Pushkin

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.’85 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.’86 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 Turgenev87 – 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.’88 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’.89 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.’90 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.91 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.’92 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.’93

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.’94 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’.95 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.’96 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.’97 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.’98 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.’99 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.’100

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’;101 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.’102 ‘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.103 Criticism of the fate of the Circassian maiden, however, he met with some irony: to Vyazemsky, after thanking him for his review* – ‘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.’104

‘In general I am very dissatisfied with my poem and consider it far inferior to Ruslan,’ he told Gorchakov.105 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’.106 ‘At my leisure I am writing a new poem, Eugene Onegin, in which I am transported by bile,’ he told Turgenev some months later.107

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.’108

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.’* 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.’109

* 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.

* 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.

† 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.

* A slip of the pen: there were approximately 25,000 Turks in the Morea.

* 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.

† 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).

* 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.

* It was first printed in London in 1861; the first Russian edition – with some omissions – appeared in 1907.

* A system for mass education devised by the Englishman Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838), by which the advanced pupils taught the beginners.

* 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.

* 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.

† ‘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.

* 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’.

* 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

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’,1 was built. It was usually occupied by an Italian opera company: Pushkin became addicted to ‘the ravishing Rossini,/Darling of Europe’.2 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.’3 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.’4

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.’5 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.6 He found, too, Tumansky’s hyperbolic praise – calling him ‘the Jesus Christ of our poetry’7 – 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’,8 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’.9 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.