Pushkin

Pushkin’s first St Petersburg passion was Princess Evdokiya Golitsyna, whom he met at the Karamzins in the autumn of 1817. This thirty-seven-year-old beauty, known, from her habit of never appearing during the day, as the princesse nocturne, had been married in 1799, at the behest of the Emperor Paul and against her wishes, to Prince Sergey Golitsyn. After Paul’s death, however, she was able to leave her husband and lead an independent, if somewhat eccentric life at her house on Bolshaya Millionnaya Street. ‘Black, expressive eyes, thick, dark hair, falling in curling locks on the shoulders, a matte, southern complexion, a kind and gracious smile; add to these an unusually soft and melodious voice and pronunciation – and you will have an approximate understanding of her appearance,’ writes Vyazemsky, one of her admirers. At midnight ‘a small, but select company gathered in this salon: one is inclined to say in this temple, all the more as its hostess could have been taken for the priestess of some pure and elevated cult’.74 Here the conversation would continue until three or four in the morning. In later life her eccentricities became more pronounced; in the 1840s she mounted a campaign against the introduction of the potato to Russia, on the grounds that this was an infringement of Russian nationality.

‘The poet Pushkin in our house fell mortally in love with the Pythia Golitsyna and now spends his evenings with her,’ Karamzin wrote to Vyazemsky in December 1817. ‘He lies from love, quarrels from love, but as yet does not write from love. I must admit, I would not have fallen in love with the Pythia: from her tripod spurts not fire, but cold.’* 75 For some months he was deeply in love with her. Sending her a copy of ‘Liberty. An Ode’, he accompanied the manuscript with a short verse:

I used to sing of

The splendid dream of Freedom

And breathed it sweetly.

But then I see you, hear you,

And so? … man is weak!

Losing freedom for ever,

I adore captivity with my heart.76

But her attractions were purely spiritual; this was an ethereal love devoid of any taint of physicality. Other desires had to be satisfied elsewhere. ‘In the mornings Pushkin tells Zhukovsky where he spent the night without sleep; he spends the entire time paying visits to whores, to me, and to Princess Golitsyna, and in the evenings sometimes plays bank,’ Turgenev noted.77 After meeting the princess in Moscow in June 1818, Vasily Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky: ‘I spent the entire evening with her and we talked much about you. She loves you and respects you. My nephew Aleksandr called on her every day. She gladdened me by saying that he was a very good, very clever young fellow.’78 By this time Pushkin’s emotions had begun to cool, and by December the episode was over.

‘Pushkin is possessed,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky on 12 November 1819. ‘I catch a glimpse of him only in the theatre, he looks in there in his free time from the animals. In general his life is spent at the office where one obtains admission tickets to look at the animals that have been brought here, among which the tiger is the most tame. He has fallen in love with the ticket-girl and has become her cavalier servant; meanwhile he is observing the nature of animals and noticing the difference from the swine he sees gratis.’ Vyazemsky’s reply is somewhat cryptic but undoubtedly indecent: ‘Pushkin’s love is surely my friend, who tortured me for a whole night … at a masked ball. Do me a favour and ask him to convey my respects to them; there should be two of them. One lion was in love with her, and when she caressed him, he displayed a leonine sceptre. Does Pushkin know about his rival? However, it’s more difficult getting a man away from a woman than having a tug-of-war with a donkey.’79 The girl – she seems to have been called Nastasya – sold tickets for one of the travelling menageries which visited St Petersburg at Easter, Shrove-tide and other times, setting up their booth, alongside others occupied by fortune-tellers, trained canaries, dancing dogs, jugglers, magicians, tight-rope walkers and the like, on Admiralty Square, Theatre Square in front of the Bolshoy, or on Tsaritsyn Field.

He also knew, and admired – but was never in love with – the eighteen-year-old Pole Sofya Potocka, whom he met in 1819. Her family history was an intriguing one. Her mother, Sofya Clavona, was a Greek from Constantinople, who had, it was said, been bought from her mother for 1,500 piastres by the Polish ambassador. As she was journeying to Poland with her protector, at Kamenets-Podolsk in the Ukraine she met Major Joseph Witt, who fell in love with her, married her secretly and took her to Paris. The portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun saw her here in the early 1780s, noting that she ‘was then extremely young and as pretty as it is possible to be, but tolerably vain of her charming face’.80 Later Sofya attracted the attention of Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite, who, besotted with her, made her husband a general and a count, took her as his mistress and bestowed on her an estate in the Crimea. In 1788 she became the mistress of General Stanislaw-Felix Potocki, a claimant to the throne of Poland with huge estates in the Ukraine. He paid Witt two million zlotys to divorce her, and married her in 1798, after the death of his wife. He hardly received full value for his money, since she soon began an affair with his son, later living openly with him in Tulchin. Her husband died in 1805, and his son soon afterwards. Her two daughters, Sofya and Olga, rivalled their mother in beauty: Sofya married Pushkin’s friend General Kiselev in 1821, but separated from him in 1829, supposedly on learning that he had had an affair with her sister (who had married General Lev Naryshkin).

