Pushkin

And Peschl – my physician.

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Vasily Malinovsky was forty-six when he became director of the Lycée. He was an odd choice, since he had no previous experience in education. He had been a diplomat, but had held no post since 1801. While with the embassy in London, he had published A Discourse on Peace and War, which anticipated Woodrow Wilson in suggesting that peace could be maintained by the establishment of a league of nations. And in 1802, like others at this time, he had put forward a project for the emancipation of the serfs – a reform which was only put into effect in 1861. He carried his liberal idealism into his new post, being responsible for the ban on corporal punishment. But his tenure was short-lived: he died, after a sudden illness, in March 1814. His death was followed by the period called by Pushkin ‘anarchy’, and by Pushchin ‘the interregnum’,

(#litres_trial_promo) when the school had no director. It was governed sometimes by a committee of the teachers, sometimes by a succession of individual teachers, each abruptly appointed as temporary director by Razumovsky and as abruptly dismissed after some disagreement or minor scandal.

Anarchy came to an end in March 1816, when the forty-year-old Egor Antonovich Engelhardt became the school’s director. Born in Riga and of German-Italian parentage, Engelhardt enjoyed the patronage of Alexander, and on occasion was to make use of this to the school’s advantage. Unlike Malinovsky, he had some qualifications for the post, having been the director of the St Petersburg Pedagogic Institute. But whereas Malinovsky’s aim had been to form virtuous individuals, imbued with high civic ideals, ‘Engelhardt was chiefly concerned with turning his charges into “des cavaliers galants et des chevaliers servants”.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the social life of the pupils outside the walls of the Lycée – absent before – was one of Engelhardt’s main concerns. He entertained them at his house in the evenings, took them for walks and drives in the neighbourhood, organized picnics and skating parties, providing, on all these occasions, feminine company from his own family or from those of friends and acquaintances in Tsarskoe Selo: ‘In a word, our director understood that forbidden fruit can be a dangerous attraction, and that freedom, guided by an experienced hand, can preserve youth from many mistakes,’ wrote Pushchin sagely.

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Above all he was concerned to establish ‘amical relations’ between himself and the lycéens, guiding himself by the maxim that ‘only through a heartfelt sympathy with the joys and sorrows of one’s pupils can one win their love’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Many succumbed to his wooing; for some he became a surrogate father, and the correspondence between himself and a number of former pupils, lasting in some cases until his death in 1862, testifies to the sincere affection in which he was held. Others, however, held themselves aloof. Among these was Pushkin. ‘Why Pushkin rejected all the attentions of the director and his wife remains an unsolved mystery for me,’ wrote Pushchin forty years later.

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The lycéens, thrown intimately together, isolated from outside influence, never leaving the Lycée from one year’s end to the next, formed a close-knit society: indeed, they referred to themselves as ‘a nation’, emphasizing their independence and unity. An extraordinarily strong esprit de corps bound the group together, persisting long after they had quitted the Lycée. For most, 19 October remained a significant anniversary throughout their lives. Pushkin had known little parental affection, and was now, in addition, cut off from his family: though his mother visited him in January 1812, he next saw her in April 1814, after the family had moved to St Petersburg. For him, more than for most of his companions, the Lycée nation became a replacement for the family. The bond was too strong for him to accept, as others did, Engelhardt as a surrogate parent.

Of his tutors only Aleksandr Kunitsyn, the young teacher of moral and political science whose speech had so impressed Alexander, had a lasting influence: his teachings on natural law, on the rights and obligations of the citizen, the relationship between the individual and society are reflected in Pushkin’s work. ‘He created us, nourished our flame/He placed the cornerstone,/He lit the pure lamp,’

(#litres_trial_promo) Pushkin wrote of him in 1825; and, sending him in January 1835 a copy of his History of the Pugachev Rebellion, inscribed it ‘To Aleksandr Petrovich Kunitsyn from the Author as a token of deep respect and gratitude’.

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Other than as a poet, he had an undistinguished school career. In November 1812 the academic and moral supervisor, Martyn Piletsky, wrote of him:

His talents are more brilliant than fundamental, his mind more ardent and subtle than deep. His application to study is moderate, as diligence has not yet become a virtue with him. Having read a great number of French books, often inappropriate to his age, he has filled his memory with many successful passages of famous authors; he is also reasonably well-read in Russian literature, and knows many fables and light verses. His knowledge is generally superficial, though he is gradually accustoming himself to a more thorough mode of thought. Pride and vanity, which can make him shy, a sensibility of heart, ardent outbursts of temper, frivolity and an especial volubility combined with wit are his chief qualities. At the same time his good-nature is evident; recognizing his weaknesses, he is willing, with some success, to accept advice […] In his character generally there is neither constancy nor firmness.

