Alexander Pushkin

1831-1837            Married Life       St. Petersburg

The newlyweds rented rooms in a charming house on Moscow’s Arbat Street.  It was there the poet Tumansky visited the new couple and was so singularly unimpressed by Natalya, as mentioned earlier.  Pushkin himself, in spite of everything, even bad omens,  was truly blissful at the beginning.  Just a week after the ceremony, Pushkin wrote his publisher:

I’m married—and happy.  I have but one wish: for nothing in my life to change. It will never get any better than this.  This feeling is so new to me.  It seems I am reborn. 

Yet Pushkin’s mother-in-law did not share his joy.  She reproved her son-in-law’s anti-clericalism, commanding her daughter to keep observing lugubrious vigils, prayers, and fasts.  Over and over she complained that her daughter had made a tragic mistake in marrying a good-for-nothing scribbler, a proven trouble-maker, a heretic, a libertine--while nagging her new son in law for ever greater sums of money. Soon Pushkin could take no more, and left Moscow for good, writing his mother-in law in parting:
               
I have been forced to leave Moscow to avoid the unpleasantness you caused, which in the end would have robbed me of more than just my peace of mind.  You have described me to my wife as an odious man, a greedy, vile bloodsucking usurer; you have told her she just was a fool, and she should not allow her husband to…etc.  You will admit that this is all preaching divorce. I have answered with both patience and mildness, both, I see now, were quite in vain.

In May 1831, the newlyweds moved to a cozy little home by the park of the Summer Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, not far from Pushkin’s beloved Lycée. Each morning he and Natalya would promenade around the lake. His sister Olga was happy that “they seem to adore each other”. The poet Zhukovsky wrote: “Pushkin is my neighbor, and we see each other often. His wife seems a quite delightful creature, and he’s so happy with her. I am gladder than ever for him that he is married. His soul, life, and poetry all gain from this”.  While in Tsarskoye Selo, Pushkin added Onegin’s Letter to Tatyana (and a few stanzas before and after) to the completed text of Eugene Onegin:

 … поминутно видеть вас,
Повсюду следовать за вами,
Улыбку уст, движенье глаз
Ловить влюбленными глазами,
Внимать вам долго, понимать
Душой все ваше совершенство,
Пред вами в муках замирать,
Бледнеть и гаснуть… вот блаженство!

…every moment seeing you,
And following where’er you go,
Your lips that smile, your eyes that move,
To catch with eyes in love, aglow.
To hear and hear you, understand
With all my soul your sweet perfection,
In agonies before you stand,
Turn pale and swoon! What bliss! What blessing!

He expressed his new “tortured joy” in the poem “No, I do not hold dear that pleasure most rebellious”, which presents an odd, ambiguous picture of Natalya as cold, barely responding to the poet’s ardor.  Many see in this poem a proof that Natalya did not love her husband, but rarely is anything in Pushkin’s works so simple.  It is worth noting that while honeymooning in Tsarskoye Selo, Pushkin wrote the happiest and most beloved of all his fairy tales, The Tale of Tsar Saltan:

Говорят,  царевна есть,
Что не можно глаз отвесть:
Днем свет Божий затмевает,
Ночью землю освещает;
Месяц под косой блестит,
А во лбу звезда горит.
А сама-то величава,
Выступает, будто пава,
Сладку речь-то говорит,
Будто реченька журчит.

There’s a princess, so they say,
From whom eyes can't look away.
During day than sun she's brighter
Nights she makes the world shine lighter.
In her locks bright moonbeams are,
In her forehead gleams a star.
She herself, majestic, precious,
Like a peacock stately, paces,
When she speaks, her sweet speech seems
Like the murmuring rush of streams.

In 1831, Pushkin wrote The Echo, an allegory of a poet’s obligation to sacrifice his own personality, to listen and reflect, to be “empty” as an echo (in which truth rings). Still missing his friend Delvig and other Lycée friends, he wrote a melancholy yet philosophical poem on October 19, 1831, the 20th anniversary of the Lycée’s founding: “The more we do commemorate”.
That same year, while promenading in the park of the Summer Palace, Pushkin and his wife met the Tsar, who, by all accounts, was very taken by Natalya. Soon thereafter, the Tsar restored Pushkin to his tenth class bureaucrat posting in the Russian civil service, and gave him access to the State Archives, and later Catherine the Great’s celebrated Voltaire Library. Pushkin began work on a projected biography of Peter the Great (never finished) as well as an outstanding history of what might be called the first Russian civil war, namely the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-1775.  As part of his research, Pushkin received a gift from the Tsar of the Complete Laws of the Russian Empire, and studied them intently.  Delving in the Archives, Pushkin began to see himself more and more as historian as well as a poet, and to turn more and more to prose.  Revolts in France, Poland, and peasant uprisings in Russia returned his interest to themes of the individual against the state, and the contrasting excesses of power and society versus  uprising and rebellion. His novel Dubrovsky, written in 1832-1833, incorporated many factual materials almost verbatim, including a letter from his nanny, the record of a corrupt court proceeding in Murom Province, and the brutal suppression of a ruined nobleman turned brigand in Belorussia.  Yet he unhappily cast the work aside, leaving it, like many of Pushkin’s works, beautifully unfinished, like a Greek torso. One senses Pushkin had trouble reconciling within himself the conflict between romantic plot and historical study, between lyric poetry and prose, which (in his view) should be always unadorned, plain, and clear as possible.   

Speaking of prose, one of the new friends Pushkin made in Tsarskoye Selo was Nikolay Gogol, just arrived from the provinces, and woefully shy.  Pushkin immediately recognized Gogol’s talent, encouraged him to write, and helped him get published.  Gogol, for his part, idolized Pushkin, and was grateful to him until death for aiding his career: it was Pushkin who gave him the plot and coached him in of two of his most famous works: the comedy The Inspector-General, and the novel Dead Souls. Pushkin helped Gogol get a university professorship, edited several of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, including The Nose, The Carriage, and Nevsky Prospekt, andhelped persuade the Tsar to permit the staging of The Inspector General.

Pushkin’s  first child Maria was born on May 19, 1832, and, by most accounts, Pushkin was a doting father.But life in the capital was ruinously expensive, especially, in light of Natalya’s taste for fancy clothes, carriages, hats, and gloves. Though Pushkin took some pride in her brilliant success in Petersburg society, he could ill afford it, as he had foreseen before his marriage.  And they each made each other jealous.  In the fall of 1832, Pushkin lectured at Moscow University, from where he wrote her:

I respond to your accusations point by point. 1) A Russian traveling on a road never changes clothes, but once he gets where he was going, piggish as a pig, goes straight to the bath-house, which is to us our second mother.  Don’t you know this?  2) The post in Moscow accepts letters only until 12 and I only crossed Tverskaya Gate just after 11, so I put off writing till the next day.  Can you see now that you’re wrong?  Wrong because (1) you’ve filled your head with all kinds of nonsense (2) out of pique you’ve sent Count Benckendorf’s (probably important) packet for me off to Lord only knows where and (3) you are flirting with the entire diplomatic corps—and complaining to boot! …I have nothing to write about.  Without you I’m so bored, so bored, that I don’t know what to do with myself…Goodbye, my angel, I kiss you and Masha.
Although Natalya bore Pushkin four children, and was grateful to him for bringing her into society, she had little interest in his world of ideas and literature, and seems to have had little appreciation or even inkling of her husband’s talent.  She was bored when he secluded himself to write, and was overheard during one of his poetry readings muttering: “Lord, how I’m sick of you and your poems, Pushkin!”  There may have been a subconscious competitive aspect to their relationship; in response to his literary fame, somehow it seemed imperative to her to triumph in society, to have fancy gowns and hats and carriages, and be the “first beauty” of St. Petersburg.  By 1833, Pushkin was writing to his friend Nashchokin: “Life here in Petersburg is so-so. Money woes keep me from relaxing. I lack my freedom of old, so necessary for writing.  I’m spin about in society, where my wife is a big hit.  But all that requires money; money comes from work, and my work requires seclusion”. 

