Alexander Pushkin

1817-1820.  St. Petersburg

Upon graduation, Pushkin was made a lowly collegiate assessor, or bureaucrat tenth class, in the Russian Foreign Ministry.   “Almost at once I obtained three months’ leave to visit my mother’s estate in Mikhaylovskoye. I was enchanted by the country, the real Russian bathhouse, the abundant strawberries…” He also enjoyed meeting his black great–uncle and downing with him six shots of fiery homemade vodka.  Back in “Peter”, he lived with his parents in cramped quarters by the Fontanka Canal, next to Pushkin’s fellow Lycéen, Baron Modest Korf—whom Pushkin once challenged to a duel for striking the poet’s beloved manservant Nikita Kozlov. Korf had been a teacher’s pet of Englehardt’s, and sneered about the Pushbin family in his memoirs:

All the Pushkins were oddballs. The father was a rather cheerful conversationalist in the old French school, full of jokes and puns, but was empty, muddleheaded, useless, and a particularly silent slave of his wife.  She was not stupid, but was a selfish, ill-tempered nag, unbelievably absent-minded and particularly bad at running the home: it was always in some sort of chaos: in one room rich antique furniture, in another bare walls, without even chairs, lots of dishevelled, drunken servants, battered old carriages, tattered nags, gorgeous ladies’ gowns and a constant lack of everything, from money on down to the last glass. Whenever two or three people visited them for dinner, they always needed us to lend them crockery!

Whether or not here (as often elsewhere in his memoirs) Korf was spitefully exaggerating, doubtless after theheady freedom and coziness of the Lycée, life with his parents felt confining, and deprived.  Pushkin later recalled in a letter to his younger brother Lev, “when I was sick in autumn rains or bitter winter frosts, and hired a coachman to take me home from Anichkov Bridge, Father would always scold me about the 80 kopecks, which doubtless neither you nor I would even begrudge our servants.”  Paternal stinginess may have been mixed with consternation at his son’s poetic carelessness about money. “One bright summer day”, a friend recalled “he was boating in company together with Sergey Lvovich [Pushkin’s father].  It was calm and the water was so clear that you could see the bottom.  Pushkin took out a few golden coins and one by one deliberately dropped them into the water, delighted by their clinking, plopping, and marveliling at their bright reflection in the pure wetness”.

He cared nothing for his official duties, but loved the theatre—and pretty actresses, like Elena Sosnitskaya, “into whose net I nearly fell, but I was lucky, and got off with just a poem” (In Sosnitskaya’s Album). Like most young intellectual Russians, he was liberal; unlike most, he was not fanatical.  His friends at Arzamas, the liberal literary club he joined, nicknamed him: “the Cricket”—for his habit of singing unseen, and for an approach to life that they felt more resembled the Grasshopper than the Ant.  One evening at the home of Alexey Olenin, director of the Public Library and the Academy, he met for the first time the beautiful and coquettish Anna Petrovna Kern, married young against her will to a senile, boorish, yet half-crippled general.    She recollected:

A jovial banter began between us as to who is a sinner and who is not, and who’d go to heaven, and who to hell.  Pushkin told my brother: “At least in hell there’ll be lots of pretty girls, and we’ll all be playing charades! Ask M-me Kern: wouldn’t she like to go to hell? I answered seriously and a bit curtly that I would not.  “How about you, Pushkin?” asked my brother. “Now I’ve changed my mind”, the poet answered, “I don’t want to go to hell anymore—even if it does have lots of pretty girls!”

In 1819 he was smitten by Eudoxia Golitsyna, known as “Princesse Nocturne” for her midnight soirées:

In 1819 he also visited the famed German fortune-teller Mme. Kirchof (who, reportedly, had helped Tsar Alexander I stand firm in the bleakest hours of the War of 1812).  Mme. Kirchof prophesied him great fame, two terms of exile, and a long happy life, provided only that at the age of 37 he avoided any conflicts due to a white horse, white head, or white (meaning blond) man.  Pushkin believed unquestioningly in all her predictions—and in the end they all came true. 

