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Forgotten by society and by gossip,

Far from the Neva’s banks,

I see before me now

The proud Caucasian peaks.

Ruslan and Lyudmila, Epilogue

PUSHKIN’S ROUTE TO EKATERINOSLAV took him initially along the well-known road towards Mikhailovskoe. At Porkhov, however, he turned off and, entering lands unknown to him, hurried on south through Velikie Luki, Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Chernigov towards Kiev. The monotonous scenery of the White Russian post-road offered no temptation to linger; in any case he could not, for the Foreign Ministry, under whose aegis Inzov’s command lay, seizing an opportunity to avoid expense, had made him an official courier. Besides the letter from Capo d’Istrias to Inzov concerning himself, he bore other documents for the general, including the latter’s appointment as plenipotentiary governor of Bessarabia.

At a post-house somewhere between Chernigov and Mogilev his Lycée companion Pushchin, who was returning to St Petersburg after four months in Bessarabia with his sister, and thus knew nothing of recent events in the capital, scanning the list of travellers, noticed the name of Pushkin among them. ‘I asked the postmaster who this Pushkin was. I had no idea that it could be Aleksandr. The postmaster answered that it was the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich, apparently travelling on official business, in a post-chaise, wearing a red Russian shirt with a belt and a felt hat.’¹

Just over a week after leaving St Petersburg, on 14 or 15 May, Pushkin arrived in Kiev. Here he found a friend, Nikolay Raevsky, an officer in the Life Guards Hussars. On leave, he was staying with his father, General Raevsky. The latter had had a distinguished military career: he had served under Suvorov in the Turkish war of 1787–90, becoming a major at eighteen; had been wounded when commanding Bagration’s avant-garde in 1805; and in 1812, in the battle for Smolensk, had held off with ten thousand troops a much larger French force under Marshal Davout. It was said that during this encounter he had taken his sons, Aleksandr and Nikolay, by the hand and led the advance, calling out, ‘Forward, men, for the tsar and the fatherland! I and my sons will show you the way!’² The episode was commemorated in popular prints, and earned him a mention in Zhukovsky’s ‘A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors’. It was, however, apocryphal. ‘It is true that I was in front,’ Raevsky later told Batyushkov. ‘But my sons were not there at that time. My youngest child was gathering berries in a wood (he was then a mere child, and a bullet made a hole in his breeches); that was all, the entire anecdote was made up in St Petersburg.’³ Nikolay – long grown out of his perforated breeches, he was now a Herculean giant who could bend an iron poker in his hands – like Chaadaev had supported and consoled Pushkin when, distressed by Tolstoy’s insinuations, he had harboured thoughts of suicide. Writing to his brother, Pushkin mentions Nikolay’s ‘important services, eternally unforgettable for me’;⁴ he would later dedicate The Prisoner of the Caucasus to him.

The meeting in Kiev had been arranged before Pushkin left St Petersburg. General Raevsky was planning to travel with Nikolay and his two younger daughters, Mariya and Sofya, to the Caucasus, where his elder son, Aleksandr, was taking the waters. They would then go on to the Crimea and join the general’s wife, Sofya Alekseevna, and the two elder daughters, Ekaterina and Elena. The party’s route to the Caucasus would pass through Ekaterinoslav; here General Raevsky would seek to persuade Inzov to give Pushkin permission to accompany them. Pushkin dined with the Raevskys and Lev Davydov,^* stayed the night, and set out for Ekaterinoslav the following morning. His route took him down the bank of the Dnieper, passing through Zolotonosha and Kremenchug; three days later he arrived in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), presented himself to General Inzov, and handed over the letters he was carrying.

Ekaterinoslav had been founded in 1778 by Potemkin, then Viceroy of New Russia – the steppe area north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The city, named after the empress, was intended as the capital of New Russia, and was planned on a grandiose scale, with a circumference of thirty-three miles, main streets seventy yards wide and a cathedral – the first stone of which was laid by Catherine – which was to compete with St Peter’s in Rome in splendour and size. However, after Potemkin’s death a decline set in; the city lost its administrative status; its magnificent buildings were never completed or fell into decay. Pushkin took lodgings in the suburb of Mandrykovka, renting a wretched little shack from a Jewish merchant, Krakonini. Behind ran the Dnieper, and he spent much of his time bathing, or watching the traffic on the river, where he witnessed the most exciting event of his stay in Ekaterinoslav: two convicts, who had escaped from the prison nearby, though shackled together and pursued by guards, swam across the river to freedom – an incident incorporated in his unfinished narrative poem The Robber Brothers (1821–2).

