Novels, Tales, Journeys

Pushkin prized his African ancestry, and his African ancestor, highly, and when he decided, in 1827, to try his hand at a historical novel along the lines of Walter Scott’s immensely popular Waverley (published in 1814), he chose the life of Ibrahim as his subject. The result was The Moor of Peter the Great. In an article published three years later, he observed: “In our time, by the term novel we mean an historical epoch developed in a fictional narrative.”^*4 And indeed, while the two protagonists, Ibrahim and Peter the Great, are fully historical, his portrayal of their interactions is almost entirely invented. We first meet Ibrahim during his military service in the decadent Paris of Philippe d’Orléans’s regency (1715–1723), and hear mainly about the complications of his love life, both in France and on his return to Russia. Peter, meanwhile, is busy building his new capital in the north, “a vast factory,” as it appears to Ibrahim, and though the emperor is referred to at one point as “the hero of Poltava, the powerful and terrible reformer of Russia,” we see him mainly as the “gentle and hospitable host” of his godson. More historical and personal complexity is suggested in later chapters, in Peter’s relations with the old boyar aristocrats and with the entrance of Ibrahim’s rival Valerian, but Pushkin abandoned the novel just at that point and never went back to the Waverley manner.

That was in 1828. A year or two later, one of Pushkin’s literary enemies, Faddei Bulgarin (Pushkin liked to call him “Figlyarin,” from figlyar, “buffoon”), wrote a scurrilous article about a certain unnamed poet whose grandfather was not a Negro prince, as he boasted, but had been bought by a sea captain for a bottle of rum. Pushkin replied in a post scriptum to his poem “My Genealogy”: “That skipper was the glorious skipper / Who started our land moving, / Who forcefully took the helm of our native ship / And set it on a majestic course.” Pushkin’s awareness of himself as a descendant both of old boyar stock and of the reformer’s black godson nourished his meditations on state power in all its contradictions. In the same year that he abandoned his first novel, he wrote the long poem Poltava, about Peter’s decisive victory in 1709 over the Swedish forces of Charles XII, which led to the emergence of Russia as the predominant nation of northern Europe. The “terrible reformer,” grown more ambiguous and demonic in the grim figure of his statue, is also the subject of Pushkin’s last long poem, The Bronze Horseman, written in 1833. D. S. Mirsky has called it “the greatest work ever penned in Russian verse.”^*5

Pushkin’s own confrontation with imperial power had begun many years earlier. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russian troops occupied Paris and camped along the Champs-Élysées. The victorious coalition restored the French monarchy, but the young Russian officers picked up French revolutionary thinking in the process and came home with new notions of political liberty. French culture had been the dominant influence in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until her death in 1796. The aristocracy spoke French, which was Pushkin’s first language. In 1811, the emperor Alexander I founded a school which he called by the French name of lycée (litsei in Russian) in the imperial village of Tsarskoe Selo, some eighteen miles south of Petersburg, to give the sons of the aristocracy a European education, after which they were to take up important posts in government service. Pushkin was in the first class of thirty, and his years at the lycée remained central to his life. There he began to write poetry, first in French, then in Russian, and by the age of fourteen he had already seen his work published and praised. On graduating in 1817, he moved to Petersburg, where he held a nominal post in the service, which did not keep him from living a rather wild life, gambling, womanizing, dueling. In Petersburg he also got to know some of the young officers who had come back from Paris. He shared their thoughts and hopes, and in that spirit wrote a number of poems which were not very pleasing to the authorities. One of them, the ode “Liberty,” written as early as 1817, praises “the exalted son of Gaul” who sang of Liberty and denounced “enthroned vice” with its scourges, irons, and serfdom. Against “lawless Authority” it invokes “the trustworthy shelter of the Law.” This, along with some biting epigrams on various government officials, was finally too much even for the rather liberal Alexander. Pushkin was relieved of his post in Petersburg and “exiled” to the south, to serve in Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, and finally Odessa.