LITMIR.BIZ

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the private theatres with troupes of serf actors; or the ‘magic castle’, the Pashkov mansion on Mokhovaya Street, whose garden, full of exotic birds at large or in gilded cages, was known as ‘Eden’: at night it was lit by lanterns, and a private orchestra played there on feast-days.¹³

      For Pushkin’s parents social life was infinitely preferable to the tedium of domesticity. Nadezhda was the dominant partner. Beautiful, charming, frivolous and – outwardly at least – always good-humoured, she was strong-willed and could be despotic, both to her husband and her children. She was cool towards Pushkin, preferring first Olga, then his younger brother Lev. When angry, she sometimes would not speak to him for weeks, or even months. Once, annoyed by his habit of rubbing his hands together, she tied them behind his back and starved him for a day; since he was always losing his handkerchiefs, she sewed one to the shoulder of his jacket like an epaulette, and forced him to wear the garment in public.

      She was incurably restless: never satisfied with her surroundings, she drove the family from lodging to lodging, or, if a move was impossible, continually moved the furniture and changed the wallpapers, turning a bedroom into a dining-room, a study into a drawing-room. On returning to Moscow they lodged in P.M. Volkov’s house on the corner of Chistoprudny Boulevard and Bolshoy Kharitonevsky Lane: here Pushkin’s brother Nikolay was born on 27 March 1801. A year later they moved up the lane into a wooden house on Prince N.B. Yusupov’s property, where they stayed for a year and a half; then, forfeiting six months’ rent, in the summer of 1803, they moved down the lane again into accommodation belonging to Count A.L. Santi. ‘It is difficult to understand,’ one historian writes, ‘how the Pushkins managed to fit into the cramped confines of Santi’s court; Santi had up to sixteen house serfs, Sergey Lvovich from four to thirteen; besides them in the court lived the civil servant Petrov and the district surveyor Fedotov, while another of Santi’s serfs, the women’s dressmaker Berezinsky, squeezed in somewhere.’¹⁴ Nevertheless, the Pushkins remained there over two years; here Lev was born on 9 April 1805. But, before Pushkin left for boarding-school in 1811, they would move eight more times, criss-crossing Moscow from east to west and back again.

      Sergey, Pushkin’s father, was short and stout, with a nose like a parrot’s beak. He was a weak character, easily dominated by his more forceful wife, and inclined to lachrymose emotional outbursts. At the same time he was hot-tempered and irritable, and would fly into rages at the slightest provocation, with the result that his children feared, rather than loved him. He had a poor head for finances, knew nothing of his estates – he visited Boldino, his property in Nizhny Novgorod province, twice in his lifetime – and refused to have anything to do with their management: everything was left in the hands of inefficient or dishonest stewards. His income was consequently insecure and continually decreased. Though, like his father, he was hospitable to his friends, he showed a remarkable lack of generosity towards his children and took little interest in them. He was fond of French literature, and an inveterate theatre-goer, but his main preoccupation was his social life. He was at his best in some salon, elaborately polite and delicately witty, throwing off a stream of French puns, or inscribing elegant sentiments in French verse or prose in ladies’ albums.

      In January 1802, after the death of the Emperor Paul, he had returned to government service, taking up a post in the Moscow military commissariat. In 1812, when Napoleon approached Moscow, he was transferred to Orel, and given the task of organizing supplies for a reserve army under the command of General Lobanov-Rostovsky. The latter, a hot-tempered and ruthless disciplinarian, soon found fault with him, and in February 1813 requested the head of the commissariat, ‘for neglect of duty and disobedience of my instructions, to remove Pushkin from his present position as incompetent and incapable and to reprimand him severely’.¹⁵ At this time the Russian armies had begun to move rapidly westwards, and it was not until the following year, when they stood outside Warsaw, that Sergey was relieved of his command: his successor found him reading a French novel in his office. He retired with the rank of civil councillor in January 1817.

      The gap left in the children’s lives by the parents’ lack of attention was filled by their grandmother, Mariya Gannibal. At the beginning of 1801 she moved to Moscow and settled close to the Pushkins. She spent most of each day with her grandchildren and from 1805 lived with the family. She took over the running of the house and saw to the education of the children, teaching them their letters, and engaging governesses and tutors for them. In 1800 Nadezhda had sold Kobrino, no longer useful as a summer residence after the move to Moscow. One of the women on the estate, Arina Rodionovna, though freed from serfdom, had preferred to come to Moscow and become Olga’s nurse. She introduced the children to the world of Russian legends and fairy-tales, while Mariya related family history to them:

      From my Moscow grandmother I love

      To hear stories of ancestors,

      And of the distant past.¹⁶

      In early childhood Pushkin was an excessively plump, silent infant, clumsy and awkward, who hated taking exercise, and, if forced to go for a walk, would often sit down in the middle of the street in protest. His character and physique changed markedly around the age of seven. In November 1804 Mariya Gannibal bought Zakharovo, an estate of nearly two and a half thousand acres with sixty male serfs, situated some thirty miles to the east of Moscow. From 1805 to 1809 the family spent the summers there. Instead of the continual displacement from one rented apartment to another, Zakharovo provided relative permanency; instead of the cramped surroundings of a Moscow lodging, the children had separate quarters, where they lived with the current governess or tutor. And most of all, of course, instead of the Moscow streets or the confined expanse of the Yusupov gardens, there was the countryside, the large park with its lake, its alleys and groves of birches. In these new surroundings Pushkin became an active and mischievous child, at times difficult to control. Here, in the summer of 1807, the six-year-old Nikolay fell severely ill – though he was still able to put his tongue out at Pushkin when the latter visited his sickbed. However, his condition worsened, and he died on 30 July. Pushkin was much affected by the loss: ‘Nikolay’s death’ is one of the few notes relating to this period in a sketchy autobiographical plan he drew up in 1830.¹⁷

As was usual at the time, the education of Olga and Aleksandr was entrusted to a series of foreign émigrés, who had in most cases little to recommend them as teachers other than their nationality and whom, for the most part, the children disliked. Their first tutor was the Comte de Montfort, a man of some culture, a musician and artist; he was followed by M. Rousselot, who wrote French verse, and then by a M. Chédel, of whom little is known other than that he was sacked for playing cards with the servants. Miss Bailey, one of Olga’s governesses, was supposed to teach them English, but failed to do so, while a German governess refused to speak any language except Russian. They went to dancing classes at their cousins, the Buturlins, on Malaya Pochtovaya Street, at the Trubetskoys, also cousins, on the Pokrovka, and at the Sushkovs, on the Bolshaya Molchanovka – their daughter, Sonya, a year younger than Pushkin, is supposed to have been the object of his first love. On Thursdays they went to the children’s dances arranged by the celebrated Moscow dancing master Iogel.^*

From early years Pushkin had a passion for reading; by ten, according to his sister, he had read Plutarch, the Iliad and the Odyssey in French, and would rummage among his father’s books – mainly consisting of French eighteenth-century authors – in search of interesting volumes. The atmosphere in their house was a cultured, literary one. Sergey read Molière to the children and wrote French verse; his brother, Vasily, was an established poet, published in periodicals, and acquainted with many of the authors of the day, including Karamzin, Zhukovsky and Batyushkov; a more distant relative, Major-General Aleksey Mikhailovich Pushkin, who had translated Molière, was a frequent guest. Among the regular visitors to

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