T. Binyon - Pushkin

My friend, – Pushkin wrote to his brother from Kishinev – I spent the happiest moments of my life amidst the family of the estimable General Raevsky. I did not see in him the hero, the glory of the Russian army, I loved in him a man with a lucid mind, with a simple, beautiful soul; an indulgent, solicitous friend, always a dear, affectionate host […] All his daughters are charming, the eldest is an extraordinary woman. Judge, whether I was happy: a free, carefree life surrounded by a dear family; a life which I love so much and with which I can never become satiated – the gay, southern sky; charming surroundings; nature, satisfying my imagination – hills, gardens, sea; my friend, my dearest wish is to see again the southern shore and the Raevsky family. 38

‘In Gurzuf I did not stir from the spot, bathed in the sea and stuffed myself with grapes; I immediately took to southern nature and enjoyed it with all the indifference and carelessness of a Neapolitan Lazzarono. I loved, waking at night, to listen to the sound of the sea – and would listen spellbound for hours on end. Two steps from the house grew a young cypress; I visited it each morning, and became attached to it with a feeling not unlike friendship.’ 39 He spent much of the time reading: he had discovered some Voltaire in the palazzo library and Nikolay lent him a volume of André Chénier, but he mainly devoted himself to Byron. He also wrote, composing several lyrics and the initial draft of his first ‘southern’ narrative poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus , eventually completed at the beginning of the following year.

On 5 September he, General Raevsky and Nikolay left Gurzuf on horseback for a short sight-seeing tour before leaving the Crimea. Passing through the Ay-Danil woods, they took the track along the coast to Yalta – then a tiny coastal village – and went on through Oreanda to Alupka, where they spent the night in a Tatar homestead. The next day they continued down the coast to Simeis before turning inland. Ascending the gorge known as the Devil’s Stairs – ‘we clambered up on foot, holding the tails of our Tatar horses. This amused me exceedingly, seeming to be some mysterious, eastern ritual’ 40 – and crossing the pass, they descended into the Valley of Baidar. Their route then took them through Balaclava, and at evening they reached the St George monastery where they put up for the night. The monastery stood on a cliff overlooking the sea; the site was spectacular. ‘The St George monastery and its steep staircase to the sea left a strong impression on me. There I saw the fabulous ruins of the temple of Diana.’ 41 These were on nearby Cape Fiolente, and were popularly supposed to be the remains of that temple of Artemis * to which the goddess had carried Iphigenia, after rescuing her from sacrifice in Aulis. ‘Why these cold doubts?/I believe: here was the dread temple/ Where to the gods, thirsty for blood,/Smoked sacrifices.’ * 42

The following morning they rode north along a narrow track, past several hamlets, before striking the high road from Sebastopol to Bakhchisaray. Pushkin was again suffering from an ague, and was too ill for much sight-seeing when they arrived in Bakhchisaray, ‘the Garden Pavilion’, the former seat of the Crimean khans. The palace, restored by Potemkin in 1787 for the visit of Catherine, made little impression on him at the time, though he was to use it as the setting for The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. ‘Entering the palace, I saw a ruined fountain; from a rusty iron pipe dripped water. I went round the palace, greatly annoyed at the neglect in which it was decaying, and the half-European refurbishment of some of the rooms. NN [Nikolay Raevsky] almost by force led me up a decrepit stair to the ruins of the harem and to the burial-place of the khans, “but not with this/At that time my heart was full: †I was tormented by fever.”’ 43

The next day, 8 September, they rode on to Simferopol. A few days later Pushkin left the Crimea. Passing through Perekop, Berislav, Kherson and Nikolaev, he arrived in Odessa on 17 September. Here he stayed for three days. On the twentieth he set out for Kishinev and the following day entered the town where he was to live for the next three years.

*Brother of the poet, Denis Davydov, and tenuously related to General Raevsky: his uncle was the second husband of Raevsky’s mother.

*Though Pushkin’s invitation was no doubt due to his reputation as a poet, he was also distantly related to Shemiot: the latter’s brother, Pavel, had married Nadezhda Rotkirch, Pushkin’s mother’s cousin.

*‘The French translation of us!!! Oime! Oime! ’ was Byron’s reaction to this version. Later he added: ‘Only think of being traduced into a foreign language in such an abominable travesty!’ Leslie A. Marchand, Byron. A Biography. New York & London, 1957, II, 881–2.

*Pushkin, like most visitors, did not know that, though Mithridates committed suicide here in 63 BC, his body was handed over by his son Pharnaces – who had revolted against his father – to the Roman general Pompey, who allowed its burial in Sinope, Mithridates’s native city.

*The Frenchman, Paul Dubrux, an amateur, self-taught archaeologist, who was employed as administrator of the local salt-pans, had not been sent from St Petersburg, nor was he without knowledge.

†I.e. the planet Venus.

*A case of poetic licence: Venus would not have been visible to the naked eye as an evening star while Pushkin was at Gurzuf.

*The Romans identified Artemis with Diana, as they did Aphrodite with Venus.

*The ‘cold doubts’ are those of I.M. Muravev-Apostol, who devoted a chapter of his Journey through Tauris in 1820 (1823) to a confutation of the popular view of the site.

†The Fountain of Bakhchisaray , 531–2.

Cursed town of Kishinev!

My tongue will tire itself in abuse of you.

Some day of course the sinful roofs

Of your dirty houses

Will be struck by heavenly thunder,

And – I will not find a trace of you!

There will fall and perish in flames,

Both Varfolomey’s motley house

And the filthy Jewish booths:

So, if Moses is to be believed,

Perished unhappy Sodom.

But with that charming little town

I dare not compare Kishinev,

I know the Bible too well,

And am wholly unused to flattery.

Sodom, you know, was distinguished

Not only by civilized sin,

But also by culture, banquets,

Hospitable houses

And by the beauty of its far from strict maidens!

How sad, that by the untimely thunder

Of Jehovah’s wrath it was struck!

From a letter to Wiegel, October 1823

KISHINEV WAS THE CAPITAL OF BESSARABIA, which lies between the rivers Dniester and Prut, the Danube delta and the Black Sea. It had been colonized successively by the Greeks, Romans and Genoese, had been annexed by the principality of Moldavia in 1367, become part of the Ottoman empire in 1513, and had been ceded to Russia in 1812 by the Treaty of Bucharest. When Pushkin arrived on 21 September 1820, he found a bustling, lively, colourful town, very different from the decaying imperial pomp of Ekaterinoslav. At that time it had some twenty thousand inhabitants. The majority were Moldavians, but there were also large Bulgarian and Jewish colonies, numbers of Greeks, Turks, Ukrainians, Germans, and Albanians, and even French and Italian communities; the relatively small Russian population consisted mainly of military personnel and civil servants. The old town, ‘with its narrow, crooked streets, dirty bazaars, low shops and small houses with tiled roofs, but also with many gardens planted with Lombardy poplars and white acacias’, 1 was spread out along the flat and muddy banks of a little river, the Byk. On the hills above was the new town, with the municipal garden, the theatre and the casino, administrative offices, and a number of stone houses in which the governor, the military commander, the metropolitan and other notables lived.