Selected Poetry (Penguin) Read online

  Pushkin’s was a neglected childhood; his pronounced African features may have reminded his mother of her bigamous father and turned her against her first son. With his brother and sister he was brought up largely by his grandmother Mariya, who taught him Russian, and a freed serf, Arina Rodionovna, who told him folk tales (the model for Tatyana’s nanny in Eugene Onegin); a succession of émigré French tutors made no impact. He seems to have been a moody, explosive child. The best times of his early years were spent in his father’s extensive library of French literature listening to the conversation at literary evenings.

  At the age of twelve, Pushkin was admitted to the Lycée for boys from cultured and noble families newly set up by Tsar Alexander I, with free tuition and board, in a wing of his palace at Tsarskoye Selo outside St Petersburg, with the aim of producing loyal officers of state – a less successful idea than had been hoped; some of Pushkin’s school friends would later be found in rebels’ ranks. Nearly one-sixth of all Pushkin’s lyric poems were written during his years at the school, in the course of which he acquired his extraordinary fluency and ease in writing verse. When in 1815 Russia’s greatest living poet, the aged Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816), paid a visit to the Lycée and heard the fifteen-year-old read his twenty-stanza ode ‘Recollections in Tsarskoye Selo’, he hailed him as his successor. Much of this early work is love poetry. During his school years, and indeed for the rest of his life, Pushkin showed himself to be highly responsive to females. ‘Pushkin was so susceptible to women at this time,’ a classmate notes, ‘that when only fifteen or sixteen, by merely touching the hand of his dancing partner at a Lyceum ball, his glance grew passionate, and he snorted and wheezed like a high-spirited horse in a drove of colts.’9 He excelled in Russian and French literature and in fencing but took little interest in other subjects, his performance in the final examinations earning him an insignificant post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  After six years at the Lycée – never going home for holidays – Pushkin spent three years in St Petersburg, where his parents had now moved; he lived in a tiny room above their apartment on the Fontanka river. His free lifestyle was more dissipated than that of Onegin as later to be depicted in the same capital. His physical appearance, which didn’t change much throughout his life, was distinctive – he was short, just under five foot six, with a shock of curly black hair, thick lips, a dark complexion and riveting eyes. Swift-moving, his features and whole figure constantly in motion, he alternated rapidly between brooding silence and high spirits; he cultivated strikingly long fingernails. His behaviour as a young adult was by all accounts an out-of-control schoolboy’s. He would disturb his neighbours at the theatre, on one occasion applauding by pounding the bald head in front of him; he was forever drawing his fencing rapier against someone he had just met over some trivial slight, real or imagined.10

  Shortly after leaving school in 1817, Pushkin was formally elected to the literary society Arzamas, whose affairs he had already followed at school and whose membership comprised some of Russia’s leading poets and writers, such as Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) and Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792–1878), and even included his uncle Vasily. Arzamas was formed in 1815 in opposition to the conservative Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word, which was dedicated to the defence of Russian literature against foreign ‘infection’ such as Karamzin’s linguistic reforms based on French. Arzamas’s programme was firmly founded on French neoclassical canons of the previous century, and its imitative approach to poetry helped to form Pushkin as a poet, as we shall see later. He also joined another literary society cum drinking club known as the Green Lamp, some of whose members were also (unknown to Pushkin) members of a secret society, the Union of Salvation, aiming at constitutional reform in Russia. He made friends for life at both Arzamas and the Green Lamp. He himself was never a member of a secret society; notoriously talkative (he later became known as a great conversationalist), he was not trusted in secret circles. However, he soaked up the liberal, anti-autocratic ideas gathering strength in Russia at this time. His close friendships with serious figures older than himself, intellectuals such as Aleksandr Turgenev (1784–1845) and Pyotr Chaadayev (1794–1856), turned the brilliant but frivolous schoolboy into a passionate and politicised energy source.

  The middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century saw a sharp change of political mood in Russia. After a far-stretching empire had been built up under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), the brutal rule of the unbalanced Paul I had been ended by his assassination in a palace revolution in 1801, and in 1812 Alexander I was victorious over Napoleon, Russian autocracy looked firmly established. However, the seeds of opposition to the spread of harsh bureaucracy in all aspects of daily life had been sown among the intelligentsia and army officers returning from Western Europe. Their tsar, in contrast, so recently ‘the liberator of Europe’, relapsed into a mode of political repression and religious bigotry in the latter part of his reign.

