Alexander Pushkin

1826-1831 Moscow and St. Petersburg

И наша дева наслалилась                                                              And so our maiden was enjoying
Дорожной скукою вполне:                                                             The endless boring road’s delights:
Семь суток ехали оне.                                                                      They rode for seven days and nights.

Но вот уж близко. Перед ними                                                      But now they’re near. Before them glistening
Уж белокаменной Москвы,                                                            Already white-stoned Moscow runs,
Как жар, крестами золотыми                                                         Like fire, with golden crosses quivering,
Горят старинные главы.                                                                  Its ancient domes gleam in the sun.
Ах, братцы! Как я был доволен,                                                   Oh brothers! How my heart was happy
Когда церквей и колоколен,                                                           To see the churches, bell-towers clanging,
Садов, чертогов полукруг                                                              The gardens, courtyards, crescents’ sweep
Открылся предо мною вдруг!                                                        Before me opened suddenly!
Как часто в горестной разлуке,                                                    How often in my exile grieving,
В моей блуждающей судьбе,                                                         Throughout my errant odyssey,
Москва, я думал о тебе!                                                                  Have I thought, Moscow, but of thee!
Москва…как много в этом звуке                                                  Moscow! How Russian hearts are heaving
Для сердца русского слилось!                                                       At all that merges in that sound!
Как много в нем отозвалось!                                                          How much in us it makes resound!

Pushkin was brought to Moscow on September 8, 1826, and was immediately brought to the Tsar in the Kremlin, without so much as a chance to shave, wash, or dress for the occasion.  Rigorous investigation of the condemned Decembrists proved they all loved  Pushkin’s poems.. Many, naïve and idealistic, had little in the way of coherent plans or ideology but the sweet hopes Pushkin’s verse had stirred. The new Tsar had secret agents sent to Mikhalovskoye to learn whether Pushkin was doing anything seditious.  An agent Boshnyak reported that he was well liked by the peasants near his home for his good humor and generosity, though he had an odd habit of jotting down old wives’ tales and folksongs. He seemed oblivious to politics, and would spend days horseback riding, swimming, and strolling the countryside in a broad straw hat and colorful Russian shirt. Very suspicious indeed!
 
Pushkin was grilled by the Tsar for an hour, and did not deny that many Decembrists were his most beloved friends.  He added that the sentences meted out against them had not changed his feelings.  Asked what he would have done if he had been in St. Petersburg on December 14th, he bravely replied that he would have joined his friends. The Tsar ordered him never again to write against the government,  to submit all future writings personally to the Tsar for censorship, then announced that he was free to go, and that his exile was over.  Later that evening the Tsar remarked: “Today I spoke with the smartest man in Russia” --and ordered Pushkin put under constant personal surveillance.  Why was Pushkin released from exile? Simply put, it was a political gesture, a half-hearted try by an unloved ruler for popularity. Pushkin was perhaps the most popular man in Russia, the darling of Moscow society. When he gave a public reading of his Boris Godunov at the home of a friend in Moscow, it brought down the house:

He read his verse superbly.  Unlike the usual style of declaiming verse in a singsong monotone, he spoke completely naturally, simply, clearly--yet so poetically, and with such animation!    We all were beside ourselves: some flushed, some shivered; our hair stood on end, we laughed, we cried…when he was done, a hush fell on us all, then we mobbed him.

But one of those who mobbed him had been an informant, and Count Benckendorf, the secret police chief, was far from pleased. Pushkin was reprimanded for not submitting his play to the Tsar before reading it aloud—even to friends. Its performance was promptly forbidden.   Pushkin’s drawings at this time show constant preoccupation with the persecution and hangings of his friends; surrounded by “spies, whores, and drunkards”  he soon was pining again for the simplicity and peace of country life, for his nanny Arina Rodionovna—and she for him (“To my Nanny”) .  Even a bright new company of musicians, gypsies, and  the great exiled Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, whom Pushkin befriended in Moscow, did not much console the poet.  In January 1827 a police proceeding began against him for his poem André Chenier, which contained the following provocative lines:

