Pushkin - T. Binyon J.

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reprimanded.’27 His only interest was Russian literature; he knew a mass of verse by heart. As with Pushkin, his talent for poetry blossomed at the Lycée. He was the first to appear in print, when a poem on the capture of Paris appeared in the Herald of Europe in June 1814. In one Lycée poem – one of the best he ever wrote – dedicated to Pushkin, he prophesies literary immortality for his friend:

      Pushkin! Even in the forests he cannot hide himself,

      His lyre will betray him with loud singing,

      And from the mortals Apollo will carry away

      The third of the Lycée’s poets was Wilhelm Küchelbecker, in some ways the strangest of all the pupils. Tall and very thin, he had had an attack of St Vitus’s Dance (Sydenham’s chorea) in childhood, which had left him with a facial tic and deaf in one ear. Engelhardt wrote of him: ‘He has read all the books in the world about all the subjects in the world; has much talent, much diligence, much good will, much heart and much feeling, but, alas, with all this he has no taste, tact, grace, moderation or clear aim. However, he is an honest, innocent soul, and the obstinacy he sometimes displays is only the result of a Quixotic honour and virtue with a considerable admixture of vanity.’29 No other pupil was referred to so often in the lycéens’ songs, or had so many epigrams written about him. In general Küchelbecker bore the attacks stoically, but when Malinovsky threw a plate of soup over his head at dinner he had to be taken to the sickbay with a fever, escaped, and tried to drown himself in the lake. A cartoon in one of the magazines produced by the lycéens shows a boat-load of teachers fishing for him with a boat-hook. His passionate, impractical idealism manifested itself even in his views on literature, in which he preached the virtues of the eighteenth-century ode, of archaic language, and of the hexameter.

      â€˜Coarse, passionate, but appreciative, zealous, clean and very diligent’: so reads a report on Mikhail Yakovlev.30 A talented musician, who sang to the guitar, he set a number of Delvig’s and Pushkin’s works to music, both at the Lycée and later. At the Lycée, however, where his nickname was ‘the clown’, he was best known for his imitations. He had a huge repertoire of two hundred roles. They include, besides all the teachers and most of the pupils, Italian bears (no. 93), their attendants (no. 94), a samovar (no. 98), Russian bear attendants (no. 109), Alexander I (no. 129), a ship (no. 170) and a mad sergeant of hussars (no. 179).31 Later, when Pushkin was living in Moscow, he asked a friend from St Petersburg what the subject of Yakovlev’s latest imitation was. ‘The St Petersburg flood’ was the reply. ‘And how’s that?’ ‘Very lifelike.’32

      The first three months of the Lycée’s existence passed quietly; Alexander I’s birthday was celebrated on 12 December; Volkhovsky was adjudged the best student of the term: his name, and that of Gorchakov (first in deportment), were inscribed in gold letters on a board which was put up in the school hall. Razumovsky ordered it to be taken down and informed Malinovsky that innovations of this kind were not to be introduced without his permission. The last week of the year was a holiday. By the beginning of 1812 war with France seemed imminent. In February and March the lycéens turned out to cheer the guards and army regiments passing through Tsarskoe Selo on their way south to join the Russian First Army in Vilna. Commander-in-chief of this army, and Minister of War, was Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, who was distantly related to Küchelbecker, and had been instrumental in securing a place for him at the Lycée.

      In May Pushkin spent five days in the sickbay with a feverish cold; he was thirteen on the twenty-sixth of that month; on 9 June the Lycée was visited by the Metropolitan of Moldavia, Gabriel Banulescu-Bodoni; and on 12 June Napoleon’s army of half a million men crossed the Neman. The news was received in Tsarskoe Selo five days later. From that time on the lycéens followed, with growing anxiety and dismay, the progress of the invasion in the Russian and foreign newspapers in the reading-room, and in the bulletins which Nikolay Koshansky, who taught Latin and Russian literature, made it his business to compose and to read on Sundays in the school hall. Delvig earned instant popularity by his vivid account of the events he had witnessed as a nine-year-old during the campaign of 1807: a complete fantasy which, nevertheless, deceived the lycéens and even Malinovsky.

      As the Grande Armée advanced, Barclay retreated before it. Napoleon was in Vilna on 16 June, Vitebsk on 16 July. After fierce fighting, Smolensk fell on 6 August, destroyed by fire. ‘The spectacle Smolensk offered the French was like the spectacle an eruption of Mount Vesuvius offered the inhabitants of Naples,’ wrote Napoleon.33 Having given battle at Lubino, the Russian army then retreated again, towards Moscow, whose inhabitants had already begun to leave the city. Nadezhda Pushkina, taking her children and mother, Mariya Gannibal, left for Nizhny Novgorod.

      The commander of a retreating, apparently beaten army, Barclay had lost Alexander’s confidence and become widely unpopular. He had often urged on the emperor the necessity for a single commander-in-chief of all the Russian armies. Alexander belatedly took his advice and appointed Kutuzov. Barclay remained as commander of the First Army, but had to give up his post as Minister of War. Küchelbecker, in dismay at the taunts, even accusations of treason, that were being levelled at his relative, turned to his mother for consolation. He was not wholly comforted by the reassurances offered in her letters, and in October she had to dissuade the fourteen-year-old from joining the army as a volunteer in order to redeem the family honour. She mentioned the immorality of the young men in the volunteer army, protested against ‘the slaughter of children’, and pointed out that it would interrupt his education. Küchelbecker abandoned the idea.34

      Even under Kutuzov the Russian army continued to retreat. Abandoning a favourable position at Tsarevo-Zaimishche, he moved east to Gzhatsk and, fighting off the French under Murat with his rearguard, arrived near the village of Borodino on the Kolocha river, seventy-two miles from Moscow, on 22 August. Here he drew up his armies and waited for the French. On the twenty-fourth the French captured the Shevardino redoubt; on the twenty-sixth, after a day’s lull, the battle of Borodino took place, lasting from six in the morning until dusk. Napoleon’s withdrawal across the Kolocha at the end of the day convinced Kutuzov that, despite the enormous Russian losses, the French had been beaten. He sent a short dispatch claiming victory to Alexander, and retreated to Mozhaisk. Meanwhile a letter from Napoleon was on its way to the Empress Marie-Louise in Paris: ‘I write to you from the battlefield of Borodino. Yesterday I beat the Russians […] The battle was a hot one: victory was ours at two in the afternoon. I took several thousand prisoners and sixty cannons. Their losses can be estimated at 30,000 men. I lost many killed and wounded […] My health is good, the weather a little fresh’.35

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