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Overview
In Robert Chandler's exquisite biography, literary giant Alexander Pushkin, lauded as the Russian Shakespeare, is examined as writer, lover and public figure. Chandler explores his relationship to politics and provides a fascinating glimpse of the turbulent history Pushkin lived through. The book acts as a succinct guide to anybody trying to understand Russia's most celebrated literary figure and also illuminates the wider historical and political context of early nineteenth-century Russia.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782273455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2017 |
| Series: | Pushkin Blues , #1 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 893 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Childhood and ancestry 1799–1811
When Pushkin was one year old, Isis nurse once took him out to the park. Suddenly coming across Tsar Paul, she did not have time to remove Pushkin's little cap. The sovereign went up to her, scolded her for her slowness and removed the child's cap) himself. In later life Pushkin was to say that Isis dealings with the Court went back all the way to the days of Tsar Paul.
P.V Annenkov, 1855
Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow on 26th May (6th June New Style) 1799, and he was to) remain in Moscow throughout Isis childhood. He had an elder sister, Olga, and a younger brother, Lev Five more siblings were born after Lev, but they all died in infancy
Pushkin's mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, was known as 'the beautiful Creole'; one of her grandfathers was black African. She was domineering and restless; between 1801 and 1811 the family moved from one lodging to another eleven times. If a change of lodging was impossible, she would move the furniture or change the wallpaper. She seems to have been distant, even cruel, in her treatment of Alexander – perhaps because he looked like her half-black father, with whom she got on badly; she made it clear that she preferred both Olga and Lev. The lack of contact between Pushkin and his parents was unusual even by the standards that prevailed among; the upper classes of the time.
Pushkin's father, Sergei Lvovich, seems to have been frivolous, irritable, and dominated by his wife. Little seems to have mattered to him apart from his social life. He was incompetent in his management of the family estate; both he end his wife were only too ready to live beyond their means.
If Pushkin's parents were important to his development mainly through their emotional absence, there were other relatives who played a more positive role. His father's brother, Vasily Lvovich, was a competent poet himself he was fond of Pushkin and aware of his brilliance. He knew most of the important writers of the time, including; the historian Nikolai Karamzin and the poets Batyushkov, Dmitriev and Zhukovsky – and most of these writers visited Pushkin's home. Pushkin was evidently brought up in an atmosphere that encouraged him to read and write poetry.
By the age of ten, according to his sister, Pushkin had read Plutarch, the Iliad and the Odyssey in French, and much of the eighteenth-century French literature in his father's library. In other respects, however, fie was a poor student, and he teems to have failed, even as an adult, to master basic arithmetic.
Still more important than Vasily Lvovich was Pushkin's maternal grandmother, Maria Cannibal. She lived with the family from 1805 and was responsible For the running of the house end the education of the children; it was she who engaged their various French tutors and governesses. Apart from the household serfs, she was she only person with whom Pushkin spoke Russian at home; with the rest of the family he spoke French. She was fond of Pushkin, but she would sometimes tell her friends shat the had no idea what would become of him, saying that her elder grandson was a bad student and that he rarely prepared his lessons properly.
Maria Cannibal also helped to instil in Pushkin a sense of family history that was to remain with him throughout his life. It is possible that the; inadequacy of Isis parents made; it all the more vital to him tea feel a connection tea the generations before them.
The Pushkins belonged to the old Russian nobility. They had never occupied the very highest positions in the Russian state, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries several Pushkins hap played roles of historical significance; Pushkin includes two of them in Isis historical drama Boris Godunov. Pushkin took pleasure in the knowledge that several of his ancestors were rebels; he refers several times in Isis works to Fyodor Pushkin, who was executed for taking part in a rebellion against Peter the Great in 1697 – 'for refusing to yield over a matter of conscience', as Pushkin himself puts it. Pushkin also refers at least twice to his paternal grandfather, Lev Alexandrovich, who lost all chance of promotion at court by remaining loyal to Peter III even after the latter was overthrown by his wife – the empress we now know as Catherine the Great.
