Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (9 page)

The affair was apparently not the first for Lise. Like many couples of the era, she and her husband had settled into an arrangement that allowed both partners a considerable degree of sexual license. The problem was Pushkin’s insistence on flouting a relationship that was intended, by social convention, to remain decorously unspoken. As one of Pushkin’s biographers has noted, the poet bent to the common temptation of despising those one has injured.
¹⁴
His weapon of choice was the epigram. “Half milord, half shopkeeper” was one quick summary he gave of Vorontsov’s character. “Half hero, half ignoramus” was another.

Those ill-considered lines—which circulated widely in several different versions—clearly reflected Pushkin’s public attitude toward Vorontsov. It was a careless and dangerous way of behaving. Vorontsov was not only his lover’s husband—and by rights deserving of some public respect, even though now a known cuckold—but also Pushkin’s boss. After all, the poet’s only reason for being in Odessa was to serve on the governor-general’s staff. A dismissal without a recommendation for further employment meant that Pushkin would be in genuine exile, wandering about the Russian plains without promise of aid or station, and still prevented from returning to St. Petersburg. But Vorontsov was in a bind too. Since the tsar had banished Pushkin, the sovereign’s express permission was necessary to remove him from the governor-general’s care. “Deliver me from Pushkin,” Vorontsov wrote to the Russian foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, in the spring of 1824. “He may be an excellent fellow and a good poet, but I don’t want to have him any longer, either in Odessa or Kishinev.”
¹⁵

Suddenly, in one of those miraculous and disastrous occurrences for which Odessa was already becoming famous, a new calamity descended on the city and provided the vehicle of Vorontsov’s unexpected deliverance: an infestation of locusts. The surrounding countryside was routinely subjected to massive locust attacks, a nearly annual occurrence that could ruin crops, denude trees, and eat up fodder intended for cattle and horses. Millions of insects, their wings clacking and popping overhead, formed a black cloud that hung like thick smoke over fields and gardens.

Once the locusts had arrived, the options for local citizens were tragically—and comically—few. The main recourse was to create enough noise to scare the insects away. One English lady, living with her merchant husband in a country villa, organized an annual parade to deal with the pests. First came her husband swinging a large bell, then the gardener banging on a watering bucket, then the footmen clanging on shovels, followed by the housemaids striking pots and kettles, and lastly the children tapping with toasting forks on tea boards.
¹⁶
Even in the city, wrote one visitor upon arriving by ship, “a fearful battle [was] raging between the inhabitants and the ruthless enemies of vegetation. Every noisy weapon, from pistol to a mortar, from kettle-drum to a tin casserole, was rattling like thunder in the hands of the horrified citizens, for the purpose of defending their little domains.”
¹⁷

Like Richelieu during the plague crisis a decade earlier, Vorontsov reckoned that more information about the relative size of each year’s locust brood could contribute to devising a better strategy for dealing with the expected attack. In May, the governor-general officially ordered Pushkin to proceed through several rural districts and survey the extent of the locust egg population, assess the efficacy of efforts to destroy the eggs before they hatched later in the summer, and offer his conclusions in a written report.

It was a shocking assignment. Pushkin had never penned a single official document throughout his time in government service. Rustication, to count locust eggs no less, was clearly a calculated rebuff. Pushkin protested in writing. He was a littérateur of some renown, he said. He was a self-confessed failure as a government official and would make a hash of the job. He had an aneurysm that might pop at any moment. None of that persuaded Vorontsov. Pushkin was soon dispatched on his mission against the tiny invaders.
¹⁸

Vorontsov’s move had its desired effect. After a few weeks in the countryside, Pushkin submitted his resignation from the civil service. It was a foolhardy move, but perhaps the only honorable one he could make. He had publicly embarrassed a man of considerable power. Odessan society had turned against him, not for over-stepping the bounds of sexual propriety but for doing so in such an ungentlemanly fashion. By the middle of the summer, his fate had been decided. Vorontsov petitioned the central authorities for the poet’s removal from Odessa, and the tsar responded favorably.

