Книга - Pushkin

Pushkin
T. J. Binyon


Note that due to the limitations of some ereading devices not all diacritical marks can be shown.A major biography of one of literature’s most romantic and enigmatic figures, published in hardback to great acclaim: ‘one of the great biographies of recent times’ (Sunday Telegraph).Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is indisputably Russia’s greatest poet – the nearest Russian equivalent to Shakespeare – and his brief life was as turbulent and dramatic as anything in his work. T.J Binyon’s biography of this brilliant and rebellious figure is ‘a remarkable achievement’ and its publication ‘a real event’ (Catriona Kelly, Guardian).‘No other work on Pushkin on the same scale, and with the same grasp of atmosphere and detail, exists in English… And Pushkin is well worth writing about… he was a remarkable man, a man of action as well as a poet, and he lived a remarkable life, dying in a duel at the age of thirty-seven.’ (John Bayley, Literary Review)Among the delights of this beautifully illustrated and lavishly produced book are the ‘caricatures of venal old men with popping eyes and side-whiskers, society beauties with long necks and empire curls and, most touchingly, images of his “cross-eyed madonna” Natalya’ (Rachel Polonsky, Evening Standard).Binyon ‘knows almost everything there is to know about Pushkin. He scrupulously chronicles his life in all its disorder, from his years at the Lycee through exile in the Crimea, Bessarabia and Odessa, for writing liberal verses, and on to the publication of Eugene Onegin and, eventually, after much wrangling with the censor, Boris Godunov’ (Julian Evans, New Statesman) and in this, ‘Binyon is unbeatable’(Clive James, TLS).










PUSHKIN

A Biography

T. J. BINYON









DEDICATION (#ulink_c8c62aee-1146-50a8-8591-7ad6ef398424)


For Helen

and In memory of my father Denis Binyon




EPIGRAPH (#ulink_47abc179-f2f3-5b03-8f7a-ee9a55d80d56)


What business is it of the critic or reader whether I am handsome or ugly, come from an ancient nobility or am not of gentle birth, whether I am good or wicked, crawl at the feet of the mighty or do not even exchange bows with them, whether I gamble at cards and so on. My future biographer, if God sends me a biographer, will concern himself with this.

PUSHKIN, 1830




CONTENTS


Cover (#uf5af31a6-d9c6-53c9-b39e-a28c953f6fb7)

Title Page (#u30626c63-5232-58c9-be9c-6e2c6d1242ec)

Dedication (#u461fc24d-185d-521b-9d32-0d3839f56b94)

Epigraph (#u9e9d8271-e7ee-5409-8401-92f923eccf0f)

Family Trees (#uf1787c22-ab71-5f3c-bf80-fc21ea17b057)

Maps (#u5c5ddd7c-0b7c-5609-850a-c3cc82496db1)

Prologue (#u1a59ac2b-5737-5f27-be2f-5c5fb5ad24ce)

1 Ancestry and Childhood, 1799–1811 (#u6b993431-e910-5e40-ba82-60f74575fafe)

2 The Lycée, 1811–17 (#u28480fb0-dca6-5d3c-b63b-4df20497f1a2)

3 St Petersburg, 1817–20: I Literature and (#ud45c209f-f3cf-556b-b673-b226277b1340)

4 St Petersburg, 1817–20: II Onegin’s Day (#uf845baa9-12f5-5c52-af40-5d4947ced148)

5 St Petersburg, 1817–20: III Triumph (#u42b26451-6580-51bf-a789-02338d598c31)

6 The Caucasus and Crimea, 1820 (#u84d84af2-6751-58ce-a503-6e6ed8d88088)

7 Kishinev, 1820–23 (#u6b6adb76-2de8-5dff-b65c-78cae0a34bc7)

8 Odessa, 1823–24 (#u4d4c7ab7-2586-5dce-b0d6-ac1df303a294)

9 Mikhailovskoe, 1824–26 (#litres_trial_promo)

10 In Search of a Wife, 1826–29 (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Courtship, 1828–31 (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Married Life, 1831–33 (#litres_trial_promo)

13 The Tired Slave, 1833–34 (#litres_trial_promo)

14 A Sea of Troubles, 1834–36 (#litres_trial_promo)

15 The Final Chapter, 1836–37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

List of Abbreviations (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Dates, Currency and Ranks (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




FAMILY TREES (#ulink_bfc863ec-1389-557f-b9e0-24d46dc2bf53)















MAPS (#ulink_5006a2cf-83a5-597b-b375-27700e44bb71)















PROLOGUE (#ulink_5891a1ff-f428-56a2-b3e8-efa92e476a53)


By now it is not so much Pushkin, our national poet, as our relationship to Pushkin that has become as it were our national characteristic.

ANDREY BITOV, 1986

‘PUSHKIN IS OUR ALL,’ declared the critic and poet Apollon Grigorev in 1854.


(#litres_trial_promo) His famous remark is perhaps the best expression of Pushkin’s significance, not merely for Russian literature, or even for Russian culture, but for the Russian ethos generally and for Russia as a whole. At the time, however, his was a lone voice. Though Pushkin had been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet during his lifetime, his reputation had begun to sink during his last years. The decline continued after his death in 1837, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the 1850s. In 1855 a petition, noting that monuments to a number of other writers – Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Koltsov, Karamzin and Krylov – had been erected, called for Pushkin to be added to their number. It met with no response. In 1861 Pushkin’s school, the Lycée – which had moved from Tsarskoe Selo to St Petersburg and been renamed the Alexandrine Lycée – celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In conjunction with this a public subscription was opened to erect a statue to Pushkin in Tsarskoe Selo. Three years later less than a fifth of the necessary sum had been subscribed, and interest in the project had lapsed completely. However, by 1869, when the idea was revived by a group of former lycéens, Pushkin’s reputation was on the rise. This time the subscription was successful, raising over 100,000 roubles. The suggestion of Admiral Matyushkin, a schoolfellow of Pushkin, that the monument should be placed in Moscow, the poet’s native city, was accepted, and a site on Strastnaya Square, at the end of Tverskoy Boulevard, was chosen. After three competitions A.M. Opekushin’s design for a statue showing a meditating Pushkin emerged as the winner.

Only after eleven years of procrastination and preparation, however, was the project completed. The unveiling ceremony was planned for 26 May 1880, the eighty-first anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, but the death of Empress Mariya caused it to be postponed until Friday 6 June. At one o’clock that day, after a service in the Strastnoy monastery opposite the site of the monument, the statue was unveiled in the presence of an immense crowd. Cheers rang out, and many wept. ‘Where are the colours, where are the words to convey the intoxication of the triumphal moment?’ wrote one reporter. ‘Those who didn’t see it did not see the populace in one of its best moments of spiritual joyousness.’


(#litres_trial_promo) That evening a banquet, given by the city duma, was followed by a literary-musical evening in the hall of the Noble Assembly. Overtures from operas based on Pushkin’s works were performed; congratulatory telegrams from Tennyson, Victor Hugo and others were read out; Dostoevsky, Turgenev and others gave readings from Pushkin: Turgenev especially being greeted with tumultuous applause.

The next day, 7 June, at a public meeting of the Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature, Turgenev gave an elegant and civilized speech. Pushkin was, he said, repeating Belinsky, Russia’s ‘first artist-poet’. ‘There is no doubt,’ he continued, ‘that he created our poetic, our literary language and that we and our descendants can only follow the path laid down by his genius.’ But in the end he had reluctantly to deny Pushkin the title of ‘a national poet in the sense of a universal poet’, as were Shakespeare, Goethe or Homer. Unlike them, he had had to perform two tasks simultaneously, ‘to establish a language and create a literature’. And, unlike them, he had had the misfortune to die young, without fulfilling his true potential. Turgenev ended his speech by apostrophizing the statue itself. ‘Shine forth, like him, thou noble bronze visage, erected in the very heart of our ancient capital, and announce to future generations our right to call ourselves a great nation, because this nation has given birth, among other great men, to such a man!’, a peroration which was greeted with enthusiasm and loud applause.


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Its reception, however, was completely overshadowed by that given to Dostoevsky’s long, passionate and emotional address the following morning, the third and last day of the celebrations. He began by quoting Gogol’s remark that Pushkin was ‘an extraordinary, and perhaps unique manifestation of the Russian spirit’, and added that he was, too, ‘a prophetic one’. Whereas Turgenev had been unable to rank Pushkin with poets such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky proclaimed his superiority to the ‘Shakespeares, Cervanteses and Schillers’, because of ‘something almost even miraculous’, his ‘universal responsiveness’, a characteristic which he shared with the Russian people. Whereas Shakespeare’s Italians are disguised Englishmen, Pushkin’s Spaniards are Spanish, his Germans German and his Englishmen English. ‘I can positively say that there has never been a poet with so universal a responsiveness as Pushkin, and it is not just his responsiveness, but its astounding depth, the reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of foreign peoples, an almost complete, and hence miraculous reincarnation, because nowhere, in no poet of the entire world has this phenomenon been repeated.’ It is this national characteristic which will eventually enable Russia to save Europe and ‘to pronounce the final word of great, general harmony, of the final brotherly agreement of all nations in accordance with the law of Christ’s Gospel!’ If this seems a presumptuous claim for a land as poor as Russia, ‘we can already point to Pushkin, to the universality and panhumanity of his genius […] In art at least, in artistic creation, he undeniably manifested this universality of the aspiration of the Russian spirit.’ Had Pushkin lived longer his message would perhaps have been clearer. ‘But God decreed otherwise. Pushkin died in the full development of his powers, and undoubtedly carried to his grave a certain great mystery,’ Dostoevsky concluded. ‘And now we must solve this mystery without him.’


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Screams and cries were heard from the audience. A number of people fainted; a student burst through the throng and fell in hysterics at Dostoevsky’s feet where he lost consciousness. At the end of the session a hundred young women, pushing Turgenev aside, made their way on to the stage bearing a huge laurel wreath, nearly five feet in diameter, and placed it round the author’s neck. It bore the inscription ‘For the Russian woman, about whom you said so much that was good!’ Late that evening Dostoevsky took a cab to Tverskaya Square, placed the wreath at the foot of the granite pedestal on which the statue stood, and, stepping back a pace, bowed to the ground.


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Dostoevsky’s speech had little to do with the reality of Pushkin’s work: he had, rather, unscrupulously made use of the other’s reputation to propagate his own belief in Russia’s messianic mission. However, it came as a fitting conclusion to what one newspaper referred to as ‘days of a magically poetic fairy-tale’, and others as ‘days of holy ecstasy’ and ‘the “holy week” of the Russian intelligentsia’. Some witnesses experienced something akin to a religious conversion, one reporter writing, ‘It was as if the atmosphere surrounding the celebration caught fire and was lit by an iridescent radiance. One’s heart beat faster, more joyfully, one’s thoughts became bright and lucid, and one’s whole being opened up to impressions and emotions that would have been incomprehensible and strange given other less elevating circumstances. Some kind of moral miracle took place, a moral shock that stirred one’s innermost soul.’


(#litres_trial_promo) But it also established a new attitude to Pushkin: from now on he was not merely a poet superior to all others, but also was no longer a man; he had become a symbol, a myth, an icon.

By 1899, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the state had taken account of the potency of the poet’s image, and organized for the occasion an immense celebration throughout the Russian empire. Busts and portraits were mass-produced, and schoolchildren given free copies of his works, together with bars of chocolate stamped with his picture. The Pushkin of 1899 was far removed from the prophetic, miraculously responsive Pushkin of 1880; he was a solid, upright, moral citizen, a firm patriot and a loyal supporter of autocracy. In 1937 the Soviet state launched an even more massive celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. His works were recruited to assist the drive towards universal literacy in the Soviet Union, while his image was tailored to fit Soviet ideology. ‘Pushkin is completely ours, Soviet, for the Soviet state inherited everything that is best in our people, and itself is the embodiment of the best aspirations of our people,’ wrote Pravda.


(#litres_trial_promo) The myth had now become the basis for a cult – at times uncomfortably close to the Stalin cult – and Pushkin himself a quasi-divine figure, not only ‘creator of the Russian literary language, father of new Russian literature, a genius who enriched humanity with his works’,


(#litres_trial_promo) but also a proto-Marxist who espoused the cause of liberty and of the common people; a man who gilded everything he touched and was without fault in every aspect of his life. Most recently, the celebrations of 1999 have enlisted Pushkin in the service of capitalism and commercial enterprise. The Bank of Russia brought out a number of commemorative silver and gold coins; the twenty-five-rouble silver has on its reverse ‘a picture of A.S. Pushkin holding a writing book and a goose-quill in his hands, in the background to the right – personages of his works of literature’.


(#litres_trial_promo) His portrait was to be seen in shop windows, on the sides of buses and trams, on billboards, boxes of matches, vodka bottles and T-shirts, while Coca-Cola ran an advertisement featuring lines from his most famous love lyric, ‘I recollect a wondrous moment’. And the Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, when condemning in language reminiscent of the Cold War western intervention in Yugoslavia, added that NATO had foolishly ignored Pushkin’s lessons on the Balkans – thus preserving the poet’s reputation, acquired in the Soviet era, for being a genius in every sphere.


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Of course, in one sense the myth is justified: Pushkin is Russia’s greatest poet, the composer of a large body of magnificent lyrics, extraordinarily diverse both in theme and treatment; of a number of great narrative poems – Ruslan and Lyudmila, The Gypsies, Poltava and The Bronze Horseman – and of a unique novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. He reformed Russian poetic language: in his hands it became a powerful, yet flexible instrument, with a diapason stretching from the solemnly archaic to the cadences of everyday speech. The aim of this biography, however, is, in all humility, to free the complex and interesting figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth. It concerns itself above all with the events of his life: though the appearance of his main works is noted, and the works themselves are commented on briefly, literary analysis has been eschewed, as being the province of the critic, rather than the biographer.

* (#ulink_82453d32-cfae-565b-867a-34fca7d4bc7d) He is presumably referring to Pushkin’s remarks on the Polish revolt of 1830, particularly the poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’.




1 ANCESTRY AND CHILDHOOD 1799–1811 (#ulink_ccc069a9-52a9-5f0b-b677-0fd23b461ef4)


Lack of respect for one’s ancestors is the first sign of barbarism and immorality.

VIII, 42

A LEKSANDR PUSHKIN was born in Moscow on Thursday 26 May 1799, in a ‘half-brick and half-wooden house’ on a plot of land situated on the corner of Malaya Pochtovaya Street and Gospitalny Lane.


(#litres_trial_promo) This was in the eastern suburb known as the German Settlement, to which foreigners had been banished in 1652. Though distant from the centre, it was, up to the fire of 1812, a fashionable area, ‘the faubourg Saint-Germain of Moscow’.


(#litres_trial_promo) On 8 June he was baptized in the parish church, the Church of the Epiphany on Elokhovskaya Square.


(#ulink_f9d50f0b-7e6d-56c7-9e35-5ebbfa238950) And that autumn his parents, Sergey and Nadezhda, took him and his sister Olga – born in December 1797 – to visit their grandfather Osip Gannibal, Nadezhda’s father, on his estate at Mikhailovskoe, in the Pskov region. Most of the next year was spent in St Petersburg. The Emperor Paul, coming across Pushkin and his nurse, reprimanded the latter for not removing the baby’s cap in the presence of royalty, and proceeded to do so himself. In the autumn they moved back to Moscow, where they were to remain for the duration of Pushkin’s childhood.

Pushkin was proud of both sides of his ancestry: both of his father’s family, the Pushkins, and of his mother’s, the Gannibals. However, the two were so different from one another, antipodes in almost every respect, that to take equal pride in both required the reconciliation of contradictory values. In Pushkin the contradictions were never completely resolved, and the resulting tension would occasionally manifest itself, both in his behaviour and in his work. The most obvious difference lay in the origins of the two families: whereas the Pushkins could hardly have been more Russian, the Gannibals could hardly have been more exotic and more foreign.



On 15 November 1704 an official at the Foreign Office in Moscow passed on to General-Admiral Golovin, the minister, news of a Serbian trader who was employed by the department. ‘Before leaving Constantinople on 21 June,’ he wrote, ‘Master Savva Raguzinsky informed me that according to the order of your excellency he had acquired with great fear and danger to his life from the Turks two little blackamoors and a third for Ambassador Petr Andreevich [Tolstoy], and that he had sent these blackamoors with a man of his for safety by way of land through the Walachian territories.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The boys had just arrived, the writer added; he had dispatched one to the ambassador’s home, and the other two, who were brothers, to the Golovin palace. The younger of these was in the course of time to become General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, cavalier of the orders of St Anne and Alexander Nevsky: Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather.


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Golovin had acquired the two boys as a gift for the tsar, to whom they were presented when he came to Moscow in December 1704. Peter had the elder brother baptized in the Preobrazhensky parish in Moscow, when he was given the name Aleksey, and the patronymic Petrov, from the tsar’s own name. He was trained as a musician and attached to the Preobrazhensky regiment, where he played the hautboy in the regimental band. Unlike his younger brother Abram, he then vanishes from the pages of history.

Abram was from the beginning a favourite of the tsar. On 18 February 1705 the account-book of the royal household notes: ‘to Abram the negro for a coat and trimming were given 15 roubles 45 copecks’.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the spring of 1707 Peter began a campaign against the Swedes. That autumn he celebrated a victory over Charles XII in the Orthodox Pyatnitskaya church in Vilna and simultaneously had his new protégé baptized, acting as his godfather and giving him, like his brother, the patronymic Petrov. And a document of 1709 notes that ‘by the tsar’s order caftans have been made for Joachim the dwarf and Abram the blackamoor, for the Christmas festival, with camisoles and breeches’.


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In 1716 Peter made a second journey to Europe. Abram was one of his retinue, and was left in France together with three other young Russians to study fortification, sapping and mining at a military school. They returned to Russia in 1723, when Abram was commissioned as a lieutenant and posted to Riga. Peter died in February 1725, but his wife, Catherine, who succeeded him, continued his favours to Abram: he was employed to teach the tsar’s grandson – the short-lived Peter II (1715–30; tsar 1727–30) – geometry and fortification. About this time he is first referred to as Gannibal. The acquisition of a surname was a step up the social ladder, differentiating him from the serfs and others known only by Christian name and patronymic; while that he should have called himself after the great Carthaginian general implies no lack of confidence in his own abilities.


(#ulink_7b968950-b036-5504-9380-42004ecd7b79) His fortunes changed after Catherine’s death: under a vague suspicion of political intrigue he was posted, first to Siberia, then to the Baltic coast. It was not until the accession of Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s younger daughter, that his situation improved. In December 1741 she promoted him major-general from lieutenant-colonel, and appointed him military commander of Reval. The following year she made him a large grant of land in the province of Pskov: this included Mikhailovskoe, the estate where Pushkin was to spend two years in exile, from 1824 to 1826. In 1752 he was transferred to St Petersburg, promoted general in 1759, and, in charge of military engineering throughout Russia, oversaw the building of the Ladoga canal and the fortification of Kronstadt. That a black slave, without relations, wealth or property, should have risen to this position is in the highest degree extraordinary: so remarkable, indeed, as to argue a character far beyond the common, one that was more than justified in appropriating the name and reputation of the great Carthaginian. Elizabeth’s death in 1761 put an end to his career; he was retired without promotion or gratuity, and lived for the rest of his life in his country house at Suida, near St Petersburg, where he died on 20 April 1781.

In 1731 he had married Evdokiya Dioper, the daughter of a Dutch sea captain. When she gave birth to a child, who was plainly not his, he divorced her (though bringing up the daughter as his own), and married the daughter of a Swedish officer in the Russian army, Christine von Schöberg. Of his seven children by Christine (three more died in infancy) the eldest son, Ivan, was a distinguished artillery officer who reached the rank of lieutenant-general. Petr, the second son, in old age lived in Pokrovskoe, some four kilometres from Mikhailovskoe, where he occupied himself with the distillation of home-made vodka. ‘He called for vodka,’ Pushkin wrote after visiting him there in 1817. ‘Vodka was brought. Pouring himself a glass, he ordered it to be offered to me, I did not pull a face – and by this seemed to gratify extraordinarily the old Negro. A quarter of an hour later he called for vodka again – and this happened again five or six times before dinner.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He visited him again in 1825, when he was thinking of composing a biography of Abram, a project which later turned into the fictional Blackamoor of Peter the Great. ‘I am counting on seeing my old negro of a Great-Uncle who, I suppose, is going to die one of these fine days, and I must get from him some memoirs concerning my great-grandfather,’ he wrote on 11 August.


(#litres_trial_promo) He carried out the intention a week or so later, bringing back with him to Mikhailovskoe not only the manuscript of Abram’s biography, written by his son-in-law, Adam Rotkirch, but also a short, unfinished note composed by Petr himself, outlining his and his father’s careers.


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Osip, Abram’s third son and Pushkin’s maternal grandfather, was a gunnery officer in the navy, reaching the rank of commander. Careless and dissolute, he ran up large debts, which his father in the end refused to pay and forbade him the house. At the beginning of the 1770s he was posted to Lipetsk, in the Tambov region, where he met and, in November 1773, married Mariya Pushkina.


(#ulink_319b0f04-fb6e-52ad-b4a3-fb48ac938f07) Mariya was generally held to have thrown herself away; her Moscow cousins made up an epigram on the marriage:

There was once a great fool,

Who without Cupid’s permission

Married a Vizapur.

The last line is a hit at Osip’s complexion; it is a reference to the ‘swarthy Vizapur’, Prince Poryus-Vizapursky, an Indian and a well-known eccentric.


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Abram forgave the newly-married Osip; he was allowed to return home, and his daughter Nadezhda, Pushkin’s mother, was born in Suida on 21 June 1775. However, Osip found his father overbearing and family life excruciatingly boring. Leaving a note to say he would never return, he fled to Pskov, where he met a pretty young widow, Ustinya Tolstaya. Having received – so he said – a mysterious message announcing his wife’s death, he married Ustinya in November 1778. Mariya, who was far from dead, lodged a complaint against him; after years of petitions and counter-petitions the marriage to Ustinya was annulled, and the estate of Kobrino outside St Petersburg (which he had now inherited, together with Mikhailovskoe, from his father) made over in trust to Nadezhda. Osip retired in dudgeon to a lonely existence at Mikhailovskoe, where he died in 1806, leaving the estate encumbered with debt.

After the separation Mariya moved to St Petersburg, spending the summers in Kobrino, some thirty miles from the capital. Nadezhda was therefore brought up in far from provincial surroundings. She was well-read, spoke excellent French, and through Mariya’s relations in the capital gained entrée into society, where she became known as ‘the beautiful creole’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Here she met Sergey Pushkin; the couple – the poet’s father and mother – were married on 28 September 1796 in the village church at Voskresenskoe on the Kobrino estate.

Though Pushkin claimed to be able to trace his ancestry on the paternal side back to the times of Alexander Nevsky,


(#ulink_2bc159d2-3404-5c52-bb6f-17d567453e71) the first to bear the family name was Konstantin Pushkin, born in the early fifteenth century, the younger son of a Grigory Pushka. There is a direct line of descent from him to the poet. From this time to the seventeenth century the Pushkins were a minor boyar family whose members never wielded great influence or occupied high positions in the state. They played, however, a lively part during the Time of Troubles (1584–1613), when one Gavrila Pushkin was a prominent supporter of the Pretender Dmitry. Pushkin put him into his historical drama Boris Godunov, remarking, ‘Finding in history one of my ancestors, who played an important role in that unhappy epoch, I brought him on the stage, without worrying about the delicacies of propriety, con amore, but without aristocratic conceit.’


(#litres_trial_promo) But a decline in importance set in during the reign of Peter the Great. By the Table of Ranks, promulgated in 1722, an hierarchical system of rank, consisting of fourteen grades, was imposed on the military, civil and court services. Those in the first eight grades automatically became gentry: henceforth, therefore, social position was to be determined not by birth, but by rank. The more powerful aristocratic families were little affected, but the less important, such as the Pushkins, were submerged in the influx of the newly ennobled. During the eighteenth century no member of the family achieved distinction in any field, though family tradition erroneously maintained that Aleksey Fedorovich Pushkin, Mariya’s father, had been voevoda (governor) of Tambov.

Lev Pushkin, the poet’s paternal grandfather, served in the artillery, reaching the rank of major, before retiring in 1763. He settled in Moscow, in a large house on the Bozhedomka (now Delegatsky Street), in the northern suburbs. The grounds covered nearly fifteen acres, running down to an orangery and large fish-pond, formed by damming up the Neglinnaya River. By his first wife he had three children, and his second, Olga Vasilevna (née Chicherina), was to give him four more: Anna, Vasily, Sergey, and Elizaveta. As was the custom, Vasily and Sergey were entered for the army at a very early age: Vasily was seven and Sergey six when their names first appeared in the list. Actual service with the regiment – the Izmailovsky Life Guards – began much later: for Sergey at the end of the 1780s. He was promoted to ensign in 1794, to lieutenant in 1796, and in 1797 transferred to the chasseur battalion with the rank of captain-lieutenant. Both brothers left the army in the autumn of 1797. Neither was cut out for military service, but it is likely that their retirement was brought about by the changes introduced by the Emperor Paul, who had come to the throne the previous year. A military tyrant and pedant, he forced a tight Prussian uniform on the army; would arbitrarily consign officers to Siberia for a minor fault on parade; and repeatedly threatened to banish fashionable regiments such as the Izmailovsky from St Petersburg to the provinces. The brothers, together with their young wives, both metropolitan beauties, all of whom adored the social whirl, would have viewed with horror the prospect of exile to some dull provincial backwater.

In 1834 Pushkin, looking back with nostalgia on the Moscow of his childhood, before the fire of 1812, wrote:

At one time there really was a rivalry between Moscow and Petersburg. Then in Moscow there were rich nobles who did not work, grandees who had given up the court, and independent, carefree individuals, passionately devoted to harmless slander and inexpensive hospitality; then Moscow was the gathering place for all Russia’s aristocracy, which streamed to it in winter from every province. Brilliant young guardsmen flew thither from Petersburg. Every corner of the ancient capital was loud with music, there were crowds everywhere. Five thousand people filled the hall of the Noble Assembly twice a week. There the young met; marriages were made. Moscow was as famous for its brides as Vyazma for its gingerbread; Moscow dinners became a proverb. The innocent eccentricities of the Muscovites were a sign of their independence. They lived their own lives, amusing themselves as they liked, caring little for the opinion of others. One rich eccentric might build himself on one of the main streets a Chinese house with green dragons and with wooden mandarins under gilded parasols. Another might drive to Marina Roshcha in a carriage covered with pure silver plate. A third might mount five or so blackamoors, footmen and attendants on the rumble of a four-seat sleigh and drive it tandem along the summer street. Alamode belles appropriated Petersburg fashions, putting their indelible imprint on them. From afar haughty Petersburg mocked, but did not interfere with old mother Moscow’s escapades. But where has this noisy, idle, carefree life gone? Where are the balls, the feasts, the eccentrics, the practical jokers? All have vanished.


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He could have mentioned, too, the classically laid-out Yusupov garden, open to the ‘respectable public’, with its alleys and round pond, marble statues and grotto, where he played as a child; the private theatres with troupes of serf actors; or the ‘magic castle’, the Pashkov mansion on Mokhovaya Street, whose garden, full of exotic birds at large or in gilded cages, was known as ‘Eden’: at night it was lit by lanterns, and a private orchestra played there on feast-days.


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For Pushkin’s parents social life was infinitely preferable to the tedium of domesticity. Nadezhda was the dominant partner. Beautiful, charming, frivolous and – outwardly at least – always good-humoured, she was strong-willed and could be despotic, both to her husband and her children. She was cool towards Pushkin, preferring first Olga, then his younger brother Lev. When angry, she sometimes would not speak to him for weeks, or even months. Once, annoyed by his habit of rubbing his hands together, she tied them behind his back and starved him for a day; since he was always losing his handkerchiefs, she sewed one to the shoulder of his jacket like an epaulette, and forced him to wear the garment in public.

She was incurably restless: never satisfied with her surroundings, she drove the family from lodging to lodging, or, if a move was impossible, continually moved the furniture and changed the wallpapers, turning a bedroom into a dining-room, a study into a drawing-room. On returning to Moscow they lodged in P.M. Volkov’s house on the corner of Chistoprudny Boulevard and Bolshoy Kharitonevsky Lane: here Pushkin’s brother Nikolay was born on 27 March 1801. A year later they moved up the lane into a wooden house on Prince N.B. Yusupov’s property, where they stayed for a year and a half; then, forfeiting six months’ rent, in the summer of 1803, they moved down the lane again into accommodation belonging to Count A.L. Santi. ‘It is difficult to understand,’ one historian writes, ‘how the Pushkins managed to fit into the cramped confines of Santi’s court; Santi had up to sixteen house serfs, Sergey Lvovich from four to thirteen; besides them in the court lived the civil servant Petrov and the district surveyor Fedotov, while another of Santi’s serfs, the women’s dressmaker Berezinsky, squeezed in somewhere.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, the Pushkins remained there over two years; here Lev was born on 9 April 1805. But, before Pushkin left for boarding-school in 1811, they would move eight more times, criss-crossing Moscow from east to west and back again.

Sergey, Pushkin’s father, was short and stout, with a nose like a parrot’s beak. He was a weak character, easily dominated by his more forceful wife, and inclined to lachrymose emotional outbursts. At the same time he was hot-tempered and irritable, and would fly into rages at the slightest provocation, with the result that his children feared, rather than loved him. He had a poor head for finances, knew nothing of his estates – he visited Boldino, his property in Nizhny Novgorod province, twice in his lifetime – and refused to have anything to do with their management: everything was left in the hands of inefficient or dishonest stewards. His income was consequently insecure and continually decreased. Though, like his father, he was hospitable to his friends, he showed a remarkable lack of generosity towards his children and took little interest in them. He was fond of French literature, and an inveterate theatre-goer, but his main preoccupation was his social life. He was at his best in some salon, elaborately polite and delicately witty, throwing off a stream of French puns, or inscribing elegant sentiments in French verse or prose in ladies’ albums.

In January 1802, after the death of the Emperor Paul, he had returned to government service, taking up a post in the Moscow military commissariat. In 1812, when Napoleon approached Moscow, he was transferred to Orel, and given the task of organizing supplies for a reserve army under the command of General Lobanov-Rostovsky. The latter, a hot-tempered and ruthless disciplinarian, soon found fault with him, and in February 1813 requested the head of the commissariat, ‘for neglect of duty and disobedience of my instructions, to remove Pushkin from his present position as incompetent and incapable and to reprimand him severely’.


(#litres_trial_promo) At this time the Russian armies had begun to move rapidly westwards, and it was not until the following year, when they stood outside Warsaw, that Sergey was relieved of his command: his successor found him reading a French novel in his office. He retired with the rank of civil councillor in January 1817.

The gap left in the children’s lives by the parents’ lack of attention was filled by their grandmother, Mariya Gannibal. At the beginning of 1801 she moved to Moscow and settled close to the Pushkins. She spent most of each day with her grandchildren and from 1805 lived with the family. She took over the running of the house and saw to the education of the children, teaching them their letters, and engaging governesses and tutors for them. In 1800 Nadezhda had sold Kobrino, no longer useful as a summer residence after the move to Moscow. One of the women on the estate, Arina Rodionovna, though freed from serfdom, had preferred to come to Moscow and become Olga’s nurse. She introduced the children to the world of Russian legends and fairy-tales, while Mariya related family history to them:

From my Moscow grandmother I love

To hear stories of ancestors,

And of the distant past.


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In early childhood Pushkin was an excessively plump, silent infant, clumsy and awkward, who hated taking exercise, and, if forced to go for a walk, would often sit down in the middle of the street in protest. His character and physique changed markedly around the age of seven. In November 1804 Mariya Gannibal bought Zakharovo, an estate of nearly two and a half thousand acres with sixty male serfs, situated some thirty miles to the east of Moscow. From 1805 to 1809 the family spent the summers there. Instead of the continual displacement from one rented apartment to another, Zakharovo provided relative permanency; instead of the cramped surroundings of a Moscow lodging, the children had separate quarters, where they lived with the current governess or tutor. And most of all, of course, instead of the Moscow streets or the confined expanse of the Yusupov gardens, there was the countryside, the large park with its lake, its alleys and groves of birches. In these new surroundings Pushkin became an active and mischievous child, at times difficult to control. Here, in the summer of 1807, the six-year-old Nikolay fell severely ill – though he was still able to put his tongue out at Pushkin when the latter visited his sickbed. However, his condition worsened, and he died on 30 July. Pushkin was much affected by the loss: ‘Nikolay’s death’ is one of the few notes relating to this period in a sketchy autobiographical plan he drew up in 1830.


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As was usual at the time, the education of Olga and Aleksandr was entrusted to a series of foreign émigrés, who had in most cases little to recommend them as teachers other than their nationality and whom, for the most part, the children disliked. Their first tutor was the Comte de Montfort, a man of some culture, a musician and artist; he was followed by M. Rousselot, who wrote French verse, and then by a M. Chédel, of whom little is known other than that he was sacked for playing cards with the servants. Miss Bailey, one of Olga’s governesses, was supposed to teach them English, but failed to do so, while a German governess refused to speak any language except Russian. They went to dancing classes at their cousins, the Buturlins, on Malaya Pochtovaya Street, at the Trubetskoys, also cousins, on the Pokrovka, and at the Sushkovs, on the Bolshaya Molchanovka – their daughter, Sonya, a year younger than Pushkin, is supposed to have been the object of his first love. On Thursdays they went to the children’s dances arranged by the celebrated Moscow dancing master Iogel.


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From early years Pushkin had a passion for reading; by ten, according to his sister, he had read Plutarch, the Iliad and the Odyssey in French, and would rummage among his father’s books – mainly consisting of French eighteenth-century authors – in search of interesting volumes. The atmosphere in their house was a cultured, literary one. Sergey read Molière to the children and wrote French verse; his brother, Vasily, was an established poet, published in periodicals, and acquainted with many of the authors of the day, including Karamzin, Zhukovsky and Batyushkov; a more distant relative, Major-General Aleksey Mikhailovich Pushkin, who had translated Molière, was a frequent guest. Among the regular visitors to Nadezhda’s salon were Ivan Dmitriev, the poet and fabulist, Minister of Justice from 1810 to 1814, an unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Sergey’s sister Anna; the ‘pretty, clever and talented’ French pianist Adélaide Percheron de Mouchy, later wife of the émigré Irish composer John Field;


(#litres_trial_promo) and the French novelist Count Xavier de Maistre, born in Savoy, who had followed Suvorov back to Russia after the Italian campaign of 1800 and had joined the Russian army.


(#ulink_9df1af37-1e30-5224-8516-6086464a5b6b) An amateur artist, he painted a miniature of Nadezhda on ivory.

Perhaps one should not take too literally Sergey’s story that the six-year-old Pushkin abandoned his toys to sit listening to his father’s conversation with Karamzin, not taking his eyes from the visitor’s face, all the more so since Karamzin did not frequent the Pushkins; nor can one accept without reservation the remark of an earlier biographer, that the child ‘listened attentively to their judgements and conversation, knew the coryphaei of our literature not only through their works, but through their living speech, which expressed the character of each, and often involuntarily but indelibly impressed itself on the young mind’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But at the very least the atmosphere could not have been more favourable to the formation of the desire to write poetry: Pushkin would never have to struggle with the incomprehension of his family, or the view that the occupation of poet was not one to be taken seriously.

At seven he was found awake in bed late at night; when asked why he was not asleep, he replied that he was making up poems. At ten he improvised little comedies in French and performed them in front of his sister; one was hissed off the stage by the audience, and the author composed a self-critical epigram on the event:

‘Tell me, why was The Filcher

Hissed by the pit?’

‘Alas! it’s because the poor author

Filched it from Molière.’


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A little later, having discovered Voltaire, and read La Henriade, he composed a parodic emulation: La Tolyade, a comic-heroic poem in six cantos, depicting a battle between male and female dwarfs, the hero of which is King Dagobert’s dwarf Toly. Olga’s governess impounded the notebook containing the poem and showed it to the tutor, M. Chédel, who read the first few lines and laughed heartily. Pushkin burst into tears and in a rage threw the manuscript into the stove.

‘I’ve no idea what will become of my eldest grandson: he’s a clever boy and loves books, but he’s a bad student and rarely prepares his lessons properly,’ Mariya Gannibal told her friends.


(#litres_trial_promo) His dislike for his tutors was not conducive to diligence in any subject, but he found arithmetic particularly incomprehensible and, his sister recollected, ‘would weep bitter tears over the first four rules, especially that of division’.


(#litres_trial_promo) As the calculations scribbled here and there on his manuscripts demonstrate, the rules always remained something of a puzzle to him. Foreign tutors were, it was clear, not the answer to the problem of his education, and it was decided to send him to school. A private Jesuit boarding-school in St Petersburg was chosen, and in February 1811 Sergey and Nadezhda travelled to the capital to enter Pushkin as a pupil there. However, a family friend, Aleksandr Turgenev, suggested that the new Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, which was to open in the autumn, might be a more suitable establishment, all the more so as its director was to be Vasily Malinovsky: he and his brothers, Aleksey and Pavel, were well known to the Pushkins; indeed Pavel had been one of the witnesses at their marriage in 1796. These considerations were supported by a more practical one: while education at the Jesuit boarding-school would put a strain on the family’s finances, that at the Lycée would be free. On 1 March Sergey sent a petition to the Minister of Education, Count A.K. Razumovsky, requesting that A.S. Pushkin should be admitted to the Lycée, and stating that ‘he had been educated in his parents’ house, where he had acquired initial knowledge of the grammar of the Russian and French languages, of arithmetic, geography, history and drawing’.


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* (#ulink_0a5fa524-abe9-5ba5-b5fe-fe0d8df04017) Pulled down in 1837; the present church on the same site in what is now Bauman Square was finished in 1845.

* (#ulink_6e83b4d8-0d79-54e3-88ec-bb33b970f64b) Abram’s origins are obscure. In a petition of 1742 he wrote, ‘I … am from Africa, of the high nobility there, was born in the town of Logon in the domain of my father, who besides had under him two other towns’ (Teletova, 170). And a short biography of Abram, written in German, probably in the late 1780s, by his son-in-law, Adam Rotkirch, asserts that he ‘was by birth an African Moor from Abyssinia’ (Rukoyu Pushkina, 43). Logon has hence traditionally been placed in Ethiopia. Recently, however, it has been identified with Logone, a town in the north-east corner of the present state of Cameroon: a conjecture which is more in agreement with the sparse evidence than the Ethiopian hypothesis (see Gnammankou, 19–26.) Though Pushkin had a translation of the German biography, he never refers to a specific region when writing of his ancestor’s origins, but remarks, for instance, that he was ‘stolen from the shores of Africa’ (VI, 530). However, his friend Aleksey Vulf mentions in his journal that on 15 September 1827 Pushkin showed him the first two chapters of The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, ‘in which the main character represents his great-grandfather Gannibal, the son of an Abyssinian emir, captured by the Turks’ (Lyubovny byt, I, 268).

* (#ulink_e22dfa07-c340-5448-9826-79ab1150f8e5) There is no h in the Russian alphabet; in transliteration g (or kh) is substituted for it. The assertion in Rotkirch’s biography that Abram’s princely father ‘proudly derived his descent in a direct line from the lineage of the renowned Hannibal, the terror of Rome’ (Rukoyu Pushkina, 43) is plainly ridiculous, though it might have suited Abram for this to be believed.

* (#ulink_79ea8ce2-af90-5efd-8442-18d887801814) This marriage would make Osip’s daughter, Nadezhda, and her husband, Sergey Pushkin, distant cousins, sharing a common ancestor: Petr Pushkin (1644–92), Nadezhda’s maternal great-great-grandfather and Sergey’s paternal great-grandfather.

* (#ulink_f85d53a4-bfb0-518e-9063-daeac2069c71) Alexander Nevsky (c.1220–63), canonized in 1547, was prince of Novgorod (1236–52), of Kiev (1246–52) and grand prince of Vladimir (1252–63).

* (#ulink_1032a4a9-81f2-5ad3-acf5-e419a3a51ffa) Tolstoy describes one of Iogel’s dances in War and Peace, book 2, part 1, chapter 12.

* (#ulink_073fad63-7822-5e9b-9413-cad0c58796a6) Author of A Journey round My Room (1794), and younger brother of the more famous Joseph de Maistre, Sardinian ambassador in St Petersburg 1802–17, best known for his St Petersburg Dialogues [Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg] (1821).




2 THE LYCÉE 1811–17 (#ulink_3764e59f-6bd5-589d-b00b-3d51fa965c5e)


In those days, when in the Lycée gardens

I serenely flourished,

Read Apuleius eagerly

But did not read Cicero,

In those days, in mysterious vales,

In spring, to the cry of swans,

Near waters gleaming in stillness,

The Muse began to visit me.

Eugene Onegin, VIII, i

IN 1710 PETER THE GREAT GRANTED to his consort Catherine an estate some fifteen miles to the south of Petersburg, a locality which later acquired the name Tsarskoe Selo – Tsar’s Village. Catherine replaced the old wooden mansion with a small stone palace, laid out a park and a vegetable garden, and constructed greenhouses, an orangery and a menagerie. On her death in 1727 the estate passed to her daughter Elizabeth, whose favourite residence it soon became. To begin with she lacked the means to improve it, but after her accession in 1741 she called on her architects to turn it into a Russian Versailles. In 1752–6 the palace was completely rebuilt by the Italian architect Rastrelli, who later designed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Rastrelli’s Catherine or Great Palace is a magnificent three-storey Baroque edifice with a façade of colossal length – 306 metres – and an immense cour d’honneur formed by a low, single-storeyed semi-circle of service buildings pierced by three fine wrought-iron gates. The park was laid out in the formal Dutch style, with ‘fish canals, avenues, neat bowers, alleys, espaliers, and “close boskets with mossy seats”’, and ornamented with pavilions and follies.


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Elizabeth was succeeded by Peter III, Peter the Great’s grandson, who ruled for only six months before being deposed and assassinated. His wife, the German princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who had changed her name on her conversion to Orthodoxy, then came to the throne as Catherine II. Her passion for Tsarskoe Selo was even greater than that of Elizabeth, and, like her predecessor, she completely changed the nature of the palace and its grounds. The Dutch style was swept away and the park recast in the English fashion. ‘I love to distraction these gardens in the English style – their curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes. My Anglomania predominates over my plutomania,’ she wrote to Voltaire in 1772.


(#litres_trial_promo) She employed as landscape gardener an Englishman, John Bush, head of a noted nursery garden at Hackney, who came out to Russia in the late 1770s. New dams and ponds were created, and the park wall replaced by a canal. ‘At the moment I have taken possession of mister Cameron, a Scot by nationality, a Jacobite by profession, a great designer nurtured by antiquities; together we are fashioning a terraced garden with baths beneath, a gallery above; that will be so beautiful, beautiful.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Cameron remodelled much of the interior of the Catherine Palace, built the famous Cameron Gallery: a large, covered Ionic terrace which juts out at right angles from the south-east corner of the palace, on the garden side, and added to the constructions in the park several examples of chinoiserie: a theatre, a bridge on whose balustrade sit four stone Chinamen with parasols, and a village – nineteen little houses surrounding a pagoda. His summer-house in the form of a granite pyramid was a memorial to Catherine’s favourite dogs, three English whippets: Sir Tom Anderson, Zemira and Duchesse, who are buried behind it, on the bank of a small stream. Catherine’s anglomania was catered for by the Marble Bridge, a copy of the Palladian bridge in the grounds at Wilton, and the red-brick Admiralty on the bank of the lake, built in the English Gothic style. The most prominent addition to Tsarskoe Selo in these years, however, was the severely classical Alexander Palace, built in 1792–6 to the designs of the Italian architect Quarenghi for Catherine’s grandson, the future Alexander I. Earlier, in 1789, she had employed a Russian architect, Neelov, to add a wing to the Great Palace for the accommodation of her grandchildren: this stands across the street from the north end of the main building, to which it is connected by a triple-bay arch. In 1811, after a complete renovation, it became the building of the Lycée. The ground floor was occupied by the domestic offices and staff apartments; the dining-room, sickbay, school office and teachers’ common-room were on the first floor; classrooms, reading-room, science laboratory and the school hall on the second; the third was divided into fifty small study-bedrooms with a central corridor, and the gallery over the arch became the library. Games were to be played on the Champ des Roses, so called because it had in Elizabeth’s time been bounded by wild rose bushes, in the south-western corner of the Catherine park. The palace swimming-pool, constructed for the empress’s grandsons in a grove near the Great Pond, with its two bright yellow wooden pavilions in the style of Louis XVI, was taken over by the school a little later. One of the houses built for court functionaries in the time of Elizabeth, on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Pevchesky Lane, just opposite the Lycée, was allotted to the school’s director, Malinovsky. A single-storey wing of this house became the school’s kitchen and bath-house.

Education reform in Russia had begun in 1803, and had had considerable success, both at secondary and university level. Alexander, influenced by Speransky, his principal adviser on internal administration and reform, now wished to establish a school to provide a cadre for the highest ranks of the civil service. His proposal, drawn up originally in 1808 by Speransky, was issued as an imperial decree on 12 August 1810, later ratified by the Senate. The school’s purpose was to be ‘the education of youth especially predestined for important parts of government service’. Among the subjects taught special stress was laid on ‘the moral sciences, under which is to be understood all that knowledge relating to the moral position of man in society and, consequently, the concepts of the system of Civic societies, and of the rights and duties arising therefrom’. ‘Beginning with the most simple concepts of law’, the pupils should be brought to ‘a deep and firm understanding of differing rights and be instructed in the systems of public, private and Russian law’. Teachers were ‘never to allow [pupils] to use words without clear ideas’, and in all subjects were to encourage the ‘exercise of reason’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Corporal punishment was forbidden, which made the Lycée probably unique in its time. There were to be two courses, junior and senior, each lasting for three years.


(#ulink_f0c6b137-5d18-5f2c-98d6-146a5e991e30) The first intake would consist of not less than twenty, and not more than fifty children of the nobility between the ages of ten and twelve; on graduation the students would be appointed, depending on achievement, to a civil service rank between the fourteenth class – the lowest – that of collegial registrar, and the ninth, that of titular councillor.

The St Petersburg Gazette of 11 July 1811 announced that children wishing to enter the Imperial Tsarskoe Selo Lycée should present themselves to the Minister of Education, A.K. Razumovsky, on 1 August together with a birth certificate, attestation of nobility, and testimonial of excellent behaviour. They would be medically examined, and there would be an examination conducted by the minister himself and the director of the Lycée. They would be expected to have: ‘a) some grammatical knowledge of the Russian and either the French or the German language, b) a knowledge of arithmetic, at least up to the rule of three, c) an understanding of the general properties of solids, d) some knowledge of the basic fundamentals of geography and e) be able to divide ancient history into its chief epochs and periods and have some knowledge of the most important peoples of antiquity’.


