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There at least one’s bold hand can rove over the swan’s down of sweet bosoms etc.’³⁴

      At the garret Pushkin met the nineteen-year-old actress Elena Sosnitskaya, to whose album he contributed a quatrain:

      With coldness of heart you have contrived to unite

      The wondrous heat of captivating eyes.

      He who loves you is, of course, a fool;

      But he who loves you not is a hundred times more foolish.³⁵

      â€˜In my youth, when she really was the beautiful Helen,’ he later remarked, ‘I nearly fell into her net, but came to my senses and got off with a poem.’³⁶ He was also seduced by the more mature charms of the singer Nimfodora Semenova, then thirty-one, more renowned for her appearance than her voice: ‘I would wish to be, Semenova, your coverlet,/Or the dog that sleeps upon your bed,’ he sighed.³⁷ More serious was his infatuation – despite the fact that she was thirteen years his senior – with Nimfodora’s elder sister, the tragic actress Ekaterina Semenova. The essay ‘My Remarks on the Russian Theatre’, composed in 1820, though purporting to be a general survey of the state of the theatre, is merely an excuse for praising Semenova. ‘Speaking of Russian tragedy, one speaks of Semenova and, perhaps, only of her. Gifted with talent, beauty, and a lively and true feeling, she formed herself […] Semenova has no rival […] she remains the autocratic queen of the tragic stage.’³⁸ He bestowed the manuscript on her. Somewhat unfeelingly she immediately handed it on to her dramatic mentor, Gnedich, who noted on it: ‘This piece was written by A. Push-kin, when he was pursuing, unsuccessfully, Semenova, who gave it to me then.’³⁹

      Semenova had, however, a stage rival: the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kolosova, who made her debut at the Bolshoy on 16 December 1818 as Antigone in Ozerov’s tragedy Oedipus in Athens. The following Easter Pushkin, who had admired her demure beauty at the Good Friday service in a church near the Bolshoy, made her acquaintance. But he naturally took Semenova’s side in the rivalry, all the more as he fancied Kolosova had slighted his attentions: she should ‘occupy herself less with aide-de-camps of his imperial majesty and more with her roles’. ‘All fell asleep,’ he added, at a performance of Racine’s Esther (translated by Katenin), on 8 December, in which she took the title role.⁴⁰ ‘Everything in Esther captivates us’ begins an epigram; her speech, her gait, her hair, voice, hand, brows, and ‘her enormous feet!’⁴¹

      When Eugene enters the theatre Evdokiya Istomina, the great beauty among the ballet-dancers, is on the stage:

      Brilliant, half-ethereal,

      Obedient to the violin’s magic bow,

      Surrounded by a crowd of nymphs,

      Stands Istomina; she

      Touching the floor with one foot,

      Slowly gyrates the other,

      And suddenly jumps, and suddenly flies,

      Flies, like fluff from Aeolus’s lips;

      Now bends, now straightens,

      And with one quick foot the other beats.

      (I, xx)

      Pushkin pursued her too, but with less zeal than Semenova: he was only one of a crowd of admirers. An amusing sketch, executed by Olenin’s son, Aleksey, shows a scene at Priyutino: a dog, with the head and neck of the dark-haired Istomina, is surrounded by a host of dog admirers with the heads of Pushkin, Gnedich, Krylov and others.⁴²

Another visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret was Nikita Vsevolozhsky, Pushkin’s coeval, a passionate theatre-goer, ‘the best of the momentary friends of my momentary youth’.^{* 43} He was the son of Vsevolod Vsevolozhsky, known, for his wealth, as ‘the Croesus of St Petersburg’, who, after the death of his wife in 1810, had caused a long-lasting scandal in society by taking to live with him a married woman, Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya. The injured husband, Petr Khovansky, complained publicly of the insult done to him, and went so far as to petition the emperor for the return of his wife, but without success. In the end, financially ruined, he was forced to accept Vsevolozhsky’s charity, and lived with the family until his death. To complicate the situation further, Nikita Vsevolozhsky later married Khovansky’s daughter, Princess Varvara. Pushkin, intrigued by the family history, in 1834–5 planned to incorporate it in a projected novel entitled A Russian Pelham. Vsevolozhsky, who received a large income from his father, had an apartment near the Bolshoy and a mistress, the ballet-dancer Evdokiya Ovoshnikova. ‘You remember Pushkin,’ runs a letter of 1824, ‘Pushkin, who sobered you up on Good Friday and led you by the hand to the church of the theatre management so that you could pray to the Lord God and gaze to your heart’s content at Mme Ovoshnikova.’⁴⁴

In March 1819 Vsevolozhsky set up a small theatrical-literary society among his friends. It met fortnightly, in a room at his apartment, and became known as the Green Lamp after the colour of the lamp-shade. Besides Pushkin and Vsevolozhsky the members included Delvig, Nikolay Gnedich, Nikita’s elder brother, Aleksandr, Fedor Glinka, Arkady Rodzyanko, a lieutenant in the Life Guards Jägers, and a poet whose work is an odd mixture of high-minded poems on civic themes and pornographic verse: Pushkin later dubbed him ‘the Piron of the Ukraine’⁴⁵ (a reference to the seventeenth-century French poet Alexis Piron, author of the licentious Ode to Priapus); and another ‘momentary friend’ of this period, Pavel Mansurov, an ensign in the Life Guards Jäger Horse, who, after his marriage to Princess Ekaterina Khovanskaya, became Vsevolozhsky’s brother-in-law.^†

      The tone of Pushkin’s relationship with Mansurov – and hence with most of the Green Lamp’s members – is conveyed by a verse epistle in which Pushkin urges his ‘bosom friend’ to persevere in his pursuit of the young ballerina Mariya Krylova, then still a pupil at the Theatre Academy, for

      soon with happy hand

      She will throw off the school uniform,

      Will lie down before you on the velvet

      And will spread her legs;⁴⁶

      and by a letter written to Mansurov after the latter had been posted to Novgorod province:

Are you well, my joy; are you enjoying yourself, my delight – do you remember us, your friends (of the male sex) … We have not forgotten you and at 1/2 past seven every day in the theatre we remember you with applause and sighs – and say: our darling Pavel! What is he doing now in great Novgorod? Envying us – and weeping about Krylova (with the lower orifice, naturally). Each morning the winged maiden^* flies to rehearsal past our Nikita’s windows, as before telescopes rise to her and pricks too – but alas … you cannot see her, she cannot see you. Let’s abandon elegies, my friend. I’ll tell you about us in historical fashion. Everything is as before; the champagne, thank God, is healthy – the actresses

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