Pushkin

During the winter there were dances twice a week at the Vorontsovs; Pushkin was assiduous in attending. On 12 December they gave a large ball, at which his impromptu verses on a number of the ladies present caused some offence. On Christmas Day Vorontsov entertained the members of his staff to dinner; Wiegel arrived from Kishinev while they were at table, and Pushkin, learning this, slipped back to the hotel to see him. On New Year’s Eve, Tumansky wrote, ‘we had a good frolic at the masquerade, which the countess [Elizaveta Vorontsova] put on for us, and at which she herself played the fool very cleverly and smartly, that is, she had a charmingly satirical costume and intrigued with everyone in it’.

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Liprandi had not forgotten Pushkin’s disappointment at not being able to visit Charles XII’s camp at Varnitsa during their trip in the winter of 1821. Planning another visit to the district, he invited Pushkin to accompany him. The latter accepted with alacrity. He had just been reading a manuscript copy of Ryleev’s narrative poem Voinarovsky. ‘Ryleev’s Voinarovsky is incomparably better than all his Dumy,* his style has matured and is becoming a truly narrative one, which we still almost completely lack,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev.

(#litres_trial_promo) The hero of Ryleev’s poem is the nephew of Mazepa, the hetman of the Dnieper Cossacks who joined with Charles against Peter the Great and died at Varnitsa in 1709. Pushkin was attracted by the figure of Mazepa himself; three lines of Ryleev’s poem describing Mazepa’s nightmares, ‘He often saw, at dead of night;/The wife of the martyr Kochubey/And their ravished daughter,’

(#litres_trial_promo) planted the germ which grew into his own poem, Poltava. Byron, too, had devoted a poem to the hetman: his Mazeppa is an account of an early episode of the hero’s life, when, according to Voltaire, the poet’s source, ‘an affair he had with the wife of a Polish nobleman having been discovered, the husband had him bound naked to the back of a wild horse and sent him forth in this state’.

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On 17 January 1824 they left Odessa for Tiraspol, where they put up with Liprandi’s brother. That evening they had supper with General Sabaneev. Pushkin was cheerful and very talkative: the general’s wife, Pulkheriya Yakovlevna, was much taken with him. The following day, accompanied by Liprandi’s brother, they set out early for Bendery. Forewarned of their coming, the police chief, A.I. Barozzi, had provided a guide: Nikola Iskra, a Little Russian, who ‘appeared to be about sixty, was tall, with an upright figure, rather lean, with thick yellowish-grey hair on his head and chest and good teeth’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He claimed that as a young man he had been sent by his mother to the Swedish camp to sell milk, butter and eggs: which, Liprandi calculated, would make him now about 135 years old. However, it was certainly true that his description of Charles XII’s appearance bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations in the historical works Liprandi had brought with him, and he showed an equally remarkable ability, when they arrived at the site of the camp, to describe its plan and fortifications and to interpret the irregularities of the terrain. Much to Pushkin’s annoyance, however, he was not only unable to show them Mazepa’s grave, but even disclaimed any knowledge of the hetman. They returned to Bendery with Pushkin in a very disgruntled mood. He cheered up, however, after dinner with Barozzi, and in the afternoon set out in a carriage, accompanied by a policeman, to view, as he hoped, the ruined palaces and fountains at Kaushany, the seat of the khans of Budzhak. Later in the evening he returned as disgruntled as before: there were – as Liprandi had warned him two years earlier – no ruins to admire in Kaushany. He was back in Odessa on the nineteenth. Liprandi did not return until the beginning of February. On the evening of his arrival he dined with the Vorontsovs, where a sulky Pushkin was making desultory conversation with the countess and Olga Naryshkina. He vanished after the company rose from table. Calling at his hotel room later, Liprandi found him in the most cheerful frame of mind imaginable: with his coat off, he was sitting on Morali’s knee and tickling the retired corsair until he roared. This was the only pleasure he had in Odessa, he told Liprandi.