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The comments of the different subject teachers echo Piletsky’s assessment: ‘His reasonable achievement is due more to talent than to diligence’; ‘very lazy, inattentive and badly-behaved in the class’; ‘empty-headed, frivolous, and inclined to temper’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the list of pupils, ordered according to their deportment, which was drawn up at regular intervals, Pushkin’s place was invariably towards the bottom: twenty-third in 1812; twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth and twenty-sixth in the three following years. His best subjects at school were Russian literature, French literature and fencing. In the final examinations, taken in May 1817, he was judged ‘excellent’ in those three subjects; ‘very good’ in Latin literature and state economics and finances; and ‘good’ in scripture and Biblical studies, in logic and moral philosophy, in natural, private and public law, and in Russian civil and criminal law. He had also studied, his graduation certificate noted, history, geography, statistics, mathematics and the German language.

Of the lycéens he was closest to Pushchin, Delvig, Küchelbecker, and Yakovlev. Pushchin was upright, honest, honourable; a hard-working, intelligent student; liked by all, yet, perhaps, a little imperceptive. His nickname was ‘tall Jeannot’; Pushkin was known as ‘the Frenchman’, for his proficiency in the language and encyclopaedic knowledge of the country’s literature.

(#ulink_d163da5a-fb89-530f-b218-a17cb523c5c1) They are linked in a verse of one of the songs the lycéens composed about each other:

Tall Jeannot

Without knowing how

Makes a million bons mots,

While our Frenchman

Lauds his own taste

With a string of four-letter words.

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Anton Delvig was plump, clumsy and phenomenally lazy. He was a very poor student, continually rebuked for his behaviour: ‘He is rude in his manner, insolent in his speech, and so disobedient and obstinate as to ignore all admonitions and even to laugh when he is reprimanded.’

(#litres_trial_promo) His only interest was Russian literature; he knew a mass of verse by heart. As with Pushkin, his talent for poetry blossomed at the Lycée. He was the first to appear in print, when a poem on the capture of Paris appeared in the Herald of Europe in June 1814. In one Lycée poem – one of the best he ever wrote – dedicated to Pushkin, he prophesies literary immortality for his friend:

Pushkin! Even in the forests he cannot hide himself,

His lyre will betray him with loud singing,

And from the mortals Apollo will carry away

The immortal to rejoicing Olympus.

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The third of the Lycée’s poets was Wilhelm Küchelbecker, in some ways the strangest of all the pupils. Tall and very thin, he had had an attack of St Vitus’s Dance (Sydenham’s chorea) in childhood, which had left him with a facial tic and deaf in one ear. Engelhardt wrote of him: ‘He has read all the books in the world about all the subjects in the world; has much talent, much diligence, much good will, much heart and much feeling, but, alas, with all this he has no taste, tact, grace, moderation or clear aim. However, he is an honest, innocent soul, and the obstinacy he sometimes displays is only the result of a Quixotic honour and virtue with a considerable admixture of vanity.’

(#litres_trial_promo) No other pupil was referred to so often in the lycéens’ songs, or had so many epigrams written about him. In general Küchelbecker bore the attacks stoically, but when Malinovsky threw a plate of soup over his head at dinner he had to be taken to the sickbay with a fever, escaped, and tried to drown himself in the lake. A cartoon in one of the magazines produced by the lycéens shows a boat-load of teachers fishing for him with a boat-hook. His passionate, impractical idealism manifested itself even in his views on literature, in which he preached the virtues of the eighteenth-century ode, of archaic language, and of the hexameter.

‘Coarse, passionate, but appreciative, zealous, clean and very diligent’: so reads a report on Mikhail Yakovlev.

(#litres_trial_promo) A talented musician, who sang to the guitar, he set a number of Delvig’s and Pushkin’s works to music, both at the Lycée and later. At the Lycée, however, where his nickname was ‘the clown’, he was best known for his imitations. He had a huge repertoire of two hundred roles. They include, besides all the teachers and most of the pupils, Italian bears (no. 93), their attendants (no. 94), a samovar (no. 98), Russian bear attendants (no. 109), Alexander I (no. 129), a ship (no. 170) and a mad sergeant of hussars (no. 179).

(#litres_trial_promo) Later, when Pushkin was living in Moscow, he asked a friend from St Petersburg what the subject of Yakovlev’s latest imitation was. ‘The St Petersburg flood’ was the reply. ‘And how’s that?’ ‘Very lifelike.’

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The first three months of the Lycée’s existence passed quietly; Alexander I’s birthday was celebrated on 12 December; Volkhovsky was adjudged the best student of the term: his name, and that of Gorchakov (first in deportment), were inscribed in gold letters on a board which was put up in the school hall. Razumovsky ordered it to be taken down and informed Malinovsky that innovations of this kind were not to be introduced without his permission. The last week of the year was a holiday. By the beginning of 1812 war with France seemed imminent. In February and March the lycéens turned out to cheer the guards and army regiments passing through Tsarskoe Selo on their way south to join the Russian First Army in Vilna. Commander-in-chief of this army, and Minister of War, was Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, who was distantly related to Küchelbecker, and had been instrumental in securing a place for him at the Lycée.

In May Pushkin spent five days in the sickbay with a feverish cold; he was thirteen on the twenty-sixth of that month; on 9 June the Lycée was visited by the Metropolitan of Moldavia, Gabriel Banulescu-Bodoni; and on 12 June Napoleon’s army of half a million men crossed the Neman. The news was received in Tsarskoe Selo five days later. From that time on the lycéens followed, with growing anxiety and dismay, the progress of the invasion in the Russian and foreign newspapers in the reading-room, and in the bulletins which Nikolay Koshansky, who taught Latin and Russian literature, made it his business to compose and to read on Sundays in the school hall. Delvig earned instant popularity by his vivid account of the events he had witnessed as a nine-year-old during the campaign of 1807: a complete fantasy which, nevertheless, deceived the lycéens and even Malinovsky.

As the Grande Armée advanced, Barclay retreated before it. Napoleon was in Vilna on 16 June, Vitebsk on 16 July. After fierce fighting, Smolensk fell on 6 August, destroyed by fire. ‘The spectacle Smolensk offered the French was like the spectacle an eruption of Mount Vesuvius offered the inhabitants of Naples,’ wrote Napoleon.

(#litres_trial_promo) Having given battle at Lubino, the Russian army then retreated again, towards Moscow, whose inhabitants had already begun to leave the city. Nadezhda Pushkina, taking her children and mother, Mariya Gannibal, left for Nizhny Novgorod.

The commander of a retreating, apparently beaten army, Barclay had lost Alexander’s confidence and become widely unpopular. He had often urged on the emperor the necessity for a single commander-in-chief of all the Russian armies. Alexander belatedly took his advice and appointed Kutuzov. Barclay remained as commander of the First Army, but had to give up his post as Minister of War. Küchelbecker, in dismay at the taunts, even accusations of treason, that were being levelled at his relative, turned to his mother for consolation. He was not wholly comforted by the reassurances offered in her letters, and in October she had to dissuade the fourteen-year-old from joining the army as a volunteer in order to redeem the family honour. She mentioned the immorality of the young men in the volunteer army, protested against ‘the slaughter of children’, and pointed out that it would interrupt his education. Küchelbecker abandoned the idea.

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Even under Kutuzov the Russian army continued to retreat. Abandoning a favourable position at Tsarevo-Zaimishche, he moved east to Gzhatsk and, fighting off the French under Murat with his rearguard, arrived near the village of Borodino on the Kolocha river, seventy-two miles from Moscow, on 22 August. Here he drew up his armies and waited for the French. On the twenty-fourth the French captured the Shevardino redoubt; on the twenty-sixth, after a day’s lull, the battle of Borodino took place, lasting from six in the morning until dusk. Napoleon’s withdrawal across the Kolocha at the end of the day convinced Kutuzov that, despite the enormous Russian losses, the French had been beaten. He sent a short dispatch claiming victory to Alexander, and retreated to Mozhaisk. Meanwhile a letter from Napoleon was on its way to the Empress Marie-Louise in Paris: ‘I write to you from the battlefield of Borodino. Yesterday I beat the Russians […] The battle was a hot one: victory was ours at two in the afternoon. I took several thousand prisoners and sixty cannons. Their losses can be estimated at 30,000 men. I lost many killed and wounded […] My health is good, the weather a little fresh’.

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