Разоблачался ветхий трон;                                                            No more do ancient thrones cause awe;
Оковы падали. Закон,                                                                      Our chains have fallen, and the Law
На вольность опершись, провозгласил равенство,                 Propped up by freedom now, proclaims that all are equal.
И мы воскликнули: Блаженство!                                                  We cried out “bliss!” in great throngs cheerful!
О горе! О безумный сон!                                                  Oh misery! Mad dream gone wrong!
Где вольность и закон? Над нами                                                Where’s freedom? Where’s the law? Unfettered
Единый властвует топор.                                                                Above us just the axe does reign.
Мы свергнули царей. Убийцу с палачами                                 We’ve overthrown the Tsar, but killers and cruel henchmen
Избрали мы в цари. О ужас! О позор!                                         Are our new chosen Tsars! Oh horror! Oh, what shame!

Pushkin explained that these lines were taken out of context from a poem submitted to the censor well before December 1825 about the great French poet Chenier, executed in 1794 under during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.  Today of course, these lines seem tailor-made for the Communists and the Bolshevik Revolution.  But the matter was only closed in July 1828

For the next four years Pushkin yearned for a wife, and sought her in society in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, living several months each year in both cities. In May 1827, before leaving Moscow to see his parents in St. Petersburg, Pushkin wrote in the album of his new love Yekaterina Ushakova,  “If they send me far from you”.  Ushakova was fond of Pushkin and adored his poetry. Yet being blond, and just as superstitious as her suitor, she refused his marriage proposal, fearing her “white head” might be the cause his death. They remained friends; Ushakova’s album has many (often whimsical) Pushkin drawings, and his  “Don Juan list” .

In St. Petersburg, while still writing Eugene Onegin, Pushkin renewed relations with Anna Kern, and was inseparable from his Lycée friend Delvig. He wrote the poem Arion on the anniversary of the hanging of his Decembrist friends. He also began a historical novel about his great-grandfather, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, written during a return visit to Mikhaylovskoye.  It was plotted to be something of a modern Othello in prose, but Pushkin set the novel aside after six chapters. Its crucial scene is sadly revealing of own insecurities and self-doubts in seeking a wife.  The Moor Ibrahim converses with Tsar Peter:
                “If I were minded to marry, would the young girl of her parents agree to this?  After all, my looks…”
“Your looks?  What nonsense!  Why aren’t you just fine? A young girl should respect the will of her parents, and let’s see what old Gavrila Rzhevsky will say If I myself am your matchmaker!”  With these words the Tsar summoned his sleigh and left Ibrahim sunk in profoundest meditation.
“To marry!” thought the African. “Why not?  Am I really doomed to spend my life in loneliness, and never know the highest pleasures and responsibilities of a man simply because I was born beneath the tropic of Cancer? I can’t hope to be loved…So?! What a childish objection…I won’t demand that my wife love me; I’ll be content if she’s faithful, and will seek to gain at least her friendship through constant tenderness, trust, and kindness.

In October 1827, changing horses on his road back to St. Petersburg, Pushkin was startled to see police manhandling his school  friend, the convicted Decembrist and poet, Wilhelm Küchelbecker.  “We threw ourselves into each other’s arms, but the guards rudely pulled the two of us apart.”  On October 19, 1827, just a few days later, a still-affected Pushkin, in yet another poem to commemorate the Lycée’s anniversary wrote: “God help you all, my dear, dear friends.” 

Back in St. Petersburg (“town so gorgeous, town of beggars”) during 1827-1828 Pushkin unrequitedly courted Annette Olenina (“Oh, blessed he picked with choice capricious”) as the secret police began yet another formal proceeding against him, this time accusing him of blasphemy for his authorship of the Gabrieliad.  Annette’s father was on the board of the commission.  Things looked bleak for Pushkin ( “Foreboding” ) and the matter was only dismissed after Pushkin wrote a personal letter to Tsar Nicholas, which has not survived.   It is perhaps not surprising that feeling pressed and persecuted by a hostile autocracy, Pushkin wrote the amazing poem: The Poison Tree.  Characteristically, the poem never preaches; it just tells a story.  It is precisely the objectivity and lack of preaching that allows us to ponder for ourselves the problem of evil.  Pushkin always lets us draw our own conclusions; we get to see and hear for ourselves how evil compounds itself, and how evil comes of being subservient to evil.