Important as earlier Pushkins were to him, not one of them was as important to his imagination as his maternal great-grand-father, Abram Gannibal. Cannibal's story is unusual, and some elements of it remain controversial. He was born in 1696; it now seems likely that he came not from Ethiopia, as was long believed, but from Chad. As a boy, he was taken by Islamic slave-traders to Constantinople. From there he was taken to Moscow – perhaps at then instigation of Peter the Great, who was always interested in anyone or anything exotic. There were, at this time, Negro servants in many of the main European courts. When Abram arrived in Moscow at the age of eight, Peter became his godfather and took responsibility for his education.
Gannibal proved equally gifted in languages, maths and science. As a young man, he became Peter's most trusted aide. Sent by Peter to study in France, he was befriended by Diderot and Voltaire, who referred to him as the 'dark star of Russia's enlightenment'. Fifty years later, when Diderot needed money, Gannibal would persuade Catherine the Great to buy his library and pay him a pension.
On his return from France, Gannibal was appointed 'principal translator of foreign books at the Imperial Court'. But he not only translated books about scientific and military matters; he was also an uncommonly gifted engineer himself. By 1759 he had been promoted to the rank of general and was in charge of military engineering throughout Russia. One of the forts he constructed – Kronstadt in the Gulf of Finland – was still of military importance 200 years later, during the Siege of Leningrad. Gannibal was awarded several estates, and he was granted the status of a hereditary nobleman.
The death of the Empress Elizabeth in 1761 put an end to his career, and he spent his last twenty years on his Mikhailovskoye estate, near Pskov. There, in Pushkin's words, 'the black African who had become a Russian noble lived out his life like a French philosophe.'
To the end of his life, Pushkin treasured a gift, from his friend Pavel Nashchokin, of an inkwell with a statuette of a black man leaning against an anchor in front of two bales of cotton. Pushkin refers to Gannibal many times in his work, and in 1827 he began a novel about him: The Blackamoor of Peter the Great. Pushkin's own physical appearance was unusual for a Russian; with his swarthy complexion and his dark, curly hair, he was generally seen as exotic. It seems likely that, in the following passage from The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, Pushkin is also describing himself:
Usually people looked at the young; blackamoor as if he were a marvel, clustering; around him and showering him with greetings and questions, and this curiosity, though seemingly well-intentioned, wounded his self esteem. The sweet attentions of women, almost the only goal of our efforts, not only failed to gladden his heart but even filled it with bitterness and indignation. He felt that they saw him as some kind of rare beast, a kind of special, alien creation that had been accidentally transported into a world that had nothing to do with him.
Andrey Sinyavsky, in Strolls with Pushkin (a high-spirited book that Sikyavsky composed in the late 1960s, in a Soviet labour camp, and sent out in instalments in letters to his wife), has written that Pushkin 'seized on his Negroid appearance and his African past, which he loved perhaps more dearly than he did his aristocratic (Russian) ancestry'. This points to an important paradox. Pushkin saw himself as an outsider and defiantly identified with someone he saw as still more of an outsider. Gannibal, however, was not only an outsider; he was also very close to no less a man than Peter the Great – and in The Blackamoor Pushkin chose to exaggerate this closeness. Pushkin's identification with Gannibal was also a way of making himself into an insider, an intimate of Russia's greatest Tsar; it may have helped him to write more freely about Peter – and about Russian history in general.
CHAPTER 2
The Imperial Lycée 1811–17
My friends, this brotherhood of ours will live.
Pushkin, '19 October', 1825, tr. Henry Jones
On 19th October 1811, aged twelve, Pushkin began Isis studies at the prestigious Imperial Lyceum; he was part of the first intake of thirty students.
