Alexander Pushkin

After a bone-jarring, dusty, two-week trip on the famously appalling roads of the Russian Empire, Pushkin reported to General Inzov in Yekaterinoslav  (now Dnepropetrovsk) – famous for its “Potemkin villages”—facades of non-existent palaces made to deceive Empress Catherine the Great.  “After making it to Yekaterinoslav, I got bored, went rowing on the Dnepr river, bathed--and got a fever”,  he wrote his brother.   Lying in bed unattended and delirious, he was met by General Nikolay Rayevsky, a hero of the War of 1812, on his way with his two sons and four daughters to the Caucasus to take the waters. Rayevsky persuaded General Inzov to let Pushkin come along.  Two months in the Caucasus mountains, hiking and drinking healing mineral waters, completely restored his health and creative energies.  He later recalled: “most of the springs were in primeval condition, bubbling, steaming, and flowing from the mountains in all directions, leaving red and white traces behind.  We would draw up the boiling water with a pitcher, or in the bottom of a broken bottle…Nowadays the Caucasian waters are more comfortable, but I miss the way they were once, completely wild: those steep rocky paths, their bushes, their unguarded precipices, up which I used to clamber”.   He was inspired to write a new long poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, about a Russian soldier, taken captive by Chechens, who falls in love with a Chechen girl.  (Probably the best film made about the current Chechen conflict is a brilliant adaptation of this poem to modern times, called The Prisoner of the Montains,  starring Sergey Bodrov and Oleg Menshikov). The poem marked Pushkin’s continuing growth as a poet, linking romantic passion with distinctive loving attention to detail:

Nikolay Gogol’ (who worked with Pushkin and became his most brilliant protégé) considered this trip a watershed in his life: 

The gigantic Caucasus range, with its peaks perpetually snow-bound, and its lush, sultry valleys amazed him.  You might say it called forth all his soul, and broke the last few chains which had held back the utter freedom of his thoughts. He was captivated by the poetic life of the bold mountain tribes, their battles, their quick, unanswerable raids…From that time his brushstroke acquired that amazing breadth, that quickness and daring, which so amazed and enchanted a Russia only just beginning to learn to read.  If he described the skirmish of a Cossack with a Chechen, his words  flashed lightning,  gleamed like the glint of sabers, flying faster than the battle itself.  He alone is the true bard of the Caucasus. 

Crossing the Black Sea from the Caucasus to the Crimea aboard the brig Mingrelia, Pushkin wrote his lovely, somewhat Byronic elegy “The day’s last gleam is disappearing”.  As he wrote home to his brother:

Our ship sailed past mountains covered with poplars, vineyards, laurels and cypresses, and little Tatar villages scattered here and there, and stopped in sight of Gurzuf.  I spent three weeks there.  My friend, the happiest minutes of my life were spent with the family of the admirable Rayevsky…Besides the war hero, the glory of the Russian army, I loved in him the man with a clear mind, and a simple, open heart, a forgiving, respectful friend…a witness of Catherine’s time, a monument of 1812, yet a man without prejudices, forceful, and yet sensitive…All his daughters are enchanting, and the oldest is a remarkable woman. Judge for yourself how happy I was: a free, unworried life in the bosom of a warm family, a life I love and have never before enjoyed: this happy southern sky, this lovely, gorgeous land, its nature made for this imagination: mountains, ocean, gardens!

In another letter to the North, he wrote:

I bathed in the sea, and gorged myself on grapes, and felt at once so at home in this Southern sunshine that I wallowed in it with all the carefree languor of a Neapolitan lazybones. I loved waking at night to the sound of the sea, which I could hear and hear for hours.  A young cypress grew near the house; I used to visit it every morning, and by the end I felt we two had developed something resembling friendship…”

A tour of the former palace of the Khans of the Crimean Tatars inspired a new poem The Fountain of Bakchisrai:

Я посетил Бахчисарая                                                     I visited Bakchisarai,
В забвенье брошенный дворец.                                     Its palace now forgot, abandoned.
Среди безмолвных переходов                                       Amidst its quiet halls medieval
Бродил я там, где, бич народов,                                    I wandered where that scourge of peoples,
Татарин буйный пировал                                              The Tatar fierce once held his feasts,
И после ужасов набега                                                   And after raids of dread and horror
В роскошной лени утопал.                                             Did laze in splendid languor sweet.
Еще поныне дышит нега                                                That bliss still breathes and is remembered
В пустых покоях и садах;                                               In restful garden groves, it seems:
Играют воды, рдеют розы,                                            The waters’ playing, roses’ blushing,
И вьются виноградны лозы,                                          The vineyard grapes so thick and luscious,
И злато блещут на стенах.                                             And on the walls the gold still gleams.
Я видел ветхие решетки,                                               I saw old wrought-iron tracery:
За коими, в своей весне,                                                Cages, behind which, in their spring
Янтарны разбирая четки,                                               Clasping an amber rosary,
Вздыхали жены в тишине.                                             The silent wives would sigh, not sing.
Я видел ханское кладбище,                                            I saw the great Khans’ burial place,
Владык последнее жилище.                                           Great rulers’ final residence.
Сии надгробные столбы,                                               I saw the columns o’er the graves
Венчанный мраморной чалмою,                                  With marble turbans crowned, but fraying,
Казалось мне, завет судьбы                                           It seemed to me the will of Fate
Гласили внятною молвою.                                            Was speaking loud and clear, and praying.
Где скрылись ханы? Где гарем?                                   Where are the Khans and harem now?
Кругом всё тихо, всё уныло,                                          Around all’s still and drear, hope-killing,
Всё изменилось…но не тем                                           Yes, all has changed.  Yet that’s not how
В то время сердце полно было:                                     I thought back then, with my heart brimming:
Дыхание роз, фонтанов шум                                          The roses’ breath, the fountains’ purl
Влекли к невольному забвенью,                                   Against my will made me oblivious,
Невольно предавался ум                                              Unwillingly my thoughts did whirl
Неизъяснимому волненью,                                             Myself not sure why I was nervous;
И по дворцу летучей тенью                                            A shade did flit about the palace,
Мелькала дева предо мной …                                       A maiden flashed before my eyes…
………………………………..                                          …………………………………….
Чью тень, о други, видел я?                                            Whose shade, my friends, was it I saw?
Скажите мне: чей образ нежный                                  Tell me, whose was the form so tender
Тогда преследовал меня,                                                Who haunted me there for so long,
Неотразимый, неизбежный?                                          Unstoppable, with me forever?

Was it Ekaterina Rayevskaya?  To that “remarkable woman” Pushkin wrote “The flying wisps of clouds are thinning, scattering far”.  Or was it perhaps her sister Maria (later the faithful “Decembrist wife”  of the banished Sergey Volkonsky, willingly joining him in Siberia for 30 years)? Some say it was Maria Rayevskya, to whom he dedicated the verse tale Poltava.  Maria has been called the “secret love” of his life.  She herself insisted he was never more than a friend:  “as a poet, Pushkin considered it was his duty to be in love with every pretty woman and fine young girl…But in truth he adored only his Muse, and poeticized all he saw.”  

These “secret love”  theories merit a digression (Pushkin, I daresay, would forgive me, being quite fond of digressions himself).

Pushkin was above all a poet of love.  No writer in Russia before him or after him ever expressed so much love in so many ways.  Love for him was not so much a choice as an unstoppable universal force, of which he was but a blessed conductor.  Love, protean and unpredictable, is in almost everything he wrote, and all he wrote, in the end, is really about love in one way or other:  Love at first sight, and at long last, by chance or arrangement, erotic and platonic, sexual and spiritual, jealous and calm, ironic and accepting, ruefully bitter, and reconciled, uncomplaining, mysteriously warm, accepting…love is his theme, love in which every happiness seems to lead to grief, yet every grief seems to lead to happiness.  Pushkin captures that mysterious quality of love, which defies definition precisely because it can only be felt.  Love is a mystery that defines us. Yet we, for our part, cannot define it.

