Pushkin

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† (#ulink_779ad34d-3019-5a6a-80ac-c0520059e57e) The quatrain is listed under Dubia in the Academy edition; its ascription to Pushkin is based on an army report of the interrogation of Private (demoted from captain) D. Brandt, who, on 18 July 1827, deposed that his fellow-inmate in the Moscow lunatic asylum, Cadet V.Ya. Zubov, had declaimed this fragment of Pushkin to him (II, 1199–200).

* (#ulink_4bf7ebe9-4864-594b-a479-910bd8b388fc) Pushkin is comparing himself to St John; earlier in the letter he refers to Kishinev as Patmos, the island to which the apostle was exiled by the Emperor Domitian, and where he is supposed to have written the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse.

* (#ulink_4b2625d5-2b2f-5e83-a645-c1e159297de1) It was first printed in London in 1861; the first Russian edition – with some omissions – appeared in 1907.

* (#ulink_e8391ed9-76d1-5184-9f2f-bbb6259656cd) A system for mass education devised by the Englishman Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838), by which the advanced pupils taught the beginners.

* (#ulink_fed2b239-f5df-5041-9097-d92e4c2a2d4c) Formerly proprietor of the Hotel de l’Europe, a luxurious establishment situated at the bottom of the Nevsky Prospect, he took to drink, got into financial difficulty and was ruined when his wife absconded with his cash-box and a colonel of cuirassiers. He fled to Odessa and, after various vicissitudes, ended up in Kishinev.

* (#ulink_a1a0b4d0-e380-58a5-98ac-f2971e226a51) Pushkin often uses the word ‘occasion’ (Russian okaziya, borrowed from the French occasion) to mean the opportunity to have a letter conveyed privately, by a friend or acquaintance, instead of entrusting it to the post, when it might be opened and read. Here the ‘dependable occasion’ is a trip by Liprandi to St Petersburg.

† (#ulink_a1a0b4d0-e380-58a5-98ac-f2971e226a51) ‘Little book (I don’t begrudge it), you will go to the city without me,/Alas for me, your master, who is not allowed to go.’

* ‘I fear the Greeks [though they bear gifts]’. Virgil, Aeneid, II, 49. The quotation had especial relevance to Gnedich: he was ‘Greek’ because he was in the process of translating the Iliad.

* (#ulink_e5e2b716-beeb-5d44-b16c-b0e2112dfc87) Vyazemsky’s enthusiastic article on the poem had appeared in Son of the Fatherland in 1822.

* The nickname often given to Pushkin in the correspondence between Turgenev and Vyazemsky: a pun on bes arabsky, ‘Arabian devil’, and bessarabsky, ‘Bessarabian’.

* (#ulink_c229a29e-afed-58e5-8ff2-a2e2cac6990c) The last two sentences are a quotation from Zhukovsky’s translation of The Prisoner of Chillon. The original reads: ‘And I felt troubled – and would fain/I had not left my recent chain’ (357–8).

8 ODESSA 1823–24 (#ulink_5cf3e488-7935-5054-8a6c-e78abcd413d0)

I lived then in dusty Odessa …

There the skies long remain clear,

There abundant trade

Busily hoists its sails;

There everything breathes, diffuses Europe,

Glitters of the South and is gay

With lively variety.

The language of golden Italy

Resounds along the merry street,

Where walk the proud Slav,

The Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Armenian,

And the Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,

And that son of the Egyptian soil,

The retired corsair, Morali.

Fragments from Onegin’s Journey

IN 1791 THE TREATY OF JASSY, which brought the Russo – Turkish war to an end, gave Russia what its rulers had sought since the late seventeenth century: a firm footing on the Black Sea littoral. To exploit this a harbour was needed; those in the Sea of Azov and on the river deltas were too shallow for large vessels, and attention was turned to the site of the Turkish settlement of Khadzhibei, between the Bug and Dniester, where the water was deep close inshore, and which, with the construction of a mole and breakwater, would be safe in any weather. Here, where the steppe abruptly terminated in a promontory, some 200 feet above the coastal plain, the construction of a new city began on 22 August 1794. Its name, Odessa, came from that of a former Greek settlement some miles to the east, but was, apparently on the orders of the Empress Catherine herself, given a feminine form. The city’s architect and first governor was Don Joseph de Ribas, a soldier of fortune in Russian service, born in Naples of Spanish and Irish parentage. With the assistance of a Dutch engineer, he laid out a gridiron plan of wide streets and began construction of a mole.

