T. Binyon - Pushkin

PUSHKIN

A Biography

T. J. BINYON

For Helen

and In memory of my father Denis Binyon

What business is it of the critic or reader whether I am handsome or ugly, come from an ancient nobility or am not of gentle birth, whether I am good or wicked, crawl at the feet of the mighty or do not even exchange bows with them, whether I gamble at cards and so on. My future biographer, if God sends me a biographer, will concern himself with this.

PUSHKIN, 1830

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Trees

Maps

Prologue

1 Ancestry and Childhood, 1799–1811

2 The Lycée, 1811–17

3 St Petersburg, 1817–20: I Literature and

4 St Petersburg, 1817–20: II Onegin’s Day

5 St Petersburg, 1817–20: III Triumph

6 The Caucasus and Crimea, 1820

7 Kishinev, 1820–23

8 Odessa, 1823–24

9 Mikhailovskoe, 1824–26

10 In Search of a Wife, 1826–29

11 Courtship, 1828–31

12 Married Life, 1831–33

13 The Tired Slave, 1833–34

14 A Sea of Troubles, 1834–36

15 The Final Chapter, 1836–37

Epilogue

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Dates, Currency and Ranks

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

By now it is not so much Pushkin, our national poet, as our relationship to Pushkin that has become as it were our national characteristic.

ANDREY BITOV, 1986

‘PUSHKIN IS OUR ALL,’ declared the critic and poet Apollon Grigorev in 1854. 1 His famous remark is perhaps the best expression of Pushkin’s significance, not merely for Russian literature, or even for Russian culture, but for the Russian ethos generally and for Russia as a whole. At the time, however, his was a lone voice. Though Pushkin had been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet during his lifetime, his reputation had begun to sink during his last years. The decline continued after his death in 1837, reaching perhaps its lowest point in the 1850s. In 1855 a petition, noting that monuments to a number of other writers – Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Koltsov, Karamzin and Krylov – had been erected, called for Pushkin to be added to their number. It met with no response. In 1861 Pushkin’s school, the Lycée – which had moved from Tsarskoe Selo to St Petersburg and been renamed the Alexandrine Lycée – celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In conjunction with this a public subscription was opened to erect a statue to Pushkin in Tsarskoe Selo. Three years later less than a fifth of the necessary sum had been subscribed, and interest in the project had lapsed completely. However, by 1869, when the idea was revived by a group of former lycéens, Pushkin’s reputation was on the rise. This time the subscription was successful, raising over 100,000 roubles. The suggestion of Admiral Matyushkin, a schoolfellow of Pushkin, that the monument should be placed in Moscow, the poet’s native city, was accepted, and a site on Strastnaya Square, at the end of Tverskoy Boulevard, was chosen. After three competitions A.M. Opekushin’s design for a statue showing a meditating Pushkin emerged as the winner.

Only after eleven years of procrastination and preparation, however, was the project completed. The unveiling ceremony was planned for 26 May 1880, the eighty-first anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, but the death of Empress Mariya caused it to be postponed until Friday 6 June. At one o’clock that day, after a service in the Strastnoy monastery opposite the site of the monument, the statue was unveiled in the presence of an immense crowd. Cheers rang out, and many wept. ‘Where are the colours, where are the words to convey the intoxication of the triumphal moment?’ wrote one reporter. ‘Those who didn’t see it did not see the populace in one of its best moments of spiritual joyousness.’ 2 That evening a banquet, given by the city duma, was followed by a literary-musical evening in the hall of the Noble Assembly. Overtures from operas based on Pushkin’s works were performed; congratulatory telegrams from Tennyson, Victor Hugo and others were read out; Dostoevsky, Turgenev and others gave readings from Pushkin: Turgenev especially being greeted with tumultuous applause.

The next day, 7 June, at a public meeting of the Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature, Turgenev gave an elegant and civilized speech. Pushkin was, he said, repeating Belinsky, Russia’s ‘first artist-poet’. ‘There is no doubt,’ he continued, ‘that he created our poetic, our literary language and that we and our descendants can only follow the path laid down by his genius.’ But in the end he had reluctantly to deny Pushkin the title of ‘a national poet in the sense of a universal poet’, as were Shakespeare, Goethe or Homer. Unlike them, he had had to perform two tasks simultaneously, ‘to establish a language and create a literature’. And, unlike them, he had had the misfortune to die young, without fulfilling his true potential. Turgenev ended his speech by apostrophizing the statue itself. ‘Shine forth, like him, thou noble bronze visage, erected in the very heart of our ancient capital, and announce to future generations our right to call ourselves a great nation, because this nation has given birth, among other great men, to such a man!’, a peroration which was greeted with enthusiasm and loud applause. 3

Its reception, however, was completely overshadowed by that given to Dostoevsky’s long, passionate and emotional address the following morning, the third and last day of the celebrations. He began by quoting Gogol’s remark that Pushkin was ‘an extraordinary, and perhaps unique manifestation of the Russian spirit’, and added that he was, too, ‘a prophetic one’. Whereas Turgenev had been unable to rank Pushkin with poets such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky proclaimed his superiority to the ‘Shakespeares, Cervanteses and Schillers’, because of ‘something almost even miraculous’, his ‘universal responsiveness’, a characteristic which he shared with the Russian people. Whereas Shakespeare’s Italians are disguised Englishmen, Pushkin’s Spaniards are Spanish, his Germans German and his Englishmen English. ‘I can positively say that there has never been a poet with so universal a responsiveness as Pushkin, and it is not just his responsiveness, but its astounding depth, the reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of foreign peoples, an almost complete, and hence miraculous reincarnation, because nowhere, in no poet of the entire world has this phenomenon been repeated.’ It is this national characteristic which will eventually enable Russia to save Europe and ‘to pronounce the final word of great, general harmony, of the final brotherly agreement of all nations in accordance with the law of Christ’s Gospel!’ If this seems a presumptuous claim for a land as poor as Russia, ‘we can already point to Pushkin, to the universality and panhumanity of his genius […] In art at least, in artistic creation, he undeniably manifested this universality of the aspiration of the Russian spirit.’ Had Pushkin lived longer his message would perhaps have been clearer. ‘But God decreed otherwise. Pushkin died in the full development of his powers, and undoubtedly carried to his grave a certain great mystery,’ Dostoevsky concluded. ‘And now we must solve this mystery without him.’ 4