By birth Pushkin was deeply embedded in Russian history. On his father’s side he could boast a 600-year lineage as a nobleman. On his mother’s he was the great-grandson of an African princeling, stolen from the harem at Constantinople for Peter the Great, under whose tutelage he rose to the rank of general. The features of Gannibal, as he was called, still showed in his great-grandson, whose African roots gave him the romantic feeling of an outsider wanting to get back to his native land (Chapter I, stanza 50). But Pushkin was equally attached to Peter, who played a dominant part in his outlook and work (see The Bronze Horseman (1833) and Poltava (1828–9)). At the same time he was envious of the new aristocracy who owed their advancement to Peter (and then to Catherine), ousting the older nobility to which his family, on his father’s side, belonged. Unloved as a child, he found a new family in his lycée, where he made lasting friendships. He was famed for his love poetry, but friendship nevertheless remained his chief value, as Onegin attests, where friends form an invisible audience or enter directly into the novel.
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On 4 November 1823 Pushkin wrote to a friend, Prince Vyazemsky, from Odessa: ‘I am writing now not a novel, but a novel in verse – the devil of a difference. Something like Don Juan – there’s no point in thinking about publication; I’m writing whatever comes into my head.’2 Odessa was Pushkin’s second place of exile after Kishinev, in Bessarabia. In Odessa he was in the employ of the Governor Count Vorontsov, who had little appreciation for his poetry, calling him ‘a weak imitator of a writer whose usefulness may be said to be very slight – Lord Byron’.3 The zest with which Pushkin wrote his new work reflected a hectic life that included an affair with the Governor’s wife.
In 1825, he was removed from Odessa, at the request of Vorontsov, to Mikhailovskoye, the Pushkin family estate in north-west Russia, which was to be his third and final place of exile, From there, in a letter to another friend, Alexander Bestuzhev, Pushkin wrote, in a different vein, about Onegin and Don Juan:
No one respects Don Juan more than I do… but it hasn’t anything in common with Onegin. You compare the satire of the Englishman Byron with mine, and demand the same thing of me! No, my dear fellow, you are asking a lot. Where is my satire? There’s not a hint of it in Eugene Onegin. The foundations of Petersburg would crack if I touched satire. – The very word ‘satirical’ should not have entered the preface. Wait for the other cantos… Canto One is merely a rapid introduction.4
Bestuzhev, himself a writer, was also a Decembrist. Many Decembrists were literary men, who, like Bestuzhev, saw their craft as a means of political struggle against autocracy and serfdom and were puzzled by Pushkin’s apparent departure from the radical poems that had sent him into exile. Why was Russia’s foremost poet, they asked, wasting his talent on the trivial lives of the gentry? In 1824, four years into exile, Pushkin declared in response to the most significant of Decembrist works, Kondraty Ryleyev’s Dumy (Reflections), that the aim of poetry was poetry. In a series of poems Ryleyev had evoked heroic figures from the past as models to be followed in the present. Pushkin questioned the accuracy of Ryleyev’s work, claiming that he was on the contrary projecting present ideals into the past.
Pushkin spent the first three years of his exile (1820–23) in what he called the ‘accursed town’ of Kishinev, capital of Bessarabia, serving in the office of General Inzov, Administrator for New Colonies in the South. By 1823, when the Decembrist movement was gathering steam, Pushkin had disavowed his earlier idealism. In ‘The Sower of Freedom in the Desert’, a poem written in Odessa, he scorns himself for philanthropy and the people for passivity. Indirectly, the poem targets the Carbonari and their followers in Western Europe (1820–23), crushed by the Holy Alliance. Pushkin writes to a friend that he is parodying the parable from the Matthew and Luke gospels that tells of Christ going out to sow. In Pushkin’s incarnation the saviour is ‘a moderate democrat’ who sows in vain. The Decembrists were, like the Carbonari, largely a military organization, operating through secret societies and equally disconnected from the people they wished to liberate. Pushkin’s sympathies for the Greek insurgents, whom he met in Kishinev and Odessa, likewise vanished. Could these dregs, he asked, be the descendants of Themistocles and Pericles?
Exile brought Pushkin into closer contact with his own countrymen, learning of their folklore from his beloved serf nurse, Arina Rodionovna, who appears as Filipevna, Tatiana’s nurse, in Eugene Onegin. Her songs about the seventeenth-century rebel Sten’ka Razin inspired Pushkin’s own songs about him (1826). In a letter to his brother (1824) he called him ‘the only poetic figure in Russian history’.5 The magnetic Emelyan Pugachov (1740?-75), who led a massive peasant revolt against Catherine the Great, dominates The Captain’s Daughter. These rebellions were popular, not directed by another class. Smaller peasant revolts were innumerable during the entire period of serfdom. Where the Decembrists wished to import Western constitutional models into Russia, Pushkin delved ever more deeply into Russian history to seek political answers for his own time. On the eve of the Decembrist revolt he completed his Shakespearean drama Boris Godunov, set in the so-called Time of Troubles (1604–13), the interregnum between the Riurik and the Romanov dynasties. Here, the people, who take centre stage, appear by turn passive, fickle, savage, murderous and finally mortified by the assassination of the deceased Boris’s family, to which they have been party. Their horrified silence at the end, when asked by the Boyars to applaud yet another Pretender, passes judgement not only on their time, but on ruling-class manipulation in every age. The centrality of the people in Boris Godunov goes beyond any of Pushkin’s Shakespearean models. But the play is Shakespearean in the sense that no one is the victor other than history. With this lesson in mind Pushkin writes to a friend, on hearing of the Decembrist defeat, that they should look upon it through Shakespearean eyes.
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Eugene Onegin is certainly about the life of the nobility down to the niceties of Onegin’s toiletry. But the popular element is very strong there and even decisive. Filipevna, based on Pushkin’s nurse, is also storyteller to Tatiana, who is rooted in peasant superstition and the Russian countryside. Of course, she also reads French and English novels and writes Russian with extreme difficulty. Her declaration of love for Onegin has to be translated by Pushkin into Russian. Nevertheless, it is clear where her roots are when, as the Princess whom Onegin is courting in Chapter VIII, she repudiates the aristocratic flummery that surrounds her and expresses her longing for the countryside and her nurse, now dead.