Jardín Pushkin station

Neighbouring stations

• 3Line 3Cuauhtémoc ← Jardín Pushkin → Hospital General

The story behind the icon

The station icon represents a quill in an inkwell. The station takes its name from a nearby park of the same name, located at the corner of Eje 1 Poniente Cuauhtémoc and Álvaro Obregón. The poet, playwright and novelist Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in 1799 in Moscow, Russia. He pioneered the use of the vernacular in his work, creating a narrative style blending drama, romance and satire that has been associated with Russian literature ever since and that notably influenced later literary figures such as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tyutchev, as well as the Russian composers Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.

As was customary among the Russian aristocracy of the early nineteenth century, he received an education based on the French language and literature. At the age of twelve he was admitted to the Imperial Lyceum, where he discovered his poetic vocation. Encouraged by several teachers, he published his first poems in the magazine Vestnik Evropy, and also began writing his first major work, the romantic poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, in 1820. Shortly before, in 1817, he had accepted a post in Saint Petersburg, where he came into contact with a select literary circle that gradually turned into a clandestine political faction. He also joined Zelyonaya Lampa, another movement opposed to the tsarist regime that would eventually become the seed of the revolutionary party behind the rebellion of 1825. Although his poetry during these youthful years was more sentimental than ideological, some of his poems, such as Liberty in 1817 and The Village in 1819, drew the attention of the tsarist secret service. As a result he was accused of subversive activities and forced into exile, confined first in Ukraine and then in Crimea, where he composed several of his major poems: The Prisoner of the Caucasus in 1822; The Robber Brothers in 1821; in 1823 he began writing his novel in verse Eugene Onegin; The Fountain of Bakhchisarai in 1824. That same year he again came into conflict with the Russian authorities and suffered a further exile in Pskov, devoting the two years he spent there to studying history and collecting traditional tales and stories. He published the tragedy Boris Godunov in 1824 and the continuation of Eugene Onegin. In 1826 he submitted a request for an audience with Nicholas I; the tsar agreed to pardon him, but on the condition that he would become his personal censor.

In 1836 he undertook the publication of the literary magazine The Contemporary, which would come to enjoy the highest prestige in Russian letters. Poorly received in court circles because of his peculiar personality and the radicalism of his ideas, he wrote his final works mostly in prose. On 29 January 1837 he died young from wounds suffered in a duel to which several of his enemies had goaded him, but by his death he was already considered the father of the Russian literary language and the founder of modern Russian literature.

What's near Jardín Pushkin

• Foro Indie Rocks!
• Arena México