He made a favourable impression on Inzov, who wrote to Capo d’Istrias: ‘I have not yet got to know Pushkin well; but I see, however, that the cause of his sins is not depravity of heart, but youthful ardour of spirit, unrestrained by morality.’⁵ Inzov had, however, been thrown into great agitation by his appointment as governor of Bessarabia, being particularly perturbed by the thought of the expenses he would have to incur in the post. Consumed by these worries, and preoccupied by the administrative problems of transferring his chancellery to Kishinev, he had little or no time for Pushkin, who, during the weeks he spent in Ekaterinoslav, found himself very much at a loose end. Local society offered none of the attractions which had been so numerous in St Petersburg, and he made no effort to form new acquaintances. Indeed, he went out of his way to gratuitously offend or shock those whom he met. Learning that the poet was in Ekaterinoslav, two young enthusiastic amateurs of literature, Andrey Ponyatovsky, a teacher at the seminary, and Sergey Klevtsov, a local landowner, hurried round to see him. He met them in the door of his hut, chewing a roll spread with caviare and holding a glass of red wine. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. The honour of seeing him, the famous poet, they replied. ‘Well, have you seen him now? Then good-bye!’⁶ He displayed an equal disregard for propriety at a dinner given by the town’s civil governor, Vikenty Shemiot.^* Andrey Fadeev, who later knew Pushkin well in Kishinev, describes the occasion:

[The dinner] took place in the summer, at the hottest time of the year. The guests gathered, Pushkin too appeared, and from the first moment of his appearance threw the whole company into extreme embarrassment by the unusual eccentricity of his attire: he was wearing muslin trousers, transparent, without any underwear. The governor’s wife, Mrs Shemiot, née Princess Gedroits, an old friend of my wife’s mother, being very shortsighted, was the only person not to notice this peculiarity. Her three daughters, young girls, were also present at this time. My wife quietly advised her to take the girls out of the drawing-room, explaining the necessity for their removal. Mrs Shemiot, disbelieving her, and not crediting the possibility of such indecency, maintained that Pushkin was simply wearing flesh or skin coloured summer trousers; finally, arming herself with her lorgnette, she assured herself of the bitter truth and immediately escorted her daughters out of the room. This was the only result of the exhibition. Although all were highly indignant and embarrassed, they tried to pretend that they had noticed nothing; the host and hostess were silent, and Pushkin’s prank had no consequences.⁷

Meanwhile General Raevsky had set off from Kiev. His party consisted of the eighteen-year-old Nikolay, the latter’s sisters, Mariya and Sofya, fourteen and thirteen respectively; Miss Matten, the girls’ English governess, and M. Fournier, their French tutor; Anna Ivanovna, a Tatar dame de compagnie; Evstafy Rudykovsky, an army doctor, and a Russian nurse. They travelled in two immense berlins and a light calash, and, after calling at Kamenka to allow the girls to see their grandmother, arrived in Ekaterinoslav late in the evening on 26 May, Pushkin’s twenty-first birthday. Despite the advanced hour Nikolay, his father, and Rudykovsky set off to see him. They found him, pale and unshaven, lying on a wooden settle in his lodging: he had caught a chill after bathing. Rudykovsky examined him, found that he had a slight fever, and advised him to drink something hot.

