Pushkin’s Origins (Part 4) Whether either of these properties would have benefited by the presence of Sergei L’vovich is open to question. He was a hot-tempered man, although his rages seldom lasted for long. His chief concern seems to have been to reserve what energies he had for social life, avoiding responsibility for anything else, including the running of his own household; and as he grew older and his financial °. umstances worsened, he also grew increasingly mean. The Pushkin household in Moscow was run by Sergei L’vovich’s bossy, but erratic, wife, who - spoiled as a child - was given to prolonged sulks as a grown-up. Not only did they move house annually from 1799 to 1807, including one brief return to St. Petersburg (hence the infant poet’s meeting with Paul I), but Nadezhda Osipovna had a habit of continually moving furniture from one room to another, changing the functions of each room in the process. The consequent disruption was on such a scale that she was said by one of Alexander Sergeevich’s contemporaries to be obliged to send out for crockery whenever more than two people were invited to dinner.15 The conditions of disorder in the Pushkins’ life in Moscow were relieved by the fact that the summer months were spent in the country on a small estate at Zakharovo, forty-four kilometres from Moscow. Nadezhda Osipovna’s mother had bought Zakharovo in exchange for Kobrino, her family property near St. Petersburg, which she sold in 1799. Even Zakharovo was mortgaged ten years later; and in January 1811 it was sold for forty-five thousand roubles.16 Nevertheless, it was during these summers at Zakharovo that Alexander Sergeevich first got to know the beauty of the Russian countryside; his love for it was reinforced later in life. The feeling that the Pushkins were camping - not living - in their home can hardly have failed to induce a feeling of instability in the small boy. To make matters worse, his mother’s favourite seems to have been his elder sister, Olga. He disliked his tutors, of whom there was a succession. They were mainly French, as was the custom at that time in a Russian family of this social standing, but they included a Miss Bailey, whose efforts to teach the boy English met with little success (he had to study the language all over again in later life). He was also confronted early in his boyhood by the tragedy of death: not only that of the first nanny, Ul’yana, of whom little is known, but also of three of his siblings, one of whom - Nikolai - was five when he died in 1807. Neither parent seems to have taken much trouble over their remarkable elder son until the time came for him to go to school at the age of twelve. The member of the family who seems to have come closest to understanding the contradictions of his character -now fiery, now withdrawn - was his maternal grandmother, Maria Alekseevna. More perceptive than either of his parents, she observed of her grandson : I do not know what he will become : the boy is intelligent, he loves books, but he works badly, it is rare that he recites his lessons correctly ; sometimes one cannot move him nor send him to play with the children, and sometimes he gets agitated and excited and one does not know how to calm him down ; he throws himself from one extreme to the other ; he does not know the happy medium. God knows how this will finish, if he does not become reasonable17 Alexander Sergeevich never did have much truck with the happy medium, nor did he ever become ‘reasonable’. No one seems to have realized until he went to boarding school - and even then only gradually - that he was a literary genius. In spite of his excellent memory, he simply did not bother with subjects which did not interest him, like mathematics. On the other hand, when reading the works of authors who did engage his attention, already as a boy he showed the beginnings of the power of discrimination which he developed in his later study of an exceptionally broad range of literature. It is the biographer’s misfortune that Pushkin destroyed most of his autobiographical notes, which might have illuminated these early years more clearly than the fragments of evidence that have been handed down by those who knew him then. What is reasonably certain, however, is that Alexander Sergeevich’s nanny, Arina Rodionovna, and his sister, Olga, were much closer to him than either parent. (For example, it was to Olga - not to his parents - that he recited his first play, a comedy written in French, imitated from Moliere.18 This recital took place before he was twelve years old.) From the age of ten he had Nikita Kozlov, a serf from Boldino, twenty-one years older than himself, as his personal servant, who stayed with him for the rest of his life and beyond (he was one of the very few who were present at the poet’s burial). Arina was also born a serf - and she was always illiterate - but she was emancipated by Pushkin’s maternal grandmother in the year of his birth. She chose to stay on with the Pushkin family and she thus became successively nanny to Olga, to Pushkin himself and to his younger brother, Lev. It seems that she was not the nanny whom the tsar Paul I scolded in 1800 when he met the infant Pushkin out for a walk in St. Petersburg. It may therefore not have been with Arina that Pushkin was later taken for walks in the Yusupov Garden in Moscow, as recorded in his own autobiographical notes. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that between the ages of six and twelve it was Arina to whom he was closest, in a family environment to which, in the same notes, Pushkin applied the adjective ‘intolerable’. Most young children love grown-ups who tell them stories. Arina not only told Pushkin stories but she also poured out peasant traditions and proverbs. An exceptionally imaginative child such as Pushkin had good reason to love Arina. Moreover, her remarkable powers of story-telling were again exercised in later years, this time with tangible poetic results, when she used to spend the evenings talking to Pushkin at Mikhailovskoe during his two-year exile on his mother’s estate. When this exile was brought to an end by Nicholas I’s summons to Pushkin for an audience in Moscow in September 1826, Arina wept; but she was glad of the opportunity to get rid of Pushkin’s smelly Limberg cheese, to which he was addicted. A letter dictated by her in the year before she died described him as constantly in her heart and in her mind. The depth of Pushkin’s own feelings towards Arina is evident from more than one of his poems; and during his exile at Mikhailovskoe a letter drafted near the end of 1824 says it all: I spend all day on horseback - in the evening I listen to tales told by my nanny, the prototype of Tatyana’s nanny [a reference to the nurse in the famous letter-writing scene in Chapter 3 of Evgertii Onegin.] ; you saw her once, it seems to me, she is my one and only friend - it is only when I am with her that I am not bored.20 What should have marked out Alexander Sergeevich to his parents and everyone else who met him - and did indeed impress his schoolmates - was the number of hours that from an early age (often at night) he spent reading. There is a story that, told to leave the room by his uncle Vasilii, who was about to recite some unsuitable verses, he shouted : ‘I know everything already!’ He probably did. His desire for reading as a boy, which he himself described in his autobiographical notes, gave him at this astonishingly early age a detailed knowledge not only of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, but also of some of the classics in French translation -Plutarch’s Lives, the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example. (Robin Edmonds)
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 14:40:53 +0000
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