I. The People Stay Silent “The people stay silent.” “(Narod bezmolvstvuyet.)” —Pushkin, Boris Godunov Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, impetuous, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight. He never had a proper job, even though he was for a while nominally at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a department of the Chancery. He lived mostly off his father. He had a tortured relationship with both the civil service and the authorities. The government of Alexander I, the tsar who had defeated Napoleon and was by European standards a medieval figure, was becoming increasingly reactionary, and an incontinent loudmouth like Pushkin had no chance. One prince, a high-level civil servant, recorded in his diary after a dinner in January 1822, “Listened to Pushkin at table . . . he tries to convince everyone he meets . . . that only a scoundrel would not wish a change of government in Russia. His favorite conversation is based on abuse and sarcasm and even when he tries to be polite there is a sardonic smile on his lips.” Pushkin was opposed to landowners, supported the abolition of serfdom, and indeed when he got going—according to the princely dinner companion—“began to pour abuse on all classes of the population.” He announced “that all noblemen should be hanged, and that he would tighten the noose round their necks with pleasure.” It is a testament to the respect in which literature was held that the government didn’t kill him. Of course, three generations later Pushkin’s dream of an egalitarian world came true in Russia. But they shot writers then.
Pushkin chose to write poems in Russian. Literary Russian had only evolved in the eighteenth century, stimulating a new school of poets from which Pushkin emerged. He turned to prose later. In his short story “The Queen of Spades” (
“Pikovaya dama”), when the countess asks her grandson if he will bring her a novel, he replies with a question: Would she like a Russian one? “Are there any Russian novels?” the countess queries. (As a young woman in the middle of the eighteenth century, she read only in French.) Pushkin produced the first major Russian work in almost every literary genre. Just as Peter the Great, standing on the banks of the Neva, founded St. Petersburg “to open a window onto Europe,” so Pushkin both Russified literary Russian and made his nation’s books into something of Europe. And he is contemporary for all time.
The young Pushkin, “Sasha,” grew up with household serfs and then attended the prestigious Imperial Lycée, where pupils were not permitted to leave during their six-year term. They studied the humanities, following the English public school system, and cultivated the worship of male friendship. (“My friends, this brotherhood of ours will live. | United, like the soul, it cannot perish.”) Parents could visit on Sundays and feast days, but for two years, as a young teenager, Pushkin never saw his mother. While he was a pupil, Napoleon entered Moscow and for four days the city burned. This was the defining trauma of Pushkin’s generation. His uncle was one of many who lost everything. The man fled the city with only the clothes he stood up in.
In the summer of 1824 the tsar dismissed the poet from the civil service (besides his political leanings, Pushkin was having an affair with his boss’s wife, which can’t have helped). Alexander exiled him first to the south, and then to his ancestral estate in the northwest, where he remained under civil and church surveillance in the company of the serf Nikita Timofeyevich Kozlov, who had brought him up. Whenever a friend visited from Petersburg, the pair would hear the sleighbells of the abbot from the local monastery. The old man would shuffle in for a glass of rum, the three would drink and mumble in the candlelit room, and the abbot would ride off again to compose his report.
Copyright © 2019 by Sara Wheeler. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