The next day Pushkin called on the Raevskys, and, overjoyed at finding himself once more in congenial company, chatted volubly with Nikolay in French over dinner, until overtaken again by fever, whereupon Rudykovsky gave him a dose of quinine. During that day General Raevsky had seen Inzov, and had had no difficulty in extracting from him permission for Pushkin to accompany the party to the Caucasus and the Crimea; he would take up his duties with Inzov in Kishinev in the autumn. ‘His disturbed health at so young an age, and the unpleasant position in which he finds himself through youth, demanded on the one hand help, and on the other harmless diversion, and therefore I allowed him to depart with General Raevsky, who, when passing through Ekaterinoslav, was willing to take him with him,’ Inzov wrote. ‘I hope I will not be reproved for this and thought to have been over-indulgent.’⁸

On the morning of 28 May Pushkin seated himself in the calash with Nikolay, and the caravan rolled off to the east, towards the Caucasus. But he was still troubled with the ague, and, on the insistence of General Raevsky, soon moved into the covered berlin with him. They crossed the Dnieper, and ‘plunged into the level and monotonous steppes, always the same, without a single object which might arrest the gaze of the traveller’.⁹ On the twenty-ninth they passed through Mariupol, and, early the following day, between Sambek and Taganrog, stopped to admire the Sea of Azov. They arrived in Taganrog later that day, dining and staying the night with the town governor, P.A. Papkov, in the house in which Alexander I was to die in 1825. Passing through Rostov, on 1 June they were entertained in Novocherkassk by General Denisov, the ataman of the Don Cossacks. Ignoring Rudykovsky’s advice, Pushkin injudiciously consumed a large portion of blancmange, and was again ill. After crossing the Don, their route took them through Stavropol, and, having been held up by a violent storm, which forced them to spend the night in a post-station, they arrived in Pyatigorsk on 6 June. Here they were met by Aleksandr, General Raevsky’s twenty-five-year-old elder son, and took up residence in a house which the general had rented.

The Caucasus region consists of the great mountain range which stretches from the Taman peninsula on the Black Sea to the Apsheron peninsula on the Caspian, the territory immediately to the north, and the southern hinterland, Transcaucasia. It has had a turbulent history since ancient times, and in the eighteenth century Russia, Turkey and Persia contended for domination here. However, in 1801 Alexander I annexed Georgia – which had been under Russian protection since 1783 – and in the following years Russia acquired most of present-day Azerbaijan from Persia. Turkey and Persia gradually withdrew, and Russia set about extending its rule over the remaining nationalities – a task which was not completed until the 1870s. As a first step in the region’s pacification, under the supervision of General Ermolov, who commanded the Russian armies in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827, the Georgian military highway was driven south, from Ekaterinograd to the north of the mountain range, through its central pass and down the Daryal gorge to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia. In the mountains it passed through the territory of the Ossetians, a Christian nation friendly to the Russians. To the west, however, were the Circassians, to the east the Chechens and Ingush, and, beyond them, the Lezgins and Avars who inhabited Dagestan. All were Moslems, who bitterly resisted Russian imperialism. Pyatigorsk lies on the southern slopes of Mount Mashuk, on the outskirts of the Caucasus, some way to the north of the main mountain chain, from which it is separated by the lands of the Kabardians. These, though Sunni Moslems, had earlier professed Orthodoxy, and had long ties with Russia; in 1557 they had petitioned Ivan IV for protection against the Tatars, and he had strengthened the alliance by marrying a Kabardian princess. The settlement was thus isolated from the areas of conflict.

Mineral springs are plentiful in the district, and Pyatigorsk had gained a reputation as a spa in the late eighteenth century. Development was slow, however, and the earliest visitors had to reside at Fort Constantine, a few miles distant, or put up in temporary shacks, tents or covered carts: even by 1829 there were only forty-seven permanent buildings. Nine years after his first visit Pushkin passed through Pyatigorsk again, on his way to Tiflis. ‘I found a great change. In my time the baths were in hastily constructed shacks. The springs, for the most part in their original form, spouted up, steamed, and flowed down the mountain-side in various directions, leaving white and reddish traces behind. We scooped up the boiling water with bark ladles or the bottom of a broken bottle. Now […] everywhere there is order, neatness, prettiness … I must confess: the Caucasian waters present more comforts now; but I regret their earlier, wild condition; I regret the steep stony paths, the shrubs and the unfenced precipices where I once clambered …’¹⁰

