Pushkin

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

4 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20
II: Onegin’s Day

I love thee, Peter’s creation,

Love thy stern, harmonious air,

The Neva’s majestic flow,

The granite of her embankments,

Thy railings’ iron pattern,

Thy pensive nights’

Translucent twilight, moonless glimmer,

When in my room

I write and read without a lamp,

And distinct are the sleeping piles

Of the empty streets, and bright

The Admiralty’s spire,

And, not admitting nocturnal dark

To the golden heavens,

Dawn to replace dusk

Hastens, giving to night but half an hour.

I love your cruel winter’s

Still air and frost,

The flight of sleighs along the broad Neva,

Maidens’ faces brighter than roses,

The brilliance, hubbub and chatter of balls,

And at the bachelor banquet

The hiss of foaming beakers

And the blue flame of punch.

The Bronze Horseman, 43–66

THE PETERSBURG THROUGH WHICH the hero of Eugene Onegin moves in the first chapter of the poem is not fictional: it is the Petersburg of Pushkin. Eugene’s friends and acquaintances, his amusements and diversions, his interests and infatuations are also Pushkin’s. This ‘description of the fashionable life of a St Petersburg young man at the end of 1819, reminiscent of Beppo, sombre Byron’s comic work’,¹ thus provides a skeleton on which to drape a description of Pushkin’s own social life at St Petersburg: his friends and associates, literary salons, the theatre, balls, gambling, liaisons, romances and flirtations.

Rising late, Eugene dons his ‘wide Bolivar’ to saunter up and down ‘the boulevard’ – the shaded walk, lined by two rows of lime trees, which ran down the middle of the Nevsky from the Fontanka canal to the Moika. Warned by his watch that it is around four in the afternoon, he hurries to Talon’s French restaurant on the Nevsky, where Petr Kaverin, the hard-drinking hussar officer who considers cold champagne the best cure for the clap, is waiting. On 27 May 1819 Kaverin noted in his diary: ‘Shcherbinin, Olsufev, Pushkin – supped with me in Petersburg – champagne had been put on ice the day before – by chance my beauty at that time (for the satisfaction of carnal desires) passed by – we called her in – the heat was insupportable – we asked Pushkin to prolong the memory of the evening in verse – here is the result:

A joyful evening in our life

Let us remember, youthful friends;

In the glass goblet champagne’s

Cold stream hissed.

We drank – and Venus with us

Sat sweating at the table.

When shall we four sit again

With whores, wine and pipes?’²

Pushkin had not lost his taste for military company, though now he was as apt to mingle with generals as with subalterns, much to Pushchin’s disapproval. ‘Though liberal in his views, Pushkin had a kind of pathetic habit of betraying his noble character and often angered me and all of us by, for example, loving to consort in the orchestra-pit with Orlov, Chernyshev, Kiselev and others: with patronizing smiles they listened to his jokes and witticisms. If you made him a sign from the stalls, he would run over immediately. You would say to him: “Why do you want, dear chap, to spend your time with that lot; not one of them is sympathetic to you, and so on.” He would listen patiently, begin to tickle you, embrace you, which he usually did when he was slightly flustered. A moment later you would see Pushkin again with the lions of that time!’³ However, something was to be gained from their company. When in 1819 he resurrected the idea of joining the hussars – ‘I’m sorry for poor Pushkin!’ Batyushkov wrote from Naples. ‘He won’t be a good officer, and there will be one good poet less. A terrible loss for poetry! Perchè? Tell me, for God’s sake.’⁴ – General Kiselev promised him a commission. However, Major-General Aleksey Orlov – brother of Mikhail, he had ‘the face of Eros, the figure of the Apollo Belvedere and Herculean muscles’⁵ – dissuaded him from the idea, a service for which Pushkin, on second thoughts, was grateful: ‘Orlov, you are right: I forgo/My hussar dreams/And with Solomon exclaim:/Uniform and sabre – all is vanity!’⁶ Orlov was either extraordinarily magnanimous, or had no knowledge of the epigram Pushkin had devoted to him and his mistress, the ballet-dancer Istomina, in 1817:

Orlov in bed with Istomina

Lay in squalid nudity.

