Somewhere in the world there is a poet whom millions of people know by heart, quote at weddings and funerals, teach to their children before the children can read, and treat as a kind of shared inner weather. He is, by general agreement, the greatest writer his language has produced. And almost no one outside that language has read him. For the English-speaking reader, Alexander Pushkin occupies roughly the place that Lord Byron occupies for a Russian: a famous name, a respectful nod, and a strange blank where the actual experience of the poetry ought to be.

This book is an attempt to cross that blank. Not by translating Pushkin's music, which cannot survive the crossing, but by carrying over something that can: a way of thinking. For Pushkin was a philosopher, though he never wrote a treatise and would have laughed at the word. His philosophy does not live in arguments. It lives in a line, an intonation, a pause, the prickle at the back of the neck when something true is said plainly. It is a philosophy not of conclusions but of being alive, and it speaks to the very things that formal philosophy, with its need for problems and proofs, so often walks straight past: the taste of a single evening, the ache of waiting for love, the dignity of a small forgotten man, the strange mercy of letting go.