T. Binyon - Pushkin

Financial worries – ‘He hasn’t a copeck’, Vyazemsky noted 27 – added to his depression. He had been paid no salary since leaving St Petersburg. In April 1821 Inzov pointed this out to Capo d’Istrias, adding: ‘since he receives no allowance from his parent, despite all my assistance he sometimes, however, suffers from a deficiency in decent clothing. In this respect I consider it my most humble duty to ask, my dear sir, that you should instruct the appointment to him of that salary which he received in St Petersburg.’ 28 As a result he received a year’s salary – less hospital charges and postal insurance it came to 685 roubles 30 copecks – in July, and was thereafter paid at four-monthly intervals. But this, though welcome, could not resolve his financial problems. On 5 May, in reply to the demand for 2,000 roubles forwarded by Inzov, he wrote, ‘not being yet of age and possessing neither movable nor immovable property, I am not capable of paying the above-mentioned promissory note.’ 29 The ‘deficiency in decent clothing’ was noted by others: ‘He leads a dissipated life, roams the inns, and is always in shirt-sleeves,’ wrote Liprandi. 30 His attire in Kishinev tended towards the bizarre: sometimes he dressed as a Turk, sometimes as a Moldavian, sometimes as a Jew, usually topping the ensemble with a fez – costumes which were adopted, not primarily from eccentricity, but because of the absence from his wardrobe of more formal wear. ‘My father had the brilliant idea of sending me some clothes,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Tell him that I asked you to remind him of it.’ 31

He had eventually left Kamenka towards the end of February, and, taking a long way round through Odessa, where he spent two days, arrived in Kishinev early in March. * He found a town much stirred by events which had taken place during his absence. In 1814 three Greek merchants in Odessa, one of the most important Greek communities outside the Ottoman empire, had founded the Philike Hetaireia (Society of Friends), whose aim was the liberation of Greece from Turkish rule. The society was soon actively engaged in conspiracy: intriguing with potential rebels, it persuaded its Greek supporters that the tsar, as the head of the greatest Orthodox state, would be unable to ignore any bid for Greek independence. In 1819–20 the time seemed ripe for an uprising: there were intimations or outbreaks of revolt in Germany, Spain, Piedmont and Naples. The society offered its leadership to Capo d’Istrias; he refused, and it turned in his stead to Alexander Ypsilanti, a Phanariot Greek, †the son of the former hospodar of Moldavia and Wallachia. An officer in the Russian army, Ypsilanti had distinguished himself in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, losing an arm at the battle of Dresden. He had attended Alexander I, as one of the emperor’s adjutants, at the congress of Vienna, and in 1817 had been promoted major-general and given command of a cavalry brigade. On his election to the leadership of the society he moved to Kishinev.

On the night of 21 February 1821, at Galata – the principal port of Moldavia, on the left bank of the Danube – the small Turkish garrison and a number of Turkish merchants were massacred by Greeks; the following day Alexander Ypsilanti, accompanied by his brothers, George and Nicholas, Prince Cantacuzen, and several other Greek officers in Russian service, crossed the Prut. At Iaşi on the twenty-third, in proclamations addressed to the Greeks and Moldavians, he called on them to rise against the Turks, declaring that his enterprise had the support of a ‘great power’. Though Michael Souzzo, the hospodar , threw in his lot with the uprising, it enjoyed no popular support, and Ypsilanti condemned it to failure by his irresolute leadership, condoning, in addition, the massacre at Galata and a subsequent similar incident at Iaşi. A final blow to the revolt was a letter from Alexander I, signed by Capo d’Istrias, which denounced Ypsilanti’s actions as ‘shameful and criminal’, upbraided him for misusing the tsar’s name, struck him from the Russian army list, and called upon him to lay down his arms immediately. 32 Though Ypsilanti endeavoured to brave matters out, he was abandoned by many of the revolutionary leaders, and, retreating slowly northwards towards the Austrian frontier, underwent a series of humiliating defeats, culminating in that of Dragashan on 7 June, after which he escaped into Austria. Here he was kept in close confinement for over seven years, and, when eventually released at the instance of Nicholas I, died in Vienna in extreme poverty in 1828. A simultaneous revolt in Greece itself, led, among others, by Ypsilanti’s brother Demetrios, proved more successful: in 1833, after the intervention of the Great Powers, it eventually resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece.

Ypsilanti’s insurrection had been in progress for just over a week when Pushkin returned to Kishinev. The boldness of this exploit in the cause of Greek independence could not fail to arouse his enthusiasm. He dashed off a letter to Vasily Davydov, telling him of the progress of the revolt, speculating on Russia’s policy – ‘Will we occupy Moldavia and Wallachia in the guise of peace-loving mediators; will we cross the Danube as the allies of the Greeks and the enemies of their enemies?’ – and quoting from an insurgent’s letter on events at Iaşi: ‘He describes with ardour the ceremony of consecrating the banners and Prince Ypsilanti’s sword – the rapture of the clergy and laity – and the sublime moments of Hope and Freedom.’ Ypsilanti, whom Pushkin had met the previous year, is mentioned with admiration: ‘Alexander Ypsilanti’s first step is splendid and brilliant. He has begun luckily – from now on, whether dead or a victor he belongs to history – 28 years old, one arm missing, a magnanimous goal! – an enviable lot.’ 33 ‘We spoke about A. Ypsilanti,’ he records in his diary of an evening at the house of a ‘charming Greek lady’. ‘Among five Greeks I alone spoke like a Greek – they all despair of the success of the Hetaireia enterprise. I am firmly convinced that Greece will triumph, and that 25,000,000 * Turks will leave the flowering land of Hellas to the rightful heirs of Homer and Themistocles.’ 34 Indeed, his enthusiasm was such that it became rumoured that he – as Byron was to do two years later – had joined the revolt. ‘I have heard from trustworthy people that he has slipped away to the Greeks,’ the journalist and historian Pogodin wrote to a friend from Moscow. 35 But his participation was only vicarious.

The question of Russia’s attitude to the insurrection, which Pushkin raises in his letter to Davydov, was one which preoccupied both the government and the Decembrists. Both were not averse to striking a blow against Russia’s old enemy, Turkey. ‘If the 16th division,’ Orlov remarked of his command, ‘were to be sent to the liberation [of Greece], that would not be at all bad. I have sixteen thousand men under arms, thirty-six cannon, and six Cossack regiments. With that one can have some fun. The regiments are splendid, all Siberian flints. They would blunt the Turkish swords.’ 36 Alexander, however, did not wish to back revolutionary activity in Greece, while the Decembrists, though supporters of Greek independence, were not eager to have an illiberal tsar gain kudos by posing as a liberator abroad. And, curiously, they had the opportunity of influencing events. At the beginning of April Kiselev was requested by the government to send an officer to Kishinev to report on the insurrection. His choice fell on Pestel, whose report may have been instrumental in persuading the government not to support the revolt: Pushkin certainly believed this to be the case. In November 1833, at a rout at the Austrian ambassador’s in St Petersburg, he met Michael Souzzo, the former hospodar of Moldavia. ‘He reminded me,’ Pushkin wrote in his diary, ‘that in 1821 I called on him in Kishinev together with Pestel. I told him how Pestel had deceived him, and betrayed the Hetaireia – by representing it to the Emperor Alexander as a branch of Carbonarism. Souzzo could conceal neither his astonishment nor his vexation – the subtlety of a Phanariot had been conquered by the cunning of a Russian officer! This wounded his vanity.’ 37