No: you will no longer find this poet in the country. As a young man, he lived in the country, and in a letter he spoke of gulleys, of the high, noble, solitary flight of eagles, of the extensive, undulating verdure of the steppes. In those days, he writes, he used to nourish himself on mute sentiments and on the beauty of the countryside. He knew the cloud-crested summits, the snowdrifts, the green of the gardens, the deepest blue of the sea beneath the brightest blue of the sky. But now you will find him in drawing rooms. In a poem, he offers a description of them: aristocrats, soldiers, gallants, ladies in sumptuous dress, complacent beneath the light of crystal chandeliers. Look, it’s like a painting: the lady of the house surrounded – as if in a makeshift frame – by a group of impeccable gentlemen, talking with the scrupulous vacancy of automata. Aloof, one man contemplates the room as though looking down on a group of ghosts. This man – is he the poet? If he is, it is only inwardly, only in the marrow – tense and corrosive, or glacially empty – of his conscience. Because, on the surface, he seems to fit in perfectly, to be fashioned of the same stuff – the drunkenness of chandelier light, the drunkenness of gaming tables, the drunkenness of nacre in the fans – as that friction of murmurs and dazzling garments in the Saint Petersburg night. A friend of his tells us: ‘I only ever meet Pushkin at balls. And he will continue in this way, wasting his life, unless something compels him to go elsewhere.’
Elsewhere. Six years before, Pushkin had finished a narrative poem, Eugen Onegin. I would like linger now over an episode from this poem. It is day, and the sun is shining over the snowy landscape. Onegin hurries out of bed, helped by a French manservant. This morning, Onegin has an appointment, which he arrives to in a sleigh. He carries a box with a pistol inside, a Lepage, the best-known brand among the elegant set in the Russia of the time. Now they are arrived: beside a mill, beneath the oaks, on a clear, cold day. Onegin has come for a duel with a young poet. Onegin – is he Pushkin? And the young poet – is he not, in a certain way, Pushkin, too? The pistols glimmer; the bullets are snug now against the rifling in the barrel. Onegin fires, and the poet falls. Onegin feels a strange chill; he has wounded the poet mortally. The poet’s mind is dark and hushed, like an abandoned house with closed shutters: one of those houses in Russia where they streak the windows with lime to block the sun during the long months of solitude.
Now look: we are in the outskirts of Saint Petersburg during the last days of January 1837. This time it is Pushkin who has an appointment, with his brother-in-law, a French émigré: D’Anthès, an officer of the Imperial Guard. The time for composing verses while listening to Rossini has passed; now is the hour to look a fate we presage hazily in the face, as if through darkness, as if woven into the fabric of a poem. Pushkin walks forward, his pistol pointed at the ground. D’Anthès – unmoving, fixed as an obsession – fires. A hole, black and bloody, appears in Pushkin’s chest, and he falls now, on this frosty morning in the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, just as the young poet fell beneath the oaks, not far from the millwheel, amid the frigid solitude of the fields.
The Almanach de Gotha of 1838 is a tiny volume containing a yearly inventory of wins and losses among the worldly; it records the landslides and the minimal seismic shifts in the static, rigid era of the frivolous aristocracy and the gallantry of the drawing rooms. There is a curt line buried deep in the Almanach de Gotha that recollects the day in 1837 when the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, of noble origins, died as the consequence of a duel. The letters are minuscule, but the words have a dry and abrupt report, like a pistol fired in the brilliance of a drawing room on the night of a ball.
8 March 1980