For a Russian writer the Caucasus, with its mountains and valleys, its fierce, independent, warring tribes, had the same exotic, romantic allure which the Levant had for Byron, or the American wilderness for Fenimore Cooper. Like his predecessors and his successors, Pushkin found the new, unfamiliar scenery exhilaratingly beautiful. ‘I regret, my friend,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘that you could not gaze with me on the splendid chain of these mountains; on their icy summits, which from afar, on a clear dawn, seem like strange clouds, many-coloured and motionless; that you could not climb with me to the sharp peak of Beshtu with its five hills, of Mashuk, of the Zhelezny, Kamenny and Zmeiny mountains.’¹¹ But the purpose of the visit was to take the waters. General Raevsky observed a strict regimen: ‘I rise at five, go to the baths, return an hour later for coffee, read, go for a walk, dine at one, read again, take another walk, go to the baths, we drink tea at seven, take another walk and go to bed.’ His walk occasionally took him back to the baths, where from the gallery he would admire the mountains and amuse himself with ‘the comic sight of the settlement, its inhabitants, their caricatures of carriages, and their colourful attire; a mixture of Kalmyks, Circassians, Tatars, local Cossacks, local residents and visitors’. He used the hot sulphurous springs, where the temperature was over 38°C; the two girls, ‘just for amusement’, would bathe once or twice a day in the warm baths.¹² Pushkin drank the waters. ‘They have done me a great deal of good, especially the hot sulphurous ones,’ he wrote. ‘In addition I bathed in the warm sulphur-acidulous springs, and in the cold ferruginous and acidulous ones.’¹³

The party also visited the other spas at Zheleznovodsk, Kislovodsk and Konstantinogorsk. In the last Pushkin, sitting on a pile of logs, compiled a list of the general’s suite for the local commandant’s book of arrivals, in which he described Rudykovsky as ‘physician-in-ordinary’ and himself as ‘Pushkin, a minor’. The general berated him soundly for his facetiousness.¹⁴ In the evenings the company would play boston, a form of whist; once a lottery was organized: it was won by Mariya; and, in Pyatigorsk on 29 June, they watched a small firework display celebrating the Orthodox feast of SS Peter and Paul. Among the other visitors Pushkin discovered two former acquaintances: Grigory Rzhevsky, the father of a former lycéen, Nikolay, who had died in 1817, and Apollon Marin, an amateur poet and former guards officer, who had been stationed in Tsarskoe Selo in 1816. Marin introduced Pushkin to his brother, Nikolay, and also to another visitor to the region, Gavriil Gerakov, tutor to young Prince Kurakin, whom he was accompanying on a tour of Russia. ‘Pushkin, Marin and I wagged our tongues together for an hour and then parted,’ Gerakov noted in his diary, adding: ‘[Pushkin] is ready to attract general attention of a laudatory kind; as he may with his gifts; I wish him all the best from the bottom of my heart.’¹⁵

In Pyatigorsk Pushkin also met an English officer, Captain George Willock, who was attached to the British mission in Persia – his brother, Henry, was the British Resident in Teheran – and had been granted permission to travel in the Caucasus. However, General Velyaminov, Ermolov’s second-in-command, suspecting the visit to be a pretext for ‘spying on our military affairs in Chechnya and Dagestan’, had given orders to ‘observe all his activities and watch with whom he consorts and how often’.¹⁶ Willock, accompanied by an interpreter, arrived in Pyatigorsk on 20 June at two in the afternoon, Velyaminov’s agents informed him. ‘Here,’ their report continued, ‘he put up in the house of the provincial secretary’s widow Anna Petrova Makeeva, paying for this three roubles in copper a day. On the same date he was in the old baths, […] listened to the band playing outside the guard-room of the main guard, and afterwards visited His Excellency, General of Cavalry and Chevalier Raevsky, drank tea and stayed some time with him, whence he returned to his lodgings at night and slept.’ The following day he was visited in his lodgings by ‘Lieutenant of the Life Guard Grenadiers Prince Sergey Ivanovich Meshchersky the first, Captain of the Life Guards Nikolay Nikolaevich Raevsky, and a minor, a member of the suite of His Excellency Raevsky, Aleksandr Sergeev Pushkin’.¹⁷ Pushkin’s little joke had rebounded on him: the military authorities had taken his facetious self-description at face value. They were less gullible with respect to Willock. A month after he had left Pyatigorsk he was caught trying to persuade soldiers of the 4th Jäger Regiment to desert to Persia; his interpreter turned out to be an Armenian employed by the Persian army. Griboedov, now secretary to the Russian diplomatic mission in Persia, wrote two sharp notes to the British Resident about his brother’s activities.