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Sergey Lvovich applied to the commissariat for a month’s leave to take his son to the examination. Permission was slow in coming and, realizing he might be detained in St Petersburg for more than a month, he entrusted Pushkin to his brother, Vasily, who was himself travelling to the capital at that time. Together with Vasily’s mistress, Anna Vorozheikina, they set off in the third week of July. Pushkin’s sister, Olga, gave him as a parting present a copy of La Fontaine’s Fables, which he left behind on the table. His great-aunt, Varvara Chicherina, and his aunt, Anna Pushkina, together gave him a hundred roubles ‘to buy nuts’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Vasily immediately borrowed the money and never returned it: behaviour that long rankled with Pushkin; he mentions it, albeit jokingly, in a letter of 1825.

Vasily had published his first verses in 1793, but since then he had produced little: only twenty poems over one five-year period, causing Batyushkov to remark that he had ‘a sluggish Muse’.


(#litres_trial_promo) She was, however, eventually stirred into action by the heated contemporary debate on literary language and style, and inspired a number of poems in which Vasily enthusiastically ridiculed the conservative faction. Indeed, he was now journeying to St Petersburg to publish two epistles in reply to a veiled personal attack on him by the leader of the conservatives, Admiral A.S. Shishkov, who had recently written of his opponents that they had ‘learnt their piety from Candide and their morality and erudition in the back streets of Paris’.


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(#litres_trial_promo) Though in childhood Pushkin had some respect for his uncle as a poet, his attitude towards him would soon settle into one of amused, if affectionate irony. Indeed, Vasily’s verse scarcely reaches mediocrity, with the exception of A Dangerous Neighbour, a racy little epic only 154 lines in length, written in lively and colourful colloquial Russian. Though too risqué to be published – it did not appear in Russia until 1901 – it circulated widely in manuscript. Pushkin gave the poem a nod of acknowledgement in Eugene Onegin; among the guests at Tatyana’s name-day party is Vasily’s hero,

My first cousin, Buyanov

Covered in fluff, in a peaked cap

(As, of course, he is known to you).

(V, xxvi)

The second line is a quotation from Vasily’s poem; Buyanov, his progeny, would of course be Pushkin’s cousin.

On arrival in St Petersburg the party put up at the Hotel Bordeaux, but Vasily complained that he was being ‘mercilessly fleeced’, and they moved to an apartment ‘in the house of the merchant Kuvshinnikov’ on the bank of the Moika canal, near the Konyushenny Bridge.


(#litres_trial_promo) Taking his nephew with him, Vasily made a round of visits to literary acquaintances. At I.I. Dmitriev’s, before reciting A Dangerous Neighbour, composed earlier that year, he told Pushkin to leave the room, only to receive the embarrassing retort: ‘Why send me out? I know it all. I’ve heard it all already.’


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The medical took place on 1 August; the examination, conducted by Count Razumovsky, the Minister of Education, I.I. Martynov, the director of the department of education, and Malinovsky, the headmaster of the Lycée, was held a week later in Razumovsky’s house on the Fontanka. While waiting to be called in, Pushkin met another candidate, Ivan Pushchin. ‘My first friend, friend without price!’ he wrote of him in 1825.


(#litres_trial_promo) Both soon learnt that they had been accepted, though Malinovsky’s private note on Pushkin read: ‘Empty-headed and thoughtless. Excellent at French and drawing, lazy and backward at arithmetic.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The two met frequently while waiting for the beginning of term. Vasily occasionally took them boating; more often, however, they would go to the Summer Gardens – a short walk from the apartment on the Moika – with Anna Vorozheikina and play there, sometimes in the company of two other future lycéens, Konstantin Gurev and Sergey Lomonosov. They were measured for the school uniform, which was supplied free to the pupils: for ordinary wear blue frock-coats with red collars and red trousers; for Sundays, walking out, and ceremonial occasions a blue uniform coat with a red collar and silver (for the junior course) or gold (for the senior) tabs, white trousers, tie and waistcoat, high polished boots and a three-cornered hat. Later the boots were abandoned, the white waistcoat and trousers replaced by blue, and the hat by a peaked cap.

On 9 October Pushkin and four other pupils with their relatives travelled to Tsarskoe Selo and had lunch with Malinovsky. In the evening they parted from their families and went across to the Lycée where they were allocated rooms. Pushkin’s was number fourteen, on the palace side. Next to him, in thirteen, was Pushchin. In his room he had an iron bedstead with brass knobs, a mattress stuffed with horse-hair and covered in leather, a chest of drawers, a mirror, a wash-stand, a chair and a desk with inkwell, candlestick and snuffer. In the next few days the other pupils – thirty in all – joined them.


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The ceremonial opening of the new school took place on 19 October 1811. It began with a service in the palace church, to whose choir access could be gained over the arch, through the school library. The priest then proceeded to the Lycée, where he sprinkled the pupils and the establishment with holy water. Between two columns in the school hall had been placed a table covered with a red cloth with a gold fringe. On it lay the imperial charter of the Lycée. The boys lined up in three ranks on one side of the table with their teachers facing them on the other. The guests – senior officials from St Petersburg and their wives – occupied chairs in the body of the hall. When all were present the emperor, the empress, the dowager empress, Grand Duke Constantine and Grand Duchess Anna (Alexander’s brother and sister) were invited in by Razumovsky and took their places in the front row.

The school charter was now read by Martynov. This was followed by a speech from the director, Malinovsky, whose indistinct utterance soon lost the audience’s attention. It was regained, however, by Aleksandr Kunitsyn, the young teacher of moral and political science, although he purported to address the boys, rather than the audience. ‘Leaving the embraces of your parents, you step beneath the roof of this sacred temple of learning,’ he began, and went on, in a rhetoric full of fervent patriotism, to inspire them with the duties of the citizen and soldier. ‘In these deserted forests, which once resounded to victorious Russian arms, you will learn of the glorious deeds of heroes, overcoming enemy armies. On these rolling plains you will be shown the blazing footsteps of your ancestors, who strove to defend the tsar and the Fatherland – surrounded by examples of virtue, will you not burn with an ardent love for it, will you not prepare yourselves to serve the Fatherland?’


(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander was so pleased with this speech that he decorated Kunitsyn with the Vladimir Cross. The pupils were now called up one by one and introduced to the emperor, who, after a short speech in return, invited the empresses to inspect the Lycée. They returned to watch the lycéens eating their dinner. The dowager empress approached little Kornilov, one of the youngest boys, and, putting her hand on his shoulder, asked him whether the soup was good. ‘Oui, monsieur,’ he replied, earning himself a smile from royalty and a nickname from his fellows.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the evening, by the light of the lampions placed round the building and of the illuminated shield bearing the imperial arms which flickered on the balcony, the boys had a snowball fight: winter had come early that year. The next day Malinovsky made known a number of regulations he had received from the Minister of Education.


(#ulink_8c263b70-3db4-59f9-bb3c-71d70fd5fce0) The most significant, as far as the boys were concerned, and which caused several to break into tears, was that they would not be permitted to leave the Lycée throughout the six years of their education. Even their vacation – the month of July – would have to be spent at the school. Parents and relatives would be allowed to visit them only on Sundays or other holidays.

The school day began at six, when a bell awoke the pupils. After prayers there were lessons from seven to nine. Breakfast – tea and white rolls – was followed by a walk, lessons from ten to twelve, another walk, and dinner at one: three courses – four on special occasions – accompanied, to begin with, by half a glass of porter, but, as Pushchin remarks, ‘this English system was later done away with. We contented ourselves with native kvas or water.’


(#litres_trial_promo) From two to three there was drawing or calligraphy, lessons from three to five, tea, a third walk, and preparation or extra tuition until the bell rang for supper – two courses – at half past eight. After supper the boys were free for recreation until evening prayers at ten, followed by bed. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there were fencing or dancing lessons in the evening, from six until supper-time.

Several servants, each responsible for a number of boys, looked after the domestic side of school life. Prokofev was a retired sergeant, who had served in the army under Catherine. The Pole Leonty Kemersky, though dishonest, was a favourite, since he had set up a tuck-shop, where the boys could buy sweets, drink coffee or chocolate, or even – strictly against the school rules – a glass of liqueur. Young Konstantin Sazonov looked after Pushkin. Much to the astonishment of the school, on 18 March 1816 the police turned up and arrested him on suspicion of half a dozen murders committed in or around Tsarskoe Selo, to which he promptly confessed. A few weeks later, when in the Lycée sickbay under the care of the genial Dr Peschl, Pushkin composed an epigram:

On the morrow, with a penny candle,

I will appear before the holy icon:

My friend! I am still alive,

Though was once beneath death’s sickle:

Sazonov was my servant

And Peschl – my physician.


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Vasily Malinovsky was forty-six when he became director of the Lycée. He was an odd choice, since he had no previous experience in education. He had been a diplomat, but had held no post since 1801. While with the embassy in London, he had published A Discourse on Peace and War, which anticipated Woodrow Wilson in suggesting that peace could be maintained by the establishment of a league of nations. And in 1802, like others at this time, he had put forward a project for the emancipation of the serfs – a reform which was only put into effect in 1861. He carried his liberal idealism into his new post, being responsible for the ban on corporal punishment. But his tenure was short-lived: he died, after a sudden illness, in March 1814. His death was followed by the period called by Pushkin ‘anarchy’, and by Pushchin ‘the interregnum’,


(#litres_trial_promo) when the school had no director. It was governed sometimes by a committee of the teachers, sometimes by a succession of individual teachers, each abruptly appointed as temporary director by Razumovsky and as abruptly dismissed after some disagreement or minor scandal.

Anarchy came to an end in March 1816, when the forty-year-old Egor Antonovich Engelhardt became the school’s director. Born in Riga and of German-Italian parentage, Engelhardt enjoyed the patronage of Alexander, and on occasion was to make use of this to the school’s advantage. Unlike Malinovsky, he had some qualifications for the post, having been the director of the St Petersburg Pedagogic Institute. But whereas Malinovsky’s aim had been to form virtuous individuals, imbued with high civic ideals, ‘Engelhardt was chiefly concerned with turning his charges into “des cavaliers galants et des chevaliers servants”.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the social life of the pupils outside the walls of the Lycée – absent before – was one of Engelhardt’s main concerns. He entertained them at his house in the evenings, took them for walks and drives in the neighbourhood, organized picnics and skating parties, providing, on all these occasions, feminine company from his own family or from those of friends and acquaintances in Tsarskoe Selo: ‘In a word, our director understood that forbidden fruit can be a dangerous attraction, and that freedom, guided by an experienced hand, can preserve youth from many mistakes,’ wrote Pushchin sagely.


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Above all he was concerned to establish ‘amical relations’ between himself and the lycéens, guiding himself by the maxim that ‘only through a heartfelt sympathy with the joys and sorrows of one’s pupils can one win their love’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Many succumbed to his wooing; for some he became a surrogate father, and the correspondence between himself and a number of former pupils, lasting in some cases until his death in 1862, testifies to the sincere affection in which he was held. Others, however, held themselves aloof. Among these was Pushkin. ‘Why Pushkin rejected all the attentions of the director and his wife remains an unsolved mystery for me,’ wrote Pushchin forty years later.


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The lycéens, thrown intimately together, isolated from outside influence, never leaving the Lycée from one year’s end to the next, formed a close-knit society: indeed, they referred to themselves as ‘a nation’, emphasizing their independence and unity. An extraordinarily strong esprit de corps bound the group together, persisting long after they had quitted the Lycée. For most, 19 October remained a significant anniversary throughout their lives. Pushkin had known little parental affection, and was now, in addition, cut off from his family: though his mother visited him in January 1812, he next saw her in April 1814, after the family had moved to St Petersburg. For him, more than for most of his companions, the Lycée nation became a replacement for the family. The bond was too strong for him to accept, as others did, Engelhardt as a surrogate parent.

Of his tutors only Aleksandr Kunitsyn, the young teacher of moral and political science whose speech had so impressed Alexander, had a lasting influence: his teachings on natural law, on the rights and obligations of the citizen, the relationship between the individual and society are reflected in Pushkin’s work. ‘He created us, nourished our flame/He placed the cornerstone,/He lit the pure lamp,’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin wrote of him in 1825; and, sending him in January 1835 a copy of his History of the Pugachev Rebellion, inscribed it ‘To Aleksandr Petrovich Kunitsyn from the Author as a token of deep respect and gratitude’.


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Other than as a poet, he had an undistinguished school career. In November 1812 the academic and moral supervisor, Martyn Piletsky, wrote of him:

His talents are more brilliant than fundamental, his mind more ardent and subtle than deep. His application to study is moderate, as diligence has not yet become a virtue with him. Having read a great number of French books, often inappropriate to his age, he has filled his memory with many successful passages of famous authors; he is also reasonably well-read in Russian literature, and knows many fables and light verses. His knowledge is generally superficial, though he is gradually accustoming himself to a more thorough mode of thought. Pride and vanity, which can make him shy, a sensibility of heart, ardent outbursts of temper, frivolity and an especial volubility combined with wit are his chief qualities. At the same time his good-nature is evident; recognizing his weaknesses, he is willing, with some success, to accept advice […] In his character generally there is neither constancy nor firmness.


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The comments of the different subject teachers echo Piletsky’s assessment: ‘His reasonable achievement is due more to talent than to diligence’; ‘very lazy, inattentive and badly-behaved in the class’; ‘empty-headed, frivolous, and inclined to temper’.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the list of pupils, ordered according to their deportment, which was drawn up at regular intervals, Pushkin’s place was invariably towards the bottom: twenty-third in 1812; twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth and twenty-sixth in the three following years. His best subjects at school were Russian literature, French literature and fencing. In the final examinations, taken in May 1817, he was judged ‘excellent’ in those three subjects; ‘very good’ in Latin literature and state economics and finances; and ‘good’ in scripture and Biblical studies, in logic and moral philosophy, in natural, private and public law, and in Russian civil and criminal law. He had also studied, his graduation certificate noted, history, geography, statistics, mathematics and the German language.

Of the lycéens he was closest to Pushchin, Delvig, Küchelbecker, and Yakovlev. Pushchin was upright, honest, honourable; a hard-working, intelligent student; liked by all, yet, perhaps, a little imperceptive. His nickname was ‘tall Jeannot’; Pushkin was known as ‘the Frenchman’, for his proficiency in the language and encyclopaedic knowledge of the country’s literature.


(#ulink_d163da5a-fb89-530f-b218-a17cb523c5c1) They are linked in a verse of one of the songs the lycéens composed about each other:

Tall Jeannot

Without knowing how

Makes a million bons mots,

While our Frenchman

Lauds his own taste

With a string of four-letter words.


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Anton Delvig was plump, clumsy and phenomenally lazy. He was a very poor student, continually rebuked for his behaviour: ‘He is rude in his manner, insolent in his speech, and so disobedient and obstinate as to ignore all admonitions and even to laugh when he is reprimanded.’


(#litres_trial_promo) His only interest was Russian literature; he knew a mass of verse by heart. As with Pushkin, his talent for poetry blossomed at the Lycée. He was the first to appear in print, when a poem on the capture of Paris appeared in the Herald of Europe in June 1814. In one Lycée poem – one of the best he ever wrote – dedicated to Pushkin, he prophesies literary immortality for his friend:

Pushkin! Even in the forests he cannot hide himself,

His lyre will betray him with loud singing,

And from the mortals Apollo will carry away

The immortal to rejoicing Olympus.


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The third of the Lycée’s poets was Wilhelm Küchelbecker, in some ways the strangest of all the pupils. Tall and very thin, he had had an attack of St Vitus’s Dance (Sydenham’s chorea) in childhood, which had left him with a facial tic and deaf in one ear. Engelhardt wrote of him: ‘He has read all the books in the world about all the subjects in the world; has much talent, much diligence, much good will, much heart and much feeling, but, alas, with all this he has no taste, tact, grace, moderation or clear aim. However, he is an honest, innocent soul, and the obstinacy he sometimes displays is only the result of a Quixotic honour and virtue with a considerable admixture of vanity.’


(#litres_trial_promo) No other pupil was referred to so often in the lycéens’ songs, or had so many epigrams written about him. In general Küchelbecker bore the attacks stoically, but when Malinovsky threw a plate of soup over his head at dinner he had to be taken to the sickbay with a fever, escaped, and tried to drown himself in the lake. A cartoon in one of the magazines produced by the lycéens shows a boat-load of teachers fishing for him with a boat-hook. His passionate, impractical idealism manifested itself even in his views on literature, in which he preached the virtues of the eighteenth-century ode, of archaic language, and of the hexameter.

‘Coarse, passionate, but appreciative, zealous, clean and very diligent’: so reads a report on Mikhail Yakovlev.


(#litres_trial_promo) A talented musician, who sang to the guitar, he set a number of Delvig’s and Pushkin’s works to music, both at the Lycée and later. At the Lycée, however, where his nickname was ‘the clown’, he was best known for his imitations. He had a huge repertoire of two hundred roles. They include, besides all the teachers and most of the pupils, Italian bears (no. 93), their attendants (no. 94), a samovar (no. 98), Russian bear attendants (no. 109), Alexander I (no. 129), a ship (no. 170) and a mad sergeant of hussars (no. 179).


(#litres_trial_promo) Later, when Pushkin was living in Moscow, he asked a friend from St Petersburg what the subject of Yakovlev’s latest imitation was. ‘The St Petersburg flood’ was the reply. ‘And how’s that?’ ‘Very lifelike.’


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The first three months of the Lycée’s existence passed quietly; Alexander I’s birthday was celebrated on 12 December; Volkhovsky was adjudged the best student of the term: his name, and that of Gorchakov (first in deportment), were inscribed in gold letters on a board which was put up in the school hall. Razumovsky ordered it to be taken down and informed Malinovsky that innovations of this kind were not to be introduced without his permission. The last week of the year was a holiday. By the beginning of 1812 war with France seemed imminent. In February and March the lycéens turned out to cheer the guards and army regiments passing through Tsarskoe Selo on their way south to join the Russian First Army in Vilna. Commander-in-chief of this army, and Minister of War, was Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, who was distantly related to Küchelbecker, and had been instrumental in securing a place for him at the Lycée.

In May Pushkin spent five days in the sickbay with a feverish cold; he was thirteen on the twenty-sixth of that month; on 9 June the Lycée was visited by the Metropolitan of Moldavia, Gabriel Banulescu-Bodoni; and on 12 June Napoleon’s army of half a million men crossed the Neman. The news was received in Tsarskoe Selo five days later. From that time on the lycéens followed, with growing anxiety and dismay, the progress of the invasion in the Russian and foreign newspapers in the reading-room, and in the bulletins which Nikolay Koshansky, who taught Latin and Russian literature, made it his business to compose and to read on Sundays in the school hall. Delvig earned instant popularity by his vivid account of the events he had witnessed as a nine-year-old during the campaign of 1807: a complete fantasy which, nevertheless, deceived the lycéens and even Malinovsky.

As the Grande Armée advanced, Barclay retreated before it. Napoleon was in Vilna on 16 June, Vitebsk on 16 July. After fierce fighting, Smolensk fell on 6 August, destroyed by fire. ‘The spectacle Smolensk offered the French was like the spectacle an eruption of Mount Vesuvius offered the inhabitants of Naples,’ wrote Napoleon.


(#litres_trial_promo) Having given battle at Lubino, the Russian army then retreated again, towards Moscow, whose inhabitants had already begun to leave the city. Nadezhda Pushkina, taking her children and mother, Mariya Gannibal, left for Nizhny Novgorod.

The commander of a retreating, apparently beaten army, Barclay had lost Alexander’s confidence and become widely unpopular. He had often urged on the emperor the necessity for a single commander-in-chief of all the Russian armies. Alexander belatedly took his advice and appointed Kutuzov. Barclay remained as commander of the First Army, but had to give up his post as Minister of War. Küchelbecker, in dismay at the taunts, even accusations of treason, that were being levelled at his relative, turned to his mother for consolation. He was not wholly comforted by the reassurances offered in her letters, and in October she had to dissuade the fourteen-year-old from joining the army as a volunteer in order to redeem the family honour. She mentioned the immorality of the young men in the volunteer army, protested against ‘the slaughter of children’, and pointed out that it would interrupt his education. Küchelbecker abandoned the idea.


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Even under Kutuzov the Russian army continued to retreat. Abandoning a favourable position at Tsarevo-Zaimishche, he moved east to Gzhatsk and, fighting off the French under Murat with his rearguard, arrived near the village of Borodino on the Kolocha river, seventy-two miles from Moscow, on 22 August. Here he drew up his armies and waited for the French. On the twenty-fourth the French captured the Shevardino redoubt; on the twenty-sixth, after a day’s lull, the battle of Borodino took place, lasting from six in the morning until dusk. Napoleon’s withdrawal across the Kolocha at the end of the day convinced Kutuzov that, despite the enormous Russian losses, the French had been beaten. He sent a short dispatch claiming victory to Alexander, and retreated to Mozhaisk. Meanwhile a letter from Napoleon was on its way to the Empress Marie-Louise in Paris: ‘I write to you from the battlefield of Borodino. Yesterday I beat the Russians […] The battle was a hot one: victory was ours at two in the afternoon. I took several thousand prisoners and sixty cannons. Their losses can be estimated at 30,000 men. I lost many killed and wounded […] My health is good, the weather a little fresh’.


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Five days later the lycéens read Kutuzov’s dispatch from Borodino in the Northern Post. As they were cheering the news, the victorious Russian army was passing through Moscow and retreating to the southeast, towards Ryazan. Alexander learnt of this on 7 September. Rumour of the retreat quickly spread through St Petersburg, causing an abrupt change of mood. Napoleon now stood between the capital and the main Russian army. Only Wittgenstein’s weak First Corps protected the city; if Napoleon turned north, an evacuation would be necessary. Government archives and the pictures in the Hermitage were packed up; plans were made for removing the statues of Peter the Great and Suvorov; many of the books of the imperial public library were crated and sent up the Neva.


(#ulink_171409b6-f804-594b-92e3-f59e933b9fbd) And Razumovsky wrote to Malinovsky, telling him that the Lycée, like the court, would be evacuated to Åbo (Turku) in Finland, and asking him to supply a list of necessities for the move. When Malinovsky did so, the minister objected that tin plates and cups for travelling were not essential and that trunks for the pupils’ clothes could be replaced by wooden crates. He added that the items should be bought only on the condition that a refund would be made, should they not be required.

Napoleon entered Moscow on 2 September. Fires broke out that night and the night after, apparently lit on the orders of the Governor-General of Moscow, Count Fedor Rostopchin. The city burned for four days. Pushkin’s uncle lost his house, his library and all his possessions, and – one of the last to leave – arrived in Nizhny Novgorod with no money and only the clothes he stood up in. The Grande Armée left Moscow on 7 October, and after a bloody battle at Maloyaroslavets, which both sides again claimed as a victory, was forced back on its old line of march, losing stragglers to cold, hunger, illness and Davydov’s partisans each day. News of Maloyaroslavets and of General Wintzingerode’s entry into Moscow reached the Lycée simultaneously. The fear of evacuation was past, and with the French on the retreat normal life could be resumed. Pushkin called Gorchakov a ‘promiscuous Polish madam’; insulted Myasoedov with some unrepeatable verses about the Fourth Department, in which the latter’s father worked (since the Fourth Department of the Imperial Chancery administered the charitable foundations and girls’ schools of the dowager empress, a guess can be made at the nature of the insult); and pushed Pushchin and Myasoedov, saying that if they complained they would get the blame, because he always managed to wriggle out of it.


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On 4 January 1813 the Northern Post reported the reading in St Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral of the imperial manifesto announcing the end of the Fatherland War: the last of Napoleon’s troops had recrossed the Neman. Napoleon, however, was not yet beaten. Fighting continued throughout that year, with Austria, Prussia and Russia in alliance. Alexander was determined to avenge the fall of Moscow with the surrender of Paris, but it was not until 31 March 1814 (NS) that he entered the city and was received by Talleyrand. The news reached St Petersburg three weeks later, and Koshansky immediately gave his pupils ‘The Capitulation of Paris’ as a theme for prose and poetic composition.

If Pushkin produced a composition on this occasion, it has not survived. However, when in November 1815 Alexander returned from the peace negotiations in Paris that followed Waterloo, Pushkin was asked by I.I. Martynov, the director of the department of education, to compose a piece commemorating the occasion. He completed the poem by 28 November, and sent it to Martynov, writing, ‘If the feelings of love and gratitude towards our great monarch, which I have described, are not too unworthy of my exalted subject, how happy I would be, if his excellency Count Aleksey Kirilovich [Razumovsky] were to deign to put before his majesty this feeble composition of an inexperienced poet!’


(#litres_trial_promo) The poem, written in the high, solemn style that befits the subject, begins with an account of the French invasion and ensuing battles – in which, Pushkin laments, he was unable to participate, ‘grasping a sword in my childish hand’ – before describing the liberation of Europe and celebrating Alexander’s return to Russia. It ends with a vision of the idyllic future, when

a golden age of tranquillity will come,

Rust will cover the helms, and the tempered arrows,

Hidden in quivers, will forget their flight,

The happy villager, untroubled by stormy disaster,

Will drag across the field a plough sharpened by peace;

Flying vessels, winged by trade,

Will cut the free ocean with their keels;

and, occasionally, before ‘the young sons of the martial Slavs’, an old man will trace plans of battle in the dust with his crutch, and

With simple, free words of truth will bring to life

In his tales the glory of past years

And will, in tears, bless the good tsar.


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The Pushkins had decided not to return to Moscow, four-fifths of which had been destroyed by the fire of 1812, but to move to St Petersburg. Nadezhda, with her surviving children, Olga and Lev (Mikhail, born in October 1811, had died the following year), arrived in the capital in the spring of 1814, and rented lodgings on the Fontanka, by the Kalinkin Bridge, in the house of Vice-Admiral Klokachev. When she and the children drove out to visit Pushkin at the beginning of April, it was the first time for more than two years that he had seen his mother, and nearly three years since he had last seen his brother and sister. Lev became a boarder at the Lycée preparatory school, and from now on Nadezhda, usually accompanied by Olga, came to Tsarskoe Selo almost every Sunday. In the autumn the family circle was completed by the arrival of Sergey, after a leisurely journey from Warsaw. His first visit to his sons was on 11 October. In the final school year Engelhardt relaxed the regulations and allowed lycéens whose families lived nearby to visit them at Christmas 1816 and at Easter 1817. Pushkin spent both holidays with his family.



‘I began to write from the age of thirteen,’ Pushkin once wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) The first known Lycée poem was written in the summer of 1813. From then on the school years were, in Goethe’s words, a time ‘Da sich ein Quell gedrängter Lieder/Ununterbrochen neu gebar’.


(#ulink_281d5db6-1d43-5380-9601-3684d50acd5b) Impromptu verse sprang into being almost without conscious thought: Pushchin, recuperating in the sickbay, woke to find a quatrain scrawled on the board above his head:

Here lies a sick student –

His fate is inexorable!

Away with the medicine:

Love’s disease is incurable!


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Semen Esakov, walking one winter’s day in the park with Pushkin, was suddenly addressed:

We’re left with the question

On the frozen waters’ bank:

‘Will red-nosed Mademoiselle Schräder

Bring the sweet Velho girls here?’


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Like other lycéens, the two were ardent admirers of Sophie and Josephine, the banker Joseph Velho’s two beautiful daughters, whom they often met at the house of Velho’s brother-in-law, Ludwig-Wilhelm Tepper de Ferguson, the Lycée’s music teacher. Sophie was unattainable, however: she was Alexander I’s mistress, and would meet him in the little, castle-like Babolovsky Palace, hidden in the depths of the park.

Beauty! Though ecstasy be enjoyed

In your arms by the Russian demi-god,

What comparison to your lot?

The whole world at his feet – here he at yours.


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Not wishing to be outdone by Delvig, Pushkin sent one of his poems – ‘To My Friend the Poet’, addressed to Küchelbecker – anonymously to the Herald of Europe in March 1814. The next number of the journal contained a note from the editor, V.V. Izmailov, asking for the author’s name, but promising not to reveal it. Pushkin complied with the request, and the poem, his first published piece, appeared in the journal in July over the signature Aleksandr N.k.sh.p.: ‘Pushkin’ written backwards with the vowels omitted. While at the Lycée he was to publish four other poems in the Herald of Europe, five in the Northern Observer, one in the Son of the Fatherland, and eighteen in a new journal, the Russian Musaeum, or Journal of European News. The only poem published during the Lycée years without a pseudonym was ‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’, which appeared in the Russian Musaeum in April 1815 accompanied by an editorial note: ‘For the conveyance of this gift we sincerely thank the relatives of this young poet, whose talent promises so much.’


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Pushkin wrote this poem at the end of 1814, on a theme given to him by the classics teacher, Aleksandr Galich, for recital at the examination at the end of the junior course. Listing the memorials to Catherine’s victories in the Tsarskoe Selo park, he apostrophizes the glories of her age, hymned by Derzhavin, before describing the 1812 campaign and capitulation of Paris and paying a graceful tribute to Alexander the peace-maker, ‘worthy grandson of Catherine’. In the final stanza he turns to Zhukovsky, whose famous patriotic poem, ‘A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors’, had been written immediately after the battle of Borodino, and calls upon him to follow this work with a paean to the recent victory:

Strike the gold harp!

So that again the harmonious voice may honour the Hero,

And the vibrant strings suffuse our hearts with fire,

And the young Warrior be impassioned and thrilled

By the verse of the martial Bard.


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The examinations took place on Monday 4 and Friday 8 January 1815, before an audience of high state officials and relatives and friends of the lycéens. The seventy-one-year-old Derzhavin, the greatest poet of the preceding age, was invited to the second examination.

When we learnt that Derzhavin would be coming – Pushkin wrote – we all were excited. Delvig went out to the stairs to wait for him and to kiss his hand, the hand that had written ‘The Waterfall’. Derzhavin arrived. He came into the vestibule and Delvig heard him asking the porter: ‘Where, fellow, is the privy here?’. This prosaic inquiry disenchanted Delvig, who changed his intention and returned to the hall. Delvig told me of this with surprising simplicity and gaiety. Derzhavin was very old. He was wearing a uniform coat and velveteen boots. Our examination greatly fatigued him. He sat, resting his head on his hand. His expression was senseless; his eyes were dull; his lip hung; his portrait (in which he is pictured in a nightcap and dressing-gown) is very lifelike. He dozed until the Russian literature examination began. Then he came to life, his eyes sparkled; he was completely transformed. Of course, his verses were being read, his verses were being analysed, his verses were being constantly praised. He listened with extraordinary animation. At last I was called out. I read my ‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’, standing two paces away from Derzhavin. I cannot describe the condition of my spirit: when I reached the line where I mention Derzhavin’s name, my adolescent voice broke, and my heart beat with intoxicating rapture …

I do not remember how I finished the recitation, do not remember whither I fled. Derzhavin was delighted; he called for me, wanted to embrace me … There was a search for me, but I could not be found.


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‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’ made, for the first time, Pushkin known as a poet beyond the walls of the Lycée; the promise it gave for the future was immediately recognized. ‘Soon,’ Derzhavin told the young Sergey Aksakov, ‘a second Derzhavin will appear in the world: he is Pushkin, who in the Lycée has already outshone all writers.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin sent a copy of the poem to his uncle; Vasily passed it on to Zhukovsky, who was soon reading it, with understandable enthusiasm, to his friends. Prince Petr Vyazemsky, a friend of Pushkin’s family, wrote to the poet Batyushkov: ‘What can you say about Sergey Lvovich’s son? It’s all a miracle. His “Recollections” have set my and Zhukovsky’s head in a whirl. What power, accuracy of expression, what a firm, masterly brush in description. May God give him health and learning and be of profit to him and sadness to us. The rascal will crush us all! Vasily Lvovich, however, is not giving up, and after his nephew’s verse, which he always reads in tears, never forgets to read his own, not realizing that in verse compared to the other it is now he who is the nephew.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Vasily, unlike his fellow poets, was not totally convinced of Pushkin’s staying-power, remarking to a friend: ‘Mon cher, you know that I love Aleksandr; he is a poet, a poet in his soul; mais je ne sais pas, il est encore trop jeune, trop libre, and, really, I don’t know when he will settle down, entre nous soit dit, comme nous autres.’


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Recognition led to a widening of Pushkin’s poetic acquaintance. Batyushkov had called on him in February; in September Zhukovsky – after Derzhavin, the best-known poet in Russia – wrote to Vyazemsky: ‘I have made another pleasant acquaintanceship! With our young miracle-worker Pushkin. I called on him for a minute in Tsarskoe Selo. A pleasant, lively creature! He was very glad to see me and firmly pressed my hand to his heart. He is the hope of our literature. I fear only lest he, imagining himself mature, should prevent himself from becoming so. We must unite to assist this future giant, who will outgrow us all, to grow up […] He has written an epistle to me, which he gave into my hands, – splendid! His best work!’


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In March 1816 Vasily Lvovich, who was travelling back to Moscow from St Petersburg with Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky and Karamzin, persuaded them to stop off at the Lycée; they stayed for about half an hour: Pushkin spoke to his uncle and Vyazemsky, whom he had known as a child in Moscow, but did not meet Karamzin. Two days later he sent Vyazemsky a witty letter, complaining of his isolated life at the Lycée: ‘seclusion is, in fact, a very stupid affair, despite all those philosophers and poets, who pretend that they live in the country and are in love with silence and tranquillity’, and breaking into verse to envy Vyazemsky’s life in Moscow:

Blessed is he, who noisy Moscow

Does not leave for a country hut …

And who not in dream, but in reality

Can caress his mistress! …

Only a year of schooling remains, ‘But a whole year of pluses and minuses, laws, taxes, the sublime and the beautiful! … a whole year of dozing before the master’s desk … what horror.’


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In April he received a letter from Vasily Lvovich, telling him that Karamzin would be spending the summer in Tsarskoe Selo: ‘Love him, honour and obey. The advice of such a man will be to your good and may be of use to our literature. We expect much from you.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Nikolay Karamzin, who at this time had just turned fifty, was Russia’s most influential eighteenth-century writer, and the acknowledged leader of the modernist school in literature. Though best-known as author of the extraordinarily popular sentimental tale Poor Liza (1792), his real achievement was to have turned the heavy and cumbersome prose of his predecessors into a flexible, supple instrument, capable of any mode of discourse. He arrived in Tsarskoe Selo on 24 May with his wife and three small children, and settled in one of Cameron’s little Chinese houses in the park to complete work on his monumental eight-volume History of the Russian State. He remained there throughout the summer, returning to St Petersburg on 20 September. During this time Pushkin visited him frequently, often in the company of another lycéen, Sergey Lomonosov. The acquaintance ripened rapidly: on 2 June Karamzin informs Vyazemsky that he is being visited by ‘the poet Pushkin, the historian Lomonosov’, who ‘are amusing in their pleasant artlessness. Pushkin is witty.’


(#litres_trial_promo) And when Prince Yury Neledinsky-Meletsky, an ageing privy councillor and minor poet, turned to Karamzin for help because he found himself unable to compose the verses he had promised for the wedding of the Grand Duchess Anna with Prince William of Orange, Karamzin recommended Pushkin for the task. Pushkin produced the required lines in an hour or two, and they were sung at the wedding supper in Pavlovsk on 6 June. The dowager empress sent him a gold watch and chain.

Pushkin’s work – like that of Voltaire, much admired, and much imitated by him at this time – is inclined to licentiousness, but any coarseness is always – even in the Lycée verse – moderated by wit. Once Pushchin, watching from the library window as the congregation dispersed after evening service in the church opposite, noticed two women – one young and pretty, the other older – who were quarrelling with one another. He pointed them out to Pushkin, wondering what the subject of the dispute could be. The next day Pushkin brought him sixteen lines of verse which gave the answer: Antipevna, the elder, is angrily taking Marfushka to task for allowing Vanyusha to take liberties with her, a married woman. ‘He’s still a child,’ Marfushka replies; ‘What about old Trofim, who is with you day and night? You’re as sinful as I am,’

In another’s cunt you see a straw,

But don’t notice the beam in your own.


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‘Pushkin was so attracted to women,’ wrote a fellow lycéen, ‘that, even at the age of fifteen or sixteen, merely touching the hand of the person he was dancing with, at the Lycée balls, caused his eye to blaze, and he snorted and puffed, like an ardent stallion in a young herd.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The first known Lycée poem is ‘To Natalya’, written in 1813, and dedicated to a young actress in the serf theatre of Count V.V. Tolstoy. He imagines himself an actor, playing opposite her: Philemon making love to Anyuta in Ablesimov’s opera, The Miller, Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker, or Dr Bartolo endeavouring to seduce Rosina in The Barber of Seville. Two summers later he made her the subject of another poem. You are a terrible actress, he writes; were another to perform as badly as you do, she would be hissed off the stage, but we applaud wildly, because you are so beautiful.

Blessed is he, who can forget his role

On the stage with this sweet actress,

Can press her hand, hoping to be

Still more blessed behind the scenes!


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When Elena Cantacuzen, the married sister of his fellow-lycéen Prince Gorchakov, visited the Lycée in 1814, he composed ‘To a Beauty Who Took Snuff’:

Ah! If, turned into powder,

And in a snuff-box, in confinement,

I could be pinched between your tender fingers

Then with heartfelt delight

I’d strew myself on the bosom beneath the silk kerchief

And even … perhaps … But no! An empty dream.

In no way can this be.

Envious, malicious fate!

Ah, why am I not snuff!


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There is far more of Pushkin in the witty, humorous light verse of this kind, when he can allow himself the expression of carnal desire, than in his love poems of the Lycée years – such as those dedicated to Ekaterina Bakunina, the sister of a fellow-lycéen. She was four years older than he and obviously attractive, for both Pushchin and the young Malinovsky were his rivals. In a fragment of a Lycée diary he wrote, on Monday 29 November 1815:

I was happy! … No, yesterday I was not happy: in the morning I was tortured by the ordeal of waiting, standing under the window with indescribable emotion, I looked at the snowy path – she was not to be seen! – finally I lost hope, then suddenly and unexpectedly I met her on the stairs, a delicious moment! […] How charming she was! How becoming was the black dress to the charming Bakunina! But I have not seen her for eighteen hours – ah! what a situation, what torture – But I was happy for five minutes.


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There is, however, no trace of this artless sincerity in any of the twenty-three poems he devoted to his love between the summer of 1815 and that of 1817, which are, almost without exception, expressions of blighted love. No doubt Pushkin’s grief was real; no doubt he experienced all the torments of adolescent love. But the agony is couched in such conventional terms, is often so exaggerated, that the emotion comes to seem as artificial as the means of its expression. The cycle begins with the sadness he experiences at her absence; she returns, only for him to discover he has a successful rival; having lost her love, he can only wish for death. ‘The early flower of hope has faded:/Life’s flower will wither from the torments!’ he laments


(#litres_trial_promo) – an image with which, in Eugene Onegin, he would mock Lensky’s adolescent despair: ‘He sang of life’s wilted flower/At not quite eighteen years of age’ (II, x).

Far less ethereal were his feelings for Natasha, Princess Varvara Volkonskaya’s pretty maid, well-known to the lycéens and much admired by them. One dark evening in 1816, Pushkin, running along one of the palace corridors, came upon someone he thought to be Natasha, and began to ‘pester her with rash words and even, so the malicious say, with indiscreet caresses’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately the woman was not Natasha, but her mistress, who recognized Pushkin and through her brother complained to the emperor. The following day Alexander came to see Engelhardt about the affair. ‘Your pupils not only climb over the fence to steal my ripe apples, and beat gardener Lyamin’s watchmen,’ he complained, ‘but now will not let my wife’s ladies-in-waiting pass in the corridor.’ Engelhardt assured him that Pushkin was in despair, and had asked the director for permission to write to the princess, ‘asking her magnanimously to forgive him for this unintended insult’. ‘Let him write – and there will be an end of it. I will be Pushkin’s advocate; but tell him that it is for the last time,’ said Alexander, adding in a whisper, ‘Between ourselves, the old woman is probably enchanted at the young man’s mistake.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin made up for the letter of apology with a malicious French epigram:

One could easily, miss,

Take you for a brothel madam,

Or for an old hag;

But for a trollop, – oh, my God, no.


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Another object of desire was the young Marie Smith, ‘very pretty, amiable and witty’,


(#litres_trial_promo) who came to stay with her relations the Engelhardts towards the end of 1816. Pushkin was soon addressing his verse to her, not a whit discomposed by the facts that she had very recently lost her husband and was three months’ pregnant. At first the tone is light and humorous, no word of love is breathed; but early in 1817 he sent her ‘To a Young Widow’:

Lida, my devoted friend,

Why do I, through my light sleep,

Exhausted with pleasure,

Often hear your quiet sigh?

‘Will you eternally shed tears,/Eternally your dead husband/Call from the grave?’ If so, she will call in vain, ‘the furious, jealous husband/Will not arise from eternal darkness.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In a sense the poem is harmless. Pushkin is not serious in imagining himself to be in bed with Mrs Smith, urging her to forget her husband: these are mere poetic conceits, no different, in a way, from those of an earlier poem, when he calls her ‘the confidante of Venus/[…] whose throne Cupid/And the playful children of Cytheraea/Have decorated with flowers.’


(#litres_trial_promo) But it is understandable that literary considerations of this kind did not present themselves to Mrs Smith’s mind when she received the poem. She saw only the literal, highly indecent meaning, was insulted by it, and took the poem to Engelhardt, who was obliged to give Pushkin another severe dressing-down.

In the spring of 1817 the Karamzins returned to Tsarskoe Selo. Karamzin’s second wife, the severely beautiful Ekaterina Andreevna, was then thirty-six. Of her Filipp Wiegel, whom Pushkin later knew well, wrote in his memoirs, ‘What can I say of her? If the pagan Phidias could have been inspired by a Christian ideal, and have wished to sculpt a Madonna, he would of course have given her the features of Karamzina in her youth.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin, always susceptible to beauty, and who was, in addition, beginning to be attracted chiefly to older women, sent her a love-letter. Ekaterina, unaffected by his devotion, was amused, and showed it to her husband; they laughed heartily over it. Nevertheless, Karamzin felt it necessary to read Pushkin a stern lecture, affecting the latter so much that he burst into tears. In later years Karamzin took pleasure in showing friends the spot in his study which had been sprinkled with Pushkin’s sobs.

As the course of the first intake at the Lycée neared its end, the thoughts of its members turned towards the future, and Pushkin startled his father with a letter requesting permission to join the Life Guards Hussars. It was an odd request, for he had not attended any of the classes on military subjects which had been held for those intending to enter the army. Sergey Lvovich wrote back to say that while he could not afford to support Pushkin in a cavalry regiment, he would have no objection were his son to join an infantry guards regiment. But it was the glamour of the hussars which had attracted Pushkin:

I’ll put on narrow breeches,

Curl the proud moustache in rings,

A pair of epaulettes will gleam,

And I – a child of the severe Muses –

Will be among the martial cornets!


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The regiment’s barracks were just outside the park, facing the south bank of the Great Lake, in Sofiya, the new settlement built by Catherine II. The lycéens were frequent visitors, Pushkin becoming acquainted ‘with a number of hussars, living then in Tsarskoe Selo (such as Kaverin, Molostvov, Solomirsky, Saburov and others


(#ulink_e9f053af-7c88-5f1c-9894-f2c1283d1b07)). Together with these he loved, in secret from the school authorities, to make an occasional sacrifice to Bacchus and to Venus,’ a fellow-lycéen later wrote, with metonymical delicacy.


(#litres_trial_promo) Kaverin was a well-known rake, and in his company Pushkin would certainly have made considerable sacrifices to both gods. But in the end his military career went no further, and he resigned himself to entering the civil service. Looking back on the episode in the winter of 1824, he wrote:

Saburov, you poured scorn

On my hussar dreams,

When I roistered with Kaverin,

Abused Russia with Molostvov,

Read with my Chedaev,

When, casting aside all cares,

I spent a whole year among them,

But Zubov did not tempt me

With his swarthy arse.


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The final examinations at the Lycée lasted a fortnight, from 15 to 31 May 1817. The graduation ceremony took place on 9 June in the presence of the emperor. Engelhardt gave a short speech; Kunitsyn a factual report on the achievements of the Lycée; Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, who had succeeded Razumovsky as Minister of Education in 1816, introduced the pupils to Alexander, who presented their medals and graduation certificates, gave a ‘short, fatherly exhortation’, and thanked the director and the staff for their work.


(#litres_trial_promo) The ceremony ended with the lycéens singing a farewell hymn, composed by Delvig and put to music by Tepper de Ferguson. Pushkin had been asked by Engelhardt to write a poem for the occasion, but had evaded the task. In the evening at the director’s house Lomonosov, Gorchakov, Korsakov, Yakovlev, Malinovsky and Engelhardt’s children performed a French play written by Marie Smith. Korsakov and Yakovlev read poems. Finally, Engelhardt gave each of his pupils a cast-iron ring on which was engraved a phrase of Delvig’s hymn.

On 11 June Pushkin, in the company of six other lycéens, left Tsarskoe Selo for St Petersburg. He had been appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a collegial secretary – the tenth rank – with a salary of 700 roubles a year.



* (#ulink_527dfaa3-34c6-5013-951c-a262965b0c4b) In January 1814 a preparatory school was set up, also in Tsarskoe Selo, whose pupils replaced the junior course on the latter’s graduation to the senior level.

* (#ulink_fb99a2e0-2d81-5107-b5b4-6a12ed83ef2b) After being sued for divorce by his wife on grounds of adultery, Vasily had spent two years in France with his mistress, returning ‘dressed in Parisian finery from head to toe’ (Veresaev (1937), I, 17).

† (#ulink_5e75ef5f-7e8e-5753-b106-420e48839d56) The thirty who formed the first course at the Lycée were Aleksandr Bakunin, Count Silvery Broglio, Konstantin Danzas, Baron Anton Delvig, Semen Esakov, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, Baron Pavel Grevenits, Konstantin Gurev, Aleksey Illichevsky, Sergey Komovsky, Baron Modest Korff, Aleksandr Kornilov, Nikolay Korsakov, Konstantin Kostensky, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Sergey Lomonosov, Ivan Malinovsky, Arkady Martynov, Dmitry Maslov, Fedor Matyushkin, Pavel Myasoedov, Ivan Pushchin, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Rzhevsky, Petr Savrasov, Fedor Steven, Aleksandr Tyrkov, Vladimir Volkhovsky, Mikhail Yakovlev and Pavel Yudin. Gurev was expelled in September 1813 for ‘Greek tastes’, i.e. homosexuality.

