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JOHN BAYLEY
small feet he later celebrated in a famous stanza of his verse novel
Eugene
Onegin.
(Pushkin had a thing about ladies' feet, and was as engagingly
direct on that subject as he was on his other emotional and social feel–
ings.) Malis Rinich, the young wife of a Dalmatian merchant, was an–
other friend, and in this case mistress too, that he made at this time; but
he shared her favors with many others, and he came to know the ex–
tremes ofjealousy which haunt his first serious and searching long poem,
The Gipsies.
Two particularly beautiful love lyrics are addressed to the
memory of Amalia, who later returned with her husband to her native
land, where she died of consumption.
Pushkin had the kind of temperament, at once loyal and affectionate,
childish and impulsive, that finds it almost impossible to keep out of hot
water. The viceroy with a cold heart and a passion for propriety and
power (he makes a brief but telling appearance in Tolstoy's last story,
Hadji Murad),
disliked the poet's guidelines bonhomie and sent unfavor–
able reports on him to the capital. The authorities also opened a letter in
which Pushkin cheerily remarked that he had been "taking lessons in
atheism." Like a boy expelled from school he was dismissed from the
nominal post he held and ordered to live on the small parental estate at
Mihailovskoye, not far from Petersburg. There he settled down to work
and read, with his old nurse for company. He continued his novel in
verse,
Eugene Onegin,
and began writing the historical play
Boris Godunov.
After the failure of the Decembrist conspiracy and the execution or
exile of many of his friends, Pushkin was summoned to Moscow by the
new Tsar, Nicholas I, and he came expecting the worst. But by one of
those paradoxes not uncommon on the Russian public scene the new
Tsar received him kindly, having decided that Pushkin was flattered by
the young Tsar, took to him, and became for some years a loyal sup–
porter. He is said to have freely confessed his solidarity with the executed
rebels, but whatever he did or did not say he was certainly seduced by
the Tsar's proffered benevolence and patronage. Part of the bait
negligently offered by Nicholas was the opportunity to work in the
historical archives, and on a project for educational reform.
Whatever his own inclination the poet thus became involved near
the center of power, the great and coming power of imperial Russia.
It
is difficult to overstress the singularity and importance of this for such a
poet and writer as Pushkin, destined as he was for absolute prominence as
the model for Russian authorship and literary genius. Pushkin's attitude
to authority was possibly not so different from Shakespeare's - he saw
through it and yet was fascinated by it, and in a sense admiring - and this
ambivalence is in its own way as marked in the great writers who fol
lowed him - Gogol and Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy. His
