Pushkin

3 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20

I: Literature and Politics

A weak and cunning ruler,

A balding fop, an enemy of labour,

Fortuitously favoured by Fame,

Reigned over us then.

Eugene Onegin, X, i

WHEN PUSHKIN ARRIVED in St Petersburg, he had just turned eighteen. This ‘ugly descendant of negroes’, as he called himself, was small in stature – just under five foot six.1 He had pale blue eyes, curly black hair, usually dishevelled, and extraordinarily long, claw-like fingernails – often dirty – of which he was inordinately proud. When the actress Aleksandra Kolosova – just sixteen when Pushkin met her in 1818 – tried to hold his hands so that her mother could punish him for some prank by ‘clipping his claws’, ‘he screamed loud enough to bring the house down, feigned sobs, groans, complained that we were insulting him, and reduced us to tears of laughter’.2 He promenaded the streets in a long black frock-coat ‘in the American style’ and silk top-hat ‘à la Bolivar’: funnel-shaped, with a wide, upturned brim, and carrying a heavy cane.* 3 In a pencil sketch he made as a guide to the illustrator of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, he depicts himself and Eugene leaning on the granite parapet of the Neva Embankment, gazing across at the Peter-Paul fortress. He is seen from behind: a shortish man in the Bolivar top-hat, with thick curly hair down to his shoulders, wearing tapering pantaloons and a frock-coat nipped at the waist, with two buttons in the small of the back and long, bell-shaped skirts. A note underneath instructs the illustrator that Pushkin should be made ‘good-looking’.* 4 Though often morose and silent in large gatherings, or among those he did not know well, in the company of his friends and intimates he displayed an extraordinary, superabundant liveliness and gaiety, combined with a continual restlessness. ‘He could never sit still for a minute,’ Kolosova wrote; ‘he would wriggle, jump up, sit somewhere else, rummage in my mother’s work-basket, tangle the balls of yarn in my embroidery, scatter my mother’s patience cards …’5

When Pushkin’s mother had moved to the capital in 1814 she had taken a seven-room apartment on the upper floor of a large house on the right, or north embankment of the Fontanka canal, near the Kalinkin Bridge. Now Pushkin moved into the apartment, joining his parents and the nineteen-year-old Olga. Lev had left the Lycée and moved to a St Petersburg boarding-school. The lodgings were in the Kolomna quarter, an unfashionable district, ‘neither metropolitan nor provincial […] here all is tranquillity and retirement, all the sediment of the capital’s traffic has settled here’.6 Pushkin came to feel some affection for the area, lodging the hero of The Bronze Horseman here, and making it the setting for his comic narrative poem The Little House in Kolomna. The apartment below the Pushkins was occupied by the Korffs, whose son, Modest, had been a fellow lycéen. According to him the Pushkins’ ‘lodging was always topsy-turvy; valuable antique furniture in one room, in another nothing but empty walls or a rush-bottomed chair; numerous, but ragged and drunken servants, fabulously unclean; decrepit coaches with emaciated nags, and a continual shortage of everything, from money to glasses. Whenever two or three extra people dined with them they always sent down to us, as neighbours, for cutlery and china.’7 Ashamed of the shabbiness of the apartment, Pushkin concealed his address from most of his acquaintance. Those given the entrée might find him in dishabille, as did Vasily Ertel, who was taken there by Delvig in February 1819. ‘We went up the stairs, the servant opened the door, and we entered the room. By the door stood a bed on which lay a young man in a striped Bokhara dressing-gown with a skull-cap on his head. Near the bed, on a table, lay papers and books. The room united the characteristics of the abode of a fashionable young man with the poetic disorder of a scholar.’8