* (#ulink_772d63d8-d6f5-5563-aa0b-813516ee9e50) Until 1816 the school was under the direct supervision of the minister, Razumovsky, who controlled its activities down to the most trivial detail.

* (#ulink_c6dad14f-d6ab-5f6a-8bcd-492e6206ebd6) Possibly also because of his use of coarse, smutty language and his obsession with sex, France being commonly associated with sexual immorality.

† (#ulink_be5f9e52-8b17-5abf-aebd-41580b26df75) ‘A boy of sixteen, prophesying in exact detail literary immortality to a boy of fifteen, and doing it in a poem that is itself immortal – this is a combination of intuitive genius and actual destiny to which I can find no parallel in the history of world poetry’ (Nabokov, III, 23).

* (#ulink_047948b7-d011-55c3-92ef-b6a93c36f513) The brig carrying them wintered on the Svir River, between Lakes Ladoga and Onega: on its return most of the books were found to be spoilt by water.

* (#ulink_b1d5688a-12ad-5db8-ba59-336c6ebf2ada) ‘When a fountain of pent-up songs/Would ceaselessly replenish itself each day’, Faust, 154–5.

* (#ulink_aa0d25f7-9c06-5fad-99ea-71e67930daba) Their society is adequately characterized by Molostvov’s mot, ‘The best woman is a boy, and the best wine vodka’ (Modzalevsky (1999), 480).




3 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20 (#ulink_c42500ce-0541-55da-b792-4fc27526c6da)

I: Literature and Politics


A weak and cunning ruler,

A balding fop, an enemy of labour,

Fortuitously favoured by Fame,

Reigned over us then.

Eugene Onegin, X, i

WHEN PUSHKIN ARRIVED in St Petersburg, he had just turned eighteen. This ‘ugly descendant of negroes’, as he called himself, was small in stature – just under five foot six.


(#litres_trial_promo) He had pale blue eyes, curly black hair, usually dishevelled, and extraordinarily long, claw-like fingernails – often dirty – of which he was inordinately proud. When the actress Aleksandra Kolosova – just sixteen when Pushkin met her in 1818 – tried to hold his hands so that her mother could punish him for some prank by ‘clipping his claws’, ‘he screamed loud enough to bring the house down, feigned sobs, groans, complained that we were insulting him, and reduced us to tears of laughter’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He promenaded the streets in a long black frock-coat ‘in the American style’ and silk top-hat ‘à la Bolivar’: funnel-shaped, with a wide, upturned brim, and carrying a heavy cane.


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(#litres_trial_promo) In a pencil sketch he made as a guide to the illustrator of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, he depicts himself and Eugene leaning on the granite parapet of the Neva Embankment, gazing across at the Peter-Paul fortress. He is seen from behind: a shortish man in the Bolivar top-hat, with thick curly hair down to his shoulders, wearing tapering pantaloons and a frock-coat nipped at the waist, with two buttons in the small of the back and long, bell-shaped skirts. A note underneath instructs the illustrator that Pushkin should be made ‘good-looking’.


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(#litres_trial_promo) Though often morose and silent in large gatherings, or among those he did not know well, in the company of his friends and intimates he displayed an extraordinary, superabundant liveliness and gaiety, combined with a continual restlessness. ‘He could never sit still for a minute,’ Kolosova wrote; ‘he would wriggle, jump up, sit somewhere else, rummage in my mother’s work-basket, tangle the balls of yarn in my embroidery, scatter my mother’s patience cards …’


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When Pushkin’s mother had moved to the capital in 1814 she had taken a seven-room apartment on the upper floor of a large house on the right, or north embankment of the Fontanka canal, near the Kalinkin Bridge. Now Pushkin moved into the apartment, joining his parents and the nineteen-year-old Olga. Lev had left the Lycée and moved to a St Petersburg boarding-school. The lodgings were in the Kolomna quarter, an unfashionable district, ‘neither metropolitan nor provincial […] here all is tranquillity and retirement, all the sediment of the capital’s traffic has settled here’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin came to feel some affection for the area, lodging the hero of The Bronze Horseman here, and making it the setting for his comic narrative poem The Little House in Kolomna. The apartment below the Pushkins was occupied by the Korffs, whose son, Modest, had been a fellow lycéen. According to him the Pushkins’ ‘lodging was always topsy-turvy; valuable antique furniture in one room, in another nothing but empty walls or a rush-bottomed chair; numerous, but ragged and drunken servants, fabulously unclean; decrepit coaches with emaciated nags, and a continual shortage of everything, from money to glasses. Whenever two or three extra people dined with them they always sent down to us, as neighbours, for cutlery and china.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Ashamed of the shabbiness of the apartment, Pushkin concealed his address from most of his acquaintance. Those given the entrée might find him in dishabille, as did Vasily Ertel, who was taken there by Delvig in February 1819. ‘We went up the stairs, the servant opened the door, and we entered the room. By the door stood a bed on which lay a young man in a striped Bokhara dressing-gown with a skull-cap on his head. Near the bed, on a table, lay papers and books. The room united the characteristics of the abode of a fashionable young man with the poetic disorder of a scholar.’


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On 13 June 1817, two days after arriving in St Petersburg, Pushkin, together with the other lycéens who had joined the Foreign Ministry, was presented to the Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. Two days later, at the ministry on the English Embankment, he took and signed an oath of allegiance, and was given the decrees of Peter the Great and Catherine II relating to the foreign service to read. From the beginning the sole attraction of the ministry was that it provided him with a rank in the civil service and a minimal income. There are no references to his work there in his correspondence; his attendance soon became desultory and his diligence non-existent: ‘I know nothing about [Pushkin],’ Engelhardt wrote in January 1818, ‘other than that he does nothing at the Ministry.’


(#litres_trial_promo) On 3 July he applied for leave until 15 September, to travel with his family to his mother’s estate at Mikhailovskoe. The journey of some 288 miles took three days, passing through Tsarskoe Selo, Luga, Porkhov, Bezhanitsa and Novorzhev, and producing an epigram:

There is in Russia the town of Luga

In the Petersburg region;

One could not imagine

A worse dump than this,

If there didn’t exist

My Novorzhev.


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In 1742 the Empress Elizabeth had made a large grant of land in the Pskov province to Abram Gannibal. This estate, some five thousand desyatins in extent, included forty-one villages, populated by – according to the census of 1744 – 806 serfs.


(#ulink_bc2dd11c-0856-504a-863f-16e1a2b280f3) Through it ran a small river, the Sorot, fed by a chain of lakes. A few miles to the south, on the Sinichi hills, lay the small settlement of Svyatye Gory, crowned by the white walls and silver spire of the Svyatogorsky monastery. Although Abram, first occupied with his military duties and later preferring to retire to his estate at Suida, spent little time here, he arranged for the construction of a manor house at Petrovskoe, on the north-east bank of Lake Kuchane. On his death in 1781 the lands in the Pskov province were divided between his three younger sons, Petr, Osip and Isaak. Petr took Petrovskoe, Osip Mikhailovskoe and Isaak Voskresenskoe.

At Petrovskoe Petr knocked down the old house and built another, much larger, further from the lake, and laid out a small park, with an alley of lime trees leading from the lawn behind the house to the lake shore. In 1817 he was seventy-five, and was living here by himself, having seen little or nothing of his wife and children since he had packed them off, with a meagre allowance, to his estate near St Petersburg in the 1780s.

Voskresenskoe, Isaak’s patrimony, was some eight miles to the east of Petrovskoe, on the road to Novorzhev. Here, on a hill overlooking Lake Belogul – twice the size of Lake Kuchane – he built an unassuming, but capacious one-storey manor to house his large family: eight sons and seven daughters. On the slope of the hill descending to the lake was a large park with alleys, ponds and summer-houses. On the other side of the house a drive flanked with birch trees, concealing numerous outbuildings and servants’ quarters, led to the road. Isaak had died in 1804, heavily in debt, and having had to mortgage and then sell the greater part of his estate. His wife, Anna Andreevna, remained at the manor house, visited each summer by some of her numerous brood, together with their wives, husbands and children.

Mikhailovskoe lay between the two other estates, just over two miles from Petrovskoe, and nearly six from Voskresenskoe. The manor house was built on the high wooded south bank of the Sorot, between Lake Kuchane and the much smaller Lake Malenets. It was a small – fifty-six feet by forty-five – single-storey wooden house on a stone foundation with an open porch before the front door. On either side, shaded by limes and maples, stood smaller buildings in the same style, on the left the bath-house, on the right the kitchen and servants’ quarters. Two long, low buildings at right angles to the kitchen contained the estate office and lodgings for the bailiff and his family with a coach-house beyond; behind these lay the orchard. In front of the house was a circular lawn, surrounded by a path bordered with lilac and jasmine, the whole being enclosed by a fence with wicket gates. Behind the bath-house a steep path led to the Sorot. In front of the house, beyond the fence, lay the well-wooded park, divided in two by a wide linden alley down which ran the entrance drive. In the middle of the portion to the left stood a small summer-house from which radiated alleys of limes, birches and maples. Flower-beds, little artificial mounds topped with benches and ponds, small and large, were scattered here and there, and the boundary was marked by an avenue of birches.

By contemporary standards Mikhailovskoe was a small to modest estate: according to the census of 1816, some five thousand acres (1,863 desyatins) with 164 male serfs on the land and 23 attached to the household. In 1806, on Osip’s death, the estate had passed to Nadezhda. But the Pushkins’ financial circumstances were hardly improved, since for several years thereafter the income of the estate had to be used to extinguish the large debts Osip had accumulated. Since Nadezhda had little taste for provincial life, her mother, Mariya Gannibal, having sold Zakharovo, had moved to Mikhailovskoe, taking with her the family’s old nurse, Arina Rodionovna.

These two and a crowd of servants now greeted the Pushkins on their arrival: it was the first time that Pushkin had seen his grandmother since parting from her six years before to go to the Lycée. The district, very different from the countryside around Moscow or St Petersburg, was completely new to him. He wandered round the park, with its ‘pond in the shadow of thick willows,/Playground for ducklings’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and stood on the heights above the Sorot, looking over

the azure levels of two lakes,

Where sometimes gleams the fisherman’s white sail,

Behind them a ridge of hills and striped cornfields,

Scattered huts in the distance,

On the moist banks wandering herds,

Smoking drying-barns and winged windmills …


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‘I remember how happy I was with village life, Russian baths, strawberries and so on, but all this did not please me for long. I loved and still love noise and crowds.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The district certainly lacked metropolitan bustle; Voskresenskoe, inhabited by his great-aunt and a swarm of cousins, was a poor substitute. Dancing there one evening, Pushkin fell into a quarrel with his cousin Semen when the latter cut him out in a figure of the cotillion with a Miss Loshakova, ‘with whom, despite her ugliness and false teeth, Aleksandr Sergeevich had fallen head over heels in love’.


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The most congenial local society was to be found at Trigorskoe, an estate some two miles from Mikhailovskoe, reached by a path along the bank of the Sorot. Here lived Praskovya Osipova, an attractive thirty-six year-old, together with the five children from her first marriage to Nikolay Vulf: the eighteen-year-old Annette, Aleksey, Mikhail, Evpraksiya (known as Zizi) and Valerian, respectively twelve, nine, eight and five; and Aleksandra, the nine-year-old daughter of her second husband, Ivan Osipov. The Osipovs were not provincial philistines, but a cultured family. Praskovya’s father, Aleksandr Vyndomsky, had collected a large library, had corresponded with Novikov, imprisoned for his writings by Catherine II, and had subscribed to Moscow and St Petersburg literary journals, one of which had even printed his poem ‘The Prayer of a Repentant Sinner’. Pushkin’s acquaintance with the family was the most significant event of the visit: on 17 August, just before leaving, he wrote, in the only lyric produced during his stay,

Farewell, Trigorskoe, where joy

So often was encountered!

Did I discover your sweetness

Only in order to leave you for ever?

From you I take memories,

To you I leave my heart.


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When Vasily Pushkin had brought his nephew to St Petersburg in 1811, he was engaged in a polemic with Admiral Shishkov, leader of the conservative, or Archaist group of Russian writers. Opposed to this were the more liberal modernists, whose centre was Karamzin. In March 1811 Shishkov had founded the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word, a society whose purpose was to defend ‘classical’ forms of Russian against foreign infection. The writers of both factions directed at each other a continual cross-fire of articles and reviews, enlivened by satirical jibes. If the dramatist Prince Shakhovskoy poked fun at Karamzin’s sentimentalism in the one-act comedy A New Sterne (1805), in Vasily’s A Dangerous Neighbour admirers of the prince’s dramatic talents were discovered among the strumpets in a brothel.

On 23 September 1815 several of the younger group – Dmitry Bludov, Dmitry Dashkov, Stepan Zhikharev, Filipp Wiegel, Aleksandr Turgenev and Zhukovsky – attended the première of Shakhovskoy’s new comedy, The Lipetsk Waters; or, A Lesson for Coquettes at the Bolshoy Theatre. Zhukovsky’s companions were soon embarrassed to discover that Shakhovskoy ‘in the poet Fialkin, a miserable swain, whom all scorned, and who bent himself double before all, intended to represent the noble modesty of Zhukovsky; […] One can imagine the situation of poor Zhukovsky, on whom numerous immodest glances were turned! One can imagine the astonishment and indignation of his friends, seated around him! A gauntlet had been thrown down; Bludov and Dashkov, still ebullient with youth, hastened to pick it up.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Bludov’s reply was a wretchedly unfunny lampoon directed at Shakhovskoy, A Vision in some Tavern, published by the Society of Learned People.


(#ulink_73b416ba-617b-5199-a521-87df429418f8) This purported to have taken place in the little provincial town of Arzamas. The idea that a learned society, dedicated to literature, could exist in such a sleepy backwater famous only for its geese amused Bludov’s friends, and led in October to the foundation of the Arzamas Society of Unknown People.

From the beginning Arzamas was an elaborate joke, a parody of the solemn proceedings of the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word. These took place in the huge hall of Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka, when ‘the members sat at tables in the centre, around them were armchairs for the most honoured guests, and round the walls in three tiers was well-arranged seating for other visitors, admitted by ticket. To add greater lustre to these gatherings, the fair sex appeared in ball-gowns, ladies-in-waiting wore their royal miniatures,


(#ulink_35390229-4c94-5dc2-8e21-43a0f184ee78) grandees and generals their ribbons and stars, and all their full-dress uniform.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The lively facetiousness of Arzamas could hardly have been more different. The meetings took place on Thursday evenings, usually at the home of one of the two married members – Bludov’s on the Nevsky Prospect or Sergey Uvarov’s in Malaya Morskaya Street. Each member had been given a name taken from one of Zhukovsky’s ballads. The president for the evening wore a Jacobin red cap; the proceedings were conducted in a parodic imitation of the high style employed at the Symposium and invariably ended with the consumption of an Arzamas goose. Vyazemsky and Batyushkov soon joined; and when Vasily Pushkin – at fifty-one, the oldest of the group – was elected in March 1816, advantage was taken of his good-natured credulity to stage a parody of Masonic initiation rites, an immensely long mummery which concluded with Vasily shooting an arrow into the heart of a dummy representing the bad taste of the Shishkovites.


(#ulink_17359220-ca42-533a-ac31-546d981e7367) This set the tone for his position in Arzamas: he became the internal butt for its members’ jokes, as members of the Symposium were the external. Having dallied at a cake-shop, he arrived late at the next meeting, to be greeted with a flood of facetious speeches and resolutions; but, forgiven, he was made the society’s elder with various privileges, including that of having ‘at Arzamas suppers a special goose roasted for him alone, which, at his choice, he may either consume entirely, or, having consumed a portion, may take the rest home’.


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While still at the Lycée Pushkin had taken an eager interest in the literary debate, naturally ranging himself on the side of his friends against Shishkov and the Symposium. He learnt of the foundation of Arzamas, and was soon addressing Vyazemsky as ‘dear Arzamasite’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and calling his uncle ‘the Nestor of Arzamas’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He already felt himself spiritually to be a member: in ‘To Zhukovsky’ (1816), calling on the ‘singers, educated/In the happy heresy of Taste and Learning’, to ‘strike down the brazen friends of Ignorance’ – the Shishkov circle – he signs himself ‘An Arzamasite’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Shortly after he arrived in St Petersburg he was elected to the society, and given the name of the Cricket. The reality he encountered was rather different from the ideal of ‘To Zhukovsky’: though the Arzamasites were a congenial, convivial set, they were hardly that band of brothers devoted to the cause of art envisaged in the epistle. He arrived, too, at a time when the society was beginning to lose its point. Derzhavin had died in July 1816; the Symposium ceased its existence not long afterwards, and Arzamas, whose whole essence was parody, could, like a reflection in a mirror, hardly remain once the original had disappeared. The last formal meeting of the society was held in the spring of 1818; though some of the members continued to come together informally thereafter, Arzamas had come to an end.

Long after it had ceased to exist it still remained a pleasant memory for Pushkin: ‘Is your swan-princess with you? Give her the respects of an Arzamas goose,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in 1825.


(#litres_trial_promo) He felt for it, too, something akin to that loyalty inspired by the Lycée – though the feeling was, naturally, far less deep. As a literary group, it was, paradoxically, more important to him before he became a member than subsequently. While he was at the Lycée it represented for him the forces of enlightenment, ranged against those of darkness and ignorance; after his election it became merely a circle of acquaintances, some of whom – Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Batyushkov, Aleksandr Turgenev – were already close friends, while others – Bludov, Dashkov, Wiegel, Poletika, and, to a lesser extent, Zhikharev – were to become so.


(#ulink_349cfff0-e349-5fb2-a562-b1031496c868) Indeed, this gathering of diplomats and civil servants, of literary practitioners and dilettantes, represented such a heterogeneous collection of views – ranging from Kavelin’s dogmatic conservatism to Nikolay Turgenev’s radical republicanism – that it could in no way have had an influence, as a whole, on one who was a part of it. But among its members were some of the liveliest minds in Russia at the time, and Pushkin undoubtedly absorbed much from his intercourse with them: particularly, perhaps, from Nikolay Turgenev.

The Turgenev brothers shared an apartment on the Fontanka Embankment, on the top floor of the official residence of Prince A.N. Golitsyn, the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Education. Aleksandr Turgenev was indolent, easy-going, an intellectual flâneur; Nikolay energetic, single-minded, with far more radical political views. Pushkin visited them often, to be berated by Aleksandr for his laziness, and urged by Nikolay to abandon the Anacreontic muse of the Lycée and turn to more serious themes. A third, younger brother, Sergey, was at this time with the diplomatic mission attached to the Russian forces of occupation in France. At the beginning of December 1817 he noted in his diary: ‘[My brothers] write again about Pushkin, as a developing talent. Ah, let them hasten to breathe liberalism into him, and instead of self-lamentation let his first song be: Freedom.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He showed remarkable prescience, for towards the end of the month Pushkin produced ‘Liberty. An Ode’.


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The Turgenevs’ apartment looked out across the canal at the gloomy Mikhailovsky Castle, the scene of the Emperor Paul’s assassination in 1801. According to Wiegel, one of the ‘high-minded young freethinkers’ gathered in the apartment, gazing out at the castle, jokingly suggested it to Pushkin as the subject for a poem. ‘With sudden agility he leapt on the large, long table before the window, stretched out, seized pen and paper and, laughing, began to write.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The poem opens with the dismissal of the poet’s former muse, Aphrodite, ‘the weak queen of Cythera’. In her stead Pushkin invokes ‘the proud songstress of Freedom’ to indict the present age: ‘Everywhere iniquitous Power/In the inspissated gloom of prejudice/Reigns.’ The proper society is the state in which ‘with sacred Liberty/Powerful Laws are firmly bound’. The rule of law applies to tyrant and mob alike: the French revolution, an infraction of law by the people, led to the despotism of Napoleon, ‘the world’s horror, nature’s shame,/A reproach on earth to God’. Three brilliant stanzas – a vivid contrast to the abstract rhetoric that has gone before – follow. The ‘pensive poet’, gazing at midnight on the Mikhailovsky Castle, imagines the assassination of Paul on the night of 11 March 1801:

in ribbons and in stars,

Drunk with wine and hate

The secret assassins come,

Boldness on their face, fear in their heart.

A final stanza, added later, reverts to the preceding style and draws a general conclusion.

Yakov Saburov, one of the hussar officers whom Pushkin frequented in Tsarskoe Selo, later told Pushkin’s biographer, Annenkov, that the poem was known to the emperor, ‘but [he] did not find in it cause for punishment’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the ideas of the poem are those of Kunitsyn, who had told the lycéens, ‘Preparing to be protectors of the laws, you must learn yourselves first to respect them; for a law, broken by its guardians, loses its sanctity in the eyes of the people,’ adding a quotation from the Abbé Raynal, one of the French Encyclopédistes, ‘Law is nothing if it is not a sword, which moves indiscriminately above all heads and strikes everything which rises above the level of the horizontal plane in which it moves.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin echoes this almost verbatim,

grasped by trusty hands

Above the equal heads of citizens

Their sword sweeps without preference.

‘Liberty. An Ode’ is Pushkin’s first great mature poem, but is far from being a revolutionary one; it expresses, rather, a conservative liberalism, defending the monarchy, provided that the monarch respects the law that binds him as well as his subjects. Opinion, however, seizing on the poem’s title and ignoring its content, held it to be subversive, and it came to have talismanic significance for the younger generation. Manuscript copies were widely circulated. D.N. Sverbeev, a coeval of Pushkin, then a junior civil servant, read to his colleagues ‘this new production of Pushkin’s then desperately liberal muse’.


(#litres_trial_promo) A copy was confiscated on the arrest of a certain Angel Galera in 1824; another was among the ‘disloyal writings possessed by officers of the Kiev Grenadier Regiment’ in 1829. Herzen published the ode in London in 1856, but it did not appear in its entirety in Russia until 1906.


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Pushkin’s other great poem of this period, ‘The Country’, was written during a second visit to Mikhailovskoe in the summer of 1819. An idyllic description of the countryside and its ability to inspire the poet is followed by an eloquent denunciation of serfdom:

Savage Lordship here, feelingless, lawless,

With violent rod has appropriated

The peasant’s labour, property and time.

Bowed over another’s plough, to whips obedient,

Here emaciated Servitude drags itself along the furrows

Of its pitiless Master.


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The serf’s obligations to his landlord took one of two forms: either that of the barshchina, the corvée: forced labour on the landlord’s fields (as in the poem); or the obrok, the quit-rent, a sum paid to the landlord in lieu of service. The latter was for the serf much less of a burden, and was the form of service preferred by progressive landlords. So Eugene Onegin, on inheriting his uncle’s estate, demonstrates his liberal credentials by replacing ‘ancient corvée’s yoke/With a moderate quit-rent’ (II, iv). Naturally, harsh treatment led to retaliation. Landlords were often killed, and minor uprisings occurred. In 1783 the arbitrary and tyrannical regime of Aleksandr Vyndomsky’s estate manager at Trigorskoe led to a revolt eventually put down, after an engagement which left forty dead or wounded, by a squadron of dragoons and a detachment of infantry under the command of the governor of Pskov. The seven ring-leaders were publicly knouted, branded, their nostrils slit, and were exiled to hard labour for life.

Since the time of Catherine II various projects had been put forward for reforming the system, or emancipating the serfs, but with no result. The accession of the liberal-minded Alexander in 1801 gave hope to the abolitionists; but, following the Napoleonic wars, a period of reaction set in, marked, in external affairs, by Alexander’s creation of the Holy Alliance and internally by his appointment in 1815 of Count Arakcheev, a narrow-minded, brutal martinet, as deputy president of the Committee of Ministers: for the next ten years Arakcheev’s house on the corner of the Liteiny Prospect and Kirochnaya Street was the effective centre of government.

Oppressor of all Russia,

Persecutor of governors

And tutor to the Council,

To the tsar he is – a friend and brother.

Full of malice, full of vengeance,

Without wit, without feeling, without honour,

Who is he? Loyal without flattery,

The penny soldier of a whore.


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Opinions differed on how the abolition of serfdom was to be brought about. In the view of the more conservative, it had to be preceded by constitutional reform. More radical opponents of the institution believed that constitutional reform would merely strengthen the hand of the landowners and worsen the condition of the serfs. Paradoxically, therefore, they saw the solution to lie in the exercise of autocratic power, through an arbitrary fiat of the emperor. It is this view which Pushkin, echoing the ideas of Nikolay Turgenev, expresses in the concluding stanza of ‘The Country’:

Will I see, o friends! a people unoppressed

And Servitude banished by the will of the tsar,

And over the fatherland will there finally arise

The sublime Dawn of enlightened Freedom?

Towards the end of 1819 Alexander expressed the wish to see some of Pushkin’s work. The request was made to General Illarion Vasilchikov, commander of the Independent Guards Brigade, who handed it on to his aide-de-camp, Petr Chaadaev, possibly knowing that he and Pushkin were acquainted. Pushkin gave Chaadaev ‘The Country’; it was presented to Alexander, who, reading it with interest, is reported to have said to Vasilchikov: ‘Thank Pushkin for the noble sentiments which his verse inspires.’


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He would have been less gracious had he seen Pushkin’s more overtly political verse, much of which was directed at him: such as the playful satire ‘Fairy Tales’, in which the tsar promises to dismiss the director of police, put the censorship secretary in the madhouse, and ‘give to the people the rights of the people’ – all of which promises are, of course, fairy tales.


(#litres_trial_promo) The scatological is also pressed into the service of lese-majesty: in ‘You and I’ Pushkin draws a series of comparisons between himself and the tsar, ending:

Your plump posterior you

Cleanse with calico;

I do not pamper

My sinful hole in this childish manner,

But with one of Khvostov’s harsh odes,

Wipe it though I wince.


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Equally unacceptable are the witty, occasionally obscene, epigrams dedicated to prominent members of the government: Arakcheev, Golitsyn, and others such as Aleksandr Sturdza, a high official in the Ministry of Education, known for his extreme obscurantist views.

Slave of a crowned soldier,

You deserve the fame of Herostratus

Or the death of Kotzebue the Hun,


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And, incidentally, fuck you.


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Nikolay Turgenev took Pushkin to task on several occasions, scolding him for ‘his epigrams and other verses against the government’ and appealing to his conscience, saying it was ‘wrong to take a salary for doing nothing and to abuse the giver of it’.


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If late eighteenth-century opponents of serfdom had attacked it chiefly as a morally repugnant system, by now it was also seen as a brake on economic progress. But it was not wholly responsible for the post-war crisis which Russia experienced after 1815. In 1825 the Decembrist Kakhovsky wrote to Nicholas I from his cell in the Peter-Paul fortress: ‘We need not be afraid of foreign enemies, but we have domestic enemies which harass the country: the absence of laws, of justice, the decline of commerce, heavy taxation and widespread poverty.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This sense among the younger generation of indignant dissatisfaction with the state of the nation was exacerbated – for those who had fought through Germany and France – by the vivid contrast between Russia and the West. But the absence in Russia of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly forced those who wished for reform to turn to secret political activity. Freemasonry – often connected, if as often unjustifiably, with secret revolutionary activity and for that reason suppressed by conservative governments – provided a means of association. In Russia the number of lodges grew rapidly after the war, and many of the future Decembrists were, or had been – like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace – Masons.

On 9 February 1816 six young officers – Aleksandr Muravev and Nikita Muravev, Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, Ivan Yakushkin, and the brothers Matvey and Sergey Muravev-Apostol, the eldest twenty-six, the youngest twenty-one – met in a room of the officers’ quarters of the Semenovsky Life Guards on Zagorodny Prospect. All had served abroad, and all – with the exception of Yakushkin – were Masons. They agreed to organize a secret political society to be called the Union of Salvation or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland: from this beginning came the Decembrist revolt of 1825. According to Aleksandr Muravev, the society’s primary aims were the emancipation of the serfs, the establishment of equality before the law and of public trial, the abolition of the state monopoly on alcohol, the abolition of military colonies,


(#ulink_2d44cf6c-f7bf-5232-9780-41fc794cf5dc) and the reduction of the term of military service. More members were soon enrolled, including the twenty-three-year-old Pavel Pestel, an officer in the Chevalier Guards. ‘Spent the morning with Pestel, a wise man in every sense of the word,’ Pushkin noted in his diary in April 1821. ‘We had a conversation on metaphysics, politics, morality, etc. He is one of the most original minds I know.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Charismatic, erudite, with an iron will and a clear vision, Pestel became the moving spirit in the conspiracy. Under his influence a constitution was drawn up, entitled the Green Book, at the same time the Union of Salvation was dissolved and its members joined the new Union of Welfare. And in 1818 Pestel set up a southern branch of the society at Tulchin in the Ukraine.

Much ink has been spilt in debating the question of the extent of Pushkin’s knowledge of the conspiracy, and of his involvement in it. The simplest answer seems the most correct. A number of the future Decembrists were his close friends, and he was acquainted with many others. He frequented houses in which they held meetings; he shared many of the political views of their programme. Nevertheless, he was never, as far as we know, involved in the conspiracy, never invited to become a member of it, never – consciously – present at a gathering of the conspirators, and, though he had a vague suspicion that something was afoot, never knew what this was.

The clearest evidence of his lack of involvement comes from his closest friend at the Lycée, Pushchin. In the summer of 1817 the latter, then an ensign in the Life Guards Horse Artillery, was recruited into the Union of Salvation. ‘My first thought,’ he writes, ‘was to confide in Pushkin: we always thought alike about the res publica.’ But Pushkin was then in Mikhailovskoe. ‘Later, when I thought of carrying out this idea, I could not bring myself to entrust a secret to him, which was not mine alone, where the slightest carelessness could be fatal to the whole affair. The liveliness of his ardent character, his association with untrustworthy persons, frightened me […] Then, involuntarily, a question occurred to me: why, besides myself, had none of the older members who knew him well considered him? They must have been held back by that which frightened me: his mode of thought was well known, but he was not fully trusted.’


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Pushkin was still ignorant of the society’s existence in November 1820, when a guest on Ekaterina Davydova’s estate at Kamenka, in the Ukraine. A number of the conspirators were present: Yakushkin, Major-General Mikhail Orlov, his aide-de-camp, Konstantin Okhotnikov, and Vasily Davydov, Ekaterina’s son. Among the other guests were Vasily’s elder brother Aleksandr and General Raevsky, half-brother to the Davydovs and soon to become Orlov’s father-in-law. According to Yakushkin, the behaviour of the conspirators aroused Raevsky’s suspicions; becoming aware of this, they resolved to dissipate them by means of a hoax. During the customary discussion after dinner, the arguments for and against the establishment of such a society were rehearsed. Orlov put both sides of the case, Pushkin ‘heatedly demonstrated all the advantages that a Secret society could bring Russia’. When Raevsky too seemed in favour, Yakushkin said to him: ‘It’s easy for me to prove that you are joking; I’ll put a question to you: if a Secret society now already existed, you certainly wouldn’t join it, would you?’

‘On the contrary, I certainly would join it,’ he replied. ‘Then give me your hand,’ I said. He stretched out his hand to me, and I burst out laughing, saying to him: ‘Of course, all this was only a joke.’ Everyone else laughed, except for A.L. Davydov, the majestic cuckold,


(#ulink_9a13b779-c377-5590-aa04-03fec23e41b8) who was asleep, and Pushkin, who was very agitated; before this he had convinced himself that a Secret society already existed, or would immediately begin to exist, and he would be a member; but when he realized that the result was only a joke, he got up, flushed, and said with tears in his eyes: ‘I have never been so unhappy as now; I already saw my life ennobled and a sublime goal before me, and all this was only a malicious joke.’


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Considered objectively, it is difficult to imagine that any serious conspirator belonging to a secret society which had the aim of overthrowing an absolute monarchy would wish to enlist a crackbrained, giddy, intemperate and dissolute young rake, whose heart and sentiments – as his poetry demonstrated – might have been in the right place, but whose reason all too often seemed absent. How could any conspiracy remain secret which had as one of its members someone who, in a theatre swarming with police spies, paid and amateur, was capable of parading round the stalls carrying a portrait of the French saddler, Louvel, who assassinated Charles, duc de Berry, in 1820, inscribed with the words ‘A Lesson to Tsars’?


(#litres_trial_promo) Or who, again in the theatre, could shout out ‘Now is the safest time – the ice is coming down the Neva’?


(#litres_trial_promo) – meaning that, since the pontoon bridges across the river, removed when it froze, could not yet be re-established, a revolt would not have to contend with the troops of the fortress.

In Rome he would have been Brutus, in Athens Pericles,

But here he is – a hussar officer,


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Pushkin wrote of Petr Chaadaev, whom he first met at the Karamzins in Tsarskoe Selo in 1816. ‘Le beau Tchadaef’, as his fellow officers called him,


(#litres_trial_promo) had a pale complexion, grey-blue eyes and a noble forehead. He was always dressed with modish elegance: Eugene Onegin is dubbed ‘a second Chaadaev’, for being in his dress ‘a pedant/And what we used to call a dandy’ (I, xxv). Yet at the same time he was curiously asexual: no trace of a relationship is to be discovered in his life. Wiegel, who disliked him intensely, attributes this to narcissism: ‘No one ever noticed in him tender feelings towards the fair sex: his heart was too overflowing with adoration for the idol which he had created from himself.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In December 1817 he moved to St Petersburg on his appointment as aide-de-camp to General Vasilchikov. Extremely learned, and with a brilliant mind – he was described by General Orlov’s wife as ‘the most striking and most brilliant young man in St Petersburg’


(#litres_trial_promo) – he seemed on the threshold of a dazzling military career, and was widely expected to become aide-de-camp to Alexander himself. But in February 1821 he suddenly and inexplicably resigned from the army and, after undergoing a spiritual crisis so severe as to affect his health, went abroad in 1823, intending to live in Europe for the rest of his life. He was a Mason, and a member of the Society of Welfare, but played no active part in the Decembrist conspiracy, and later severely condemned the revolt of 1825. However, there is no doubt that, while at Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg, he was ‘deeply and essentially linked with Russian liberalism and radicalism’,


(#litres_trial_promo) sharing the ideals of the future Decembrists.

In St Petersburg Chaadaev lived in Demouth’s Hotel, one of the most fashionable in the capital, on the Moika, but a stone’s throw from the Nevsky. Here, according to Wiegel, he received visitors, ‘sitting on a dais, beneath two laurel bushes in tubs; to the right was a portrait of Napoleon, to the left of Byron, and his own, on which he was depicted as a genius in chains, opposite’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin was a constant visitor, abandoning in Chaadaev’s presence his adolescent antics and behaving with sober seriousness. Chaadaev’s ‘influence on Pushkin was astonishing’, Saburov – who knew both well – remarked. ‘He forced him to think. Pushkin’s French education was counteracted by Chaadaev, who already knew Locke and substituted analysis for frivolity […] He thought about that which Pushkin had never thought about.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He not only introduced logic into Pushkin’s thought, he also widened his literary horizons. Pushkin was to be deeply grateful for Chaadaev’s sympathy and support in the first months of 1820, when he was both the victim of malicious slander, and being threatened by exile to the Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea for his writings. ‘O devoted friend,’ he wrote in 1821, ‘Penetrating to the depths of my soul with your severe gaze,/You invigorated it with counsel or reproof.’


(#litres_trial_promo) To express his gratitude, he gave Chaadaev a ring: engraved on the inner surface was the inscription ‘Sub rosa 1820’.


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In 1818 he had addressed a poem to him which concludes with the stirring lines,

While we yet with freedom burn,

While our hearts yet live for honour,

My friend, let us devote to our country

The sublime impulses of our soul!

Comrade, believe: it will arise,

The star of captivating joy,

Russia will start from her sleep,

And on the ruins of autocracy

Our names will be inscribed!


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The epistle, which has been called ‘the most optimistic verse in Pushkin’s entire poetry’,


(#litres_trial_promo) circulated widely in manuscript, together with ‘Fairy Tales’, ‘The Country’ and the epigrams on Arakcheev; according to Yakushkin ‘there was scarcely a more or less literate ensign in the army who did not know them by heart’.


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* (#ulink_fa373d9f-df4c-5635-b6bd-be58c5756aed) A reference to contemporary portraits of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), the hero of South American independence.

* (#ulink_fa373d9f-df4c-5635-b6bd-be58c5756aed) The artist, Aleksandr Notbek, ignored Pushkin’s instructions; his ill-executed engraving, printed in the Neva Almanac in January 1829, shows the poet facing the spectator with arms crossed on his chest. Pushkin greeted the travesty with an amusing, if scatological epigram:

Here, having crossed Kokushkin Bridge,

Supporting his arse on the granite,

Aleksandr Sergeich Pushkin himself

Stands with Monsieur Onegin.

Scorning to glance

At the citadel of fateful power,

He has proudly turned his posterior to the fortress:

Don’t spit in the well, dear chap. (III, 165)

* (#ulink_84d7775d-a23c-5285-841d-7b75a8813e6a) A desyatin is approximately 2.7 acres: only adult male serfs were numbered in the census.

* (#ulink_28e41ba9-0ccd-565d-a1fb-27074d4aedde) Modelled on ‘The Vision of Charles Palissot’ (1760), an attack by Abbé André Morellet on Palissot’s play Les Philosophes, itself a satire directed at the Encyclopédistes.

* (#ulink_90edf394-e072-5f5f-afcb-ca46cf1ff89c) In the reign of Peter the Great the custom had been established of presenting to ladies attached to the court a miniature portrait of the monarch which was worn on state occasions.

† (#ulink_90edf394-e072-5f5f-afcb-ca46cf1ff89c) Other members included Dmitry Kavelin, Aleksandr Voeikov, Aleksandr Pleshcheev, Petr Poletika, Dmitry Severin; and, later, Nikita Muravev, General Mikhail Orlov and Nikolay Turgenev.

* (#ulink_cef1fe2b-cc5e-5555-94f8-5865a0e17185) On 7 January 1834 after a visit from Wiegel Pushkin noted in his diary, ‘I like his conversation – he is entertaining and sensible, but always ends up by talking of sodomy’ (Wiegel was homosexual), and in June, after an evening at the Karamzins, wrote, ‘I am very fond of Poletika’ (XII, 318, 330).

* (#ulink_e5972866-34dd-596c-b36e-846e8a3be847) ‘Loyal without flattery’ was the motto adopted by Arakcheev for his coat-of-arms; the last line is a reference to his mistress, Anastasiya Minkina, in 1825 murdered by the serfs for her intolerable cruelty.

* (#ulink_1e18c614-24c4-5792-b34c-3b5826f813b1) Count Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov, the Alfred Austin of Alexandrine Russia, an extraordinarily prolific, but talentless poet, the constant butt of Pushkin’s jokes.

† (#ulink_399a41ff-f62e-5b24-9c1d-37f27b046b38) Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order, he confessed, to gain everlasting fame; the German dramatist Kotzebue, employed by the Russian foreign service as a political informant, was assassinated in 1819 by the student Karl Ludwig Sand.

* (#ulink_2504a408-7b46-58db-bf95-51c11cf87f0e) By an order of 5 August 1816 certain districts in the Novgorod province and, later, in the south, had been turned into military colonies. Every village was transformed into an army camp; all peasants under fifty had to shave their beards and crop their hair, while those under forty-five had to wear uniform. Children received military training, and girls were married by order of the military authorities. Arakcheev was particularly hated for his merciless enforcement of the rules governing these colonies.

* (#ulink_10a756ef-1205-54e2-95db-1ba3f4f6af2a) The Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevsky, a member of the Society of United Slavs (which amalgamated with the southern society in 1825), who knew Pushchin well, having shared a cell with him in the Peter-Paul fortress, after reading this passage in the latter’s memoirs, remarked in a letter to M.A. Bestuzhev dated 12 June 1861: ‘Poor Pushchin, – he did not know that the Supreme Duma [of the society] had even forbidden us to make the acquaintance of the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, when he lived in the south; – and for what reason? It was openly said that because of his character and pusillanimity, because of his debauched life, he would immediately inform the government of the existence of a secret society […] Muravev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin told me about such antics of Pushkin in the south that even now turn one’s ears red.’ Shchegolev (1931), 294–5.

† (#ulink_e0e7abdf-0d95-5669-8ad8-67cc25d3e164) A quotation from Eugene Onegin, I, xii; Davydov’s wife, Aglaë (née de Grammont) was generous with her favours.

* (#ulink_77cc8f7b-2048-5ebd-b5d0-d8ffe7cda033) I.e., in secret, in strict confidence.




4 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20 (#ulink_da7a04b7-88cc-566b-90c9-0d0426afaaa0)

II: Onegin’s Day


I love thee, Peter’s creation,

Love thy stern, harmonious air,

The Neva’s majestic flow,

The granite of her embankments,

Thy railings’ iron pattern,

Thy pensive nights’

Translucent twilight, moonless glimmer,

When in my room

I write and read without a lamp,

And distinct are the sleeping piles

Of the empty streets, and bright

The Admiralty’s spire,

And, not admitting nocturnal dark

To the golden heavens,

Dawn to replace dusk

Hastens, giving to night but half an hour.

I love your cruel winter’s

Still air and frost,

The flight of sleighs along the broad Neva,

Maidens’ faces brighter than roses,

The brilliance, hubbub and chatter of balls,

And at the bachelor banquet

The hiss of foaming beakers

And the blue flame of punch.

The Bronze Horseman, 43–66

THE PETERSBURG THROUGH WHICH the hero of Eugene Onegin moves in the first chapter of the poem is not fictional: it is the Petersburg of Pushkin. Eugene’s friends and acquaintances, his amusements and diversions, his interests and infatuations are also Pushkin’s. This ‘description of the fashionable life of a St Petersburg young man at the end of 1819, reminiscent of Beppo, sombre Byron’s comic work’,


(#litres_trial_promo) thus provides a skeleton on which to drape a description of Pushkin’s own social life at St Petersburg: his friends and associates, literary salons, the theatre, balls, gambling, liaisons, romances and flirtations.

Rising late, Eugene dons his ‘wide Bolivar’ to saunter up and down ‘the boulevard’ – the shaded walk, lined by two rows of lime trees, which ran down the middle of the Nevsky from the Fontanka canal to the Moika. Warned by his watch that it is around four in the afternoon, he hurries to Talon’s French restaurant on the Nevsky, where Petr Kaverin, the hard-drinking hussar officer who considers cold champagne the best cure for the clap, is waiting. On 27 May 1819 Kaverin noted in his diary: ‘Shcherbinin, Olsufev, Pushkin – supped with me in Petersburg – champagne had been put on ice the day before – by chance my beauty at that time (for the satisfaction of carnal desires) passed by – we called her in – the heat was insupportable – we asked Pushkin to prolong the memory of the evening in verse – here is the result:

A joyful evening in our life

Let us remember, youthful friends;

In the glass goblet champagne’s

Cold stream hissed.

We drank – and Venus with us

Sat sweating at the table.

When shall we four sit again

With whores, wine and pipes?’


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Pushkin had not lost his taste for military company, though now he was as apt to mingle with generals as with subalterns, much to Pushchin’s disapproval. ‘Though liberal in his views, Pushkin had a kind of pathetic habit of betraying his noble character and often angered me and all of us by, for example, loving to consort in the orchestra-pit with Orlov, Chernyshev, Kiselev and others: with patronizing smiles they listened to his jokes and witticisms. If you made him a sign from the stalls, he would run over immediately. You would say to him: “Why do you want, dear chap, to spend your time with that lot; not one of them is sympathetic to you, and so on.” He would listen patiently, begin to tickle you, embrace you, which he usually did when he was slightly flustered. A moment later you would see Pushkin again with the lions of that time!’


(#litres_trial_promo) However, something was to be gained from their company. When in 1819 he resurrected the idea of joining the hussars – ‘I’m sorry for poor Pushkin!’ Batyushkov wrote from Naples. ‘He won’t be a good officer, and there will be one good poet less. A terrible loss for poetry! Perchè? Tell me, for God’s sake.’


(#litres_trial_promo) – General Kiselev promised him a commission. However, Major-General Aleksey Orlov – brother of Mikhail, he had ‘the face of Eros, the figure of the Apollo Belvedere and Herculean muscles’


(#litres_trial_promo) – dissuaded him from the idea, a service for which Pushkin, on second thoughts, was grateful: ‘Orlov, you are right: I forgo/My hussar dreams/And with Solomon exclaim:/Uniform and sabre – all is vanity!’


(#litres_trial_promo) Orlov was either extraordinarily magnanimous, or had no knowledge of the epigram Pushkin had devoted to him and his mistress, the ballet-dancer Istomina, in 1817:

Orlov in bed with Istomina

Lay in squalid nudity.

In the heated affair the inconstant general

Had not distinguished himself.

Not intending to insult her dear one,

Laïs took a microscope

And says: ‘Let me see,

My sweet, what you fucked me with.’


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Among other new acquaintances a colleague at the Foreign Ministry, Nikolay Krivtsov, was a congenial companion. An officer in the Life Guards Jägers, Krivtsov had lost a leg at the battle of Kulm in 1813, but in England had acquired a cork replacement, so well fashioned as to allow him to dance. Pushkin saw much of him before he was posted to London in March 1818. Bidding him farewell, he gave him a copy of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans – one of his own favourite works – inscribed ‘To a friend from a friend’,


(#litres_trial_promo) accompanied by a poem:

When wilt thou press again the hand

Which bestows on thee

For the dull journey and on parting

The Holy Bible of the Charites?


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The two shared anti-religious, humanist views: ‘Krivtsov continues to corrupt Pushkin even from London,’ Turgenev told Vyazemsky, who had been posted to Warsaw, ‘and has sent him atheistic verses from pious England.’


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At this time he got to know two of Lev’s friends: Pavel Nashchokin and Sergey Sobolevsky, the illegitimate son of a well-to-do landowner. Nashchokin was extremely rich, and was an inveterate gambler. His addiction later reduced him to poverty. Though he lived with his mother, he also kept a bachelor apartment in a house on the Fontanka, where his friends, either alone or with a companion, could spend the night. Sobolevsky, tall, and inclined to portliness due to a fondness for good food and drink, was a cynical and witty companion with a flair for turning epigrams. They were to be Pushkin’s closest non-literary friends; perhaps, indeed, his most intimate and trusted friends during the last decade of his life.

Of his fellows at the Lycée Delvig had taken lodgings in Troitsky Lane, which he shared with Yakovlev and the latter’s brother Pavel. Pushkin called here almost daily; together they frequented common eating-houses, or, like the London Mohocks, assaulted the capital’s policemen. Küchelbecker, like Pushkin, had joined the Foreign Ministry, eking out the meagre stipend by teaching at the school for sons of the nobility where Lev and Sobolevsky were pupils. He religiously attended Zhukovsky’s Saturday literary soirées in the latter’s apartment on Ekateringofsky Prospect – Pushkin and Delvig were less regular – and often called at other times to read Zhukovsky his verse. Zhukovsky proffered an original excuse for not attending one social function: ‘My stomach had been upset since the previous evening; in addition Küchelbecker came, so I remained at home,’ he explained.


(#litres_trial_promo) Vastly amused by this combination of accidents, Pushkin composed a short verse:

I over-ate at supper,

And Yakov mistakenly locked the door, –

So, my friends, I felt

Both küchelbeckerish and sick!


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Insulted, Küchelbecker issued a challenge. They met in the Volkovo cemetery, to the south-east of the city. Delvig, as Küchelbecker’s second, stood to the left of his principal. Küchelbecker was to have the first shot. When he began to aim, Pushkin shouted: ‘Delvig! Stand where I am, it’s safer here.’ Incensed, Küchelbecker made a half-turn, his pistol went off and blew a hole in Delvig’s hat. Pushkin refused to fire, and the quarrel was made up.


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He seemed determined to acquire a reputation for belligerence equal to that of his acquaintance Rufin Dorokhov – the model for Dolokhov in War and Peace – an ensign in a carabinier regiment noted for his uncontrolled temper and violent behaviour. At a performance of the opera The Swiss Family at the Bolshoy Theatre on 20 December 1818 he began to hiss one of the actresses. His neighbour, who admired her performance, objected; words were spoken, with Pushkin using ‘indecent language’. Ivan Gorgoli, the head of the St Petersburg police, who was present, intervened. ‘You’re quarrelling, Pushkin! Shouting!’ he said. ‘I would have slapped his face,’ Pushkin replied, ‘and only refrained, lest the actors should take it for applause!’


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Almost exactly a year later the incident was repeated when Pushkin, bored by a play, interrupted it with hisses and cat-calls. After the performance a Major Denisevich, who had been sitting next to him, took him to task in the corridor, waving his finger at him. Outraged by the gesture, Pushkin demanded Denisevich’s address, and appointed to meet him at eight the following morning. Denisevich was sharing the quarters of Ivan Lazhechnikov, then aide-de-camp to General Count Ostermann-Tolstoy, in the general’s house between the English Embankment and Galernaya Street. At a quarter to eight Pushkin, accompanied by two cavalry officers, appeared and was met by Lazhechnikov. The latter, who was to be acclaimed as ‘the Russian Walter Scott’ for his historical novels The Last Page (1831–3) and The Ice Palace (1835), takes up the story in a letter to Pushkin written eleven years later: ‘Do you remember a morning in Count Ostermann’s house on the Galernaya, with you were two fine young guardsmen, giants in size and spirit, the miserable figure of the Little Russian [Denisevich], who to your question: had you come in time? answered, puffing himself up like a turkey-cock, that he had summoned you not for a chivalrous affair of honour, but to give you a lesson on how to conduct yourself in the theatre and that it was unseemly for a major to fight with a civilian; do you remember the tiny aide-de-camp, laughing heartily at the scene and advising you not to waste honest powder on such vermin and the spur of irony on the skin of an ass. That baby aide-de-camp was your most humble servant.’


(#litres_trial_promo) No wonder that Karamzin’s wife Ekaterina should write to her half-brother, Vyazemsky, in March 1820: ‘Mr Pushkin has duels every day; thank God, not fatal, since the opponents always remain unharmed’,


(#litres_trial_promo) or that Pushkin, in preparation for an occasion when cold steel might be preferred to honest powder, should have attended the school set up in St Petersburg by the famous French fencing master Augustin Grisier.


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In St Petersburg Pushkin had been reunited with Nikita Kozlov, a serf from Sergey Lvovich’s estate at Boldino, who had looked after him as a child. Nikita became his body-servant, and remained with him until his death. Tall, good-looking, with reddish side-whiskers, he married Nadezhda, Arina Rodionovna’s daughter. Like his master, he was fond of drink. Once, when in liquor, he quarrelled with one of Korff’s servants. Hearing the row, Korff came out and set about Nikita with a stick. Pushkin, feeling that he had been insulted in the person of his servant, called Korff out. Korff refused the challenge with a note: ‘I do not accept your challenge, not because you are Pushkin, but because I am not Küchelbecker.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin’s way of life aroused a puritanical disgust in Korff:

Beginning while still at the Lycée, he later, in society, abandoned himself to every kind of debauchery and spent days and nights in an uninterrupted succession of bacchanals and orgies, with the most noted and inveterate rakes of the time. It is astonishing how his health and his very talent could withstand such a way of life, with which were naturally associated frequent venereal sicknesses, bringing him at times to the brink of the grave […] Eternally without a copeck, eternally in debt, sometimes even without a decent frock-coat, with endless scandals, frequent duels, closely acquainted with every tavern-keeper, whore and trollop, Pushkin represented a type of the filthiest depravity.


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The passage, though savagely caricatural, is a recognizable portrait. ‘The Cricket hops around the boulevard and the bordellos,’ Aleksandr Turgenev told Vyazemsky, later referring to his ‘two bouts of a sickness with a non-Russian name’, caught as a result. Once, however, the illness was not that which might have been expected. ‘The poet Pushkin is very ill,’ Turgenev wrote. ‘He caught cold, waiting at the door of a whore, who would not let him in despite the rain, so as not to infect him with her illness. What a battle between generosity and love and licentiousness.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The girl in question might have been the charming Pole, Angelica, who lived with her stout and ugly aunt and a disagreeable little dog on the Moika near Pushchin, also one of her clients.

Intercourse of a different kind was to be had in one of the capital’s salons – that, for instance, of Ekaterina Muraveva, the widow of Mikhail Muravev, a poet and the curator of Moscow University. Nikita, her elder son, was a member of Arzamas and one of the founders of the Union of Salvation; the younger, Aleksandr, a cavalry cornet, joined the conspiracy in 1820. She entertained in a large house on the Fontanka near the Anichkov Bridge, ‘one of the most luxurious and pleasant in the capital’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The Karamzins usually stayed here when in St Petersburg, as did Batyushkov, to whom Ekaterina Fedorovna was related by marriage: her husband’s sister had been the poet’s grandmother.

When Batyushkov set out to join the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples on 19 November 1818, she gave a farewell party for him. ‘Yesterday we saw off Batyushkov,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky. ‘Between one and two, before dinner, K.F. Muraveva with her son and niece, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, Lunin, Baron Schilling and I drove to Tsarskoe Selo, where a good dinner and a battery of champagne awaited us. We grieved, drank, laughed, argued, grew heated, were ready to weep and drank again. Pushkin wrote an impromptu, which it is impossible to send, and at nine in the evening we sat our dear voyager in his carriage and, sensing a protracted separation, embraced him and took a long farewell of him.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The first signs of Batyushkov’s mental illness showed themselves in Italy. When he returned to Russia in 1822 he was suffering from persecution mania, which grew ever more severe, and was accompanied by attempts at suicide.

The best-known literary salon in St Petersburg was that of the Olenins. Aleksey Olenin was one of the highest government officials, having replaced Speransky as Imperial Secretary in 1812; he was also president of the Academy of Arts, director of the Public Library, an archaeologist and historian. He was charming and extremely hospitable, as was his wife, Elizaveta Markovna – though she was a chronic invalid who often received her guests lying on a sofa.


(#ulink_ad78a545-cbad-563e-a39c-828b51d402b6) She had inherited a house on the Fontanka near the Semenovsky Bridge: a three-storey building whose entrance columns supported a first-floor balcony; inside the rooms were ornamented with Aleksey Nikolaevich’s collection of antique statues and Etruscan vases. Pushkin was a frequent visitor, both to the St Petersburg house and to Priyutino, the Olenins’ small estate some twelve miles to the north of the capital, and enthusiastically took part in their amateur theatricals. He played Alnaskarov in Khmelnitsky’s one-act comedy Castles in the Air, and, on 2 May 1819, composed together with Zhukovsky a ballad for a charade devised by Ivan Krylov, in honour of Elizaveta Markovna’s birthday. At a party at the Olenins earlier that year, as a forfeit in some game, Krylov – whose satirical fables rival those of La Fontaine – declaimed one of his latest compositions, ‘The Donkey and the Peasant’, before an audience which included Pushkin and an innocent-looking nineteen-year-old beauty, Anna Kern – the daughter of Petr Poltoratsky and hence the niece, both of her hostess and of Praskovya Osipova.

Anna had been married at sixteen – ‘too early and too undiscriminatingly’


(#litres_trial_promo) – to Lieutenant-General Ermolay Kern, thirty-five years her senior. Kern, who had lost his command through injudicious behaviour towards a superior officer, had come to St Petersburg in order to petition the emperor for reinstatement. Aware that Alexander was not unsusceptible to Anna’s beauty – which he had compared to that of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, wife of his brother Nicholas – he sent her out to the Fontanka each day in the hope of meeting the emperor, whose habits were well-known: ‘At one in the afternoon he came out of the Winter Palace, walked up the Dvortsovaya Embankment, at Pracheshny Bridge turned down the Fontanka to the Anichkov Bridge […] then returned home by the Nevsky Prospect. The walk was repeated each day, and was called le tour impérial.’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘This was very disagreeable to me and I froze and walked along annoyed both with myself and with Kern’s insistence,’ Anna wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) Kern’s intelligence sources were at fault, for Anna and the emperor never met.

Enchanted by Krylov’s recital, she noticed no one else. But Pushkin soon forced himself on her attention:

During a further game to my part fell the role of Cleopatra and, as I was holding a basket of flowers, Pushkin, together with my cousin Aleksandr Poltoratsky, came up to me, looked at the basket, and, pointing at my cousin, said: ‘And this gentleman will no doubt play the asp?’ I found that insolent, did not answer and moved away […] At supper Pushkin seated himself behind me, with my cousin, and attempted to gain my attention with flattering exclamations, such as, for example, ‘Can one be allowed to be so pretty!’ There then began a jocular conversation between them on the subject of who was a sinner and who not, who would go to hell and who to heaven. Pushkin said to my cousin: ‘In any case, there will be a lot of pretty women in hell, one will be able to play charades. Ask Mme Kern whether she would like to go to hell.’ I answered very seriously and somewhat drily that I did not wish to go to hell. ‘Well, what do you think now, Pushkin?’ asked my cousin. ‘I have changed my mind,’ the poet replied. ‘I do not want to go to hell, even though there will be pretty women there …’


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Eugene has enjoyed his dinner with Kaverin –

… the cork hit the ceiling,

A stream of the comet year’s wine spurted out,

Before him is bloody roast-beef

And truffles – the luxury of our young years,

The finest flower of French cuisine,

And Strasbourg’s imperishable pie

Between a live Limburg cheese

And a golden pineapple –

(I, xvi)

but it is now half past six, and he hurries to the Bolshoy Theatre, where the performance of a new ballet is beginning.

When Pushkin came to St Petersburg in 1817 the capital’s chief theatre was the Maly (or Kazassi Theatre), a wooden building situated on the south side of the Nevsky near the Anichkov Bridge, in what is now Ostrovsky Square, approximately where the Aleksandrinsky Theatre (designed by Rossi, and built in 1832) stands. On 3 February 1818, however, the Bolshoy (or Kamenny) Theatre, burnt down in 1811, was reopened in Teatralnaya Square in Kolomna, on the site of the present Conservatoire. There was also the German (or Novy) Theatre on Dvortsovaya Square, where a troupe of German actors performed, which existed until the early 1820s. When the Maly Theatre was pulled down at the end of the 1820s, its actors moved for some time to the building of the former circus, near Simeonovsky Bridge on the Fontanka, but this was closed when the Aleksandrinsky Theatre and, a year later, the Mikhailovsky Theatre on Mikhailovskaya Square were opened. In 1827 the wooden Kamennoostrovsky Theatre was built on Kamenny Island, a popular resort for the nobility in the summer months. There was also a theatre, seating four hundred, in the Winter Palace, built by Quarenghi between 1783 and 1787, where performances were given for the royal family and the court, while a number of the richer nobles had small, domestic theatres in their palaces.

The Bolshoy Theatre was huge. Behind the immense colonnade of its portico was a double ramp, enabling carriages to be driven up to the theatre entrance. Immediately inside were a succession of foyers: these, however, were only used when a ball was held at the theatre; they remained empty during the intervals, the audience preferring to circulate in the theatre itself. This consisted of a parterre, above which rose five tiers of boxes and galleries. The vast stage could accommodate several hundred performers at once, and was equipped with the most modern machinery for the production of spectacular effects, which were particularly appreciated by the audience. Performances took place every evening, with the exception of Saturday,


(#ulink_7ecabd06-62f7-50ee-a8aa-e26e8f858de4) each performance usually comprising two works: a ballet and a comedy, for example, or an opera and a tragedy.

‘Beneath the shade of the coulisses/My youthful days were spent,’ Pushkin writes in Eugene Onegin (I, xviii). Only unforeseen circumstances could keep him away. When, at the end of October 1819, he arrived late for a performance of the ‘magical ballet’ Hen-Zi and Tao staged by the French ballet master Charles Didelot, it was with the excuse that an exciting event in Tsarskoe Selo had delayed his return. A bear had broken its chain and escaped into the palace gardens where it could have attacked the emperor, had he chanced to be passing. He ended the anecdote with the regretful quip: ‘When a good fellow does turn up, he’s only a bear!’


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In August 1817, during an interval at the Bolshoy, Pushkin was introduced to Pavel Katenin, an officer in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards. Katenin’s regiment left for Moscow shortly afterwards, but when he returned the following summer, Pushkin came to see him: ‘I have come to you as Diogenes came to Antisthenes,’ he said. ‘Beat me, but teach me.’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Round-faced, with full, red cheeks, like a toy cherub from a Palm Sunday fair’,


(#litres_trial_promo) Katenin was a poet, playwright, critic and literary theorist, closer in his views to the Archaic school than that of Karamzin; influential in the theatre, his chief service was to introduce Pushkin into theatrical circles. In early December 1818 he took him to see Prince Shakhovskoy, who lived with his mistress, the comic actress Ekaterina Ezhova, on the upper floor – known as ‘the garret’ – of a house in Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street. Extraordinarily ugly – he was immensely stout, with a huge, beak-like nose – Shakhovskoy was not only a playwright, but also the repertoire director of the St Petersburg theatres, instructing the performers in acting and declamation. His methods, however, were not to the taste of all. ‘His comic pronunciation with its lisp, his squeaky voice, his sobs, his recitatives, his wails, were all intolerable,’ one actress commented. ‘At the same time he showed one at which line one had to put one’s weight on one’s right foot, with one’s left in the rear, and when one should sway on to one’s left, stretching out the right, which to his mind had a majestic effect. One line had to be said in a whisper, and, after a “pause”, making an “indication” with both hands in the direction of the actor facing one, the last line of the monologue had to be cried out in a rapid gabble.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was, however, extremely charming, and Pushkin, walking back with Katenin after the first meeting, exclaimed: ‘Do you know that at bottom he’s a very good fellow?’, and expressed the hope that he did not know of ‘those schoolboy’s scribblings’: an epigram on him Pushkin had written at the Lycée.


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Shakhovskoy entertained most evenings after the theatre, and Pushkin became a constant visitor to these Bohemian revels, remembering one occasion as ‘one of the best evenings of my life’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Vasily Pushkin was saddened when he heard of the visits; he remained true to the hostile view of Shakhovskoy taken by Arzamas. ‘Shakhovskoy is still in Moscow,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in April 1819. ‘He told me that my nephew visited him practically every day. I said nothing, but only sighed quietly.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The main attraction of the garret lay perhaps not so much in the personality of the host, as in the presence of young actresses, in whose careers Shakhovskoy took a paternal interest, assisting them not only by instruction in elocution, but also by bringing them together with rich young officers. ‘He is really a good chap, a tolerable author and an excellent pander,’ Pushkin commented to Vyazemsky.


(#litres_trial_promo) In 1825 the playwright Griboedov, another of Pushkin’s colleagues at the Foreign Office, wrote to a friend: ‘For a long time I lived in seclusion from all, then suddenly had an urge to go out into the world, and where should I go, if not to Shakhovskoy’s? There at least one’s bold hand can rove over the swan’s down of sweet bosoms etc.’


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At the garret Pushkin met the nineteen-year-old actress Elena Sosnitskaya, to whose album he contributed a quatrain:

With coldness of heart you have contrived to unite

The wondrous heat of captivating eyes.

He who loves you is, of course, a fool;

But he who loves you not is a hundred times more foolish.


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‘In my youth, when she really was the beautiful Helen,’ he later remarked, ‘I nearly fell into her net, but came to my senses and got off with a poem.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was also seduced by the more mature charms of the singer Nimfodora Semenova, then thirty-one, more renowned for her appearance than her voice: ‘I would wish to be, Semenova, your coverlet,/Or the dog that sleeps upon your bed,’ he sighed.


(#litres_trial_promo) More serious was his infatuation – despite the fact that she was thirteen years his senior – with Nimfodora’s elder sister, the tragic actress Ekaterina Semenova. The essay ‘My Remarks on the Russian Theatre’, composed in 1820, though purporting to be a general survey of the state of the theatre, is merely an excuse for praising Semenova. ‘Speaking of Russian tragedy, one speaks of Semenova and, perhaps, only of her. Gifted with talent, beauty, and a lively and true feeling, she formed herself […] Semenova has no rival […] she remains the autocratic queen of the tragic stage.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He bestowed the manuscript on her. Somewhat unfeelingly she immediately handed it on to her dramatic mentor, Gnedich, who noted on it: ‘This piece was written by A. Push-kin, when he was pursuing, unsuccessfully, Semenova, who gave it to me then.’


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Semenova had, however, a stage rival: the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kolosova, who made her debut at the Bolshoy on 16 December 1818 as Antigone in Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus in Athens. The following Easter Pushkin, who had admired her demure beauty at the Good Friday service in a church near the Bolshoy, made her acquaintance. But he naturally took Semenova’s side in the rivalry, all the more as he fancied Kolosova had slighted his attentions: she should ‘occupy herself less with aide-de-camps of his imperial majesty and more with her roles’. ‘All fell asleep,’ he added, at a performance of Racine’s Esther (translated by Katenin), on 8 December, in which she took the title role.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Everything in Esther captivates us’ begins an epigram; her speech, her gait, her hair, voice, hand, brows, and ‘her enormous feet!’


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When Eugene enters the theatre Evdokiya Istomina, the great beauty among the ballet-dancers, is on the stage:

Brilliant, half-ethereal,

Obedient to the violin’s magic bow,

Surrounded by a crowd of nymphs,

Stands Istomina; she

Touching the floor with one foot,

Slowly gyrates the other,

And suddenly jumps, and suddenly flies,

Flies, like fluff from Aeolus’s lips;

Now bends, now straightens,

And with one quick foot the other beats.

(I, xx)

Pushkin pursued her too, but with less zeal than Semenova: he was only one of a crowd of admirers. An amusing sketch, executed by Olenin’s son, Aleksey, shows a scene at Priyutino: a dog, with the head and neck of the dark-haired Istomina, is surrounded by a host of dog admirers with the heads of Pushkin, Gnedich, Krylov and others.


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Another visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret was Nikita Vsevolozhsky, Pushkin’s coeval, a passionate theatre-goer, ‘the best of the momentary friends of my momentary youth’.


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(#litres_trial_promo) He was the son of Vsevolod Vsevolozhsky, known, for his wealth, as ‘the Croesus of St Petersburg’, who, after the death of his wife in 1810, had caused a long-lasting scandal in society by taking to live with him a married woman, Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya. The injured husband, Petr Khovansky, complained publicly of the insult done to him, and went so far as to petition the emperor for the return of his wife, but without success. In the end, financially ruined, he was forced to accept Vsevolozhsky’s charity, and lived with the family until his death. To complicate the situation further, Nikita Vsevolozhsky later married Khovansky’s daughter, Princess Varvara. Pushkin, intrigued by the family history, in 1834–5 planned to incorporate it in a projected novel entitled A Russian Pelham. Vsevolozhsky, who received a large income from his father, had an apartment near the Bolshoy and a mistress, the ballet-dancer Evdokiya Ovoshnikova. ‘You remember Pushkin,’ runs a letter of 1824, ‘Pushkin, who sobered you up on Good Friday and led you by the hand to the church of the theatre management so that you could pray to the Lord God and gaze to your heart’s content at Mme Ovoshnikova.’


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In March 1819 Vsevolozhsky set up a small theatrical-literary society among his friends. It met fortnightly, in a room at his apartment, and became known as the Green Lamp after the colour of the lamp-shade. Besides Pushkin and Vsevolozhsky the members included Delvig, Nikolay Gnedich, Nikita’s elder brother, Aleksandr, Fedor Glinka, Arkady Rodzyanko, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Jägers, and a poet whose work is an odd mixture of high-minded poems on civic themes and pornographic verse: Pushkin later dubbed him ‘the Piron of the Ukraine’


(#litres_trial_promo) (a reference to the seventeenth-century French poet Alexis Piron, author of the licentious Ode to Priapus); and another ‘momentary friend’ of this period, Pavel Mansurov, an ensign in the Life Guards Jäger Horse, who, after his marriage to Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya, became Vsevolozhsky’s brother-in-law.


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The tone of Pushkin’s relationship with Mansurov – and hence with most of the Green Lamp’s members – is conveyed by a verse epistle in which Pushkin urges his ‘bosom friend’ to persevere in his pursuit of the young ballerina Mariya Krylova, then still a pupil at the Theatre Academy, for

soon with happy hand

She will throw off the school uniform,

Will lie down before you on the velvet

And will spread her legs;


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and by a letter written to Mansurov after the latter had been posted to Novgorod province:

Are you well, my joy; are you enjoying yourself, my delight – do you remember us, your friends (of the male sex) … We have not forgotten you and at 1/2 past seven every day in the theatre we remember you with applause and sighs – and say: our darling Pavel! What is he doing now in great Novgorod? Envying us – and weeping about Krylova (with the lower orifice, naturally). Each morning the winged maiden


(#ulink_9280a16d-a965-5b80-acd0-68995a119b86) flies to rehearsal past our Nikita’s windows, as before telescopes rise to her and pricks too – but alas … you cannot see her, she cannot see you. Let’s abandon elegies, my friend. I’ll tell you about us in historical fashion. Everything is as before; the champagne, thank God, is healthy – the actresses too – the one is drunk, the others are fucked – amen, amen. That’s how it ought to be. Yurev’s clap is cured, thank God – I’m developing a small case […] Tolstoy is ill – I won’t say with what – as it is I already have too much clap in my letter. The Green Lamp’s wick needs trimming – it might go out – and that would be a pity – there is oil (i.e. our friend’s champagne).


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The note struck here suggests that the Green Lamp was a Russian version of the Hell-fire Club. This was certainly the view taken by earlier biographers of Pushkin, Annenkov, for example, writing: ‘Researches and investigations into this group revealed that it … consisted of nothing more than an orgiastic society.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, the reality was somewhat less than orgiastic. Though no doubt a good deal of champagne and other wines was consumed during and after the meetings – Küchelbecker puritanically refused to join, ‘on account of the intemperance in the use of drink, which apparently prevailed there’


(#litres_trial_promo) – and the younger members were in constant pursuit of actresses and ballerinas, the actual proceedings of the society were of a more serious nature.

One of the policies of the Supreme Council of the Union of Welfare was to ‘set up private societies. These, directed by one or two members of the Union, whose existence was not revealed to the societies, did not form part of the Union. No political aim was intended for them, and the only benefit that was hoped for was that, guided by their founders or heads, they could, especially through their activity in literature, art and the like, further the achievement of the aim of the Supreme Council.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Besides Trubetskoy, three other members of the society were Decembrists: Tolstoy, the usual president at its meetings, Glinka and Tokarev; and there is no doubt that under their direction the Green Lamp became a society of this type. Its name, fortuitously chosen, came to have emblematic significance; Tolstoy, in his deposition to the Committee of Investigation in 1826, remarked that it ‘concealed an ambiguous meaning and the motto of the society consisted of the words: Light and Hope; moreover rings were also made on which a lamp was engraved; each member was obliged to wear one of these rings.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin used his to seal his letter to Mansurov. Rodzyanko later remarked that at each meeting ‘were read verses against the emperor and against the government’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and Tolstoy speaks of ‘some republican verses and other fragments’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But it was never a political society with a definite programme and specific aims. It was, however, a secret society, in that its existence had not been officially sanctioned, and its members were hence to some extent at risk, given the climate of the time: a fact which brought about its dissolution at the end of 1820.

The meetings usually opened with a review, hastily written by Barkov, of the theatre production its members had witnessed that evening. Then followed contributions from those present. On 17 April 1819, for example, Delvig read his poems ‘Fanny’ – addressed to a prostitute he and Pushkin frequented – and ‘To a Child’; Ulybyshev followed with a political article; a fable by Zhadovsky, two poems by Dolgorukov, and one by Tolstoy ended the proceedings. Only two contributions by Pushkin are listed in the – incomplete – records of the society. Of these the more interesting – and the better poem – is the verse epistle to Vsevolozhsky on the latter’s departure for Moscow, read on 27 November 1819. Urging his friend to avoid high society there, he imagines a far more congenial scene:

In the foaming goblet froths

Ay’s cold stream;

In the thick smoke of lazy pipes,

In dressing-gowns, your new friends

Shout and drink!


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Like Arzamas, the Green Lamp provided Pushkin with a ready-made circle of friends, though in the majority of cases his intimacy with them was confined to this period of his life. They were, however, closer to him in age than the Arzamasites, and shared the tastes and predilections which governed his life in these years. Whereas his elder friends sighed over his behaviour and saw him as wasting his talent – Aleksandr Turgenev told Zhukovsky that he daily scolded Pushkin for ‘his laziness and neglect of his own education’, to which ‘he had added a taste for vulgar philandering and equally vulgar eighteenth-century freethinking’


(#litres_trial_promo) – the members of the Green Lamp were companions in his amusements: drinking, whoring and gambling. As with Arzamas, his loyalty to the group persisted in exile; in 1821 he looked back nostalgically at its meetings:

Do you still burn, our lamp,

Friend of vigils and of feasts?

Do you still foam, golden cup,

In the hands of merry wits?

Are you still the same, friends of mirth,

Friends of Cypris and of verse?

Do the hours of love, the hours of drunkenness

Still fly to the call

Of Freedom, indolence and idleness?


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Pushkin’s tastes were not wholly identical with those of Eugene: ‘I am always glad to note the difference/Between Onegin and myself’, he remarks, in case some ‘sarcastic reader’ should imagine that, like Byron, he is painting his own portrait (I, lvi). One vice Eugene did not share was Pushkin’s addiction to gambling.

Passion for bank! neither the love of liberty,

Nor Phoebus, nor friendship, nor feasts

Could have distracted me in past years

From cards.


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So he described, in a cancelled stanza of the second chapter of Eugene Onegin, himself during the years in St Petersburg. It was an addiction, moreover, not confined to this period, as he here implies, but which lasted throughout his life. The game to which he was addicted – which was also Casanova’s passion – was bank, also known as faro (or pharo, originally le pharaon) or shtoss, a descendant of lansquenet, the game played by d’Artagnan and the musketeers on the bastion at La Rochelle while under Huguenot fire, and of basset, the favourite card-game at the court of Charles II. Each player chose a card from his pack, placed it either face-up or face-down – in the latter case it was known as a ‘dark’ card – in front of him on the table and set his stake upon it. The banker, taking a fresh pack, turned the cards up from the top, dealing them alternately to his right and left, stopping momentarily if a player called out attendez, in order to make or reconsider a bet. If a card which fell to the right was of the same denomination as one on which a stake had been placed the banker won; he lost, and paid out the amount of the stake, when such a card fell to the left. If both cards exposed in one turn were the same, a player wagering on that denomination lost either half, or the whole of his stake, depending on the rules in force at the game. Having won once, the player could then cock his card – turn up one corner – to wager both his original stake and his gains: this was known as a parolet; or bend the card, to bet only his gains. This was a paix, or parolet-paix, if he had just won a parolet. After winning a parolet, he could cock another corner, to double his winnings again (sept-et-le-va), followed by a third (quinze-et-le-va) and a fourth (trente-et-le-va).


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Pushkin gambled constantly, and as constantly lost, as a result having to resort to money-lenders. He played frequently with Nikita Vsevolozhsky, whose deep pockets enabled him to bear his losses. Pushkin, less fortunate, was compelled to stake his manuscripts, and in 1820 lost to Vsevolozhsky a collection of poems which he valued at 1,000 roubles. When, four years later, he was preparing to publish his verse, he employed his brother Lev to buy the manuscript back. Vsevolozhsky generously asked for only 500 roubles in exchange, but Pushkin insisted that the full amount should be paid. ‘The second chapter of “Onegin”/ Modestly slid down [i.e., was lost] upon an ace,’ Ivan Velikopolsky, an old St Petersburg acquaintance, recorded in 1826, adding elsewhere: ‘the long nails of the poet/Are no defence against the misfortunes of play.’


(#litres_trial_promo) And in December of the same year, when Pushkin was staying at a Pskov inn to recover after having been overturned in a carriage on the road from Mikhailovskoe, he told Vyazemsky that ‘instead of writing the 7th chapter of Onegin, I am losing the fourth at shtoss: it’s not funny’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Another favourite opponent at the card-table was Vasily Engelhardt, described by Vyazemsky as ‘an extravagant rich man, who did not neglect the pleasures of life, a deep gambler, who, however, during his life seems to have lost more than he won’. ‘Pushkin was very fond of Engelhardt,’ he adds, ‘because he was always ready to play cards, and very felicitously played on words.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In July 1819, having recovered from a serious illness – ‘I have escaped from Aesculapius/Thin and shaven – but alive’ – Pushkin, who was leaving for Mikhailovskoe to convalesce, in a verse epistle begged Engelhardt, ‘Venus’s pious worshipper’, to visit him before his departure.


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The cold he had caught while, as Turgenev reported, standing outside a prostitute’s door, had turned into a more serious illness – it seems likely to have been typhus. On 25 June his uncle wrote from Moscow to Vyazemsky in Warsaw: ‘Pity our poet Pushkin. He is ill with a severe fever. My brother is in despair, and I am extremely concerned by such sad news.’


(#litres_trial_promo) James Leighton, the emperor’s personal physician, was called in. He prescribed baths of ice and had Pushkin’s head shaved. After six weeks’ illness Pushkin recovered, but had to wear a wig while his own hair grew again. This was not Pushkin’s only illness, though it was the most severe, during these years in the unhealthy – both in climate and amusements – atmosphere of St Petersburg. Besides a series of venereal infections, he was also seriously ill in January 1818: ‘Our poet Aleksandr was desperately ill, but, thank God, is now better,’ Vasily Pushkin informed Vyazemsky.


(#litres_trial_promo) During this illness Elizaveta Schott-Schedel, a St Petersburg demi-mondaine, had visited him dressed as an hussar officer, which apparently contributed to his recovery. ‘Was it you, tender maiden, who stood over me/In warrior garb with pleasing gaucherie?’ he wonders, pleading with her to return now he is convalescent:

Appear, enchantress! Let me again glimpse

Beneath the stern shako your heavenly eyes,

And the greatcoat, and the belt of battle,

And the legs adorned with martial boots.


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‘Pushkin has taken to his bed,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote the following February;


(#litres_trial_promo) a year later, in February 1820, he was laid up yet again. Unpleasant though the recurrent maladies were, the periods of convalescence that followed afforded him the leisure to read and compose: he can have had little time for either in the frenetic pursuit of pleasure that was his life when healthy. The first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State had come out at the beginning of February 1818. ‘I read them in bed with avidity and attention,’ Pushkin wrote. ‘The appearance of this work (as was fitting) was a great sensation and produced a strong impression. 3,000 copies were sold in a month (Karamzin himself in no way expected this) – a unique happening in our country. Everyone, even society women, rushed to read the History of their Fatherland, previously unknown to them. It was a new revelation for them. Ancient Russia seemed to have been discovered by Karamzin, as America by Columbus.’


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The friendship between Pushkin and the Karamzins, begun at Tsarskoe Selo, had continued in St Petersburg. During the winter of 1817–18 he was a frequent visitor to the apartment they had taken in the capital on Zakharevskaya Street; at the end of June 1818 he stayed with them for three days at Peterhof, sketched a portrait of Karamzin, and, with him, Zhukovsky and Aleksandr Turgenev went for a sail on the Gulf of Finland. He was in Peterhof again in the middle of July, and, when the Karamzins moved back to their lodging in Tsarskoe Selo, visited them three times in September. At the beginning of October they took up residence in St Petersburg for the winter, staying this time with Ekaterina Muraveva on the Fontanka. Pushkin visited them soon after their arrival, but then the intimacy suddenly ceased: apart from two short meetings at Tsarskoe Selo in August 1819 there is no trace of any lengthy encounter until the spring of 1820. During this period Pushkin composed a biting epigram on Karamzin’s work:

In his ‘History’ elegance and simplicity

Disinterestedly demonstrate to us

The necessity for autocracy

And the charm of the knout.


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Shortly after Karamzin’s death on 22 May 1826 Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoe: ‘You know the sad cause of my journey to Petersburg. Although you are a knave and have occasionally sinned with epigrams against Karamzin, in order to extract a smile from rascals and cads, without doubt you mourn his death with your heart and mind.’


(#ulink_4292cf69-7728-5236-a78e-66317fdc33a1) ‘Your short letter distresses me for many reasons,’ Pushkin replied on 10 July. ‘Firstly, what do you mean by my epigrams against Karamzin? There was only one, written at a time when Karamzin had put me from himself, deeply wounding both my self-esteem and my heartfelt attachment to him. Even now I cannot think of this without emotion. My epigram was witty and in no way insulting, but the others, as far as I know, were stupid and violent: surely you don’t ascribe them to me? Secondly. Who are you calling rascals and cads? Oh, my dear chap … you hear an accusation and make up your mind without hearing the justification: that’s Jeddart justice. If even Vyazemsky already etc., what about the rest? It’s sad, old man, so sad, one might as well straightaway put one’s head in a noose.’


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The ‘rascals and cads’ of Vyazemsky’s letter are the Decembrists. Their trial had opened a month earlier, on 3 June: no wonder he should sadly reproach Vyazemsky for prematurely passing sentence on them. However, as his letter makes clear, though the epigram is a political attack, his rejection by Karamzin was on personal, not political grounds. In April 1820 Karamzin wrote to Dmitriev, ‘Having exhausted all means of knocking sense into his dissolute head, I already long ago abandoned the unfortunate fellow to Fate and to Nemesis.’


(#litres_trial_promo) What wounded Pushkin so deeply was an unsparing castigation of his follies, followed by banishment into outer darkness.

The performance at the Bolshoy has ended, and Eugene hurries home to change into ‘pantaloons, dress-coat, waistcoat’ (I, xxvi) – probably a brass-buttoned, blue coat with velvet collar and long tails, white waistcoat and blue nankeen pantaloons or tights, buttoning at the ankle – before speeding in a hackney carriage to a ball. This has already begun; the first dance, the polonaise, and the second, the waltz, have taken place; the mazurka, the central event of the ball, is in full swing and will be followed by the final dance, a cotillion.

The ballroom’s full;

The music’s already tired of blaring;

The crowd is busy with the mazurka;

Around it’s noisy and a squash;

The spurs of a Chevalier guardsman jingle;


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The little feet of darling ladies fly;

After their captivating tracks

Fly fiery glances,

And by the roar of violins are drowned

The jealous whispers of modish wives.

(I, xxviii)

‘In the days of gaieties and desires/I was crazy about balls’ (I, xxix), wrote Pushkin: for the furtherance of amorous intrigue they were supreme. He was simultaneously both highly idealistic and deeply cynical in his view of and attitude towards women. In a letter to his brother, written from Moldavia in 1822, full of sage and prudent injunctions on how Lev should conduct his life – none of which Pushkin himself observed – he remarked: ‘What I have to say to you with regard to women would be perfectly useless. I will only point out to you that the less one loves a woman, the surer one is of possessing her. But this pleasure is worthy of an old 18th-century monkey.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Though he fell violently in love, repeatedly, and at the least excuse, he never forgot that the objects of his passion belonged to a sex of which he held no very high opinion. ‘Women are everywhere the same. Nature, which has given them a subtle mind and the most delicate sensibility, has all but denied them a sense of the beautiful. Poetry glides past their hearing without reaching their soul; they are insensitive to its harmonies; remark how they sing fashionable romances, how they distort the most natural verses, deranging the metre and destroying the rhyme. Listen to their literary opinions, and you will be amazed by the falsity, even coarseness of their understanding … Exceptions are rare.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The hero of the unfinished A Novel in Letters echoes these views. ‘I have been often astonished by the obtuseness in understanding and the impurity of imagination of ladies who in other respects are extremely amiable. Often they take the most subtle of witticisms, the most poetic of greetings, either as an impudent epigram or a vulgar indecency. In such a case the cold aspect they assume is so appallingly repulsive that the most ardent love cannot withstand it.’


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Pushkin’s first St Petersburg passion was Princess Evdokiya Golitsyna, whom he met at the Karamzins in the autumn of 1817. This thirty-seven-year-old beauty, known, from her habit of never appearing during the day, as the princesse nocturne, had been married in 1799, at the behest of the Emperor Paul and against her wishes, to Prince Sergey Golitsyn. After Paul’s death, however, she was able to leave her husband and lead an independent, if somewhat eccentric life at her house on Bolshaya Millionnaya Street. ‘Black, expressive eyes, thick, dark hair, falling in curling locks on the shoulders, a matte, southern complexion, a kind and gracious smile; add to these an unusually soft and melodious voice and pronunciation – and you will have an approximate understanding of her appearance,’ writes Vyazemsky, one of her admirers. At midnight ‘a small, but select company gathered in this salon: one is inclined to say in this temple, all the more as its hostess could have been taken for the priestess of some pure and elevated cult’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Here the conversation would continue until three or four in the morning. In later life her eccentricities became more pronounced; in the 1840s she mounted a campaign against the introduction of the potato to Russia, on the grounds that this was an infringement of Russian nationality.

‘The poet Pushkin in our house fell mortally in love with the Pythia Golitsyna and now spends his evenings with her,’ Karamzin wrote to Vyazemsky in December 1817. ‘He lies from love, quarrels from love, but as yet does not write from love. I must admit, I would not have fallen in love with the Pythia: from her tripod spurts not fire, but cold.’


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(#litres_trial_promo) For some months he was deeply in love with her. Sending her a copy of ‘Liberty. An Ode’, he accompanied the manuscript with a short verse:

I used to sing of

The splendid dream of Freedom

And breathed it sweetly.

But then I see you, hear you,

And so? … man is weak!

Losing freedom for ever,

I adore captivity with my heart.


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But her attractions were purely spiritual; this was an ethereal love devoid of any taint of physicality. Other desires had to be satisfied elsewhere. ‘In the mornings Pushkin tells Zhukovsky where he spent the night without sleep; he spends the entire time paying visits to whores, to me, and to Princess Golitsyna, and in the evenings sometimes plays bank,’ Turgenev noted.


(#litres_trial_promo) After meeting the princess in Moscow in June 1818, Vasily Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky: ‘I spent the entire evening with her and we talked much about you. She loves you and respects you. My nephew Aleksandr called on her every day. She gladdened me by saying that he was a very good, very clever young fellow.’


(#litres_trial_promo) By this time Pushkin’s emotions had begun to cool, and by December the episode was over.

‘Pushkin is possessed,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky on 12 November 1819. ‘I catch a glimpse of him only in the theatre, he looks in there in his free time from the animals. In general his life is spent at the office where one obtains admission tickets to look at the animals that have been brought here, among which the tiger is the most tame. He has fallen in love with the ticket-girl and has become her cavalier servant; meanwhile he is observing the nature of animals and noticing the difference from the swine he sees gratis.’ Vyazemsky’s reply is somewhat cryptic but undoubtedly indecent: ‘Pushkin’s love is surely my friend, who tortured me for a whole night … at a masked ball. Do me a favour and ask him to convey my respects to them; there should be two of them. One lion was in love with her, and when she caressed him, he displayed a leonine sceptre. Does Pushkin know about his rival? However, it’s more difficult getting a man away from a woman than having a tug-of-war with a donkey.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The girl – she seems to have been called Nastasya – sold tickets for one of the travelling menageries which visited St Petersburg at Easter, Shrove-tide and other times, setting up their booth, alongside others occupied by fortune-tellers, trained canaries, dancing dogs, jugglers, magicians, tight-rope walkers and the like, on Admiralty Square, Theatre Square in front of the Bolshoy, or on Tsaritsyn Field.

He also knew, and admired – but was never in love with – the eighteen-year-old Pole Sofya Potocka, whom he met in 1819. Her family history was an intriguing one. Her mother, Sofya Clavona, was a Greek from Constantinople, who had, it was said, been bought from her mother for 1,500 piastres by the Polish ambassador. As she was journeying to Poland with her protector, at Kamenets-Podolsk in the Ukraine she met Major Joseph Witt, who fell in love with her, married her secretly and took her to Paris. The portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun saw her here in the early 1780s, noting that she ‘was then extremely young and as pretty as it is possible to be, but tolerably vain of her charming face’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Later Sofya attracted the attention of Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite, who, besotted with her, made her husband a general and a count, took her as his mistress and bestowed on her an estate in the Crimea. In 1788 she became the mistress of General Stanislaw-Felix Potocki, a claimant to the throne of Poland with huge estates in the Ukraine. He paid Witt two million zlotys to divorce her, and married her in 1798, after the death of his wife. He hardly received full value for his money, since she soon began an affair with his son, later living openly with him in Tulchin. Her husband died in 1805, and his son soon afterwards. Her two daughters, Sofya and Olga, rivalled their mother in beauty: Sofya married Pushkin’s friend General Kiselev in 1821, but separated from him in 1829, supposedly on learning that he had had an affair with her sister (who had married General Lev Naryshkin).

Vyazemsky met the Potocki family in Warsaw in October 1819, and immediately succumbed to Sofya’s attractions. ‘With us for a few days longer are Potocka and Sofya, who is as beautiful as Minerva in the hour of lust,’ he informed Turgenev, and a fortnight later wrote: ‘Give my respects to all our acquaintance; and, if you see her and get to know her, – to the sovereign of my imagination, Minerva in the hour of lust, in whom everything is not earthly, apart from the gaze, in which there glows the spark of earthly desire. Happy is he who will fan the spark: in it the fire of poetry glows.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In December Turgenev told Vyazemsky of Pushkin’s new verses; he had written ‘an epistle to a masturbator, and, really, it can be read even by the most bashful … How Sofya’s roses fade, because she allows no one to pick them.’ In January he sent Vyazemsky the poem in question, together with a request for enough striped black velvet to make a waistcoat, since it was unobtainable in St Petersburg. ‘Pushkin’s verses are charming!’ Vyazemsky replied. ‘Did he not write them to my lustful Minerva? They say she deals in that business.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Vyazemsky was right; the poem, ironically enitled ‘Platonic Love’, was addressed to Sofya Potocka. In 1825, when preparing his verse for publication, Pushkin wrote on the margin of the poem’s manuscript: ‘Not to be included – since I want to be a moral person.’


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* (#ulink_467999af-4b2f-5c27-b473-00720a81f408) I.e. La Pucelle: the Charites were the daughters of Zeus, goddesses personifying charm, grace and beauty.

* (#ulink_1993fb9c-5f6c-5db8-b188-93112a52879d) Grisier was a friend of Alexandre Dumas, who mentions him in The Count of Monte Cristo, and based a novel, Le Maître d’armes (3 vols, Paris, 1840–1), on his experiences in St Petersburg.

Duelling had been banned in France from 1566, in England from 1615, and in Russia from 1702. The relevant ukase of Peter the Great runs: ‘Inhabitants of Russia and foreigners residing there shall not engage in duels with any weapon whatsoever, and for this purpose shall not call out anyone nor go out: whosoever having issued a challenge inflicts a wound shall be executed’ (Duel Pushkina s Dantesom-Gekkerenom, 104). However, in all three countries there always had been a very wide gap between ban and enforcement. This was especially true of Russia, where the authorities would usually turn a blind eye to rencontres which did not have a fatal result; in the case of those which ended with the death of one combatant, the fate of the survivor often depended on the arbitrary whim of the tsar. Ivan Annenkov, a lieutenant in the Chevalier Guards, who killed an officer of the Life Guards Hussars in a duel, was, on Alexander’s orders, given the extraordinarily light sentence of three months in the guard-house. And when, in June 1823, General Kiselev, the chief of staff of the Second Army, killed Major-General Mordvinov, Alexander took no action at all: Kiselev remained in his post and underwent no punishment.

* (#ulink_aa2be086-ce6d-5e99-bf08-b3b9d6179100) Elizaveta Markovna was related to Praskovya Osipova, the owner of Trigorskoe: her brother, Petr Poltoratsky, had married Ekaterina Vulf, the sister of Praskovya’s first husband, Nikolay Vulf.

* (#ulink_e122c88d-c9c2-52e1-a5bf-7186afd04c12) The theatres were also closed from the Monday of the first week of Lent to the Sunday after Easter.

* (#ulink_cc083d84-5b36-57d3-a681-6b17bb8d9093) The phrase is an adaptation of a line in a poem of 1820, ‘Extinguished is the orb of day …’ [‘Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo …’], II, 146.

† (#ulink_98f8c01f-76f6-5b4f-a6c8-438d272614e4) The known other members are Sergey Trubetskoy, Fedor Yurev, Dmitry Barkov, Yakov Tolstoy, Aleksandr Tokarev, Ivan Zhadovsky, Aleksandr Ulybyshev, and Prince Dmitry Dolgorukov.

* (#ulink_9013dc53-d3f9-5238-9293-6501a5375aa7) I.e. Krylova: the Russian for wing is krylo.

* (#ulink_86d71484-eb78-592e-bfed-bf8812214ba2) Vyazemsky had almost filial feelings for Karamzin: after his father’s death in 1807 (his mother, an O’Reilly, had died in 1802) Karamzin, whose second wife was Vyazemsky’s illegitimate half-sister, had come to live on the family estate at Ostafevo, near Moscow, and had acted as the young prince’s guardian.

* (#ulink_9037b027-27e8-53eb-ad5b-6ed53368ca61) Pushkin later added a manuscript note to this line: ‘An inaccuracy. Chevalier Guards officers, like other guests, appeared at balls in undress and low shoes. A just remark, but there is something poetic about the spurs’ (VI, 528).

* (#ulink_a39c9d1e-d168-5afb-bffb-c5ce11f576b5) Pythia was the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, who ‘delivered the answer of the god to such as came to consult the oracle, and was supposed to be suddenly inspired by the sulphureous vapours which issued from the hole of a subterranean cavity within the temple, over which she sat bare on a three-legged stool, called a tripod’ (Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. London, 1984, 539).




5 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20 (#ulink_806de601-aa80-51cd-b3eb-cb9eca19b31e)

III: Triumph and Disaster


Thus, an unconcerned dweller in the world,

On the lap of idle quiet,

I celebrated with obedient lyre

The legends of dark antiquity.

I sang – and forgot the insults

Of blind fate and of my enemies,

Flighty Dorida’s treacheries,

And the loud slanders of fools.

Borne on the wings of invention,

My spirit soared beyond the earth’s confine;

But meanwhile an invisible thunder-storm’s

Cloud gathered over me! …

Ruslan and Lyudmila, Epilogue

AT THE LYCÉE Pushkin had begun his first long poem, the mock-heroic epic Ruslan and Lyudmila. He continued to work on it – slowly and spasmodically, most productively when confined to his bed – in St Petersburg, reading excerpts to his friends as he progressed. ‘Pushkin is writing a charming poem and is maturing,’ Batyushkov told Vyazemsky in May 1818;


(#litres_trial_promo) and in autumn wrote to Bludov in London: ‘The Cricket is beginning the third canto of his poem. What a marvellous, rare talent! Taste, wit, invention and gaiety. Ariosto at nineteen could not have done better. I see with grief that he is letting himself be distracted, harming himself and us, lovers of beautiful verse.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In December Vyazemsky heard of further progress from Turgenev: ‘[Pushkin], despite his whole dissolute way of life, is finishing the fourth canto of his poem. If he were to have three or four more doses of clap, it would be in the bag. His first dose of venereal disease was also the first wet-nurse of his poem.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The fifth canto was written in the summer of 1819 at Mikhailovskoe; in August Fedor Glinka, the fellow-member of the Green Lamp, read the first two in manuscript. ‘O Pushkin, Pushkin! Who/Taught you to captivate with miraculous verse?’ he exclaimed.


(#litres_trial_promo) In February 1820 Pushkin, ill again, revised the fifth and worked on the sixth and final canto while convalescing. He completed this a month later, and immediately read it to Zhukovsky, who in admiration presented his young rival with his portrait, bearing the inscription: ‘To the pupil-conqueror from the conquered teacher on that most solemn day when he completed Ruslan and Lyudmila. Good Friday, 26 March 1820.’


(#litres_trial_promo) It was a generous gesture, acknowledging Pushkin’s graceful and affectionate parody of Zhukovsky’s own work, ‘The Twelve Sleeping Maidens’, within the poem. Pushkin later regretted the imitation: ‘It was unforgivable (especially at my age) to parody, for the amusement of the mob, a virginal, poetic creation,’ he wrote.


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Ruslan and Lyudmila opens in Kiev, at the feast given by Prince Vladimir to celebrate the marriage of his daughter, Lyudmila, to Ruslan. The couple repair to the bridal chamber, but, before their union can be consummated, Lyudmila is carried away by the wizard Chernomor, a hunchbacked dwarf with a magic nightcap. After many adventures Ruslan vanquishes Chernomor and brings his bride back to Kiev, routing an army of Pechenegs that is besieging the city.

Portions of the first and third cantos of the poem appeared in periodicals – the Neva Spectator and Son of the Fatherland – in 1820, and the whole poem was published as a separate edition at the end of July, after Pushkin’s departure for the south: a paperback of 142 pages, selling for ten roubles (fifteen if printed on vellum). It was Pushkin’s first published book. Earlier, in 1818 and 1819, he had tried to raise interest in a subscription edition of his poems, employing his brother Lev and Sergey Sobolevsky to sell tickets. Some had been sold (Zhukovsky had taken a hundred), but the enterprise had collapsed after the loss of the manuscript at cards to Vsevolozhsky. Before leaving St Petersburg he entrusted the manuscript of Ruslan and Lyudmila to Zhukovsky, Lev and Sobolevsky, who prepared it for publication: a difficult task in the case of canto six, since Pushkin had not had time to produce a fair copy. Gnedich took charge of the book’s production: he was experienced in these matters, having already acted as publisher for a number of authors. He was, however, a sharp operator. In 1817 he agreed to publish a work by Batyushkov, but insisted that the poet be responsible for any loss the book might make, and, when it proved surprisingly popular, passed on to him only two thousand roubles out of the fifteen thousand the book made. He was to be similarly sharp in dealing with Pushkin and, even by publishers’ standards, dilatory: Pushkin first saw a copy of Ruslan and Lyudmila on 20 March 1821, some eight months after its publication. The entire print-run of the work was bought by Ivan Slenin, one of the largest book-sellers in St Petersburg. Gnedich’s production costs were therefore immediately covered; it has been calculated that his profit was in the region of six thousand roubles, of which Pushkin received only fifteen hundred. The poem proved extraordinarily popular; the edition soon sold out, after which copies changed hands for the unheard-of price of twenty-five roubles. And in December 1821 the imperial theatre in Moscow put on Ruslan and Lyudmila, or the Downfall of Chernomor, the evil magician, a ‘heroico-magical pantomine ballet’ in five acts, adapted by A. Glushkovsky, with music by F. Scholz: in order to help the audience in the comprehension of the plot, placards were exhibited on stage with inscriptions such as: ‘Tremble, Chernomor! Ruslan approaches.’


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In July 1820, in the south, Pushkin wrote an epilogue to the poem, and for the second edition in 1828 added the famous and extraordinary prologue (written at Mikhailovskoe in 1824), one of his finest poems, the first line of which – ‘On the sea-shore stands a green oak’


(#litres_trial_promo) – haunts Masha Prozorova in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. For this edition he also, perhaps mistakenly – but no doubt sensibly, in view of his situation at the time – toned down some of the more risqué passages of the first version. The loss of Chernomor’s attempted seduction of Lyudmila at the end of the fourth canto is particularly to be regretted: a scene which has been claimed to represent Pushkin’s view of the marital relations between an ill-matched St Petersburg couple – the seventy-one-year-old Count Stroinovsky and his eighteen-year-old wife, Ekaterina Butkevich.

In October 1820 A.A. Bestuzhev, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Dragoons, later an extremely popular short-story writer under the pseudonym Marlinsky, another habitué of Shakhovskoy’s garret, wrote to his sister Elena: ‘On account of Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila a terrible ink war has started up here – idiocy upon idiocy – but the poem itself is good.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The war had begun in June with an article in the Herald of Europe, directed chiefly against Zhukovsky, but deploring en passant the intrusion into literature of such coarse material as the published extracts from Pushkin’s poem. ‘Let me ask you: what if somehow […] a guest with a beard, in a peasant coat and bast shoes were to worm his way into the Moscow Noble Assembly, and were to cry in a loud voice: Greetings, folk! Would one admire such a rascal?’


(#litres_trial_promo) In August and September Voeikov, a member of Arzamas, who hence might have been expected to be on Pushkin’s side, devoted four long and tedious articles to the poem in Son of the Fatherland, in the last of which he accused Pushkin of using ‘peasant’ rhymes, and ‘low’ language, and of one expression remarked ‘here the young poet pays tribute to the Germanicized taste of our times’, a dig at romanticism and Zhukovsky.


(#litres_trial_promo) The Neva Spectator now chimed in, complaining of the ‘insignificant subject’, taking particular exception to the intrusion of a contemporary narrator into the narrative, and deploring the presence of ‘scenes, before which it is impossible not to blush and lower one’s gaze’; these possibly encouraged revolution, and were certainly unsuited to poetry.


(#litres_trial_promo) In September an article signed N.N. – thought then to be by Pushkin’s friend Katenin, but now known to have been written, under Katenin’s influence, by a fellow-officer in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards, Dmitry Zykov – in Son of the Fatherland concentrated on what the author saw as the implausibilities of the poem: ‘Why does Ruslan whistle when he sets off? Does this indicate a man in despair? […] Why does Chernomor, having got the magic sword, hide it on the steppe, under his brother’s head? Would it not be better to take it home with him?’ In October Aleksey Perovsky came to the poem’s defence with two witty articles in Son of the Fatherland, in which he took issue both with Voeikov and Zykov: ‘Unfortunate poet! Hardly had he time to recover from the severe attacks of Mr V., when Mr N.N. appeared with a pack full of questions, each more subtle than the other! […] Anyone would think that at issue was not a Poem, but a criminal offence.’


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Most of these critical remarks, though annoying, were too ludicrous to be taken seriously; and the success of the work was wonderfully consoling. However, Pushkin was hurt when Dmitriev, whom he had known since childhood, commented to Vyazemsky – who passed the remark on – of the poem: ‘I find in it much brilliant poetry, lightness in the narrative: but it is a pity that he should so often lapse into burlesque, and a still greater pity that he did not use as an epigraph the well-known line, slightly amended: “A mother will forbid her daughter to read it”.


(#ulink_1f630a26-aa4e-52d9-901b-b11d62806d56) Without this caution the poem will fall from a good mother’s hand on the fourth page.’


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Pushkin hardly conceals his multiple borrowings in the poem: from Zhukovsky, from Ossian, from the Russian folk epic, and, above all, from Ariosto and Voltaire. The first two are the least important: Zhukovsky’s influence is limited to the parody of ‘The Twelve Sleeping Maidens’, where Pushkin’s lively irreverence, his delight in the physical, his attention to detail are an invigorating contrast to Zhukovsky’s somewhat plodding gothic narrative with its lack of specificity. From Ossian Pushkin borrows a line from the poem ‘Carthon’, ‘A tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years’, which, translated, forms the first and last two lines of his poem.


(#litres_trial_promo) He seems, too, to have adapted some names from this poem for his characters: Moina, the mother of Carthon, becoming Naina, and Reuthamir, her father, Ratmir. His debt to the Russian folk epic, the bylina, is somewhat greater. The poem employs the traditional setting of the Kievan bylina cycle: the court of Prince Vladimir in Kiev, and follows the folk epic in referring to the prince as ‘Vladimir the Sun’, a legendary figure who is seen as an amalgam of the Kievan rulers Vladimir I (d. 1015) and Vladimir II Monomakh (d. 1125). Pushkin, however, no doubt as a result of his reading of Karamzin, is more historically correct than his model: the nomadic army, one of a succession of invaders from the East, which besieges Kiev in Ruslan and Lyudmila, is that of the Pechenegs, against whom Vladimir I fought; in the byliny such enemies are usually generalized as Tatars.

But Pushkin had no intention of creating a modern bylina: he makes no use of the mythology of the genre, nor of its traditional heroes. Instead, he invents his own characters, who, on leaving Vladimir’s court, leave the world of the bylina and abruptly find themselves confronting the crenellated battlements of a Western European castle. Neither was he inclined to write a Russian heroic epic, as many wished him to do: the tone of Ruslan and Lyudmila is determinedly mock-heroic throughout, as Pushkin’s comic treatment of the most obviously heroic episodes demonstrates, such as Ruslan’s defeat of the Pecheneg army:

Wherever the dread sword whistles,

Wherever the furious steed prances,

Everywhere heads fly from shoulders

And with a wail rank on rank collapses;

In one moment the field of battle

Is covered with heaps of bloody bodies,

Living, squashed, decapitated,

With piles of spears, arrows, armour.

(VI, 299–306)

The models to which Ruslan and Lyudmila owes most are Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) – which Pushkin would have read in a French prose version – and Voltaire’s La Pucelle (1755), itself modelled on Ariosto, though Pushkin’s work is on a much smaller scale than its predecessors.


(#ulink_664824b5-1d51-5eb5-b7e5-af000ce72827) Like them, he will begin a canto with general remarks, often addressed to his readers, and tantalizingly break off the narration at a crucial moment to turn to the adventures of another character. His narrator, like those of Ariosto and Voltaire, is not contemporary with the events, but of the present day, intrusive, digressive, and constantly ironizing at the expense of the characters, the plot and its devices. Both Ariosto and Voltaire claim that their works are based upon actual chronicles; composed, in Ariosto’s case, by Tripten, Archbishop of Reims, a legendary figure; and, in Voltaire’s, by l’abbé Tritême, a real figure, but innocent of the authorship foisted upon him. Pushkin follows suit with another ecclesiastic, a ‘monk, who preserved/For posterity the true legend/Of my glorious knight’ (V, 225–7).

It is here, however, that Pushkin parts company with his predecessors. Fantastic as the events in both Ariosto and Voltaire are, the narratives rest on some slight residue of fact, and the backgrounds against which the action unfolds have, for the most part, some semblance of geographical plausibility. With the exception of the Kievan court, however, Ruslan and Lyudmila is pure fantasy, set in a land of pure romance. If Ariosto’s aim is to please his patrons by extolling the glorious, if legendary past of the House of Este, and Voltaire’s to satirize – powerfully, if often crudely – religion, superstition and monarchical rule, Pushkin’s is far more intimate, as his poem is on a far more intimate scale: to entertain his friends and social acquaintances. In his asides, foreshadowing Eugene Onegin, he brings himself and St Petersburg society into the poem. When he compares Lyudmila with ‘severe Delfira’, who ‘beneath her petticoat is a hussar,/Give her only spurs and whiskers!’ (V, 15–16), he is referring to Countess Ekaterina Ivelich, a distant relation of the Pushkins, who lived near them on the Fontanka, and was described by Delvig’s wife as ‘more like a grenadier officer of the worst kind than a lady’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He begins, too, at first timidly, to experiment with a literary device that was to become a favourite, both in verse and in prose: he plays with his readers, teasing them and subverting their expectations.

When, in the third stanza of Eugene Onegin, he calls on the ‘friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan’ to meet his new hero, he is not merely attempting to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier poem, but hinting that those who had enjoyed it would also enjoy his latest work: despite the obvious dissimilarities – one a mock epic, set in a fabulous past, the other a contemporary novel in verse – the two share a common tone. Batyushkov was right when he spoke of the poem’s ‘taste, wit, invention and gaiety’; to these he could have added youthful exuberance, charm, and the effortless brilliance of the verse: characteristics which are also those of Eugene Onegin. The poem improves as it continues, and is at its best when Pushkin’s fantasy is least constrained by the demands of the plot or a traditional setting: Prince Ratmir in the hands of his female bath attendants, and Lyudmila in Chernomor’s castle and garden are episodes which outshine the rest.

One of the most colourful characters of this time – an age when they were not in short supply – was Count Fedor Tolstoy (his first cousin, Nikolay, was the father of Leo Tolstoy


(#ulink_56bff66a-0610-5d90-81e9-c16b344b110a)). Born in 1782, he joined the Preobrazhensky Life Guards, where he soon made a reputation for himself as a fire-eater, duellist – he was said to have killed eleven men in duels in the course of his life – and cardsharp. In 1803 he was a member of an embassy to Japan, taken there by Admiral Krusenstiern on his circumnavigation of the world. Tolstoy made himself so obnoxious on board that Krusenstiern abandoned him on one of the Aleutian Islands – together with a pet female ape, which he may later have eaten. Crossing the Bering Straits, he wandered slowly back through Siberia, arriving in St Petersburg at the end of 1805: hence his nickname ‘the American’. Coincidentally, Wiegel, who, as a member of Count Golovkin’s embassy to China, was travelling in the opposite direction in the summer of that year, met him at a post-station in Siberia. ‘What stories were not told about him! As a youth he was supposed to have had a passion for catching rats and frogs, opening their bellies with a pen-knife, and amusing himself by watching their mortal agonies for hours on end […] in a word, there was no wild animal comparable in its fearlessness and bloodthirstiness with his propensities. In fact, he surprised us with his appearance. Nature had tightly curled the thick black hair on his head; his eyes, probably reddened with heat and dust, seemed to us injected with blood, his almost melancholy gaze and extremely quiet speech seemed to my terrified companions to conceal something devilish.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Settling in Moscow – where in 1821 he married a beautiful gypsy singer, Avdotya Tugaeva – he spent his time gambling at the English Club, usually winning large sums through his skill in manipulating the deck. He was a close friend of Shakhovskoy – the two had been fellow-officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards – and of Vyazemsky.

‘Count Tolstoy the American is here,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky from St Petersburg in October 1819. ‘He is staying with Prince Shakhovskoy, and therefore we will probably see each other rarely.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin, however, as a regular visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret, soon met Tolstoy, and was soon, unwisely, playing cards with him. Noticing that Tolstoy had slipped a card from the bottom of the pack, he commented on this. ‘Yes, I’m aware of that myself,’ Tolstoy replied, ‘but I don’t care to have it pointed out to me.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Whether because of this, or whether out of sheer malice, Tolstoy, on returning to Moscow, wrote a letter to Shakhovskoy in which he asserted that, on the direct orders of the tsar, Count Miloradovich, the military governor-general of St Petersburg, had had Pushkin flogged in the secret chancellery of the Ministry of the Interior. Shakhovskoy made the libel known to the frequenters of his garret. Though other friends, such as Katenin, energetically refuted it, it spread quickly through literary and social circles. Pushkin eventually learnt of it – though not of its author – from Katenin. Humiliated and infuriated, he oscillated between thoughts of suicide and of reckless defiance of authority.

Though, with Chaadaev’s help, he overcame his initial despair – ‘The voice of slander could no longer wound me,/Able to hate, I was able to despise’


(#litres_trial_promo) – he burnt with the desire to avenge himself. In the draft of a letter to the emperor (which was never sent), composed in 1825 in Mikhailovskoe, he wrote, ‘the rumour spread that I had been brought before the secret chancellery and whipped. I was the last to hear this rumour, which had become widespread, I saw myself as branded by opinion, I became disheartened – I fought, I was 20 in 1820.’


(#litres_trial_promo) There is no direct evidence that Pushkin fought a duel early in 1820 over this matter. However, in June 1822 the seventeen-year-old ensign Fedor Luginin recorded in his diary a conversation with Pushkin in Kishinev: ‘There were rumours that he was whipped in the Secret chancellery, but that is rubbish. In Petersburg he fought a duel because of that.’


(#litres_trial_promo) If he did fight a duel, it has been suggested that his opponent was the poet and Decembrist Kondraty Ryleev.


(#litres_trial_promo) The conjecture is based on a letter of March 1825 from Pushkin to Ryleev’s friend Bestuzhev. ‘I know very well that I am his teacher in verse diction – but he goes his own way. He is a poet in his soul. I am afraid of him in earnest and very much regret that I did not shoot him dead when I had the chance, but how the devil could I have known?’


(#litres_trial_promo) He certainly met Ryleev a number of times between September 1819 and February 1820 (when Ryleev returned to his wife’s parents’ estate near Voronezh) and preserved a sufficiently vivid memory of him to sketch, in January 1826, his profile, with ski-jump nose, protruding lower lip and lank hair next to a portrait of Küchelbecker on a page of the manuscript of the fifth chapter of Eugene Onegin.


(#litres_trial_promo) But whether a duel did take place, and, if it did, whether Ryleev was his opponent are questions which cannot be answered without more evidence.

Pushkin did not learn that Tolstoy had been responsible for the rumours until the autumn of 1820. Then he took partial revenge with an epigram, an adaptation of which he inserted into an epistle to Chaadaev in April 1821. Tolstoy is called a ‘philosopher, who in former years/With debauchery amazed the world’s four corners,/ But, growing civilized, effaced his shame/Abandoned drink and became a card-sharp.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The poem appeared in Son of the Fatherland in August. Tolstoy had no difficulty in recognizing his portrait, and composed his own epigram in reply. ‘The sharp sting of moral satire/ Bears no resemblance to a scurrilous lampoon,’ he wrote, advising Pushkin to ‘Smite sins with your example, not your verse,/And remember, dear friend, that you have cheeks.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He too submitted his lines to the Son of the Fatherland, which, however, declined the honour of printing them.

Pushkin had no intention of avenging himself with the pen, rather than the pistol. ‘He wants to go to Moscow this winter,’ Luginin wrote in his diary, ‘to have a duel with one Count Tolstoy the American, who is the chief in putting about these rumours. Since he has no friends in Moscow, I offered to be his second, if I am in Moscow this winter, which overjoyed him.’


(#litres_trial_promo) But Pushkin’s exile did not end, as he had hoped, in the winter of 1821, and the following September he wrote to Vyazemsky, ‘Forgive me if I speak to you about Tolstoy, your opinion is valuable to me. You say that my lines are no good. I know, but my intention was not to start a witty literary war, but with a sharp insult to repay for his hidden insults a man from whom I parted as a friend, and whom I defended with ardour whenever the occasion presented itself. It seemed amusing to him to make an enemy of me and to give Prince Shakhovskoy’s garret a laugh at my expense with his letters, I found out about all this when already exiled, and, considering revenge one of the first Christian virtues – in the impotence of my rage showered Tolstoy from afar with journalistic mud. […] You reproach me for printing, from Kishinev, under the aegis of exile, abuse of a man who lives in Moscow. But then I did not doubt in my return. My intention was to go to Moscow, where only I could completely clear myself. Such an open attack on Count Tolstoy is not pusillanimity.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The burning feeling of insult, exacerbated by the impossibility of redeeming it in the only honourable way, remained with Pushkin throughout exile: his first action, on the day he reached Moscow in 1826, was to send Sobolevsky round to Tolstoy with a challenge. Luckily, the count was away from Moscow.

In November 1819 V.N. Karazin, a forty-six-year-old Ukrainian landowner, joined the Private Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature,


(#ulink_4e70cf72-9347-5f81-a2c6-20eb0a29ec48) established three years earlier in St Petersburg. The society’s president was Count Sergey Saltykov, but Glinka, the vice-president, was effectively in control. Obedient to the orders of the Union of Welfare’s Supreme Council, he set about turning the society, like the Green Lamp, into one of those which would further the aims of the Union through its activities and discussions.


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Karazin was an idealistic, romantic conservative who had come to Alexander l’s attention in 1801, when ‘he left on the emperor’s study-table an anonymous letter, greeting his accession in exalted terms and appealing to him to lead Russia to a glorious new age’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander discovered his identity, embraced his admirer and showed him great favour for a time, appointing him to the new Ministry of Education. In 1804 Karazin resigned to found a university at Kharkov, which opened in January 1805. For some time thereafter he lived on his estate, opened a tanning factory, made efforts to found a meteorological observatory, forwarded to the Ministry of War his method of preparing food concentrates, and wrote articles on a variety of subjects, such as ‘The description of an apparatus for distilling spirit’, ‘On the possibility of adapting the electric forces of the upper layers of the atmosphere to the needs of man’ and ‘On baking a tasty and healthy bread from acorns’.

Now, on his return to St Petersburg, Karazin was appalled by the political atmosphere of the city, the lack of respect for authority in the discussions, the conversations and jokes he heard, and the poems and epigrams recited at meetings of the society. ‘Some young brat, Pushkin, a pupil of the Lycée, in gratitude, has written a despicable ode, in which the names of the Romanovs are insulted, and the Emperor Alexander called a wandering despot […] Whither are we going?’


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(#litres_trial_promo) he commented in his diary on 18 November 1819. He went to see Prince Kochubey, the Minister of the Interior, whom he had known when at the Ministry of Education, and offered to inform him of the proceedings of the society and of what he might hear elsewhere, promising to keep ‘an unsleeping eye’ on ‘suspicious persons’ such as Prince Sergey Volkonsky, Küchelbecker, Ryleev, Glinka, who was ‘all the more dangerous because through the especial trust of the governor-general he was employed to collect in secret rumours going about the town for the information of the emperor’, and, finally, Pushkin.


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By the end of March he had collected a good deal of what he considered to be subversive literature – including Pushkin’s epigram on Sturdza – which he incorporated into a report sent to Kochubey on 2 April. Though this consisted largely of a disquisition on the present state of Russia, combined with proposals for a number of reforms, it included an attack on the Lycée, where, he wrote, ‘the emperor is educating pupils who are ill-disposed both to him and to the fatherland […] as is demonstrated by practically all those who graduate from it. It is said that one of them, Pushkin, was secretly punished by imperial command. But among the pupils more or less each one is almost a Pushkin, and they are all bound together by some kind of suspicious union, similar to Masonry, some indeed have joined actual lodges.’ To this remark he appended a note: ‘Who are the composers of the caricatures or epigrams, such as, for example, on the two-headed eagle, on Sturdza in which the person of the emperor is referred to very indecently and so on? The pupils of the Lycée! Who make themselves known to the public with suggestive songs at an age when honesty and modesty are most decorous? They do.’


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Having submitted this report to the emperor, Kochubey invited Karazin to call on him on the evening of 12 April. After their conversation Karazin made an emotional note of its content on the back of the invitation. He was extremely disconcerted to discover that the emperor was not at all interested in the substance of his paper, neither in his analysis of the situation nor his proposals for reform. Its sole result, he wrote, ‘was the desire of his majesty to assure himself that the epigram mentioned in my note was actually written […] that it was not my invention! […] My God! […] It’s almost unbelievable! […] What a sad but true picture of the position of the state is produced!’


(#litres_trial_promo) He washed his hands of the whole affair, refusing Kochubey’s request to obtain manuscript copies of the epigram.

Following this conversation Miloradovich, the military governor-general of St Petersburg, was ordered to impound Pushkin’s writings. He sent a police spy, Fogel, round to Pushkin’s apartment when the latter was out. Fogel offered Nikita fifty roubles for the loan of his master’s poems, promising to bring them back in a short time. Nikita refused and, on Pushkin’s return, told him of the visitor. Pushkin immediately burnt his manuscripts. The following day he was summoned to see Miloradovich. Before going, he went to see Glinka – who had been the general’s adjutant during the war and was now attached to his office – to ask his advice. ‘Go straight to Miloradovich, don’t show confusion and don’t be afraid. He is not a poet; but in his soul and in his chivalrous impulses there is much that is romantic and poetic: he is misunderstood. Go and rely unconditionally on the nobility of his spirit: he will not abuse your trust.’ Heartened, Pushkin set off for Miloradovich’s house on the Nevsky. A few days later Miloradovich told Glinka of the meeting:

Do you know, my dear fellow, Pushkin was with me the other day! You see, I’d been ordered to arrest him and impound all his papers; but I thought it more delicate to invite him to my house and ask him himself for his papers. Well, he turned up, very calm, with a bright face, and, when I asked about the papers, answered: ‘Count! all my poems are burnt! – you will find nothing of mine in my apartment, but if you please, everything is here (he pointed to his forehead with his finger). Order a quire of paper to be brought, I’ll write everything that I’ve ever written (of course, except that which has been printed), with a note: what is mine and what has been circulated under my name.’ Paper was brought. Pushkin sat down and wrote, wrote … and filled a whole note-book … Here it is, look at that! Tomorrow I’ll take it to the emperor. And do you know? Pushkin charmed me with his noble tone and manner of behaviour.


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Miloradovich had read the verses, laughed, and said to Pushkin: ‘If you’ve really decided to attack the government, why don’t you write something about the Senate, which is nothing but a menagerie or pigsty.’ He had concluded by pardoning Pushkin in the name of the emperor.


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Alexander, however, extremely displeased with the idea that the Lycée was a hot-bed of revolutionary fervour, and outraged by Pushkin’s verse, was disinclined to ratify Miloradovich’s generous gesture. Meeting the director of the Lycée, Engelhardt, he expressed his feelings to him as they strolled through the palace garden at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘Engelhardt!’ he said. ‘Pushkin must be exiled to Siberia: he has flooded Russia with seditious verses; the entire youth knows them by heart. His frank conduct with Miloradovich pleases me, but that does not amend matters.’ Engelhardt endeavoured to soften the tsar’s attitude, referring to Pushkin’s literary reputation, and adding: ‘Exile could have a baneful effect on the ardent temper of this young man. I think that magnanimity, your majesty, would be more likely to make him sensible.’


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Alarmed by the danger – it was rumoured that Pushkin would be sent, if not to Siberia, then to the Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea – his friends hurried to his aid. Chaadaev asked his superior, General Vasilchikov, to intercede with Alexander; and, going to Karamzin, persuaded him to speak with the dowager empress, Mariya Fedorovna, on Pushkin’s behalf. Zhukovsky and Aleksandr Turgenev used their influence at the court, and Gnedich visited Olenin, who promised to mention the matter to Alexander. Pushkin himself, somewhat cowed by events, swallowed his pride and called on Karamzin. After exacting a pledge that he should refrain from writing verse against the government for two years, Karamzin undertook to help him, and, going to the empress, asked her to intercede. The emperor relented. Pushkin was not to be banished, but was to be attached to the chancellery of General Ivan Inzov, the Chief Trustee of the Interests of Foreign Colonists in the Southern Territory of Russia, then stationed in Ekaterinoslav. ‘[Pushkin’s] liberal mouth has been closed for two years,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky on 21 April. ‘He has been saved from the misfortune into which he fell by my good genius and his good friends,’ and, on 5 May, ‘He has become quieter and more modest and, in order not to compromise himself, even avoids me in public.’


(#litres_trial_promo) A few days later Vyazemsky heard from Karamzin: ‘Pushkin, having been for a few days completely in unpoetical fear because of his verses on freedom and some epigrams, gave me his word to cease […] He was, I think, moved by the emperor’s magnanimity, which was genuinely touching. It would take too long to describe the details, but if Pushkin does not reform now, he will be a devil long before he gets to hell.’


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On 4 May 1820, Count Capo d’Istrias, the head of the Foreign Office, an honorary member of Arzamas, who, according to Wiegel, had ‘dared to point out’ to Alexander the cruelty of exiling Pushkin to Siberia, and had suggested that he should be transferred to Inzov’s chancellery,


(#litres_trial_promo) composed a letter to Inzov which was signed the following day by the Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. ‘At the Lycée,’ Capo d’Istrias wrote, ‘his progress was rapid, his wit was admired, but his character appears to have escaped the vigilance of the tutors.’ He continued:

There is no excess in which this unfortunate young man has not indulged – as there is no perfection he cannot attain through the transcendent superiority of his talents […] Some pieces of verse and above all an ode to liberty directed the attention of the government towards Mr Pushkin. Amid the greatest beauties of conception and style this latter piece gives evidence of dangerous principles drawn from the ideas of the age, or, more accurately, that system of anarchy dishonestly called the system of the rights of man, of liberty and of independence of nations.

However Messrs Karamzin and Zhukovsky, realizing the dangers to which the young poet was exposing himself, hastened to offer him their advice, made him recognize the error of his ways and brought him to give a solemn promise that he would abjure it for ever. Mr Pushkin appears to be cured – if, that is, his tears and protestations are to be believed. However, his guardians think his repentance to be sincere, and that, by banishing him for a time from St Petersburg, by putting him to work, and by surrounding him with good examples, he can be turned into an excellent servant of the state, or at least a man of letters of the first distinction. In response to their wishes the Emperor has authorized me to give the young Pushkin leave and recommend him to you. He will be attached to your person, General, and will work as a supernumerary in your chancellery. His fate will depend on your good advice.


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Alexander approved the letter, writing ‘So be it’ at the foot. On 4 May the accounts department at the Foreign Office handed out a thousand roubles in assignats to Pushkin for travel expenses; on the fifth he received a podorozhnaya, an official pass entitling him to use post-horses on state business. On 6 or 7 May, accompanied by his servant Nikita Kozlov, he left St Petersburg. Delvig and Pavel Yakovlev travelled with him as far as Tsarskoe Selo. On 9 May he set out for the south.


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* (#ulink_0407138b-69dd-5f69-8640-52df26dd1e6e) An adaptation of a line from Alexis Piron’s comedy, Le Métromanie (1738), where the author, striving to expunge the memory of his earlier Ode to Priapus, wrote, ‘[in my works] I wish that virtue more than wit should shine/A mother will prescribe them to her daughter.’

* (#ulink_546d9052-61cb-59a8-a1a0-4724060fa79a) In its final form Ruslan and Lyudmila has 2,761 lines; Orlando Furioso 38,736 and La Pucelle 8,234.

* (#ulink_34100b4c-84e9-5e50-bf1d-bf4cec40dca4) Tolstoy described his relative as ‘an unusual, criminal and attractive man’ (Chereisky, 438).

* (#ulink_3d9c8f54-ccb6-5b2b-a3da-714e17fc65bf) Not to be confused with the similarly named Private Society of Amateurs of Literature, Sciences and the Arts.

† (#ulink_3d9c8f54-ccb6-5b2b-a3da-714e17fc65bf) The society was, of course, much larger than the unofficial Green Lamp: in 1824 it had 82 full, 24 associate, 34 corresponding and 96 honorary members.

* (#ulink_513131cc-c174-51d0-b770-436b9ea916be) Karazin is confusing ‘Liberty. An Ode’ and ‘Fairy Tales’.




6 THE CAUCASUS AND CRIMEA 1820 (#ulink_359e6c09-2ebb-5f48-91d4-19e3e3505327)


Forgotten by society and by gossip,

Far from the Neva’s banks,

I see before me now

The proud Caucasian peaks.

Ruslan and Lyudmila, Epilogue

PUSHKIN’S ROUTE TO EKATERINOSLAV took him initially along the well-known road towards Mikhailovskoe. At Porkhov, however, he turned off and, entering lands unknown to him, hurried on south through Velikie Luki, Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Chernigov towards Kiev. The monotonous scenery of the White Russian post-road offered no temptation to linger; in any case he could not, for the Foreign Ministry, under whose aegis Inzov’s command lay, seizing an opportunity to avoid expense, had made him an official courier. Besides the letter from Capo d’Istrias to Inzov concerning himself, he bore other documents for the general, including the latter’s appointment as plenipotentiary governor of Bessarabia.

At a post-house somewhere between Chernigov and Mogilev his Lycée companion Pushchin, who was returning to St Petersburg after four months in Bessarabia with his sister, and thus knew nothing of recent events in the capital, scanning the list of travellers, noticed the name of Pushkin among them. ‘I asked the postmaster who this Pushkin was. I had no idea that it could be Aleksandr. The postmaster answered that it was the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich, apparently travelling on official business, in a post-chaise, wearing a red Russian shirt with a belt and a felt hat.’


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Just over a week after leaving St Petersburg, on 14 or 15 May, Pushkin arrived in Kiev. Here he found a friend, Nikolay Raevsky, an officer in the Life Guards Hussars. On leave, he was staying with his father, General Raevsky. The latter had had a distinguished military career: he had served under Suvorov in the Turkish war of 1787–90, becoming a major at eighteen; had been wounded when commanding Bagration’s avant-garde in 1805; and in 1812, in the battle for Smolensk, had held off with ten thousand troops a much larger French force under Marshal Davout. It was said that during this encounter he had taken his sons, Aleksandr and Nikolay, by the hand and led the advance, calling out, ‘Forward, men, for the tsar and the fatherland! I and my sons will show you the way!’


(#litres_trial_promo) The episode was commemorated in popular prints, and earned him a mention in Zhukovsky’s ‘A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors’. It was, however, apocryphal. ‘It is true that I was in front,’ Raevsky later told Batyushkov. ‘But my sons were not there at that time. My youngest child was gathering berries in a wood (he was then a mere child, and a bullet made a hole in his breeches); that was all, the entire anecdote was made up in St Petersburg.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Nikolay – long grown out of his perforated breeches, he was now a Herculean giant who could bend an iron poker in his hands – like Chaadaev had supported and consoled Pushkin when, distressed by Tolstoy’s insinuations, he had harboured thoughts of suicide. Writing to his brother, Pushkin mentions Nikolay’s ‘important services, eternally unforgettable for me’;


(#litres_trial_promo) he would later dedicate The Prisoner of the Caucasus to him.

The meeting in Kiev had been arranged before Pushkin left St Petersburg. General Raevsky was planning to travel with Nikolay and his two younger daughters, Mariya and Sofya, to the Caucasus, where his elder son, Aleksandr, was taking the waters. They would then go on to the Crimea and join the general’s wife, Sofya Alekseevna, and the two elder daughters, Ekaterina and Elena. The party’s route to the Caucasus would pass through Ekaterinoslav; here General Raevsky would seek to persuade Inzov to give Pushkin permission to accompany them. Pushkin dined with the Raevskys and Lev Davydov,


(#ulink_49801f68-6c9c-57d9-af66-f8a05efec3b6) stayed the night, and set out for Ekaterinoslav the following morning. His route took him down the bank of the Dnieper, passing through Zolotonosha and Kremenchug; three days later he arrived in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), presented himself to General Inzov, and handed over the letters he was carrying.

Ekaterinoslav had been founded in 1778 by Potemkin, then Viceroy of New Russia – the steppe area north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The city, named after the empress, was intended as the capital of New Russia, and was planned on a grandiose scale, with a circumference of thirty-three miles, main streets seventy yards wide and a cathedral – the first stone of which was laid by Catherine – which was to compete with St Peter’s in Rome in splendour and size. However, after Potemkin’s death a decline set in; the city lost its administrative status; its magnificent buildings were never completed or fell into decay. Pushkin took lodgings in the suburb of Mandrykovka, renting a wretched little shack from a Jewish merchant, Krakonini. Behind ran the Dnieper, and he spent much of his time bathing, or watching the traffic on the river, where he witnessed the most exciting event of his stay in Ekaterinoslav: two convicts, who had escaped from the prison nearby, though shackled together and pursued by guards, swam across the river to freedom – an incident incorporated in his unfinished narrative poem The Robber Brothers (1821–2).

He made a favourable impression on Inzov, who wrote to Capo d’Istrias: ‘I have not yet got to know Pushkin well; but I see, however, that the cause of his sins is not depravity of heart, but youthful ardour of spirit, unrestrained by morality.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Inzov had, however, been thrown into great agitation by his appointment as governor of Bessarabia, being particularly perturbed by the thought of the expenses he would have to incur in the post. Consumed by these worries, and preoccupied by the administrative problems of transferring his chancellery to Kishinev, he had little or no time for Pushkin, who, during the weeks he spent in Ekaterinoslav, found himself very much at a loose end. Local society offered none of the attractions which had been so numerous in St Petersburg, and he made no effort to form new acquaintances. Indeed, he went out of his way to gratuitously offend or shock those whom he met. Learning that the poet was in Ekaterinoslav, two young enthusiastic amateurs of literature, Andrey Ponyatovsky, a teacher at the seminary, and Sergey Klevtsov, a local landowner, hurried round to see him. He met them in the door of his hut, chewing a roll spread with caviare and holding a glass of red wine. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. The honour of seeing him, the famous poet, they replied. ‘Well, have you seen him now? Then good-bye!’


(#litres_trial_promo) He displayed an equal disregard for propriety at a dinner given by the town’s civil governor, Vikenty Shemiot.


(#ulink_ac88afdf-d676-5335-ac19-9113dc7da4c4) Andrey Fadeev, who later knew Pushkin well in Kishinev, describes the occasion:

[The dinner] took place in the summer, at the hottest time of the year. The guests gathered, Pushkin too appeared, and from the first moment of his appearance threw the whole company into extreme embarrassment by the unusual eccentricity of his attire: he was wearing muslin trousers, transparent, without any underwear. The governor’s wife, Mrs Shemiot, née Princess Gedroits, an old friend of my wife’s mother, being very shortsighted, was the only person not to notice this peculiarity. Her three daughters, young girls, were also present at this time. My wife quietly advised her to take the girls out of the drawing-room, explaining the necessity for their removal. Mrs Shemiot, disbelieving her, and not crediting the possibility of such indecency, maintained that Pushkin was simply wearing flesh or skin coloured summer trousers; finally, arming herself with her lorgnette, she assured herself of the bitter truth and immediately escorted her daughters out of the room. This was the only result of the exhibition. Although all were highly indignant and embarrassed, they tried to pretend that they had noticed nothing; the host and hostess were silent, and Pushkin’s prank had no consequences.


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Meanwhile General Raevsky had set off from Kiev. His party consisted of the eighteen-year-old Nikolay, the latter’s sisters, Mariya and Sofya, fourteen and thirteen respectively; Miss Matten, the girls’ English governess, and M. Fournier, their French tutor; Anna Ivanovna, a Tatar dame de compagnie; Evstafy Rudykovsky, an army doctor, and a Russian nurse. They travelled in two immense berlins and a light calash, and, after calling at Kamenka to allow the girls to see their grandmother, arrived in Ekaterinoslav late in the evening on 26 May, Pushkin’s twenty-first birthday. Despite the advanced hour Nikolay, his father, and Rudykovsky set off to see him. They found him, pale and unshaven, lying on a wooden settle in his lodging: he had caught a chill after bathing. Rudykovsky examined him, found that he had a slight fever, and advised him to drink something hot.

The next day Pushkin called on the Raevskys, and, overjoyed at finding himself once more in congenial company, chatted volubly with Nikolay in French over dinner, until overtaken again by fever, whereupon Rudykovsky gave him a dose of quinine. During that day General Raevsky had seen Inzov, and had had no difficulty in extracting from him permission for Pushkin to accompany the party to the Caucasus and the Crimea; he would take up his duties with Inzov in Kishinev in the autumn. ‘His disturbed health at so young an age, and the unpleasant position in which he finds himself through youth, demanded on the one hand help, and on the other harmless diversion, and therefore I allowed him to depart with General Raevsky, who, when passing through Ekaterinoslav, was willing to take him with him,’ Inzov wrote. ‘I hope I will not be reproved for this and thought to have been over-indulgent.’


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On the morning of 28 May Pushkin seated himself in the calash with Nikolay, and the caravan rolled off to the east, towards the Caucasus. But he was still troubled with the ague, and, on the insistence of General Raevsky, soon moved into the covered berlin with him. They crossed the Dnieper, and ‘plunged into the level and monotonous steppes, always the same, without a single object which might arrest the gaze of the traveller’.


(#litres_trial_promo) On the twenty-ninth they passed through Mariupol, and, early the following day, between Sambek and Taganrog, stopped to admire the Sea of Azov. They arrived in Taganrog later that day, dining and staying the night with the town governor, P.A. Papkov, in the house in which Alexander I was to die in 1825. Passing through Rostov, on 1 June they were entertained in Novocherkassk by General Denisov, the ataman of the Don Cossacks. Ignoring Rudykovsky’s advice, Pushkin injudiciously consumed a large portion of blancmange, and was again ill. After crossing the Don, their route took them through Stavropol, and, having been held up by a violent storm, which forced them to spend the night in a post-station, they arrived in Pyatigorsk on 6 June. Here they were met by Aleksandr, General Raevsky’s twenty-five-year-old elder son, and took up residence in a house which the general had rented.

The Caucasus region consists of the great mountain range which stretches from the Taman peninsula on the Black Sea to the Apsheron peninsula on the Caspian, the territory immediately to the north, and the southern hinterland, Transcaucasia. It has had a turbulent history since ancient times, and in the eighteenth century Russia, Turkey and Persia contended for domination here. However, in 1801 Alexander I annexed Georgia – which had been under Russian protection since 1783 – and in the following years Russia acquired most of present-day Azerbaijan from Persia. Turkey and Persia gradually withdrew, and Russia set about extending its rule over the remaining nationalities – a task which was not completed until the 1870s. As a first step in the region’s pacification, under the supervision of General Ermolov, who commanded the Russian armies in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827, the Georgian military highway was driven south, from Ekaterinograd to the north of the mountain range, through its central pass and down the Daryal gorge to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia. In the mountains it passed through the territory of the Ossetians, a Christian nation friendly to the Russians. To the west, however, were the Circassians, to the east the Chechens and Ingush, and, beyond them, the Lezgins and Avars who inhabited Dagestan. All were Moslems, who bitterly resisted Russian imperialism. Pyatigorsk lies on the southern slopes of Mount Mashuk, on the outskirts of the Caucasus, some way to the north of the main mountain chain, from which it is separated by the lands of the Kabardians. These, though Sunni Moslems, had earlier professed Orthodoxy, and had long ties with Russia; in 1557 they had petitioned Ivan IV for protection against the Tatars, and he had strengthened the alliance by marrying a Kabardian princess. The settlement was thus isolated from the areas of conflict.

Mineral springs are plentiful in the district, and Pyatigorsk had gained a reputation as a spa in the late eighteenth century. Development was slow, however, and the earliest visitors had to reside at Fort Constantine, a few miles distant, or put up in temporary shacks, tents or covered carts: even by 1829 there were only forty-seven permanent buildings. Nine years after his first visit Pushkin passed through Pyatigorsk again, on his way to Tiflis. ‘I found a great change. In my time the baths were in hastily constructed shacks. The springs, for the most part in their original form, spouted up, steamed, and flowed down the mountain-side in various directions, leaving white and reddish traces behind. We scooped up the boiling water with bark ladles or the bottom of a broken bottle. Now […] everywhere there is order, neatness, prettiness … I must confess: the Caucasian waters present more comforts now; but I regret their earlier, wild condition; I regret the steep stony paths, the shrubs and the unfenced precipices where I once clambered …’


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For a Russian writer the Caucasus, with its mountains and valleys, its fierce, independent, warring tribes, had the same exotic, romantic allure which the Levant had for Byron, or the American wilderness for Fenimore Cooper. Like his predecessors and his successors, Pushkin found the new, unfamiliar scenery exhilaratingly beautiful. ‘I regret, my friend,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘that you could not gaze with me on the splendid chain of these mountains; on their icy summits, which from afar, on a clear dawn, seem like strange clouds, many-coloured and motionless; that you could not climb with me to the sharp peak of Beshtu with its five hills, of Mashuk, of the Zhelezny, Kamenny and Zmeiny mountains.’


(#litres_trial_promo) But the purpose of the visit was to take the waters. General Raevsky observed a strict regimen: ‘I rise at five, go to the baths, return an hour later for coffee, read, go for a walk, dine at one, read again, take another walk, go to the baths, we drink tea at seven, take another walk and go to bed.’ His walk occasionally took him back to the baths, where from the gallery he would admire the mountains and amuse himself with ‘the comic sight of the settlement, its inhabitants, their caricatures of carriages, and their colourful attire; a mixture of Kalmyks, Circassians, Tatars, local Cossacks, local residents and visitors’. He used the hot sulphurous springs, where the temperature was over 38°C; the two girls, ‘just for amusement’, would bathe once or twice a day in the warm baths.


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin drank the waters. ‘They have done me a great deal of good, especially the hot sulphurous ones,’ he wrote. ‘In addition I bathed in the warm sulphur-acidulous springs, and in the cold ferruginous and acidulous ones.’


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The party also visited the other spas at Zheleznovodsk, Kislovodsk and Konstantinogorsk. In the last Pushkin, sitting on a pile of logs, compiled a list of the general’s suite for the local commandant’s book of arrivals, in which he described Rudykovsky as ‘physician-in-ordinary’ and himself as ‘Pushkin, a minor’. The general berated him soundly for his facetiousness.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the evenings the company would play boston, a form of whist; once a lottery was organized: it was won by Mariya; and, in Pyatigorsk on 29 June, they watched a small firework display celebrating the Orthodox feast of SS Peter and Paul. Among the other visitors Pushkin discovered two former acquaintances: Grigory Rzhevsky, the father of a former lycéen, Nikolay, who had died in 1817, and Apollon Marin, an amateur poet and former guards officer, who had been stationed in Tsarskoe Selo in 1816. Marin introduced Pushkin to his brother, Nikolay, and also to another visitor to the region, Gavriil Gerakov, tutor to young Prince Kurakin, whom he was accompanying on a tour of Russia. ‘Pushkin, Marin and I wagged our tongues together for an hour and then parted,’ Gerakov noted in his diary, adding: ‘[Pushkin] is ready to attract general attention of a laudatory kind; as he may with his gifts; I wish him all the best from the bottom of my heart.’


