T. Binyon - Pushkin

The friendship between Pushkin and the Karamzins, begun at Tsarskoe Selo, had continued in St Petersburg. During the winter of 1817–18 he was a frequent visitor to the apartment they had taken in the capital on Zakharevskaya Street; at the end of June 1818 he stayed with them for three days at Peterhof, sketched a portrait of Karamzin, and, with him, Zhukovsky and Aleksandr Turgenev went for a sail on the Gulf of Finland. He was in Peterhof again in the middle of July, and, when the Karamzins moved back to their lodging in Tsarskoe Selo, visited them three times in September. At the beginning of October they took up residence in St Petersburg for the winter, staying this time with Ekaterina Muraveva on the Fontanka. Pushkin visited them soon after their arrival, but then the intimacy suddenly ceased: apart from two short meetings at Tsarskoe Selo in August 1819 there is no trace of any lengthy encounter until the spring of 1820. During this period Pushkin composed a biting epigram on Karamzin’s work:

In his ‘History’ elegance and simplicity

Disinterestedly demonstrate to us

The necessity for autocracy

And the charm of the knout. 68

Shortly after Karamzin’s death on 22 May 1826 Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin in Mikhailovskoe: ‘You know the sad cause of my journey to Petersburg. Although you are a knave and have occasionally sinned with epigrams against Karamzin, in order to extract a smile from rascals and cads, without doubt you mourn his death with your heart and mind.’ * ‘Your short letter distresses me for many reasons,’ Pushkin replied on 10 July. ‘Firstly, what do you mean by my epigrams against Karamzin? There was only one, written at a time when Karamzin had put me from himself, deeply wounding both my self-esteem and my heartfelt attachment to him. Even now I cannot think of this without emotion. My epigram was witty and in no way insulting, but the others, as far as I know, were stupid and violent: surely you don’t ascribe them to me? Secondly. Who are you calling rascals and cads? Oh, my dear chap … you hear an accusation and make up your mind without hearing the justification: that’s Jeddart justice. If even Vyazemsky already etc., what about the rest? It’s sad, old man, so sad, one might as well straightaway put one’s head in a noose.’ 69

The ‘rascals and cads’ of Vyazemsky’s letter are the Decembrists. Their trial had opened a month earlier, on 3 June: no wonder he should sadly reproach Vyazemsky for prematurely passing sentence on them. However, as his letter makes clear, though the epigram is a political attack, his rejection by Karamzin was on personal, not political grounds. In April 1820 Karamzin wrote to Dmitriev, ‘Having exhausted all means of knocking sense into his dissolute head, I already long ago abandoned the unfortunate fellow to Fate and to Nemesis.’ 70 What wounded Pushkin so deeply was an unsparing castigation of his follies, followed by banishment into outer darkness.

The performance at the Bolshoy has ended, and Eugene hurries home to change into ‘pantaloons, dress-coat, waistcoat’ (I, xxvi) – probably a brass-buttoned, blue coat with velvet collar and long tails, white waistcoat and blue nankeen pantaloons or tights, buttoning at the ankle – before speeding in a hackney carriage to a ball. This has already begun; the first dance, the polonaise, and the second, the waltz, have taken place; the mazurka, the central event of the ball, is in full swing and will be followed by the final dance, a cotillion.

The ballroom’s full;

The music’s already tired of blaring;

The crowd is busy with the mazurka;

Around it’s noisy and a squash;

The spurs of a Chevalier guardsman jingle; *

The little feet of darling ladies fly;

After their captivating tracks

Fly fiery glances,

And by the roar of violins are drowned

The jealous whispers of modish wives.

(I, xxviii)

‘In the days of gaieties and desires/I was crazy about balls’ (I, xxix), wrote Pushkin: for the furtherance of amorous intrigue they were supreme. He was simultaneously both highly idealistic and deeply cynical in his view of and attitude towards women. In a letter to his brother, written from Moldavia in 1822, full of sage and prudent injunctions on how Lev should conduct his life – none of which Pushkin himself observed – he remarked: ‘What I have to say to you with regard to women would be perfectly useless. I will only point out to you that the less one loves a woman, the surer one is of possessing her. But this pleasure is worthy of an old 18th-century monkey.’ 71 Though he fell violently in love, repeatedly, and at the least excuse, he never forgot that the objects of his passion belonged to a sex of which he held no very high opinion. ‘Women are everywhere the same. Nature, which has given them a subtle mind and the most delicate sensibility, has all but denied them a sense of the beautiful. Poetry glides past their hearing without reaching their soul; they are insensitive to its harmonies; remark how they sing fashionable romances, how they distort the most natural verses, deranging the metre and destroying the rhyme. Listen to their literary opinions, and you will be amazed by the falsity, even coarseness of their understanding … Exceptions are rare.’ 72 The hero of the unfinished A Novel in Letters echoes these views. ‘I have been often astonished by the obtuseness in understanding and the impurity of imagination of ladies who in other respects are extremely amiable. Often they take the most subtle of witticisms, the most poetic of greetings, either as an impudent epigram or a vulgar indecency. In such a case the cold aspect they assume is so appallingly repulsive that the most ardent love cannot withstand it.’ 73

Pushkin’s first St Petersburg passion was Princess Evdokiya Golitsyna, whom he met at the Karamzins in the autumn of 1817. This thirty-seven-year-old beauty, known, from her habit of never appearing during the day, as the princesse nocturne , had been married in 1799, at the behest of the Emperor Paul and against her wishes, to Prince Sergey Golitsyn. After Paul’s death, however, she was able to leave her husband and lead an independent, if somewhat eccentric life at her house on Bolshaya Millionnaya Street. ‘Black, expressive eyes, thick, dark hair, falling in curling locks on the shoulders, a matte, southern complexion, a kind and gracious smile; add to these an unusually soft and melodious voice and pronunciation – and you will have an approximate understanding of her appearance,’ writes Vyazemsky, one of her admirers. At midnight ‘a small, but select company gathered in this salon: one is inclined to say in this temple, all the more as its hostess could have been taken for the priestess of some pure and elevated cult’. 74 Here the conversation would continue until three or four in the morning. In later life her eccentricities became more pronounced; in the 1840s she mounted a campaign against the introduction of the potato to Russia, on the grounds that this was an infringement of Russian nationality.

‘The poet Pushkin in our house fell mortally in love with the Pythia Golitsyna and now spends his evenings with her,’ Karamzin wrote to Vyazemsky in December 1817. ‘He lies from love, quarrels from love, but as yet does not write from love. I must admit, I would not have fallen in love with the Pythia: from her tripod spurts not fire, but cold.’ * 75 For some months he was deeply in love with her. Sending her a copy of ‘Liberty. An Ode’, he accompanied the manuscript with a short verse:

I used to sing of

The splendid dream of Freedom

And breathed it sweetly.