The almost existential grief and loneliness Pushkin  experienced in 1828 can be felt in his sleepless meditation: Remembrance, as well as a poem--addressed to life itself-- on the occasion of his own birthday: “Gift so futile, gift so random”.  Around this time Pushkin also wrote the lyric “I loved you once”, a light yet profoundly moving parting gift of love.  Again, Pushkin does not singe the twilight of his feelings with glaring and unnecessary details.  It does not really matter whom it was he loved; she is Woman, and one senses his deep and abiding love was unrequited.  Those who know the poem by  W.B. Yeats  “When you are old and grey” may find it evokes a similar mood.  Yet nothing is ever one-dimensional in Pushkin; the very act of putting love into the past tense somehow makes it everlasting, and the overwhelming wistfulness, warmth, regret, grief, and true generosity of spirit he feels are crowned simultaneously with a bittersweet irony.  

Despite his griefs, in 1827-1828, Pushkin kept working on Eugene Onegin, completing the work through Chapter VII. In 1828 Pushkin also completed Poltava, a thrilling narrative poem (best known in the West as the plot for Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa).  Maria, the heroine is asked to choose between her father and his mortal enemy, the husband she eloped with, against the backdrop of Peter the Great’s defeat of the Swedish invasion of Russia in 1709.   Throughout the many conflicts and twists and turns, Pushkin is sympathetic to all sides, to all of the many choices possible.  He shows us how Tsar Peter the Great is a hero whose eccentric brilliance and indomitable will created a mighty modern nation, yet portrays with understanding and sympathy Peter’s bitter foe, the Ukrainian rebel leader Mazeppa, struggling against fate and—at times-- his own conscience:

Тиха украйнская ночь.                                                                    Hushed the Ukrainian night
Прозрачно небо. Звезды блещут.                                                 And clear its sky; the stars are shining.
Своей дремоты хочет превозмочь                                                It seems the very air, try as it might,
Не хочет воздух. Чуть трепещут                                                  Can’t shake off slumber.  Only slightly
Сребристых тополей листы.                                                          Some poplars quiver silvery leaves.
Но мрачны странные мечты                                                          But gloomy, weird, unnatural dreams
В душе Мазепы: звезды ночи,                                                       Still haunt Mazeppa; constellations,
Как обвинительные очи,                                                                 Like eyes that fill with accusations,
За ним насмешливо глядят.                                                            Look down at him in mockery.
И тополи? Cтеснившись в ряд,                                                      Those crowded rows of poplar trees
Качая тихо головою,                                                                        All shake their heads now, silently,
Как судьи, шепчут меж собою.                                                     Like judges’ secret whispering
И летней, теплой ночи тьма                                                           The summer night’s warm murk is stale
Душна, как черная тюрьма.                                                           And stifling, like a great black jail.

In December 1828, at a dance lesson in Moscow, Pushkin briefly met the sixteen-year-old Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova, who would later become his wife.  “When I first saw her, her beauty was just barely beginning to be noticed in society; I loved her; she turned my head”.   Yet turned though his head was, it was still able to revolve in other directions.  A few days later he left for St. Petersburg, stopping along the way to visit friends in Malinniki, Tver Province, where he had a fling with Annette again, and wrote his wistful The Little Flower.  In St. Petersburg he wrote the meditative “When through the noisy streets I wander”.

