T. Binyon - Pushkin

The next morning they set out for Kishinev. Late that evening, as Pushkin was dozing in his corner of the carriage, Liprandi remarked that it was a pity it was so dark, as otherwise they could have seen to the left the site of the battle of Kagul: here in August 1770 General Rumyantsev with 17,000 men engaged the main Turkish army, winning a hard-fought battle with the bayonet and capturing the Turkish camp. Pushkin immediately started to life, animatedly discussed the battle, and quoted a few lines of verse – perhaps those from his Lycée poem, ‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’, in which he mentions the monument to the battle in the palace park:

In the thick shade of gloomy pines

Rises a simple monument.

O, how shameful for thee, Kagulian shore!

And glorious for our dear native land! 72

Arriving in Leovo before midday, they called on Lieutenant-Colonel Katasanov, the commander of the Cossack regiment stationed here. He was away, but his adjutant insisted that they should stay for lunch: caviare, smoked sturgeon – of which Pushkin was inordinately fond – and vodka appeared, succeeded by partridge soup and roast chicken. Half an hour after their departure Pushkin, who had been in a brown study, suddenly burst into such raucous and prolonged laughter that Liprandi thought he was having a fit. ‘I love cossacks because they are so individual and don’t keep to the normal rules of taste,’ he said. ‘We – indeed everyone else – would have made soup from the chicken and would have roasted the partridge, but they did the opposite!’ 73 He was so struck by this that after his return to Kishinev – they arrived at nine that evening, 23 December – he sought out the French chef Tardif – ‘inexhaustible in ideas/For entremets, or for pies’ 74 – then living on Gorchakov’s charity, * to tell him about it, and two years later, in Odessa, reminded Liprandi of the meal.

During the winter the training battalion of the 16th division had been employed in constructing, at Orlov’s expense, a manège, or riding-school. Its ceremonial opening took place on New Year’s Day 1822. Liprandi and Okhotnikov had decorated the interior: the walls were hung with bayonets, swords, muskets; on that opposite the entrance was a large shield, with a cannon and heap of cannon-balls to each side; in the centre was the monogram of Alexander, done in pistols, surrounded by a sunburst of ramrods, and flanked by the colours of the Kamchatka and Okhotsk regiments. Before this was a table, laid for forty guests, while eight other tables, four down each side of the hall, were to accommodate the training battalion. Inzov and his officials – including Pushkin – and the town notables were invited. The building was blessed by Archbishop Dimitry and after the ceremony all sat down to a breakfast. ‘There was no lack of champagne or vodka. Some felt a buzzing in their heads, but all departed decorously.’ 75 A week later Orlov and Ekaterina left for Kiev, where they were to stay for some time. As it turned out, the absence of the division’s commander at this moment was unfortunate.

The 16th division was part of the 6th Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sabaneev, whose headquarters were at Tiraspol, halfway between Kishinev and Odessa. Over the previous six months General Kiselev, the chief of staff of the Second Army, had stepped up surveillance of the army’s units: he was particularly concerned about the 16th division, commanded as it was by such a noted liberal. Despite his friendship with Orlov, he had cautiously insinuated to Wittgenstein, the commander of the army, that the latter was unsuited to the command of the division. Raevsky, too, had come to his attention. ‘I have long had under observation a certain Raevsky, a major of the 32nd Jäger regiment, who is known to me by his completely unrestrained freethinking. At the present moment in agreement with Sabaneev an overt and covert investigation of all his actions is taking place, and he will, it seems, not escape trial and exile.’ 76

In Orlov’s absence General Sabaneev – a short, choleric fifty-two-year-old with a red nose, ginger hair and side-whiskers – began to pay frequent visits to Kishinev. He dined with Inzov on 15 January. Pushkin was present, but was uncharacteristically silent during the meal. Sabaneev was in Kishinev again on the twentieth, when he wrote to Kiselev: ‘There is no one in the Kishinev gang besides those whom you know about, but what aim this gang has I do not as yet know. That well-known puppy Pushkin cries me up all over town as one of the Carbonari, and proclaims me guilty of every disorder. Of course, it is not unintentional, and I suspect him of being an organ of the gang.’ 77

On 5 February, at nine in the evening, Raevsky was reclining on his divan and smoking a pipe when there was a knock on the door; his Albanian servant let in Pushkin. He had, he told Raevsky, just eavesdropped on a conversation between Inzov and Sabaneev. Raevsky was to be arrested in the morning. ‘To arrest a staff officer on suspicion alone has the whiff of a Turkish punishment. However, what will be, will be,’ Raevsky remarked. Lost in admiration at his coolness, Pushkin attempted to embrace him. ‘You’re no Greek girl,’ said Raevsky, pushing him away. The two went round to Liprandi, who was entertaining a number of guests, including his younger brother, Pavel, Sabaneev’s adjutant. When Raevsky and Pushkin entered, they were assailed with questions as to what was going on. ‘Ask Pavel Petrovich,’ Raevsky replied, ‘he is Sabaneev’s trusted plenipotentiary minister.’ ‘True,’ said the younger Liprandi, ‘but if Sabaneev trusted you as he trusts me, you too would not wish to break the codes of trust and honour.’ 78 At noon the next day he was summoned to Sabaneev, and confronted with three officer cadets, members of his Lancaster school, whose testimony as to his teaching was the ostensible reason for his arrest. His books and papers were confiscated and a guard put on his quarters. A week later he was taken to Tiraspol and lodged in a cell in the fortress. The investigation into his case and his trial dragged on for years. Only in 1827 was he finally sentenced to exile in Siberia. In March Major-General Pushchin was relieved of his command of a brigade in Orlov’s division, and the following April Kiselev succeeded in bringing about Orlov’s removal from his command.

In July 1822 Liprandi, passing through Tiraspol on his way from Odessa to Kishinev, managed, with the connivance of the commandant of the fortress, to have half an hour’s conversation with Raevsky as they strolled backwards and forwards over the glacis. Raevsky gave him a poem, ‘The Bard in the Dungeon’, to pass on to Pushkin, who was particularly impressed by one stanza:

Like an automaton, the dumb nation

Sleeps in secret fear beneath the yoke:

Over it a bloody clan of scourges

Both thoughts and looks executes on the block.

Reading it aloud to Liprandi, he repeated the last line, and added with a sigh: ‘After such verses we will not see this Spartan again soon.’ 79

Although the authorities knew that Raevsky was a member of some kind of conspiracy, he remained resolutely silent in prison, and no other arrest followed his. Pushkin was surprised and shocked by the incident, which in addition appeared to him deeply mysterious: the severity of Raevsky’s treatment seemed wholly out of proportion to his crime. It was only in January 1825, when his old Lycée friend Pushchin visited him in Mikhailovskoe, that he gained some inkling of what had been going on. ‘Imperceptibly we again came to touch on his suspicions concerning the society,’ writes Pushchin. ‘When I told him that I was far from alone in joining this new service to the fatherland, he leapt from his chair and shouted: “This must all be connected with Major Raevsky, who has been sitting in the fort at Tiraspol for four years and whom they cannot get anything out of.”’ 80