Alexander Pushkin

Exile in Mikhaylovskoye 1824 –1826

About a week’s hard riding from Moscow or St. Petersburg,  “in this forgotten waste/ This shrine of desolation, frost, and snowstorms”, Mikhaylovskoye was a modest manor house, with a few cottages for the surrounding serfs.  The whole family was home when he arrived (supposedly his father was playing French songs on the guitar).  But “being with my family has only added to my griefs and sorrows. The government was brazen enough to request that my father act as its agent in persecuting me…My father was craven enough to accept this ‘proposal’, which makes him play utterly false with me.  As a result every moment I’m not in bed I spend either on horseback or in the fields.  Anything that reminds me of the sea grieves me. A fountain’s murmur makes me truly ill, and I think a clear blue sky would make me weep with rage, but here, thank God, our sky is grey, and our moon is just like a boiled turnip.”  (“A drizzly day’s fized out”).  By November 1824, Pushkin’s father in fact refused to inform or assist surveillance on his son.  The whole family soon was gone, leaving the poet blissfully alone with a few household serfs and Arina Rodionovna, his doting nanny.  He had already loved her dearly since childhood.  Her constant care, good-natured affection, and singsong speech, full of proverbs and phrases from fairy tales, made her a truly beloved maternal figure.He called her “mama, mamushka”,  delighted in her hard-boiled eggs, buckwheat kasha, baked potatoes, pickled vegetables, and stewed apples. She was famous for making berry jams--and moonshine.  Pushkin wrote a friend in Odessa:

I’m stuck in the utter boondocks, bored, with nothing to do.  There’s no sea here, or southern sky, or Italian opera—
though at least there’s no locusts, nor Milords Worontsov… In the evenings I hear  fairy tales told by my nanny, the original nanny of my Tatyana.  She’s my only friend, and the only person with whom I’m not bored.

Arina Rodionovna’s maternal and spiritual warmth in times of bleakness is the theme of A Winter Evening and To my Nanny; she is also lovingly mentioned in Eugene Onegin and “I went back again”.  Pushkin recorded dozens of songs she taught him, as well as seven fairy tales, three of which (The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Balda’s Tale, and The Dead Princess) he transformed into verse while keeping the folktale elements and embellishments of her oral tradition.  He incorporated one of her fairytale flourishes into a new Prologue for the second edition of Ruslan and Lyudmila.. Readers who know Chekhov’s The Three Sisters will recognize its first line, which sister Masha repeats obsessively: “A green oak grows by a cove curving” ) .

Besides fairy tales and incessant reading, he consoled himself at Trigorsk, the estate of the family of Praskovya Aleksandrovna Osipova-Wulf.  Pushkin liked to make his entrance leaping through her open windows.  He made friends with her young son Aleksey Wulf, and courted all Aleksey’s pretty sisters:

Чудо – жизнь архимандрита!                                        Archimandrite life’s a marvel!
В Троегорском до ночи,                                                  In Trigorsk we play till dusk,
А в Михайловском до света,                                          In Mikhailovskoye till dawn
Дни любви посвящены,                                                    Days to love are given up,
Ночью царствуют стаканы,                                           Nights are ruled by our good tankards,
Мы же – то смертельно пьяны,                                      And we’re either deadly drunkards,
То мертвецки влюблены.                                 Or we’re smitten dead in love.

