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I lived then in dusty Odessa …

There the skies long remain clear,

There abundant trade

Busily hoists its sails;

There everything breathes, diffuses Europe,

Glitters of the South and is gay

With lively variety.

The language of golden Italy

Resounds along the merry street,

Where walk the proud Slav,

The Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Armenian,

And the Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,

And that son of the Egyptian soil,

The retired corsair, Morali.

Fragments from Onegin’s Journey

IN 1791 THE TREATY OF JASSY, which brought the Russo – Turkish war to an end, gave Russia what its rulers had sought since the late seventeenth century: a firm footing on the Black Sea littoral. To exploit this a harbour was needed; those in the Sea of Azov and on the river deltas were too shallow for large vessels, and attention was turned to the site of the Turkish settlement of Khadzhibei, between the Bug and Dniester, where the water was deep close inshore, and which, with the construction of a mole and breakwater, would be safe in any weather. Here, where the steppe abruptly terminated in a promontory, some 200 feet above the coastal plain, the construction of a new city began on 22 August 1794. Its name, Odessa, came from that of a former Greek settlement some miles to the east, but was, apparently on the orders of the Empress Catherine herself, given a feminine form. The city’s architect and first governor was Don Joseph de Ribas, a soldier of fortune in Russian service, born in Naples of Spanish and Irish parentage. With the assistance of a Dutch engineer, he laid out a gridiron plan of wide streets and began construction of a mole.

Under Richelieu, governor from 1803 to 1815 – whose little palazzo in Gurzuf had sheltered Pushkin and the Raevskys – the city prospered and gained in amenities: a wide boulevard was constructed along the cliff edge, overlooking the sea; and ‘an elegant stone theatre, […] the front of which is ornamented by a peristyle supported by columns’,¹ was built. It was usually occupied by an Italian opera company: Pushkin became addicted to ‘the ravishing Rossini,/Darling of Europe’.² However, the town ‘was still in the course of construction, there were everywhere vacant lots and shacks. Stone houses were scattered along the Rishelevskaya, Khersonskaya and Tiraspolskaya streets, the cathedral and theatre squares; but for the most part all these houses stood in isolation with wooden single-storey houses and fences between them.’³ Very few streets were paved: all travellers mention the insupportable dust in the summer, and the indescribable mud in the spring and autumn.

In 1819 Odessa had become a free port: the population increased – there were some 30,000 inhabitants in 1823 – as did the number of foreign merchants and shipping firms. The lingua franca of business was Italian, and many of the streets bore signs in this language or in French, until Vorontsov, in a fit of patriotism, had them replaced by Russian ones. But this could not conceal the fact that the city was very different in its population and its manners from the typical Russian provincial town: ‘Two customs of social life gave Odessa the air of a foreign town: in the theatre during the entr’actes the men in the parterre audience would don their hats, and the smoking of cigars on the street was allowed.’⁴

Odessa, with its opera and its restaurants, might seem a far more attractive place for exile than Kishinev. Nevertheless, Pushkin was to be considerably less happy here. He had lost the company of his close friends: Gorchakov’s regiment was still stationed in Kishinev; Alekseev, not wishing to part from his mistress Mariya Eichfeldt, had turned down a post he had been offered with Vorontsov in Odessa; while Liprandi, who had left the army and was attached to Vorontsov’s office, was rarely in Odessa, being continually employed on missions elsewhere. And though Aleksandr Raevsky was now living in the town, the relationship between the two was to become very strained over the following months. Pushkin did make a number of new acquaintances, but they remained acquaintances, rather than friends. He was closest, perhaps, to Vasily Tumansky, a year younger than himself, an official in Vorontsov’s bureau and a fellow-poet – ‘Odessa in sonorous verses/Our friend Tumansky has described.’⁵ But he had no great opinion of his talent: ‘Tumansky is a famous fellow, but I do not like him as a poet. May God give him wisdom,’ he told Bestuzhev.⁶ He found, too, Tumansky’s hyperbolic praise – calling him ‘the Jesus Christ of our poetry’⁷ – and servile imitation of his work distasteful. However, they dined together most evenings in Dimitraki’s Greek restaurant, sitting with others over wine until the early hours. An acquaintance of a different kind was ‘the retired corsair Morali’,⁸ a Moor from Tunis, and the skipper of a trading vessel – ‘a very merry character, about thirty-five years old, of medium height, thick-set, with a bronzed, somewhat pock-marked, but very pleasant physiognomy’.⁹ He spoke fluent Italian, some French, and was very fond of Pushkin, whom he accompanied about the town. Some believed that he was a Turkish spy. Pushkin struck up an acquaintance, too, with the Vorontsovs’ family doctor, the thirty-year-old William Hutchinson, whom they had engaged in London in the autumn of 1821. Tall, thin and balding, Hutchinson proved to be an interesting companion, despite his deafness, taciturnity and bad French. The vicissitudes of his emotional life, however, contributed most to his unhappiness. In Kishinev he may have believed himself several times to be in love, but these light and airy flirtations bore no resemblance to the serious and deep involvements he was now to experience. And whereas Inzov had shown a paternal affection towards him, indulgently pardoning Pushkin’s misdemeanours, or, if this was impossible, treating him like an erring adolescent, his relationship with Vorontsov, far more of a grandee than his predecessor, was of a very different kind.