Vyazemsky met the Potocki family in Warsaw in October 1819, and immediately succumbed to Sofya’s attractions. ‘With us for a few days longer are Potocka and Sofya, who is as beautiful as Minerva in the hour of lust,’ he informed Turgenev, and a fortnight later wrote: ‘Give my respects to all our acquaintance; and, if you see her and get to know her, – to the sovereign of my imagination, Minerva in the hour of lust, in whom everything is not earthly, apart from the gaze, in which there glows the spark of earthly desire. Happy is he who will fan the spark: in it the fire of poetry glows.’81 In December Turgenev told Vyazemsky of Pushkin’s new verses; he had written ‘an epistle to a masturbator, and, really, it can be read even by the most bashful … How Sofya’s roses fade, because she allows no one to pick them.’ In January he sent Vyazemsky the poem in question, together with a request for enough striped black velvet to make a waistcoat, since it was unobtainable in St Petersburg. ‘Pushkin’s verses are charming!’ Vyazemsky replied. ‘Did he not write them to my lustful Minerva? They say she deals in that business.’82 Vyazemsky was right; the poem, ironically enitled ‘Platonic Love’, was addressed to Sofya Potocka. In 1825, when preparing his verse for publication, Pushkin wrote on the margin of the poem’s manuscript: ‘Not to be included – since I want to be a moral person.’83

* I.e. La Pucelle: the Charites were the daughters of Zeus, goddesses personifying charm, grace and beauty.

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

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

* Elizaveta Markovna was related to Praskovya Osipova, the owner of Trigorskoe: her brother, Petr Poltoratsky, had married Ekaterina Vulf, the sister of Praskovya’s first husband, Nikolay Vulf.

* The theatres were also closed from the Monday of the first week of Lent to the Sunday after Easter.

* The phrase is an adaptation of a line in a poem of 1820, ‘Extinguished is the orb of day …’ [‘Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo …’], II, 146.

† The known other members are Sergey Trubetskoy, Fedor Yurev, Dmitry Barkov, Yakov Tolstoy, Aleksandr Tokarev, Ivan Zhadovsky, Aleksandr Ulybyshev, and Prince Dmitry Dolgorukov.

* I.e. Krylova: the Russian for wing is krylo.

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

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

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

5 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20

III: Triumph and Disaster

Thus, an unconcerned dweller in the world,

On the lap of idle quiet,

I celebrated with obedient lyre

The legends of dark antiquity.

I sang – and forgot the insults

Of blind fate and of my enemies,

Flighty Dorida’s treacheries,

And the loud slanders of fools.

Borne on the wings of invention,

My spirit soared beyond the earth’s confine;

But meanwhile an invisible thunder-storm’s

Cloud gathered over me! …

Ruslan and Lyudmila, Epilogue

AT THE LYCÉE Pushkin had begun his first long poem, the mock-heroic epic Ruslan and Lyudmila. He continued to work on it – slowly and spasmodically, most productively when confined to his bed – in St Petersburg, reading excerpts to his friends as he progressed. ‘Pushkin is writing a charming poem and is maturing,’ Batyushkov told Vyazemsky in May 1818;1 and in autumn wrote to Bludov in London: ‘The Cricket is beginning the third canto of his poem. What a marvellous, rare talent! Taste, wit, invention and gaiety. Ariosto at nineteen could not have done better. I see with grief that he is letting himself be distracted, harming himself and us, lovers of beautiful verse.’2 In December Vyazemsky heard of further progress from Turgenev: ‘[Pushkin], despite his whole dissolute way of life, is finishing the fourth canto of his poem. If he were to have three or four more doses of clap, it would be in the bag. His first dose of venereal disease was also the first wet-nurse of his poem.’3 The fifth canto was written in the summer of 1819 at Mikhailovskoe; in August Fedor Glinka, the fellow-member of the Green Lamp, read the first two in manuscript. ‘O Pushkin, Pushkin! Who/Taught you to captivate with miraculous verse?’ he exclaimed.4 In February 1820 Pushkin, ill again, revised the fifth and worked on the sixth and final canto while convalescing. He completed this a month later, and immediately read it to Zhukovsky, who in admiration presented his young rival with his portrait, bearing the inscription: ‘To the pupil-conqueror from the conquered teacher on that most solemn day when he completed Ruslan and Lyudmila. Good Friday, 26 March 1820.’5 It was a generous gesture, acknowledging Pushkin’s graceful and affectionate parody of Zhukovsky’s own work, ‘The Twelve Sleeping Maidens’, within the poem. Pushkin later regretted the imitation: ‘It was unforgivable (especially at my age) to parody, for the amusement of the mob, a virginal, poetic creation,’ he wrote.6