But the affair and Vorontsov’s personal feelings toward Pushkin probably played a secondary role in the governor-general’s decision to seek his transfer from Odessa. Given the customary randiness of Odessa’s high society, flamboyant adultery and unseemly talk of it were hardly news. The more important of Pushkin’s transgressions—one that was as typically Odessan as the promiscuity of the provincial gentry—involved the rumor of revolution.

A
FEW YEARS
before his arrival in Odessa, Pushkin wrote to a correspondent about a series of “occurrences of importance not only for our land, but for all Europe.”
¹⁹
In 1814 a secret organization of Greek patriots called Philike Hetairia, or the Society of Friends, had been founded in Odessa. Their goal was to rally the Greek diaspora throughout southeastern Europe and launch a revolt to wrest ancient Christian lands—from Constantinople to the Greek mainland—from the control of the Ottoman Muslims. Odessa provided the ideal environment for hatching revolutionary plans.

It was a city that political radicals could enter with relative ease, located far from other major centers of imperial governance. A climate of social freedom was readily apparent. Public smoking, fashions that bordered on the scandalous, and public discussion of contentious issues from international affairs to taxes were relatively uncommon privileges in St. Petersburg or Moscow. But they were part of normal street life in Odessa. Dozens of secret societies—some quasi-religious such as the Freemasons, others vaguely political and modeled on the Italian Carbonari, still others secret for the sake of being secret—enrolled radical intellectuals, public officials, and sons of noble families.

As a free port, the city attracted more and more ships each year. New political ideas were filling up Odessa’s numerous restaurants and drinking establishments just as wheat was filling up the newly constructed silos near the harbor. “A gentleman, with whom I am acquainted calls Odessa the world’s end,” reported an English visitor in the early 1820s, “it is, certainly, a place by itself—a singular spot—a semi-oriental city.”
²⁰
Its very location, far removed from the Russian imperial capitals and looking out on a teetering Ottoman Empire, allowed the city to become a hotbed of political intrigue. Italians seeking to throw off Bourbon kings or establish a constitutional monarchy, Greeks and Romanians desiring an end to Muslim domination, and Russians pushing a reformed version of tsarist autocracy all found haven there.

Philike Hetairia’s members were generally disorganized, truculent, and only waveringly loyal, but their underground machinations linked up with geopolitical changes already taking place in the rest of Europe. Farther to the south, patriots in Greece revolted against their Ottoman rulers and declared independence. Soon, other Ottoman dependencies—such as Odessa’s immediate neighbors to the west, the Romanian principalities of Moldova and Wallachia—launched their own bids for freedom. In February of 1821, a ragtag army under Alexandros Ypsilantis, a Greek in Russian military service and one of Philike Hetairia’s leaders, crossed the Prut River separating Bessarabia from the Ottoman vassal principality of Moldova, seeking to spark a full-scale uprising of Christian peasants—the event that Pushkin referred to as “occurences” of importance to both Russia and Europe. Contemporary observers compared it to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the beginning of what many hoped would be a large-scale uprising of Balkan and Mediterranean Christians against the Muslim empire. Romantics from across Europe flocked to the Greek cause, just as their fathers had moved east to join Catherine’s army and navy a generation earlier. Lord Byron—whose work had been an inspiration to Pushkin—died during the Greek war for independence a few years later.

The Greek revolt inaugurated a decade of struggle for the future of southeastern Europe. Greek guerrillas and irregular troops—the
klephts
and
armatoloi
, dressed in their colorful highland garb and wielding scimitars and deadly long muskets—staged small attacks and pitched battles against Ottoman forces throughout the 1820s. Conservative European powers, at first wary of any hint of revolution, gradually sought to manage the Greek crisis through diplomatic overtures to the Ottoman sultan. Russia joined the struggle informally in 1827, helping to destroy an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet in the Mediterranean at the Battle of Navarino. A year later, Russia entered a brief war with the sultan (1828–29) to ensure freedom of shipping on the Black Sea, which had been placed in peril by Ottoman efforts to quell the Balkan rebels.

