Pushkin

Shakhovskoy entertained most evenings after the theatre, and Pushkin became a constant visitor to these Bohemian revels, remembering one occasion as ‘one of the best evenings of my life’.31 Vasily Pushkin was saddened when he heard of the visits; he remained true to the hostile view of Shakhovskoy taken by Arzamas. ‘Shakhovskoy is still in Moscow,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in April 1819. ‘He told me that my nephew visited him practically every day. I said nothing, but only sighed quietly.’32 The main attraction of the garret lay perhaps not so much in the personality of the host, as in the presence of young actresses, in whose careers Shakhovskoy took a paternal interest, assisting them not only by instruction in elocution, but also by bringing them together with rich young officers. ‘He is really a good chap, a tolerable author and an excellent pander,’ Pushkin commented to Vyazemsky.33 In 1825 the playwright Griboedov, another of Pushkin’s colleagues at the Foreign Office, wrote to a friend: ‘For a long time I lived in seclusion from all, then suddenly had an urge to go out into the world, and where should I go, if not to Shakhovskoy’s? There at least one’s bold hand can rove over the swan’s down of sweet bosoms etc.’34

At the garret Pushkin met the nineteen-year-old actress Elena Sosnitskaya, to whose album he contributed a quatrain:

With coldness of heart you have contrived to unite

The wondrous heat of captivating eyes.

He who loves you is, of course, a fool;

But he who loves you not is a hundred times more foolish.35

‘In my youth, when she really was the beautiful Helen,’ he later remarked, ‘I nearly fell into her net, but came to my senses and got off with a poem.’36 He was also seduced by the more mature charms of the singer Nimfodora Semenova, then thirty-one, more renowned for her appearance than her voice: ‘I would wish to be, Semenova, your coverlet,/Or the dog that sleeps upon your bed,’ he sighed.37 More serious was his infatuation – despite the fact that she was thirteen years his senior – with Nimfodora’s elder sister, the tragic actress Ekaterina Semenova. The essay ‘My Remarks on the Russian Theatre’, composed in 1820, though purporting to be a general survey of the state of the theatre, is merely an excuse for praising Semenova. ‘Speaking of Russian tragedy, one speaks of Semenova and, perhaps, only of her. Gifted with talent, beauty, and a lively and true feeling, she formed herself […] Semenova has no rival […] she remains the autocratic queen of the tragic stage.’38 He bestowed the manuscript on her. Somewhat unfeelingly she immediately handed it on to her dramatic mentor, Gnedich, who noted on it: ‘This piece was written by A. Push-kin, when he was pursuing, unsuccessfully, Semenova, who gave it to me then.’39

Semenova had, however, a stage rival: the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kolosova, who made her debut at the Bolshoy on 16 December 1818 as Antigone in Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus in Athens. The following Easter Pushkin, who had admired her demure beauty at the Good Friday service in a church near the Bolshoy, made her acquaintance. But he naturally took Semenova’s side in the rivalry, all the more as he fancied Kolosova had slighted his attentions: she should ‘occupy herself less with aide-de-camps of his imperial majesty and more with her roles’. ‘All fell asleep,’ he added, at a performance of Racine’s Esther (translated by Katenin), on 8 December, in which she took the title role.40 ‘Everything in Esther captivates us’ begins an epigram; her speech, her gait, her hair, voice, hand, brows, and ‘her enormous feet!’41

When Eugene enters the theatre Evdokiya Istomina, the great beauty among the ballet-dancers, is on the stage:

Brilliant, half-ethereal,

Obedient to the violin’s magic bow,

Surrounded by a crowd of nymphs,

Stands Istomina; she

Touching the floor with one foot,

Slowly gyrates the other,

And suddenly jumps, and suddenly flies,

Flies, like fluff from Aeolus’s lips;

Now bends, now straightens,

And with one quick foot the other beats.

(I, xx)

Pushkin pursued her too, but with less zeal than Semenova: he was only one of a crowd of admirers. An amusing sketch, executed by Olenin’s son, Aleksey, shows a scene at Priyutino: a dog, with the head and neck of the dark-haired Istomina, is surrounded by a host of dog admirers with the heads of Pushkin, Gnedich, Krylov and others.42

Another visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret was Nikita Vsevolozhsky, Pushkin’s coeval, a passionate theatre-goer, ‘the best of the momentary friends of my momentary youth’.* 43 He was the son of Vsevolod Vsevolozhsky, known, for his wealth, as ‘the Croesus of St Petersburg’, who, after the death of his wife in 1810, had caused a long-lasting scandal in society by taking to live with him a married woman, Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya. The injured husband, Petr Khovansky, complained publicly of the insult done to him, and went so far as to petition the emperor for the return of his wife, but without success. In the end, financially ruined, he was forced to accept Vsevolozhsky’s charity, and lived with the family until his death. To complicate the situation further, Nikita Vsevolozhsky later married Khovansky’s daughter, Princess Varvara. Pushkin, intrigued by the family history, in 1834–5 planned to incorporate it in a projected novel entitled A Russian Pelham. Vsevolozhsky, who received a large income from his father, had an apartment near the Bolshoy and a mistress, the ballet-dancer Evdokiya Ovoshnikova. ‘You remember Pushkin,’ runs a letter of 1824, ‘Pushkin, who sobered you up on Good Friday and led you by the hand to the church of the theatre management so that you could pray to the Lord God and gaze to your heart’s content at Mme Ovoshnikova.’44

In March 1819 Vsevolozhsky set up a small theatrical-literary society among his friends. It met fortnightly, in a room at his apartment, and became known as the Green Lamp after the colour of the lamp-shade. Besides Pushkin and Vsevolozhsky the members included Delvig, Nikolay Gnedich, Nikita’s elder brother, Aleksandr, Fedor Glinka, Arkady Rodzyanko, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Jägers, and a poet whose work is an odd mixture of high-minded poems on civic themes and pornographic verse: Pushkin later dubbed him ‘the Piron of the Ukraine’45 (a reference to the seventeenth-century French poet Alexis Piron, author of the licentious Ode to Priapus); and another ‘momentary friend’ of this period, Pavel Mansurov, an ensign in the Life Guards Jäger Horse, who, after his marriage to Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya, became Vsevolozhsky’s brother-in-law.†

The tone of Pushkin’s relationship with Mansurov – and hence with most of the Green Lamp’s members – is conveyed by a verse epistle in which Pushkin urges his ‘bosom friend’ to persevere in his pursuit of the young ballerina Mariya Krylova, then still a pupil at the Theatre Academy, for

soon with happy hand

She will throw off the school uniform,

Will lie down before you on the velvet

And will spread her legs;46

and by a letter written to Mansurov after the latter had been posted to Novgorod province:

Are you well, my joy; are you enjoying yourself, my delight – do you remember us, your friends (of the male sex) … We have not forgotten you and at 1/2 past seven every day in the theatre we remember you with applause and sighs – and say: our darling Pavel! What is he doing now in great Novgorod? Envying us – and weeping about Krylova (with the lower orifice, naturally). Each morning the winged maiden* flies to rehearsal past our Nikita’s windows, as before telescopes rise to her and pricks too – but alas … you cannot see her, she cannot see you. Let’s abandon elegies, my friend. I’ll tell you about us in historical fashion. Everything is as before; the champagne, thank God, is healthy – the actresses too – the one is drunk, the others are fucked – amen, amen. That’s how it ought to be. Yurev’s clap is cured, thank God – I’m developing a small case […] Tolstoy is ill – I won’t say with what – as it is I already have too much clap in my letter. The Green Lamp’s wick needs trimming – it might go out – and that would be a pity – there is oil (i.e. our friend’s champagne).47

The note struck here suggests that the Green Lamp was a Russian version of the Hell-fire Club. This was certainly the view taken by earlier biographers of Pushkin, Annenkov, for example, writing: ‘Researches and investigations into this group revealed that it … consisted of nothing more than an orgiastic society.’48 Unfortunately, the reality was somewhat less than orgiastic. Though no doubt a good deal of champagne and other wines was consumed during and after the meetings – Küchelbecker puritanically refused to join, ‘on account of the intemperance in the use of drink, which apparently prevailed there’49 – and the younger members were in constant pursuit of actresses and ballerinas, the actual proceedings of the society were of a more serious nature.

One of the policies of the Supreme Council of the Union of Welfare was to ‘set up private societies. These, directed by one or two members of the Union, whose existence was not revealed to the societies, did not form part of the Union. No political aim was intended for them, and the only benefit that was hoped for was that, guided by their founders or heads, they could, especially through their activity in literature, art and the like, further the achievement of the aim of the Supreme Council.’50 Besides Trubetskoy, three other members of the society were Decembrists: Tolstoy, the usual president at its meetings, Glinka and Tokarev; and there is no doubt that under their direction the Green Lamp became a society of this type. Its name, fortuitously chosen, came to have emblematic significance; Tolstoy, in his deposition to the Committee of Investigation in 1826, remarked that it ‘concealed an ambiguous meaning and the motto of the society consisted of the words: Light and Hope; moreover rings were also made on which a lamp was engraved; each member was obliged to wear one of these rings.’51 Pushkin used his to seal his letter to Mansurov. Rodzyanko later remarked that at each meeting ‘were read verses against the emperor and against the government’,52 and Tolstoy speaks of ‘some republican verses and other fragments’.53 But it was never a political society with a definite programme and specific aims. It was, however, a secret society, in that its existence had not been officially sanctioned, and its members were hence to some extent at risk, given the climate of the time: a fact which brought about its dissolution at the end of 1820.

The meetings usually opened with a review, hastily written by Barkov, of the theatre production its members had witnessed that evening. Then followed contributions from those present. On 17 April 1819, for example, Delvig read his poems ‘Fanny’ – addressed to a prostitute he and Pushkin frequented – and ‘To a Child’; Ulybyshev followed with a political article; a fable by Zhadovsky, two poems by Dolgorukov, and one by Tolstoy ended the proceedings. Only two contributions by Pushkin are listed in the – incomplete – records of the society. Of these the more interesting – and the better poem – is the verse epistle to Vsevolozhsky on the latter’s departure for Moscow, read on 27 November 1819. Urging his friend to avoid high society there, he imagines a far more congenial scene:

In the foaming goblet froths

Ay’s cold stream;

In the thick smoke of lazy pipes,

In dressing-gowns, your new friends

Shout and drink!54

Like Arzamas, the Green Lamp provided Pushkin with a ready-made circle of friends, though in the majority of cases his intimacy with them was confined to this period of his life. They were, however, closer to him in age than the Arzamasites, and shared the tastes and predilections which governed his life in these years. Whereas his elder friends sighed over his behaviour and saw him as wasting his talent – Aleksandr Turgenev told Zhukovsky that he daily scolded Pushkin for ‘his laziness and neglect of his own education’, to which ‘he had added a taste for vulgar philandering and equally vulgar eighteenth-century freethinking’55 – the members of the Green Lamp were companions in his amusements: drinking, whoring and gambling. As with Arzamas, his loyalty to the group persisted in exile; in 1821 he looked back nostalgically at its meetings:

Do you still burn, our lamp,

Friend of vigils and of feasts?

Do you still foam, golden cup,

In the hands of merry wits?

Are you still the same, friends of mirth,

Friends of Cypris and of verse?

Do the hours of love, the hours of drunkenness

Still fly to the call

Of Freedom, indolence and idleness?56

Pushkin’s tastes were not wholly identical with those of Eugene: ‘I am always glad to note the difference/Between Onegin and myself’, he remarks, in case some ‘sarcastic reader’ should imagine that, like Byron, he is painting his own portrait (I, lvi). One vice Eugene did not share was Pushkin’s addiction to gambling.

Passion for bank! neither the love of liberty,

Nor Phoebus, nor friendship, nor feasts

Could have distracted me in past years

From cards.57

So he described, in a cancelled stanza of the second chapter of Eugene Onegin, himself during the years in St Petersburg. It was an addiction, moreover, not confined to this period, as he here implies, but which lasted throughout his life. The game to which he was addicted – which was also Casanova’s passion – was bank, also known as faro (or pharo, originally le pharaon) or shtoss, a descendant of lansquenet, the game played by d’Artagnan and the musketeers on the bastion at La Rochelle while under Huguenot fire, and of basset, the favourite card-game at the court of Charles II. Each player chose a card from his pack, placed it either face-up or face-down – in the latter case it was known as a ‘dark’ card – in front of him on the table and set his stake upon it. The banker, taking a fresh pack, turned the cards up from the top, dealing them alternately to his right and left, stopping momentarily if a player called out attendez, in order to make or reconsider a bet. If a card which fell to the right was of the same denomination as one on which a stake had been placed the banker won; he lost, and paid out the amount of the stake, when such a card fell to the left. If both cards exposed in one turn were the same, a player wagering on that denomination lost either half, or the whole of his stake, depending on the rules in force at the game. Having won once, the player could then cock his card – turn up one corner – to wager both his original stake and his gains: this was known as a parolet; or bend the card, to bet only his gains. This was a paix, or parolet-paix, if he had just won a parolet. After winning a parolet, he could cock another corner, to double his winnings again (sept-et-le-va), followed by a third (quinze-et-le-va) and a fourth (trente-et-le-va).58

Pushkin gambled constantly, and as constantly lost, as a result having to resort to money-lenders. He played frequently with Nikita Vsevolozhsky, whose deep pockets enabled him to bear his losses. Pushkin, less fortunate, was compelled to stake his manuscripts, and in 1820 lost to Vsevolozhsky a collection of poems which he valued at 1,000 roubles. When, four years later, he was preparing to publish his verse, he employed his brother Lev to buy the manuscript back. Vsevolozhsky generously asked for only 500 roubles in exchange, but Pushkin insisted that the full amount should be paid. ‘The second chapter of “Onegin”/ Modestly slid down [i.e., was lost] upon an ace,’ Ivan Velikopolsky, an old St Petersburg acquaintance, recorded in 1826, adding elsewhere: ‘the long nails of the poet/Are no defence against the misfortunes of play.’59 And in December of the same year, when Pushkin was staying at a Pskov inn to recover after having been overturned in a carriage on the road from Mikhailovskoe, he told Vyazemsky that ‘instead of writing the 7th chapter of Onegin, I am losing the fourth at shtoss: it’s not funny’.60 Another favourite opponent at the card-table was Vasily Engelhardt, described by Vyazemsky as ‘an extravagant rich man, who did not neglect the pleasures of life, a deep gambler, who, however, during his life seems to have lost more than he won’. ‘Pushkin was very fond of Engelhardt,’ he adds, ‘because he was always ready to play cards, and very felicitously played on words.’61 In July 1819, having recovered from a serious illness – ‘I have escaped from Aesculapius/Thin and shaven – but alive’ – Pushkin, who was leaving for Mikhailovskoe to convalesce, in a verse epistle begged Engelhardt, ‘Venus’s pious worshipper’, to visit him before his departure.62

The cold he had caught while, as Turgenev reported, standing outside a prostitute’s door, had turned into a more serious illness – it seems likely to have been typhus. On 25 June his uncle wrote from Moscow to Vyazemsky in Warsaw: ‘Pity our poet Pushkin. He is ill with a severe fever. My brother is in despair, and I am extremely concerned by such sad news.’63 James Leighton, the emperor’s personal physician, was called in. He prescribed baths of ice and had Pushkin’s head shaved. After six weeks’ illness Pushkin recovered, but had to wear a wig while his own hair grew again. This was not Pushkin’s only illness, though it was the most severe, during these years in the unhealthy – both in climate and amusements – atmosphere of St Petersburg. Besides a series of venereal infections, he was also seriously ill in January 1818: ‘Our poet Aleksandr was desperately ill, but, thank God, is now better,’ Vasily Pushkin informed Vyazemsky.64 During this illness Elizaveta Schott-Schedel, a St Petersburg demi-mondaine, had visited him dressed as an hussar officer, which apparently contributed to his recovery. ‘Was it you, tender maiden, who stood over me/In warrior garb with pleasing gaucherie?’ he wonders, pleading with her to return now he is convalescent:

Appear, enchantress! Let me again glimpse

Beneath the stern shako your heavenly eyes,

And the greatcoat, and the belt of battle,

And the legs adorned with martial boots.65

‘Pushkin has taken to his bed,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote the following February;66 a year later, in February 1820, he was laid up yet again. Unpleasant though the recurrent maladies were, the periods of convalescence that followed afforded him the leisure to read and compose: he can have had little time for either in the frenetic pursuit of pleasure that was his life when healthy. The first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State had come out at the beginning of February 1818. ‘I read them in bed with avidity and attention,’ Pushkin wrote. ‘The appearance of this work (as was fitting) was a great sensation and produced a strong impression. 3,000 copies were sold in a month (Karamzin himself in no way expected this) – a unique happening in our country. Everyone, even society women, rushed to read the History of their Fatherland, previously unknown to them. It was a new revelation for them. Ancient Russia seemed to have been discovered by Karamzin, as America by Columbus.’67

The friendship between Pushkin and the Karamzins, begun at Tsarskoe Selo, had continued in St Petersburg. During the winter of 1817–18 he was a frequent visitor to the apartment they had taken in the capital on Zakharevskaya Street; at the end of June 1818 he stayed with them for three days at Peterhof, sketched a portrait of Karamzin, and, with him, Zhukovsky and Aleksandr Turgenev went for a sail on the Gulf of Finland. He was in Peterhof again in the middle of July, and, when the Karamzins moved back to their lodging in Tsarskoe Selo, visited them three times in September. At the beginning of October they took up residence in St Petersburg for the winter, staying this time with Ekaterina Muraveva on the Fontanka. Pushkin visited them soon after their arrival, but then the intimacy suddenly ceased: apart from two short meetings at Tsarskoe Selo in August 1819 there is no trace of any lengthy encounter until the spring of 1820. During this period Pushkin composed a biting epigram on Karamzin’s work:

