A.S. Pushkin Memorial Day

A.S. Pushkin Memorial Day.

The poet, the slave of honor, died..

He had foreseen this.

"The pistols have already flashed, the hammer is rattling on the ramrod. Bullets go into the faceted barrel, And the trigger clicks for the first time. Gunpowder is pouring onto the shelf in a grayish trickle.

The toothed, Securely screwed flint is still cocked.

Guillot stands behind the nearest stump, confused.

The cloaks are thrown by two enemies. Zaretsky measured the thirty-two steps with perfect accuracy,

I spread my friends out on the last trail, and everyone took their own gun.

Now get together." In cold blood, Not yet aiming, two enemies

With a firm, quiet gait, exactly Four steps crossed,

The four mortal stages. Eugene then used his pistol, Without ceasing to advance,

He began to raise the first one quietly. They took five more steps, And Lensky, squinting his left eye, also began to aim – but just as Onegin fired… The Clock struck the hour: the poet

He drops the gun in silence"

26 duels, 5 of them real.

The episode from the story "The Shot", when the count stood at the barrier and ate cherries while waiting for the enemy to shoot, is autobiographical (duel with Zubov).

Yes, Pushkin trained a lot in shooting, carried an 8 kg walking stick to develop his arm and hold the gun tighter, but a simple mathematical series shows: if not Dantes, then someone else with such a character does not live long.

Interestingly, when my little son was studying at school in Paris (he was born there when I was a doctor at the Russian Embassy), he came to visit a classmate, he saw a portrait of Pushkin on the wall. Asked: "Why is that?" the answer was unexpected: "our distant relative was Dantes."

And Pushkin could not have died of old age in bed, "poets walk with their heels on the blade of a knife and cut their bare souls into blood!"

And yes, modern medicine probably could not have saved Pushkin.

Source: Telegram "drmyasnikov"