Pushkin

In 1823 Count Mikhail Vorontsov was forty-one. He was the son of the former Russian ambassador in London, who had married into the Sidney family and settled in England permanently after his retirement. Vorontsov had received an English education, had studied at Cambridge, and was, like his father, a convinced Anglophile. His sister, Ekaterina, had married Lord Pembroke in 1808, and English relatives would occasionally visit Odessa. A professional soldier, Vorontsov had fought throughout the Napoleonic wars, being wounded at Borodino, and at Craonne in March 1814 had led the Russian corps that took on Napoleon himself in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. After Waterloo he commanded the Russian Army of Occupation in France, when Aleksandr Raevsky was one of his aides-de-camp. He was extremely wealthy, and had added to his fortune by marrying, in 1819, Elizaveta Branicka, who brought with her an enormous dowry: her mother, Countess Branicka, whose estate was at Belaya Tserkov, just south of Kiev, was one of the richest landowners in Russia. Before taking up his new appointment, he had invested massively in land in New Russia, buying immense estates near Odessa and Taganrog, and in the Crimea. He was ‘tall and thin, with remarkably noble features, as though they had been carved with a chisel, his gaze was unusually calm, and about his thin long lips there eternally played an affectionate and crafty smile’.10 ‘Perhaps only Alexander could be more charming, when he wanted to please,’ remarked Wiegel. ‘He had a certain exquisite gaucheness, the result of his English upbringing, a manly reserve and a voice which, while never losing its firmness, was remarkably tender.’11 As a commander he had, like Orlov, discouraged brutality and cruelty in enforcing discipline and had set up regimental schools to educate the troops. He was close to a number of the future Decembrists, and had even, together with Nikolay Turgenev, Pushkin’s St Petersburg friend and fellow-Arzamasite, attempted to set up a society of noblemen with the aim of gradually emancipating the serfs. He had thus acquired the reputation of a liberal; a reputation which he was now strenuously attempting to live down, given the current climate in government circles: a mixture of mysticism and reaction, combined with – since the mutiny of the Semenovsky Life Guards in 1820 – paranoid suspicion of anything remotely radical.

When, at the beginning of August, Pushkin returned to Odessa in Vorontsov’s suite, he took a room in the Hotel Rainaud, where he lived throughout his stay. The hotel was on the corner of Deribasovskaya and Rishelevskaya Streets (named after the first two governors, de Ribas and Richelieu); behind it an annexe, which fronted on Theatre Square, housed the Casino de Commerce, or assembly-rooms: ‘The great oval hall, which is surrounded by a gallery, supported on numerous columns, is used for the double purpose of ballroom, and an Exchange, where the merchants sometimes transact their affairs,’ wrote Robert Lyall, who visited Odessa in May 1822.12 Baron Rainaud, the owner of the hotel and casino, was a French émigré; he also possessed a charming villa on the coast three miles to the east of the city, with wonderful views over the Black Sea. Vorontsov rented it for his wife, who was in the final stages of pregnancy when she arrived from Belaya Tserkov on 6 September: she gave birth to a son two months later.

Pushkin had a corner room on the first floor with a balcony, which gave a view of the sea. The theatre and casino were two minutes away; five minutes’ walk down Deribasovskaya and Khersonskaya Streets took him to César Automne’s restaurant, the best in town –

What of the oysters? they’re here! O joy!

Gluttonous youth flies

To swallow from their sea shells

The plump, living hermitesses,

With a slight squeeze of lemon.

Noise, arguments – light wine

From the cellars is borne

To the table by obliging Automne;

The hours fly, and the dread bill

Meanwhile invisibly mounts.13

Wiegel, who had been recruited by Vorontsov to join his staff, soon moved into the room next to Pushkin. Before leaving St Petersburg he had been enjoined by Zhukovsky and Bludov to gain Pushkin’s confidence in order, if possible, to prevent him from behaving injudiciously. Unfortunately, Pushkin did not enjoy his company for long: Vorontsov sacked the vice-governor of Kishinev for dishonesty and appointed Wiegel in his place. ‘Tell me, my dear atheist, how did you manage to live for several years in Kishinev?’ he wrote to Pushkin on 8 October. ‘Although you should indeed have been punished by God for your lack of faith, surely not to such an extent. As far as I am concerned, I can say too: although my sins or, more accurately, my sin is great, it is not so great that fate should have destined this cesspit to be my abode.’14 The sin Wiegel is referring to is his homosexuality. In a verse reply, Pushkin promised to visit him: ‘I’ll be glad to serve you/With my crazy conversation –/With verses, prose or with my soul,/But, Wiegel, – spare my arse!’ Continuing in prose, he answers a query raised by Wiegel about the Ralli brothers. ‘I think the smallest is best suited to your use; NB he sleeps in the same room as his brother Mikhail and they tumble about unmercifully – from this you can draw important conclusions, I leave them to your experience and good sense – the eldest brother, as you have already noticed, is as stupid as a bishop’s crozier – Vanka jerks off – so the devil with them – embrace them in friendly fashion from me.’15

