Pushkin. T. Binyon J.

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names will be inscribed!⁵¹

      The epistle, which has been called ‘the most optimistic verse in Pushkin’s entire poetry’,⁵² circulated widely in manuscript, together with ‘Fairy Tales’, ‘The Country’ and the epigrams on Arakcheev; according to Yakushkin ‘there was scarcely a more or less literate ensign in the army who did not know them by heart’.⁵³

* A reference to contemporary portraits of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), the hero of South American independence.

* The artist, Aleksandr Notbek, ignored Pushkin’s instructions; his ill-executed engraving, printed in the Neva Almanac in January 1829, shows the poet facing the spectator with arms crossed on his chest. Pushkin greeted the travesty with an amusing, if scatological epigram:

      Here, having crossed Kokushkin Bridge,

      Supporting his arse on the granite,

      Aleksandr Sergeich Pushkin himself

      Stands with Monsieur Onegin.

      Scorning to glance

      At the citadel of fateful power,

      He has proudly turned his posterior to the fortress:

      Don’t spit in the well, dear chap. (III, 165)

* A desyatin is approximately 2.7 acres: only adult male serfs were numbered in the census.

* Modelled on ‘The Vision of Charles Palissot’ (1760), an attack by Abbé André Morellet on Palissot’s play Les Philosophes, itself a satire directed at the Encyclopédistes.

* In the reign of Peter the Great the custom had been established of presenting to ladies attached to the court a miniature portrait of the monarch which was worn on state occasions.

† Other members included Dmitry Kavelin, Aleksandr Voeikov, Aleksandr Pleshcheev, Petr Poletika, Dmitry Severin; and, later, Nikita Muravev, General Mikhail Orlov and Nikolay Turgenev.

* On 7 January 1834 after a visit from Wiegel Pushkin noted in his diary, ‘I like his conversation – he is entertaining and sensible, but always ends up by talking of sodomy’ (Wiegel was homosexual), and in June, after an evening at the Karamzins, wrote, ‘I am very fond of Poletika’ (XII, 318, 330).

* ‘Loyal without flattery’ was the motto adopted by Arakcheev for his coat-of-arms; the last line is a reference to his mistress, Anastasiya Minkina, in 1825 murdered by the serfs for her intolerable cruelty.

* Count Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov, the Alfred Austin of Alexandrine Russia, an extraordinarily prolific, but talentless poet, the constant butt of Pushkin’s jokes.

† Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order, he confessed, to gain everlasting fame; the German dramatist Kotzebue, employed by the Russian foreign service as a political informant, was assassinated in 1819 by the student Karl Ludwig Sand.

* By an order of 5 August 1816 certain districts in the Novgorod province and, later, in the south, had been turned into military colonies. Every village was transformed into an army camp; all peasants under fifty had to shave their beards and crop their hair, while those under forty-five had to wear uniform. Children received military training, and girls were married by order of the military authorities. Arakcheev was particularly hated for his merciless enforcement of the rules governing these colonies.

* The Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevsky, a member of the Society of United Slavs (which amalgamated with the southern society in 1825), who knew Pushchin well, having shared a cell with him in the Peter-Paul fortress, after reading this passage in the latter’s memoirs, remarked in a letter to M.A. Bestuzhev dated 12 June 1861: ‘Poor Pushchin, – he did not know that the Supreme Duma [of the society] had even forbidden us to make the acquaintance of the poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, when he lived in the south; – and for what reason? It was openly said that because of his character and pusillanimity, because of his debauched life, he would immediately inform the government of the existence of a secret society […] Muravev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin told me about such antics of Pushkin in the south that even now turn one’s ears red.’ Shchegolev (1931), 294–5.

† A quotation from Eugene Onegin, I, xii; Davydov’s wife, Aglaë (née de Grammont) was generous with her favours.

* I.e., in secret, in strict confidence.

       4 ST PETERSBURG 1817–20

      II: Onegin’s Day

      I love thee, Peter’s creation,

      Love thy stern, harmonious air,

      The Neva’s majestic flow,

      The granite of her embankments,

      Thy railings’ iron pattern,

      Thy pensive nights’

      Translucent twilight, moonless glimmer,

      When in my room

      I write and read without a lamp,

      And distinct are the sleeping piles

      Of the empty streets, and bright

      The Admiralty’s spire,

      And, not admitting nocturnal dark

      To the golden heavens,

      Dawn to replace dusk

      Hastens, giving to night but half an hour.

      I love your cruel winter’s

      Still air and frost,

      The flight of sleighs along the broad Neva,

      Maidens’ faces brighter than roses,

      The brilliance, hubbub and chatter of balls,

      And at the bachelor banquet

      The hiss of foaming beakers

      And the blue flame of punch.

      The Bronze Horseman, 43–66

      THE PETERSBURG THROUGH WHICH the hero of Eugene Onegin moves in the first chapter of the poem is not fictional: it is the Petersburg of Pushkin. Eugene’s friends and acquaintances, his amusements and diversions, his interests and infatuations are also Pushkin’s. This ‘description of the fashionable life of a St Petersburg young man at the end of 1819, reminiscent of Beppo,

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