In 1823 Count Mikhail Vorontsov was forty-one. He was the son of the former Russian ambassador in London, who had married into the Sidney family and settled in England permanently after his retirement. Vorontsov had received an English education, had studied at Cambridge, and was, like his father, a convinced Anglophile. His sister, Ekaterina, had married Lord Pembroke in 1808, and English relatives would occasionally visit Odessa. A professional soldier, Vorontsov had fought throughout the Napoleonic wars, being wounded at Borodino, and at Craonne in March 1814 had led the Russian corps that took on Napoleon himself in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. After Waterloo he commanded the Russian Army of Occupation in France, when Aleksandr Raevsky was one of his aides-de-camp. He was extremely wealthy, and had added to his fortune by marrying, in 1819, Elizaveta Branicka, who brought with her an enormous dowry: her mother, Countess Branicka, whose estate was at Belaya Tserkov, just south of Kiev, was one of the richest landowners in Russia. Before taking up his new appointment, he had invested massively in land in New Russia, buying immense estates near Odessa and Taganrog, and in the Crimea. He was ‘tall and thin, with remarkably noble features, as though they had been carved with a chisel, his gaze was unusually calm, and about his thin long lips there eternally played an affectionate and crafty smile’.¹⁰ ‘Perhaps only Alexander could be more charming, when he wanted to please,’ remarked Wiegel. ‘He had a certain exquisite gaucheness, the result of his English upbringing, a manly reserve and a voice which, while never losing its firmness, was remarkably tender.’¹¹ As a commander he had, like Orlov, discouraged brutality and cruelty in enforcing discipline and had set up regimental schools to educate the troops. He was close to a number of the future Decembrists, and had even, together with Nikolay Turgenev, Pushkin’s St Petersburg friend and fellow-Arzamasite, attempted to set up a society of noblemen with the aim of gradually emancipating the serfs. He had thus acquired the reputation of a liberal; a reputation which he was now strenuously attempting to live down, given the current climate in government circles: a mixture of mysticism and reaction, combined with – since the mutiny of the Semenovsky Life Guards in 1820 – paranoid suspicion of anything remotely radical.

When, at the beginning of August, Pushkin returned to Odessa in Vorontsov’s suite, he took a room in the Hotel Rainaud, where he lived throughout his stay. The hotel was on the corner of Deribasovskaya and Rishelevskaya Streets (named after the first two governors, de Ribas and Richelieu); behind it an annexe, which fronted on Theatre Square, housed the Casino de Commerce, or assembly-rooms: ‘The great oval hall, which is surrounded by a gallery, supported on numerous columns, is used for the double purpose of ballroom, and an Exchange, where the merchants sometimes transact their affairs,’ wrote Robert Lyall, who visited Odessa in May 1822.¹² Baron Rainaud, the owner of the hotel and casino, was a French émigré; he also possessed a charming villa on the coast three miles to the east of the city, with wonderful views over the Black Sea. Vorontsov rented it for his wife, who was in the final stages of pregnancy when she arrived from Belaya Tserkov on 6 September: she gave birth to a son two months later.

Pushkin had a corner room on the first floor with a balcony, which gave a view of the sea. The theatre and casino were two minutes away; five minutes’ walk down Deribasovskaya and Khersonskaya Streets took him to César Automne’s restaurant, the best in town –

What of the oysters? they’re here! O joy!

Gluttonous youth flies

To swallow from their sea shells

The plump, living hermitesses,

With a slight squeeze of lemon.

Noise, arguments – light wine

From the cellars is borne

To the table by obliging Automne;

The hours fly, and the dread bill

Meanwhile invisibly mounts.¹³

Wiegel, who had been recruited by Vorontsov to join his staff, soon moved into the room next to Pushkin. Before leaving St Petersburg he had been enjoined by Zhukovsky and Bludov to gain Pushkin’s confidence in order, if possible, to prevent him from behaving injudiciously. Unfortunately, Pushkin did not enjoy his company for long: Vorontsov sacked the vice-governor of Kishinev for dishonesty and appointed Wiegel in his place. ‘Tell me, my dear atheist, how did you manage to live for several years in Kishinev?’ he wrote to Pushkin on 8 October. ‘Although you should indeed have been punished by God for your lack of faith, surely not to such an extent. As far as I am concerned, I can say too: although my sins or, more accurately, my sin is great, it is not so great that fate should have destined this cesspit to be my abode.’¹⁴ The sin Wiegel is referring to is his homosexuality. In a verse reply, Pushkin promised to visit him: ‘I’ll be glad to serve you/With my crazy conversation –/With verses, prose or with my soul,/But, Wiegel, – spare my arse!’ Continuing in prose, he answers a query raised by Wiegel about the Ralli brothers. ‘I think the smallest is best suited to your use; NB he sleeps in the same room as his brother Mikhail and they tumble about unmercifully – from this you can draw important conclusions, I leave them to your experience and good sense – the eldest brother, as you have already noticed, is as stupid as a bishop’s crozier – Vanka jerks off – so the devil with them – embrace them in friendly fashion from me.’¹⁵

Two and a half years earlier, on 2 February 1821, in the governor of Kiev’s drawing-room, Pushkin had been struck by the beauty of a woman wearing a poppy-red toque with a drooping ostrich feather, ‘which set off extraordinarily well her tall stature, luxuriant shoulders and fiery eyes’.¹⁶ This was Karolina Sobańska, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Count Adam Rzewuski, one of several attractive and brilliantly clever brothers and sisters: her sister Ewa Hanska was Balzac’s Étrangère, who, after a long correspondence and liaison with the novelist, married him in 1850, a few months before his death. Karolina had been married at seventeen to Hieronim Sobański, a wealthy landowner and owner of one of the largest trading houses in Odessa. He was, however, thirty-three years older than her; she left him in 1816, and in 1819 met and began a long liaison with Colonel-General Count Jan Witt.^* Since 1817 Witt had been in command of all the military colonies in the south of Russia; in addition he controlled a wide and efficient network of spies and secret police agents. He and Sobańska lived openly together; the liaison was recognized by society, and though its more straitlaced members might have frowned at the irregularity of the relationship, there were few who wished to incur his enmity by cutting Sobańska in public.