Pushkin saw Natalya Goncharova again at a ball in Moscow in March 1829. Onw week later he had proposed. Natalya, or “Tasha”  as Pushkin called her, was the youngest—and by far the prettiest of  three sisters.  Her mother, Natalya Ivanovna Zagryazhskaya, had been the mistress of a dashing cavalry officer who was a favorite of Tsar Alexander I (and a lover of Empress Elizabeth).  That officer had been mysteriously murdered; soon afterwards, Natalya Ivanovna was married off  to Nikolay Goncharov, a wealthy owner of a factory in Kaluga Province.  But Goncharov, Natalya’s father, became a severe alcoholic, and went insane from drink, in the process squandering all the family’s wealth and leaving his family destitute.   Natalya Ivanovna responded to these traumas by seeing in them the hand of God, and becoming a religious fanatic (though a licentious one.  Natalya Ivanovna was, by all accounts, an unmercifully harsh, strict, domineering, and extraordinarily capricious mother.  However, she brought her daughters up to speak French and dance perfectly—the only two skills thought needed for a good society marriage.  She hoped to improve here dire finances by marrying off pretty youung Natalya in Moscow, “the marketplace of brides”.  

Biographers of Pushkin often discount any spiritual component to Pushkin’s feelings for Natalya.  The great poetess Marina Tsvetayeva, opined, not, perhaps, without jealousy: “Natalya had only one good quality: beauty.  Just beauty, simply beauty, without intelligence, wit, soul, heart, or talent.  Naked beauty—sharp as a sword.  And she pierced him through”.  Vladimir Sollogub (with whom Pushkin almost had a duel for alleged attentions to Natalya) remembered: “I have met many beautiful women, but none whose perfection seemed so complete, classical in both her features and her body…her presence made all other women fade away, even the most charming. Yet she seemed reserved to the point of coldness, and hardly ever spoke”.  By contrast, the poet Tumansky wrote: “don’t imagine she’s so extraordinary. She’s pale, with pure naïve features, but her eyes are sly and flirty as any grisette’s. She is gauche and stiff and reeks of the typical Moscow girl’s vulgarity. That she’s tasteless is clear by how she dresses, that she’s lazy is clear by the mess she makes of her household: soiled napkins, tablecloths, jumbled furniture and crockery”…

We do not have Natalya’s letters to Pushkin, but 78 letters from Pushkin to Natalya have survived.  It is obvious from their tender and deeply intimate tone that the poet, at least, did not share Tsvetayeva’s own opinion.  Instead the letters unmistakably evince his tender friendship, true devotion, sympathy, caring, and indeed: “I love your soul much more than your face.”   Pushkin may have truly sympathized with his sweet young damsel in distress.  Natalya, having no dowry, had few suitors, to her mother’s great disappointment.Yet Natalya’s mother, Natalya Ivanovna, greatly disapproved of Pushkin: he had scarce means, but ample troubles with the government, as well as a checkered romantic past.  She is known to have dictated sharp haughty letters to Pushkin (which her daughter softened with tender post scripta), and to have imperiously required her daughter to feign cold indifference, in hopes Pushkin would go away.  Natalya Ivanovna bluntly stated she hoped someone more “suitable” would come along.  But no one did, and Natalya Ivanovna therefore rejected Pushkin’s proposal as vaguely as she could.  On May 1, 1829, Pushkin wrote her back:
               

On my knees with  tears of gratitude I should write you now…your answer is not a refusal; you leave me hope. Yet if I
murmur still, and if sadness and bitterness mix with my feelings of joy, do not tax me with ingratitude; I perceive a mother’s prudence and tenderness!  But forgive as well a heart that is sick at being deprived of happiness.  I am leaving for now, but in the depths of my soul I bear the image of that celestial soul to whom you have brought the light of day.

Pushkin had left for the Caucasus, where his friend Nikolay Rayevsky, the General’s son, was fighting in the Russian army’s latest new war with Turkey.  At one stop to change horses, he was invited by a nomadic Kalmyk family to join them for breakfast:

A young Kalmyk girl, not at all bad looking, was sewing and smoking tobacco. I sat by her.  “What’s your name?”
                “***”. “How old are you?” “Ten and eight”. “What are you sewing?”  “Trousers”. “For whom?” “Myself”.  She gave me
her pipe and began breakfast: salted tea with mutton fat.  She gave me her ladle. I did not wish to offend by refusal and swallowed, trying not too obviously to take a deep breath. I doubt any national cuisine ever produced anything more revolting. I asked if I could try something else. She gave me a bit of dried mare’s meat. Even that was an improvement.  But such Kalmyk flirtations alarmed me; I ran from her tent as soon as possible and escaped this Circe of the steppes.

