LITMIR.BIZ

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it for applause!’¹⁴

Almost exactly a year later the incident was repeated when Pushkin, bored by a play, interrupted it with hisses and cat-calls. After the performance a Major Denisevich, who had been sitting next to him, took him to task in the corridor, waving his finger at him. Outraged by the gesture, Pushkin demanded Denisevich’s address, and appointed to meet him at eight the following morning. Denisevich was sharing the quarters of Ivan Lazhechnikov, then aide-de-camp to General Count Ostermann-Tolstoy, in the general’s house between the English Embankment and Galernaya Street. At a quarter to eight Pushkin, accompanied by two cavalry officers, appeared and was met by Lazhechnikov. The latter, who was to be acclaimed as ‘the Russian Walter Scott’ for his historical novels The Last Page (1831–3) and The Ice Palace (1835), takes up the story in a letter to Pushkin written eleven years later: ‘Do you remember a morning in Count Ostermann’s house on the Galernaya, with you were two fine young guardsmen, giants in size and spirit, the miserable figure of the Little Russian [Denisevich], who to your question: had you come in time? answered, puffing himself up like a turkey-cock, that he had summoned you not for a chivalrous affair of honour, but to give you a lesson on how to conduct yourself in the theatre and that it was unseemly for a major to fight with a civilian; do you remember the tiny aide-de-camp, laughing heartily at the scene and advising you not to waste honest powder on such vermin and the spur of irony on the skin of an ass. That baby aide-de-camp was your most humble servant.’¹⁵ No wonder that Karamzin’s wife Ekaterina should write to her half-brother, Vyazemsky, in March 1820: ‘Mr Pushkin has duels every day; thank God, not fatal, since the opponents always remain unharmed’,¹⁶ or that Pushkin, in preparation for an occasion when cold steel might be preferred to honest powder, should have attended the school set up in St Petersburg by the famous French fencing master Augustin Grisier.^*

      In St Petersburg Pushkin had been reunited with Nikita Kozlov, a serf from Sergey Lvovich’s estate at Boldino, who had looked after him as a child. Nikita became his body-servant, and remained with him until his death. Tall, good-looking, with reddish side-whiskers, he married Nadezhda, Arina Rodionovna’s daughter. Like his master, he was fond of drink. Once, when in liquor, he quarrelled with one of Korff’s servants. Hearing the row, Korff came out and set about Nikita with a stick. Pushkin, feeling that he had been insulted in the person of his servant, called Korff out. Korff refused the challenge with a note: ‘I do not accept your challenge, not because you are Pushkin, but because I am not Küchelbecker.’¹⁷ Pushkin’s way of life aroused a puritanical disgust in Korff:

      Beginning while still at the Lycée, he later, in society, abandoned himself to every kind of debauchery and spent days and nights in an uninterrupted succession of bacchanals and orgies, with the most noted and inveterate rakes of the time. It is astonishing how his health and his very talent could withstand such a way of life, with which were naturally associated frequent venereal sicknesses, bringing him at times to the brink of the grave […] Eternally without a copeck, eternally in debt, sometimes even without a decent frock-coat, with endless scandals, frequent duels, closely acquainted with every tavern-keeper, whore and trollop, Pushkin represented a type of the filthiest depravity.¹⁸

      The passage, though savagely caricatural, is a recognizable portrait. ‘The Cricket hops around the boulevard and the bordellos,’ Aleksandr Turgenev told Vyazemsky, later referring to his ‘two bouts of a sickness with a non-Russian name’, caught as a result. Once, however, the illness was not that which might have been expected. ‘The poet Pushkin is very ill,’ Turgenev wrote. ‘He caught cold, waiting at the door of a whore, who would not let him in despite the rain, so as not to infect him with her illness. What a battle between generosity and love and licentiousness.’¹⁹ The girl in question might have been the charming Pole, Angelica, who lived with her stout and ugly aunt and a disagreeable little dog on the Moika near Pushchin, also one of her clients.

      Intercourse of a different kind was to be had in one of the capital’s salons – that, for instance, of Ekaterina Muraveva, the widow of Mikhail Muravev, a poet and the curator of Moscow University. Nikita, her elder son, was a member of Arzamas and one of the founders of the Union of Salvation; the younger, Aleksandr, a cavalry cornet, joined the conspiracy in 1820. She entertained in a large house on the Fontanka near the Anichkov Bridge, ‘one of the most luxurious and pleasant in the capital’.²⁰ The Karamzins usually stayed here when in St Petersburg, as did Batyushkov, to whom Ekaterina Fedorovna was related by marriage: her husband’s sister had been the poet’s grandmother.

      When Batyushkov set out to join the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples on 19 November 1818, she gave a farewell party for him. ‘Yesterday we saw off Batyushkov,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky. ‘Between one and two, before dinner, K.F. Muraveva with her son and niece, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, Lunin, Baron Schilling and I drove to Tsarskoe Selo, where a good dinner and a battery of champagne awaited us. We grieved, drank, laughed, argued, grew heated, were ready to weep and drank again. Pushkin wrote an impromptu, which it is impossible to send, and at nine in the evening we sat our dear voyager in his carriage and, sensing a protracted separation, embraced him and took a long farewell of him.’²¹ The first signs of Batyushkov’s mental illness showed themselves in Italy. When he returned to Russia in 1822 he was suffering from persecution mania, which grew ever more severe, and was accompanied by attempts at suicide.

The best-known literary salon in St Petersburg was that of the Olenins. Aleksey Olenin was one of the highest government officials, having replaced Speransky as Imperial Secretary in 1812; he was also president of the Academy of Arts, director of the Public Library, an archaeologist and historian. He was charming and extremely hospitable, as was his wife, Elizaveta Markovna – though she was a chronic invalid who often received her guests lying on a sofa.^* She had inherited a house on the Fontanka near the Semenovsky Bridge: a three-storey building whose entrance columns supported a first-floor balcony; inside the rooms were ornamented with Aleksey Nikolaevich’s collection of antique statues and Etruscan vases. Pushkin was a frequent visitor, both to the St Petersburg house and to Priyutino, the Olenins’ small estate some twelve miles to the north of the capital, and enthusiastically took part in their amateur theatricals. He played Alnaskarov in Khmelnitsky’s one-act comedy Castles in the Air, and, on 2 May 1819, composed together with Zhukovsky a ballad for a charade devised by Ivan Krylov, in honour of Elizaveta Markovna’s birthday. At a party at the Olenins earlier that year, as a forfeit in some game, Krylov – whose satirical fables rival those of La Fontaine – declaimed one of his latest compositions, ‘The Donkey and the Peasant’, before an audience which included Pushkin and an innocent-looking nineteen-year-old beauty, Anna Kern – the daughter of Petr Poltoratsky and hence the niece, both of her hostess and of Praskovya Osipova.

      Anna had been married at sixteen – ‘too early and too undiscriminatingly’²² – to Lieutenant-General Ermolay Kern, thirty-five years her senior. Kern, who had lost his command through injudicious behaviour towards a superior officer, had come to St Petersburg in order to petition the emperor for reinstatement. Aware that Alexander was not unsusceptible to Anna’s beauty – which he had compared to that of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, wife of his brother Nicholas – he sent her out to the Fontanka each day in the hope of meeting the emperor, whose habits were well-known: ‘At one in the afternoon he came out of the Winter Palace, walked up the Dvortsovaya Embankment, at Pracheshny Bridge turned down the Fontanka to the Anichkov Bridge

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