Pushkin's button

Providing an account of the last few months of Alexandr Pushkin's life, this is also the story of the French soldier who killed him in a duel on 27th January 1837 - a man in love with the poet's beautiful wife.

Vitale's archival detective work unearthed a mass of written material about this celebrated love triangle - journals, letters, scraps of gossip - that evokes the indulgent world of 1830s St Petersburg's salons and imperial balls.