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ladies of the Petersburg demi-monde, and was in a set of rich and rakish
young men; he may also have taken part in duels, of a less serious sort
than the one in which he was to die less than twenty years later. Many
of his friends were active liberals, already engaged in the conspiracies
against the government which were to lead to the Decembrist insurrec–
tion in St. Petersburg in 1825, after which some were hanged and others
exiled for life to Siberia. Pushkin was absent in the south of Russia at the
time of the revolt, but would have been on the square with his comrades
had he been in town, despite the fact that he knew nothing of their
plans and had never been trusted with any secret information. Although
he had belonged like them to a revolutionary society called the Green
Lamp, his friends knew that he was not really a political animal. They
admired his verses and epigrams, which were helping the cause, but con–
sidered him too frivolous for the responsibilities of a conspirator.
Pushkin gambled heavily at this time, as he was to do all his life; and
his friends and his gambling form the background of one of the most
exciting and melodramatic tales he was later to write "Pilovaya
Dama," "The Queen of Spades." He began his career as a narrator by
writing a sparkling fairy-tale in verse,
Rusian and Lyudmiia,
with its magi–
cal opening on the green oak tree by the sea shore, the learned cat on its
golden chain, the thirty knights taking lessons form their "sea-tutor" in
underwater adventures. These were common tales from Russian folklore
which Pushkin had hard when young from his old nurse, to whose
memory he was to write one of his most affectionate and best-known
lyrics. He recalled the stories she had told him with that vividly
unselfconscious charm - his own unique sort of innocence - which in–
stantly became for the Russian language and Russian poetry what Mozart
is
to music. In spite of the rackety and even dangerous life he habitually
led, Pushkin always retained the genius and the freshness of this particular
innocence, which seems a part of his wholly unpretentious instinct as an
artist for directness, simplicity and economy.
In addition to wonderful lyrics and tales in verse he was also writing
in
these early days epigrams and verses of a politically fashionable kind, in
favour of liberty and against tyranny and those who were taken to be
the Tsar's evil advisers. Some of these were soon drawn to Alexander's
attention, and it was suggested that a mild form of exile would be a
suitable penalty for the talented but misguided poet. Pushkin was sent to
south Russia, to serve on the "Board of Protection of Foreign
Colonists," but luck was with him, for he fell in with some old and
powerful friends, the Raevskys, who virtually adopted him for his period
of banishment. He went with them to the Caucasus, where he obtained
the material and local color for oriental verse tales in the manner of By–
ron, and he also fell in love with a youthful Raevsky daughter, whose