For Pushkin by far the most significant experience of the sojourn in the Caucasus was his acquaintance with Aleksandr Raevsky. ‘[General Raevsky’s] elder son will be more than well-known,’ he wrote to his brother.¹⁸ During the next few years Raevsky was to exert an influence on Pushkin perhaps greater – and certainly less beneficial – than that of his earlier mentor, Chaadaev. Born in 1795, Raevsky had entered the army at fifteen, fought in the Russo – Turkish war of 1810, and took part in the war of 1812 and the following campaigns. Promotion was rapid: at twenty-three he was a colonel commanding the Rzhevsk infantry regiment. In 1819 he was attached to Ermolov’s forces in the Caucasus, but, taking leave, had come to Pyatigorsk in an attempt to cure a long-standing affliction of his legs – possibly the result of a war-wound, or possibly, in Ermolov’s words, ‘the bitter fruits of the sweetest of memories’.¹⁹ Tall, but emaciated – ‘physical and mental ailments had desiccated him and lined his brow’²⁰ – he had a wide mouth whose thin lips were usually curled in a sarcastic smile, and, behind his spectacles, small brown eyes with whites of a jaundiced yellow; his voice, however, was exceedingly charming. In character he was very different from the open-hearted, generous and straightforward Nikolay. His father, not long after their reunion, wrote despondently to his eldest daughter: ‘I live at peace with Aleksandr, but how cold he is! I seek in him manifestations of love, of tenderness and do not find them. He does not reason, but argues, and the wronger he is, the more unpleasant his tone becomes, even coarse. We have agreed not to enter into any arguments, or abstract discussions. It is not that I am dissatisfied with him, but I see no cordial relationship on his side. What can one do? Such is his character, and one cannot hold it against him. His mind is turned inside out: he philosophizes about things which he does not understand, and subtilizes in such a way that any sense evaporates. It is the same with his feelings […] I think that he does not believe in love, since he himself neither experiences it, nor tries to inspire it.’²¹ ‘His character was a mixture of excessive self-esteem, indolence, cunning and envy,’ commented Wiegel, adding, ‘like a cat, he loved to soil only all that was pure, all that was elevated.’²²

Pushkin and he spent long hours together, reading and discussing Byron: they had to hand the first four volumes of Pichot’s and de Salle’s translation of the poet into French prose, which had appeared in 1819.^* These contained, among other works, The Corsair, Manfred and the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Or they would sit at night on the bank of the Podkumok River, listening to the sound of its waters, while Raevsky expounded his philosophy of life to an eager listener. Clever, mocking, sceptical, cynical and manipulative, Raevsky played Mephistopheles to an innocent Faust. Later, in October or November 1823, when Pushkin was beginning to escape Raevsky’s influence, he described him in ‘The Demon’:

His smile, his wondrous gaze,

His caustic speech

Poured cold poison into my soul.

With inexhaustible slander

He tempted providence;

He called the beautiful an illusion;

He despised inspiration;

He did not believe in love, in freedom:

Looked mockingly at life –

And nothing in all of nature

Did he wish to bless.²³

For Pushkin these few weeks had an influence disproportionate to their length. They coincidentally brought together three elements – the wild, exotic scenery of the Caucasus with its fierce native tribes, the poetry of Byron, and the demonic teachings of Aleksandr Raevsky – which were to determine the next stage in his development as a poet. He was all the more receptive in that he felt himself, like some Byronic hero, to be a doomed outcast: had he not, during his last months in St Petersburg, experienced the treachery of friends, the deceit of women and the perfidy of society?

