Pushkin

When, in the third stanza of Eugene Onegin, he calls on the ‘friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan’ to meet his new hero, he is not merely attempting to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier poem, but hinting that those who had enjoyed it would also enjoy his latest work: despite the obvious dissimilarities – one a mock epic, set in a fabulous past, the other a contemporary novel in verse – the two share a common tone. Batyushkov was right when he spoke of the poem’s ‘taste, wit, invention and gaiety’; to these he could have added youthful exuberance, charm, and the effortless brilliance of the verse: characteristics which are also those of Eugene Onegin. The poem improves as it continues, and is at its best when Pushkin’s fantasy is least constrained by the demands of the plot or a traditional setting: Prince Ratmir in the hands of his female bath attendants, and Lyudmila in Chernomor’s castle and garden are episodes which outshine the rest.

One of the most colourful characters of this time – an age when they were not in short supply – was Count Fedor Tolstoy (his first cousin, Nikolay, was the father of Leo Tolstoy*). Born in 1782, he joined the Preobrazhensky Life Guards, where he soon made a reputation for himself as a fire-eater, duellist – he was said to have killed eleven men in duels in the course of his life – and cardsharp. In 1803 he was a member of an embassy to Japan, taken there by Admiral Krusenstiern on his circumnavigation of the world. Tolstoy made himself so obnoxious on board that Krusenstiern abandoned him on one of the Aleutian Islands – together with a pet female ape, which he may later have eaten. Crossing the Bering Straits, he wandered slowly back through Siberia, arriving in St Petersburg at the end of 1805: hence his nickname ‘the American’. Coincidentally, Wiegel, who, as a member of Count Golovkin’s embassy to China, was travelling in the opposite direction in the summer of that year, met him at a post-station in Siberia. ‘What stories were not told about him! As a youth he was supposed to have had a passion for catching rats and frogs, opening their bellies with a pen-knife, and amusing himself by watching their mortal agonies for hours on end […] in a word, there was no wild animal comparable in its fearlessness and bloodthirstiness with his propensities. In fact, he surprised us with his appearance. Nature had tightly curled the thick black hair on his head; his eyes, probably reddened with heat and dust, seemed to us injected with blood, his almost melancholy gaze and extremely quiet speech seemed to my terrified companions to conceal something devilish.’17 Settling in Moscow – where in 1821 he married a beautiful gypsy singer, Avdotya Tugaeva – he spent his time gambling at the English Club, usually winning large sums through his skill in manipulating the deck. He was a close friend of Shakhovskoy – the two had been fellow-officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards – and of Vyazemsky.

‘Count Tolstoy the American is here,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky from St Petersburg in October 1819. ‘He is staying with Prince Shakhovskoy, and therefore we will probably see each other rarely.’18 Pushkin, however, as a regular visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret, soon met Tolstoy, and was soon, unwisely, playing cards with him. Noticing that Tolstoy had slipped a card from the bottom of the pack, he commented on this. ‘Yes, I’m aware of that myself,’ Tolstoy replied, ‘but I don’t care to have it pointed out to me.’19 Whether because of this, or whether out of sheer malice, Tolstoy, on returning to Moscow, wrote a letter to Shakhovskoy in which he asserted that, on the direct orders of the tsar, Count Miloradovich, the military governor-general of St Petersburg, had had Pushkin flogged in the secret chancellery of the Ministry of the Interior. Shakhovskoy made the libel known to the frequenters of his garret. Though other friends, such as Katenin, energetically refuted it, it spread quickly through literary and social circles. Pushkin eventually learnt of it – though not of its author – from Katenin. Humiliated and infuriated, he oscillated between thoughts of suicide and of reckless defiance of authority.