Pushkin had completed his second southern poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, the previous autumn, and had begun to think about publication. Gnedich, though eager, had ruled himself out through excessive sharpness; he therefore turned to Vyazemsky, who agreed to see the work through the press. However, there was a complication. The work was suffused with memories of the Crimea and, in particular, of his love for Ekaterina Raevskaya. Now, three years later, he was not anxious to call attention to this, all the more so as Ekaterina was now Orlov’s wife. He hit on a simple solution in a letter to his brother: ‘I will send Vyazemsky The Fountain – omitting the love ravings – but it’s a pity!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Sending the manuscript to Vyazemsky on 4 November, he wrote, ‘I have thrown out that which the censor would have thrown out if I had not, and that which I did not want to exhibit before the public. If these disconnected fragments seem to you worthy of type, then print them, and do me a favour, don’t give in to that bitch the censorship, bite back in defence of every line, and bite it to death if you can, in memory of me […] another request: add a foreword or afterword to Bakhchisaray, if not for my sake, then for the sake of your lustful Minerva, Sofya Kiseleva; I enclose a police report as material; draw on it for information (without, of course, mentioning the source).’

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(#litres_trial_promo) With the letter he sent a copy of ‘Platonic Love’, the immodest poem he had addressed to Sofya in 1819. ‘Print it quickly; I ask this not for the sake of fame, but for the sake of Mammon,’ he urged in December.

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But his hopes of concealing his former feelings for Ekaterina were soon sadly dented. In St Petersburg Bestuzhev and Ryleev had been preparing a second number of their literary almanac, Pole Star. They obtained Pushkin’s permission to include some of his verses which had been circulating in manuscript in St Petersburg, and others which they had obtained from Tumansky. When the almanac came out in December, Pushkin was horrified to discover that the final three lines of ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, the coded reference to Ekaterina which he had specifically asked Bestuzhev not to include, had in fact been printed. ‘It makes me sad to see that I am treated like a dead person, with no respect for my wishes or my miserable possessions,’ he wrote reproachfully to Bestuzhev. Worse was to follow. In February, just before the publication of the poem, he wrote to Bestuzhev again: ‘I am glad that my Fountain is making a stir. The absence of plan is not my fault. I reverentially put into verse a young woman’s tale, Aux douces loix des vers je pliais les accents/De sa bouche aimable et naïve.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the way, I wrote it only for myself, but am publishing it because I need money.’

(#litres_trial_promo) As with previous letters to Bestuzhev, he addressed this care of Nikolay Grech. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of Faddey Bulgarin – a close associate of Grech, and from 1825 co-editor, with him, of Son of the Fatherland – who shamelessly printed an extract from it in his paper, Literary Leaves, adding that it was taken from a letter of the author to one of his St Petersburg friends. Anyone who knew of Pushkin’s visit to the Crimea could make an intelligent guess at the possessor of the ‘lovable and naïve mouth’; even worse, however, were the conclusions Ekaterina herself might draw. ‘I once fell head over heels in love,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev later that year. ‘In such cases I usually write elegies, as another has wet dreams. But is it a friendly act to hang out my soiled sheets for show? God forgive you, but you shamed me in the current Star – printing the last 3 lines of my elegy; what the devil possessed me apropos of the Bakhchisaray fountain also to write some sentimental lines and mention my elegiac beauty there. Picture my despair, when I saw them printed – the journal could fall into her hands. What would she think of me, seeing with what eagerness I chat about her with one of my Petersburg friends. How can she know that she is not named by me, that the letter was unsealed and printed by Bulgarin – that the devil knows who delivered the damned Elegy to you – and that no one is to blame. I confess that I value just one thought of this woman more than the opinions of all the journals in the world and of all our public.’

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As with The Prisoner, Pushkin’s new narrative poem was eagerly anticipated in literary circles: before publication it was being read everywhere, and even manuscript copies were circulating in St Petersburg – much to Pushkin’s annoyance, since he feared this would affect sales. ‘Pletnev tells me The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is in everyone’s hands. Thank you, my friends, for your gracious care for my fame!’ he wrote sarcastically to Lev, whom he deemed responsible.

(#litres_trial_promo) His fears proved unjustified. Having seen the poem through the censorship, Vyazemsky had it printed in Moscow at a cost of 500 roubles, and then began negotiations to sell the entire print-run jointly to two booksellers, Shiryaev in Moscow and Smirdin in St Petersburg. ‘How I have sold the Fountain!’ he exulted to Bestuzhev in March. ‘Three thousand roubles for 1,200 copies for a year, and I’m paid for all printing costs. This is in the European style and deserves to be known.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He saw to it that it was by contributing an article about the sale to the April number of News of Literature: ‘For a line of The Fountain of Bakhchisaray more has been paid than has ever been paid previously for any Russian verse.’ The book-seller had gained ‘the grateful respect of the friends of culture by valuing a work of the mind not according to its size or weight’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Shalikov, in the Ladies’ Journal, did the calculation and came out with the figure of eight roubles a line. Bulgarin, too, commented on the transaction in Literary Leaves, while the Russian Invalid remarked patriotically that it was a ‘proof that not in England alone and not the English alone pay with a generous hand for elegant works of poetry’.