  Pushkin continued to write verse after leaving school. As unrestrained as his lifestyle (he was laid low from time to time with a venereal infection) were his poems against autocracy, which were widely copied and gave voice to the attitudes of a whole new generation in military and civil service. Some of them fell into the hands of the authorities and would have landed him in Siberia had it not been for the efforts of high-placed friends, including Zhukovsky, now Russian tutor to Tsar Alexander’s German-born wife, who also played a part in the decision to send Pushkin to the more congenial South. Once again he was appointed to a humble bureaucratic post, a supernumerary in the chancellery of the shortly to be appointed governor of Bessarabia in Kishinev; Russia had recently wrested back this semi-Asiatic territory from Turkey in the latest hostilities between the two empires. Pushkin’s superior at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Count Capo d’Istrias, who happened to be an honorary member of Arzamas, had supported this milder form of exile which was accepted by the tsar, and then commented in a letter to Pushkin’s new master:

  Certain poems, especially an ode on freedom [1817], have brought Mr Pushkin to the attention of the government. […] this poem reveals dangerous principles issuing from that contemporary school, or perhaps it would be better to say, from that anarchical system which people maliciously call a system of the rights of man, of freedom, and of the independence of people. […] his patrons suppose that his penitence is sincere and that, removed for some time from Petersburg, provided with an occupation, and surrounded with good examples, one may make of him a fine servant of the government or, at least, a writer of the first rank.11

  It was the latter expectation that was to be realised.

  On his way south to Kishinev, in a Tatar village on the edge of the Black Sea in the company of the jovial family of General Nikolay Rayevsky, a hero of 1812, with his three daughters and two sons, Pushkin spent perhaps the happiest three weeks of his life. He fell in love, with varying degrees of seriousness, with each of the daughters in turn, and in their company read Byron in French prose translation and visited the historic ruined palace of the Tatar khans in the town of Bakhchisaray, with its famous fountain.

  By the time he arrived in Kishinev in the autumn of 1820, a long poem he had worked on for three years in St Petersburg, Ruslan and Lyudmila, was published. It was customary at this time for an ambitious new poet to become established with a long, typically narrative poem, a poema, rather than scattered lyrics, and Pushkin’s older writer friends, who had great faith in his poetic gift, had urged him to make his mark in this way. The mock-heroic verse tale of the ravishing of a princess by a wicked wizard shocked some critics by its frivolity, but the perfection of its poetry delighted everyone else and made Pushkin famous overnight.12 Another accolade came from his friend and mentor Zhukovsky, who gave him his own portrait inscribed: ‘To a victorious pupil from a defeated master.’

  Pushkin was intoxicated by the atmosphere of Kishinev, a multi-ethnic garrison town with a popula
tion of Moldavians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Turks, Greeks, Jews and gypsies as well as Western Europeans. His forays among the young Moldavian girls caused frequent complaints from their parents; in response to these his kindly guardian, General Inzov, in whose household he lived, had his boots removed from time to time to prevent him from leaving the house.

  Settling down and inspired by Byron’s verse tales, Pushkin wrote his three finished Southern poemy in Kishinev, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bahkchisaray and The Gypsies, as well as the first three chapters of Eugene Onegin; also The Gabrieliad, a blasphemous treatment of the Annunciation in which Satan, the archangel Gabriel and the dove of the Holy Spirit successively have their way with the Virgin Mary. This poem was of course unpublished in Pushkin’s lifetime but became well known to the authorities, who were to pursue him long and wearisomely as the suspected author, which was never officially established. The Prisoner of the Caucasus soon sold out in its first edition as a booklet (1822), praised by everyone for its vivid portrayal of Circassian life and landscape but disappointing some critics unconvinced by the character of the hero, a Byronic fugitive from the ‘civilised’ world (Pushkin agreed with them). The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, however, made publishing history two years later, earning Pushkin the princely sum of 3,000 roubles and unanimous critical praise. Its commercial success decided Pushkin in his pioneering endeavour to make his living as a poet; the rest of his life was to be spent in increasing debt.

  After three years in what had become a backwater for him, Pushkin requested and was granted a transfer to Odessa. In this sophisticated Black Sea port, he was given his usual modest post in the offices of Count Mikhail Vorontsov, the recently appointed governor-general of New Russia (i.e. the South), an Anglophile and veteran of the Battle of Borodino, someone his unruly charge never got on with, secretly lampooning him and conducting an affair with his younger wife. The vivacious and sociable Yelizaveta was one of two beautiful and prosperous married women Pushkin met in Odessa and fell deeply in love with; the other was a shipping merchant’s wife, Amalia Riznich. Lyrics inspired by both of them are among Pushkin’s most deeply felt love poems. His relationship with a third woman, the brilliant and flamboyant Karolina Sobanskaya, who was rumoured to be a government spy, might have developed had he not been distracted by each of the other two in turn.

  From his immediate post-Lycée period to the end of his life, Pushkin was constantly under government surveillance. During his fourth year in the South, the authorities got wind that he was ‘taking lessons in pure atheism’ according to new scientific principles – ironically enough, with Vorontsov’s personal physician.13 In fact, Pushkin had simply shown a passing curiosity in ideas new to him. But Orthodoxy being one of the ideological pillars of the state (‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’, as Tsar Alexander had laid down), there was once again a cloud hanging over the poet. To minimise any possible dissemination of atheism, the tsar, in his religious zealotry, decided to change Pushkin’s place of exile to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoye, tucked away in the north-west in the province of Pskov. Here Pushkin spent two years in the company of his childhood nanny Arina Rodionovna, walking, riding and noting down folk tales told to him by the old woman. Early in 1825 the first chapter of Eugene Onegin was brought out by his friend the publisher Pyotr Pletnyov. It was enthusiastically received by the critics but the booklet considerably undersold its ambitious print run, largely due to trade mismanagement, including an excessively high price. However, Pushkin’s first collection of lyric verse, from the same publisher at the end of 1825, containing a hundred or so poems, including several of his most famous, sold out within two months despite the book’s pricing and the fact that many of the poems would have been widely familiar from initial publication in a journal.

  During the last year of his exile at Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin wrote the blank verse historical drama The Comedy of Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrep’yev, to be known since its first publication bowdlerised by the censor in 1831 simply as Boris Godunov, in which form it was unsurprisingly a critical and commercial failure. The censor’s removal of the carefully researched but politically unwelcome theme of the people’s espousal of the Pretender rather than Tsar Boris made it seem like something it wasn’t – a one-sided neoclassical tragedy focusing (like Mussorgsky’s later opera) on the unhistorical given of Boris’s personal guilt after murdering the young heir to the throne.

  In November 1825, Alexander I died unexpectedly. Hoping that the new tsar might release him from exile, Pushkin set out alone for the capital but superstitiously turned back when two hares and a priest crossed his path. He distracted himself by writing the comic narrative poem on rural moeurs Count Nulin instead.

  This may have saved his life. As he was courageously to tell the new tsar, Nicholas I, when summoned for interview the following year, if he had been in St Petersburg he would surely have joined his friends in the uprising that took place when 3,000 troops assembled on Senate Square on 14 December. The complete failure of the disastrously underprepared rising and severe punishment of the leaders of the rebels, known thereafter as the Decembrists – five were executed and some hundred and twenty sentenced to hard labour, including some of Pushkin’s closest friends – cast all educated Russia into a depression for the rest of the decade. The fact that Pushkin was fortunate enough to be well out of the way, and so missed sharing the punishment of his friends and allies, gave him a profound sense of guilt for the rest of his life.

  The interview with the tsar took place in the Kremlin, Moscow, in September 1826. Impressed by Pushkin’s honesty about his Decembrist sympathies, Nicholas put an end to his exile but extracted an undertaking from him ‘to think and act in a different fashion’14 in future; he also declared that henceforth he would be Pushkin’s personal censor. The sovereign wasn’t to keep to his side of the bargain; it turned out that Pushkin had to submit all his work to Count Aleksandr Benckendorff, head of the newly created Third Department of the Tsar’s Chancellery, the secret police, the responsible body for censorship, a lasting source of bitterness for the most popular literary figure in the country at this time.

