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A weak and cunning ruler,

A balding fop, an enemy of labour,

Fortuitously favoured by Fame,

Reigned over us then.

Eugene Onegin, X, i

WHEN PUSHKIN ARRIVED in St Petersburg, he had just turned eighteen. This ‘ugly descendant of negroes’, as he called himself, was small in stature – just under five foot six.¹ He had pale blue eyes, curly black hair, usually dishevelled, and extraordinarily long, claw-like fingernails – often dirty – of which he was inordinately proud. When the actress Aleksandra Kolosova – just sixteen when Pushkin met her in 1818 – tried to hold his hands so that her mother could punish him for some prank by ‘clipping his claws’, ‘he screamed loud enough to bring the house down, feigned sobs, groans, complained that we were insulting him, and reduced us to tears of laughter’.² He promenaded the streets in a long black frock-coat ‘in the American style’ and silk top-hat ‘à la Bolivar’: funnel-shaped, with a wide, upturned brim, and carrying a heavy cane.^{* 3} In a pencil sketch he made as a guide to the illustrator of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, he depicts himself and Eugene leaning on the granite parapet of the Neva Embankment, gazing across at the Peter-Paul fortress. He is seen from behind: a shortish man in the Bolivar top-hat, with thick curly hair down to his shoulders, wearing tapering pantaloons and a frock-coat nipped at the waist, with two buttons in the small of the back and long, bell-shaped skirts. A note underneath instructs the illustrator that Pushkin should be made ‘good-looking’.^{* 4} Though often morose and silent in large gatherings, or among those he did not know well, in the company of his friends and intimates he displayed an extraordinary, superabundant liveliness and gaiety, combined with a continual restlessness. ‘He could never sit still for a minute,’ Kolosova wrote; ‘he would wriggle, jump up, sit somewhere else, rummage in my mother’s work-basket, tangle the balls of yarn in my embroidery, scatter my mother’s patience cards …’⁵

When Pushkin’s mother had moved to the capital in 1814 she had taken a seven-room apartment on the upper floor of a large house on the right, or north embankment of the Fontanka canal, near the Kalinkin Bridge. Now Pushkin moved into the apartment, joining his parents and the nineteen-year-old Olga. Lev had left the Lycée and moved to a St Petersburg boarding-school. The lodgings were in the Kolomna quarter, an unfashionable district, ‘neither metropolitan nor provincial […] here all is tranquillity and retirement, all the sediment of the capital’s traffic has settled here’.⁶ Pushkin came to feel some affection for the area, lodging the hero of The Bronze Horseman here, and making it the setting for his comic narrative poem The Little House in Kolomna. The apartment below the Pushkins was occupied by the Korffs, whose son, Modest, had been a fellow lycéen. According to him the Pushkins’ ‘lodging was always topsy-turvy; valuable antique furniture in one room, in another nothing but empty walls or a rush-bottomed chair; numerous, but ragged and drunken servants, fabulously unclean; decrepit coaches with emaciated nags, and a continual shortage of everything, from money to glasses. Whenever two or three extra people dined with them they always sent down to us, as neighbours, for cutlery and china.’⁷ Ashamed of the shabbiness of the apartment, Pushkin concealed his address from most of his acquaintance. Those given the entrée might find him in dishabille, as did Vasily Ertel, who was taken there by Delvig in February 1819. ‘We went up the stairs, the servant opened the door, and we entered the room. By the door stood a bed on which lay a young man in a striped Bokhara dressing-gown with a skull-cap on his head. Near the bed, on a table, lay papers and books. The room united the characteristics of the abode of a fashionable young man with the poetic disorder of a scholar.’⁸

On 13 June 1817, two days after arriving in St Petersburg, Pushkin, together with the other lycéens who had joined the Foreign Ministry, was presented to the Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. Two days later, at the ministry on the English Embankment, he took and signed an oath of allegiance, and was given the decrees of Peter the Great and Catherine II relating to the foreign service to read. From the beginning the sole attraction of the ministry was that it provided him with a rank in the civil service and a minimal income. There are no references to his work there in his correspondence; his attendance soon became desultory and his diligence non-existent: ‘I know nothing about [Pushkin],’ Engelhardt wrote in January 1818, ‘other than that he does nothing at the Ministry.’⁹ On 3 July he applied for leave until 15 September, to travel with his family to his mother’s estate at Mikhailovskoe. The journey of some 288 miles took three days, passing through Tsarskoe Selo, Luga, Porkhov, Bezhanitsa and Novorzhev, and producing an epigram:

There is in Russia the town of Luga

In the Petersburg region;

One could not imagine

A worse dump than this,

If there didn’t exist

My Novorzhev.¹⁰

In 1742 the Empress Elizabeth had made a large grant of land in the Pskov province to Abram Gannibal. This estate, some five thousand desyatins in extent, included forty-one villages, populated by – according to the census of 1744 – 806 serfs.^* Through it ran a small river, the Sorot, fed by a chain of lakes. A few miles to the south, on the Sinichi hills, lay the small settlement of Svyatye Gory, crowned by the white walls and silver spire of the Svyatogorsky monastery. Although Abram, first occupied with his military duties and later preferring to retire to his estate at Suida, spent little time here, he arranged for the construction of a manor house at Petrovskoe, on the north-east bank of Lake Kuchane. On his death in 1781 the lands in the Pskov province were divided between his three younger sons, Petr, Osip and Isaak. Petr took Petrovskoe, Osip Mikhailovskoe and Isaak Voskresenskoe.

