Once Natalie was taken to a court party without Pushkin’s knowledge, and she pleased the empress very much. Angry, Pushkin declared, “I do not wish my wife to go where I do not go.” A contemporary reported, “His words were passed along, and Pushkin was made a gentleman of the chamber.”
Pushkin tried to retire, but his desire contradicted Nicholas’s fundamental belief in service for everyone. Avoiding service made a man suspect. The emperor threatened to take away Pushkin’s salary and end his access to the archives. This would have made further work as a state historian impossible and imperiled his livelihood. Pushkin had to give in.
There was one more point: Pushkin thought (or needed to think) that Natalie’s beauty was so overwhelming that even the emperor could not resist her. The poet thought the court title was forced on him so that Nicholas could see Natalie at court balls.
In a letter dated October 11, 1833, he warned his wife, “Don’t flirt with the tsar.” And a few weeks later, “You’re happy that dogs run after you like a bitch, their tails erect and sniffing your ass; a fine thing to be happy about! … Alas, that’s the whole secret of coquetry: as long as there’s a trough, pigs will come.”
Pushkin bitterly complained to a friend that Nicholas “courted his wife like a lousy officer; having his carriage pass under her windows several times in the morning, and in the evening, at balls, asking why her blinds were always shut.” Pushkin could learn this only from Natalie—was she trying to make him jealous? (In 1848, more than eleven years after Pushkin’s death, the emperor recalled during a dinner conversation how Pushkin spoke with him three days before the fatal duel: “I confess sincerely, that I suspected even you of courting my wife.”) The poet Anna Akhmatova, a great connoisseur of the Pushkin era and of human psychology, blamed Natalie for boasting about her conquests to Pushkin; Akhmatova felt this led to the catastrophe that ensued.
Pushkin was an insanely jealous man. Did he have any reason to suspect Nicholas of improper intentions? In the Soviet era, many historians said yes, stressing the emperor’s supposed “vile lust,” even though the most cynical contemporaries never presumed that the emperor’s attention to Pushkin’s wife was anything but innocent flirtation.
The final tragedy was not caused by Nicholas; however, without meaning to, he helped set the scene. Balls in St. Petersburg really were the place where numerous love affairs began, often ending in social scandals and sometimes in tragedy.
At a ball in 1835 or early 1836, Georges D’Anthes met Natalie Pushkin and apparently fell madly in love with her. He was a young cavalry officer, a French emigre and adopted son of Baron Jacob Burchard van Heeckeren, the Dutch ambassador. The tall, blond, and handsome D’Anthes cut a dashing social figure, and his attraction to Natalie soon was noticed. She was flattered, and enjoyed telling her husband about him.
This was a mistake. Pushkin was agitated, and only a spark was needed to set him off. That spark was an anonymous letter, which Pushkin and several of his friends received, bestowing a “diploma of cuckolds” upon him, implying that Natalie had succumbed to D’Anthes (which Pushkin considered a lie).
Pushkin challenged D’Anthes to a duel. Zhukovsky, terrified, managed to settle the affair: he told Nicholas, who then invited Pushkin to an audience, an extraordinary gesture. This conversation, unlike their meeting in the Kremlin in 1826, was not publicized; the topic was quite sensitive. The outcome was this: Nicholas made Pushkin give his word that he would not fight a duel (they were officially banned), and if new complications were to arise, he would promise to appeal to the tsar.
Pushkin was always proud of his noble ancestry and of being a man of honor, but he did not keep his word. On January 25, 1837, he sent an insulting letter to Baron Heeckeren in order to provoke a duel with his son.
The duel took place on January 27 at five in the evening outside St. Petersburg. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later, after receiving the final rites, in terrible suffering, at the age of thirty-seven. His last words were “It’s hard to breathe, I’m suffocating.”
The night after the duel, Pushkin sent word to the tsar that he was sorry for not keeping his word. In response, the emperor sent a note: “If God does not allow us to meet in this world, I send you my forgiveness and last advice: die a Christian. Do not worry about your wife and children: I will take care of them.”21
In fact, Nicholas paid all the late poet’s debts, assigned a pension to the widow and daughters and a special stipend for the sons, and ordered the publication, at state expense, of a collection of Pushkin’s works to benefit his family.
These were all signs of special attention (comparable to those given to Karamzin’s family after the historian’s death), and they stunned contemporaries: one courtier noted, “This is wonderful, but it’s too much.”22
Only insiders knew that Nicholas rejected Zhukovsky’s request to accompany the financial generosity with a special imperial rescript. One was published upon Karamzin’s death, reiterating the official recognition of his outstanding achievements for the state. The tsar told Zhukovsky, “Listen, brother, I’ve done everything I can for Pushkin, but I won’t write the way I did for Karamzin; we barely forced Pushkin to die like a Christian, while Karamzin lived and died like an angel.”
Unexpectedly, Pushkin’s death incited a wave of nationalist emotions in St. Petersburg. Crowds gathered outside his apartment; according to Zhukovsky, some ten thousand people paid their respects to his body laid out in a coffin—a huge number for those days. Foreign ambassadors reported in their dispatches of a new “Russian Party,” and calls for “hanging foreigners.”
No less surprised than the ambassadors was Nicholas. On his orders, measures were taken to keep Pushkin’s funeral from turning into an opposition political demonstration: he had not gotten over the shock of the Decembrist rebellion of 1825.
The planned funeral service in St. Isaac’s Cathedral was moved to a small church, the coffin delivered at night, under police escort. From there, still under police guard, the body was hastily moved to the Svyatogorsk Monastery, not far from Pushkin’s family estate in Pskov Province.
A St. Petersburg newspaper printed a small obituary: “The sun of poetry has set! Pushkin passed away, in his prime, in the midst of his great life work!” The next day the editor was called on the carpet by the chairman of the capital’s censorship committee, who demanded, “Why this publication about Pushkin? Why such honor? Was Pushkin a military leader, a minister, a statesman? Writing little verses does not yet mean a great life work.”
The editor was told that the criticism came from Sergei Uvarov, minister of education. But behind that strict reprimand loomed the regal figure of Nicholas I.
CHAPTER 7
Lermontov and Briullov
The Pushkin mythos began to form while he was still alive. In the fall of 1833 he wrote to his wife in St. Petersburg from his family estate, “Do you know what the neighbors say about me? Here’s how they gossip about me working: How Pushkin writes poetry—he has a decanter of the finest liqueur before him—he downs a glass,