As his carriage rolled south, Pushkin reflected on this encounter in To a Kalmyk Girl.  He paused by Mount Mashuk to take the mineral waters where he had once found healing and inspiration, then continued south through Chechnya, noting:  “the Chechens hate us. We have driven them from their free pastures, ruined their villages, wiped out whole clans. No wonder hour by hour they slip away further into the mountains and from there carry out their raids against us.  The friendship of so-called pacified Chechens is doubtful; they are always in the end willing to support their ungovernable compatriots.”  (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).  Pushkin wrote several poems in the mountains, including The Monastery on Mount Kazbek.  Then he joined the army, and fought when the Turks made a surprise attack on the Cossack vanguard.  “He ran from our quarters, leaped on his horse and rode to the front lines.  Brave Major Semichev, who had been ordered by General Pashkevich to keep Pushkin safe, had to drag him away by force from the front lines; Pushkin had grabbed a spear from a slain Cossack and charged against the enemy horsemen.”  This Turkish campaign was Pushkin’s only experience of being “abroad”; he filled his sketchbooks with pictures of defiant Turkish prisoners.  In Georgia, remembering Natalya, he wrote his sublime: “Upon the Georgian hills there lies the haze of night…”  As soon as he got back to Moscow he threw himself at the feet of his beloved—again in vain. As he later wrote his mother in law:

What tortures awaited me on my return.  Your silence, cold manner, and my indifferent and careless reception by M-lle
N…I did not dare express myself.  I left for Petersburg with death in my soul.
Pushkin consoled himself on his way north by staying again with his friends in Tver’ Province. In “Round Izhora I was riding”  he renewed his acquaintance with Katya Velyasheva, with whom vowed to “till November fall in love”.  Snowbound on the Malinniki estate, he also wrote his sardonic yet lyrical “It’s winter. What’s to do here in the country?”   Its moods darken with the weather from boredom to gentle irony, to true ennui and “spleen”…And then, all of a sudden, pretty girls show up, and life seems worth living again: the verses grow more musical, and the plunges light-heartedly into the pleasures of flirtation, dances, hints… then sensuous passion and joy.   For a while, perhaps, he truly was able to take his mind off “Kars” and “Mama Kars”  as he nicknamed Natalya and her mother (a Turkish fortress by that name had stubbornly held out against a lengthy Russian siege).

Back in Petersburg, he asked the Tsar’s permission to travel “unto the distant foot of the Great Wall of China,/ To Paris bubbling” (“Let’s leave! I’m ready now!). As usual, he was refused; the Tsar was angry Pushkin had gone to the Caucasus without his leave.
Until his death (even in transporting his coffin) his every movement was restricted, requiring written permission from the Tsar.

Foreign travel had long been his fondest dream. Exiled in Kishinev, he had dreamed of joining Byron in fighting for Greek independence. In Book I of Eugene Onegin he dreamed in verse of Italy; from Odessa in January 1824, he had written his brother:

I’ve twice begged for leave to be allowed at least a foreign vacation, and each time received a most august and merciful refusal.  Only one thing remains: to write straight to So-and So, address, Winter Palace, opposite Peter and Paul Fortress.  Or else just grab my hat and cane and go check out Constantinople.  Holy Mother Russia is becoming quite unbearable!

From Mikhaylovskoye Pushkin had begged for leave to go abroad for medical reasons; his mother wrote the Tsar about this personally.  Again he was refused, and was directly only to Pskov, to seek healing.  He replied:

His Majesty’s unexpected kindness greatly touched me, especially as the local governor had already given me leave to be in Pskov, but I strictly obey our highest authority. Inquiring about treatment in Pskov, I was referred to a certain Vsevolozhsky, a skilled veterinarian, respected in the scientific community for a book on the treatment of horses”.  

