Pushkin

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.30

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.31 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.32 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.’33

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.* 34

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.35 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.’36 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.37 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.38

‘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.’39 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’40 – 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.’41 These were on nearby Cape Fiolente, and were popularly supposed to be the remains of that temple of Artemis* 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.’* 42

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:† I was tormented by fever.”’43

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.

* Brother of the poet, Denis Davydov, and tenuously related to General Raevsky: his uncle was the second husband of Raevsky’s mother.

* 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.

* ‘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.

* 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.

* 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.

† I.e. the planet Venus.

* A case of poetic licence: Venus would not have been visible to the naked eye as an evening star while Pushkin was at Gurzuf.

* The Romans identified Artemis with Diana, as they did Aphrodite with Venus.

* 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.

† The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, 531–2.

7 KISHINEV 1820–23

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’,1 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.’2 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’.3 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’.*

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’,4 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.5 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.’6 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.7 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.’8 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’.9 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.10

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.’11 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.12

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’.13 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.’14 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.