In Trigorsk, Pushkin wrote his Confession  for Annette (“Alina”) Osipovna.  In the album of her younger sister Zizi (“the crystal of my soul” ) he wrote “If life chances to deceive you” .  One visitor to Trigorsk was Praskovya’s Wulf’s cousin, Anna Petrovna Kern, whom he had met six years ago in St. Petersburg.  The night before Kern left to go home, Pushkin gave her a manuscript of Chapter II of Eugene Onegin. Stuck within its pages was the poem  “A wondrous moment I remember”— perhaps the Russian language’s most famous lyric, set to music by Pushkin’s friend Glinka, and many other composers.  He rather shocked the sleepy local priest in Trigorsk by requesting a memorial mass for Byron.  For all his light-hearted skepticism, Pushkin was drawn to his Orthodox faith, and frequented the local Svyatogorsky Monastery, whose chief monk, Father Ioann, was his confessor.  He spent much time in the monastic library, reading the old scrolls and chronicles, and also visited the monastery’s fairs, where he walked among the crowd, hearing the tales of beggars, pilgrims, and “holy fools”. It was all grist for his blank verse tragedy, Boris Godunov.  He would wake before dawn, write by candlelight, and sometimes not leave his little room for days. Verse was pouring out of him. He wrote Nikolay Rayevsky: “My soul has reached full strength: I can create!”  On November 7, 1825, he wrote Vyazemsky:  “I have finished my tragedy.  I read it aloud to myself, then clapped till my palms hurt, cheering: “Hooray, Pushkin-! Hooray! You son-of-a-bitch!”  (That was nearly the only applause for this work Pushkin would ever hear.  Its public performance, or even private reading aloud, was for years forbidden). Although the incredibly beautiful, graceful and sonorous verse of Boris Godunov has never really crossed the language barrier, the play is of course, known in the West as the plot for a magnificent opera by Modest Mussorgsky.  One cannot do justice in a few words to Boris Godunov; though Pushkin himself put it in a nutshell:  “what is the play about? The fate of a man decides the fate of a people.”  Many consider it the finest Russian language drama: the critic Belinsky’s judged it: “lonely, splendid, sober, magnificent in its purity of style, dignified and classical in simplicity—a giant among pygmies.”  

On November 19, 1825 Tsar Alexander I died childless; the news received Pushkin at the end of the month.  “As a loyal subject, I ought to be sad at the Tsar’s death, but as a poet, I look forward in joyful anticipation…”  Alexander’s oldest brother Constantine was expected to assume the throne, but Constantine, on marrying a Polish Catholic wife in 1823, had renounced the throne in favor of his brother Nicholas. Few knew this, however; many soldiers and citizens alike refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas.I, considering Constantine the rightful heir. On December 14, in what would be called the Decembrist Uprising, thousands of assorted nobles from secret revolutionary societies, officers, and soldiers gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg (where the Bronze Horseman stands) to demonstrate against autocracy, and demand: “Constantine and a Constitution”.  The crowd refused to disperse, and shooting began. Miloradovich, the Governor of St. Petersburg who had been kind to Pushkin, was killed.  Nicholas I dispersed the crowd with grapeshot; five Decembrists were hanged, hundreds of others were exiled to Siberia. Pushkin had planned to escape to Petersburg, and even created a fake internal travel passport for the purpose.  It describes one: “Aleksey Khokhlov, height, two arshins, four vershky [about five foot three], dark red hair, blue eyes, clean shaven, age 29”.  But Pushkin had barely started riding off for the capital, when a hare crossed his path, and then he met an Orthodox  priest.  Ever superstitious, if not religious, Pushkin turned around at these omens of bad luck and went home. Seeking solace in Shakespeare, and perhaps sensing (though unaware of) the bloody events taking place in Petersburg, he pondered the accidents of individual fate in history. 

Rereading The Rape of Lucrece, one of Shakespeare’s weaker poems, I thought to myself: what if it had just occurred to Lucretia to give Tarquin a good slap in the face?  What if, perhaps, that would have cooled his ardor, and he’d had to retreat in shame? Lucretia would not have stabbed herself, Collatine would not have been enraged, Brutus would not have banished the Kings, and the world and history would be utterly different.  And so we owe the Republic, the consuls, the dictators, the censors, and the Caesars all to one overwrought scene of seduction a bit like something that happened the other day to our neighbours in the Novorzhevsky district.  The thought of parodying this history and Shakespeare occurred to me, and being unable to withstand such double temptation, I wrote this little tale in two mornings.  It is my habit to date my writings…Count Nulin was written December 13-14, 1825.  There are strange coincidences in life.

