Pushkin

A few days later Pushkin wrote to Gnedich: ‘I am now in the Kiev province, in the village of the Davydovs, charming and intelligent recluses, brothers of General Raevsky. My time slips away between aristocratic dinners and demagogic arguments. Our company, now dispersed, was recently a varied and jolly mixture of original minds, people well-known in our Russia, interesting to an unfamiliar observer. Women are few, there is much champagne, many witty words, many books, a few verses.’15 Though there may have been few women in Kamenka, Pushkin made the best of the situation and enjoyed an affair with Aglaë Davydova, Aleksandr Lvovich’s thirty-three-year-old wife. It was a short-lived liaison. The difference in age and social position between the two led Aglaë to treat him with a patronizing condescension that was as distasteful to Pushkin in his mistress as it had been in her husband. When Liprandi dined with Davydov and his wife in St Petersburg in March 1822 he noted that she ‘was not very favourably disposed towards Aleksandr Sergeevich, and it was obviously unwelcome to her, when her husband asked after him with great interest’, and added: ‘I had already heard a number of times of the kindness shown to Pushkin at Kamenka, and heard from him enthusiastic praise of the family society there, and Aglaë too had been mentioned. Then I learnt that there had been some kind of quarrel between her and Pushkin, and that the latter had rewarded her with some verses!’16 The affair had indeed broken off acrimoniously, and Pushkin, hurt and insulted, gave vent to his feelings with four extraordinarily spiteful epigrams. One, commenting on her promiscuity, wonders what impelled her to marry Davydov; another, coarse and excessively indecent even by Pushkin’s standards, portrays her as sexually insatiable; the least offensive, and the wittiest, is in French:

To her lover without resistance Aglaë

Had ceded – he, pale and petrified,

Was making a great effort – at last, incapable of more,

Completely breathless, withdrew … with a bow, –

‘Monsieur’, says Aglaë in an arrogant tone,

‘Speak, monsieur: why does my appearance

Intimidate you? Will you tell me the cause?

Is it disgust?’ ‘Good heavens, it’s not that.’

‘Excess of love?’ ‘No, of respect.’17

Pushkin did not leave Kamenka until the end of January 1821, then travelling, in the company of the Davydov brothers, not to Kishinev but to Kiev, where he put up with General Raevsky, and met the ‘hussar-poet’ Denis Davydov, cousin both of the Davydovs and of General Raevsky, famous for his partisan activities during the French army’s retreat in 1812 – the model for Denisov in War and Peace. ‘Hussar-poet, you’ve sung of bivouacs/Of the licence of devil-may-care carousals/Of the fearful charm of battle/And of the curls of your moustache,’ he wrote.18 In the second week of February he and the Davydovs set off for Tulchin, some 180 miles to the west. His St Petersburg acquaintance General Kiselev was now chief of staff of the Second Army here: he was to marry Sofya Potocka later that year. ‘I had the occasion to see [Pushkin] in Tulchin at Kiselev’s,’ wrote Nikolay Basargin, a young ensign in the 31st Jägers. ‘I was not acquainted with him, but met him two or three times in company. I disliked him as a person. There was something of the bully about him, an element of vanity, and the desire to mock and wound others.’19 After a week in Tulchin Pushkin, still avoiding his official duties, returned to Kamenka with the Davydovs, arriving on or about 18 February.

During his first stay on the estate he had begun a new notebook, copying into it fair versions of his Crimean poems ‘A Nereid’ and ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, and continuing to work on The Prisoner of the Caucasus. Now, lying on the Davydovs’ billiard table surrounded by scraps of manuscript, so engrossed in composition as to ignore everything about him, he produced the first fair copy of the poem, adding at the end of the text the notation ‘23 February 1821, Kamenka’.20 Despite this achievement, he was often in a bleak mood. ‘Beneath the storms of harsh fate/My flowering wreath has faded,’ he had written the previous day.21 He was isolated from his family and his closest friends, from the literary and social life of the capital; the best years of his poetic and personal life were being wasted in a provincial slough. Melancholy was to recur ever more frequently during his years of exile: ‘I am told he is fading away from depression, boredom and poverty,’ Vyazemsky wrote to Turgenev in 1822.22 Constantly deluding himself with hopes of an end to his exile, or at least of being granted leave to visit St Petersburg – ‘I shall try to be with you myself for a few days,’ he wrote to his brother in January 182223 – he was as constantly brought to face the reality of his situation. When, a year later, he made a formal application to Nesselrode for permission to come to St Petersburg, ‘whither,’ he wrote, ‘I am called by the affairs of a family whom I have not seen for three years’,24 he found that Alexander had not forgotten his misdemeanours: Nesselrode’s report was endorsed by the emperor with a single word: ‘Refused’.25 He could not but compare himself to Ovid: their fates were strangely alike. Because of their verse (and, in Ovid’s case, also for some other, mysterious crime) both had been exiled by an emperor – Ovid by Augustus, the former Octavian, in AD 8 – to the region of the Black Sea. In Ovid’s works written in exile – Tristia and Black Sea Letters – Pushkin found reflections of an experience analogous to his own, and contrasted his emotions as an exile from St Petersburg with those of Ovid as an exile from Rome. ‘Like you, submitting to an inimical fate,/ I was your equal in destiny, if not in fame,’ he wrote in ‘To Ovid’, completed on 26 December 1821.26

Financial worries – ‘He hasn’t a copeck’, Vyazemsky noted27 – added to his depression. He had been paid no salary since leaving St Petersburg. In April 1821 Inzov pointed this out to Capo d’Istrias, adding: ‘since he receives no allowance from his parent, despite all my assistance he sometimes, however, suffers from a deficiency in decent clothing. In this respect I consider it my most humble duty to ask, my dear sir, that you should instruct the appointment to him of that salary which he received in St Petersburg.’28 As a result he received a year’s salary – less hospital charges and postal insurance it came to 685 roubles 30 copecks – in July, and was thereafter paid at four-monthly intervals. But this, though welcome, could not resolve his financial problems. On 5 May, in reply to the demand for 2,000 roubles forwarded by Inzov, he wrote, ‘not being yet of age and possessing neither movable nor immovable property, I am not capable of paying the above-mentioned promissory note.’29 The ‘deficiency in decent clothing’ was noted by others: ‘He leads a dissipated life, roams the inns, and is always in shirt-sleeves,’ wrote Liprandi.30 His attire in Kishinev tended towards the bizarre: sometimes he dressed as a Turk, sometimes as a Moldavian, sometimes as a Jew, usually topping the ensemble with a fez – costumes which were adopted, not primarily from eccentricity, but because of the absence from his wardrobe of more formal wear. ‘My father had the brilliant idea of sending me some clothes,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Tell him that I asked you to remind him of it.’31

He had eventually left Kamenka towards the end of February, and, taking a long way round through Odessa, where he spent two days, arrived in Kishinev early in March.* He found a town much stirred by events which had taken place during his absence. In 1814 three Greek merchants in Odessa, one of the most important Greek communities outside the Ottoman empire, had founded the Philike Hetaireia (Society of Friends), whose aim was the liberation of Greece from Turkish rule. The society was soon actively engaged in conspiracy: intriguing with potential rebels, it persuaded its Greek supporters that the tsar, as the head of the greatest Orthodox state, would be unable to ignore any bid for Greek independence. In 1819–20 the time seemed ripe for an uprising: there were intimations or outbreaks of revolt in Germany, Spain, Piedmont and Naples. The society offered its leadership to Capo d’Istrias; he refused, and it turned in his stead to Alexander Ypsilanti, a Phanariot Greek,† the son of the former hospodar of Moldavia and Wallachia. An officer in the Russian army, Ypsilanti had distinguished himself in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, losing an arm at the battle of Dresden. He had attended Alexander I, as one of the emperor’s adjutants, at the congress of Vienna, and in 1817 had been promoted major-general and given command of a cavalry brigade. On his election to the leadership of the society he moved to Kishinev.

On the night of 21 February 1821, at Galata – the principal port of Moldavia, on the left bank of the Danube – the small Turkish garrison and a number of Turkish merchants were massacred by Greeks; the following day Alexander Ypsilanti, accompanied by his brothers, George and Nicholas, Prince Cantacuzen, and several other Greek officers in Russian service, crossed the Prut. At Iaşi on the twenty-third, in proclamations addressed to the Greeks and Moldavians, he called on them to rise against the Turks, declaring that his enterprise had the support of a ‘great power’. Though Michael Souzzo, the hospodar, threw in his lot with the uprising, it enjoyed no popular support, and Ypsilanti condemned it to failure by his irresolute leadership, condoning, in addition, the massacre at Galata and a subsequent similar incident at Iaşi. A final blow to the revolt was a letter from Alexander I, signed by Capo d’Istrias, which denounced Ypsilanti’s actions as ‘shameful and criminal’, upbraided him for misusing the tsar’s name, struck him from the Russian army list, and called upon him to lay down his arms immediately.32 Though Ypsilanti endeavoured to brave matters out, he was abandoned by many of the revolutionary leaders, and, retreating slowly northwards towards the Austrian frontier, underwent a series of humiliating defeats, culminating in that of Dragashan on 7 June, after which he escaped into Austria. Here he was kept in close confinement for over seven years, and, when eventually released at the instance of Nicholas I, died in Vienna in extreme poverty in 1828. A simultaneous revolt in Greece itself, led, among others, by Ypsilanti’s brother Demetrios, proved more successful: in 1833, after the intervention of the Great Powers, it eventually resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece.

Ypsilanti’s insurrection had been in progress for just over a week when Pushkin returned to Kishinev. The boldness of this exploit in the cause of Greek independence could not fail to arouse his enthusiasm. He dashed off a letter to Vasily Davydov, telling him of the progress of the revolt, speculating on Russia’s policy – ‘Will we occupy Moldavia and Wallachia in the guise of peace-loving mediators; will we cross the Danube as the allies of the Greeks and the enemies of their enemies?’ – and quoting from an insurgent’s letter on events at Iaşi: ‘He describes with ardour the ceremony of consecrating the banners and Prince Ypsilanti’s sword – the rapture of the clergy and laity – and the sublime moments of Hope and Freedom.’ Ypsilanti, whom Pushkin had met the previous year, is mentioned with admiration: ‘Alexander Ypsilanti’s first step is splendid and brilliant. He has begun luckily – from now on, whether dead or a victor he belongs to history – 28 years old, one arm missing, a magnanimous goal! – an enviable lot.’33 ‘We spoke about A. Ypsilanti,’ he records in his diary of an evening at the house of a ‘charming Greek lady’. ‘Among five Greeks I alone spoke like a Greek – they all despair of the success of the Hetaireia enterprise. I am firmly convinced that Greece will triumph, and that 25,000,000* Turks will leave the flowering land of Hellas to the rightful heirs of Homer and Themistocles.’34 Indeed, his enthusiasm was such that it became rumoured that he – as Byron was to do two years later – had joined the revolt. ‘I have heard from trustworthy people that he has slipped away to the Greeks,’ the journalist and historian Pogodin wrote to a friend from Moscow.35 But his participation was only vicarious.

The question of Russia’s attitude to the insurrection, which Pushkin raises in his letter to Davydov, was one which preoccupied both the government and the Decembrists. Both were not averse to striking a blow against Russia’s old enemy, Turkey. ‘If the 16th division,’ Orlov remarked of his command, ‘were to be sent to the liberation [of Greece], that would not be at all bad. I have sixteen thousand men under arms, thirty-six cannon, and six Cossack regiments. With that one can have some fun. The regiments are splendid, all Siberian flints. They would blunt the Turkish swords.’36 Alexander, however, did not wish to back revolutionary activity in Greece, while the Decembrists, though supporters of Greek independence, were not eager to have an illiberal tsar gain kudos by posing as a liberator abroad. And, curiously, they had the opportunity of influencing events. At the beginning of April Kiselev was requested by the government to send an officer to Kishinev to report on the insurrection. His choice fell on Pestel, whose report may have been instrumental in persuading the government not to support the revolt: Pushkin certainly believed this to be the case. In November 1833, at a rout at the Austrian ambassador’s in St Petersburg, he met Michael Souzzo, the former hospodar of Moldavia. ‘He reminded me,’ Pushkin wrote in his diary, ‘that in 1821 I called on him in Kishinev together with Pestel. I told him how Pestel had deceived him, and betrayed the Hetaireia – by representing it to the Emperor Alexander as a branch of Carbonarism. Souzzo could conceal neither his astonishment nor his vexation – the subtlety of a Phanariot had been conquered by the cunning of a Russian officer! This wounded his vanity.’37

Pushkin’s confidence in the success of the revolt soon proved unjustified – at least as far as Moldavia was concerned, where the uprising was quickly suppressed by the Turks. After a final, bloody engagement at Sculeni, on the west bank of the Prut, in June, the few survivors escaped by swimming the river. Gorchakov, who had been sent to observe events from the Russian side, gave Pushkin an account of this incident, which he later made use of in the short story ‘Kirdzhali’. Though he remained constant in his support for Greek independence, he was disappointed by this ‘crowd of cowardly beggars, thieves and vagabonds who could not even withstand the first fire of the worthless Turkish musketry’. ‘As for the officers, they are worse than the soldiers. We have seen these new Leonidases in the streets of Odessa and Kishinev – we are personally acquainted with a number of them, we can attest to their complete uselessness – they have discovered the art of being boring, even at the moment when their conversation ought to interest every European – no idea of the military art, no concept of honour, no enthusiasm – the French and Russians who are here show them a contempt of which they are only too worthy, they put up with anything, even blows of a cane, with a sangfroid worthy of Themistocles. I am neither a barbarian nor an apostle of the Koran, the cause of Greece interests me keenly, that is just why I become indignant when I see these wretches invested with the sacred office of defenders of liberty.’38

As the failure of the insurrection became apparent, refugees began to flood into Bessarabia: Moldavian nobles, Phanariot Greeks from the Turkish territories and Constantinople, Albanians and others. Their presence certainly made Kishinev a more lively place, and Pushkin’s circle of acquaintances was widened by a number of the new arrivals. Among these was Todoraki Balsch, a Moldavian hatman – military commander – who had fled from Iaşi with his wife Mariya – ‘a woman in her late twenties, reasonably comely, extremely witty and loquacious’39 – and daughter Anika. For some time Mariya was the sole object of Pushkin’s attentions; they held long, uninhibited conversations in French together, and she became convinced that he was in love with her. However, he suddenly transferred his allegiance to another refugee from Iaşi, Ekaterina Albrecht, ‘two years older than Balsch, but more attractive, with unconstrained European manners; she had read much, experienced much, and in civility consigned Balsch to the background’.40 Ekaterina came from an old Moldavian noble family, the Basotas, and was separated from her third husband, the commander of the Life Guards Uhlans: qualities which attracted Pushkin – he remarked that she was ‘historical and of ardent passions’.41 As a result, Mariya’s feelings turned to virulent dislike, which the following year was to give rise to a notable scandal.

Another refugee was Calypso Polichroni, a Greek girl who had fled from Constantinople with her mother and taken a humble two-room lodging in Kishinev. She went little into society; indeed, would hardly have been welcomed there, for her morals were not above suspicion. ‘There was not the slightest strictness about her conversation or her behaviour,’ Wiegel noted, adding euphemistically: ‘if she had lived at the time of Pericles, history, no doubt, would have recorded her name together with those of Phryne and Laïs’42 – famous courtesans of the past. ‘Extremely small, with a scarcely noticeable bosom,’ Calypso ‘had a long, dry face, always rouged in the Turkish manner; a huge nose as it were divided her face from top to bottom; she had thick, long hair and huge fiery eyes made even more voluptuous by the use of kohl’;43 and ‘a tender, attractive voice, not only when she spoke, but also when she sang to the guitar terrible, gloomy Turkish songs’.44 But what excited Pushkin’s imagination ‘was the thought that at about fifteen she was supposed to have first known passion in the arms of Lord Byron, who was then travelling in Greece’.45 If Vyazemsky came to Kishinev, Pushkin wrote, he would introduce him to ‘a Greek girl, who has exchanged kisses with Lord Byron’.46 ‘You were born to set on fire/The imagination of poets,’ he told her.47 A juxtaposition of Byron’s life with what is known of Calypso’s shows they can never have met. But in inventing the story, Calypso revealed an acute perception of psychology: in dalliance with her there was an extra titillation to be derived from the feeling that one was following, metaphorically, in Byron’s footsteps. Bulwer-Lytton is supposed to have gained a peculiar satisfaction from an affair with a woman whom Byron had loved, while the Marquis de Boissy, who married Teresa Guiccioli, would, it was reported, introduce her as ‘My wife, the Marquise de Boissy, Byron’s former mistress’.48 Pushkin was not immune to this thrill.*

Meanwhile Inzov had put him to work. Peter Manega, a Rumanian Greek who had studied law in Paris, had produced for Inzov a code of Moldavian law, written in French, and Pushkin was given the task of turning it into Russian. In his spare time he began to study Moldavian, taking lessons from one of Inzov’s servants. He learnt enough to be able to teach Inzov’s parrot to swear in Moldavian. Chuckling heartily, it repeated an indecency to the archbishop of Kishinev and Khotin when the latter was lunching at Inzov’s on Easter Sunday. Inzov did not hold the prank against Pushkin; indeed, when Capo d’Istrias wrote a few weeks later to enquire ‘whether [Pushkin] was now obeying the suggestions of a naturally good heart or the impulses of an unbridled and harmful imagination’, he replied: ‘Inspired, as are all residents of Parnassus, by a spirit of jealous emulation of certain writers, in his conversations with me he sometimes reveals poetic thoughts. But I am convinced that age and time will render him sensible in this respect and with experience he will come to recognize the unfoundedness of conclusions, inspired by the reading of harmful works and by the conventions accepted by the present age.’49 Had he known what Pushkin was writing he might not have been so generous.

At this period in his life Pushkin was a professed, indeed a militant atheist, modelling himself on the eighteenth-century French rationalists he admired. Whether or not he was the author, while at St Petersburg, of the quatrain ‘We will amuse the good citizens/And in the pillory/With the guts of the last priest/Will strangle the last tsar’,† 50 an adaptation of a famous remark by Diderot, his view of religion emerges clearly from much of his Kishinev work. When Inzov, a pious man, made it clear that he expected his staff to attend church, Pushkin, in a humorous epistle to Davydov, explained that his compliance was due to hypocrisy, not piety, and complained about the communion fare:

my impious stomach

‘For pity’s sake, old chap,’ remarks,

‘If only Christ’s blood

Were, let’s say, Lafite …

Or Clos de Vougeot, then not a word,

But this – it’s just ridiculous –

Is Moldavian wine and water.’51

He greeted Easter with the irreverent poem ‘Christ is risen’, addressed to the daughter of a Kishinev inn-keeper. Today he would exchange kisses with her in the Christian manner, but tomorrow, for another kiss, would be willing to adhere to ‘the faith of Moses’, and even put into her hand ‘That by which one can distinguish/A genuine Hebrew from the Orthodox’.52

At the beginning of May, in a letter to Aleksandr Turgenev, he jokingly suggested that the latter might use his influence to obtain a few days’ leave for his exiled friend, adding: ‘I would bring you in reward a composition in the taste of the Apocalypse, and would dedicate it to you, Christ-loving pastor of our poetic flock.’* 53 The description of Turgenev alluded to the fact that he was the head of the Department of Foreign Creeds; the work Pushkin was proposing to dedicate to him was, however, hardly appropriate: it was The Gabrieliad, a blasphemous parody of the Annunciation.54

Far from Jerusalem lives the beautiful Mary, whose ‘secret flower’ ‘Her lazy husband with his old spout/In the mornings fails to water’. God sees her, and, falling in love, sends the archangel Gabriel down to announce this to her. Before Gabriel arrives, Satan appears in the guise of a snake; then, turning into a handsome young man, seduces her. Gabriel interrupts them; the two fight; Satan, vanquished by a bite ‘in that fatal spot/(Superfluous in almost every fight)/That haughty member, with which the devil sinned’ (421–2), limps off, and his place and occupation are assumed by Gabriel. After his departure, as Mary is lying contemplatively on her bed, a white dove – God, in disguise – flies in at the window, and, despite her resistance, has its way with her.

Tired Mary

Thought: ‘What goings-on!

One, two, three! – how can they keep it up?

I must say, it’s been a busy time:

I’ve been had in one and the same day

By Satan, an Archangel and by God.’

(509–14)

It is slightly surprising to find the poem in Pushkin’s work at this time: the wit is not that of his current passion, Byron, but that of his former heroes, Voltaire and Parny; the blend of the blasphemous and the erotic is characteristic of the eighteenth, rather than the nineteenth century. Obviously it could not be published, but, like Pushkin’s political verses, was soon in circulation in manuscript.* Seven years later this lighthearted Voltairean anti-religious squib was to cause him almost as much trouble as his political verse had earlier.

Fasting seemed to stimulate Pushkin’s comic vein; during the following Lent, in 1822, he produced the short comic narrative poem ‘Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters’.55 There is nothing blasphemous or anti-religious about this work; though it might be considered risqué or indecent, it is certainly not, as it has been called, ‘out-and-out pornography’.56 Written in the manner of a Russian fairy-tale, the poem tells us that Tsar Nikita’s forty daughters, though uniformly captivating from head to toe, were all deficient in the same respect: