Strolls With Pushkin

blur with sidewhiskers / Pushkin, who followed the latest trends in fashion, had prominent sidewhiskers, which became an obligatory element of his portraits. O. Kiprensky’s portrait, painted in 1829, occupies a special place. In the Soviet period it became the canonical representation of Pushkin and was included in textbooks, anthologies, and editions of Pushkin’s collected works. Reproductions of the portrait often adorn the walls of schools, cafeterias, and other public places.

Nothing more / From the poem The Little House in Kolomna (1830).

Pushkin Academy of Sciences and Arts / There is no such place. Sinyavsky invents it to spoof the mindless idolization of the poet in Soviet Russia. There is, however, Pushkin House, a literary research institution attached to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It was established in 1905 as a museum and center for Pushkin studies and became part of the Academy of Sciences in 1918. It holds all of Pushkin’s manuscripts and his library.

Pushkinspieler! Pushkinstein! / A reference to colloquial punning on Pushkin’s name. The names given in the Russian text—Pushkinshuler and Pushkinzon—connote a card sharp and a scoundrel, respectively. They sound unmistakably Jewish.

Neva Spectator / A Russian monthly, published in St. Petersburg in 1820–1821 with the active participation of the future Decembrists Kondraty Ryleev and Wilhelm Kyukhelbeker. It was an organ of the liberal segment of Russian society. The journal published Pushkin’s “To Dorida,” “To Kyukhelbeker,” “To the Enchantress,” and an excerpt from Ruslan and Lyudmila. In 1821 Bestuzhev-Mariinsky published his review of Ruslan and Lyudmila there.

Son of the Fatherland / A conservative weekly, published from 1812 to 1840 by N. I. Grech. In 1825 it merged with Faddei Bulgarin’s Northern Archive and published articles directed against Pushkin.

there was Batyushkov, there was Zhukovsky / Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855) was one of the leading poets of early romanticism in Russia. He was the main representative of so-called light poetry, which continued the eighteenth-century tradition of Anacreontic poetry. His poems were concerned with the joys of earthly life, friendship, and love. Later, under the influence of the tragic experience of the 1812 war, Batyushkov’s poetry assumed pessimistic overtones that reflected the poet’s spiritual crisis. Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) is often referred to as the father of Russian romanticism. He introduced new forms and rhymes into Russian poetry in his adaptation of Thomas Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1801). In his poetry, cold, classical structures give way to an emotional perception of the world, vivid and tangible imagery, and a wealth of poetic meter.

She / Touching the floor with one foot / From Evgeny Onegin, chapter 1, stanza xx, in which Pushkin describes the ballet of his time. Pushkin himself was an avid theatergoer and balletomane. His interest in theater included participation in behind-the-stage life, patronage of actors, and numerous love affairs with actresses and dancers. Avdotya Istomina (1799–1848) was a prima ballerina of the Petersburg ballet. Pushkin was at one time romantically involved with her.

Summon me no longer / From “To Turgenev” (1817). Aleksandr Turgenev (1784–1845) was a statesman and a friend of Pushkin. In the poem Pushkin responds to Turgenev’s urging him to continue his work on Ruslan and Lyudmila.

the fruits of merry leisure / From the poem “To My Aristarchus” (1815). Pushkin’s Aristarchus was Nikolai Fyodorovich Koshansky (1785–1830), an instructor of literature at the lycée at Tsarskoe Selo who was famous for his critical attitude toward the compositions of his students. Aristarchus (ca. 217–145 b.c.) was a prominent Greek scholar and a commentator on classical Greek poets. His name became synonymous for Pushkin and his friends with strict, pedantic criticism. Pushkin could expect that Koshansky would disapprove of the frivolous tone and subject of his “flitting epistles” and to deviations from classical metrical norms.

When I’m in this lazy pose / Also from “To My Aristarchus.”

Rossiad / A lengthy poem (nine thousand lines) by Mikhail Kheraskov on which the poet worked for more than eight years, from 1771 to 1779. Written during the reign of Catherine the Great, the Rossiad clearly shows the influence of ideas common to the period of the Enlightenment: the demand for an enlightened monarch, patriotic pathos, and a warning against the dangers of despotism. The Rossiad was an attempt to create a national epic. It is based on the events of the capture of Kazan by the army of Ivan the Terrible in 1552.

where Mayakovsky ended / The theory of “art in production” was proclaimed by the Russian formalists, who were grouped around the journal LEF (Left Front of Art) in the mid-1920s. As Sinyavsky writes in Soviet Civilization, “the revolution had furnished Futurism with a purpose that conformed to…the creation of useful things as opposed to form pure and simple…. This movement of left-wing abstract artists dedicated to production was dubbed ‘design’ in the West. But Russian ‘design’ of that period distinguished itself in that it was not confined to the aesthetics of contemporary industrial and technological culture. It was art sacrificed to production, to a socialist production that encompassed all of life in its march toward the future.” A. Siniavsky, Soviet Civilization (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), 46.

Nowadays I dash off after my own fashion / From the poem “To Prince A.M. Gorchakov” (1814). A.M. Gorchakov (1798–1883) was one of Pushkin’s classmates at the lycée. Later he became a prominent statesman. The poem was written on the occasion of Gorchakov’s birthday on August 30, 1814.

some stanzas as a gift / Yakov Tolstoy (1791–1867) was one of the organizers of the Green Lamp literary circle. He participated in the War of 1812. In 1823 he went to Europe for medical reasons and stayed there after he found out that he was to be put on trial in connection with his association with the Decembrists. To clear his name, Tolstoy agreed to become an informer for the Russian government, and after he returned to Russia in 1837 he became an official in the Ministry of Education and an agent of the Third Section (secret police). The stanzas mentioned here are “Stanzas for Tolstoy,” written in 1819.

Don’t think, my gloomy censor / An inexact quotation from “To My Aristarchus”: “laziness” (len’yu) should be “rest” (pokoem).

Baratynsky / Evgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844) was one of the most prominent poets of Pushkin’s time. He was often considered Pushkin’s rival, and his attitude toward Pushkin ranged from admiration to envy and hate.

Pushkin in Moscow / Ivan Turgenev delivered his speech on Pushkin on the occasion of the opening of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow in 1880. In his speech Turgenev pointed out that it had become necessary to establish links between the younger generation of the 1860s and the older generation of the 1840s. He argued that the rejection of Pushkin and of art in general that was typical of the young radicals was a temporary and justifiable stage in Russian historical development but that the time had come to turn once again to the Russian poet, who would serve as a point of reconciliation between the generations.

Russian Antiquity / A historical monthly, which came out in Petersburg from 1870 to 1918. The journal published materials on Russian history and the history of Russian literature and art, primarily of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

why am I not Pushkin! / The poem “To the Beauty Who Was Sniffing Tobacco,” written in 1814 when Pushkin was fifteen years old, ends with the following lines:

I almost came to hate my native land / From “An Inexperienced Lover of Distant Lands” (1817). Princess E. I. Golitsyna (1780–1850) was a beautiful socialite. Pushkin visited her salon during 1817–1820 when he lived in St. Petersburg.

divinity…and love / From Pushkin’s most famous love poem, “To ———” (To A. P. Kern), written in 1825 and published in 1827 in the almanac Northern Flowers.

rosy and lily-white little feet / A reference to Pushkin’s fascination with women’s feet, which he immortalized in Evgeny Onegin (1, xxx–xxxii). Pushkin writes about his passion for balls:

What the devil! I thought: now / From Pushkin’s poem “The Hussar” (1833), in which a soldier tells the story of how he stayed at the house of an attractive woman who turned out to be a witch.

Ruslan and Lyudmila / A long poem (1817–1820) about a fairy-tale land filled with fantastic creatures from Russian folklore. This is one of the first poems that Russian children read.

the prologue / The introductory stanzas of Ruslan and Lyudmila are among the best-known verses to Russians, and schoolchildren are often made to memorize them. The first lines are, “A green oak stands at the curved seashore, / A golden chain hangs on that oak.”

hunters at rest / Sinyavsky lists here popular emblems of Russian and Soviet life. A kokoshnik is a type of headdress worn over the forehead by Russian peasant women. It is usually triangular in form and embroidered with golden thread and semiprecious stones. Sugar-coated hawthorn berries were a treat popular among Russian children, as were honey cakes and gingerbread cakes, which were sold in the streets. Moscow and Tula honey cakes had an imprint of Saint George on them, thus becoming gingerbread knights in Sinyavsky’s text. The bears on bicycles come from Kornei Chukovsky’s children’s tale in verse “The Cockroach.” It was rumored that the frightening cockroach was an allusion to Stalin, its whiskers calling to mind Stalin’s moustache. “Hunters at Rest” is the title of a realist painting by Vasily Perov, reproductions of which hung in many public places in the Soviet Union.

breathed out by Zhukovsky / Sinyavsky refers here to Zhukovsky’s ballad “Lyudmila” (1808), which was considered one of the most important works of Russian romanticism. Zhukovsky’s poem was an adaptation of Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore.” The elevated diction of the ballad, which is constructed around rhetorical questions and exclamations, led younger contemporaries of Zhukovsky, like Pushkin in Ruslan and Lyudmila, to parody the elder poet’s sentimental style.