At Petrovskoe Petr knocked down the old house and built another, much larger, further from the lake, and laid out a small park, with an alley of lime trees leading from the lawn behind the house to the lake shore. In 1817 he was seventy-five, and was living here by himself, having seen little or nothing of his wife and children since he had packed them off, with a meagre allowance, to his estate near St Petersburg in the 1780s.

Voskresenskoe, Isaak’s patrimony, was some eight miles to the east of Petrovskoe, on the road to Novorzhev. Here, on a hill overlooking Lake Belogul – twice the size of Lake Kuchane – he built an unassuming, but capacious one-storey manor to house his large family: eight sons and seven daughters. On the slope of the hill descending to the lake was a large park with alleys, ponds and summer-houses. On the other side of the house a drive flanked with birch trees, concealing numerous outbuildings and servants’ quarters, led to the road. Isaak had died in 1804, heavily in debt, and having had to mortgage and then sell the greater part of his estate. His wife, Anna Andreevna, remained at the manor house, visited each summer by some of her numerous brood, together with their wives, husbands and children.

Mikhailovskoe lay between the two other estates, just over two miles from Petrovskoe, and nearly six from Voskresenskoe. The manor house was built on the high wooded south bank of the Sorot, between Lake Kuchane and the much smaller Lake Malenets. It was a small – fifty-six feet by forty-five – single-storey wooden house on a stone foundation with an open porch before the front door. On either side, shaded by limes and maples, stood smaller buildings in the same style, on the left the bath-house, on the right the kitchen and servants’ quarters. Two long, low buildings at right angles to the kitchen contained the estate office and lodgings for the bailiff and his family with a coach-house beyond; behind these lay the orchard. In front of the house was a circular lawn, surrounded by a path bordered with lilac and jasmine, the whole being enclosed by a fence with wicket gates. Behind the bath-house a steep path led to the Sorot. In front of the house, beyond the fence, lay the well-wooded park, divided in two by a wide linden alley down which ran the entrance drive. In the middle of the portion to the left stood a small summer-house from which radiated alleys of limes, birches and maples. Flower-beds, little artificial mounds topped with benches and ponds, small and large, were scattered here and there, and the boundary was marked by an avenue of birches.

By contemporary standards Mikhailovskoe was a small to modest estate: according to the census of 1816, some five thousand acres (1,863 desyatins) with 164 male serfs on the land and 23 attached to the household. In 1806, on Osip’s death, the estate had passed to Nadezhda. But the Pushkins’ financial circumstances were hardly improved, since for several years thereafter the income of the estate had to be used to extinguish the large debts Osip had accumulated. Since Nadezhda had little taste for provincial life, her mother, Mariya Gannibal, having sold Zakharovo, had moved to Mikhailovskoe, taking with her the family’s old nurse, Arina Rodionovna.

These two and a crowd of servants now greeted the Pushkins on their arrival: it was the first time that Pushkin had seen his grandmother since parting from her six years before to go to the Lycée. The district, very different from the countryside around Moscow or St Petersburg, was completely new to him. He wandered round the park, with its ‘pond in the shadow of thick willows,/Playground for ducklings’,¹¹ and stood on the heights above the Sorot, looking over

the azure levels of two lakes,

Where sometimes gleams the fisherman’s white sail,

Behind them a ridge of hills and striped cornfields,

Scattered huts in the distance,

On the moist banks wandering herds,

Smoking drying-barns and winged windmills …¹²

‘I remember how happy I was with village life, Russian baths, strawberries and so on, but all this did not please me for long. I loved and still love noise and crowds.’¹³ The district certainly lacked metropolitan bustle; Voskresenskoe, inhabited by his great-aunt and a swarm of cousins, was a poor substitute. Dancing there one evening, Pushkin fell into a quarrel with his cousin Semen when the latter cut him out in a figure of the cotillion with a Miss Loshakova, ‘with whom, despite her ugliness and false teeth, Aleksandr Sergeevich had fallen head over heels in love’.¹⁴

The most congenial local society was to be found at Trigorskoe, an estate some two miles from Mikhailovskoe, reached by a path along the bank of the Sorot. Here lived Praskovya Osipova, an attractive thirty-six year-old, together with the five children from her first marriage to Nikolay Vulf: the eighteen-year-old Annette, Aleksey, Mikhail, Evpraksiya (known as Zizi) and Valerian, respectively twelve, nine, eight and five; and Aleksandra, the nine-year-old daughter of her second husband, Ivan Osipov. The Osipovs were not provincial philistines, but a cultured family. Praskovya’s father, Aleksandr Vyndomsky, had collected a large library, had corresponded with Novikov, imprisoned for his writings by Catherine II, and had subscribed to Moscow and St Petersburg literary journals, one of which had even printed his poem ‘The Prayer of a Repentant Sinner’. Pushkin’s acquaintance with the family was the most significant event of the visit: on 17 August, just before leaving, he wrote, in the only lyric produced during his stay,

Farewell, Trigorskoe, where joy

So often was encountered!

Did I discover your sweetness

Only in order to leave you for ever?

From you I take memories,

To you I leave my heart.¹⁵

When Vasily Pushkin had brought his nephew to St Petersburg in 1811, he was engaged in a polemic with Admiral Shishkov, leader of the conservative, or Archaist group of Russian writers. Opposed to this were the more liberal modernists, whose centre was Karamzin. In March 1811 Shishkov had founded the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word, a society whose purpose was to defend ‘classical’ forms of Russian against foreign infection. The writers of both factions directed at each other a continual cross-fire of articles and reviews, enlivened by satirical jibes. If the dramatist Prince Shakhovskoy poked fun at Karamzin’s sentimentalism in the one-act comedy A New Sterne (1805), in Vasily’s A Dangerous Neighbour admirers of the prince’s dramatic talents were discovered among the strumpets in a brothel.

On 23 September 1815 several of the younger group – Dmitry Bludov, Dmitry Dashkov, Stepan Zhikharev, Filipp Wiegel, Aleksandr Turgenev and Zhukovsky – attended the première of Shakhovskoy’s new comedy, The Lipetsk Waters; or, A Lesson for Coquettes at the Bolshoy Theatre. Zhukovsky’s companions were soon embarrassed to discover that Shakhovskoy ‘in the poet Fialkin, a miserable swain, whom all scorned, and who bent himself double before all, intended to represent the noble modesty of Zhukovsky; […] One can imagine the situation of poor Zhukovsky, on whom numerous immodest glances were turned! One can imagine the astonishment and indignation of his friends, seated around him! A gauntlet had been thrown down; Bludov and Dashkov, still ebullient with youth, hastened to pick it up.’¹⁶ Bludov’s reply was a wretchedly unfunny lampoon directed at Shakhovskoy, A Vision in some Tavern, published by the Society of Learned People.^* This purported to have taken place in the little provincial town of Arzamas. The idea that a learned society, dedicated to literature, could exist in such a sleepy backwater famous only for its geese amused Bludov’s friends, and led in October to the foundation of the Arzamas Society of Unknown People.

From the beginning Arzamas was an elaborate joke, a parody of the solemn proceedings of the Symposium of Amateurs of the Russian Word. These took place in the huge hall of Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka, when ‘the members sat at tables in the centre, around them were armchairs for the most honoured guests, and round the walls in three tiers was well-arranged seating for other visitors, admitted by ticket. To add greater lustre to these gatherings, the fair sex appeared in ball-gowns, ladies-in-waiting wore their royal miniatures,^* grandees and generals their ribbons and stars, and all their full-dress uniform.’¹⁷ The lively facetiousness of Arzamas could hardly have been more different. The meetings took place on Thursday evenings, usually at the home of one of the two married members – Bludov’s on the Nevsky Prospect or Sergey Uvarov’s in Malaya Morskaya Street. Each member had been given a name taken from one of Zhukovsky’s ballads. The president for the evening wore a Jacobin red cap; the proceedings were conducted in a parodic imitation of the high style employed at the Symposium and invariably ended with the consumption of an Arzamas goose. Vyazemsky and Batyushkov soon joined; and when Vasily Pushkin – at fifty-one, the oldest of the group – was elected in March 1816, advantage was taken of his good-natured credulity to stage a parody of Masonic initiation rites, an immensely long mummery which concluded with Vasily shooting an arrow into the heart of a dummy representing the bad taste of the Shishkovites.^† This set the tone for his position in Arzamas: he became the internal butt for its members’ jokes, as members of the Symposium were the external. Having dallied at a cake-shop, he arrived late at the next meeting, to be greeted with a flood of facetious speeches and resolutions; but, forgiven, he was made the society’s elder with various privileges, including that of having ‘at Arzamas suppers a special goose roasted for him alone, which, at his choice, he may either consume entirely, or, having consumed a portion, may take the rest home’.¹⁸