Odessa was the birthplace of the Greek revolution, and sympathies there were strong. The problem for Russian authorities was that revolution—like locusts and the plague—was not choosy about its host. What had begun as a movement among Greek-speaking soldiers and intellectuals aimed against the Muslim Ottomans could easily infect Russia itself. Mutinies against the tsar were not unknown. The elite Semyonovsky Guards in St. Petersburg had revolted in the fall of 1820 in protest over harsh military discipline. The mutiny was quickly suppressed, but it illustrated the fact that Russia was not immune to the revolutionary feelings circulating throughout Europe. Secret societies such as Philike Hetairia were the chief vector for spreading ideas of liberty and political reform.

Pushkin had long been suspected of flirting with radical ideas, and his sojourn on the southern frontier had only increased his antipathy to the harshest elements of the tsar’s policies. Vorontsov was able to use those suspicions to his advantage. In his written complaints to central authorities, he hinted at Pushkin’s radical, perhaps even republican, politics—gleaned as much from the reports of provincial gossips as from the writer’s own occasional poems in praise of liberty. By the summer of 1824, St. Petersburg had become convinced of the dangers of leaving the poet relatively unsupervised in the hothouse environment of Odessa. Pushkin was to be dismissed from public service, but he still needed to be watched. Otherwise, “making use of his independent position, he will, without doubt, disseminate more and more widely those harmful ideas which he holds and will oblige the authorities to employ against him the most severe measures,” wrote Nesselrode to Vorontsov.
²¹

Pushkin was to be sent home, to his family’s country estate at Mikhailovskoye, in Pskov province, where he would have little opportunity to get into trouble and could be easily invigilated from the capital. On July 29, 1824, he set out on the long journey north, leaving Lise and Odessa forever. Nine months later, Lise gave birth to a daughter, Sophie. Odessa gossips whispered that the child was Pushkin’s, a rumor that the poet did little to squelch. After all, their love story would soon be immortalized in other ways, not just in the marginal doodles of the
Evgeny Onegin
manuscript but, in fictionalized and poetic code, in the storyline itself. Like the initially besotted Lise Vorontsova, one of the central characters, Tatyana Larina, ultimately chooses loyalty to her husband over imprudent love. Wisps of Odessa remained in the work of a writer who went on to become Russia’s national poet and the supreme architect of the literary Russian language.

For reasons both personal and political, Vorontsov had secured Pushkin’s removal from Odessa. But the city’s growing reputation for radicalism came close to tarnishing Vorontsov himself. Tsar Alexander I had been a liberal-minded reformer in his early years on the throne. However, the revolutionary swells that seemed to threaten the post-Napoleonic order made him increasingly suspicious of those around him. In December of 1825, during a journey to New Russia, he died suddenly—and heirless—in Taganrog. Rumors flew. Had the tsar been assassinated? Was he really dead? The public mood was tense and the outcome of the imperial succession uncertain. As his body was being transported back to St. Petersburg, Alexander’s younger brother Nicholas announced after some delay that he would become tsar, seemingly skipping over the elder brother and next in line to the throne, Constantine.

The uncertainty over the succession—and the public perception that Nicholas was purposefully bypassing Constantine—sparked a rebellion. That icy winter in St. Petersburg, a group of military officers and their sympathizers refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas. On December 14, three thousand mutinous troops massed in Senate Square, arrayed against a far larger number loyal to Nicholas. A few cannon shots dispersed the protestors, leaving scores dead and injured. Sweeping arrests and dismissals followed. Five of the ringleaders—liberal activists and intellectuals known to history as the Decembrists—were eventually hanged.

In Odessa, the echoes of the Decembrist movement were profoundly felt. One of the centers of liberal activism had been Tulchin, a small garrison town to the north of Odessa, where young nobles, regimental officers, and writers exchanged ideas of liberty, social reform, and even an end to the tsarist monarchy. The suspicions of the new tsar, Nicholas I, naturally fell on the city and its governor-general, whose liberal disposition and progressive ideas—formed in English drawing rooms and Cambridge debating clubs—seemed dangerously close to the rebellious thinking of the Decembrists.