Pushkin's Estates

Although Alexander Pushkin, that most cosmopolitan of poets, never traveled beyond the bounds of the Russian empire, he managed to visit a considerable number of places within that vast territory: Kishinev, Odessa, the Crimea, the Caucasus. Even in the central part of Russia, he traveled frequently, from St. Petersburg to Moscow (his native city) and beyond to his small estate of Boldino, in Nizhny Novgorod Province.

But of all the Pushkin sites, none is more lyrically evocative and biographically rich than the cluster of estates–Mikhailovskoe, Petrovskoe, Trigorskoe–located some 120 kilometers to the southeast of the ancient city of Pskov and collectively know as “Pushkin Hills.” Nearby is the Svyatogorsky Monastery, where Pushkin is buried. In this picturesque region of Pskov Province, pine forests and birch groves are interspersed by small lakes, fields, and gentle hills.

In the biography of Pushkin, the most important of these estates is Mikhailovskoe, which the poet’s famous great-grandfather, Abraham Petrovich Hannibal (Gannibal) received as part of a larger grant from Empress Elizabeth in 1742 for his services to her father, Peter the Great. After Abraham’s death, in 1781, the estate went to his son Osip, who built the main house and laid out a park. Following Osip’s death, in 1806, the house remained in the hands of his widow, Maria, and daughter, Nadezhda, who was Pushkin’s mother.

In 1866, this original house was dismantled by Pushkin’s younger son Grigory and rebuilt in a different style, but on the same foundation. That house in turn burned twice, in 1908 and 1918, but each time it was rebuilt because of the association with Pushkin. Severe fighting during World War II also caused much damage, and in 1949 architects followed the original foundation and old memoirs to reconstruct the house in a form closer to that of Pushkin’s time. Thus the house we see today is a 20th-century reconstruction, as are a number of the adjacent service buildings. The ambience of the estate is so carefully recreated, however, that visitors can easily imagine the modest, peaceful–if sometimes boring–existence that Pushkin led here.

In fact the poet rarely lived on this remote estate. His first visit was in the summer of 1817, just after his graduation from the Alexander Lycée at Tsarskoe Selo. He would later write of these six weeks as a delightful time in which he discovered the pleasures of village life. Indeed, Pushkin returned to Mikhailovskoe in the summer of 1819. Yet he was perceptive enough to realize that not all was idyllic in this serf society. Indeed, his sentiments of protest appeared so clearly in certain poems, that Emperor Alexander I sent him into lenient exile to the south of the Russian empire, where he spent almost five years.

Ironically, Pushkin’s continued expression of free thought led to a return from Odessa to Mikhailovskoe in August 1824 as an extension of his exile. He was not alone: his parents, as well as his sister Olga and his brother Lev, were in residence. But this was little consolation, for Pushkin was much at odds with his father, whom he accused of spying on him for the police (evidently true). His father, on the other hand, considered his older son a dangerous subversive. Heated reproaches followed in rapid succession, and Pushkin despairingly wrote in a letter to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky (his influential friend and protector in St. Petersburg) that even prison would be preferable to this domestic nightmare. Finally, his parents seemed to have recognized the emotional precipice, and they departed with the rest of the family for St. Petersburg in November. Pushkin was left largely to himself at Mikhailovskoe for the next two years.

In his biography of Pushkin, Prince D. S. Mirsky, one of the most astute literary critics to write about the poet, noted that Pushkin’s way of life at Mikhailovskoe had an important influence on the descriptions of rural estate life in his greatest work, Yevgeny Onegin. Indeed, this “novel in verse” was in progress during the Mikhailovskoe period, and from contemporary accounts of Pushkin, who was still under close surveillance, we can detect certain similarities with his literary character. Pushkin usually stayed aloof from local society (with a few notable exceptions) and maintained a quiet sense of self-worth. He was courteous in his dealings with the peasantry.

He also cultivated certain eccentricities of behavior, particularly in his attire. One local merchant wrote in his diary: “I had the happiness of seeing Alexander Sergeevich, Mr. Pushkin, who in a way astonished me by his dress, namely, he had on a straw hat, a crimson blouse, a blue ribbon round his waist, an iron cane in his hand, with exceedingly long black whiskers, ... also with exceedingly long nails, with the ends of which he peeled oranges and ate them with great appetite, half a dozen of them I should say.”

As would happen more than once in Pushkin’s life, this enforced idleness proved very productive for the poet’s genius. During the Mikhailovskoe exile he not only continued work on Yevgeny Onegin and the tragedy Boris Godunov, but also wrote some of the greatest lyrics in the Russian language. Despite the occasional languor of provincial exile, Pushkin was not a recluse. He came to a more profound appreciation of the folk culture represented by his former nanny, the elderly Arina Rodionovna, with whom he had frequent talks.

His primary antidote to boredom, however, was at the neighboring estate of Trigorskoe, where Pushkin visited the extended family of Praskovya Osipova (Vulf by her first marriage). Like the Mikhailovskoe manor, the Trigorskoe house burned in 1918 as a result of the implacable violence which swept the Pskov region during the civil war. After World War II it was rebuilt on its original foundation. The elongated house is strange in form, resembling a barn, and had earlier been used for weaving linen. The family moved there temporarily in 1820, during major repairs to the main house; and when the latter burned to the ground, Madame Osipova, with remarkable aplomb, decided to remain in the temporary residence and added porches on either end.

The Osipova family was almost entirely female: the twice-widowed Praskovya, her four daughters and one son (Aleksei Vulf, a student at Dorpat–now Tartu–University), as well as assorted relatives. The matriarch was enamored of Pushkin, and there is little doubt that he was pleasantly spoiled during his frequent visits to their house. But the poet’s amorous attentions were directed primarily to a niece of Osipova, Anna Petrovna Kern, who visited Trigorskoe in the summer of 1825. Pushkin had met her previously in St. Petersburg; yet this unexpected reacquaintance stimulated his desire, and he wrote for her one of his most passionate love lyrics: “I remember the miraculous moment.” When Osipova got wind of this romance, she spirited Kern back to her elderly husband, General Ermolai Kern, in Riga.

Although the congenial circle at Trigorskoe undoubtedly eased the tedium of Pushkin’s enforced residence at Mikhailovskoe, feelings of despair suffused his letters in the autumn of 1825. His remote seclusion proved to be fortunate, however, for in December 1825, after the death of Alexander I, there occurred an attempted coup against the designated heir to the throne, Nicholas I. The Decembrist Revolt (see Russian Life, December 1995) involved a number of Pushkin’s friends, and had he been in St. Petersburg at that time, the consequences for him might well have been severe.

Pushkin spent several anxious weeks following the Decembrist affair, and it is clear that he was the object of attention by the new emperor’s reinvigorated gendarmerie. At the same time, there was no evidence that Pushkin had engaged in seditious activity, and Nicholas decided to co-opt the poet by bringing him under his direct supervision. Thus, in September 1826, Pushkin was allowed to leave Mikhailovskoe and return to the great world of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The third in this ensemble of estates, Petrovskoe, is the one most closely connected with Pushkin’s Hannibal ancestors. In 1781 it was deeded to the first of Abraham Hannibal’s sons, Peter, who made it his home. The estate manor, although not great in size, was clearly the most impressive among the three Pushkin estates. Like the other estate houses, Petrovskoe was burned in 1918, and after the Second World War archival documents were used in its careful reconstruction, completed in 1976. The house was surrounded by an extensive natural park leading to Lake Petrovskoe (or Kuchane), with a network of paths, bowers, and pavilions, some of which were also reconstructed after the war. On numerous occasions, Pushkin is known to have come here to visit his great-uncle, who reminisced about bygone years and the era of the illustrious Abraham Hannibal.

The final Pushkin site in this area, and perhaps the most picturesque, is the Svyatogorsky Monastery, founded in 1569 at the command of Ivan the Terrible. Located at the top of a small, but steep hill (like the fortress it once was), the monastery contains the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin, built of flat stone in 1569 and expanded in the 1770s. Pushkin visited the monastery on numerous occasions, and various members of his family were buried here, including his mother in April 1836. Less than a year later, on January 29, 1837 (old style), Pushkin would be dead from a tragic duel. Shortly after the funeral in St. Petersburg, his body was brought under guard to the Svyatogorsky Monastery and laid to rest next to the grave of his mother, near the east wall of the Dormition Church. At the end of 1839, Pushkin’s widow, Natalya Nikolaevna, commissioned the Petersburg sculptor A. Permagorov to create a marble obelisk for the grave, and in the autumn of 1840 it was placed with a simple inscription of the year and date of his birth and death. For Russia’s greatest poet, any other words would have been superfluous.