Pushkin

Although the authorities knew that Raevsky was a member of some kind of conspiracy, he remained resolutely silent in prison, and no other arrest followed his. Pushkin was surprised and shocked by the incident, which in addition appeared to him deeply mysterious: the severity of Raevsky’s treatment seemed wholly out of proportion to his crime. It was only in January 1825, when his old Lycée friend Pushchin visited him in Mikhailovskoe, that he gained some inkling of what had been going on. ‘Imperceptibly we again came to touch on his suspicions concerning the society,’ writes Pushchin. ‘When I told him that I was far from alone in joining this new service to the fatherland, he leapt from his chair and shouted: “This must all be connected with Major Raevsky, who has been sitting in the fort at Tiraspol for four years and whom they cannot get anything out of.”’

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In December 1820 Pushkin had written from Kamenka to Gnedich, the publisher of Ruslan and Lyudmila, to tell him that his next narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, was nearly completed. He was unduly optimistic; it was not until the following March that he wrote again. ‘The setting of my poem should have been the banks of the noisy Terek, on the frontier of Georgia, in the remote valleys of the Caucasus – I placed my hero in the monotonous plains where I myself spent two months – where far distant from one another four mountains rise, the last spur of the Caucasus; – there are no more than 700 lines in the whole poem – I will send it you soon – so that you might do with it what you like.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Before long, however, he was having second thoughts; he was in need of money and, compared to Gnedich, had made little out of Ruslan. In September he wrote to Grech, editor of Son of the Fatherland. ‘I wanted to send you an extract from my Caucasian Prisoner, but am too lazy to copy it out; would you like to buy the poem from me in one piece? It is 800 lines long; each line is four feet wide; it is chopped into two cantos. I am letting it go cheaply, so that the goods do not get stale.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, Gnedich got wind of the offer. ‘You tell me that Gnedich is angry with me,’ he wrote to his brother in January 1822, ‘he is right – I should have gone to him with my new narrative poem – but my head was spinning – I had not heard from him for a long time; I had to write to Grech – and using this dependable occasion

(#ulink_069deb3a-022c-5d8b-a6a9-212c53ee1ca9) I offered him the Captive … Besides, Gnedich will not haggle with me, nor I with Gnedich, each of us over-concerned with his own advantage, whereas I would have haggled as shamelessly with Grech as with any other bearded connoisseur of the literary imagination.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He also made an attempt to sell the poem directly to book-sellers in St Petersburg, but, offered a derisory sum, had to fall back on Gnedich. On 29 April he sent him the manuscript, accompanying it with a letter which began ‘Parve (nec invideo) sine me, liber, ibis in urbem,/Heu mihi! quo domino non licet ire’ – the opening lines of Ovid’s Tristia,

(#ulink_1e3c8789-d640-5ee0-86d5-97637b965e2a) – and continued: ‘Exalted poet, enlightened connoisseur of poets, I hand over to you my Caucasian prisoner […] Call this work a fable, a story, a poem or call it nothing at all, publish it in two cantos or in only one, with a preface or without; I put it completely at your disposal.’

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Pushkin’s friends knew that he had been at work on a successor to Ruslan: ‘Pushkin has written another long poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus,’ Turgenev had told Dmitriev the previous May; ‘but he has not mended his behaviour: he is determined to resemble Byron not in talent alone.’

(#litres_trial_promo) When the manuscript arrived in St Petersburg, it was bitterly fought over. ‘I have not set eyes on the Caucasian captive,’ Zhukovsky complained to Gnedich at the end of May; ‘Turgenev, who has no interest in reading himself, but only in taking other people’s verse around on visits, has decided not to send me the poem, since he is afraid of letting it out of his claws, lest I (and not he) should show it to someone. I beg you to let me have it as soon as possible; I will not keep it for more than a day and will return it immediately.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Turgenev eventually did take the poem out to Zhukovsky in Pavlovsk, but Vyazemsky, who had been clamouring for it – ‘The Captive, for God’s sake, just for one post,’ he implored Turgenev

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The Prisoner of the Caucasus came out on 14 August – a small book of fifty-three pages, costing five roubles, or seven if on vellum. A note at the end of the poem read: ‘The editors have added a portrait of the author, drawn from him in youth. They believe that it is pleasing to preserve the youthful features of a poet whose first works are marked by so unusual a talent.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The portrait, engraved by Geitman, depicts Pushkin ‘at fifteen, as a Lycéen, in a shirt, as Byron was then drawn, with his chin on his hand, in meditation’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Gnedich, more expeditious than before, sent him a single copy of the poem in September, together with a copy of Zhukovsky’s translation of Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon. Pushkin wrote to him on 27 September: ‘The Prisoners have arrived – and I thank you cordially, dear Nikolay Ivanovich […] Aleksandr Pushkin is lithographed in masterly fashion, but I do not know whether it is like him, the editors’ note is very flattering, but I do not know whether it is just.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The edition – probably of 1,200 copies – sold out with remarkable speed: in 1825 Pletnev, searching for a copy to send to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoe, could not find one. Of the profit Gnedich sent Pushkin 500 roubles, keeping, it has been calculated, 5,000 for himself.

(#litres_trial_promo) This time he had been too sharp. The following August Pushkin wrote to Vyazemsky; ‘Gnedich wants to buy a second edition of Ruslan and The Prisoner of the Caucasus from me – but timeo danaos,* i.e., I am afraid lest he should treat me as before.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Gnedich did not get the rights: The Prisoner was the last of Pushkin’s works he published.

Its plot is not difficult to recapitulate: a Russian journeying in the Caucasus is captured by a Circassian tribe; a young girl falls in love with the captive, but he cannot return her feeling. Nevertheless, she aids him to escape: he swims the river and reaches the Russian lines; she drowns herself. In a letter to Lev describing his journey through the Caucasus Pushkin had toyed with the fancy of a Russian general falling prey to a Circassian’s lasso. The fancy becomes real in the poem’s opening lines; but the plot might also owe something to Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801), in which an American Indian, made prisoner by another tribe and about to be burnt at the stake, is freed by a native girl, with whom he flees; she later commits suicide. The poem’s hero is a Byronic figure, and the poem itself resembles Byron’s eastern poems, The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour and particularly The Corsair. Pushkin, however, undercuts Romantic ideology with an ironic paradox: fleeing the corruption and deceit of society to search for freedom in a wild and exotic region peopled by man in his natural state, the hero becomes a prisoner of the mountain tribesmen who incarnate his ideal. There is, too, a peculiar ideological discrepancy between the poem and its epilogue, written in Odessa in May 1821. This preaches an imperial message, celebrating the pacification of the Caucasus, and praising the Russian generals who forcibly subdued the tribes. Vyazemsky was shocked. ‘It is a pity that Pushkin should have bloodied the final lines of his story,’ he wrote to Turgenev. ‘What kind of heroes are Kotlyarevsky and Ermolov? What is good in the fact that he “like a black plague,/Destroyed, annihilated the tribes”? Such fame causes one’s blood to freeze in one’s veins, and one’s hair to stand on end. If we had educated the tribes, then there would be something to sing. Poetry is not the ally of executioners; they may be necessary in politics, and then it is for the judgement of history to decide whether it was justified or not; but the hymns of a poet should never be eulogies of butchery. I am annoyed with Pushkin, such enthusiasm is a real anachronism.’

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Anachronistic or not, these were definitely Pushkin’s views. ‘The Caucasian region, the sultry frontier of Asia, is curious in every respect,’ he had written in 1820. ‘Ermolov has filled it with his name and beneficent genius. The savage Circassians have become frightened; their ancient audacity is disappearing. The roads are becoming safer by the hour, and the numerous convoys are superfluous. One must hope that this conquered region, which up to now has brought no real good to Russia, will soon through safe trading bring us close to the Persians, and in future wars will not be an obstacle to us – and, perhaps, Napoleon’s chimerical plan for the conquest of India will come true for us.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He obviously could see no contradiction between his fiery support of Greek independence and his equally fiery desire to eradicate Caucasian independence; nor between his whole-hearted support of the government here and his equally whole-hearted denunciation of the government everywhere else. In fact, some of the Decembrists shared his view that the Caucasus could not be independent: Pestel, in his Russian Justice, writes that some neighbouring lands ‘must be united to Russia for the firm establishment of state security’, and names among them: ‘those lands of the Caucasian mountain peoples, not subject to Russia, which lie to the north of the Persian and Turkish frontiers, including the western littoral of the Caucasus, presently belonging to Turkey’.

(#litres_trial_promo) They did not, however, share his chimerical Indian plan, nor the pleasure – the real stumbling-block for Vyazemsky – which he apparently took in genocide.