Some post-modernist Soviet Pushkinists (whose views seem fathered by Marx and step-mothered by Freud) obsess (a bit jealously perhaps?) over every name on Pushkin’s jokingly compiled so-called “Don Juan list” --whose very existence is not quite “politically correct”.   But hindsight can be uncomprehending, and often misses the wood for the trees.  All Pushkin’s “experience, sired of errors grievous”  blessed us with a divine transcendent wealth of lyrical love poetry.  We all should re-read a letter Pushkin once wrote rebuking his friend Vyazemsky’s interest in gossipy  revelations of the stormy details of Byron’s intimate life:

Leave curiosity to the mob, and be at one with genius.  We know enough about Byron.  We saw him enthroned in his glory, and in his torments, as a great soul, and then we saw him buried in a Greece reborn. Who needs to see him on his chamberpot?  The mob greedily reads confessions and memoirs because in its baseness it gloats at the humiliation of the great, and the weaknesses of the mighty.  At the discovery of any filth the mob is jubilant: “he was base, like us; he was filthy, like us!”  You lie, you scoundrels!  He was base and filthy, but not like you at all –- he was different!

Even in his earlier, earthier love poems, Pushkin had a unique economy and sense of balance absorbed from the classical masters he had studied in the Lycée.  Even as a teenager, his half-drunken (usually half-joking) odes to easy women were light and graceful, eschewing vulgarity, which, for Pushkin, was one of the ultimate, most unforgivable sins.  Yet whether it was the Caucasus, as Gogol supposed,  that released the last chains on the freedom of his thoughts, or a new inner harmony that emerged from communion at dawn with a cypress tree, the Pushkin that emerged was--until death-- was a far more spiritual, meditative, inward- looking, and fundamentally mysterious poet.
Mystery is indeed a key to all great poetry. Pushkin’s favorite author Shakespeare (most Russians rank him second to their own bard) kept himself so anonymous in his love lyrics that, as Mark Twain said, “Shakespeare is the most famous man who never lived”.   For Shakespeare the mystery was himself, and the focus was mostly on the object of the poet’s love, and on her qualities:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips red;
If snow be white, why then, her breasts are dun;
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes there is more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, walks on the ground:
And yet, by heaven I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.    (Sonnet CXXX).

There’s no “false compare” in Pushkin either.   We learn who his love is just by how she makes him feel: otherwise, he—often deliberately—gives no clue. (In an age where the bonds of marriage were all too often imposed without any love, love all too often arose without the bonds of marriage. Many of Pushkin’s loves were unhappily married women, whose reputations needed guarding).  Thus he would freely strike whole lines and stanzas which might identify who had inspired them.  (See, e.g. “A drizzly day fizzed out, a drizzly night’s dull haze” ). Pushkin was furious when “The flying wisps of clouds are thinning, scattering far” was first published; its mention of his beloved’s astronomical interests compromised, as he thought, the star-gazing Yekaterina Raevsky.  But in truth his secrecy and mysteriousness were not just practical.  They were part of the sadness of love itself:

His poems are more sublime for being utterly independent of whom they are written to, of how she looks, or acts, or what she does or says…She is, just is—and that’s enough. Details and reasons are superfluous. The Talmud says that “the love that has a reason lasts only as long as the reason; but the love that has no reason lasts until the end of time.”   Just so, Pushkin’s love never has reasons.  And his feelings usually only let him focus on the object of his love when they aren’t really very serious (e.g. Confession, To a Kalmyk Girl,  “Round Izhora I was riding”).  Even then, he provides just the barest details, just enough to reflect the outpourings of is own heart…. His poetry is unique, then, in conveying with unparalleled intensity the experience of love as he felt it himself.  It involves us ever more deeply in his self- revelations, worries, elations.  He even lets us right into his bedroom as he lies with his love: “and our whole room with amber sparkling/ Glints in the dawn…”  

It is true Pushkin dedicated quite a few love poems by name, and many others were written into his beloved’s albums.  Yet most of his poems leave his loves in a kind of blissful Vermeer twilight.  To guess (to a greater or lesser degree, perhaps) just whom any given masterpiece is for is to singe his lovely murk with searchlights...hy do we need to know the name of Pushkin’s “secret love” ?  Why can’t we “leave curiousity to the mob”?   I decry—while relying on—the mob of scholars probing and searching, all needing to know: whom did the poet love “with such unsated endless passion”?

Она одна бы разумела                                          Alone she’d understand, decipher
Стихи неясные мои;                                               My blur of verse, confused unclear;
Одна бы в сердце пламенела                               Alone within my heart she’d fire
Лампадой чистою любви!                                    The lamp of love that’s pure, austere!
Увы, напрасные желанья                                      Alas, in vain such aspirations!
Она отвергла заклинанья,                                     My prayers, all my invocations,
Мольбы, тоску души моей,                                   My heart’s grief –all – she would not heed!
Земных восторгов излиянья,                                Of cries of earthly joys and passions,
Как божеству, не нужно ей!..                               Of the divine, she had no need!

Cherchez la femme!   Pushkin’s “secret love” may have been the most famous woman who never lived (at least to Russians).  And it’s unlikely they will find her in the archives …for she is eternal…She is Woman.

Alas, Pushkin’s idyll by Southern seas and mountains ended abruptly, like the above digression.  In September 1820 Pushkin was summoned to report for duty in the desolate flatlands and muddy lanes of Kishinev, Moldavia, where General Inzov had moved his headquarters.  There wasn’t much to do, and Pushkin found little to like about the place at first, except its dubious honor as the supposed site of exile of the great Roman poet Ovid.  In November 1820 Pushkin asked permission to visit Kamenka, the estate in the Ukraine of General Rayevsky’s relatives, the Davydov,family. Granted two weeks’ leave, he stayed six months; General Inzov extended his leave and, like a good-natured father, wrote the Davydovs: “I’ve been so worried about Mr. Pushkin. I feared that in spite of cruel frosts, biting winds, and blizzards he might try to come back, and something bad might happen on one of those awful roads in the steppes.  But after your letter, I am calm and hope your Excellency won’t permit him to travel till he regains his health.”

On December 4, 1820, Pushkin wrote to Gnedich (the Iliad ‘s translator into Russian): “Eights months already, my dear Nikolay Ivanovich, I’ve been leading the life of a nomad. First the Caucasus, then the Crimea, and Moldavia, and now I’m in Kiev Province, at the estate of the Davydov’s, very dear and intelligent brothers of General Rayevsky.  My time is spent between aristocratic dinners and democratic arguments…a colorful mix of the most original and famous minds in Russia are here. There are few women, but much champagne, much ardent wit, many books, and a few poems…”  Most of the “original and famous minds» at the estate were in secret revolutionary societies; one of the “few women” Karolina Sobanskaya, was a government spy. Though Pushkin did not join any societies, he tippled much champagne with these future Decembrist revolutionaries to uprisings in Spain and Portugal, the Americas, Naples, and Greece, while continuing work on The Prisoner of the Mountains and The Fountain of Bakchisarai.

Not that the elder Davydov brother (another 1812 veteran) needed much excuse for tippling…Pushkin described him as:  “a second Falstaff: lecherous, gluttonous, cowardly, boastful, shrewd, amusing, unscrupulous, whiny, and fat.  He had, however, one distinctive feature, which gave him still more charm: he was married.  Shakespeare never got around to marrying off his bachelor; Falstaff died without learning the joys of becoming a cuckold and a father.”   Pushkin seems to have had a brief affair with Davydov’s wife Aglaia (whose famously easy virtue prompted sharp epigrams from him in Russian and French).  He also wrote a little trifle of a song for the Davydovs’ twelve year old daughter Adele: 

Играй, Адель,                      Play on, Adele,
Не знай печали.                 And know no sadness.
Хариты, Лель                      The Graces dwell
Тебя венчали.                     With you in gladness.
И колыбель                          Your cradle bells
Твою качали                       They gently rattled.
Твоя весна                           Your springtime youth
Тиха, ясна:                          Is calm, clear, smooth.
Для наслажденья               For sweet sensations
Ты рождена.                        You’re born for sure.
Час упоенья                         So catch elation
Лови, лови!                          On the run!
Младые лета                      Your youth so boisterous
Отдай любви,                      Give up to love,
И в шуме света                   In this world’s noises,
Люби, Адель,                      Still love, Adele,
Мою свирель.                     My pipe’s soft swell.

By March 1821 Pushkin was back in Kishinev. General Inzov, angry that the government had not paid Pushkin’s salary, brought him to live in his own house, full of exotic plants and an aviary. Pushkin was fond of “good old Ivan Nikitich”, who admired his talent (even for writing forbidden songs to freedom like To a Bird and The Captive) and looked the other way at Pushkin’s many pranks and eccentricities. Kishinev was a frontier town, peopled by many ethnic groups. Pushkin, who himself had been teased for being “African” ,  was not only free of any kind of prejudice towards other peoples, but fascinated and sympathetic. With sketchpad in hand he’d stroll round town in a Moldavian cassock, or a fez and flowing Turkish robes, or Hasidic garb; Pushkin had several Jewish girlfriends; his sympathy for the poverty and fear endured by Russia’s Jews is plainin his fragment  “The lantern in the Jewish hovel” (any characters in his works who are anti-Semitic are invariably villains). .Pushkin thrilled, too, in the Greek struggle for independence and had an affair with a Greek lady rumored to have been Byron’s mistress (To a Greek Woman).  Entranced by a gypsy girl, he ran off to join her troupe for a while. His memories from this adventure set the scene for his tale The Gypsies…

Цыганы шумною толпой                                       The gypsies in a noisy throng
По Бессарабии кочуют.                                            Through Bessarabia are wandering.
Они сегодня над рекой                                             This night their tattered tents along
В шатрах изодранных ночуют.                            A riverbank are pitched, meandering.
Как вольность, весел их ночлег                          Like freedom, happy is their rest,
И мирный сон под небесами;                                Their peaceful sleep beneath the heavens.
Между колесами телег,                                               Between the wagon wheels are decked
Полузавешанных коврами,                                       The rugs that they hang up like curtains.
Горит огонь; семья кругом                                        Gathered around a fire’s blaze
Готовит ужин; в чистом поле                                      A family cooks; in empty fields
Пасутся кони; за шатром                                          Beyond their tent their horses graze,
Ручной медведь лежит на воле.                                    Their trained bear’s sprawled out at his ease.
Всё живо посреди степей:                                        All’s full of life among the steppes:
Заботы мирные семей,                                         The peaceful cares of roving clans
Готовых с утром в путь недальний,                           Readied to move off in the morning,
И песни жен, и крик детей,                                    Wives sing, kids shriek; throughout the band
И звон походной наковальни.                                    Their traveling anvil pounds its clonking…
Но вот на табор кочевой                                         But soon upon the nomad’s troupe
Нисходит сонное молчанье,                                         A sleepy silence shrinks and falls,
И слышно в тишине степной                                      And in the stillness nothing moves:
Лишь лай собак да коней ржанье.                                    A few dogs bark, some horses snort.

His amorous adventures, biting wit, and his keenly felt sense of personal honor involved him in over a dozen duels during this period—all bloodless, some even jocular.  Yet his friend Colonel Liprandi recalled: “When face to face with death, when a man fully discovers himself, Pushkin was possessed of the highest degree of inner calm, in spite of his emotionality.  When the time came to take his paces, he seemed cold as ice.”  In one duel, while his opponent was aiming and firing at him,  Pushkin calmly ate cherries, then cast away his gun.  In another duel, fought in a wild snowstorm at sixteen paces, he deliberately missed, then, when his opponent shot and missed, he offered his opponent a chance to hit him from twelve paces. The duel ended with his opponent saying: “you stand up to bullets as well as you write”—and Pushkin embraing him. Periodically, Inzov would try to keep his protégé out of trouble by putting him under house arrest and dragging him off to church. Pushkin, ever a prankster, taught Inzov’s parrot vivid blasphemies— quite startling an Archbishop who came by for tea. Pushkin wrote an ironic note in verse to Davydov:

In Kishinev, Pushkin wrote the Gabrieliad, a sparkling “piece of mischief” , a spoof of the Annuciation story  (never meant for publication, but  just a private prank, a way to kill time and amuse friends).  Later his prank almost killed him--on charges of blasphemy and atheism. Yet Pushkin is not easily classified. Would a real “blasphemer” end his heresy with a prayer to an angel?

These lines have a cruel irony in light of his final years.  Yet at the time Pushkin was a fundamentally happy man.  In May 1823 Pushkin began work on his great novel in verse Eugene Onegin.  A few months later he wrote his friend, the poet Delvig: “I’m writing a new long poem, a novel in verse, in which I babble freely on whatever I please beyond all limits…Publication is quite unthinkable; the censor would cry if he saw it…Lord only knows when we’ll be able to read it together…I write with rapture, and cannot stop” .  During his southern exile Pushkin would write several chapters of the novel, concluding with Tatyana’s Letter to Onegin (later turned by Tchaikovsky into perhaps his most famous operatic aria).
In July 1823, Pushkin was transferred to serve under the Governor-General of Southerrn Russia, Count Mikhail Vorontsov, headquartered in the port of Odessa.  Back then it was “a half-Italian porto franco”; all signs were in Italian as well as Russian.  Pushkin frolicked in the sea, the opera and restaurants, and befriended a former Moorish corsair named Ali. Yet at leaving General Inzov’s tender care,  “a new sadness pangs my breast: I miss the chains I’ve left behind”.  And, with more distractions, life in Odessa was much more expensive.  His salary was paid sporadically, and he had only been paid 500 rubles for his manuscript of the Prisoner of the Mountains.  (There was no copyright law in Russia until 1828, and even that first weak statute was so weakly enforced that Pushkin was helpless, all his life, to prevent pirates from robbing him of thousands by publishing his works without his consent).  However, as the first professional writer in the history of Russia, he managed a great deal for his new manuscript The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.  “I think of my poem as a cobbler would of a pair of boots, as a finished good, which I intend to sell as a profit”.  He got three thousand rubles for it—more than four years pay— and spent it with abandon.  Pushkin later poignantly described his memories of life in Odessa in a poetic fragment omitted from Eugene Onegin (“And so, I lived then in Odessa”). During his 13 months there, Pushkin dreamed of escaping Russia for Italy, immersed himself in Italian culture (having begun to learn “the tongue of golden Italy” in Kishinev) and fell in love with Amalia Riznich, an Italian Jewish beauty who had come to Odessa from Trieste, together with her husband, a Venetian trader.  Riznich is thought to have inspired such poems as “Will you forgive my jealous reverie”, “Into your bower, my friend so tender” “Bound for your distant country’s shoreline”,  “Beneath the blue skies of your native land” and “Invocation”.    Riznich did not remain long in Odessa, however, and for a brief while Pushkin was head over heels in love again with Karolina Sobanskaya (“Night”)—in Odessa with General Witte, the secret police chief.

During Pushkin’s last months in Odessa, his love was yet another Polish beauty, Countess Elizaveta Vorontsova. Their relations remain swathed in legends (she is yet another candidate for the role of “Pushkin’s secret love”; more than 30 drawings of her are in Pushkin’s manuscripts).  Their strolls by the sea may have been immortalized in Eugene Onegin’s “Pedal Digression”, Chapter I, xxix-xxxiv, though Nabokov argued that of the “sweet fet, sweet feet that I treasured” only one foot was Vorontsova’s, while the other foot was Maria Rayevskaya’s.   It is said that Voronstova gave Pushkin the ring with a Hebrew inscription “Simcha” (“Joy”)  which he treasured all his life.  (He bequeathed it on his deathbed to the poet Zhukovsky, from whom it passed to the novelist Turgenev; in 1917 the ring disappeared).  Supposedly that ring was his “Talisman” .  Pushkin’s sister Olga claimed Vorontsova wrote Pushkin when he was sent to further exile.  (“The Burned Letter” ). Although Pushkin’s  “The Demon” , written in Odessa, was, according to Pushkin himself, about the paralyzing effects of doubt, cynicism, and negativity,  many have supposed its subject was Alexander Rayevsky, General Rayevsky’s oldest son, who was the open, practically official, paramour of Countess Vorontsova.

Pushkin’s relations with her husband, Count Vorontsov, were rocky, and complicated by more than jealousy (Vorontsov, notorious for his own philandering is said to have quite tolerated his wife’s dalliances).  Formal and stiff, Vorontsov modeled himself on the English lords with whom he’d been schooled in Cambridge.  Yet fine English manners could not conceal his methods for ruthless control of the uneasy new provinces of Russia’s Southern Empire: spying, intrigue, and repression.  Though not above dabbling in trade, and using his official position to profit from his commercial activities, Vorontsov railed against Pushkin’s habit of writing poems instead of official memoranda.  He tried to force Pushkin to do his bureaucratic duties, and ordered him to write an official report about a plague of locusts attacking the Kherson Peninsula in the Ukraine.  Pushkin defiantly replied:

To write a memorandum is completely foreign to my nature.  For seven years I’ve ignored such duties, never wrote a single legal report, never tried to curry favor with any bosses…But I do not consider these years lost. Writing poems is my profession. …Just because I’m paid 700 rubles a year doesn’t mean I am obliged to serve. I accept these 700 rubles a year not as a bureaucrat’s salary, but as compensation for involuntary exile… If the Count wishes me to retire, I am ready.

Nonetheless, “the Cricket” was forced to go report about the locusts.  No record exists of his ever having written the required report.  Instead, legend has it that his “memorandum” was this little verse (quite often taught to students of Russian struggling valiantly  to master the myriad nuances of Russian perfective and imperfective verbs):

Vorontsov’s deputy recalled the Count asking: “You seem to love Pushkin.  Can’t you control him, and get him to do anything useful?”  “Excuse me, sir, but people like him can only be great poets. ”  “Well then—what use are they?”  Naturally, Pushkin resented being sneered at.  “Vorontsov is a vandal, a Court boor, and petty egotist.  All he saw in me was a tenth-class collegiate assessor, and I, I must say, see myself a bit differently”.  Pushkin wrote several epigrams about Count Vorontsov:

Vorontsov denounced Pushkin to St. Petersburg as a radical, and urged that the poet be removed. An excuse provided itself when police opened the poet’s private letter to a friend, in which he joked of  “taking lessons in pure atheism from a young Englishman, a deaf philosopher”.  Atheism was almost as grave a crime under the Tsars as religious belief would one day be under the commissars.  By order of Tsar Alexander I, Imperial Chancellor Nesselrode (another butt of epigrams and biting quip) decreed Pushkin stripped of his official rank and duties, and put under house arrest at the estate of his parents in Pskov Province, “under the supervision of local authorities”.   His carriage was commanded “to travel following exactly the itinerary given him by the governor of Odessa-- straight to the city of Pskov; he may not rest anyplace along the way, but immediately upon arrival in Pskov, must report to the Governor.”  A day before leaving, Pushkin wrote a poetic farewell: To the Sea. He set off northwards on July 31, 1824.  While waiting for fresh post-horses in the town of Mogilev, he was recognized by a cadet with whom he had caroused in the Lycée.  Midst bear hugs and tears, he was dragged off to become the occasion for a grand impromptu Russian feast and poetry reading: at four in the morning, the carousers tried to dunk their beloved bard in a champagne bath, which he reluctantly refused, as the gendarmes were waiting.  He reached his family home on August 9, 1824.  The second exile foretold by Madame Kirchof had come to pass.