In 1833 Eugene Onegin was published for the first time, and Pushkin’s second child Alexander was born. Flushed from Onegin’s  success, Pushkin decided to write a historical novel about the Pugachev Rebellion. On July 30, 1833, he wrote to the acting head of the secret police requesting permission to travel to the provinces in which the rebellion had taken place: “I have devoted the last two years to historical research alone, and have not written one line of purely literature.  I need about two months of complete seclusion to relax from my duties and finish research for a book I began long ago, which will bring me the funds I so need.”   The request was granted; Pushkin made the laborious trip to Kazan, Simbirsk, Orenburg, and the Ural provinces where the rebellion had begun and took copious notes.  On his way home he stopped in Boldino to write his impressions, but got scared at the bad omen of crossing paths with a priest as he rode into his estate’s grounds.  One can imagine what worries were passing through his mind when he saw that priest from his startled letter home to Natalya:

This isn’t just coincidence.  Watch out, dear wife. Soon you may grow spoiled without me, forget me, and flirt too much.
All hope lies in God and your Auntie.  May they keep you from frivolous temptations.  I’m proud to report for my part being pure before you as a newborn babe.  All trip long I chased only 70 and 80 year old maids, and as for slutty young 60 year olds—I didn’t even spare them a glance.  In a village where Pugachev spent 6 months I found a 75 year old Cossack woman who remembers those days just like you and I remember 1830…

In his second Boldino Autumn, Pushkin again enjoyed a phenomenal burst of creativity.  He wrote his History of the Pugachev Rebellion and  two verse fairy tales: The Fisherman and the Little Goldfish, and The Dead Princess and the Seven Knights.
He also wrote about fifteen poems, including Autumn, a sublime meditation on nature and its relationship to creativity, and two long narrative poems.  One, Angelo, which he later called “my finest work ever”  was based on Measure for Measure, Pushkin’s favorite Shakespeare play (some scenes of which Pushkin even translated into Russian).  A longer  narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman , relates how a poor obscure clerk in St. Petersburg loses his home and fiancée in the great flood of November 7, 1824, and comes grief-strucen to confront the statue in Senate Square of “The Bronze Horseman” , Peter the Great.  Peter has killed his love and ruined his life: Peter built his splendid capital to “open a window on Europe”  on the banks of the sea, heedless of the cost in human suffering. The clerk threatens the Tsar: “just you wait!” In reply, the furious Horseman chases down the clerk, and he dies a madman, on an outcast island at the mouth of the Neva. The Bronze Horseman is both a paean of love for the city of St. Petersburg, and a condemnation of the cruelty of Russian state, as personified in the poem by the Janus-like figure, ever larger than life,of Tsar Peter the Great. The theme of lost love again merges into a profound meditation, subtly ambivalent in its view of the nature of power and its relationship to individual freedom and fate.

Fate and freedom were the themes of yet another masterpiece written in that Boldino Autumn of 1833.  The Queen of Spades was a page-turner, a search for the no-risk risk, a gambling tale (and a ghost story), a romantic intrigue, and a playful, almost satirical examination of the conflicts between the natural versus the supernatural, risk and certainty, free will and personal responsibility, fate, mercy and madness.  Though Pushkin himself loved gambling at cards, in this story he transformed his own unhappy experiences as an inveterate gambler into something at once lighter and more profound: the gambling plot at its core becomes a powerful metaphor for the game of life itself, and the self-destructiveness of ruthless ambition.  In Dostoyevsky’s words, it is “the height of artistic perfection”  (and a major influence on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler and Crime and Punishment).  It has been said that old Princess Golitsyna was his model for the tyrannical Countess who possesses the fateful secret of the cards.  Others see in her caprices true portraits of Natalya’s mother and Aunt.  Is there some of Pushkin’s undying sympathy for his wife in his depiction of the heroine Lizaveta Ivanovna, so bitterly oppressed by her relative?

Countess *** was not, of course, evil-hearted.  Yet she was capricious as a woman spoiled by society and grown meanly  stingy, sunk into a cold selfishness, like all old people who have used up their store of love in the past and are foreign to the present. She took part in every frivolity of the beau monde, dragging herself to balls, where she’d sit in a corner, powdered and rigged up à l’ancien régime, a hideous yet indispensable ornament of the ballroom.  Arriving guests would bow low to her, in homage to an established rite,; then no one bothered with her further. She received the entire town in her own home, where she practiced rigorous etiquette, being unable to recognize anyone at all. Her numerous servants, grown fat and grey in the foyer and maid’s quarters, did whatever they wanted, constantly robbing their dying old lady every way they could. Lizaveta Ivanovna was the martyr of the house.  If she poured tea, she got a scolding for her excessive consumption of sugar.  If she read aloud, she was blamed for all the mistakes of the author.  In accompanying the Countess on her walks,  she was held responsible for the weather and the state of the sidewalk.  She had a salary which was hardly ever paid, and yet it was expected of her that she dress like “everyone”, meaning like very few indeed.  All knew her, but none saw her. At the balls she only got to dance when a pair could not be found.  Ladies grabbed her arm and dragged her off into the toilet anytime they needed to adjust their gowns. She was proud and keenly felt her humiliation, looking around impatiently, awaiting  her savior. But young suitors, calculating in their flippant vanity, paid her no attention, even though she was hundred times dearer than the brazen and cold brides round whom they fluttered.  How often had she fled the soporific splendor of the ballroom to weep her eyes out in her shabby little room, with its painted wallpaper screen, commode, small mirror, painted bed, and cheap tallow candle sputtering darkly in its little brass candle-holder!

By the epilogue of The Queen of Spades Lizaveta Ivanovna seems transformed into just the kind of person her Countess was--and doesn’t leap into the icy Neva to drown herself, as Tchaikovsky killed her off in his opera. (Ambiguity is not a grand operatic emotion).  And just as Pushkin’s creative genius was pouring forth in Boldino, Natalya, shy and meek no longer, was writing letters boasting how she had conquered all men’s hearts—including the Tsar’s. On October 11, 1833 Pushkin wrote back: “Don’t scare me, stay healthy, look after the kids, and don’t flirt with the Tsar.”  10 days later, he paused fromThe Bronze Horseman to write home:

Yesterday, my friend, I got two letters from you. Thanks, but I want to scold you a bit…You appear to have been
flirting way too much…You love it when men run after you like mutts after a bitch, with their tails in the air,  sniffing her you know where! Is this something to joy in?… It’s easy to train bachelor layabouts to chase you; just let them know you’re that way inclined. That’s the whole idea of flirting. Where there’s a trough there are pigs.  Why must you allow these men to court you?  I  kiss you my angel, as though nothing were wrong, and am grateful to you for such honest detailed descriptions of your life of decadence.  Well, have fun, dear wife, but not too much, and don’t forget me…Tell me how you look at these balls, now that the season, as you write, has started.  But please, my angel, do not flirt.  I am not jealous, and I know you would never get involved in anything serious.  Yet you know how I can’t stand anything that smacks of the typical Moscow girl, anything not comme il faut, anything vulgar…If I find when I come back that your dear, soft, simple, aristocratic manner has changed, I’ll divorce you, by Christ, and go be a soldier from grief!