When Pushkin met her again, his interest was immediately rekindled: she was, indeed, almost irresistible – not only beautiful, but also lively, charming and provocative, and a talented musician: ‘What grace, what a voice, and what manners!’¹⁷ Few, if any, knew at the time that, as well as being Witt’s mistress, she also worked for him, and was an extremely valuable Russian intelligence agent. Only Wiegel appears to have had an inkling of the truth. ‘When a few years later I learnt […] that for financial gain she joined the ranks of the gendarme agents, I felt an invincible aversion to her. I will not mention the unproved crimes of which she was suspected. What vilenesses were concealed beneath her elegant appearance!’^{* 18} Witt, eager to obtain evidence of subversive activity, encouraged her friendship with Pushkin, as in 1825 he would encourage her liaison with the Polish poet Mickiewicz. She and Pushkin made an excursion by boat together; he accompanied her to the Roman Catholic church, where she dipped her fingers into the stoup and crossed his forehead with holy water; and there were ‘burning readings’ of Constant’s Adolphe,19 a book so appropriate to their circumstances it might have been written with them in mind: the hero, Adolphe, falls in love with Ellénore, a Polish countess, celebrated for her beauty, who is older than he and is being kept by a M. de P***. But Sobanska did not appear to feel more than friendship for him; piqued, he concocted, together with Aleksandr Raevsky, a scheme to arouse her interest. Before it could be put into practice she left the city, and Pushkin consoled himself for her absence by falling in love with Amaliya Riznich, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish banker, married to an Odessa shipping merchant.

‘Mrs Riznich was young, tall, graceful, and extraordinarily beautiful.

Particularly attractive were her fiery eyes, a neck of amazing form and whiteness, and a plait of black hair, nearly five feet long. But her feet were too large; in order to conceal this deficiency, she always wore a long dress, to the ground. She went about wearing a man’s hat and dressed in a semi-riding habit. All this gave her originality and attracted both young and not so young heads and hearts.’²⁰ She distinguished herself by going about much in society – ‘Our married ladies (with the exception of the beautiful and charming Mrs Riznich) avoid company, concealing under the guise of modesty either their simplicity or their ignorance,’ Tumansky wrote to his cousin²¹ – and entertained frequently at home. These were lively gatherings, at which much whist was played: a game of which she was passionately fond. Pushkin was soon obsessed with her. Profiles of ‘Madame Riznich, with her Roman nose’²² crept out of his pen to ornament the manuscript of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. His emotions reached their zenith in the last weeks of October and the first of November with a sudden burst of poems. The passionate love, the burning jealousy they express are far deeper, far more powerful, far more agonizing than anything he had previously experienced. Though intense, the feelings were short-lived. In January or early February 1824, he bade her farewell with a final lyric. She had been pregnant when they first met; early in 1824 she gave birth to a son. Meanwhile her health had deteriorated; the Odessa climate had exacerbated a tendency towards consumption. At the beginning of May she left Odessa; a year later she died in Italy.

Beneath the blue sky of her native land

She languished, faded …

Faded finally, and above me surely

The young shade already hovered;

But there is an unapproachable line between us.

In vain I tried to awaken emotion:

From indifferent lips I heard the news of death,

And received it with indifference.

So this is whom my fiery soul loved

With such painful intensity,

With such tender, agonizing heartache,

With such madness and such torment!

Where now the tortures, where the love? Alas!

For the poor, gullible shade,

For the sweet memory of irretrievable days

In my soul I find neither tears nor reproaches.²³

Riznich did not long remain a widower. In March 1827 Tumansky wrote to Pushkin: ‘One piece of our news, which might interest you, is Riznich’s marriage to the sister of Sobańska, Witt’s mistress […] The new Mme Riznich will probably not deserve either your or my verse on her death; she is a child with a wide mouth and Polish manners.’²⁴

The social scene in Odessa in the autumn and winter of 1823 was a lively one. Pushkin, in a black frock-coat, wearing a peaked cap or black hat over his cropped hair, and carrying an iron cane, hastened through the mud from one gathering to another. General Raevsky, his wife, and his two younger daughters, Mariya and Sofya, paid a lengthy visit to the town. ‘The Raevskys are here,’ Tumansky told his cousin, ‘Mariya is the ideal of Pushkin’s Circassian maid (the poet’s own expression), ugly, but very attractive in the sharpness of her conversation and tenderness of her manner.’²⁵ A sketch of the sixteen-year-old girl with her short nose, heavy jaw and unruly hair escaping from an elaborate bonnet appears in the left-hand margin of a draft of several stanzas from Eugene Onegin.26 Pushkin had finished the first chapter on 22 October and embarked immediately on the second: ‘I am writing with a rapture which I have not had for a long time,’ he told Vyazemsky.²⁷ Several other St Petersburg acquaintances were in Odessa. Aleksandr Sturdza, the subject, in 1819, of two hostile epigrams, turned out to be not such a pillar of reaction after all. ‘Monarchical Sturdza is here; we are not only friends, but also think the same about one or two things, without being sly to one another.’²⁸ However, he quarrelled with the Arzamasite Severin, relieving his anger with an epigram ridiculing Severin’s pretensions to nobility.

He saw, too, General Kiselev and his wife Sofya, who frequently travelled over from the headquarters of the Second Army at Tulchin. Earlier that year, after the officers of the Odessa regiment had revolted against their colonel, Kiselev had sacked the brigade commander, General Mordvinov. The latter had challenged him to a duel. Kiselev accepted the challenge, the two met, and Mordvinov was killed. Kiselev immediately sent the emperor an account of the affair, saying that the manner of the challenge left him ‘no choice between the strict application of the law and the most sacred obligations of honour’.²⁹ Alexander pardoned him and retained him as chief of staff of the Second Army. The incident caused much stir at the time, and particularly fascinated Pushkin, who, ‘for many days talked of nothing else, asking others for their opinion as to whose side was more honourable, who had been the more self-sacrificial and so on’.³⁰ Though he inclined towards Mordvinov, he could not but admire Kiselev’s sangfroid. Also in Odessa were Sofya’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Olga, and her recently acquired husband, General Lev Naryshkin, who was Vorontsov’s cousin. Olga was as beautiful as her sister, but ‘in her beauty there was nothing maidenly or touching […] in the very flower of youth she seemed already armoured with great experience. Everything was calculated, and she preserved the arrows of coquetry for the conquest of the mighty.’³¹ Wiegel’s last sentence is a hidden reference to a relationship which was well-known in Odessa: soon after her arrival Olga became Vorontsov’s mistress. Naryshkin, seventeen years older than his wife, lacked the character and energy to complain – ‘always sleepy, always good-natured’ was his brother-in-law’s description of him³² – and, in addition, his affection for his wife was lukewarm: he had long been hopelessly in love with his aunt, Mariya Naryshkina, for many years the mistress of Alexander I.

During the winter there were dances twice a week at the Vorontsovs; Pushkin was assiduous in attending. On 12 December they gave a large ball, at which his impromptu verses on a number of the ladies present caused some offence. On Christmas Day Vorontsov entertained the members of his staff to dinner; Wiegel arrived from Kishinev while they were at table, and Pushkin, learning this, slipped back to the hotel to see him. On New Year’s Eve, Tumansky wrote, ‘we had a good frolic at the masquerade, which the countess [Elizaveta Vorontsova] put on for us, and at which she herself played the fool very cleverly and smartly, that is, she had a charmingly satirical costume and intrigued with everyone in it’.³³

Liprandi had not forgotten Pushkin’s disappointment at not being able to visit Charles XII’s camp at Varnitsa during their trip in the winter of 1821. Planning another visit to the district, he invited Pushkin to accompany him. The latter accepted with alacrity. He had just been reading a manuscript copy of Ryleev’s narrative poem Voinarovsky. ‘Ryleev’s Voinarovsky is incomparably better than all his Dumy,* his style has matured and is becoming a truly narrative one, which we still almost completely lack,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev.³⁴ The hero of Ryleev’s poem is the nephew of Mazepa, the hetman of the Dnieper Cossacks who joined with Charles against Peter the Great and died at Varnitsa in 1709. Pushkin was attracted by the figure of Mazepa himself; three lines of Ryleev’s poem describing Mazepa’s nightmares, ‘He often saw, at dead of night;/The wife of the martyr Kochubey/And their ravished daughter,’³⁵ planted the germ which grew into his own poem, Poltava. Byron, too, had devoted a poem to the hetman: his Mazeppa is an account of an early episode of the hero’s life, when, according to Voltaire, the poet’s source, ‘an affair he had with the wife of a Polish nobleman having been discovered, the husband had him bound naked to the back of a wild horse and sent him forth in this state’.³⁶

On 17 January 1824 they left Odessa for Tiraspol, where they put up with Liprandi’s brother. That evening they had supper with General Sabaneev. Pushkin was cheerful and very talkative: the general’s wife, Pulkheriya Yakovlevna, was much taken with him. The following day, accompanied by Liprandi’s brother, they set out early for Bendery. Forewarned of their coming, the police chief, A.I. Barozzi, had provided a guide: Nikola Iskra, a Little Russian, who ‘appeared to be about sixty, was tall, with an upright figure, rather lean, with thick yellowish-grey hair on his head and chest and good teeth’.³⁷ He claimed that as a young man he had been sent by his mother to the Swedish camp to sell milk, butter and eggs: which, Liprandi calculated, would make him now about 135 years old. However, it was certainly true that his description of Charles XII’s appearance bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations in the historical works Liprandi had brought with him, and he showed an equally remarkable ability, when they arrived at the site of the camp, to describe its plan and fortifications and to interpret the irregularities of the terrain. Much to Pushkin’s annoyance, however, he was not only unable to show them Mazepa’s grave, but even disclaimed any knowledge of the hetman. They returned to Bendery with Pushkin in a very disgruntled mood. He cheered up, however, after dinner with Barozzi, and in the afternoon set out in a carriage, accompanied by a policeman, to view, as he hoped, the ruined palaces and fountains at Kaushany, the seat of the khans of Budzhak. Later in the evening he returned as disgruntled as before: there were – as Liprandi had warned him two years earlier – no ruins to admire in Kaushany. He was back in Odessa on the nineteenth. Liprandi did not return until the beginning of February. On the evening of his arrival he dined with the Vorontsovs, where a sulky Pushkin was making desultory conversation with the countess and Olga Naryshkina. He vanished after the company rose from table. Calling at his hotel room later, Liprandi found him in the most cheerful frame of mind imaginable: with his coat off, he was sitting on Morali’s knee and tickling the retired corsair until he roared. This was the only pleasure he had in Odessa, he told Liprandi.

Pushkin had completed his second southern poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, the previous autumn, and had begun to think about publication. Gnedich, though eager, had ruled himself out through excessive sharpness; he therefore turned to Vyazemsky, who agreed to see the work through the press. However, there was a complication. The work was suffused with memories of the Crimea and, in particular, of his love for Ekaterina Raevskaya. Now, three years later, he was not anxious to call attention to this, all the more so as Ekaterina was now Orlov’s wife. He hit on a simple solution in a letter to his brother: ‘I will send Vyazemsky The Fountain – omitting the love ravings – but it’s a pity!’³⁸ Sending the manuscript to Vyazemsky on 4 November, he wrote, ‘I have thrown out that which the censor would have thrown out if I had not, and that which I did not want to exhibit before the public. If these disconnected fragments seem to you worthy of type, then print them, and do me a favour, don’t give in to that bitch the censorship, bite back in defence of every line, and bite it to death if you can, in memory of me […] another request: add a foreword or afterword to Bakhchisaray, if not for my sake, then for the sake of your lustful Minerva, Sofya Kiseleva; I enclose a police report as material; draw on it for information (without, of course, mentioning the source).’^{* 39} With the letter he sent a copy of ‘Platonic Love’, the immodest poem he had addressed to Sofya in 1819. ‘Print it quickly; I ask this not for the sake of fame, but for the sake of Mammon,’ he urged in December.⁴⁰

