‘It was a devil’s trick to let me be born with a soul and talent in Russia,’ he wrote to his wife, whom he married in 1831.’

Natalia Goncharova possessed unusual beauty but a shallow, uncultured mind. The pair settled in Petersburg, and the Tsar, who admired Natalia and wished her to attend Court, made Pushkin a gentleman of the chamber – a rank suitable for a youth of eighteen but an insult to a man of standing, which compromised the poet in the eyes of the liberal younger generation. The adopted son of the Dutch minister at Petersburg, Baron George Heckeren d’Anthès, paid persistent attention to Natalia, until anonymous letters goaded Pushkin into challenging him to a duel, in which the poet was mortally wounded. His death was recognized by the people as a national calamity, and the house where his body lay was besieged by mourners. The Tsar and his police became alarmed. After a secret funeral service the remains were removed by night in a coffin covered with straw, which was driven in an ordinary sledge under an escort of gendarmes to the Svyatogorsky monastery.

Of Pushkin’s short life six years were spent in exile. As we have seen, his writings were subjected to the severest censorship, and oppression by the police and gendarmerie was unremitting. Almost from his schooldays he felt that he lived bors la loi and deprived of legal justice.

Pushkin began his prose work in 1827 with an historical narrative, The Negro of Peter the Great. It was the age of the great historical romances of Walter Scott, the age of new ideas on history. ‘In our day’, wrote Pushkin, ‘the word novel means an historical epoch developed in the form of an imaginary story.’ In The Negro of Peter the Great Pushkin strove for a new understanding of history. He brought history nearer to himself and to his readers by giving it biographical interest. ‘The plot of the story’, he said, ‘centres about the Negro’s wife, who is unfaithful to her husband, gives birth to a white child, and is punished by being shut up in a convent’ The novel opens with a striking picture of the morals and manners of French society in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. ‘Nothing could equal the frivolity, folly and luxury of the French of that period…. Greed for money was united to a thirst for pleasure and dissipation; estates were squandered; morals foundered; the French laughed and speculated – and the State was going to ruin to the lively refrain of satirical vaudevilles.’ In contrast to the decay of France under the Regent, Pushkin vividly portrays youthful Petrine Russia, the stern simplicity of the Petersburg Court and Peter’s ‘progressive’ outlook and concern for his Empire. ‘Russia seemed to Ibrahim one huge work-room where only machines were moving and every worker was occupied with his job in accordance with a fixed plan.’ Ibrahim was one of Peter’s collaborators, a courtier who recognized his responsibility to the country. A feeling of duty and not dread of the Tsar or any motive of personal ambition brought him home from the brilliant if frivolous ambiance of the nobility of France. For the sake of duty, for the sake of the honour of helping a great man, Ibrahim sacrificed gaiety and pleasure, exchanging a life of refinement for one of austerity and toil. ‘He felt that he, too, ought to be labouring at his appointed task, and tried to regret as little as possible the gaieties of Parisian life.’

It was natural that Pushkin should feel drawn to a monarch whose work he understood in all its implications. ‘Peter was undoubtedly a revolutionary by God’s grace,’ he wrote the year before his death. ‘The tremendous revolution achieved by his autocratic power abolished the old system of life, and European influences spread all over Russia. Russia entered Europe like a launched vessel, amid the hammering of axes and the thunder of cannon… As the executioner of an era which no longer corresponded to the nation’s needs, the Tsar brought us culture and enlightenment, which in the end must bring us freedom too.’

‘Had this novel [The Negro of Peter the Great] been completed… we should have a supreme Russian historical novel, depicting the manners and customs of the greatest epoch of Russian history,’ was the verdict of the eminent critic Belinsky.

Dubrovsky, the tale of a young officer whose father, like Naboth, is ousted from his small estate by an unscrupulous neighbour, is one of Pushkin’s masterpieces. Melodramatic in subject, it is extremely simple in style. The fairly elaborate plot develops swiftly against a background which presents an illuminating picture of rural conditions in Russia and of Russian legal procedure under Catherine II. The two noblemen, Troyekurov and Vereisky, with the Byronic hero, the young Dubrovsky, are impressive creations in Pushkin’s portrait gallery. The heroine is more of a lay figure – in all his prose stories except the historical ones Pushkin seems to have been more interested in his men than in his women characters. An almost exclusive diet of a little gentle music, a great many French novels, and no companionship, makes them eager to Suffer in one role after another – any role so long as they can dramatize themselves into the centre of the stage. This time the heroine goes to the altar to wed her elderly suitor, expecting until the last second to be rescued and carried off by the brigand. But the brigand arrives late and unhesitatingly she switches into the new part of the loyal wife.

A word as to Pushkin’s use of landscape, which he introduces only when it is needed as a physical setting. For him nature is a visual phenomenon, never to be endowed with emotional content in order to add to a mood. In Dubrovsky there is an almost laconic description of the Volga: ‘The Volga flowed past outside; loaded barges under full sail floated by, and little fishing boats… flashed here and there.