Pushkin

I serenely flourished,

Read Apuleius eagerly

But did not read Cicero,

In those days, in mysterious vales,

In spring, to the cry of swans,

Near waters gleaming in stillness,

The Muse began to visit me.

Eugene Onegin, VIII, i

IN 1710 PETER THE GREAT GRANTED to his consort Catherine an estate some fifteen miles to the south of Petersburg, a locality which later acquired the name Tsarskoe Selo – Tsar’s Village. Catherine replaced the old wooden mansion with a small stone palace, laid out a park and a vegetable garden, and constructed greenhouses, an orangery and a menagerie. On her death in 1727 the estate passed to her daughter Elizabeth, whose favourite residence it soon became. To begin with she lacked the means to improve it, but after her accession in 1741 she called on her architects to turn it into a Russian Versailles. In 1752–6 the palace was completely rebuilt by the Italian architect Rastrelli, who later designed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Rastrelli’s Catherine or Great Palace is a magnificent three-storey Baroque edifice with a façade of colossal length – 306 metres – and an immense cour d’honneur formed by a low, single-storeyed semi-circle of service buildings pierced by three fine wrought-iron gates. The park was laid out in the formal Dutch style, with ‘fish canals, avenues, neat bowers, alleys, espaliers, and “close boskets with mossy seats”’, and ornamented with pavilions and follies.

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Elizabeth was succeeded by Peter III, Peter the Great’s grandson, who ruled for only six months before being deposed and assassinated. His wife, the German princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who had changed her name on her conversion to Orthodoxy, then came to the throne as Catherine II. Her passion for Tsarskoe Selo was even greater than that of Elizabeth, and, like her predecessor, she completely changed the nature of the palace and its grounds. The Dutch style was swept away and the park recast in the English fashion. ‘I love to distraction these gardens in the English style – their curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes. My Anglomania predominates over my plutomania,’ she wrote to Voltaire in 1772.

(#litres_trial_promo) She employed as landscape gardener an Englishman, John Bush, head of a noted nursery garden at Hackney, who came out to Russia in the late 1770s. New dams and ponds were created, and the park wall replaced by a canal. ‘At the moment I have taken possession of mister Cameron, a Scot by nationality, a Jacobite by profession, a great designer nurtured by antiquities; together we are fashioning a terraced garden with baths beneath, a gallery above; that will be so beautiful, beautiful.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Cameron remodelled much of the interior of the Catherine Palace, built the famous Cameron Gallery: a large, covered Ionic terrace which juts out at right angles from the south-east corner of the palace, on the garden side, and added to the constructions in the park several examples of chinoiserie: a theatre, a bridge on whose balustrade sit four stone Chinamen with parasols, and a village – nineteen little houses surrounding a pagoda. His summer-house in the form of a granite pyramid was a memorial to Catherine’s favourite dogs, three English whippets: Sir Tom Anderson, Zemira and Duchesse, who are buried behind it, on the bank of a small stream. Catherine’s anglomania was catered for by the Marble Bridge, a copy of the Palladian bridge in the grounds at Wilton, and the red-brick Admiralty on the bank of the lake, built in the English Gothic style. The most prominent addition to Tsarskoe Selo in these years, however, was the severely classical Alexander Palace, built in 1792–6 to the designs of the Italian architect Quarenghi for Catherine’s grandson, the future Alexander I. Earlier, in 1789, she had employed a Russian architect, Neelov, to add a wing to the Great Palace for the accommodation of her grandchildren: this stands across the street from the north end of the main building, to which it is connected by a triple-bay arch. In 1811, after a complete renovation, it became the building of the Lycée. The ground floor was occupied by the domestic offices and staff apartments; the dining-room, sickbay, school office and teachers’ common-room were on the first floor; classrooms, reading-room, science laboratory and the school hall on the second; the third was divided into fifty small study-bedrooms with a central corridor, and the gallery over the arch became the library. Games were to be played on the Champ des Roses, so called because it had in Elizabeth’s time been bounded by wild rose bushes, in the south-western corner of the Catherine park. The palace swimming-pool, constructed for the empress’s grandsons in a grove near the Great Pond, with its two bright yellow wooden pavilions in the style of Louis XVI, was taken over by the school a little later. One of the houses built for court functionaries in the time of Elizabeth, on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Pevchesky Lane, just opposite the Lycée, was allotted to the school’s director, Malinovsky. A single-storey wing of this house became the school’s kitchen and bath-house.

Education reform in Russia had begun in 1803, and had had considerable success, both at secondary and university level. Alexander, influenced by Speransky, his principal adviser on internal administration and reform, now wished to establish a school to provide a cadre for the highest ranks of the civil service. His proposal, drawn up originally in 1808 by Speransky, was issued as an imperial decree on 12 August 1810, later ratified by the Senate. The school’s purpose was to be ‘the education of youth especially predestined for important parts of government service’. Among the subjects taught special stress was laid on ‘the moral sciences, under which is to be understood all that knowledge relating to the moral position of man in society and, consequently, the concepts of the system of Civic societies, and of the rights and duties arising therefrom’. ‘Beginning with the most simple concepts of law’, the pupils should be brought to ‘a deep and firm understanding of differing rights and be instructed in the systems of public, private and Russian law’. Teachers were ‘never to allow [pupils] to use words without clear ideas’, and in all subjects were to encourage the ‘exercise of reason’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Corporal punishment was forbidden, which made the Lycée probably unique in its time. There were to be two courses, junior and senior, each lasting for three years.