But his hopes of concealing his former feelings for Ekaterina were soon sadly dented. In St Petersburg Bestuzhev and Ryleev had been preparing a second number of their literary almanac, Pole Star. They obtained Pushkin’s permission to include some of his verses which had been circulating in manuscript in St Petersburg, and others which they had obtained from Tumansky. When the almanac came out in December, Pushkin was horrified to discover that the final three lines of ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, the coded reference to Ekaterina which he had specifically asked Bestuzhev not to include, had in fact been printed. ‘It makes me sad to see that I am treated like a dead person, with no respect for my wishes or my miserable possessions,’ he wrote reproachfully to Bestuzhev. Worse was to follow. In February, just before the publication of the poem, he wrote to Bestuzhev again: ‘I am glad that my Fountain is making a stir. The absence of plan is not my fault. I reverentially put into verse a young woman’s tale, Aux douces loix des vers je pliais les accents/De sa bouche aimable et naïve.^† By the way, I wrote it only for myself, but am publishing it because I need money.’⁴¹ As with previous letters to Bestuzhev, he addressed this care of Nikolay Grech. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of Faddey Bulgarin – a close associate of Grech, and from 1825 co-editor, with him, of Son of the Fatherland – who shamelessly printed an extract from it in his paper, Literary Leaves, adding that it was taken from a letter of the author to one of his St Petersburg friends. Anyone who knew of Pushkin’s visit to the Crimea could make an intelligent guess at the possessor of the ‘lovable and naïve mouth’; even worse, however, were the conclusions Ekaterina herself might draw. ‘I once fell head over heels in love,’ he wrote to Bestuzhev later that year. ‘In such cases I usually write elegies, as another has wet dreams. But is it a friendly act to hang out my soiled sheets for show? God forgive you, but you shamed me in the current Star – printing the last 3 lines of my elegy; what the devil possessed me apropos of the Bakhchisaray fountain also to write some sentimental lines and mention my elegiac beauty there. Picture my despair, when I saw them printed – the journal could fall into her hands. What would she think of me, seeing with what eagerness I chat about her with one of my Petersburg friends. How can she know that she is not named by me, that the letter was unsealed and printed by Bulgarin – that the devil knows who delivered the damned Elegy to you – and that no one is to blame. I confess that I value just one thought of this woman more than the opinions of all the journals in the world and of all our public.’⁴²

As with The Prisoner, Pushkin’s new narrative poem was eagerly anticipated in literary circles: before publication it was being read everywhere, and even manuscript copies were circulating in St Petersburg – much to Pushkin’s annoyance, since he feared this would affect sales. ‘Pletnev tells me The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is in everyone’s hands. Thank you, my friends, for your gracious care for my fame!’ he wrote sarcastically to Lev, whom he deemed responsible.⁴³ His fears proved unjustified. Having seen the poem through the censorship, Vyazemsky had it printed in Moscow at a cost of 500 roubles, and then began negotiations to sell the entire print-run jointly to two booksellers, Shiryaev in Moscow and Smirdin in St Petersburg. ‘How I have sold the Fountain!’ he exulted to Bestuzhev in March. ‘Three thousand roubles for 1,200 copies for a year, and I’m paid for all printing costs. This is in the European style and deserves to be known.’⁴⁴ He saw to it that it was by contributing an article about the sale to the April number of News of Literature: ‘For a line of The Fountain of Bakhchisaray more has been paid than has ever been paid previously for any Russian verse.’ The book-seller had gained ‘the grateful respect of the friends of culture by valuing a work of the mind not according to its size or weight’.⁴⁵ Shalikov, in the Ladies’ Journal, did the calculation and came out with the figure of eight roubles a line. Bulgarin, too, commented on the transaction in Literary Leaves, while the Russian Invalid remarked patriotically that it was a ‘proof that not in England alone and not the English alone pay with a generous hand for elegant works of poetry’.⁴⁶

Vyazemsky sent a first instalment of the advance in March. Pushkin immediately paid Inzov a debt of 360 roubles which he was ‘embarrassed and humiliated’ not to have settled earlier,⁴⁷ and dashed off a grateful letter to Vyazemsky: ‘One thing troubles me, you sold the entire edition for 3000r., but how much did it cost you to print it? You are still making me a gift, you shameless fellow! For Christ’s sake take what is due to you out of the remainder, and send it here. There’s no point in letting it grow. It won’t lie around with me for long, although I am really not extravagant. I’ll pay my old debts and sit down to a new poem. Since I’m not one of our 18th century writers: I write for myself, and publish for money, certainly not for the smiles of the fair sex.’^{* 48}

The Fountain of Bakhchisaray was published on 10 March. Vyazemsky had responded to Pushkin’s plea and had contributed an unsigned introductory article which bore the strange title ‘Instead of a foreword. A conversation between the publisher and a classicist from the Vyborg Side or Vasilevsky Island’.^† This had little to do with the poem, but was a provocative attack, from the standpoint of romanticism, on the literary old guard and classicism. An immediate reply appeared in the Herald of Europe; Pushkin came to Vyazemsky’s defence with a short letter to Son of the Fatherland; and, much to Vyazemsky’s delight, a controversy developed which rumbled on in the literary pages for months. Turgenev disapproved: ‘Stop squabbling,’ he advised his friend. ‘It is unworthy of you and I do not recognize you in all this polemical rubbish.’⁴⁹ Onlookers took a similar view: ‘There has been a shower of lampoons, epigrams, arguments, gibes, personalities, each more nasty and more stupid than the last,’ Yakov Saburov wrote to his brother.⁵⁰