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Vyazemsky sent a first instalment of the advance in March. Pushkin immediately paid Inzov a debt of 360 roubles which he was ‘embarrassed and humiliated’ not to have settled earlier,

(#litres_trial_promo) and dashed off a grateful letter to Vyazemsky: ‘One thing troubles me, you sold the entire edition for 3000r., but how much did it cost you to print it? You are still making me a gift, you shameless fellow! For Christ’s sake take what is due to you out of the remainder, and send it here. There’s no point in letting it grow. It won’t lie around with me for long, although I am really not extravagant. I’ll pay my old debts and sit down to a new poem. Since I’m not one of our 18th century writers: I write for myself, and publish for money, certainly not for the smiles of the fair sex.’

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The Fountain of Bakhchisaray was published on 10 March. Vyazemsky had responded to Pushkin’s plea and had contributed an unsigned introductory article which bore the strange title ‘Instead of a foreword. A conversation between the publisher and a classicist from the Vyborg Side or Vasilevsky Island’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This had little to do with the poem, but was a provocative attack, from the standpoint of romanticism, on the literary old guard and classicism. An immediate reply appeared in the Herald of Europe; Pushkin came to Vyazemsky’s defence with a short letter to Son of the Fatherland; and, much to Vyazemsky’s delight, a controversy developed which rumbled on in the literary pages for months. Turgenev disapproved: ‘Stop squabbling,’ he advised his friend. ‘It is unworthy of you and I do not recognize you in all this polemical rubbish.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Onlookers took a similar view: ‘There has been a shower of lampoons, epigrams, arguments, gibes, personalities, each more nasty and more stupid than the last,’ Yakov Saburov wrote to his brother.

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Shorter than The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray has an equally simple plot. Girey, khan of the Crimea, falls in love with the latest captive added to his harem, the Polish princess Mariya. She dies, either of illness or at the hand of Girey’s previous favourite, Zarema, who is drowned by the khan. He builds a marble fountain in memory of Mariya. For the subject of the poem Pushkin adapted a Crimean legend which he had heard from the Raevskys at Gurzuf, and which Muravev-Apostol recounts in his Journey through Tauris in 1820. An extract from this work, describing the palace at Bakhchisaray, was appended to the poem when it was published. The Fountain was greeted with a general chorus of praise: there was no pedantic carping at detail and little criticism. Pushkin’s own opinion was less favourable. ‘Between ourselves,’ he had written to Vyazemsky, ‘the Fountain of Bakhchisaray is rubbish, but its epigraph is charming.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This, attributed to the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sadi, runs: ‘Many, similarly to myself, visited this fountain; but some are no more, others are journeying far.’ The second half of the saying came to have a political significance: when the critic Polevoy quoted it in an article in the Moscow Telegraph in 1827, he was clearly alluding to the fate of the Decembrists, some of whom had been executed, others exiled to Siberia. Pushkin had not taken the quotation directly from the Persian poet, but from the French translation of a prose passage in Thomas Moore’s ‘oriental romance’ Lalla Rookh (1817), which refers to ‘a fountain, on which some hand had rudely traced those well-known words from the Garden of Sadi, – “Many, like me, have viewed this fountain, but they are gone, and their eyes are closed forever!”’

(#litres_trial_promo) Despite this borrowing, he was no admirer of Moore. ‘The whole of Lalla Rookh is not worth ten lines of Tristram Shandy,’ he exclaimed; and, commenting on the Fountain, told Vyazemsky: ‘The eastern style was a model for me, inasmuch as is possible for us rational, cold Europeans. By the by, do you know why I do not like Moore? – because he is excessively eastern. He imitates in a childish and ugly manner the childishness and ugliness of Sadi, Hafiz and Mahomet. – A European, even when in ecstasy over eastern splendour, should retain the taste and eye of a European. That is why Byron is so charming in The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and so on.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This was the effect at which he aimed, and Byron was undoubtedly his inspiration: in 1830 he remarked: ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than The Prisoner and, like it, reflects my reading of Byron, about whom I then raved.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin was right: The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than ThePrisoner; is indeed the weakest of all his narrative poems, though the portrayal of the languid, surfeited life of the harem breathes an indolent sensuality, while the scene between Mariya and Zarema has, as he remarked, ‘dramatic merit’.

