T. Binyon - Pushkin

Initially Pushkin put up in a small inn in the old town. At the beginning of October, however, he moved into a house rented by Inzov: a large, stone building in an isolated position near the old town, on a hill above the Byk. Inzov and several officials lived on the upper floors; Pushkin and his servant Nikita inhabited two rooms on the ground floor, through whose barred windows he looked out over an orchard and vineyard to the open country and mountains beyond. The walls were painted blue; one was soon disfigured with blobs of wax: Pushkin, sitting naked on his bed, would practise his marksmanship by – like Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street – picking out initials on the wall with wax bullets from his pistols. Another of Inzov’s officials, Andrey Fadeev, was obliged to share this room on his visits to Kishinev. ‘This was extremely inconvenient, for I had come on business, had work to do, got up and went to bed early; but some nights he did not sleep at all, wrote, moved about noisily, declaimed, and recited his verse in a loud voice. In summer he would disrobe completely and perform in the room all his nocturnal evolutions in the full nudity of his natural form.’ 2 On 14 July and 5 November 1821 earthquakes struck Kishinev. The second, more severe, damaged the house. Inzov and the civil servants moved out immediately, but Pushkin, either through indolence or affection for his quarters – the first independent lodging he had had – stayed put, living there by himself for several months.

The day after his arrival Pushkin presented himself to Inzov, who introduced him to some members of his staff: Major Sergey Malevinsky, the illegitimate son of General Ermolov, then commanding the Russian armies in the Caucasus; and Nikolay Alekseev, who was to become a close friend. Ten years older than Pushkin, he knew many of the latter’s friends in St Petersburg, and, with a taste for literature, ‘was the only one among the civil servants in whose person Pushkin could see in Kishinev a likeness to that cultured society of the capital to which he was used’. 3 That evening Malevinsky took him to the casino in the municipal gardens, which also served as a club for officers, civil servants and local gentry. A rudimentary restaurant was attached to the club, run by Joseph, the former maître d’hôtel of General Bakhmetev, Inzov’s predecessor. It became a regular port of call for Pushkin, who heard from a waitress, Mariola, the Moldavian song on which he based his poem ‘The Black Shawl’. *

The following day Pushkin dined with his old friend and fellow-member of Arzamas , General Mikhail Orlov, recently appointed to the command of the 16th Infantry Division, whose headquarters were in Kishinev. Here he met Orlov’s younger brother, Fedor, a colonel in the Life Guards Uhlans, who had lost a leg at the battle of Bautzen, together with several of Orlov’s officers: Major-General Pushchin, who commanded a brigade in the division; Captain Okhotnikov, Orlov’s aide-de-camp; and Ivan Liprandi, a lieutenant-colonel in the Kamchatka regiment, and one of Orlov’s staff officers. Liprandi was an interesting, somewhat mysterious character, who soon became another of Pushkin’s intimates.

Born in 1790, the son of an Italian émigré and a Russian baroness, he had made a name for himself in military intelligence during the Napoleonic wars. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel at twenty-four, and seemed on the verge of a brilliant career, but after a duel – one of several – which resulted in the death of his opponent, was transferred from the guards to an army regiment and posted to Kishinev. Pushkin, who would describe him as ‘uniting genuine scholarship with the excellent qualities of a military man’, 4 was immediately attracted to him, pestered him with questions about his duels, and borrowed books from his library. The day after meeting Pushkin, Liprandi dined with Prince George Cantacuzen and his wife Elena, the addressee of Pushkin’s Lycée poem, ‘To a Beauty Who Took Snuff.’ They asked Liprandi to bring Pushkin round to see them; though protesting that his acquaintance with the poet was very short, the next day he, Fedor Orlov, and Pushkin called on the Cantacuzens, stayed for dinner, and remained drinking until well after midnight.

Pushkin soon had a wide circle of acquaintances and friends among the civilians and officers in the town. Some he had known, or heard of, earlier: a Lycée friend, Konstantin Danzas, now an officer in the engineers, was stationed here, as were the cousins Mikhail and Aleksey Poltoratsky, both cousins of Anna Kern, whose beauty had so impressed Pushkin at the Olenins in St Petersburg. They were attached to a unit of the general staff which was carrying out a military topographical survey of Bessarabia. Another member was Aleksandr Veltman. Later a well-known novelist, at this time he dabbled in poetry, and, cherishing a profound admiration for Pushkin’s work, initially held himself timidly aloof from him, fearing a comparison between their achievements. Chance, however, brought them together; Pushkin learnt of his verse and, calling at Veltman’s lodgings, asked him to read the work on which he was then engaged: an imitation Moldavian folk-tale in verse, entitled ‘Yanko the Shepherd’, some episodes of which caused him to laugh uproariously.

