T. Binyon - Pushkin

Lev Pushkin, the poet’s paternal grandfather, served in the artillery, reaching the rank of major, before retiring in 1763. He settled in Moscow, in a large house on the Bozhedomka (now Delegatsky Street), in the northern suburbs. The grounds covered nearly fifteen acres, running down to an orangery and large fish-pond, formed by damming up the Neglinnaya River. By his first wife he had three children, and his second, Olga Vasilevna (née Chicherina), was to give him four more: Anna, Vasily, Sergey, and Elizaveta. As was the custom, Vasily and Sergey were entered for the army at a very early age: Vasily was seven and Sergey six when their names first appeared in the list. Actual service with the regiment – the Izmailovsky Life Guards – began much later: for Sergey at the end of the 1780s. He was promoted to ensign in 1794, to lieutenant in 1796, and in 1797 transferred to the chasseur battalion with the rank of captain-lieutenant. Both brothers left the army in the autumn of 1797. Neither was cut out for military service, but it is likely that their retirement was brought about by the changes introduced by the Emperor Paul, who had come to the throne the previous year. A military tyrant and pedant, he forced a tight Prussian uniform on the army; would arbitrarily consign officers to Siberia for a minor fault on parade; and repeatedly threatened to banish fashionable regiments such as the Izmailovsky from St Petersburg to the provinces. The brothers, together with their young wives, both metropolitan beauties, all of whom adored the social whirl, would have viewed with horror the prospect of exile to some dull provincial backwater.

In 1834 Pushkin, looking back with nostalgia on the Moscow of his childhood, before the fire of 1812, wrote:

At one time there really was a rivalry between Moscow and Petersburg. Then in Moscow there were rich nobles who did not work, grandees who had given up the court, and independent, carefree individuals, passionately devoted to harmless slander and inexpensive hospitality; then Moscow was the gathering place for all Russia’s aristocracy, which streamed to it in winter from every province. Brilliant young guardsmen flew thither from Petersburg. Every corner of the ancient capital was loud with music, there were crowds everywhere. Five thousand people filled the hall of the Noble Assembly twice a week. There the young met; marriages were made. Moscow was as famous for its brides as Vyazma for its gingerbread; Moscow dinners became a proverb. The innocent eccentricities of the Muscovites were a sign of their independence. They lived their own lives, amusing themselves as they liked, caring little for the opinion of others. One rich eccentric might build himself on one of the main streets a Chinese house with green dragons and with wooden mandarins under gilded parasols. Another might drive to Marina Roshcha in a carriage covered with pure silver plate. A third might mount five or so blackamoors, footmen and attendants on the rumble of a four-seat sleigh and drive it tandem along the summer street. Alamode belles appropriated Petersburg fashions, putting their indelible imprint on them. From afar haughty Petersburg mocked, but did not interfere with old mother Moscow’s escapades. But where has this noisy, idle, carefree life gone? Where are the balls, the feasts, the eccentrics, the practical jokers? All have vanished. 12

He could have mentioned, too, the classically laid-out Yusupov garden, open to the ‘respectable public’, with its alleys and round pond, marble statues and grotto, where he played as a child; the private theatres with troupes of serf actors; or the ‘magic castle’, the Pashkov mansion on Mokhovaya Street, whose garden, full of exotic birds at large or in gilded cages, was known as ‘Eden’: at night it was lit by lanterns, and a private orchestra played there on feast-days. 13

For Pushkin’s parents social life was infinitely preferable to the tedium of domesticity. Nadezhda was the dominant partner. Beautiful, charming, frivolous and – outwardly at least – always good-humoured, she was strong-willed and could be despotic, both to her husband and her children. She was cool towards Pushkin, preferring first Olga, then his younger brother Lev. When angry, she sometimes would not speak to him for weeks, or even months. Once, annoyed by his habit of rubbing his hands together, she tied them behind his back and starved him for a day; since he was always losing his handkerchiefs, she sewed one to the shoulder of his jacket like an epaulette, and forced him to wear the garment in public.

She was incurably restless: never satisfied with her surroundings, she drove the family from lodging to lodging, or, if a move was impossible, continually moved the furniture and changed the wallpapers, turning a bedroom into a dining-room, a study into a drawing-room. On returning to Moscow they lodged in P.M. Volkov’s house on the corner of Chistoprudny Boulevard and Bolshoy Kharitonevsky Lane: here Pushkin’s brother Nikolay was born on 27 March 1801. A year later they moved up the lane into a wooden house on Prince N.B. Yusupov’s property, where they stayed for a year and a half; then, forfeiting six months’ rent, in the summer of 1803, they moved down the lane again into accommodation belonging to Count A.L. Santi. ‘It is difficult to understand,’ one historian writes, ‘how the Pushkins managed to fit into the cramped confines of Santi’s court; Santi had up to sixteen house serfs, Sergey Lvovich from four to thirteen; besides them in the court lived the civil servant Petrov and the district surveyor Fedotov, while another of Santi’s serfs, the women’s dressmaker Berezinsky, squeezed in somewhere.’ 14 Nevertheless, the Pushkins remained there over two years; here Lev was born on 9 April 1805. But, before Pushkin left for boarding-school in 1811, they would move eight more times, criss-crossing Moscow from east to west and back again.

Sergey, Pushkin’s father, was short and stout, with a nose like a parrot’s beak. He was a weak character, easily dominated by his more forceful wife, and inclined to lachrymose emotional outbursts. At the same time he was hot-tempered and irritable, and would fly into rages at the slightest provocation, with the result that his children feared, rather than loved him. He had a poor head for finances, knew nothing of his estates – he visited Boldino, his property in Nizhny Novgorod province, twice in his lifetime – and refused to have anything to do with their management: everything was left in the hands of inefficient or dishonest stewards. His income was consequently insecure and continually decreased. Though, like his father, he was hospitable to his friends, he showed a remarkable lack of generosity towards his children and took little interest in them. He was fond of French literature, and an inveterate theatre-goer, but his main preoccupation was his social life. He was at his best in some salon, elaborately polite and delicately witty, throwing off a stream of French puns, or inscribing elegant sentiments in French verse or prose in ladies’ albums.

In January 1802, after the death of the Emperor Paul, he had returned to government service, taking up a post in the Moscow military commissariat. In 1812, when Napoleon approached Moscow, he was transferred to Orel, and given the task of organizing supplies for a reserve army under the command of General Lobanov-Rostovsky. The latter, a hot-tempered and ruthless disciplinarian, soon found fault with him, and in February 1813 requested the head of the commissariat, ‘for neglect of duty and disobedience of my instructions, to remove Pushkin from his present position as incompetent and incapable and to reprimand him severely’. 15 At this time the Russian armies had begun to move rapidly westwards, and it was not until the following year, when they stood outside Warsaw, that Sergey was relieved of his command: his successor found him reading a French novel in his office. He retired with the rank of civil councillor in January 1817.