Pushkin

One thing was missing.

What was this?

Nothing in particular, a trifle, bagatelle,

Nothing or very little,

But it was missing, all the same.

How might one explain this,

So as not to anger

That devout pompous ninny,

The over-prim censor?

How is it to be done? … Aid me, Lord!

The tsarevnas have between their legs …

No, that’s far too precise

And dangerous to modesty, –

Let’s try another tack:

I love in Venus her breast,

Her lips, her ankle particularly,

But the steel that strikes love’s spark,

The goal of my desire …

Is what? … Nothing!

Nothing or very little …

And this wasn’t present

In the young princesses,

Mischievous and lively.

Tsar Nikita is simpler, more of a jeu d’esprit than The Gabrieliad: it consists essentially of a number of variations on the same joke. But it is charmingly written, witty and highly amusing.

Pushkin’s readiness to take offence and his profligate way with a challenge were as evident in Kishinev as in St Petersburg. At the beginning of June 1821, having quarrelled with a former French officer, M. Déguilly, for some reason possibly connected with the latter’s wife, he called him out, but was incensed to discover the following day that his opponent had managed to weasel his way out of a duel. He dashed off an offensive letter in French, and unable to draw blood with his sabre, consoled himself by doing so with his pen, sketching a cartoon showing Déguilly, clad only in a shirt, exclaiming: ‘My wife! … my breeches! … and my duel too! … ah, well, let her get out of it how she will, since it is she who wears the breeches …’57

Other opponents were more worthy. One evening in January 1822, at a dance in the casino, Pushkin’s request that the orchestra should play a mazurka was countermanded by a young officer of the 33rd Jägers, who demanded a Russian quadrille. Shouts of ‘Mazurka!’, ‘Quadrille!’ alternated for some time; eventually the orchestra, though composed of army musicians, obeyed the civilian. Lieutenant-Colonel Starov, the commander of the Jäger regiment, told his officer that he should demand an apology. When the officer hesitated, Starov marched over to Pushkin, and, failing to receive satisfaction, arranged a meeting for the following morning. The duel took place a mile or two outside Kishinev, during a snowstorm: the driving snow and the cold made both aiming and loading difficult. They fired first at sixteen paces and both missed; then at twelve and missed again. Both contestants wished to continue, but their seconds insisted that the affair be postponed. On his return to Kishinev, Pushkin called on Aleksey Poltoratsky and, not finding him at home, dropped off a brief jingle: ‘I’m alive/Starov’s/Well./The duel’s not over.’58 In fact, it was: Poltoratsky and Nikolay Alekseev, who had acted as Pushkin’s second, arranged a meeting at Nikoleti’s restaurant, where Pushkin often played billiards, and a reconciliation took place. Pushkin swelled with pride when Starov, who had fought in the campaign of 1812 and was known for his bravery, complimented him on his behaviour: ‘You have increased my respect for you,’ he said, ‘and I must truthfully say that you stand up to bullets as well as you write.’59 According to Gorchakov, Pushkin displayed even more sangfroid at a duel fought in May or June 1823. This was with Zubov, an officer of the topographical survey, whom he had accused of cheating at cards. Pushkin, like his character the Count, in the short story ‘The Shot’, one of the Tales of Belkin, arrived with a hatful of cherries, which he ate while Zubov took the first shot. He missed. ‘Are you satisfied?’ Pushkin asked. Zubov threw himself on him and embraced him. ‘That is going too far,’ said Pushkin, and walked off without taking his shot.60

The Starov affair had, however, unpleasant repercussions. Though the quarrel had been public, the duel and reconciliation were not; and it was rumoured, especially in Moldavian society, that both Starov and Pushkin had acted dishonourably. At an evening party some weeks later Pushkin light-heartedly referred to a remark made by Liprandi to the effect that Moldavians did not fight duels, but hired a couple of ruffians to thrash their enemy. Mariya Balsch, still smarting with jealousy, said acidly, ‘You have an odd way of defending yourself, too,’ adding that his duel with Starov had ended in a very peculiar manner. Pushkin, enraged, rushed off to Balsch, who was playing cards, and demanded satisfaction for the insult. Mariya complained of his behaviour to her husband, who, somewhat the worse for wine, himself flew into a rage, calling Pushkin a coward, a convict and worse. ‘The scene […] could not have been more terrible, Balsch was shouting and screaming, the old lady Bogdan fell down in a swoon, the vice-governor’s pregnant wife had hysterics.’61 The affair was reported to Inzov, who ordered that the two should be reconciled. Two days later they both appeared before the vice-governor, Krupensky; Major-General Pushchin was also present. When they met, Balsch said, ‘I have been forced to apologize to you. What kind of apology do you require?’ Pushkin, without a word, slapped his face and drew out a pistol, before being led from the room by Pushchin.62 In a letter to Inzov Balsch demanded, firstly a safeguard against any further attempt which Pushkin might make on him, and, secondly, that the other should be proceeded against with the utmost rigour of the law.63 Whatever the rights of the situation, there was only one choice Inzov could make between an extremely junior civil servant and a Moldavian magnate: sending Pushkin to his quarters, he placed him under house arrest for three weeks.