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But the real significance of the poem for Pushkin – and, indeed, for Russian literature – lay not in its aesthetic, but rather in its commercial value. At the beginning of his stay in Odessa and, as usual, hard-pressed for money, Pushkin had written despairingly to his brother: ‘Explain to my father that I cannot live without his money. To live by my pen is impossible with the present censorship; I have not studied the carpenter’s trade; I cannot become a teacher; although I know scripture and the four elementary rules – but I am a civil servant against my will – and cannot take retirement. – Everything and everyone deceives me – on whom should I depend, if not on my nearest and dearest. I will not live on Vorontsov’s bounty – I will not and that is all – extremes can lead to extremes – I am pained by my father’s indifference to my state – although his letters are very amiable.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The successful sale of The Fountain changed his views in an instant. ‘I begin to respect our booksellers and to think that our trade is really no worse than any other,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky.

(#litres_trial_promo) For the first time financial independence seemed possible; the career of a professional writer beckoned. This new-found self-sufficiency strengthened his belief in his talent, his sense of himself as an artist: it was to affect materially his behaviour during the remaining months in Odessa.

Another chance to exploit his work commercially soon arrived; in June he was offered 2,000 roubles for the right to bring out a second edition of The Prisoner of the Caucasus. But before Lev in St Petersburg could close the deal, he was forestalled. The previous year a German translation of The Prisoner had come out. August Oldekop, the publisher of the St Petersburg Gazette and the Sankt-Peterburgische Zeitung, now brought out this translation again, printing the original Russian text opposite the German. This was a great success and killed Pushkin’s hopes of selling a second edition of the poem. ‘I will have to petition for redress under the law,’ he told Vyazemsky.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the law respecting authors’ rights was unclear and, though the Censorship Committee put a temporary ban on the sale of the edition, this was soon lifted. In addition, Oldekop muddied the waters by insisting that he had bought the right to publish the edition from Pushkin’s father. When Vyazemsky anxiously enquired whether this was true, and asked Pushkin to send him, if it was not, a power of attorney, giving him the right to act on his friend’s part against Oldekop, Pushkin – who was by this time in Mikhailovskoe – replied: ‘Oldekop stole and lied; my father made no kind of bargain with him. I would send you a power of attorney; but you must wait; stamped paper is only to be had in town; some kind of witnessing has to be done in town – and I am in the depths of the country.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The indictment of Oldekop’s villainy is certainly positive; but is the disinclination to ride into Pskov for a power of attorney prompted by indolence, by a healthy scepticism about the process of law, or by the suspicion that his father – with whom he was on extremely bad terms – had not been wholly honest with him? Six months later, when he was afraid that The Fountain was also being pirated, and was therefore having to turn down offers for it, he wrote to Lev, ‘Selivanovsky is offering me 12,000 roubles, and I have to turn it down – this way I’ll die of hunger – what with my father and Oldekop. Farewell, I’m in a rage.’

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Outside Russia the heady days of the revolution in Spain and of Ypsilanti’s Greek revolt, both of which had so aroused Pushkin’s enthusiasm, had passed, and a tide of reaction, encouraged by Alexander I, was sweeping over Europe. At the Congress of Verona France asked to be allowed to march into Spain – as Austria had marched into Naples in 1821 – to restore order in the Peninsula; despite British protests, this was agreed, and in April 1823 the duke of Angoulême, at the head of a powerful army, crossed the Bidassoa. Ferdinand, a prisoner since 1820, was restored to the throne, and, in an orgy of revenge, Colonel Rafael Riego, the leader of the revolution, and many other insurgents were executed. Pushkin, disgusted by this, and disillusioned with the Greeks – ‘The Jesuits have stuffed our heads with Themistocles and Pericles, and we have come to imagine that this dirty people, consisting of bandits and shopkeepers, is their legitimate descendant, the heir to their fame in school’

(#litres_trial_promo) – came to the conclusion, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor some sixty years later, that man did not deserve freedom. In ‘Of freedom the solitary sower’, ‘an imitation of a parable by that moderate democrat Jesus Christ (A sower went out to sow his seed)’

(#litres_trial_promo) he expressed this new cynicism:

Graze, placid peoples!

What good to herds the gift of freedom?

They must be slaughtered or be shorn.

Their inheritance from generation to generation