While still at the Lycée Pushkin had taken an eager interest in the literary debate, naturally ranging himself on the side of his friends against Shishkov and the Symposium. He learnt of the foundation of Arzamas, and was soon addressing Vyazemsky as ‘dear Arzamasite’,¹⁹ and calling his uncle ‘the Nestor of Arzamas’.²⁰ He already felt himself spiritually to be a member: in ‘To Zhukovsky’ (1816), calling on the ‘singers, educated/In the happy heresy of Taste and Learning’, to ‘strike down the brazen friends of Ignorance’ – the Shishkov circle – he signs himself ‘An Arzamasite’.²¹ Shortly after he arrived in St Petersburg he was elected to the society, and given the name of the Cricket. The reality he encountered was rather different from the ideal of ‘To Zhukovsky’: though the Arzamasites were a congenial, convivial set, they were hardly that band of brothers devoted to the cause of art envisaged in the epistle. He arrived, too, at a time when the society was beginning to lose its point. Derzhavin had died in July 1816; the Symposium ceased its existence not long afterwards, and Arzamas, whose whole essence was parody, could, like a reflection in a mirror, hardly remain once the original had disappeared. The last formal meeting of the society was held in the spring of 1818; though some of the members continued to come together informally thereafter, Arzamas had come to an end.

Long after it had ceased to exist it still remained a pleasant memory for Pushkin: ‘Is your swan-princess with you? Give her the respects of an Arzamas goose,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in 1825.²² He felt for it, too, something akin to that loyalty inspired by the Lycée – though the feeling was, naturally, far less deep. As a literary group, it was, paradoxically, more important to him before he became a member than subsequently. While he was at the Lycée it represented for him the forces of enlightenment, ranged against those of darkness and ignorance; after his election it became merely a circle of acquaintances, some of whom – Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Batyushkov, Aleksandr Turgenev – were already close friends, while others – Bludov, Dashkov, Wiegel, Poletika, and, to a lesser extent, Zhikharev – were to become so.^* Indeed, this gathering of diplomats and civil servants, of literary practitioners and dilettantes, represented such a heterogeneous collection of views – ranging from Kavelin’s dogmatic conservatism to Nikolay Turgenev’s radical republicanism – that it could in no way have had an influence, as a whole, on one who was a part of it. But among its members were some of the liveliest minds in Russia at the time, and Pushkin undoubtedly absorbed much from his intercourse with them: particularly, perhaps, from Nikolay Turgenev.

The Turgenev brothers shared an apartment on the Fontanka Embankment, on the top floor of the official residence of Prince A.N. Golitsyn, the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Education. Aleksandr Turgenev was indolent, easy-going, an intellectual flâneur; Nikolay energetic, single-minded, with far more radical political views. Pushkin visited them often, to be berated by Aleksandr for his laziness, and urged by Nikolay to abandon the Anacreontic muse of the Lycée and turn to more serious themes. A third, younger brother, Sergey, was at this time with the diplomatic mission attached to the Russian forces of occupation in France. At the beginning of December 1817 he noted in his diary: ‘[My brothers] write again about Pushkin, as a developing talent. Ah, let them hasten to breathe liberalism into him, and instead of self-lamentation let his first song be: Freedom.’²³ He showed remarkable prescience, for towards the end of the month Pushkin produced ‘Liberty. An Ode’.²⁴

The Turgenevs’ apartment looked out across the canal at the gloomy Mikhailovsky Castle, the scene of the Emperor Paul’s assassination in 1801. According to Wiegel, one of the ‘high-minded young freethinkers’ gathered in the apartment, gazing out at the castle, jokingly suggested it to Pushkin as the subject for a poem. ‘With sudden agility he leapt on the large, long table before the window, stretched out, seized pen and paper and, laughing, began to write.’²⁵ The poem opens with the dismissal of the poet’s former muse, Aphrodite, ‘the weak queen of Cythera’. In her stead Pushkin invokes ‘the proud songstress of Freedom’ to indict the present age: ‘Everywhere iniquitous Power/In the inspissated gloom of prejudice/Reigns.’ The proper society is the state in which ‘with sacred Liberty/Powerful Laws are firmly bound’. The rule of law applies to tyrant and mob alike: the French revolution, an infraction of law by the people, led to the despotism of Napoleon, ‘the world’s horror, nature’s shame,/A reproach on earth to God’. Three brilliant stanzas – a vivid contrast to the abstract rhetoric that has gone before – follow. The ‘pensive poet’, gazing at midnight on the Mikhailovsky Castle, imagines the assassination of Paul on the night of 11 March 1801:

in ribbons and in stars,

Drunk with wine and hate

The secret assassins come,

Boldness on their face, fear in their heart.

A final stanza, added later, reverts to the preceding style and draws a general conclusion.

