И время и место: Историко-филологический сборник к шестидесятилетию Александра Львовича Осповата. Сборник статей
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on the other. An 1812 character report made by his professors cites many of the traits that made up this strange breed of tiger monkey: his talents are more “brilliant” than “substantial,” his mind “ardent” and “subtle” rather than “profound”; his diligence is “mediocre”; he is “well read” in both French and Russian literature, but his knowledge is “superficial”; he displays “pride” together with “ambition,” which at times causes him to seem “withdrawn”; “heated bursts of irritability, flippancy, and a special kind of witty loquaciousness” are characteristic of him; at the same time his “good nature” is noticeable, as he recognizes his faults.3 In his dealings with others Pushkin often found himself in awkward situations from which to extricate himself required tact; unfortunately, despite his essentially good heart, it was tact that he didn’t have. Close friend Ivan Pushchin says it with the greatest clarity:
From the very beginning Pushkin was more short-tempered than most and therefore did not arouse general sympathy. This is an eccentric person’s lot among people. It wasn’t that he was acting out a role or trying to impress us with special oddities, as happens with some people. But at times it was through inappropriate jokes and awkward witticisms that he put himself in a difficult situation, from which he could then not escape. This would lead to new blunders, which never go unnoticed in schoolboy dealings… In him was a blend of excessive boldness and shyness, both appearing at the wrong times, which by that fact harmed him further. It would happen that we’d both get in a scrape; I’d manage to wiggle out of it, while he could never set it right. The main thing that was lacking in him is what is called tact, that capital which is necessary in relations with comrades, where it is difficult, almost impossible, when involved in totally informal interactions with others, to avoid some unpleasant confrontation brought on by daily life.4
And Baron Korf, as precise and unforgiving as Pushchin is generous, has this to say about Pushkin:
Easily enraged, with unbridled African passions (his heritage on his mother’s side), eternally preoccupied, eternally immersed in poetical daydreams, spoiled from childhood by the praise of flatterers that can be found in every circle, Pushkin neither as a schoolboy nor afterwards in society had anything appealing in his deportment… In him was no external or internal religion, no higher moral feelings. He even asserted a kind of bragger’s pride in the supreme cynicism he showed these subjects… and I do not doubt that for the sake of a caustic word he sometimes said even more and worse than he thought and felt.5
As harsh as Korf’s appraisal is, there is also much truth in it, and when placed next to Pushchin s it affords us a rather accurate picture of how the adolescent Pushkin must have seemed to both well-wishers and to those he may have antagonized.
As is evident from these character sketches, Pushkin was in need of yet a third nickname: “Sem’ raz otmer’, potom otrezh’” (translation: “Measure Seven Times Then Cut,” or “Look Before You Leap”). How many times in later life he got himself in hot water by saying or doing something on impulse; the examples – insulting the principled Karamzin in a epigram, satirizing the powerful Uvarov as a gold-digger – are legion. At this stage, however, the consequences were less dire and often humorous. For example, one of the senior ladies in waiting to Alexander’s wife, the Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, had a pretty maid, Natasha, and it was not long before Pushkin and his mates became infatuated with her. Once, as the boys were walking in smaller groups through the darkened palace corridor where the ladies’ chambers were located, Pushkin happened to be alone and heard the rustle of a dress nearby. He was certain it was Natasha. Without giving it a thought he rushed up and tried to embrace and kiss her, only to find out as the door suddenly opened that he had in his arms old Princess Varvara Volkonskaia She was insulted, Pushkin mortified. Soon thereafter the tsar himself was informed by the princess’s brother and called the Lyceum’s director, Egor Engelhardt, on the carpet. “What is going to come of this?” complained the sovereign. “Your schoolboys not only steal my ripe apples through the fence and beat the gardener’s watchmen, but now they also pester my wife’s maids of honor.”6 The tsar told Engelhardt to have the boy whipped, but luckily he refused and it eventually blew over. In the wake of the brouhaha an unrepentant Pushkin described the princess in an epigram as “an old monkey” (une vielle guenon).
Yet another episode involved Marie Smith, a young widow who was living in the Engelhardt household and participating in school theatricals. Predictably, Pushkin was smitten with her comeliness and before long wrote her a poem, “To a Young Widow” (K molodoi vdove), in which he urged her to forget the dead, as they will not return, and celebrate life with the living. The verses seemed more than a little irreverent, which was the point. In any event, this lady too was offended, but what made the contretemps particularly awkward was the fact that Marie Smith was pregnant. She expressed her indignation to Egor Antonovich, who himself may not have been indifferent to her, and he censured Pushkin for it. Finally, a misadventure without amorous overtones is the one that has come down in Lyceum lore as the “gogel’-mogel”’ affair of 1814. This time three boys, Pushkin, Pushchin, and Malinovskii, smuggled a bottle of rum into the building with the help of Foma, one of the diad’-ki. They then created a grog-like concoction of eggs, sugar, and alcohol which they heated in the samovar. Muffled laughter and noise could be heard from the hall, which brought Frolov, the on-duty tutor, to the scene to investigate. The conspirators had enough time to toss their wine glasses out the window and disappear to their rooms, but one of them, Aleksandr Tyrkov, was discovered clearly in his cups (1,132–133). Frolov told the director, who then reported it to the Minister of Education, Count Razumovskii, the senior state official in charge of the Lyceum. Razumovskii came in person from St. Petersburg, called the boys out of class and gave them a severe reprimand, with the punishment to follow – two weeks on their knees throughout morning and evening prayer services, placement at the end of the dining table, and a sentence citing their names and a description of their crime in the school’s black book.7 Despite the apparent seriousness of the offense, Pushkin wrote another impromptu ditty, this one taking the hussar Denis Davydov’s rollicking call to wine and women as its model, in which it is not sobriety that is banished but Foma the diad’ka, who was let go for his part in the affair.
So, against this background of Lyceum comradeship and shared experience how did the mercurial schoolboy begin to become, to quote Nabokov, “Russia’s most essential and most European” writer, “the greatest poet of his time (and perhaps of all time, excepting Shakespeare)”?8 Perhaps the first thing that alerts us to the youngster’s potential uniqueness is his receptiveness to the creative impulse, to the way that sound and sense suddenly come together in his consciousness and then are born into (zarozhdenie tvorchestva) something altogether different and mesmerizing.9 Pushkin, let us recall, has forever been associated with “harmonious sounds” (garmonicheskie zvuki, which subsequent scholars have duly linked to the influences of Batiushkov and Zhukovskii) and a free, unfettered intonation (intonatsiia). But even here the freedom with which he is able to say something seems in excess of anything he could have learned from respected older contemporaries. This is how he presents the onset of the rhyming urge in “To My Aristarchus” (Moemu Aristarkhu, 1815):
Сижу ли с добрыми друзьями,
Лежу ль в постеле пуховой,
Брожу ль над тихими водами
В дубраве темной и глухой,
Задумаюсь – взмахну руками,
На рифмах вдруг заговорю…
[I can be sitting with good friends,
Or lying in a feather bed,
Or wandering near quiet waters
In an oak grove dark and deserted,
When I fall to musing, wave my arms,
And suddenly start to speak in rhyme…]
The