Shorter than The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray has an equally simple plot. Girey, khan of the Crimea, falls in love with the latest captive added to his harem, the Polish princess Mariya. She dies, either of illness or at the hand of Girey’s previous favourite, Zarema, who is drowned by the khan. He builds a marble fountain in memory of Mariya. For the subject of the poem Pushkin adapted a Crimean legend which he had heard from the Raevskys at Gurzuf, and which Muravev-Apostol recounts in his Journey through Tauris in 1820. An extract from this work, describing the palace at Bakhchisaray, was appended to the poem when it was published. The Fountain was greeted with a general chorus of praise: there was no pedantic carping at detail and little criticism. Pushkin’s own opinion was less favourable. ‘Between ourselves,’ he had written to Vyazemsky, ‘the Fountain of Bakhchisaray is rubbish, but its epigraph is charming.’⁵¹ This, attributed to the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sadi, runs: ‘Many, similarly to myself, visited this fountain; but some are no more, others are journeying far.’ The second half of the saying came to have a political significance: when the critic Polevoy quoted it in an article in the Moscow Telegraph in 1827, he was clearly alluding to the fate of the Decembrists, some of whom had been executed, others exiled to Siberia. Pushkin had not taken the quotation directly from the Persian poet, but from the French translation of a prose passage in Thomas Moore’s ‘oriental romance’ Lalla Rookh (1817), which refers to ‘a fountain, on which some hand had rudely traced those well-known words from the Garden of Sadi, – “Many, like me, have viewed this fountain, but they are gone, and their eyes are closed forever!”’⁵² Despite this borrowing, he was no admirer of Moore. ‘The whole of Lalla Rookh is not worth ten lines of Tristram Shandy,’ he exclaimed; and, commenting on the Fountain, told Vyazemsky: ‘The eastern style was a model for me, inasmuch as is possible for us rational, cold Europeans. By the by, do you know why I do not like Moore? – because he is excessively eastern. He imitates in a childish and ugly manner the childishness and ugliness of Sadi, Hafiz and Mahomet. – A European, even when in ecstasy over eastern splendour, should retain the taste and eye of a European. That is why Byron is so charming in The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and so on.’⁵³ This was the effect at which he aimed, and Byron was undoubtedly his inspiration: in 1830 he remarked: ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than The Prisoner and, like it, reflects my reading of Byron, about whom I then raved.’⁵⁴ Pushkin was right: The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is weaker than The Prisoner; is indeed the weakest of all his narrative poems, though the portrayal of the languid, surfeited life of the harem breathes an indolent sensuality, while the scene between Mariya and Zarema has, as he remarked, ‘dramatic merit’.⁵⁵

But the real significance of the poem for Pushkin – and, indeed, for Russian literature – lay not in its aesthetic, but rather in its commercial value. At the beginning of his stay in Odessa and, as usual, hard-pressed for money, Pushkin had written despairingly to his brother: ‘Explain to my father that I cannot live without his money. To live by my pen is impossible with the present censorship; I have not studied the carpenter’s trade; I cannot become a teacher; although I know scripture and the four elementary rules – but I am a civil servant against my will – and cannot take retirement. – Everything and everyone deceives me – on whom should I depend, if not on my nearest and dearest. I will not live on Vorontsov’s bounty – I will not and that is all – extremes can lead to extremes – I am pained by my father’s indifference to my state – although his letters are very amiable.’⁵⁶ The successful sale of The Fountain changed his views in an instant. ‘I begin to respect our booksellers and to think that our trade is really no worse than any other,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky.⁵⁷ For the first time financial independence seemed possible; the career of a professional writer beckoned. This new-found self-sufficiency strengthened his belief in his talent, his sense of himself as an artist: it was to affect materially his behaviour during the remaining months in Odessa.

Another chance to exploit his work commercially soon arrived; in June he was offered 2,000 roubles for the right to bring out a second edition of The Prisoner of the Caucasus. But before Lev in St Petersburg could close the deal, he was forestalled. The previous year a German translation of The Prisoner had come out. August Oldekop, the publisher of the St Petersburg Gazette and the Sankt-Peterburgische Zeitung, now brought out this translation again, printing the original Russian text opposite the German. This was a great success and killed Pushkin’s hopes of selling a second edition of the poem. ‘I will have to petition for redress under the law,’ he told Vyazemsky.⁵⁸ But the law respecting authors’ rights was unclear and, though the Censorship Committee put a temporary ban on the sale of the edition, this was soon lifted. In addition, Oldekop muddied the waters by insisting that he had bought the right to publish the edition from Pushkin’s father. When Vyazemsky anxiously enquired whether this was true, and asked Pushkin to send him, if it was not, a power of attorney, giving him the right to act on his friend’s part against Oldekop, Pushkin – who was by this time in Mikhailovskoe – replied: ‘Oldekop stole and lied; my father made no kind of bargain with him. I would send you a power of attorney; but you must wait; stamped paper is only to be had in town; some kind of witnessing has to be done in town – and I am in the depths of the country.’⁵⁹ The indictment of Oldekop’s villainy is certainly positive; but is the disinclination to ride into Pskov for a power of attorney prompted by indolence, by a healthy scepticism about the process of law, or by the suspicion that his father – with whom he was on extremely bad terms – had not been wholly honest with him? Six months later, when he was afraid that The Fountain was also being pirated, and was therefore having to turn down offers for it, he wrote to Lev, ‘Selivanovsky is offering me 12,000 roubles, and I have to turn it down – this way I’ll die of hunger – what with my father and Oldekop. Farewell, I’m in a rage.’⁶⁰

Outside Russia the heady days of the revolution in Spain and of Ypsilanti’s Greek revolt, both of which had so aroused Pushkin’s enthusiasm, had passed, and a tide of reaction, encouraged by Alexander I, was sweeping over Europe. At the Congress of Verona France asked to be allowed to march into Spain – as Austria had marched into Naples in 1821 – to restore order in the Peninsula; despite British protests, this was agreed, and in April 1823 the duke of Angoulême, at the head of a powerful army, crossed the Bidassoa. Ferdinand, a prisoner since 1820, was restored to the throne, and, in an orgy of revenge, Colonel Rafael Riego, the leader of the revolution, and many other insurgents were executed. Pushkin, disgusted by this, and disillusioned with the Greeks – ‘The Jesuits have stuffed our heads with Themistocles and Pericles, and we have come to imagine that this dirty people, consisting of bandits and shopkeepers, is their legitimate descendant, the heir to their fame in school’⁶¹ – came to the conclusion, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor some sixty years later, that man did not deserve freedom. In ‘Of freedom the solitary sower’, ‘an imitation of a parable by that moderate democrat Jesus Christ (A sower went out to sow his seed)’^* he expressed this new cynicism:

Graze, placid peoples!

What good to herds the gift of freedom?

They must be slaughtered or be shorn.