Yakov Saburov, one of the hussar officers whom Pushkin frequented in Tsarskoe Selo, later told Pushkin’s biographer, Annenkov, that the poem was known to the emperor, ‘but [he] did not find in it cause for punishment’.²⁶ Indeed, the ideas of the poem are those of Kunitsyn, who had told the lycéens, ‘Preparing to be protectors of the laws, you must learn yourselves first to respect them; for a law, broken by its guardians, loses its sanctity in the eyes of the people,’ adding a quotation from the Abbé Raynal, one of the French Encyclopédistes, ‘Law is nothing if it is not a sword, which moves indiscriminately above all heads and strikes everything which rises above the level of the horizontal plane in which it moves.’²⁷ Pushkin echoes this almost verbatim,

grasped by trusty hands

Above the equal heads of citizens

Their sword sweeps without preference.

‘Liberty. An Ode’ is Pushkin’s first great mature poem, but is far from being a revolutionary one; it expresses, rather, a conservative liberalism, defending the monarchy, provided that the monarch respects the law that binds him as well as his subjects. Opinion, however, seizing on the poem’s title and ignoring its content, held it to be subversive, and it came to have talismanic significance for the younger generation. Manuscript copies were widely circulated. D.N. Sverbeev, a coeval of Pushkin, then a junior civil servant, read to his colleagues ‘this new production of Pushkin’s then desperately liberal muse’.²⁸ A copy was confiscated on the arrest of a certain Angel Galera in 1824; another was among the ‘disloyal writings possessed by officers of the Kiev Grenadier Regiment’ in 1829. Herzen published the ode in London in 1856, but it did not appear in its entirety in Russia until 1906.²⁹

Pushkin’s other great poem of this period, ‘The Country’, was written during a second visit to Mikhailovskoe in the summer of 1819. An idyllic description of the countryside and its ability to inspire the poet is followed by an eloquent denunciation of serfdom:

Savage Lordship here, feelingless, lawless,

With violent rod has appropriated

The peasant’s labour, property and time.

Bowed over another’s plough, to whips obedient,

Here emaciated Servitude drags itself along the furrows

Of its pitiless Master.³⁰

The serf’s obligations to his landlord took one of two forms: either that of the barshchina, the corvée: forced labour on the landlord’s fields (as in the poem); or the obrok, the quit-rent, a sum paid to the landlord in lieu of service. The latter was for the serf much less of a burden, and was the form of service preferred by progressive landlords. So Eugene Onegin, on inheriting his uncle’s estate, demonstrates his liberal credentials by replacing ‘ancient corvée’s yoke/With a moderate quit-rent’ (II, iv). Naturally, harsh treatment led to retaliation. Landlords were often killed, and minor uprisings occurred. In 1783 the arbitrary and tyrannical regime of Aleksandr Vyndomsky’s estate manager at Trigorskoe led to a revolt eventually put down, after an engagement which left forty dead or wounded, by a squadron of dragoons and a detachment of infantry under the command of the governor of Pskov. The seven ring-leaders were publicly knouted, branded, their nostrils slit, and were exiled to hard labour for life.

Since the time of Catherine II various projects had been put forward for reforming the system, or emancipating the serfs, but with no result. The accession of the liberal-minded Alexander in 1801 gave hope to the abolitionists; but, following the Napoleonic wars, a period of reaction set in, marked, in external affairs, by Alexander’s creation of the Holy Alliance and internally by his appointment in 1815 of Count Arakcheev, a narrow-minded, brutal martinet, as deputy president of the Committee of Ministers: for the next ten years Arakcheev’s house on the corner of the Liteiny Prospect and Kirochnaya Street was the effective centre of government.

Oppressor of all Russia,

Persecutor of governors

And tutor to the Council,

To the tsar he is – a friend and brother.

Full of malice, full of vengeance,

Without wit, without feeling, without honour,

Who is he? Loyal without flattery,

The penny soldier of a whore.^{* 31}

Opinions differed on how the abolition of serfdom was to be brought about. In the view of the more conservative, it had to be preceded by constitutional reform. More radical opponents of the institution believed that constitutional reform would merely strengthen the hand of the landowners and worsen the condition of the serfs. Paradoxically, therefore, they saw the solution to lie in the exercise of autocratic power, through an arbitrary fiat of the emperor. It is this view which Pushkin, echoing the ideas of Nikolay Turgenev, expresses in the concluding stanza of ‘The Country’:

Will I see, o friends! a people unoppressed

And Servitude banished by the will of the tsar,

And over the fatherland will there finally arise

The sublime Dawn of enlightened Freedom?

Towards the end of 1819 Alexander expressed the wish to see some of Pushkin’s work. The request was made to General Illarion Vasilchikov, commander of the Independent Guards Brigade, who handed it on to his aide-de-camp, Petr Chaadaev, possibly knowing that he and Pushkin were acquainted. Pushkin gave Chaadaev ‘The Country’; it was presented to Alexander, who, reading it with interest, is reported to have said to Vasilchikov: ‘Thank Pushkin for the noble sentiments which his verse inspires.’³²

He would have been less gracious had he seen Pushkin’s more overtly political verse, much of which was directed at him: such as the playful satire ‘Fairy Tales’, in which the tsar promises to dismiss the director of police, put the censorship secretary in the madhouse, and ‘give to the people the rights of the people’ – all of which promises are, of course, fairy tales.³³ The scatological is also pressed into the service of lese-majesty: in ‘You and I’ Pushkin draws a series of comparisons between himself and the tsar, ending:

Your plump posterior you

Cleanse with calico;

I do not pamper

My sinful hole in this childish manner,

But with one of Khvostov’s harsh odes,

Wipe it though I wince.^{* 34}

Equally unacceptable are the witty, occasionally obscene, epigrams dedicated to prominent members of the government: Arakcheev, Golitsyn, and others such as Aleksandr Sturdza, a high official in the Ministry of Education, known for his extreme obscurantist views.

Slave of a crowned soldier,

You deserve the fame of Herostratus

Or the death of Kotzebue the Hun,^†

And, incidentally, fuck you.³⁵

Nikolay Turgenev took Pushkin to task on several occasions, scolding him for ‘his epigrams and other verses against the government’ and appealing to his conscience, saying it was ‘wrong to take a salary for doing nothing and to abuse the giver of it’.³⁶

If late eighteenth-century opponents of serfdom had attacked it chiefly as a morally repugnant system, by now it was also seen as a brake on economic progress. But it was not wholly responsible for the post-war crisis which Russia experienced after 1815. In 1825 the Decembrist Kakhovsky wrote to Nicholas I from his cell in the Peter-Paul fortress: ‘We need not be afraid of foreign enemies, but we have domestic enemies which harass the country: the absence of laws, of justice, the decline of commerce, heavy taxation and widespread poverty.’³⁷ This sense among the younger generation of indignant dissatisfaction with the state of the nation was exacerbated – for those who had fought through Germany and France – by the vivid contrast between Russia and the West. But the absence in Russia of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly forced those who wished for reform to turn to secret political activity. Freemasonry – often connected, if as often unjustifiably, with secret revolutionary activity and for that reason suppressed by conservative governments – provided a means of association. In Russia the number of lodges grew rapidly after the war, and many of the future Decembrists were, or had been – like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace – Masons.

On 9 February 1816 six young officers – Aleksandr Muravev and Nikita Muravev, Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, Ivan Yakushkin, and the brothers Matvey and Sergey Muravev-Apostol, the eldest twenty-six, the youngest twenty-one – met in a room of the officers’ quarters of the Semenovsky Life Guards on Zagorodny Prospect. All had served abroad, and all – with the exception of Yakushkin – were Masons. They agreed to organize a secret political society to be called the Union of Salvation or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland: from this beginning came the Decembrist revolt of 1825. According to Aleksandr Muravev, the society’s primary aims were the emancipation of the serfs, the establishment of equality before the law and of public trial, the abolition of the state monopoly on alcohol, the abolition of military colonies,^* and the reduction of the term of military service. More members were soon enrolled, including the twenty-three-year-old Pavel Pestel, an officer in the Chevalier Guards. ‘Spent the morning with Pestel, a wise man in every sense of the word,’ Pushkin noted in his diary in April 1821. ‘We had a conversation on metaphysics, politics, morality, etc. He is one of the most original minds I know.’³⁸ Charismatic, erudite, with an iron will and a clear vision, Pestel became the moving spirit in the conspiracy. Under his influence a constitution was drawn up, entitled the Green Book, at the same time the Union of Salvation was dissolved and its members joined the new Union of Welfare. And in 1818 Pestel set up a southern branch of the society at Tulchin in the Ukraine.

Much ink has been spilt in debating the question of the extent of Pushkin’s knowledge of the conspiracy, and of his involvement in it. The simplest answer seems the most correct. A number of the future Decembrists were his close friends, and he was acquainted with many others. He frequented houses in which they held meetings; he shared many of the political views of their programme. Nevertheless, he was never, as far as we know, involved in the conspiracy, never invited to become a member of it, never – consciously – present at a gathering of the conspirators, and, though he had a vague suspicion that something was afoot, never knew what this was.

The clearest evidence of his lack of involvement comes from his closest friend at the Lycée, Pushchin. In the summer of 1817 the latter, then an ensign in the Life Guards Horse Artillery, was recruited into the Union of Salvation. ‘My first thought,’ he writes, ‘was to confide in Pushkin: we always thought alike about the res publica.’ But Pushkin was then in Mikhailovskoe. ‘Later, when I thought of carrying out this idea, I could not bring myself to entrust a secret to him, which was not mine alone, where the slightest carelessness could be fatal to the whole affair. The liveliness of his ardent character, his association with untrustworthy persons, frightened me […] Then, involuntarily, a question occurred to me: why, besides myself, had none of the older members who knew him well considered him? They must have been held back by that which frightened me: his mode of thought was well known, but he was not fully trusted.’^{* 39}

Pushkin was still ignorant of the society’s existence in November 1820, when a guest on Ekaterina Davydova’s estate at Kamenka, in the Ukraine. A number of the conspirators were present: Yakushkin, Major-General Mikhail Orlov, his aide-de-camp, Konstantin Okhotnikov, and Vasily Davydov, Ekaterina’s son. Among the other guests were Vasily’s elder brother Aleksandr and General Raevsky, half-brother to the Davydovs and soon to become Orlov’s father-in-law. According to Yakushkin, the behaviour of the conspirators aroused Raevsky’s suspicions; becoming aware of this, they resolved to dissipate them by means of a hoax. During the customary discussion after dinner, the arguments for and against the establishment of such a society were rehearsed. Orlov put both sides of the case, Pushkin ‘heatedly demonstrated all the advantages that a Secret society could bring Russia’. When Raevsky too seemed in favour, Yakushkin said to him: ‘It’s easy for me to prove that you are joking; I’ll put a question to you: if a Secret society now already existed, you certainly wouldn’t join it, would you?’

‘On the contrary, I certainly would join it,’ he replied. ‘Then give me your hand,’ I said. He stretched out his hand to me, and I burst out laughing, saying to him: ‘Of course, all this was only a joke.’ Everyone else laughed, except for A.L. Davydov, the majestic cuckold,^† who was asleep, and Pushkin, who was very agitated; before this he had convinced himself that a Secret society already existed, or would immediately begin to exist, and he would be a member; but when he realized that the result was only a joke, he got up, flushed, and said with tears in his eyes: ‘I have never been so unhappy as now; I already saw my life ennobled and a sublime goal before me, and all this was only a malicious joke.’⁴⁰

Considered objectively, it is difficult to imagine that any serious conspirator belonging to a secret society which had the aim of overthrowing an absolute monarchy would wish to enlist a crackbrained, giddy, intemperate and dissolute young rake, whose heart and sentiments – as his poetry demonstrated – might have been in the right place, but whose reason all too often seemed absent. How could any conspiracy remain secret which had as one of its members someone who, in a theatre swarming with police spies, paid and amateur, was capable of parading round the stalls carrying a portrait of the French saddler, Louvel, who assassinated Charles, duc de Berry, in 1820, inscribed with the words ‘A Lesson to Tsars’?⁴¹ Or who, again in the theatre, could shout out ‘Now is the safest time – the ice is coming down the Neva’?⁴² – meaning that, since the pontoon bridges across the river, removed when it froze, could not yet be re-established, a revolt would not have to contend with the troops of the fortress.

In Rome he would have been Brutus, in Athens Pericles,

But here he is – a hussar officer,⁴³

Pushkin wrote of Petr Chaadaev, whom he first met at the Karamzins in Tsarskoe Selo in 1816. ‘Le beau Tchadaef’, as his fellow officers called him,⁴⁴ had a pale complexion, grey-blue eyes and a noble forehead. He was always dressed with modish elegance: Eugene Onegin is dubbed ‘a second Chaadaev’, for being in his dress ‘a pedant/And what we used to call a dandy’ (I, xxv). Yet at the same time he was curiously asexual: no trace of a relationship is to be discovered in his life. Wiegel, who disliked him intensely, attributes this to narcissism: ‘No one ever noticed in him tender feelings towards the fair sex: his heart was too overflowing with adoration for the idol which he had created from himself.’⁴⁵ In December 1817 he moved to St Petersburg on his appointment as aide-de-camp to General Vasilchikov. Extremely learned, and with a brilliant mind – he was described by General Orlov’s wife as ‘the most striking and most brilliant young man in St Petersburg’⁴⁶ – he seemed on the threshold of a dazzling military career, and was widely expected to become aide-de-camp to Alexander himself. But in February 1821 he suddenly and inexplicably resigned from the army and, after undergoing a spiritual crisis so severe as to affect his health, went abroad in 1823, intending to live in Europe for the rest of his life. He was a Mason, and a member of the Society of Welfare, but played no active part in the Decembrist conspiracy, and later severely condemned the revolt of 1825. However, there is no doubt that, while at Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg, he was ‘deeply and essentially linked with Russian liberalism and radicalism’,⁴⁷ sharing the ideals of the future Decembrists.

In St Petersburg Chaadaev lived in Demouth’s Hotel, one of the most fashionable in the capital, on the Moika, but a stone’s throw from the Nevsky. Here, according to Wiegel, he received visitors, ‘sitting on a dais, beneath two laurel bushes in tubs; to the right was a portrait of Napoleon, to the left of Byron, and his own, on which he was depicted as a genius in chains, opposite’.⁴⁸ Pushkin was a constant visitor, abandoning in Chaadaev’s presence his adolescent antics and behaving with sober seriousness. Chaadaev’s ‘influence on Pushkin was astonishing’, Saburov – who knew both well – remarked. ‘He forced him to think. Pushkin’s French education was counteracted by Chaadaev, who already knew Locke and substituted analysis for frivolity […] He thought about that which Pushkin had never thought about.’⁴⁹ He not only introduced logic into Pushkin’s thought, he also widened his literary horizons. Pushkin was to be deeply grateful for Chaadaev’s sympathy and support in the first months of 1820, when he was both the victim of malicious slander, and being threatened by exile to the Solovetsky monastery on the White Sea for his writings. ‘O devoted friend,’ he wrote in 1821, ‘Penetrating to the depths of my soul with your severe gaze,/You invigorated it with counsel or reproof.’⁵⁰ To express his gratitude, he gave Chaadaev a ring: engraved on the inner surface was the inscription ‘Sub rosa 1820’.^*

In 1818 he had addressed a poem to him which concludes with the stirring lines,

While we yet with freedom burn,

While our hearts yet live for honour,

My friend, let us devote to our country

The sublime impulses of our soul!

Comrade, believe: it will arise,

The star of captivating joy,

Russia will start from her sleep,

And on the ruins of autocracy

Our names will be inscribed!⁵¹

The epistle, which has been called ‘the most optimistic verse in Pushkin’s entire poetry’,⁵² circulated widely in manuscript, together with ‘Fairy Tales’, ‘The Country’ and the epigrams on Arakcheev; according to Yakushkin ‘there was scarcely a more or less literate ensign in the army who did not know them by heart’.⁵³

* A reference to contemporary portraits of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), the hero of South American independence.

* The artist, Aleksandr Notbek, ignored Pushkin’s instructions; his ill-executed engraving, printed in the Neva Almanac in January 1829, shows the poet facing the spectator with arms crossed on his chest. Pushkin greeted the travesty with an amusing, if scatological epigram:

Here, having crossed Kokushkin Bridge,

Supporting his arse on the granite,

Aleksandr Sergeich Pushkin himself

Stands with Monsieur Onegin.

Scorning to glance

At the citadel of fateful power,

He has proudly turned his posterior to the fortress:

Don’t spit in the well, dear chap. (III, 165)

* A desyatin is approximately 2.7 acres: only adult male serfs were numbered in the census.

* Modelled on ‘The Vision of Charles Palissot’ (1760), an attack by Abbé André Morellet on Palissot’s play Les Philosophes, itself a satire directed at the Encyclopédistes.

* In the reign of Peter the Great the custom had been established of presenting to ladies attached to the court a miniature portrait of the monarch which was worn on state occasions.

† Other members included Dmitry Kavelin, Aleksandr Voeikov, Aleksandr Pleshcheev, Petr Poletika, Dmitry Severin; and, later, Nikita Muravev, General Mikhail Orlov and Nikolay Turgenev.

* On 7 January 1834 after a visit from Wiegel Pushkin noted in his diary, ‘I like his conversation – he is entertaining and sensible, but always ends up by talking of sodomy’ (Wiegel was homosexual), and in June, after an evening at the Karamzins, wrote, ‘I am very fond of Poletika’ (XII, 318, 330).

* ‘Loyal without flattery’ was the motto adopted by Arakcheev for his coat-of-arms; the last line is a reference to his mistress, Anastasiya Minkina, in 1825 murdered by the serfs for her intolerable cruelty.

* Count Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov, the Alfred Austin of Alexandrine Russia, an extraordinarily prolific, but talentless poet, the constant butt of Pushkin’s jokes.

† Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order, he confessed, to gain everlasting fame; the German dramatist Kotzebue, employed by the Russian foreign service as a political informant, was assassinated in 1819 by the student Karl Ludwig Sand.

* By an order of 5 August 1816 certain districts in the Novgorod province and, later, in the south, had been turned into military colonies. Every village was transformed into an army camp; all peasants under fifty had to shave their beards and crop their hair, while those under forty-five had to wear uniform. Children received military training, and girls were married by order of the military authorities. Arakcheev was particularly hated for his merciless enforcement of the rules governing these colonies.

* The Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevsky, a member of the Society of United Slavs (which amalgamated with the southern society in 1825), who knew Pushchin well, having shared a cell with him in the Peter-Paul fortress, after reading this passage in the latter’s memoirs, remarked in a letter to M.A. Bestuzhev dated 12 June 1861: ‘Poor Pushchin, – he did not know that the Supreme Duma [of the society] had even forbidden us to make the acquaintance of the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, when he lived in the south; – and for what reason? It was openly said that because of his character and pusillanimity, because of his debauched life, he would immediately inform the government of the existence of a secret society […] Muravev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin told me about such antics of Pushkin in the south that even now turn one’s ears red.’ Shchegolev (1931), 294–5.

† A quotation from Eugene Onegin, I, xii; Davydov’s wife, Aglaë (née de Grammont) was generous with her favours.

* I.e., in secret, in strict confidence.