When Pushkin came back to St. Petersburg in the wee hours of November 21, 1833,  Natalia was out—at a ball.  He went there with a servant, climbed into her carriage, and told the servant to find her and say nothing but that there was an emergency at home.  But she did not come at once (being engaged for the mazurka) Pushkin waited and fretted.  Finally, as she stepped in her sumptuous pink dress into her carriage: “I brought her home as a hussar kidnaps a provincial missy from the mayor’s wife’s birthday party.”

His spiritual equanimity, so restored by Boldino, was soon dashed again by two severe blows.  First the Tsar forbade publication of The Bronze Horseman (it was only fully printed after 1917).  Worse, on the eve of the New Year of 1834, the Tsar, who continued to be attracted to Natalya, appointed Pushkin to the post of Imperial Chamber-Page “which is rather indecent to my age” [generally pages were teenagers], “but the Court wanted Natalya to dance at Anichkov Palace” [the Tsar’s private residence].  This meant that Pushkin and his wife were now invited to court functions-- to his wife’s delight, and to his own despair.  He loathed his page-boy uniform, and at the balls Natalya’s ball-gowns and popularity were ruinous to his pocket and peace of mind alike.  He began to gamble again (having abstained after marriage for three years, though he had once told the English traveler Thomas Raikes “I would rather die than not play cards anymore.”  And by March 1834  “my Queen of Spades is all the rage now; everyone bets on nothing but three, seven, and ace!”   Yet cards were hardly consolation for his wife’s being queen of all ballrooms while he sulked in a corner in his flunkey’s costume.  He hated the costume so much that he once attempted to attend a court ceremony in simple evening dress, for which he received an official scolding.  The humiliation was galling. In his diary he fumed:  “I am willing to be a subject, even a slave, but I will not be a flunkey or a fool even before the Tsar of Heaven!…These balls and amusements will cost the state half a million.  What of all our poor people dying of hunger?  Whatever will they think?… Our sovereign has in him a great deal of second lieutenant, and just a wee bit of Peter the Great…”     Gogol  fretted for his friend and mentor: “one only ever sees Pushkin at balls anymore.  His whole life will be wasted this way, unless by good luck he can return to the country”.   Instead, in the spring of 1834, dismayed by rumors linking his wife to the Tsar, he sent his wife and children to the country, to theGoncharov family estate near Moscow The anguish he was feeling in the summer of 1834 and the desire to escape this “piggish Petersburg” can be clearly felt in the poem he wrote Natalya: “It’s time, my friend, it’s time!  For peace the heart is calling”.

Even his letters to his wife were perlustrated and passed to “the gendarme of Europe”  for his inspection.  In one of those letters he had written: “I’ve seen three Tsars.  The first [Paul I] commanded me to remove my baby cap, and scolded my nanny about it.  The second [Alexander I] didn’t like me at all; the third at least made me a pageboy in my old age, but I’ve no wish to see a fourth.  Leave well enough alone.”   The letter was opened and read, and provoked an official warning against lèse-majesté.  As he wrote in his diary: “What profound lack of conscience or morals underpins our entire government! Police open a husband’s private letters to his wife and bring them to the Tsar.  And the Tsar (a well-brought up and honest man) has no shame in admitting it!”   He wrote his wife, clearly understanding that his letters were going to be read:

It’s been so very long now you haven’t written me, that, even though I don’t like to worry myself about trifles, I worry…
Are the kids in good health? And you? I’ve not written either: I was furious. Not at you, but at the others. One of my letters ended up in the police and so on…No one should know what goes on between us; no one should be allowed into our bedroom.  Without privacy there is no family life…but swinishness in anyone has long since ceased to surprise me. Yet that swinishness has quite chilled my pen in writing you.  The thought that we are being snooped on enrages me.  I can live without political freedom, but without the inviolability of the family it is impossible. To be a convict laborer is far preferable. That’s not written for you.  For you:  how are the mineral baths? Helping?  Does Masha have new teeth?
…Be healthy, clever, charming, don’t ride any more wild horses, look after the kids, and make sure their nanny does too,
and write me more often…my Peter the Great is coming along; by winter, Volume I may be done. As for him, [the Tsar]  I have stopped being angry, because, upon reflection, he is not really to blame for all the filth surrounding him. If you live in an outhouse, you get used to the shit, whether you like it or not; after a while it doesn’t even stink anymore, never mind if you’re a gentleman. Ah, but if only I could escape to the fresh air!

In the summer of 1834 Pushkin formally requested that the Tsar relieve him of any official duties and allowed to retire to the country.  But it was all in vain; Natalya was adamant against his plan, and the Tsar threatened to revoke his access to the State Archives, with his history of Peter the Great still in progress.  He was obliged to retract his request and surveillance on him was redoubled. About this time Pushkin wrote “May God forbid I go insane”.. 

Granted leave to visit Boldino briefly, he went there hoping for another miraculous autumn.  But he was sadness so consumed him that he could not write.  On September 25, 1834, he wrote Natalya: “I’ve been in the country for more than two weeks now, and there’s still no letter from you. I’m bored, my angel. And poems no longer come into my head, and I can’t re-write my novel.  So I re-read Walter Scott and the Bible, and pine all the time for you.  I don’t think I’ll stay long in Boldino this fall” . The “novel”  he was re-writing was The Captain’s Daughter, which would take him until October 1836 to finish.  In this last stay in Boldino, Pushkin wrote just the charming verse fairy tale The Golden Cockerel, based on The Legend of the Arabian Astrologer from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra.  The Golden Cockerel is an almost existential portrayal of the corrupting effects of power, greed, and lust, yet the tale of the magic cock, which proves a curse in disguise, is executed so light-heartedly that the
Tsar even permitted publication, censored as “improper”  only the Cockerel’s famous refrain:

                И кричит: Кири-ку-ку.                      “Kiri-ku-ku”, the cockerel cried,
                Царствуй, лежа на боку!                 “Rule, while lying on your side!”

Finances continued to worsen when he got back to Petersburg. Natalya, over Pushkin’s objections, decided to bring her two older sisters Yekaterina and Alexandra to come and live with her and be brought out in society.   This forced Pushkin to move into a bigger, more expensive apartment. And now to that interminable round of balls, receptions, and parties which made up their lives in St. Petersburg, Pushkin  found himself escorting not just one woman-–but three.  Pushkin remarked mournfully: “I thought my expenses would triple because of this— and what do you know? They increased tenfold.” 

He had placed great hopes to recoup his finances on his History of the Pugachev Rebellion, which came out in December 1834.  Unfortunately, however, the very politicized Russian readership was not ready for Pushkin’s neutral historical perspective. Liberal reviewers panned its frank portrayal of the viciousness and arbitrary lawlessness of the rebellion, its analysis of Pugachev and the rebels not as romantic heroes struggling against Tsarist oppression, but as brigands seeking power.  Conservatives, however, led by Sergey Uvarov, Minister of Education, condemned the book as subversive in its honest evaluation of the cruelties and inefficiencies of the Tsarist government which gave rise to rebellion in the first place, and made it so difficult to suppress.  Pushkin noted in his diary that Uvarov “rose from pimp to nanny of the Finance Minister’s children to President of the Academy of Sciences”, and responded with epigrams and a poem criticizing Uvarov’s widely known incompetence, graft, and theft of state resources.  And now, as if he hadn’t enough to deal with, he had a powerful new enemy: suddenly his travelogue A Journey to Arzururm was delayed in censorship, as was a second edition of the Tales of Belkin.  Meanwhile, he could find no peace at home, because his wife and two sisters “have turned our home into a dress shop”.    Even Pushkin’s ailing mother complained in January 1835:

Natalie’s out dancing every single day. Yesterday we had a family reunion here with all the kids.  She and her sisters talk just of feasts, balls, and spectacles. Little Masha is so used to seeing only luxuriously dressed people that when she saw me, she began to cry. We asked her why she didn’t want to kiss Grandma, and she said: “her hat’s old, and her dress is shabby”.
                 
