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with the distillation of home-made vodka. ‘He called for vodka,’ Pushkin wrote after visiting him there in 1817. ‘Vodka was brought. Pouring himself a glass, he ordered it to be offered to me, I did not pull a face – and by this seemed to gratify extraordinarily the old Negro. A quarter of an hour later he called for vodka again – and this happened again five or six times before dinner.’⁶ He visited him again in 1825, when he was thinking of composing a biography of Abram, a project which later turned into the fictional Blackamoor of Peter the Great. ‘I am counting on seeing my old negro of a Great-Uncle who, I suppose, is going to die one of these fine days, and I must get from him some memoirs concerning my great-grandfather,’ he wrote on 11 August.⁷ He carried out the intention a week or so later, bringing back with him to Mikhailovskoe not only the manuscript of Abram’s biography, written by his son-in-law, Adam Rotkirch, but also a short, unfinished note composed by Petr himself, outlining his and his father’s careers.⁸

Osip, Abram’s third son and Pushkin’s maternal grandfather, was a gunnery officer in the navy, reaching the rank of commander. Careless and dissolute, he ran up large debts, which his father in the end refused to pay and forbade him the house. At the beginning of the 1770s he was posted to Lipetsk, in the Tambov region, where he met and, in November 1773, married Mariya Pushkina.^* Mariya was generally held to have thrown herself away; her Moscow cousins made up an epigram on the marriage:

      There was once a great fool,

      Who without Cupid’s permission

      Married a Vizapur.

      The last line is a hit at Osip’s complexion; it is a reference to the ‘swarthy Vizapur’, Prince Poryus-Vizapursky, an Indian and a well-known eccentric.⁹

      Abram forgave the newly-married Osip; he was allowed to return home, and his daughter Nadezhda, Pushkin’s mother, was born in Suida on 21 June 1775. However, Osip found his father overbearing and family life excruciatingly boring. Leaving a note to say he would never return, he fled to Pskov, where he met a pretty young widow, Ustinya Tolstaya. Having received – so he said – a mysterious message announcing his wife’s death, he married Ustinya in November 1778. Mariya, who was far from dead, lodged a complaint against him; after years of petitions and counter-petitions the marriage to Ustinya was annulled, and the estate of Kobrino outside St Petersburg (which he had now inherited, together with Mikhailovskoe, from his father) made over in trust to Nadezhda. Osip retired in dudgeon to a lonely existence at Mikhailovskoe, where he died in 1806, leaving the estate encumbered with debt.

      After the separation Mariya moved to St Petersburg, spending the summers in Kobrino, some thirty miles from the capital. Nadezhda was therefore brought up in far from provincial surroundings. She was well-read, spoke excellent French, and through Mariya’s relations in the capital gained entrée into society, where she became known as ‘the beautiful creole’.¹⁰ Here she met Sergey Pushkin; the couple – the poet’s father and mother – were married on 28 September 1796 in the village church at Voskresenskoe on the Kobrino estate.

Though Pushkin claimed to be able to trace his ancestry on the paternal side back to the times of Alexander Nevsky,^* the first to bear the family name was Konstantin Pushkin, born in the early fifteenth century, the younger son of a Grigory Pushka. There is a direct line of descent from him to the poet. From this time to the seventeenth century the Pushkins were a minor boyar family whose members never wielded great influence or occupied high positions in the state. They played, however, a lively part during the Time of Troubles (1584–1613), when one Gavrila Pushkin was a prominent supporter of the Pretender Dmitry. Pushkin put him into his historical drama Boris Godunov, remarking, ‘Finding in history one of my ancestors, who played an important role in that unhappy epoch, I brought him on the stage, without worrying about the delicacies of propriety, con amore, but without aristocratic conceit.’¹¹ But a decline in importance set in during the reign of Peter the Great. By the Table of Ranks, promulgated in 1722, an hierarchical system of rank, consisting of fourteen grades, was imposed on the military, civil and court services. Those in the first eight grades automatically became gentry: henceforth, therefore, social position was to be determined not by birth, but by rank. The more powerful aristocratic families were little affected, but the less important, such as the Pushkins, were submerged in the influx of the newly ennobled. During the eighteenth century no member of the family achieved distinction in any field, though family tradition erroneously maintained that Aleksey Fedorovich Pushkin, Mariya’s father, had been voevoda (governor) of Tambov.

      Lev Pushkin, the poet’s paternal grandfather, served in the artillery, reaching the rank of major, before retiring in 1763. He settled in Moscow, in a large house on the Bozhedomka (now Delegatsky Street), in the northern suburbs. The grounds covered nearly fifteen acres, running down to an orangery and large fish-pond, formed by damming up the Neglinnaya River. By his first wife he had three children, and his second, Olga Vasilevna (née Chicherina), was to give him four more: Anna, Vasily, Sergey, and Elizaveta. As was the custom, Vasily and Sergey were entered for the army at a very early age: Vasily was seven and Sergey six when their names first appeared in the list. Actual service with the regiment – the Izmailovsky Life Guards – began much later: for Sergey at the end of the 1780s. He was promoted to ensign in 1794, to lieutenant in 1796, and in 1797 transferred to the chasseur battalion with the rank of captain-lieutenant. Both brothers left the army in the autumn of 1797. Neither was cut out for military service, but it is likely that their retirement was brought about by the changes introduced by the Emperor Paul, who had come to the throne the previous year. A military tyrant and pedant, he forced a tight Prussian uniform on the army; would arbitrarily consign officers to Siberia for a minor fault on parade; and repeatedly threatened to banish fashionable regiments such as the Izmailovsky from St Petersburg to the provinces. The brothers, together with their young wives, both metropolitan beauties, all of whom adored the social whirl, would have viewed with horror the prospect of exile to some dull provincial backwater.

      In 1834 Pushkin, looking back with nostalgia on the Moscow of his childhood, before the fire of 1812, wrote:

      At one time there really was a rivalry between Moscow and Petersburg. Then in Moscow there were rich nobles who did not work, grandees who had given up the court, and independent, carefree individuals, passionately devoted to harmless slander and inexpensive hospitality; then Moscow was the gathering place for all Russia’s aristocracy, which streamed to it in winter from every province. Brilliant young guardsmen flew thither from Petersburg. Every corner of the ancient capital was loud with music, there were crowds everywhere. Five thousand people filled the hall of the Noble Assembly twice a week. There the young met; marriages were made. Moscow was as famous for its brides as Vyazma for its gingerbread; Moscow dinners became a proverb. The innocent eccentricities of the Muscovites were a sign of their independence. They lived their own lives, amusing themselves as they liked, caring little for the opinion of others. One rich eccentric might build himself on one of the main streets a Chinese house with green dragons and with wooden mandarins under gilded parasols. Another might drive to Marina Roshcha in a carriage covered with pure silver plate. A third might mount five or so blackamoors, footmen and attendants on the rumble of a four-seat sleigh and drive it tandem along the summer street. Alamode belles appropriated Petersburg fashions, putting their indelible imprint on them. From afar haughty Petersburg mocked, but did not interfere with old mother Moscow’s escapades. But where has this noisy, idle, carefree life gone? Where are the balls, the feasts, the eccentrics, the practical jokers? All have vanished.¹²

      He could have mentioned, too, the classically laid-out Yusupov garden,

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