The tsar-struck poet

Pushkin, writer of the 19th century's nimblest erotic verse in praise of women's feet, died in the end over a clumsy pun about a pedicure. The identical sound of the French words for "corn" and for "body"

D'Anthes, the French, adopted son (and probably homosexual lover) of the Dutch ambassador to the Court of Nicholas I, had only recently ducked out of a duel of honour with Pushkin over Natalya by hastily wedding her less well-favoured sister, Ekaterina.

At a grand ball, less than a fortnight after his marriage, he said to Natalya: "The pedicurist claims that your corn/body is more beautiful than that of my wife."

Within days, the duel had been fought, Pushkin was dead, D'Anthes court-martialled and, to the disquiet of the Tsar and his police, great crowds of mourners were gathering in the streets.

Since Pushkin's death in 1837, Russia has been distinguished for the reverence in which it holds its writers. And no poet has proved more amenable to myth. Pushkin's legacy has been exploited to support every imaginable crackpot ideology and political posture, from Stalinist totalitarianism to anti-Nato foreign policy. Like a static bronze, his image has been cast in heroic form and polished out of all recognition.

In reality, Pushkin's life was a mess of love affairs, gambling debts, compromises with authority and increasingly thwarted efforts to find the peace in which to write. His death remains a sordid puzzle from which it is hard to draw any moral.

In this magnificent biography, TJ Binyon, a leading scholar of Russian literature, known to Evening Standard readers as a crime reviewer, tells Pushkin's story with the patience and finesse of a detective.

Making use of the detailed historical research accumulated by obscure academics while the Soviet state was commissioning ever-more kitsch Pushkin busts and chocolate wrappers, Binyon frees the poet from the simplicity of myth in which posterity has encased him.

The pace at which he leads the reader through the events of the poet's short, strained life is careful, yet unfailingly riveting.

Paradoxically, the cultural icon of a nation that destroyed its aristocracy, and in which racism is still rife and quasirespectable, was a nobleman of African descent. Pushkin's great-grandfather, Ibrahim Hannibal, was presented to Peter the Great as a gift and raised as his godson; he became a general and a wealthy landowner.