Pushkin. T. Binyon J.
the features of Karamzina in her youth.â65 Pushkin, always susceptible to beauty, and who was, in addition, beginning to be attracted chiefly to older women, sent her a love-letter. Ekaterina, unaffected by his devotion, was amused, and showed it to her husband; they laughed heartily over it. Nevertheless, Karamzin felt it necessary to read Pushkin a stern lecture, affecting the latter so much that he burst into tears. In later years Karamzin took pleasure in showing friends the spot in his study which had been sprinkled with Pushkinâs sobs.
As the course of the first intake at the Lycée neared its end, the thoughts of its members turned towards the future, and Pushkin startled his father with a letter requesting permission to join the Life Guards Hussars. It was an odd request, for he had not attended any of the classes on military subjects which had been held for those intending to enter the army. Sergey Lvovich wrote back to say that while he could not afford to support Pushkin in a cavalry regiment, he would have no objection were his son to join an infantry guards regiment. But it was the glamour of the hussars which had attracted Pushkin:
Iâll put on narrow breeches,
Curl the proud moustache in rings,
A pair of epaulettes will gleam,
And I â a child of the severe Muses â
Will be among the martial cornets!66
The regimentâs barracks were just outside the park, facing the south bank of the Great Lake, in Sofiya, the new settlement built by Catherine II. The lycéens were frequent visitors, Pushkin becoming acquainted âwith a number of hussars, living then in Tsarskoe Selo (such as Kaverin, Molostvov, Solomirsky, Saburov and others*). Together with these he loved, in secret from the school authorities, to make an occasional sacrifice to Bacchus and to Venus,â a fellow-lycéen later wrote, with metonymical delicacy.67 Kaverin was a well-known rake, and in his company Pushkin would certainly have made considerable sacrifices to both gods. But in the end his military career went no further, and he resigned himself to entering the civil service. Looking back on the episode in the winter of 1824, he wrote:
Saburov, you poured scorn
On my hussar dreams,
When I roistered with Kaverin,
Abused Russia with Molostvov,
Read with my Chedaev,
When, casting aside all cares,
I spent a whole year among them,
But Zubov did not tempt me
With his swarthy arse.68
The final examinations at the Lycée lasted a fortnight, from 15 to 31 May 1817. The graduation ceremony took place on 9 June in the presence of the emperor. Engelhardt gave a short speech; Kunitsyn a factual report on the achievements of the Lycée; Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, who had succeeded Razumovsky as Minister of Education in 1816, introduced the pupils to Alexander, who presented their medals and graduation certificates, gave a âshort, fatherly exhortationâ, and thanked the director and the staff for their work.69 The ceremony ended with the lycéens singing a farewell hymn, composed by Delvig and put to music by Tepper de Ferguson. Pushkin had been asked by Engelhardt to write a poem for the occasion, but had evaded the task. In the evening at the directorâs house Lomonosov, Gorchakov, Korsakov, Yakovlev, Malinovsky and Engelhardtâs children performed a French play written by Marie Smith. Korsakov and Yakovlev read poems. Finally, Engelhardt gave each of his pupils a cast-iron ring on which was engraved a phrase of Delvigâs hymn.
On 11 June Pushkin, in the company of six other lycéens, left Tsarskoe Selo for St Petersburg. He had been appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a collegial secretary â the tenth rank â with a salary of 700 roubles a year.
* In January 1814 a preparatory school was set up, also in Tsarskoe Selo, whose pupils replaced the junior course on the latterâs graduation to the senior level.
* After being sued for divorce by his wife on grounds of adultery, Vasily had spent two years in France with his mistress, returning âdressed in Parisian finery from head to toeâ (Veresaev (1937), I, 17).
â The thirty who formed the first course at the Lycée were Aleksandr Bakunin, Count Silvery Broglio, Konstantin Danzas, Baron Anton Delvig, Semen Esakov, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, Baron Pavel Grevenits, Konstantin Gurev, Aleksey Illichevsky, Sergey Komovsky, Baron Modest Korff, Aleksandr Kornilov, Nikolay Korsakov, Konstantin Kostensky, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Sergey Lomonosov, Ivan Malinovsky, Arkady Martynov, Dmitry Maslov, Fedor Matyushkin, Pavel Myasoedov, Ivan Pushchin, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Rzhevsky, Petr Savrasov, Fedor Steven, Aleksandr Tyrkov, Vladimir Volkhovsky, Mikhail Yakovlev and Pavel Yudin. Gurev was expelled in September 1813 for âGreek tastesâ, i.e. homosexuality.
* Until 1816 the school was under the direct supervision of the minister, Razumovsky, who controlled its activities down to the most trivial detail.
* Possibly also because of his use of coarse, smutty language and his obsession with sex, France being commonly associated with sexual immorality.
â âA boy of sixteen, prophesying in exact detail literary immortality to a boy of fifteen, and doing it in a poem that is itself immortal â this is a combination of intuitive genius and actual destiny to which I can find no parallel in the history of world poetryâ (Nabokov, III, 23).
* The brig carrying them wintered on the Svir River, between Lakes Ladoga and Onega: on its return most of the books were found to be spoilt by water.
* âWhen a fountain of pent-up songs/Would ceaselessly replenish itself each dayâ, Faust, 154â5.
* Their society is adequately characterized by Molostvovâs mot, âThe best woman is a boy, and the best wine vodkaâ (Modzalevsky (1999), 480).
I: Literature and Politics
A weak and cunning ruler,
A balding fop, an enemy of labour,
Fortuitously favoured by Fame,
Reigned over us then.
Eugene Onegin, X, i
WHEN PUSHKIN ARRIVED in St Petersburg, he had just turned eighteen. This âugly descendant of negroesâ, as he called himself, was small in stature â just under five foot six.1 He had pale blue eyes, curly black hair, usually dishevelled, and extraordinarily long, claw-like fingernails â often dirty â of which he was inordinately proud. When the actress Aleksandra Kolosova