On 13 June 1817, two days after arriving in St Petersburg, Pushkin, together with the other lycéens who had joined the Foreign Ministry, was presented to the Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. Two days later, at the ministry on the English Embankment, he took and signed an oath of allegiance, and was given the decrees of Peter the Great and Catherine II relating to the foreign service to read. From the beginning the sole attraction of the ministry was that it provided him with a rank in the civil service and a minimal income. There are no references to his work there in his correspondence; his attendance soon became desultory and his diligence non-existent: ‘I know nothing about [Pushkin],’ Engelhardt wrote in January 1818, ‘other than that he does nothing at the Ministry.’9 On 3 July he applied for leave until 15 September, to travel with his family to his mother’s estate at Mikhailovskoe. The journey of some 288 miles took three days, passing through Tsarskoe Selo, Luga, Porkhov, Bezhanitsa and Novorzhev, and producing an epigram:

There is in Russia the town of Luga

In the Petersburg region;

One could not imagine

A worse dump than this,

If there didn’t exist

My Novorzhev.10

In 1742 the Empress Elizabeth had made a large grant of land in the Pskov province to Abram Gannibal. This estate, some five thousand desyatins in extent, included forty-one villages, populated by – according to the census of 1744 – 806 serfs.* Through it ran a small river, the Sorot, fed by a chain of lakes. A few miles to the south, on the Sinichi hills, lay the small settlement of Svyatye Gory, crowned by the white walls and silver spire of the Svyatogorsky monastery. Although Abram, first occupied with his military duties and later preferring to retire to his estate at Suida, spent little time here, he arranged for the construction of a manor house at Petrovskoe, on the north-east bank of Lake Kuchane. On his death in 1781 the lands in the Pskov province were divided between his three younger sons, Petr, Osip and Isaak. Petr took Petrovskoe, Osip Mikhailovskoe and Isaak Voskresenskoe.

At Petrovskoe Petr knocked down the old house and built another, much larger, further from the lake, and laid out a small park, with an alley of lime trees leading from the lawn behind the house to the lake shore. In 1817 he was seventy-five, and was living here by himself, having seen little or nothing of his wife and children since he had packed them off, with a meagre allowance, to his estate near St Petersburg in the 1780s.

Voskresenskoe, Isaak’s patrimony, was some eight miles to the east of Petrovskoe, on the road to Novorzhev. Here, on a hill overlooking Lake Belogul – twice the size of Lake Kuchane – he built an unassuming, but capacious one-storey manor to house his large family: eight sons and seven daughters. On the slope of the hill descending to the lake was a large park with alleys, ponds and summer-houses. On the other side of the house a drive flanked with birch trees, concealing numerous outbuildings and servants’ quarters, led to the road. Isaak had died in 1804, heavily in debt, and having had to mortgage and then sell the greater part of his estate. His wife, Anna Andreevna, remained at the manor house, visited each summer by some of her numerous brood, together with their wives, husbands and children.

Mikhailovskoe lay between the two other estates, just over two miles from Petrovskoe, and nearly six from Voskresenskoe. The manor house was built on the high wooded south bank of the Sorot, between Lake Kuchane and the much smaller Lake Malenets. It was a small – fifty-six feet by forty-five – single-storey wooden house on a stone foundation with an open porch before the front door. On either side, shaded by limes and maples, stood smaller buildings in the same style, on the left the bath-house, on the right the kitchen and servants’ quarters. Two long, low buildings at right angles to the kitchen contained the estate office and lodgings for the bailiff and his family with a coach-house beyond; behind these lay the orchard. In front of the house was a circular lawn, surrounded by a path bordered with lilac and jasmine, the whole being enclosed by a fence with wicket gates. Behind the bath-house a steep path led to the Sorot. In front of the house, beyond the fence, lay the well-wooded park, divided in two by a wide linden alley down which ran the entrance drive. In the middle of the portion to the left stood a small summer-house from which radiated alleys of limes, birches and maples. Flower-beds, little artificial mounds topped with benches and ponds, small and large, were scattered here and there, and the boundary was marked by an avenue of birches.