Their inheritance from generation to generation

Is the yoke with bells and the whip.⁶²

The two-year moratorium on political verse, agreed with Karamzin, had reached its term long ago, and Pushkin relapsed into his former ways with ‘The motionless sentinel slumbered on the royal threshold …’, a satirical portrait of Alexander after his return from the Congress of Verona.⁶³

Though poems such as these were not intended for publication, they were known to Pushkin’s friends – ‘Of freedom the solitary sower’ was included in a letter to Turgenev – and circulated in manuscript: by writing them he was flirting with danger. He was flirting with danger, too, given the pietistic fervour then in vogue, when he wrote to Küichelbecker: ‘You want to know what I am doing – I am writing motley stanzas of a romantic poem – and am taking lessons in pure atheism. There is an Englishman here, a deaf philosopher, the only intelligent atheist I have yet met. He has written over 1,000 pages to prove that no intelligent being, Creator and governor can exist, in passing destroying the weak proofs of the immortality of the soul. His system is not so consoling as is usually thought, but unfortunately is the most plausible.’⁶⁴ The deaf English philosopher was William Hutchinson, the Vorontsovs’ personal physician, a proponent of the new, scientific atheism, which Pushkin – hitherto acquainted only with the rational atheism of the eighteenth century – found excitingly original. This letter, like his verse, circulated in manuscript. Learning of this, Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin in some agitation, sending his letter by a traveller to Odessa and marking it ‘Secret’. ‘Please be cautious both with your tongue and your pen,’ he urged. ‘Do not risk your future. Your present exile is better than anywhere else.’⁶⁵ It was too late. ‘Thanks to the not wholly sensible publicity given to it by Pushkin’s friends and especially by the late Aleksandr Ivanovich Turgenev, who, as we have heard, rushed round his acquaintances with it, the letter came to the knowledge of the administration.’⁶⁶ It was to have a decisive influence on his future.

Pushkin’s flirtation with danger extended into his emotional life. From the turn of the year a new face appears among those idly scribbled by his pen while waiting for inspiration. It is that of the governor’s wife, Elizaveta – or, as he called her, Elise – Vorontsova, with whom he was now violently in love. There are more portraits of her in his manuscripts than of anyone else: indeed, one page of the second chapter of Eugene Onegin has no fewer than six sketches of her. She is represented constantly in profile, with and without a bonnet; Pushkin returns over and over again to her graceful shoulders and neck, sometimes encircled by her famous necklace: ‘Potocki gave balls and evening parties,’ Aleksandra Smirnova-Rosset wrote. ‘At his house I saw Elizaveta Vorontsova for the first time, in a pink satin dress. Then people wore cordelière necklaces. Hers was made of the largest of diamonds.’⁶⁷

At thirty-one, Elise was seven years older than Pushkin. She was not conventionally beautiful, like her friend Olga Naryshkina, but had a vivacity and charm which were enchanting. ‘With her innate Polish frivolity and coquetry she desired to please,’ commented Wiegel, ‘and no one succeeded better than her in this. […] She did not have that which is called beauty; but the swift, tender gaze of her sweet small eyes penetrated one completely; I have never seen anything comparable to the smile on her lips, which seemed to demand a kiss.’⁶⁸ Count Sollogub, who met her years later, devotes a passage to her in his memoirs: ‘Small and plump, with somewhat coarse and irregular features, Elizaveta Ksaverevna was, nonetheless, one of the most attractive women of her time. Her whole being was suffused with such soft, enchanting, feminine grace, such cordiality, such irreproachable elegance, that it was easy to understand why such people as Pushkin […] Raevsky and many, many others fell head over heels in love with Vorontsova.’⁶⁹

Pushkin had known her since the previous autumn; in the new year her attractions began to supplant those of Amaliya Riznich; a turning-point in their relationship occurred in February, when Vorontsov was absent in Kishinev. On his manuscripts Pushkin only notes events he considers significant: on 8 February 1824, opposite the first stanza of the third chapter of Eugene Onegin, he jotted down ‘soupé chez C.E.W’ – ‘had supper with Countess Elise Woronzof’.⁷⁰ The relationship was to be short, and much interrupted. Pushkin himself was in Kishinev for two weeks in March. When he returned to Odessa he found that Elise had left on a visit to her mother in Belaya Tserkov; she remained there until 20 April. As the weather grew warmer they began to meet at Baron Rainaud’s villa. ‘Rainaud has successfully made use of the cliffs which surround his domain,’ wrote a visitor. ‘In the midst of the cliffs a bathing-place has been constructed. It is shaped like a large shell, attached to the cliffs.’⁷¹ This was the site of their assignations:

The shelter of love, it is eternally full

With dark, damp cool,

There the constrained waves’

Prolonged roar is never silent.⁷²

The affair brought Pushkin two enemies. Aleksandr Raevsky, who was himself in love with Elise, and who enjoyed her favours during her visits to Belaya Tserkov, had originally encouraged her not to reject his friend’s advances in order to divert attention from their own relationship. But when his cunning overreached itself and pretence became reality, his attitude towards Pushkin changed: the latter was no longer a naive young pupil, but a serious rival in love, and Raevsky, while maintaining a pretence of friendship, lost no opportunity to undermine his position. The second enemy was Vorontsov himself, who, though the injured husband, did not in principle disapprove of his wife’s infidelity. ‘Countess Vorontsova is a fashionable lady, very pleasant, who likes to take lovers, to which her husband has no objection whatsoever; on the contrary he patronizes them, because this gives him freedom to take mistresses without constraint,’ a contemporary observed.⁷³ Nevertheless, it went somewhat against the grain to be cuckolded by this self-opinionated young upstart, without a penny to his name and no profession to speak of. ‘You’re fond of Pushkin, I think,’ he once said to Wiegel; ‘can’t you persuade him to occupy himself with something sensible; under your guidance?’⁷⁴ Matters were made worse when Pushkin succumbed to that common human trait which leads us to dislike those we have injured. He had no notion of preserving the decencies and allowing himself to be patronized by Vorontsov as one of his wife’s gigolos; on the contrary, he was determined to assert that he was the equal of anyone, even if the other were nearly twice his age, the possessor of immense wealth, and governor-general of New Russia to boot. As usual, he voiced his hostility in an epigram:

Half an English lord, half a merchant

Half a sage, half an ignoramus,

Half a scoundrel, but there is the hope,

That he’ll be a whole one in the end⁷⁵

– a verse hardly calculated to endear him to Vorontsov; more likely, indeed, to strengthen the latter’s opinion formed earlier that year that, from the point of view of his own career, he had acted unwisely in taking over responsibility for Pushkin from Inzov. ‘Should there be foul weather, Vorontsov will not stand up for you and will not defend you, if it is true that he himself is suspected of suspiciousness,’ Vyazemsky warned. ‘In addition I openly confess: I put no firm trust in Vorontsov’s chivalry. He is a pleasant, well-meaning man, but will not take a quixotic line against the government in respect of a person or an idea, no matter who or what these are, if the government forces him to declare either for them or for it.’⁷⁶

Vorontsov was indeed beginning to feel that he was ‘suspected of suspiciousness’ and had fallen into disfavour in St Petersburg. The tsar had ignored him during a visit to Tulchin to inspect the Second Army in October 1823, and had passed him over in the annual round of promotions at the end of that year; furthermore, he had recently been reprimanded for recommending as governor of Ekaterinoslav a general who had been involved in ‘intrigues and disturbances’ in the army.⁷⁷ Was he not, he thought, perhaps suspicious because of his association with Pushkin, whose name was anathema in conservative circles? Here the poet was automatically assumed to be the author of any new seditious verses: in January 1824, for example, Major-General Skobelev, provost-marshal of the First Army, in a report to the army’s commander, attributed to Pushkin a poem entitled ‘Thoughts on Freedom’ – of whose composition the poet was wholly innocent – and wrote, ‘would it not be better to forbid this Pushkin, who has employed his reasonable talents for obvious evil, to publish his perverted verse? […] It would be better if the author of these harmful libels were to be, as a reward, immediately deprived of a few strips of skin. Why should there be leniency towards a man on whom the general voice of well-thinking citizens has pronounced a strict sentence?’⁷⁸ Vorontsov therefore took pains to distance himself from the poet, at the same time keeping him under close surveillance. ‘As for Pushkin, I have exchanged only four words with him in the last fortnight,’ he wrote to Kiselev in March; ‘he is afraid of me because he is well aware that at the first rumour I hear of him I will dismiss him and that then no one will wish to take him on, and I am sure that he is now behaving much better and is more reserved in his conversations than he was with the good General Inzov […] From everything that I learn of him through Gurev [the mayor of Odessa], through Kaznacheev [the head of his chancellery] and through the police, he is being very sensible and restrained at the moment, if he were the contrary I would dismiss him, and personally would be enchanted to do so for I do not love his manners and am no enthusiast of his talent – one cannot be a real poet without study and he has undertaken none.’⁷⁹ A few days later Kaznacheev wrote to the Kishinev police chief: ‘Our young poet Pushkin with the permission of Count Mikhail Semenovich [Vorontsov] has been given several days leave in Kishinev. He is a fine noble young fellow; but often harms himself by saying too much, loves consorting with Ultra-liberals and is sometimes incautious. The count writes to me from the Crimea to instruct you to keep a surreptitious eye on this ardent youth: note where he makes dangerous remarks, with whom he consorts, and how he occupies himself or spends his time. If you find out anything, give him a tactful hint to be careful and write to me about it in detail.’⁸⁰

Just before his departure for Kishinev Pushkin had received the first instalment of the proceeds from the sale of The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. Experiencing an unaccustomed, exhilarating feeling of independence, and cock-a-hoop with his success, he became even more outrageous in his behaviour. Unfortunately for Vorontsov, Pushkin had been attached to his bureau by imperial fiat, and the governor-general could not, therefore, sack him or transfer him – as he could his other civil servants – without the express permission of the emperor. He now resolved to take this step: at the end of March he told Kiselev that he had decided to ask the Foreign Minister, Nesselrode, to transfer Pushkin elsewhere. ‘Here there are too many people and especially ones who flatter his conceit,’ he wrote.⁸¹ He made the same point to Nesselrode: ‘There are many flatterers who praise his work; this arouses in him a harmful delusion and turns his head with the belief that he is a remarkable writer, whereas he is only the weak imitator of a writer on whose behalf very little can be said (Lord Byron) […] If Pushkin were to live in another province he would find more encouragement to work and would avoid the dangerous company here.’ He had only Pushkin’s best interests in mind in making this request for his transfer, which he begged Nesselrode to bring to the emperor’s attention.⁸² A month later, having had no reply, he concluded a letter to Nesselrode about the Greek refugees in Moldavia with the words: ‘By the by I repeat my prayer – deliver me from Pushkin; he may be an excellent fellow and a good poet, but I don’t want to have him any longer, either in Odessa or Kishinev.’⁸³ On 16 May he finally received a reply, but one which was unsatisfactorily inconclusive: ‘I have put your letter on Pushkin before the emperor,’ Nesselrode wrote. ‘He is completely satisfied with your judgement of this young man, and orders me to inform you of this officially. He has reserved his instructions on what should be finally undertaken with regard to him until a later date.’⁸⁴ Vorontsov’s patience was running out. He had intended to leave Odessa for the Crimea in the middle of May, to spend the summer there with his family and a large number of guests. However, his daughter fell ill, and the departure had to be postponed. Constrained to remain in Odessa, and waiting vainly for the emperor’s permission to transfer Pushkin, he found that circumstances had provided an opportunity to rid himself for some time at least of the poet’s presence.

‘The neighbourhood of Odessa is very bleak and much infested by locusts, which come in immense bodies and in an hour after they have alighted, every vestige of verdure is effaced,’ an English visitor wrote.⁸⁵ In fact, the whole of New Russia, including the Crimea, was subject to these plagues. At the end of 1823 the Ministry of Internal Affairs had allocated 100,000 roubles to Vorontsov for a campaign against the infestations expected the following year. From the beginning of May 1824 reports that the insects had begun to hatch flooded in to Odessa. In July the swarms took wing, with catastrophic results, especially in Kherson province and in the Crimea. ‘Locusts have spread in terrible quantities,’ ran an official report. ‘The river Salgir was arrested in its flow by a swarm of these harmful insects, which had fallen into it, and 150 men worked for several days and nights to clear the stream. […] Some houses near Simferopol were so filled with the insects that the inhabitants had to abandon them.’⁸⁶