Prisoner of Russia

Alexander Pushkin and the Political Uses of Nationalism

Yuri Druzhnikov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138513600
• eBook ISBN: 9781351290104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

As the central figure in Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin (1799u1837) has been claimed by nearly every political faction, right and left, in Russian cultural politics over the past two centuries, culminating in his official canonization under the Soviet regime. In Prisoner of Russia, Yuri Druzhnikov analyzes the distortions and misrepresentations of Pushkin's cultural appropriation by focusing on Pushkin's attempts at emigration and his attitudes toward Russia and Western Europe.Druzhnikov's semi-biographical narrative concentrates on Pushkin's attempts to leave Russia after his graduation from the Lyceum, through his period of exile, until his early death in a duel in 1837. The matter of emigration from Russia was a politically charged issue well before 1917; witness the hostile reception of all of Turgenev's novels from Fathers and Sons on. The emigrU artist's cultural context is often used to assess his authenticity and stature as seen in the Western examples of Henry James, T.S. Eliot, or James Joyce. Druzhnikov sharply criticizes the omnipresent and reductive tendency in Russia (and the West) to define Russian cultural figures in terms of absolute essences and ideologies and to ignore the ambivalences that in fact help to define a writer's singularity. In the larger view, he argues, it is these that explain the variety and complexity of Russian culture.Druzhnikov's multidisciplinary approach combines literary and political history, with critical commentary arranged in chronological sequence. His interpretive apparatus ranges widely through nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, and provides the necessary intellectual context for nonspecialist readers. He also avoids the massive accumulation of trivial detail characteristic of so much Pushkinology. This accessible, valuable exercise in cultural history will be of interest to Slavic scholars and students, cultural historians, and general readers interested in Russian literature and culture.

Part One

A Willful Exile

Translated by Thomas Moore

1

Pushkin Intends to Go Abroad

“A callow lover of all foreign nations,

Forever calling to account my own... “

—Pushkin. November 30, 1817 (1.281)

One summer evening in 1817 in St. Petersburg, Nikolay Gnedich, the eminent Russian poet and future translator of Homer’s Iliad, introduced two poets to each other during an intermission at the theater. One of them, Pavel Katenin, was a playwright and Guards officer who had achieved the rank of colonel in only three years. The other poet was a young man accompanying Gnedich, who introduced him to Katenin: “You know him by his talent—this is the Lyceum’s Pushkin.”¹ In reality, Pushkin had already achieved tenth-class rank—collegiate secretary—and had been taken onto the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Gnedich of course meant “Lyceum’s Pushkin” in the sense of “that very poet who became famous while still at the Lyceum.”

Apparently the conversation between them touched upon continuing their acquaintance, but that wasn’t to be at that time. “I told my new acquaintance,” Katenin wrote in his memoirs, “that, to my regret, I was being transferred to Moscow the day after next with the First Battalion of the Guards Regiment. Pushkin replied that he would also soon be setting out for foreign parts; we wished each other a pleasant journey and parted.”²

There is no doubt that Katenin was recalling Pushkin’s exact words. Researchers have more than once confirmed the authenticity of Katenin’s memoirs. Yuri Lotman calls him an authoritative witness.³ Katenin doesn’t indicate the date he met Pushkin, but most likely Pushkin mentioned going away himself at the August 27 premiere of August Kotzebue’s The Power of an Oath, featuring the tragic actress and beauty Yekaterina Semyonova. Gnedich was her elocution instructor, while Katenin and Pushkin were both pursuing her, not suspecting their rivalry.

That flirtation doesn’t concern us, and we won’t linger over it. We will only note Pushkin’s remarks to the effect that he would soon be setting out for parts unknown. The words chuzhie kraii (foreign parts) and chuzhbina (strangerdom) were synonymous with “abroad.” No negative connotations adhered to them in the educated society of those times.

So by the time of his graduation from the Lyceum (and possibly even earlier, while still attending it, but we have no knowledge of that), Pushkin had already begun thinking of travel abroad. He was just eighteen.

We are highlighting that remark of Pushkin’s, that was recorded by Katenin, because the poet’s biographers have paid no attention to it and have made no mention of his plans to go abroad immediately after graduation. Mstislav Tsyavlovsky, a leading Pushkin scholar, discussed the intentions of the poet to go abroad only in his first and apparently last article on this painful topic in 1923, about which we will be saying more later.⁴ Twenty years later, Pushkin would be dead, but in that whole time the great Russian poet never once made it beyond the bounds of the empire—the very fact whose importance for him and for the country he lived in we will be investigating.

Ancestral voices were strong in Pushkin. Perhaps that is why his foreign origins, so to speak, are important. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, a particular ancestor of Pushkin’s was considered first to be an African, and then an Abyssinian, that is, a native of the country now known as Ethiopia. It is presumed that he came from a noble family. Today it has been shown that the poet’s great-grandfather Ibrahim, nicknamed “the Blackamoor of Peter the Great,” was apparently born not far from Lake Chad, on the borders of contemporary Chad and Cameroon in Africa.⁵ Ibrahim had been a child at the outset of a war with Turkey. The Turks carried off trophies of valuables and slaves, among whom was the future poet’s ancestor. At that very time, black-skinned servants had become fashionable in Russia.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the boy was given as a gift to Peter I, and christened Abram Hannibal. Curiously enough, though he had been a slave in Turkey, he became a free man in Russia—not at Peter’s whim, but by a law then promulgated. Later on he was made a general for his intelligence and devotion. Abram’s first marriage was to a Greek woman, and subsequently he married a German or Swede by the name of Christina Scherberg, with whom he had children. Abram and Christina’s son Iosif, later Osip, was Pushkin’s grandfather.⁶

These ancestral voices might have been no small factor in his desire to leave the country of his birth, or might have been of no significance at all. This fact has never been considered by Pushkin scholars. Apologists for the regime at the height of flight from the Soviet Union liked to ascribe a desire to emigrate to the amount of foreign blood in one’s veins. During particular periods of political controversy, either Pushkin’s pure Russianness or his “internationalism” or “brotherly solidarity with other peoples” was stressed, since blacks were symbolic of the oppressed in capitalist countries. Mayakovsky, thinking of the poet’s negro origins, wrote: “After all, Pushkin wouldn’t be allowed even now into a respectable hotel or occasion in New York.”⁷ Pushkin’s origin served to prove to Soviet readers how bad life was in America and how good it was in the USSR.

Contrary to the traditional perception, Pushkin’s hair wasn’t black, and after he had fully grown, it stopped being curly. He didn’t cut it, and it hung to his shoulders. “I have a fresh complexion and fair hair,” he described himself coquettishly in a poem in French when he was fifteen years old (I. 80). He also said that he wanted to dye his hair black to look more like an African. The poet’s biographer Pyotr Bartenev recorded from oral recollections of relatives that Nadezhda Osipovna Hannibal, Pushkin’s mother, had dark spots on her body.⁸ They called her “the Creole.” Perhaps these spots were signs of imperfection in the pigmentation of her skin and not her origin. As for her nickname, it designates only the offspring of European colonials in Latin America. Nadezhda Hannibal was half Swedish, or as a Soviet source vaguely hinted, there were Varangians on her mother’s side.⁹ The ancestors of the other Pushkin grandmother, Olga Checherina, his father’s mother, were emigrants from Italy.

Pushkin’s father’s family stems from a Prussian emigrant, Radshi (or Rachi), who settled in Russia during the reign of Alexander Nevsky. Pushkin spoke of this in his journals. After Pushkin’s canonization, people began to write that Radshi wasn’t of German, but Slavic origin. But does this have any vital significance? Only for the myth, it seems to us. As a matter of fact, despite all the influence of genetics, what is important is who Pushkin felt himself to be. Pushkin considered himself a Russian nobleman, and that was his nationality. The cultured Pyotr Vyazemsky, a man more cosmopolitan than Pushkin, tried to assure him that at particular times in history Russianness could be something to be ashamed of. But Pushkin’s pride in his Russian birth also had a right to exist.

Nevertheless, Pushkin inherited some of his great-grandfather’s traits, and not always the best of them. While Abram was still a boy, there were attempts to ransom him, but the tsar wouldn’t give him up, and later sent the youth to study in France. With delight bordering on excess Pushkin describes his foreign escapades, where “nothing could compare with the frivolousness, craziness, and splendor of the French” (IV. 7). Peter I summoned Abram home, but he kept on with his studies, sowed his wild oats, enlisted in the army, and fought for France. He revealed his readiness to return—if he was sent the means to do so—only after having squandered all his money and finally even getting mixed up in amorous intrigues. It was done. Pushkin never got around to writing about his great-grandfather’s life in Russia, his journals having been cut off so abruptly.

There is a suspicion that Peter didn’t make Abram a courtier by accident. The tsar was battling with the Turkish empire, but that didn’t exclude him from having designs not just on India, but on Abyssinia as well. For that circumstance he had to have, thinking in contemporary categories, a ready puppet. Peter died, leaving his schemes to succeeding masters of the empire. In any event, Russia’s influence over Africa was infinitesimal in Pushkin’s day. But for him, Africa remained a part of that abroad that he called his own.

Pushkin’s social origins theoretically gave him definite privileges of travel out of the country, but those origins should be looked at. Where exactly in Moscow Pushkin was born remains unclear, and has been cropping up as a subject of dispute for a century and a half—as rickety as any Russian history. It is established only that he was born in Nemetskaya Sloboda and that he was baptized in the Church of the Epiphany in Yelokhovo. The author lived for a couple of years in that formerly German suburb after the Second World War—everything there was as it had been at the end of the century before last, except for tramcars clattering alongside horsecarts, down crooked lanes running through ruins where people were crawling in and out of every crack in the wall. It goes without saying that there were no more German university professors or other Russified foreign intellectuals left, most of the streets had been renamed, and the homes of the grandees and rich landowners were crammed with proletarians and rustics.

In Pushkin’s day it was a prestigious German district not far from the center of Moscow, where 300,000 people lived then (in all of Russia under Peter there was about thirteen million people, and under Alexander I about forty million).¹⁰ The population of the empire didn’t grow due to fertility so much as to the acquisition of new territories. Civilization penetrated unhurriedly: the first aqueduct, similar to those of the ancient Romans’, was built when Pushkin was five years old, and the populace began to draw water by horse-carried barrels not from the river, but from a fountain in the middle of town.

Although Pushkin’s father, Sergey Lvovich, was the son of a rich landowner, little of that wealth was left to the grandson. To soothe his vanity and preserve his upward mobility, he had to confirm the distinction of his bloodline. The poet would go on about his 600-year-old roots, but he was mocked for it. Among Pushkin’s ancestors were those who had signed the electoral deed of Mikhail Romanov’s tsarship. The poet inserted his forebears into his artistic descriptions of Russian history. A genuine genealogy of Pushkin’s Russified ancestors was compiled before the end of the last century by M. Muravyev.¹¹ It came to light that his father’s pedigree was even richer than the poet had imagined.

Among his ancestors were distinguished diplomats and some who carried out special foreign missions for the tsar. Vasily Slepets escorted Princess Elena to the Lithuanian Empire in 1495; in 1532 Vasily Pushkin went as ambassador to the Kazan Empire, Yevstafy Pushkin to the Swedes, Grigory to the Poles and Swedes, Stepan as ambassador to Poland, and Aleksey Pushkin was a senator and envoy to the Danish court. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century did one Matvey Pushkin resist the idea of sending his children abroad to study, which sent Peter into a rage. Pushkin’s genealogy would seem to have encouraged him to embark upon a diplomatic career.

It is strange but true: Pushkin recalled his early years with reluctance. He didn’t like the home where he was born, his family, or his parents. Not even once did the poet mention his father or mother in his poems, although he immortalized almost everyone else. In Eugene Onegin, for instance, he speaks in detail about the upbringing of his hero, his teachers, father, even uncle, but not a word about his mother. Nor has correspondence between the poet and his parents survived. He called the Lyceum his native abode, his birthplace. On his deathbed, Pushkin didn’t mention his recently deceased mother or ask to see his father or brother or sister.

At first there weren’t any serious reasons for his alienation from the parental hearth. As a child, Pushkin was fat (obese, according to his sister), clumsy, inactive. But he wasn’t picked on any more than anyone else. His education before he entered the Lyceum was unsystematic. His sole success was with the French language, and he read a great deal, of course, in French.

The eighteenth century in Russia had been a time of German influence. At the end of that century and the beginning of the nineteenth, that began to change to French, and the Pushkin family gave in to it completely. Pushkin grew up among the French people and Frenchified Russians visiting his parents’ home. His brother Lev Pushkin recollects: “His upbringing almost entirely excluded anything Russian. He heard only the French language, his tutor was French ... his father’s library consisted entirely of French compositions.” It was bursting mainly with erotic writers of the eighteenth century and French philosophers—all of it read by Pushkin from childhood, promoting his precocity. The Soviet Pushkin sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Part 1: A Willful Exile Translated by Thomas Moore
• Part 2: Dossier on a Runaway Translated by Ilya Druzhnikov
• Selective Bibliography
• Index