Pushkin: A Biography - Hardcover

Binyon, T.J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400041104 ISBN 13: 9781400041107

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

Pushkin is Russia’s greatest and best-loved poet: a romantic, enigmatic figure who, during a brief but turbulent life, changed Russian literature forever with his vital and passionate verse. Many of his works—including The Bronze Horseman, The Queen of Spades, and his extraordinary novel in verse, Eugene Onegin—have become classics of world literature and are as exhilarating to read today as they were when first published. Now we have the first full biography in sixty years of this literary legend.

Born in Moscow in 1799, he was descended on one side from an ancient noble family, on the other from a black African slave of Peter the Great. At the age of twenty he was expelled from St. Petersburg for his satirical writings. He remained in internal exile, under the direct supervision of the emperor, for the next seven years, and throughout his life attracted official disapproval for his political and religious beliefs—and for his many love affairs. In 1831, despite mounting debts from gambling and an insecure income, he married the eighteen-year-old Natalya Goncharova, who soon became recognized as one of the most beautiful women of St. Petersburg society. The attentions paid her by a Guards officer, the French émigré d’Anthès, roused Pushkin to fury. In the subsequent duel, fought on January 27, 1837, he was fatally wounded. He died in agony two days later.

This superb, authoritative biography—winner of England’s prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize—frees the complex figure of Pushkin the man from the heroic simplicity of Pushkin the myth, making palpable the poet’s rare energy, talents, and spirit. Telling Pushkin’s story with exacting scholarship, elegant wit, and acute insight, T. J. Binyon gives us a revelation of the poet and the man.

About this title

About the Author:

T. J. Binyon lectures on Russian literature at Oxford University and is a senior research fellow at Wadham College. He is also the author of Murder Will Out, a history of the fictional detective, and two thrillers, Swan Song and Greek Gifts. He lives with his wife in Oxfordshire, England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
ANCESTRY AND CHILDHOOD
1799-1811

Lack of respect for one's ancestors is the first sign of barbarism and immorality.
VIII, 42

Aleksandr Pushkin was born in Moscow on Thursday 26 May 1799, in a "half-brick and half-wooden house" on a plot of land situated on the corner of Malaya Pochtovaya Street and Gospitalny Lane.This was in the eastern suburb known as the German Settlement, to which foreigners had been banished in 1652. Though distant from the centre, it was, up to the fire of 1812, a fashionable area, "the faubourg Saint-Germain of Moscow."On 8 June he was baptized in the parish church, the Church of the Epiphany on Elokhovskaya Square.* And that autumn his parents, Sergey and Nadezhda, took him and his sister Olga-born in December 1797-to visit their grandfather Osip Gannibal, Nadezhda's father, on his estate at Mikhailovskoe, in the Pskov region. Most of the next year was spent in St. Petersburg. The Emperor Paul, coming across Pushkin and his nurse, reprimanded the latter for not removing the baby's cap in the presence of royalty, and proceeded to do so himself. In the autumn they moved back to Moscow, where they were to remain for the duration of Pushkin's childhood.

Pushkin was proud of both sides of his ancestry: both of his father's family, the Pushkins, and of his mother's, the Gannibals. However, the two were so different from one another, antipodes in almost every respect, that to take equal pride in both required the reconciliation of contradictory values. In Pushkin the contradictions were never completely resolved, and the resulting tension would occasionally manifest itself, both in his behaviour and in his work. The most obvious difference lay in the origins of the two families: whereas the Pushkins could hardly have been more Russian, the Gannibals could hardly have been more exotic and more foreign.

On 15 November 1704 an official at the Foreign Office in Moscow passed on to General-Admiral Golovin, the minister, news of a Serbian trader who was employed by the department. "Before leaving Constantinople on 21 June," he wrote, "Master Savva Raguzinsky informed me that according to the order of your excellency he had acquired with great fear and danger to his life from the Turks two little blackamoors and a third for Ambassador Petr Andreevich [Tolstoy], and that he had sent these blackamoors with a man of his for safety by way of land through the Walachian territories." The boys had just arrived, the writer added; he had dispatched one to the ambassador's home, and the other two, who were brothers, to the Golovin palace. The younger of these was in the course of time to become General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, cavalier of the orders of St. Anne and Alexander Nevsky: Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather.*

Golovin had acquired the two boys as a gift for the tsar, to whom they were presented when he came to Moscow in December 1704. Peter had the elder brother baptized in the Preobrazhensky parish in Moscow, when he was given the name Aleksey, and the patronymic Petrov, from the tsar's own name. He was trained as a musician and attached to the Preobrazhensky regiment, where he played the hautboy in the regimental band. Unlike his younger brother Abram, he then vanishes from the pages of history.

Abram was from the beginning a favourite of the tsar. On 18 February 1705 the account-book of the royal household notes: "to Abram the negro for a coat and trimming were given 15 roubles 45 copecks."4 In the spring of 1707 Peter began a campaign against the Swedes. That autumn he celebrated a victory over Charles XII in the Orthodox Pyatnitskaya church in Vilna and simultaneously had his new protégé baptized, acting as his godfather and giving him, like his brother, the patronymic Petrov. And a document of 1709 notes that "by the tsar's order caftans have been made for Joachim the dwarf and Abram the blackamoor, for the Christmas festival, with camisoles and breeches."

In 1716 Peter made a second journey to Europe. Abram was one of his retinue, and was left in France together with three other young Russians to study fortification, sapping and mining at a military school. They returned to Russia in 1723, when Abram was commissioned as a lieutenant and posted to Riga. Peter died in February 1725, but his wife, Catherine, who succeeded him, continued his favours to Abram: he was employed to teach the tsar's grandson-the short-lived Peter II (1715-30; tsar 1727-30)-geometry and fortification. About this time he is first referred to as Gannibal. The acquisition of a surname was a step up the social ladder, differentiating him from the serfs and others known only by Christian name and patronymic; while that he should have called himself after the great Carthaginian general implies no lack of confidence in his own abilities.* His fortunes changed after Catherine's death: under a vague suspicion of political intrigue he was posted, first to Siberia, then to the Baltic coast. It was not until the accession of Elizabeth, Peter the Great's younger daughter, that his situation improved. In December 1741 she promoted him major-general from lieutenant-colonel, and appointed him military commander of Reval. The following year she made him a large grant of land in the province of Pskov: this included Mikhailovskoe, the estate where Pushkin was to spend two years in exile, from 1824 to 1826. In 1752 he was transferred to St. Petersburg, promoted general in 1759, and, in charge of military engineering throughout Russia, oversaw the building of the Ladoga canal and the fortification of Kronstadt. That a black slave, without relations, wealth or property, should have risen to this position is in the highest degree extraordinary: so remarkable, indeed, as to argue a character far beyond the common, one that was more than justified in appropriating the name and reputation of the great Carthaginian. Elizabeth's death in 1761 put an end to his career; he was retired without promotion or gratuity, and lived for the rest of his life in his country house at Suida, near St. Petersburg, where he died on 20 April 1781.

In 1731 he had married Evdokiya Dioper, the daughter of a Dutch sea captain. When she gave birth to a child, who was plainly not his, he divorced her (though bringing up the daughter as his own), and married the daughter of a Swedish officer in the Russian army, Christine von Schöberg. Of his seven children by Christine (three more died in infancy) the eldest son, Ivan, was a distinguished artillery officer who reached the rank of lieutenant-general. Petr, the second son, in old age lived in Pokrovskoe, some four kilometres from Mikhailovskoe, where he occupied himself 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.

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.

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 Alexa...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1400041104
• ISBN 13: 9781400041107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 768