Pushkin

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Pushkin wrote of Petr Chaadaev, whom he first met at the Karamzins in Tsarskoe Selo in 1816. ‘Le beau Tchadaef’, as his fellow officers called him,

(#litres_trial_promo) had a pale complexion, grey-blue eyes and a noble forehead. He was always dressed with modish elegance: Eugene Onegin is dubbed ‘a second Chaadaev’, for being in his dress ‘a pedant/And what we used to call a dandy’ (I, xxv). Yet at the same time he was curiously asexual: no trace of a relationship is to be discovered in his life. Wiegel, who disliked him intensely, attributes this to narcissism: ‘No one ever noticed in him tender feelings towards the fair sex: his heart was too overflowing with adoration for the idol which he had created from himself.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In December 1817 he moved to St Petersburg on his appointment as aide-de-camp to General Vasilchikov. Extremely learned, and with a brilliant mind – he was described by General Orlov’s wife as ‘the most striking and most brilliant young man in St Petersburg’

(#litres_trial_promo) – he seemed on the threshold of a dazzling military career, and was widely expected to become aide-de-camp to Alexander himself. But in February 1821 he suddenly and inexplicably resigned from the army and, after undergoing a spiritual crisis so severe as to affect his health, went abroad in 1823, intending to live in Europe for the rest of his life. He was a Mason, and a member of the Society of Welfare, but played no active part in the Decembrist conspiracy, and later severely condemned the revolt of 1825. However, there is no doubt that, while at Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg, he was ‘deeply and essentially linked with Russian liberalism and radicalism’,

(#litres_trial_promo) sharing the ideals of the future Decembrists.

In St Petersburg Chaadaev lived in Demouth’s Hotel, one of the most fashionable in the capital, on the Moika, but a stone’s throw from the Nevsky. Here, according to Wiegel, he received visitors, ‘sitting on a dais, beneath two laurel bushes in tubs; to the right was a portrait of Napoleon, to the left of Byron, and his own, on which he was depicted as a genius in chains, opposite’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin was a constant visitor, abandoning in Chaadaev’s presence his adolescent antics and behaving with sober seriousness. Chaadaev’s ‘influence on Pushkin was astonishing’, Saburov – who knew both well – remarked. ‘He forced him to think. Pushkin’s French education was counteracted by Chaadaev, who already knew Locke and substituted analysis for frivolity […] He thought about that which Pushkin had never thought about.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He not only introduced logic into Pushkin’s thought, he also widened his literary horizons. Pushkin was to be deeply grateful for Chaadaev’s sympathy and support in the first months of 1820, when he was both the victim of malicious slander, and being threatened by exile to the Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea for his writings. ‘O devoted friend,’ he wrote in 1821, ‘Penetrating to the depths of my soul with your severe gaze,/You invigorated it with counsel or reproof.’

(#litres_trial_promo) To express his gratitude, he gave Chaadaev a ring: engraved on the inner surface was the inscription ‘Sub rosa 1820’.

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In 1818 he had addressed a poem to him which concludes with the stirring lines,

While we yet with freedom burn,

While our hearts yet live for honour,

My friend, let us devote to our country

The sublime impulses of our soul!

Comrade, believe: it will arise,

The star of captivating joy,

Russia will start from her sleep,

And on the ruins of autocracy

Our names will be inscribed!

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The epistle, which has been called ‘the most optimistic verse in Pushkin’s entire poetry’,

(#litres_trial_promo) circulated widely in manuscript, together with ‘Fairy Tales’, ‘The Country’ and the epigrams on Arakcheev; according to Yakushkin ‘there was scarcely a more or less literate ensign in the army who did not know them by heart’.

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* (#ulink_fa373d9f-df4c-5635-b6bd-be58c5756aed) A reference to contemporary portraits of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), the hero of South American independence.

* (#ulink_fa373d9f-df4c-5635-b6bd-be58c5756aed) The artist, Aleksandr Notbek, ignored Pushkin’s instructions; his ill-executed engraving, printed in the Neva Almanac in January 1829, shows the poet facing the spectator with arms crossed on his chest. Pushkin greeted the travesty with an amusing, if scatological epigram:

Here, having crossed Kokushkin Bridge,

Supporting his arse on the granite,

Aleksandr Sergeich Pushkin himself

Stands with Monsieur Onegin.