(#ulink_f0c6b137-5d18-5f2c-98d6-146a5e991e30) The first intake would consist of not less than twenty, and not more than fifty children of the nobility between the ages of ten and twelve; on graduation the students would be appointed, depending on achievement, to a civil service rank between the fourteenth class – the lowest – that of collegial registrar, and the ninth, that of titular councillor.

The St Petersburg Gazette of 11 July 1811 announced that children wishing to enter the Imperial Tsarskoe Selo Lycée should present themselves to the Minister of Education, A.K. Razumovsky, on 1 August together with a birth certificate, attestation of nobility, and testimonial of excellent behaviour. They would be medically examined, and there would be an examination conducted by the minister himself and the director of the Lycée. They would be expected to have: ‘a) some grammatical knowledge of the Russian and either the French or the German language, b) a knowledge of arithmetic, at least up to the rule of three, c) an understanding of the general properties of solids, d) some knowledge of the basic fundamentals of geography and e) be able to divide ancient history into its chief epochs and periods and have some knowledge of the most important peoples of antiquity’.

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Sergey Lvovich applied to the commissariat for a month’s leave to take his son to the examination. Permission was slow in coming and, realizing he might be detained in St Petersburg for more than a month, he entrusted Pushkin to his brother, Vasily, who was himself travelling to the capital at that time. Together with Vasily’s mistress, Anna Vorozheikina, they set off in the third week of July. Pushkin’s sister, Olga, gave him as a parting present a copy of La Fontaine’s Fables, which he left behind on the table. His great-aunt, Varvara Chicherina, and his aunt, Anna Pushkina, together gave him a hundred roubles ‘to buy nuts’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Vasily immediately borrowed the money and never returned it: behaviour that long rankled with Pushkin; he mentions it, albeit jokingly, in a letter of 1825.

Vasily had published his first verses in 1793, but since then he had produced little: only twenty poems over one five-year period, causing Batyushkov to remark that he had ‘a sluggish Muse’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She was, however, eventually stirred into action by the heated contemporary debate on literary language and style, and inspired a number of poems in which Vasily enthusiastically ridiculed the conservative faction. Indeed, he was now journeying to St Petersburg to publish two epistles in reply to a veiled personal attack on him by the leader of the conservatives, Admiral A.S. Shishkov, who had recently written of his opponents that they had ‘learnt their piety from Candide and their morality and erudition in the back streets of Paris’.

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(#litres_trial_promo) Though in childhood Pushkin had some respect for his uncle as a poet, his attitude towards him would soon settle into one of amused, if affectionate irony. Indeed, Vasily’s verse scarcely reaches mediocrity, with the exception of A Dangerous Neighbour, a racy little epic only 154 lines in length, written in lively and colourful colloquial Russian. Though too risqué to be published – it did not appear in Russia until 1901 – it circulated widely in manuscript. Pushkin gave the poem a nod of acknowledgement in Eugene Onegin; among the guests at Tatyana’s name-day party is Vasily’s hero,

My first cousin, Buyanov

Covered in fluff, in a peaked cap

(As, of course, he is known to you).

(V, xxvi)

The second line is a quotation from Vasily’s poem; Buyanov, his progeny, would of course be Pushkin’s cousin.

On arrival in St Petersburg the party put up at the Hotel Bordeaux, but Vasily complained that he was being ‘mercilessly fleeced’, and they moved to an apartment ‘in the house of the merchant Kuvshinnikov’ on the bank of the Moika canal, near the Konyushenny Bridge.

(#litres_trial_promo) Taking his nephew with him, Vasily made a round of visits to literary acquaintances. At I.I. Dmitriev’s, before reciting A Dangerous Neighbour, composed earlier that year, he told Pushkin to leave the room, only to receive the embarrassing retort: ‘Why send me out? I know it all. I’ve heard it all already.’

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The medical took place on 1 August; the examination, conducted by Count Razumovsky, the Minister of Education, I.I. Martynov, the director of the department of education, and Malinovsky, the headmaster of the Lycée, was held a week later in Razumovsky’s house on the Fontanka. While waiting to be called in, Pushkin met another candidate, Ivan Pushchin. ‘My first friend, friend without price!’ he wrote of him in 1825.

(#litres_trial_promo) Both soon learnt that they had been accepted, though Malinovsky’s private note on Pushkin read: ‘Empty-headed and thoughtless. Excellent at French and drawing, lazy and backward at arithmetic.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The two met frequently while waiting for the beginning of term. Vasily occasionally took them boating; more often, however, they would go to the Summer Gardens – a short walk from the apartment on the Moika – with Anna Vorozheikina and play there, sometimes in the company of two other future lycéens, Konstantin Gurev and Sergey Lomonosov. They were measured for the school uniform, which was supplied free to the pupils: for ordinary wear blue frock-coats with red collars and red trousers; for Sundays, walking out, and ceremonial occasions a blue uniform coat with a red collar and silver (for the junior course) or gold (for the senior) tabs, white trousers, tie and waistcoat, high polished boots and a three-cornered hat. Later the boots were abandoned, the white waistcoat and trousers replaced by blue, and the hat by a peaked cap.

On 9 October Pushkin and four other pupils with their relatives travelled to Tsarskoe Selo and had lunch with Malinovsky. In the evening they parted from their families and went across to the Lycée where they were allocated rooms. Pushkin’s was number fourteen, on the palace side. Next to him, in thirteen, was Pushchin. In his room he had an iron bedstead with brass knobs, a mattress stuffed with horse-hair and covered in leather, a chest of drawers, a mirror, a wash-stand, a chair and a desk with inkwell, candlestick and snuffer. In the next few days the other pupils – thirty in all – joined them.

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The ceremonial opening of the new school took place on 19 October 1811. It began with a service in the palace church, to whose choir access could be gained over the arch, through the school library. The priest then proceeded to the Lycée, where he sprinkled the pupils and the establishment with holy water. Between two columns in the school hall had been placed a table covered with a red cloth with a gold fringe. On it lay the imperial charter of the Lycée. The boys lined up in three ranks on one side of the table with their teachers facing them on the other. The guests – senior officials from St Petersburg and their wives – occupied chairs in the body of the hall. When all were present the emperor, the empress, the dowager empress, Grand Duke Constantine and Grand Duchess Anna (Alexander’s brother and sister) were invited in by Razumovsky and took their places in the front row.

The school charter was now read by Martynov. This was followed by a speech from the director, Malinovsky, whose indistinct utterance soon lost the audience’s attention. It was regained, however, by Aleksandr Kunitsyn, the young teacher of moral and political science, although he purported to address the boys, rather than the audience. ‘Leaving the embraces of your parents, you step beneath the roof of this sacred temple of learning,’ he began, and went on, in a rhetoric full of fervent patriotism, to inspire them with the duties of the citizen and soldier. ‘In these deserted forests, which once resounded to victorious Russian arms, you will learn of the glorious deeds of heroes, overcoming enemy armies. On these rolling plains you will be shown the blazing footsteps of your ancestors, who strove to defend the tsar and the Fatherland – surrounded by examples of virtue, will you not burn with an ardent love for it, will you not prepare yourselves to serve the Fatherland?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander was so pleased with this speech that he decorated Kunitsyn with the Vladimir Cross. The pupils were now called up one by one and introduced to the emperor, who, after a short speech in return, invited the empresses to inspect the Lycée. They returned to watch the lycéens eating their dinner. The dowager empress approached little Kornilov, one of the youngest boys, and, putting her hand on his shoulder, asked him whether the soup was good. ‘Oui, monsieur,’ he replied, earning himself a smile from royalty and a nickname from his fellows.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the evening, by the light of the lampions placed round the building and of the illuminated shield bearing the imperial arms which flickered on the balcony, the boys had a snowball fight: winter had come early that year. The next day Malinovsky made known a number of regulations he had received from the Minister of Education.

(#ulink_8c263b70-3db4-59f9-bb3c-71d70fd5fce0) The most significant, as far as the boys were concerned, and which caused several to break into tears, was that they would not be permitted to leave the Lycée throughout the six years of their education. Even their vacation – the month of July – would have to be spent at the school. Parents and relatives would be allowed to visit them only on Sundays or other holidays.

The school day began at six, when a bell awoke the pupils. After prayers there were lessons from seven to nine. Breakfast – tea and white rolls – was followed by a walk, lessons from ten to twelve, another walk, and dinner at one: three courses – four on special occasions – accompanied, to begin with, by half a glass of porter, but, as Pushchin remarks, ‘this English system was later done away with. We contented ourselves with native kvas or water.’

(#litres_trial_promo) From two to three there was drawing or calligraphy, lessons from three to five, tea, a third walk, and preparation or extra tuition until the bell rang for supper – two courses – at half past eight. After supper the boys were free for recreation until evening prayers at ten, followed by bed. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there were fencing or dancing lessons in the evening, from six until supper-time.

Several servants, each responsible for a number of boys, looked after the domestic side of school life. Prokofev was a retired sergeant, who had served in the army under Catherine. The Pole Leonty Kemersky, though dishonest, was a favourite, since he had set up a tuck-shop, where the boys could buy sweets, drink coffee or chocolate, or even – strictly against the school rules – a glass of liqueur. Young Konstantin Sazonov looked after Pushkin. Much to the astonishment of the school, on 18 March 1816 the police turned up and arrested him on suspicion of half a dozen murders committed in or around Tsarskoe Selo, to which he promptly confessed. A few weeks later, when in the Lycée sickbay under the care of the genial Dr Peschl, Pushkin composed an epigram:

On the morrow, with a penny candle,

I will appear before the holy icon:

My friend! I am still alive,

Though was once beneath death’s sickle:

Sazonov was my servant