Arguments were frequent at Inzov’s dinner table. A few months later, on 20 July 1822, when discussing politics with Smirnov, a translator, Pushkin ‘became heated, enraged and lost his temper. Abuse of all classes flew about. Civil councillors were villains and thieves, generals for the most part swine, only peasant farmers were honourable. Pushkin particularly attacked the nobility. They all ought to be hanged, and if this were to happen, he would have pleasure in tying the noose.’64 When both parties were heated with wine a possible explosion was never too far away. One occurred the following day, when the conversation at dinner touched upon the subject of hailstorms; whereupon a retired army captain named Rudkovsky claimed to have once witnessed a remarkable storm, during which hailstones weighing no less than three pounds apiece had fallen. Pushkin howled with laughter, Rudkovsky became indignant, and, after they had risen from table and Inzov had left, an exchange of insults led to an agreement to exchange shots. Both, accompanied by Smirnov, who had suffered Pushkin’s abuse the previous day, then went to Pushkin’s quarters, where some kind of fracas took place. Rudkovsky asserted that Pushkin attacked him with a knife, and Smirnov, agreeing, claimed to have managed to ward off the blow. Luckily no one was injured; however, Inzov, learning of the incident, put Pushkin under house arrest again.

General Orlov, ‘Hymen’s shaven-headed recruit’,65 had married Ekaterina Raevskaya in Kiev on 15 May 1821. Pushkin welcomed her arrival in Kishinev, and would visit the couple almost every day, lounging on their divan in wide Turkish velvet trousers, and conversing with them animatedly. He went riding with Orlov and fell off. ‘He can only ride Pegasus or a nag from the Don,’ the general commented to his wife. ‘Pushkin no longer pretends to be cruel,’ she wrote to her brother Aleksandr in November, ‘he often calls on us to smoke his pipe and discourses or chats very pleasantly. He has only just completed an ode on Napoleon, which, in my humble opinion, is very good, as far as I can judge, having heard only part of it once.’66 Napoleon had died on 5 May 1821 (NS); the news of his death reached Kishinev in July.

The miraculous destiny has been accomplished;

The great man is no more.

In gloomy captivity has set

The terrible age of Napoleon,

Pushkin wrote.67 His earlier hatred of the emperor had been replaced, if not by the hero-worship of Romanticism, at least by awe and admiration.

Orlov was a humane and enlightened commander, who was particularly anxious to reduce the incidence of corporal punishment in the units under his command. He had surrounded himself by a number of like-minded officers: Pushchin, his second-in-command, was a Decembrist, as was Okhotnikov, his aide-de-camp. So too was Vladimir Raevsky, ‘a man of extraordinary energy, capabilities, very well-educated and no stranger to literature’:68 a distant relative of Pushkin’s friends. Born in 1795, Raevsky had entered the army at sixteen; in 1812, as an ensign in an artillery brigade, he had been awarded a gold sword for bravery at Borodino. Now a major in the 32nd Jägers, he was the division’s chief education officer, responsible for all its Lancaster schools.* This position gave him great influence on the rank-and-file of the division, and he employed it to inculcate what were considered to be dangerously subversive ideas. A later report on his activities singled out the fact that in handwriting exercises he used for examples words such as ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, and ‘constitution’ and alleged that he told officer cadets that constitutional government was better than any other form of government, and especially than Russian monarchic government, which, although called monarchic, was really despotic.69 A pedagogue by nature, he exposed the gaps in Pushkin’s knowledge, and was a severe critic of his verse.

In December 1821 Liprandi was ordered by Orlov to report on the condition of the 31st and 32nd Jäger regiments, stationed in Izmail and Akkerman at the mouth of the Dniester. He invited Pushkin to accompany him; Inzov, who had just been reprimanded for not keeping a strict watch over his protégé, at first refused his permission, but was persuaded by Orlov to change his mind.

Pushkin was full of historical enthusiasm when the two set off on 13 December. He was eager to stop in Bendery and visit the camp at Varnitsa, where Charles XII of Sweden had lived from 1709 to 1713, having taken refuge on Turkish territory after his defeat by Peter at Poltava – the battle which was to be the climax of, and provide the title for Pushkin’s long narrative poem of 1828–9. Liprandi, however, hurried him on. The next post-station, Kaushany, aroused his excitement again: this had been the seat, from the sixteenth century until 1806, of the khans who had ruled Budzhak, the southern region of Moldavia. But according to Liprandi there was nothing to see and, stopping only to change horses, they drove on.

They arrived in Akkerman early in the evening of the fourteenth, and went straight to dinner with Colonel Nepenin, the commander of the 32nd Jägers. Among the guests was an old St Petersburg acquaintance, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Courteau, now commandant of the fortress. He and Pushkin were both members of Kishinev’s short-lived Masonic lodge, Ovid, opened in the spring and closed – together with all other lodges in Bessarabia – in December by Inzov on the emperor’s orders. While Pushkin and Courteau were talking, Nepenin asked Liprandi in an undertone, audible to Pushkin, whether his friend was the author of A Dangerous Neighbour – the indecent little epic composed by Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily. Liprandi, embarrassed, and wishing to avoid further queries, replied that he was, but did not like to have it talked about. His ruse succeeded, the poem was not mentioned further; later that evening, however, Pushkin took him to task for his subterfuge, and called Nepenin an uneducated ignoramus for imagining that he, a twenty-two-year-old, could be the author of a poem which had been well-known ever since its composition ten years earlier, in 1811.

The following day, while Liprandi was inspecting the regiment, Pushkin was shown round the fortress by Courteau; they dined with him, and returned to their quarters in the early hours of the morning, after an evening spent at the card-table and in flirtation with the commandant’s ‘five robust daughters, no longer in the bloom of youth’.70 They left for Izmail early the following evening, arriving at ten at night and putting up with a Slovenian merchant, Slavic.

In 1791, during the Russo – Turkish war, Izmail had been stormed and captured by a Russian army commanded by Suvorov – an event celebrated by Byron in the seventh and eighth cantos of Don Juan. Pushkin was naturally impatient to inspect the scenes of the fighting: when Liprandi returned to their lodging the next evening he found that his companion had already been round the fortress with Slavič; he was amazed that the besiegers had managed to scale the fortifications facing the Danube. He had also taken down a Slovenian song from the dictation of their host’s sister-in-law, Irena. The following morning Liprandi, before leaving to inspect the 31st Jägers, introduced Pushkin to a naval lieutenant in the Danube flotilla, Ivan Gamaley; together they visited the town, the fortress and the quarantine station; were taken to the casino by Slavič, and then had supper at his house with another naval lieutenant, Vasily Shcherbachev. Returning at midnight, Liprandi found Pushkin sitting cross-legged on a divan, surrounded by a large number of little pieces of paper. When asked whether he had got hold of Irena’s curling papers, Pushkin laughed, shuffled them together and hid them under a cushion; the two emptied a decanter of local wine and went to bed. In the morning Liprandi awoke to find Pushkin, unclothed, sitting in the same posture as the previous night, again surrounded by his pieces of paper, but holding a pen in his hand with which he was beating time as he recited, nodding his head in unison. Noticing that Liprandi was awake, he stopped and gathered up his papers; he had been caught in the act of composition. That morning Liprandi, after writing his report, called on Major-General Tuchkov, who expressed the wish to meet Pushkin. He came to dinner at their lodgings and afterwards bore off Pushkin, who returned at ten in the evening, somewhat out of sorts; he wished he could stay here a month to examine properly everything the general had shown him. ‘He has all the classics and extracts from them,’ he told Liprandi, who jokingly suggested that he was more interested in Irena’s classical forms.71

The next morning they set out for Kishinev. Late that evening, as Pushkin was dozing in his corner of the carriage, Liprandi remarked that it was a pity it was so dark, as otherwise they could have seen to the left the site of the battle of Kagul: here in August 1770 General Rumyantsev with 17,000 men engaged the main Turkish army, winning a hard-fought battle with the bayonet and capturing the Turkish camp. Pushkin immediately started to life, animatedly discussed the battle, and quoted a few lines of verse – perhaps those from his Lycée poem, ‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’, in which he mentions the monument to the battle in the palace park:

In the thick shade of gloomy pines

Rises a simple monument.

O, how shameful for thee, Kagulian shore!

And glorious for our dear native land!72

Arriving in Leovo before midday, they called on Lieutenant-Colonel Katasanov, the commander of the Cossack regiment stationed here. He was away, but his adjutant insisted that they should stay for lunch: caviare, smoked sturgeon – of which Pushkin was inordinately fond – and vodka appeared, succeeded by partridge soup and roast chicken. Half an hour after their departure Pushkin, who had been in a brown study, suddenly burst into such raucous and prolonged laughter that Liprandi thought he was having a fit. ‘I love cossacks because they are so individual and don’t keep to the normal rules of taste,’ he said. ‘We – indeed everyone else – would have made soup from the chicken and would have roasted the partridge, but they did the opposite!’73 He was so struck by this that after his return to Kishinev – they arrived at nine that evening, 23 December – he sought out the French chef Tardif – ‘inexhaustible in ideas/For entremets, or for pies’74 – then living on Gorchakov’s charity,* to tell him about it, and two years later, in Odessa, reminded Liprandi of the meal.

During the winter the training battalion of the 16th division had been employed in constructing, at Orlov’s expense, a manège, or riding-school. Its ceremonial opening took place on New Year’s Day 1822. Liprandi and Okhotnikov had decorated the interior: the walls were hung with bayonets, swords, muskets; on that opposite the entrance was a large shield, with a cannon and heap of cannon-balls to each side; in the centre was the monogram of Alexander, done in pistols, surrounded by a sunburst of ramrods, and flanked by the colours of the Kamchatka and Okhotsk regiments. Before this was a table, laid for forty guests, while eight other tables, four down each side of the hall, were to accommodate the training battalion. Inzov and his officials – including Pushkin – and the town notables were invited. The building was blessed by Archbishop Dimitry and after the ceremony all sat down to a breakfast. ‘There was no lack of champagne or vodka. Some felt a buzzing in their heads, but all departed decorously.’75 A week later Orlov and Ekaterina left for Kiev, where they were to stay for some time. As it turned out, the absence of the division’s commander at this moment was unfortunate.

The 16th division was part of the 6th Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sabaneev, whose headquarters were at Tiraspol, halfway between Kishinev and Odessa. Over the previous six months General Kiselev, the chief of staff of the Second Army, had stepped up surveillance of the army’s units: he was particularly concerned about the 16th division, commanded as it was by such a noted liberal. Despite his friendship with Orlov, he had cautiously insinuated to Wittgenstein, the commander of the army, that the latter was unsuited to the command of the division. Raevsky, too, had come to his attention. ‘I have long had under observation a certain Raevsky, a major of the 32nd Jäger regiment, who is known to me by his completely unrestrained freethinking. At the present moment in agreement with Sabaneev an overt and covert investigation of all his actions is taking place, and he will, it seems, not escape trial and exile.’76

In Orlov’s absence General Sabaneev – a short, choleric fifty-two-year-old with a red nose, ginger hair and side-whiskers – began to pay frequent visits to Kishinev. He dined with Inzov on 15 January. Pushkin was present, but was uncharacteristically silent during the meal. Sabaneev was in Kishinev again on the twentieth, when he wrote to Kiselev: ‘There is no one in the Kishinev gang besides those whom you know about, but what aim this gang has I do not as yet know. That well-known puppy Pushkin cries me up all over town as one of the Carbonari, and proclaims me guilty of every disorder. Of course, it is not unintentional, and I suspect him of being an organ of the gang.’77

On 5 February, at nine in the evening, Raevsky was reclining on his divan and smoking a pipe when there was a knock on the door; his Albanian servant let in Pushkin. He had, he told Raevsky, just eavesdropped on a conversation between Inzov and Sabaneev. Raevsky was to be arrested in the morning. ‘To arrest a staff officer on suspicion alone has the whiff of a Turkish punishment. However, what will be, will be,’ Raevsky remarked. Lost in admiration at his coolness, Pushkin attempted to embrace him. ‘You’re no Greek girl,’ said Raevsky, pushing him away. The two went round to Liprandi, who was entertaining a number of guests, including his younger brother, Pavel, Sabaneev’s adjutant. When Raevsky and Pushkin entered, they were assailed with questions as to what was going on. ‘Ask Pavel Petrovich,’ Raevsky replied, ‘he is Sabaneev’s trusted plenipotentiary minister.’ ‘True,’ said the younger Liprandi, ‘but if Sabaneev trusted you as he trusts me, you too would not wish to break the codes of trust and honour.’78 At noon the next day he was summoned to Sabaneev, and confronted with three officer cadets, members of his Lancaster school, whose testimony as to his teaching was the ostensible reason for his arrest. His books and papers were confiscated and a guard put on his quarters. A week later he was taken to Tiraspol and lodged in a cell in the fortress. The investigation into his case and his trial dragged on for years. Only in 1827 was he finally sentenced to exile in Siberia. In March Major-General Pushchin was relieved of his command of a brigade in Orlov’s division, and the following April Kiselev succeeded in bringing about Orlov’s removal from his command.

In July 1822 Liprandi, passing through Tiraspol on his way from Odessa to Kishinev, managed, with the connivance of the commandant of the fortress, to have half an hour’s conversation with Raevsky as they strolled backwards and forwards over the glacis. Raevsky gave him a poem, ‘The Bard in the Dungeon’, to pass on to Pushkin, who was particularly impressed by one stanza:

Like an automaton, the dumb nation

Sleeps in secret fear beneath the yoke:

Over it a bloody clan of scourges

Both thoughts and looks executes on the block.

Reading it aloud to Liprandi, he repeated the last line, and added with a sigh: ‘After such verses we will not see this Spartan again soon.’79

Although the authorities knew that Raevsky was a member of some kind of conspiracy, he remained resolutely silent in prison, and no other arrest followed his. Pushkin was surprised and shocked by the incident, which in addition appeared to him deeply mysterious: the severity of Raevsky’s treatment seemed wholly out of proportion to his crime. It was only in January 1825, when his old Lycée friend Pushchin visited him in Mikhailovskoe, that he gained some inkling of what had been going on. ‘Imperceptibly we again came to touch on his suspicions concerning the society,’ writes Pushchin. ‘When I told him that I was far from alone in joining this new service to the fatherland, he leapt from his chair and shouted: “This must all be connected with Major Raevsky, who has been sitting in the fort at Tiraspol for four years and whom they cannot get anything out of.”’80

In December 1820 Pushkin had written from Kamenka to Gnedich, the publisher of Ruslan and Lyudmila, to tell him that his next narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, was nearly completed. He was unduly optimistic; it was not until the following March that he wrote again. ‘The setting of my poem should have been the banks of the noisy Terek, on the frontier of Georgia, in the remote valleys of the Caucasus – I placed my hero in the monotonous plains where I myself spent two months – where far distant from one another four mountains rise, the last spur of the Caucasus; – there are no more than 700 lines in the whole poem – I will send it you soon – so that you might do with it what you like.’81 Before long, however, he was having second thoughts; he was in need of money and, compared to Gnedich, had made little out of Ruslan. In September he wrote to Grech, editor of Son of the Fatherland. ‘I wanted to send you an extract from my Caucasian Prisoner, but am too lazy to copy it out; would you like to buy the poem from me in one piece? It is 800 lines long; each line is four feet wide; it is chopped into two cantos. I am letting it go cheaply, so that the goods do not get stale.’82 Unfortunately, Gnedich got wind of the offer. ‘You tell me that Gnedich is angry with me,’ he wrote to his brother in January 1822, ‘he is right – I should have gone to him with my new narrative poem – but my head was spinning – I had not heard from him for a long time; I had to write to Grech – and using this dependable occasion* I offered him the Captive … Besides, Gnedich will not haggle with me, nor I with Gnedich, each of us over-concerned with his own advantage, whereas I would have haggled as shamelessly with Grech as with any other bearded connoisseur of the literary imagination.’83 He also made an attempt to sell the poem directly to book-sellers in St Petersburg, but, offered a derisory sum, had to fall back on Gnedich. On 29 April he sent him the manuscript, accompanying it with a letter which began ‘Parve (nec invideo) sine me, liber, ibis in urbem,/Heu mihi! quo domino non licet ire’ – the opening lines of Ovid’s Tristia,† – and continued: ‘Exalted poet, enlightened connoisseur of poets, I hand over to you my Caucasian prisoner […] Call this work a fable, a story, a poem or call it nothing at all, publish it in two cantos or in only one, with a preface or without; I put it completely at your disposal.’84