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In Pyatigorsk Pushkin also met an English officer, Captain George Willock, who was attached to the British mission in Persia – his brother, Henry, was the British Resident in Teheran – and had been granted permission to travel in the Caucasus. However, General Velyaminov, Ermolov’s second-in-command, suspecting the visit to be a pretext for ‘spying on our military affairs in Chechnya and Dagestan’, had given orders to ‘observe all his activities and watch with whom he consorts and how often’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Willock, accompanied by an interpreter, arrived in Pyatigorsk on 20 June at two in the afternoon, Velyaminov’s agents informed him. ‘Here,’ their report continued, ‘he put up in the house of the provincial secretary’s widow Anna Petrova Makeeva, paying for this three roubles in copper a day. On the same date he was in the old baths, […] listened to the band playing outside the guard-room of the main guard, and afterwards visited His Excellency, General of Cavalry and Chevalier Raevsky, drank tea and stayed some time with him, whence he returned to his lodgings at night and slept.’ The following day he was visited in his lodgings by ‘Lieutenant of the Life Guard Grenadiers Prince Sergey Ivanovich Meshchersky the first, Captain of the Life Guards Nikolay Nikolaevich Raevsky, and a minor, a member of the suite of His Excellency Raevsky, Aleksandr Sergeev Pushkin’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin’s little joke had rebounded on him: the military authorities had taken his facetious self-description at face value. They were less gullible with respect to Willock. A month after he had left Pyatigorsk he was caught trying to persuade soldiers of the 4th Jäger Regiment to desert to Persia; his interpreter turned out to be an Armenian employed by the Persian army. Griboedov, now secretary to the Russian diplomatic mission in Persia, wrote two sharp notes to the British Resident about his brother’s activities.

For Pushkin by far the most significant experience of the sojourn in the Caucasus was his acquaintance with Aleksandr Raevsky. ‘[General Raevsky’s] elder son will be more than well-known,’ he wrote to his brother.


(#litres_trial_promo) During the next few years Raevsky was to exert an influence on Pushkin perhaps greater – and certainly less beneficial – than that of his earlier mentor, Chaadaev. Born in 1795, Raevsky had entered the army at fifteen, fought in the Russo – Turkish war of 1810, and took part in the war of 1812 and the following campaigns. Promotion was rapid: at twenty-three he was a colonel commanding the Rzhevsk infantry regiment. In 1819 he was attached to Ermolov’s forces in the Caucasus, but, taking leave, had come to Pyatigorsk in an attempt to cure a long-standing affliction of his legs – possibly the result of a war-wound, or possibly, in Ermolov’s words, ‘the bitter fruits of the sweetest of memories’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Tall, but emaciated – ‘physical and mental ailments had desiccated him and lined his brow’


(#litres_trial_promo) – he had a wide mouth whose thin lips were usually curled in a sarcastic smile, and, behind his spectacles, small brown eyes with whites of a jaundiced yellow; his voice, however, was exceedingly charming. In character he was very different from the open-hearted, generous and straightforward Nikolay. His father, not long after their reunion, wrote despondently to his eldest daughter: ‘I live at peace with Aleksandr, but how cold he is! I seek in him manifestations of love, of tenderness and do not find them. He does not reason, but argues, and the wronger he is, the more unpleasant his tone becomes, even coarse. We have agreed not to enter into any arguments, or abstract discussions. It is not that I am dissatisfied with him, but I see no cordial relationship on his side. What can one do? Such is his character, and one cannot hold it against him. His mind is turned inside out: he philosophizes about things which he does not understand, and subtilizes in such a way that any sense evaporates. It is the same with his feelings […] I think that he does not believe in love, since he himself neither experiences it, nor tries to inspire it.’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘His character was a mixture of excessive self-esteem, indolence, cunning and envy,’ commented Wiegel, adding, ‘like a cat, he loved to soil only all that was pure, all that was elevated.’


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Pushkin and he spent long hours together, reading and discussing Byron: they had to hand the first four volumes of Pichot’s and de Salle’s translation of the poet into French prose, which had appeared in 1819.


(#ulink_beef81c5-ea8c-5724-a039-18cb9e87ba35) These contained, among other works, The Corsair, Manfred and the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Or they would sit at night on the bank of the Podkumok River, listening to the sound of its waters, while Raevsky expounded his philosophy of life to an eager listener. Clever, mocking, sceptical, cynical and manipulative, Raevsky played Mephistopheles to an innocent Faust. Later, in October or November 1823, when Pushkin was beginning to escape Raevsky’s influence, he described him in ‘The Demon’:

His smile, his wondrous gaze,

His caustic speech

Poured cold poison into my soul.

With inexhaustible slander

He tempted providence;

He called the beautiful an illusion;

He despised inspiration;

He did not believe in love, in freedom:

Looked mockingly at life –

And nothing in all of nature

Did he wish to bless.


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For Pushkin these few weeks had an influence disproportionate to their length. They coincidentally brought together three elements – the wild, exotic scenery of the Caucasus with its fierce native tribes, the poetry of Byron, and the demonic teachings of Aleksandr Raevsky – which were to determine the next stage in his development as a poet. He was all the more receptive in that he felt himself, like some Byronic hero, to be a doomed outcast: had he not, during his last months in St Petersburg, experienced the treachery of friends, the deceit of women and the perfidy of society?



In the first week of August, leaving Aleksandr behind in Pyatigorsk, General Raevsky and his party set out for the Crimea. They retraced their route to Stavropol, but then turned west. Since the region they were to traverse could be dangerous for travellers, a military escort accompanied the party. ‘I travelled in sight of the hostile lands of the free mountain peoples,’ Pushkin wrote. ‘Around us rode sixty cossacks, behind us was drawn a loaded cannon, its match lit. Although the Circassians nowadays are relatively peaceful, one cannot rely on them; in the hope of a large ransom they are ready to fall upon a well-known Russian general. And there, where a poor officer safely gallops along in a post-chaise, his excellency may easily fall prey to some Circassian’s lasso. You will understand how pleasing this shadow of danger is to the fanciful imagination.’


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They passed through Temizhbek on 8 August, and spent the night at a neighbouring fort, where they dined with the commandant. The heat was oppressive throughout the journey, and all the party suffered from it. On the eleventh they were in Ekaterinodar, and two days later arrived in Taman on the Black Sea coast – ‘the foulest little town of all Russia’s coastal towns’, Lermontov calls it in A Hero of Our Time. In 1820 it was ‘a miserable collection of wooden shacks with two hundred inhabitants, half of whom were beggars, the other half bandits’.


(#litres_trial_promo) However, they did not have to test its hospitality, since both the party and escort were accommodated at the fortress in nearby Fanagoriya. Meanwhile the weather had changed: though the Crimea could be seen in the distance on the far side of the Kerch Strait, the crossing could not be attempted for a day or two.

On the morning of 15 August they were able to embark, though weather conditions were still unfavourable: the crossing took nine hours, instead of the usual two and a half. They arrived in Kerch – the ancient Panticapaeum, founded by Greeks in the seventh century BC, and later the capital of Mithridates the Great’s territory in southern Russia – towards evening. ‘The view of Kertch, and the large bay in which it is situated, was very beautiful,’ noted Laurence Oliphant, who visited the town in 1852; ‘the broken outline of the opposite hills projected far across the straits; while the houses of the town rose one above another up the steep side of the hill of Mithridates; – the whole reminding me of Naples, to which it certainly bears a humble resemblance.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin, eager to glimpse the classical remains, rushed up the hill at sunset, as soon as they had disembarked. ‘Here I will see the ruins of the tomb of Mithridates, here I will see the remains of Panticapaeum, I thought – on the nearest hill amidst a cemetery I saw a heap of stones, of boulders, rudely chiselled – noticed a few steps, the work of human hands. Whether this was the tomb, the ancient fundament of a tower – I do not know.’


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(#litres_trial_promo) He ‘plucked a flower for remembrance, but lost it the next day – without regret’.


(#litres_trial_promo) On the following morning the party left for Feodosiya, halting, as all visitors did, to view the Golden Barrow, a huge Cimmerian funeral mound, and the ruins of Panticapaeum. The latter proved as disappointing as the tomb: ‘Rows of stones, a ditch, almost level with the ground – that is all that remains of the city of Panticapaeum. There is no doubt that much that is valuable is concealed beneath the earth, accumulated through the ages; a certain Frenchman has been sent from St Petersburg for excavations, but he lacks money and knowledge, as usually is the case with us.’


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In Feodosiya (or Kefa, as it was then known) they stayed two nights with the former town governor, Semen Bronevsky, and at dawn on 18 August boarded a navy brig, the Mingreliya, for the passage to Gurzuf. During the journey Pushkin composed the elegy ‘Extinguished is the orb of day’, which in manuscript bore the heading ‘An Imitation of Byron’, and had the epigraph ‘Good night my native land’ – a misquotation of Byron’s line ‘My native Land – Good Night!’ from ‘Childe Harold’s Good Night’. They arrived before dawn on 19 August:

Splendid are you, shores of the Tauris;

When one sees you from the ship

By the light of morning Cypris,


(#ulink_d6bf3d9d-36e6-5053-8fbd-e149903268b6)

As I for the first time saw you;

You appeared before me in nuptial brilliance:

Against the blue, transparent sky

Shone the masses of your mountains,

The pattern of your valleys, trees and villages

Was spread before me.

And there, among the Tatar huts …

What ardour woke within me!

What magical yearnings

Compressed my fiery breast!

But, Muse! forget the past.


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The ardour which turned his breast to fire was inspired by the Raevskys’ eldest daughter, the twenty-three-year-old Ekaterina. He had known her well in St Petersburg, but she did not possess the mature charms which he had then admired; here, however, she was without rivals, and Pushkin’s all too susceptible heart was soon hers. ‘Mikhailo Orlov is to marry General Raevsky’s daughter, after whom the poet Pushkin languished,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky the following year.


(#litres_trial_promo) She was a splendid, tall, goddess-like creature, with a strong will and forceful personality; the very ‘ideal of a proud maid’ seen against a background of sea and cliffs.


(#litres_trial_promo) Several years later, when engaged on his historical drama Boris Godunov, in a letter to Vyazemsky he remarked of his heroine, the haughty and ambitious Marina Mniszek, ‘My Marina is a fine wench: a real Katerina Orlova! Do you know her? However, don’t tell anyone this.’


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Nothing could come of the infatuation: Ekaterina was two years older than he, did not return his feelings, and was already informally engaged to General Orlov. Moreover, in a few weeks he would have to leave for Kishinev. A few months later, in perhaps the finest lyric of this period, he returned in spirit to Gurzuf and memories of Katerina:

Sparser grows the flying range of clouds:

Melancholy star, evening star,

Your ray has silvered the faded levels,

The dreaming gulf, the dark crags’ summits;

I love your weak light in the heavenly height:

It awakened thoughts, which slumbered in me.

I remember your rising, familiar orb,

Above that peaceful land, where all is dear to the heart,

Where graceful poplars in the valleys rise,

Where dream the tender myrtle and the dark cypress,

And sweetly sound the southern waves.

There once on the hills, full of thoughts of love,

Above the sea in brooding idleness I wandered,

While on the huts the shade of night descended –

And a young maiden sought you in the darkness

And to her friends named you by her name.


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Ekaterina, in beauty herself a very Venus, is seeking the planet Venus in the evening dusk and, it has been suggested, humorously confusing ‘Cytherean’ – a title given to Aphrodite from the legend that she landed at Cythera after her birth in the sea – with her own name, Katerina.


(#litres_trial_promo) She certainly identified herself with the star; in 1823 her husband wrote to her: ‘I feel myself near to you or imagine you near each time I see that memorable star which you pointed out to me. You may be sure that the moment it rises above the horizon I will catch its appearance from my balcony.’


(#litres_trial_promo) When Pushkin speaks of first seeing Gurzuf ‘By the light of morning Cypris’, using another of Aphrodite’s titles, he is making a coded reference to Ekaterina.

‘If there exists on earth a spot which may be described as a terrestrial paradise, it is that which intervenes between Kütchückoy and Sudack on the south coast of the Crimea,’ wrote Edward Clarke, an English traveller.


(#litres_trial_promo) It is here that Gurzuf is situated – a small Tatar village of clay huts, clinging to the steep, craggy, pine-covered slopes which rise from the sea-cliff to the stone brow of the plateau above. On the edge of the cliff are the remains of a fortress, built by the orders of Justinian in the sixth century, and refortified by the Genoese, who had a settlement here, in the fourteenth. They were followed by the Turks, who controlled the Khanate of the Crimea until 1774, when it became independent, only to be annexed by Catherine in 1783. The village and surrounding district had belonged to Potemkin, but its ownership had passed to Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, governor-general of Odessa and New Russia from 1803 to 1814. He had built a small palazzo, which he only visited once for a few weeks in 1811, and which otherwise stood empty. A three-storeyed edifice, built into the mountain slope, it had a profusion of windows and huge, light galleries on the first floor, which enabled its inhabitants to enjoy the splendid views, but did little for their comfort. It was here that the Raevskys stayed.

My friend, – Pushkin wrote to his brother from Kishinev – I spent the happiest moments of my life amidst the family of the estimable General Raevsky. I did not see in him the hero, the glory of the Russian army, I loved in him a man with a lucid mind, with a simple, beautiful soul; an indulgent, solicitous friend, always a dear, affectionate host […] All his daughters are charming, the eldest is an extraordinary woman. Judge, whether I was happy: a free, carefree life surrounded by a dear family; a life which I love so much and with which I can never become satiated – the gay, southern sky; charming surroundings; nature, satisfying my imagination – hills, gardens, sea; my friend, my dearest wish is to see again the southern shore and the Raevsky family.


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‘In Gurzuf I did not stir from the spot, bathed in the sea and stuffed myself with grapes; I immediately took to southern nature and enjoyed it with all the indifference and carelessness of a Neapolitan Lazzarono. I loved, waking at night, to listen to the sound of the sea – and would listen spellbound for hours on end. Two steps from the house grew a young cypress; I visited it each morning, and became attached to it with a feeling not unlike friendship.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He spent much of the time reading: he had discovered some Voltaire in the palazzo library and Nikolay lent him a volume of André Chénier, but he mainly devoted himself to Byron. He also wrote, composing several lyrics and the initial draft of his first ‘southern’ narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, eventually completed at the beginning of the following year.

On 5 September he, General Raevsky and Nikolay left Gurzuf on horseback for a short sight-seeing tour before leaving the Crimea. Passing through the Ay-Danil woods, they took the track along the coast to Yalta – then a tiny coastal village – and went on through Oreanda to Alupka, where they spent the night in a Tatar homestead. The next day they continued down the coast to Simeis before turning inland. Ascending the gorge known as the Devil’s Stairs – ‘we clambered up on foot, holding the tails of our Tatar horses. This amused me exceedingly, seeming to be some mysterious, eastern ritual’


(#litres_trial_promo) – and crossing the pass, they descended into the Valley of Baidar. Their route then took them through Balaclava, and at evening they reached the St George monastery where they put up for the night. The monastery stood on a cliff overlooking the sea; the site was spectacular. ‘The St George monastery and its steep staircase to the sea left a strong impression on me. There I saw the fabulous ruins of the temple of Diana.’


(#litres_trial_promo) These were on nearby Cape Fiolente, and were popularly supposed to be the remains of that temple of Artemis


(#ulink_a384ec05-cb4f-5326-9b76-f51e1835196f) to which the goddess had carried Iphigenia, after rescuing her from sacrifice in Aulis. ‘Why these cold doubts?/I believe: here was the dread temple/ Where to the gods, thirsty for blood,/Smoked sacrifices.’


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The following morning they rode north along a narrow track, past several hamlets, before striking the high road from Sebastopol to Bakhchisaray. Pushkin was again suffering from an ague, and was too ill for much sight-seeing when they arrived in Bakhchisaray, ‘the Garden Pavilion’, the former seat of the Crimean khans. The palace, restored by Potemkin in 1787 for the visit of Catherine, made little impression on him at the time, though he was to use it as the setting for The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. ‘Entering the palace, I saw a ruined fountain; from a rusty iron pipe dripped water. I went round the palace, greatly annoyed at the neglect in which it was decaying, and the half-European refurbishment of some of the rooms. NN [Nikolay Raevsky] almost by force led me up a decrepit stair to the ruins of the harem and to the burial-place of the khans, “but not with this/At that time my heart was full:


(#ulink_557b416e-b444-53e3-8ec9-5735dbfd6fa3) I was tormented by fever.”’


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The next day, 8 September, they rode on to Simferopol. A few days later Pushkin left the Crimea. Passing through Perekop, Berislav, Kherson and Nikolaev, he arrived in Odessa on 17 September. Here he stayed for three days. On the twentieth he set out for Kishinev and the following day entered the town where he was to live for the next three years.



* (#ulink_c68f907d-d204-51cd-ac39-9bcda51abc2c) Brother of the poet, Denis Davydov, and tenuously related to General Raevsky: his uncle was the second husband of Raevsky’s mother.

* (#ulink_b0a0286f-542c-5593-af64-36cf8da4cacf) Though Pushkin’s invitation was no doubt due to his reputation as a poet, he was also distantly related to Shemiot: the latter’s brother, Pavel, had married Nadezhda Rotkirch, Pushkin’s mother’s cousin.

* (#ulink_cec3571e-e03a-5127-b786-e7d52af37d82) ‘The French translation of us!!! Oime! Oime!’ was Byron’s reaction to this version. Later he added: ‘Only think of being traduced into a foreign language in such an abominable travesty!’ Leslie A. Marchand, Byron. A Biography. New York & London, 1957, II, 881–2.

* (#ulink_8dbcb289-6538-57ca-afb2-7a21b92ee754) Pushkin, like most visitors, did not know that, though Mithridates committed suicide here in 63 BC, his body was handed over by his son Pharnaces – who had revolted against his father – to the Roman general Pompey, who allowed its burial in Sinope, Mithridates’s native city.

* (#ulink_8dbcb289-6538-57ca-afb2-7a21b92ee754) The Frenchman, Paul Dubrux, an amateur, self-taught archaeologist, who was employed as administrator of the local salt-pans, had not been sent from St Petersburg, nor was he without knowledge.

† (#ulink_d63edeb2-605b-54ee-a37d-f8d510bde275) I.e. the planet Venus.

* (#ulink_a8309313-6380-5ef8-aa84-fbe9aaab44cd) A case of poetic licence: Venus would not have been visible to the naked eye as an evening star while Pushkin was at Gurzuf.

* (#ulink_277495d7-d8c1-501f-ab0a-01960e1a28a8) The Romans identified Artemis with Diana, as they did Aphrodite with Venus.

* (#ulink_277495d7-d8c1-501f-ab0a-01960e1a28a8) The ‘cold doubts’ are those of I.M. Muravev-Apostol, who devoted a chapter of his Journey through Tauris in 1820 (1823) to a confutation of the popular view of the site.

† (#ulink_66cb4224-01e9-5b1c-ac6d-249380d2b126)The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, 531–2.




7 KISHINEV 1820–23 (#ulink_168125d1-bfcd-5b94-a430-ded5deefbfc1)


Cursed town of Kishinev!

My tongue will tire itself in abuse of you.

Some day of course the sinful roofs

Of your dirty houses

Will be struck by heavenly thunder,

And – I will not find a trace of you!

There will fall and perish in flames,

Both Varfolomey’s motley house

And the filthy Jewish booths:

So, if Moses is to be believed,

Perished unhappy Sodom.

But with that charming little town

I dare not compare Kishinev,

I know the Bible too well,

And am wholly unused to flattery.

Sodom, you know, was distinguished

Not only by civilized sin,

But also by culture, banquets,

Hospitable houses

And by the beauty of its far from strict maidens!

How sad, that by the untimely thunder

Of Jehovah’s wrath it was struck!

From a letter to Wiegel, October 1823

KISHINEV WAS THE CAPITAL OF BESSARABIA, which lies between the rivers Dniester and Prut, the Danube delta and the Black Sea. It had been colonized successively by the Greeks, Romans and Genoese, had been annexed by the principality of Moldavia in 1367, become part of the Ottoman empire in 1513, and had been ceded to Russia in 1812 by the Treaty of Bucharest. When Pushkin arrived on 21 September 1820, he found a bustling, lively, colourful town, very different from the decaying imperial pomp of Ekaterinoslav. At that time it had some twenty thousand inhabitants. The majority were Moldavians, but there were also large Bulgarian and Jewish colonies, numbers of Greeks, Turks, Ukrainians, Germans, and Albanians, and even French and Italian communities; the relatively small Russian population consisted mainly of military personnel and civil servants. The old town, ‘with its narrow, crooked streets, dirty bazaars, low shops and small houses with tiled roofs, but also with many gardens planted with Lombardy poplars and white acacias’,


(#litres_trial_promo) was spread out along the flat and muddy banks of a little river, the Byk. On the hills above was the new town, with the municipal garden, the theatre and the casino, administrative offices, and a number of stone houses in which the governor, the military commander, the metropolitan and other notables lived.

Initially Pushkin put up in a small inn in the old town. At the beginning of October, however, he moved into a house rented by Inzov: a large, stone building in an isolated position near the old town, on a hill above the Byk. Inzov and several officials lived on the upper floors; Pushkin and his servant Nikita inhabited two rooms on the ground floor, through whose barred windows he looked out over an orchard and vineyard to the open country and mountains beyond. The walls were painted blue; one was soon disfigured with blobs of wax: Pushkin, sitting naked on his bed, would practise his marksmanship by – like Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street – picking out initials on the wall with wax bullets from his pistols. Another of Inzov’s officials, Andrey Fadeev, was obliged to share this room on his visits to Kishinev. ‘This was extremely inconvenient, for I had come on business, had work to do, got up and went to bed early; but some nights he did not sleep at all, wrote, moved about noisily, declaimed, and recited his verse in a loud voice. In summer he would disrobe completely and perform in the room all his nocturnal evolutions in the full nudity of his natural form.’


(#litres_trial_promo) On 14 July and 5 November 1821 earthquakes struck Kishinev. The second, more severe, damaged the house. Inzov and the civil servants moved out immediately, but Pushkin, either through indolence or affection for his quarters – the first independent lodging he had had – stayed put, living there by himself for several months.

The day after his arrival Pushkin presented himself to Inzov, who introduced him to some members of his staff: Major Sergey Malevinsky, the illegitimate son of General Ermolov, then commanding the Russian armies in the Caucasus; and Nikolay Alekseev, who was to become a close friend. Ten years older than Pushkin, he knew many of the latter’s friends in St Petersburg, and, with a taste for literature, ‘was the only one among the civil servants in whose person Pushkin could see in Kishinev a likeness to that cultured society of the capital to which he was used’.


(#litres_trial_promo) That evening Malevinsky took him to the casino in the municipal gardens, which also served as a club for officers, civil servants and local gentry. A rudimentary restaurant was attached to the club, run by Joseph, the former maître d’hôtel of General Bakhmetev, Inzov’s predecessor. It became a regular port of call for Pushkin, who heard from a waitress, Mariola, the Moldavian song on which he based his poem ‘The Black Shawl’.


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The following day Pushkin dined with his old friend and fellow-member of Arzamas, General Mikhail Orlov, recently appointed to the command of the 16th Infantry Division, whose headquarters were in Kishinev. Here he met Orlov’s younger brother, Fedor, a colonel in the Life Guards Uhlans, who had lost a leg at the battle of Bautzen, together with several of Orlov’s officers: Major-General Pushchin, who commanded a brigade in the division; Captain Okhotnikov, Orlov’s aide-de-camp; and Ivan Liprandi, a lieutenant-colonel in the Kamchatka regiment, and one of Orlov’s staff officers. Liprandi was an interesting, somewhat mysterious character, who soon became another of Pushkin’s intimates.

Born in 1790, the son of an Italian émigré and a Russian baroness, he had made a name for himself in military intelligence during the Napoleonic wars. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel at twenty-four, and seemed on the verge of a brilliant career, but after a duel – one of several – which resulted in the death of his opponent, was transferred from the guards to an army regiment and posted to Kishinev. Pushkin, who would describe him as ‘uniting genuine scholarship with the excellent qualities of a military man’,


(#litres_trial_promo) was immediately attracted to him, pestered him with questions about his duels, and borrowed books from his library. The day after meeting Pushkin, Liprandi dined with Prince George Cantacuzen and his wife Elena, the addressee of Pushkin’s Lycée poem, ‘To a Beauty Who Took Snuff.’ They asked Liprandi to bring Pushkin round to see them; though protesting that his acquaintance with the poet was very short, the next day he, Fedor Orlov, and Pushkin called on the Cantacuzens, stayed for dinner, and remained drinking until well after midnight.

Pushkin soon had a wide circle of acquaintances and friends among the civilians and officers in the town. Some he had known, or heard of, earlier: a Lycée friend, Konstantin Danzas, now an officer in the engineers, was stationed here, as were the cousins Mikhail and Aleksey Poltoratsky, both cousins of Anna Kern, whose beauty had so impressed Pushkin at the Olenins in St Petersburg. They were attached to a unit of the general staff which was carrying out a military topographical survey of Bessarabia. Another member was Aleksandr Veltman. Later a well-known novelist, at this time he dabbled in poetry, and, cherishing a profound admiration for Pushkin’s work, initially held himself timidly aloof from him, fearing a comparison between their achievements. Chance, however, brought them together; Pushkin learnt of his verse and, calling at Veltman’s lodgings, asked him to read the work on which he was then engaged: an imitation Moldavian folk-tale in verse, entitled ‘Yanko the Shepherd’, some episodes of which caused him to laugh uproariously.

Among the local inhabitants he frequently visited the civil governor, Konstantin Katakazi: ‘Having yawned my way through mass,/I go to Katakazi’s,/What Greek rubbish!/What Greek bedlam!’ he wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) Most evenings a company gathered to play cards at the home of the vice-governor, Matvey Krupensky; here Pushkin could satisfy his addiction to faro. Krupensky’s large mansion housed not only the province’s revenue department, but also, in a columned hall decorated with a frieze emblematic of Russian military achievement, the town’s small theatre. At the beginning of November, a twenty-year-old ensign, Vladimir Gorchakov, who had just arrived in Kishinev and was attached to Orlov’s staff, attended a performance given by a travelling troupe of German actors. ‘My attention was particularly caught,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘by the entrance of a young man of small stature, but quite strong and broad-shouldered, with a quick and observant gaze, extraordinarily lively in his movements, often laughing in a surfeit of unconstrained gaiety and then suddenly turning meditative, which awoke one’s sympathy. His features were irregular and ugly, but the expression of thought was so fascinating that involuntarily one wanted to ask: what is the matter? What grief darkens your soul? The unknown’s clothing consisted of a closely buttoned black frock-coat and wide trousers of the same colour.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This was Pushkin; during the interval Alekseev introduced Gorchakov to him, and the two were soon deep in reminiscences of the St Petersburg theatre and of their favourite actresses, Semenova and Kolosova.

Another prominent member of Kishinev society was Egor Varfolomey, a wealthy tax-farmer and member of the supreme council of Bessarabia. He was extremely hospitable: it was very difficult to visit him and not stay to dinner; but for the young officers and civil servants the main attractions of the house were the informal dances in his ballroom and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Pulkheriya. She was a pretty, plump, healthy, empty-headed girl, with few powers of conversation, whose invariable reply to advances, compliments or witticisms was ‘Who do you think you are! What are you about!’ – Veltman, in a flight of fancy, surmised that she might be an automaton.


(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, Pushkin, for want of a better object for his affections, fell in love with her during his stay in Kishinev. It was hardly a passionate affair, and did not prevent him from languishing, during the next three years, after many others: Mariya Schreiber, the shy seventeen-year-old daughter of the president of the medical board, for example; or Viktoriya Vakar, a colonel’s wife with whom he often danced; or the playful, dark-complexioned Anika Sandulaki. He sighed from afar after pretty Elena Solovkina, who was married to the commander of the Okhotsk infantry regiment and occasionally visited Kishinev, and made a determined assault on the virtue of Ekaterina Stamo, whose husband Apostol, a counsellor of the Bessarabian civil court, was some thirty years older than her. ‘Pushkin was a great rake, and in addition I, unfortunately, was considered a beauty in my youth,’ Ekaterina remarked in her recollections. ‘I had great difficulty in restraining a young man of his age. I always had the most strict principles, – such was the upbringing we all had been given, – but, you know, Aleksandr Sergeevich’s views on women were somewhat lax, and then one must take into account that our society was strange to him, as a Russian. Thanks to my personal tact […] I managed finally to arrange things with Aleksandr Sergeevich in such a way that he did not repeat the declaration which he had made to me, a married woman.’


(#litres_trial_promo) She was one of the seven children of Zamfir Ralli, a rich Moldavian landowner with estates to the west of Kishinev. Pushkin got to know the family very well during his stay in Kishinev: they were his closest friends among the Moldavian nobility, and he was especially intimate with Ivan, Ekaterina’s brother, a year younger than himself, who shared his literary tastes. Another Kishinev beauty was Mariya Eichfeldt, ‘whose pretty little face became famous for its attractiveness from Bessarabia to the Caucasus’.


(#litres_trial_promo) She had a much older husband: Pushkin christened the couple ‘Zémire and Azor’, after the French opéra comique with that name on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. He flirted with her in society, but refrained from pressing his advances further, as she was Alekseev’s mistress: ‘My dear chap, how unjust/Are your jealous dreams,’ he wrote.


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At the beginning of November General Raevsky’s two half-brothers, Aleksandr and Vasily Davydov, came to stay with Orlov. ‘Aleksandr Lvovich,’ Gorchakov noted, ‘was distinguished by the refinement of a marquis, Vasily flaunted a kind of manner peculiar to the common man […] They were both very friendly towards Pushkin, but Aleksandr Lvovich’s friendliness was inclined to condescension, which, it seemed to me, was very much disliked by Pushkin.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Orlov was about to visit the Davydov estate at Kamenka – some 160 miles to the south-east of Kiev, not far from the Dnieper – and the brothers also extended an invitation to Pushkin. He accepted with alacrity; Inzov gave his permission; and in the middle of November he left with the Davydovs. Passing through Dubossary, Balta, Olviopol and Novomirgorod, they arrived in Kamenka three days later. General Raevsky and his son Aleksandr were already there, having travelled down from Kiev; Mikhail Orlov and his aide-de-camp Okhotnikov soon followed, bringing with them Ivan Yakushkin, who ‘was pleasantly surprised when A.S. Pushkin […] ran out towards me with outstretched arms’: they had been introduced to one another in St Petersburg by Chaadaev.


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Kamenka was one of the centres of the Decembrist movement in the south; the other, more important, was Tulchin, the headquarters of the Second Army, where Pestel was stationed. The gathering here, ostensibly to celebrate the name-day, on 24 November, of Ekaterina Nikolaevna, the mother of General Raevsky and of the Davydov brothers, was in effect a meeting of a number of the conspirators: Orlov, Okhotnikov, Yakushkin and Vasily Davydov. The party dined luxuriously each evening with Ekaterina Nikolaevna, and then retired to Vasily’s quarters for political discussions.

Orlov and Okhotnikov left at the beginning of December. Pushkin had intended to accompany them, but was prevented by illness. Aleksandr Davydov made his excuses to Inzov, writing that ‘having caught a severe cold, he is not yet in a condition to undertake the return journey […] but if he feels soon some relief in his illness, will not delay in setting out for Kishinev’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Inzov replied sympathetically, thanking Davydov for allaying his anxiety, since, he wrote, ‘Up to now I was in fear for Mr Pushkin, lest he, regardless of the harsh frosts there have been with wind and snow, should have set out and somewhere, given the inconvenience of the steppe highways, should have met with an accident [but am] reassured and hope that your excellency will not allow him to undertake the journey until he has recovered his strength.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He enclosed with his letter a copy of a demand for the repayment of 2,000 roubles, which Pushkin had borrowed from a money-lender in November 1819 to pay a debt at cards.

A few days later Pushkin wrote to Gnedich: ‘I am now in the Kiev province, in the village of the Davydovs, charming and intelligent recluses, brothers of General Raevsky. My time slips away between aristocratic dinners and demagogic arguments. Our company, now dispersed, was recently a varied and jolly mixture of original minds, people well-known in our Russia, interesting to an unfamiliar observer. Women are few, there is much champagne, many witty words, many books, a few verses.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Though there may have been few women in Kamenka, Pushkin made the best of the situation and enjoyed an affair with Aglaë Davydova, Aleksandr Lvovich’s thirty-three-year-old wife. It was a short-lived liaison. The difference in age and social position between the two led Aglaë to treat him with a patronizing condescension that was as distasteful to Pushkin in his mistress as it had been in her husband. When Liprandi dined with Davydov and his wife in St Petersburg in March 1822 he noted that she ‘was not very favourably disposed towards Aleksandr Sergeevich, and it was obviously unwelcome to her, when her husband asked after him with great interest’, and added: ‘I had already heard a number of times of the kindness shown to Pushkin at Kamenka, and heard from him enthusiastic praise of the family society there, and Aglaë too had been mentioned. Then I learnt that there had been some kind of quarrel between her and Pushkin, and that the latter had rewarded her with some verses!’


(#litres_trial_promo) The affair had indeed broken off acrimoniously, and Pushkin, hurt and insulted, gave vent to his feelings with four extraordinarily spiteful epigrams. One, commenting on her promiscuity, wonders what impelled her to marry Davydov; another, coarse and excessively indecent even by Pushkin’s standards, portrays her as sexually insatiable; the least offensive, and the wittiest, is in French:

To her lover without resistance Aglaë

Had ceded – he, pale and petrified,

Was making a great effort – at last, incapable of more,

Completely breathless, withdrew … with a bow, –

‘Monsieur’, says Aglaë in an arrogant tone,

‘Speak, monsieur: why does my appearance

Intimidate you? Will you tell me the cause?

Is it disgust?’ ‘Good heavens, it’s not that.’

‘Excess of love?’ ‘No, of respect.’


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Pushkin did not leave Kamenka until the end of January 1821, then travelling, in the company of the Davydov brothers, not to Kishinev but to Kiev, where he put up with General Raevsky, and met the ‘hussar-poet’ Denis Davydov, cousin both of the Davydovs and of General Raevsky, famous for his partisan activities during the French army’s retreat in 1812 – the model for Denisov in War and Peace. ‘Hussar-poet, you’ve sung of bivouacs/Of the licence of devil-may-care carousals/Of the fearful charm of battle/And of the curls of your moustache,’ he wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the second week of February he and the Davydovs set off for Tulchin, some 180 miles to the west. His St Petersburg acquaintance General Kiselev was now chief of staff of the Second Army here: he was to marry Sofya Potocka later that year. ‘I had the occasion to see [Pushkin] in Tulchin at Kiselev’s,’ wrote Nikolay Basargin, a young ensign in the 31st Jägers. ‘I was not acquainted with him, but met him two or three times in company. I disliked him as a person. There was something of the bully about him, an element of vanity, and the desire to mock and wound others.’


(#litres_trial_promo) After a week in Tulchin Pushkin, still avoiding his official duties, returned to Kamenka with the Davydovs, arriving on or about 18 February.

During his first stay on the estate he had begun a new notebook, copying into it fair versions of his Crimean poems ‘A Nereid’ and ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, and continuing to work on The Prisoner of the Caucasus. Now, lying on the Davydovs’ billiard table surrounded by scraps of manuscript, so engrossed in composition as to ignore everything about him, he produced the first fair copy of the poem, adding at the end of the text the notation ‘23 February 1821, Kamenka’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Despite this achievement, he was often in a bleak mood. ‘Beneath the storms of harsh fate/My flowering wreath has faded,’ he had written the previous day.


(#litres_trial_promo) He was isolated from his family and his closest friends, from the literary and social life of the capital; the best years of his poetic and personal life were being wasted in a provincial slough. Melancholy was to recur ever more frequently during his years of exile: ‘I am told he is fading away from depression, boredom and poverty,’ Vyazemsky wrote to Turgenev in 1822.


(#litres_trial_promo) Constantly deluding himself with hopes of an end to his exile, or at least of being granted leave to visit St Petersburg – ‘I shall try to be with you myself for a few days,’ he wrote to his brother in January 1822


(#litres_trial_promo) – he was as constantly brought to face the reality of his situation. When, a year later, he made a formal application to Nesselrode for permission to come to St Petersburg, ‘whither,’ he wrote, ‘I am called by the affairs of a family whom I have not seen for three years’,


(#litres_trial_promo) he found that Alexander had not forgotten his misdemeanours: Nesselrode’s report was endorsed by the emperor with a single word: ‘Refused’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He could not but compare himself to Ovid: their fates were strangely alike. Because of their verse (and, in Ovid’s case, also for some other, mysterious crime) both had been exiled by an emperor – Ovid by Augustus, the former Octavian, in AD 8 – to the region of the Black Sea. In Ovid’s works written in exile – Tristia and Black Sea Letters – Pushkin found reflections of an experience analogous to his own, and contrasted his emotions as an exile from St Petersburg with those of Ovid as an exile from Rome. ‘Like you, submitting to an inimical fate,/ I was your equal in destiny, if not in fame,’ he wrote in ‘To Ovid’, completed on 26 December 1821.


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Financial worries – ‘He hasn’t a copeck’, Vyazemsky noted


(#litres_trial_promo) – added to his depression. He had been paid no salary since leaving St Petersburg. In April 1821 Inzov pointed this out to Capo d’Istrias, adding: ‘since he receives no allowance from his parent, despite all my assistance he sometimes, however, suffers from a deficiency in decent clothing. In this respect I consider it my most humble duty to ask, my dear sir, that you should instruct the appointment to him of that salary which he received in St Petersburg.’


(#litres_trial_promo) As a result he received a year’s salary – less hospital charges and postal insurance it came to 685 roubles 30 copecks – in July, and was thereafter paid at four-monthly intervals. But this, though welcome, could not resolve his financial problems. On 5 May, in reply to the demand for 2,000 roubles forwarded by Inzov, he wrote, ‘not being yet of age and possessing neither movable nor immovable property, I am not capable of paying the above-mentioned promissory note.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The ‘deficiency in decent clothing’ was noted by others: ‘He leads a dissipated life, roams the inns, and is always in shirt-sleeves,’ wrote Liprandi.


(#litres_trial_promo) His attire in Kishinev tended towards the bizarre: sometimes he dressed as a Turk, sometimes as a Moldavian, sometimes as a Jew, usually topping the ensemble with a fez – costumes which were adopted, not primarily from eccentricity, but because of the absence from his wardrobe of more formal wear. ‘My father had the brilliant idea of sending me some clothes,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Tell him that I asked you to remind him of it.’


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He had eventually left Kamenka towards the end of February, and, taking a long way round through Odessa, where he spent two days, arrived in Kishinev early in March.


(#ulink_f79a0c84-913b-5002-9a35-039042b0a938) He found a town much stirred by events which had taken place during his absence. In 1814 three Greek merchants in Odessa, one of the most important Greek communities outside the Ottoman empire, had founded the Philike Hetaireia (Society of Friends), whose aim was the liberation of Greece from Turkish rule. The society was soon actively engaged in conspiracy: intriguing with potential rebels, it persuaded its Greek supporters that the tsar, as the head of the greatest Orthodox state, would be unable to ignore any bid for Greek independence. In 1819–20 the time seemed ripe for an uprising: there were intimations or outbreaks of revolt in Germany, Spain, Piedmont and Naples. The society offered its leadership to Capo d’Istrias; he refused, and it turned in his stead to Alexander Ypsilanti, a Phanariot Greek,


(#ulink_f5a0c8df-2e73-5711-b622-9405f3a8d4b4) the son of the former hospodar of Moldavia and Wallachia. An officer in the Russian army, Ypsilanti had distinguished himself in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, losing an arm at the battle of Dresden. He had attended Alexander I, as one of the emperor’s adjutants, at the congress of Vienna, and in 1817 had been promoted major-general and given command of a cavalry brigade. On his election to the leadership of the society he moved to Kishinev.

On the night of 21 February 1821, at Galata – the principal port of Moldavia, on the left bank of the Danube – the small Turkish garrison and a number of Turkish merchants were massacred by Greeks; the following day Alexander Ypsilanti, accompanied by his brothers, George and Nicholas, Prince Cantacuzen, and several other Greek officers in Russian service, crossed the Prut. At Iaşi on the twenty-third, in proclamations addressed to the Greeks and Moldavians, he called on them to rise against the Turks, declaring that his enterprise had the support of a ‘great power’. Though Michael Souzzo, the hospodar, threw in his lot with the uprising, it enjoyed no popular support, and Ypsilanti condemned it to failure by his irresolute leadership, condoning, in addition, the massacre at Galata and a subsequent similar incident at Iaşi. A final blow to the revolt was a letter from Alexander I, signed by Capo d’Istrias, which denounced Ypsilanti’s actions as ‘shameful and criminal’, upbraided him for misusing the tsar’s name, struck him from the Russian army list, and called upon him to lay down his arms immediately.


(#litres_trial_promo) Though Ypsilanti endeavoured to brave matters out, he was abandoned by many of the revolutionary leaders, and, retreating slowly northwards towards the Austrian frontier, underwent a series of humiliating defeats, culminating in that of Dragashan on 7 June, after which he escaped into Austria. Here he was kept in close confinement for over seven years, and, when eventually released at the instance of Nicholas I, died in Vienna in extreme poverty in 1828. A simultaneous revolt in Greece itself, led, among others, by Ypsilanti’s brother Demetrios, proved more successful: in 1833, after the intervention of the Great Powers, it eventually resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece.

Ypsilanti’s insurrection had been in progress for just over a week when Pushkin returned to Kishinev. The boldness of this exploit in the cause of Greek independence could not fail to arouse his enthusiasm. He dashed off a letter to Vasily Davydov, telling him of the progress of the revolt, speculating on Russia’s policy – ‘Will we occupy Moldavia and Wallachia in the guise of peace-loving mediators; will we cross the Danube as the allies of the Greeks and the enemies of their enemies?’ – and quoting from an insurgent’s letter on events at Iaşi: ‘He describes with ardour the ceremony of consecrating the banners and Prince Ypsilanti’s sword – the rapture of the clergy and laity – and the sublime moments of Hope and Freedom.’ Ypsilanti, whom Pushkin had met the previous year, is mentioned with admiration: ‘Alexander Ypsilanti’s first step is splendid and brilliant. He has begun luckily – from now on, whether dead or a victor he belongs to history – 28 years old, one arm missing, a magnanimous goal! – an enviable lot.’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘We spoke about A. Ypsilanti,’ he records in his diary of an evening at the house of a ‘charming Greek lady’. ‘Among five Greeks I alone spoke like a Greek – they all despair of the success of the Hetaireia enterprise. I am firmly convinced that Greece will triumph, and that 25,000,000


(#ulink_6a94605e-3427-5a53-aff1-31f58706d58b) Turks will leave the flowering land of Hellas to the rightful heirs of Homer and Themistocles.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, his enthusiasm was such that it became rumoured that he – as Byron was to do two years later – had joined the revolt. ‘I have heard from trustworthy people that he has slipped away to the Greeks,’ the journalist and historian Pogodin wrote to a friend from Moscow.


(#litres_trial_promo) But his participation was only vicarious.

The question of Russia’s attitude to the insurrection, which Pushkin raises in his letter to Davydov, was one which preoccupied both the government and the Decembrists. Both were not averse to striking a blow against Russia’s old enemy, Turkey. ‘If the 16th division,’ Orlov remarked of his command, ‘were to be sent to the liberation [of Greece], that would not be at all bad. I have sixteen thousand men under arms, thirty-six cannon, and six Cossack regiments. With that one can have some fun. The regiments are splendid, all Siberian flints. They would blunt the Turkish swords.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander, however, did not wish to back revolutionary activity in Greece, while the Decembrists, though supporters of Greek independence, were not eager to have an illiberal tsar gain kudos by posing as a liberator abroad. And, curiously, they had the opportunity of influencing events. At the beginning of April Kiselev was requested by the government to send an officer to Kishinev to report on the insurrection. His choice fell on Pestel, whose report may have been instrumental in persuading the government not to support the revolt: Pushkin certainly believed this to be the case. In November 1833, at a rout at the Austrian ambassador’s in St Petersburg, he met Michael Souzzo, the former hospodar of Moldavia. ‘He reminded me,’ Pushkin wrote in his diary, ‘that in 1821 I called on him in Kishinev together with Pestel. I told him how Pestel had deceived him, and betrayed the Hetaireia – by representing it to the Emperor Alexander as a branch of Carbonarism. Souzzo could conceal neither his astonishment nor his vexation – the subtlety of a Phanariot had been conquered by the cunning of a Russian officer! This wounded his vanity.’


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Pushkin’s confidence in the success of the revolt soon proved unjustified – at least as far as Moldavia was concerned, where the uprising was quickly suppressed by the Turks. After a final, bloody engagement at Sculeni, on the west bank of the Prut, in June, the few survivors escaped by swimming the river. Gorchakov, who had been sent to observe events from the Russian side, gave Pushkin an account of this incident, which he later made use of in the short story ‘Kirdzhali’. Though he remained constant in his support for Greek independence, he was disappointed by this ‘crowd of cowardly beggars, thieves and vagabonds who could not even withstand the first fire of the worthless Turkish musketry’. ‘As for the officers, they are worse than the soldiers. We have seen these new Leonidases in the streets of Odessa and Kishinev – we are personally acquainted with a number of them, we can attest to their complete uselessness – they have discovered the art of being boring, even at the moment when their conversation ought to interest every European – no idea of the military art, no concept of honour, no enthusiasm – the French and Russians who are here show them a contempt of which they are only too worthy, they put up with anything, even blows of a cane, with a sangfroid worthy of Themistocles. I am neither a barbarian nor an apostle of the Koran, the cause of Greece interests me keenly, that is just why I become indignant when I see these wretches invested with the sacred office of defenders of liberty.’


