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more historically correct than his model: the nomadic army, one of a succession of invaders from the East, which besieges Kiev in Ruslan and Lyudmila, is that of the Pechenegs, against whom Vladimir I fought; in the byliny such enemies are usually generalized as Tatars.

      But Pushkin had no intention of creating a modern bylina: he makes no use of the mythology of the genre, nor of its traditional heroes. Instead, he invents his own characters, who, on leaving Vladimir’s court, leave the world of the bylina and abruptly find themselves confronting the crenellated battlements of a Western European castle. Neither was he inclined to write a Russian heroic epic, as many wished him to do: the tone of Ruslan and Lyudmila is determinedly mock-heroic throughout, as Pushkin’s comic treatment of the most obviously heroic episodes demonstrates, such as Ruslan’s defeat of the Pecheneg army:

      Wherever the dread sword whistles,

      Wherever the furious steed prances,

      Everywhere heads fly from shoulders

      And with a wail rank on rank collapses;

      In one moment the field of battle

      Is covered with heaps of bloody bodies,

      Living, squashed, decapitated,

      With piles of spears, arrows, armour.

      (VI, 299–306)

The models to which Ruslan and Lyudmila owes most are Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) – which Pushkin would have read in a French prose version – and Voltaire’s La Pucelle (1755), itself modelled on Ariosto, though Pushkin’s work is on a much smaller scale than its predecessors.^* Like them, he will begin a canto with general remarks, often addressed to his readers, and tantalizingly break off the narration at a crucial moment to turn to the adventures of another character. His narrator, like those of Ariosto and Voltaire, is not contemporary with the events, but of the present day, intrusive, digressive, and constantly ironizing at the expense of the characters, the plot and its devices. Both Ariosto and Voltaire claim that their works are based upon actual chronicles; composed, in Ariosto’s case, by Tripten, Archbishop of Reims, a legendary figure; and, in Voltaire’s, by l’abbé Tritême, a real figure, but innocent of the authorship foisted upon him. Pushkin follows suit with another ecclesiastic, a ‘monk, who preserved/For posterity the true legend/Of my glorious knight’ (V, 225–7).

      It is here, however, that Pushkin parts company with his predecessors. Fantastic as the events in both Ariosto and Voltaire are, the narratives rest on some slight residue of fact, and the backgrounds against which the action unfolds have, for the most part, some semblance of geographical plausibility. With the exception of the Kievan court, however, Ruslan and Lyudmila is pure fantasy, set in a land of pure romance. If Ariosto’s aim is to please his patrons by extolling the glorious, if legendary past of the House of Este, and Voltaire’s to satirize – powerfully, if often crudely – religion, superstition and monarchical rule, Pushkin’s is far more intimate, as his poem is on a far more intimate scale: to entertain his friends and social acquaintances. In his asides, foreshadowing Eugene Onegin, he brings himself and St Petersburg society into the poem. When he compares Lyudmila with ‘severe Delfira’, who ‘beneath her petticoat is a hussar,/Give her only spurs and whiskers!’ (V, 15–16), he is referring to Countess Ekaterina Ivelich, a distant relation of the Pushkins, who lived near them on the Fontanka, and was described by Delvig’s wife as ‘more like a grenadier officer of the worst kind than a lady’.¹⁶ He begins, too, at first timidly, to experiment with a literary device that was to become a favourite, both in verse and in prose: he plays with his readers, teasing them and subverting their expectations.

      When, in the third stanza of Eugene Onegin, he calls on the ‘friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan’ to meet his new hero, he is not merely attempting to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier poem, but hinting that those who had enjoyed it would also enjoy his latest work: despite the obvious dissimilarities – one a mock epic, set in a fabulous past, the other a contemporary novel in verse – the two share a common tone. Batyushkov was right when he spoke of the poem’s ‘taste, wit, invention and gaiety’; to these he could have added youthful exuberance, charm, and the effortless brilliance of the verse: characteristics which are also those of Eugene Onegin. The poem improves as it continues, and is at its best when Pushkin’s fantasy is least constrained by the demands of the plot or a traditional setting: Prince Ratmir in the hands of his female bath attendants, and Lyudmila in Chernomor’s castle and garden are episodes which outshine the rest.

One of the most colourful characters of this time – an age when they were not in short supply – was Count Fedor Tolstoy (his first cousin, Nikolay, was the father of Leo Tolstoy^*). Born in 1782, he joined the Preobrazhensky Life Guards, where he soon made a reputation for himself as a fire-eater, duellist – he was said to have killed eleven men in duels in the course of his life – and cardsharp. In 1803 he was a member of an embassy to Japan, taken there by Admiral Krusenstiern on his circumnavigation of the world. Tolstoy made himself so obnoxious on board that Krusenstiern abandoned him on one of the Aleutian Islands – together with a pet female ape, which he may later have eaten. Crossing the Bering Straits, he wandered slowly back through Siberia, arriving in St Petersburg at the end of 1805: hence his nickname ‘the American’. Coincidentally, Wiegel, who, as a member of Count Golovkin’s embassy to China, was travelling in the opposite direction in the summer of that year, met him at a post-station in Siberia. ‘What stories were not told about him! As a youth he was supposed to have had a passion for catching rats and frogs, opening their bellies with a pen-knife, and amusing himself by watching their mortal agonies for hours on end […] in a word, there was no wild animal comparable in its fearlessness and bloodthirstiness with his propensities. In fact, he surprised us with his appearance. Nature had tightly curled the thick black hair on his head; his eyes, probably reddened with heat and dust, seemed to us injected with blood, his almost melancholy gaze and extremely quiet speech seemed to my terrified companions to conceal something devilish.’¹⁷ Settling in Moscow – where in 1821 he married a beautiful gypsy singer, Avdotya Tugaeva – he spent his time gambling at the English Club, usually winning large sums through his skill in manipulating the deck. He was a close friend of Shakhovskoy – the two had been fellow-officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards – and of Vyazemsky.

      â€˜Count Tolstoy the American is here,’ Turgenev wrote to Vyazemsky from St Petersburg in October 1819. ‘He is staying with Prince Shakhovskoy, and therefore we will probably see each other rarely.’¹⁸ Pushkin, however, as a regular visitor to Shakhovskoy’s garret, soon met Tolstoy, and was soon, unwisely, playing cards with him. Noticing that Tolstoy had slipped a card from the bottom of the pack, he commented on this. ‘Yes, I’m aware of that myself,’ Tolstoy replied, ‘but I don’t care to have it pointed out to me.’¹⁹ Whether because of this, or whether out of sheer malice, Tolstoy, on returning to Moscow, wrote a letter to Shakhovskoy in which he asserted that, on the direct orders of the tsar, Count Miloradovich, the military governor-general of St Petersburg, had had Pushkin flogged in the secret chancellery of the Ministry of the Interior. Shakhovskoy made the libel known to the frequenters of his garret. Though other friends, such as Katenin, energetically refuted it, it spread quickly through literary and social circles. Pushkin eventually learnt of it – though not of its author – from Katenin. Humiliated and infuriated, he oscillated between thoughts of suicide and of reckless defiance of authority.

      Though, with Chaadaev’s help, he overcame his initial despair – ‘The voice of slander could no longer wound me,/Able to hate, I was able to despise’ Скачать книгу