With a slight squeeze of lemon.
Noise, arguments â light wine
From the cellars is borne
To the table by obliging Automne;
The hours fly, and the dread bill
Meanwhile invisibly mounts.
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Wiegel, who had been recruited by Vorontsov to join his staff, soon moved into the room next to Pushkin. Before leaving St Petersburg he had been enjoined by Zhukovsky and Bludov to gain Pushkinâs confidence in order, if possible, to prevent him from behaving injudiciously. Unfortunately, Pushkin did not enjoy his company for long: Vorontsov sacked the vice-governor of Kishinev for dishonesty and appointed Wiegel in his place. âTell me, my dear atheist, how did you manage to live for several years in Kishinev?â he wrote to Pushkin on 8 October. âAlthough you should indeed have been punished by God for your lack of faith, surely not to such an extent. As far as I am concerned, I can say too: although my sins or, more accurately, my sin is great, it is not so great that fate should have destined this cesspit to be my abode.â
(#litres_trial_promo) The sin Wiegel is referring to is his homosexuality. In a verse reply, Pushkin promised to visit him: âIâll be glad to serve you/With my crazy conversation â/With verses, prose or with my soul,/But, Wiegel, â spare my arse!â Continuing in prose, he answers a query raised by Wiegel about the Ralli brothers. âI think the smallest is best suited to your use; NB he sleeps in the same room as his brother Mikhail and they tumble about unmercifully â from this you can draw important conclusions, I leave them to your experience and good sense â the eldest brother, as you have already noticed, is as stupid as a bishopâs crozier â Vanka jerks off â so the devil with them â embrace them in friendly fashion from me.â
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Two and a half years earlier, on 2 February 1821, in the governor of Kievâs drawing-room, Pushkin had been struck by the beauty of a woman wearing a poppy-red toque with a drooping ostrich feather, âwhich set off extraordinarily well her tall stature, luxuriant shoulders and fiery eyesâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was Karolina SobaÅska, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Count Adam Rzewuski, one of several attractive and brilliantly clever brothers and sisters: her sister Ewa Hanska was Balzacâs Ãtrangère, who, after a long correspondence and liaison with the novelist, married him in 1850, a few months before his death. Karolina had been married at seventeen to Hieronim SobaÅski, a wealthy landowner and owner of one of the largest trading houses in Odessa. He was, however, thirty-three years older than her; she left him in 1816, and in 1819 met and began a long liaison with Colonel-General Count Jan Witt.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since 1817 Witt had been in command of all the military colonies in the south of Russia; in addition he controlled a wide and efficient network of spies and secret police agents. He and SobaÅska lived openly together; the liaison was recognized by society, and though its more straitlaced members might have frowned at the irregularity of the relationship, there were few who wished to incur his enmity by cutting SobaÅska in public.
When Pushkin met her again, his interest was immediately rekindled: she was, indeed, almost irresistible â not only beautiful, but also lively, charming and provocative, and a talented musician: âWhat grace, what a voice, and what manners!â
(#litres_trial_promo) Few, if any, knew at the time that, as well as being Wittâs mistress, she also worked for him, and was an extremely valuable Russian intelligence agent. Only Wiegel appears to have had an inkling of the truth. âWhen a few years later I learnt [â¦] that for financial gain she joined the ranks of the gendarme agents, I felt an invincible aversion to her. I will not mention the unproved crimes of which she was suspected. What vilenesses were concealed beneath her elegant appearance!â
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(#litres_trial_promo) Witt, eager to obtain evidence of subversive activity, encouraged her friendship with Pushkin, as in 1825 he would encourage her liaison with the Polish poet Mickiewicz. She and Pushkin made an excursion by boat together; he accompanied her to the Roman Catholic church, where she dipped her fingers into the stoup and crossed his forehead with holy water; and there were âburning readingsâ of Constantâs Adolphe,19 a book so appropriate to their circumstances it might have been written with them in mind: the hero, Adolphe, falls in love with Ellénore, a Polish countess, celebrated for her beauty, who is older than he and is being kept by a M. de P***. But Sobanska did not appear to feel more than friendship for him; piqued, he concocted, together with Aleksandr Raevsky, a scheme to arouse her interest. Before it could be put into practice she left the city, and Pushkin consoled himself for her absence by falling in love with Amaliya Riznich, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish banker, married to an Odessa shipping merchant.
âMrs Riznich was young, tall, graceful, and extraordinarily beautiful.
Particularly attractive were her fiery eyes, a neck of amazing form and whiteness, and a plait of black hair, nearly five feet long. But her feet were too large; in order to conceal this deficiency, she always wore a long dress, to the ground. She went about wearing a manâs hat and dressed in a semi-riding habit. All this gave her originality and attracted both young and not so young heads and hearts.â
(#litres_trial_promo) She distinguished herself by going about much in society â âOur married ladies (with the exception of the beautiful and charming Mrs Riznich) avoid company, concealing under the guise of modesty either their simplicity or their ignorance,â Tumansky wrote to his cousin
(#litres_trial_promo) â and entertained frequently at home. These were lively gatherings, at which much whist was played: a game of which she was passionately fond. Pushkin was soon obsessed with her. Profiles of âMadame Riznich, with her Roman noseâ
(#litres_trial_promo) crept out of his pen to ornament the manuscript of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. His emotions reached their zenith in the last weeks of October and the first of November with a sudden burst of poems. The passionate love, the burning jealousy they express are far deeper, far more powerful, far more agonizing than anything he had previously experienced. Though intense, the feelings were short-lived. In January or early February 1824, he bade her farewell with a final lyric. She had been pregnant when they first met; early in 1824 she gave birth to a son. Meanwhile her health had deteriorated; the Odessa climate had exacerbated a tendency towards consumption. At the beginning of May she left Odessa; a year later she died in Italy.
Beneath the blue sky of her native land
She languished, faded â¦
Faded finally, and above me surely
The young shade already hovered;
But there is an unapproachable line between us.
In vain I tried to awaken emotion:
From indifferent lips I heard the news of death,
And received it with indifference.
So this is whom my fiery soul loved
With such painful intensity,
With such tender, agonizing heartache,
With such madness and such torment!
Where now the tortures, where the love? Alas!
For the poor, gullible shade,
For the sweet memory of irretrievable days
In my soul I find neither tears nor reproaches.
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Riznich did not long remain a widower. In March 1827 Tumansky wrote to Pushkin: âOne piece of our news, which might interest you, is Riznichâs marriage to the sister of SobaÅska, Wittâs mistress [â¦] The new Mme Riznich will probably not deserve either your or my verse on her death; she is a child with a wide mouth and Polish manners.â
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The social scene in Odessa in the autumn and winter of 1823 was a lively one. Pushkin, in a black frock-coat, wearing a peaked cap or black hat over his cropped hair, and carrying an iron cane, hastened through the mud from one gathering to another. General Raevsky, his wife, and his two younger daughters, Mariya and Sofya, paid a lengthy visit to the town. âThe Raevskys are here,â Tumansky told his cousin, âMariya is the ideal of Pushkinâs Circassian maid (the poetâs own expression), ugly, but very attractive in the sharpness of her conversation and tenderness of her manner.â
(#litres_trial_promo) A sketch of the sixteen-year-old girl with her short nose, heavy jaw and unruly hair escaping from an elaborate bonnet appears in the left-hand margin of a draft of several stanzas from Eugene Onegin.26 Pushkin had finished the first chapter on 22 October and embarked immediately on the second: âI am writing with a rapture which I have not had for a long time,â he told Vyazemsky.
(#litres_trial_promo) Several other St Petersburg acquaintances were in Odessa. Aleksandr Sturdza, the subject, in 1819, of two hostile epigrams, turned out to be not such a pillar of reaction after all. âMonarchical Sturdza is here; we are not only friends, but also think the same about one or two things, without being sly to one another.â
(#litres_trial_promo) However, he quarrelled with the Arzamasite Severin, relieving his anger with an epigram ridiculing Severinâs pretensions to nobility.
He saw, too, General Kiselev and his wife Sofya, who frequently travelled over from the headquarters of the Second Army at Tulchin. Earlier that year, after the officers of the Odessa regiment had revolted against their colonel, Kiselev had sacked the brigade commander, General Mordvinov. The latter had challenged him to a duel. Kiselev accepted the challenge, the two met, and Mordvinov was killed. Kiselev immediately sent the emperor an account of the affair, saying that the manner of the challenge left him âno choice between the strict application of the law and the most sacred obligations of honourâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander pardoned him and retained him as chief of staff of the Second Army. The incident caused much stir at the time, and particularly fascinated Pushkin, who, âfor many days talked of nothing else, asking others for their opinion as to whose side was more honourable, who had been the more self-sacrificial and so onâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Though he inclined towards Mordvinov, he could not but admire Kiselevâs sangfroid. Also in Odessa were Sofyaâs twenty-two-year-old sister, Olga, and her recently acquired husband, General Lev Naryshkin, who was Vorontsovâs cousin. Olga was as beautiful as her sister, but âin her beauty there was nothing maidenly or touching [â¦] in the very flower of youth she seemed already armoured with great experience. Everything was calculated, and she preserved the arrows of coquetry for the conquest of the mighty.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Wiegelâs last sentence is a hidden reference to a relationship which was well-known in Odessa: soon after her arrival Olga became Vorontsovâs mistress. Naryshkin, seventeen years older than his wife, lacked the character and energy to complain â âalways sleepy, always good-naturedâ was his brother-in-lawâs description of him
(#litres_trial_promo) â and, in addition, his affection for his wife was lukewarm: he had long been hopelessly in love with his aunt, Mariya Naryshkina, for many years the mistress of Alexander I.