In the first week of August, leaving Aleksandr behind in Pyatigorsk, General Raevsky and his party set out for the Crimea. They retraced their route to Stavropol, but then turned west. Since the region they were to traverse could be dangerous for travellers, a military escort accompanied the party. ‘I travelled in sight of the hostile lands of the free mountain peoples,’ Pushkin wrote. ‘Around us rode sixty cossacks, behind us was drawn a loaded cannon, its match lit. Although the Circassians nowadays are relatively peaceful, one cannot rely on them; in the hope of a large ransom they are ready to fall upon a well-known Russian general. And there, where a poor officer safely gallops along in a post-chaise, his excellency may easily fall prey to some Circassian’s lasso. You will understand how pleasing this shadow of danger is to the fanciful imagination.’²⁴

They passed through Temizhbek on 8 August, and spent the night at a neighbouring fort, where they dined with the commandant. The heat was oppressive throughout the journey, and all the party suffered from it. On the eleventh they were in Ekaterinodar, and two days later arrived in Taman on the Black Sea coast – ‘the foulest little town of all Russia’s coastal towns’, Lermontov calls it in A Hero of Our Time. In 1820 it was ‘a miserable collection of wooden shacks with two hundred inhabitants, half of whom were beggars, the other half bandits’.²⁵ However, they did not have to test its hospitality, since both the party and escort were accommodated at the fortress in nearby Fanagoriya. Meanwhile the weather had changed: though the Crimea could be seen in the distance on the far side of the Kerch Strait, the crossing could not be attempted for a day or two.

On the morning of 15 August they were able to embark, though weather conditions were still unfavourable: the crossing took nine hours, instead of the usual two and a half. They arrived in Kerch – the ancient Panticapaeum, founded by Greeks in the seventh century BC, and later the capital of Mithridates the Great’s territory in southern Russia – towards evening. ‘The view of Kertch, and the large bay in which it is situated, was very beautiful,’ noted Laurence Oliphant, who visited the town in 1852; ‘the broken outline of the opposite hills projected far across the straits; while the houses of the town rose one above another up the steep side of the hill of Mithridates; – the whole reminding me of Naples, to which it certainly bears a humble resemblance.’²⁶ Pushkin, eager to glimpse the classical remains, rushed up the hill at sunset, as soon as they had disembarked. ‘Here I will see the ruins of the tomb of Mithridates, here I will see the remains of Panticapaeum, I thought – on the nearest hill amidst a cemetery I saw a heap of stones, of boulders, rudely chiselled – noticed a few steps, the work of human hands. Whether this was the tomb, the ancient fundament of a tower – I do not know.’^{* 27} He ‘plucked a flower for remembrance, but lost it the next day – without regret’.²⁸ On the following morning the party left for Feodosiya, halting, as all visitors did, to view the Golden Barrow, a huge Cimmerian funeral mound, and the ruins of Panticapaeum. The latter proved as disappointing as the tomb: ‘Rows of stones, a ditch, almost level with the ground – that is all that remains of the city of Panticapaeum. There is no doubt that much that is valuable is concealed beneath the earth, accumulated through the ages; a certain Frenchman has been sent from St Petersburg for excavations, but he lacks money and knowledge, as usually is the case with us.’^{* 29}

In Feodosiya (or Kefa, as it was then known) they stayed two nights with the former town governor, Semen Bronevsky, and at dawn on 18 August boarded a navy brig, the Mingreliya, for the passage to Gurzuf. During the journey Pushkin composed the elegy ‘Extinguished is the orb of day’, which in manuscript bore the heading ‘An Imitation of Byron’, and had the epigraph ‘Good night my native land’ – a misquotation of Byron’s line ‘My native Land – Good Night!’ from ‘Childe Harold’s Good Night’. They arrived before dawn on 19 August:

Splendid are you, shores of the Tauris;

When one sees you from the ship

By the light of morning Cypris,^†

As I for the first time saw you;

You appeared before me in nuptial brilliance:

Against the blue, transparent sky

Shone the masses of your mountains,

The pattern of your valleys, trees and villages

Was spread before me.

And there, among the Tatar huts …

What ardour woke within me!

What magical yearnings

Compressed my fiery breast!