In May 1835, Pushkin’s son Grigory was born and Pushkin was faced with yet another mouth to feed.  “But  I earn my income from the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet, nothing else.”   And the increasingly obstructive process of censorship waas making it impossible for him to work.  Frustrated by the time it took for other journals to get approvals to publish his works, he asked for permission to start a literary review; his request was denied.  By late July 1835, desperately strained by the costs of living in the capital, he renewed his request to be allowed to move to the country for a few years.  Pushkin wrote to Count Benckendorf:

The Emperor, having been so kind as to take me into his service again, pays me a salary of 5000 rubles a year.  This is,
of course, a huge sum, but not enough to cover my expenses of living here in St. Petersburg, where I find myself forced to spend no less than 25,000 rubles a year, just to live, take care of my family, pay my debts…In four years of marriage, I have contracted over 60,000 rubles in debts...  The only way to repair my finances is to move to the country where I can work and study without worries—or else receive a loan of a huge sum of money.

But the Tsar enjoyed having Natalya at his balls, and Count Benckendorf did not want to see Pushkin out of close surveillance.  They stipulated that if Pushkin moved, he would not only lose his salary, but all access forever to the State Archives. In the end, the Tsar gave Pushkin a loan of 30,000 rubles, to be paid for by suspension of his salary for the next six years.  The Tsar’s loan was still not enough though; it vanished at once on urgent old debts, and—even more urgent— new dresses for Natalya.  In the fall of 1835, theTsar gave him leave to go back briefly to Mikhaylovskoye to finish The Captain’s Daughter. From there he wrote Natalya:

You can’t imagine how lively the imagination becomes here, sitting all alone, or walking in the woods, where no one stops you from thinking, thinking—thinking until one’s head spins.  But what am I thinking of? Here’s what: how are we going to live?  Father won’t give me this estate, besides he’s squandered near half of it away already.  Your family property is a hair’s breadth from total ruin.  The Tsar won’t let me move to the country or be a journalist.  To sell out and write what I’m told just for money—as God is my witness—I cannot do that. We haven’t a penny of stable income left, with stable expenses of at least 30,000…What will come of all this, Lord only knows.  For now, it’s sad.  But just kiss me, and maybe the grief will pass…If possible, could you please send me Montaigne’s Essays?  The four blue volumes on the long bookcase.  Please find them…The weather is very cloudy…I walk a lot, and ride a lot as well, on some old nags who are very happy about this, because they get oats afterwards, which they weren’t used to before…I kiss you, my own dear soul, and all the kids, and bless you with all my heart. 

Yet all that “thinking, thinking, thinking” was beginning to weigh on him, and a few days later he wrote home again:

I’ve found everything in Mikhaylovskoye the same as always, except my nanny’s no longer here. And in my absence, by my friends, the old pine trees, a new family of young evergreens has sprung up, which saddens me to see--just as I’m sad seeing dashing young guardsmen at all those balls where I no longer dance.

These observations form part of his haunting elegy “I  came back again”  written that day, walking around Mikhaylovskoye:

...Вновь я посетил                                                                                              ...I came back again
Тот уголок земли, где я провел                                      To that small plot of land, where I once spent
Изгнанником два года незаметных.                             Two years living in exile and unnoticed
Уж десять лет ушло с тех пор – и много                     Since then ten years have passed by now and many
Переменилось в жизни для меня,                                  Have been the changes coming to my life.
И сам, покорный общему закону,                 I too, to universal law submissive,
Переменился я – но здесь опять                                    Have changed myself, but once more here
Минувшее меня объемлет живо,                                   All of my past embraces me with vigor,
И, кажется, вечор еще бродил                                       And so it seems but yesterday I walked
Я в этих рощах.                                                                  In these groves wand’ring.
...Вот опальный домик,                                                    …Here the outcast hut stands,
Где жил я с бедной нянею моей.                                   Where with my poor old nanny I did live.
Уже старушки нет – уж за стеною                               The dear old lady’s gone—beyond the wall now
Не слышу я шагов ее тяжелых,                                     I cannot hear her footsteps heavy  tramping,
Ни кропотливого ее дозора.                                           Nor her devoted, always-caring snooping.
Вот холм лесистый, над которым часто                    And here’s the wooded hillock, on which often
Я сиживал недвижим – и глядел                                   I used to sit, not moving, and look down
На озеро, вспоминая с грустью                                     Into the lake, remembering with sadness
Иные берега, иные волны...                                            The look of other waves, of other shorelines….

At least in this elegy (whose unrhymed freeness marked a watershed in Russian poetry) Pushkin transcended his feelings of sadness with a wistfully loving greeting to nature, to future generations of life, itself springing up in new pines:

Теперь младая роща разрослась,                                                 But now a new young grove has grown up there,
Зеленая семья; кусты теснятся                                                      A family of green, its bushes thickening,
Под сенью их как дети.  А вдали                                                   Sheltering beneath like children.  Further off,
Стоит один угрюмый их товарищ,                                               Their brooding gloomy friend is still there, standing
Как старый холостяк, и вкруг него                                              Like some old bachelor, and all around
По-прежнему все пусто.                                                                  Him still all is deserted…

Здравствуй, племя                                                                             Greetings, youngsters!
Младое, незнакомое! Не я                                                              So young, and so unknown to me. I won’t 
Увижу твой могучий поздний возраст,                                       Be blessed to see your greening growth in fullness,
Когда перерастешь моих знакомцев                                           When you outgrow and pass my old companions
И старую главу их заслонишь                                                       And hide their ancient heads with your new boughs
От глаз прохожего.  Но пусть мой внук                                      From sight to passersby.  But one day may
Услышит ваш приветный шум, когда,                                         My grandson hear your greetings whispered soft
С приятельской беседы возвращаясь,                                         When riding back from chatting at a friend’s house,
Веселых и приятных мыслей полон,                                           Filled in his heart with happy, pleasant musings,
Пройдет он мимо вас во мраке ночи                                            And passing by your shade in gloom of nighttime
И обо мне вспомянет.                                                                       Then  think of me, remembering.

New griefs mounted in St. Petersburg.  One of those “dashing young guardsmen at balls, where I no longer dance” was a tall, blond, handsome Frenchman named Georges D’Anthès.  A royalist who left France after 1830, D’Anthès had been inducted in the Russian Imperial Horse Guards (earning, in his brief service to the Tsar, 44 separate reprimands from his commanding officers for conduct unbecoming). D’Anthès was the live-in “toyboy” of Baron Heckeren, the Dutch ambassador to Russia.  Heckeren had fraudulently “adopted” D’Anthès as his “son” at the age of 24; there is copious evidence of a homosexual relationship, including passionate letters between Heckeren and D’Anthès.  Yet D’Anthès was also a renowned lady-killer, a flashy hussar playboy, a dandy fond of dancing, a foppish rake, a fashionable roué.  All this, plus the inestimable cachet of being a Frenchman in a society of Gallomanes, made him all  the rage at court balls— in a way Pushkin could never hope to be.   And besides being popular, D’Anthès was rolling in  his “father’s” money.  In short, he was the antithesis of Pushkin, the ideal suitor Natalya Ivanovna Goncharova had once dreamed of for her daughter.  Little wonder, then, that he quite turned Natalya’s head (and her two sisters’ heads as well).

By late 1835 D’Anthès lusted for the ultimate society triumph: to seduce and conquer the first beauty in St. Petersburg: Natalya Pushkina.  That she was the wife of the “sunshine of Russian poetry” concerned him not at all.  He knew (and needed) no Russian—save a few simple drill commands (and curses). Even his French was mediocre; he had read nothing, and the Muses were Greek to him.  If D’Anthès can be believed, lthough Shakespeare remarked “at lovers’ perjuries they say Jove laughs”, D’Anthès won Natalya’s heart by declaring her his soulmate (perhaps she was); he wrote her melodramatic notes dying of love, and ready to die for her, etc.etc.. And she believed him . or at least was flattered to see D’Anthès wooing her, almost, some biographers relate, with the passion of Onegin wooing of Tatyana in the end of Eugene Onegin. By January 20, 1836, D’Anthès wrote Baron Heckeren to say that he loved Natalya, and “she loves me too, but we cannot see each other, for the husband is revoltingly jealous”.   Whether or not Natalya actually became D’Anthès’ mistress (D’Anthès claimed she did, but this may have been hussar boasting) Natalya did not trouble to conceal from her husband her delight in flirting with her handsome guardsman. 

She did this even as Pushkin’s mother, Nadyezhda Osipovna Pushkina, was dying.  Pushkin’s old friend from Mikhalovskoye, Zizi remembered: “Pushkin was always extraordinarily attached to and fond of his mother, even though she plainly preferred her younger son to him.  But in the last year of her life, Alexander Sergeyevich looked after her with such tender care and affection that she at last recognized her former unfairness to him, and begged his forgiveness, confessing sadly that she had never been capable of appreciating him.”  Anna Kern (by now just a good family friend) remembered in her memoirs:

I saw him one last time with his wife at his mother’s house, not long before her death; she was too weak to get out of bed anymore, and was just lying there on a cot  moved to the middle of the room, with her head to the windows.  They sat by her on a little couch, and Nadyezhda Osipovna just looked at them tenderly with love.  Alexander Sergeyevich returned her gaze while holding in one hand the soft end of his wife’s elegant fur boa, with which he gently stroked his mother, as if expressing in that one gesture all his love and tenderness at once both for his mother and his wife.  All the while he could not speak a word.  Natalya Nikolayevna’s hair was in curlers. She was getting herself ready for a ball.

Pushkin’s mother died on March 29, 1836.  He brought her coffin riding by himself through 250 miles of roads quagmired by the spring thaw,  to the Gannibal family burial plot by Mikhaylovskoye, in Svyatogorsky Monsatery.  After burying her, he paid the monastery in advance for his own grave--right by hers.   To Zizi he “lamented with exceptional distress how cruel fate had been to him once again, in giving him so little time to feel maternal tenderness which he had never in his life known before. And when he got back to St. Petersburg, gossips were spreading malicious stories that he had laughed all through his mother’s funeral.”

Meanwhile, the Tsar had finally given Pushkin permission to publish his own quarterly journal, The Contemporary (under vigilant censorship).In April 1836 the first issue came out featuring A Journey to Arzurum and several Pushkin poems, as well as the first publication of Gogol’s amazing short story The Nose.  Unfortunately, circulation was poor, and reviews (by Pushkin’s enemies, chiefly Bulgarin and Uvarov) were vicious.  The entire year of 1836 was financially disastrous for Pushkin.  The Contemporary was struggling to survive and gain circulation. Virtually no income remained to support  his four children (a daughter was born May 27, 1836) his wife, her two sisters (in attendance at three balls per week), and his own younger brother.  He was forced to fawn to pawnbrokers and moneylenders; to borrow from Peter to pay Paul, and nearly had to giving up buying books. Yet bleak though Pushkin’s finances were, we should remember that it was a fairly normal, even stylish, habit of the Russian aristocracy to live for years on debt, as described in Eugene Onegin I, iii: “By serving honestly and nobly/His father lived, amassing debt” .  Pushkin  was Russia’s first professional writer ( he once quipped “I write for the same reason that the singer sings, the baker bakes, and the quack kills his patient—for money”) . Yet thwarted at nearly every turn by censorship, he had always known that money might not reward his efforts; most of his works were denied publication in his lifetime.  Yet just as he had once cast a gold coin in a canal to admire its gleam underwater, beauty remained for Pushkin more important than profit. He could always find happiness in himself as long as he was “filled with the silent Muse” (“By lands where sovereignty of golden Venice reigns” ).  He often turned down lucrative offers to write things that compromised what he saw as his artistic freedom or integrity, and indeed did so several times in 1836. 

What made 1836 the bitterest year of his life was unquestionably loneliness.  To his grief  at the death of his mother, at his increasing loss of freedom, more than ever was added the pain of missing his true friends, from the Lycée, like Delvig “whom I can speak with of whatever wracks the soul and pangs the heart” who had died before his marriage, or Pushchin or Küchelbecker, exiled to Siberia.  He had no real friends in St. Petersburg.  by the end of 1836 he was forbidden to read new works, still uncleared by the censor,  aloud even in the privacy of his own home.  His letters were still being opened, and his every movement watched, prompting him to complain: “spies with us are like our letter “ъ” [a silent letter at the end of every word that ended in a consonant, until post-Revolutionary spelling reforms].  They are soundless, useless—and ubiquitous”.

As Pushkin was finding no one with whom to assuage the grief and jealousy gnawing at his heart.  D’Anthès was finding Natalya in every ballroom in town, besieging her with secret presents, love notes, ballet tickets.  Natalya seems not to have noticed that  In the finest hussar traditions D’Anthès was then writing love letters to three people at once: Baron Heckeren, Natalya, and herown sister Yekaterina—and fooling everyone! 

In the summer of 1836, to recover from a post-natal illness, Natalya rented an expensive summer house in a fashionable island suburb of St. Petersburg (D’Anthès’ regiment had been posted nearby).  While D’Anthès wooed Natalya (and her sister) again, Pushkin wrote brooding poems on death, the soul, and his own poetic legacy, including “In vain I seek to flee to Zion’s heights” , “Our  hermit fathers and our nuns blessed and blameless “ “When past the city gates with wistful thoughts I roam” , From Pndemonti and Exegi Monumentum, and finished hisThe Captain’s Daughter, printed in the December 1836 issue of The Contemporary.  Many Russians consider it the finest novel ever written in the Russian language.  Its gripping plot and themes of coming of age and love amidst rebellion, civil war, imprisonment,  treachery, and death made it an instant classic, selling out the issue at once.  In the novel, Pushkin warned prophetically: “God forbid any rebellion in Russia.  It will be pointless—and pitiless”. The major Russian critic Belinsky called the novel “a miracle of artistic perfection” , and no less a genius than Gogol wrote “compared to The Captain’s Daughter all our other novels and short stories are like watery gruel. Its purity and poetic restraint attain such heights that reality itself seems an artificial caricature by comparison”. 

Yet his woes blocked him from finishing yet another extraordinary work: Egyptian Nights, an  enchantingly intricate fabric of poetry and prose, mixing cynical Russian reality and Italian Renaissance ideals, and treating clearly autobiographical themes of a poet’s struggle to keep his freedom amidst the enmity of authority and high society.  Another theme of that novel is—at least for poetic improvisation— the nature of love itself, ranging from utter self-sacrifice on one side,  to predatory, voluptuous female power, cruel yet sublime, life-consuming yet unanswerably majestic, a power personified in Queen Cleopatra.   

October 19, 1836, was the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Lycée, and Pushkin had that morning written a poem for the occasion, promising to read it at the traditional  festive dinner party.  He began to read:

Была пора: наш праздник молодой                             There was a time our youthful holiday
Сиял, шумел и розами венчался,                                   Just shined, made noise, when roses crowned our hymning,
И с песнями бокалов звон мешался,                             When goblets’ clinking merged into our singing,
И тесною сидели мы толпой.                                         We sat together tight in warm affray.
Тогда, душой беспечные невежды,                              Back then we all were carefree as a novice
Мы жили все и легче и смелей,                                      We all lived much more lightly, boldly then,
Мы пили все за здравие надежды                                We all did drink to hope, did lift our chalice
И юности и всех ее затеи.                                                To youth itself, and all youth comprehends.