By contemporary standards Mikhailovskoe was a small to modest estate: according to the census of 1816, some five thousand acres (1,863 desyatins) with 164 male serfs on the land and 23 attached to the household. In 1806, on Osip’s death, the estate had passed to Nadezhda. But the Pushkins’ financial circumstances were hardly improved, since for several years thereafter the income of the estate had to be used to extinguish the large debts Osip had accumulated. Since Nadezhda had little taste for provincial life, her mother, Mariya Gannibal, having sold Zakharovo, had moved to Mikhailovskoe, taking with her the family’s old nurse, Arina Rodionovna.

These two and a crowd of servants now greeted the Pushkins on their arrival: it was the first time that Pushkin had seen his grandmother since parting from her six years before to go to the Lycée. The district, very different from the countryside around Moscow or St Petersburg, was completely new to him. He wandered round the park, with its ‘pond in the shadow of thick willows,/Playground for ducklings’,11 and stood on the heights above the Sorot, looking over

the azure levels of two lakes,

Where sometimes gleams the fisherman’s white sail,

Behind them a ridge of hills and striped cornfields,

Scattered huts in the distance,

On the moist banks wandering herds,

Smoking drying-barns and winged windmills …12

‘I remember how happy I was with village life, Russian baths, strawberries and so on, but all this did not please me for long. I loved and still love noise and crowds.’13 The district certainly lacked metropolitan bustle; Voskresenskoe, inhabited by his great-aunt and a swarm of cousins, was a poor substitute. Dancing there one evening, Pushkin fell into a quarrel with his cousin Semen when the latter cut him out in a figure of the cotillion with a Miss Loshakova, ‘with whom, despite her ugliness and false teeth, Aleksandr Sergeevich had fallen head over heels in love’.14

The most congenial local society was to be found at Trigorskoe, an estate some two miles from Mikhailovskoe, reached by a path along the bank of the Sorot. Here lived Praskovya Osipova, an attractive thirty-six year-old, together with the five children from her first marriage to Nikolay Vulf: the eighteen-year-old Annette, Aleksey, Mikhail, Evpraksiya (known as Zizi) and Valerian, respectively twelve, nine, eight and five; and Aleksandra, the nine-year-old daughter of her second husband, Ivan Osipov. The Osipovs were not provincial philistines, but a cultured family. Praskovya’s father, Aleksandr Vyndomsky, had collected a large library, had corresponded with Novikov, imprisoned for his writings by Catherine II, and had subscribed to Moscow and St Petersburg literary journals, one of which had even printed his poem ‘The Prayer of a Repentant Sinner’. Pushkin’s acquaintance with the family was the most significant event of the visit: on 17 August, just before leaving, he wrote, in the only lyric produced during his stay,

Farewell, Trigorskoe, where joy

So often was encountered!

Did I discover your sweetness

Only in order to leave you for ever?

From you I take memories,

To you I leave my heart.15

When Vasily Pushkin had brought his nephew to St Petersburg in 1811, he was engaged in a polemic with Admiral Shishkov, leader of the conservative, or Archaist group of Russian writers. Opposed to this were the more liberal modernists, whose centre was Karamzin. In March 1811 Shishkov had founded the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word, a society whose purpose was to defend ‘classical’ forms of Russian against foreign infection. The writers of both factions directed at each other a continual cross-fire of articles and reviews, enlivened by satirical jibes. If the dramatist Prince Shakhovskoy poked fun at Karamzin’s sentimentalism in the one-act comedy A New Sterne (1805), in Vasily’s A Dangerous Neighbour admirers of the prince’s dramatic talents were discovered among the strumpets in a brothel.

