Alexander Pushkin (Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, Александр Сергеевич Пушкин; born 6 June 1799, New Style – died February 1837) is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature; the United Nations celebrates its Russian Language Day on his birthday.[1] A remarkable share of what the world reads of him was written in one place: Boldino (Болдино), his family's estate in the Nizhny Novgorod province, about 230 kilometres (145 miles) from Nizhny Novgorod — the city on the Volga at the mouth of the Oka, called Gorky from 1932 to 1990.[2][3]

Pushkin spent three autumns in Boldino, in 1830, 1833 and 1834 — about five months in all — and wrote more than sixty works there, among them The Tales of Belkin, the Little Tragedies, the last chapters of Eugene Onegin, The Bronze Horseman and nearly all his famous fairy tales. The "Boldino autumn" has become a Russian byword for a sudden creative surge.[2][4] On his way to the Urals in 1833 Pushkin also spent two days in Nizhny Novgorod itself, and the suspicion with which the provincial governor met him became, by Pushkin's own account, the germ of Nikolai Gogol's comedy The Government Inspector.[5][6] The estate is now the Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve, and its branch in Nizhny Novgorod occupies the former hotel where the poet stayed.[2]

The Boldino autumn of 1830

In the spring of 1830 Pushkin became engaged to Natalia Goncharova. To set up house he needed money, and on 27 June his father, Sergei Lvovich Pushkin, made over to him part of the village of Kistenevo (Кистенёво) near Boldino with two hundred serfs; to take possession Pushkin had to travel there in person. The summer brought one delay after another: his uncle Vasily Pushkin died on 20 August, and a quarrel with his future mother-in-law put the wedding itself in doubt. Cholera had broken out in the Astrakhan and Saratov provinces and was moving towards Nizhny Novgorod.[7] (Dates of 19th-century events in Russia in this article follow the Julian calendar then in use there, twelve days behind the Western one.)

On 31 August Pushkin left Moscow and wrote to his friend and publisher Pyotr Pletnev:[7]

Autumn is coming. This is my favourite time — my health usually grows stronger — the season of my literary labours begins — and I have to fuss about a dowry and a wedding that we will celebrate God knows when.

— Pushkin to Pletnev, 31 August 1830[7]

He travelled through Vladimir, Murom and Arzamas and on the way met people fleeing the epidemic from the Makaryev Fair.[8] On 3 September he reached Boldino for the first time in his life.[8] The estate had belonged to the Pushkins for two and a half centuries: documents of 1585 record its grant to Evstafy Pushkin, a voivode in the service of Ivan the Terrible, and in 1740 it passed to the poet's grandfather Lev Pushkin, who began building the manor house and the stone Church of the Assumption.[9] Six days after arriving Pushkin wrote to Pletnev:

Ah, my dear! What a delight this countryside is! Imagine: steppe and steppe; not a soul of a neighbour; ride as much as you like, write at home as much as you please, nobody will disturb you.

— Pushkin to Pletnev, Boldino, 9 September 1830[10]

By 20 September the business was done and he had taken possession of Kistenevo, but the cholera quarantines closed the roads.[8] He set out twice and twice had to turn back; in early October he was even appointed a district overseer for the epidemic and with great difficulty got himself released.[11][12] Only on 27 or 28 November did a travel certificate arrive from Nizhny Novgorod. He left on 29 November, was held again at the Platava quarantine on the road to Moscow and reached the city on 5 December.[12]

What he brought back he listed in a letter to Pletnev, "in secret": the last two chapters of Eugene Onegin, "completely ready for print"; a tale in octaves (The Little House in Kolomna); four "dramatic scenes, or little tragedies" — The Covetous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, A Feast in Time of Plague and Don Juan (later known as The Stone Guest); about thirty shorter poems; and five prose tales, at which his friend Yevgeny Baratynsky "neighs and thrashes about" — the future Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, with "The Shot", "The Snowstorm" and "The Stationmaster".[11][13] The same autumn produced the poems "Demons" and "Elegy", The History of the Village of Goryukhino and fairy tales.[13][8] On 28 November he drafted a preface for the final chapters of Onegin; a tenth chapter, too dangerous for the censor, was written in Boldino and burnt there, surviving only in coded fragments.[14]

I will tell you a secret: I have been writing in Boldino as I have not written for a long time.

