Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (8 page)

B
Y THE
1820s, the province of New Russia was dotted with towns and river ports. New roads had been cut across the steppe. Colonies of German, Bulgarian, and Serbian farmers made the prairie bloom. It was administered by a generation of talented administrators sent south to tame the frontier and remake the
dikoe pole
, or the “wild field,” as it was known in Russian.

For all these improvements, it was also still a place of exile. The frontier towns and ports of New Russia, with their masses of bedraggled peasants recently arrived from the countryside, newly settled nomadic herders, and Mediterranean and Levantine sailors, were a far cry from the well-kept streets and urban bustle of the imperial capitals. They were fitting destinations for political agitators or self-important men of letters who, while not presenting a direct threat to the power of the tsar, might find their libertinism and youthful insolence an affront to the powerful classes in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Such was the case with Alexander Pushkin.

A notorious romantic and a writer of fiery and dyspeptic spirit, his curly hair fashionably unkempt and a mass of whiskers trailing down his cheeks, Pushkin was a descendant of Avram Gannibal, an African who had been reared in the court of Peter the Great and was later granted landholding rights by the tsar. The official reason for Pushkin’s relegation to the south was his transfer from a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to government service helping to oversee the colonization of the southern territories. In reality his journey was a form of internal exile. Already a poet and publicist of some note while still in his late teens, Pushkin pioneered the Russian literary genre that mixed lyrical imagery with political radicalism, cloaking calls for reforming the stifling tsarist autocracy in language infused with romantic suffering. When he emerged as one of the most vocal members of the coterie of young writers and artists that swirled through the salon society of St. Petersburg, he increasingly came under the attention of government censors, who ordered his banishment from the capital in 1820.

Pushkin spent the next three years on the southern plains, near the Caucasus Mountains and in the borderland district of Bessarabia, a land of rolling hills, sunflower fields, and Gypsy encampments. The region fueled his imagination and confirmed his self-image as a passionate outsider—in his own mind, a latter-day Ovid reduced to writing plaintive epistles from the Black Sea. “Accursed city Kishinev! the tongue would tire of berating you,” he wrote to one correspondent from the Bessarabian regional seat.
⁴
By 1823 his frequent requests to be transferred to Odessa had been granted, in large part because of the personal intervention of Vorontsov, who took pity on the poet. He was reassigned to the staff of New Russia’s governor-general.

Pushkin’s reputation at this stage was decidedly mixed. He had gained some renown as a clever writer, even if he had a habit of stepping over the line of propriety when making impromptu verses at parties or society dinners. He continued to publish in the literary press during his exile, and his southern meanderings added a wisp of orientalism to his work, an oeuvre that was already heavily influenced by the eastern themes and quaint Islamophilia of Lord Byron. Pushkin’s longing and lyrical “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” offered the poet’s reflections on the frailty of humanity and empire after viewing a delicately carved fountain in the old palace of the Tatar khan of Crimea, the same residence that had hosted Catherine and Potemkin several decades earlier. His poem “The Captive of the Caucasus,” born of his active imagination while viewing the majestic Caucasus Mountains at a distance, became the empire’s quintessential literary statement of its own wild south: a land of romantic natives, restless frontiersmen, and exotic beauty.

When Pushkin finally arrived in Odessa in the hot July of 1823, he came with a literary and public celebrity that made the transfer of his exile something of a public event. He was never at a loss for dinner invitations or drinking partners. He was known to the city’s substantial number of prostitutes, who were well acquainted with Greek and Italian sailors but rather less familiar with poets. He had spent the last three years wandering the empire’s far-flung borderlands (albeit in a good deal of luxury) and now found himself sloshing through dust and mud to attend a salon or late-evening supper. “I am again in Odessa and still cannot become accustomed to the European mode of life,” he wrote to his brother, Lev, in August.
⁵

The city had changed considerably since the time of de Ribas and Richelieu. The population was growing rapidly, on its way to tripling in size by mid-century to nearly 116,000 people. Occupying the site of the old Turkish fortress, a handsome stone palace for the new governor-general would soon rise at one end of Nikolaevsky Boulevard, to be completed by 1830. The state rooms on the ground floor were outfitted with doors, shutters, and chimney pieces from the Mikhailovsky Palace in St. Petersburg, the residence of the late Paul I (and the site of his murder). A billiard hall, a grand dining room, a large salon, and a library were decorated with elegant English furniture, while a separate “Turkish” chamber had a soaring ceiling, gilded fixtures, Persian carpets on the floor, and silk-covered divans arrayed around the walls. A library held the finest private collection of books, pictures, and samples of scientific instruments in the entire empire.
⁶

Elsewhere in the town, plastered facades with tile- or iron-covered roofs were going up around a circular plaza, soon to be flanked by a new local museum, public library, and government buildings. Hotels run by Genoese and other foreign entrepreneurs dotted the city. A selection of bars and lesser eating establishments catered to new arrivals. At the height of the commercial season, from April to October, the population could swell by as many as ten thousand people, as laborers, wagon-drivers, Russian and Polish landowners, and foreign merchants descended on the port, which still enjoyed the privilege of free trade with the wider world.
⁷
Were it not for the exoticism of this transient population, noted an English visitor during Vorontsov’s tenure, “Odessa may be said to be Petersburgh in miniature.”
⁸

Pushkin was still in his early twenties when he moved to Odessa, and he soon began his pursuit—and occasional conquest—of the local notables, married and single, young and old. There was the twenty-seven-year-old Karolina Soba
ska, still technically married to a wealthy Odessan businessman but living openly with the commander of military colonies in New Russia—while also working secretly as a government spy to ferret out political radicals. There was Amaliya Riznich, with a pronounced Roman nose and already pregnant when they first met.

Pushkin was a giddy and voluble correspondent on matters of love and sex, gossiping in infantile detail with many of his friends. “I’ll be glad to serve you / With my crazy conversation,” he wrote to Filipp Wiegel, a closeted gay friend who was serving as a tsarist official in Kishinev. “But, Wiegel,—spare my arse!”
⁹
But the most telling record of Pushkin’s loves during his days in Odessa comes from an unexpected source: his own doodles. In the marginalia of an early draft of his masterpiece
Evgeny Onegin
, a work he began in Bessarabia and continued while working for Vorontsov, tiny portraits of women and men frame the text—friends, acquaintances, people he saw on the street, and one after another of his obsessive loves. There, amid an angelic choir of widows and ingénues, dark-haired foreigners and fine-featured Russians, is a woman seven years his senior, someone with whose likeness he decorated the manuscript more often than any other—Vorontsov’s wife, Lise.

Alexander Pushkin.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

W
HEN EXACTLY
Lise and Pushkin first met is uncertain, but the small size of Odessa’s high society and the necessarily public life of the governor-general’s wife meant that they would have encountered one another at some point early in Pushkin’s stay. He had taken rooms in the Hôtel du Nord, located on Italian Street, but soon moved to another hotel nearer the sea, at the corner of Deribasovskaya and Richelieu streets, where he could take in the fresh air and recuperate after his sojourn in Bessarabia. (A desperate need to breathe the rejuvenating sea air was one of the reasons he had adduced for requesting a transfer to the coast.) From there, he regularly made his way to a calendar of events that packed the long, warm social season.

Lise enjoyed creative socializing, and the galas, balls, and suppers she organized were renowned across the empire. “It was difficult to leave Odessa,” complained a contemporary Russian visitor, “since I did not want to absent myself from the company of the count and countess, the likes of which are not to be found in other parts.”
¹⁰
The grand Vorontsov palace was not yet in existence during Pushkin’s time in Odessa, but the later parties that Lise staged there give some sense of the fêtes she probably organized even in lesser quarters.

A visitor to the Vorontsov palace might have descended into the residence’s grand salon around nine o’clock in the evening. A band would already be playing as the guests, some masked and others in fancy dress, perhaps in the tunic and trousers of a Russian coachman or the lace apron of a Swiss peasant, turned quadrilles on the parquet floor. Suddenly, a giant sugarloaf might glide onto the dance floor, out of which would pop an old man doing a lively jig. Amid the dancers, dressed in the brocaded and corded coatee of a Hussar cavalryman, was the Countess Vorontsova herself, welcoming the guests who had just arrived from their country estates or from the streets leading off Nikolaevsky Boulevard: General Lev Naryshkin, Vorontsov’s cousin, and his wife Olga; her family, the Potockis, the great Polish-Russian landholders; Baron Rainaud, a French hotelier (and Pushkin’s landlord); the Shcherbinins and the Blarembergs, the Pushchins and the Raevskys.
¹¹

With his newfound commercial success and a rebounding reputation—“The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” was on its way to publication, and printers were clamoring for rights to further editions of “The Captive of the Caucasus”—Pushkin’s natural swagger only increased. He may have met the countess in the autumn or early winter of 1823, perhaps at a seasonal ball or at one of the governor-general’s twice-weekly entertainments, over a session of parlor games or whist. Pushkin fell for her as quickly as Vorontsov had done just a few years earlier.

His affections, by all accounts, were returned. Lise was known to enjoy the flirtatious interactions that even a provincial city such as Odessa had raised to a high art. Pushkin’s witticisms and impromptu verses were a striking contrast to Vorontsov’s business-like bearing. More important, the governor-general, following established form among Russia’s noble class, had himself already taken a mistress, Olga Naryshkina, nearly a decade younger than Lise. Olga was married to a prominent general, but the affair was a public secret.
¹²

In the bitter winter of 1823–24, with the edges of the Black Sea encrusted in salty ice and the winds howling down unpaved streets from the flatlands beyond, the poet and the countess developed a relationship that soon became the scandal of Odessa society. The affair was probably consummated in early February, when Vorontsov was away in Kishinev, an encounter that Pushkin noted in the marginalia of the
Evgeny Onegin
manuscript as “soupé chez C. E. W.”—“had supper with Countess Elise Woronzoff,” using the French initials of her name.

As winter gave way to spring, and with the return of the governor-general to the city, the couple began meeting at a country villa owned by Baron Rainaud, the prominent hotelier. Rainaud had constructed a bathing area in the seaside cliffs bordering his rural estate. The hideaway, detached from the city but still close enough for the two lovers to slip away to throughout the season, produced one of the more plainly erotic of Pushkin’s short verses: