REKI MOYKI – ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799–1837)
Alexander Pushkin’s last home was a first-floor apartment on Reki Moyki, in the house of Prince Pyotr Volkonsky overlooking the Moika River. It’s a big cream-painted building with white piping like so many in St Petersburg. It wasn’t uncommon for a noble family to rent out parts of their property portfolio. Volkonsky, a hero of Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, was now a Minister of the Imperial Court and in 1834 had been given the title Serene Highness by Tsar Nicholas I. Two years later the Pushkins became his tenants. Their occupancy would run only four months because on 10 February 1837 (29 January Old Calendar) Alexander Pushkin died in this apartment from gunshot wounds.
The darling of the St Petersburg literary scene was killed duelling over a woman, just like Lensky in Pushkin’s great narrative poem, Eugene Onegin. As with Onegin and Lensky, the argument was between men who should have been friends; Pushkin challenged his wife’s brother-in-law, Georges d’Anthès, after rumours spread that d’Anthès was her lover. The Frenchman only made matters worse when he published a lampoon that referred to Pushkin as ‘Deputy Grand Master and Historiographer of the Order of Cuckolds’.
Pushkin was devoted to his beautiful wife Natalya; it was to make her happy that he had allowed them to stumble into debts in St Petersburg. This was a difficult time in the poet’s life. He was grieving for the loss of his mother, coping with inheritance issues and working hard to keep a magazine that he had founded, Sovremennik (The Contemporary), going.
Not yet 40, Pushkin was being talked of as the father of modern Russian literature but he was not financially astute. Instead of publishing his new historical novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836) as a book and making money, he serialised it in Sovremennik and made nothing. At his death Pushkin left two unfinished short stories, The Story of the Village of Goryukhino and Egyptian Nights, as well as two more novels, Roslavlev and Dubrovsky – all worked on here but none completed.
I picture him exhausted as he wrote into the night at his slender wooden desk overlooking the Moika River, struggling to stay solvent. It was reckless of him to challenge d’Anthès. Unfortunately, although duelling was strictly illegal in Tsarist Russia, it was still expected when men of honour clashed. Pushkin had fought duels successfully before. But his family – and Russian literature – really needed him to stay alive.
It was a cruelly cold February when I visited St Petersburg. The sun was bright but ice formed in my beard as I walked past the Lutheran church of SS Peter and Paul and the Hermitage Museum. When I turned onto the embankment itself, a vicious wind stung my cheeks. Was it this cold the afternoon that Pushkin and d’Anthès duelled among the dachas outside St Petersburg?
Snow was piled up high in the courtyard of the old Volkonsky mansion, part of which has been the Pushkin Museum since 1925. On the ground floor I found a cloakroom and a useful introduction to Pushkin’s life and the story of his death. Talking to the curator I also learned that I had only just missed its annual commemoration of his demise which, since 1925, is marked in this very courtyard. Here representatives of the city’s administration, members of the scientific and creative communities of St Petersburg, and Pushkin’s descendants (there are many) stand in silence at 2.45pm, the moment when the poet’s heart ceased beating.
The museum has recreated Pushkin’s apartment as it looked in 1836–7 just before the duel. To do this they used contemporary sketches made by the poet Vasily Zhukovsky and drew on written recollections of Pushkin’s friends. That the museum survived the appalling Siege of Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called) in 1941–4 says a lot for the priority accorded to literature by the Russian people. It also says a lot for the Russian ability to reconstruct. Photos of the city, which had been bombed and starved almost to death by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe for 872 days, show how completely the St Petersburg of Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky had to be rebuilt after the Second World War.
The main room of the apartment is Pushkin’s working study, lined with his possessions or facsimiles. The custodian told me rather poetically that here there were many things ‘that remember the touch of his hands’. I looked at his red leather chair and sofa, and his delicate writing desk with the paper knife he chewed, and an inkstand in black and gold. It depicted a negro figure that the custodian said was a memento of Pushkin’s Central African ancestor, Gannibal, who in the eighteenth century rose to be superintendent of Tallinn under Empress Elizabeth of Russia. I also saw a small portrait of Natalia Pushkina, so beautiful that it was said she was briefly the mistress of the Tsar after her husband’s untimely death.
So often these writers’ rooms are tinged with sadness, especially when the author died too soon. What might John Keats have gone on to write in Piazza di Spagna if his tuberculosis had been curable in 1821? What if Virginia Woolf’s intense depression had not driven her to suicide while she was staying at Monk’s House? What if Dylan Thomas hadn’t drunk himself to death at Hotel Chelsea? Similarly with Pushkin. He left this room on 27 January for a duel that would have taken place with the same insistence on form that Tolstoy would soon record in War and Peace and Pushkin himself had already described in Eugene Onegin. Sadly, Alexander Pushkin did not die instantly like poor Lensky, but lingered for two days with a bullet wound in his abdomen.
Surprised by the liberal outpouring of grief that greeted news of his death, the Tsarist authorities obliged Pushkin’s grieving family to remove his body overnight to his mother’s estate in the Pskow region, where he was quietly buried on 6 February.
He was only 37, a father of four young children and with many more years of great writing in him. No wonder St Petersburg’s intelligentsia bow their heads in the cold, wintry courtyard every year.
KUZNECHNYY PEREULOK – FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY (1821–81)
Maybe I shouldn’t have seen them on the same day, but after the grace and decorum of Pushkin’s apartment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s was disappointing. Of course it provided an insight into the man, but if Pushkin’s was the apartment of an early nineteenth-century dandy, Dostoyevsky’s to me was the last home of a big shaggy man who by all accounts cared deeply about keeping his desk tidy but had a lamentable fondness for Russian Victoriana.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky rented apartment 5/2 at Kuznechnyy Pereulok (Kuznechnyy Lane) twice in his troubled life, once for a very short period in 1846, and then from October 1878 until his death in January 1881. It was here that he wrote his last great novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
Kuznechnyy Lane is in Tsentralny District, not far from St Petersburg’s main railway station. I found this very apt. Between Pushkin’s time and Dostoyevsky’s the railways arrived in Russia – and entered dramatically into Russian fiction. In The Demons Verkhovensky flees on a train, in The Brothers Karamazov Kolya boldly lies between railroad tracks as a train passes over him, and in The Gambler Alexei sees his grandmother off at a railway station. The Idiot opens with Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returning to Russia on a train. Trains are also to be found in Tolstoy’s work, most dramatically in Anna Karenina. Pushkin was only 22 years older than Dostoyevsky and 29 years older than Tolstoy, but he inhabited a Russia of elegant horse-drawn carriages, they of smoky railway carriages and noisy engines.
Even today with the wholesale gentrification of St Petersburg, Kuznechnyy Lane is unprepossessing. Inside, the Dostoyevskys’ apartment has been recreated for the most part from the memoirs of his second wife Anna, and of his contemporaries. It was opened on 12 November 1971 when the city was still called Leningrad. The apartment takes up the corner wing of a dull, four-storey city block typical of the kind you find across Europe, built quickly and built tall as cities grew rapidly in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The author’s study is decorated with a greenish wallpaper with a repeated floral scroll patterning that would drive you crazy if you stared at it for too long. Historians found this under eighteen other layers of more recent wallpaper and had it recreated for the museum as the most period-appropriate. Near his big, heavy wooden desk with its little fat legs stands a big black clock – stopped at the hour that he died. Roll-up cigarettes of the kind Dostoyevsky smoked lie on another table which is covered with a green cloth. The floor is scuffed parquet.
I’d read that Dostoyevsky liked the corners of buildings. The wider views meant he could see the nearby domes of Our Lady of Vladimir church. Although Dostoyevsky had to move frequently because of his debts, I gather he always tried to find an apartment with a view of a church or cathedral.
The dining room has a big white ceramic-tiled heater in the corner and its table was draped in a white cloth with ragged tassels. The overly-ornate crockery on display reminded me of the kind my great aunts inherited from their mothers. There was a small rocking horse by the hearth. Between 1868 and 1875 Dostoyevsky’s wife bore four children, two of whom died in infancy. I also saw Dostoyevsky’s hat on show inside a glass case and two of his umbrellas in a stand in the hall.
With the help of the museum downstairs I was able to piece together Dostoyevsky’s life and what he wrote in the apartment above. His first novel Poor Folk, described at the time as Russia’s first ‘social novel’, was published in January 1846 and was a much-needed commercial success for the 24-year-old aspiring writer. He then resigned his military career and wrote a second novel, The Double, in which the main character descends into insanity. It was not well reviewed. Around this time Dostoyevsky discovered French ideas of socialism and in this apartment he began a new novel, Netochka Nezvanova (‘Nameless Nobody’), about a young St Petersburg woman living in extreme poverty, but he never completed it.
On 23 April 1849 Dostoyevsky was one of a number of idealistic writers arrested on the orders of Tsar Nicolas I. By the time he returned to live in Kuznechnyy Pereulok in 1878 he had experienced a life as desperate as any of his characters. Aged 56 he could look back on narrowly escaping execution by firing squad for his political views, spending five years in bleak Siberian exile that permanently damaged his health, marrying, and losing both his wife and his first child, becoming addicted to gambling, losing nearly all his money as a result, and embarking on a number of extramarital affairs. Yet he had also become a literary success. With The House of the Dead (1862), Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Gambler (1867), The Idiot (1868) and The Adolescent (1875) behind him, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was working on his final book. He spent nearly two years writing the twelve-volume philosophical novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which was first published as a serial from January 1879 to November 1880. This makes the study at Kuznechnyy Lane very much Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov room. It is a great work of literature, but how could he manage to concentrate in such an ugly apartment?
These quests for an author’s writing room can bring one up against one’s own prejudices. I felt I would have written wittily and elegantly in Pushkin’s apartment. Sitting in Dostoyevsky’s I think I would have decamped to the nearest café. Clearly he and I could never have decorated a house together.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky died at Kuznechnyy Lane less than four months after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov, suffering the first of his three heart attacks when a neighbour’s apartment was raided by the Tsarist police. I came away disliking the bourgeois dullness of that ugly apartment, yet after such a dramatic and difficult life, it was probably what Dostoyevsky craved.
HOTEL ASTORIA – MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891–1940)
According to Mikhail Bulgakov, Room 412 on the fourth floor of the Hotel Astoria is ‘a room, where, as is well known, there is blue-gray furniture and a fine bathroom’. That line comes from his novel The Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov began in 1928 and completed shortly before his death of a kidney disorder in 1940. The story concerns a visit by the Devil to the atheist Soviet Union and is a satire on the new Russian state. It was a samizdat (clandestine) publication, not issued in book form until 1967.
In the 1920s the playwright and novelist Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov suffered greatly from the government’s persecution of creative artists. At one point he was frightened enough to burn the first manuscript of The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov was fortunate, however, that the unpredictable General Secretary Stalin liked his work despite its un-Soviet attitudes. Stalin protected the author and after he was sacked personally reinstated him in his job at the Moscow Art Theatre.
In 1932, after divorcing his second wife, Bulgakov married Yelena Nyurenberg, who had in turn divorced her army officer husband so that they could be together. The couple honeymooned at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad that October. At the time of his remarriage Bulgakov had been invited to Leningrad (these days known once again as St Petersburg) on theatre business and so it was a local theatre company who actually footed the bill for their honeymoon. Yelena is generally believed to be the model for Margarita in Bulgakov’s most famous novel. She claimed he recommenced the story here, dictating fresh chapters to her, and told her: ‘The whole world was against me and I was alone. Now we are together, and nothing frightens me.’
The Astoria gets only a brief walk-on role near the end of Bulgakov’s novel after Grigory Danilovich Rimsky, treasurer of the Variety Theatre in Moscow, is attacked on the night of the great satanic performance staged by Professor Woland (who is really the Devil in disguise). Rimsky’s attacker is Varenukha (house manager of the theatre) who has been temporarily turned into a vampire by Woland. Terrified, Rimsky flees to the railway station and takes a train to Leningrad. He is found later in Room 412 of the Astoria, hiding in a wardrobe and barely sane. He is arrested and brought back to Moscow.
Most people assume that the Bulgakovs themselves stayed in Room 412 and were able to enjoy that in-joke. Sadly if you look for Room 412 today you will not find it, as it was merged into Room 411 some years ago to create a Presidential Suite. However it’s clear that Room 412 was at the point where the two wings of the hotel sharply intersect, giving a very good view out across St Isaac’s Square from above the front door.
The Astoria remains one of my favourite St Petersburg hotels. It was commissioned in 1910 by the British Palace Hotel Company to accommodate international guests during the tercentenary celebrations of the Romanoff dynasty in 1913. Little did anyone think then that Russia’s first family had only four of its 304 years left in power. The architect was Fyodor Lidval, born in St Petersburg to Swedish parents. The style of the building is a kind of stripped-down Art Nouveau that flirts with Art Deco but retreats into neoclassicism, especially in its austere facade. Adolf Hitler, a keen amateur architect, loved this building. During the Siege of Leningrad he insisted it not be bombed even though the nearby St Isaac’s cathedral was significantly damaged. The Führer intended to hold his victory banquet in the Astoria once Leningrad had fallen, and had even had invitations printed.
For decades after the Second World War the Astoria was run by the state-owned Intourist travel group. It underwent the usual Soviet neglect, which in a way was fortunate. (The auditorium of the St Petersburg Conservatory where Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin was premiered was refurbished under Communism and a priceless Italianate jewel of a theatre was eviscerated by concrete and bad taste.)
In 1987 the hotel was closed for mercifully sympathetic renovations, and it was purchased in 1997 by Rocco Forte Hotels who spent $20 million on further upgrades. Today the Astoria has a 1930s feel to its public spaces, with marble floors and bound fasces – a common 1930s symbol – carved around the bedroom doors. The lift portals on the ground floor to the left of reception display brass door plaques naming the many celebrity guests who have stayed at the Astoria. These included socialists like Lenin and H.G. Wells, actors like Jack Nicholson and Gina Lollobrigida, many world leaders, and musicians like Pavarotti, Madonna and Elton John. Rumour has it that Rasputin stayed here during the last years of the Romanoff empire, with various married women to whom he ministered.
You really cannot get a more celebrated hotel in Russia – and the Astoria is comfortable too. There’s not much to give you an insight into Bulgakov and his satiric masterwork, but it’s nice to think of him taking up the story again here with Yelena.