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

Portions of the first and third cantos of the poem appeared in periodicals – the Neva Spectator and Son of the Fatherland – in 1820, and the whole poem was published as a separate edition at the end of July, after Pushkin’s departure for the south: a paperback of 142 pages, selling for ten roubles (fifteen if printed on vellum). It was Pushkin’s first published book. Earlier, in 1818 and 1819, he had tried to raise interest in a subscription edition of his poems, employing his brother Lev and Sergey Sobolevsky to sell tickets. Some had been sold (Zhukovsky had taken a hundred), but the enterprise had collapsed after the loss of the manuscript at cards to Vsevolozhsky. Before leaving St Petersburg he entrusted the manuscript of Ruslan and Lyudmila to Zhukovsky, Lev and Sobolevsky, who prepared it for publication: a difficult task in the case of canto six, since Pushkin had not had time to produce a fair copy. Gnedich took charge of the book’s production: he was experienced in these matters, having already acted as publisher for a number of authors. He was, however, a sharp operator. In 1817 he agreed to publish a work by Batyushkov, but insisted that the poet be responsible for any loss the book might make, and, when it proved surprisingly popular, passed on to him only two thousand roubles out of the fifteen thousand the book made. He was to be similarly sharp in dealing with Pushkin and, even by publishers’ standards, dilatory: Pushkin first saw a copy of Ruslan and Lyudmila on 20 March 1821, some eight months after its publication. The entire print-run of the work was bought by Ivan Slenin, one of the largest book-sellers in St Petersburg. Gnedich’s production costs were therefore immediately covered; it has been calculated that his profit was in the region of six thousand roubles, of which Pushkin received only fifteen hundred. The poem proved extraordinarily popular; the edition soon sold out, after which copies changed hands for the unheard-of price of twenty-five roubles. And in December 1821 the imperial theatre in Moscow put on Ruslan and Lyudmila, or the Downfall of Chernomor, the evil magician, a ‘heroico-magical pantomine ballet’ in five acts, adapted by A. Glushkovsky, with music by F. Scholz: in order to help the audience in the comprehension of the plot, placards were exhibited on stage with inscriptions such as: ‘Tremble, Chernomor! Ruslan approaches.’7

In July 1820, in the south, Pushkin wrote an epilogue to the poem, and for the second edition in 1828 added the famous and extraordinary prologue (written at Mikhailovskoe in 1824), one of his finest poems, the first line of which – ‘On the sea-shore stands a green oak’8 – haunts Masha Prozorova in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. For this edition he also, perhaps mistakenly – but no doubt sensibly, in view of his situation at the time – toned down some of the more risqué passages of the first version. The loss of Chernomor’s attempted seduction of Lyudmila at the end of the fourth canto is particularly to be regretted: a scene which has been claimed to represent Pushkin’s view of the marital relations between an ill-matched St Petersburg couple – the seventy-one-year-old Count Stroinovsky and his eighteen-year-old wife, Ekaterina Butkevich.

In October 1820 A.A. Bestuzhev, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Dragoons, later an extremely popular short-story writer under the pseudonym Marlinsky, another habitué of Shakhovskoy’s garret, wrote to his sister Elena: ‘On account of Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila a terrible ink war has started up here – idiocy upon idiocy – but the poem itself is good.’9 The war had begun in June with an article in the Herald of Europe, directed chiefly against Zhukovsky, but deploring en passant the intrusion into literature of such coarse material as the published extracts from Pushkin’s poem. ‘Let me ask you: what if somehow […] a guest with a beard, in a peasant coat and bast shoes were to worm his way into the Moscow Noble Assembly, and were to cry in a loud voice: Greetings, folk! Would one admire such a rascal?’10 In August and September Voeikov, a member of Arzamas, who hence might have been expected to be on Pushkin’s side, devoted four long and tedious articles to the poem in Son of the Fatherland, in the last of which he accused Pushkin of using ‘peasant’ rhymes, and ‘low’ language, and of one expression remarked ‘here the young poet pays tribute to the Germanicized taste of our times’, a dig at romanticism and Zhukovsky.11 The Neva Spectator now chimed in, complaining of the ‘insignificant subject’, taking particular exception to the intrusion of a contemporary narrator into the narrative, and deploring the presence of ‘scenes, before which it is impossible not to blush and lower one’s gaze’; these possibly encouraged revolution, and were certainly unsuited to poetry.12 In September an article signed N.N. – thought then to be by Pushkin’s friend Katenin, but now known to have been written, under Katenin’s influence, by a fellow-officer in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards, Dmitry Zykov – in Son of the Fatherland concentrated on what the author saw as the implausibilities of the poem: ‘Why does Ruslan whistle when he sets off? Does this indicate a man in despair? […] Why does Chernomor, having got the magic sword, hide it on the steppe, under his brother’s head? Would it not be better to take it home with him?’ In October Aleksey Perovsky came to the poem’s defence with two witty articles in Son of the Fatherland, in which he took issue both with Voeikov and Zykov: ‘Unfortunate poet! Hardly had he time to recover from the severe attacks of Mr V., when Mr N.N. appeared with a pack full of questions, each more subtle than the other! […] Anyone would think that at issue was not a Poem, but a criminal offence.’13

Most of these critical remarks, though annoying, were too ludicrous to be taken seriously; and the success of the work was wonderfully consoling. However, Pushkin was hurt when Dmitriev, whom he had known since childhood, commented to Vyazemsky – who passed the remark on – of the poem: ‘I find in it much brilliant poetry, lightness in the narrative: but it is a pity that he should so often lapse into burlesque, and a still greater pity that he did not use as an epigraph the well-known line, slightly amended: “A mother will forbid her daughter to read it”.* Without this caution the poem will fall from a good mother’s hand on the fourth page.’14

Pushkin hardly conceals his multiple borrowings in the poem: from Zhukovsky, from Ossian, from the Russian folk epic, and, above all, from Ariosto and Voltaire. The first two are the least important: Zhukovsky’s influence is limited to the parody of ‘The Twelve Sleeping Maidens’, where Pushkin’s lively irreverence, his delight in the physical, his attention to detail are an invigorating contrast to Zhukovsky’s somewhat plodding gothic narrative with its lack of specificity. From Ossian Pushkin borrows a line from the poem ‘Carthon’, ‘A tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years’, which, translated, forms the first and last two lines of his poem.15 He seems, too, to have adapted some names from this poem for his characters: Moina, the mother of Carthon, becoming Naina, and Reuthamir, her father, Ratmir. His debt to the Russian folk epic, the bylina, is somewhat greater. The poem employs the traditional setting of the Kievan bylina cycle: the court of Prince Vladimir in Kiev, and follows the folk epic in referring to the prince as ‘Vladimir the Sun’, a legendary figure who is seen as an amalgam of the Kievan rulers Vladimir I (d. 1015) and Vladimir II Monomakh (d. 1125). Pushkin, however, no doubt as a result of his reading of Karamzin, is more historically correct than his model: the nomadic army, one of a succession of invaders from the East, which besieges Kiev in Ruslan and Lyudmila, is that of the Pechenegs, against whom Vladimir I fought; in the byliny such enemies are usually generalized as Tatars.

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

Wherever the dread sword whistles,

Wherever the furious steed prances,

Everywhere heads fly from shoulders

And with a wail rank on rank collapses;

In one moment the field of battle

Is covered with heaps of bloody bodies,

Living, squashed, decapitated,

With piles of spears, arrows, armour.

(VI, 299–306)

The models to which Ruslan and Lyudmila owes most are Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) – which Pushkin would have read in a French prose version – and Voltaire’s La Pucelle (1755), itself modelled on Ariosto, though Pushkin’s work is on a much smaller scale than its predecessors.* Like them, he will begin a canto with general remarks, often addressed to his readers, and tantalizingly break off the narration at a crucial moment to turn to the adventures of another character. His narrator, like those of Ariosto and Voltaire, is not contemporary with the events, but of the present day, intrusive, digressive, and constantly ironizing at the expense of the characters, the plot and its devices. Both Ariosto and Voltaire claim that their works are based upon actual chronicles; composed, in Ariosto’s case, by Tripten, Archbishop of Reims, a legendary figure; and, in Voltaire’s, by l’abbé Tritême, a real figure, but innocent of the authorship foisted upon him. Pushkin follows suit with another ecclesiastic, a ‘monk, who preserved/For posterity the true legend/Of my glorious knight’ (V, 225–7).

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