Pushkin

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.33 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.34

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’.35

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.* 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.36

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!’37 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.38

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.39 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’.* 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!40

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?’41

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.42

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.’43

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.44

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.45

‘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.’46 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.’47 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.’48

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!’49

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.’50

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.’51 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.’52 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.53

‘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.’54 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!55

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!56

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.57

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 laments58 – 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’.59 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.’60 Pushkin made up for the letter of apology with a malicious French epigram: