1837 No poet of the Romantic movement can claim to have died as romantically as Alexander Pushkin. In 1829, aged 30, he fell in love with a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova. They married two years later. The glamorous couple moved in Moscow’s high society and were seen at every grand ball.
Pushkin was famous as the author of Eugene Onegin (completing its serial publication in 1832, with a clear depiction of Natalya as ‘Tatyana’) but – like other poets – not rich. Natalya was, gossip informed him and the world, conducting an affair with Baron Georges d’Anthès, whom the Pushkins had met in 1834. D’Anthès was a dashing Frenchman who had come to Russia and joined the tsar’s army. He began taking an interest in Natalya in 1835.
In 1836 Pushkin received a poison pen letter informing him that he had been elected to the ‘The Serene Order of Cuckolds’. It may have been baseless. D’Anthès had, by now, married Natalya’s sister. But Pushkin was determined to follow the script laid down in Eugene Onegin, where Lensky provokes the hero to a duel over Tatyana.
Pushkin would prove unluckier than Onegin. Despite furious efforts to prevent it, the duel, with pistols, took place on 27 January 1837. D’Anthès fired first and wounded Pushkin. Pushkin then fired, and winged his opponent. Pushkin was, it transpired, fatally hurt. He died, lingeringly, on 10 February.
His death was the occasion of extraordinary public mourning which – since he was a proclaimed critic of the government – caused alarm. By the tsar’s order (the potentate had also, at one point, eyed the beautiful Natalya), Pushkin was buried out of the way, and discreetly, at a monastery. D’Anthès was expelled from Russia and lived a long life, dying in 1895. According to the New York Times, reporting the event in 1837, ‘every patriotic Russian will spit on the ground on hearing the name of d’Anthès’.