Pushkin

Though Pushkin claimed to be able to trace his ancestry on the paternal side back to the times of Alexander Nevsky,* the first to bear the family name was Konstantin Pushkin, born in the early fifteenth century, the younger son of a Grigory Pushka. There is a direct line of descent from him to the poet. From this time to the seventeenth century the Pushkins were a minor boyar family whose members never wielded great influence or occupied high positions in the state. They played, however, a lively part during the Time of Troubles (1584–1613), when one Gavrila Pushkin was a prominent supporter of the Pretender Dmitry. Pushkin put him into his historical drama Boris Godunov, remarking, ‘Finding in history one of my ancestors, who played an important role in that unhappy epoch, I brought him on the stage, without worrying about the delicacies of propriety, con amore, but without aristocratic conceit.’11 But a decline in importance set in during the reign of Peter the Great. By the Table of Ranks, promulgated in 1722, an hierarchical system of rank, consisting of fourteen grades, was imposed on the military, civil and court services. Those in the first eight grades automatically became gentry: henceforth, therefore, social position was to be determined not by birth, but by rank. The more powerful aristocratic families were little affected, but the less important, such as the Pushkins, were submerged in the influx of the newly ennobled. During the eighteenth century no member of the family achieved distinction in any field, though family tradition erroneously maintained that Aleksey Fedorovich Pushkin, Mariya’s father, had been voevoda (governor) of Tambov.

Lev Pushkin, the poet’s paternal grandfather, served in the artillery, reaching the rank of major, before retiring in 1763. He settled in Moscow, in a large house on the Bozhedomka (now Delegatsky Street), in the northern suburbs. The grounds covered nearly fifteen acres, running down to an orangery and large fish-pond, formed by damming up the Neglinnaya River. By his first wife he had three children, and his second, Olga Vasilevna (née Chicherina), was to give him four more: Anna, Vasily, Sergey, and Elizaveta. As was the custom, Vasily and Sergey were entered for the army at a very early age: Vasily was seven and Sergey six when their names first appeared in the list. Actual service with the regiment – the Izmailovsky Life Guards – began much later: for Sergey at the end of the 1780s. He was promoted to ensign in 1794, to lieutenant in 1796, and in 1797 transferred to the chasseur battalion with the rank of captain-lieutenant. Both brothers left the army in the autumn of 1797. Neither was cut out for military service, but it is likely that their retirement was brought about by the changes introduced by the Emperor Paul, who had come to the throne the previous year. A military tyrant and pedant, he forced a tight Prussian uniform on the army; would arbitrarily consign officers to Siberia for a minor fault on parade; and repeatedly threatened to banish fashionable regiments such as the Izmailovsky from St Petersburg to the provinces. The brothers, together with their young wives, both metropolitan beauties, all of whom adored the social whirl, would have viewed with horror the prospect of exile to some dull provincial backwater.

In 1834 Pushkin, looking back with nostalgia on the Moscow of his childhood, before the fire of 1812, wrote:

At one time there really was a rivalry between Moscow and Petersburg. Then in Moscow there were rich nobles who did not work, grandees who had given up the court, and independent, carefree individuals, passionately devoted to harmless slander and inexpensive hospitality; then Moscow was the gathering place for all Russia’s aristocracy, which streamed to it in winter from every province. Brilliant young guardsmen flew thither from Petersburg. Every corner of the ancient capital was loud with music, there were crowds everywhere. Five thousand people filled the hall of the Noble Assembly twice a week. There the young met; marriages were made. Moscow was as famous for its brides as Vyazma for its gingerbread; Moscow dinners became a proverb. The innocent eccentricities of the Muscovites were a sign of their independence. They lived their own lives, amusing themselves as they liked, caring little for the opinion of others. One rich eccentric might build himself on one of the main streets a Chinese house with green dragons and with wooden mandarins under gilded parasols. Another might drive to Marina Roshcha in a carriage covered with pure silver plate. A third might mount five or so blackamoors, footmen and attendants on the rumble of a four-seat sleigh and drive it tandem along the summer street. Alamode belles appropriated Petersburg fashions, putting their indelible imprint on them. From afar haughty Petersburg mocked, but did not interfere with old mother Moscow’s escapades. But where has this noisy, idle, carefree life gone? Where are the balls, the feasts, the eccentrics, the practical jokers? All have vanished.12