Among the local inhabitants he frequently visited the civil governor, Konstantin Katakazi: ‘Having yawned my way through mass,/I go to Katakazi’s,/What Greek rubbish!/What Greek bedlam!’ he wrote. 5 Most evenings a company gathered to play cards at the home of the vice-governor, Matvey Krupensky; here Pushkin could satisfy his addiction to faro. Krupensky’s large mansion housed not only the province’s revenue department, but also, in a columned hall decorated with a frieze emblematic of Russian military achievement, the town’s small theatre. At the beginning of November, a twenty-year-old ensign, Vladimir Gorchakov, who had just arrived in Kishinev and was attached to Orlov’s staff, attended a performance given by a travelling troupe of German actors. ‘My attention was particularly caught,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘by the entrance of a young man of small stature, but quite strong and broad-shouldered, with a quick and observant gaze, extraordinarily lively in his movements, often laughing in a surfeit of unconstrained gaiety and then suddenly turning meditative, which awoke one’s sympathy. His features were irregular and ugly, but the expression of thought was so fascinating that involuntarily one wanted to ask: what is the matter? What grief darkens your soul? The unknown’s clothing consisted of a closely buttoned black frock-coat and wide trousers of the same colour.’ 6 This was Pushkin; during the interval Alekseev introduced Gorchakov to him, and the two were soon deep in reminiscences of the St Petersburg theatre and of their favourite actresses, Semenova and Kolosova.

Another prominent member of Kishinev society was Egor Varfolomey, a wealthy tax-farmer and member of the supreme council of Bessarabia. He was extremely hospitable: it was very difficult to visit him and not stay to dinner; but for the young officers and civil servants the main attractions of the house were the informal dances in his ballroom and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Pulkheriya. She was a pretty, plump, healthy, empty-headed girl, with few powers of conversation, whose invariable reply to advances, compliments or witticisms was ‘Who do you think you are! What are you about!’ – Veltman, in a flight of fancy, surmised that she might be an automaton. 7 Nevertheless, Pushkin, for want of a better object for his affections, fell in love with her during his stay in Kishinev. It was hardly a passionate affair, and did not prevent him from languishing, during the next three years, after many others: Mariya Schreiber, the shy seventeen-year-old daughter of the president of the medical board, for example; or Viktoriya Vakar, a colonel’s wife with whom he often danced; or the playful, dark-complexioned Anika Sandulaki. He sighed from afar after pretty Elena Solovkina, who was married to the commander of the Okhotsk infantry regiment and occasionally visited Kishinev, and made a determined assault on the virtue of Ekaterina Stamo, whose husband Apostol, a counsellor of the Bessarabian civil court, was some thirty years older than her. ‘Pushkin was a great rake, and in addition I, unfortunately, was considered a beauty in my youth,’ Ekaterina remarked in her recollections. ‘I had great difficulty in restraining a young man of his age. I always had the most strict principles, – such was the upbringing we all had been given, – but, you know, Aleksandr Sergeevich’s views on women were somewhat lax, and then one must take into account that our society was strange to him, as a Russian. Thanks to my personal tact […] I managed finally to arrange things with Aleksandr Sergeevich in such a way that he did not repeat the declaration which he had made to me, a married woman.’ 8 She was one of the seven children of Zamfir Ralli, a rich Moldavian landowner with estates to the west of Kishinev. Pushkin got to know the family very well during his stay in Kishinev: they were his closest friends among the Moldavian nobility, and he was especially intimate with Ivan, Ekaterina’s brother, a year younger than himself, who shared his literary tastes. Another Kishinev beauty was Mariya Eichfeldt, ‘whose pretty little face became famous for its attractiveness from Bessarabia to the Caucasus’. 9 She had a much older husband: Pushkin christened the couple ‘Zémire and Azor’, after the French opéra comique with that name on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. He flirted with her in society, but refrained from pressing his advances further, as she was Alekseev’s mistress: ‘My dear chap, how unjust/Are your jealous dreams,’ he wrote. 10