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JOHN BAYLEY
formed the taste and expectation of their readers, and offered the back–
ground model for later writers, from Scott and Jane Austen to Macaulay.
Insofar as Pushkin had models they were the French authors of the
eighteenth century, with whom however he felt no very strong or sym–
pathetic affiliation, and the Russian historian Karamzin, who had himself
copied them. In a brief unfinished essay on "Prose" which Pushkin wrote
around 1822, when he was twenty-three years old, he commented that
"Voltaire may be regarded as an excellent example of prose style," and
that "precision and tidiness are the prime methods of prose . .. poetry is
another matter." "Whose prose is the best in our literature?" he goes on.
"Karamzin's. This is no great praise."
Nonetheless he felt great respect for the Russian historian who was
old enough to be his grandfather; and he was to write a good deal of
history himself in the short time that was given to him: an account of
the rebellion of Pugachev, the Cossack leader of Catharine the Great's
time, and a projected volume on her great predecessor, Peter the Great.
Russia's history had always fascinated Pushkin, as can be seen from the
way he handled his drama of
Boris Godunov;
and he always took a par–
ticular interest in the career of the great Tsar who had founded the
modern Russian state, and in the Cossack rebel who had come closest to
overthrowing it. The latter is in some sense the hero of Pushkin's short
and masterly historical novel,
The Captain
'5
Daughter,
and the Tsar and
his entourage would have been the subject of
The Negro of Peter the Great,
an historical sketch which went uncompleted. Pushkin's great–
grandfather, probably an Ethiopian, had been presented as a page to
Peter from the Turkish court, and had risen to become a general and to
found a landowning family. Pushkin was very proud of his African
ancestry on his mother's side, that of the Gannibals, and his black hair
and swarthy complexion gave him a distinctly African appearance. His
friends had an affection for his "negro" face, and he attributed to the
same source his volatile temperament and strong sexual passions.
Pushkin began to write poetry while he was still at the Lycee which
Alexander I had set up at the village of Tsarskoe Selo (now renamed
Pushkin) outside St. Petersburg. His early French-influenced verses are
quite unremarkable, being chiefly concerned with his many friends and
with the liberal sentiments fashionable among bright young Russians of
the upper class in 1818. Only a few years after Russia's great victory over
Napoleon political reaction had set in, and the climate of hope and en–
lightenment had gone sour with the waning popularity among the upper
class of Tsar Alexander himself During these years Pushkin was hard up,
and his parents in Moscow - not too well off themselves - showed little
interest in his prospects of welfare. He frequented the theater and the