— Pushkin to Pletnev, Moscow, 9 December 1830[11]

Two days in Nizhny Novgorod, 1833

In 1833 Pushkin was writing a history of the Pugachev rebellion of the 1770s and set out to see its places with his own eyes: Kazan, Simbirsk, Orenburg and the Ural Cossack country.[5][8][15] He reached Nizhny Novgorod on 2 September 1833, on the fifth day from Moscow, and wrote to his wife the same day that he had only had time for the bathhouse; of the town he would say only, in French, that "the streets are wide and well paved, the houses solidly built". He was off to the fair, "which is showing its last tricks", and would leave for Kazan the next day.[15]

In a second letter that evening he reported a visit to the military governor, General Mikhail Buturlin:[16]

Today I called on the governor, General Buturlin. He and his wife received me very nicely and kindly; he persuaded me to dine with him tomorrow. The fair is over. I walked through the empty stalls. They made on me the impression of the departure from a ball, when the Goncharovs' carriage has already driven away.

— Pushkin to his wife, Nizhny Novgorod, 2 September 1833[16]

Pushkin stayed at the hotel of the merchant Dmitry Deulin, one of the best in the town, on what is now Minin and Pozharsky Square next to the Kremlin. In two days he saw the post office, the Kremlin, the city archive and the fair, and met local society.[5] He left on 3 September, probably after the governor's dinner, and reached Kazan late on the 5th.[17]

The governor's courtesy concealed a suspicion. According to a story Pushkin later told himself, recorded in notes that the historian Pyotr Bartenev published in 1865, Buturlin wrote to the military governor of Orenburg, Vasily Perovsky, an old friend of the poet, with whom Pushkin was staying:[17]

Pushkin passed through here recently. Knowing who he is, I received him kindly, but I must confess I cannot believe he is travelling for documents on the Pugachev rebellion; he must have been given a secret commission to gather information about irregularities. You know my goodwill towards you; I considered it my duty to advise you to be more careful.

— M. P. Buturlin to V. A. Perovsky, as recounted in the notes published by Bartenev[17]

One morning in Orenburg, probably on 20 September, Pushkin was woken by "a terrible roar of laughter": Perovsky stood over him with the letter in his hand.[6][17] The same notes say that this gave Pushkin the idea of a comedy about a man mistaken for an inspector, which he later passed on to Gogol; the writer Vladimir Sollogub, who also named another anecdote among its sources, recalled that Pushkin "always called himself the godfather" of The Government Inspector.[17][6] Among Pushkin's papers there is a plan from 1833–1834 that begins: "Crispin arrives in the province N. for the fair — he is taken for an ambassador… The governor is an honest fool — the governor's wife flirts with him — Crispin asks for the daughter's hand."[17]

The suspicion was not only Buturlin's private worry. The office of the Nizhny Novgorod military governor asked Perovsky to place the poet under secret watch — but its paper was dated 9 October and reached Orenburg on 23 October, when Pushkin had long been in Boldino. Perovsky replied that Pushkin had stayed in his own house and that the journey "had no other object than the historical research he needed".[17] On 11 November 1833 the district police officer reported to the governor from Lukoyanov uyezd: "The said Mr Pushkin is residing in the Lukoyanov uyezd, in the village of Boldino. During his stay, as is known to me, he has been occupied solely with writing, has visited none of the neighbours and has received no one."[17]

The second and third autumns

Pushkin arrived in Boldino from the Urals on 1 October 1833.[18][8] In about forty days he finished The History of Pugachev and wrote the narrative poems Angelo and The Bronze Horseman, the fairy tales of the fisherman and the fish and of the dead princess and the seven knights, translations from Adam Mickiewicz and the poem "Autumn".[8] He described his routine to his wife:

I wake up at seven, drink coffee and lie in bed until three. I have recently got into my stride and have already written a heap. At three I get on a horse, at five into the bath, and then I dine on potatoes and buckwheat porridge. Until nine I read. There is my day for you, and they are all alike.

