, Pushkin’s famous nanny. French tutors were also involved in raising the child. Under their strict guidance, he studied Russian and French grammar, arithmetic, history and geography. The Pushkin house was constantly visited by creative personalities, the elite of society of that time.
The family belonged to an untitled noble family. The writer was extremely proud of his relatives and repeatedly dedicated poems to them. Sasha's father, Sergei Lvovich, was an official of the Moscow Commissariat. His mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, was of African descent. Her grandfather was Abram Petrovich Hannibal, a pupil and servant of Peter I. It was from his mother and her relatives that the prose writer inherited an incredible love of life and a stubborn character. He skillfully selected his words, infecting all readers with his passion.