He could have mentioned, too, the classically laid-out Yusupov garden, open to the ‘respectable public’, with its alleys and round pond, marble statues and grotto, where he played as a child; the private theatres with troupes of serf actors; or the ‘magic castle’, the Pashkov mansion on Mokhovaya Street, whose garden, full of exotic birds at large or in gilded cages, was known as ‘Eden’: at night it was lit by lanterns, and a private orchestra played there on feast-days.13

For Pushkin’s parents social life was infinitely preferable to the tedium of domesticity. Nadezhda was the dominant partner. Beautiful, charming, frivolous and – outwardly at least – always good-humoured, she was strong-willed and could be despotic, both to her husband and her children. She was cool towards Pushkin, preferring first Olga, then his younger brother Lev. When angry, she sometimes would not speak to him for weeks, or even months. Once, annoyed by his habit of rubbing his hands together, she tied them behind his back and starved him for a day; since he was always losing his handkerchiefs, she sewed one to the shoulder of his jacket like an epaulette, and forced him to wear the garment in public.

She was incurably restless: never satisfied with her surroundings, she drove the family from lodging to lodging, or, if a move was impossible, continually moved the furniture and changed the wallpapers, turning a bedroom into a dining-room, a study into a drawing-room. On returning to Moscow they lodged in P.M. Volkov’s house on the corner of Chistoprudny Boulevard and Bolshoy Kharitonevsky Lane: here Pushkin’s brother Nikolay was born on 27 March 1801. A year later they moved up the lane into a wooden house on Prince N.B. Yusupov’s property, where they stayed for a year and a half; then, forfeiting six months’ rent, in the summer of 1803, they moved down the lane again into accommodation belonging to Count A.L. Santi. ‘It is difficult to understand,’ one historian writes, ‘how the Pushkins managed to fit into the cramped confines of Santi’s court; Santi had up to sixteen house serfs, Sergey Lvovich from four to thirteen; besides them in the court lived the civil servant Petrov and the district surveyor Fedotov, while another of Santi’s serfs, the women’s dressmaker Berezinsky, squeezed in somewhere.’14 Nevertheless, the Pushkins remained there over two years; here Lev was born on 9 April 1805. But, before Pushkin left for boarding-school in 1811, they would move eight more times, criss-crossing Moscow from east to west and back again.

Sergey, Pushkin’s father, was short and stout, with a nose like a parrot’s beak. He was a weak character, easily dominated by his more forceful wife, and inclined to lachrymose emotional outbursts. At the same time he was hot-tempered and irritable, and would fly into rages at the slightest provocation, with the result that his children feared, rather than loved him. He had a poor head for finances, knew nothing of his estates – he visited Boldino, his property in Nizhny Novgorod province, twice in his lifetime – and refused to have anything to do with their management: everything was left in the hands of inefficient or dishonest stewards. His income was consequently insecure and continually decreased. Though, like his father, he was hospitable to his friends, he showed a remarkable lack of generosity towards his children and took little interest in them. He was fond of French literature, and an inveterate theatre-goer, but his main preoccupation was his social life. He was at his best in some salon, elaborately polite and delicately witty, throwing off a stream of French puns, or inscribing elegant sentiments in French verse or prose in ladies’ albums.

In January 1802, after the death of the Emperor Paul, he had returned to government service, taking up a post in the Moscow military commissariat. In 1812, when Napoleon approached Moscow, he was transferred to Orel, and given the task of organizing supplies for a reserve army under the command of General Lobanov-Rostovsky. The latter, a hot-tempered and ruthless disciplinarian, soon found fault with him, and in February 1813 requested the head of the commissariat, ‘for neglect of duty and disobedience of my instructions, to remove Pushkin from his present position as incompetent and incapable and to reprimand him severely’.15 At this time the Russian armies had begun to move rapidly westwards, and it was not until the following year, when they stood outside Warsaw, that Sergey was relieved of his command: his successor found him reading a French novel in his office. He retired with the rank of civil councillor in January 1817.

