Pushkin

Love thy stern, harmonious air,

The Neva’s majestic flow,

The granite of her embankments,

Thy railings’ iron pattern,

Thy pensive nights’

Translucent twilight, moonless glimmer,

When in my room

I write and read without a lamp,

And distinct are the sleeping piles

Of the empty streets, and bright

The Admiralty’s spire,

And, not admitting nocturnal dark

To the golden heavens,

Dawn to replace dusk

Hastens, giving to night but half an hour.

I love your cruel winter’s

Still air and frost,

The flight of sleighs along the broad Neva,

Maidens’ faces brighter than roses,

The brilliance, hubbub and chatter of balls,

And at the bachelor banquet

The hiss of foaming beakers

And the blue flame of punch.

The Bronze Horseman, 43–66

THE PETERSBURG THROUGH WHICH the hero of Eugene Onegin moves in the first chapter of the poem is not fictional: it is the Petersburg of Pushkin. Eugene’s friends and acquaintances, his amusements and diversions, his interests and infatuations are also Pushkin’s. This ‘description of the fashionable life of a St Petersburg young man at the end of 1819, reminiscent of Beppo, sombre Byron’s comic work’,

(#litres_trial_promo) thus provides a skeleton on which to drape a description of Pushkin’s own social life at St Petersburg: his friends and associates, literary salons, the theatre, balls, gambling, liaisons, romances and flirtations.

Rising late, Eugene dons his ‘wide Bolivar’ to saunter up and down ‘the boulevard’ – the shaded walk, lined by two rows of lime trees, which ran down the middle of the Nevsky from the Fontanka canal to the Moika. Warned by his watch that it is around four in the afternoon, he hurries to Talon’s French restaurant on the Nevsky, where Petr Kaverin, the hard-drinking hussar officer who considers cold champagne the best cure for the clap, is waiting. On 27 May 1819 Kaverin noted in his diary: ‘Shcherbinin, Olsufev, Pushkin – supped with me in Petersburg – champagne had been put on ice the day before – by chance my beauty at that time (for the satisfaction of carnal desires) passed by – we called her in – the heat was insupportable – we asked Pushkin to prolong the memory of the evening in verse – here is the result:

A joyful evening in our life

Let us remember, youthful friends;

In the glass goblet champagne’s

Cold stream hissed.

We drank – and Venus with us

Sat sweating at the table.

When shall we four sit again

With whores, wine and pipes?’

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Pushkin had not lost his taste for military company, though now he was as apt to mingle with generals as with subalterns, much to Pushchin’s disapproval. ‘Though liberal in his views, Pushkin had a kind of pathetic habit of betraying his noble character and often angered me and all of us by, for example, loving to consort in the orchestra-pit with Orlov, Chernyshev, Kiselev and others: with patronizing smiles they listened to his jokes and witticisms. If you made him a sign from the stalls, he would run over immediately. You would say to him: “Why do you want, dear chap, to spend your time with that lot; not one of them is sympathetic to you, and so on.” He would listen patiently, begin to tickle you, embrace you, which he usually did when he was slightly flustered. A moment later you would see Pushkin again with the lions of that time!’

(#litres_trial_promo) However, something was to be gained from their company. When in 1819 he resurrected the idea of joining the hussars – ‘I’m sorry for poor Pushkin!’ Batyushkov wrote from Naples. ‘He won’t be a good officer, and there will be one good poet less. A terrible loss for poetry! Perchè? Tell me, for God’s sake.’

(#litres_trial_promo) – General Kiselev promised him a commission. However, Major-General Aleksey Orlov – brother of Mikhail, he had ‘the face of Eros, the figure of the Apollo Belvedere and Herculean muscles’

(#litres_trial_promo) – dissuaded him from the idea, a service for which Pushkin, on second thoughts, was grateful: ‘Orlov, you are right: I forgo/My hussar dreams/And with Solomon exclaim:/Uniform and sabre – all is vanity!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Orlov was either extraordinarily magnanimous, or had no knowledge of the epigram Pushkin had devoted to him and his mistress, the ballet-dancer Istomina, in 1817:

Orlov in bed with Istomina

Lay in squalid nudity.

In the heated affair the inconstant general

Had not distinguished himself.

Not intending to insult her dear one,

Laïs took a microscope

And says: ‘Let me see,

My sweet, what you fucked me with.’

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