Though, with Chaadaev’s help, he overcame his initial despair – ‘The voice of slander could no longer wound me,/Able to hate, I was able to despise’20 – he burnt with the desire to avenge himself. In the draft of a letter to the emperor (which was never sent), composed in 1825 in Mikhailovskoe, he wrote, ‘the rumour spread that I had been brought before the secret chancellery and whipped. I was the last to hear this rumour, which had become widespread, I saw myself as branded by opinion, I became disheartened – I fought, I was 20 in 1820.’21 There is no direct evidence that Pushkin fought a duel early in 1820 over this matter. However, in June 1822 the seventeen-year-old ensign Fedor Luginin recorded in his diary a conversation with Pushkin in Kishinev: ‘There were rumours that he was whipped in the Secret chancellery, but that is rubbish. In Petersburg he fought a duel because of that.’22 If he did fight a duel, it has been suggested that his opponent was the poet and Decembrist Kondraty Ryleev.23 The conjecture is based on a letter of March 1825 from Pushkin to Ryleev’s friend Bestuzhev. ‘I know very well that I am his teacher in verse diction – but he goes his own way. He is a poet in his soul. I am afraid of him in earnest and very much regret that I did not shoot him dead when I had the chance, but how the devil could I have known?’24 He certainly met Ryleev a number of times between September 1819 and February 1820 (when Ryleev returned to his wife’s parents’ estate near Voronezh) and preserved a sufficiently vivid memory of him to sketch, in January 1826, his profile, with ski-jump nose, protruding lower lip and lank hair next to a portrait of Küchelbecker on a page of the manuscript of the fifth chapter of Eugene Onegin.25 But whether a duel did take place, and, if it did, whether Ryleev was his opponent are questions which cannot be answered without more evidence.

Pushkin did not learn that Tolstoy had been responsible for the rumours until the autumn of 1820. Then he took partial revenge with an epigram, an adaptation of which he inserted into an epistle to Chaadaev in April 1821. Tolstoy is called a ‘philosopher, who in former years/With debauchery amazed the world’s four corners,/ But, growing civilized, effaced his shame/Abandoned drink and became a card-sharp.’26 The poem appeared in Son of the Fatherland in August. Tolstoy had no difficulty in recognizing his portrait, and composed his own epigram in reply. ‘The sharp sting of moral satire/ Bears no resemblance to a scurrilous lampoon,’ he wrote, advising Pushkin to ‘Smite sins with your example, not your verse,/And remember, dear friend, that you have cheeks.’27 He too submitted his lines to the Son of the Fatherland, which, however, declined the honour of printing them.

Pushkin had no intention of avenging himself with the pen, rather than the pistol. ‘He wants to go to Moscow this winter,’ Luginin wrote in his diary, ‘to have a duel with one Count Tolstoy the American, who is the chief in putting about these rumours. Since he has no friends in Moscow, I offered to be his second, if I am in Moscow this winter, which overjoyed him.’28 But Pushkin’s exile did not end, as he had hoped, in the winter of 1821, and the following September he wrote to Vyazemsky, ‘Forgive me if I speak to you about Tolstoy, your opinion is valuable to me. You say that my lines are no good. I know, but my intention was not to start a witty literary war, but with a sharp insult to repay for his hidden insults a man from whom I parted as a friend, and whom I defended with ardour whenever the occasion presented itself. It seemed amusing to him to make an enemy of me and to give Prince Shakhovskoy’s garret a laugh at my expense with his letters, I found out about all this when already exiled, and, considering revenge one of the first Christian virtues – in the impotence of my rage showered Tolstoy from afar with journalistic mud. […] You reproach me for printing, from Kishinev, under the aegis of exile, abuse of a man who lives in Moscow. But then I did not doubt in my return. My intention was to go to Moscow, where only I could completely clear myself. Such an open attack on Count Tolstoy is not pusillanimity.’29 The burning feeling of insult, exacerbated by the impossibility of redeeming it in the only honourable way, remained with Pushkin throughout exile: his first action, on the day he reached Moscow in 1826, was to send Sobolevsky round to Tolstoy with a challenge. Luckily, the count was away from Moscow.

In November 1819 V.N. Karazin, a forty-six-year-old Ukrainian landowner, joined the Private Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature,* established three years earlier in St Petersburg. The society’s president was Count Sergey Saltykov, but Glinka, the vice-president, was effectively in control. Obedient to the orders of the Union of Welfare’s Supreme Council, he set about turning the society, like the Green Lamp, into one of those which would further the aims of the Union through its activities and discussions.†

Karazin was an idealistic, romantic conservative who had come to Alexander l’s attention in 1801, when ‘he left on the emperor’s study-table an anonymous letter, greeting his accession in exalted terms and appealing to him to lead Russia to a glorious new age’.30 Alexander discovered his identity, embraced his admirer and showed him great favour for a time, appointing him to the new Ministry of Education. In 1804 Karazin resigned to found a university at Kharkov, which opened in January 1805. For some time thereafter he lived on his estate, opened a tanning factory, made efforts to found a meteorological observatory, forwarded to the Ministry of War his method of preparing food concentrates, and wrote articles on a variety of subjects, such as ‘The description of an apparatus for distilling spirit’, ‘On the possibility of adapting the electric forces of the upper layers of the atmosphere to the needs of man’ and ‘On baking a tasty and healthy bread from acorns’.

Now, on his return to St Petersburg, Karazin was appalled by the political atmosphere of the city, the lack of respect for authority in the discussions, the conversations and jokes he heard, and the poems and epigrams recited at meetings of the society. ‘Some young brat, Pushkin, a pupil of the Lycée, in gratitude, has written a despicable ode, in which the names of the Romanovs are insulted, and the Emperor Alexander called a wandering despot […] Whither are we going?’* 31 he commented in his diary on 18 November 1819. He went to see Prince Kochubey, the Minister of the Interior, whom he had known when at the Ministry of Education, and offered to inform him of the proceedings of the society and of what he might hear elsewhere, promising to keep ‘an unsleeping eye’ on ‘suspicious persons’ such as Prince Sergey Volkonsky, Küchelbecker, Ryleev, Glinka, who was ‘all the more dangerous because through the especial trust of the governor-general he was employed to collect in secret rumours going about the town for the information of the emperor’, and, finally, Pushkin.32

By the end of March he had collected a good deal of what he considered to be subversive literature – including Pushkin’s epigram on Sturdza – which he incorporated into a report sent to Kochubey on 2 April. Though this consisted largely of a disquisition on the present state of Russia, combined with proposals for a number of reforms, it included an attack on the Lycée, where, he wrote, ‘the emperor is educating pupils who are ill-disposed both to him and to the fatherland […] as is demonstrated by practically all those who graduate from it. It is said that one of them, Pushkin, was secretly punished by imperial command. But among the pupils more or less each one is almost a Pushkin, and they are all bound together by some kind of suspicious union, similar to Masonry, some indeed have joined actual lodges.’ To this remark he appended a note: ‘Who are the composers of the caricatures or epigrams, such as, for example, on the two-headed eagle, on Sturdza in which the person of the emperor is referred to very indecently and so on? The pupils of the Lycée! Who make themselves known to the public with suggestive songs at an age when honesty and modesty are most decorous? They do.’33

Having submitted this report to the emperor, Kochubey invited Karazin to call on him on the evening of 12 April. After their conversation Karazin made an emotional note of its content on the back of the invitation. He was extremely disconcerted to discover that the emperor was not at all interested in the substance of his paper, neither in his analysis of the situation nor his proposals for reform. Its sole result, he wrote, ‘was the desire of his majesty to assure himself that the epigram mentioned in my note was actually written […] that it was not my invention! […] My God! […] It’s almost unbelievable! […] What a sad but true picture of the position of the state is produced!’34 He washed his hands of the whole affair, refusing Kochubey’s request to obtain manuscript copies of the epigram.

Following this conversation Miloradovich, the military governor-general of St Petersburg, was ordered to impound Pushkin’s writings. He sent a police spy, Fogel, round to Pushkin’s apartment when the latter was out. Fogel offered Nikita fifty roubles for the loan of his master’s poems, promising to bring them back in a short time. Nikita refused and, on Pushkin’s return, told him of the visitor. Pushkin immediately burnt his manuscripts. The following day he was summoned to see Miloradovich. Before going, he went to see Glinka – who had been the general’s adjutant during the war and was now attached to his office – to ask his advice. ‘Go straight to Miloradovich, don’t show confusion and don’t be afraid. He is not a poet; but in his soul and in his chivalrous impulses there is much that is romantic and poetic: he is misunderstood. Go and rely unconditionally on the nobility of his spirit: he will not abuse your trust.’ Heartened, Pushkin set off for Miloradovich’s house on the Nevsky. A few days later Miloradovich told Glinka of the meeting:

Do you know, my dear fellow, Pushkin was with me the other day! You see, I’d been ordered to arrest him and impound all his papers; but I thought it more delicate to invite him to my house and ask him himself for his papers. Well, he turned up, very calm, with a bright face, and, when I asked about the papers, answered: ‘Count! all my poems are burnt! – you will find nothing of mine in my apartment, but if you please, everything is here (he pointed to his forehead with his finger). Order a quire of paper to be brought, I’ll write everything that I’ve ever written (of course, except that which has been printed), with a note: what is mine and what has been circulated under my name.’ Paper was brought. Pushkin sat down and wrote, wrote … and filled a whole note-book … Here it is, look at that! Tomorrow I’ll take it to the emperor. And do you know? Pushkin charmed me with his noble tone and manner of behaviour.35

Miloradovich had read the verses, laughed, and said to Pushkin: ‘If you’ve really decided to attack the government, why don’t you write something about the Senate, which is nothing but a menagerie or pigsty.’ He had concluded by pardoning Pushkin in the name of the emperor.36

Alexander, however, extremely displeased with the idea that the Lycée was a hot-bed of revolutionary fervour, and outraged by Pushkin’s verse, was disinclined to ratify Miloradovich’s generous gesture. Meeting the director of the Lycée, Engelhardt, he expressed his feelings to him as they strolled through the palace garden at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘Engelhardt!’ he said. ‘Pushkin must be exiled to Siberia: he has flooded Russia with seditious verses; the entire youth knows them by heart. His frank conduct with Miloradovich pleases me, but that does not amend matters.’ Engelhardt endeavoured to soften the tsar’s attitude, referring to Pushkin’s literary reputation, and adding: ‘Exile could have a baneful effect on the ardent temper of this young man. I think that magnanimity, your majesty, would be more likely to make him sensible.’37

Alarmed by the danger – it was rumoured that Pushkin would be sent, if not to Siberia, then to the Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea – his friends hurried to his aid. Chaadaev asked his superior, General Vasilchikov, to intercede with Alexander; and, going to Karamzin, persuaded him to speak with the dowager empress, Mariya Fedorovna, on Pushkin’s behalf. Zhukovsky and Aleksandr Turgenev used their influence at the court, and Gnedich visited Olenin, who promised to mention the matter to Alexander. Pushkin himself, somewhat cowed by events, swallowed his pride and called on Karamzin. After exacting a pledge that he should refrain from writing verse against the government for two years, Karamzin undertook to help him, and, going to the empress, asked her to intercede. The emperor relented. Pushkin was not to be banished, but was to be attached to the chancellery of General Ivan Inzov, the Chief Trustee of the Interests of Foreign Colonists in the Southern Territory of Russia, then stationed in Ekaterinoslav. ‘[Pushkin’s] liberal mouth has been closed for two years,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky on 21 April. ‘He has been saved from the misfortune into which he fell by my good genius and his good friends,’ and, on 5 May, ‘He has become quieter and more modest and, in order not to compromise himself, even avoids me in public.’38 A few days later Vyazemsky heard from Karamzin: ‘Pushkin, having been for a few days completely in unpoetical fear because of his verses on freedom and some epigrams, gave me his word to cease […] He was, I think, moved by the emperor’s magnanimity, which was genuinely touching. It would take too long to describe the details, but if Pushkin does not reform now, he will be a devil long before he gets to hell.’39

On 4 May 1820, Count Capo d’Istrias, the head of the Foreign Office, an honorary member of Arzamas, who, according to Wiegel, had ‘dared to point out’ to Alexander the cruelty of exiling Pushkin to Siberia, and had suggested that he should be transferred to Inzov’s chancellery,40 composed a letter to Inzov which was signed the following day by the Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. ‘At the Lycée,’ Capo d’Istrias wrote, ‘his progress was rapid, his wit was admired, but his character appears to have escaped the vigilance of the tutors.’ He continued:

There is no excess in which this unfortunate young man has not indulged – as there is no perfection he cannot attain through the transcendent superiority of his talents […] Some pieces of verse and above all an ode to liberty directed the attention of the government towards Mr Pushkin. Amid the greatest beauties of conception and style this latter piece gives evidence of dangerous principles drawn from the ideas of the age, or, more accurately, that system of anarchy dishonestly called the system of the rights of man, of liberty and of independence of nations.

However Messrs Karamzin and Zhukovsky, realizing the dangers to which the young poet was exposing himself, hastened to offer him their advice, made him recognize the error of his ways and brought him to give a solemn promise that he would abjure it for ever. Mr Pushkin appears to be cured – if, that is, his tears and protestations are to be believed. However, his guardians think his repentance to be sincere, and that, by banishing him for a time from St Petersburg, by putting him to work, and by surrounding him with good examples, he can be turned into an excellent servant of the state, or at least a man of letters of the first distinction. In response to their wishes the Emperor has authorized me to give the young Pushkin leave and recommend him to you. He will be attached to your person, General, and will work as a supernumerary in your chancellery. His fate will depend on your good advice.41

Alexander approved the letter, writing ‘So be it’ at the foot. On 4 May the accounts department at the Foreign Office handed out a thousand roubles in assignats to Pushkin for travel expenses; on the fifth he received a podorozhnaya, an official pass entitling him to use post-horses on state business. On 6 or 7 May, accompanied by his servant Nikita Kozlov, he left St Petersburg. Delvig and Pavel Yakovlev travelled with him as far as Tsarskoe Selo. On 9 May he set out for the south.42

* An adaptation of a line from Alexis Piron’s comedy, Le Métromanie (1738), where the author, striving to expunge the memory of his earlier Ode to Priapus, wrote, ‘[in my works] I wish that virtue more than wit should shine/A mother will prescribe them to her daughter.’

* In its final form Ruslan and Lyudmila has 2,761 lines; Orlando Furioso 38,736 and La Pucelle 8,234.

* Tolstoy described his relative as ‘an unusual, criminal and attractive man’ (Chereisky, 438).

* Not to be confused with the similarly named Private Society of Amateurs of Literature, Sciences and the Arts.

† The society was, of course, much larger than the unofficial Green Lamp: in 1824 it had 82 full, 24 associate, 34 corresponding and 96 honorary members.

* Karazin is confusing ‘Liberty. An Ode’ and ‘Fairy Tales’.

6 THE CAUCASUS AND CRIMEA 1820

Forgotten by society and by gossip,

Far from the Neva’s banks,

I see before me now

The proud Caucasian peaks.

Ruslan and Lyudmila, Epilogue

PUSHKIN’S ROUTE TO EKATERINOSLAV took him initially along the well-known road towards Mikhailovskoe. At Porkhov, however, he turned off and, entering lands unknown to him, hurried on south through Velikie Luki, Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Chernigov towards Kiev. The monotonous scenery of the White Russian post-road offered no temptation to linger; in any case he could not, for the Foreign Ministry, under whose aegis Inzov’s command lay, seizing an opportunity to avoid expense, had made him an official courier. Besides the letter from Capo d’Istrias to Inzov concerning himself, he bore other documents for the general, including the latter’s appointment as plenipotentiary governor of Bessarabia.

At a post-house somewhere between Chernigov and Mogilev his Lycée companion Pushchin, who was returning to St Petersburg after four months in Bessarabia with his sister, and thus knew nothing of recent events in the capital, scanning the list of travellers, noticed the name of Pushkin among them. ‘I asked the postmaster who this Pushkin was. I had no idea that it could be Aleksandr. The postmaster answered that it was the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich, apparently travelling on official business, in a post-chaise, wearing a red Russian shirt with a belt and a felt hat.’1

Just over a week after leaving St Petersburg, on 14 or 15 May, Pushkin arrived in Kiev. Here he found a friend, Nikolay Raevsky, an officer in the Life Guards Hussars. On leave, he was staying with his father, General Raevsky. The latter had had a distinguished military career: he had served under Suvorov in the Turkish war of 1787–90, becoming a major at eighteen; had been wounded when commanding Bagration’s avant-garde in 1805; and in 1812, in the battle for Smolensk, had held off with ten thousand troops a much larger French force under Marshal Davout. It was said that during this encounter he had taken his sons, Aleksandr and Nikolay, by the hand and led the advance, calling out, ‘Forward, men, for the tsar and the fatherland! I and my sons will show you the way!’2 The episode was commemorated in popular prints, and earned him a mention in Zhukovsky’s ‘A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors’. It was, however, apocryphal. ‘It is true that I was in front,’ Raevsky later told Batyushkov. ‘But my sons were not there at that time. My youngest child was gathering berries in a wood (he was then a mere child, and a bullet made a hole in his breeches); that was all, the entire anecdote was made up in St Petersburg.’3 Nikolay – long grown out of his perforated breeches, he was now a Herculean giant who could bend an iron poker in his hands – like Chaadaev had supported and consoled Pushkin when, distressed by Tolstoy’s insinuations, he had harboured thoughts of suicide. Writing to his brother, Pushkin mentions Nikolay’s ‘important services, eternally unforgettable for me’;4 he would later dedicate The Prisoner of the Caucasus to him.