1824–6 After misdemeanours in Odessa, exile continued in greater isolation of parental estate of Mikhailovskoe. The Gipsies (1824); Count Nulin; Boris Godunov (1825). Misses Decembrist Revolt of 1825, ruthlessly suppressed by new emperor, Nicholas I.
1826 September Summoned to Moscow by Nicholas I. Freed from exile, with tsar as personal censor; subject thereafter to ‘surveillance, guidance and counselling’ of Count Benkendorf, Head of the Third Section (Secret Police). Resumed life in Moscow and St Petersburg; restlessness, search for stability.
1828 Poltava (narrative poem on Peter the Great and Mazeppa). Four-month visit to Transcaucasia. Witnessed Russian army in action against the Turks.
1830 Proposed to Natalya Goncharova (1812–63). In September – November stranded by cholera epidemic at new estate of Boldino: first and most productive ‘Boldino autumn’ (Onegin; lyrics; Little Tragedies; Tales of Belkin; The Little House in Kolomna).
1831 Married in February. Settled in St Petersburg. Completed Onegin.
1833 Historical research. Travelled to Urals. Second Boldino autumn (The Bronze Horseman; work on The Queen of Spades).
1833–6 Unhappy period in St Petersburg: humiliations at court (with requests for retirement from government service refused), mounting debts and marital insecurity. Relatively little creative work: The Captain’s Daughter (completed 1836) and some outstanding lyrics.
1837 27 January Provoked into duel with Baron D’Anthès, adopted son of Dutch ambassador, and shot in stomach. Died two days later. ‘Secret’ burial decreed to avoid expressions of public sympathy.
Introduction
1
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is by the common consent of his compatriots Russia’s greatest writer. He is to Russia what Shakespeare is to England, Goethe to Germany and Dante to Italy. He lived at the springtime of Russian literature, which had gained its independent language only some fifty years before his birth. There was no unified language before Mikhail Lomonosov formulated it in his famous grammar of 1755. Before that, Church Slavonic coexisted with the disparate dialects of the civil service and the business community. With the growth of a centralized state a national language appeared.
In this new period Russian writers leaned heavily on Western models, and the nobility, to which Pushkin belonged, spoke French before it did Russian. French phraseology, often in its more flowery form, left its stamp on dramatists, novelists and poets during the reign of the German Empress Catherine the Great (1762–96), who loved all things French, corresponded with Voltaire and invited Diderot to St Petersburg. She freed the nobility from the service imposed on them by Peter the Great (1672–1725) and encouraged them to use their leisure in the pursuit of literature and the arts, as long as they didn’t question the fundamentals of the Russian state, in particular serfdom. Enlightenment figures at home were imprisoned or sent to Siberia.
While it would be wrong to say that Pushkin was the first authentically Russian writer, since predecessors like the fabulist Ivan Krylov and the playwright Denis Fonvizin were already incorporating the vernacular in their work, nevertheless he was the first to treat the major events of Russian history and society in an accessible way. He borrowed themes and styles from Western literature only to give them new twists from a Russian perspective. Although he tried his hand at most genres, he was essentially a poet. The new literary language had blossomed into a poetic culture in the generation preceding him, dominated by the Romantic Vasily Zhukovsky and the more classical Konstantin Batyushkov. Zhukovsky gave the language a new expressiveness and musicality, Batyushkov a fresh clarity and precision. Pushkin learned from them both. In his own generation a cluster of poets appeared – Yazykov, Delvig, Baratynsky – who became known as the Pushkin pleiad and appear as minor characters in Eugene Onegin. As elsewhere in contemporary Europe this poetic heyday was short-lived, superseded by the prose novel – Gogol, Turgenev – with which Western readers are more familiar. Pushkin himself went on to produce an historical novel, The Captain’s Daughter (1836), and other works of prose. His poetry reflected a time of hope among the younger members of the nobility, epitomized by two dates – 1812 and 1825.
In 1812, Russia’s armies defeated Napoleon. Yet on reaching Paris their younger officers were drawn to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Back in Russia, they were keen to introduce reforms – abolition of serfdom, a constitutional monarchy, even a republic. Having no influence on the increasingly reactionary Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825), who headed the Holy Alliance, they began forming secret societies on the model of the Western Carbonari1 movements, aimed at overturning the government. Pushkin, then aged thirteen, befriended some of these officers when they were quartered in the grounds of his lycée. Several of his close schoolfriends would later join the secret societies. For the liberal nobility 1812 was a wake-up call. Officers were impressed by the courage of their serf soldiers. Soon, on leaving the lycée, Pushkin was writing poems deploring serfdom. Circulating all over Russia, they earned him the honour of becoming the Tsar’s first political victim, exiled in 1820. The years of hope came to an end when the young revolutionaries attempted an ill-organized coup d’état on the death of Alexander, which was mercilessly crushed by the new Tsar, Nicholas I (1825–55). The date of the revolt, 14 December 1825, gave the participants the name ‘Decembrists’.
Pushkin was still in exile at the time. During the previous years he had met the conspirators, but was not admitted to their ranks because of his volatility and indiscretion. However, when the new Tsar called him to Moscow and asked him what he would have done had he been present at the attempted revolt, Pushkin replied that he would have stood with his friends on the Senate Square in St Petersburg, the chosen place of the insurrection. Nicholas played a cat-and-mouse game with him, revoking his exile and promising to be his personal protector and censor. In fact, the task fell to the chief of the secret police. Pushkin married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova in 1831, who had no interest in his work and was happy only at court functions, which Pushkin hated, particularly after having been assigned a demeaning rank by the Tsar out of keeping with his age. Nor was he, either as a small landowner or a professional writer, able to pay for his wife’s expensive tastes.
From this moment Pushkin was trapped by the court until his death in a duel with a French émigré officer, the Baron D’ Anthès, who was paying attentions to his wife. Pushkin was thirty-seven. Later, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok remarked that it was not D’ Anthès’s bullet that killed Pushkin, but ‘lack of air’ in the court environment.
Although the Pushkin age was short-lived, and Pushkin himself died at thirty-seven, his work provided the seeds for the later Russian novel and several operas. Eugene Onegin inaugurated a lineage of superfluous men and self-sacrificing women in the novels of Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, and in Tchaikovsky’s opera version of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse. Pushkin suggested the plots of Dead Souls and The Inspector General to Nikolai Gogol, appreciating the latter’s gifts for the grotesque that were outside his more classical bent. Leo Tolstoy emulated Pushkin’s storytelling manner, comparing it with Homer’s, and his novel Anna Karenina describes what might have happened to Tatiana had she given in to Onegin. With Fyodor Dostoevsky, who condemned the Onegin type as a Western intrusion and glorified Tatiana as the exemplar of Russian womanhood, a nationalist cult of Pushkin began that has not ceased. Radicals and conservatives fought over Pushkin’s characters as if they were real people. Opponents of Tsarism saw Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana as kindred victims of feudal Russia.