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rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">¹⁶ The affair had indeed broken off acrimoniously, and Pushkin, hurt and insulted, gave vent to his feelings with four extraordinarily spiteful epigrams. One, commenting on her promiscuity, wonders what impelled her to marry Davydov; another, coarse and excessively indecent even by Pushkin’s standards, portrays her as sexually insatiable; the least offensive, and the wittiest, is in French:

      To her lover without resistance Aglaë

      Had ceded – he, pale and petrified,

      Was making a great effort – at last, incapable of more,

      Completely breathless, withdrew … with a bow, –

      â€˜Monsieur’, says Aglaë in an arrogant tone,

      â€˜Speak, monsieur: why does my appearance

      Intimidate you? Will you tell me the cause?

      Is it disgust?’ ‘Good heavens, it’s not that.’

      â€˜Excess of love?’ ‘No, of respect.’¹⁷

      Pushkin did not leave Kamenka until the end of January 1821, then travelling, in the company of the Davydov brothers, not to Kishinev but to Kiev, where he put up with General Raevsky, and met the ‘hussar-poet’ Denis Davydov, cousin both of the Davydovs and of General Raevsky, famous for his partisan activities during the French army’s retreat in 1812 – the model for Denisov in War and Peace. ‘Hussar-poet, you’ve sung of bivouacs/Of the licence of devil-may-care carousals/Of the fearful charm of battle/And of the curls of your moustache,’ he wrote.¹⁸ In the second week of February he and the Davydovs set off for Tulchin, some 180 miles to the west. His St Petersburg acquaintance General Kiselev was now chief of staff of the Second Army here: he was to marry Sofya Potocka later that year. ‘I had the occasion to see [Pushkin] in Tulchin at Kiselev’s,’ wrote Nikolay Basargin, a young ensign in the 31st Jägers. ‘I was not acquainted with him, but met him two or three times in company. I disliked him as a person. There was something of the bully about him, an element of vanity, and the desire to mock and wound others.’¹⁹ After a week in Tulchin Pushkin, still avoiding his official duties, returned to Kamenka with the Davydovs, arriving on or about 18 February.

      During his first stay on the estate he had begun a new notebook, copying into it fair versions of his Crimean poems ‘A Nereid’ and ‘Sparser grows the flying range of clouds’, and continuing to work on The Prisoner of the Caucasus. Now, lying on the Davydovs’ billiard table surrounded by scraps of manuscript, so engrossed in composition as to ignore everything about him, he produced the first fair copy of the poem, adding at the end of the text the notation ‘23 February 1821, Kamenka’.²⁰ Despite this achievement, he was often in a bleak mood. ‘Beneath the storms of harsh fate/My flowering wreath has faded,’ he had written the previous day.²¹ He was isolated from his family and his closest friends, from the literary and social life of the capital; the best years of his poetic and personal life were being wasted in a provincial slough. Melancholy was to recur ever more frequently during his years of exile: ‘I am told he is fading away from depression, boredom and poverty,’ Vyazemsky wrote to Turgenev in 1822.²² Constantly deluding himself with hopes of an end to his exile, or at least of being granted leave to visit St Petersburg – ‘I shall try to be with you myself for a few days,’ he wrote to his brother in January 1822²³ – he was as constantly brought to face the reality of his situation. When, a year later, he made a formal application to Nesselrode for permission to come to St Petersburg, ‘whither,’ he wrote, ‘I am called by the affairs of a family whom I have not seen for three years’,²⁴ he found that Alexander had not forgotten his misdemeanours: Nesselrode’s report was endorsed by the emperor with a single word: ‘Refused’.²⁵ He could not but compare himself to Ovid: their fates were strangely alike. Because of their verse (and, in Ovid’s case, also for some other, mysterious crime) both had been exiled by an emperor – Ovid by Augustus, the former Octavian, in AD 8 – to the region of the Black Sea. In Ovid’s works written in exile – Tristia and Black Sea Letters – Pushkin found reflections of an experience analogous to his own, and contrasted his emotions as an exile from St Petersburg with those of Ovid as an exile from Rome. ‘Like you, submitting to an inimical fate,/ I was your equal in destiny, if not in fame,’ he wrote in ‘To Ovid’, completed on 26 December 1821.²⁶

      Financial worries – ‘He hasn’t a copeck’, Vyazemsky noted²⁷ – added to his depression. He had been paid no salary since leaving St Petersburg. In April 1821 Inzov pointed this out to Capo d’Istrias, adding: ‘since he receives no allowance from his parent, despite all my assistance he sometimes, however, suffers from a deficiency in decent clothing. In this respect I consider it my most humble duty to ask, my dear sir, that you should instruct the appointment to him of that salary which he received in St Petersburg.’²⁸ As a result he received a year’s salary – less hospital charges and postal insurance it came to 685 roubles 30 copecks – in July, and was thereafter paid at four-monthly intervals. But this, though welcome, could not resolve his financial problems. On 5 May, in reply to the demand for 2,000 roubles forwarded by Inzov, he wrote, ‘not being yet of age and possessing neither movable nor immovable property, I am not capable of paying the above-mentioned promissory note.’²⁹ The ‘deficiency in decent clothing’ was noted by others: ‘He leads a dissipated life, roams the inns, and is always in shirt-sleeves,’ wrote Liprandi.³⁰ His attire in Kishinev tended towards the bizarre: sometimes he dressed as a Turk, sometimes as a Moldavian, sometimes as a Jew, usually topping the ensemble with a fez – costumes which were adopted, not primarily from eccentricity, but because of the absence from his wardrobe of more formal wear. ‘My father had the brilliant idea of sending me some clothes,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Tell him that I asked you to remind him of it.’³¹

He had eventually left Kamenka towards the end of February, and, taking a long way round through Odessa, where he spent two days, arrived in Kishinev early in March.^* He found a town much stirred by events which had taken place during his absence. In 1814 three Greek merchants in Odessa, one of the most important Greek communities outside the Ottoman empire, had founded the Philike Hetaireia (Society of Friends), whose aim was the liberation of Greece from Turkish rule. The society was soon actively engaged in conspiracy: intriguing with potential rebels, it persuaded its Greek supporters that the tsar, as the head of the greatest Orthodox state, would be unable to ignore any bid for Greek independence. In 1819–20 the time seemed ripe for an uprising: there were intimations or outbreaks of revolt in Germany, Spain, Piedmont and Naples. The society offered its leadership to Capo d’Istrias; he refused, and it turned in his stead to Alexander Ypsilanti, a Phanariot Greek,^† the son of the former hospodar of Moldavia and Wallachia. An officer in the Russian army, Ypsilanti had distinguished himself in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, losing an arm at the battle of Dresden. He had attended Alexander I, as one of the emperor’s adjutants, at the

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