“Pushkin could cry hot tears, and he who can weep can hope. “I want to live, so that I may think and suffer,” he says; and it seems as if the word “to suffer,” which is so beautiful in the poem, just fell in accidentally, because there was no better rhyme in Russian for “to die.”

“Pushkin could cry hot tears, and he who can weep can hope. “I want to live, so that I may think and suffer,” he says; and it seems as if the word “to suffer,” which is so beautiful in the poem, just fell in accidentally, because there was no better rhyme in Russian for “to die.”

— Lev Shestov