Pushkin

The finest flower of French cuisine,

And Strasbourg’s imperishable pie

Between a live Limburg cheese

And a golden pineapple –

(I, xvi)

but it is now half past six, and he hurries to the Bolshoy Theatre, where the performance of a new ballet is beginning.

When Pushkin came to St Petersburg in 1817 the capital’s chief theatre was the Maly (or Kazassi Theatre), a wooden building situated on the south side of the Nevsky near the Anichkov Bridge, in what is now Ostrovsky Square, approximately where the Aleksandrinsky Theatre (designed by Rossi, and built in 1832) stands. On 3 February 1818, however, the Bolshoy (or Kamenny) Theatre, burnt down in 1811, was reopened in Teatralnaya Square in Kolomna, on the site of the present Conservatoire. There was also the German (or Novy) Theatre on Dvortsovaya Square, where a troupe of German actors performed, which existed until the early 1820s. When the Maly Theatre was pulled down at the end of the 1820s, its actors moved for some time to the building of the former circus, near Simeonovsky Bridge on the Fontanka, but this was closed when the Aleksandrinsky Theatre and, a year later, the Mikhailovsky Theatre on Mikhailovskaya Square were opened. In 1827 the wooden Kamennoostrovsky Theatre was built on Kamenny Island, a popular resort for the nobility in the summer months. There was also a theatre, seating four hundred, in the Winter Palace, built by Quarenghi between 1783 and 1787, where performances were given for the royal family and the court, while a number of the richer nobles had small, domestic theatres in their palaces.

The Bolshoy Theatre was huge. Behind the immense colonnade of its portico was a double ramp, enabling carriages to be driven up to the theatre entrance. Immediately inside were a succession of foyers: these, however, were only used when a ball was held at the theatre; they remained empty during the intervals, the audience preferring to circulate in the theatre itself. This consisted of a parterre, above which rose five tiers of boxes and galleries. The vast stage could accommodate several hundred performers at once, and was equipped with the most modern machinery for the production of spectacular effects, which were particularly appreciated by the audience. Performances took place every evening, with the exception of Saturday,

(#ulink_7ecabd06-62f7-50ee-a8aa-e26e8f858de4) each performance usually comprising two works: a ballet and a comedy, for example, or an opera and a tragedy.

‘Beneath the shade of the coulisses/My youthful days were spent,’ Pushkin writes in Eugene Onegin (I, xviii). Only unforeseen circumstances could keep him away. When, at the end of October 1819, he arrived late for a performance of the ‘magical ballet’ Hen-Zi and Tao staged by the French ballet master Charles Didelot, it was with the excuse that an exciting event in Tsarskoe Selo had delayed his return. A bear had broken its chain and escaped into the palace gardens where it could have attacked the emperor, had he chanced to be passing. He ended the anecdote with the regretful quip: ‘When a good fellow does turn up, he’s only a bear!’

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In August 1817, during an interval at the Bolshoy, Pushkin was introduced to Pavel Katenin, an officer in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards. Katenin’s regiment left for Moscow shortly afterwards, but when he returned the following summer, Pushkin came to see him: ‘I have come to you as Diogenes came to Antisthenes,’ he said. ‘Beat me, but teach me.’

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Round-faced, with full, red cheeks, like a toy cherub from a Palm Sunday fair’,

(#litres_trial_promo) Katenin was a poet, playwright, critic and literary theorist, closer in his views to the Archaic school than that of Karamzin; influential in the theatre, his chief service was to introduce Pushkin into theatrical circles. In early December 1818 he took him to see Prince Shakhovskoy, who lived with his mistress, the comic actress Ekaterina Ezhova, on the upper floor – known as ‘the garret’ – of a house in Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street. Extraordinarily ugly – he was immensely stout, with a huge, beak-like nose – Shakhovskoy was not only a playwright, but also the repertoire director of the St Petersburg theatres, instructing the performers in acting and declamation. His methods, however, were not to the taste of all. ‘His comic pronunciation with its lisp, his squeaky voice, his sobs, his recitatives, his wails, were all intolerable,’ one actress commented. ‘At the same time he showed one at which line one had to put one’s weight on one’s right foot, with one’s left in the rear, and when one should sway on to one’s left, stretching out the right, which to his mind had a majestic effect. One line had to be said in a whisper, and, after a “pause”, making an “indication” with both hands in the direction of the actor facing one, the last line of the monologue had to be cried out in a rapid gabble.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He was, however, extremely charming, and Pushkin, walking back with Katenin after the first meeting, exclaimed: ‘Do you know that at bottom he’s a very good fellow?’, and expressed the hope that he did not know of ‘those schoolboy’s scribblings’: an epigram on him Pushkin had written at the Lycée.

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Shakhovskoy entertained most evenings after the theatre, and Pushkin became a constant visitor to these Bohemian revels, remembering one occasion as ‘one of the best evenings of my life’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Vasily Pushkin was saddened when he heard of the visits; he remained true to the hostile view of Shakhovskoy taken by Arzamas. ‘Shakhovskoy is still in Moscow,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in April 1819. ‘He told me that my nephew visited him practically every day. I said nothing, but only sighed quietly.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The main attraction of the garret lay perhaps not so much in the personality of the host, as in the presence of young actresses, in whose careers Shakhovskoy took a paternal interest, assisting them not only by instruction in elocution, but also by bringing them together with rich young officers. ‘He is really a good chap, a tolerable author and an excellent pander,’ Pushkin commented to Vyazemsky.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1825 the playwright Griboedov, another of Pushkin’s colleagues at the Foreign Office, wrote to a friend: ‘For a long time I lived in seclusion from all, then suddenly had an urge to go out into the world, and where should I go, if not to Shakhovskoy’s? There at least one’s bold hand can rove over the swan’s down of sweet bosoms etc.’

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At the garret Pushkin met the nineteen-year-old actress Elena Sosnitskaya, to whose album he contributed a quatrain:

With coldness of heart you have contrived to unite

The wondrous heat of captivating eyes.

He who loves you is, of course, a fool;

But he who loves you not is a hundred times more foolish.

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‘In my youth, when she really was the beautiful Helen,’ he later remarked, ‘I nearly fell into her net, but came to my senses and got off with a poem.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He was also seduced by the more mature charms of the singer Nimfodora Semenova, then thirty-one, more renowned for her appearance than her voice: ‘I would wish to be, Semenova, your coverlet,/Or the dog that sleeps upon your bed,’ he sighed.

(#litres_trial_promo) More serious was his infatuation – despite the fact that she was thirteen years his senior – with Nimfodora’s elder sister, the tragic actress Ekaterina Semenova. The essay ‘My Remarks on the Russian Theatre’, composed in 1820, though purporting to be a general survey of the state of the theatre, is merely an excuse for praising Semenova. ‘Speaking of Russian tragedy, one speaks of Semenova and, perhaps, only of her. Gifted with talent, beauty, and a lively and true feeling, she formed herself […] Semenova has no rival […] she remains the autocratic queen of the tragic stage.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He bestowed the manuscript on her. Somewhat unfeelingly she immediately handed it on to her dramatic mentor, Gnedich, who noted on it: ‘This piece was written by A. Push-kin, when he was pursuing, unsuccessfully, Semenova, who gave it to me then.’

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Semenova had, however, a stage rival: the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kolosova, who made her debut at the Bolshoy on 16 December 1818 as Antigone in Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus in Athens. The following Easter Pushkin, who had admired her demure beauty at the Good Friday service in a church near the Bolshoy, made her acquaintance. But he naturally took Semenova’s side in the rivalry, all the more as he fancied Kolosova had slighted his attentions: she should ‘occupy herself less with aide-de-camps of his imperial majesty and more with her roles’. ‘All fell asleep,’ he added, at a performance of Racine’s Esther (translated by Katenin), on 8 December, in which she took the title role.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Everything in Esther captivates us’ begins an epigram; her speech, her gait, her hair, voice, hand, brows, and ‘her enormous feet!’

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When Eugene enters the theatre Evdokiya Istomina, the great beauty among the ballet-dancers, is on the stage:

Brilliant, half-ethereal,

Obedient to the violin’s magic bow,

Surrounded by a crowd of nymphs,

Stands Istomina; she

Touching the floor with one foot,

Slowly gyrates the other,

And suddenly jumps, and suddenly flies,

Flies, like fluff from Aeolus’s lips;

Now bends, now straightens,

And with one quick foot the other beats.

(I, xx)

Pushkin pursued her too, but with less zeal than Semenova: he was only one of a crowd of admirers. An amusing sketch, executed by Olenin’s son, Aleksey, shows a scene at Priyutino: a dog, with the head and neck of the dark-haired Istomina, is surrounded by a host of dog admirers with the heads of Pushkin, Gnedich, Krylov and others.

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Another visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret was Nikita Vsevolozhsky, Pushkin’s coeval, a passionate theatre-goer, ‘the best of the momentary friends of my momentary youth’.