И время и место

From the very beginning Pushkin was more short-tempered than most and therefore did not arouse general sympathy. This is an eccentric person’s lot among people. It wasn’t that he was acting out a role or trying to impress us with special oddities, as happens with some people. But at times it was through inappropriate jokes and awkward witticisms that he put himself in a difficult situation, from which he could then not escape. This would lead to new blunders, which never go unnoticed in schoolboy dealings… In him was a blend of excessive boldness and shyness, both appearing at the wrong times, which by that fact harmed him further. It would happen that we’d both get in a scrape; I’d manage to wiggle out of it, while he could never set it right. The main thing that was lacking in him is what is called tact, that capital which is necessary in relations with comrades, where it is difficult, almost impossible, when involved in totally informal interactions with others, to avoid some unpleasant confrontation brought on by daily life.⁴

And Baron Korf, as precise and unforgiving as Pushchin is generous, has this to say about Pushkin:

Easily enraged, with unbridled African passions (his heritage on his mother’s side), eternally preoccupied, eternally immersed in poetical daydreams, spoiled from childhood by the praise of flatterers that can be found in every circle, Pushkin neither as a schoolboy nor afterwards in society had anything appealing in his deportment… In him was no external or internal religion, no higher moral feelings. He even asserted a kind of bragger’s pride in the supreme cynicism he showed these subjects… and I do not doubt that for the sake of a caustic word he sometimes said even more and worse than he thought and felt.⁵

As harsh as Korf’s appraisal is, there is also much truth in it, and when placed next to Pushchin s it affords us a rather accurate picture of how the adolescent Pushkin must have seemed to both well-wishers and to those he may have antagonized.