In his ‘History’ elegance and simplicity

Disinterestedly demonstrate to us

The necessity for autocracy

And the charm of the knout.68

Shortly after Karamzin’s death on 22 May 1826 Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoe: ‘You know the sad cause of my journey to Petersburg. Although you are a knave and have occasionally sinned with epigrams against Karamzin, in order to extract a smile from rascals and cads, without doubt you mourn his death with your heart and mind.’* ‘Your short letter distresses me for many reasons,’ Pushkin replied on 10 July. ‘Firstly, what do you mean by my epigrams against Karamzin? There was only one, written at a time when Karamzin had put me from himself, deeply wounding both my self-esteem and my heartfelt attachment to him. Even now I cannot think of this without emotion. My epigram was witty and in no way insulting, but the others, as far as I know, were stupid and violent: surely you don’t ascribe them to me? Secondly. Who are you calling rascals and cads? Oh, my dear chap … you hear an accusation and make up your mind without hearing the justification: that’s Jeddart justice. If even Vyazemsky already etc., what about the rest? It’s sad, old man, so sad, one might as well straightaway put one’s head in a noose.’69

The ‘rascals and cads’ of Vyazemsky’s letter are the Decembrists. Their trial had opened a month earlier, on 3 June: no wonder he should sadly reproach Vyazemsky for prematurely passing sentence on them. However, as his letter makes clear, though the epigram is a political attack, his rejection by Karamzin was on personal, not political grounds. In April 1820 Karamzin wrote to Dmitriev, ‘Having exhausted all means of knocking sense into his dissolute head, I already long ago abandoned the unfortunate fellow to Fate and to Nemesis.’70 What wounded Pushkin so deeply was an unsparing castigation of his follies, followed by banishment into outer darkness.

The performance at the Bolshoy has ended, and Eugene hurries home to change into ‘pantaloons, dress-coat, waistcoat’ (I, xxvi) – probably a brass-buttoned, blue coat with velvet collar and long tails, white waistcoat and blue nankeen pantaloons or tights, buttoning at the ankle – before speeding in a hackney carriage to a ball. This has already begun; the first dance, the polonaise, and the second, the waltz, have taken place; the mazurka, the central event of the ball, is in full swing and will be followed by the final dance, a cotillion.

The ballroom’s full;

The music’s already tired of blaring;

The crowd is busy with the mazurka;

Around it’s noisy and a squash;

The spurs of a Chevalier guardsman jingle;*

The little feet of darling ladies fly;

After their captivating tracks

Fly fiery glances,

And by the roar of violins are drowned

The jealous whispers of modish wives.

(I, xxviii)

‘In the days of gaieties and desires/I was crazy about balls’ (I, xxix), wrote Pushkin: for the furtherance of amorous intrigue they were supreme. He was simultaneously both highly idealistic and deeply cynical in his view of and attitude towards women. In a letter to his brother, written from Moldavia in 1822, full of sage and prudent injunctions on how Lev should conduct his life – none of which Pushkin himself observed – he remarked: ‘What I have to say to you with regard to women would be perfectly useless. I will only point out to you that the less one loves a woman, the surer one is of possessing her. But this pleasure is worthy of an old 18th-century monkey.’71 Though he fell violently in love, repeatedly, and at the least excuse, he never forgot that the objects of his passion belonged to a sex of which he held no very high opinion. ‘Women are everywhere the same. Nature, which has given them a subtle mind and the most delicate sensibility, has all but denied them a sense of the beautiful. Poetry glides past their hearing without reaching their soul; they are insensitive to its harmonies; remark how they sing fashionable romances, how they distort the most natural verses, deranging the metre and destroying the rhyme. Listen to their literary opinions, and you will be amazed by the falsity, even coarseness of their understanding … Exceptions are rare.’72 The hero of the unfinished A Novel in Letters echoes these views. ‘I have been often astonished by the obtuseness in understanding and the impurity of imagination of ladies who in other respects are extremely amiable. Often they take the most subtle of witticisms, the most poetic of greetings, either as an impudent epigram or a vulgar indecency. In such a case the cold aspect they assume is so appallingly repulsive that the most ardent love cannot withstand it.’73