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As the failure of the insurrection became apparent, refugees began to flood into Bessarabia: Moldavian nobles, Phanariot Greeks from the Turkish territories and Constantinople, Albanians and others. Their presence certainly made Kishinev a more lively place, and Pushkin’s circle of acquaintances was widened by a number of the new arrivals. Among these was Todoraki Balsch, a Moldavian hatman – military commander – who had fled from Iaşi with his wife Mariya – ‘a woman in her late twenties, reasonably comely, extremely witty and loquacious’


(#litres_trial_promo) – and daughter Anika. For some time Mariya was the sole object of Pushkin’s attentions; they held long, uninhibited conversations in French together, and she became convinced that he was in love with her. However, he suddenly transferred his allegiance to another refugee from Iaşi, Ekaterina Albrecht, ‘two years older than Balsch, but more attractive, with unconstrained European manners; she had read much, experienced much, and in civility consigned Balsch to the background’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Ekaterina came from an old Moldavian noble family, the Basotas, and was separated from her third husband, the commander of the Life Guards Uhlans: qualities which attracted Pushkin – he remarked that she was ‘historical and of ardent passions’.


(#litres_trial_promo) As a result, Mariya’s feelings turned to virulent dislike, which the following year was to give rise to a notable scandal.

Another refugee was Calypso Polichroni, a Greek girl who had fled from Constantinople with her mother and taken a humble two-room lodging in Kishinev. She went little into society; indeed, would hardly have been welcomed there, for her morals were not above suspicion. ‘There was not the slightest strictness about her conversation or her behaviour,’ Wiegel noted, adding euphemistically: ‘if she had lived at the time of Pericles, history, no doubt, would have recorded her name together with those of Phryne and Laïs’


(#litres_trial_promo) – famous courtesans of the past. ‘Extremely small, with a scarcely noticeable bosom,’ Calypso ‘had a long, dry face, always rouged in the Turkish manner; a huge nose as it were divided her face from top to bottom; she had thick, long hair and huge fiery eyes made even more voluptuous by the use of kohl’;


(#litres_trial_promo) and ‘a tender, attractive voice, not only when she spoke, but also when she sang to the guitar terrible, gloomy Turkish songs’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But what excited Pushkin’s imagination ‘was the thought that at about fifteen she was supposed to have first known passion in the arms of Lord Byron, who was then travelling in Greece’.


(#litres_trial_promo) If Vyazemsky came to Kishinev, Pushkin wrote, he would introduce him to ‘a Greek girl, who has exchanged kisses with Lord Byron’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘You were born to set on fire/The imagination of poets,’ he told her.


(#litres_trial_promo) A juxtaposition of Byron’s life with what is known of Calypso’s shows they can never have met. But in inventing the story, Calypso revealed an acute perception of psychology: in dalliance with her there was an extra titillation to be derived from the feeling that one was following, metaphorically, in Byron’s footsteps. Bulwer-Lytton is supposed to have gained a peculiar satisfaction from an affair with a woman whom Byron had loved, while the Marquis de Boissy, who married Teresa Guiccioli, would, it was reported, introduce her as ‘My wife, the Marquise de Boissy, Byron’s former mistress’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin was not immune to this thrill.


(#ulink_93f84465-9598-5a65-8eed-648722722f48)

Meanwhile Inzov had put him to work. Peter Manega, a Rumanian Greek who had studied law in Paris, had produced for Inzov a code of Moldavian law, written in French, and Pushkin was given the task of turning it into Russian. In his spare time he began to study Moldavian, taking lessons from one of Inzov’s servants. He learnt enough to be able to teach Inzov’s parrot to swear in Moldavian. Chuckling heartily, it repeated an indecency to the archbishop of Kishinev and Khotin when the latter was lunching at Inzov’s on Easter Sunday. Inzov did not hold the prank against Pushkin; indeed, when Capo d’Istrias wrote a few weeks later to enquire ‘whether [Pushkin] was now obeying the suggestions of a naturally good heart or the impulses of an unbridled and harmful imagination’, he replied: ‘Inspired, as are all residents of Parnassus, by a spirit of jealous emulation of certain writers, in his conversations with me he sometimes reveals poetic thoughts. But I am convinced that age and time will render him sensible in this respect and with experience he will come to recognize the unfoundedness of conclusions, inspired by the reading of harmful works and by the conventions accepted by the present age.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Had he known what Pushkin was writing he might not have been so generous.

At this period in his life Pushkin was a professed, indeed a militant atheist, modelling himself on the eighteenth-century French rationalists he admired. Whether or not he was the author, while at St Petersburg, of the quatrain ‘We will amuse the good citizens/And in the pillory/With the guts of the last priest/Will strangle the last tsar’,


(#ulink_46b32cd9-afd0-5868-8270-2bb491e89df9)


(#litres_trial_promo) an adaptation of a famous remark by Diderot, his view of religion emerges clearly from much of his Kishinev work. When Inzov, a pious man, made it clear that he expected his staff to attend church, Pushkin, in a humorous epistle to Davydov, explained that his compliance was due to hypocrisy, not piety, and complained about the communion fare:

my impious stomach

‘For pity’s sake, old chap,’ remarks,

‘If only Christ’s blood

Were, let’s say, Lafite …

Or Clos de Vougeot, then not a word,

But this – it’s just ridiculous –

Is Moldavian wine and water.’


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He greeted Easter with the irreverent poem ‘Christ is risen’, addressed to the daughter of a Kishinev inn-keeper. Today he would exchange kisses with her in the Christian manner, but tomorrow, for another kiss, would be willing to adhere to ‘the faith of Moses’, and even put into her hand ‘That by which one can distinguish/A genuine Hebrew from the Orthodox’.


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At the beginning of May, in a letter to Aleksandr Turgenev, he jokingly suggested that the latter might use his influence to obtain a few days’ leave for his exiled friend, adding: ‘I would bring you in reward a composition in the taste of the Apocalypse, and would dedicate it to you, Christ-loving pastor of our poetic flock.’


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(#litres_trial_promo) The description of Turgenev alluded to the fact that he was the head of the Department of Foreign Creeds; the work Pushkin was proposing to dedicate to him was, however, hardly appropriate: it was The Gabrieliad, a blasphemous parody of the Annunciation.


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Far from Jerusalem lives the beautiful Mary, whose ‘secret flower’ ‘Her lazy husband with his old spout/In the mornings fails to water’. God sees her, and, falling in love, sends the archangel Gabriel down to announce this to her. Before Gabriel arrives, Satan appears in the guise of a snake; then, turning into a handsome young man, seduces her. Gabriel interrupts them; the two fight; Satan, vanquished by a bite ‘in that fatal spot/(Superfluous in almost every fight)/That haughty member, with which the devil sinned’ (421–2), limps off, and his place and occupation are assumed by Gabriel. After his departure, as Mary is lying contemplatively on her bed, a white dove – God, in disguise – flies in at the window, and, despite her resistance, has its way with her.

Tired Mary

Thought: ‘What goings-on!

One, two, three! – how can they keep it up?

I must say, it’s been a busy time:

I’ve been had in one and the same day

By Satan, an Archangel and by God.’

(509–14)

It is slightly surprising to find the poem in Pushkin’s work at this time: the wit is not that of his current passion, Byron, but that of his former heroes, Voltaire and Parny; the blend of the blasphemous and the erotic is characteristic of the eighteenth, rather than the nineteenth century. Obviously it could not be published, but, like Pushkin’s political verses, was soon in circulation in manuscript.


(#ulink_ca5754e2-6c07-5529-9e30-ea9e28ed8624) Seven years later this lighthearted Voltairean anti-religious squib was to cause him almost as much trouble as his political verse had earlier.

Fasting seemed to stimulate Pushkin’s comic vein; during the following Lent, in 1822, he produced the short comic narrative poem ‘Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters’.


(#litres_trial_promo) There is nothing blasphemous or anti-religious about this work; though it might be considered risqué or indecent, it is certainly not, as it has been called, ‘out-and-out pornography’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Written in the manner of a Russian fairy-tale, the poem tells us that Tsar Nikita’s forty daughters, though uniformly captivating from head to toe, were all deficient in the same respect:

One thing was missing.

What was this?

Nothing in particular, a trifle, bagatelle,

Nothing or very little,

But it was missing, all the same.

How might one explain this,

So as not to anger

That devout pompous ninny,

The over-prim censor?

How is it to be done? … Aid me, Lord!

The tsarevnas have between their legs …

No, that’s far too precise

And dangerous to modesty, –

Let’s try another tack:

I love in Venus her breast,

Her lips, her ankle particularly,

But the steel that strikes love’s spark,

The goal of my desire …

Is what? … Nothing!

Nothing or very little …

And this wasn’t present

In the young princesses,

Mischievous and lively.

Tsar Nikita is simpler, more of a jeu d’esprit than The Gabrieliad: it consists essentially of a number of variations on the same joke. But it is charmingly written, witty and highly amusing.

Pushkin’s readiness to take offence and his profligate way with a challenge were as evident in Kishinev as in St Petersburg. At the beginning of June 1821, having quarrelled with a former French officer, M. Déguilly, for some reason possibly connected with the latter’s wife, he called him out, but was incensed to discover the following day that his opponent had managed to weasel his way out of a duel. He dashed off an offensive letter in French, and unable to draw blood with his sabre, consoled himself by doing so with his pen, sketching a cartoon showing Déguilly, clad only in a shirt, exclaiming: ‘My wife! … my breeches! … and my duel too! … ah, well, let her get out of it how she will, since it is she who wears the breeches …’


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Other opponents were more worthy. One evening in January 1822, at a dance in the casino, Pushkin’s request that the orchestra should play a mazurka was countermanded by a young officer of the 33rd Jägers, who demanded a Russian quadrille. Shouts of ‘Mazurka!’, ‘Quadrille!’ alternated for some time; eventually the orchestra, though composed of army musicians, obeyed the civilian. Lieutenant-Colonel Starov, the commander of the Jäger regiment, told his officer that he should demand an apology. When the officer hesitated, Starov marched over to Pushkin, and, failing to receive satisfaction, arranged a meeting for the following morning. The duel took place a mile or two outside Kishinev, during a snowstorm: the driving snow and the cold made both aiming and loading difficult. They fired first at sixteen paces and both missed; then at twelve and missed again. Both contestants wished to continue, but their seconds insisted that the affair be postponed. On his return to Kishinev, Pushkin called on Aleksey Poltoratsky and, not finding him at home, dropped off a brief jingle: ‘I’m alive/Starov’s/Well./The duel’s not over.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, it was: Poltoratsky and Nikolay Alekseev, who had acted as Pushkin’s second, arranged a meeting at Nikoleti’s restaurant, where Pushkin often played billiards, and a reconciliation took place. Pushkin swelled with pride when Starov, who had fought in the campaign of 1812 and was known for his bravery, complimented him on his behaviour: ‘You have increased my respect for you,’ he said, ‘and I must truthfully say that you stand up to bullets as well as you write.’


(#litres_trial_promo) According to Gorchakov, Pushkin displayed even more sangfroid at a duel fought in May or June 1823. This was with Zubov, an officer of the topographical survey, whom he had accused of cheating at cards. Pushkin, like his character the Count, in the short story ‘The Shot’, one of the Tales of Belkin, arrived with a hatful of cherries, which he ate while Zubov took the first shot. He missed. ‘Are you satisfied?’ Pushkin asked. Zubov threw himself on him and embraced him. ‘That is going too far,’ said Pushkin, and walked off without taking his shot.


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The Starov affair had, however, unpleasant repercussions. Though the quarrel had been public, the duel and reconciliation were not; and it was rumoured, especially in Moldavian society, that both Starov and Pushkin had acted dishonourably. At an evening party some weeks later Pushkin light-heartedly referred to a remark made by Liprandi to the effect that Moldavians did not fight duels, but hired a couple of ruffians to thrash their enemy. Mariya Balsch, still smarting with jealousy, said acidly, ‘You have an odd way of defending yourself, too,’ adding that his duel with Starov had ended in a very peculiar manner. Pushkin, enraged, rushed off to Balsch, who was playing cards, and demanded satisfaction for the insult. Mariya complained of his behaviour to her husband, who, somewhat the worse for wine, himself flew into a rage, calling Pushkin a coward, a convict and worse. ‘The scene […] could not have been more terrible, Balsch was shouting and screaming, the old lady Bogdan fell down in a swoon, the vice-governor’s pregnant wife had hysterics.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The affair was reported to Inzov, who ordered that the two should be reconciled. Two days later they both appeared before the vice-governor, Krupensky; Major-General Pushchin was also present. When they met, Balsch said, ‘I have been forced to apologize to you. What kind of apology do you require?’ Pushkin, without a word, slapped his face and drew out a pistol, before being led from the room by Pushchin.


(#litres_trial_promo) In a letter to Inzov Balsch demanded, firstly a safeguard against any further attempt which Pushkin might make on him, and, secondly, that the other should be proceeded against with the utmost rigour of the law.


(#litres_trial_promo) Whatever the rights of the situation, there was only one choice Inzov could make between an extremely junior civil servant and a Moldavian magnate: sending Pushkin to his quarters, he placed him under house arrest for three weeks.

Arguments were frequent at Inzov’s dinner table. A few months later, on 20 July 1822, when discussing politics with Smirnov, a translator, Pushkin ‘became heated, enraged and lost his temper. Abuse of all classes flew about. Civil councillors were villains and thieves, generals for the most part swine, only peasant farmers were honourable. Pushkin particularly attacked the nobility. They all ought to be hanged, and if this were to happen, he would have pleasure in tying the noose.’


(#litres_trial_promo) When both parties were heated with wine a possible explosion was never too far away. One occurred the following day, when the conversation at dinner touched upon the subject of hailstorms; whereupon a retired army captain named Rudkovsky claimed to have once witnessed a remarkable storm, during which hailstones weighing no less than three pounds apiece had fallen. Pushkin howled with laughter, Rudkovsky became indignant, and, after they had risen from table and Inzov had left, an exchange of insults led to an agreement to exchange shots. Both, accompanied by Smirnov, who had suffered Pushkin’s abuse the previous day, then went to Pushkin’s quarters, where some kind of fracas took place. Rudkovsky asserted that Pushkin attacked him with a knife, and Smirnov, agreeing, claimed to have managed to ward off the blow. Luckily no one was injured; however, Inzov, learning of the incident, put Pushkin under house arrest again.

General Orlov, ‘Hymen’s shaven-headed recruit’,


(#litres_trial_promo) had married Ekaterina Raevskaya in Kiev on 15 May 1821. Pushkin welcomed her arrival in Kishinev, and would visit the couple almost every day, lounging on their divan in wide Turkish velvet trousers, and conversing with them animatedly. He went riding with Orlov and fell off. ‘He can only ride Pegasus or a nag from the Don,’ the general commented to his wife. ‘Pushkin no longer pretends to be cruel,’ she wrote to her brother Aleksandr in November, ‘he often calls on us to smoke his pipe and discourses or chats very pleasantly. He has only just completed an ode on Napoleon, which, in my humble opinion, is very good, as far as I can judge, having heard only part of it once.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Napoleon had died on 5 May 1821 (NS); the news of his death reached Kishinev in July.

The miraculous destiny has been accomplished;

The great man is no more.

In gloomy captivity has set

The terrible age of Napoleon,

Pushkin wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) His earlier hatred of the emperor had been replaced, if not by the hero-worship of Romanticism, at least by awe and admiration.

Orlov was a humane and enlightened commander, who was particularly anxious to reduce the incidence of corporal punishment in the units under his command. He had surrounded himself by a number of like-minded officers: Pushchin, his second-in-command, was a Decembrist, as was Okhotnikov, his aide-de-camp. So too was Vladimir Raevsky, ‘a man of extraordinary energy, capabilities, very well-educated and no stranger to literature’:


(#litres_trial_promo) a distant relative of Pushkin’s friends. Born in 1795, Raevsky had entered the army at sixteen; in 1812, as an ensign in an artillery brigade, he had been awarded a gold sword for bravery at Borodino. Now a major in the 32nd Jägers, he was the division’s chief education officer, responsible for all its Lancaster schools.


(#ulink_48d12b25-2783-54d1-8880-d3548192d345) This position gave him great influence on the rank-and-file of the division, and he employed it to inculcate what were considered to be dangerously subversive ideas. A later report on his activities singled out the fact that in handwriting exercises he used for examples words such as ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, and ‘constitution’ and alleged that he told officer cadets that constitutional government was better than any other form of government, and especially than Russian monarchic government, which, although called monarchic, was really despotic.


(#litres_trial_promo) A pedagogue by nature, he exposed the gaps in Pushkin’s knowledge, and was a severe critic of his verse.

In December 1821 Liprandi was ordered by Orlov to report on the condition of the 31st and 32nd Jäger regiments, stationed in Izmail and Akkerman at the mouth of the Dniester. He invited Pushkin to accompany him; Inzov, who had just been reprimanded for not keeping a strict watch over his protégé, at first refused his permission, but was persuaded by Orlov to change his mind.

Pushkin was full of historical enthusiasm when the two set off on 13 December. He was eager to stop in Bendery and visit the camp at Varnitsa, where Charles XII of Sweden had lived from 1709 to 1713, having taken refuge on Turkish territory after his defeat by Peter at Poltava – the battle which was to be the climax of, and provide the title for Pushkin’s long narrative poem of 1828–9. Liprandi, however, hurried him on. The next post-station, Kaushany, aroused his excitement again: this had been the seat, from the sixteenth century until 1806, of the khans who had ruled Budzhak, the southern region of Moldavia. But according to Liprandi there was nothing to see and, stopping only to change horses, they drove on.

They arrived in Akkerman early in the evening of the fourteenth, and went straight to dinner with Colonel Nepenin, the commander of the 32nd Jägers. Among the guests was an old St Petersburg acquaintance, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Courteau, now commandant of the fortress. He and Pushkin were both members of Kishinev’s short-lived Masonic lodge, Ovid, opened in the spring and closed – together with all other lodges in Bessarabia – in December by Inzov on the emperor’s orders. While Pushkin and Courteau were talking, Nepenin asked Liprandi in an undertone, audible to Pushkin, whether his friend was the author of A Dangerous Neighbour – the indecent little epic composed by Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily. Liprandi, embarrassed, and wishing to avoid further queries, replied that he was, but did not like to have it talked about. His ruse succeeded, the poem was not mentioned further; later that evening, however, Pushkin took him to task for his subterfuge, and called Nepenin an uneducated ignoramus for imagining that he, a twenty-two-year-old, could be the author of a poem which had been well-known ever since its composition ten years earlier, in 1811.

The following day, while Liprandi was inspecting the regiment, Pushkin was shown round the fortress by Courteau; they dined with him, and returned to their quarters in the early hours of the morning, after an evening spent at the card-table and in flirtation with the commandant’s ‘five robust daughters, no longer in the bloom of youth’.


(#litres_trial_promo) They left for Izmail early the following evening, arriving at ten at night and putting up with a Slovenian merchant, Slavic.

In 1791, during the Russo – Turkish war, Izmail had been stormed and captured by a Russian army commanded by Suvorov – an event celebrated by Byron in the seventh and eighth cantos of Don Juan. Pushkin was naturally impatient to inspect the scenes of the fighting: when Liprandi returned to their lodging the next evening he found that his companion had already been round the fortress with Slavič; he was amazed that the besiegers had managed to scale the fortifications facing the Danube. He had also taken down a Slovenian song from the dictation of their host’s sister-in-law, Irena. The following morning Liprandi, before leaving to inspect the 31st Jägers, introduced Pushkin to a naval lieutenant in the Danube flotilla, Ivan Gamaley; together they visited the town, the fortress and the quarantine station; were taken to the casino by Slavič, and then had supper at his house with another naval lieutenant, Vasily Shcherbachev. Returning at midnight, Liprandi found Pushkin sitting cross-legged on a divan, surrounded by a large number of little pieces of paper. When asked whether he had got hold of Irena’s curling papers, Pushkin laughed, shuffled them together and hid them under a cushion; the two emptied a decanter of local wine and went to bed. In the morning Liprandi awoke to find Pushkin, unclothed, sitting in the same posture as the previous night, again surrounded by his pieces of paper, but holding a pen in his hand with which he was beating time as he recited, nodding his head in unison. Noticing that Liprandi was awake, he stopped and gathered up his papers; he had been caught in the act of composition. That morning Liprandi, after writing his report, called on Major-General Tuchkov, who expressed the wish to meet Pushkin. He came to dinner at their lodgings and afterwards bore off Pushkin, who returned at ten in the evening, somewhat out of sorts; he wished he could stay here a month to examine properly everything the general had shown him. ‘He has all the classics and extracts from them,’ he told Liprandi, who jokingly suggested that he was more interested in Irena’s classical forms.


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The next morning they set out for Kishinev. Late that evening, as Pushkin was dozing in his corner of the carriage, Liprandi remarked that it was a pity it was so dark, as otherwise they could have seen to the left the site of the battle of Kagul: here in August 1770 General Rumyantsev with 17,000 men engaged the main Turkish army, winning a hard-fought battle with the bayonet and capturing the Turkish camp. Pushkin immediately started to life, animatedly discussed the battle, and quoted a few lines of verse – perhaps those from his Lycée poem, ‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’, in which he mentions the monument to the battle in the palace park:

In the thick shade of gloomy pines

Rises a simple monument.

O, how shameful for thee, Kagulian shore!

And glorious for our dear native land!


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Arriving in Leovo before midday, they called on Lieutenant-Colonel Katasanov, the commander of the Cossack regiment stationed here. He was away, but his adjutant insisted that they should stay for lunch: caviare, smoked sturgeon – of which Pushkin was inordinately fond – and vodka appeared, succeeded by partridge soup and roast chicken. Half an hour after their departure Pushkin, who had been in a brown study, suddenly burst into such raucous and prolonged laughter that Liprandi thought he was having a fit. ‘I love cossacks because they are so individual and don’t keep to the normal rules of taste,’ he said. ‘We – indeed everyone else – would have made soup from the chicken and would have roasted the partridge, but they did the opposite!’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was so struck by this that after his return to Kishinev – they arrived at nine that evening, 23 December – he sought out the French chef Tardif – ‘inexhaustible in ideas/For entremets, or for pies’


(#litres_trial_promo) – then living on Gorchakov’s charity,


(#ulink_ec9d3726-2c19-510d-9222-5bd3dd1c28b6) to tell him about it, and two years later, in Odessa, reminded Liprandi of the meal.

During the winter the training battalion of the 16th division had been employed in constructing, at Orlov’s expense, a manège, or riding-school. Its ceremonial opening took place on New Year’s Day 1822. Liprandi and Okhotnikov had decorated the interior: the walls were hung with bayonets, swords, muskets; on that opposite the entrance was a large shield, with a cannon and heap of cannon-balls to each side; in the centre was the monogram of Alexander, done in pistols, surrounded by a sunburst of ramrods, and flanked by the colours of the Kamchatka and Okhotsk regiments. Before this was a table, laid for forty guests, while eight other tables, four down each side of the hall, were to accommodate the training battalion. Inzov and his officials – including Pushkin – and the town notables were invited. The building was blessed by Archbishop Dimitry and after the ceremony all sat down to a breakfast. ‘There was no lack of champagne or vodka. Some felt a buzzing in their heads, but all departed decorously.’


(#litres_trial_promo) A week later Orlov and Ekaterina left for Kiev, where they were to stay for some time. As it turned out, the absence of the division’s commander at this moment was unfortunate.

The 16th division was part of the 6th Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sabaneev, whose headquarters were at Tiraspol, halfway between Kishinev and Odessa. Over the previous six months General Kiselev, the chief of staff of the Second Army, had stepped up surveillance of the army’s units: he was particularly concerned about the 16th division, commanded as it was by such a noted liberal. Despite his friendship with Orlov, he had cautiously insinuated to Wittgenstein, the commander of the army, that the latter was unsuited to the command of the division. Raevsky, too, had come to his attention. ‘I have long had under observation a certain Raevsky, a major of the 32nd Jäger regiment, who is known to me by his completely unrestrained freethinking. At the present moment in agreement with Sabaneev an overt and covert investigation of all his actions is taking place, and he will, it seems, not escape trial and exile.’


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In Orlov’s absence General Sabaneev – a short, choleric fifty-two-year-old with a red nose, ginger hair and side-whiskers – began to pay frequent visits to Kishinev. He dined with Inzov on 15 January. Pushkin was present, but was uncharacteristically silent during the meal. Sabaneev was in Kishinev again on the twentieth, when he wrote to Kiselev: ‘There is no one in the Kishinev gang besides those whom you know about, but what aim this gang has I do not as yet know. That well-known puppy Pushkin cries me up all over town as one of the Carbonari, and proclaims me guilty of every disorder. Of course, it is not unintentional, and I suspect him of being an organ of the gang.’


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On 5 February, at nine in the evening, Raevsky was reclining on his divan and smoking a pipe when there was a knock on the door; his Albanian servant let in Pushkin. He had, he told Raevsky, just eavesdropped on a conversation between Inzov and Sabaneev. Raevsky was to be arrested in the morning. ‘To arrest a staff officer on suspicion alone has the whiff of a Turkish punishment. However, what will be, will be,’ Raevsky remarked. Lost in admiration at his coolness, Pushkin attempted to embrace him. ‘You’re no Greek girl,’ said Raevsky, pushing him away. The two went round to Liprandi, who was entertaining a number of guests, including his younger brother, Pavel, Sabaneev’s adjutant. When Raevsky and Pushkin entered, they were assailed with questions as to what was going on. ‘Ask Pavel Petrovich,’ Raevsky replied, ‘he is Sabaneev’s trusted plenipotentiary minister.’ ‘True,’ said the younger Liprandi, ‘but if Sabaneev trusted you as he trusts me, you too would not wish to break the codes of trust and honour.’


(#litres_trial_promo) At noon the next day he was summoned to Sabaneev, and confronted with three officer cadets, members of his Lancaster school, whose testimony as to his teaching was the ostensible reason for his arrest. His books and papers were confiscated and a guard put on his quarters. A week later he was taken to Tiraspol and lodged in a cell in the fortress. The investigation into his case and his trial dragged on for years. Only in 1827 was he finally sentenced to exile in Siberia. In March Major-General Pushchin was relieved of his command of a brigade in Orlov’s division, and the following April Kiselev succeeded in bringing about Orlov’s removal from his command.

In July 1822 Liprandi, passing through Tiraspol on his way from Odessa to Kishinev, managed, with the connivance of the commandant of the fortress, to have half an hour’s conversation with Raevsky as they strolled backwards and forwards over the glacis. Raevsky gave him a poem, ‘The Bard in the Dungeon’, to pass on to Pushkin, who was particularly impressed by one stanza:

Like an automaton, the dumb nation

Sleeps in secret fear beneath the yoke:

Over it a bloody clan of scourges

Both thoughts and looks executes on the block.

Reading it aloud to Liprandi, he repeated the last line, and added with a sigh: ‘After such verses we will not see this Spartan again soon.’


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Although the authorities knew that Raevsky was a member of some kind of conspiracy, he remained resolutely silent in prison, and no other arrest followed his. Pushkin was surprised and shocked by the incident, which in addition appeared to him deeply mysterious: the severity of Raevsky’s treatment seemed wholly out of proportion to his crime. It was only in January 1825, when his old Lycée friend Pushchin visited him in Mikhailovskoe, that he gained some inkling of what had been going on. ‘Imperceptibly we again came to touch on his suspicions concerning the society,’ writes Pushchin. ‘When I told him that I was far from alone in joining this new service to the fatherland, he leapt from his chair and shouted: “This must all be connected with Major Raevsky, who has been sitting in the fort at Tiraspol for four years and whom they cannot get anything out of.”’


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In December 1820 Pushkin had written from Kamenka to Gnedich, the publisher of Ruslan and Lyudmila, to tell him that his next narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, was nearly completed. He was unduly optimistic; it was not until the following March that he wrote again. ‘The setting of my poem should have been the banks of the noisy Terek, on the frontier of Georgia, in the remote valleys of the Caucasus – I placed my hero in the monotonous plains where I myself spent two months – where far distant from one another four mountains rise, the last spur of the Caucasus; – there are no more than 700 lines in the whole poem – I will send it you soon – so that you might do with it what you like.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Before long, however, he was having second thoughts; he was in need of money and, compared to Gnedich, had made little out of Ruslan. In September he wrote to Grech, editor of Son of the Fatherland. ‘I wanted to send you an extract from my Caucasian Prisoner, but am too lazy to copy it out; would you like to buy the poem from me in one piece? It is 800 lines long; each line is four feet wide; it is chopped into two cantos. I am letting it go cheaply, so that the goods do not get stale.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, Gnedich got wind of the offer. ‘You tell me that Gnedich is angry with me,’ he wrote to his brother in January 1822, ‘he is right – I should have gone to him with my new narrative poem – but my head was spinning – I had not heard from him for a long time; I had to write to Grech – and using this dependable occasion


(#ulink_069deb3a-022c-5d8b-a6a9-212c53ee1ca9) I offered him the Captive … Besides, Gnedich will not haggle with me, nor I with Gnedich, each of us over-concerned with his own advantage, whereas I would have haggled as shamelessly with Grech as with any other bearded connoisseur of the literary imagination.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He also made an attempt to sell the poem directly to book-sellers in St Petersburg, but, offered a derisory sum, had to fall back on Gnedich. On 29 April he sent him the manuscript, accompanying it with a letter which began ‘Parve (nec invideo) sine me, liber, ibis in urbem,/Heu mihi! quo domino non licet ire’ – the opening lines of Ovid’s Tristia,


(#ulink_1e3c8789-d640-5ee0-86d5-97637b965e2a) – and continued: ‘Exalted poet, enlightened connoisseur of poets, I hand over to you my Caucasian prisoner […] Call this work a fable, a story, a poem or call it nothing at all, publish it in two cantos or in only one, with a preface or without; I put it completely at your disposal.’


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Pushkin’s friends knew that he had been at work on a successor to Ruslan: ‘Pushkin has written another long poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus,’ Turgenev had told Dmitriev the previous May; ‘but he has not mended his behaviour: he is determined to resemble Byron not in talent alone.’


(#litres_trial_promo) When the manuscript arrived in St Petersburg, it was bitterly fought over. ‘I have not set eyes on the Caucasian captive,’ Zhukovsky complained to Gnedich at the end of May; ‘Turgenev, who has no interest in reading himself, but only in taking other people’s verse around on visits, has decided not to send me the poem, since he is afraid of letting it out of his claws, lest I (and not he) should show it to someone. I beg you to let me have it as soon as possible; I will not keep it for more than a day and will return it immediately.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Turgenev eventually did take the poem out to Zhukovsky in Pavlovsk, but Vyazemsky, who had been clamouring for it – ‘The Captive, for God’s sake, just for one post,’ he implored Turgenev


(#litres_trial_promo) – had to wait until publication.

The Prisoner of the Caucasus came out on 14 August – a small book of fifty-three pages, costing five roubles, or seven if on vellum. A note at the end of the poem read: ‘The editors have added a portrait of the author, drawn from him in youth. They believe that it is pleasing to preserve the youthful features of a poet whose first works are marked by so unusual a talent.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The portrait, engraved by Geitman, depicts Pushkin ‘at fifteen, as a Lycéen, in a shirt, as Byron was then drawn, with his chin on his hand, in meditation’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Gnedich, more expeditious than before, sent him a single copy of the poem in September, together with a copy of Zhukovsky’s translation of Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon. Pushkin wrote to him on 27 September: ‘The Prisoners have arrived – and I thank you cordially, dear Nikolay Ivanovich […] Aleksandr Pushkin is lithographed in masterly fashion, but I do not know whether it is like him, the editors’ note is very flattering, but I do not know whether it is just.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The edition – probably of 1,200 copies – sold out with remarkable speed: in 1825 Pletnev, searching for a copy to send to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoe, could not find one. Of the profit Gnedich sent Pushkin 500 roubles, keeping, it has been calculated, 5,000 for himself.


(#litres_trial_promo) This time he had been too sharp. The following August Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky; ‘Gnedich wants to buy a second edition of Ruslan and The Prisoner of the Caucasus from me – but timeo danaos,* i.e., I am afraid lest he should treat me as before.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Gnedich did not get the rights: The Prisoner was the last of Pushkin’s works he published.

Its plot is not difficult to recapitulate: a Russian journeying in the Caucasus is captured by a Circassian tribe; a young girl falls in love with the captive, but he cannot return her feeling. Nevertheless, she aids him to escape: he swims the river and reaches the Russian lines; she drowns herself. In a letter to Lev describing his journey through the Caucasus Pushkin had toyed with the fancy of a Russian general falling prey to a Circassian’s lasso. The fancy becomes real in the poem’s opening lines; but the plot might also owe something to Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801), in which an American Indian, made prisoner by another tribe and about to be burnt at the stake, is freed by a native girl, with whom he flees; she later commits suicide. The poem’s hero is a Byronic figure, and the poem itself resembles Byron’s eastern poems, The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour and particularly The Corsair. Pushkin, however, undercuts Romantic ideology with an ironic paradox: fleeing the corruption and deceit of society to search for freedom in a wild and exotic region peopled by man in his natural state, the hero becomes a prisoner of the mountain tribesmen who incarnate his ideal. There is, too, a peculiar ideological discrepancy between the poem and its epilogue, written in Odessa in May 1821. This preaches an imperial message, celebrating the pacification of the Caucasus, and praising the Russian generals who forcibly subdued the tribes. Vyazemsky was shocked. ‘It is a pity that Pushkin should have bloodied the final lines of his story,’ he wrote to Turgenev. ‘What kind of heroes are Kotlyarevsky and Ermolov? What is good in the fact that he “like a black plague,/Destroyed, annihilated the tribes”? Such fame causes one’s blood to freeze in one’s veins, and one’s hair to stand on end. If we had educated the tribes, then there would be something to sing. Poetry is not the ally of executioners; they may be necessary in politics, and then it is for the judgement of history to decide whether it was justified or not; but the hymns of a poet should never be eulogies of butchery. I am annoyed with Pushkin, such enthusiasm is a real anachronism.’


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Anachronistic or not, these were definitely Pushkin’s views. ‘The Caucasian region, the sultry frontier of Asia, is curious in every respect,’ he had written in 1820. ‘Ermolov has filled it with his name and beneficent genius. The savage Circassians have become frightened; their ancient audacity is disappearing. The roads are becoming safer by the hour, and the numerous convoys are superfluous. One must hope that this conquered region, which up to now has brought no real good to Russia, will soon through safe trading bring us close to the Persians, and in future wars will not be an obstacle to us – and, perhaps, Napoleon’s chimerical plan for the conquest of India will come true for us.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He obviously could see no contradiction between his fiery support of Greek independence and his equally fiery desire to eradicate Caucasian independence; nor between his whole-hearted support of the government here and his equally whole-hearted denunciation of the government everywhere else. In fact, some of the Decembrists shared his view that the Caucasus could not be independent: Pestel, in his Russian Justice, writes that some neighbouring lands ‘must be united to Russia for the firm establishment of state security’, and names among them: ‘those lands of the Caucasian mountain peoples, not subject to Russia, which lie to the north of the Persian and Turkish frontiers, including the western littoral of the Caucasus, presently belonging to Turkey’.


(#litres_trial_promo) They did not, however, share his chimerical Indian plan, nor the pleasure – the real stumbling-block for Vyazemsky – which he apparently took in genocide.

‘Tell me, my dear, is my Prisoner making a sensation?’ he asked his brother in October 1822. ‘Has it produced a scandal, Orlov writes, that is the essential. I hope the critics will not leave the Prisoner’s character in peace, he was created for them, my dear fellow.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was to be disappointed: there was no critical polemic over the poem, as there had been over Ruslan and Lyudmila. The Byronic poem had ceased to be a novelty; Pushkin’s reputation was now more firmly established, and, above all, The Prisoner did not have that awkward contrast between present-day narrator and past narrative which had worried some critics, nor that equally awkward comic intent, which had worried others. Praise was almost unanimous. In September Pushkin’s uncle wrote to Vyazemsky: ‘Here is what our La Fontaine [Dmitriev] writes to our Livy [Karamzin]: “Yesterday I read in one breath The Prisoner of the Caucasus and from the bottom of my heart wished the young poet a long life! What a prospect! Right at the beginning two proper narrative poems, and what sweetness in the verse! Everything is picturesque, full of feeling and wit!” I confess, that reading this letter, I shed a tear of joy.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Karamzin was slightly less enthusiastic. ‘In the poem of that liberal Pushkin The Prisoner of the Caucasus the style is picturesque: I am dissatisfied only with the love intrigue. He really has a splendid talent: what a pity that there is no order and peace in his soul and not the slightest sense in his head.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Of the critics only Mikhail Pogodin, in the Herald of Europe, descended to the kind of pedantic quibbling that had characterized reviews of Ruslan. Of the lines ‘Neath his wet burka, in the smoky hut/The traveller enjoys peaceful sleep’ (I, 321–2), he remarks: ‘He would be better advised to throw off his wet burka [a felt cloak, worn in the Caucasus], and dry himself.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin’s comment, when meditating corrections for a second edition, was: ‘A burka is waterproof and gets wet only on the surface, therefore one can sleep under it when one has nothing better to cover oneself with.’


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Where dissatisfaction was felt, it was, as in Karamzin’s case, with the love intrigue: the character of the hero, and the fate of the heroine. In the second edition of 1828 Pushkin inserted a note: ‘The author also agrees with the general opinion of the critics, who justifiably condemned the character of the prisoner’;


(#litres_trial_promo) and in 1830 wrote: ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus is the first, unsuccessful attempt at character, which I had difficulty in managing; it was received better than anything I had written, thanks to some elegiac and descriptive verses. But on the other hand Nikolay and Aleksandr Raevsky and I had a good laugh over it.’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The character of the Prisoner is not a success; this proves that I am not cut out to be the hero of a Romantic poem. In him I wanted to portray that indifference to life and its pleasures, that premature senility of soul, which have become characteristic traits of nineteenth-century youth,’ he wrote to Gorchakov.


(#litres_trial_promo) Criticism of the fate of the Circassian maiden, however, he met with some irony: to Vyazemsky, after thanking him for his review


(#ulink_393b62fa-5ede-55c7-b143-577eb1e9df10) – ‘You cannot imagine how pleasant it is to read the opinion of an intelligent person about oneself’ – he wrote: ‘[Chaadaev] gave me a dressing-down for the prisoner, he finds him insufficiently blasé; unfortunately Chaadaev is a connoisseur in that respect […] Others are annoyed that the Prisoner did not throw himself into the water to pull out my Circassian girl – yes, you try; I have swum in Caucasian rivers, – you’ll drown yourself before you find anything; my prisoner is an intelligent man, sensible, not in love with the Circassian girl – he is right not to drown himself.’


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‘In general I am very dissatisfied with my poem and consider it far inferior to Ruslan,’ he told Gorchakov.


(#litres_trial_promo) He was right: The Prisoner has none of the wit, the gaiety and the grace of the earlier poem; he was not ‘cut out to be the hero of a Romantic poem’. But a combination of circumstances – his reading of Byron, his acquaintance with Aleksandr Raevsky, his exile – had led him down a blind alley: it was still to take him some time to retrace his steps fully. A significant move in this direction took place when, on 9 May 1823, he began Eugene Onegin. At the head of the first stanza in the manuscript this date is noted with a large, portentously shaped and heavily inked numeral. It was a significant, indeed fatidic date in Pushkin’s life: on 9 May 1820, according to his calendar, his exile from St Petersburg had begun. He usually worked on the poem in the early morning, before getting up. Visitors found him, as Liprandi had glimpsed him in Izmail, sitting cross-legged on his bed, surrounded by scraps of papers, ‘now meditative, now bursting with laughter over a stanza’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘At my leisure I am writing a new poem, Eugene Onegin, in which I am transported by bile,’ he told Turgenev some months later.


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Meanwhile changes in the region’s administration were taking place. On 7 May 1823 Alexander signed an order freeing Inzov from his duties and appointing Count Mikhail Vorontsov governor-general of New Russia and of Bessarabia. Informing Vyazemsky of this, Turgenev wrote: ‘I do not yet know whether the Arabian devil* will be transferred to him. He was, it seems, appointed to Inzov personally.’ ‘Have you spoken to Vorontsov about Pushkin?’ Vyazemsky asked. ‘It is absolutely necessary that he should take him on. Petition him, good people! All the more as Pushkin really does want to settle down, and boredom and vexation are bad counsellors.’ Turgenev’s agitation was successful. ‘This is what happened about Pushkin. Knowing politics and fearing the powerful of this world, consequently Vorontsov as well, I did not want to speak to him, but said to Nesselrode under the guise of doubt, whom should he be with: Vorontsov or Inzov. Count Nesselrode affirmed the former, and I advised him to tell Vorontsov of this. No sooner said than done. Afterwards I myself spoke twice with Vorontsov, explained Pushkin to him and what was necessary for his salvation. All, it seems, should go well. A Maecenas, the climate, the sea, historical reminiscences – there is everything; there is no lack of talent, as long as he does not choke to death.’


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Unaware of these machinations, Pushkin had successfully requested permission to spend some time in Odessa: the excuse being that he needed to take sea baths for his health. He arrived at the beginning of July and put up at the Hotel du Nord on Italyanskaya Street. ‘I left my Moldavia and appeared in Europe – the restaurants and Italian opera reminded me of old times and by God refreshed my soul’. Vorontsov and his suite arrived on the evening of 21 July. The following day Vorontsov summoned him to his presence. ‘He receives me very affably, declares to me that I am being transferred to his command, that I will remain in Odessa – this seems fine to me – but a new sadness wrung my bosom – I began to regret my abandoned chains.’


(#ulink_a56531d0-5f3a-5104-8fb3-225cb6d38e0d) On the twenty-fourth a large ball was given in honour of Vorontsov by the Odessa Chamber of Commerce; on the twenty-sixth Vorontsov and his suite, now including Pushkin, left for Kishinev, where, two days later, Inzov handed over his post to his successor. Pushkin had time to collect his salary before accompanying the new governor-general back to Odessa at the beginning of August. ‘I travelled to Kishinev for a few days, spent them in indescribably elegiac fashion – and, having left there for good, sighed after Kishinev.’


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* (#ulink_b439d54c-cc30-5033-bf8f-5a87086de8c2) Written in November 1820 and published the following year, ‘The Black Shawl’, in which a jealous lover kills his Greek mistress and her Armenian paramour, became, though an indifferent work, one of Pushkin’s most popular poems. It was set to music by the composer Aleksey Verstovsky in 1824, and often performed.

* (#ulink_c2bc2b7d-08b9-532b-9405-5889db54a1cc) It is thought that Pushkin might have paid a second visit to Kamenka, Kiev, and possibly Tulchin in November-December 1822, but there is no direct evidence as to his whereabouts at this time. The arguments supporting the hypothesis are summarized in Letopis, I, 504–5.

† (#ulink_c2bc2b7d-08b9-532b-9405-5889db54a1cc) From the Phanari, or lighthouse quarter of Constantinople, which became the Greek quarter after the Turkish conquest: and hence the appellation of the Greek official class under the Turks, through whom the affairs of the Christian population in the Ottoman empire were largely administered.

* (#ulink_fad9ec97-c976-55d2-86ef-58f3fa18273c) A slip of the pen: there were approximately 25,000 Turks in the Morea.

* (#ulink_04787cc1-719d-5a36-8226-3d14e02a52a3) Pushkin could later, when in Moscow in 1826–7, have met a woman who had indubitably been Byron’s mistress: Claire Clairmont, the mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra, was employed as a governess in Moscow from 1825 to 1827, first by the Posnikov, and later by the Kaisarov family. She met Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily, and his close friend, Sobolevsky, but Pushkin himself was apparently unaware of her existence.

† (#ulink_779ad34d-3019-5a6a-80ac-c0520059e57e) The quatrain is listed under Dubia in the Academy edition; its ascription to Pushkin is based on an army report of the interrogation of Private (demoted from captain) D. Brandt, who, on 18 July 1827, deposed that his fellow-inmate in the Moscow lunatic asylum, Cadet V.Ya. Zubov, had declaimed this fragment of Pushkin to him (II, 1199–200).

* (#ulink_4bf7ebe9-4864-594b-a479-910bd8b388fc) Pushkin is comparing himself to St John; earlier in the letter he refers to Kishinev as Patmos, the island to which the apostle was exiled by the Emperor Domitian, and where he is supposed to have written the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse.

* (#ulink_4b2625d5-2b2f-5e83-a645-c1e159297de1) It was first printed in London in 1861; the first Russian edition – with some omissions – appeared in 1907.

* (#ulink_e8391ed9-76d1-5184-9f2f-bbb6259656cd) A system for mass education devised by the Englishman Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838), by which the advanced pupils taught the beginners.

* (#ulink_fed2b239-f5df-5041-9097-d92e4c2a2d4c) Formerly proprietor of the Hotel de l’Europe, a luxurious establishment situated at the bottom of the Nevsky Prospect, he took to drink, got into financial difficulty and was ruined when his wife absconded with his cash-box and a colonel of cuirassiers. He fled to Odessa and, after various vicissitudes, ended up in Kishinev.

* (#ulink_a1a0b4d0-e380-58a5-98ac-f2971e226a51) Pushkin often uses the word ‘occasion’ (Russian okaziya, borrowed from the French occasion) to mean the opportunity to have a letter conveyed privately, by a friend or acquaintance, instead of entrusting it to the post, when it might be opened and read. Here the ‘dependable occasion’ is a trip by Liprandi to St Petersburg.

† (#ulink_a1a0b4d0-e380-58a5-98ac-f2971e226a51) ‘Little book (I don’t begrudge it), you will go to the city without me,/Alas for me, your master, who is not allowed to go.’

* ‘I fear the Greeks [though they bear gifts]’. Virgil, Aeneid, II, 49. The quotation had especial relevance to Gnedich: he was ‘Greek’ because he was in the process of translating the Iliad.

* (#ulink_e5e2b716-beeb-5d44-b16c-b0e2112dfc87) Vyazemsky’s enthusiastic article on the poem had appeared in Son of the Fatherland in 1822.

* The nickname often given to Pushkin in the correspondence between Turgenev and Vyazemsky: a pun on bes arabsky, ‘Arabian devil’, and bessarabsky, ‘Bessarabian’.

* (#ulink_c229a29e-afed-58e5-8ff2-a2e2cac6990c) The last two sentences are a quotation from Zhukovsky’s translation of The Prisoner of Chillon. The original reads: ‘And I felt troubled – and would fain/I had not left my recent chain’ (357–8).




8 ODESSA 1823–24 (#ulink_5cf3e488-7935-5054-8a6c-e78abcd413d0)


I lived then in dusty Odessa …

There the skies long remain clear,

There abundant trade

Busily hoists its sails;

There everything breathes, diffuses Europe,

Glitters of the South and is gay

With lively variety.

The language of golden Italy

Resounds along the merry street,

Where walk the proud Slav,

The Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Armenian,

And the Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,

And that son of the Egyptian soil,

The retired corsair, Morali.