The ephemeral range of clouds grows thin / The opening line of an elegy (1820) dedicated to one of General Raevsky’s daughters.

at least got warm / Sinyavsky refers here to a joke about a rooster that wants to have his way with a hen and so chases her around the yard. After the rooster fails to catch the hen, he is asked how he feels. The rooster answers that although he did not get what he wanted, he did get warm.

Love of poetry, love of my freedom / From “To Zhukovsky” (1818).

Ninette or Temira or even Parasha / Ninette, Temira, and Parasha are women’s names that appear frequently in Pushkin’s poetry—especially Parasha. Not only does the name Parasha appear in Pushkin’s lyrics, but the main female character in The Little House in Kolomna and Evgeny’s beloved in The Bronze Horseman both bear that name.

We await the moment of sacred freedom / From “To Chaadaev” (1818). Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) was a writer and philosopher as well as Pushkin’s friend and mentor at the time of the poet’s studies at the lycée.

By you, by you alone / From the poem that begins “High gloom lies on the hills of Georgia,” written in 1829 during Pushkin’s trip to Erzurum and published in Northern Flowers in 1831.

Marina Mnishek / A Polish princess who figures as a character in Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov.

better than any other woman / A reference to the beginning of the eighth and final chapter of Evgeny Onegin. The chapter opens with an account of Pushkin’s relationship with his Muse, embodied in the heroines of his works—from “the gardens of the lycée” through “the cliffs of the Caucasus” and “the wilderness of sad Moldavia” to his own garden, where the Muse appears to him as a provincial noble maiden “with a sad thought in her eyes, / With a French book in her hands”—like Tatyana Larina, the heroine of Onegin.

All my life was a pledge / From Tatyana’s letter to Onegin (3, xxxi).

to the black sky, to the whole wide world / In Russian there is a play here on the opposition between black and white. The folkloric expression bely svet can mean “white light” as well as “the whole wide world.” This may be viewed as an allusion to the main visual image in Aleksandr Blok’s 1918 poem The Twelve, the opening stanza of which reads:

wrote the letter in French / Evgeny Onegin, 3, xxvi. French was an obligatory component of the education of children of the Russian nobility. Russian was used in daily conversations (especially with servants), whereas French was used for correspondence, since Russian did not have as developed an epistolary style. Pushkin himself wrote letters in French. As one of Pushkin’s contemporaries quipped, “We philosophize in German, joke in French, and use Russian only for praying to God and scolding our servants.”

Here is / An incomplete and weak translation / Evgeny Onegin, 3, xxxi.

From morning till evening / From the poem “The Muse” (1821).

Ruslan…“The Queen of Spades” / Ruslan dreams of his death at the hand of his rival, Farlaf, and of the loss of Lyudmila. The dreams of Aleko, the main character of the narrative poem The Gypsies, “are strange and disturbing” because he is dissatisfied with his life with the gypsies and jealous about his wife Zemfira. Tatyana in Evgeny Onegin has a dream about Onegin in which he appears as the leader of a gang of grotesque creatures. The dream serves as a premonition of the duel between Onegin and Lensky in which Lensky is killed. In Boris Godunov, Grigory Otrepev, the fugitive monk who aspires to become the tsar of Russia, dreams of a staircase going upward by which he ascends to the throne. Grinyov, the main character of the novel The Captain’s Daughter, has a dream that, in his own words, he “cannot forget and in which he…sees something prophetic.” In his dream he returns home and finds his father ill, but when he goes up to him, he sees a black-bearded man lying in the bed instead of his father. The man is Pugachov, whom Grinyov will meet later. In the poem “The Song of Oleg the Seer,” a magician predicts that Prince Oleg will meet his death through his horse. In the “little tragedy” Mozart and Salieri, Mozart is visited by a man in black who commissions him to compose a requiem. It becomes a requiem for Mozart himself when Salieri poisons him. In “The Queen of Spades,” the old countess appears to Hermann in a dream and reveals the secret of three cards that can win money in a card game.

All earthly joys are in our dreams! / The concluding lines of “The Epistle to Yudin” (1815). Pavel Yudin (1798–1852) was a classmate of Pushkin at the lycée.

And fatal passions are everywhere / The concluding lines of the narrative poem The Gypsies (1824).

We are not the masters of our fate / From “To the Album of Illichevsky” (1817). Aleksei Illichevsky (1798–1837) was a classmate of Pushkin at the lycée.

broken trough / A reference to Pushkin’s Tale of the Fisherman and the Golden Fish. In this verse tale a poor fisherman accidentally catches a magical golden fish. The fish asks him in a human voice to let it go and promises to grant him a wish in return. The kind fisherman lets the fish go, returns to his wife, and tells her what has happened. His wife becomes angry with him for not asking the fish for something, not even a new trough, and sends her husband back to the seashore. The fisherman goes back, summons the golden fish, and asks it for a new trough. His wife is still not satisfied with this small gift and demands again and again that the fisherman go back and ask the fish to grant ever grander requests. The fish becomes angrier with each new demand and finally ends by taking everything it gave her away, leaving her only with the broken trough she had at the beginning of the story. The expression has become such a popular saying that the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary includes it in its entry for koryto (trough), giving the English equivalents “to be no better off than before” and “to be back where one started.”

Now, Naina, you are mine! / From Ruslan and Lyudmila.

He to whom irresistible fate / From Ruslan and Lyudmila.

Only I, subservient / From the poem “Farewell” (1817).

blood and deception / A reference to the “little tragedy” Mozart and Salieri (1830). Pushkin represents Mozart as a genius by the grace of God, a true artist, and Salieri as an untalented artisan who decides to assume the role of a defender of art. In the play Salieri explains that he must kill Mozart to save art from the human Mozart. By killing him, Salieri can transform Mozart into a god of music who cannot be soiled by the unclean hands of his human incarnation.

Aleko…Godunov…Hermann / Aleko, the main character of the narrative poem The Gypsies, murders his wife and her lover. Boris Godunov is called a usurper because he supposedly ordered the murder of the young tsarevich Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, in order to become tsar himself. Hermann is called a petty thief for stealing the secret of the three cards.

its own whimsically created being / The story “The Snowstorm” is one of the Tales of Belkin, which Pushkin wrote during his stay at Boldino in 1830. The story begins with a young noblewoman, Masha, who was raised on French novels and falls in love with her neighbor Vladimir. They decide to run away and get married. On the appointed day Masha arrives at the church where they have agreed to meet, but Vladimir loses his way in the blizzard. Masha returns to her parents’ home feeling feverish and becomes seriously ill. Vladimir leaves for the front and is killed soon after at Borodino. Several years later Masha meets Colonel Burmin, who falls in love with her but says he cannot marry her because he is already married. He tells her that once he was lost in a blizzard and stopped at a church where he found a young lady and her maid waiting for someone. The lady was delirious and did not quite know where she was. The maid ushered him to her, and the priest performed the marriage ceremony. When he pronounced them husband and wife, the girl looked at Burmin, cried, “He is the wrong man,” and fainted. It turns out that Masha was that girl and that now the husband and wife have found each other.

like a black ribbon / From the poem “The Song of Oleg the Seer,” published in Northern Flowers in 1825. It narrates the fulfillment of the prophecy made to Prince Oleg that he would die because of his horse. The prince, trying to avoid his destiny, orders his horse taken far away from him. Several years later he learns that the steed is dead. Prince Oleg thinks that this proves that the prophecy was wrong and goes to see the remains of his horse. The “black ribbon” in the lines cited refers to the snake that was hiding in the skull of the prince’s horse. It bites the prince, and he dies.

the realm of the supernatural / In “The Queen of Spades” a young officer named Tomsky tells a story about his grandmother, an old countess, who came into possession of the secret of three cards that could guarantee three successive wins in a card game. The secret was revealed to her by the French alchemist St. Germaine, who wanted to help her win back money she had lost in a card game. Since that time the countess had not played cards and had divulged the secret to no one. The story makes a strong impression on a military engineer named Hermann, who decides to ask the countess to reveal the secret to him. For this purpose Hermann begins to court the countess’s ward Lizaveta. Lizaveta, thinking that he is in love with her, arranges a rendezvous with him: Hermann is supposed to sneak into her room while she and the countess are at a ball. Instead of going to Lizaveta’s room, Hermann hides in the countess’s bedroom. When she returns, Hermann implores her to reveal the secret to him, but the countess remains silent. Then Hermann pulls out a revolver and threatens to kill her. The countess dies of fright, and Hermann leaves in despair. Several days later, the countess appears to him in a dream and says that she will reveal the secret to him, but he must marry Lizaveta. The three cards that will win for him are the three, the seven, and the ace. Hermann plays the three and wins. The next day he plays the seven and wins again, but when he plays the ace, the queen of spades is dealt to him instead. It seems to him that the queen of spades is the old countess. He loses all his money, goes mad, and ends up in an asylum.

Futile gift, gift of chance / The opening lines of a poem written by Pushkin on May 26, 1828, on the occasion of his birthday. At the end of the poem, Pushkin says that he has no goal in life, that his heart is empty, his mind is idle, and the monotonous world bores him.

heads or tails / The game of heads or tails is played differently in Russia than it is in the United States. The object of the game in Russia is to flip your opponent’s coins to the opposite side—from heads to tails and vice versa. In order to do so, you have to hit smaller coins with heavier ones.

perhaps, a pledge of immortality / From the last “little tragedy,” Feast in Time of Plague. The words are taken from the Chairman’s “Hymn in Honor of the Plague.”

and what if Bonaparte / A reference to the rumor that Napoleon had a cold during the battle of Waterloo and that it affected his ability to react alertly to events, leading him to make tactical errors and, ultimately, lose the battle.

If you drew the wrong queen / A reference to the final scene of “The Queen of Spades.”

all is permitted! / Raskolnikov, the main character of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, conceives the idea of a superman who stands above everyone else, above ordinary laws, and morality. “All is permitted” becomes his motto. In order to prove his idea is true, he murders an old pawnbroker.

Count Nulin / A narrative poem in which the title character, a young nobleman returning from Paris, has an accident near the estate of a landowner and is invited to spend the night there. The landowner’s young wife flirts with him and appears willing to offer him further “hospitality.” But when he goes to her bedroom later that night, she resists his advances and slaps him. Ashamed, he departs the next morning.

the echo mimics us / A reference to the poem “Echo” (1831).

Gabrieliad…“The Undertaker” / The Gabrieliad is a satiric poem written by Pushkin in 1821. It created a scandal because in it Pushkin made fun of the immaculate conception. Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1553) was an Italian poet of the Renaissance. His long narrative poem Orlando Furioso was one of the most popular works of the romantic period. Ruslan and Lyudmila is a parody of the traditional romantic poems of Zhukovsky. “Poor Liza” is a sentimentalist tale by Nikolai Karamzin, one of the most popular works in Russia at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a poor peasant maiden who falls in love with a nobleman. When he marries another woman, she commits suicide. Despite the fact that she is supposed to be a peasant girl, Karamzin gives her the speech and social graces of a noblewoman. In Pushkin’s “Mistress into Maid” the roles are reversed, and the plot revolves around a noblewoman who pretends to be a peasant maiden. The Stone Guest is one of Pushkin’s “little tragedies” and is based on the story of Don Juan. In “The Undertaker” one of the Tales of Belkin, a coffin maker named Adrian Prokhorov is invited to a party at his neighbor Gottlieb Schultz’s house. When the guests begin to drink to the health of everyone present and then to the health of people they work for, one of the guests jokingly suggests that Adrian drink to the health of his corpses. Adrian becomes angry, leaves the party, and goes home to sleep. Soon he is awakened and summoned to the house of a merchant’s wife who has just died. He goes there, takes measurements for the coffin, and returns home. There, to his astonishment and horror, he sees that he too has guests; the dead he has buried have come to thank him for his work. Horrified, Adrian pushes one of the skeletons away from him, and the skeleton crumbles. The dead are outraged and begin to shout at Adrian. He faints and wakes up the next morning wondering what has happened. It turns out that it has all been nothing but a dream.

The unexpected event amazed all of us / From “The Shot,” one of the Tales of Belkin.

table of ranks / Introduced by Peter the Great in January 1722. Government service had hitherto been the prerogative and duty of the hereditary nobility alone. Peter, who was fond of promoting people from diverse social groups, wanted to make it possible for his protégés to attain the highest ranks in the realm. The table of ranks arranged all offices in both the armed forces and the civil service into fourteen classes in hierarchical order. A soldier who had achieved the lowest officer’s rank and a civil servant who had attained rank 8 gained membership in the nobility.

I am Dubrovsky / Dubrovsky is the main character of Pushkin’s unfinished novel of the same name. He is the son of a Russian landowner who was ruined by his rich neighbor. Dubrovsky vows to avenge his father and becomes a bandit (a sort of Robin Hood). The matter is complicated by Dubrovsky’s love for the daughter of his enemy.

Mérimée…a given epoch / The French novelist Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) was also a prolific translator of Russian works. The quotation is from the preface to his historical novel Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX. Our thanks to Charles Porter of Yale University for identifying the source.

Ivan Khmelnitsky / Eighteenth-century Ukrainian writer and philosopher. He was a direct descendant of Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky. Ivan studied at the Kiev Seminary and later at Koenigsburg University, where in 1762 he defended his dissertation, “Discourse on Primary Philosophical Principles.” He translated The Light Seen Through Personifications from the German.

a rabbitskin coat / While collecting materials for his life of Peter the Great, Pushkin came across secret documents about the Pugachov rebellion and decided to write A History of Pugachov. He traveled to Orenburg and Kazan—the sites of the peasant uprising—examined documents, and interviewed participants. His investigation resulted not only in a historical account of the events but also in a short novel entitled The Captain’s Daughter, in which a young officer, Grinyov, while traveling to his post, meets Pugachov, the future leader of the peasant army fighting the army of Catherine the Great. Grinyov gives him his rabbitskin coat in payment for his services. Later, when Pugachov’s army captures the fort where Grinyov is stationed, his life is spared by Pugachov, who remembers Grinyov and his gift to him. Wishing to pay back the debt, Pugachov gives Grinyov a sheepskin coat off his own shoulders.

its handshake / A reference to the ending of the “little tragedy” The Stone Guest, in which the statue of the commander takes Don Juan by the hand and drags him into hell.

But luck toys with me maliciously / From the poem “To Yazykov” (1824). Nikolai Yazykov (1803–1846) was a poet close in his philosophy to the ideas of the Decembrists. He met Pushkin in 1826 when he visited the exiled poet at Mikhailovskoe.

his uncle / Pushkin’s uncle Vasily Lvovich Pushkin (1767–1830) was a minor poet, known mostly for his epigrams and fables. His most important work, a comic poem entitled “A Dangerous Neighbor,” circulated in manuscript form in intellectual circles of the time. He played a very important role in Pushkin’s biography. Vasily Pushkin introduced his nephew to the literary society Arzamas, which marked the beginning of Pushkin’s literary career. Sinyavsky is not referring here to a specific incident but is merely alluding to the general atmosphere of literary gatherings of the time.

At first I was just playing / From the poem “To Delvig (A Response)” (1815).

Generals and privy counsellors / From “The Queen of Spades.” Hermann plays his last card against his opponent, Chekalinsky. The game is cast as a battle with fate.

P. A. Vyazemsky / Prince Vyazemsky (1792–1878) was a poet and literaiy critic and Pushkin’s close friend.

d’Anthès’ button / According to an account of the duel between Pushkin and d’Anthès recorded in Veresaev’s Pushkin in Life, the seriously wounded Pushkin demanded the right to take his shot. After he was given a new revolver, he aimed and fired. The bullet went through d’Anthès’ hand, which he had pressed to his heart, and hit a metal button on his uniform, which saved his life.

But the days are flying / The concluding lines of The Gabrieliad.

The horse’s move…sound the fanfare! / Pushkin creates a pun here. In Russian the “knight” chess piece is called a “horse” or “steed.” A “move with the horse” in chess terms generally means moving around or over another piece and thus suggests a sneaky action. In the poem “The Song of Oleg the Seer” the prince’s death comes from a snake hiding in his dead horse’s skull.

The warriors remember / The concluding lines of “The Song of Oleg the Seer.”

A state of freedom and peace comes / A reference to a poem of 1833, which contains the lines: “There is no happiness in life, / But there is peace and freedom.”

now lettest thou thy servant depart / From the blessing of Simeon on the presentation of the child Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem (Luke 2:29–32). It symbolizes the point at which the Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins.

It’s time to ride / From Ruslan and Lyudmila. The four rivals—Ruslan, Farlaf, Rogdai, and Rotmir—set out in search of Lyudmila, who has been abducted by the wizard Chernomor.

The Gypsies / Pushkin’s last “romantic” narrative poem focuses on the question of freedom. A romantic hero, the “proud man” Aleko, rebels against civilization and leaves it to join the free life of the gypsies. He falls in love and marries a beautiful gypsy woman, Zemfira. In the poem the author contrasts two notions of freedom: the logical construction of freedom that underlies Aleko’s rebellion against civilization and society and the absolute freedom of the gypsies, who live in harmony with nature, with the boundless expanse of the steppes. Aleko is unable to understand and accept the total freedom of the natural life. He wants Zemfira to belong to him alone. When she falls in love with another man, Aleko kills her and her lover. The gypsies demand that he leave them.

like the moon in oil / A reference to the Russian saying “to slide like cheese in butter” (“oil” and “butter” are the same word, maslo, in Russian), which means to be well off, to live the good life.

Friends! Does it make any difference / The closing lines of the poem “To a Kalmyk Woman” (1830), which Pushkin wrote shortly after returning from his trip to Erzerum.

and the Finn / From Pushkin’s 1836 poem that begins, “I raised a monument to myself not made by hand.” In Russia it became famous as Pushkin’s literary testament under the name “The Monument” (1836). In English translations it is often called “Exigi monumentum,” following the epigraph from Horace.

The Robber Brothers / A narrative poem, published in 1825, that Pushkin wrote during his romantic or “Byronic” period. It begins with a gathering of bandits, among whom we see “a mixture of clothes and faces” of “fugitives from the banks of the militant Don,” of Jews with black hair, of “wild sons of the steppes—Kalmyks and Bashkirs,” of red-haired Finns, and of gypsies. An old robber tells the story of his and his brother’s escape from prison and of his brother’s death.

Paskevich, Ermolov / A reference to Pushkin’s journey to Erzerum in the Caucasus Mountains in 1829. On his way to General Paskevich’s forces, Pushkin visited General Aleksei Ermolov, who was living in retirement. I. F. Paskevich (1782–1856) fought in the war of 1812. In 1828–1829 he was in charge of military activities against the Turks, for which he received the title of Count of Erevan and later the rank of commander in chief. He was also in charge of the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1831. A. P. Ermolov (1772–1861) was a participant in the Napoleonic Wars and a commander of a special Caucasus corps. In 1817 he became the governor of Georgia. Ermolov opposed the policies of Alexander I and, because of that, was popular among the Decembrists. He retired and moved to Moscow in 1827.

So my Muse / The opening lines of the epilogue of the narrative poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1821).

A. O. Smirnova-Rosset / Before her marriage, Aleksandra Smirnova, née Rosset (1809–1882), was a lady-in-waiting to the emperor’s wife Aleksandra. Smirnova-Rosset was a highly educated woman, a graduate of the Catherine Institute. Her wit, beauty, and independence of thought attracted many prominent people of her time, including Zhukovsky, Turgenev, and Lermontov. She met Pushkin in 1828, and they became good friends. Pushkin valued Smirnova-Rosset’s literary taste, read his new works to her, and in 1832 suggested that she keep a diary, giving her an album inscribed with the facetious title “The Historic Notes of A. O. Smirnova.”

and the underwater movement / From the poem “The Prophet” (1826).

Holding my nose, I turned away my face / From the poem “And we went further—and fear seized me…” (1832).

Pellico’s book / Silvio Pellico (1789–1854) was an Italian writer close to the revolutionary group of the Carbonari. In 1820 he was arrested by the Austrian police and spent ten years in prison. His memoir My Prisons was extremely popular among young Russian radicals. On the Obligations of Man appeared in 1834, and Pushkin reviewed the book in his journal the Contemporary.

Winter! / From one of the lyrical digressions in Evgeny Onegin (5, ii).

Why are you neighing / The opening line of the poem “The Steed,” one of the poems in the cycle “The Songs of the Western Slavs” (1834).

My uncle / The opening line of Evgeny Onegin.

“Borodino” / Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” is about the battle between the Russian and French armies at the village of Borodino, not far from Moscow. The poem begins with a young soldier asking an old one: “Tell me, uncle, is it not in vain / That Moscow was surrendered to the French?” Lermontov’s poetry is characterized by a pessimistic tone of disillusionment with life, love, friendship, and society.

The Ukrainian night is quiet / From Poltava (1828), one of Pushkin’s historical poems about Peter the Great. Historically, Poltava was the place of the decisive victory of the Russian army led by Peter over the Swedish army of Charles IX. Charles made a treaty with the Ukrainian hetman Mazepa, who promised to help him in exchange for the independence of Ukraine. The main characters of the poem are Kochubei and his daughter Mariya. Fascinated with the power the hetman possesses, Mariya falls in love with Mazepa in spite of the fact that he is much older than she, and she eventually marries him against her father’s will. At the beginning Kochubei is a close friend of Mazepa. But when he learns about the pact between the hetman and Charles IX, he denounces his former friend to Peter. Mazepa captures and executes Kochubei. After she learns about her father’s fate, Mariya leaves her husband.

Kochubei is rich and famous / The opening line of Poltava.

The children ran to the cottage / The opening lines of the poem “The Drowned Man” (1828). The children run to their father after they discover a drowned man tangled in his fishing net. The peasant decides to get rid of the body and pushes it back into the water. From then on, the drowned man comes every year to haunt the peasant.

Godspeed on your long journey! / The opening lines of the poem “The Funeral Dirge of Iakinf Maglanovich,” from the cycle “The Songs of the Western Slavs” (1834).

So—praise to you, Plague! / From the “little tragedy” Feast in Time of Plague. The Chairman sings a hymn in which he challenges death, the Plague.

the coming of autumn / The ode was the main genre of neoclassical poetry, belonging to the “high style” in the hierarchy of genres of that period. Sinyavsky here refers to Pushkin’s poems “To My Inkwell” (1821) and “Autumn (An Excerpt)” (1833).

Frost and sun / The opening stanza of the poem “A Winter Morning” (1829).

The Bronze Horseman…The Covetous Knight…“The Stationmaster”…“The Shot” / In The Bronze Horseman “poor” Evgeny rebels against Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg. In the “little tragedy” The Covetous Knight the miserly baron and his son Albert argue over the baron’s money. In one of the Belkin tales, “The Stationmaster,” the daughter of a stationmaster leaves her father to live in the city with a handsome hussar. The father is heartbroken and tries to bring her back. She loves her father but refuses to return to him. The father dies from grief. In “The Shot,” another Belkin tale, a magnanimous count, while fighting a duel with an officer named Silvio, offers his opponent the right to shoot at him whenever he wants—Silvio is unwilling to shoot now because he sees that the count is not afraid to die. Silvio appears at the count’s estate several years after the duel when the count, now happily married, is enjoying the best time of his life. But instead of taking the count’s life, Silvio, observing the count’s fear, nobly shoots at a painting in the count’s study.

An exchange of fire / From the poem “The Banner” (1829).

God help you, my friends / This poem, written in 1827, is one of the series of “October 19” poems that Pushkin wrote throughout his life to commemorate the anniversary of the opening of the lycée at Tsarskoe Selo.

the Decembrists / The Decembrist revolt took place on December 14, 1825, when a group of officers led a regiment of soldiers to Senate Square in St. Petersburg and demanded political reforms. The revolt was severely suppressed: five leaders were executed, and the rest of the participants—many of them friends of Pushkin—were exiled to Siberia or sent into active army duty in the Caucasus.

Was it not we / From the unfinished poem “What a night! The ringing frost” (1827), about an oprichnik (called in the text of the poem kromeshnik), a member of Ivan the Terrible’s personal guard. The poem is based on Karamzin’s History of the Russian State and describes mass executions during Ivan’s reign.

epistle to Siberia / A reference to “In the Depths of Siberian Mines” (1827), which Pushkin wrote to his friends Ivan Pushchin and Wilhelm Kyukhelbeker. The poem became known as “An Epistle to Siberia.”

send him away empty-handed / A reference to “What a night! The ringing frost.”

Pushchin complained about him / Ivan Pushchin (1798–1859) was one of Pushkin’s closest friends and had been a classmate in the Tsarskoe Selo lycée. For his part in the Decembrist uprising Pushchin was exiled to Siberia from 1826 to 1856. Pushchin’s Reminiscences of Pushkin are considered one of the best memoirs about the poet.

touchingly…from under a mantilla / From the poem “To the Grandee” (1830), which has the subtitle “An Epistle to PNBY,” that is, to Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov. Prince Yusupov (1751–1831) was a Russian statesman during the reign of Catherine the Great. He lived in Arkhangelskoe near Moscow, where Pushkin visited him. Yusupov’s service to Catherine included traveling to European courts with diplomatic missions and managing the Imperial Theater and the Hermitage.

Kolobok slipped away from the old man and woman / A reference to the Russian fairy tale about Kolobok, a round loaf of bread. When the old woman in the tale puts Kolobok on a windowsill to cool, it escapes and rolls down a path, meeting various animals on its way, including a rabbit, a wolf, and a bear. Kolobok taunts each of them in turn, bragging that it got away from the old woman and the old man and can get away from them as well. Finally a fox tricks Kolobok and eats it.

God, don’t let me go out of my mind / The opening line of an untitled poem (1833).

They dragged me / From The Captain’s Daughter.

a disposition of the soul / This statement of Pushkin’s is cited by Blok in his speech “On the Calling of the Poet,” which may be where Sinyavsky remembered it from.

his own crooked nose / The great satiric writer Nikolai Gogol was a younger contemporary of Pushkin. His style is marked by a complex mixture of realistic details and fantastic occurrences. One of his most famous works is the short story “The Nose,” in which the central character wakes up one morning to discover that his nose has disappeared. He later meets his nose, which is wearing the uniform of an important government official. Noses are mentioned frequently in Gogol’s other writings, including Dead Souls and “Nevsky Prospect.” Sinyavsky is also alluding to Gogol’s own very long nose. According to rumors, Gogol could touch the tip of his nose with his tongue.

Is a beast howling / The opening lines of the poem “The Echo” (1831).

Don Juan / As portrayed in Pushkin’s The Stone Guest.

You’re beautiful! / A reference to Mephistopheles’s words to Faustus in A Scene from “Faustus” (1825).

Having reveled in pleasure / From The Stone Guest.

The clouds rush, the clouds whirl / From “The Devils” (1830). In the poem a traveler is caught in a blizzard while on the road. In the flying clouds that cover the moon and make it invisible, he sees a devils’ Sabbath. Dostoevsky borrowed the title of the poem for his novel The Devils, best known in English translation as The Possessed.

“The Queen of Spades”…Boris Godunov / In “The Queen of Spades” the ghost of the dead countess appears twice to Hermann: first in his dream, in which she reveals the secret of the three cards, and the second time on the face of the card Hermann plays at the end of the story. It also seems to Hermann that during the funeral the dead countess winks at him. In Boris Godunov the tsarevich, Dmitry, murdered on Godunov’s orders, is mentioned over and over in speeches made by various characters. It seems as if he and not the Pretender becomes Godunov’s true opponent. Dmitry lived with his mother in Uglich and was killed there.

The clever Shuisky / Vasily Shuisky was a Russian boyar. He was an adviser to Tsar Fyodor and, to some extent, a rival of Boris Godunov. He even joined the Pretender’s army to overthrow Boris. After Godunov’s death and the Pretender’s ascent to the throne, Shuisky organized a boyars’ revolt against him. The Pretender was killed, his body burned, and the ashes shot from a cannon to the four winds. Shuisky proclaimed himself tsar, although he was not elected by the Zemsky Sobor, as was customary at the time, but only nominated by his associates. Shuisky remained the ruler of Muscovy (if not much more than that) for three years, overcoming peasant rebellions, war with Poland, and internal strife.

The healer came to Yakubovich / From the poem “Marko Yakubovich,” which belongs to the cycle of poems “Songs of the Western Slavs.”

Zaretsky carefully laid / From Evgeny Onegin, 6, xxxv. The duel between the friends Onegin and Lensky stands at the center of the novel, dividing it into two parts. Toward the beginning, after Onegin comes to live in the country, Tatyana, under the influence of romantic and sentimentalist novels, falls in love with him and openly declares her feelings in a letter to Onegin. Onegin rejects her. After the duel Onegin has to leave Russia. He returns to St. Petersburg, after traveling in Europe for several years, and meets Tatyana there. She is now married to a general. Onegin falls in love with her and declares himself to her in a letter. Tatyana rejects him.

And having recognized the naked guest / From “The Drowned Man” (1828).

more useful than poetry / The literary critic D. I. Pisarev (1840–1868) was one of the most prominent of the radical critics. In his articles “Pushkin and Belinsky,” “The Destruction of Criticism,” and “We’ll See,” Pisarev launched an attack on Pushkin from the utilitarian position. He ridiculed Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, taking quotes out of context and commenting on them with the simple-heartedness of a plebeian. Pisarev drowned while swimming in the Baltic Sea in June 1868.

There is a high mountain / From “The Tale of the Dead Tsarevna and the Seven Bogatyrs,” written at Boldino in 1830.

The entrance to the grave / From the closing stanza of “Whether I wander through noisy streets” (1829).

The Feast in Time of Plague / The last of Pushkin’s “little tragedies” is based on a scene from John Wilson’s poem The City of Plague. The main idea of Pushkin’s play is conquering fear of death. Surrounded by a raging plague, a group of survivors led by the Chairman celebrate the last days of their lives. One of them, a young woman named Mary, sings a song about two lovers—Jenny and Edmund—who overcome death through the memory of their faithful love. The other way to defeat death is to fight it. In his “Hymn to the Plague” the Chairman challenges death, opposing the fullness of life to submission to death.

Michael Psellus / An eleventh-century Byzantine scholar who became very popular among Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s because of the duality of his philosophy. Psellus was a devoted Christian, but at the same time he admired pagan Greek philosophy. His duality corresponded to the duality of life in the Soviet Union, where people were living two lives—one official and one private—and was reflected in the duality of Sinyavsky-Tertz as well.

For a long time / From “To Yazykov” (1828). The Kiselyov mentioned in the poem is Nikolai Dmitrievich Kiselyov (1802–1869), Yazykov’s friend at Derpt (now Tartu) University. In 1828 he was going on a diplomatic mission to Vienna and was supposed to stop in Carlsbad.

Tungus / A Siberian ethnic group that includes the Evenki and the Lamut. In Pushkin’s time to call someone a Tungus was to call him a savage or primitive.

Having donned a wide-brimmed bolivar / From Evgeny Onegin, 1, xv–xvi.

Belinsky…a whole encyclopedia / Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) was the leading Russian literary critic of the 1830s and 1840s. His most significant work was a series of eleven articles on the works of Pushkin (1843–1846). The eighth and ninth articles are dedicated to Evgeny Onegin. Belinsky writes that Pushkin depicts the whole epoch in his novel, showing not only details of the everyday life of Russian society but also the entire scope of ideas and problems characteristic of it. In his conclusion, Belinsky calls the novel an “encyclopedia of Russian life.” This became a cliché that was hammered into the heads of Soviet schoolchildren.

we’ve all studied something a little bit somewhere / Evgeny Onegin, 1, v.

The closed sleigh rushed / The description of the Larins’ arrival in Moscow, Evgeny Onegin, 7, xxxviii.

Plyushkin / A character from Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. His name has become synonymous in Russian with “miser.” Plyushkin collects everything. Describing his house, Gogol depicts rooms piled with things that are decaying because Plyushkin never uses them.

toilet water he used / A reference to the description of Onegin’s dressing room (1, xxiii–xxvi), which especially outraged Pisarev.

Belkin / Sinyavsky deliberately confuses time periods here, placing Chekhov—who lived and wrote in the 1880s and the 1890s, “the decades of little deeds and mediocre people,” and was noted for describing the flow of everyday life in his stories—chronologically before Pushkin, who according to Sinyavsky did the same sixty years earlier. Belkin is the fictional narrator of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin, which were among Pushkin’s earliest attempts at writing prose. The probable parallel with Chekhov in this respect is Belikov from Chekhov’s story “The Man in a Case.”

Of course, Evgeny was not the only one / From Evgeny Onegin, 5, xxxii.

sieves of ellipsis points / There are several instances in Evgeny Onegin where in place of verses we find lines of dots. Politically radical contemporaries and Soviet literary critics have insisted that these indicate lines that were omitted because of the censorship.

My tongue is my enemy / From the draft of chapter 1 of Evgeny Onegin.

the famous tenth chapter / A hypothetical chapter 10 of Evgeny Onegin, describing Onegin’s political activities, was purportedly omitted from the novel under pressure from the censor.

And in order to open up / From The Little House in Kolomna.

Devout Shikhmatov / From The Little House in Kolomna. Prince S. A. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov (1783–1837) was a poet and a member of A. S. Shishkov’s conservative-minded Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word. In 1830 he took holy vows as a monk.

O, dreams…Ta-tá… / Evgeny Onegin, 6, xliv, and 4, xlii. These lines may be considered an instance of self-parody on Pushkin’s part, since he is poking fun at rhymes he himself used in earlier works.

Poor Folk / Dostoevsky’s first novel (1844–1845). Dead Souls / Gogol’s epic novel (1841). An Ordinary Story / A short novel (1847) by Goncharov. A Boring Story / A short novel (1889) by Chekhov.

Life…War and Peace… / There is no well-known novel in Russian literature entitled Life. Sinyavsky may be alluding here to works like Leonid Andreev’s Life of Man or Maksim Gorky’s Life of Klim Samgin. One cannot help noticing the blithe juxtaposition of this obscure Life and perhaps the most famous of Russian novels, War and Peace. The “other” artist, incidentally, is Lev Tolstoy.

even the misera knight / A reference to the title character in the “little tragedy” The Covetous Knight.

the Contemporary / A literary and historical journal that Pushkin founded in 1836. He remained its editor until his death in 1837.

“moralistic and decorous” novel / From Count Nulin: a reference to the type of novel Natalya Pavlovna reads.

Natalya Pavlovna at first / From Count Nulin.

Anton Goremyko…Pushkin’s stationmaster / “The Stationmaster” is a parody of sentimentalist literature. The main character of the story cries over the loss of his daughter, who has abandoned him for a traveling hussar. “Bad-Luck Anton” is a story by Dmitry Grigorovich (1822–1899), a representative of the “natural school.” The main character of the story, a poor peasant named Anton, is at first patient and obedient. When he tries to correct an injustice and complains to a landowner about the steward of his village, he is put in jail. The story was seen as a protest against the inhuman treatment of people, and Anton became a symbol of the best qualities of the Russian national character. P. A. Kropotkin wrote: “In the days of my youth and even later on, every educated person of that time could neither read without tears about Anton’s misfortune nor remain indifferent to the horrors of serfdom.”

today he’s here, tomorrow there / From a Russian children’s song.

like a Swede at Poltava / A reference to the crushing defeat that the Russian army of Peter the Great dealt to the Swedish army of Charles IX at Poltava. The expression, “You won’t perish like a Swede at Poltava,” became a popular saying.

When youth sweeps away / From the poem “Good Advice” (1817–1820), which exists in a manuscript by Pushkin’s brother Lev.

a faithful wife and a virtuous mother / From Evgeny Onegin, 3, xxi (Tatyana’s letter). Sinyavsky refers here to Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy chronicles the trials of married life and the disintegration of a family.

For everything there is a time / From the poem “To Kaverin,” written in 1817 but published only in 1828. Pyotr Pavlovich Kaverin (1794–1855) was a Hussar officer. In 1816 his regiment was stationed at Tsarskoe Selo, where Pushkin met him. Later Kaverin was a member of the Decembrist association the Union of Welfare.

Sleep comes in its turn / “Autumn (An Excerpt)” (1833).

Joy is granted / From The Gypsies.

Gavrila and Afanasy / Gavrila Pushkin and his nephew Afanasy were Pushkin’s ancestors on his father’s side of the family. The Soviet Pushkin scholar D. Blagoi points out that in his Blackamoor of Peter the Great Pushkin portrays another relative on his mother’s side, Gavrila Afanasevich Rzhevsky, combining in his name the names of the two other relatives. Including them in the plot of Boris Godunov, Pushkin cast them as opponents of the tsar. For Pushkin, Gavrila was the most characteristic representative of “the rebellious kin of the Pushkins,” and he compared him directly to members of the French revolutionary National Convention.

entrance into history / Sinyavsky here refers to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “First Introduction to a Poem. ‘At the Top of My Voice’” (1929–1930). Mayakovsky never completed the poem, which was supposed to be about the first five-year plan initiated by Stalin. The Introduction was presented as the poet’s report to his reader about what he was doing. At the end of the Introduction, Mayakovsky directly addresses future generations: “Over the gang of skinflints and grabbers of poetry, I will raise like a Bolshevik party card, all hundred volumes of my party books.”

My forefather did not get on with Peter / From the poem “My Pedigree” (1830).

poem about the resurrection of the dead / These words belong to Chichikov, the main character of Gogol’s Dead Souls, who is describing the collection of things he sees in Plyushkin’s house. Gogol intended to write a trilogy modeled on the Iliad and the Divine Comedy, which is one reason Dead Souls bears the subtitle A Poem. Gogol published only the first part of his intended trilogy. He burned the second part shortly after its completion because he was dissatisfied with it.

times of chivalry / Sinyavsky here refers to subtitles of Pushkin’s works, including, for example, the poem “Autumn. A Fragment” and the dramatic works A Scene from “Faustus” and Scenes from the Times of Chivalry.

The fragmentariness of Onegin…the “little tragedies” and Godunov / Evgeny Onegin ends with the “thunderstruck” Onegin left standing alone after Tatyana rejects his love. Tatyana’s husband appears, and the narrator’s closing words are: “And here…we will leave my hero…for a long time…forever.” In The Covetous Knight it remains unclear what will happen to the baron’s son, Albert. Mozart and Salieri ends with Salieri’s question, “And was not the creator of the Vatican a murderer?” In The Stone Guest, after Don Juan is taken to hell by the statue of the commander, we are left wondering about the fate of Doña Anna, to whom Don Juan’s last words are addressed. At the end of The Feast in Time of Plague the Chairman is left “lost in thoughts.” Boris Godunov ends with the famous stage direction, “The folk are silent.”

I loved you so honestly / The concluding lines of Pushkin’s famous poem “I loved you” (1829).

That is why in this joyous hour / From the poem “The Feast of Peter I” (1835).

She paused for a moment / From the unfinished poem “Critias, a Magnificent Citizen” (1829).

I loved the sound of clear water and leaves / The middle and concluding stanzas of the poem “At the beginning of life, I remember school” (1830).

The maiden sits eternally / From the poem “A Statue at Tsarskoe Selo” (1830). On statues in Pushkin’s works, see Roman Jakobson, Puškin and His Sculptural Myth.

meekly presses to his heart / A reference to the pose of the Bronze Horseman, the Falconet statue of Peter the Great, which stands on the banks of the Neva River in St. Petersburg. Evgeny survives the flood by sitting on one of two statues of lions that stand in front of a house on Admiralty Prospect. At the time the poem was written there was a clear sight line between the statues of the lions and the statue of Peter the Great, although that is no longer the case today.

Pimen / The monk Pimen is a chronicler in Boris Godunov. Sinyavsky here refers to Grigory’s words when he wakes up and sees Pimen: “And by the candle / The old man sits and keeps writing.”

The Chairman remains / The closing stage direction of The Feast in Time of Plague.

I am involuntarily drawn / From the Prince’s monologue in Pushkin’s drama The Mermaid (1833).

Memory silently unfolds / From the poem “Recollection” (1828).

But I can’t wash away / The closing line of the poem “Recollection.”

I gaze like a madman / From the poem “The Black Shawl” (1820).

A withered and scentless flower / From the poem “A Flower” (1828).

Chaadaev, do you remember the old days? / From “To Chaadaev” (1824).

Once again I visited / The opening line of a poem written to commemorate Pushkin’s last visit to Mikhailovskoe in 1835, in which the poet recalls the Black Sea, Kishinyov, and Odessa.

“behold” and “arise” / A reference to the poem “The Prophet” (1826), in which an angel tells the poet: “Arise, prophet, and behold and understand.”

Your eyes gleam / An inexact quotation from the poem “Night” (1823). Instead of sverkayut (gleam) it should read blistayut (shine).

in the dark of the night / A reference to the last part of the poem “Once again I visited,” in which Pushkin addresses the trees saying that “my grandson…will pass by you in the dark of the night and will remember me.”

Appear, beloved shade / From the poem “Incantation” (1830).

visions of days primordial and innocent / From the poem “Resurrection” (1819).

And reveal the bright distance / From the poem “The Dreamer” (1815).

The profound darkness dissipated in the sky / The closing scene of Pushkin’s romantic poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus. In it a young Russian is captured by the Cherkess, a mountain people at war with Russia. The prisoner is wounded. A beautiful Cherkess girl tends to his wound, and they fall in love. She helps him to escape, knowing that they will never see each other again.

They remind me / From the poem “Once again I visited…”

Your voice, my darling / From The Feast in Time of Plague.

The folk are silent / The closing stage direction of Boris Godunov.

And was not the creator of the Vatican a murderer? / The closing line of Mozart and Salieri. Salieri is referring to the rumor that Michelangelo ordered a young man crucified to serve as a model for the suffering Christ in a painting of the Crucifixion.

And the sails swelled / The closing lines of the poem “Autumn (An Excerpt)” (1833).

senior tutor at the court / Batyushkov was an officer in the Russian army and participated in three wars, including the campaign of 1814 against Napoleon. Zhukovsky served as tutor to the heir to the Russian throne, the future Alexander II, at the court of Nicholas I.

Everyone worshiped him / Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) was the major literary figure of the late 1780s and 1790s as well as “by an irony of fate, a professional soldier and administrator and one of the great ‘magnates’ [vel’mozhi] clustered around the throne of Catherine II” (William Edward Brown, A History of Russian Literature [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1980], 381). Derzhavin’s career soared when he wrote his ode “Felitsa” (1783), dedicated to Catherine the Great. The empress was so pleased that she made Derzhavin an “actual state councillor” and appointed him to the governorship of Olonets Province in northern Russia.

To be a clerk or an uhlan / From the poem “Farewell” (1817).

You don’t have to be a poet / Actually, these words belong to the “civic poet” of the 1860s, Nikolai Nekrasov. Sinyavsky playfully ascribes them to Mikhailo Lomonosov (1711–65), who, inspired by Enlightenment ideals, was one of the first to invoke in poetry the pathos of civic service and the enthusiasm of building the new state.

Stillness is dear to my heart / From “The Dreamer.”

I like war’s bloody entertainments / From the poem “I am acquainted with fighting—I love the sound of swords” (1820).

these same nerves / Lermontov often wrote about war and death, depicting them in expressive terms.

Bulgarin / Faddei Bulgarin (1789–1859) was a liberal literary critic before the Decembrist revolt of 1825. In 1826 he became a mouthpiece for monarchism and reaction and even received praise from Count Benkendorf for being a capable police informer. In 1825 Bulgarin became the editor of the political and literary newspaper the Northern Bee, which in the 1820s and 1850s published some works by Pushkin, Ivan Krylov, and Aleksandr Griboedov, but after the first issue of the Contemporary appeared he launched an attack on Pushkin.

My soul is bored / From Ruslan and Lyudmila.

kyukhelbekerish / Wilhelm Kyukhelbeker (1799–1846) was a poet and a close friend of Pushkin’s from his lycée days. He participated in the Decembrist revolt and was arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to exile to Siberia for life. Sinyavsky here refers to Pushkin’s epigram, “At dinner I overate / And Yakov locked the door by mistake / Because of that, my friends, / I felt both kyukhelbekerish and wretched.”

Delvig / Baron A. A. Delvig (1798–1831) was a close friend of Pushkin’s from his lyceé days. He was a poet, a member of the Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences, and Arts, of the Free Society of Russian Literature, and of the Green Lamp literary circle. Delvig published a literary almanac called Northern Flowers and edited the Literary Gazette, in which Pushkin published several of his works. Delvig visited Pushkin in exile at Mikhailovskoe, and Pushkin dedicated several of his poems to him.

The Raevskys / Pushkin had a very close relationship with the Raevsky family. In 1820, on his way into exile in Odessa, he spent about three months with General N. N. Raevsky’s family in the Caucasus and the Crimea. At that time Pushkin became especially close with the sons and daughters of the general: Aleksandr and Nikolai, both officers and participants in the war of 1812, and Ekaterina and Elizaveta, with whom Pushkin spent three weeks in the Crimean city of Gurzuf. Later Pushkin met Ekaterina in Kishinyov, where she lived with her husband, General Orlov. Pushkin also knew the third daughter of Nikolai Raevsky, Mariya, married to the Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky, who followed her exiled husband to Siberia.

publish it as government legislation / A reference to Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1842), in which Gogol, having experienced a spiritual crisis, proposed an extremely conservative plan for the reorganization of the Russian state based on theocratic ideas.

We remain the same / From the most famous of Pushkin’s poems written on the occasion of the anniversary of the opening of the lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, “October 19” (1825), which begins with the line “The woods lose their crimson dress…”

Why shouldn’t I write about him? / From Evgeny Onegin, 1, lix.

That the ardent agitation / An inexact quotation from the poem “It’s Not That That I’m Proud of, My Bard” (1822). Instead of “thirst” (zhazhdoi) it should read “passion” (strast’yu).

The world’s grown empty / From “To the Sea” (1824).

the Demon / The main character of Lermontov’s long poem of the same name. He is a fallen angel doomed to live between heaven and earth. In him, Lermontov wanted to show the fate of the suffering individual.

When the poet is not called / The first stanza of “The Poet” (1827).

But as soon as the divine word / From “The Poet” (1827).

Pushkin’s “Prophet” / In the poem “The Prophet” (1826) the poet, wandering through the desert, meets an angel, who replaces his eyes with those of an eagle and his tongue with that of a “wise snake.” The angel touches his ears, and the poet gains the power to hear the hidden life of the world. Finally, the angel cuts open the poet’s chest and replaces his human heart with a burning piece of coal. Thus the poet undergoes a rite of initiation: he dies as a man and rises as a prophet. At the end of the poem the angel calls to him: “Rise, prophet, see and hear, / Be filled with my will, / And going over seas and lands / Burn people’s hearts with your words.”

Lermontov’s “Prophet” / Lermontov’s poem “The Prophet” (1841) is essentially a realization of the saying, “No one is a prophet in his own land.” From the moment that a person, by the will of the “eternal judge,” becomes a prophet and begins to preach love and truth to people, all he can see in their eyes is anger and vice. People reject him and drive him away. As he is leaving, the elders point at him and say to children that he is an example of a proud man who wanted people to believe that God speaks through him, and now he is naked and poor, and everyone despises him.

The poet strummed his inspired lyre / The opening lines of the poem “The Poet and the Crowd” (1828).

Like a deity, it does not need / From the poem “A Conversation Between the Bookseller and the Poet” (1824).

the Negro branch / Pushkin’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side was Ibrahim Hannibal (1697–1781). According to legend, he was the son of an Abyssinian prince. In 1705 he was stolen from the palace of a Turkish sultan where he was living as a hostage and presented to Peter the Great. In 1717 Peter sent him to France to study the military arts. In 1723 Hannibal returned to Russia, where he received the rank of engineer-lieutenant of an artillery company in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. In 1762 he retired with the rank of commander in chief.

Under the sky of my Africa / From Evgeny Onegin, 1, i.

Mayne Reid / A British writer who lived and worked as a journalist in the United States. He fought in the Spanish-American War of 1846–1848 and wrote adventure novels about Indians, Mexican rebels, hunters, and young people traveling to exotic countries in search of rare animals, flowers, and plants. Together with Jules Verne, Captain Mayne Reid has been the most popular writer among Russian children since 1860, when his novels (The Headless Horseman, Oceola the Seminole, The Quadroon, The Plant Hunters, and The Cliff Climbers) were translated into Russian.

a real Indian / When Russian children play cowboys and Indians, the roles are reversed in comparison with American culture: the Indians are the good guys. The cult of the noble savage was popularized in Russia by the works of such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and Sinclair Thompson (The Little Savages) as well as Mayne Reid.

Razuvaevka / A Russian town on the Moscow-Tashkent railway line where Sinyavsky spent summers with his grandparents when he was a boy.

At the sight of Ibrahim / The unfinished historical novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great was Pushkin’s first attempt at writing prose. It tells the story of how Peter married his godson Ibrahim Hannibal to a girl from an old Russian aristocratic family, the Rzhevskys.

And I, the eternally idle scapegrace / From the poem “To Yurev” (1820).

This skipper was that famous skipper / From the Post Scriptum to the poem “My Pedigree” (1830).

You are a tsar, live alone / From the poem “To the Poet” (1830).

I recruit an army / From The Little House in Kolomna.

Only a revolutionary thinker / This statement was written in 1823. In Pushkin’s original text only initials are given where Sinyavsky supplies names.

On the bank by deserted waves / This is another example of Sinyavsky’s intentional conflation of temporal coordinates. Any Russian would recognize these lines as the opening of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, in which “he” refers to Peter the Great. The words, however, also begin Boris Pasternak’s poem “Imitation,” from his collection Themes and Variations, where the “he” becomes Pushkin.

Only you, Poltava’s hero / From the concluding stanza of Poltava.

I have erected / The opening line of “The Monument” (1836).

My ideal now is a spouse / From “Onegin’s Travels,” the last chapter of Evgeny Onegin, published separately from the rest of the novel.

You have to find a use in everything / From “The Poet and the Crowd.”

His eyes / Shine / From Poltava. Pushkin here describes Peter the Great at the battle of Poltava.

They were representations of two demons / From the poem “At the beginning of life, I remember school.”

We press upon the Swedes / From Poltava.

the window that Peter cut / A reference to the introduction to The Bronze Horseman, in which Pushkin mentions Russia’s ambition to open a way to Europe (“to cut a window into Europe”) as Peter’s main goal in building St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland.

The weather was growing ever fiercer / In The Bronze Horseman Pushkin describes the flood that engulfs St. Petersburg as a rebellion of nature against the will of man.

There is an ecstasy in battle / From The Feast in Time of Plague, the Chairman’s “Hymn to the Plague.”

I love you, creation of Peter / From The Bronze Horseman. Peter’s creation is the city of St. Petersburg.

become Corsairs / The Corsair comes from Byron’s poem of the same name, which was translated into Russian in 1825–1826. The poem was one of Byron’s so-called oriental poems, filled with dramatic actions, fatal passions, and catastrophic finales. Along with Goethe’s Werther and Byron’s Childe Harold, The Corsair was viewed as one of the most typical of romantic heroes. The Corsair is a person who breaks all ties with his environment and takes the path of uncompromising struggle, revenge, and crime against the world of oppression and slavery. His individual revolt becomes an act of universal significance: rebelling against civilization, the hero challenges fate, the whole world, and God Himself.

I was embittered…his caustic arguments / From Evgeny Onegin, 1, xlv, xlvi. “He” is Onegin.

science of the tender passion / Evgeny Onegin, 1, viii.

an involuntary devotion to dreams / Evgeny Onegin, 1, xiv.

a superfluous man, a petty demon, a Carbonaro, or simply a minor / Sinyavsky here refers to typical characters of Russian literature. “Superfluous man” is a term that the critic Vissarion Belinsky applied to Evgeny Onegin, and it has since become a cliché. In his essay On Socialist Realism Sinyavsky writes that the central character of nineteenth-century Russian literature is called a superfluous man because “for all his generous impulses he is unable to find a destiny and he presents a lamentable example of purposelessness, which is of no use to anybody. He is, as a rule, a reflective character, with tendencies to self-analysis and self-flagellation. His life is full of unrealized projects, and his fate is sad and slightly ridiculous” (Abram Tertz [Sinyavsky], On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis [New York: Pantheon, 1960], 61–66). The “petty demon” comes from Fyodor Sologub’s novel of the same name. It is the nedotykomka, a little gray sprite that pesters the insane Peredonov, the main character of the novel. For Sologub’s contemporaries, the nedotykomka became a symbol of all the ugliness that existed in Russia at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The Carbonari were Italian rebels who around 1821 organized to drive out the Austrians and establish a united Italy. For Russian romantics “Carbonaro” became synonymous with “revolutionary.” Interest in the Carbonari became even greater after the novel The Gadfly (Ovod), by the British writer Ethel Lillian Voynich, was published in Russia in 1897. It tells the story of a Carbonaro and his fight against political oppression as well as against the Catholic church. In the Soviet period it became obligatory reading for all schoolchildren. The minor Mitrofan is the main character of Denis Fonvizin’s comedy The Minor (1782). He is the uneducated, rude, and obtuse son of an equally vile woman landowner. Written in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the play is a satire on the stagnation and corruption of the eighteenth-century Russian gentry.

empty, universal, and sincere / This characterization of Khlestakov in The Inspector General is given by the characters Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, who think that he is an important government official.

Love knows no distinctions / From The Inspector General. Khlestakov flirts with both the mayor’s daughter and wife. First he flirts with the daughter, Marya Antonovna, but when he is interrupted by her mother, Anna Andreevna, he switches allegiances. He declares his love for Anna Andreevna and, disregarding the fact that she is “in a certain sense…married,” offers to run away with her and “withdraw beneath the canopy of streams.” Then when Marya Antonovna returns and sees him on his knees in front of her mother, he switches again and immediately proclaims that he wants to marry her.

I confess that / Khlestakov in The Inspector General.

the lady became a peasant girl / The Belkin tale “Mistress into Maid” is a kind of unrealized Romeo and Juliet. It tells the story of a rivalry between two Russian landowners: the “progressive” anglomaniac Muromsky and the conservative Russian Berestov. After Muromsky’s daughter, Lisa, hears from her maid Nastya about the arrival of Berestov’s son, Aleksei, at his father’s estate, she decides as a joke to meet him pretending to be a simple peasant girl named Akulina. They meet by accident in the forest, and Aleksei falls in love with the beautiful peasant girl. They begin to see each other often, and when the weather is bad they exchange letters. Meanwhile their fathers have a chance meeting of their own. Muromsky’s horse throws him, and Berestov takes him to his house to recover. Their enmity disappears and a friendship begins. They decide that their children should be married to each other. Aleksei is in despair. He has seen Lisa as herself only once when she, not wishing him to recognize her, put on heavy makeup and behaved like a spoiled brat. He goes to Muromsky’s estate to announce his decision not to marry Muromsky’s daughter, but when he arrives he sees Lisa and recognizes her as his beautiful Akulina. As Pushkin says, you can guess what happens next.

I couldn’t help wondering / From The Captain’s Daughter.

The shade of Ivan / From Boris Godunov: Grigory, in his conversation with Marina Mnishek.

Pugachov pulled exactly the same stunt / Emelyan Pugachov was a Don Cossack who claimed that he was Peter III, Catherine the Great’s husband, who had supposedly been assassinated. He was arrested several times, and several times he escaped from both prison and the Russian army. In the autumn of 1773 he led a rebellion in the territory east of the Volga with the cities of Orenburg and Kazan as its centers. Pugachov found strong support among fugitives from serfdom, who were abundant in that area: dispossessed native tribesmen (like the Bashkirs), Old Believers, forced laborers in Ural mines, and of course the Cossacks, who were perpetually at odds with the central government. Pugachov’s forces amounted to 20,000–30,000 men, and the rebellion grew into a full-scale war with the rebels capturing even large cities like Perm, Tsaritsyn, Saratov, and Kazan. Catherine was forced to send regular troops released at the conclusion of the Russian-Turkish war to fight the peasant army. In 1775 Pugachov was finally captured and brought in a cage to Moscow, where he was executed.

Bored with the strictures of monastic life / Grigory is preparing a miracle for the world: his ascent to the throne in the guise of the tsarevich Dmitry, risen from the dead.

Monastery of the Miracle / The monastery where Grigory was a monk.

the parable of his life and art / In The Captain’s Daughter Pugachov tells Grinyov a parable about an eagle and a raven. The raven brags that it lives longer than the eagle, to which the eagle responds that it would prefer to drink fresh blood once rather than feed on carrion for a hundred years.

The fatal scaffold stood / From Poltava.

Khlopusha / A historical figure, a “heneral” in Pugachov’s army. He was reported to be a convict who had escaped from the mines in the Urals. His nostrils were torn when he was tortured.

I dreamed that a steep staircase / Grigory Otrepev’s dream from Boris Godunov.

The noise died down. I stepped out onto the stage / The opening line of Boris Pasternak’s poem “Hamlet,” from the poems of Yury Zhivago, which comprise the final chapter of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago.

Having crossed the bridge, Kokushkin / A reference to Pushkin’s poem “Kokushkin Bridge” (1829), written as a response to illustrations to Evgeny Onegin that were published in the Neva Almanac. Sinyavsky also has in mind limericks in which Pushkin’s name is often used out of context just for the sake of rhyme. The probable continuation here would be something like, “Tsar Nicholas was shit on by Pushkin.”

Tynyanov / Yury Tynyanov was a Soviet critic and theoretician of literature, one of the major representatives of the formalist school. Tynyanov wrote several articles on Pushkin as well as a biography of the poet.

Who do you think I am / From The Captain’s Daughter.

The rumor…grew to a fury / Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova, widely considered the most beautiful woman in Moscow. She caught the eye of Tsar Nicholas I, who decided to transfer Pushkin to St. Petersburg in order to have Natalya nearby. To do that, he bestowed the meaningless title of Kammerjunker on Pushkin, forcing him to be present at various court ceremonies. Immediately after their move to St. Petersburg, rumors began that implicated Natalya in affairs at the court. This finally resulted in Pushkin’s challenging Baron d’Anthès, the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, to a duel. D’Anthès mortally wounded Pushkin and was exiled from Russia. Natalya Goncharova remarried several years later.

a coarsely painted ace / A reference to the red diamond shape that was sewn on prisoners’ clothes. It served as a target for guards if a prisoner attempted to escape.

Just you wait / From The Bronze Horseman: “poor” Evgeny’s threat to the monument.

in every existing tongue / In the poem “Monument” Pushkin writes that he will be remembered by every nation and that his name will be spoken in every tongue. Here, however, Sinyavsky uses the words “every tongue” differently: every tongue will spread rumors about Pushkin.

He recognized him in the crowd / From The Captain’s Daughter, when Grinyov witnesses the execution of Pugachov.

Not for ordinary worries / The concluding lines of “The Poet and the Crowd.”

despondent and mute / From “To the Poet” (1830).

Didn’t he encourage the Decembrists? Didn’t he scorch people’s hearts with his Word? / References are to Pushkin’s “Epistle to Siberia” (“In the depths of Siberian mines, keep your proud patience,” 1827), in which Pushkin rallied the exiled Decembrists; to his ode “Liberty” (1817), which ends with the words, “And now learn, o tsars:…You should be the first to bow your heads / To the faithful shadow of Law”; to the poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” (1831); to the poem “The Monument” (1836), in which among his achievements Pushkin mentions the fact that he will be remembered for his appeal for mercy toward the exiled Decembrists; and to the poem “The Prophet,” in which the final goal of the poet is to burn people’s hearts with his words.

He sings for his own amusement / From the poem “Near the place where golden Venice reigns” (1827).

I write for myself and publish for money / Pushkin was the first Russian writer to rely on his writing as his primary source of income. His civil service posts—first in Kishinyov and Odessa and later in St. Petersburg as a Kammerjunker—provided him with very little money. His father (who was the probable prototype for the baron in The Covetous Knight) refused to help him financially. Pushkin was in constant need of money, not only to provide for his most ordinary needs, but also to pay his gambling debts.