In May 1826, he had written his friend Prince Vyazemsky:
               
I, of course, despise my Fatherland from head to toe.  How can you, not being tied down like me, stay here in Russia?  If the Tsar ever gives me freedom, I won’t stay a month.  It’s a sad age we live in. When I imagine London, and railroads, and steamships, and free English journals, or Parisian theatres—or bordellos, then my desolate Mikhaylovskoye just aggrieves and enrages me.  In Chapter Four of Onegin I’ve described my life; one day you’ll read it and ask with a sweet smile: where is my poet?  He seemed talented. And you’ll hear, my dear, the answer: “he ran off to Paris and will never—ever!— return to that accursed Russia! Hooray! Clever fellow!”

But it was not to be. The closest he ever got to England was the English Club in Moscow.  (When someone kidded him that the Moscow English Club was a contradiction in terms, he replied: “so is the Imperial Humane Society”).  And so, the most completely European of Russian writers was denied even a glimpse of the Europe he so dreamed of. Still, one wonders what would have happened had Pushkin been allowed to travel. The celebrated Russian painter Karl Bryulov  recalled:

[In the fall of 1836] Pushkin called one evening and asked me to dinner.  I wasn’t in the mood, and tried to refuse, but his stubbornness was stronger than mine, and he dragged me along.  His kids were already tucked into bed when he showed them to me, cradling them in his arms one by one, and cooing affectionately.  But something wasn’t right.  There was feeling of sadness, as if he was trying to force upon himself this idyllic picture of family happiness.  I couldn’t take it anymore and asked him: “why the devil did you ever marry?”  He answered: “I really wanted to travel abroad, but they didn’t let me.  Then I got in such a tizzy that I didn’t know what to do.  So I got married”.

The winter of 1830 was particularly lonely for Pushkin.  The Tsarist spy and propagandist Bulgarin was writing vicious slanders and racial slurs against him in the Northern Bee, a paper funded by the secret police.  Pushkin shot back with An Epigram on Bulgarin. As his chances to wed Natalya seemed dashed, he met his old flame Karolina Sobanskaya (the secret agent) once more in St. Petersburg. On February 2, 1830, he wrote her two notes that read like prose drafts of Onegin’s Letter toTatyana. In one: “happiness is so little made for me, that I could not recognize it when it was right in front of me”:   In another he wrote:

Today is the 9th anniversary of the day when I saw you for the first time.  That date was decisive in my life.The more I think about it, the more I see that my existence is inseparable from yours: I was born to love you and follow you.  All other cares on my part are either errors or folly.  Apart from you I have nothing but remorse for a happinessI have been unable to attain.  Sooner or later I will have to abandon everything and cast myself at your feet.

Pushkin never sent either note, which may have been in part something of a composition exercise: Sobanskaya was not the marrying kind.  In parting, Sobanskaya asked Pushkin to write his name in her album.  He wrote instead:“What is there in my name for you?”    By April 1830 Pushkin was back in Moscow wooing Natalya.  Completely despondent, he proposed again to “Mama Kars”:
Only habit and long intimacy can help me win the affection of M-lle your daughter.  Eventually I can hope to attach her to me, but I have nothing to please her.  If she consents to give me her hand, I will see in this only proof of the tranquil indifference of her heart.  Yet will this tranquility of hers last when she is surrounded by admiration, tributes, and seductions?  She will be told that just bad luck has prevented her from forming other attachments more fitting, more brilliant, more worthy of her…Maybe these offers will be sincere; doubtless she will think so.  Will she not have regrets? Will she not regard me as a fraudulent ravisher? Will she take aversion to me? God is my witness; I am ready to die for her, but to have to die, and leave her a brilliant widow, free to choose a new husband the next day—this idea is hell.

It is hard to imagine a more melancholy proposal, which reads eerily in light of what would follow.  How could the wittiest man in Russia, “the sunshine of Russian poetry” prize himself so little?  Why did he feel “I have nothing to please her”?  Why, surrounded by admirers, did the champion and poet of romantic love wish to marry someone who regarded him at best with “tranquil indifference”?   Two seasons had passed, however, and Natalya’s mother had received no better offers. Three weeks later Pushkin reflected, in a letter to Princess Vyazemskaya: “First love is always a matter of sentiment; the sillier it was, the sweeter its memories.  Second love is a matter of voluptuous sensations…I could continue the parallel, but it would take too long. My marriage to Natalie (who is, in parenthesis my 113th love) has been decided.”  The engagement was announced May 6, 1830.

