“Pushkin was short in stature,” the poet’s friend Vera Nashchokina once wrote.
“The grand priest of high art” was “of medium height, almost a low man”, according to his publisher Mikhail Pogodin.
So what height did Pushkin have?
There is evidence from Pushkin’s younger brother Lev: “He was small in height (some 2 arshin 5 vershoks).” The old Russian measure unit arshin was equal to about 71 cm (or about 2.3 ft.), while a vershok is equal to 4.4 cm (or 1.75 inches). If we are to go by this recount, it would mean that Pushkin’s height was a little more than 166 cm. Read more about old Russian measurements here.
Artist Grigory Chernetsov confirms this height, as well. He signed his pencil drawing of Pushkin: “2 arsh. 5 versh. and a half”.
In Soviet times, on Pushkin’s 150th anniversary, academician Igor Grabar announced the official height – 166.5 cm.
But, for some reason, Pushkin himself claimed to be only 160 centimeters tall. In 1825, Pushkin found himself in exile in his country estate Mikhailovskoe. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, the Decembrist uprising was happening, in which many of his friends were participating. Pushkin wanted to secretly go to St. Petersburg without being caught by police. So, he created a fake document, in which he wrote his height – 2 arsh. 4 ver. (i.e. about 160 cm). He couldn’t fake his height, because the police would have recognized it at once.
Most likely, these 5-6 centimeters of difference appeared because of… heels, which were worn by socialite men of the 19th century.
So, Pushkin was, indeed, short in stature. Although, in his time, it was quite an average height of a man in Russia.
And, yet, Pushkin was actually quite self-conscious about his height. In all his poems, he admires tall people. In addition, his wife Natalia Goncharova was a head taller than him, standing at about 175.5 cm. Therefore, at balls, he tried to be less close to her. One can only imagine how angry and jealous Pushkin was, when in secular society the Emperor Nicholas I himself paid attention to Goncharova… And he was two meters tall!
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