In the next decade, one of the most remarkable in the history of Russian culture, Pushkin published poem and after poem: “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” from the events of the Caucasian Wars, “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” with its Crimean background, “The Gypsies,” “Poltava” from Ukrainian history in the time of Peter the Great, and others. From his reading of Shakespeare he was moved to write a verse drama, “Boris Godunov,” a tragedy of ambition and power that served as the basis for Modest Mussorgskii’s later opera. Pushkin’s masterpiece was the novel in verse Evgenii Onegin. On the surface the story of a bored young nobleman’s flirtation with Tatiana, a country girl brought up on French novels, it provided a portrait of Russian gentry society. Onegin emerges as a man with no purpose in life, neither a career nor an absorbing occupation, well educated in European culture but contributing nothing to the Russia around him. In contrast Tatiana, for all her girlish naivité, is the deeper and stronger character, the prototype of many of the women in Russian literature. The book had phenomenal success and later Tchaikovsky was to turn it into his own greatest opera. The echoes of European Romanticism were apparent in almost all these works, but Pushkin was no imitator, alongside the echoes from his reading was a powerful melody all his own.
Pushkin’s astonishing creativity was not alone. The decade saw an explosion of Russian poetry and a gradual transformation of the audience. Normal commercial publication was still barely profitable, but innovative booksellers found a new genre, the almanach. Small format volumes with fancy bindings and paper, they were designed as New Year’s presents, especially for young ladies. They normally included only Russian authors with few translations, all of them new. Poets competed to be published in them, and they were guaranteed an audience, for part of the appeal of the format was that they could be easily carried in a lady’s purse. In aristocratic drawing rooms the French novel now had a competitor.
In 1824 Pushkin received permission to return to his estate near Pskov, south of St. Petersburg, but not to the capitals. The Decembrist revolt complicated his attempts to restore his position, and the newly founded Third Section sent agents to observe him. They were particularly concerned to discover if he talked to the peasantry, and about what. Their findings were meager: the worst they could discover was that he wore a straw hat and a Russian traditional shirt with a pink sash around it. The point was that his dress could be construed as an attempt to mix with the people to stir up revolution, but his neighbors reported that he never talked about politics or even went out much. Finally Pushkin, with encouragement from Zhukovskii, appealed directly to tsar Nicholas, who granted him an interview in Moscow in 1826. After a long conversation, Nicholas agreed to end the exile, to allow Pushkin back to St. Petersburg, and to help him with his problems with the censorship. Henceforth his censor would be the tsar himself.
Pushkin returned to the capital still closely observed by the authorities, but also with the court title of kammerjunker and a direct relationship to the tsar and to the head of the Third Section, Benckendorf himself. Pushkin chafed at Benckendorf’s philistinism, but he admired Nicholas and remained loyal to the monarchy, if critical of its officials and many of its policies. He received an official appointment as historian and wrote a history of the Pugachev rebellion as well as a novella on the same subject, The Captain’s Daughter. Pushkin even borrowed money through the Third Section, and eventually received permission to found a journal, The Contemporary. This was in part a commercial venture, for the economic circumstances of literature were rapidly changing. In 1834 the Polish conservative turned Russian writer Osip Senkovskii founded the Library for Reading, which quickly outsold any other Russian journal with its thick issues that contained a mixture of light fiction, serious literature, non-fiction, and much chitchat from the editor himself. Pushkin was hoping to move into this market while offering more sophisticated material for the reader when fate intervened.
Pushkin had married a woman of great beauty, limited intelligence and depth, and great social ambitions. Her life centered on the houses of the great aristocracy, the court and its entertainments, its balls and intimate gatherings, which she attended as lady-in-waiting to the empress. There she met Georges-Charles D’Anthès, a young Alsatian-French nobleman serving in the Russian guards, a monarchist refugee from the French revolution of 1830. Adopted as a son by the Dutch ambassador Baron van Heeckeren, he revolved in the highest society and was utterly unscrupulous. He began a flirtation with Natalia Pushkina (how serious it was remains unclear to this day), and in November 1836, Pushkin received an anonymous letter that asserted the flirtation to be a real affair. He challenged D’Anthès to a duel, but Zhukovskii and others managed to patch up the quarrel. It erupted again a few months later and on January 27, 1837, it ended in a duel. In the snow on the outskirts of St. Petersburg the two opponents faced each other and D’Anthès fired first. Fatally wounded and bleeding profusely, Pushkin raised himself on his elbow and fired, but only inflicted a slight wound. His second brought him home where Zhukovskii got the best doctors in the city, those who treated the tsar, but they could do nothing. Pushkin sent a message to Nicholas, asking him for forgiveness (dueling was a crime) and Nicholas granted it, but advised him to take the last rites like a Christian, and promised to take care of his family. Count Mikhail Wielhorski, the poet Prince Peter Viazemskii, and Zhukovskii visited and stayed with him until he died. D’Anthes was expelled from Russia, and went on to a long career in his native France. Nicholas paid Pushkin’s debts and took care of his family and Natalia soon remarried.
Pushkin’s death was a huge event in the history of Russian culture, soon mythologized into martyrdom at the hands of an unfeeling aristocracy and court, but his death was the result of his deep roots in precisely that milieu. Though most of the later Russian writers were still noblemen, none were as much part of the court circle as was Pushkin. The closest to Pushkin’s social position was the poet Mikhail Lermontov, also a nobleman but without distinguished ancestors like Pushkin’s. His political views were not really radical, but his poetic reaction to Pushkin’s death earned him a transfer to the Caucasus, the scene of his greatest work, A Hero of Our Time. An interconnected series of stories, the book’s hero Pechorin is a sort of Onegin, this time serving in the army in the Caucasus but again placed between European education and the limits of Russian reality. On Lermontov’s return to St. Petersburg in 1838 he, too, frequented aristocratic salons if not the court, and as if repeating Pushkin’s fate, got into a duel over a woman with the son of the French ambassador. The duel ended in reconciliation, but Lermontov was sent back to the Caucasus. There he met his end in yet another duel in July 1841.
Pushkin and Lermontov were typical of the writers of their age though far more talented. Both noblemen, with many friends and relatives in the court, the government, and the army, they lived as did the men of their social rank. They were present at the great social events of the capital and spent much of their time playing cards, drinking, hunting, and occasionally visiting their country estates. The next generation of writers, though also noblemen, lacked the connections at court and experienced St. Petersburg less as the home of the court than as a great modern city.