But, Muse! forget the past.³⁰

The ardour which turned his breast to fire was inspired by the Raevskys’ eldest daughter, the twenty-three-year-old Ekaterina. He had known her well in St Petersburg, but she did not possess the mature charms which he had then admired; here, however, she was without rivals, and Pushkin’s all too susceptible heart was soon hers. ‘Mikhailo Orlov is to marry General Raevsky’s daughter, after whom the poet Pushkin languished,’ Aleksandr Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky the following year.³¹ She was a splendid, tall, goddess-like creature, with a strong will and forceful personality; the very ‘ideal of a proud maid’ seen against a background of sea and cliffs.³² Several years later, when engaged on his historical drama Boris Godunov, in a letter to Vyazemsky he remarked of his heroine, the haughty and ambitious Marina Mniszek, ‘My Marina is a fine wench: a real Katerina Orlova! Do you know her? However, don’t tell anyone this.’³³

Nothing could come of the infatuation: Ekaterina was two years older than he, did not return his feelings, and was already informally engaged to General Orlov. Moreover, in a few weeks he would have to leave for Kishinev. A few months later, in perhaps the finest lyric of this period, he returned in spirit to Gurzuf and memories of Katerina:

Sparser grows the flying range of clouds:

Melancholy star, evening star,

Your ray has silvered the faded levels,

The dreaming gulf, the dark crags’ summits;

I love your weak light in the heavenly height:

It awakened thoughts, which slumbered in me.

I remember your rising, familiar orb,

Above that peaceful land, where all is dear to the heart,

Where graceful poplars in the valleys rise,

Where dream the tender myrtle and the dark cypress,

And sweetly sound the southern waves.

There once on the hills, full of thoughts of love,

Above the sea in brooding idleness I wandered,

While on the huts the shade of night descended –

And a young maiden sought you in the darkness

And to her friends named you by her name.^{* 34}

Ekaterina, in beauty herself a very Venus, is seeking the planet Venus in the evening dusk and, it has been suggested, humorously confusing ‘Cytherean’ – a title given to Aphrodite from the legend that she landed at Cythera after her birth in the sea – with her own name, Katerina.³⁵ She certainly identified herself with the star; in 1823 her husband wrote to her: ‘I feel myself near to you or imagine you near each time I see that memorable star which you pointed out to me. You may be sure that the moment it rises above the horizon I will catch its appearance from my balcony.’³⁶ When Pushkin speaks of first seeing Gurzuf ‘By the light of morning Cypris’, using another of Aphrodite’s titles, he is making a coded reference to Ekaterina.

‘If there exists on earth a spot which may be described as a terrestrial paradise, it is that which intervenes between Kütchückoy and Sudack on the south coast of the Crimea,’ wrote Edward Clarke, an English traveller.³⁷ It is here that Gurzuf is situated – a small Tatar village of clay huts, clinging to the steep, craggy, pine-covered slopes which rise from the sea-cliff to the stone brow of the plateau above. On the edge of the cliff are the remains of a fortress, built by the orders of Justinian in the sixth century, and refortified by the Genoese, who had a settlement here, in the fourteenth. They were followed by the Turks, who controlled the Khanate of the Crimea until 1774, when it became independent, only to be annexed by Catherine in 1783. The village and surrounding district had belonged to Potemkin, but its ownership had passed to Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, governor-general of Odessa and New Russia from 1803 to 1814. He had built a small palazzo, which he only visited once for a few weeks in 1811, and which otherwise stood empty. A three-storeyed edifice, built into the mountain slope, it had a profusion of windows and huge, light galleries on the first floor, which enabled its inhabitants to enjoy the splendid views, but did little for their comfort. It was here that the Raevskys stayed.

My friend, – Pushkin wrote to his brother from Kishinev – I spent the happiest moments of my life amidst the family of the estimable General Raevsky. I did not see in him the hero, the glory of the Russian army, I loved in him a man with a lucid mind, with a simple, beautiful soul; an indulgent, solicitous friend, always a dear, affectionate host […] All his daughters are charming, the eldest is an extraordinary woman. Judge, whether I was happy: a free, carefree life surrounded by a dear family; a life which I love so much and with which I can never become satiated – the gay, southern sky; charming surroundings; nature, satisfying my imagination – hills, gardens, sea; my friend, my dearest wish is to see again the southern shore and the Raevsky family.³⁸

‘In Gurzuf I did not stir from the spot, bathed in the sea and stuffed myself with grapes; I immediately took to southern nature and enjoyed it with all the indifference and carelessness of a Neapolitan Lazzarono. I loved, waking at night, to listen to the sound of the sea – and would listen spellbound for hours on end. Two steps from the house grew a young cypress; I visited it each morning, and became attached to it with a feeling not unlike friendship.’³⁹ He spent much of the time reading: he had discovered some Voltaire in the palazzo library and Nikolay lent him a volume of André Chénier, but he mainly devoted himself to Byron. He also wrote, composing several lyrics and the initial draft of his first ‘southern’ narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, eventually completed at the beginning of the following year.

