Novels, Tales, Journeys

Pushkin was absent from Petersburg from 1820 to 1826. During those years he wrote a great deal of poetry, some of it based on his travels to the Caucasus and the Crimea with General Nikolai Raevsky, a retired hero of the Napoleonic Wars, and his sons Alexander and Nikolai, who became his close friends. He detested life in backward Kishinev, which had been ceded to Russia by the Turks in 1812, managed to get transferred to Odessa, but caused himself trouble there as well, particularly with the beautiful young wife of the governor-general, Prince Mikhail Vorontsov. He wrote a notorious epigram about the governor-general:

Half milord, half merchant,

Half wise man, half ignoramus,

Half scoundrel, but there’s hope

He’ll finally become a full one.

The post office routinely opened Pushkin’s mail, and in one letter found him sympathizing with the atheistic arguments of a local philosopher (a certain “deaf Englishman”). This was enough to allow Vorontsov to petition for Pushkin’s removal from Odessa. By imperial order he was expelled from the service and confined to his mother’s small estate at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov, where he was to be kept under surveillance by his father and the local authorities.

In a way the two years of this “house arrest” were Pushkin’s salvation. He was left free to read and to write, and he produced more than he had in the previous four years. Along with many of his finest lyric poems, which went into the collection he was gathering then and published in 1826, he finished his long poem The Gypsies, begun in Kishinev, wrote two more long poems, The Bridegroom and the comic parody Count Nulin, completed three chapters of his novel in verse Evgeny Onegin, and wrote his first and longest play, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov. And he worked on yet another narrative poem, Cleopatra, parts of which eventually found their way into the prose/verse fragment Egyptian Nights, included in our collection.

In a letter to his brother in November 1824, he describes his typical day: “I write memoirs until dinner; I dine late. After dinner I ride on horseback. In the evening I listen to fairy tales, and thereby I am compensating for the insufficiencies of my accursed upbringing. How charming these fairy tales are!”^*6 The storyteller was his former nanny, the house serf Arina Rodionovna, who at first was his only company on the estate. Pushkin was deeply struck by her tales, kept notes on them, and a few years later turned them into some of his finest poems: Tsar Saltan, The Golden Cockerel, and The Dead Princess and the Seven Mighty Men. He also collected her sayings and expressions, a trove of Russian speech that was part of the compensation for his “accursed upbringing.”

But his confinement to Mikhailovskoe saved him in a more literal sense as well. The young officers who had come back from France began to organize a movement for political reform and in 1816 founded a secret society called the Union of Salvation, based in Petersburg with branches in other cities. The Union later divided into the Northern Society in Petersburg and the Southern Society in the Ukraine. Their aims included the abolition of serfdom, the election of a legislative assembly, and the drafting of a constitution limiting the powers of the monarchy. The Southern Society, led by Colonel Pavel Pestel, went further, advocating universal suffrage and the abolition of the monarchy. Both foresaw the inevitability of an armed uprising.

Their chance came in December 1825. The emperor Alexander died suddenly on December 1, at the age of forty-eight, leaving no direct heir. The elder of his two brothers, Constantine, had married a Polish woman and Roman Catholic, and had renounced his right of succession, but only Alexander knew of it. There was uncertainty for several weeks before the younger brother, Nicholas, was prevailed upon to accept the throne. The secret societies decided to take the opportunity of his coronation on December 26 to stage their uprising, earning themselves the name of Decembrists. Some three thousand soldiers, led by the young officers of the Northern Society, appeared in Senate Square in Petersburg, calling for the formation of a provisional government. A few days later the Southern Society incited a mutiny among the troops in the Ukraine. But the revolts were poorly organized and, after the initial shock, were quickly suppressed. The instigators were arrested; five of them, including Colonel Pestel and the poet Kondraty Ryleev, were executed, and another 120 were sent into permanent exile in Siberia.