Pushkin

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Full of malice, full of vengeance,

Without wit, without feeling, without honour,

Who is he? Loyal without flattery,

The penny soldier of a whore.

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Opinions differed on how the abolition of serfdom was to be brought about. In the view of the more conservative, it had to be preceded by constitutional reform. More radical opponents of the institution believed that constitutional reform would merely strengthen the hand of the landowners and worsen the condition of the serfs. Paradoxically, therefore, they saw the solution to lie in the exercise of autocratic power, through an arbitrary fiat of the emperor. It is this view which Pushkin, echoing the ideas of Nikolay Turgenev, expresses in the concluding stanza of ‘The Country’:

Will I see, o friends! a people unoppressed

And Servitude banished by the will of the tsar,

And over the fatherland will there finally arise

The sublime Dawn of enlightened Freedom?

Towards the end of 1819 Alexander expressed the wish to see some of Pushkin’s work. The request was made to General Illarion Vasilchikov, commander of the Independent Guards Brigade, who handed it on to his aide-de-camp, Petr Chaadaev, possibly knowing that he and Pushkin were acquainted. Pushkin gave Chaadaev ‘The Country’; it was presented to Alexander, who, reading it with interest, is reported to have said to Vasilchikov: ‘Thank Pushkin for the noble sentiments which his verse inspires.’

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He would have been less gracious had he seen Pushkin’s more overtly political verse, much of which was directed at him: such as the playful satire ‘Fairy Tales’, in which the tsar promises to dismiss the director of police, put the censorship secretary in the madhouse, and ‘give to the people the rights of the people’ – all of which promises are, of course, fairy tales.

(#litres_trial_promo) The scatological is also pressed into the service of lese-majesty: in ‘You and I’ Pushkin draws a series of comparisons between himself and the tsar, ending:

Your plump posterior you

Cleanse with calico;

I do not pamper

My sinful hole in this childish manner,

But with one of Khvostov’s harsh odes,

Wipe it though I wince.

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Equally unacceptable are the witty, occasionally obscene, epigrams dedicated to prominent members of the government: Arakcheev, Golitsyn, and others such as Aleksandr Sturdza, a high official in the Ministry of Education, known for his extreme obscurantist views.

Slave of a crowned soldier,

You deserve the fame of Herostratus

Or the death of Kotzebue the Hun,

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And, incidentally, fuck you.

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Nikolay Turgenev took Pushkin to task on several occasions, scolding him for ‘his epigrams and other verses against the government’ and appealing to his conscience, saying it was ‘wrong to take a salary for doing nothing and to abuse the giver of it’.

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If late eighteenth-century opponents of serfdom had attacked it chiefly as a morally repugnant system, by now it was also seen as a brake on economic progress. But it was not wholly responsible for the post-war crisis which Russia experienced after 1815. In 1825 the Decembrist Kakhovsky wrote to Nicholas I from his cell in the Peter-Paul fortress: ‘We need not be afraid of foreign enemies, but we have domestic enemies which harass the country: the absence of laws, of justice, the decline of commerce, heavy taxation and widespread poverty.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This sense among the younger generation of indignant dissatisfaction with the state of the nation was exacerbated – for those who had fought through Germany and France – by the vivid contrast between Russia and the West. But the absence in Russia of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly forced those who wished for reform to turn to secret political activity. Freemasonry – often connected, if as often unjustifiably, with secret revolutionary activity and for that reason suppressed by conservative governments – provided a means of association. In Russia the number of lodges grew rapidly after the war, and many of the future Decembrists were, or had been – like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace – Masons.

On 9 February 1816 six young officers – Aleksandr Muravev and Nikita Muravev, Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, Ivan Yakushkin, and the brothers Matvey and Sergey Muravev-Apostol, the eldest twenty-six, the youngest twenty-one – met in a room of the officers’ quarters of the Semenovsky Life Guards on Zagorodny Prospect. All had served abroad, and all – with the exception of Yakushkin – were Masons. They agreed to organize a secret political society to be called the Union of Salvation or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland: from this beginning came the Decembrist revolt of 1825. According to Aleksandr Muravev, the society’s primary aims were the emancipation of the serfs, the establishment of equality before the law and of public trial, the abolition of the state monopoly on alcohol, the abolition of military colonies,