Теперь не то: разгульный праздник наш                    That’s over now: we’re tamed  when we carouse.
С приходом лет, как мы, перебесился,                        With passing time, our feast no more is furious
Он присмирел, утих, остепенился,                               We’ve compromised, grown still, become more serious,
Стал глуше звон его заздравных чаш;                        More hollow now our clinking healths do sound.
Меж нами речь не так игриво льется,                          Our speech is much less playful now and daring:
Просторнее, грустнее мы сидим,                                  With more space midst us, sadder now we sit,
И реже смех средь песен раздается,                            Amidst our singing laughter now is rarer
И чаще мы вздыхаем и молчим.                                    We sigh more often, hushed in gloomy fit.

But as he was reading, Pavel Annenkov relates, “tears welled up in his eyes and he began to sob.  He put down his paper and withdrew quietly to a couch in the corner of the room.  A friend picked up the paper and read the next six stanzas for him”.  
Earlier that same day Pushkin wrote a letter to his old friend, Pyotr Chaadayev, in response to his “indictment of Russia” , or greatly controversial Philosophical Letter, a blistering attack on autocracy, serfdom, corrupt servility before brute power, and the lack of a civil society in Russia,  all of which Chaadayev blamed on Russia’s Orthodox faith and Byzantine heritage.  Even writing to Chaadayev (who was promptly declared insane, and placed under strict house arrest) was considerably risky; Pushkin knew that malevolently vigilant “others” would read his words. Yet they are still pertinent, still worth quoting:

Thanks for the pamphlet you sent me.  I read it with great pleasure, though I am amazed to see it translated and printed.  I am far from agreeing with you entirely.  Certainly the Schism of the Church separated us from the rest of Europe and we were left out of many of the grand events that followed.  Yet we have had our own mission.  It was Russia with its endless spaces that swallowed up the Mongol invaders; they were not able to penetrate our Western borders, leaving us dangerously in their rear.  They withdrew to their desolate steppes and Western civilization was saved…We have been forced to develop a separate existence, which even while we remained Christians, nonetheless made us strangers to the rest of Christendom.  Still it was by our sufferings that Catholic Europe was able to develop energetically. You say that the source of our Christianity is impure, that Byzantium was contemptible.  Excuse me, my friend! Who cares? Was not Jesus Christ himself a Jew?  Is not Jerusalem the cradle of us all?  The Russian clergy is indeed backward.
Yet it has never stooped to some of the infamies of the Papist Inquisition, or provoked the wars of Reformation, just at the time when mankind needs unity and brotherhood above all else. I absolutely cannot agree with you that we have no history, and that our civilization is a nullity. Our history presents a sad but magnificent painting…[From Kievan Rus through the Time of Troubles] is that not all history? And is Peter the Great not a universal history all by himself?  What of Catherine II who put us on the doorstep of Europe? And Tsar Alexander who took you along with him to Paris? And put your hand on your heart: can you truly see nothing in the story of today’s Russia which will be memorable to future historians? Although I am personally loyal in my heart to the Tsar, I am far from admiring everything I see around me.  As a man of letters, I am harassed, embittered; as a man of principle, appalled.  And yet I swear to you on my honor that I would not switch my country for some other, nor switch our history, that of our forefathers, that which God has given us…Yet, having just contradicted you, I must say, much of what you say in your Epistle is profoundly true.  It cannot be denied that the state of our civil society is just woeful. Our absence of free public opinion, our indifference to all concepts of honor, justice, and truth, our cynical contempt for ideas, and for the dignity of man, for all that is not mere personal necessity—this is something that is truly sorrowful.

From this sorrow Pushkin still longed to escape, to move to the country.  But he was trapped in a gilded cage   On October 20, 1836, he wrote his father: “I had wanted to go to Mikhaylovskoye, but was not able to. This will set me back by another year at least.  In the country I would have gotten a lot of work done.  Here I do nothing but brood.”  The flirtation between Natalya and D’Anthès grew to a fever pitch, as had the mockery it aroused. There are many versions of what happened next. On November 2, 1836, according to one version of events, D’Anthès lured Natalya to an assignation and threatened to kill himself unless she consented to become his mistress (though other versions say she aready was his mistress).  Supposedly, according to yet another version, she answered, in some tawdry imitation of Tatyana’s rebuff to Onegin: “you have my heart; why do you need my body?”  (What really happened at their tryst, if it happened, of course, we may never know). But the Imperial Court gloated pitilessly over the rumors. 

On November 4, 1836, Pushkin and his friends received anonymous “diplomas” in French, certifying Pushkin as “coadjutor to the Grand Master of the Order of Cuckolds and Historiographer of the Order”.  The “diplomas” implied that Pushkin had been cuckolded no by D’Anthès, but by the Tsar.  Pushkin took the document for analysis.  “From the type of paper used, the vocabulary, and the style, I immediately verified for myself that the letter is from a foreigner, a member of high society, and a diplomat”—in other words, from Baron Heckeren.  Anna Akhmatova argues Pushkin was right, and proved his case to the Tsar. Baron Heckeren genuinely hated Pushkin on behalf of his “son” ; at the same time he was perhaps no less jealous than Pushkin of a relationship that was taking his “son” away from him.  Akhmatova argues convincingly  that the letters were Heckeren’s “blind”.: unable to challenge the Tsar to a duel, Pushkin would have to move away with his family, or at least send his wife away, thereby ending Natalya’s relationship to D’Anthès.  Other scholars believe that the “diplomas” were not from Heckeren, who could not, they argue, risk a scandal (others rejoin that this is precisely why why the letters were anonymous).  Whatever their motives, whoever wrote the “diplomas” risked their lives in casting aspersions not just on Russia’s national poet, but on the honor of the Sovereign.  Such risks could only be run by someone either high enough in the government to feel safe taking a risk, or someone who enjoyed diplomatic immunity  Different “diplomas” were in different handwritings; many years later Tsar Alexander II stateded that one of the writers was Heckeren’s closest friend in St. Petersburg, and Pushkin’s old enemy, Count Nesselrode, the Foreign Minister himself.

Pushkin himself was convinced beyond any doubt that the “diplomas” came from Heckeren and were intended as a “blind” to distract the poet from ever-increasing rumors about Natalya and D’Anthès. He confronted his wife with them; Natalya related her version of November 2nd, and  told Pushkin that both Heckeren and D’Anthès had beseeched her to become D’Anthès’ mistress, but that she had refused (in her version of events, D’Anthès was little more than a stalker).  Pushkin found (or perhaps was shown) several notes and letters from D’Anthès, and reacted by challenging D’Anthès  to a duel.  Baron Heckeren promptly visited Pushkin, accepted the challenge on behalf of his “son” , but requested a two week extension to inquire as to the circumstances.
During the interim, a duel was avoided.  To the amazement of everyone in St. Petersburg society, D’Anthès’ announced his engagement to Yekaterina Goncharova, Natalya’s sister (it seems Pushkin learned Yekaterina was pregnant by D’Anthès, which has recently been proven by unearthed correspondence between D’Anthès and Yekaterina).  Under these circumstances, Pushkin reluctantly withdrew his challenge, on condition, however, that D’Anthès stay away from his home and from Natalya, and never expect either of them to socialize with the newlyweds.  On January 10, 1837, D’Anthès and Yekaterina were married.

However, D’Anthès continued to act towards Natalya as he had before, ostentatiously casting longing looks at her, dancing with her, and dropping sexual innuendoes about Natalya in Pushkin’s presence.  Malicious gossip spread throughout St. Petersburg that D’Anthès had married Yekaterina soley in order to save Natalya’s honor; at the same time, D’Anthès was doing everything he could to compromise it further.  Natalya was upset too; she was jealous of her sister.  Pushkin could stand it no longer. On January 25, 1837, he wrote to Baron Heckeren a letter which he knew was certain to provoke a challenge:

I have long known the conduct of your son and could not remain indifferent to it. I was content to play observer,
ready to intervene when I judged it meet.  An incident, which in all other cases would have been very disagreeable, happily rescued me from the affair. I received the anonymous letters.  I saw that the time was right and I took advantage of it.  You know the rest: I made your son play such a pitiable role that my wife, shocked by such cowardice and banality could not help laughing, and the emotion that she had perhaps felt for this grand and sublime passion evaporated into the calmest contempt and most deserved disgust. I  am obliged to admit, Baron, that your role has hardly been seemly. You, the representative of a sovereign crown, have been the paternal pimp for your own son.  It seems his (by the way, quite inept) conduct has all been directed by you.  It is you who probably dictated to him the sorry phrases and blather he tried to write.  Like an obscene old woman, you’ve  lain in wait for my wife to speak of the love of your bastard or self-styled “son” for her. While he in fact was laid up in your home with the clap, you’d tell her he was dying of love for her; you murmured:
“Give me back my son!”  You must grasp, Baron, that after all this I cannot permit my family to have the least relationship with yours.  It was exactly on this condition that I consented not to follow through with this dirty affair, and not to dishonor you in the eyes of our court and yours, as I have the power and the intention.  But I do not care for my wife to have to hear any more of your paternal exhortations. I cannot permit your “son”, after his base behavior, to dare address a word to my wife, and still less will I let him subject her to barrack-room puns, and his overacted role of devoted, grand, unhappy passion when he is in fact no more than a coward and a scoundrelly roué.  I am therefore obliged to ask that you put an end to all this scheming, if you wish to avoid a new scandal, from which I will certainly not retreat.

Immediately upon receipt of this letter, Pushkin received a challenge from D’Anthès.  The duel between Pushkin and D’Anthès took place the next day, January 27, 1837.  While getting dressed to go to the duel, Pushkin did not put on his talisman against violent death which had been a present from his friend and patron Nashchokin. After having left he stopped, turned around, and went back home to get his bearskin coat.  As the ever-superstitious poet surely knew, in Russian superstition “to retrace one’s steps is bad luck.”   On his way to the duel, Pushkin’s carriage crossed path with Natalya’s comng home, but she was near-sighted and he was looking the other way—potent symbolism, perhaps, of the problems in their relationship that had led to such a fatal calamity.

The duel between Pushkin and D’Anthès on the snowy grounds of the Black River near St. Petersburg bears an eerie resemblance to the duel between the poet Lensky and Onegin in Eugene Onegin.  One wonders how Pushkin could have helped pondering what he was doing.  He had taken Madame Kirchgoff’s prophecy so seriously that he had not pursued marriage to Yekaterina Ushakova, a beautiful woman of means, who had truly loved him and his poetry—just because she was blond!  What was he doing exactly in his 37th year getting into a duel with a blond man? According to his old friend Zizi, who had come to visit St. Petersburg in the days shortly before the duel, Pushkin confided in her his desire to seek death, and had answered her remonstrance that he should think of his family by saying that he had already spoken to the Tsar, who had given his word to take his family under imperial protection. Yet he had also written, not long ago:

О нет, ине жизнь не надоела,                                                         Oh no, I am not tired of living,
Я жить люблю, я жить хочу,                                                          I love to live, I want to live
Душа не вовсе охладела,                                                                 Not all within my soul’s gone chilly,
Утратя молодость свою.                                                                 Although my youth from has slipped.

On the morning of his duel Pushkin seemed happier than in a long time, and wrote a letter connected to the upcoming issue of The Contemporary.  He did not act like a man planning to die.  Yet at Pushkin’s insistence the duel was fought at ten paces (nearly point-blank range).  D’Anthès fired first; his bullet landed right where Natalya had forgotten to sew back a button in Pushkin’s waistcoat, bursting through the abdomen cavity and shattering the sacrum.  The wound was fatal.  Bleeding in the snow, and unable to rise from great pain, Pushkin insisted on nevertheless taking his shot.  His shot passed through D’Anthès right arm, and deflected off a button on D’Anthès’ chest, knocking D’Anthès down.  Thinking D’Anthès was dead, Pushkin remarked: “Strange, I thought I’d be pleased if I killed him, but now I feel that’s not the case.” 

The wounded poet was brought home and eight doctors were summoned, including Dr. Arendt, the Tsar’s personal physician.  All told him there was nothing they could do to save him,. Pushkin thanked them, and then dictated a list of all his debts, including all debts not evidenced by any writing, and signed it, and passed a request that the Tsar would absolve his debts, or at least permit sales and publication of his works to pay them, and to secure his family a pension.  He also requested clemency for his second, his schoolmate Danzas (dueling, though common, was technically quite a serious crime in Russia). The Tsar wrote back to urge Pushkin to “die as a Christian” and promised to grant Pushkin’s requests, which greatly relieved him.  In spite of agonizing pain, he lived on for forty-six hours after the duel; Dr. Arendt wrote in his memoirs: “I’ve been in thirty battles, and have seen many people dying, but never saw anyone die with so much courage in the face of pain”). After having himsef confessed and given rites of extreme unction, he blessed his wife and children, and told his wife: “Go to the country, mourn for me two years, then, if you like,  remarry--but not to a good-for-nothing”. Then he forced himself briefly up to wave to his books: “Farewell, friends!”   Present with him were the poet Zhukovsky, and the dictionary compiler Dal’ (joking with him that for the the first-and last time in his lifehe was addressing him with the intimate, informal second person pronoun ty, instead of the formal Vy.) Yet even in death, he was lonely, missing his real friends from the Lycée, and exclaimed:  “What a pity neither Pushchin no Malinovsky are here!  It would have been easier to die.”  Shortly before dying he asked for cloudberries; Natalya fed him cloudberry jam with a spoon.  He died January 29, 1837 at 2: 45 in the afternoon. (Even the time of his death gives pause; the ghost of his personification of Fate, the malevolent spirit of Countess in The Queen of Spades  had appeared to at 2:45 in the dead of night.  His benevolent spirit left his body at 2:45 in the afternoon, just as the northern wintry sun was setting).

Controversy swirls to this day about the reasons for such a tragic ending of what should have been such a happy story. Shortly after his death Natalya in tears is said to have cried hysterically: “I killed my husband! I’m the reason he died!”  The poetess Anna Akhmatova indignantly agreed, and summing up Natalya with bitterness: “She always did what she wanted and never cared about his feelings.  She bankrupted him, denied him all peace of mind, didn’t even let his dying mother into their home, but brought her two sisters in, rented the most expensive villas and apartments, forgot his address whenever he traveled, ceaselessly related to him all her amatory victories, complained to D’Anthès about his jealousy, and then made her own husband her confidant in the whole situation—which precipitated the tragedy.”   Yet Pushkin himself insisted on his deathbed “my wife is blameless in this affair” . And he told  friends who plotted revenge on Baron Heckeren and D’Anthès:  “do not avenge me; I have forgiven everything” . Had some part of him had simply resigned himself with equanimity to the fate that had once been foretold him?  After stopping the clock, and after everyone else left the room, the poet Zhukovsky stayed a while.  He wrote Pushkin’s father later:

I sat down by him just looking at his face for a long time all alone.  I never saw anything quite like his face in that first instant of death.  His head was sunk slightly and his hands folded, as if resting after hard labors.  Yet there was an odd expression on his face that I simply can’t put into words, so new, yet so familiar; relaxed, yet neither sleeping nor resting.  Not the usual wit and intelligence that always sparkled in him, nor some poetic pose.  No!  It was a sense of profound surprise, yet contemplation, of contentment, of some sort of all-encompassing divine, profound wisdom and light. 
As I kept looking at him, I wanted to ask: “What are you seeing, my friend?”  What would he have said if he could have been resurrected?  I can assure you in all our years I never saw him in such profound contentment, such majestic and triumphant joy. Of course joy had always danced before him and with him, but never was it revealed in such utter purity as in that moment when the hand of death lifted from him all earthly cares. That was the end of our Pushkin.

Profound shock gripped the capital at the news of Pushkin’s death. Thousand gathered to mourn, thousands more bought his works, in a two days earning his estate many time more than what it owed in debts. There was a widespread sense of outrage that a foreign favorite of the Tsar had murdered the national poet; both D’Anthès and Heckeren were expelled from Russia after the duel. Yet many felt that the authorities who had so harassed the poet in life were directly responsible in some way for his death.  The young Mikhail Lermontov expressed some of the public’s indignation in his Death of a Poet (which promptly earned its author exile):

…Вы, жадною толпой стоящие у трона,                    …You crowd that throng our throne with greed relentless--
Свободы, Гения и Славы  палачи!                               Of freedom, genius, glory killers true!
Таитесь вы под сению закона                                        You hide yourselves behind the law’s protection
Пред вами суд и правда – все молчи!                          You hush the truth, and silence justice too.
Но есть и божий суд, наперсники разврата!             But there’s a higher court, accomplices of evil!

Есть грозный суд; он ждет;                                            A dreaded court that waits—
Он не доступен звону злата,                                          Whose judgment is quite deaf to clinking silver
И мысли и дела он знает наперед.                                And knows your thoughts and deeds every which way.
Тогда напрасно вы прибегнете к злословью:           Then you in vain will grasp at gossip’s libel,
Оно вам не поможет вновь,                                             No help to you from lies will come;
И вы не смоете всей вашей черной кровью                Your black blood will not wash, for all your trying,
Поэта праведную кровь!                                                 The righteous noble poet’s blood!

Gogol, more gently, wrote: “All my joy and pleasure in life vanished with him.  I never again wrote a single line without seeing him in my mind standing before me, and asking myself: what would he say of this? Would he like it? Would it make him laugh?”
 
Secret police reports denounced the  “excessive fuss being made by so many, as if for a person of exceptional merit”.  An estimated 50,000 people assembled by his apartment on the Moika Canal, not far from the Winter Palace, seriously alarming the Tsar and Count Benckendorf, who feared a possible uprising.  They reacted as always: repressively. Mourners were driven away.  Obituaries in the press were strictly forbidden.  Only one newspaper managed a headline on January 30, 1837: “The sunshine of our poetry has set!  Pushkin is dead!”  Its editor was summoned at once and reprimanded by Benckendorf himself: “How dare you put out a black banner headline to announce the death of a person of no consequence or importance in the government service?  ‘The sunshine of our poetry?  Ha!  What kind of position is that?’” 

Popular indignation grew as Metropolitan Serafim, head of the Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg, refused to say a planned memorial mass (on the grounds that duelers, like suicides, were unworthy of Christian burial).  On February 1, 1837, the Tsar without warning switched the funeral site from St. Issac’s Cathedral to a much smaller church right by the Winter Palace, the small Konyushennaya Church (later converted by the Soviets into a taxi garage)…The traditional funeral procession was ordered cancelled; instead, the coffin was sneaked to the church after midnight, as troops blocked the streets, and in Zhukovsky sad phrase, “there were more gendarmes than mourners”.   Schools and colleges were warned not to permit absences to attend the funeral, yet throngs surrounded the church, roughly held back by police.  Admission was by tickets only, and tickets were issued froma register compiled by none other than Pushkin’s old enemy Count Vorontsov, listing mostly diplomats.  Admission was by tickets only, mostly for uncomprehending diplomats.  Natalya did not attend the funeral procession, nor was she at the requiem the night before, having told Prince Vyazemsky she was exhausted and did not wish to appear before the gendarmes—or the crowds.

Fearful of displays of popular sentiment, the authorities, in the dead of night on February 3, 1837, had the poet’s coffin borne out of the church crypt, wrapped in a rude matting, and unceremoniously packed into a wooden box on a fast police sled whose floor was covered in straw.  The coffin was then ordered removed for burial in Pushkin’s burial plot in Svyatogorsky Monastery in Mikhaylovskoye.  By decree, all demonstrations of grief or even respect for the national poet were forbidden. Only three persons were allowed to accompany the coffin on the long trip:  a gendarme named Rakeyev, Pushkin’s old friend Alexander Turgenev, by command of the Tsar, and Nikita Kozlov, Pushkin’s devoted servant from cradle to grave, who did not leave the coffin even at any time, and “ neither ate nor drank n for three days from grief”.  To ensure no crowds, in the bitterly cold dark wee hours of the morning of February 6, 1837, the “sunshine of Russian poetry» was laid to rest in the grave he had chosen himself less than a year before—right by his mother. Natalya lived until 1863, and in 1844 remarried an officer in the Life Guards (and friend of D’Anthès) named Pyotr Lanskoy.  She visited Pushkin’s grave just twice: once after remarrying, and once in 1841, when a simple obelisk was placed over his tomb.

Russia’s first monument to Pushkin was erected in 1880, in what is now Pushkin Square in Moscow.  If you chance to be there at about seven o’clock in the evening, it may seem to you that all the fretting lovers in the city are meeting by the poet’s statue.  Perhaps for an instant, before they go off on their dates, they are taking in just a bit of his loving energy, his warmth, wit, humor, passion, and intensity.  Of course, there is a more prosaic explanation (his statue is directly over the hub connecting Moscow’s three busiest subway lines).   Yet it is fitting that lovers bearing flowers meet where Pushkin stands: over central arteries, in heart of Moscow, where he was born and married, on a little hill near the Kremlin. (It is fitting, too, that Pushkin looks away from that seat of power and gazes with majestic melancholy at the constant stream of humanity spilling into what is said to be the busiest single branch of McDonalds in the world). 

I am sentimentally attached to Pushkin Square, and it has given me much personal happiness.  As an American, I’ve felt honored leaving flowers there for a spirit so in tune with the ideals my country was meant to stand for. Yet few places on Earth are quite as soulful and serene as the graveyard in Mikhaylovskoye where Pushkin rests by his mother, where:

Стоит широко дуб над важными гробами,                Above the solid graves an oak stands, broad boughs spanning
Колеблясь и шумя….                                                 With quivering, rustling leaves.

Such peacefulness and love seem to abide in that place—such simple grace, such dignity! No graveyard, it’s true, can be called happy.  It is still a place of quiet mourning.and wordless contemplation.  Yet it gives me comfort to feel that this great soul—this poet of the soul—has there received at last—at least from Mother Nature—the bliss he was always seeking.

И хоть беcчувственному телу                                                                        And though the body without feeling
Равно повсюду истлевать,                                                                              Will wither anywhere and keep,
Но ближе к милому пределу                                                                          Yet closer to a place endearing
Мне все б хотелось почивать.                                                                       Is where I feel I'd rather sleep.

И пусть у гробового входа                                                                             I'd like, if by my graveyard's entrance,
Младая будет жизнь играть,                                                                          A sweet young life would bloom and play,
И равнодушная природа                                                                                 And nature, shining with indifference,
Красою вечною сиять.                                                                                     Forever beauty would display.