Scorning to glance

At the citadel of fateful power,

He has proudly turned his posterior to the fortress:

Don’t spit in the well, dear chap. (III, 165)

* (#ulink_84d7775d-a23c-5285-841d-7b75a8813e6a) A desyatin is approximately 2.7 acres: only adult male serfs were numbered in the census.

* (#ulink_28e41ba9-0ccd-565d-a1fb-27074d4aedde) Modelled on ‘The Vision of Charles Palissot’ (1760), an attack by Abbé André Morellet on Palissot’s play Les Philosophes, itself a satire directed at the Encyclopédistes.

* (#ulink_90edf394-e072-5f5f-afcb-ca46cf1ff89c) In the reign of Peter the Great the custom had been established of presenting to ladies attached to the court a miniature portrait of the monarch which was worn on state occasions.

† (#ulink_90edf394-e072-5f5f-afcb-ca46cf1ff89c) Other members included Dmitry Kavelin, Aleksandr Voeikov, Aleksandr Pleshcheev, Petr Poletika, Dmitry Severin; and, later, Nikita Muravev, General Mikhail Orlov and Nikolay Turgenev.

* (#ulink_cef1fe2b-cc5e-5555-94f8-5865a0e17185) On 7 January 1834 after a visit from Wiegel Pushkin noted in his diary, ‘I like his conversation – he is entertaining and sensible, but always ends up by talking of sodomy’ (Wiegel was homosexual), and in June, after an evening at the Karamzins, wrote, ‘I am very fond of Poletika’ (XII, 318, 330).

* (#ulink_e5972866-34dd-596c-b36e-846e8a3be847) ‘Loyal without flattery’ was the motto adopted by Arakcheev for his coat-of-arms; the last line is a reference to his mistress, Anastasiya Minkina, in 1825 murdered by the serfs for her intolerable cruelty.

* (#ulink_1e18c614-24c4-5792-b34c-3b5826f813b1) Count Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov, the Alfred Austin of Alexandrine Russia, an extraordinarily prolific, but talentless poet, the constant butt of Pushkin’s jokes.

† (#ulink_399a41ff-f62e-5b24-9c1d-37f27b046b38) Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order, he confessed, to gain everlasting fame; the German dramatist Kotzebue, employed by the Russian foreign service as a political informant, was assassinated in 1819 by the student Karl Ludwig Sand.

* (#ulink_2504a408-7b46-58db-bf95-51c11cf87f0e) By an order of 5 August 1816 certain districts in the Novgorod province and, later, in the south, had been turned into military colonies. Every village was transformed into an army camp; all peasants under fifty had to shave their beards and crop their hair, while those under forty-five had to wear uniform. Children received military training, and girls were married by order of the military authorities. Arakcheev was particularly hated for his merciless enforcement of the rules governing these colonies.

* (#ulink_10a756ef-1205-54e2-95db-1ba3f4f6af2a) The Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevsky, a member of the Society of United Slavs (which amalgamated with the southern society in 1825), who knew Pushchin well, having shared a cell with him in the Peter-Paul fortress, after reading this passage in the latter’s memoirs, remarked in a letter to M.A. Bestuzhev dated 12 June 1861: ‘Poor Pushchin, – he did not know that the Supreme Duma [of the society] had even forbidden us to make the acquaintance of the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, when he lived in the south; – and for what reason? It was openly said that because of his character and pusillanimity, because of his debauched life, he would immediately inform the government of the existence of a secret society […] Muravev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin told me about such antics of Pushkin in the south that even now turn one’s ears red.’ Shchegolev (1931), 294–5.

† (#ulink_e0e7abdf-0d95-5669-8ad8-67cc25d3e164) A quotation from Eugene Onegin, I, xii; Davydov’s wife, Aglaë (née de Grammont) was generous with her favours.

* (#ulink_77cc8f7b-2048-5ebd-b5d0-d8ffe7cda033) I.e., in secret, in strict confidence.

4 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20 (#ulink_da7a04b7-88cc-566b-90c9-0d0426afaaa0)

II: Onegin’s Day

I love thee, Peter’s creation,