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clever and talented’ French pianist Adélaide Percheron de Mouchy, later wife of the émigré Irish composer John Field;¹⁸ and the French novelist Count Xavier de Maistre, born in Savoy, who had followed Suvorov back to Russia after the Italian campaign of 1800 and had joined the Russian army.^* An amateur artist, he painted a miniature of Nadezhda on ivory.

      Perhaps one should not take too literally Sergey’s story that the six-year-old Pushkin abandoned his toys to sit listening to his father’s conversation with Karamzin, not taking his eyes from the visitor’s face, all the more so since Karamzin did not frequent the Pushkins; nor can one accept without reservation the remark of an earlier biographer, that the child ‘listened attentively to their judgements and conversation, knew the coryphaei of our literature not only through their works, but through their living speech, which expressed the character of each, and often involuntarily but indelibly impressed itself on the young mind’.¹⁹ But at the very least the atmosphere could not have been more favourable to the formation of the desire to write poetry: Pushkin would never have to struggle with the incomprehension of his family, or the view that the occupation of poet was not one to be taken seriously.

      At seven he was found awake in bed late at night; when asked why he was not asleep, he replied that he was making up poems. At ten he improvised little comedies in French and performed them in front of his sister; one was hissed off the stage by the audience, and the author composed a self-critical epigram on the event:

      â€˜Tell me, why was The Filcher

      Hissed by the pit?’

      â€˜Alas! it’s because the poor author

      Filched it from Molière.’²⁰

      A little later, having discovered Voltaire, and read La Henriade, he composed a parodic emulation: La Tolyade, a comic-heroic poem in six cantos, depicting a battle between male and female dwarfs, the hero of which is King Dagobert’s dwarf Toly. Olga’s governess impounded the notebook containing the poem and showed it to the tutor, M. Chédel, who read the first few lines and laughed heartily. Pushkin burst into tears and in a rage threw the manuscript into the stove.

      â€˜I’ve no idea what will become of my eldest grandson: he’s a clever boy and loves books, but he’s a bad student and rarely prepares his lessons properly,’ Mariya Gannibal told her friends.²¹ His dislike for his tutors was not conducive to diligence in any subject, but he found arithmetic particularly incomprehensible and, his sister recollected, ‘would weep bitter tears over the first four rules, especially that of division’.²² As the calculations scribbled here and there on his manuscripts demonstrate, the rules always remained something of a puzzle to him. Foreign tutors were, it was clear, not the answer to the problem of his education, and it was decided to send him to school. A private Jesuit boarding-school in St Petersburg was chosen, and in February 1811 Sergey and Nadezhda travelled to the capital to enter Pushkin as a pupil there. However, a family friend, Aleksandr Turgenev, suggested that the new Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, which was to open in the autumn, might be a more suitable establishment, all the more so as its director was to be Vasily Malinovsky: he and his brothers, Aleksey and Pavel, were well known to the Pushkins; indeed Pavel had been one of the witnesses at their marriage in 1796. These considerations were supported by a more practical one: while education at the Jesuit boarding-school would put a strain on the family’s finances, that at the Lycée would be free. On 1 March Sergey sent a petition to the Minister of Education, Count A.K. Razumovsky, requesting that A.S. Pushkin should be admitted to the Lycée, and stating that ‘he had been educated in his parents’ house, where he had acquired initial knowledge of the grammar of the Russian and French languages, of arithmetic, geography, history and drawing’.²³

* Pulled down in 1837; the present church on the same site in what is now Bauman Square was finished in 1845.

* Abram’s origins are obscure. In a petition of 1742 he wrote, ‘I … am from Africa, of the high nobility there, was born in the town of Logon in the domain of my father, who besides had under him two other towns’ (Teletova, 170). And a short biography of Abram, written in German, probably in the late 1780s, by his son-in-law, Adam Rotkirch, asserts that he ‘was by birth an African Moor from Abyssinia’ (Rukoyu Pushkina, 43). Logon has hence traditionally been placed in Ethiopia. Recently, however, it has been identified with Logone, a town in the north-east corner of the present state of Cameroon: a conjecture which is more in agreement with the sparse evidence than the Ethiopian hypothesis (see Gnammankou, 19–26.) Though Pushkin had a translation of the German biography, he never refers to a specific region when writing of his ancestor’s origins, but remarks, for instance, that he was ‘stolen from the shores of Africa’ (VI, 530). However, his friend Aleksey Vulf mentions in his journal that on 15 September 1827 Pushkin showed him the first two chapters of The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, ‘in which the main character represents his great-grandfather Gannibal, the son of an Abyssinian emir, captured by the Turks’ (Lyubovny byt, I, 268).

* There is no h in the Russian alphabet; in transliteration g (or kh) is substituted for it. The assertion in Rotkirch’s biography that Abram’s princely father ‘proudly derived his descent in a direct line from the lineage of the renowned Hannibal, the terror of Rome’ (Rukoyu Pushkina, 43) is plainly ridiculous, though it might have suited Abram for this to be believed.

* This marriage would make Osip’s daughter, Nadezhda, and her husband, Sergey Pushkin, distant cousins, sharing a common ancestor: Petr Pushkin (1644–92), Nadezhda’s maternal great-great-grandfather and Sergey’s paternal great-grandfather.

* Alexander Nevsky (c.1220–63), canonized in 1547, was prince of Novgorod (1236–52), of Kiev (1246–52) and grand prince of Vladimir (1252–63).

* Tolstoy describes one of Iogel’s dances in War and Peace, book 2, part 1, chapter 12.

* Author of A Journey round My Room (1794), and younger brother of the more famous Joseph de Maistre, Sardinian ambassador in St Petersburg 1802–17, best known for his St Petersburg Dialogues [Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg] (1821).

       2 THE LYCÉE 1811–17

      In those days, when in the Lycée gardens

      I serenely flourished,

      Read Apuleius eagerly

      But did not read Cicero,

      In those days, in mysterious vales,

      In spring, to the cry of swans,

      Near waters gleaming in stillness,

      The Muse began to visit me.

      Eugene Onegin, VIII, i

      IN 1710 PETER THE GREAT GRANTED to his consort Catherine an estate some

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