The Lycée, as it was usually known, was a remarkable institution – the most progressive of its day. It was housed in a wing of the Great Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the summer residence, sixteen miles from St Petersburg, of the imperial family; its ethos was liberal, and it enjoyed extraordinary privileges. Its purpose, according to an imperial decree, was 'the education of the young, especially those destined for important parts of government service'. Corporal punishment was forbidden. Teachers were never to allow pupils 'to use words without clear ideas', and they were to encourage 'the exercise of reason' in all subjects. Teaching was mostly carried out in Russian – not, as was then common, in French. Each student had his own small study-bedroom. The one strangely harsh regulation was that the boys were not allowed to leave the Lycée throughout the six years of their studies. Even the July vacation had to be spent at the school, and parents and relatives were allowed to visit: only on Sundays or other holidays.
In July 1811, on the suggestion of Alexander Turgenev (a friend of the family and an important historian, not to be confused with the well-known novelist: Ivan Turgenev), Pushkin had been sent by his parents so take the oral entrance examination. This was conducted by the Minister of Education, the Lycée'e first director Vasily Malinovsky, and one other official. Pushkin was accepted, though Malinovsky's private note read, 'Flighty and frivolous. Excellent at French and drawing, lazy and backward at arithmetic.' Except in his best subjects – Russian and French literature and fencing – Pushkin did not prove a good student, and Malinovsky's assessment is echoed in later reports. One written in November 1812 reads:
His talents are brilliant rather than fundamental, his mind more ardent and subtle than deep. His application to study is moderate [...] Having; read a great number of French books, often inappropriate to his age, he has filled his memory with many successful passages of famous authors; he is also reasonably well read in Russian literature, and knows many fables and light verses. His knowledge is generally superficial ...
The Lycée was ceremonially opened on 19th October 1811, in the presence of Tsar Alexander I, to whom the pupils were introduced individually. On the whole, the school seems to have run smoothly. There are mentions in memoirs of the mischievous behaviour of the boys, but there was only one case of expulsion during the six years Pushkin spent there. The Russian critic, D.S. Mirsky, describes the curriculum as giving a general groundwork in the humanities and modern culture but 'being; calculated rather to develop an easy-going conversationalist and man of the world than either a serious scholar or an efficient statesman'. One tutor, Alexander Kunitsyn, had a lasting influence on Pushkin; the imprint of Isis thoughts about freedom, natural law and the relation between the individual and society can be seen in Pushkin's mature work.
More important to Pushkin than any of the tutors were Isis fellow students. The members of the Lycée's first intake formed a close fellowship. They referred to themselves as 'a nation', and they held a reunion every year for the rest of their lives on 19th October, the anniversary of the Lycée's opening. Pushkin was in exile from 1820 to 1826, but he attended four times during the next ten years; and in 1825, 1827, 1831 and 1836 he wrote poems dedicated to the occasion. For Pushkin, 19th October was a date intimately bound up with reflections on his own fate, the fate of his contemporaries and the fate of Russia. The 'publisher's note' accompanying the original, anonymous publication of The Captain's Daughter was dated 19th October 1836 – almost as if this were the equivalent of his signature. And it was on 19th October 1830 that Pushkin burned the unfinished 'Decembrist' chapter of Eugene Onegin.
The lasting closeness that developed among the members of the Lycée's first intake is remarkable. There is no doubt that the Lycée was sensitively and generously run, but there may have been other determinants. The decade following the defeat of Napoleon was a brief golden age for St Petersburg. Russia had, at last, become a major European power. There seemed no reason to doubt that the westernising project begun by Peter the Great would continue, but Russian writers no longer felt that they need remain forever in the shadow of French, German and English writers. The Imperial Lycée, western-orientated in many ways but with Russian as its main language of instruction, seemed destined to play a crucial role in this new Russia, and the boys who formed its first intake may well have felt chosen by date. As Mirsky remarks:
... in this feeling of Pushkin's toward! his school, compared to his attitude towards his home and family, there is a symbolical significance: all Petrine Russia belonged more to its school than to its home. Its school was Europe and Civilisation, its home the old traditional Russia.