Fragments from Onegin’s Journey

IN 1791 THE TREATY OF JASSY, which brought the Russo – Turkish war to an end, gave Russia what its rulers had sought since the late seventeenth century: a firm footing on the Black Sea littoral. To exploit this a harbour was needed; those in the Sea of Azov and on the river deltas were too shallow for large vessels, and attention was turned to the site of the Turkish settlement of Khadzhibei, between the Bug and Dniester, where the water was deep close inshore, and which, with the construction of a mole and breakwater, would be safe in any weather. Here, where the steppe abruptly terminated in a promontory, some 200 feet above the coastal plain, the construction of a new city began on 22 August 1794. Its name, Odessa, came from that of a former Greek settlement some miles to the east, but was, apparently on the orders of the Empress Catherine herself, given a feminine form. The city’s architect and first governor was Don Joseph de Ribas, a soldier of fortune in Russian service, born in Naples of Spanish and Irish parentage. With the assistance of a Dutch engineer, he laid out a gridiron plan of wide streets and began construction of a mole.

Under Richelieu, governor from 1803 to 1815 – whose little palazzo in Gurzuf had sheltered Pushkin and the Raevskys – the city prospered and gained in amenities: a wide boulevard was constructed along the cliff edge, overlooking the sea; and ‘an elegant stone theatre, […] the front of which is ornamented by a peristyle supported by columns’,


(#litres_trial_promo) was built. It was usually occupied by an Italian opera company: Pushkin became addicted to ‘the ravishing Rossini,/Darling of Europe’.


(#litres_trial_promo) However, the town ‘was still in the course of construction, there were everywhere vacant lots and shacks. Stone houses were scattered along the Rishelevskaya, Khersonskaya and Tiraspolskaya streets, the cathedral and theatre squares; but for the most part all these houses stood in isolation with wooden single-storey houses and fences between them.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Very few streets were paved: all travellers mention the insupportable dust in the summer, and the indescribable mud in the spring and autumn.

In 1819 Odessa had become a free port: the population increased – there were some 30,000 inhabitants in 1823 – as did the number of foreign merchants and shipping firms. The lingua franca of business was Italian, and many of the streets bore signs in this language or in French, until Vorontsov, in a fit of patriotism, had them replaced by Russian ones. But this could not conceal the fact that the city was very different in its population and its manners from the typical Russian provincial town: ‘Two customs of social life gave Odessa the air of a foreign town: in the theatre during the entr’actes the men in the parterre audience would don their hats, and the smoking of cigars on the street was allowed.’


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Odessa, with its opera and its restaurants, might seem a far more attractive place for exile than Kishinev. Nevertheless, Pushkin was to be considerably less happy here. He had lost the company of his close friends: Gorchakov’s regiment was still stationed in Kishinev; Alekseev, not wishing to part from his mistress Mariya Eichfeldt, had turned down a post he had been offered with Vorontsov in Odessa; while Liprandi, who had left the army and was attached to Vorontsov’s office, was rarely in Odessa, being continually employed on missions elsewhere. And though Aleksandr Raevsky was now living in the town, the relationship between the two was to become very strained over the following months. Pushkin did make a number of new acquaintances, but they remained acquaintances, rather than friends. He was closest, perhaps, to Vasily Tumansky, a year younger than himself, an official in Vorontsov’s bureau and a fellow-poet – ‘Odessa in sonorous verses/Our friend Tumansky has described.’


(#litres_trial_promo) But he had no great opinion of his talent: ‘Tumansky is a famous fellow, but I do not like him as a poet. May God give him wisdom,’ he told Bestuzhev.


(#litres_trial_promo) He found, too, Tumansky’s hyperbolic praise – calling him ‘the Jesus Christ of our poetry’


(#litres_trial_promo) – and servile imitation of his work distasteful. However, they dined together most evenings in Dimitraki’s Greek restaurant, sitting with others over wine until the early hours. An acquaintance of a different kind was ‘the retired corsair Morali’,


(#litres_trial_promo) a Moor from Tunis, and the skipper of a trading vessel – ‘a very merry character, about thirty-five years old, of medium height, thick-set, with a bronzed, somewhat pock-marked, but very pleasant physiognomy’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He spoke fluent Italian, some French, and was very fond of Pushkin, whom he accompanied about the town. Some believed that he was a Turkish spy. Pushkin struck up an acquaintance, too, with the Vorontsovs’ family doctor, the thirty-year-old William Hutchinson, whom they had engaged in London in the autumn of 1821. Tall, thin and balding, Hutchinson proved to be an interesting companion, despite his deafness, taciturnity and bad French. The vicissitudes of his emotional life, however, contributed most to his unhappiness. In Kishinev he may have believed himself several times to be in love, but these light and airy flirtations bore no resemblance to the serious and deep involvements he was now to experience. And whereas Inzov had shown a paternal affection towards him, indulgently pardoning Pushkin’s misdemeanours, or, if this was impossible, treating him like an erring adolescent, his relationship with Vorontsov, far more of a grandee than his predecessor, was of a very different kind.

In 1823 Count Mikhail Vorontsov was forty-one. He was the son of the former Russian ambassador in London, who had married into the Sidney family and settled in England permanently after his retirement. Vorontsov had received an English education, had studied at Cambridge, and was, like his father, a convinced Anglophile. His sister, Ekaterina, had married Lord Pembroke in 1808, and English relatives would occasionally visit Odessa. A professional soldier, Vorontsov had fought throughout the Napoleonic wars, being wounded at Borodino, and at Craonne in March 1814 had led the Russian corps that took on Napoleon himself in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. After Waterloo he commanded the Russian Army of Occupation in France, when Aleksandr Raevsky was one of his aides-de-camp. He was extremely wealthy, and had added to his fortune by marrying, in 1819, Elizaveta Branicka, who brought with her an enormous dowry: her mother, Countess Branicka, whose estate was at Belaya Tserkov, just south of Kiev, was one of the richest landowners in Russia. Before taking up his new appointment, he had invested massively in land in New Russia, buying immense estates near Odessa and Taganrog, and in the Crimea. He was ‘tall and thin, with remarkably noble features, as though they had been carved with a chisel, his gaze was unusually calm, and about his thin long lips there eternally played an affectionate and crafty smile’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Perhaps only Alexander could be more charming, when he wanted to please,’ remarked Wiegel. ‘He had a certain exquisite gaucheness, the result of his English upbringing, a manly reserve and a voice which, while never losing its firmness, was remarkably tender.’


(#litres_trial_promo) As a commander he had, like Orlov, discouraged brutality and cruelty in enforcing discipline and had set up regimental schools to educate the troops. He was close to a number of the future Decembrists, and had even, together with Nikolay Turgenev, Pushkin’s St Petersburg friend and fellow-Arzamasite, attempted to set up a society of noblemen with the aim of gradually emancipating the serfs. He had thus acquired the reputation of a liberal; a reputation which he was now strenuously attempting to live down, given the current climate in government circles: a mixture of mysticism and reaction, combined with – since the mutiny of the Semenovsky Life Guards in 1820 – paranoid suspicion of anything remotely radical.

When, at the beginning of August, Pushkin returned to Odessa in Vorontsov’s suite, he took a room in the Hotel Rainaud, where he lived throughout his stay. The hotel was on the corner of Deribasovskaya and Rishelevskaya Streets (named after the first two governors, de Ribas and Richelieu); behind it an annexe, which fronted on Theatre Square, housed the Casino de Commerce, or assembly-rooms: ‘The great oval hall, which is surrounded by a gallery, supported on numerous columns, is used for the double purpose of ballroom, and an Exchange, where the merchants sometimes transact their affairs,’ wrote Robert Lyall, who visited Odessa in May 1822.


(#litres_trial_promo) Baron Rainaud, the owner of the hotel and casino, was a French émigré; he also possessed a charming villa on the coast three miles to the east of the city, with wonderful views over the Black Sea. Vorontsov rented it for his wife, who was in the final stages of pregnancy when she arrived from Belaya Tserkov on 6 September: she gave birth to a son two months later.

Pushkin had a corner room on the first floor with a balcony, which gave a view of the sea. The theatre and casino were two minutes away; five minutes’ walk down Deribasovskaya and Khersonskaya Streets took him to César Automne’s restaurant, the best in town –

What of the oysters? they’re here! O joy!

Gluttonous youth flies

To swallow from their sea shells

The plump, living hermitesses,

With a slight squeeze of lemon.

Noise, arguments – light wine

From the cellars is borne

To the table by obliging Automne;

The hours fly, and the dread bill

Meanwhile invisibly mounts.


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Wiegel, who had been recruited by Vorontsov to join his staff, soon moved into the room next to Pushkin. Before leaving St Petersburg he had been enjoined by Zhukovsky and Bludov to gain Pushkin’s confidence in order, if possible, to prevent him from behaving injudiciously. Unfortunately, Pushkin did not enjoy his company for long: Vorontsov sacked the vice-governor of Kishinev for dishonesty and appointed Wiegel in his place. ‘Tell me, my dear atheist, how did you manage to live for several years in Kishinev?’ he wrote to Pushkin on 8 October. ‘Although you should indeed have been punished by God for your lack of faith, surely not to such an extent. As far as I am concerned, I can say too: although my sins or, more accurately, my sin is great, it is not so great that fate should have destined this cesspit to be my abode.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The sin Wiegel is referring to is his homosexuality. In a verse reply, Pushkin promised to visit him: ‘I’ll be glad to serve you/With my crazy conversation –/With verses, prose or with my soul,/But, Wiegel, – spare my arse!’ Continuing in prose, he answers a query raised by Wiegel about the Ralli brothers. ‘I think the smallest is best suited to your use; NB he sleeps in the same room as his brother Mikhail and they tumble about unmercifully – from this you can draw important conclusions, I leave them to your experience and good sense – the eldest brother, as you have already noticed, is as stupid as a bishop’s crozier – Vanka jerks off – so the devil with them – embrace them in friendly fashion from me.’


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Two and a half years earlier, on 2 February 1821, in the governor of Kiev’s drawing-room, Pushkin had been struck by the beauty of a woman wearing a poppy-red toque with a drooping ostrich feather, ‘which set off extraordinarily well her tall stature, luxuriant shoulders and fiery eyes’.


(#litres_trial_promo) This was Karolina Sobańska, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Count Adam Rzewuski, one of several attractive and brilliantly clever brothers and sisters: her sister Ewa Hanska was Balzac’s Étrangère, who, after a long correspondence and liaison with the novelist, married him in 1850, a few months before his death. Karolina had been married at seventeen to Hieronim Sobański, a wealthy landowner and owner of one of the largest trading houses in Odessa. He was, however, thirty-three years older than her; she left him in 1816, and in 1819 met and began a long liaison with Colonel-General Count Jan Witt.


(#litres_trial_promo) Since 1817 Witt had been in command of all the military colonies in the south of Russia; in addition he controlled a wide and efficient network of spies and secret police agents. He and Sobańska lived openly together; the liaison was recognized by society, and though its more straitlaced members might have frowned at the irregularity of the relationship, there were few who wished to incur his enmity by cutting Sobańska in public.

When Pushkin met her again, his interest was immediately rekindled: she was, indeed, almost irresistible – not only beautiful, but also lively, charming and provocative, and a talented musician: ‘What grace, what a voice, and what manners!’


(#litres_trial_promo) Few, if any, knew at the time that, as well as being Witt’s mistress, she also worked for him, and was an extremely valuable Russian intelligence agent. Only Wiegel appears to have had an inkling of the truth. ‘When a few years later I learnt […] that for financial gain she joined the ranks of the gendarme agents, I felt an invincible aversion to her. I will not mention the unproved crimes of which she was suspected. What vilenesses were concealed beneath her elegant appearance!’


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(#litres_trial_promo) Witt, eager to obtain evidence of subversive activity, encouraged her friendship with Pushkin, as in 1825 he would encourage her liaison with the Polish poet Mickiewicz. She and Pushkin made an excursion by boat together; he accompanied her to the Roman Catholic church, where she dipped her fingers into the stoup and crossed his forehead with holy water; and there were ‘burning readings’ of Constant’s Adolphe,19 a book so appropriate to their circumstances it might have been written with them in mind: the hero, Adolphe, falls in love with Ellénore, a Polish countess, celebrated for her beauty, who is older than he and is being kept by a M. de P***. But Sobanska did not appear to feel more than friendship for him; piqued, he concocted, together with Aleksandr Raevsky, a scheme to arouse her interest. Before it could be put into practice she left the city, and Pushkin consoled himself for her absence by falling in love with Amaliya Riznich, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish banker, married to an Odessa shipping merchant.

‘Mrs Riznich was young, tall, graceful, and extraordinarily beautiful.

Particularly attractive were her fiery eyes, a neck of amazing form and whiteness, and a plait of black hair, nearly five feet long. But her feet were too large; in order to conceal this deficiency, she always wore a long dress, to the ground. She went about wearing a man’s hat and dressed in a semi-riding habit. All this gave her originality and attracted both young and not so young heads and hearts.’


(#litres_trial_promo) She distinguished herself by going about much in society – ‘Our married ladies (with the exception of the beautiful and charming Mrs Riznich) avoid company, concealing under the guise of modesty either their simplicity or their ignorance,’ Tumansky wrote to his cousin


(#litres_trial_promo) – and entertained frequently at home. These were lively gatherings, at which much whist was played: a game of which she was passionately fond. Pushkin was soon obsessed with her. Profiles of ‘Madame Riznich, with her Roman nose’


(#litres_trial_promo) crept out of his pen to ornament the manuscript of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. His emotions reached their zenith in the last weeks of October and the first of November with a sudden burst of poems. The passionate love, the burning jealousy they express are far deeper, far more powerful, far more agonizing than anything he had previously experienced. Though intense, the feelings were short-lived. In January or early February 1824, he bade her farewell with a final lyric. She had been pregnant when they first met; early in 1824 she gave birth to a son. Meanwhile her health had deteriorated; the Odessa climate had exacerbated a tendency towards consumption. At the beginning of May she left Odessa; a year later she died in Italy.

Beneath the blue sky of her native land

She languished, faded …

Faded finally, and above me surely

The young shade already hovered;

But there is an unapproachable line between us.

In vain I tried to awaken emotion:

From indifferent lips I heard the news of death,

And received it with indifference.

So this is whom my fiery soul loved

With such painful intensity,

With such tender, agonizing heartache,

With such madness and such torment!

Where now the tortures, where the love? Alas!

For the poor, gullible shade,

For the sweet memory of irretrievable days

In my soul I find neither tears nor reproaches.


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Riznich did not long remain a widower. In March 1827 Tumansky wrote to Pushkin: ‘One piece of our news, which might interest you, is Riznich’s marriage to the sister of Sobańska, Witt’s mistress […] The new Mme Riznich will probably not deserve either your or my verse on her death; she is a child with a wide mouth and Polish manners.’


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The social scene in Odessa in the autumn and winter of 1823 was a lively one. Pushkin, in a black frock-coat, wearing a peaked cap or black hat over his cropped hair, and carrying an iron cane, hastened through the mud from one gathering to another. General Raevsky, his wife, and his two younger daughters, Mariya and Sofya, paid a lengthy visit to the town. ‘The Raevskys are here,’ Tumansky told his cousin, ‘Mariya is the ideal of Pushkin’s Circassian maid (the poet’s own expression), ugly, but very attractive in the sharpness of her conversation and tenderness of her manner.’


(#litres_trial_promo) A sketch of the sixteen-year-old girl with her short nose, heavy jaw and unruly hair escaping from an elaborate bonnet appears in the left-hand margin of a draft of several stanzas from Eugene Onegin.26 Pushkin had finished the first chapter on 22 October and embarked immediately on the second: ‘I am writing with a rapture which I have not had for a long time,’ he told Vyazemsky.


(#litres_trial_promo) Several other St Petersburg acquaintances were in Odessa. Aleksandr Sturdza, the subject, in 1819, of two hostile epigrams, turned out to be not such a pillar of reaction after all. ‘Monarchical Sturdza is here; we are not only friends, but also think the same about one or two things, without being sly to one another.’


(#litres_trial_promo) However, he quarrelled with the Arzamasite Severin, relieving his anger with an epigram ridiculing Severin’s pretensions to nobility.

He saw, too, General Kiselev and his wife Sofya, who frequently travelled over from the headquarters of the Second Army at Tulchin. Earlier that year, after the officers of the Odessa regiment had revolted against their colonel, Kiselev had sacked the brigade commander, General Mordvinov. The latter had challenged him to a duel. Kiselev accepted the challenge, the two met, and Mordvinov was killed. Kiselev immediately sent the emperor an account of the affair, saying that the manner of the challenge left him ‘no choice between the strict application of the law and the most sacred obligations of honour’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander pardoned him and retained him as chief of staff of the Second Army. The incident caused much stir at the time, and particularly fascinated Pushkin, who, ‘for many days talked of nothing else, asking others for their opinion as to whose side was more honourable, who had been the more self-sacrificial and so on’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Though he inclined towards Mordvinov, he could not but admire Kiselev’s sangfroid. Also in Odessa were Sofya’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Olga, and her recently acquired husband, General Lev Naryshkin, who was Vorontsov’s cousin. Olga was as beautiful as her sister, but ‘in her beauty there was nothing maidenly or touching […] in the very flower of youth she seemed already armoured with great experience. Everything was calculated, and she preserved the arrows of coquetry for the conquest of the mighty.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Wiegel’s last sentence is a hidden reference to a relationship which was well-known in Odessa: soon after her arrival Olga became Vorontsov’s mistress. Naryshkin, seventeen years older than his wife, lacked the character and energy to complain – ‘always sleepy, always good-natured’ was his brother-in-law’s description of him


(#litres_trial_promo) – and, in addition, his affection for his wife was lukewarm: he had long been hopelessly in love with his aunt, Mariya Naryshkina, for many years the mistress of Alexander I.

During the winter there were dances twice a week at the Vorontsovs; Pushkin was assiduous in attending. On 12 December they gave a large ball, at which his impromptu verses on a number of the ladies present caused some offence. On Christmas Day Vorontsov entertained the members of his staff to dinner; Wiegel arrived from Kishinev while they were at table, and Pushkin, learning this, slipped back to the hotel to see him. On New Year’s Eve, Tumansky wrote, ‘we had a good frolic at the masquerade, which the countess [Elizaveta Vorontsova] put on for us, and at which she herself played the fool very cleverly and smartly, that is, she had a charmingly satirical costume and intrigued with everyone in it’.


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Liprandi had not forgotten Pushkin’s disappointment at not being able to visit Charles XII’s camp at Varnitsa during their trip in the winter of 1821. Planning another visit to the district, he invited Pushkin to accompany him. The latter accepted with alacrity. He had just been reading a manuscript copy of Ryleev’s narrative poem Voinarovsky. ‘Ryleev’s Voinarovsky is incomparably better than all his Dumy,* his style has matured and is becoming a truly narrative one, which we still almost completely lack,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev.


(#litres_trial_promo) The hero of Ryleev’s poem is the nephew of Mazepa, the hetman of the Dnieper Cossacks who joined with Charles against Peter the Great and died at Varnitsa in 1709. Pushkin was attracted by the figure of Mazepa himself; three lines of Ryleev’s poem describing Mazepa’s nightmares, ‘He often saw, at dead of night;/The wife of the martyr Kochubey/And their ravished daughter,’


(#litres_trial_promo) planted the germ which grew into his own poem, Poltava. Byron, too, had devoted a poem to the hetman: his Mazeppa is an account of an early episode of the hero’s life, when, according to Voltaire, the poet’s source, ‘an affair he had with the wife of a Polish nobleman having been discovered, the husband had him bound naked to the back of a wild horse and sent him forth in this state’.


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On 17 January 1824 they left Odessa for Tiraspol, where they put up with Liprandi’s brother. That evening they had supper with General Sabaneev. Pushkin was cheerful and very talkative: the general’s wife, Pulkheriya Yakovlevna, was much taken with him. The following day, accompanied by Liprandi’s brother, they set out early for Bendery. Forewarned of their coming, the police chief, A.I. Barozzi, had provided a guide: Nikola Iskra, a Little Russian, who ‘appeared to be about sixty, was tall, with an upright figure, rather lean, with thick yellowish-grey hair on his head and chest and good teeth’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He claimed that as a young man he had been sent by his mother to the Swedish camp to sell milk, butter and eggs: which, Liprandi calculated, would make him now about 135 years old. However, it was certainly true that his description of Charles XII’s appearance bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations in the historical works Liprandi had brought with him, and he showed an equally remarkable ability, when they arrived at the site of the camp, to describe its plan and fortifications and to interpret the irregularities of the terrain. Much to Pushkin’s annoyance, however, he was not only unable to show them Mazepa’s grave, but even disclaimed any knowledge of the hetman. They returned to Bendery with Pushkin in a very disgruntled mood. He cheered up, however, after dinner with Barozzi, and in the afternoon set out in a carriage, accompanied by a policeman, to view, as he hoped, the ruined palaces and fountains at Kaushany, the seat of the khans of Budzhak. Later in the evening he returned as disgruntled as before: there were – as Liprandi had warned him two years earlier – no ruins to admire in Kaushany. He was back in Odessa on the nineteenth. Liprandi did not return until the beginning of February. On the evening of his arrival he dined with the Vorontsovs, where a sulky Pushkin was making desultory conversation with the countess and Olga Naryshkina. He vanished after the company rose from table. Calling at his hotel room later, Liprandi found him in the most cheerful frame of mind imaginable: with his coat off, he was sitting on Morali’s knee and tickling the retired corsair until he roared. This was the only pleasure he had in Odessa, he told Liprandi.

Pushkin had completed his second southern poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, the previous autumn, and had begun to think about publication. Gnedich, though eager, had ruled himself out through excessive sharpness; he therefore turned to Vyazemsky, who agreed to see the work through the press. However, there was a complication. The work was suffused with memories of the Crimea and, in particular, of his love for Ekaterina Raevskaya. Now, three years later, he was not anxious to call attention to this, all the more so as Ekaterina was now Orlov’s wife. He hit on a simple solution in a letter to his brother: ‘I will send Vyazemsky The Fountain – omitting the love ravings – but it’s a pity!’


(#litres_trial_promo) Sending the manuscript to Vyazemsky on 4 November, he wrote, ‘I have thrown out that which the censor would have thrown out if I had not, and that which I did not want to exhibit before the public. If these disconnected fragments seem to you worthy of type, then print them, and do me a favour, don’t give in to that bitch the censorship, bite back in defence of every line, and bite it to death if you can, in memory of me […] another request: add a foreword or afterword to Bakhchisaray, if not for my sake, then for the sake of your lustful Minerva, Sofya Kiseleva; I enclose a police report as material; draw on it for information (without, of course, mentioning the source).’


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(#litres_trial_promo) With the letter he sent a copy of ‘Platonic Love’, the immodest poem he had addressed to Sofya in 1819. ‘Print it quickly; I ask this not for the sake of fame, but for the sake of Mammon,’ he urged in December.


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But his hopes of concealing his former feelings for Ekaterina were soon sadly dented. In St Petersburg Bestuzhev and Ryleev had been preparing a second number of their literary almanac, Pole Star. They obtained Pushkin’s permission to include some of his verses which had been circulating in manuscript in St Petersburg, and others which they had obtained from Tumansky. When the almanac came out in December, Pushkin was horrified to discover that the final three lines of ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, the coded reference to Ekaterina which he had specifically asked Bestuzhev not to include, had in fact been printed. ‘It makes me sad to see that I am treated like a dead person, with no respect for my wishes or my miserable possessions,’ he wrote reproachfully to Bestuzhev. Worse was to follow. In February, just before the publication of the poem, he wrote to Bestuzhev again: ‘I am glad that my Fountain is making a stir. The absence of plan is not my fault. I reverentially put into verse a young woman’s tale, Aux douces loix des vers je pliais les accents/De sa bouche aimable et naïve.


(#litres_trial_promo) By the way, I wrote it only for myself, but am publishing it because I need money.’


(#litres_trial_promo) As with previous letters to Bestuzhev, he addressed this care of Nikolay Grech. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of Faddey Bulgarin – a close associate of Grech, and from 1825 co-editor, with him, of Son of the Fatherland – who shamelessly printed an extract from it in his paper, Literary Leaves, adding that it was taken from a letter of the author to one of his St Petersburg friends. Anyone who knew of Pushkin’s visit to the Crimea could make an intelligent guess at the possessor of the ‘lovable and naïve mouth’; even worse, however, were the conclusions Ekaterina herself might draw. ‘I once fell head over heels in love,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev later that year. ‘In such cases I usually write elegies, as another has wet dreams. But is it a friendly act to hang out my soiled sheets for show? God forgive you, but you shamed me in the current Star – printing the last 3 lines of my elegy; what the devil possessed me apropos of the Bakhchisaray fountain also to write some sentimental lines and mention my elegiac beauty there. Picture my despair, when I saw them printed – the journal could fall into her hands. What would she think of me, seeing with what eagerness I chat about her with one of my Petersburg friends. How can she know that she is not named by me, that the letter was unsealed and printed by Bulgarin – that the devil knows who delivered the damned Elegy to you – and that no one is to blame. I confess that I value just one thought of this woman more than the opinions of all the journals in the world and of all our public.’


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As with The Prisoner, Pushkin’s new narrative poem was eagerly anticipated in literary circles: before publication it was being read everywhere, and even manuscript copies were circulating in St Petersburg – much to Pushkin’s annoyance, since he feared this would affect sales. ‘Pletnev tells me The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is in everyone’s hands. Thank you, my friends, for your gracious care for my fame!’ he wrote sarcastically to Lev, whom he deemed responsible.


(#litres_trial_promo) His fears proved unjustified. Having seen the poem through the censorship, Vyazemsky had it printed in Moscow at a cost of 500 roubles, and then began negotiations to sell the entire print-run jointly to two booksellers, Shiryaev in Moscow and Smirdin in St Petersburg. ‘How I have sold the Fountain!’ he exulted to Bestuzhev in March. ‘Three thousand roubles for 1,200 copies for a year, and I’m paid for all printing costs. This is in the European style and deserves to be known.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He saw to it that it was by contributing an article about the sale to the April number of News of Literature: ‘For a line of The Fountain of Bakhchisaray more has been paid than has ever been paid previously for any Russian verse.’ The book-seller had gained ‘the grateful respect of the friends of culture by valuing a work of the mind not according to its size or weight’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Shalikov, in the Ladies’ Journal, did the calculation and came out with the figure of eight roubles a line. Bulgarin, too, commented on the transaction in Literary Leaves, while the Russian Invalid remarked patriotically that it was a ‘proof that not in England alone and not the English alone pay with a generous hand for elegant works of poetry’.


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Vyazemsky sent a first instalment of the advance in March. Pushkin immediately paid Inzov a debt of 360 roubles which he was ‘embarrassed and humiliated’ not to have settled earlier,


(#litres_trial_promo) and dashed off a grateful letter to Vyazemsky: ‘One thing troubles me, you sold the entire edition for 3000r., but how much did it cost you to print it? You are still making me a gift, you shameless fellow! For Christ’s sake take what is due to you out of the remainder, and send it here. There’s no point in letting it grow. It won’t lie around with me for long, although I am really not extravagant. I’ll pay my old debts and sit down to a new poem. Since I’m not one of our 18th century writers: I write for myself, and publish for money, certainly not for the smiles of the fair sex.’


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The Fountain of Bakhchisaray was published on 10 March. Vyazemsky had responded to Pushkin’s plea and had contributed an unsigned introductory article which bore the strange title ‘Instead of a foreword. A conversation between the publisher and a classicist from the Vyborg Side or Vasilevsky Island’.


(#litres_trial_promo) This had little to do with the poem, but was a provocative attack, from the standpoint of romanticism, on the literary old guard and classicism. An immediate reply appeared in the Herald of Europe; Pushkin came to Vyazemsky’s defence with a short letter to Son of the Fatherland; and, much to Vyazemsky’s delight, a controversy developed which rumbled on in the literary pages for months. Turgenev disapproved: ‘Stop squabbling,’ he advised his friend. ‘It is unworthy of you and I do not recognize you in all this polemical rubbish.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Onlookers took a similar view: ‘There has been a shower of lampoons, epigrams, arguments, gibes, personalities, each more nasty and more stupid than the last,’ Yakov Saburov wrote to his brother.


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Shorter than The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray has an equally simple plot. Girey, khan of the Crimea, falls in love with the latest captive added to his harem, the Polish princess Mariya. She dies, either of illness or at the hand of Girey’s previous favourite, Zarema, who is drowned by the khan. He builds a marble fountain in memory of Mariya. For the subject of the poem Pushkin adapted a Crimean legend which he had heard from the Raevskys at Gurzuf, and which Muravev-Apostol recounts in his Journey through Tauris in 1820. An extract from this work, describing the palace at Bakhchisaray, was appended to the poem when it was published. The Fountain was greeted with a general chorus of praise: there was no pedantic carping at detail and little criticism. Pushkin’s own opinion was less favourable. ‘Between ourselves,’ he had written to Vyazemsky, ‘the Fountain of Bakhchisaray is rubbish, but its epigraph is charming.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This, attributed to the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sadi, runs: ‘Many, similarly to myself, visited this fountain; but some are no more, others are journeying far.’ The second half of the saying came to have a political significance: when the critic Polevoy quoted it in an article in the Moscow Telegraph in 1827, he was clearly alluding to the fate of the Decembrists, some of whom had been executed, others exiled to Siberia. Pushkin had not taken the quotation directly from the Persian poet, but from the French translation of a prose passage in Thomas Moore’s ‘oriental romance’ Lalla Rookh (1817), which refers to ‘a fountain, on which some hand had rudely traced those well-known words from the Garden of Sadi, – “Many, like me, have viewed this fountain, but they are gone, and their eyes are closed forever!”’


(#litres_trial_promo) Despite this borrowing, he was no admirer of Moore. ‘The whole of Lalla Rookh is not worth ten lines of Tristram Shandy,’ he exclaimed; and, commenting on the Fountain, told Vyazemsky: ‘The eastern style was a model for me, inasmuch as is possible for us rational, cold Europeans. By the by, do you know why I do not like Moore? – because he is excessively eastern. He imitates in a childish and ugly manner the childishness and ugliness of Sadi, Hafiz and Mahomet. – A European, even when in ecstasy over eastern splendour, should retain the taste and eye of a European. That is why Byron is so charming in The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and so on.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This was the effect at which he aimed, and Byron was undoubtedly his inspiration: in 1830 he remarked: ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than The Prisoner and, like it, reflects my reading of Byron, about whom I then raved.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin was right: The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than ThePrisoner; is indeed the weakest of all his narrative poems, though the portrayal of the languid, surfeited life of the harem breathes an indolent sensuality, while the scene between Mariya and Zarema has, as he remarked, ‘dramatic merit’.


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But the real significance of the poem for Pushkin – and, indeed, for Russian literature – lay not in its aesthetic, but rather in its commercial value. At the beginning of his stay in Odessa and, as usual, hard-pressed for money, Pushkin had written despairingly to his brother: ‘Explain to my father that I cannot live without his money. To live by my pen is impossible with the present censorship; I have not studied the carpenter’s trade; I cannot become a teacher; although I know scripture and the four elementary rules – but I am a civil servant against my will – and cannot take retirement. – Everything and everyone deceives me – on whom should I depend, if not on my nearest and dearest. I will not live on Vorontsov’s bounty – I will not and that is all – extremes can lead to extremes – I am pained by my father’s indifference to my state – although his letters are very amiable.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The successful sale of The Fountain changed his views in an instant. ‘I begin to respect our booksellers and to think that our trade is really no worse than any other,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky.


(#litres_trial_promo) For the first time financial independence seemed possible; the career of a professional writer beckoned. This new-found self-sufficiency strengthened his belief in his talent, his sense of himself as an artist: it was to affect materially his behaviour during the remaining months in Odessa.

Another chance to exploit his work commercially soon arrived; in June he was offered 2,000 roubles for the right to bring out a second edition of The Prisoner of the Caucasus. But before Lev in St Petersburg could close the deal, he was forestalled. The previous year a German translation of The Prisoner had come out. August Oldekop, the publisher of the St Petersburg Gazette and the Sankt-Peterburgische Zeitung, now brought out this translation again, printing the original Russian text opposite the German. This was a great success and killed Pushkin’s hopes of selling a second edition of the poem. ‘I will have to petition for redress under the law,’ he told Vyazemsky.


(#litres_trial_promo) But the law respecting authors’ rights was unclear and, though the Censorship Committee put a temporary ban on the sale of the edition, this was soon lifted. In addition, Oldekop muddied the waters by insisting that he had bought the right to publish the edition from Pushkin’s father. When Vyazemsky anxiously enquired whether this was true, and asked Pushkin to send him, if it was not, a power of attorney, giving him the right to act on his friend’s part against Oldekop, Pushkin – who was by this time in Mikhailovskoe – replied: ‘Oldekop stole and lied; my father made no kind of bargain with him. I would send you a power of attorney; but you must wait; stamped paper is only to be had in town; some kind of witnessing has to be done in town – and I am in the depths of the country.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The indictment of Oldekop’s villainy is certainly positive; but is the disinclination to ride into Pskov for a power of attorney prompted by indolence, by a healthy scepticism about the process of law, or by the suspicion that his father – with whom he was on extremely bad terms – had not been wholly honest with him? Six months later, when he was afraid that The Fountain was also being pirated, and was therefore having to turn down offers for it, he wrote to Lev, ‘Selivanovsky is offering me 12,000 roubles, and I have to turn it down – this way I’ll die of hunger – what with my father and Oldekop. Farewell, I’m in a rage.’


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Outside Russia the heady days of the revolution in Spain and of Ypsilanti’s Greek revolt, both of which had so aroused Pushkin’s enthusiasm, had passed, and a tide of reaction, encouraged by Alexander I, was sweeping over Europe. At the Congress of Verona France asked to be allowed to march into Spain – as Austria had marched into Naples in 1821 – to restore order in the Peninsula; despite British protests, this was agreed, and in April 1823 the duke of Angoulême, at the head of a powerful army, crossed the Bidassoa. Ferdinand, a prisoner since 1820, was restored to the throne, and, in an orgy of revenge, Colonel Rafael Riego, the leader of the revolution, and many other insurgents were executed. Pushkin, disgusted by this, and disillusioned with the Greeks – ‘The Jesuits have stuffed our heads with Themistocles and Pericles, and we have come to imagine that this dirty people, consisting of bandits and shopkeepers, is their legitimate descendant, the heir to their fame in school’


(#litres_trial_promo) – came to the conclusion, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor some sixty years later, that man did not deserve freedom. In ‘Of freedom the solitary sower’, ‘an imitation of a parable by that moderate democrat Jesus Christ (A sower went out to sow his seed)’


(#litres_trial_promo) he expressed this new cynicism:

Graze, placid peoples!

What good to herds the gift of freedom?

They must be slaughtered or be shorn.

Their inheritance from generation to generation

Is the yoke with bells and the whip.


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The two-year moratorium on political verse, agreed with Karamzin, had reached its term long ago, and Pushkin relapsed into his former ways with ‘The motionless sentinel slumbered on the royal threshold …’, a satirical portrait of Alexander after his return from the Congress of Verona.


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Though poems such as these were not intended for publication, they were known to Pushkin’s friends – ‘Of freedom the solitary sower’ was included in a letter to Turgenev – and circulated in manuscript: by writing them he was flirting with danger. He was flirting with danger, too, given the pietistic fervour then in vogue, when he wrote to Küichelbecker: ‘You want to know what I am doing – I am writing motley stanzas of a romantic poem – and am taking lessons in pure atheism. There is an Englishman here, a deaf philosopher, the only intelligent atheist I have yet met. He has written over 1,000 pages to prove that no intelligent being, Creator and governor can exist, in passing destroying the weak proofs of the immortality of the soul. His system is not so consoling as is usually thought, but unfortunately is the most plausible.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The deaf English philosopher was William Hutchinson, the Vorontsovs’ personal physician, a proponent of the new, scientific atheism, which Pushkin – hitherto acquainted only with the rational atheism of the eighteenth century – found excitingly original. This letter, like his verse, circulated in manuscript. Learning of this, Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin in some agitation, sending his letter by a traveller to Odessa and marking it ‘Secret’. ‘Please be cautious both with your tongue and your pen,’ he urged. ‘Do not risk your future. Your present exile is better than anywhere else.’


(#litres_trial_promo) It was too late. ‘Thanks to the not wholly sensible publicity given to it by Pushkin’s friends and especially by the late Aleksandr Ivanovich Turgenev, who, as we have heard, rushed round his acquaintances with it, the letter came to the knowledge of the administration.’


(#litres_trial_promo) It was to have a decisive influence on his future.

Pushkin’s flirtation with danger extended into his emotional life. From the turn of the year a new face appears among those idly scribbled by his pen while waiting for inspiration. It is that of the governor’s wife, Elizaveta – or, as he called her, Elise – Vorontsova, with whom he was now violently in love. There are more portraits of her in his manuscripts than of anyone else: indeed, one page of the second chapter of Eugene Onegin has no fewer than six sketches of her. She is represented constantly in profile, with and without a bonnet; Pushkin returns over and over again to her graceful shoulders and neck, sometimes encircled by her famous necklace: ‘Potocki gave balls and evening parties,’ Aleksandra Smirnova-Rosset wrote. ‘At his house I saw Elizaveta Vorontsova for the first time, in a pink satin dress. Then people wore cordelière necklaces. Hers was made of the largest of diamonds.’


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At thirty-one, Elise was seven years older than Pushkin. She was not conventionally beautiful, like her friend Olga Naryshkina, but had a vivacity and charm which were enchanting. ‘With her innate Polish frivolity and coquetry she desired to please,’ commented Wiegel, ‘and no one succeeded better than her in this. […] She did not have that which is called beauty; but the swift, tender gaze of her sweet small eyes penetrated one completely; I have never seen anything comparable to the smile on her lips, which seemed to demand a kiss.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Count Sollogub, who met her years later, devotes a passage to her in his memoirs: ‘Small and plump, with somewhat coarse and irregular features, Elizaveta Ksaverevna was, nonetheless, one of the most attractive women of her time. Her whole being was suffused with such soft, enchanting, feminine grace, such cordiality, such irreproachable elegance, that it was easy to understand why such people as Pushkin […] Raevsky and many, many others fell head over heels in love with Vorontsova.’


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Pushkin had known her since the previous autumn; in the new year her attractions began to supplant those of Amaliya Riznich; a turning-point in their relationship occurred in February, when Vorontsov was absent in Kishinev. On his manuscripts Pushkin only notes events he considers significant: on 8 February 1824, opposite the first stanza of the third chapter of Eugene Onegin, he jotted down ‘soupé chez C.E.W’ – ‘had supper with Countess Elise Woronzof’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The relationship was to be short, and much interrupted. Pushkin himself was in Kishinev for two weeks in March. When he returned to Odessa he found that Elise had left on a visit to her mother in Belaya Tserkov; she remained there until 20 April. As the weather grew warmer they began to meet at Baron Rainaud’s villa. ‘Rainaud has successfully made use of the cliffs which surround his domain,’ wrote a visitor. ‘In the midst of the cliffs a bathing-place has been constructed. It is shaped like a large shell, attached to the cliffs.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This was the site of their assignations:

The shelter of love, it is eternally full

With dark, damp cool,

There the constrained waves’

Prolonged roar is never silent.


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The affair brought Pushkin two enemies. Aleksandr Raevsky, who was himself in love with Elise, and who enjoyed her favours during her visits to Belaya Tserkov, had originally encouraged her not to reject his friend’s advances in order to divert attention from their own relationship. But when his cunning overreached itself and pretence became reality, his attitude towards Pushkin changed: the latter was no longer a naive young pupil, but a serious rival in love, and Raevsky, while maintaining a pretence of friendship, lost no opportunity to undermine his position. The second enemy was Vorontsov himself, who, though the injured husband, did not in principle disapprove of his wife’s infidelity. ‘Countess Vorontsova is a fashionable lady, very pleasant, who likes to take lovers, to which her husband has no objection whatsoever; on the contrary he patronizes them, because this gives him freedom to take mistresses without constraint,’ a contemporary observed.


(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, it went somewhat against the grain to be cuckolded by this self-opinionated young upstart, without a penny to his name and no profession to speak of. ‘You’re fond of Pushkin, I think,’ he once said to Wiegel; ‘can’t you persuade him to occupy himself with something sensible; under your guidance?’


(#litres_trial_promo) Matters were made worse when Pushkin succumbed to that common human trait which leads us to dislike those we have injured. He had no notion of preserving the decencies and allowing himself to be patronized by Vorontsov as one of his wife’s gigolos; on the contrary, he was determined to assert that he was the equal of anyone, even if the other were nearly twice his age, the possessor of immense wealth, and governor-general of New Russia to boot. As usual, he voiced his hostility in an epigram:

Half an English lord, half a merchant

Half a sage, half an ignoramus,

Half a scoundrel, but there is the hope,

That he’ll be a whole one in the end


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– a verse hardly calculated to endear him to Vorontsov; more likely, indeed, to strengthen the latter’s opinion formed earlier that year that, from the point of view of his own career, he had acted unwisely in taking over responsibility for Pushkin from Inzov. ‘Should there be foul weather, Vorontsov will not stand up for you and will not defend you, if it is true that he himself is suspected of suspiciousness,’ Vyazemsky warned. ‘In addition I openly confess: I put no firm trust in Vorontsov’s chivalry. He is a pleasant, well-meaning man, but will not take a quixotic line against the government in respect of a person or an idea, no matter who or what these are, if the government forces him to declare either for them or for it.’


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Vorontsov was indeed beginning to feel that he was ‘suspected of suspiciousness’ and had fallen into disfavour in St Petersburg. The tsar had ignored him during a visit to Tulchin to inspect the Second Army in October 1823, and had passed him over in the annual round of promotions at the end of that year; furthermore, he had recently been reprimanded for recommending as governor of Ekaterinoslav a general who had been involved in ‘intrigues and disturbances’ in the army.


(#litres_trial_promo) Was he not, he thought, perhaps suspicious because of his association with Pushkin, whose name was anathema in conservative circles? Here the poet was automatically assumed to be the author of any new seditious verses: in January 1824, for example, Major-General Skobelev, provost-marshal of the First Army, in a report to the army’s commander, attributed to Pushkin a poem entitled ‘Thoughts on Freedom’ – of whose composition the poet was wholly innocent – and wrote, ‘would it not be better to forbid this Pushkin, who has employed his reasonable talents for obvious evil, to publish his perverted verse? […] It would be better if the author of these harmful libels were to be, as a reward, immediately deprived of a few strips of skin. Why should there be leniency towards a man on whom the general voice of well-thinking citizens has pronounced a strict sentence?’


(#litres_trial_promo) Vorontsov therefore took pains to distance himself from the poet, at the same time keeping him under close surveillance. ‘As for Pushkin, I have exchanged only four words with him in the last fortnight,’ he wrote to Kiselev in March; ‘he is afraid of me because he is well aware that at the first rumour I hear of him I will dismiss him and that then no one will wish to take him on, and I am sure that he is now behaving much better and is more reserved in his conversations than he was with the good General Inzov […] From everything that I learn of him through Gurev [the mayor of Odessa], through Kaznacheev [the head of his chancellery] and through the police, he is being very sensible and restrained at the moment, if he were the contrary I would dismiss him, and personally would be enchanted to do so for I do not love his manners and am no enthusiast of his talent – one cannot be a real poet without study and he has undertaken none.’


(#litres_trial_promo) A few days later Kaznacheev wrote to the Kishinev police chief: ‘Our young poet Pushkin with the permission of Count Mikhail Semenovich [Vorontsov] has been given several days leave in Kishinev. He is a fine noble young fellow; but often harms himself by saying too much, loves consorting with Ultra-liberals and is sometimes incautious. The count writes to me from the Crimea to instruct you to keep a surreptitious eye on this ardent youth: note where he makes dangerous remarks, with whom he consorts, and how he occupies himself or spends his time. If you find out anything, give him a tactful hint to be careful and write to me about it in detail.’


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Just before his departure for Kishinev Pushkin had received the first instalment of the proceeds from the sale of The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. Experiencing an unaccustomed, exhilarating feeling of independence, and cock-a-hoop with his success, he became even more outrageous in his behaviour. Unfortunately for Vorontsov, Pushkin had been attached to his bureau by imperial fiat, and the governor-general could not, therefore, sack him or transfer him – as he could his other civil servants – without the express permission of the emperor. He now resolved to take this step: at the end of March he told Kiselev that he had decided to ask the Foreign Minister, Nesselrode, to transfer Pushkin elsewhere. ‘Here there are too many people and especially ones who flatter his conceit,’ he wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) He made the same point to Nesselrode: ‘There are many flatterers who praise his work; this arouses in him a harmful delusion and turns his head with the belief that he is a remarkable writer, whereas he is only the weak imitator of a writer on whose behalf very little can be said (Lord Byron) […] If Pushkin were to live in another province he would find more encouragement to work and would avoid the dangerous company here.’ He had only Pushkin’s best interests in mind in making this request for his transfer, which he begged Nesselrode to bring to the emperor’s attention.


(#litres_trial_promo) A month later, having had no reply, he concluded a letter to Nesselrode about the Greek refugees in Moldavia with the words: ‘By the by I repeat my prayer – deliver me from Pushkin; he may be an excellent fellow and a good poet, but I don’t want to have him any longer, either in Odessa or Kishinev.’


(#litres_trial_promo) On 16 May he finally received a reply, but one which was unsatisfactorily inconclusive: ‘I have put your letter on Pushkin before the emperor,’ Nesselrode wrote. ‘He is completely satisfied with your judgement of this young man, and orders me to inform you of this officially. He has reserved his instructions on what should be finally undertaken with regard to him until a later date.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Vorontsov’s patience was running out. He had intended to leave Odessa for the Crimea in the middle of May, to spend the summer there with his family and a large number of guests. However, his daughter fell ill, and the departure had to be postponed. Constrained to remain in Odessa, and waiting vainly for the emperor’s permission to transfer Pushkin, he found that circumstances had provided an opportunity to rid himself for some time at least of the poet’s presence.

‘The neighbourhood of Odessa is very bleak and much infested by locusts, which come in immense bodies and in an hour after they have alighted, every vestige of verdure is effaced,’ an English visitor wrote.


(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, the whole of New Russia, including the Crimea, was subject to these plagues. At the end of 1823 the Ministry of Internal Affairs had allocated 100,000 roubles to Vorontsov for a campaign against the infestations expected the following year. From the beginning of May 1824 reports that the insects had begun to hatch flooded in to Odessa. In July the swarms took wing, with catastrophic results, especially in Kherson province and in the Crimea. ‘Locusts have spread in terrible quantities,’ ran an official report. ‘The river Salgir was arrested in its flow by a swarm of these harmful insects, which had fallen into it, and 150 men worked for several days and nights to clear the stream. […] Some houses near Simferopol were so filled with the insects that the inhabitants had to abandon them.’


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