Pushkin's Death

“Pushkin is our everything,” wrote nineteenth century critic Apollon Grigoriyev, who spent his life contemplating beauty and the ideal, and died an impoverished drunk. 

“Is there any other guy in Russian culture besides Pushkin?” I was asked by a Dutch woman who often visits Russia. Cultural programs were arranged for each of her visits, and they all consisted of Pushkin, Pushkin, and more Pushkin. 

We see what she means. In Russia, unfortunately, we love to put ourselves down. But Pushkin is the object of our universal love and admiration. Everyone knows him, everyone has read him – at least in school, where we had to memorize his works. We still remember them, which is something Pushkin could surely take pride in. 

“The sun of our poetry has set!” were the opening words of the famous announcement of Pushkin’s death, published on January 30, 1837 (February 11 new style), the day after the great poet succumbed to wounds inflicted in a duel. 

Russians all claim Pushkin as their own. For Slavophiles, this descendent of an Ethiopian prince is the embodiment of the Russian Soul. For Westernizers, this man who never set foot in Europe was a symbol of liberalism. He wrote, “To depend on the powerful, to depend on the people, what difference does it make to us?” But for revolutionaries he was a revolutionary, a comrade-in-arms and friend of the Decembrists. He wrote an ode to “Freedom,” but for proponents of art for art’s sake, he embodied pure art, divorced from the fleeting concerns of daily existence. He created the sacrilegious Gavriliada, yet some seek religious meaning in his work. He produced whole collections of bawdy verse and everyone seems to be able to quote obscenities attributed to him or found in his letters, but he also produced the purest, most beautiful poems of love. 

And what is even stranger is that both official and “unofficial” Russia revere Pushkin. It has always been possible to love Pushkin without being ashamed of this devotion. Pushkin is neither a talentless toady nor the author of cheap romance novels. You never feel the need to hide the fact that you are reading him. And when times were tough, official reverence for Pushkin provided society with an emotional outlet. The hundredth anniversary of his death was an occasion of exuberant celebration amidst the horrors of 1937. In a country awash in blood, where executions were carried out in a relentless stream, the occasion was celebrated at the highest levels of power. It was an insane, almost grotesque celebration. Indeed, it is an irony of history that 1937 saw the first complete academic collection of Pushkin’s work. Yet, because it was a “People’s Celebration,” the collection was published without the exhaustive commentary that had been prepared by Pushkin’s most knowledgeable scholars. What the people needed was sumptuously-bound volumes, not the erudition of literary experts. 

In 1999, a very different era, the two hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s birth was celebrated with official speeches and idiotic images of the poet in store windows, advertisements, and on candy wrappers. There was even a daily countdown leading up to the big day.

It would seem that all the vulgarity and poor taste that has been used in resurrecting Pushkin’s memory for more than two centuries should have rubbed off on him, ruining him for us by now. Nothing of the sort. Pushkin museums are never empty. And it is not just school children who are “doing Pushkin” that come. Any place with the smallest association with him is a magnet for the thousands who believe that such sites will bring them closer to something extraordinary, amazing, and pure. 

First among the destinations for such pilgrims has always been Pushkinskiye Gory (Pushkin Hills), a reserve that includes the village of Mikhailovskoye, the family estate to which he was banished; Trigorskoye, the home of his friends; and Petrovskoye, the estate of his grandfather and great-grandfather. The reserve also includes the Svyatogorsky Monastery, to which Pushkin’s friends brought his body in the winter of 1837, and where he lies, buried on a hill next to the church. 

Much has been written about Pushkinskiye Gory – some of it trite and some of it insightful and contemplative. It is a wondrously alluring place, and you start to feel this as soon as you approach the reserve along the same road from Pskov that Pushkin traveled, pondering the unhappy fate that had cast him from the warm and merry Crimea into a cold, northern exile, remembering the women who inspired some of his most remarkable verse, recalling the friends who had organized a rebellion, and the verse that filled his whole being. Pushkin composed approximately 100 works in Mikhailovskoye, most of which are masterpieces. Here he wrote the drama Boris Godunov. When he was done, he himself was amazed at his own genius and shouted, “Ah, yes, Pushkin, ah, yes, you son of a bitch!”

Here we are shown and told how the poet lived, and we can try to imagine how he spent his day in this cramped little house, although the fact that almost none of the original furnishings have survived makes it more difficult. But we sense his presence. The house and the park at Mikhailovskoye have preserved an air of history, despite the crowds and the artificiality of the tourist experience. 

Sergei Dovlatov wrote Zapovednik (The Reserve), a marvelous and tragic book about a man reassessing his life against the backdrop of Pushkin, which contains a malicious and sorrowful depiction of Mikhailovskoye: “Victoria Albertovna talked with me, smiling mistrustfully. I was already growing accustomed to this. All of the acolytes of the Pushkin cult were shockingly possessive. Pushkin was their collective property, the beloved object of their adoration, their cherished child. Any encroachment into their sanctuary irritated them. They were quick to convince themselves
of my ignorance, cynicism, and
cupidity.”

Pushkin really is transformed into something iconic at Mikhailovskoye, largely through the efforts of the reserve’s founder and first director, Semyon Stepanovich Geychenko, who put his heart and soul into the museum at Pushkinskiye Gory, but who at the same time gave it a touch of Disneyland. There is the Onegin bench and the tree-lined alley where the subject of one of Pushkin’s best known love poems, Anna Petrovna Kern, is said to have walked. There are many spots that have been created more as “objects of worship” than informational displays. Nevertheless, it is impossible to miss the beauty and purity of the place. 

The dejected hero of Dovlatov’s novel, who (like the author himself) worked at the museum as a tour guide, wrote: 

My work began at nine in the morning. We sat in the office awaiting visitors. The conversations were about Pushkin and about tourists. Mostly about tourists. About their glaring ignorance.

“Can you imagine, he asked me who Boris Godunov was?”

For my part, I was not annoyed by such things. Or rather I was annoyed, but I tried not to be. The tourists had come to enjoy themselves. The local trade union committee lured them with cheap excursions. For the most part, these people cared little about poetry. For them, Pushkin was a symbol of culture. What was important to them was being able to say “I’ve been there.” You have to be able to mark that off the list. To sign the visitor book of spirituality…

It is easy to understand how intellectuals feel about all this, but you can also look at it another way. For countless ordinary people, the trip to Pushkin’s home is a trip to the beauty that is so lacking in their daily lives. They might behave crudely, thoughtlessly, vulgarly, but the fact that they come here shows that Pushkin means something to them. 

And when you walk down the road from Mikhailovskoye to Trigorskoye and the beauty of the surroundings takes your breath away, or when you are standing next to the simple monument over Pushkin’s grave in Svyatye Gory (Holy Hills), then you understand what Apollon Grigoriyev said, you understand why grown people sobbed listening to Dostoyevsky’s speech about Pushkin. You believe Dostoyevsky’s words: “Pushkin died at the height of his powers and undoubtedly took some great secret to the grave. And now we are left to guess at this secret without him.” And you want to echo the sentiments expressed by 20th century poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who loved Pushkin with all her heart, “Pushkin? He scared us!”