Pushkin

In March 1816 Vasily Lvovich, who was travelling back to Moscow from St Petersburg with Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky and Karamzin, persuaded them to stop off at the Lycée; they stayed for about half an hour: Pushkin spoke to his uncle and Vyazemsky, whom he had known as a child in Moscow, but did not meet Karamzin. Two days later he sent Vyazemsky a witty letter, complaining of his isolated life at the Lycée: ‘seclusion is, in fact, a very stupid affair, despite all those philosophers and poets, who pretend that they live in the country and are in love with silence and tranquillity’, and breaking into verse to envy Vyazemsky’s life in Moscow:

Blessed is he, who noisy Moscow

Does not leave for a country hut …

And who not in dream, but in reality

Can caress his mistress! …

Only a year of schooling remains, ‘But a whole year of pluses and minuses, laws, taxes, the sublime and the beautiful! … a whole year of dozing before the master’s desk … what horror.’⁵⁰

In April he received a letter from Vasily Lvovich, telling him that Karamzin would be spending the summer in Tsarskoe Selo: ‘Love him, honour and obey. The advice of such a man will be to your good and may be of use to our literature. We expect much from you.’⁵¹ Nikolay Karamzin, who at this time had just turned fifty, was Russia’s most influential eighteenth-century writer, and the acknowledged leader of the modernist school in literature. Though best-known as author of the extraordinarily popular sentimental tale Poor Liza (1792), his real achievement was to have turned the heavy and cumbersome prose of his predecessors into a flexible, supple instrument, capable of any mode of discourse. He arrived in Tsarskoe Selo on 24 May with his wife and three small children, and settled in one of Cameron’s little Chinese houses in the park to complete work on his monumental eight-volume History of the Russian State. He remained there throughout the summer, returning to St Petersburg on 20 September. During this time Pushkin visited him frequently, often in the company of another lycéen, Sergey Lomonosov. The acquaintance ripened rapidly: on 2 June Karamzin informs Vyazemsky that he is being visited by ‘the poet Pushkin, the historian Lomonosov’, who ‘are amusing in their pleasant artlessness. Pushkin is witty.’⁵² And when Prince Yury Neledinsky-Meletsky, an ageing privy councillor and minor poet, turned to Karamzin for help because he found himself unable to compose the verses he had promised for the wedding of the Grand Duchess Anna with Prince William of Orange, Karamzin recommended Pushkin for the task. Pushkin produced the required lines in an hour or two, and they were sung at the wedding supper in Pavlovsk on 6 June. The dowager empress sent him a gold watch and chain.

Pushkin’s work – like that of Voltaire, much admired, and much imitated by him at this time – is inclined to licentiousness, but any coarseness is always – even in the Lycée verse – moderated by wit. Once Pushchin, watching from the library window as the congregation dispersed after evening service in the church opposite, noticed two women – one young and pretty, the other older – who were quarrelling with one another. He pointed them out to Pushkin, wondering what the subject of the dispute could be. The next day Pushkin brought him sixteen lines of verse which gave the answer: Antipevna, the elder, is angrily taking Marfushka to task for allowing Vanyusha to take liberties with her, a married woman. ‘He’s still a child,’ Marfushka replies; ‘What about old Trofim, who is with you day and night? You’re as sinful as I am,’

In another’s cunt you see a straw,

But don’t notice the beam in your own.⁵³

‘Pushkin was so attracted to women,’ wrote a fellow lycéen, ‘that, even at the age of fifteen or sixteen, merely touching the hand of the person he was dancing with, at the Lycée balls, caused his eye to blaze, and he snorted and puffed, like an ardent stallion in a young herd.’⁵⁴ The first known Lycée poem is ‘To Natalya’, written in 1813, and dedicated to a young actress in the serf theatre of Count V.V. Tolstoy. He imagines himself an actor, playing opposite her: Philemon making love to Anyuta in Ablesimov’s opera, The Miller, Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker, or Dr Bartolo endeavouring to seduce Rosina in The Barber of Seville. Two summers later he made her the subject of another poem. You are a terrible actress, he writes; were another to perform as badly as you do, she would be hissed off the stage, but we applaud wildly, because you are so beautiful.

Blessed is he, who can forget his role

On the stage with this sweet actress,

Can press her hand, hoping to be

Still more blessed behind the scenes!⁵⁵

When Elena Cantacuzen, the married sister of his fellow-lycéen Prince Gorchakov, visited the Lycée in 1814, he composed ‘To a Beauty Who Took Snuff’:

Ah! If, turned into powder,

And in a snuff-box, in confinement,

I could be pinched between your tender fingers

Then with heartfelt delight

I’d strew myself on the bosom beneath the silk kerchief

And even … perhaps … But no! An empty dream.

In no way can this be.

Envious, malicious fate!

Ah, why am I not snuff!⁵⁶

There is far more of Pushkin in the witty, humorous light verse of this kind, when he can allow himself the expression of carnal desire, than in his love poems of the Lycée years – such as those dedicated to Ekaterina Bakunina, the sister of a fellow-lycéen. She was four years older than he and obviously attractive, for both Pushchin and the young Malinovsky were his rivals. In a fragment of a Lycée diary he wrote, on Monday 29 November 1815:

I was happy! … No, yesterday I was not happy: in the morning I was tortured by the ordeal of waiting, standing under the window with indescribable emotion, I looked at the snowy path – she was not to be seen! – finally I lost hope, then suddenly and unexpectedly I met her on the stairs, a delicious moment! […] How charming she was! How becoming was the black dress to the charming Bakunina! But I have not seen her for eighteen hours – ah! what a situation, what torture – But I was happy for five minutes.⁵⁷

There is, however, no trace of this artless sincerity in any of the twenty-three poems he devoted to his love between the summer of 1815 and that of 1817, which are, almost without exception, expressions of blighted love. No doubt Pushkin’s grief was real; no doubt he experienced all the torments of adolescent love. But the agony is couched in such conventional terms, is often so exaggerated, that the emotion comes to seem as artificial as the means of its expression. The cycle begins with the sadness he experiences at her absence; she returns, only for him to discover he has a successful rival; having lost her love, he can only wish for death. ‘The early flower of hope has faded:/Life’s flower will wither from the torments!’ he laments⁵⁸ – an image with which, in Eugene Onegin, he would mock Lensky’s adolescent despair: ‘He sang of life’s wilted flower/At not quite eighteen years of age’ (II, x).

Far less ethereal were his feelings for Natasha, Princess Varvara Volkonskaya’s pretty maid, well-known to the lycéens and much admired by them. One dark evening in 1816, Pushkin, running along one of the palace corridors, came upon someone he thought to be Natasha, and began to ‘pester her with rash words and even, so the malicious say, with indiscreet caresses’.⁵⁹ Unfortunately the woman was not Natasha, but her mistress, who recognized Pushkin and through her brother complained to the emperor. The following day Alexander came to see Engelhardt about the affair. ‘Your pupils not only climb over the fence to steal my ripe apples, and beat gardener Lyamin’s watchmen,’ he complained, ‘but now will not let my wife’s ladies-in-waiting pass in the corridor.’ Engelhardt assured him that Pushkin was in despair, and had asked the director for permission to write to the princess, ‘asking her magnanimously to forgive him for this unintended insult’. ‘Let him write – and there will be an end of it. I will be Pushkin’s advocate; but tell him that it is for the last time,’ said Alexander, adding in a whisper, ‘Between ourselves, the old woman is probably enchanted at the young man’s mistake.’⁶⁰ Pushkin made up for the letter of apology with a malicious French epigram:

One could easily, miss,

Take you for a brothel madam,

Or for an old hag;

But for a trollop, – oh, my God, no.⁶¹

Another object of desire was the young Marie Smith, ‘very pretty, amiable and witty’,⁶² who came to stay with her relations the Engelhardts towards the end of 1816. Pushkin was soon addressing his verse to her, not a whit discomposed by the facts that she had very recently lost her husband and was three months’ pregnant. At first the tone is light and humorous, no word of love is breathed; but early in 1817 he sent her ‘To a Young Widow’:

Lida, my devoted friend,

Why do I, through my light sleep,

Exhausted with pleasure,

Often hear your quiet sigh?

‘Will you eternally shed tears,/Eternally your dead husband/Call from the grave?’ If so, she will call in vain, ‘the furious, jealous husband/Will not arise from eternal darkness.’⁶³ In a sense the poem is harmless. Pushkin is not serious in imagining himself to be in bed with Mrs Smith, urging her to forget her husband: these are mere poetic conceits, no different, in a way, from those of an earlier poem, when he calls her ‘the confidante of Venus/[…] whose throne Cupid/And the playful children of Cytheraea/Have decorated with flowers.’⁶⁴ But it is understandable that literary considerations of this kind did not present themselves to Mrs Smith’s mind when she received the poem. She saw only the literal, highly indecent meaning, was insulted by it, and took the poem to Engelhardt, who was obliged to give Pushkin another severe dressing-down.

In the spring of 1817 the Karamzins returned to Tsarskoe Selo. Karamzin’s second wife, the severely beautiful Ekaterina Andreevna, was then thirty-six. Of her Filipp Wiegel, whom Pushkin later knew well, wrote in his memoirs, ‘What can I say of her? If the pagan Phidias could have been inspired by a Christian ideal, and have wished to sculpt a Madonna, he would of course have given her the features of Karamzina in her youth.’⁶⁵ Pushkin, always susceptible to beauty, and who was, in addition, beginning to be attracted chiefly to older women, sent her a love-letter. Ekaterina, unaffected by his devotion, was amused, and showed it to her husband; they laughed heartily over it. Nevertheless, Karamzin felt it necessary to read Pushkin a stern lecture, affecting the latter so much that he burst into tears. In later years Karamzin took pleasure in showing friends the spot in his study which had been sprinkled with Pushkin’s sobs.

As the course of the first intake at the Lycée neared its end, the thoughts of its members turned towards the future, and Pushkin startled his father with a letter requesting permission to join the Life Guards Hussars. It was an odd request, for he had not attended any of the classes on military subjects which had been held for those intending to enter the army. Sergey Lvovich wrote back to say that while he could not afford to support Pushkin in a cavalry regiment, he would have no objection were his son to join an infantry guards regiment. But it was the glamour of the hussars which had attracted Pushkin:

I’ll put on narrow breeches,

Curl the proud moustache in rings,

A pair of epaulettes will gleam,

And I – a child of the severe Muses –

Will be among the martial cornets!⁶⁶

The regiment’s barracks were just outside the park, facing the south bank of the Great Lake, in Sofiya, the new settlement built by Catherine II. The lycéens were frequent visitors, Pushkin becoming acquainted ‘with a number of hussars, living then in Tsarskoe Selo (such as Kaverin, Molostvov, Solomirsky, Saburov and others^*). Together with these he loved, in secret from the school authorities, to make an occasional sacrifice to Bacchus and to Venus,’ a fellow-lycéen later wrote, with metonymical delicacy.⁶⁷ Kaverin was a well-known rake, and in his company Pushkin would certainly have made considerable sacrifices to both gods. But in the end his military career went no further, and he resigned himself to entering the civil service. Looking back on the episode in the winter of 1824, he wrote:

Saburov, you poured scorn

On my hussar dreams,

When I roistered with Kaverin,

Abused Russia with Molostvov,

Read with my Chedaev,

When, casting aside all cares,

I spent a whole year among them,

But Zubov did not tempt me

With his swarthy arse.⁶⁸

The final examinations at the Lycée lasted a fortnight, from 15 to 31 May 1817. The graduation ceremony took place on 9 June in the presence of the emperor. Engelhardt gave a short speech; Kunitsyn a factual report on the achievements of the Lycée; Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, who had succeeded Razumovsky as Minister of Education in 1816, introduced the pupils to Alexander, who presented their medals and graduation certificates, gave a ‘short, fatherly exhortation’, and thanked the director and the staff for their work.⁶⁹ The ceremony ended with the lycéens singing a farewell hymn, composed by Delvig and put to music by Tepper de Ferguson. Pushkin had been asked by Engelhardt to write a poem for the occasion, but had evaded the task. In the evening at the director’s house Lomonosov, Gorchakov, Korsakov, Yakovlev, Malinovsky and Engelhardt’s children performed a French play written by Marie Smith. Korsakov and Yakovlev read poems. Finally, Engelhardt gave each of his pupils a cast-iron ring on which was engraved a phrase of Delvig’s hymn.

On 11 June Pushkin, in the company of six other lycéens, left Tsarskoe Selo for St Petersburg. He had been appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a collegial secretary – the tenth rank – with a salary of 700 roubles a year.

* In January 1814 a preparatory school was set up, also in Tsarskoe Selo, whose pupils replaced the junior course on the latter’s graduation to the senior level.

* After being sued for divorce by his wife on grounds of adultery, Vasily had spent two years in France with his mistress, returning ‘dressed in Parisian finery from head to toe’ (Veresaev (1937), I, 17).

† The thirty who formed the first course at the Lycée were Aleksandr Bakunin, Count Silvery Broglio, Konstantin Danzas, Baron Anton Delvig, Semen Esakov, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, Baron Pavel Grevenits, Konstantin Gurev, Aleksey Illichevsky, Sergey Komovsky, Baron Modest Korff, Aleksandr Kornilov, Nikolay Korsakov, Konstantin Kostensky, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Sergey Lomonosov, Ivan Malinovsky, Arkady Martynov, Dmitry Maslov, Fedor Matyushkin, Pavel Myasoedov, Ivan Pushchin, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Rzhevsky, Petr Savrasov, Fedor Steven, Aleksandr Tyrkov, Vladimir Volkhovsky, Mikhail Yakovlev and Pavel Yudin. Gurev was expelled in September 1813 for ‘Greek tastes’, i.e. homosexuality.

* Until 1816 the school was under the direct supervision of the minister, Razumovsky, who controlled its activities down to the most trivial detail.

* Possibly also because of his use of coarse, smutty language and his obsession with sex, France being commonly associated with sexual immorality.

† ‘A boy of sixteen, prophesying in exact detail literary immortality to a boy of fifteen, and doing it in a poem that is itself immortal – this is a combination of intuitive genius and actual destiny to which I can find no parallel in the history of world poetry’ (Nabokov, III, 23).

* The brig carrying them wintered on the Svir River, between Lakes Ladoga and Onega: on its return most of the books were found to be spoilt by water.

* ‘When a fountain of pent-up songs/Would ceaselessly replenish itself each day’, Faust, 154–5.

* Their society is adequately characterized by Molostvov’s mot, ‘The best woman is a boy, and the best wine vodka’ (Modzalevsky (1999), 480).

3 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20
I: Literature and Politics

A weak and cunning ruler,

A balding fop, an enemy of labour,

Fortuitously favoured by Fame,

Reigned over us then.

Eugene Onegin, X, i

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

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

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

There is in Russia the town of Luga

In the Petersburg region;

One could not imagine

A worse dump than this,

If there didn’t exist

My Novorzhev.¹⁰

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

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

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

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

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

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

the azure levels of two lakes,

Where sometimes gleams the fisherman’s white sail,

Behind them a ridge of hills and striped cornfields,

Scattered huts in the distance,

On the moist banks wandering herds,

Smoking drying-barns and winged windmills …¹²

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

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

Farewell, Trigorskoe, where joy

So often was encountered!

Did I discover your sweetness

Only in order to leave you for ever?

From you I take memories,

To you I leave my heart.¹⁵

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

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