Under Richelieu, governor from 1803 to 1815 – whose little palazzo in Gurzuf had sheltered Pushkin and the Raevskys – the city prospered and gained in amenities: a wide boulevard was constructed along the cliff edge, overlooking the sea; and ‘an elegant stone theatre, […] the front of which is ornamented by a peristyle supported by columns’,

(#litres_trial_promo) was built. It was usually occupied by an Italian opera company: Pushkin became addicted to ‘the ravishing Rossini,/Darling of Europe’.

(#litres_trial_promo) However, the town ‘was still in the course of construction, there were everywhere vacant lots and shacks. Stone houses were scattered along the Rishelevskaya, Khersonskaya and Tiraspolskaya streets, the cathedral and theatre squares; but for the most part all these houses stood in isolation with wooden single-storey houses and fences between them.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Very few streets were paved: all travellers mention the insupportable dust in the summer, and the indescribable mud in the spring and autumn.

In 1819 Odessa had become a free port: the population increased – there were some 30,000 inhabitants in 1823 – as did the number of foreign merchants and shipping firms. The lingua franca of business was Italian, and many of the streets bore signs in this language or in French, until Vorontsov, in a fit of patriotism, had them replaced by Russian ones. But this could not conceal the fact that the city was very different in its population and its manners from the typical Russian provincial town: ‘Two customs of social life gave Odessa the air of a foreign town: in the theatre during the entr’actes the men in the parterre audience would don their hats, and the smoking of cigars on the street was allowed.’

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Odessa, with its opera and its restaurants, might seem a far more attractive place for exile than Kishinev. Nevertheless, Pushkin was to be considerably less happy here. He had lost the company of his close friends: Gorchakov’s regiment was still stationed in Kishinev; Alekseev, not wishing to part from his mistress Mariya Eichfeldt, had turned down a post he had been offered with Vorontsov in Odessa; while Liprandi, who had left the army and was attached to Vorontsov’s office, was rarely in Odessa, being continually employed on missions elsewhere. And though Aleksandr Raevsky was now living in the town, the relationship between the two was to become very strained over the following months. Pushkin did make a number of new acquaintances, but they remained acquaintances, rather than friends. He was closest, perhaps, to Vasily Tumansky, a year younger than himself, an official in Vorontsov’s bureau and a fellow-poet – ‘Odessa in sonorous verses/Our friend Tumansky has described.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But he had no great opinion of his talent: ‘Tumansky is a famous fellow, but I do not like him as a poet. May God give him wisdom,’ he told Bestuzhev.

(#litres_trial_promo) He found, too, Tumansky’s hyperbolic praise – calling him ‘the Jesus Christ of our poetry’

(#litres_trial_promo) – and servile imitation of his work distasteful. However, they dined together most evenings in Dimitraki’s Greek restaurant, sitting with others over wine until the early hours. An acquaintance of a different kind was ‘the retired corsair Morali’,

(#litres_trial_promo) a Moor from Tunis, and the skipper of a trading vessel – ‘a very merry character, about thirty-five years old, of medium height, thick-set, with a bronzed, somewhat pock-marked, but very pleasant physiognomy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He spoke fluent Italian, some French, and was very fond of Pushkin, whom he accompanied about the town. Some believed that he was a Turkish spy. Pushkin struck up an acquaintance, too, with the Vorontsovs’ family doctor, the thirty-year-old William Hutchinson, whom they had engaged in London in the autumn of 1821. Tall, thin and balding, Hutchinson proved to be an interesting companion, despite his deafness, taciturnity and bad French. The vicissitudes of his emotional life, however, contributed most to his unhappiness. In Kishinev he may have believed himself several times to be in love, but these light and airy flirtations bore no resemblance to the serious and deep involvements he was now to experience. And whereas Inzov had shown a paternal affection towards him, indulgently pardoning Pushkin’s misdemeanours, or, if this was impossible, treating him like an erring adolescent, his relationship with Vorontsov, far more of a grandee than his predecessor, was of a very different kind.

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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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!’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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!’

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(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 cousin

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.’

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 him

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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.