(#ulink_2d44cf6c-f7bf-5232-9780-41fc794cf5dc) and the reduction of the term of military service. More members were soon enrolled, including the twenty-three-year-old Pavel Pestel, an officer in the Chevalier Guards. ‘Spent the morning with Pestel, a wise man in every sense of the word,’ Pushkin noted in his diary in April 1821. ‘We had a conversation on metaphysics, politics, morality, etc. He is one of the most original minds I know.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Charismatic, erudite, with an iron will and a clear vision, Pestel became the moving spirit in the conspiracy. Under his influence a constitution was drawn up, entitled the Green Book, at the same time the Union of Salvation was dissolved and its members joined the new Union of Welfare. And in 1818 Pestel set up a southern branch of the society at Tulchin in the Ukraine.

Much ink has been spilt in debating the question of the extent of Pushkin’s knowledge of the conspiracy, and of his involvement in it. The simplest answer seems the most correct. A number of the future Decembrists were his close friends, and he was acquainted with many others. He frequented houses in which they held meetings; he shared many of the political views of their programme. Nevertheless, he was never, as far as we know, involved in the conspiracy, never invited to become a member of it, never – consciously – present at a gathering of the conspirators, and, though he had a vague suspicion that something was afoot, never knew what this was.

The clearest evidence of his lack of involvement comes from his closest friend at the Lycée, Pushchin. In the summer of 1817 the latter, then an ensign in the Life Guards Horse Artillery, was recruited into the Union of Salvation. ‘My first thought,’ he writes, ‘was to confide in Pushkin: we always thought alike about the res publica.’ But Pushkin was then in Mikhailovskoe. ‘Later, when I thought of carrying out this idea, I could not bring myself to entrust a secret to him, which was not mine alone, where the slightest carelessness could be fatal to the whole affair. The liveliness of his ardent character, his association with untrustworthy persons, frightened me […] Then, involuntarily, a question occurred to me: why, besides myself, had none of the older members who knew him well considered him? They must have been held back by that which frightened me: his mode of thought was well known, but he was not fully trusted.’

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Pushkin was still ignorant of the society’s existence in November 1820, when a guest on Ekaterina Davydova’s estate at Kamenka, in the Ukraine. A number of the conspirators were present: Yakushkin, Major-General Mikhail Orlov, his aide-de-camp, Konstantin Okhotnikov, and Vasily Davydov, Ekaterina’s son. Among the other guests were Vasily’s elder brother Aleksandr and General Raevsky, half-brother to the Davydovs and soon to become Orlov’s father-in-law. According to Yakushkin, the behaviour of the conspirators aroused Raevsky’s suspicions; becoming aware of this, they resolved to dissipate them by means of a hoax. During the customary discussion after dinner, the arguments for and against the establishment of such a society were rehearsed. Orlov put both sides of the case, Pushkin ‘heatedly demonstrated all the advantages that a Secret society could bring Russia’. When Raevsky too seemed in favour, Yakushkin said to him: ‘It’s easy for me to prove that you are joking; I’ll put a question to you: if a Secret society now already existed, you certainly wouldn’t join it, would you?’

‘On the contrary, I certainly would join it,’ he replied. ‘Then give me your hand,’ I said. He stretched out his hand to me, and I burst out laughing, saying to him: ‘Of course, all this was only a joke.’ Everyone else laughed, except for A.L. Davydov, the majestic cuckold,

(#ulink_9a13b779-c377-5590-aa04-03fec23e41b8) who was asleep, and Pushkin, who was very agitated; before this he had convinced himself that a Secret society already existed, or would immediately begin to exist, and he would be a member; but when he realized that the result was only a joke, he got up, flushed, and said with tears in his eyes: ‘I have never been so unhappy as now; I already saw my life ennobled and a sublime goal before me, and all this was only a malicious joke.’

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Considered objectively, it is difficult to imagine that any serious conspirator belonging to a secret society which had the aim of overthrowing an absolute monarchy would wish to enlist a crackbrained, giddy, intemperate and dissolute young rake, whose heart and sentiments – as his poetry demonstrated – might have been in the right place, but whose reason all too often seemed absent. How could any conspiracy remain secret which had as one of its members someone who, in a theatre swarming with police spies, paid and amateur, was capable of parading round the stalls carrying a portrait of the French saddler, Louvel, who assassinated Charles, duc de Berry, in 1820, inscribed with the words ‘A Lesson to Tsars’?

