Pushkin

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When Vasily Pushkin had brought his nephew to St Petersburg in 1811, he was engaged in a polemic with Admiral Shishkov, leader of the conservative, or Archaist group of Russian writers. Opposed to this were the more liberal modernists, whose centre was Karamzin. In March 1811 Shishkov had founded the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word, a society whose purpose was to defend ‘classical’ forms of Russian against foreign infection. The writers of both factions directed at each other a continual cross-fire of articles and reviews, enlivened by satirical jibes. If the dramatist Prince Shakhovskoy poked fun at Karamzin’s sentimentalism in the one-act comedy A New Sterne (1805), in Vasily’s A Dangerous Neighbour admirers of the prince’s dramatic talents were discovered among the strumpets in a brothel.

On 23 September 1815 several of the younger group – Dmitry Bludov, Dmitry Dashkov, Stepan Zhikharev, Filipp Wiegel, Aleksandr Turgenev and Zhukovsky – attended the première of Shakhovskoy’s new comedy, The Lipetsk Waters; or, A Lesson for Coquettes at the Bolshoy Theatre. Zhukovsky’s companions were soon embarrassed to discover that Shakhovskoy ‘in the poet Fialkin, a miserable swain, whom all scorned, and who bent himself double before all, intended to represent the noble modesty of Zhukovsky; […] One can imagine the situation of poor Zhukovsky, on whom numerous immodest glances were turned! One can imagine the astonishment and indignation of his friends, seated around him! A gauntlet had been thrown down; Bludov and Dashkov, still ebullient with youth, hastened to pick it up.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Bludov’s reply was a wretchedly unfunny lampoon directed at Shakhovskoy, A Vision in some Tavern, published by the Society of Learned People.

(#ulink_73b416ba-617b-5199-a521-87df429418f8) This purported to have taken place in the little provincial town of Arzamas. The idea that a learned society, dedicated to literature, could exist in such a sleepy backwater famous only for its geese amused Bludov’s friends, and led in October to the foundation of the Arzamas Society of Unknown People.

From the beginning Arzamas was an elaborate joke, a parody of the solemn proceedings of the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word. These took place in the huge hall of Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka, when ‘the members sat at tables in the centre, around them were armchairs for the most honoured guests, and round the walls in three tiers was well-arranged seating for other visitors, admitted by ticket. To add greater lustre to these gatherings, the fair sex appeared in ball-gowns, ladies-in-waiting wore their royal miniatures,

(#ulink_35390229-4c94-5dc2-8e21-43a0f184ee78) grandees and generals their ribbons and stars, and all their full-dress uniform.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The lively facetiousness of Arzamas could hardly have been more different. The meetings took place on Thursday evenings, usually at the home of one of the two married members – Bludov’s on the Nevsky Prospect or Sergey Uvarov’s in Malaya Morskaya Street. Each member had been given a name taken from one of Zhukovsky’s ballads. The president for the evening wore a Jacobin red cap; the proceedings were conducted in a parodic imitation of the high style employed at the Symposium and invariably ended with the consumption of an Arzamas goose. Vyazemsky and Batyushkov soon joined; and when Vasily Pushkin – at fifty-one, the oldest of the group – was elected in March 1816, advantage was taken of his good-natured credulity to stage a parody of Masonic initiation rites, an immensely long mummery which concluded with Vasily shooting an arrow into the heart of a dummy representing the bad taste of the Shishkovites.

(#ulink_17359220-ca42-533a-ac31-546d981e7367) This set the tone for his position in Arzamas: he became the internal butt for its members’ jokes, as members of the Symposium were the external. Having dallied at a cake-shop, he arrived late at the next meeting, to be greeted with a flood of facetious speeches and resolutions; but, forgiven, he was made the society’s elder with various privileges, including that of having ‘at Arzamas suppers a special goose roasted for him alone, which, at his choice, he may either consume entirely, or, having consumed a portion, may take the rest home’.

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While still at the Lycée Pushkin had taken an eager interest in the literary debate, naturally ranging himself on the side of his friends against Shishkov and the Symposium. He learnt of the foundation of Arzamas, and was soon addressing Vyazemsky as ‘dear Arzamasite’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and calling his uncle ‘the Nestor of Arzamas’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He already felt himself spiritually to be a member: in ‘To Zhukovsky’ (1816), calling on the ‘singers, educated/In the happy heresy of Taste and Learning’, to ‘strike down the brazen friends of Ignorance’ – the Shishkov circle – he signs himself ‘An Arzamasite’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Shortly after he arrived in St Petersburg he was elected to the society, and given the name of the Cricket. The reality he encountered was rather different from the ideal of ‘To Zhukovsky’: though the Arzamasites were a congenial, convivial set, they were hardly that band of brothers devoted to the cause of art envisaged in the epistle. He arrived, too, at a time when the society was beginning to lose its point. Derzhavin had died in July 1816; the Symposium ceased its existence not long afterwards, and Arzamas, whose whole essence was parody, could, like a reflection in a mirror, hardly remain once the original had disappeared. The last formal meeting of the society was held in the spring of 1818; though some of the members continued to come together informally thereafter, Arzamas had come to an end.

Long after it had ceased to exist it still remained a pleasant memory for Pushkin: ‘Is your swan-princess with you? Give her the respects of an Arzamas goose,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in 1825.

(#litres_trial_promo) He felt for it, too, something akin to that loyalty inspired by the Lycée – though the feeling was, naturally, far less deep. As a literary group, it was, paradoxically, more important to him before he became a member than subsequently. While he was at the Lycée it represented for him the forces of enlightenment, ranged against those of darkness and ignorance; after his election it became merely a circle of acquaintances, some of whom – Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Batyushkov, Aleksandr Turgenev – were already close friends, while others – Bludov, Dashkov, Wiegel, Poletika, and, to a lesser extent, Zhikharev – were to become so.

(#ulink_349cfff0-e349-5fb2-a562-b1031496c868) Indeed, this gathering of diplomats and civil servants, of literary practitioners and dilettantes, represented such a heterogeneous collection of views – ranging from Kavelin’s dogmatic conservatism to Nikolay Turgenev’s radical republicanism – that it could in no way have had an influence, as a whole, on one who was a part of it. But among its members were some of the liveliest minds in Russia at the time, and Pushkin undoubtedly absorbed much from his intercourse with them: particularly, perhaps, from Nikolay Turgenev.

The Turgenev brothers shared an apartment on the Fontanka Embankment, on the top floor of the official residence of Prince A.N. Golitsyn, the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Education. Aleksandr Turgenev was indolent, easy-going, an intellectual flâneur; Nikolay energetic, single-minded, with far more radical political views. Pushkin visited them often, to be berated by Aleksandr for his laziness, and urged by Nikolay to abandon the Anacreontic muse of the Lycée and turn to more serious themes. A third, younger brother, Sergey, was at this time with the diplomatic mission attached to the Russian forces of occupation in France. At the beginning of December 1817 he noted in his diary: ‘[My brothers] write again about Pushkin, as a developing talent. Ah, let them hasten to breathe liberalism into him, and instead of self-lamentation let his first song be: Freedom.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He showed remarkable prescience, for towards the end of the month Pushkin produced ‘Liberty. An Ode’.

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The Turgenevs’ apartment looked out across the canal at the gloomy Mikhailovsky Castle, the scene of the Emperor Paul’s assassination in 1801. According to Wiegel, one of the ‘high-minded young freethinkers’ gathered in the apartment, gazing out at the castle, jokingly suggested it to Pushkin as the subject for a poem. ‘With sudden agility he leapt on the large, long table before the window, stretched out, seized pen and paper and, laughing, began to write.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The poem opens with the dismissal of the poet’s former muse, Aphrodite, ‘the weak queen of Cythera’. In her stead Pushkin invokes ‘the proud songstress of Freedom’ to indict the present age: ‘Everywhere iniquitous Power/In the inspissated gloom of prejudice/Reigns.’ The proper society is the state in which ‘with sacred Liberty/Powerful Laws are firmly bound’. The rule of law applies to tyrant and mob alike: the French revolution, an infraction of law by the people, led to the despotism of Napoleon, ‘the world’s horror, nature’s shame,/A reproach on earth to God’. Three brilliant stanzas – a vivid contrast to the abstract rhetoric that has gone before – follow. The ‘pensive poet’, gazing at midnight on the Mikhailovsky Castle, imagines the assassination of Paul on the night of 11 March 1801:

in ribbons and in stars,

Drunk with wine and hate

The secret assassins come,

Boldness on their face, fear in their heart.

A final stanza, added later, reverts to the preceding style and draws a general conclusion.

Yakov Saburov, one of the hussar officers whom Pushkin frequented in Tsarskoe Selo, later told Pushkin’s biographer, Annenkov, that the poem was known to the emperor, ‘but [he] did not find in it cause for punishment’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the ideas of the poem are those of Kunitsyn, who had told the lycéens, ‘Preparing to be protectors of the laws, you must learn yourselves first to respect them; for a law, broken by its guardians, loses its sanctity in the eyes of the people,’ adding a quotation from the Abbé Raynal, one of the French Encyclopédistes, ‘Law is nothing if it is not a sword, which moves indiscriminately above all heads and strikes everything which rises above the level of the horizontal plane in which it moves.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin echoes this almost verbatim,

grasped by trusty hands

Above the equal heads of citizens

Their sword sweeps without preference.

‘Liberty. An Ode’ is Pushkin’s first great mature poem, but is far from being a revolutionary one; it expresses, rather, a conservative liberalism, defending the monarchy, provided that the monarch respects the law that binds him as well as his subjects. Opinion, however, seizing on the poem’s title and ignoring its content, held it to be subversive, and it came to have talismanic significance for the younger generation. Manuscript copies were widely circulated. D.N. Sverbeev, a coeval of Pushkin, then a junior civil servant, read to his colleagues ‘this new production of Pushkin’s then desperately liberal muse’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A copy was confiscated on the arrest of a certain Angel Galera in 1824; another was among the ‘disloyal writings possessed by officers of the Kiev Grenadier Regiment’ in 1829. Herzen published the ode in London in 1856, but it did not appear in its entirety in Russia until 1906.

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Pushkin’s other great poem of this period, ‘The Country’, was written during a second visit to Mikhailovskoe in the summer of 1819. An idyllic description of the countryside and its ability to inspire the poet is followed by an eloquent denunciation of serfdom:

Savage Lordship here, feelingless, lawless,

With violent rod has appropriated

The peasant’s labour, property and time.

Bowed over another’s plough, to whips obedient,

Here emaciated Servitude drags itself along the furrows

Of its pitiless Master.

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The serf’s obligations to his landlord took one of two forms: either that of the barshchina, the corvée: forced labour on the landlord’s fields (as in the poem); or the obrok, the quit-rent, a sum paid to the landlord in lieu of service. The latter was for the serf much less of a burden, and was the form of service preferred by progressive landlords. So Eugene Onegin, on inheriting his uncle’s estate, demonstrates his liberal credentials by replacing ‘ancient corvée’s yoke/With a moderate quit-rent’ (II, iv). Naturally, harsh treatment led to retaliation. Landlords were often killed, and minor uprisings occurred. In 1783 the arbitrary and tyrannical regime of Aleksandr Vyndomsky’s estate manager at Trigorskoe led to a revolt eventually put down, after an engagement which left forty dead or wounded, by a squadron of dragoons and a detachment of infantry under the command of the governor of Pskov. The seven ring-leaders were publicly knouted, branded, their nostrils slit, and were exiled to hard labour for life.

Since the time of Catherine II various projects had been put forward for reforming the system, or emancipating the serfs, but with no result. The accession of the liberal-minded Alexander in 1801 gave hope to the abolitionists; but, following the Napoleonic wars, a period of reaction set in, marked, in external affairs, by Alexander’s creation of the Holy Alliance and internally by his appointment in 1815 of Count Arakcheev, a narrow-minded, brutal martinet, as deputy president of the Committee of Ministers: for the next ten years Arakcheev’s house on the corner of the Liteiny Prospect and Kirochnaya Street was the effective centre of government.

Oppressor of all Russia,

Persecutor of governors

And tutor to the Council,

To the tsar he is – a friend and brother.