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Kishinev, describes the occasion:

      [The dinner] took place in the summer, at the hottest time of the year. The guests gathered, Pushkin too appeared, and from the first moment of his appearance threw the whole company into extreme embarrassment by the unusual eccentricity of his attire: he was wearing muslin trousers, transparent, without any underwear. The governor’s wife, Mrs Shemiot, née Princess Gedroits, an old friend of my wife’s mother, being very shortsighted, was the only person not to notice this peculiarity. Her three daughters, young girls, were also present at this time. My wife quietly advised her to take the girls out of the drawing-room, explaining the necessity for their removal. Mrs Shemiot, disbelieving her, and not crediting the possibility of such indecency, maintained that Pushkin was simply wearing flesh or skin coloured summer trousers; finally, arming herself with her lorgnette, she assured herself of the bitter truth and immediately escorted her daughters out of the room. This was the only result of the exhibition. Although all were highly indignant and embarrassed, they tried to pretend that they had noticed nothing; the host and hostess were silent, and Pushkin’s prank had no consequences.⁷

      Meanwhile General Raevsky had set off from Kiev. His party consisted of the eighteen-year-old Nikolay, the latter’s sisters, Mariya and Sofya, fourteen and thirteen respectively; Miss Matten, the girls’ English governess, and M. Fournier, their French tutor; Anna Ivanovna, a Tatar dame de compagnie; Evstafy Rudykovsky, an army doctor, and a Russian nurse. They travelled in two immense berlins and a light calash, and, after calling at Kamenka to allow the girls to see their grandmother, arrived in Ekaterinoslav late in the evening on 26 May, Pushkin’s twenty-first birthday. Despite the advanced hour Nikolay, his father, and Rudykovsky set off to see him. They found him, pale and unshaven, lying on a wooden settle in his lodging: he had caught a chill after bathing. Rudykovsky examined him, found that he had a slight fever, and advised him to drink something hot.

      The next day Pushkin called on the Raevskys, and, overjoyed at finding himself once more in congenial company, chatted volubly with Nikolay in French over dinner, until overtaken again by fever, whereupon Rudykovsky gave him a dose of quinine. During that day General Raevsky had seen Inzov, and had had no difficulty in extracting from him permission for Pushkin to accompany the party to the Caucasus and the Crimea; he would take up his duties with Inzov in Kishinev in the autumn. ‘His disturbed health at so young an age, and the unpleasant position in which he finds himself through youth, demanded on the one hand help, and on the other harmless diversion, and therefore I allowed him to depart with General Raevsky, who, when passing through Ekaterinoslav, was willing to take him with him,’ Inzov wrote. ‘I hope I will not be reproved for this and thought to have been over-indulgent.’⁸

      On the morning of 28 May Pushkin seated himself in the calash with Nikolay, and the caravan rolled off to the east, towards the Caucasus. But he was still troubled with the ague, and, on the insistence of General Raevsky, soon moved into the covered berlin with him. They crossed the Dnieper, and ‘plunged into the level and monotonous steppes, always the same, without a single object which might arrest the gaze of the traveller’.⁹ On the twenty-ninth they passed through Mariupol, and, early the following day, between Sambek and Taganrog, stopped to admire the Sea of Azov. They arrived in Taganrog later that day, dining and staying the night with the town governor, P.A. Papkov, in the house in which Alexander I was to die in 1825. Passing through Rostov, on 1 June they were entertained in Novocherkassk by General Denisov, the ataman of the Don Cossacks. Ignoring Rudykovsky’s advice, Pushkin injudiciously consumed a large portion of blancmange, and was again ill. After crossing the Don, their route took them through Stavropol, and, having been held up by a violent storm, which forced them to spend the night in a post-station, they arrived in Pyatigorsk on 6 June. Here they were met by Aleksandr, General Raevsky’s twenty-five-year-old elder son, and took up residence in a house which the general had rented.

