T. Binyon - Pushkin

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.