Pushkin. T. Binyon J.
often calls on us to smoke his pipe and discourses or chats very pleasantly. He has only just completed an ode on Napoleon, which, in my humble opinion, is very good, as far as I can judge, having heard only part of it once.â66 Napoleon had died on 5 May 1821 (NS); the news of his death reached Kishinev in July.
The miraculous destiny has been accomplished;
The great man is no more.
In gloomy captivity has set
The terrible age of Napoleon,
Pushkin wrote.67 His earlier hatred of the emperor had been replaced, if not by the hero-worship of Romanticism, at least by awe and admiration.
Orlov was a humane and enlightened commander, who was particularly anxious to reduce the incidence of corporal punishment in the units under his command. He had surrounded himself by a number of like-minded officers: Pushchin, his second-in-command, was a Decembrist, as was Okhotnikov, his aide-de-camp. So too was Vladimir Raevsky, âa man of extraordinary energy, capabilities, very well-educated and no stranger to literatureâ:68 a distant relative of Pushkinâs friends. Born in 1795, Raevsky had entered the army at sixteen; in 1812, as an ensign in an artillery brigade, he had been awarded a gold sword for bravery at Borodino. Now a major in the 32nd Jägers, he was the divisionâs chief education officer, responsible for all its Lancaster schools.* This position gave him great influence on the rank-and-file of the division, and he employed it to inculcate what were considered to be dangerously subversive ideas. A later report on his activities singled out the fact that in handwriting exercises he used for examples words such as âfreedomâ, âequalityâ, and âconstitutionâ and alleged that he told officer cadets that constitutional government was better than any other form of government, and especially than Russian monarchic government, which, although called monarchic, was really despotic.69 A pedagogue by nature, he exposed the gaps in Pushkinâs knowledge, and was a severe critic of his verse.
In December 1821 Liprandi was ordered by Orlov to report on the condition of the 31st and 32nd Jäger regiments, stationed in Izmail and Akkerman at the mouth of the Dniester. He invited Pushkin to accompany him; Inzov, who had just been reprimanded for not keeping a strict watch over his protégé, at first refused his permission, but was persuaded by Orlov to change his mind.
Pushkin was full of historical enthusiasm when the two set off on 13 December. He was eager to stop in Bendery and visit the camp at Varnitsa, where Charles XII of Sweden had lived from 1709 to 1713, having taken refuge on Turkish territory after his defeat by Peter at Poltava â the battle which was to be the climax of, and provide the title for Pushkinâs long narrative poem of 1828â9. Liprandi, however, hurried him on. The next post-station, Kaushany, aroused his excitement again: this had been the seat, from the sixteenth century until 1806, of the khans who had ruled Budzhak, the southern region of Moldavia. But according to Liprandi there was nothing to see and, stopping only to change horses, they drove on.
They arrived in Akkerman early in the evening of the fourteenth, and went straight to dinner with Colonel Nepenin, the commander of the 32nd Jägers. Among the guests was an old St Petersburg acquaintance, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Courteau, now commandant of the fortress. He and Pushkin were both members of Kishinevâs short-lived Masonic lodge, Ovid, opened in the spring and closed â together with all other lodges in Bessarabia â in December by Inzov on the emperorâs orders. While Pushkin and Courteau were talking, Nepenin asked Liprandi in an undertone, audible to Pushkin, whether his friend was the author of A Dangerous Neighbour â the indecent little epic composed by Pushkinâs uncle, Vasily. Liprandi, embarrassed, and wishing to avoid further queries, replied that he was, but did not like to have it talked about. His ruse succeeded, the poem was not mentioned further; later that evening, however, Pushkin took him to task for his subterfuge, and called Nepenin an uneducated ignoramus for imagining that he, a twenty-two-year-old, could be the author of a poem which had been well-known ever since its composition ten years earlier, in 1811.
The following day, while Liprandi was inspecting the regiment, Pushkin was shown round the fortress by Courteau; they dined with him, and returned to their quarters in the early hours of the morning, after an evening spent at the card-table and in flirtation with the commandantâs âfive robust daughters, no longer in the bloom of youthâ.70 They left for Izmail early the following evening, arriving at ten at night and putting up with a Slovenian merchant, Slavic.
In 1791, during the Russo â Turkish war, Izmail had been stormed and captured by a Russian army commanded by Suvorov â an event celebrated by Byron in the seventh and eighth cantos of Don Juan. Pushkin was naturally impatient to inspect the scenes of the fighting: when Liprandi returned to their lodging the next evening he found that his companion had already been round the fortress with SlaviÄ; he was amazed that the besiegers had managed to scale the fortifications facing the Danube. He had also taken down a Slovenian song from the dictation of their hostâs sister-in-law, Irena. The following morning Liprandi, before leaving to inspect the 31st Jägers, introduced Pushkin to a naval lieutenant in the Danube flotilla, Ivan Gamaley; together they visited the town, the fortress and the quarantine station; were taken to the casino by SlaviÄ, and then had supper at his house with another naval lieutenant, Vasily Shcherbachev. Returning at midnight, Liprandi found Pushkin sitting cross-legged on a divan, surrounded by a large number of little pieces of paper. When asked whether he had got hold of Irenaâs curling papers, Pushkin laughed, shuffled them together and hid them under a cushion; the two emptied a decanter of local wine and went to bed. In the morning Liprandi awoke to find Pushkin, unclothed, sitting in the same posture as the previous night, again surrounded by his pieces of paper, but holding a pen in his hand with which he was beating time as he recited, nodding his head in unison. Noticing that Liprandi was awake, he stopped and gathered up his papers; he had been caught in the act of composition. That morning Liprandi, after writing his report, called on Major-General Tuchkov, who expressed the wish to meet Pushkin. He came to dinner at their lodgings and afterwards bore off Pushkin, who returned at ten in the evening, somewhat out of sorts; he wished he could stay here a month to examine properly everything the general had shown him. âHe has all the classics and extracts from them,â he told Liprandi, who jokingly suggested that he was more interested in Irenaâs classical forms.71
The next morning they set out for Kishinev. Late that evening, as Pushkin was dozing in his corner of the carriage, Liprandi remarked that it was a pity it was so dark, as otherwise they could have seen to the left the site of the battle of Kagul: here in August 1770 General Rumyantsev with 17,000 men engaged the main Turkish army, winning a hard-fought battle with the bayonet and capturing the Turkish camp. Pushkin immediately started to life, animatedly discussed the battle, and quoted a few lines of verse â perhaps those from his Lycée poem, âRecollections in Tsarskoe Seloâ, in which he mentions the monument to the battle in the palace park:
In the thick shade of gloomy pines
Rises a simple monument.
O, how shameful for thee, Kagulian shore!
And glorious for our dear native land!72
Arriving in Leovo before midday, they called on Lieutenant-Colonel Katasanov, the commander of the Cossack regiment stationed here. He was away, but his adjutant insisted that they should stay for lunch: caviare, smoked sturgeon â of which Pushkin was inordinately fond â and vodka appeared, succeeded by partridge soup and roast chicken. Half an hour after their departure Pushkin, who had been in a brown study, suddenly burst into such raucous and prolonged laughter that Liprandi thought he was having a fit. âI love cossacks