Pushkin

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(#litres_trial_promo) He was the son of Vsevolod Vsevolozhsky, known, for his wealth, as ‘the Croesus of St Petersburg’, who, after the death of his wife in 1810, had caused a long-lasting scandal in society by taking to live with him a married woman, Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya. The injured husband, Petr Khovansky, complained publicly of the insult done to him, and went so far as to petition the emperor for the return of his wife, but without success. In the end, financially ruined, he was forced to accept Vsevolozhsky’s charity, and lived with the family until his death. To complicate the situation further, Nikita Vsevolozhsky later married Khovansky’s daughter, Princess Varvara. Pushkin, intrigued by the family history, in 1834–5 planned to incorporate it in a projected novel entitled A Russian Pelham. Vsevolozhsky, who received a large income from his father, had an apartment near the Bolshoy and a mistress, the ballet-dancer Evdokiya Ovoshnikova. ‘You remember Pushkin,’ runs a letter of 1824, ‘Pushkin, who sobered you up on Good Friday and led you by the hand to the church of the theatre management so that you could pray to the Lord God and gaze to your heart’s content at Mme Ovoshnikova.’

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In March 1819 Vsevolozhsky set up a small theatrical-literary society among his friends. It met fortnightly, in a room at his apartment, and became known as the Green Lamp after the colour of the lamp-shade. Besides Pushkin and Vsevolozhsky the members included Delvig, Nikolay Gnedich, Nikita’s elder brother, Aleksandr, Fedor Glinka, Arkady Rodzyanko, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Jägers, and a poet whose work is an odd mixture of high-minded poems on civic themes and pornographic verse: Pushkin later dubbed him ‘the Piron of the Ukraine’

(#litres_trial_promo) (a reference to the seventeenth-century French poet Alexis Piron, author of the licentious Ode to Priapus); and another ‘momentary friend’ of this period, Pavel Mansurov, an ensign in the Life Guards Jäger Horse, who, after his marriage to Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya, became Vsevolozhsky’s brother-in-law.

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The tone of Pushkin’s relationship with Mansurov – and hence with most of the Green Lamp’s members – is conveyed by a verse epistle in which Pushkin urges his ‘bosom friend’ to persevere in his pursuit of the young ballerina Mariya Krylova, then still a pupil at the Theatre Academy, for

soon with happy hand

She will throw off the school uniform,

Will lie down before you on the velvet

And will spread her legs;

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and by a letter written to Mansurov after the latter had been posted to Novgorod province:

Are you well, my joy; are you enjoying yourself, my delight – do you remember us, your friends (of the male sex) … We have not forgotten you and at 1/2 past seven every day in the theatre we remember you with applause and sighs – and say: our darling Pavel! What is he doing now in great Novgorod? Envying us – and weeping about Krylova (with the lower orifice, naturally). Each morning the winged maiden

(#ulink_9280a16d-a965-5b80-acd0-68995a119b86) flies to rehearsal past our Nikita’s windows, as before telescopes rise to her and pricks too – but alas … you cannot see her, she cannot see you. Let’s abandon elegies, my friend. I’ll tell you about us in historical fashion. Everything is as before; the champagne, thank God, is healthy – the actresses too – the one is drunk, the others are fucked – amen, amen. That’s how it ought to be. Yurev’s clap is cured, thank God – I’m developing a small case […] Tolstoy is ill – I won’t say with what – as it is I already have too much clap in my letter. The Green Lamp’s wick needs trimming – it might go out – and that would be a pity – there is oil (i.e. our friend’s champagne).

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The note struck here suggests that the Green Lamp was a Russian version of the Hell-fire Club. This was certainly the view taken by earlier biographers of Pushkin, Annenkov, for example, writing: ‘Researches and investigations into this group revealed that it … consisted of nothing more than an orgiastic society.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, the reality was somewhat less than orgiastic. Though no doubt a good deal of champagne and other wines was consumed during and after the meetings – Küchelbecker puritanically refused to join, ‘on account of the intemperance in the use of drink, which apparently prevailed there’

(#litres_trial_promo) – and the younger members were in constant pursuit of actresses and ballerinas, the actual proceedings of the society were of a more serious nature.