Исполнились мои желания. Творец                                             My dream’s come true.  Our Lord Creator
Тебя мне ниспослал, тебя, моя Мадонна,                                  Sent you down to me, sent you, my own Madonna,
Чистейшей прелести чистейший образец.                                 Of purest grace the purest monument.

His future mother-in-law, however, was far from a dream come true.  She was continuing to seek ways to break the engagement, and demanding money from the poet, which he did not have. By August 31, 1830, he was writing his publisher:

I’ll tell you what I feel: grief, grief, grief.  My future mother in law’s finances are a mess, so our wedding gets postponed day by day.  All the while my ardor dampens, as I think of the cares of a married man and the charms of bachelorhood.  To make things worse, all the gossip in Moscow reaches the ears of my fiancée and her mother, causing more tiffs, nasty remarks, uncertain reconciliations— in a word, if I am not unhappy, I am at least not happy. 

In September 1830 Pushkin went to Boldino, a property his father had given him as his engagement present (and mortgaged it to pay for his mother-in-law’s clothes and expenses). No sooner had he arrived than cholera broke out in the province. Quarantine roadblocks were set up, cutting Pushkin off from return to Moscow. Holed up in the simple wooden house in Boldino, he wrote his publisher: “Cholera morbus is all around. Do you know what sort of beast that is?  Any moment it may hit Boldino and devour us all…You can’t imagine how grand it is to give my fiancée the slip and just get down to writing poems.”  The famous Boldino Autumn had begun.  Three months later, he reported to his publisher: “In Boldino I wrote as I have never written”. Truly,  the quality and productivity of what flew from his pen in Boldino is astounding: several dramatic scenes or “little tragedies” in brilliant verse: Mozart and Salieri, The Guest of Stone, The Miserly Knight, and The Feast in a Time of Plague, several long narrative poems, including  the humorous A Little House in Kolomna.  In addition, at Boldino, he wrote five brilliant short prose tales known as the Tales of Belkin, which are a watershed in Russian literature.  Tolstoy was to call them the finest prose ever written in Russian, and advise young authors: “read and re-read The Tales of Belkin.  Every writer ought to study every last word of them.”   At Boldino he also wrote over thirty poems, including The Demons, Elegy, The Page, To the Poet, “I can’t sleep, fire’s out, no light “ Bound  for your Distant Country’s Shoreline”, “When in the grasp of my embrace”, Invocation.  At Boldino he also finished Eugene Onegin, the crown jewel of Russian literature, after seven years, four months and seventeen days’ labor of love:

Миг вожделенный настал: окончен мой труд многолетний.              Finally, now the time’s come!  I have finished my many years’ labor.
Что ж непонятаная грусть тайно тревожит меня?                              Why, strange and secret, does sadness so trouble me now?
Или, свой подвиг свершив, я стою, как поденщик ненужный,          Is it, the deed being done, that I stand like a day-worker, useless,
Плату приявший свою, чуждый работе другой?                                Having been given my pay,  foreign to all other work?          
Или жаль мне труда, молчаливого спутника ночи,                            Am I sad for the work, for my silent companion at nightimes,
Друга Авроры златой, друга пенатов святых?                                  Friend of my dawns swathed in gold, friend of my home’s holy shrine?

Eugene Onegin is best known in the West by the Tchaikovsky opera, which eliminates the novel’s main character: the poet narrator, Pushkin, and captures little of its magical exuberance.  Perhaps because Tchaikovsky was musically attracted to the “pathétique”, many miss the joyous heart that surrounds the unhappy plot of the novel.  Although it depicts the sufferings of what would later be called by Russian critics “a useless person”, its tale of mutual unrequited love and missed opportunities, of friendship gone wrong and misunderstandings that lead to disaster—this is a sense doesn’t matter to Pushkin.  Even tragedy itself is to him but a metaphor that deepens his abiding love of humanity and nature, his wisdom and acceptance, his poetic happiness, through a seemingly aimless but precisely guided loving, transcendant, poetic ramble through a “an encyclopedia of Russian life” in Belinsky’s famous phrase.