The gap left in the children’s lives by the parents’ lack of attention was filled by their grandmother, Mariya Gannibal. At the beginning of 1801 she moved to Moscow and settled close to the Pushkins. She spent most of each day with her grandchildren and from 1805 lived with the family. She took over the running of the house and saw to the education of the children, teaching them their letters, and engaging governesses and tutors for them. In 1800 Nadezhda had sold Kobrino, no longer useful as a summer residence after the move to Moscow. One of the women on the estate, Arina Rodionovna, though freed from serfdom, had preferred to come to Moscow and become Olga’s nurse. She introduced the children to the world of Russian legends and fairy-tales, while Mariya related family history to them:

From my Moscow grandmother I love

To hear stories of ancestors,

And of the distant past.16

In early childhood Pushkin was an excessively plump, silent infant, clumsy and awkward, who hated taking exercise, and, if forced to go for a walk, would often sit down in the middle of the street in protest. His character and physique changed markedly around the age of seven. In November 1804 Mariya Gannibal bought Zakharovo, an estate of nearly two and a half thousand acres with sixty male serfs, situated some thirty miles to the east of Moscow. From 1805 to 1809 the family spent the summers there. Instead of the continual displacement from one rented apartment to another, Zakharovo provided relative permanency; instead of the cramped surroundings of a Moscow lodging, the children had separate quarters, where they lived with the current governess or tutor. And most of all, of course, instead of the Moscow streets or the confined expanse of the Yusupov gardens, there was the countryside, the large park with its lake, its alleys and groves of birches. In these new surroundings Pushkin became an active and mischievous child, at times difficult to control. Here, in the summer of 1807, the six-year-old Nikolay fell severely ill – though he was still able to put his tongue out at Pushkin when the latter visited his sickbed. However, his condition worsened, and he died on 30 July. Pushkin was much affected by the loss: ‘Nikolay’s death’ is one of the few notes relating to this period in a sketchy autobiographical plan he drew up in 1830.17

As was usual at the time, the education of Olga and Aleksandr was entrusted to a series of foreign émigrés, who had in most cases little to recommend them as teachers other than their nationality and whom, for the most part, the children disliked. Their first tutor was the Comte de Montfort, a man of some culture, a musician and artist; he was followed by M. Rousselot, who wrote French verse, and then by a M. Chédel, of whom little is known other than that he was sacked for playing cards with the servants. Miss Bailey, one of Olga’s governesses, was supposed to teach them English, but failed to do so, while a German governess refused to speak any language except Russian. They went to dancing classes at their cousins, the Buturlins, on Malaya Pochtovaya Street, at the Trubetskoys, also cousins, on the Pokrovka, and at the Sushkovs, on the Bolshaya Molchanovka – their daughter, Sonya, a year younger than Pushkin, is supposed to have been the object of his first love. On Thursdays they went to the children’s dances arranged by the celebrated Moscow dancing master Iogel.*

From early years Pushkin had a passion for reading; by ten, according to his sister, he had read Plutarch, the Iliad and the Odyssey in French, and would rummage among his father’s books – mainly consisting of French eighteenth-century authors – in search of interesting volumes. The atmosphere in their house was a cultured, literary one. Sergey read Molière to the children and wrote French verse; his brother, Vasily, was an established poet, published in periodicals, and acquainted with many of the authors of the day, including Karamzin, Zhukovsky and Batyushkov; a more distant relative, Major-General Aleksey Mikhailovich Pushkin, who had translated Molière, was a frequent guest. Among the regular visitors to Nadezhda’s salon were Ivan Dmitriev, the poet and fabulist, Minister of Justice from 1810 to 1814, an unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Sergey’s sister Anna; the ‘pretty, clever and talented’ French pianist Adélaide Percheron de Mouchy, later wife of the émigré Irish composer John Field;18 and the French novelist Count Xavier de Maistre, born in Savoy, who had followed Suvorov back to Russia after the Italian campaign of 1800 and had joined the Russian army.* An amateur artist, he painted a miniature of Nadezhda on ivory.

Perhaps one should not take too literally Sergey’s story that the six-year-old Pushkin abandoned his toys to sit listening to his father’s conversation with Karamzin, not taking his eyes from the visitor’s face, all the more so since Karamzin did not frequent the Pushkins; nor can one accept without reservation the remark of an earlier biographer, that the child ‘listened attentively to their judgements and conversation, knew the coryphaei of our literature not only through their works, but through their living speech, which expressed the character of each, and often involuntarily but indelibly impressed itself on the young mind’.19 But at the very least the atmosphere could not have been more favourable to the formation of the desire to write poetry: Pushkin would never have to struggle with the incomprehension of his family, or the view that the occupation of poet was not one to be taken seriously.

At seven he was found awake in bed late at night; when asked why he was not asleep, he replied that he was making up poems. At ten he improvised little comedies in French and performed them in front of his sister; one was hissed off the stage by the audience, and the author composed a self-critical epigram on the event:

‘Tell me, why was The Filcher

Hissed by the pit?’

‘Alas! it’s because the poor author

Filched it from Molière.’20

A little later, having discovered Voltaire, and read La Henriade, he composed a parodic emulation: La Tolyade, a comic-heroic poem in six cantos, depicting a battle between male and female dwarfs, the hero of which is King Dagobert’s dwarf Toly. Olga’s governess impounded the notebook containing the poem and showed it to the tutor, M. Chédel, who read the first few lines and laughed heartily. Pushkin burst into tears and in a rage threw the manuscript into the stove.

‘I’ve no idea what will become of my eldest grandson: he’s a clever boy and loves books, but he’s a bad student and rarely prepares his lessons properly,’ Mariya Gannibal told her friends.21 His dislike for his tutors was not conducive to diligence in any subject, but he found arithmetic particularly incomprehensible and, his sister recollected, ‘would weep bitter tears over the first four rules, especially that of division’.22 As the calculations scribbled here and there on his manuscripts demonstrate, the rules always remained something of a puzzle to him. Foreign tutors were, it was clear, not the answer to the problem of his education, and it was decided to send him to school. A private Jesuit boarding-school in St Petersburg was chosen, and in February 1811 Sergey and Nadezhda travelled to the capital to enter Pushkin as a pupil there. However, a family friend, Aleksandr Turgenev, suggested that the new Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, which was to open in the autumn, might be a more suitable establishment, all the more so as its director was to be Vasily Malinovsky: he and his brothers, Aleksey and Pavel, were well known to the Pushkins; indeed Pavel had been one of the witnesses at their marriage in 1796. These considerations were supported by a more practical one: while education at the Jesuit boarding-school would put a strain on the family’s finances, that at the Lycée would be free. On 1 March Sergey sent a petition to the Minister of Education, Count A.K. Razumovsky, requesting that A.S. Pushkin should be admitted to the Lycée, and stating that ‘he had been educated in his parents’ house, where he had acquired initial knowledge of the grammar of the Russian and French languages, of arithmetic, geography, history and drawing’.23

* Pulled down in 1837; the present church on the same site in what is now Bauman Square was finished in 1845.

* Abram’s origins are obscure. In a petition of 1742 he wrote, ‘I … am from Africa, of the high nobility there, was born in the town of Logon in the domain of my father, who besides had under him two other towns’ (Teletova, 170). And a short biography of Abram, written in German, probably in the late 1780s, by his son-in-law, Adam Rotkirch, asserts that he ‘was by birth an African Moor from Abyssinia’ (Rukoyu Pushkina, 43). Logon has hence traditionally been placed in Ethiopia. Recently, however, it has been identified with Logone, a town in the north-east corner of the present state of Cameroon: a conjecture which is more in agreement with the sparse evidence than the Ethiopian hypothesis (see Gnammankou, 19–26.) Though Pushkin had a translation of the German biography, he never refers to a specific region when writing of his ancestor’s origins, but remarks, for instance, that he was ‘stolen from the shores of Africa’ (VI, 530). However, his friend Aleksey Vulf mentions in his journal that on 15 September 1827 Pushkin showed him the first two chapters of The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, ‘in which the main character represents his great-grandfather Gannibal, the son of an Abyssinian emir, captured by the Turks’ (Lyubovny byt, I, 268).

* There is no h in the Russian alphabet; in transliteration g (or kh) is substituted for it. The assertion in Rotkirch’s biography that Abram’s princely father ‘proudly derived his descent in a direct line from the lineage of the renowned Hannibal, the terror of Rome’ (Rukoyu Pushkina, 43) is plainly ridiculous, though it might have suited Abram for this to be believed.

* This marriage would make Osip’s daughter, Nadezhda, and her husband, Sergey Pushkin, distant cousins, sharing a common ancestor: Petr Pushkin (1644–92), Nadezhda’s maternal great-great-grandfather and Sergey’s paternal great-grandfather.

* Alexander Nevsky (c.1220–63), canonized in 1547, was prince of Novgorod (1236–52), of Kiev (1246–52) and grand prince of Vladimir (1252–63).

* Tolstoy describes one of Iogel’s dances in War and Peace, book 2, part 1, chapter 12.

* Author of A Journey round My Room (1794), and younger brother of the more famous Joseph de Maistre, Sardinian ambassador in St Petersburg 1802–17, best known for his St Petersburg Dialogues [Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg] (1821).

2 THE LYCÉE 1811–17

In those days, when in the Lycée gardens

I serenely flourished,

Read Apuleius eagerly

But did not read Cicero,

In those days, in mysterious vales,

In spring, to the cry of swans,

Near waters gleaming in stillness,

The Muse began to visit me.

Eugene Onegin, VIII, i

IN 1710 PETER THE GREAT GRANTED to his consort Catherine an estate some fifteen miles to the south of Petersburg, a locality which later acquired the name Tsarskoe Selo – Tsar’s Village. Catherine replaced the old wooden mansion with a small stone palace, laid out a park and a vegetable garden, and constructed greenhouses, an orangery and a menagerie. On her death in 1727 the estate passed to her daughter Elizabeth, whose favourite residence it soon became. To begin with she lacked the means to improve it, but after her accession in 1741 she called on her architects to turn it into a Russian Versailles. In 1752–6 the palace was completely rebuilt by the Italian architect Rastrelli, who later designed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Rastrelli’s Catherine or Great Palace is a magnificent three-storey Baroque edifice with a façade of colossal length – 306 metres – and an immense cour d’honneur formed by a low, single-storeyed semi-circle of service buildings pierced by three fine wrought-iron gates. The park was laid out in the formal Dutch style, with ‘fish canals, avenues, neat bowers, alleys, espaliers, and “close boskets with mossy seats”’, and ornamented with pavilions and follies.1

Elizabeth was succeeded by Peter III, Peter the Great’s grandson, who ruled for only six months before being deposed and assassinated. His wife, the German princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who had changed her name on her conversion to Orthodoxy, then came to the throne as Catherine II. Her passion for Tsarskoe Selo was even greater than that of Elizabeth, and, like her predecessor, she completely changed the nature of the palace and its grounds. The Dutch style was swept away and the park recast in the English fashion. ‘I love to distraction these gardens in the English style – their curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes. My Anglomania predominates over my plutomania,’ she wrote to Voltaire in 1772.2 She employed as landscape gardener an Englishman, John Bush, head of a noted nursery garden at Hackney, who came out to Russia in the late 1770s. New dams and ponds were created, and the park wall replaced by a canal. ‘At the moment I have taken possession of mister Cameron, a Scot by nationality, a Jacobite by profession, a great designer nurtured by antiquities; together we are fashioning a terraced garden with baths beneath, a gallery above; that will be so beautiful, beautiful.’3 Cameron remodelled much of the interior of the Catherine Palace, built the famous Cameron Gallery: a large, covered Ionic terrace which juts out at right angles from the south-east corner of the palace, on the garden side, and added to the constructions in the park several examples of chinoiserie: a theatre, a bridge on whose balustrade sit four stone Chinamen with parasols, and a village – nineteen little houses surrounding a pagoda. His summer-house in the form of a granite pyramid was a memorial to Catherine’s favourite dogs, three English whippets: Sir Tom Anderson, Zemira and Duchesse, who are buried behind it, on the bank of a small stream. Catherine’s anglomania was catered for by the Marble Bridge, a copy of the Palladian bridge in the grounds at Wilton, and the red-brick Admiralty on the bank of the lake, built in the English Gothic style. The most prominent addition to Tsarskoe Selo in these years, however, was the severely classical Alexander Palace, built in 1792–6 to the designs of the Italian architect Quarenghi for Catherine’s grandson, the future Alexander I. Earlier, in 1789, she had employed a Russian architect, Neelov, to add a wing to the Great Palace for the accommodation of her grandchildren: this stands across the street from the north end of the main building, to which it is connected by a triple-bay arch. In 1811, after a complete renovation, it became the building of the Lycée. The ground floor was occupied by the domestic offices and staff apartments; the dining-room, sickbay, school office and teachers’ common-room were on the first floor; classrooms, reading-room, science laboratory and the school hall on the second; the third was divided into fifty small study-bedrooms with a central corridor, and the gallery over the arch became the library. Games were to be played on the Champ des Roses, so called because it had in Elizabeth’s time been bounded by wild rose bushes, in the south-western corner of the Catherine park. The palace swimming-pool, constructed for the empress’s grandsons in a grove near the Great Pond, with its two bright yellow wooden pavilions in the style of Louis XVI, was taken over by the school a little later. One of the houses built for court functionaries in the time of Elizabeth, on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Pevchesky Lane, just opposite the Lycée, was allotted to the school’s director, Malinovsky. A single-storey wing of this house became the school’s kitchen and bath-house.