One of the policies of the Supreme Council of the Union of Welfare was to ‘set up private societies. These, directed by one or two members of the Union, whose existence was not revealed to the societies, did not form part of the Union. No political aim was intended for them, and the only benefit that was hoped for was that, guided by their founders or heads, they could, especially through their activity in literature, art and the like, further the achievement of the aim of the Supreme Council.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Besides Trubetskoy, three other members of the society were Decembrists: Tolstoy, the usual president at its meetings, Glinka and Tokarev; and there is no doubt that under their direction the Green Lamp became a society of this type. Its name, fortuitously chosen, came to have emblematic significance; Tolstoy, in his deposition to the Committee of Investigation in 1826, remarked that it ‘concealed an ambiguous meaning and the motto of the society consisted of the words: Light and Hope; moreover rings were also made on which a lamp was engraved; each member was obliged to wear one of these rings.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin used his to seal his letter to Mansurov. Rodzyanko later remarked that at each meeting ‘were read verses against the emperor and against the government’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and Tolstoy speaks of ‘some republican verses and other fragments’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But it was never a political society with a definite programme and specific aims. It was, however, a secret society, in that its existence had not been officially sanctioned, and its members were hence to some extent at risk, given the climate of the time: a fact which brought about its dissolution at the end of 1820.

The meetings usually opened with a review, hastily written by Barkov, of the theatre production its members had witnessed that evening. Then followed contributions from those present. On 17 April 1819, for example, Delvig read his poems ‘Fanny’ – addressed to a prostitute he and Pushkin frequented – and ‘To a Child’; Ulybyshev followed with a political article; a fable by Zhadovsky, two poems by Dolgorukov, and one by Tolstoy ended the proceedings. Only two contributions by Pushkin are listed in the – incomplete – records of the society. Of these the more interesting – and the better poem – is the verse epistle to Vsevolozhsky on the latter’s departure for Moscow, read on 27 November 1819. Urging his friend to avoid high society there, he imagines a far more congenial scene:

In the foaming goblet froths

Ay’s cold stream;

In the thick smoke of lazy pipes,

In dressing-gowns, your new friends

Shout and drink!

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Like Arzamas, the Green Lamp provided Pushkin with a ready-made circle of friends, though in the majority of cases his intimacy with them was confined to this period of his life. They were, however, closer to him in age than the Arzamasites, and shared the tastes and predilections which governed his life in these years. Whereas his elder friends sighed over his behaviour and saw him as wasting his talent – Aleksandr Turgenev told Zhukovsky that he daily scolded Pushkin for ‘his laziness and neglect of his own education’, to which ‘he had added a taste for vulgar philandering and equally vulgar eighteenth-century freethinking’

(#litres_trial_promo) – the members of the Green Lamp were companions in his amusements: drinking, whoring and gambling. As with Arzamas, his loyalty to the group persisted in exile; in 1821 he looked back nostalgically at its meetings:

Do you still burn, our lamp,

Friend of vigils and of feasts?

Do you still foam, golden cup,

In the hands of merry wits?

Are you still the same, friends of mirth,

Friends of Cypris and of verse?

Do the hours of love, the hours of drunkenness

Still fly to the call

Of Freedom, indolence and idleness?

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Pushkin’s tastes were not wholly identical with those of Eugene: ‘I am always glad to note the difference/Between Onegin and myself’, he remarks, in case some ‘sarcastic reader’ should imagine that, like Byron, he is painting his own portrait (I, lvi). One vice Eugene did not share was Pushkin’s addiction to gambling.

Passion for bank! neither the love of liberty,

Nor Phoebus, nor friendship, nor feasts

Could have distracted me in past years

From cards.

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So he described, in a cancelled stanza of the second chapter of Eugene Onegin, himself during the years in St Petersburg. It was an addiction, moreover, not confined to this period, as he here implies, but which lasted throughout his life. The game to which he was addicted – which was also Casanova’s passion – was bank, also known as faro (or pharo, originally le pharaon) or shtoss, a descendant of lansquenet, the game played by d’Artagnan and the musketeers on the bastion at La Rochelle while under Huguenot fire, and of basset, the favourite card-game at the court of Charles II. Each player chose a card from his pack, placed it either face-up or face-down – in the latter case it was known as a ‘dark’ card – in front of him on the table and set his stake upon it. The banker, taking a fresh pack, turned the cards up from the top, dealing them alternately to his right and left, stopping momentarily if a player called out attendez, in order to make or reconsider a bet. If a card which fell to the right was of the same denomination as one on which a stake had been placed the banker won; he lost, and paid out the amount of the stake, when such a card fell to the left. If both cards exposed in one turn were the same, a player wagering on that denomination lost either half, or the whole of his stake, depending on the rules in force at the game. Having won once, the player could then cock his card – turn up one corner – to wager both his original stake and his gains: this was known as a parolet; or bend the card, to bet only his gains. This was a paix, or parolet-paix, if he had just won a parolet. After winning a parolet, he could cock another corner, to double his winnings again (sept-et-le-va), followed by a third (quinze-et-le-va) and a fourth (trente-et-le-va).