Pushkin's "Ode to Liberty" and Mr. Slusky

Praxis is a lead pre-seed/seed investor in manufacturing and software startups. The Firm's General Partner is a poet manqué.

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This Sunday's "Poets and Poems of Praxis" is Pushkin's "Ode to Liberty."

Pushkin is Russia's greatest poet. I began thinking about Pushkin shortly after joining Vector Capital in 2014. Vector’s founder and Chief Investment Officer, Alex Slusky, immigrated to the United States as a child from Ukraine during the Cold War. Alex’s father is a Ukrainian engineer who in the 1980’s, saw the Soviet Union for what it was and did the right thing, the hard thing. He left.

This poem was immediately named subversive and revolutionary in Russia. It held talismanic significance for young revolutionaries.

Here’s what the Tsar’s police wrote about it at the time

Among the greatest beauties of conception and style this latter piece gives evidence of dangerous principles drawn from the ideas of our age, or, more precisely, that system of anarchy dishonestly called the system of human rights, of freedom and the independence of nations.

Manuscripts were often confiscated when revolutionaries were arrested. Tsar Alexander's reaction to the popularity of this poem was that "Pushkin must be exiled."

Read this poem slowly. Then listen to it in Russian. Read it again, and think, with Praxis.