Alexander Pushkin

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign and six of the ten sit in water. Four of them are in Cancer, inside six degrees of each other: the Moon, Mars, Venus and Saturn, with the Moon's sign certain at eighteen degrees. The record calls Pushkin the founder of modern Russian literature, almost untranslatable for exactly the reasons he is revered, and says he died at thirty seven of a wound from a duel he had been manoeuvred into.

Four of the six closest contacts in this chart involve the Moon or Mars, which sit conjunct at just over half a degree inside that Cancer group. The reading for that pairing is emotion acting immediately: protectiveness, courage on behalf of other people, and a temper that arrives and departs faster than anybody else has adjusted to it. Mars also stands at an awkward angle to Pluto at four tenths, force against force, which includes situations where winning becomes more important than the thing being won.

A duel is that last clause made into a procedure, and a reader will join the two at once. The record does not allow it. Its own word is manoeuvred, which places the agency with other people: somebody arranged the circumstances, and a man with a temper walked into them. The chart describes a temperament and the record describes a manipulation, and a temperament that can be provoked is not the same thing as a decision to be provoked. That distinction is the whole of what this entry can honestly keep.

The Moon sits sixty degrees from Uranus at just over a fifth of a degree, comfortable with change, and Mars sixty degrees from that same Uranus at a third, quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency. No fire at all, with six planets in water, is the balance, and in the founder of a national literature a chart weighted entirely towards what is felt is the fit a reader expects and the one worth least. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Saint Petersburg on 10 February 1837, at thirty seven. Mars stood sixty degrees from his natal Sun at nine hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was a crescent at thirty per cent.