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successfully rivalling the other Russian journals. In one of them, published
in Moscow, the fervent young ideologue Belinsky was already writing,
and was to become a martyr to the great new cause of "committed"
literature. That was against all Pushkin's artistic instincts, although he
himself was revered by Belinsky, who sought to enlist Pushkin's work af–
ter his death in the service of the new social and political awareness.
Probably because it was felt to be behind the times,
The Contempo–
rary
was not a great success, and it was soon losing money. This did
nothing to relieve Pushkin's debts, but they had become the least of his
troubles. In 1834 a young French royalist emigre, Baron d"Anthes, was
admitted to the Tsar's Chevalier Guard through the influence of the
Dutch ambassador, who had adopted him as a son. Natalia Pushkin was
recognized as the most beautiful woman in the circles he now moved in,
and he at once began to pay court to her. Natalia was flattered by his
attentions and enjoyed his company, but there is no likelihood that she
fell in love with him: she was too much in love already with the whole
social world of the capital. Her openness about it with her husband did
nothing to decrease his irritation and a growing sense of the impossibility
of his position. Where his wife was concerned he had been neither a
gloomy nor a jealous husband, and the idea of a wife whose looks were
universally admired had appealed to him as much as the prospect of a
&roily and a home. He had no illusions about the probable nature of
their life together. "II nest de bonheur que dans les voies communes," he
had written to a friend, quoting the last sentence of Chateaubriand's
Rene.
"Trials and tribulations will not astonish me. They are included in
my family budget. Any joy will be something I did not expect."
But this good-natured sanity and commonsense were alas not the
end of the matter. The strong superstitious element in Pushkin's make-up
may have convinced him that he had met his fate, in every sense, when he
met his wife. In his terse and lively "Little Tragedy,"
The Stone Guest,
written in the country in one of his last great creative periods, he presents
a Don Juan who loves all his many conquests, but is finally and fatally
attracted to me last, the wife of the Commander. He loves her for her
statuesque unresponsiveness, and begs from her "one cold and peaceful
kiss." In an essay on
The Stone Guest
the poet Anna Akhmatova has
suggested it comes closer to Pushkin's own outlook and emotional tem–
perament than any of his other works.
But ordinary commonplace domesticity, the poetic humor and
heroism of the commonplace, is never far away from Pushkin, as for his
young clerk in
The Bronze Horseman
and for the youthful hero of
The
Captain's Daughter.
In his case it took the form of an absurd complica–
tion that might have occurred in his own verse novel
Eugene Onegin:
the
