Pushkin. T. Binyon J.
â who were quarrelling with one another. He pointed them out to Pushkin, wondering what the subject of the dispute could be. The next day Pushkin brought him sixteen lines of verse which gave the answer: Antipevna, the elder, is angrily taking Marfushka to task for allowing Vanyusha to take liberties with her, a married woman. âHeâs still a child,â Marfushka replies; âWhat about old Trofim, who is with you day and night? Youâre as sinful as I am,â
In anotherâs cunt you see a straw,
But donât notice the beam in your own.53
âPushkin was so attracted to women,â wrote a fellow lycéen, âthat, even at the age of fifteen or sixteen, merely touching the hand of the person he was dancing with, at the Lycée balls, caused his eye to blaze, and he snorted and puffed, like an ardent stallion in a young herd.â54 The first known Lycée poem is âTo Natalyaâ, written in 1813, and dedicated to a young actress in the serf theatre of Count V.V. Tolstoy. He imagines himself an actor, playing opposite her: Philemon making love to Anyuta in Ablesimovâs opera, The Miller, Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker, or Dr Bartolo endeavouring to seduce Rosina in The Barber of Seville. Two summers later he made her the subject of another poem. You are a terrible actress, he writes; were another to perform as badly as you do, she would be hissed off the stage, but we applaud wildly, because you are so beautiful.
Blessed is he, who can forget his role
On the stage with this sweet actress,
Can press her hand, hoping to be
Still more blessed behind the scenes!55
When Elena Cantacuzen, the married sister of his fellow-lycéen Prince Gorchakov, visited the Lycée in 1814, he composed âTo a Beauty Who Took Snuffâ:
Ah! If, turned into powder,
And in a snuff-box, in confinement,
I could be pinched between your tender fingers
Then with heartfelt delight
Iâd strew myself on the bosom beneath the silk kerchief
And even ⦠perhaps ⦠But no! An empty dream.
In no way can this be.
Envious, malicious fate!
Ah, why am I not snuff!56
There is far more of Pushkin in the witty, humorous light verse of this kind, when he can allow himself the expression of carnal desire, than in his love poems of the Lycée years â such as those dedicated to Ekaterina Bakunina, the sister of a fellow-lycéen. She was four years older than he and obviously attractive, for both Pushchin and the young Malinovsky were his rivals. In a fragment of a Lycée diary he wrote, on Monday 29 November 1815:
I was happy! ⦠No, yesterday I was not happy: in the morning I was tortured by the ordeal of waiting, standing under the window with indescribable emotion, I looked at the snowy path â she was not to be seen! â finally I lost hope, then suddenly and unexpectedly I met her on the stairs, a delicious moment! [â¦] How charming she was! How becoming was the black dress to the charming Bakunina! But I have not seen her for eighteen hours â ah! what a situation, what torture â But I was happy for five minutes.57
There is, however, no trace of this artless sincerity in any of the twenty-three poems he devoted to his love between the summer of 1815 and that of 1817, which are, almost without exception, expressions of blighted love. No doubt Pushkinâs grief was real; no doubt he experienced all the torments of adolescent love. But the agony is couched in such conventional terms, is often so exaggerated, that the emotion comes to seem as artificial as the means of its expression. The cycle begins with the sadness he experiences at her absence; she returns, only for him to discover he has a successful rival; having lost her love, he can only wish for death. âThe early flower of hope has faded:/Lifeâs flower will wither from the torments!â he laments58 â an image with which, in Eugene Onegin, he would mock Lenskyâs adolescent despair: âHe sang of lifeâs wilted flower/At not quite eighteen years of ageâ (II, x).
Far less ethereal were his feelings for Natasha, Princess Varvara Volkonskayaâs pretty maid, well-known to the lycéens and much admired by them. One dark evening in 1816, Pushkin, running along one of the palace corridors, came upon someone he thought to be Natasha, and began to âpester her with rash words and even, so the malicious say, with indiscreet caressesâ.59 Unfortunately the woman was not Natasha, but her mistress, who recognized Pushkin and through her brother complained to the emperor. The following day Alexander came to see Engelhardt about the affair. âYour pupils not only climb over the fence to steal my ripe apples, and beat gardener Lyaminâs watchmen,â he complained, âbut now will not let my wifeâs ladies-in-waiting pass in the corridor.â Engelhardt assured him that Pushkin was in despair, and had asked the director for permission to write to the princess, âasking her magnanimously to forgive him for this unintended insultâ. âLet him write â and there will be an end of it. I will be Pushkinâs advocate; but tell him that it is for the last time,â said Alexander, adding in a whisper, âBetween ourselves, the old woman is probably enchanted at the young manâs mistake.â60 Pushkin made up for the letter of apology with a malicious French epigram:
One could easily, miss,
Take you for a brothel madam,
Or for an old hag;
But for a trollop, â oh, my God, no.61
Another object of desire was the young Marie Smith, âvery pretty, amiable and wittyâ,62 who came to stay with her relations the Engelhardts towards the end of 1816. Pushkin was soon addressing his verse to her, not a whit discomposed by the facts that she had very recently lost her husband and was three monthsâ pregnant. At first the tone is light and humorous, no word of love is breathed; but early in 1817 he sent her âTo a Young Widowâ:
Lida, my devoted friend,
Why do I, through my light sleep,
Exhausted with pleasure,
Often hear your quiet sigh?
âWill you eternally shed tears,/Eternally your dead husband/Call from the grave?â If so, she will call in vain, âthe furious, jealous husband/Will not arise from eternal darkness.â63 In a sense the poem is harmless. Pushkin is not serious in imagining himself to be in bed with Mrs Smith, urging her to forget her husband: these are mere poetic conceits, no different, in a way, from those of an earlier poem, when he calls her âthe confidante of Venus/[â¦] whose throne Cupid/And the playful children of Cytheraea/Have decorated with flowers.â64 But it is understandable that literary considerations of this kind did not present themselves to Mrs Smithâs mind when she received the poem. She saw only the literal, highly indecent meaning, was insulted by it, and took the poem to Engelhardt, who was obliged to give Pushkin another severe dressing-down.
In the spring of 1817 the Karamzins returned to Tsarskoe Selo. Karamzinâs second wife, the severely beautiful Ekaterina Andreevna, was then thirty-six. Of her Filipp Wiegel, whom Pushkin later knew well, wrote in his memoirs, âWhat can I say of her? If the pagan