He returned to Moscow in December 1830, but quarrels with his future mother-in-law continued to delay the wedding, as did, in January 1831, the grievous news of the death of Pushkin’s dear friend Delvig.  Many noticed the poet’s grief: one friend wrote: “Soon Pushkin is marrying Miss Goncharova, entre nous, a soulless beauty. It seems to me by now he’d be glad to cancel the engagement”. Just a week before his wedding, Pushkin wrote a friend:
               
I’m married. Well—almost. I’ve already pondered all that might tell me in favor of bachelor life and against marriage.
I’ve cold-bloodedly weighed the gains and losses in the estate I am choosing.  My youth has passed noisily and
fruitlessly. Hitherto I have not lived as most people do, and I was not happy.  Happiness lurks only on beaten paths. I’m over thirty. Most people usually marry at 30; I’m acting like most people, and probably won’t have grounds to regret.   I am marrying without ecstasy or boyish enchantment; I see the future not all rosily, but in all its naked truth.  Griefs will not surprise me; they are part of my domestic calculations.  Any joys, though, will be completely unexpected. 

Just two days before his marriage, he wrote his publisher: “I can afford to take a wife who has no money, but to plunge into debt just for the sake of her frilly clothes—that I can’t afford.  Yet I am stubborn and must insist on at least going through with this marriage.  Well, there’s no remedy.  You’ll just have to publish my short stories”.  Pushkin’s gloom was not dispelled at his bachelor party, where he burst into tears hearing the gypsies’ plaintive songs.  The day of the wedding, February 18, 1831, began even worse, Natalya was ill, and a rude note came from Pushkin’s future mother-in-law threatening to call off the marriage unless he gave her a huge sum of money for a carriage.  In spite of everything, Pushkin and Natalya proceeded to marry in the Church of the Ascension in Moscow (opposite where the TASS Building today looms, by the Nikitsky Gates). During the ceremony, the bride dropped the ring meant for the groom. Then a draft blew a Bible and a cross off the lectern, and snuffed out Pushkin’s candle.  Princess Dolgorukaya saw Pushkin turn pale and exclaim: “All bad omens!”    Then he composed himself, and smiled. 

My fate is decided. I am getting married…She whom I have loved for two whole years, whom my eyes ever yearn for first, with whom every meeting has seemed bliss…My God! She’s mine…Awaiting the decisive moment was the most painful feeling in my life.  The wait for the last card to be dealt, pangs of conscience, trying to sleep before a duel—all that is nothing in comparison…To marry!  Easy enough to say!  Most people make of marriage a fancy gown bought on credit, a new carriage, and a silk rose nightgown.  For others it’s about a dowry and settling down.  Others marry because everyone else marries, because they’re thirty…I am marrying, i.e. giving up my dear freedom, my carefree, whimsical independence, luxurious habits, aimless wanderings, seclusion and inner calm, my inconstancy…to double a life which is far from full now. I’ve never sought happiness; I never needed to. Now I seek enough for two—but where will I find it?
…No longer is this a mystery of two hearts.  No, today, it’s the news of all the house, tomorrow, the news of all the square.  Just so a poem composed in seclusion beneath the moon on a soft summer night  must soon be hawked in a bookstall and taken apart by a pack of tomfool reviewers…
All claim to joy in my joy, all congratulate me, all now suddenly love me.  Everyone wants to offer me favors: a house, a loan, a Bukharan dress pedlar.  Others worry about the size of my future family and offer me a bargain price for 12 gloves with a portrait of the hit singer M-lle Sontag.  Young men now act uppity with me, respecting me as a new enemy.  Meanwhile the ladies praise my choice to my face, then behind my back pity my bride: “poor thing! She’s so young so innocent, and he’s so flippant and immoral!”  I must admit I’m getting sick of it all.