On June 6, Russia will celebrate the 220th birthday of the poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, one of the country’s most important literary icons. An icon who not only made an imprint on the country with his works of literature, but with his feet, heart, and head.
It seems as if every region of Russia strives to connect their past with the hallowed name of Alexander Sergeyevich. Since he traveled frequently and far, not all these claimed connections are necessarily tenuous. Certainly the poet traveled through and even stopped in many small villages and towns, and so current residents can align the place they live with the illustrious life of this “sun of Russian poetry.”
And while there are a great number of well-known places that Pushkin slept or visited, streets that he walked down, buildings and sites that he saw during his short life, we enumerate here a few lesser-known Pushkin-places, in hopes of showing a side of the poet’s life that others have missed. If such a thing is even possible 220 years on.
In the spring of 1820, having committed the offense of penning freedom-loving poems and epigrams, Pushkin was exiled from St. Petersburg by Tsar Alexander I. Sent to Crimea, there he spent, in his own words, “the happiest times of my life.”
The poet arrived in Kerch, on the peninsula that juts off the eastern side of the Crimean Peninsula, on August 15. Knowing that the city had been built on the ruins of ancient Panticapaeum (founded by the Milesians in the sixth or seventh century BC) and anticipating having a window onto its romantic past, he was greatly disappointed. Kerch was a tiny, poor town at the time, and so all the poet saw were a few streets, along with many fragments of columns and statues.
In a letter to his younger brother Lev, Pushkin wrote, “from the Taman Peninsula, of the ancient Tmutarakansky Principality (which existed from 988 to 1094, in what is today the western tip of Krasnodar Oblast and the eastern tip of Crimea), I saw the Crimean coast. We arrived in Kerch by sea. Here I thought I would see the ruins of Mithridates’ grave, and traces of Panticapaeum… On a nearby mountain amid a graveyard, I saw a pile of stones, cliffs with crude carvings, and I noticed several steps, the work of human hands. Whether it was an ancient tomb or the foundation of a tower, I do not know. A few versts on we stopped on the Golden Hill. Rows of stones and a moat, about level with the ground, is all that remained of the city.”
On his way to Crimea in 1820, Pushkin passed through the city then known as Yekaterinodar (and now simply Krasnodar). It is thought that he traveled along the Stavropol Highway. Accordingly, it is conceivable that he overnighted at the post station that was located at the entrance to this, the Cossack capital, which stood not far from what is today Krasnodar’s Gorky Park. At the time, it was known as the Prikubansky (“bordering the Kuban”) Forest, where there were offices, small shops for comestibles, and from whence one could see the earthen ramparts of the fortress and the market square.
Whether Pushkin strolled through the city center, we cannot know for certain, since the Cossack capital sat in a depression, and even in hot weather its streets were rather dirty. Yet the oaks that even today grow in the park (then a forest), he likely saw when entering Yekaterinodar.
To his younger brother Lev, the poet wrote, “I saw the banks of the Kuban and the Cossack villages – and feasted my eyes on our Cossacks. Eternally on horseback: eternally ready to fight, at eternal readiness!”
Arriving in the city on September 7, 1820, Pushkin, despite the fact that he was sick, headed to the Khan’s Palace straight away. He had already heard the legend of the Bakhchisaray Fountain and, finding himself in the city, could not fail to visit the monument. Yet its appearance upset him greatly.
He wrote to his Tsarskoye Selo lyceum friend Anton Delvig: “I entered the palace and saw the deteriorating fountain, the water dripping from its rusted pipe. I walked about the palace greatly annoyed at the neglect from which it is decaying, and at the quasi-European renovations of several rooms.”
Entering the inner courtyard, Pushkin saw the ruins of the harem. Wild roses covered the stones of the wall. To somehow dress up the unappealing appearance of the “Fountain of Tears,” he plucked a pair of flowers and laid them in the upper bowl. To this day, two roses can always be found there.
The fountain made such a strong impression that Pushkin wrote two works about it, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray verse tale and a poem, “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray Palace.”
Pushkin found himself in the town of Yelets (now a part of Lipetsk Oblast, but then part of Oryol Province) in 1829, since the main road from Moscow to the Caucasus, where he was headed, passed through it. Yet Alexander Sergeyevich did not leave behind the fondest of memories of Yelets. In his A Journey to Arzrum, he wrote: “The roads to Yelets are horrible. Several times the carriage got stuck in mud that was worthy of Odessa. I was not able to get more than fifty versts in a day. Finally I saw the Voronezh steppes and drove freely across the green plains.”
The cause for his troubles was the impassible black earth mud and generous rains. What is more, after having stopped in to visit General Alexei Yermolov in Oryol, Pushkin had entered Yelets from the direction of the village of Kazak, and that road was the worst of them all.
In A Journey to Arzrum there is nothing about Pushkin having any Yelets acquaintances, nor is there any information about them in his biography. So it is thought that he likely stayed over at the inn that was located right at the entrance to the city from the direction of Oryol. In 1949 a memorial tablet was hung on the wall of the inn, to commemorate the event, but in 1984 the building was torn down to make way for the Hotel Yelets.
In its long history, Neskuchny Garden (founded in 1756, today it comprises nearly 60 hectares of the capital’s sprawling Gorky Park) saw no small number of young lovers. Yet one very romantic story is connected with the name of Alexander Pushkin.
In the summer of 1830, the poet invited his fiancée, Natalya Goncharova, and her family, to the delightfully intimate open air theater that had recently opened here. Yet, despite his best intentions, he disrupted the performance. The famous actors Mikhail Shchepkin and Vasily Kachalov did not want to miss the opportunity to chat with the poet one on one and so interrupted their play.
On their way back out of the park, Pushkin led Natalya across Grotesque Bridge, the smallest of all the bridges in the park. Standing on it, he kissed his future bride. The tale might have been considered apocryphal had not the poet recorded the event in his diary.
Pushkin thrice rode through Vladimir Province, since the road to Boldino Estate in Nizhny Novgorod Province passed through it. And, at least in 1830, the city of Vladimir was on his way. Yet during his trip he found out about an epidemic of cholera that was sweeping northward across the country, and thus there was a quarantine in Vladimir Province, so he did not stop anywhere for long.
In Vladimir, he likely stopped at the post station to rest a bit and change horses. Today the building is famous as the erstwhile residence of Grigory Meshcheryagin, who became wealthy as steward to Count Vorontsov. It is situated near the Golden Gate, in the city center, and in Pushkin’s time the building’s curved outer corner faced the Moscow high road and the city was using the building as a post station, which no one entering the city could have missed.
Pushkin left behind virtually no recollections of Vladimir. In a letter to his wife, Natalya Goncharova, he wrote, sarcastically:
“If there is anything that can comfort me, it is the wisdom with which the roads from here to Moscow are laid. Imagine mounds on both sides of the road, with no ditch or drain for water, as a result of which the road is a box of mud, while the pedestrians walk in satisfaction along completely dry paths, laughing at the mired carriages.”
The poet visited this city in September 1833, in order to see the site of the famous 1774 battle and to converse with witnesses of the peasant uprising. At the time, he was writing his History of Pugachev and traveling to cities with residents who could recount stories of the Pugachev rebellion. He spent more than two days in Kazan.
First settling in at the hotel of the Noble Assembly, located in the right wing of the merchant Ivan Mikhlyayev’s three-story home on Peterpavlovsky Alley, he met the poet Yevgeny Boratynsky, a friend from his youth. Boratynsky immediately thereafter headed to the estate of his father-in-law, in the village of Kaymari. And it is likely he invited Pushkin to move into the home of his father-in-law, Lev Engelhardt, located on Great Gruzinsky Street (now Karl Marx Street), but which has not survived to the present day. It was in this home that the poet wrote down everything he heard from the city’s elderly residents. Today, the writing desk where Pushkin worked in Engelhardt’s home is in the Boratynsky Museum and is one of its most valued exhibits.
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