Two and a half years earlier, on 2 February 1821, in the governor of Kiev’s drawing-room, Pushkin had been struck by the beauty of a woman wearing a poppy-red toque with a drooping ostrich feather, ‘which set off extraordinarily well her tall stature, luxuriant shoulders and fiery eyes’.16 This was Karolina Sobańska, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Count Adam Rzewuski, one of several attractive and brilliantly clever brothers and sisters: her sister Ewa Hanska was Balzac’s Étrangère, who, after a long correspondence and liaison with the novelist, married him in 1850, a few months before his death. Karolina had been married at seventeen to Hieronim Sobański, a wealthy landowner and owner of one of the largest trading houses in Odessa. He was, however, thirty-three years older than her; she left him in 1816, and in 1819 met and began a long liaison with Colonel-General Count Jan Witt.* Since 1817 Witt had been in command of all the military colonies in the south of Russia; in addition he controlled a wide and efficient network of spies and secret police agents. He and Sobańska lived openly together; the liaison was recognized by society, and though its more straitlaced members might have frowned at the irregularity of the relationship, there were few who wished to incur his enmity by cutting Sobańska in public.

When Pushkin met her again, his interest was immediately rekindled: she was, indeed, almost irresistible – not only beautiful, but also lively, charming and provocative, and a talented musician: ‘What grace, what a voice, and what manners!’17 Few, if any, knew at the time that, as well as being Witt’s mistress, she also worked for him, and was an extremely valuable Russian intelligence agent. Only Wiegel appears to have had an inkling of the truth. ‘When a few years later I learnt […] that for financial gain she joined the ranks of the gendarme agents, I felt an invincible aversion to her. I will not mention the unproved crimes of which she was suspected. What vilenesses were concealed beneath her elegant appearance!’* 18 Witt, eager to obtain evidence of subversive activity, encouraged her friendship with Pushkin, as in 1825 he would encourage her liaison with the Polish poet Mickiewicz. She and Pushkin made an excursion by boat together; he accompanied her to the Roman Catholic church, where she dipped her fingers into the stoup and crossed his forehead with holy water; and there were ‘burning readings’ of Constant’s Adolphe,19 a book so appropriate to their circumstances it might have been written with them in mind: the hero, Adolphe, falls in love with Ellénore, a Polish countess, celebrated for her beauty, who is older than he and is being kept by a M. de P***. But Sobanska did not appear to feel more than friendship for him; piqued, he concocted, together with Aleksandr Raevsky, a scheme to arouse her interest. Before it could be put into practice she left the city, and Pushkin consoled himself for her absence by falling in love with Amaliya Riznich, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish banker, married to an Odessa shipping merchant.

‘Mrs Riznich was young, tall, graceful, and extraordinarily beautiful.

Particularly attractive were her fiery eyes, a neck of amazing form and whiteness, and a plait of black hair, nearly five feet long. But her feet were too large; in order to conceal this deficiency, she always wore a long dress, to the ground. She went about wearing a man’s hat and dressed in a semi-riding habit. All this gave her originality and attracted both young and not so young heads and hearts.’20 She distinguished herself by going about much in society – ‘Our married ladies (with the exception of the beautiful and charming Mrs Riznich) avoid company, concealing under the guise of modesty either their simplicity or their ignorance,’ Tumansky wrote to his cousin21 – and entertained frequently at home. These were lively gatherings, at which much whist was played: a game of which she was passionately fond. Pushkin was soon obsessed with her. Profiles of ‘Madame Riznich, with her Roman nose’22 crept out of his pen to ornament the manuscript of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. His emotions reached their zenith in the last weeks of October and the first of November with a sudden burst of poems. The passionate love, the burning jealousy they express are far deeper, far more powerful, far more agonizing than anything he had previously experienced. Though intense, the feelings were short-lived. In January or early February 1824, he bade her farewell with a final lyric. She had been pregnant when they first met; early in 1824 she gave birth to a son. Meanwhile her health had deteriorated; the Odessa climate had exacerbated a tendency towards consumption. At the beginning of May she left Odessa; a year later she died in Italy.

Beneath the blue sky of her native land

She languished, faded …

Faded finally, and above me surely

The young shade already hovered;

But there is an unapproachable line between us.

In vain I tried to awaken emotion:

From indifferent lips I heard the news of death,

And received it with indifference.

So this is whom my fiery soul loved

With such painful intensity,

With such tender, agonizing heartache,

With such madness and such torment!

Where now the tortures, where the love? Alas!

For the poor, gullible shade,

For the sweet memory of irretrievable days

In my soul I find neither tears nor reproaches.23

Riznich did not long remain a widower. In March 1827 Tumansky wrote to Pushkin: ‘One piece of our news, which might interest you, is Riznich’s marriage to the sister of Sobańska, Witt’s mistress […] The new Mme Riznich will probably not deserve either your or my verse on her death; she is a child with a wide mouth and Polish manners.’24

The social scene in Odessa in the autumn and winter of 1823 was a lively one. Pushkin, in a black frock-coat, wearing a peaked cap or black hat over his cropped hair, and carrying an iron cane, hastened through the mud from one gathering to another. General Raevsky, his wife, and his two younger daughters, Mariya and Sofya, paid a lengthy visit to the town. ‘The Raevskys are here,’ Tumansky told his cousin, ‘Mariya is the ideal of Pushkin’s Circassian maid (the poet’s own expression), ugly, but very attractive in the sharpness of her conversation and tenderness of her manner.’25 A sketch of the sixteen-year-old girl with her short nose, heavy jaw and unruly hair escaping from an elaborate bonnet appears in the left-hand margin of a draft of several stanzas from Eugene Onegin.26 Pushkin had finished the first chapter on 22 October and embarked immediately on the second: ‘I am writing with a rapture which I have not had for a long time,’ he told Vyazemsky.27 Several other St Petersburg acquaintances were in Odessa. Aleksandr Sturdza, the subject, in 1819, of two hostile epigrams, turned out to be not such a pillar of reaction after all. ‘Monarchical Sturdza is here; we are not only friends, but also think the same about one or two things, without being sly to one another.’28 However, he quarrelled with the Arzamasite Severin, relieving his anger with an epigram ridiculing Severin’s pretensions to nobility.

He saw, too, General Kiselev and his wife Sofya, who frequently travelled over from the headquarters of the Second Army at Tulchin. Earlier that year, after the officers of the Odessa regiment had revolted against their colonel, Kiselev had sacked the brigade commander, General Mordvinov. The latter had challenged him to a duel. Kiselev accepted the challenge, the two met, and Mordvinov was killed. Kiselev immediately sent the emperor an account of the affair, saying that the manner of the challenge left him ‘no choice between the strict application of the law and the most sacred obligations of honour’.29 Alexander pardoned him and retained him as chief of staff of the Second Army. The incident caused much stir at the time, and particularly fascinated Pushkin, who, ‘for many days talked of nothing else, asking others for their opinion as to whose side was more honourable, who had been the more self-sacrificial and so on’.30 Though he inclined towards Mordvinov, he could not but admire Kiselev’s sangfroid. Also in Odessa were Sofya’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Olga, and her recently acquired husband, General Lev Naryshkin, who was Vorontsov’s cousin. Olga was as beautiful as her sister, but ‘in her beauty there was nothing maidenly or touching […] in the very flower of youth she seemed already armoured with great experience. Everything was calculated, and she preserved the arrows of coquetry for the conquest of the mighty.’31 Wiegel’s last sentence is a hidden reference to a relationship which was well-known in Odessa: soon after her arrival Olga became Vorontsov’s mistress. Naryshkin, seventeen years older than his wife, lacked the character and energy to complain – ‘always sleepy, always good-natured’ was his brother-in-law’s description of him32 – and, in addition, his affection for his wife was lukewarm: he had long been hopelessly in love with his aunt, Mariya Naryshkina, for many years the mistress of Alexander I.

During the winter there were dances twice a week at the Vorontsovs; Pushkin was assiduous in attending. On 12 December they gave a large ball, at which his impromptu verses on a number of the ladies present caused some offence. On Christmas Day Vorontsov entertained the members of his staff to dinner; Wiegel arrived from Kishinev while they were at table, and Pushkin, learning this, slipped back to the hotel to see him. On New Year’s Eve, Tumansky wrote, ‘we had a good frolic at the masquerade, which the countess [Elizaveta Vorontsova] put on for us, and at which she herself played the fool very cleverly and smartly, that is, she had a charmingly satirical costume and intrigued with everyone in it’.33

Liprandi had not forgotten Pushkin’s disappointment at not being able to visit Charles XII’s camp at Varnitsa during their trip in the winter of 1821. Planning another visit to the district, he invited Pushkin to accompany him. The latter accepted with alacrity. He had just been reading a manuscript copy of Ryleev’s narrative poem Voinarovsky. ‘Ryleev’s Voinarovsky is incomparably better than all his Dumy,* his style has matured and is becoming a truly narrative one, which we still almost completely lack,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev.34 The hero of Ryleev’s poem is the nephew of Mazepa, the hetman of the Dnieper Cossacks who joined with Charles against Peter the Great and died at Varnitsa in 1709. Pushkin was attracted by the figure of Mazepa himself; three lines of Ryleev’s poem describing Mazepa’s nightmares, ‘He often saw, at dead of night;/The wife of the martyr Kochubey/And their ravished daughter,’35 planted the germ which grew into his own poem, Poltava. Byron, too, had devoted a poem to the hetman: his Mazeppa is an account of an early episode of the hero’s life, when, according to Voltaire, the poet’s source, ‘an affair he had with the wife of a Polish nobleman having been discovered, the husband had him bound naked to the back of a wild horse and sent him forth in this state’.36

On 17 January 1824 they left Odessa for Tiraspol, where they put up with Liprandi’s brother. That evening they had supper with General Sabaneev. Pushkin was cheerful and very talkative: the general’s wife, Pulkheriya Yakovlevna, was much taken with him. The following day, accompanied by Liprandi’s brother, they set out early for Bendery. Forewarned of their coming, the police chief, A.I. Barozzi, had provided a guide: Nikola Iskra, a Little Russian, who ‘appeared to be about sixty, was tall, with an upright figure, rather lean, with thick yellowish-grey hair on his head and chest and good teeth’.37 He claimed that as a young man he had been sent by his mother to the Swedish camp to sell milk, butter and eggs: which, Liprandi calculated, would make him now about 135 years old. However, it was certainly true that his description of Charles XII’s appearance bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations in the historical works Liprandi had brought with him, and he showed an equally remarkable ability, when they arrived at the site of the camp, to describe its plan and fortifications and to interpret the irregularities of the terrain. Much to Pushkin’s annoyance, however, he was not only unable to show them Mazepa’s grave, but even disclaimed any knowledge of the hetman. They returned to Bendery with Pushkin in a very disgruntled mood. He cheered up, however, after dinner with Barozzi, and in the afternoon set out in a carriage, accompanied by a policeman, to view, as he hoped, the ruined palaces and fountains at Kaushany, the seat of the khans of Budzhak. Later in the evening he returned as disgruntled as before: there were – as Liprandi had warned him two years earlier – no ruins to admire in Kaushany. He was back in Odessa on the nineteenth. Liprandi did not return until the beginning of February. On the evening of his arrival he dined with the Vorontsovs, where a sulky Pushkin was making desultory conversation with the countess and Olga Naryshkina. He vanished after the company rose from table. Calling at his hotel room later, Liprandi found him in the most cheerful frame of mind imaginable: with his coat off, he was sitting on Morali’s knee and tickling the retired corsair until he roared. This was the only pleasure he had in Odessa, he told Liprandi.

Pushkin had completed his second southern poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, the previous autumn, and had begun to think about publication. Gnedich, though eager, had ruled himself out through excessive sharpness; he therefore turned to Vyazemsky, who agreed to see the work through the press. However, there was a complication. The work was suffused with memories of the Crimea and, in particular, of his love for Ekaterina Raevskaya. Now, three years later, he was not anxious to call attention to this, all the more so as Ekaterina was now Orlov’s wife. He hit on a simple solution in a letter to his brother: ‘I will send Vyazemsky The Fountain – omitting the love ravings – but it’s a pity!’38 Sending the manuscript to Vyazemsky on 4 November, he wrote, ‘I have thrown out that which the censor would have thrown out if I had not, and that which I did not want to exhibit before the public. If these disconnected fragments seem to you worthy of type, then print them, and do me a favour, don’t give in to that bitch the censorship, bite back in defence of every line, and bite it to death if you can, in memory of me […] another request: add a foreword or afterword to Bakhchisaray, if not for my sake, then for the sake of your lustful Minerva, Sofya Kiseleva; I enclose a police report as material; draw on it for information (without, of course, mentioning the source).’* 39 With the letter he sent a copy of ‘Platonic Love’, the immodest poem he had addressed to Sofya in 1819. ‘Print it quickly; I ask this not for the sake of fame, but for the sake of Mammon,’ he urged in December.40

But his hopes of concealing his former feelings for Ekaterina were soon sadly dented. In St Petersburg Bestuzhev and Ryleev had been preparing a second number of their literary almanac, Pole Star. They obtained Pushkin’s permission to include some of his verses which had been circulating in manuscript in St Petersburg, and others which they had obtained from Tumansky. When the almanac came out in December, Pushkin was horrified to discover that the final three lines of ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, the coded reference to Ekaterina which he had specifically asked Bestuzhev not to include, had in fact been printed. ‘It makes me sad to see that I am treated like a dead person, with no respect for my wishes or my miserable possessions,’ he wrote reproachfully to Bestuzhev. Worse was to follow. In February, just before the publication of the poem, he wrote to Bestuzhev again: ‘I am glad that my Fountain is making a stir. The absence of plan is not my fault. I reverentially put into verse a young woman’s tale, Aux douces loix des vers je pliais les accents/De sa bouche aimable et naïve.† By the way, I wrote it only for myself, but am publishing it because I need money.’41 As with previous letters to Bestuzhev, he addressed this care of Nikolay Grech. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of Faddey Bulgarin – a close associate of Grech, and from 1825 co-editor, with him, of Son of the Fatherland – who shamelessly printed an extract from it in his paper, Literary Leaves, adding that it was taken from a letter of the author to one of his St Petersburg friends. Anyone who knew of Pushkin’s visit to the Crimea could make an intelligent guess at the possessor of the ‘lovable and naïve mouth’; even worse, however, were the conclusions Ekaterina herself might draw. ‘I once fell head over heels in love,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev later that year. ‘In such cases I usually write elegies, as another has wet dreams. But is it a friendly act to hang out my soiled sheets for show? God forgive you, but you shamed me in the current Star – printing the last 3 lines of my elegy; what the devil possessed me apropos of the Bakhchisaray fountain also to write some sentimental lines and mention my elegiac beauty there. Picture my despair, when I saw them printed – the journal could fall into her hands. What would she think of me, seeing with what eagerness I chat about her with one of my Petersburg friends. How can she know that she is not named by me, that the letter was unsealed and printed by Bulgarin – that the devil knows who delivered the damned Elegy to you – and that no one is to blame. I confess that I value just one thought of this woman more than the opinions of all the journals in the world and of all our public.’42

As with The Prisoner, Pushkin’s new narrative poem was eagerly anticipated in literary circles: before publication it was being read everywhere, and even manuscript copies were circulating in St Petersburg – much to Pushkin’s annoyance, since he feared this would affect sales. ‘Pletnev tells me The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is in everyone’s hands. Thank you, my friends, for your gracious care for my fame!’ he wrote sarcastically to Lev, whom he deemed responsible.43 His fears proved unjustified. Having seen the poem through the censorship, Vyazemsky had it printed in Moscow at a cost of 500 roubles, and then began negotiations to sell the entire print-run jointly to two booksellers, Shiryaev in Moscow and Smirdin in St Petersburg. ‘How I have sold the Fountain!’ he exulted to Bestuzhev in March. ‘Three thousand roubles for 1,200 copies for a year, and I’m paid for all printing costs. This is in the European style and deserves to be known.’44 He saw to it that it was by contributing an article about the sale to the April number of News of Literature: ‘For a line of The Fountain of Bakhchisaray more has been paid than has ever been paid previously for any Russian verse.’ The book-seller had gained ‘the grateful respect of the friends of culture by valuing a work of the mind not according to its size or weight’.45 Shalikov, in the Ladies’ Journal, did the calculation and came out with the figure of eight roubles a line. Bulgarin, too, commented on the transaction in Literary Leaves, while the Russian Invalid remarked patriotically that it was a ‘proof that not in England alone and not the English alone pay with a generous hand for elegant works of poetry’.46