Pushkin. T. Binyon J.
days talked of nothing else, asking others for their opinion as to whose side was more honourable, who had been the more self-sacrificial and so onâ.30 Though he inclined towards Mordvinov, he could not but admire Kiselevâs sangfroid. Also in Odessa were Sofyaâs twenty-two-year-old sister, Olga, and her recently acquired husband, General Lev Naryshkin, who was Vorontsovâs cousin. Olga was as beautiful as her sister, but âin her beauty there was nothing maidenly or touching [â¦] in the very flower of youth she seemed already armoured with great experience. Everything was calculated, and she preserved the arrows of coquetry for the conquest of the mighty.â31 Wiegelâs last sentence is a hidden reference to a relationship which was well-known in Odessa: soon after her arrival Olga became Vorontsovâs mistress. Naryshkin, seventeen years older than his wife, lacked the character and energy to complain â âalways sleepy, always good-naturedâ was his brother-in-lawâs description of him32 â and, in addition, his affection for his wife was lukewarm: he had long been hopelessly in love with his aunt, Mariya Naryshkina, for many years the mistress of Alexander I.
During the winter there were dances twice a week at the Vorontsovs; Pushkin was assiduous in attending. On 12 December they gave a large ball, at which his impromptu verses on a number of the ladies present caused some offence. On Christmas Day Vorontsov entertained the members of his staff to dinner; Wiegel arrived from Kishinev while they were at table, and Pushkin, learning this, slipped back to the hotel to see him. On New Yearâs Eve, Tumansky wrote, âwe had a good frolic at the masquerade, which the countess [Elizaveta Vorontsova] put on for us, and at which she herself played the fool very cleverly and smartly, that is, she had a charmingly satirical costume and intrigued with everyone in itâ.33
Liprandi had not forgotten Pushkinâs disappointment at not being able to visit Charles XIIâs camp at Varnitsa during their trip in the winter of 1821. Planning another visit to the district, he invited Pushkin to accompany him. The latter accepted with alacrity. He had just been reading a manuscript copy of Ryleevâs narrative poem Voinarovsky. âRyleevâs Voinarovsky is incomparably better than all his Dumy,* his style has matured and is becoming a truly narrative one, which we still almost completely lack,â he wrote to Bestuzhev.34 The hero of Ryleevâs poem is the nephew of Mazepa, the hetman of the Dnieper Cossacks who joined with Charles against Peter the Great and died at Varnitsa in 1709. Pushkin was attracted by the figure of Mazepa himself; three lines of Ryleevâs poem describing Mazepaâs nightmares, âHe often saw, at dead of night;/The wife of the martyr Kochubey/And their ravished daughter,â35 planted the germ which grew into his own poem, Poltava. Byron, too, had devoted a poem to the hetman: his Mazeppa is an account of an early episode of the heroâs life, when, according to Voltaire, the poetâs source, âan affair he had with the wife of a Polish nobleman having been discovered, the husband had him bound naked to the back of a wild horse and sent him forth in this stateâ.36
On 17 January 1824 they left Odessa for Tiraspol, where they put up with Liprandiâs brother. That evening they had supper with General Sabaneev. Pushkin was cheerful and very talkative: the generalâs wife, Pulkheriya Yakovlevna, was much taken with him. The following day, accompanied by Liprandiâs brother, they set out early for Bendery. Forewarned of their coming, the police chief, A.I. Barozzi, had provided a guide: Nikola Iskra, a Little Russian, who âappeared to be about sixty, was tall, with an upright figure, rather lean, with thick yellowish-grey hair on his head and chest and good teethâ.37 He claimed that as a young man he had been sent by his mother to the Swedish camp to sell milk, butter and eggs: which, Liprandi calculated, would make him now about 135 years old. However, it was certainly true that his description of Charles XIIâs appearance bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations in the historical works Liprandi had brought with him, and he showed an equally remarkable ability, when they arrived at the site of the camp, to describe its plan and fortifications and to interpret the irregularities of the terrain. Much to Pushkinâs annoyance, however, he was not only unable to show them Mazepaâs grave, but even disclaimed any knowledge of the hetman. They returned to Bendery with Pushkin in a very disgruntled mood. He cheered up, however, after dinner with Barozzi, and in the afternoon set out in a carriage, accompanied by a policeman, to view, as he hoped, the ruined palaces and fountains at Kaushany, the seat of the khans of Budzhak. Later in the evening he returned as disgruntled as before: there were â as Liprandi had warned him two years earlier â no ruins to admire in Kaushany. He was back in Odessa on the nineteenth. Liprandi did not return until the beginning of February. On the evening of his arrival he dined with the Vorontsovs, where a sulky Pushkin was making desultory conversation with the countess and Olga Naryshkina. He vanished after the company rose from table. Calling at his hotel room later, Liprandi found him in the most cheerful frame of mind imaginable: with his coat off, he was sitting on Moraliâs knee and tickling the retired corsair until he roared. This was the only pleasure he had in Odessa, he told Liprandi.
Pushkin had completed his second southern poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, the previous autumn, and had begun to think about publication. Gnedich, though eager, had ruled himself out through excessive sharpness; he therefore turned to Vyazemsky, who agreed to see the work through the press. However, there was a complication. The work was suffused with memories of the Crimea and, in particular, of his love for Ekaterina Raevskaya. Now, three years later, he was not anxious to call attention to this, all the more so as Ekaterina was now Orlovâs wife. He hit on a simple solution in a letter to his brother: âI will send Vyazemsky The Fountain â omitting the love ravings â but itâs a pity!â38 Sending the manuscript to Vyazemsky on 4 November, he wrote, âI have thrown out that which the censor would have thrown out if I had not, and that which I did not want to exhibit before the public. If these disconnected fragments seem to you worthy of type, then print them, and do me a favour, donât give in to that bitch the censorship, bite back in defence of every line, and bite it to death if you can, in memory of me [â¦] another request: add a foreword or afterword to Bakhchisaray, if not for my sake, then for the sake of your lustful Minerva, Sofya Kiseleva; I enclose a police report as material; draw on it for information (without, of course, mentioning the source).â* 39 With the letter he sent a copy of âPlatonic Loveâ, the immodest poem he had addressed to Sofya in 1819. âPrint it quickly; I ask this not for the sake of fame, but for the sake of Mammon,â he urged in December.40
But his hopes of concealing his former feelings for Ekaterina were soon sadly dented. In St Petersburg Bestuzhev and Ryleev had been preparing a second number of their literary almanac, Pole Star. They obtained Pushkinâs permission to include some of his verses which had been circulating in manuscript in St Petersburg, and others which they had obtained from Tumansky. When the almanac came out in December, Pushkin was horrified to discover that the final three lines of âSparser grows the flying range of cloudsâ, the coded reference to Ekaterina which he had specifically asked Bestuzhev not to include, had in fact been printed. âIt makes me sad to see that I am treated like a dead person, with no respect for my wishes or my miserable possessions,â he wrote reproachfully to Bestuzhev. Worse was to follow. In February, just before the publication of the poem, he wrote to Bestuzhev again: âI am glad that my Fountain is making a stir. The absence of plan is not my fault. I reverentially put into verse a young womanâs tale, Aux douces loix des vers je pliais les accents/De sa bouche aimable et naïve.â