Young Pushkin

In July 1813, the schoolboy Sasha Pushkin, nicknamed “the Frenchman” by his classmates at the Lycée in Tsarskoye Selo, was just 14 years old. He was already exhibiting a gift for poetry, but his mind was preoccupied with the same things that tend to engage the mind of any 14-year-old boy. So in the poem “The Monk,” which Pushkin wrote during June-July 1813, the young poet is clearly less concerned with rhyme and meter then with the somewhat indecent story of how the devil attempts to seduce a well-respected monk by showing him a woman’s skirt.

«Что вижу я!.. иль это только сон?—