      The Caucasus region consists of the great mountain range which stretches from the Taman peninsula on the Black Sea to the Apsheron peninsula on the Caspian, the territory immediately to the north, and the southern hinterland, Transcaucasia. It has had a turbulent history since ancient times, and in the eighteenth century Russia, Turkey and Persia contended for domination here. However, in 1801 Alexander I annexed Georgia – which had been under Russian protection since 1783 – and in the following years Russia acquired most of present-day Azerbaijan from Persia. Turkey and Persia gradually withdrew, and Russia set about extending its rule over the remaining nationalities – a task which was not completed until the 1870s. As a first step in the region’s pacification, under the supervision of General Ermolov, who commanded the Russian armies in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827, the Georgian military highway was driven south, from Ekaterinograd to the north of the mountain range, through its central pass and down the Daryal gorge to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia. In the mountains it passed through the territory of the Ossetians, a Christian nation friendly to the Russians. To the west, however, were the Circassians, to the east the Chechens and Ingush, and, beyond them, the Lezgins and Avars who inhabited Dagestan. All were Moslems, who bitterly resisted Russian imperialism. Pyatigorsk lies on the southern slopes of Mount Mashuk, on the outskirts of the Caucasus, some way to the north of the main mountain chain, from which it is separated by the lands of the Kabardians. These, though Sunni Moslems, had earlier professed Orthodoxy, and had long ties with Russia; in 1557 they had petitioned Ivan IV for protection against the Tatars, and he had strengthened the alliance by marrying a Kabardian princess. The settlement was thus isolated from the areas of conflict.

      Mineral springs are plentiful in the district, and Pyatigorsk had gained a reputation as a spa in the late eighteenth century. Development was slow, however, and the earliest visitors had to reside at Fort Constantine, a few miles distant, or put up in temporary shacks, tents or covered carts: even by 1829 there were only forty-seven permanent buildings. Nine years after his first visit Pushkin passed through Pyatigorsk again, on his way to Tiflis. ‘I found a great change. In my time the baths were in hastily constructed shacks. The springs, for the most part in their original form, spouted up, steamed, and flowed down the mountain-side in various directions, leaving white and reddish traces behind. We scooped up the boiling water with bark ladles or the bottom of a broken bottle. Now […] everywhere there is order, neatness, prettiness … I must confess: the Caucasian waters present more comforts now; but I regret their earlier, wild condition; I regret the steep stony paths, the shrubs and the unfenced precipices where I once clambered …’¹⁰

      For a Russian writer the Caucasus, with its mountains and valleys, its fierce, independent, warring tribes, had the same exotic, romantic allure which the Levant had for Byron, or the American wilderness for Fenimore Cooper. Like his predecessors and his successors, Pushkin found the new, unfamiliar scenery exhilaratingly beautiful. ‘I regret, my friend,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘that you could not gaze with me on the splendid chain of these mountains; on their icy summits, which from afar, on a clear dawn, seem like strange clouds, many-coloured and motionless; that you could not climb with me to the sharp peak of Beshtu with its five hills, of Mashuk, of the Zhelezny, Kamenny and Zmeiny mountains.’¹¹ But the purpose of the visit was to take the waters. General Raevsky observed a strict regimen: ‘I rise at five, go to the baths, return an hour later for coffee, read, go for a walk, dine at one, read again, take another walk, go to the baths, we drink tea at seven, take another walk and go to bed.’ His walk occasionally took him back to the baths, where from the gallery he would admire the mountains and amuse himself with ‘the comic sight of the settlement, its inhabitants, their caricatures of carriages, and their colourful attire; a mixture of Kalmyks, Circassians, Tatars, local Cossacks, local residents and visitors’. He used the hot sulphurous springs, where the temperature was over 38°C; the two girls, ‘just for amusement’, would bathe once or twice a day in the warm baths.¹² Pushkin drank the waters. ‘They have done me a great deal of good, especially the hot sulphurous ones,’ he wrote. ‘In addition

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