Pushkin

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,47 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.’* 48

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’.† 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.’49 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.50

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.’51 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!”’52 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.’53 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.’54 Pushkin was right: The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than The Prisoner; 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’.55

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.’56 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.57 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.58 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.’59 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.’60

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’61 – 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)’* 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.62

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.63

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.’64 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.’65 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.’66 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.’67

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.’68 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.’69

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’.70 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.’71 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.72

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.73 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?’74 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 end75

– 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.’76

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.77 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?’78 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.’79 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.’80

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.81 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.82 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.’83 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.’84 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.85 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.’86