On 23 September 1815 several of the younger group – Dmitry Bludov, Dmitry Dashkov, Stepan Zhikharev, Filipp Wiegel, Aleksandr Turgenev and Zhukovsky – attended the première of Shakhovskoy’s new comedy, The Lipetsk Waters; or, A Lesson for Coquettes at the Bolshoy Theatre. Zhukovsky’s companions were soon embarrassed to discover that Shakhovskoy ‘in the poet Fialkin, a miserable swain, whom all scorned, and who bent himself double before all, intended to represent the noble modesty of Zhukovsky; […] One can imagine the situation of poor Zhukovsky, on whom numerous immodest glances were turned! One can imagine the astonishment and indignation of his friends, seated around him! A gauntlet had been thrown down; Bludov and Dashkov, still ebullient with youth, hastened to pick it up.’16 Bludov’s reply was a wretchedly unfunny lampoon directed at Shakhovskoy, A Vision in some Tavern, published by the Society of Learned People.* This purported to have taken place in the little provincial town of Arzamas. The idea that a learned society, dedicated to literature, could exist in such a sleepy backwater famous only for its geese amused Bludov’s friends, and led in October to the foundation of the Arzamas Society of Unknown People.

From the beginning Arzamas was an elaborate joke, a parody of the solemn proceedings of the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word. These took place in the huge hall of Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka, when ‘the members sat at tables in the centre, around them were armchairs for the most honoured guests, and round the walls in three tiers was well-arranged seating for other visitors, admitted by ticket. To add greater lustre to these gatherings, the fair sex appeared in ball-gowns, ladies-in-waiting wore their royal miniatures,* grandees and generals their ribbons and stars, and all their full-dress uniform.’17 The lively facetiousness of Arzamas could hardly have been more different. The meetings took place on Thursday evenings, usually at the home of one of the two married members – Bludov’s on the Nevsky Prospect or Sergey Uvarov’s in Malaya Morskaya Street. Each member had been given a name taken from one of Zhukovsky’s ballads. The president for the evening wore a Jacobin red cap; the proceedings were conducted in a parodic imitation of the high style employed at the Symposium and invariably ended with the consumption of an Arzamas goose. Vyazemsky and Batyushkov soon joined; and when Vasily Pushkin – at fifty-one, the oldest of the group – was elected in March 1816, advantage was taken of his good-natured credulity to stage a parody of Masonic initiation rites, an immensely long mummery which concluded with Vasily shooting an arrow into the heart of a dummy representing the bad taste of the Shishkovites.† This set the tone for his position in Arzamas: he became the internal butt for its members’ jokes, as members of the Symposium were the external. Having dallied at a cake-shop, he arrived late at the next meeting, to be greeted with a flood of facetious speeches and resolutions; but, forgiven, he was made the society’s elder with various privileges, including that of having ‘at Arzamas suppers a special goose roasted for him alone, which, at his choice, he may either consume entirely, or, having consumed a portion, may take the rest home’.18

While still at the Lycée Pushkin had taken an eager interest in the literary debate, naturally ranging himself on the side of his friends against Shishkov and the Symposium. He learnt of the foundation of Arzamas, and was soon addressing Vyazemsky as ‘dear Arzamasite’,19 and calling his uncle ‘the Nestor of Arzamas’.20 He already felt himself spiritually to be a member: in ‘To Zhukovsky’ (1816), calling on the ‘singers, educated/In the happy heresy of Taste and Learning’, to ‘strike down the brazen friends of Ignorance’ – the Shishkov circle – he signs himself ‘An Arzamasite’.21 Shortly after he arrived in St Petersburg he was elected to the society, and given the name of the Cricket. The reality he encountered was rather different from the ideal of ‘To Zhukovsky’: though the Arzamasites were a congenial, convivial set, they were hardly that band of brothers devoted to the cause of art envisaged in the epistle. He arrived, too, at a time when the society was beginning to lose its point. Derzhavin had died in July 1816; the Symposium ceased its existence not long afterwards, and Arzamas, whose whole essence was parody, could, like a reflection in a mirror, hardly remain once the original had disappeared. The last formal meeting of the society was held in the spring of 1818; though some of the members continued to come together informally thereafter, Arzamas had come to an end.