Alexander Pushkin

“What is a poet?  Someone who writes poems? Of course not.  One is a poet not because one writes poems, but one writes poems, bringing words in harmony with sounds, because one is a child of harmony—because one is a poet”.
The Poet’s Mission

1799-1811 Childhood

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on June 6, 1799 (May 26, 1799 according to the Julian calendar used in Russia until 1917.  All dates that follow will be given as Pushkin experienced them, “in the old style”).  The poet’s father, Sergey Lvovich Pushkin, came from an illustrious, if impoverished, noble family. He was known for his wit, French library, and literary salons, in which he read Molière aloud.  The poet’s mother Nadyezhda Osipovna, née Gannibal, was known as “la belle créole”.  Her black grandfather, Ibrahim Gannibal, had been kidnapped in childhood from Central Africa, sold by slave traders to the Turks, and then bought and sent as a “gift” to Tsar Peter the Great.  Peter baptized the boy Abraham, raised him fondly, and sent him to study military engineering at Vauban’s academy in France.  Abraham became Russia’s chief fortress builder, and wrote textbooks in French on military engineering.  Proud of his African heritage, he chose his last name in honor of the great Carthaginian general Hannibal.  Repeatedly decorated for valiant service, he rose to the rank of General en chef of the Imperial Russian Army; Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, endowed him with estates, including Mikhailovskoye, in Pskov Province.  Upon retirement, the former slave had become a Russian nobleman—owning 800 serfs (white slaves) himself.  Pushkin inherited many of his great-grandfather’s African features, including thick lips, somewhat frizzy hair, and tan-colored skin. On his writing desk he kept an inkwell with a statuette of Negroes unloading cotton bales, and joked proudly of being a “Moor”:

Most biographers are harsh to Pushkin’s parents.  His mother is portrayed as charming but cold, neglectful, and moody.  “She could sulk for days, months, even years” one grandson recalled. In fairness, eight surviving children (of whom Pushkin was the second) would be hard for anyone to handle, but for some reason she favored the poet’s younger brother Lev, and was noticeably unaffectionate with that enfant terrible, her restless, brilliant eldest son, Alexander.  Some degree of connective warmth between the poet and his mother seems to have been attained only in their last few years of life; one senses in many of Pushkin’s deepest love lyrics a grieving and yearning for the mother he missed in childhood.  Perhaps it’s telling that in a fictional semi-autobiographic sketch, A Russian Pelham, Pushkin would portray himself as motherless.  As for his father:

My time under my father’s roof leaves little in the way of pleasant memories. Of course he loved me- but he showed no interest in me.  I was entrusted to a series of French tutors, who were constantly being hired and fired.  My first gouverneur was a desperate drunkard, the second, while not stupid or uneducated, could fly into such rages that he once tried to murder me for spilling a few drops of ink onto his waistcoat.  The third, who was kept in our house for a whole year, was totally and obviously insane.

“Hands on” parenting and “family values” were not part of Pushkin’s time.  Benign neglect was by contrast, considered bon ton and aristocratic.  Children who “should be seen, not heard” were routinely treated like all other household matters, to be iognored, and dealt with by servants.  Doubtless this left dep scars in the poet, but unlike his contemporary Dickens, childhood misery is not really his  theme. Instread, Pushkin preferred to just keep a bit of distance from “his dear ones”:

Yet how wrote many poems for his maternal grandmother Maria Alekseyevna.  (“My confidante of  magical old times”).  It was she who taught him Russian (at that time the first language of the Russian nobility was French).  He also loved his serf nanny Arina Rodionovna, who walked his pram in the park, and once got scolded by Tsar Paul I for forgetting to remove the boy’s baby cap in the august presence of the Sovereign (an omen perhaps, of problems to come).   Childhood summers were spent in Maria Alekseyevna’s country house in Zakharovo, near Moscow, by the ancestral lands of Tsar Boris Godunov.  Both his grandmother and his nanny mixed maternal warmth and affection with the Russian language itself—and great storytelling:

Even without dread tales, Pushkin seems to have had trouble sleeping all his life. (“I can’t sleep, fire’s out, no light…”, Remembrance.  Is insomnia an occupational hazards of being a poet?). One day when he was seven, Grandmother found him up before dawn, wandering the house entranced, saying: “I am writing poems”.   He and his older sister Olga used to write and act various skits in verse.  Pushkin’s earliest surviving poem--in French of course--described the flop of his first world premiere:

Already at the age of seven, we can hear the first strains of Pushkin’s voice : ironic detachment, self-deprecating wit, light-hearted, mischievous humor – masking, perhaps, a little sadness and inner loneliness… Perhaps the truest portrait of Pushkin’s childhood is the description of Tatyana’s upbringing in Eugene Onegin, Book II, xxv-xxix.  From childhood, Pushkin had the free run of his father’s extensive, mostly French-language library: Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, Horace, Montaigne, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Beaumarchais, Laclos, St. Preux, Richardson, Sterne, Defoe, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau…young Pushkin devoured them all, while lapping up bons mots at his father’s literary soirées. A French houseguest exclaimed:  “What an amazing child!  How quickly he understands everything! May this boy live and live; you will see what will come of him!”   Between French tutors, and houseguests, and his father’s library, Pushkin became so fluent in French, that later his schoolmates at the Lycée nicknamed him “the Frenchman”.   Suckled by nanny and grandma in Russian singsong fairy tales, while losing himself in the heady brilliance of his father’s library and salon must have made him uniquely suited to one day transform his language, and to use it like Peter the Great used St. Petersburg (in Pushkin’s phrase)  “to open a window onto Europe”.   Pushkin’s unique ability to straddle worlds, and be at once at home in two totally conflicting realities was a gift even of his infancy.  It is fair to say that the  “sunshine of Russian poetry” began as a child of the French Enlightenment.