Pushkin. T. Binyon J.

were not above suspicion. ‘There was not the slightest strictness about her conversation or her behaviour,’ Wiegel noted, adding euphemistically: ‘if she had lived at the time of Pericles, history, no doubt, would have recorded her name together with those of Phryne and Laïs’⁴² – famous courtesans of the past. ‘Extremely small, with a scarcely noticeable bosom,’ Calypso ‘had a long, dry face, always rouged in the Turkish manner; a huge nose as it were divided her face from top to bottom; she had thick, long hair and huge fiery eyes made even more voluptuous by the use of kohl’;⁴³ and ‘a tender, attractive voice, not only when she spoke, but also when she sang to the guitar terrible, gloomy Turkish songs’.⁴⁴ But what excited Pushkin’s imagination ‘was the thought that at about fifteen she was supposed to have first known passion in the arms of Lord Byron, who was then travelling in Greece’.⁴⁵ If Vyazemsky came to Kishinev, Pushkin wrote, he would introduce him to ‘a Greek girl, who has exchanged kisses with Lord Byron’.⁴⁶ ‘You were born to set on fire/The imagination of poets,’ he told her.⁴⁷ A juxtaposition of Byron’s life with what is known of Calypso’s shows they can never have met. But in inventing the story, Calypso revealed an acute perception of psychology: in dalliance with her there was an extra titillation to be derived from the feeling that one was following, metaphorically, in Byron’s footsteps. Bulwer-Lytton is supposed to have gained a peculiar satisfaction from an affair with a woman whom Byron had loved, while the Marquis de Boissy, who married Teresa Guiccioli, would, it was reported, introduce her as ‘My wife, the Marquise de Boissy, Byron’s former mistress’.⁴⁸ Pushkin was not immune to this thrill.^*

      Meanwhile Inzov had put him to work. Peter Manega, a Rumanian Greek who had studied law in Paris, had produced for Inzov a code of Moldavian law, written in French, and Pushkin was given the task of turning it into Russian. In his spare time he began to study Moldavian, taking lessons from one of Inzov’s servants. He learnt enough to be able to teach Inzov’s parrot to swear in Moldavian. Chuckling heartily, it repeated an indecency to the archbishop of Kishinev and Khotin when the latter was lunching at Inzov’s on Easter Sunday. Inzov did not hold the prank against Pushkin; indeed, when Capo d’Istrias wrote a few weeks later to enquire ‘whether [Pushkin] was now obeying the suggestions of a naturally good heart or the impulses of an unbridled and harmful imagination’, he replied: ‘Inspired, as are all residents of Parnassus, by a spirit of jealous emulation of certain writers, in his conversations with me he sometimes reveals poetic thoughts. But I am convinced that age and time will render him sensible in this respect and with experience he will come to recognize the unfoundedness of conclusions, inspired by the reading of harmful works and by the conventions accepted by the present age.’⁴⁹ Had he known what Pushkin was writing he might not have been so generous.

At this period in his life Pushkin was a professed, indeed a militant atheist, modelling himself on the eighteenth-century French rationalists he admired. Whether or not he was the author, while at St Petersburg, of the quatrain ‘We will amuse the good citizens/And in the pillory/With the guts of the last priest/Will strangle the last tsar’,^{† 50} an adaptation of a famous remark by Diderot, his view of religion emerges clearly from much of his Kishinev work. When Inzov, a pious man, made it clear that he expected his staff to attend church, Pushkin, in a humorous epistle to Davydov, explained that his compliance was due to hypocrisy, not piety, and complained about the communion fare:

      my impious stomach

      â€˜For pity’s sake, old chap,’ remarks,

      â€˜If only Christ’s blood

      Were, let’s say, Lafite …

      Or Clos de Vougeot, then not a word,

      But this – it’s just ridiculous –

      Is Moldavian wine and water.’⁵¹

      He greeted Easter with the irreverent poem ‘Christ is risen’, addressed to the daughter of a Kishinev inn-keeper. Today he would exchange kisses with her in the Christian manner, but tomorrow, for another kiss, would be willing to adhere to ‘the faith of Moses’, and even put into her hand ‘That by which one can distinguish/A genuine Hebrew from the Orthodox’.⁵²

At the beginning of May, in a letter to Aleksandr Turgenev, he jokingly suggested that the latter might use his influence to obtain a few days’ leave for his exiled friend, adding: ‘I would bring you in reward a composition in the taste of the Apocalypse, and would dedicate it to you, Christ-loving pastor of our poetic flock.’^{* 53} The description of Turgenev alluded to the fact that he was the head of the Department of Foreign Creeds; the work Pushkin was proposing to dedicate to him was, however, hardly appropriate: it was The Gabrieliad, a blasphemous parody of the Annunciation.⁵⁴

      Far from Jerusalem lives the beautiful Mary, whose ‘secret flower’ ‘Her lazy husband with his old spout/In the mornings fails to water’. God sees her, and, falling in love, sends the archangel Gabriel down to announce this to her. Before Gabriel arrives, Satan appears in the guise of a snake; then, turning into a handsome young man, seduces her. Gabriel interrupts them; the two fight; Satan, vanquished by a bite ‘in that fatal spot/(Superfluous in almost every fight)/That haughty member, with which the devil sinned’ (421–2), limps off, and his place and occupation are assumed by Gabriel. After his departure, as Mary is lying contemplatively on her bed, a white dove – God, in disguise – flies in at the window, and, despite her resistance, has its way with her.

      Tired Mary

      Thought: ‘What goings-on!

      One, two, three! – how can they keep it up?

      I must say, it’s been a busy time:

      I’ve been had in one and the same day

      By Satan, an Archangel and by God.’

      (509–14)

It is slightly surprising to find the poem in Pushkin’s work at this time: the wit is not that of his current passion, Byron, but that of his former heroes, Voltaire and Parny; the blend of the blasphemous and the erotic is characteristic of the eighteenth, rather than the nineteenth century. Obviously it could not be published, but, like Pushkin’s political verses, was soon in circulation in manuscript.^* Seven years later this lighthearted Voltairean anti-religious squib was to cause him almost as much trouble as his political verse had earlier.

      Fasting seemed to stimulate Pushkin’s comic vein; during the following Lent, in 1822, he produced the short comic narrative poem ‘Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters’.⁵⁵ There is nothing blasphemous or anti-religious about this work; though it might be considered risqué or indecent, it is certainly not, as it has been called, ‘out-and-out pornography’.⁵⁶ Written in the manner of a Russian