In the heated affair the inconstant general

Had not distinguished himself.

Not intending to insult her dear one,

Laïs took a microscope

And says: ‘Let me see,

My sweet, what you fucked me with.’⁷

Among other new acquaintances a colleague at the Foreign Ministry, Nikolay Krivtsov, was a congenial companion. An officer in the Life Guards Jägers, Krivtsov had lost a leg at the battle of Kulm in 1813, but in England had acquired a cork replacement, so well fashioned as to allow him to dance. Pushkin saw much of him before he was posted to London in March 1818. Bidding him farewell, he gave him a copy of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans – one of his own favourite works – inscribed ‘To a friend from a friend’,⁸ accompanied by a poem:

When wilt thou press again the hand

Which bestows on thee

For the dull journey and on parting

The Holy Bible of the Charites?^{* 9}

The two shared anti-religious, humanist views: ‘Krivtsov continues to corrupt Pushkin even from London,’ Turgenev told Vyazemsky, who had been posted to Warsaw, ‘and has sent him atheistic verses from pious England.’¹⁰

At this time he got to know two of Lev’s friends: Pavel Nashchokin and Sergey Sobolevsky, the illegitimate son of a well-to-do landowner. Nashchokin was extremely rich, and was an inveterate gambler. His addiction later reduced him to poverty. Though he lived with his mother, he also kept a bachelor apartment in a house on the Fontanka, where his friends, either alone or with a companion, could spend the night. Sobolevsky, tall, and inclined to portliness due to a fondness for good food and drink, was a cynical and witty companion with a flair for turning epigrams. They were to be Pushkin’s closest non-literary friends; perhaps, indeed, his most intimate and trusted friends during the last decade of his life.

Of his fellows at the Lycée Delvig had taken lodgings in Troitsky Lane, which he shared with Yakovlev and the latter’s brother Pavel. Pushkin called here almost daily; together they frequented common eating-houses, or, like the London Mohocks, assaulted the capital’s policemen. Küchelbecker, like Pushkin, had joined the Foreign Ministry, eking out the meagre stipend by teaching at the school for sons of the nobility where Lev and Sobolevsky were pupils. He religiously attended Zhukovsky’s Saturday literary soirées in the latter’s apartment on Ekateringofsky Prospect – Pushkin and Delvig were less regular – and often called at other times to read Zhukovsky his verse. Zhukovsky proffered an original excuse for not attending one social function: ‘My stomach had been upset since the previous evening; in addition Küchelbecker came, so I remained at home,’ he explained.¹¹ Vastly amused by this combination of accidents, Pushkin composed a short verse:

I over-ate at supper,

And Yakov mistakenly locked the door, –

So, my friends, I felt

Both küchelbeckerish and sick!¹²

Insulted, Küchelbecker issued a challenge. They met in the Volkovo cemetery, to the south-east of the city. Delvig, as Küchelbecker’s second, stood to the left of his principal. Küchelbecker was to have the first shot. When he began to aim, Pushkin shouted: ‘Delvig! Stand where I am, it’s safer here.’ Incensed, Küchelbecker made a half-turn, his pistol went off and blew a hole in Delvig’s hat. Pushkin refused to fire, and the quarrel was made up.¹³

He seemed determined to acquire a reputation for belligerence equal to that of his acquaintance Rufin Dorokhov – the model for Dolokhov in War and Peace – an ensign in a carabinier regiment noted for his uncontrolled temper and violent behaviour. At a performance of the opera The Swiss Family at the Bolshoy Theatre on 20 December 1818 he began to hiss one of the actresses. His neighbour, who admired her performance, objected; words were spoken, with Pushkin using ‘indecent language’. Ivan Gorgoli, the head of the St Petersburg police, who was present, intervened. ‘You’re quarrelling, Pushkin! Shouting!’ he said. ‘I would have slapped his face,’ Pushkin replied, ‘and only refrained, lest the actors should take it for applause!’¹⁴

Almost exactly a year later the incident was repeated when Pushkin, bored by a play, interrupted it with hisses and cat-calls. After the performance a Major Denisevich, who had been sitting next to him, took him to task in the corridor, waving his finger at him. Outraged by the gesture, Pushkin demanded Denisevich’s address, and appointed to meet him at eight the following morning. Denisevich was sharing the quarters of Ivan Lazhechnikov, then aide-de-camp to General Count Ostermann-Tolstoy, in the general’s house between the English Embankment and Galernaya Street. At a quarter to eight Pushkin, accompanied by two cavalry officers, appeared and was met by Lazhechnikov. The latter, who was to be acclaimed as ‘the Russian Walter Scott’ for his historical novels The Last Page (1831–3) and The Ice Palace (1835), takes up the story in a letter to Pushkin written eleven years later: ‘Do you remember a morning in Count Ostermann’s house on the Galernaya, with you were two fine young guardsmen, giants in size and spirit, the miserable figure of the Little Russian [Denisevich], who to your question: had you come in time? answered, puffing himself up like a turkey-cock, that he had summoned you not for a chivalrous affair of honour, but to give you a lesson on how to conduct yourself in the theatre and that it was unseemly for a major to fight with a civilian; do you remember the tiny aide-de-camp, laughing heartily at the scene and advising you not to waste honest powder on such vermin and the spur of irony on the skin of an ass. That baby aide-de-camp was your most humble servant.’¹⁵ No wonder that Karamzin’s wife Ekaterina should write to her half-brother, Vyazemsky, in March 1820: ‘Mr Pushkin has duels every day; thank God, not fatal, since the opponents always remain unharmed’,¹⁶ or that Pushkin, in preparation for an occasion when cold steel might be preferred to honest powder, should have attended the school set up in St Petersburg by the famous French fencing master Augustin Grisier.^*

In St Petersburg Pushkin had been reunited with Nikita Kozlov, a serf from Sergey Lvovich’s estate at Boldino, who had looked after him as a child. Nikita became his body-servant, and remained with him until his death. Tall, good-looking, with reddish side-whiskers, he married Nadezhda, Arina Rodionovna’s daughter. Like his master, he was fond of drink. Once, when in liquor, he quarrelled with one of Korff’s servants. Hearing the row, Korff came out and set about Nikita with a stick. Pushkin, feeling that he had been insulted in the person of his servant, called Korff out. Korff refused the challenge with a note: ‘I do not accept your challenge, not because you are Pushkin, but because I am not Küchelbecker.’¹⁷ Pushkin’s way of life aroused a puritanical disgust in Korff:

Beginning while still at the Lycée, he later, in society, abandoned himself to every kind of debauchery and spent days and nights in an uninterrupted succession of bacchanals and orgies, with the most noted and inveterate rakes of the time. It is astonishing how his health and his very talent could withstand such a way of life, with which were naturally associated frequent venereal sicknesses, bringing him at times to the brink of the grave […] Eternally without a copeck, eternally in debt, sometimes even without a decent frock-coat, with endless scandals, frequent duels, closely acquainted with every tavern-keeper, whore and trollop, Pushkin represented a type of the filthiest depravity.¹⁸

The passage, though savagely caricatural, is a recognizable portrait. ‘The Cricket hops around the boulevard and the bordellos,’ Aleksandr Turgenev told Vyazemsky, later referring to his ‘two bouts of a sickness with a non-Russian name’, caught as a result. Once, however, the illness was not that which might have been expected. ‘The poet Pushkin is very ill,’ Turgenev wrote. ‘He caught cold, waiting at the door of a whore, who would not let him in despite the rain, so as not to infect him with her illness. What a battle between generosity and love and licentiousness.’¹⁹ The girl in question might have been the charming Pole, Angelica, who lived with her stout and ugly aunt and a disagreeable little dog on the Moika near Pushchin, also one of her clients.

Intercourse of a different kind was to be had in one of the capital’s salons – that, for instance, of Ekaterina Muraveva, the widow of Mikhail Muravev, a poet and the curator of Moscow University. Nikita, her elder son, was a member of Arzamas and one of the founders of the Union of Salvation; the younger, Aleksandr, a cavalry cornet, joined the conspiracy in 1820. She entertained in a large house on the Fontanka near the Anichkov Bridge, ‘one of the most luxurious and pleasant in the capital’.²⁰ The Karamzins usually stayed here when in St Petersburg, as did Batyushkov, to whom Ekaterina Fedorovna was related by marriage: her husband’s sister had been the poet’s grandmother.

When Batyushkov set out to join the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples on 19 November 1818, she gave a farewell party for him. ‘Yesterday we saw off Batyushkov,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky. ‘Between one and two, before dinner, K.F. Muraveva with her son and niece, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, Lunin, Baron Schilling and I drove to Tsarskoe Selo, where a good dinner and a battery of champagne awaited us. We grieved, drank, laughed, argued, grew heated, were ready to weep and drank again. Pushkin wrote an impromptu, which it is impossible to send, and at nine in the evening we sat our dear voyager in his carriage and, sensing a protracted separation, embraced him and took a long farewell of him.’²¹ The first signs of Batyushkov’s mental illness showed themselves in Italy. When he returned to Russia in 1822 he was suffering from persecution mania, which grew ever more severe, and was accompanied by attempts at suicide.

The best-known literary salon in St Petersburg was that of the Olenins. Aleksey Olenin was one of the highest government officials, having replaced Speransky as Imperial Secretary in 1812; he was also president of the Academy of Arts, director of the Public Library, an archaeologist and historian. He was charming and extremely hospitable, as was his wife, Elizaveta Markovna – though she was a chronic invalid who often received her guests lying on a sofa.^* She had inherited a house on the Fontanka near the Semenovsky Bridge: a three-storey building whose entrance columns supported a first-floor balcony; inside the rooms were ornamented with Aleksey Nikolaevich’s collection of antique statues and Etruscan vases. Pushkin was a frequent visitor, both to the St Petersburg house and to Priyutino, the Olenins’ small estate some twelve miles to the north of the capital, and enthusiastically took part in their amateur theatricals. He played Alnaskarov in Khmelnitsky’s one-act comedy Castles in the Air, and, on 2 May 1819, composed together with Zhukovsky a ballad for a charade devised by Ivan Krylov, in honour of Elizaveta Markovna’s birthday. At a party at the Olenins earlier that year, as a forfeit in some game, Krylov – whose satirical fables rival those of La Fontaine – declaimed one of his latest compositions, ‘The Donkey and the Peasant’, before an audience which included Pushkin and an innocent-looking nineteen-year-old beauty, Anna Kern – the daughter of Petr Poltoratsky and hence the niece, both of her hostess and of Praskovya Osipova.

Anna had been married at sixteen – ‘too early and too undiscriminatingly’²² – to Lieutenant-General Ermolay Kern, thirty-five years her senior. Kern, who had lost his command through injudicious behaviour towards a superior officer, had come to St Petersburg in order to petition the emperor for reinstatement. Aware that Alexander was not unsusceptible to Anna’s beauty – which he had compared to that of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, wife of his brother Nicholas – he sent her out to the Fontanka each day in the hope of meeting the emperor, whose habits were well-known: ‘At one in the afternoon he came out of the Winter Palace, walked up the Dvortsovaya Embankment, at Pracheshny Bridge turned down the Fontanka to the Anichkov Bridge […] then returned home by the Nevsky Prospect. The walk was repeated each day, and was called le tour impérial.’²³ ‘This was very disagreeable to me and I froze and walked along annoyed both with myself and with Kern’s insistence,’ Anna wrote.²⁴ Kern’s intelligence sources were at fault, for Anna and the emperor never met.

Enchanted by Krylov’s recital, she noticed no one else. But Pushkin soon forced himself on her attention:

During a further game to my part fell the role of Cleopatra and, as I was holding a basket of flowers, Pushkin, together with my cousin Aleksandr Poltoratsky, came up to me, looked at the basket, and, pointing at my cousin, said: ‘And this gentleman will no doubt play the asp?’ I found that insolent, did not answer and moved away […] At supper Pushkin seated himself behind me, with my cousin, and attempted to gain my attention with flattering exclamations, such as, for example, ‘Can one be allowed to be so pretty!’ There then began a jocular conversation between them on the subject of who was a sinner and who not, who would go to hell and who to heaven. Pushkin said to my cousin: ‘In any case, there will be a lot of pretty women in hell, one will be able to play charades. Ask Mme Kern whether she would like to go to hell.’ I answered very seriously and somewhat drily that I did not wish to go to hell. ‘Well, what do you think now, Pushkin?’ asked my cousin. ‘I have changed my mind,’ the poet replied. ‘I do not want to go to hell, even though there will be pretty women there …’²⁵

Eugene has enjoyed his dinner with Kaverin –

… the cork hit the ceiling,

A stream of the comet year’s wine spurted out,

Before him is bloody roast-beef

And truffles – the luxury of our young years,

The finest flower of French cuisine,

And Strasbourg’s imperishable pie

Between a live Limburg cheese

And a golden pineapple –

(I, xvi)

but it is now half past six, and he hurries to the Bolshoy Theatre, where the performance of a new ballet is beginning.

When Pushkin came to St Petersburg in 1817 the capital’s chief theatre was the Maly (or Kazassi Theatre), a wooden building situated on the south side of the Nevsky near the Anichkov Bridge, in what is now Ostrovsky Square, approximately where the Aleksandrinsky Theatre (designed by Rossi, and built in 1832) stands. On 3 February 1818, however, the Bolshoy (or Kamenny) Theatre, burnt down in 1811, was reopened in Teatralnaya Square in Kolomna, on the site of the present Conservatoire. There was also the German (or Novy) Theatre on Dvortsovaya Square, where a troupe of German actors performed, which existed until the early 1820s. When the Maly Theatre was pulled down at the end of the 1820s, its actors moved for some time to the building of the former circus, near Simeonovsky Bridge on the Fontanka, but this was closed when the Aleksandrinsky Theatre and, a year later, the Mikhailovsky Theatre on Mikhailovskaya Square were opened. In 1827 the wooden Kamennoostrovsky Theatre was built on Kamenny Island, a popular resort for the nobility in the summer months. There was also a theatre, seating four hundred, in the Winter Palace, built by Quarenghi between 1783 and 1787, where performances were given for the royal family and the court, while a number of the richer nobles had small, domestic theatres in their palaces.

The Bolshoy Theatre was huge. Behind the immense colonnade of its portico was a double ramp, enabling carriages to be driven up to the theatre entrance. Immediately inside were a succession of foyers: these, however, were only used when a ball was held at the theatre; they remained empty during the intervals, the audience preferring to circulate in the theatre itself. This consisted of a parterre, above which rose five tiers of boxes and galleries. The vast stage could accommodate several hundred performers at once, and was equipped with the most modern machinery for the production of spectacular effects, which were particularly appreciated by the audience. Performances took place every evening, with the exception of Saturday,^* each performance usually comprising two works: a ballet and a comedy, for example, or an opera and a tragedy.

‘Beneath the shade of the coulisses/My youthful days were spent,’ Pushkin writes in Eugene Onegin (I, xviii). Only unforeseen circumstances could keep him away. When, at the end of October 1819, he arrived late for a performance of the ‘magical ballet’ Hen-Zi and Tao staged by the French ballet master Charles Didelot, it was with the excuse that an exciting event in Tsarskoe Selo had delayed his return. A bear had broken its chain and escaped into the palace gardens where it could have attacked the emperor, had he chanced to be passing. He ended the anecdote with the regretful quip: ‘When a good fellow does turn up, he’s only a bear!’²⁶

In August 1817, during an interval at the Bolshoy, Pushkin was introduced to Pavel Katenin, an officer in the Preobrazhensky Life Guards. Katenin’s regiment left for Moscow shortly afterwards, but when he returned the following summer, Pushkin came to see him: ‘I have come to you as Diogenes came to Antisthenes,’ he said. ‘Beat me, but teach me.’²⁷ ‘Round-faced, with full, red cheeks, like a toy cherub from a Palm Sunday fair’,²⁸ Katenin was a poet, playwright, critic and literary theorist, closer in his views to the Archaic school than that of Karamzin; influential in the theatre, his chief service was to introduce Pushkin into theatrical circles. In early December 1818 he took him to see Prince Shakhovskoy, who lived with his mistress, the comic actress Ekaterina Ezhova, on the upper floor – known as ‘the garret’ – of a house in Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street. Extraordinarily ugly – he was immensely stout, with a huge, beak-like nose – Shakhovskoy was not only a playwright, but also the repertoire director of the St Petersburg theatres, instructing the performers in acting and declamation. His methods, however, were not to the taste of all. ‘His comic pronunciation with its lisp, his squeaky voice, his sobs, his recitatives, his wails, were all intolerable,’ one actress commented. ‘At the same time he showed one at which line one had to put one’s weight on one’s right foot, with one’s left in the rear, and when one should sway on to one’s left, stretching out the right, which to his mind had a majestic effect. One line had to be said in a whisper, and, after a “pause”, making an “indication” with both hands in the direction of the actor facing one, the last line of the monologue had to be cried out in a rapid gabble.’²⁹ He was, however, extremely charming, and Pushkin, walking back with Katenin after the first meeting, exclaimed: ‘Do you know that at bottom he’s a very good fellow?’, and expressed the hope that he did not know of ‘those schoolboy’s scribblings’: an epigram on him Pushkin had written at the Lycée.³⁰

Shakhovskoy entertained most evenings after the theatre, and Pushkin became a constant visitor to these Bohemian revels, remembering one occasion as ‘one of the best evenings of my life’.³¹ Vasily Pushkin was saddened when he heard of the visits; he remained true to the hostile view of Shakhovskoy taken by Arzamas. ‘Shakhovskoy is still in Moscow,’ he wrote to Vyazemsky in April 1819. ‘He told me that my nephew visited him practically every day. I said nothing, but only sighed quietly.’³² The main attraction of the garret lay perhaps not so much in the personality of the host, as in the presence of young actresses, in whose careers Shakhovskoy took a paternal interest, assisting them not only by instruction in elocution, but also by bringing them together with rich young officers. ‘He is really a good chap, a tolerable author and an excellent pander,’ Pushkin commented to Vyazemsky.³³ In 1825 the playwright Griboedov, another of Pushkin’s colleagues at the Foreign Office, wrote to a friend: ‘For a long time I lived in seclusion from all, then suddenly had an urge to go out into the world, and where should I go, if not to Shakhovskoy’s? There at least one’s bold hand can rove over the swan’s down of sweet bosoms etc.’³⁴

At the garret Pushkin met the nineteen-year-old actress Elena Sosnitskaya, to whose album he contributed a quatrain:

With coldness of heart you have contrived to unite

The wondrous heat of captivating eyes.

He who loves you is, of course, a fool;

But he who loves you not is a hundred times more foolish.³⁵

‘In my youth, when she really was the beautiful Helen,’ he later remarked, ‘I nearly fell into her net, but came to my senses and got off with a poem.’³⁶ He was also seduced by the more mature charms of the singer Nimfodora Semenova, then thirty-one, more renowned for her appearance than her voice: ‘I would wish to be, Semenova, your coverlet,/Or the dog that sleeps upon your bed,’ he sighed.³⁷ More serious was his infatuation – despite the fact that she was thirteen years his senior – with Nimfodora’s elder sister, the tragic actress Ekaterina Semenova. The essay ‘My Remarks on the Russian Theatre’, composed in 1820, though purporting to be a general survey of the state of the theatre, is merely an excuse for praising Semenova. ‘Speaking of Russian tragedy, one speaks of Semenova and, perhaps, only of her. Gifted with talent, beauty, and a lively and true feeling, she formed herself […] Semenova has no rival […] she remains the autocratic queen of the tragic stage.’³⁸ He bestowed the manuscript on her. Somewhat unfeelingly she immediately handed it on to her dramatic mentor, Gnedich, who noted on it: ‘This piece was written by A. Push-kin, when he was pursuing, unsuccessfully, Semenova, who gave it to me then.’³⁹

Semenova had, however, a stage rival: the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kolosova, who made her debut at the Bolshoy on 16 December 1818 as Antigone in Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus in Athens. The following Easter Pushkin, who had admired her demure beauty at the Good Friday service in a church near the Bolshoy, made her acquaintance. But he naturally took Semenova’s side in the rivalry, all the more as he fancied Kolosova had slighted his attentions: she should ‘occupy herself less with aide-de-camps of his imperial majesty and more with her roles’. ‘All fell asleep,’ he added, at a performance of Racine’s Esther (translated by Katenin), on 8 December, in which she took the title role.⁴⁰ ‘Everything in Esther captivates us’ begins an epigram; her speech, her gait, her hair, voice, hand, brows, and ‘her enormous feet!’⁴¹

When Eugene enters the theatre Evdokiya Istomina, the great beauty among the ballet-dancers, is on the stage:

Brilliant, half-ethereal,

Obedient to the violin’s magic bow,

Surrounded by a crowd of nymphs,

Stands Istomina; she

Touching the floor with one foot,

Slowly gyrates the other,

And suddenly jumps, and suddenly flies,

Flies, like fluff from Aeolus’s lips;

Now bends, now straightens,

And with one quick foot the other beats.

(I, xx)

Pushkin pursued her too, but with less zeal than Semenova: he was only one of a crowd of admirers. An amusing sketch, executed by Olenin’s son, Aleksey, shows a scene at Priyutino: a dog, with the head and neck of the dark-haired Istomina, is surrounded by a host of dog admirers with the heads of Pushkin, Gnedich, Krylov and others.⁴²

Another visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret was Nikita Vsevolozhsky, Pushkin’s coeval, a passionate theatre-goer, ‘the best of the momentary friends of my momentary youth’.^{* 43} He was the son of Vsevolod Vsevolozhsky, known, for his wealth, as ‘the Croesus of St Petersburg’, who, after the death of his wife in 1810, had caused a long-lasting scandal in society by taking to live with him a married woman, Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya. The injured husband, Petr Khovansky, complained publicly of the insult done to him, and went so far as to petition the emperor for the return of his wife, but without success. In the end, financially ruined, he was forced to accept Vsevolozhsky’s charity, and lived with the family until his death. To complicate the situation further, Nikita Vsevolozhsky later married Khovansky’s daughter, Princess Varvara. Pushkin, intrigued by the family history, in 1834–5 planned to incorporate it in a projected novel entitled A Russian Pelham. Vsevolozhsky, who received a large income from his father, had an apartment near the Bolshoy and a mistress, the ballet-dancer Evdokiya Ovoshnikova. ‘You remember Pushkin,’ runs a letter of 1824, ‘Pushkin, who sobered you up on Good Friday and led you by the hand to the church of the theatre management so that you could pray to the Lord God and gaze to your heart’s content at Mme Ovoshnikova.’⁴⁴