(#litres_trial_promo) Or who, again in the theatre, could shout out ‘Now is the safest time – the ice is coming down the Neva’?

(#litres_trial_promo) – meaning that, since the pontoon bridges across the river, removed when it froze, could not yet be re-established, a revolt would not have to contend with the troops of the fortress.

In Rome he would have been Brutus, in Athens Pericles,

But here he is – a hussar officer,

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Pushkin wrote of Petr Chaadaev, whom he first met at the Karamzins in Tsarskoe Selo in 1816. ‘Le beau Tchadaef’, as his fellow officers called him,

(#litres_trial_promo) had a pale complexion, grey-blue eyes and a noble forehead. He was always dressed with modish elegance: Eugene Onegin is dubbed ‘a second Chaadaev’, for being in his dress ‘a pedant/And what we used to call a dandy’ (I, xxv). Yet at the same time he was curiously asexual: no trace of a relationship is to be discovered in his life. Wiegel, who disliked him intensely, attributes this to narcissism: ‘No one ever noticed in him tender feelings towards the fair sex: his heart was too overflowing with adoration for the idol which he had created from himself.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In December 1817 he moved to St Petersburg on his appointment as aide-de-camp to General Vasilchikov. Extremely learned, and with a brilliant mind – he was described by General Orlov’s wife as ‘the most striking and most brilliant young man in St Petersburg’

(#litres_trial_promo) – he seemed on the threshold of a dazzling military career, and was widely expected to become aide-de-camp to Alexander himself. But in February 1821 he suddenly and inexplicably resigned from the army and, after undergoing a spiritual crisis so severe as to affect his health, went abroad in 1823, intending to live in Europe for the rest of his life. He was a Mason, and a member of the Society of Welfare, but played no active part in the Decembrist conspiracy, and later severely condemned the revolt of 1825. However, there is no doubt that, while at Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg, he was ‘deeply and essentially linked with Russian liberalism and radicalism’,

(#litres_trial_promo) sharing the ideals of the future Decembrists.

In St Petersburg Chaadaev lived in Demouth’s Hotel, one of the most fashionable in the capital, on the Moika, but a stone’s throw from the Nevsky. Here, according to Wiegel, he received visitors, ‘sitting on a dais, beneath two laurel bushes in tubs; to the right was a portrait of Napoleon, to the left of Byron, and his own, on which he was depicted as a genius in chains, opposite’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin was a constant visitor, abandoning in Chaadaev’s presence his adolescent antics and behaving with sober seriousness. Chaadaev’s ‘influence on Pushkin was astonishing’, Saburov – who knew both well – remarked. ‘He forced him to think. Pushkin’s French education was counteracted by Chaadaev, who already knew Locke and substituted analysis for frivolity […] He thought about that which Pushkin had never thought about.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He not only introduced logic into Pushkin’s thought, he also widened his literary horizons. Pushkin was to be deeply grateful for Chaadaev’s sympathy and support in the first months of 1820, when he was both the victim of malicious slander, and being threatened by exile to the Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea for his writings. ‘O devoted friend,’ he wrote in 1821, ‘Penetrating to the depths of my soul with your severe gaze,/You invigorated it with counsel or reproof.’

(#litres_trial_promo) To express his gratitude, he gave Chaadaev a ring: engraved on the inner surface was the inscription ‘Sub rosa 1820’.

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In 1818 he had addressed a poem to him which concludes with the stirring lines,

While we yet with freedom burn,

While our hearts yet live for honour,

My friend, let us devote to our country

The sublime impulses of our soul!

Comrade, believe: it will arise,

The star of captivating joy,

Russia will start from her sleep,

And on the ruins of autocracy

Our names will be inscribed!

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The epistle, which has been called ‘the most optimistic verse in Pushkin’s entire poetry’,

(#litres_trial_promo) circulated widely in manuscript, together with ‘Fairy Tales’, ‘The Country’ and the epigrams on Arakcheev; according to Yakushkin ‘there was scarcely a more or less literate ensign in the army who did not know them by heart’.

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* (#ulink_fa373d9f-df4c-5635-b6bd-be58c5756aed) A reference to contemporary portraits of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), the hero of South American independence.

* (#ulink_fa373d9f-df4c-5635-b6bd-be58c5756aed) The artist, Aleksandr Notbek, ignored Pushkin’s instructions; his ill-executed engraving, printed in the Neva Almanac in January 1829, shows the poet facing the spectator with arms crossed on his chest. Pushkin greeted the travesty with an amusing, if scatological epigram:

Here, having crossed Kokushkin Bridge,

Supporting his arse on the granite,

Aleksandr Sergeich Pushkin himself

Stands with Monsieur Onegin.

Scorning to glance

At the citadel of fateful power,

He has proudly turned his posterior to the fortress:

Don’t spit in the well, dear chap. (III, 165)

* (#ulink_84d7775d-a23c-5285-841d-7b75a8813e6a) A desyatin is approximately 2.7 acres: only adult male serfs were numbered in the census.

* (#ulink_28e41ba9-0ccd-565d-a1fb-27074d4aedde) Modelled on ‘The Vision of Charles Palissot’ (1760), an attack by Abbé André Morellet on Palissot’s play Les Philosophes, itself a satire directed at the Encyclopédistes.

* (#ulink_90edf394-e072-5f5f-afcb-ca46cf1ff89c) In the reign of Peter the Great the custom had been established of presenting to ladies attached to the court a miniature portrait of the monarch which was worn on state occasions.

† (#ulink_90edf394-e072-5f5f-afcb-ca46cf1ff89c) Other members included Dmitry Kavelin, Aleksandr Voeikov, Aleksandr Pleshcheev, Petr Poletika, Dmitry Severin; and, later, Nikita Muravev, General Mikhail Orlov and Nikolay Turgenev.

* (#ulink_cef1fe2b-cc5e-5555-94f8-5865a0e17185) On 7 January 1834 after a visit from Wiegel Pushkin noted in his diary, ‘I like his conversation – he is entertaining and sensible, but always ends up by talking of sodomy’ (Wiegel was homosexual), and in June, after an evening at the Karamzins, wrote, ‘I am very fond of Poletika’ (XII, 318, 330).

* (#ulink_e5972866-34dd-596c-b36e-846e8a3be847) ‘Loyal without flattery’ was the motto adopted by Arakcheev for his coat-of-arms; the last line is a reference to his mistress, Anastasiya Minkina, in 1825 murdered by the serfs for her intolerable cruelty.

* (#ulink_1e18c614-24c4-5792-b34c-3b5826f813b1) Count Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov, the Alfred Austin of Alexandrine Russia, an extraordinarily prolific, but talentless poet, the constant butt of Pushkin’s jokes.

† (#ulink_399a41ff-f62e-5b24-9c1d-37f27b046b38) Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order, he confessed, to gain everlasting fame; the German dramatist Kotzebue, employed by the Russian foreign service as a political informant, was assassinated in 1819 by the student Karl Ludwig Sand.

* (#ulink_2504a408-7b46-58db-bf95-51c11cf87f0e) By an order of 5 August 1816 certain districts in the Novgorod province and, later, in the south, had been turned into military colonies. Every village was transformed into an army camp; all peasants under fifty had to shave their beards and crop their hair, while those under forty-five had to wear uniform. Children received military training, and girls were married by order of the military authorities. Arakcheev was particularly hated for his merciless enforcement of the rules governing these colonies.

* (#ulink_10a756ef-1205-54e2-95db-1ba3f4f6af2a) The Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevsky, a member of the Society of United Slavs (which amalgamated with the southern society in 1825), who knew Pushchin well, having shared a cell with him in the Peter-Paul fortress, after reading this passage in the latter’s memoirs, remarked in a letter to M.A. Bestuzhev dated 12 June 1861: ‘Poor Pushchin, – he did not know that the Supreme Duma [of the society] had even forbidden us to make the acquaintance of the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, when he lived in the south; – and for what reason? It was openly said that because of his character and pusillanimity, because of his debauched life, he would immediately inform the government of the existence of a secret society […] Muravev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin told me about such antics of Pushkin in the south that even now turn one’s ears red.’ Shchegolev (1931), 294–5.

† (#ulink_e0e7abdf-0d95-5669-8ad8-67cc25d3e164) A quotation from Eugene Onegin, I, xii; Davydov’s wife, Aglaë (née de Grammont) was generous with her favours.

* (#ulink_77cc8f7b-2048-5ebd-b5d0-d8ffe7cda033) I.e., in secret, in strict confidence.

4 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20 (#ulink_da7a04b7-88cc-566b-90c9-0d0426afaaa0)

II: Onegin’s Day

I love thee, Peter’s creation,