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.
Pushkin, like many of his young friends, shared the liberal ideas of the Decembrists. The Raevsky brothers had joined the Southern Society, though they pulled out of it some time before the uprising. He had made the acquaintance of Pestel during his time in Kishinev and had been struck by his forceful personality. Later, as he records in Journey to Arzrum, Pushkin ran into many former Decembrists who had been sent to serve in the Caucasus as “punishment” for their radical views. In September 1826, during a private meeting in Moscow, the new emperor asked him where he would have been on December 26. Pushkin replied candidly: “On Senate Square with the rebels.”
That conversation took place soon after Nicholas decided to end Pushkin’s exile. A messenger brought the news to Mikhailovskoe. Pushkin left the same day and on September 8 arrived in Moscow. The emperor met with him at once and explained his new situation. His work would no longer be subject to official censorship; instead it would be submitted for approval to the emperor himself. Pushkin, charmed by Nicholas’s apparent benevolence during their meeting, took that as an honor, not realizing that the real censor would be Count Benckendorf, head of the Third Section, his majesty’s new secret police. He soon began to feel the burden of that blessing, but for some time he was reluctant to blame it on Nicholas himself. Nevertheless, it weighed on him for the rest of his life.
In 1827 he was allowed to move to Petersburg. There he lived more or less as he had before his banishment, and was able to enjoy the company of some of his oldest literary friends. In 1829 he met and fell in love with a beautiful young woman of seventeen, Natalya Goncharova. He proposed to her almost at once, but was refused. He also wanted very much to travel abroad, but that, too, was denied him. Suddenly the capital felt stifling to him, and he took off without permission to join the army in the Caucasus, where the Raevskys were serving. This was during one of the Russo-Turkish Wars. He recounts his experiences in Journey to Arzrum, published six years later. Some of his finest poems also came from events he encountered along the way.
On his return, Pushkin went to Moscow, where he continued his courtship of Natalya Goncharova. In April 1830 he proposed to her a second time and was accepted. His father, with whom he had always had strained relations, was pleased at this sign of maturity and respectability and settled on him the small estate of Boldino in the region of Nizhny Novgorod, some 385 miles east of Moscow. In late summer, prior to the wedding, Pushkin went to look over the property, intending to stay a few weeks at most, but a cholera epidemic broke out, quarantines closed the roads, and he ended up staying for three months. This period of suspension, the most fruitful in his creative life, came to be known as the “Boldino Autumn.” During it he wrote some thirty lyric poems, the last two chapters of Evgeny Onegin, the comic narrative poem The Little House in Kolomna, and the four superb short plays he referred to as “Little Tragedies”: The Miserly Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, and A Feast in a Time of Plague. And it was during those months that he also wrote his first finished work of fiction, the five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, with their companion piece, The History of the Village of Goryukhino.
The tales are epitomes of Pushkin’s fiction. “Inspiration finds the poet,” he says in the preface to Arzrum, but prose he worked at very consciously. His aim was to make the tales as unpoetic, as purely narrative, as possible. They have no commentary, no psychology, no ideas, no flights of rhetoric or authorial digressions. They are cast as local anecdotes, and are told so simply and artlessly that at first one barely notices the subtlety of their composition, the shifts in time and point of view, the reversals of expectation, the elements of parody, the ambiguity of their resolutions. Pushkin attributed them to the naïve country squire Ivan Petrovich Belkin, who in turn claimed to have collected them from various local sources. Belkin’s life is briefly sketched in a prefatory letter from one of his neighbors. Pushkin himself appears only as “the publisher” over the initials A. P.
Belkin seems to have occurred to Pushkin after the tales were written, in connection with their publication. For one thing, the disguise enabled him to elude Benckendorf’s censorship. Mirsky suggests that he may also have wanted an alias because the tales were experimental and he was not sure how they would be received. If so, his uncertainty proved justified. “The stories met with no success,” Mirsky continues. “When they appeared without Pushkin’s name the critics paid no attention to them, and when his authorship was divulged, like good critics, they declared that the stories were not worthy of their author and that they marked a grievous decline in his talent.”*7 Their artistic perfection went unnoticed, as did their originality in the development of Russian fiction.