No less remarkable-was the amount of poetic talent to be found in this first intake. Pushkin's two closest friends were Ivan Pushchin, who later became a magistrate, and the poet Anton Delvig. His other friends included Wilhelm Küchelbecker, an intelligent critic and an interesting;, unusual poet; Illichevsky, who wrote elegant epigrams; and Mikhail Yakovlev, a composer-who set a number of Pushkin's and Delvig's poems to music. Both Pushkin and Delvig were soon publishing in the main literary magazines of the day. A poem dedicated to Küchelbecker and signed by an anagram of Pushkin's name was published in the prestigious The Messenger of Europe when Pushkin was only fifteen years old.
Pushkin wrote a great deal while at the Lycée: bawdy epigrams, conventional love poems, patriotic reflections, light verse. Nearly all of his verse from these years is elegant; none of it is great poetry. It is all the more impressive that Pushkin's seniors were so quick, and so generous, in their recognition of his talent.
In 1815, Gavrila Derzhavin, the greatest Russian poet of the age of Catherine the Great, heard Pushkin recite his poem 'Recollections at Tsarskoye Selo' at a public examination at the Lycée. Derzhavin, who had until then been half asleep, was enthralled; he is said to have told a friend that Pushkin had already outshone all other writers. Derzhavin was by then already seventy-one years old – an age by which most writers have long since lost the ability to appreciate the talents of the young. Pushkin later memorialised the occasion:
And with a smile my Muse was greeted;
Eugene Onegin, VIII, 2
Several other leading poets – Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, Konstantin Batyushkov and Vasily Zhukovsky – expressed similar enthusiasm. In a letter to Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky wrote, 'He is the hope of our literature. I !ear only lest fie, imagining himself mature, should prevent himself from becoming so. We must all unite to assist this future giant, who 'will outgrow us alt, to grow up.' And on one occasion Karamzin recommended Pushkin to a minor poet, Prince Neledinsky-Meletsky who found himself unable to compose the poem he had promised for the farewell party of the Grand Duchess Anna. Having just married, she was about to leave for Holland with her husband, Prince William of Orange. Pushkin quickly produced soma appropriate verses, and these were sung at the supper in the gardens of the Pavlovsk palace; the dowager empress rewarded him with the gift of a gold watch and chain.
A great poet seldom, if ever, appears out of nowhere. Shakespeare was heir to the earlier Elizabethan poets, playwrights and translators of Ovid. Dante was heir to the Provençal audition anti the dolce stil nuovo developed by Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti. Similarly, Karamzin, Batyushkov and Zhukovsky had prepared the ground for Pushkin; they also had literary banks to fight and were probably glad of a talented young recruit.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Short Life of Pushkin"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Robert Chandler.
Excerpted by permission of Pushkin Press.
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Table of Contents
Childhood and Ancestry, 1799–1811, 7,
The Imperial Lycée, 1811–17, 13,
St Petersburg, 1817–20, 19,
The South, 1820–4, 25,
Mikhailovskoye, 1824–6, 35,
Tsar Nicholas, Moscow and Boris Godunov, 1826, 45,
Bachelor Life, 1826–9, 57,
Courtship and Marriage, 1830, 65,
Boldino, Autumn 1830, 69,
Eugene Onegin, 1823–31, 79,
Loyal Subject and Family Man, 1831–3, 83,
Return to Boldino, Autumn 1833, 93,
Pushkin and History, 1825–37, 99,
Junior Gentleman of the Chamber, 1834–6, 105,
Duel, 1836–7, 115,
'Exegi Monumentum', 131,
Pushkin's Legacy: my Pushkin or yours?, 135,
Notes, 145,
Chronology, 147,
Bibliography, 149,
Acknowledgements, 151,
Biographical note, 152,