— Pushkin to his wife, Boldino, 30 October 1833[19]

He left on 9 November 1833. A year later, on 13 September 1834, he came to Boldino for the last time and found the yard "white" with early snow; the great surge of the first two autumns did not return, and the only work of the third was The Tale of the Golden Cockerel; by 18 October he was back in St Petersburg.[8] The plot of the Golden Cockerel, as the poet Anna Akhmatova showed in 1933, comes not from folklore but from the American writer Washington Irving's "Legend of the Arabian Astrologer".[20] Of Pushkin's famous fairy tales, all except The Tale of Tsar Saltan were written in Boldino.[4]

Pushkin's three Boldino autumns
YearIn BoldinoMain works
18303 September – 29 NovemberThe Tales of Belkin; the four Little Tragedies; last chapters of Eugene Onegin; The Little House in Kolomna; about 30 lyric poems[11][12]
18331 October – 9 NovemberThe History of Pugachev; The Bronze Horseman; Angelo; two fairy tales; "Autumn"[8]
1834from 13 SeptemberThe Tale of the Golden Cockerel[8]

From the Nizhny Novgorod countryside to the world

What was written in a remote corner of the Nizhny Novgorod province went far beyond it. The Tale of the Golden Cockerel became Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera, composed in 1907 and first performed in Moscow on 24 September 1909; it is still in the repertoire of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg.[21] Anna Akhmatova wrote of the four short plays of 1830:

Perhaps in none of the works of world poetry are the menacing questions of morality posed as sharply as in Pushkin's "Little Tragedies".

— Anna Akhmatova, quoted by the Commission of the Russian Federation for UNESCO[13]

In 2020, when much of the world was in lockdown, the Russian Commission for UNESCO retold the story of Pushkin's cholera quarantine as "a lesson on how to stay creative and active during a quarantine".[13]

The Pushkins and the Nizhny Novgorod land

Pushkin was in Nizhny Novgorod only once, but his family's ties to the province were old. The Pushkins held Boldino from the time of Ivan the Terrible; in the 17th century they received it as a hereditary estate for defending Moscow against the Poles.[9][5] An ancestor, Grigory Gavrilovich Pushkin, held the post of namestnik (governor) of Nizhny Novgorod in the mid-17th century; the poet's great-grandmother Sara Rzhevskaya lived in the town, and his uncle Vasily Pushkin spent the war years of 1812–1813 there as an evacuee.[5] The neighbouring estate of Lvovka (Львовка) was last owned by the poet's son, General Alexander Alexandrovich Pushkin, and its house and avenues survive.[2]

Memory

During the revolution of 1917, when manor houses were burning across Russia — including Pushkin's other family estate, Mikhailovskoye — the peasants of Boldino saved the house, the landscape park with its cascade of ponds and the estate office. According to the museum, it is the only place where an authentic manor house of the Pushkin family survives.[2] The museum opened in 1949. The manor has since been restored from archive documents and excavations: the house holds the exhibition "Pushkin in Boldino" with the study where he worked, the restored Church of the Assumption, begun by his grandfather, was consecrated in the year of the poet's birth, and the former clergy houses are now a museum of Pushkin's fairy tales. Nine kilometres away, Lvovka has a museum of the characters of The Tales of Belkin and a restored parish school, and the museum-reserve also includes the Luchinnik grove, the poet's favourite place for walks.[2][4]

Every year on the first weekend of June Boldino celebrates the poet's birthday; since 2024 it has hosted the international arts festival "Pushkin without Borders", and the scholarly conference "Boldino Readings" brings literary scholars from Russia and abroad.[2][8]

In Nizhny Novgorod the former Deulin hotel is now the Nizhny Novgorod Pushkin Museum, a branch of the Boldino museum. A bronze plaque with a relief portrait of the poet against the Kremlin, by the sculptor Ivan Lukin, reads: "Here, in the former hotel, A. S. Pushkin stayed on 2–3 September 1833." For its 25th anniversary, on 6 June 2024, the museum opened a new exhibition, "Pushkin and the Nizhny Novgorod of Pushkin's time".[5]

The city's opera and ballet theatre has borne Pushkin's name since 10 February 1937, the centenary of his death; it runs a festival called "Boldino Autumn", and a bust of the poet stands at its entrance.[22] Nizhny Novgorod also has a Pushkin Park and a Pushkin Street.

See also

Sources

  1. United Nations — "Russian Language Day", UN observances page (archive)
  2. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "Pages of history and the present day", official website (in Russian) (archive)
  3. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "How to get to Bolshoye Boldino", official website (in Russian) (archive)
  4. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "A remote abode of work and bliss…", About the museum (English page) (archive)
  5. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "Nizhny Novgorod Pushkin Museum", page of the branch (in Russian) (archive)
  6. All-Russian A. S. Pushkin Museum (St Petersburg) — "A. S. Pushkin in Orenburg" (in Russian) (archive)
  7. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "The Boldino autumn day by day: prehistory. Pushkin sets out for Boldino" (in Russian) (archive)
  8. Nizhny Novgorod State Regional Universal Scientific Library — "Literary map of the Nizhny Novgorod region": Alexander Pushkin and the Nizhny Novgorod land (with the Faculty of Philology of Lobachevsky University) (in Russian) (archive)
  9. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "The Boldino autumn day by day: 3 September 1830" (in Russian)
  10. RVB (Russian Virtual Library) — A. S. Pushkin, letter to P. A. Pletnev, Boldino, 9 September 1830, in: Collected Works in 10 volumes, vol. 9 (Moscow, 1959–1962) (in Russian)
  11. RVB (Russian Virtual Library) — A. S. Pushkin, letter to P. A. Pletnev, Moscow, 9 December 1830, in: Collected Works in 10 volumes, vol. 9 (in Russian) (archive)
  12. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "The Boldino autumn day by day: 30 November 1830. Departure from Boldino", with Pushkin's letters from the Platava quarantine (in Russian)
  13. Commission of the Russian Federation for UNESCO — "…Not for a Long Time Have I Written as Productively as I Have in Boldino", 1 October 2020 (archive)
  14. Boldino Pushkin Museum-Reserve — "The Boldino autumn day by day: 28 November 1830. Preface to Eugene Onegin" (in Russian)
  15. RVB (Russian Virtual Library) — A. S. Pushkin, first letter to N. N. Pushkina, Nizhny Novgorod, 2 September 1833, in: Collected Works in 10 volumes, vol. 10 (in Russian)
  16. RVB (Russian Virtual Library) — A. S. Pushkin, second letter to N. N. Pushkina, Nizhny Novgorod, 2 September 1833, in: Collected Works in 10 volumes, vol. 10 (in Russian)
  17. Fundamental Electronic Library (FEB) — Commentary by L. B. Modzalevsky to Pushkin. Letters, vol. 3: 1831–1833 (Moscow–Leningrad: Academia, 1935), notes to the letters of September–November 1833 (in Russian) (archive)
  18. RVB (Russian Virtual Library) — A. S. Pushkin, letter to N. N. Pushkina, Boldino, 2 October 1833, in: Collected Works in 10 volumes, vol. 10 (in Russian) (archive)
  19. RVB (Russian Virtual Library) — A. S. Pushkin, letter to N. N. Pushkina, Boldino, 30 October 1833, in: Collected Works in 10 volumes, vol. 10 (in Russian)
  20. Foreign Language Teaching (Sofia) — Suren Zolyan, "A. Akhmatova, 'Pushkin's Last Fairy Tale'", vol. 43, no. 3, 2016, p. 291 ff. (in Russian)
  21. Mariinsky Theatre — "The Golden Cockerel", opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, production page (archive)
  22. Nizhny Novgorod State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre named after A. S. Pushkin — "History of the theatre" (in Russian)