T. Binyon - Pushkin

Screams and cries were heard from the audience. A number of people fainted; a student burst through the throng and fell in hysterics at Dostoevsky’s feet where he lost consciousness. At the end of the session a hundred young women, pushing Turgenev aside, made their way on to the stage bearing a huge laurel wreath, nearly five feet in diameter, and placed it round the author’s neck. It bore the inscription ‘For the Russian woman, about whom you said so much that was good!’ Late that evening Dostoevsky took a cab to Tverskaya Square, placed the wreath at the foot of the granite pedestal on which the statue stood, and, stepping back a pace, bowed to the ground. 5

Dostoevsky’s speech had little to do with the reality of Pushkin’s work: he had, rather, unscrupulously made use of the other’s reputation to propagate his own belief in Russia’s messianic mission. However, it came as a fitting conclusion to what one newspaper referred to as ‘days of a magically poetic fairy-tale’, and others as ‘days of holy ecstasy’ and ‘the “holy week” of the Russian intelligentsia’. Some witnesses experienced something akin to a religious conversion, one reporter writing, ‘It was as if the atmosphere surrounding the celebration caught fire and was lit by an iridescent radiance. One’s heart beat faster, more joyfully, one’s thoughts became bright and lucid, and one’s whole being opened up to impressions and emotions that would have been incomprehensible and strange given other less elevating circumstances. Some kind of moral miracle took place, a moral shock that stirred one’s innermost soul.’ 6 But it also established a new attitude to Pushkin: from now on he was not merely a poet superior to all others, but also was no longer a man; he had become a symbol, a myth, an icon.

By 1899, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the state had taken account of the potency of the poet’s image, and organized for the occasion an immense celebration throughout the Russian empire. Busts and portraits were mass-produced, and schoolchildren given free copies of his works, together with bars of chocolate stamped with his picture. The Pushkin of 1899 was far removed from the prophetic, miraculously responsive Pushkin of 1880; he was a solid, upright, moral citizen, a firm patriot and a loyal supporter of autocracy. In 1937 the Soviet state launched an even more massive celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. His works were recruited to assist the drive towards universal literacy in the Soviet Union, while his image was tailored to fit Soviet ideology. ‘Pushkin is completely ours, Soviet, for the Soviet state inherited everything that is best in our people, and itself is the embodiment of the best aspirations of our people,’ wrote Pravda. 7 The myth had now become the basis for a cult – at times uncomfortably close to the Stalin cult – and Pushkin himself a quasi-divine figure, not only ‘creator of the Russian literary language, father of new Russian literature, a genius who enriched humanity with his works’, 8 but also a proto-Marxist who espoused the cause of liberty and of the common people; a man who gilded everything he touched and was without fault in every aspect of his life. Most recently, the celebrations of 1999 have enlisted Pushkin in the service of capitalism and commercial enterprise. The Bank of Russia brought out a number of commemorative silver and gold coins; the twenty-five-rouble silver has on its reverse ‘a picture of A.S. Pushkin holding a writing book and a goose-quill in his hands, in the background to the right – personages of his works of literature’. 9 His portrait was to be seen in shop windows, on the sides of buses and trams, on billboards, boxes of matches, vodka bottles and T-shirts, while Coca-Cola ran an advertisement featuring lines from his most famous love lyric, ‘I recollect a wondrous moment’. And the Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, when condemning in language reminiscent of the Cold War western intervention in Yugoslavia, added that NATO had foolishly ignored Pushkin’s lessons on the Balkans – thus preserving the poet’s reputation, acquired in the Soviet era, for being a genius in every sphere. *

Of course, in one sense the myth is justified: Pushkin is Russia’s greatest poet, the composer of a large body of magnificent lyrics, extraordinarily diverse both in theme and treatment; of a number of great narrative poems – Ruslan and Lyudmila, The Gypsies, Poltava and The Bronze Horseman – and of a unique novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. He reformed Russian poetic language: in his hands it became a powerful, yet flexible instrument, with a diapason stretching from the solemnly archaic to the cadences of everyday speech. The aim of this biography, however, is, in all humility, to free the complex and interesting figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth. It concerns itself above all with the events of his life: though the appearance of his main works is noted, and the works themselves are commented on briefly, literary analysis has been eschewed, as being the province of the critic, rather than the biographer.

*He is presumably referring to Pushkin’s remarks on the Polish revolt of 1830, particularly the poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’.

Lack of respect for one’s ancestors is the first sign of barbarism and immorality.

VIII, 42

A LEKSANDR PUSHKIN was born in Moscow on Thursday 26 May 1799, in a ‘half-brick and half-wooden house’ on a plot of land situated on the corner of Malaya Pochtovaya Street and Gospitalny Lane. 1 This was in the eastern suburb known as the German Settlement, to which foreigners had been banished in 1652. Though distant from the centre, it was, up to the fire of 1812, a fashionable area, ‘the faubourg Saint-Germain of Moscow’. 2 On 8 June he was baptized in the parish church, the Church of the Epiphany on Elokhovskaya Square. * And that autumn his parents, Sergey and Nadezhda, took him and his sister Olga – born in December 1797 – to visit their grandfather Osip Gannibal, Nadezhda’s father, on his estate at Mikhailovskoe, in the Pskov region. Most of the next year was spent in St Petersburg. The Emperor Paul, coming across Pushkin and his nurse, reprimanded the latter for not removing the baby’s cap in the presence of royalty, and proceeded to do so himself. In the autumn they moved back to Moscow, where they were to remain for the duration of Pushkin’s childhood.

Pushkin was proud of both sides of his ancestry: both of his father’s family, the Pushkins, and of his mother’s, the Gannibals. However, the two were so different from one another, antipodes in almost every respect, that to take equal pride in both required the reconciliation of contradictory values. In Pushkin the contradictions were never completely resolved, and the resulting tension would occasionally manifest itself, both in his behaviour and in his work. The most obvious difference lay in the origins of the two families: whereas the Pushkins could hardly have been more Russian, the Gannibals could hardly have been more exotic and more foreign.

On 15 November 1704 an official at the Foreign Office in Moscow passed on to General-Admiral Golovin, the minister, news of a Serbian trader who was employed by the department. ‘Before leaving Constantinople on 21 June,’ he wrote, ‘Master Savva Raguzinsky informed me that according to the order of your excellency he had acquired with great fear and danger to his life from the Turks two little blackamoors and a third for Ambassador Petr Andreevich [Tolstoy], and that he had sent these blackamoors with a man of his for safety by way of land through the Walachian territories.’ 3 The boys had just arrived, the writer added; he had dispatched one to the ambassador’s home, and the other two, who were brothers, to the Golovin palace. The younger of these was in the course of time to become General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, cavalier of the orders of St Anne and Alexander Nevsky: Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather. *