The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

102 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

writer, and noble birth. The poet possessed a distinguished genealogy of which he was very proud. On his father’s side the Pushkins were an ancient, although impoverished and marginalized, boyar family. His exotic mother, known as “the beautiful Creole,” was a granddaughter of Abram Gannibal, a black African who had been captured as a boy and educated as a favorite of Peter the Great (rising to rank Four, major general). Scarcely out of his teens, Pushkin was already celebrated as Russia’s supreme poet. But he never “served the state” with distinction on its terms - indeed, he was arrested and exiled in 1820 for several free-thinking poems and remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life.

Pushkin was to rise only one notch above the miserably low rank assigned him upon graduation from his boarding school, St. Petersburg’s imperial Lycee: the Tenth (civilian collegiate secretary). Many of his best friends were dashing officers. Pushkin felt his unglamorous official status keenly; but when the politically suspect and financially strapped poet volunteered for the army in 1829, he was turned down. In 1831 he was promoted to titular councilor (rank Nine), with access to imperial archives. He did receive one further dubious honor, however. On New Year’s Eve, 1834, Tsar Nicholas, desiring to gaze on Pushkin’s breathtakingly beautiful wife at imperial balls, named the poet a “kammerjunker” or Gentleman of the Bedchamber (court rank Eleven; the courtier ranks had no equivalent to civilian Ten). Pushkin considered this rank humiliating for someone of his years and stature, and furthermore it obliged him to escort his wife to palace events. Outraged, he avoided wearing the hated green uniform and (so it was said) even sabotaged it, ripping off a button and refusing to repair it.4 After Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel defending his wife’s honor in January 1837, his widow bravely respected his wish to be buried in his frock coat, not in uniform - a gesture that greatly irritated the tsar. When his opponent, the young and well-connected French officer Georges d’Anthes, was eventually deported from Russia, the reason given was “for killing the kammerjunker Pushkin.”

Birth, service rank, and social status came together for Pushkin in the concept of honnete homme, a man of honor. This image (or ego ideal) hovers constantly over Pushkin’s heroes. It sits at the center of his historical novel on Pugachov’s rebellion, The Captains Daughter (1836), which is organized entirely around the nurturing, testing, and defining of honorable behavior. In the final scenes of Boris Godunov (1825), Pyotr Basmanov, the tsar’s brilliant military commander and a man of non-princely birth, defects to the Pretender. He is urged to do so by Gavrila Pushkin, ancestor of the poet and military aide to the invading False Dmitry. Basmanov openly confesses that he feels trapped in the traditional Muscovite system, where a princely pedigree guaranteed incompetents a