‘Tell me, my dear, is my Prisoner making a sensation?’ he asked his brother in October 1822. ‘Has it produced a scandal, Orlov writes, that is the essential. I hope the critics will not leave the Prisoner’s character in peace, he was created for them, my dear fellow.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He was to be disappointed: there was no critical polemic over the poem, as there had been over Ruslan and Lyudmila. The Byronic poem had ceased to be a novelty; Pushkin’s reputation was now more firmly established, and, above all, The Prisoner did not have that awkward contrast between present-day narrator and past narrative which had worried some critics, nor that equally awkward comic intent, which had worried others. Praise was almost unanimous. In September Pushkin’s uncle wrote to Vyazemsky: ‘Here is what our La Fontaine [Dmitriev] writes to our Livy [Karamzin]: “Yesterday I read in one breath The Prisoner of the Caucasus and from the bottom of my heart wished the young poet a long life! What a prospect! Right at the beginning two proper narrative poems, and what sweetness in the verse! Everything is picturesque, full of feeling and wit!” I confess, that reading this letter, I shed a tear of joy.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Karamzin was slightly less enthusiastic. ‘In the poem of that liberal Pushkin The Prisoner of the Caucasus the style is picturesque: I am dissatisfied only with the love intrigue. He really has a splendid talent: what a pity that there is no order and peace in his soul and not the slightest sense in his head.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Of the critics only Mikhail Pogodin, in the Herald of Europe, descended to the kind of pedantic quibbling that had characterized reviews of Ruslan. Of the lines ‘Neath his wet burka, in the smoky hut/The traveller enjoys peaceful sleep’ (I, 321–2), he remarks: ‘He would be better advised to throw off his wet burka [a felt cloak, worn in the Caucasus], and dry himself.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin’s comment, when meditating corrections for a second edition, was: ‘A burka is waterproof and gets wet only on the surface, therefore one can sleep under it when one has nothing better to cover oneself with.’

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Where dissatisfaction was felt, it was, as in Karamzin’s case, with the love intrigue: the character of the hero, and the fate of the heroine. In the second edition of 1828 Pushkin inserted a note: ‘The author also agrees with the general opinion of the critics, who justifiably condemned the character of the prisoner’;

(#litres_trial_promo) and in 1830 wrote: ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus is the first, unsuccessful attempt at character, which I had difficulty in managing; it was received better than anything I had written, thanks to some elegiac and descriptive verses. But on the other hand Nikolay and Aleksandr Raevsky and I had a good laugh over it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The character of the Prisoner is not a success; this proves that I am not cut out to be the hero of a Romantic poem. In him I wanted to portray that indifference to life and its pleasures, that premature senility of soul, which have become characteristic traits of nineteenth-century youth,’ he wrote to Gorchakov.

(#litres_trial_promo) Criticism of the fate of the Circassian maiden, however, he met with some irony: to Vyazemsky, after thanking him for his review

(#ulink_393b62fa-5ede-55c7-b143-577eb1e9df10) – ‘You cannot imagine how pleasant it is to read the opinion of an intelligent person about oneself’ – he wrote: ‘[Chaadaev] gave me a dressing-down for the prisoner, he finds him insufficiently blasé; unfortunately Chaadaev is a connoisseur in that respect […] Others are annoyed that the Prisoner did not throw himself into the water to pull out my Circassian girl – yes, you try; I have swum in Caucasian rivers, – you’ll drown yourself before you find anything; my prisoner is an intelligent man, sensible, not in love with the Circassian girl – he is right not to drown himself.’

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‘In general I am very dissatisfied with my poem and consider it far inferior to Ruslan,’ he told Gorchakov.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was right: The Prisoner has none of the wit, the gaiety and the grace of the earlier poem; he was not ‘cut out to be the hero of a Romantic poem’. But a combination of circumstances – his reading of Byron, his acquaintance with Aleksandr Raevsky, his exile – had led him down a blind alley: it was still to take him some time to retrace his steps fully. A significant move in this direction took place when, on 9 May 1823, he began Eugene Onegin. At the head of the first stanza in the manuscript this date is noted with a large, portentously shaped and heavily inked numeral. It was a significant, indeed fatidic date in Pushkin’s life: on 9 May 1820, according to his calendar, his exile from St Petersburg had begun. He usually worked on the poem in the early morning, before getting up. Visitors found him, as Liprandi had glimpsed him in Izmail, sitting cross-legged on his bed, surrounded by scraps of papers, ‘now meditative, now bursting with laughter over a stanza’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘At my leisure I am writing a new poem, Eugene Onegin, in which I am transported by bile,’ he told Turgenev some months later.

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Meanwhile changes in the region’s administration were taking place. On 7 May 1823 Alexander signed an order freeing Inzov from his duties and appointing Count Mikhail Vorontsov governor-general of New Russia and of Bessarabia. Informing Vyazemsky of this, Turgenev wrote: ‘I do not yet know whether the Arabian devil* will be transferred to him. He was, it seems, appointed to Inzov personally.’ ‘Have you spoken to Vorontsov about Pushkin?’ Vyazemsky asked. ‘It is absolutely necessary that he should take him on. Petition him, good people! All the more as Pushkin really does want to settle down, and boredom and vexation are bad counsellors.’ Turgenev’s agitation was successful. ‘This is what happened about Pushkin. Knowing politics and fearing the powerful of this world, consequently Vorontsov as well, I did not want to speak to him, but said to Nesselrode under the guise of doubt, whom should he be with: Vorontsov or Inzov. Count Nesselrode affirmed the former, and I advised him to tell Vorontsov of this. No sooner said than done. Afterwards I myself spoke twice with Vorontsov, explained Pushkin to him and what was necessary for his salvation. All, it seems, should go well. A Maecenas, the climate, the sea, historical reminiscences – there is everything; there is no lack of talent, as long as he does not choke to death.’

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Unaware of these machinations, Pushkin had successfully requested permission to spend some time in Odessa: the excuse being that he needed to take sea baths for his health. He arrived at the beginning of July and put up at the Hotel du Nord on Italyanskaya Street. ‘I left my Moldavia and appeared in Europe – the restaurants and Italian opera reminded me of old times and by God refreshed my soul’. Vorontsov and his suite arrived on the evening of 21 July. The following day Vorontsov summoned him to his presence. ‘He receives me very affably, declares to me that I am being transferred to his command, that I will remain in Odessa – this seems fine to me – but a new sadness wrung my bosom – I began to regret my abandoned chains.’

(#ulink_a56531d0-5f3a-5104-8fb3-225cb6d38e0d) On the twenty-fourth a large ball was given in honour of Vorontsov by the Odessa Chamber of Commerce; on the twenty-sixth Vorontsov and his suite, now including Pushkin, left for Kishinev, where, two days later, Inzov handed over his post to his successor. Pushkin had time to collect his salary before accompanying the new governor-general back to Odessa at the beginning of August. ‘I travelled to Kishinev for a few days, spent them in indescribably elegiac fashion – and, having left there for good, sighed after Kishinev.’

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* (#ulink_b439d54c-cc30-5033-bf8f-5a87086de8c2) Written in November 1820 and published the following year, ‘The Black Shawl’, in which a jealous lover kills his Greek mistress and her Armenian paramour, became, though an indifferent work, one of Pushkin’s most popular poems. It was set to music by the composer Aleksey Verstovsky in 1824, and often performed.

* (#ulink_c2bc2b7d-08b9-532b-9405-5889db54a1cc) It is thought that Pushkin might have paid a second visit to Kamenka, Kiev, and possibly Tulchin in November-December 1822, but there is no direct evidence as to his whereabouts at this time. The arguments supporting the hypothesis are summarized in Letopis, I, 504–5.

† (#ulink_c2bc2b7d-08b9-532b-9405-5889db54a1cc) From the Phanari, or lighthouse quarter of Constantinople, which became the Greek quarter after the Turkish conquest: and hence the appellation of the Greek official class under the Turks, through whom the affairs of the Christian population in the Ottoman empire were largely administered.

* (#ulink_fad9ec97-c976-55d2-86ef-58f3fa18273c) A slip of the pen: there were approximately 25,000 Turks in the Morea.

* (#ulink_04787cc1-719d-5a36-8226-3d14e02a52a3) Pushkin could later, when in Moscow in 1826–7, have met a woman who had indubitably been Byron’s mistress: Claire Clairmont, the mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra, was employed as a governess in Moscow from 1825 to 1827, first by the Posnikov, and later by the Kaisarov family. She met Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily, and his close friend, Sobolevsky, but Pushkin himself was apparently unaware of her existence.