On 5 September he, General Raevsky and Nikolay left Gurzuf on horseback for a short sight-seeing tour before leaving the Crimea. Passing through the Ay-Danil woods, they took the track along the coast to Yalta – then a tiny coastal village – and went on through Oreanda to Alupka, where they spent the night in a Tatar homestead. The next day they continued down the coast to Simeis before turning inland. Ascending the gorge known as the Devil’s Stairs – ‘we clambered up on foot, holding the tails of our Tatar horses. This amused me exceedingly, seeming to be some mysterious, eastern ritual’⁴⁰ – and crossing the pass, they descended into the Valley of Baidar. Their route then took them through Balaclava, and at evening they reached the St George monastery where they put up for the night. The monastery stood on a cliff overlooking the sea; the site was spectacular. ‘The St George monastery and its steep staircase to the sea left a strong impression on me. There I saw the fabulous ruins of the temple of Diana.’⁴¹ These were on nearby Cape Fiolente, and were popularly supposed to be the remains of that temple of Artemis^* to which the goddess had carried Iphigenia, after rescuing her from sacrifice in Aulis. ‘Why these cold doubts?/I believe: here was the dread temple/ Where to the gods, thirsty for blood,/Smoked sacrifices.’^{* 42}

The following morning they rode north along a narrow track, past several hamlets, before striking the high road from Sebastopol to Bakhchisaray. Pushkin was again suffering from an ague, and was too ill for much sight-seeing when they arrived in Bakhchisaray, ‘the Garden Pavilion’, the former seat of the Crimean khans. The palace, restored by Potemkin in 1787 for the visit of Catherine, made little impression on him at the time, though he was to use it as the setting for The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. ‘Entering the palace, I saw a ruined fountain; from a rusty iron pipe dripped water. I went round the palace, greatly annoyed at the neglect in which it was decaying, and the half-European refurbishment of some of the rooms. NN [Nikolay Raevsky] almost by force led me up a decrepit stair to the ruins of the harem and to the burial-place of the khans, “but not with this/At that time my heart was full:^† I was tormented by fever.”’⁴³

The next day, 8 September, they rode on to Simferopol. A few days later Pushkin left the Crimea. Passing through Perekop, Berislav, Kherson and Nikolaev, he arrived in Odessa on 17 September. Here he stayed for three days. On the twentieth he set out for Kishinev and the following day entered the town where he was to live for the next three years.

* Brother of the poet, Denis Davydov, and tenuously related to General Raevsky: his uncle was the second husband of Raevsky’s mother.

* Though Pushkin’s invitation was no doubt due to his reputation as a poet, he was also distantly related to Shemiot: the latter’s brother, Pavel, had married Nadezhda Rotkirch, Pushkin’s mother’s cousin.

* ‘The French translation of us!!! Oime! Oime!’ was Byron’s reaction to this version. Later he added: ‘Only think of being traduced into a foreign language in such an abominable travesty!’ Leslie A. Marchand, Byron. A Biography. New York & London, 1957, II, 881–2.

* Pushkin, like most visitors, did not know that, though Mithridates committed suicide here in 63 BC, his body was handed over by his son Pharnaces – who had revolted against his father – to the Roman general Pompey, who allowed its burial in Sinope, Mithridates’s native city.

* The Frenchman, Paul Dubrux, an amateur, self-taught archaeologist, who was employed as administrator of the local salt-pans, had not been sent from St Petersburg, nor was he without knowledge.

† I.e. the planet Venus.

* A case of poetic licence: Venus would not have been visible to the naked eye as an evening star while Pushkin was at Gurzuf.

* The Romans identified Artemis with Diana, as they did Aphrodite with Venus.

* The ‘cold doubts’ are those of I.M. Muravev-Apostol, who devoted a chapter of his Journey through Tauris in 1820 (1823) to a confutation of the popular view of the site.

† The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, 531–2.