  The 1820s saw a transformation of the writer’s world from a manuscript culture to a literary market. The Russian poets and writers of the eighteenth century had written in a world of patronage, dependent on a sovereign, a wealthy or powerful figure or a circle of friends. They were treated like servants by their noble masters – and on occasion ill-treated; the poet Vasily Tredyakovsky (1703–69) is recorded as being caned for failing to deliver an ode on schedule.15 In his early years, Pushkin’s poems were read in such a culture. Literary salons, modelled on those of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, and literary societies, often with a political fringe, played a leading role in intellectual life. These private circles began to publish their own journals and almanacs, which developed into periodicals in their own right – the origin of the thick literary journals of modern times. On Pushkin’s return to Moscow and St Petersburg in 1826 after six years in exile, bookshops and literary periodicals were in full flow in a highly competitive open market.

  In Moscow, Pushkin renewed his friendships with poets and writers from his pre-exile St Petersburg days, in particular his closest literary school friend Anton Delvig (1798–1831), and got to know up-and-coming Moscow literati such as Nikolay Polevoy (1796–1846) and Mikhail Pogodin (1800–1875), founders of the new literary journals the Moscow Telegraph and the Moscow Herald. He also met the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), exiled to central Russia for several years from his Lithuanian birthplace, under Russian rule since the Third Partition of Poland (1795). The two admired each other and became warm friends until Pushkin’s literary response to the Polish uprising of 1830–31 led to mutual antagonism – which was to prove especially productive for Russian literature (see below).

  Delvig and Pushkin launched a new journal, the short-lived Literary Gazette, doing battle with the hack writer Faddey Bulgari
n (1789–1859), a police spy, who denigrated Pushkin’s Boris Godunov to his paymaster the tsar and then plagiarised it in his own historical novel Dmitry the Pretender (1830). Many of Pushkin’s lyric poems of the 1820s were first published in Pogodin’s Moscow Herald and especially Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers, a showcase for him and the circle of poets who were his friends and contemporaries and known to posterity as the Pushkin Pleiad. Both these publications were at the more discerning, small-subscription end of the Russian literary journal spectrum.

  The 1820s saw the composition of most of Pushkin’s poetry, and two further collections of his verse were published in 1829 (containing short poems both new and reprinted after appearing in journals and almanacs) and 1832 (with short poems and also first printings of The Tale of Tsar Saltan and the blank verse ‘Little Tragedy’ Mozart and Salieri). By this time, however, the peak of his lifetime popularity had passed. Before he was thirty, the public had lost its appetite for verse tales and lyric poetry and was turning firmly to prose. Historical novels began a new era for the reading public, and Gogol’s early stories met with immediate success. Prose translations of popular fiction thrived. In the 1830s, Pushkin himself turned to prose with the innovative Tales of Belkin, five stories of great parodic sophistication, but they were not appreciated by their first, disappointingly small readership. The intriguingly ambiguous short tale The Queen of Spades, a gambling story, was more successful, appearing in the omnivorous publisher Aleksandr Smirdin’s new monthly Library for Reading, covering literature, arts, science, news and fashion, which was winning a solid middle-class readership and was by far the most read Russian journal for the next decade, casting its net widely enough to publish some of Pushkin’s lyrics written in the 1830s in its first issues.

  Pushkin’s numerous amatory relationships in St Petersburg after his return from exile have been well documented. They overlapped with his courtship of a young girl who soon became one of the most celebrated beauties of St Petersburg society. Two years after his return from exile, he met the sixteen-year-old Natalya Goncharova, whose large family – she had two sisters and three brothers – had become impoverished since the heyday of her great-great-grandfather, a rich and powerful manufacturer. After more than two years of distractions on other fronts and haggling with her mother, Pushkin married her, without a dowry – a key point in his favour. Natalya had no interest in literature; her passion was the ballroom. Exceptionally, magnetically beautiful, she even turned the head of the tsar. A young observer, a Count Vladimir Sollogub, has this description of her from the year of her marriage, included in a memoir published exactly a century later (1931):