In Count Nulin, as in Eugene Onegin, Pushkin sympathizes above all with his heroine, merging his feelings with hers:
Она сидит перед окном;                                                             There by the windowsill she sits,
Пред ней открыт четвертый том                                                   And Volume Four on her lap flits
Сентиментального романа:                                                           Of a most sentimental novel:
ЛюбовьЭлизыиАрмана,                                                 The Love of Elise and Armand, or
Ильперепискадвухсемей. —                                                         Letters twixt Two Families.
Роман классической, старинный,                                                 A classic tale of morals strong,
Отменно длинный, длинный, длинный,                                      Amazingly long, long, long, long,
Нравоучительный и чинный,                                                         Most proper, teaching right and wrong,
Без романтических затей.                                                               Without romantic fantasies.
Наталья Павловна сначала                                                           At first Natalia Pavlovna was
Его внимательно читала,                                                                Reading, raptured, serious,
Но скоро как-то развлеклась                                                         But somehow soon she drifted off,
Перед окном возникшей дракой                                                    Then out the window came a quarrel
Козла с дворовою собакой                                                             Between a goat and courtyard mongrel:
И ею тихо занялась.                                                                          She was transfixed in watching this.
Кругом мальчишки хохотали.                                                       All round a bunch of boys were laughing,
Меж тем печально, под окном,                                                      Beneath her windows, though, there mourned
Индейки с криком выступали                                                        A gaggle of wild geese, their cackling
Вослед за мокрым петухом;                                                           Inspired by rain-drenched rooster’s dawn.
Три утки полоскались в луже;                                                       Three ducks were splashing in a puddle;
Шла баба через грязный двор                                                       Across the yard an old hag went
Белье повесить на забор;                                                               To hang old linen on the fence;
Погода становилась хуже:                                                             The weather seemed to presage trouble:
Казалось, снег идти хотел...                                                           It seemed snow wished to tumble down…
Вдруг колокольчик зазвенел.                                                         And then a little bell did sound.
Кто долго жил в глуши печальной,                                              Whoever’s lived in backwoods gloomy,
Друзья, тот, верно, знает сам,                                                        My friends, knows, surely all too well,
Как сильно колокольчик дальный                                               How distant tinkling bells can truly
Порой волнует сердце нам.                                                            At times just make our heartbeats swell.
Не друг ли едет запоздалый,                                                         Is it an old friend out there, lagging,
Товарищ юности удалой?..                                                            A bosom pal of our youth dashing?

As dawn was breaking on January 11, 1825, Pushkin’s beloved “Jeannot”, Ivan Pushchin, had arrived; Pushkin, hearing the sleigh bells, had rushed in his nightshirt barefoot into the snow to embrace him.  Soon Arina Rodionovna, not even comprehending who had come, was embracing both of them.  Pushchin was on a mission for a secret revolutionary society, and could only detour for one day.  Pushchin soon would be one of hundreds of Decembrists exiled for 30 years to Siberia as “criminals against the state”. Yet that one embrace in a snowy courtyard has lasted longer than all his years of exile; it is remembered in “My very first and priceless friend”.   After Pushchin’s sentence, Pushkin risked a third exile--or worse, given the circumstances, and sent that poem to his friend along with his now-famous Message to Siberia. .*  But friendship and poetry were linked in his imagination, and “it was Poetry that saved me, Poetry, like a consoling angel, and my soul was reborn”.  Another close friend who risked visiting him was the poet Anton Delvig, who came in the spring of 1825, and helped Pushkin edit his first book of poems.  Pushkin expressed his thanks to his friends in an elegy commemorating the Lycée’s anniversary, October 19th, a classic found in every Russian poetry anthology.  October 19th combines the melancholy splendors of the fall and he warm sensation of the poet’s solitary glass of wine to heighten his nostalgia as an exile,  his warm hopes—and pining— for his friends.

In September 1826, Pushkin was summoned by an imperial courier to appear at once before Tsar Nicholas I, days after his official coronation in Moscow.  On his way to a fateful meeting, Pushkin composed his magnificent evocation of the poet’s role as the conscience of his nation: The Prophet.  With images from the Book of Isaiah, Chapter VI, it describes what might be called an operation by the Heavenly Surgeon, in which the poet, who once was “babbling, idle, cunning, moody”, transforms into an all-seeing, all-hearing vessel of the divine, sensitive and sympathetic to the voice of heaven and earth itself:

И внял я неба содроганье,                                                               To Heaven’s shuddering I hearkened,
И горний ангелов полет,                                                                  And to the lofty angels’ flight,
И гад морских подводный ход,                                                     To slithering things in deep seas’ night,
И дольней лозы прозябанье.                                                          And valley grapes grown dull, cold,  hardened.

The Prophet is the first of many poems Pushkin would devote to poetry itself, and to the poet’s relationship to others (The Poet, The Echo, Autumn). The Prophet rises above politics and sounds a clarion call for the poet to remember his divine mission in life:

“Восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли,                                       “Arise, thou prophet, see, and hearken,
Исполнись волею моей:                                                                   By my will let your soul be stirred,
И, обходя моря и земли,                                                                   And, wandering by lands and waters,