Gossip went all over town about the wild young poet-flibbertigibbet, heedless of warnings against wine, women, and song.  Engelgardt, Lycée headmaster, complained as usual:  “how often have I sighed, if only that good-for-nothing Pushkin would be serious, he’d amount to something special in our literature!”   His friend Alexander Turgenev despaired: “An idle laziness, dread slayer of all that’s beautiful and talented, looms banefully over Pushkin …. Mornings he tells Zhukovsky where he hasn’t slept all evening, out visiting various sluts-- or me, or Princess Golitsyn, or playing cards….”  The poet Batyushkov wrote back: “We should lock our Cricket up in Göttingen for three years on a diet of milk soup and logic!”  But Pushkin was quite happy playing, and made no apologies:

Mornings Pushkin would rouse himself with ice-cold baths, then write for hours, lying in bed.   He was finishing Ruslan and Lyudmila, an ironic Russian folktale in verse, which created an immediate sensation when it came out in 1820.  The Russian public delighted in Pushkin’s majestic exuberance and ebullient command of their language:

The poet Zhukovsky, a translator of The Odyssey into stately Russian hexameter verse, reacted to Ruslan and Lyudmila  by sending Pushkin  his portrait, inscribed  “to the conquering pupil from the defeated teacher”.

Many of Pushkin’s closest friends during these three years in St. Petersburg were in secret revolutionary societies.  Inconveniently for later Soviet biographers, the “Cricket” was too busy “chirping” to actually join any of these societies himself.  Yet Pushkin did more for their cause than they themselves did, with his popular poems and biting epigrams against the government and leading ministers (including Arakcheyev, who basically ran Tsar Alexander I’s government; Epigram on Arakcheyev ).   He seemed truly fearless in expressing himself. Pushchin recalled how Pushkin, in a crowded theatre, reacted to an announcement that a bear cub had escaped its chains at the Summer Palace and nearly attacked the Tsar by exclaiming loudly, so all could hear:  “At last a man’s been found in Russia—but he’s only a bear!”  (The poor bear was executed). 

While at a party in apartments overlooking the gloomy Mikhaylovskiy Palace of Tsar Paul I, Pushkin was asked to look out the window and improvise a poem.  A few hour later he had penned a draft of his Ode to Liberty-- banned in Russia until 1906.  It and other forbidden works, such as To Chaadayev ,and The Country, spread quickly throughout the land, creating a sensation, inspiring secret societies and dissidents.  Tsar Alexander I was particularly incensed by an Ode to Liberty: not only did it call for a constitutional monarchy, but it violated the gravest and most puinishable taboo by frankly mentioning the murder of Alexander’s father, Paul I,  (in which Alexander may have been complicit). Attempts were made by agents to bribe Pushkin’s loyal manservant Nikita Kozlov to obtain forbidden manuscripts.   Kozlov staunchly refused, and warned his master, who burned everything, and “I was waiting for Siberia or the [Peter and Paul] Fortress to restore my honor.”  Instead the military governor-general of St. Petersburg, Mikhail Miloradovich, summoned him to interrogation.  Pushkin, in an act of true civic courage, wrote out from memory, word for word, his strongest poems against the government-- into the now famous “Miloradovich Notebook”. Charmed and impressed by the young poet’s bravery and talent, Miloradovich released Pushkin on his own recognizance. The Tsar, however, found the notebook far from amusing, and planned to exile Pushkin to Siberia, or Solovki,  far above the Artic Circle in the White Sea (where the Soviets later built one of their worst concentration camps). Last-minute lobbying by Miloradovich, Zhukovsky, Chaadayev, and Karamzin helped make the place of exile someplace far warmer:  Russia’s south-western frontier province under the command of General Ivan Nikitich Inzov. On May 6, 1820, Ascension Day, he left St. Petersburg for the South.  In his epilogue to Ruslan and Lyudmila, Pushkin summed up his past three years: