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1837
1837
Russia’s Quiet Revolution
PAU L W. W E RT H
1
1
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Preface
Someone offering a book about Russia in 1837 has some explaining to do. People
familiar with the Russian past will recall that Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest
poet, was killed in a duel that year. Some perhaps know that Russia’s first railway
appeared then as well. But most would be hard-pressed to identify much else of
note. Other years in Russian history would seem better candidates for the kind of
‘year book’ that has become so prominent in popular historical works.1 Yet the
central task of this book is to demonstrate precisely that 1837, despite initial
appearances to the contrary, was exceptionally eventful and consequential for
Russian history, and that—exaggerating slightly—one cannot really comprehend
Russia without understanding this year.
The project grows out of research I have done over nearly three decades, mostly
on religious matters, that repeatedly drew my attention to critical shifts occurring
in the 1830s. The more I explored diverse realms of Russia’s history, the more
compelling I found that initial observation to be. In an ideal world, I might have
focused on a quadrennium (1836–39), but neither the word (‘quadrennium’) nor
the period (four years) works well from a marketing standpoint, so I concluded
that a single year would have to do. Pushkin’s death created a strong argument for
1837, and further exploration revealed that, with some stretching here and there,
I could make it work. When it occurred to me that both my home city of Chicago
and my undergraduate alma mater (Knox College) were founded in 1837, I knew
that fate was kicking me in the pants to get on with the project. Whether there is
any merit to it is for the reader to decide.
1 At least three exist for Russia: Wayne Dowler, Russia in 1913 (DeKalb, 2010); Karl Schlögel,
Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden, MA, 2012); and Kathleen Smith, Moscow, 1956:
The Silenced Spring (Cambridge, MA, 2017). I propose that there were also important years before
the 20th c.
Acknowledgements
Stephanie Ireland, David McDonald, Elizabeth Nelson, Willard Sunderland, and

the late Andrew Bell (1963–2017) were enthusiastic about this project when I
myself still feared it to be silly and self-indulgent. At an early stage, the Berkeley
Russian history kruzhok offered confirmation that the project was indeed worth
pursuing, and I thank Clarissa Ibarra for the invitation. Portions of the book
benefited from discussions at the European University in St Petersburg, the
University of Tokyo, the University of Washington, New York University, the
Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan),
Arizona State University (the Desert Workshop in Russian History, Year Three),
Ural Federal University (Yekaterinburg), and the University of Nevada in Las
Vegas. Numerous individual colleagues provided me with ideas, critiques, mater
ials, answers to questions, and in some cases alcohol: Yoko Aoshima, Nadezhda
Balatskaia, Greg Brown, Elena Campbell, David Darrow, Mikhail Dolbilov, Jeff
Eden, Catherine Evtuhov, Victoria Frede, Gary Hamburg, Mami Hamomoto,
John Hay, James Howard, Hubertus Jahn, Joanna Kepka, Igor Khristoforov, Yanni
Kotsonis, Scott Levi, Mariia Lukovskaia, Olga Maiorova, Mark Mazower, Susan
McCaffrey, Natalia Mazur, Patrick Michelson, David Moon, Alexander Morrison,
Norihiro Naganawa, Ekaterina Pravilova, Stephen Riegg, Jeff Schauer, Benjamin
Schenk, Taku Shinohara, Jeff Simpson, Barbara Skinner, Susan Smith-Peter,
Darius Staliūnas, Gulmira Sultangalieva, Benjamin Tromley, Ulzhan Tuleshova,
Arya Udry, Teddy Uldricks, Elena Vishlenkova, Aleksei Volvenko, Richard
Wortman, and Daniil Zavlunov. Several exceptional colleagues read the entire
manuscript and must therefore accept greater responsibility for its faults: Andrew
Jenks, Jay Johnson, Stephen Lovell, Laurie Manchester, Yekaterina Raykhlina, and
William Rosenberg. The sabbatical committee at UNLV, the office of its Provost,
the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of History all pro-
vided either funds for research and writing or time off for the same. Daniel Werth
asked a question critical to Chapter 8. Elizaveta Zoueva sustained me throughout.
Contents
List of Figures xi
List of Tables xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Transliteration and Terminology xvii
Introduction1
1. He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 9
2. A Life for the Tsar, an Opera for the Nation 28
3. Philosophical Madness 43
4. In the Flesh 59
5. Provinces Animated 85
6. Guardians of the Benighted 105
7. Think More About Camels 125
8. Orthodoxy Marches West 145
9. A Unicorn, Violent but Submissive 163
10. Northern Phoenix 179
Conclusion200
Index 205
List of Figures
0.1 St. Petersburg and its environs xviii

0.2 The provinces of European Russia 6
0.3 The Romanov Dynasty, 1796–1881 7
1.1 Alexander Julius Klünder, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin11
1.2 V. A. Zhukovskii, Pushkin in His Coffin, 30 January 1837 16
4.1 Natale Schiavoni, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich. Italy, 1838 61
4.2 Route of Grand Prince Alexander Nikolaevich’s Tour, 1837 65
5.1 Title page for Vologda Provincial Gazette, 1 January 1838 93
7.1 The Kazakh steppe and the polities of Central Asia 126
7.2 A Kazakh leading camels during Perovskii’s winter expedition 136
9.1 Friedrich von Martens, Arrival of the First Train from St. Petersburg to
Tsarskoye Selo on 30 October 1837171
10.1 Pierre Marie Joseph Vernet, Fire at the Winter Palace, 17 December 1837.
St Petersburg, 1838 182
List of Tables
5.1 Number of newspapers in Russia, 1801–47 89

8.1 Numbers of Uniate parishioners, churches, and monasteries in 1827 147
9.1 Railway trips and passengers, 1838–41 172
List of Abbreviations
ChPSS (I and II) Z. A. Kamenskii (ed.), P. Ia. Chaadaev: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i
izbrannye pis’ma, 2 vols (Moscow, 1991)
GARF Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow
GV Gubernskie vedomosti
PSZ Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (reference is always to the
second series)
RGADA Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov, Moscow
RGIA Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv, St Petersburg
SPb St Petersburg
TsGARK Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Respubliki Kazakhstan, Almaty
Transliteration and Terminology
When citing sources in notes I use the Library of Congress system of transliter
ation, but in the text itself I eliminate soft signs and use ‘y’ when this simplifies
pronunciation for non-speakers of Russian (thus ‘Yaroslavl’). I sometimes use
common English equivalents for first names in the text; thus ‘Alexander’ rather
than ‘Aleksandr.’ For similar reasons of intelligibility, I use older but more familiar
spellings of such terms as ‘Kazakhs’ (rather than ‘Qazaqs’) and ‘Khiva’ (even to
refer to the entire khanate known as ‘Khvārazm’ in Central Asian sources). The
emphasis, in short, is on accessibility, with acknowledgement that this might
entail a dose of Russocentrism. All emphases within quotations are in the ori
ginal, and dates are by the Julian calendar, twelve behind the Gregorian. In most
cases I have converted obsolete Russian units of measure (versts and desiatinas)
into (square) kilometres, as well as Réaumur degrees to centigrade.
Peter and
St. Petersburg Li t Paul Fortress
tle Rive r
N eva Neva
Tsaritsyn
Square
Vasilievskii Winter
Palace
Island Moika 12
Admiralty (Pushkin’s residence)
Nevsk
ii Pros
pekt
Go
Tsarskoe Selo
ro
Anichkov Palace
k
eva
ho
N ika
Pavlovsk Mo
va
at
ia
Gre
St
re
a
et
a nk
Bolshoi Theater nt
Fo
Catherine
Canal
Semenovskii
Platz
Figure 0.1. St. Petersburg and its environs. Map by Bill Nelson.
Introduction
Do you not find something grand in Russia’s present situation,

something that will astonish the future historian?
Alexander Pushkin (19 October 1836)1
When the clock struck midnight at the start of 1837, few Russians could have
imagined how much was in store for them before the next New Year’s Eve. Two
great disasters stood as the year’s bookends. In January, the country lost its greatest
poet, Alexander Pushkin, in a duel that killed the bard but also laid the foundation
for a cult central to the country’s identity to this day. In December, Russia lost its
greatest building, the Winter Palace, in a huge fire from whose ashes the edifice
nonetheless rose again, phoenix-like, a mere 15 months later. These two tragedies
only begin to account for the drama and dynamism of this remarkable year. The
months in and around 1837 gave birth to Russian musical nationalism with the
completion of Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, and initiated a flowering of
regional life with the creation of a provincial press. Peter Chaadaev’s controversial
texts riled society and have conditioned debates about backwardness, national
character, and Russia’s place in the world ever since. In its west, Russia advanced
an audacious plan to extend its eastern variant of Christianity at the expense of
Catholicism, while in the east it prepared the century’s first major assault on an
independent Central Asian state. The heir to the throne undertook a massive tour
of the empire, with handlers exploiting media to promote his celebrity and forge
images that would secure his subsequent rule. The half of Russia’s peasants who
were not serfs acquired new bosses in a novel government ministry committed to
aggressive reform and enlightened guardianship. And the quintessential symbol
of industrial modernity—the steam railway—made its debut as well. The cata-
logue of the year’s noteworthy occurrences thus extends from the realms of
culture, religion, and ideas to those of empire, politics, and industry.
The observant reader will note that these events differ in their character, dur
ation, and significance. Some, such as Pushkin’s death and the palace fire, were
chance occurrences. Those implicated in empire building reflect long-term pro-
cesses that began before 1837 and ended after. Still others, such as Glinka’s opera
and the railway, represent moments of metaphorical birth. Inquisitive readers will
ask (heads politely cocked to one side) and sceptical ones will demand (arms
folded in demonstrable defiance): What unites these disparate events and pro-
cesses, aside from their chronological coincidence?
1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution. Paul W. Werth, Oxford University Press (2021). © Paul W. Werth.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198826354.003.0001
2 1837
First of all, let us not write off chronological coincidence itself too quickly.
Scholarly convention ordinarily demands focus on a single historical issue, thus
isolating that one problem or process from the rest of history’s flow. The approach
here is different. Embracing the inevitable randomness that characterizes those
things that just happen to have occurred in a single year, I seek to show that for
contemporaries, matters that we as scholars would not normally combine were
actually occurring simultaneously. Multifariousness is precisely what people
experienced at the time.
But we may go further. This book contends that the 1830s in Russia constituted
a period of striking dynamism, innovation, and consequence, and that 1837 was a
pivotal year for the empire’s entry into the modern age. Such a thesis may raise
eyebrows. Historians traditionally think of the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55) as a
time of conservative stasis, when the ‘gendarme of Europe’ secured order beyond
Russia and entrenched the autocratic system at home. Similarly, most would see
in 1837 nothing beyond an utterly ordinary year. There was no great upheaval, no
change in the country’s ruler, no major foreign war, and no grand transformation
in the country’s social or political order. The institution of serfdom continued to
structure life in much of rural Russia, and autocracy remained immune to serious
challenge until 1905. All of this is true. Yet my contention is that a substantial
number of modern Russia’s most distinctive and noteworthy features can be
traced back to this exceptional but inconspicuous year. Russia became what it did,
in no small measure, because of 1837.
Indeed, I propose that diverse occurrences in and around 1837 amount to a
‘quiet revolution’—a formulation consciously designed to convey incongruity
and even paradox. The revolution in question was not a rapid overturning of an
existing political or social order (as in the French or Bolshevik revolutions) but
rather a dramatic and wide-ranging alteration in the way something works or is
organized, or at least in the ways people contemplate it (think the industrial or
price revolution). Russia, I propose, underwent a set of transformations in the
1830s that introduced new institutions, novel conceptions, and unprecedented
experiences. The year 1837 thus represents a profound moment of conjuncture,
when diverse existing strands of historical development intersected and new
ones emerged. The consequences can be traced far beyond 1837 to elucidate key
attributes of Russia in the later tsarist, Soviet, and even post-Soviet eras. Thus
while these twelve months stand at the centre of my narrative, the account con-
templates the long-term implications of events described and elucidates later
manifestations of the tendencies so strikingly present in that earlier moment. I thus
offer not a discrete, isolated history of the year 1837, but rather the insertion of
that one year into a longer timeline: 1837 in history.2
In order not to exaggerate these transformations, however, and to indicate the
ways in which most people at the time experienced these changes without fully
grasping their import, I label this revolution ‘quiet’. What occurred in Russia in
Introduction 3
1837 was significant, at times openly dramatic; a few contemporaries—for

example Pushkin, as revealed in the epigraph to this introduction—sensed that
big things were afoot. But there was also a tranquil and discreet character to these
processes, featuring less disturbance and bustle than calm and unobtrusiveness.
In some cases, the significance of things could only be discerned in retrospect,
with 1837 playing a key, if sometimes inconspicuous, role as a point of origin, a
pivot, or a noteworthy segment on a longer continuum. In short, even as I pro-
pose that 1837 was highly consequential, I recognize that for many at the time
that year remained unremarkable. It was at once exceptional and ordinary.
I submit further that for all of the diversity of the events I describe, each in its
own way played an important role in promoting Russia’s unification. In some
cases this function is obvious: the railway network that began in 1837 would
eventually connect far-flung parts of the country to an extent unimaginable at the
start of the century. The conversion of 1.5 million Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy
united two branches of Christianity and bound Russia’s western provinces—part
of Poland a mere half-century earlier—more thoroughly with its central ones. The
creation of a ministry for state peasants unified administration for an enormous
segment of the country’s population and proved a big step in the consolidation of
a single peasantry in Russia. In other cases, the effect was more subtle, but no less
real. The appearance of provincial newspapers imposed on sundry provinces a
shared intellectual experience that paradoxically promoted unity precisely by
revelling in the distinctiveness of each. The heir’s travels bound diverse subjects,
strewn across vast geographical distance, in common affection and enthusiasm.
Glinka’s opera offered musical expression that could (aspire to) unite monarch
and masses for decades thereafter. Performing a similar function was the fire at
the Winter Palace, which generated articulations of solidarity between people and
tsar, and a shared commitment to reconstruction. Pushkin’s death united many in
grief, and his cult, though it appeared only gradually, served as cultural glue for
the late empire and the USSR—as it does still for contemporary Russia. Even the
unsuccessful campaign in Central Asia proved part of the intervening steppe’s
unification with the Russian ‘mainland’, a key stage in the incorporation of
Kazakhs into Russia’s institutional and cultural orbit. In short, among the conse-
quences of Russia’s ‘quiet revolution’ in 1837 was the country’s enhanced integration,
the increased unification of its people through diverse institutions and practices,
and the promotion of shared experience across vast spaces.
The 1830s, in other words, represented a crucial moment in Russian nation-
building. Even as the empire continued to expand, and as imperial consciousness
persisted in framing the thinking of its governing elite, elements of national con-
sciousness also became prominent, and diverse parts of the country—or at least
its predominantly Orthodox core—began consolidating into an integrated whole,
distinct from more distant and diverse borderland territories. A Russian nation,
in short, was emerging within the empire. Thus Pushkin became the national
4 1837
poet (his cult enhanced by the romantic character of his death), while Glinka—so
it seemed to many—gave Russia national music and its own opera. The conver-
sion of Greek Catholics was designed, in part, to consolidate an emerging Russian
nation (including Belarusians), and the Winter Palace’s destruction revealed that
edifice as belonging to the nation as a whole rather than just the imperial family.
Chaadaev’s contemplation of Russia’s place in the world likewise represented an
inquiry into the character of the Russian nation. Provincial newspapers, meanwhile,
documented this nation as it was coming into being and indeed served as mid-
wives for that process. In the 1830s, then, the nation was becoming an ideological
preoccupation for the regime and an inspiration for many thinking Russians.
Close attention to 1837, I propose, reveals the embodiment of this nation in spe-
cific institutions and practices, from opera and poetry to newspapers and palaces.
Even as my central claims rest on the aggregation of the episodes that I explore,
each chapter is designed to stand more or less independently as a discrete his
torical sketch that may be enjoyed or censured in its own right. A reader might
adore railways but take no interest in religious matters. Another may enthuse
over opera but refuse to bother with provincial newspapers. Of course, those who
make such exclusions are misguided and deprive themselves of both pleasure and
edification. But they are in no way obligated to read all chapters—or for that matter
any at all. In writing each sketch, I have assumed that readers might know some-
thing about the topic in question, but not a great deal. Specialists may take issue
with simplifications designed to keep the text accessible and brief. Upon reflection,
they will realize that my humble narrative aspires to enhance readers’ curiosity
for each topic, thus inducing them to explore the compositions of actual experts.
Many events in Russia in 1837 could have served as the basis for sketches in
this book but do not. For example, the scientist Karl von Baer embarked on a trip
to Novaia Zemlia, which proved a key moment in the birth of Russian ethnog
raphy. Russia was then engaged in a lengthy war of conquest in the Caucasus, and
construction began on Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. But the exclusion
of these and other episodes does not mean that my choices were random. Some,
I can freely admit, attracted me because I knew they would make for a good story
(which, for all of the discipline’s conceptual and methodological innovation,
remains at history’s heart). Overall, my aspiration was to represent different
aspects of Russia: the provinces and borderlands as well as the capital; culture as
well as industry; peasants as well as elites; foreign policy as well as domestic
developments. This approach permits us not only to observe dynamism in diverse
contexts but also to assemble a portrait of the country at this critical moment.
The first three chapters embrace culture—literature, music, and ideas—and
focus on an intense period extending from the Autumn of 1836 into 1837. The
fourth chapter, on the heir’s tour of the empire, takes us to the provinces, where
we remain for the next two chapters to contemplate the local press and the reform
of state peasants. Two chapters then engage the problem of empire, one in the east
Introduction 5
(the attempted conquest of Khiva) and one in the west (the mass conversion of
Greek Catholics). The last two chapters address building and rebuilding: Russia’s
first railway and the Winter Palace.
Before beginning our first sketch, three brief tasks remain. One is to recount,
with extreme concision and selectivity, what was going on elsewhere in the world
so as to situate Russia’s 1837 in a global tableau. In June a young Victoria began
her reign in Britain, which would last into the first month of the twentieth century,
conferring her name on an entire era. In July one of her subjects, Charles Darwin,
began assembling notebooks on variations of animals and plants that eventually
produced the theory of evolution. In Spain, the Carlist wars raged, with whole
armies engaged in savage conflict. In the New World, Texas had recently declared
independence, and Nuevo México experienced popular insurrection (the Chimayó
rebellion). The USA’s populist president Andrew Jackson ceded the land’s highest
office to Martin van Buren in March, and in October the family-run candle and
soap business of Procter & Gamble was founded in Cincinnati. In Asia, the failure
of monsoon rains produced disastrous famine in India’s northwest, while the
game of cricket was played for the first recorded time on the padang (field) that
eventually became the Singapore Cricket Club. China meanwhile faced growing
encroachments that would lead to the First Opium War in 1839, fundamentally
altering the dynamics of power in East Asia.
The second task is to provide some core facts about Russia itself for the uniniti-
ated. The country in 1837 was a near-complete autocracy, ruled by the Romanov
dynasty since 1613. The tsar was Nicholas I, who came to the throne in December
of 1825. His wife, the empress Alexandra (Prussian Princess Charlotte), had pro-
duced seven children between 1818 and 1832. St Petersburg, founded in 1703 by
the Peter the Great, had been Russia’s capital since 1712 and had approximately
450,000 inhabitants. Russia’s historical capital, Moscow, was the country’s second
largest city and the birthplace of both Pushkin and the heir to the throne,
Alexander Nikolaevich. The country as a whole had a population of around
50 million people, which included ethnic Russians but also an extraordinary
range of diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. Serfdom was the order of the day
for half of the country’s enormous peasant population (we meet the other half in
Chapter 6), and would remain in place until 1861. The country’s ‘ruling and pre-
dominant’ faith was the Orthodox Christian one, although more than a quarter
of its inhabitants adhered to other faiths, from variants of Christianity to separate
religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. Geographically, the country
extended from Norway and Austria to Persia and China, and across the Bering
Strait into North America .
Finally, a word on the politics of the tsarist regime. While my narrative fore-
grounds Russia’s dynamism in the 1830s, of the autocracy’s own conservatism
there can be no doubt. Shaping Nicholas’s views and indeed casting a long shadow
on the 1830s were major challenges to the existing order in Russia and Europe
6 1837
BARENTS SEA
White Sea
N
GRAND DUCHY ARKHANGEL
OF FINLAND
Lake
Ladoga OLONETS
SIBERIA
VOLOGDA
Gulf of Finland
ESTAND
ST. PERM
PETERSBURG NOVGOROD
LIVLAND
VIATKA
BALTIC KURLAND YAROSLAVL KOSTROMA
SEA PSKOV TVER
VITE
B SK
VILNA VLADIMIR NIZHNII
MOSCOW KAZAN
BELOSTOK NOVGOROD
SMOLENSK
ORENBURG
N
KALUGA SIMBIRSK
ZA
MOGILEV
KINGDOM GRODNO TULA
RIA
MINSK PENZA
OF POLAND
OREL
TAMBOV
V
GO
SARATOV
NI
VOLYNIA ER KURSK
CH VORONEZH
KAZAKH
KIEV POLTAVA
PO D STEPPE
OL KHARKOV
I
A
DON
B ES
YEKATERINOSLAV
KHERSON COSSACKS
SAR
0 100 200 mi ASTRAKHAN

ABIA
TAURIDE CASPIAN
0 100 200 300 km Sea of
Azov SEA
BLACK SEA
Black
Sea ARCTIC OCEAN
ALASKA
Area of Map
(Above)
Caspian
Sea R U S S I A N E M P I R E
PA C I F I C
OCEAN
Figure 0.2. The provinces of European Russia. Map by Bill Nelson.

Maria Fedorovna (1759–1828) Paul I (1754–1801, r. 1796–1801)
Alexander I Constantine Alexandra Elena Maria Catherine Olga Anna Michael

(1777–1825, (1779–1831) (1783–1801) (1784–1803) (1786–1859) (1788–1819) (1792–95) (1795–1865) (1798–1849)
r. 1801–25)
Alexandra Fedorovna Nicholas I

(Princess Charlotte, 1798–1860) (1796–1855
r. 1825–55)
Alexander II Maria Olga Alexandra Constantine Nicholas Michael

(1818–1881, (1819–76) (1822–92) (1825–44) (1827–92) (1831–91) (1832–1909)
r. 1855–81)
* Rulers in bold
Figure 0.3. The Romanov Dynasty, 1796–1881.

8 1837
more broadly. Confusion over the succession after Alexander I’s death in November
1825 offered an opportunity for elite insurgents, subsequently known as the
Decembrists, to attempt to impose a new constitutional form of government on
the country. Though Nicholas was able easily to disperse the few regiments that
mutinied on the morning of 14 December by opening fire on them, the revolt and
the subsequent execution of five of its leaders represented a grievous way to start
his reign. The insurgents included members of leading noble families, and
Nicholas, exhibiting a heightened appreciation for public opinion, fretted about
the manner in which the European press would interpret the crisis. The revolt
also rendered him highly sensitive to potential threats to his rule, which he sought
to combat through intensified surveillance and censorship under a new police
force called the Third Section. Adding to this apprehension were revolutions and
insurrections in Europe and Russian Poland in 1830–31. The Decembrist revolt
itself capped a wave of European rebellion in Spain, Naples, and Greece in
1820–21, which undermined certainty about the stability of the post-Napoleonic
order. The July Revolution in France in 1830 brought the overthrow of the
Bourbon dynasty in favour of the ‘bourgeois’ king Louis-Philippe of Orléans,
while Belgium won its independence from the Netherlands through revolution
the same year. In Russian Poland, the November Insurrection of 1830–31 required
outright warfare for its suppression, adding a nationalist challenge to the tsar’s list
of worries. In short, this was a dynamic and uncertain time altogether, and an old
regime like Russia’s had good reason to be apprehensive. Yet it could also not
afford to be immobile; it needed to exhibit dynamism of its own. Conservatism
notwithstanding, Nicholas regarded himself as the continuation of Peter the Great
(r. 1682–1725), the autocratic reformer who transformed Russia dramatically in
the early eighteenth century.
With the formalities of introduction behind us, let us turn to the events of
1837. We start with the poet Alexander Pushkin, who as the year began had
already become Russia’s leading poet. He was also about to die.
Notes
1. The letter in the original French is in ‘Pis’mo A. S. Pushkina k P. Ia. Chaadaevu’, Russkii
arkhiv 2 (1884): 454. It remained unsent.
2. Here I modify the approach to the 19th c. of Jürgen Osterhammel in The Transformation
of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller
(Princeton, NJ, 2014), 47.
1
He Fell, Slandered by Rumour
Let us imagine that it is February 1937 and that we are in the USSR. Our senses
are assaulted. On the one hand, we are confronted by Stalin’s Great Terror, in
which hundreds of thousands are arrested for fantastical crimes and dramatic
show trials provide dubious edification. At the very same time, however, we wit-
ness an elaborate celebration. Its organizers declare its object, Alexander Pushkin,
to be ‘the great Russian poet, creator of the Russian literary language, and founder
of the new Russian literature, who enriched mankind with his immortal creations
in artistic language’.1 The poet’s works are published in millions of copies. Gala
performances occur throughout the Union. Pushkin is everywhere: printed on
posters, painted on lacquer boxes, woven into shawls and rugs.2 This remarkable,
all-encompassing commemoration can occur precisely now only because Pushkin
managed to get himself killed in a duel exactly one century earlier.
The duel, precipitated by the romantic attentions of another man towards
Pushkin’s wife, Natalia, occurred on the outskirts of Petersburg on 27 January
1837. The mortally wounded poet was returned to his home, the famous Moika
12, where he expired after two days of agony, still only 37 years old. The next day
the newspaper Northern Bee carried a brief announcement of his death express-
ing its ‘deepest sorrows’ and declaring, ‘Russia owes a debt of thanks to Pushkin
for his contributions of 22 years to the world of Letters, a series of the most bril-
liant and most beneficial successes through compositions of various kinds’.3 In
light of censorship and official prohibitions on duelling, the precise circumstances
of Pushkin’s death remained a mystery in public discourse for decades. Questions
remain even today. Pushkin was of course already famous in Russia in 1837 for
his exceptional literary talent. He presumably would have been venerated in some
form even had he lived longer. But as it was, the manner of his death proved cen-
tral to his cult, which in turn became a critical resource for defining modern
Russia and uniting its population in the late empire and the USSR. ‘No story has
offered the promise of greater national coherence than has Pushkin’s,’ writes
Stephanie Sandler,4 and his death helped to produce a cultural mythology that
eventually made the poet Russia’s ‘everything’. No history of Russia in 1837 is pos-
sible without an account of this episode.
1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution. Paul W. Werth, Oxford University Press (2021). © Paul W. Werth.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198826354.003.0002
10 1837
Frenchman Went A-Courtin’
Broadly regarded as the father of the modern Russian language, Alexander

Pushkin was born in 1799. He was at once of ancient Russian noble lineage and
African descent—his great-grandfather, possibly from Abyssinia, had served
under the Peter the Great—and he took pride in both. He was in the first class of
the famed Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo beginning in 1811, and with the completion
of his romantic epic Ruslan and Liudmila in 1820, Pushkin was already earning
laud. Exiled that same year for freethinking epigrams, Pushkin spent three years
in Russia’s south—the Caucasus, Crimea, and Bessarabia—which provided
material for his Captive of the Caucasus, Fountain of Bakhchisarai, and The
Gypsies. By 1824 Pushkin occupied a unique position in Russian letters, with
Vasilii Zhukovskii, an older poet (and a central protagonist in the chapters to fol-
low), declaring in November: ‘By the power vested in me I offer you the foremost
place on Russia’s Parnassus’. His freethinking having once again gotten him into
trouble in 1824, Pushkin was restricted to his mother’s estate, Mikhailovskoe
(Pskov province). This seclusion allowed for much productivity and also kept
Pushkin at a safe distance from the Decembrist insurrection in 1825, though his
personal ties to many of the rebels engendered suspicions about his political sym-
pathies. In 1826, the new emperor summoned the young poet to Petersburg, par-
doned him, and became his personal censor. After the completion of his masterful
‘novel in verse’, Eugene Onegin, and as he was finishing his narrative poem, The
Bronze Horseman, Pushkin ventured into prose, producing among other works
‘The Queen of Spades’ and The Captain’s Daughter. In his last years, he took grow-
ing interest in Peter the Great and also founded a journal called The Contemporary.
By meeting the demand for a modern literature in Russian; by completing an epic
credited with expressing the spirit of the people in literary form, and by exploit-
ing both old practices like imperial patronage and newer ones involving markets
and publics, by the 1830s Pushkin had claimed his place at the head of Russian
letters.5
At the centre of the drama leading to the poet’s duel stood his wife, Natalia,
whom Pushkin wed in 1831. Just 18 years old at the time of her marriage,
Natalia distinguished herself by her exceptional beauty. Dolly Ficquelmont,
the Russian wife of the Austrian ambassador, wrote of her in 1832, ‘One could
hardly picture a more beautiful woman’—someone who merited lengthy con-
templation ‘as a perfect work of the Creator!’ Pushkin himself wrote to Natalia
in 1833 from his estate in Nizhnii Novgorod province, ‘The glory of your
beauty has reached the priest’s wife here, who certifies that you are ideal in
your figure as well as your face’. Admitting that he had fallen senselessly in love
with Natalia the first time he saw her, a young contemporary recounted, ‘At the
time there was essentially not a single young man in Petersburg who did not
secretly pine for Pushkina’. In 1834 the emperor designated Pushkin a
He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 11
Figure 1.1. Alexander Julius Klünder, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Lithograph,

February 1837. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.
‘gentleman of the chamber’ (an honor the poet resented) supposedly so that he
could invite the pair—and above all her—to court balls.6
Among Natalia’s many admirers was a certain Frenchman in Russian service,
Georges d’Anthès, the adopted son of Baron Louis van Heeckeren, a Dutch diplo-
mat accredited to Petersburg.7 By early 1836 Natalia had turned the young
Frenchman’s head, and eventually society began to notice his efforts to court her
at the balls and salons of Petersburg’s winter season. ‘Forgetting all delicacy and
violating society’s sense of propriety’, recounted Madame Ficquelmont, d’Anthès
12 1837
began to show Natalia ‘signs of admiration completely inadmissible in relation to

a married woman’.8 Nor could Pushkin himself fail to notice, and he increasingly
regarded d’Anthès’s impunity as a challenge to both his own honour and that of
his wife. In October, Natalia rejected d’Anthès decisively in order to preserve her
reputation, and at one point d’Anthès threatened, in Natalia’s presence, to kill
himself if she refused to give herself to him. By November 1836, the situation was
rife with passion and intrigue.
At this moment, on 4 November, Pushkin received an anonymous mock cer-
tificate proclaiming his election to an ‘Order of Cuckolds’. In light of what Natalia
had by then related, Pushkin immediately suspected d’Anthès and Heeckeren of
this despicable stunt, and he accordingly challenged the former to a duel. The two
foreigners understood that such a contest would ruin their careers in Russia, and
for their part Pushkin’s friends, as they became aware of the situation, made
strenuous efforts to effectuate reconciliation (Zhukovskii in particular). The task
was devilishly difficult. Pushkin was adamant about protecting his and his wife’s
honour, while d’Anthès was open only to a resolution that would not make him
look like a coward. (‘Never in my life have I racked my brains like that’, wrote one
participant in the effort to resolve the affair.9) A solution—secured only after
false starts and extensive negotiation—was for d’Anthès to propose marriage to
Natalia’s older sister, Yekaterina, thereby creating the impression that she had
been the true object of his affection all along. Yet even this scheme did not put the
matter to rest. When the marriage was announced, some in Petersburg society
concluded that the Frenchman’s proposal represented a noble act of self-sacrifice
designed to save Natalia’s reputation. Other complications threatened to renew
the averted duel. Though the precise circumstances remain unclear, it appears
that Zhukovskii, otherwise sworn to secrecy on the matter of the duel but lacking
any other way of preventing it, appealed for intercession directly to the emperor,
who met with Pushkin on 23 November. The emperor apparently managed to
assuage the poet’s concerns, and, if we may believe the well-informed Yekaterina
Karamzina, Pushkin ‘promised the sovereign, after the history with the first duel,
not to fight for any reason’.10 It looked as though the contest had been averted.
Alas, it had only been postponed. Pushkin was by no means reconciled with
d’Anthès even after the Frenchman married Natalia’s sister on 10 January 1837.
He refused to treat the newly-weds as part of his own family, but still encountered
them frequently in social settings. Nor did it help that Natalia was visibly jealous
of her sister—d’Anthès was after all a dashing fellow much closer to Natalia’s age
than was Pushkin. d’Anthès’s advances continued and tongues again started wag-
ging. As Sophia Karamzina wrote, in Pushkin’s presence Natalia ‘pretends that she
is not on speaking terms with d’Anthès and does not even look at him, but when
her husband is absent she takes up her previous coquetry with downcast eyes and
nervous embarrassment in conversation, while he, standing across from her,
directs lengthy glances at her and, it seems, forgets completely about his bride’.
Another attempt at reconciliation in mid-January failed, after which d’Anthès’s

actions became even more impudent, fuelled in part, apparently, by his know
ledge of Pushkin’s promise to the tsar not to duel. Between the two interpretations
of d’Anthès’s marriage proposal—that it had been a cowardly way to avert the
duel, and that it had been an act of self-sacrifice for Natalia’s sake—the latter was
gaining the upper hand. This situation became intolerable for Pushkin, who
declared that he needed his reputation to be ‘inviolable in every corner of
Russia, where my name is known’.11 Few even among Pushkin’s closest circle
appear to have fully understood what was occurring and what it meant to the
poet. The emperor might have intervened to restrain d’Anthès or to end all the
gossip, but instead he chose to admonish Natalia to take more care in protecting
her reputation.
For Pushkin, this intervention by the tsar was likely the last straw. On
25 January, his earlier promise notwithstanding, he resolved to renew the duel by
sending an offensive letter to Heeckeren, in which he accused the adoptive father
of instigating all of the son’s ‘wretchedness’ and ‘foolishness’. ‘Like a lewd old
woman’, Pushkin averred, ‘you waylaid my wife in every corner, to speak to her
about your illegitimate or so-called son’. He demanded that Heeckeren put an end
‘to all these escapades’.12 By directly offending the Dutchman, Pushkin made a
proponent of the duel someone who would otherwise have sought to thwart it
(again). And by maintaining fuller secrecy this time, he prevented his friends’
intervention (Zhukovskii apparently knew nothing). Once Heeckeren had shared
news of the letter with d’Anthès, the latter challenged Pushkin. There was nothing
now to prevent the contest from occurring.13
The Duel
The duel took place on 27 January on the outskirts of the capital (a monument by
a railway overpass marks the spot today). It was clear, windy, and cold that day,
and the location, selected for its seclusion, was initially knee-deep in snow. The
rules worked out by the combatants’ seconds called for the following: the oppon
ents were to stand twenty steps apart, with barriers five steps in front of each and
ten steps between them. On a signal, each of the two was to begin walking toward
the other and to fire whenever it suited, though without crossing the barrier and
without retreating after his shot. The exercise would repeat itself by the same rules
until a result was secured.14 Though Pushkin reached the barrier first, d’Anthès
took the first shot and wounded his opponent fatally: the bullet passed through
Pushkin’s entire body, near the bottom of the right side of his belly, and stopped
under the skin on the other side. Not yet dead, the poet propped himself up on
his left arm and managed to fire his own shot and injure his opponent, though not
seriously. As d’Anthès’s second reported, Pushkin’s wound ‘was too serious to
14 1837
continue’. Having fallen again after taking his shot, the poet ‘half fainted twice and
for several moments was in a daze. He regained consciousness completely and did
not lose it again. In the sledge, being jolted during the half-mile trip on a very bad
road, he suffered without complaint’.15 On the longer trip home from a transfer
point to his apartment, the carriage had to stop several times, as Pushkin fre-
quently fainted. He was now sensing the seriousness of his wound.16
Deposited in his apartment at around 6 p.m., Pushkin had to suffer for almost
two days before expiring around 2.45 p.m. on the 29th. In the accounts we have of
those 45 hours, three central issues appear. One is Pushkin’s tremendous physical
suffering and the stoicism with which he endured it. On the morning of the 28th,
the family doctor Spasskii described his ordeal as ‘genuine torture. Pushkin’s physi-
ognomy altered; his gaze became wild, and it seemed as though his eyes were
ready to leap from their sockets’.17 Pushkin’s friend Alexander Turgenev remarked
of that same night that Pushkin ‘screamed frightfully; he nearly fell on the floor in
convulsions of suffering’. Later that day Turgenev reported: ‘He is suffering,
repeating the words, “My God, my God! What is this?” and clenches his fists in
convulsions’. At one point Pushkin even sought to acquire a pistol so that he could
end his ordeal by suicide. Yet even as the poet ‘experienced frightful torment’,
Spasskii remarked, the ‘uncommon toughness of his soul revealed itself to the
fullest’. Zhukovskii concurred: ‘On the whole, from the beginning to the end of
his sufferings (aside from two or three hours the first night, when they surpassed
every measure of human endurance) he was amazingly tough’. He cited one of
Pushkin’s doctors, Arendt, as saying that he had been in thirty battles: ‘I have seen
many people dying, but little comparable to this’.18
A second issue is the concern that Pushkin exhibited for his wife. Whatever
Natalia’s actions leading up the duel (and views on the matter vary), Pushkin was
apparently convinced of her innocence and determined to spare her shock. Even
in the carriage ride home, he was already considering how not to alarm her, tell-
ing his second, Constantine Danzas, to assure her that his wound was light. When
doctors told him that the matter was serious, he asked them not to inform her. He
called her to his bed and told her: ‘Don’t worry, you’re not responsible for this’. As
doctors attended to him, with Pushkin insisting that Natalia not be present dur-
ing their inspection of his injury, she suffered terribly in the next room, especially
once Pushkin let out a cry of pain. During the worst two hours of his suffering,
Natalia had mercifully fallen into ‘a heavy, lethargic sleep . . . as if purposely sent
from above’. Yet when he was encouraged to moan in order to ease the suffering,
Pushkin replied, ‘No, I shouldn’t moan, my wife will hear it’. Summarizing,
Yekaterina Meshcherskaia-Karamzina recounted that ‘amidst the most frightful
physical suffering’, the poet ‘thought only of his wife and of what she would feel
on account of him. During each intermission between bouts of tormenting pain,
he called her and attempted to console her, repeating that he regarded her as
innocent in his death and that he never, for one minute, deprived her of his trust
and love’.19 The dying man’s friend and fellow poet Peter Viazemskii reported a
week after Pushkin’s death that the poet had imposed on his friends ‘the sacred
obligation to protect his wife’s name from slander’.20
Finally, Pushkin sought to come to terms with his patron and censor, the
emperor. Duelling was a hanging offence, and by 1837 Pushkin had contracted
significant debts. The future of his wife and four children was now in doubt,
and his second, Danzas, faced prosecution for his participation in the duel.
Recall, moreover, that Pushkin had promised the tsar in November not to duel;
now, fatally wounded, ‘he sent the good Zhukovskii to ask the sovereign’s for-
giveness for having failed to keep his word’.21 When for his part a doctor told
Pushkin that he had no choice but to inform the sovereign, the poet initially
requested only that Nicholas not prosecute Danzas. Two hours later, the doctor
returned with a hand-written note from the emperor encouraging Pushkin to
‘die as a Christian’ and agreeing to take his wife and children into his charge
(the exact contents of the note remain unknown).22 Though he said nothing
directly about Danzas, the emperor also expressed his desire to cover all of
Pushkin’s debts. The tsar’s solicitude for Pushkin’s family after the poet’s death
earned renown and praise in both Russia and abroad (which presumably was
the intent).23
Although it appeared momentarily that Pushkin was on the mend, his
wound eventually overcame him. Having requested cloudberries and having
consumed them with satisfaction, he died.24 For two days the body remained
in his apartment, during which time throngs came to pay respects. On the
night of 30–31 January, instead of being transferred for a funeral service at St
Isaac’s Cathedral (to whose parish Pushkin belonged), the body was trans-
ferred, secretly and without spectacle, to the church of the imperial stables.
A requiem there occurred on 1 February with large numbers in attendance,
despite official efforts to limit the crowd. ‘Anyone and everyone in St Petersburg
who thinks or reads thronged to the church where the mass was being sung for
the poet’, wrote the diarist (and censor) Alexander Nikitenko that day.25 Two
days later the body travelled to Pskov province, again secretly, for interment,
at the poet’s request, beside his mother at the Sviatogorskii monastery. Natalia
requested that Danzas be allowed to accompany the body in transit, but the
emperor refused: Danzas had participated in a duel, which was illegal, and was
therefore subject to prosecution. Nicholas specified that Alexander Turgenev,
who was not involved in the duel, could accompany the corpse. Nikitenko
recorded that his wife, travelling to Petersburg, encountered the body at a
depot outside the capital, where gendarmes were scurrying about, eager to get
the carriage on its way, with the coffin under straw and wrapped in bast matting.
A peasant there explained, ‘You see, some fellow by the name of Pushkin was
killed, and they are speeding him away on this post chaise in matting and
straw—may God forgive them!—like a dog’. Turgenev was one of a tiny
16 1837
Figure 1.2. V. A. Zhukovskii, Pushkin in His Coffin, 30 January 1837. © The National
Pushkin Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
handful of people present at dawn on 6 February when, after a final liturgy,

Pushkin’s casket was lowered into a shallow grave: the earth was frozen solid,
and the coffin buried properly only after the spring thaw.26
For all that we know about the duel, many questions about Pushkin’s death
remain unanswered. We still do not know, for example, who sent the mock certifi-
cates to Pushkin in November. Natalia’s attitude in all of this is also a mystery—
we have virtually no sources in her own voice. It seems possible that Pushkin
actively sought death. In one reading, his spiritual development, discernible in his
poems of 1835–6, brought him to a greater belief in, and acceptance of, Providence
and his own early demise.27 But it is also true that he continued with literary
activity right up until the duel, which implies that he sought redemption rather
than death.28 So numerous are the unanswered questions that one interpretation
proposes that the true object of Pushkin’s resentment was the emperor himself. In
this reading, Nicholas, something of a womanizer, had paid court to Natalia and
had secured his desires, leaving Pushkin with only the extreme outlet to which he
resorted.29 This version of events helps to explain a number of the drama’s other-
wise inexplicable features, but direct evidence for it is scarce. Assessing its viability
is something that this author leaves to true Pushkinists, among whom he does not
count himself.
The Immediate Aftermath
In print, the reaction to Pushkin’s death was muted. As noted, Northern Bee
reported the death the day after it had occurred, but it did so on the second page
of the paper, with no headline and no explanation as to how or why the poet had
died. A few other papers followed suit. That same day the literary supplement to
Russian Invalid printed an obituary by Vladimir Odoevskii that declared, ‘The
sun of our poetry has set’. The next day, St Petersburg News concurred: ‘Russian
literature has not experienced such an important loss since the death of [Nikolai]
Karamzin’ in 1826.30 Neither of these publications could refer to the duel,
although it is worth noting—and this can scarcely be coincidental—that on
17 February Moscow News carried a story about a ‘Society Against Duels’ in the
Belgian city of Liège, praising its members for their ‘moral restraint’.31 In its first
issue of 1837, Pushkin’s own journal, The Contemporary, printed Zhukovskii’s
letter to Pushkin’s father, which constituted the first published account of the
poet’s death. But here as well, the story began from the moment that Pushkin was
brought to his apartment, without any explanation for his dire condition. The real
cause of Pushkin’s death was first openly mentioned—and then only in passing—
with the publication in April of the verdict of d’Anthès calling for his ejection
from the country.32 This is not to say that people were unaware of what had hap-
pened. In fact, there was an extensive epistolary production unfolding even as
Pushkin lay dying, and its authors actively encouraged broad distribution of their
accounts.33 Indeed, letters were so central to the manner in which Pushkin’s death
was originally written that the story bears comparison to an epistolary novel.34 As
a consequence, many people had a reasonably accurate understanding of what
had transpired, including even detailed information on Pushkin’s bodily wounds
and suffering.35
Those first weeks and months after January 1837 revealed a concerted effort by
various parties to shape the meaning of Pushkin’s death, in part by plumbing the
nature of his views while still alive. Lamenting that the ‘mystery’ surrounding the
last stage of Pushkin’s life provided endless fuel for misconception, Viazemskii
wrote on 14 February to the emperor’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael, that it
was incumbent upon Pushkin’s friends ‘to expose all that they know on that
account, and thereby to reveal his personality in its true light’. It was especially
important for Viazemskii to establish Pushkin’s devotion to the emperor.
Concerned that some were inclined to see in Pushkin (and his friends) oppos
ition to the government and the order it upheld, he was sure to recount that
Pushkin’s words on his deathbed ‘revealed the degree to which he was attached,
devoted, and thankful to the sovereign’. The poet was fundamentally apolitical,
not a ‘political activist’. ‘He was above all a poet, and only a poet. . . . He was deeply,
truly devoted to the sovereign, he loved him with all his heart’. Perhaps Pushkin
18 1837
had attacked the government in his youth (‘like any young person’), but by taste
and conviction he was ‘not a liberal but an aristocrat’. He regretted the fall of
France’s old regime, disliked that country’s July Monarchy (after the revolution in
1830), and wrote verse in direct opposition to the Polish insurrection of that same
year. ‘Jokes, a certain independence of character and opinion—that is still not lib-
eralism and not systematic opposition’. The best works of his later years—Boris
Godunov, Poltava, and History of the Pugachev Rebellion—were all distinctly
‘monarchist’, Viazemskii insisted.36 Writing in the same vein and charged with
going through Pushkin’s papers, Zhukovskii reported to the head of the Third
Section, Alexander Benckendorff, that there turned out to be nothing hostile to
the government and good morality, ‘of which I was certain beforehand, knowing
Pushkin’s manner of thought in his last years’. Pushkin’s ‘credo’, wrote Zhukovskii,
included ‘decisive conviction in the necessity for Russia of pure, unlimited autoc-
racy’, hostility to the July Revolution, and a fanatical opposition to ‘the Polish
revolution’. In short, Pushkin’s friends quickly set out to secure not only his per-
sonal rehabilitation after the duel, but also his political rehabilitation—for his
sake and their own.37
As the very urgency of these assertions suggest, however, there was another
way of interpreting Pushkin’s views. Particularly intriguing in this regard are the
remarks of the Prussian ambassador August von Liebermann, who already on
2 February reported to his government that public opinion would compel Nicholas
to punish Heeckeren. ‘Pushkin’s death presents itself here as an incomparable loss
for the country, as a public calamity. National pride has been riled up all the more
by the fact that the opponent, who has survived the poet, is of foreign origin’.
Liebermann recounted a great outpouring of emotion on Pushkin’s behalf at his
funeral, with many wishing to bear the body or even unbridle the horses and pull
the funeral carriage themselves. He added that Pushkin ‘was well-known as an
atheist’, and that there were grounds for supposing ‘that a significant portion of
the ovations to which Pushkin’s death gave occasion may and should be ascribed
to that distinct popularity that the departed acquired among some people in
certain layers of society for his ideas of contemporary liberalism’. Liebermann
went still further: ‘I know for a fact that under the cover of hot patriotism over
the course of several days people in Petersburg are holding highly unusual
speeches, asserting among other things that Pushkin represented the only sup-
port, the only representative of popular freedoms’. A letter of Heeckeren him-
self to his government the same day stated that the death had revealed to the
authorities ‘the existence of an entire party, of which [Pushkin] was the head’—
a ‘reformist’ party. Some foreign newspapers that covered Pushkin’s death
similarly drew attention to his opposition, liberal thought, and even atheism.38
The extent to which all of this is accurate remains an open question, though if
the matter concerns Pushkin’s views in the 1830s, his friends were probably
closer to the mark.
As we shall see, Nicholas was indeed concerned about potential public

r eactions to Pushkin’s death. But his personal response tended towards indiffer-
ence. As he wrote in one letter on 4 February, ‘Here everything is quiet, except
that Pushkin’s tragic death occupies the public and serves as food for various stu-
pid gossip. He died from a wound for an impudent and stupid challenge that he
issued, though, thank God, he died as a Christian’. Four days later he wrote
laconically to his brother Michael (the same grand prince to whom Viazemskii
had written), ‘Since my last letter nothing important has happened here, except
for the death of the famous Pushkin from a wound in a duel with d’Anthès’.
Acknowledging that to a point Pushkin had conducted himself as any honourable
man would, Nicholas criticized his ‘impudent letter’ to Heeckeren, which had
ultimately made d’Anthès ‘right in this matter’. The event, the emperor continued,
gave birth ‘to countless rumors, the vast majority of them stupid and among
which censure of Heeckeren’s behavior alone is just and warranted; he definitely
conducted himself like a vile scoundrel’.39 The emperor thus expressed neither
deep emotion at the loss of a great literary talent nor relief that an intellectual
resource for political opposition had conveniently disappeared.
Pushkin’s death generated interest abroad, all the more in light of foreigners’
prominence in the drama. Unburdened by Russia’s censorship, foreign news
papers could more openly discuss the duel. True, some of the details were off. The
German press reported that Pushkin’s estate Mikhailovskoe was on the banks of
the Neva River (it was actually in Pskov province), and that he had been exiled
from Russia for his liberal thinking (his exile had been within the country). Some
of the details of the duel were inaccurate—for example, that Pushkin died on the
spot or fatally wounded d’Anthès. Even Pushkin’s name appeared in curious
forms, for example ‘Musin Alexander von Pushkin’ (based apparently on confu-
sion with the prominent noble family Musin-Pushkin). Nor were foreigners
always aware of Pushkin’s literary status, as few of his works had been translated.
Still, it is noteworthy that foreign publications took an interest, even if it was the
duel above all that captured their imagination. There was clearly recognition, as
one German paper reported, that ‘Russian literature has suffered a great loss with
the death of its renowned poet Alexander von Pushkin’.40
Soon there were also attempts to raise funds for the poet’s family. The emperor
had agreed to take them under his protection, but soon the idea appeared that
selling Pushkin’s works could also cover those costs. The interior ministry thus
notified marshals of the nobility in various provinces in May 1837 about the
impending publication and their role in its sale. Given ‘how much the talent of
good writers facilitates the perfection of language, cultivates taste, and elevates
the sense of elegance’, said marshals were instructed to promote the sale of that
forthcoming publication among the nobles in their jurisdictions. ‘One cannot
doubt, it seems, that Russians will honor the memory of the great poet and at the
same time facilitate help for his children’. Yet to judge by the results in one
20 1837
province (Kursk), doubt was very much in order: in six of the province’s fifteen
districts no nobles at all agreed to the purchase (two other districts failed to
respond). By extending the deadline once, the marshal managed to sell 36 of the
40 sets entrusted to him, sending the other four back to Petersburg.41 By 1838
new provincial gazettes (see Chapter 5) could encourage such purchases as well.42
On the whole, though, the enterprise became, to quote Marcus Levitt, ‘one of the
most famous failures in Russian publishing’.43 A literary elite already idolized
Pushkin as a genius, but a broader cult of Pushkin did not yet exist.
Of Myths and Cults
Part of the issue is that state authorities were determined to prevent the poet’s
demise from becoming an occasion for protest. They therefore asserted strict
control over the body and the funeral process. Noting the gendarmes that had
appeared in Pushkin’s apartment during the day before the proposed transfer of
his body that night, Viazemskii asked Grand Duke Michael in frustration, ‘Against
whom was this force mustered, this full military parade?’ That police were needed
to maintain order outside the building was undeniable. ‘But what could they fear
from us? What intentions, what ulterior motives did they ascribe to us, if they
considered us neither madmen nor scoundrels?’44 Head of the Third Section
Benckendorff provides something of an answer, commenting on the many who
wanted to follow the funeral convoy to the burial site in Pskov province: it was
difficult to determine whether these gestures represented veneration for ‘Pushkin
the liberal or Pushkin the poet’. Best not to take chances: Fearing that popular
expressions of grief ‘might develop into a deplorable spectacle of triumph for the
liberals’, Benckendorff asserted the need ‘to adopt secret measures to suppress all
honours’.45 He and minister of education Sergei Uvarov—a comrade of Pushkin
in earlier days who had since become a foe—moved to block all other forms of
public reaction and even had destroyed those portraits of the poet produced for
mourning. When the literary supplement to Russian Invalid published the obit
uary cited earlier (‘The sun of our poetry has set’), Uvarov gave the publisher a
dressing down through Petersburg’s head censor: Uvarov, the censor explained,
‘is very, very cross with you. Why this publication about Pushkin? Why this black
frame around the news of the death of a person of low rank, without any real
position in state service?’ Uvarov objected to the expression ‘sun of our poetry’
(‘For pity’s sake, why such an honour?’) and the assertion that Pushkin had died
‘half-way through his great career’ (writing ‘little verses’ did not constitute ‘a great
career’).46 Even the publisher of the Northern Bee, Faddei Bulgarin, received a
reprimand for publishing the words quoted at the start of this chapter. On
12 February, the censor Nikitenko remarked, ‘The measure prohibiting the publi-
cation of anything about Pushkin is still in effect and the public is very disturbed
by it’.47 In short, the government was determined to ensure that, publicly at least,
no one was able to make too much of Pushkin.
Nor did people immediately agree on the meaning of Pushkin. The poet had
left an ambiguous legacy, and his proximity to the court rendered him suspect in
the eyes of the next generation of intellectuals, who were more eager to promote
socially conscious art. The result was that for a time two prominent value systems
in Russia—a new ‘nihilism’ on the left and government claims to monopoly over
Russian intellectual life—shared an aversion to the poet. In his novel Nests of the
Gentry (1859), set in 1842, Ivan Turgenev remarked of his protagonist reading a
different poet, ‘At that time Pushkin had not yet managed to come back into fash-
ion’.48 Even two decades after the duel, the writer Nadezhda Sokhanskaia could
lament, ‘The twenty-first year since the fateful day on which our first great poet
died has arrived, and what have we done for his memory? Nothing’.49
Gradually, though, a broader cult of Pushkin began to emerge. A critical stage
began in 1855, when Pavel Annenkov’s new edition of Pushkin’s work began to
appear. In 1859 the literary critic Apollon Grigoriev made the indelible state-
ment—‘Pushkin is our everything’ (Pushkin—eto nashe vse)—that would encap-
sulate the poet’s universal veneration in the twentieth century.50 In 1862, Pushkin
appeared in the famous Millennium of Russia Monument in Novgorod, as part of
a new government effort to include artists and writers in the national pantheon.51
By then graduates of the Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Pushkin’s alma mater, had also
begun to agitate for the poet’s proper commemoration. Though it took almost two
decades, these efforts culminated in the erection in 1880 of a famous monument
to Pushkin in Moscow, the poet’s birthplace. Its unveiling drew a crowd of between
100,000 and 500,000 (estimates vary), and an electrifying speech by Fyodor
Dostoevsky generated a tumultuous reaction that surprised even the speaker
himself.52 The termination of copyright on Pushkin’s work in 1887 generated a
flood of new editions, many of them intended for an audience of newly or par-
tially literate masses. The year 1899 brought the centenary of the poet’s birth, by
which time almost 7.5 million copies of Pushkin’s works had been printed. This
commemoration became an official affair, with the state more actively aspiring to
make Russian literature part of official culture. Its success was only partial, but the
tsarist regime had in any event recognized the potential unifying nature of
Pushkinism.53 The Soviet one would exploit it more fully.
Yet to acknowledge that a full-blown Pushkin cult emerged only gradually is
not to deny that many of its crucial elements were present early on. We have seen
that a literary elite already celebrated Pushkin as a genius during his lifetime, and
Nicholas also recognized the poet’s importance by becoming his personal censor.
The poet himself laid further groundwork. Especially striking is his most intensely
canonized poem of 1836, ‘I have built myself a monument’, which with uncanny
prescience established the terms for Pushkin’s shared national admiration. The
poem proposed that its author ‘shall not wholly die’ and ‘shall be famous so long
22 1837
as in this world beneath the moon / Lives even a single poet’. As if predicting the
Pushkin cult in its full-blown Soviet incarnation, Pushkin wrote,
News of me will pass through the whole of great Russia

And every language in her realm will speak my name . . .
And long shall I be loved by the people.
As Sandler comments, Pushkin’s prediction of immortality ‘seems proleptically to

console his mourners’. The consensus among Russians is that the poem represents
Pushkin’s ‘testament’, a work expressing the poignancy of Pushkin’s position as an
unappreciated hero addressing posterity.54 The poem seems also to presage the
erection of the monument in Moscow, a central moment in the emergence of the
Pushkin cult in tsarist years. Indeed, lines from the poem are inscribed on that
monument’s base.
If Pushkin’s own verse initiated the process of mythologization, then the work
of others drove that process on to the next stage. Zhukovskii offered a short poem
that gazed intently on the dead poet’s body. Written in melancholy, it fixates on
the transition from life to death and also supposes that future readers will want to
know specific details and physical attributes. On Zhukovskii’s request, countess
Yevdokiia Rostopchina produced two poems in 1838–9, including one, set at a
ball, that sought to read the features of Pushkin’s face: his ‘uneven features’, his
‘Southern eyes’, and his ‘exhausted smile’.55 Mirza Fatih-Ali-Akhundov, an Azeri
poet and a founder of Azerbaijani literature, likewise offered verse (originally in
Persian) ‘on Pushkin, the head of the cathedral of Poets’, thus revealing the bard’s
ability to speak across cultural divides.56 Yet undoubtedly the most important
poetic tribute was Mikhail Lermontov’s Death of a Poet, possibly written even
while Pushkin still lay dying. Lermontov’s angry verse accused above all high
society for his loss, as the very first lines attest: ‘The poet has perished!—a
prisoner of honor / He fell, slandered by rumour’.57 This poem, unpublished but
circulated in numerous copies, catapulted Lermontov to fame, though it also
earned him (like Pushkin earlier) exile to the south, where he himself perished in
a duel in 1841.
Early tribute took other forms as well. Even before Pushkin’s passing, many
came to his apartment to learn of his condition. Most important were his most
immediate friends: Zhukovskii, Viazemskii and his wife, and others.58 The ante-
chamber of his apartment was swamped with people as well. The public crowded
the street outside the apartment, so that a guards unit was needed to maintain
order. Viazemskii recounted that it was ‘impossible to count all of those who
came from various directions to inquire about his health during his illness’ (one
estimate suggested 4,000 people per day), and after his passing the apartment
proved far too small to accommodate all those who wished to pay respects.
Sensitive to public sentiment in light of his role in the duel, Heeckeren reported
to his government, ‘Upon Pushkin’s death public opinion has expressed itself
more strongly than expected’, and he ascribed these views to ‘the third estate’—
that is, ‘men of letters, artists, lesser civil servants, the nation’s big wheel merchant
class, and so on’.59
Implicated in the mourning and commemoration were growing aspirations for
national expression in Russia, which rendered Pushkin’s death especially timely. It
was in the 1830s that the ideal of narodnost—translated variously as ‘nationality’,
‘national character’, ‘folk character’, and other variants—thoroughly took root in
Russia. Reflecting a shift in the discursive framework of Russian culture that now
defined ‘the people’ (narod) unambiguously as the Russian popular masses, the
term narodnost was devised by Viazemskii in 1819 as a translation of the French
nationalité, combining the ideas of both ‘national’ and ‘popular’.60 The concept
narodnost offered a new way of thinking about the distinctiveness of Russian
national character and the ways in which it could be explored and expressed. It
also held out the prospect of joining Europe on equal terms. As the critic Nikolai
Nadezhdin wrote in 1836, in Europe the idea of narodnost had been made ‘a pin-
nacle of civilization’. ‘If we truly wish to be Europeans’, he asserted, ‘then we should
start by learning from them how to respect ourselves’.61 High culture became one
area in which people increasingly aspired to see narodnost embodied. Pushkin
himself remarked as early as 1825, ‘For some time it had been customary among
us to talk about narodnost, to demand narodnost, to complain of the absence of
narodnost in works of literature’. Pushkin was frustrated that ‘no one has thought
to define what he means by the word narodnost’, but the poet seems to have
accepted the basic premise at its foundation: ‘Climate, faith, and form of rule give
each people a particular physiognomy, which is more or less reflected in the mir-
ror of poetry’.62 Endowed with exceptional gifts and romanticized through his
death in a duel over love and jealousy, Pushkin could easily quench the thirst of
Russia’s young nationalists for narodnost and offer proof of their country’s artistic
prowess. His cult thus reflected the emergence of a Russian nation.
Conclusion
Apollon Grigoriev was perhaps premature when he declared in 1859, ‘Pushkin is

our everything’. But the remark was ultimately prophetic. From 1880 or so,
Pushkin has stood unchallenged at the apex of Russia’s hierarchy of culture. As
Lydia Ginzburg wrote in the late Soviet era, ‘The love of Pushkin, which is incom-
prehensible to foreigners, is the true sign of a person born of Russian culture. You
can like or dislike any other Russian writer—that is a matter of taste. But Pushkin
as a phenomenon is obligatory for us’.63
It is hard to deny Irina Surat’s assertion that Pushkin’s death represents ‘the
most significant event of his biography’. Positing that national heroes typically
24 1837
win their cherished status only in death, Sandler concurs: The poet ‘became
Pushkin only when he died in duel’, and his death ‘has fascinated Russians in
every generation since 1837’. Its timing was enormously important for making
Pushkin the national poet. Pushkin appeared at that moment in the early nineteenth
century when post-Napoleonic romantic nationalism made it imperative that
every nation have its native genius. Indeed, the cult of artistic genius—with ‘genius’
now encompassing the whole person rather than constituting merely one of his
attributes—was a central feature of the era’s Romanticism.64 No doubt the bril-
liance of Pushkin’s writing was critical to his appointment to this role, but his
death in a duel marked by romantic intrigue was also essential to him becoming
the most appealing figure. His death ‘was itself a poetic subject’, as the verse of
Lermontov and others attest, and was thus ‘especially conducive to the myth-
making process’.65 Which is another way of saying that Pushkin became what he
did—not just a great poet but a mythical figure—because of 1837.
The assertion may warrant contesting, but I will advance it here nonetheless:
Russia’s greatest contributions to world culture have come in the realms of litera-
ture and music. This initial sketch has touched on the first of these, so it is time
now to address the second. Our transition proves wonderfully seamless, for—as
luck would have it—the hero of our second sketch has been described as ‘our
musical Pushkin’.
Notes
1. Cited in Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet
(Stanford, CA, 2004), 87.
2. For accounts of the event, see ibid. 107–18; Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Malden, MA, 2012), 144–59; Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous,
Comrades! Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 113–48; and
Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger (eds), Epic Revisionism: Russian History
and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison, WI, 2006), 193–229.
3. L. Iakubovich, Severnaia Pchela 24 (30 Jan. 1837): 94.
4. Sandler, Commemorating, 5.
5. Abram Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki o knizhnoi
kul’ture Pushkinskoi epokhi (Moscow, 2001), 51–69 (citation at 59).
6. Ficquelmont, cited in Serena Vitale, Pushkin’s Button, trans. Ann Goldstein and Jon
Rothschild (New York, 1998), 47–8; letter of 11 Oct. 1833 in I. L. Levkovich (ed.),
Pis’ma A. S. Pushkina k zhene (SPb, 2019), 60; and V. A. Sollogub cited in
P. E. Shchegolev, Duel’ i smert’ Pushkina: Issledovanie i materialy, 2nd edn (Petrograd,
1917), 55.
7. On their backgrounds, see Shchegolev, Duel’ i smert’, 13–30. After his adoption in
1836, d’Anthès became a Heeckeren as well, but I use his pre-adoption surname to dis-
tinguish the two men.
8. Dolli Fikel’mon, Dnevnik, 1829–1837: Ves’ Pushkinskii Peterburg, ed. V. V. Savitskii

(Moscow, 2009), 355.
9. This was Pushkin’s second, V. A. Sollogub, as quoted in Stella Abramovich, Predystoriia
poslednei dueli Pushkina (SPb, 1994), 117.
10. Yekaterina Karamzina to her son Andrei (2 Feb. 1837), in Pushkin v pis’makh
Karamzinykh 1836–1837 godov (Moscow, 1960), 170 (Russian) and 300 (French
original).
11. Quoted in Abramovich, Predystoriia, 170–1, 178.
12. The letter is in A. N. Ammosov, Poslednie dni i konchina Aleksandra Sergeevicha
Pushkina so slov byvshego ego litseiskogo tovarishcha i sekundanta Konstantina
Karlovicha Danzasa (SPb, 1963), 47–9.
13. My account is based principally on Shchegelov, Duel’ i smert’ and especially
Abramovich, Predystoriia. For accounts in English, see Vitale’s idiosyncratic Pushkin’s
Button, and Walter N. Vickery’s, Pushkin: Death of a Poet (Bloomington, IN, 1968).
14. The precise conditions are in Shchegelov, Duel’ i smert’, 143.
15. Duel’ Pushkina s Dantesom-Gekkerenom: Podlinnoe voenno-sudnoe delo 1837 g. (SPb,
1900), 53.
16. P. V. Annenkov, Materialy dlia biografii Aleksandra Sergeevicha Pushkina (SPb,
1855), 420.
17. Spasskii in V. V. Versaev, Duel’ i smert’ Pushkina: Sistematicheskii svod podlinnykh
svidetel’stv sovremennikov iz knigi ‘Pushkin v zhizni’ (Moscow, 1927), 29.
18. Turgenev in Veresaev, Duel’ i smert’, 30, 32; Spasskii, ibid. 29; Vasilii Zhukovskii,
‘Poslednie minuty Pushkina’, Sovremennik 5 (1837): vi.
19. Ammosov, Poslednie dni, 27–8; Turgenev in Veresaev, Duel’ i smert’, 28; Zhukovskii,
‘Poslednie minuty’, esp. iv–viii (citation at vii); Vladimir Dahl and Meshcherskaia-
Karamzina in Veresaev, Duel’ i smert’, 35–7.
20. Cited in P. E. Shchegelov, ‘Duel’ Pushkina s Dantesom (Novye materialy)’, Istoricheskii
vestnik 94 (Jan. 1905), 175.
21. Yekaterina Karamzina to her son Andrei (2 Feb. 1837), in Pushkin v pis’makh
Karamzinykh, 170 (Russian) and 300 (French).
22. Ammosov quotes this note in Poslednie dni (31), but this was based only on Danzas’s
recollection of its content.
23. Shchegelov, ‘Duel’ Pushkina’, 954; Abramovich, Predystoriia, 155.
24. Ammosov, Poslednie dni, 37.
25. Aleksandr Nikitenko, The Diary of a Russian Censor, ed. and trans. Helen Saltz
Jacobson (Amherst, MA, 1975), 70.
26. Ammosov, Poslednie dni, 38–40, 68; Nikitenko, Diary, 71; Zhukovskii, ‘Poslednie
minuty’, vxii–vxiii; Irina Surat, ‘ “Da pristupliu’ ko smerti smelo…” O gibeli Pushkina’,
Novyi mir 2 (1999): https://magazines.gorky.media/novyi_mi/1999/2/da-pristuplyu-
ko-smerti-smelo.html.
27. This is Surat’s assertion in ‘ “Da pristupliu” ’.
28. Abramovich, Predystoriia, 158–68, 201.
29. Igor Yefimov, ‘A Duel with the Tsar’, Russian Review 58 (1999): 574–90.
30. Both cited here from M. Venevitinov, Nekrologi Pushkina v nemetskikh gazetakh 1837
goda (SPb, 1900), 5.
26 1837
31. ‘Obshchestvo protiv deulei v g. Liezhe’, Moskovskie vedomosti 14 (17 Feb. 1837): 95.
32. Severnaia Pchela 81 (12 Feb. 1837): 521.
33. Surat, ‘ “Da pristpliu” ’; Shchegelov, ‘Duel’ Pushkina’, 174.
34. Such is Leslie O’Bell’s contention in ‘Writing the Story of Pushkin’s Death’, Slavic
Review 58(2) (1999): 393–406.
35. Irina Reyfman, ‘Death and Mutilation at the Dueling Site: Pushkin’s Death as a
National Spectacle’, Russian Review 60 (2001): 72–88.
36. Shchegelov, ‘Duel’ Pushkina’, 173–95 (citations at 177, 183, 189–90).
37. Ibid., citations at 193 and 194.
38. Ibid. 944–72 (citations at 966–9); Venevitinov, Nekrologi Pushkina, 12, 15, 18, 26, 28.
39. Nicholas to Prince Ivan Paskevich and Grand Duke Michael, in Shchegelov, ‘Duel’
Pushkina’, citations at 956–7.
40. Venevitinov, Nekrologi Pushkina (citations at 8, 12, 27).
41. A. Tankov, ‘Rasprostranenie sochinenii Pushkina v Kurskoi gubernii v 1837 godu’,
Istoricheskii vestnik 26 (1886): 630–3 (citations at 631).
42. E.g. Voronezhskie GV 11 (12 Mar. 1838): 62–3.
43. Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca,
NY, 1989), 23.
44. Cited in Shchegelov, ‘Duel’ Pushkina’, 188.
45. Cited in Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, 19.
46. Cited in Irina Reyfman, How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial
Table of Ranks (Madison, WI, 2016), 63. Reyfman interprets this and other evidence
to show that Pushkin’s service record, which was indeed far from impressive, was
more important to both him and contemporaries than is generally allowed. See
ibid. 44–85.
47. Nikitenko, Diary, 70–71 (citation at 71).
48. I. S. Turgenev, Romany (Moscow, 1975), 229.
49. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, esp. 4–10, 26–33 (citation of Sokhanskaia at 33).
50. Cited in Sandler, Commemorating, 10.
51. Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through
Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison, WI, 2010), 66–8.
52. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics; Neil Stewart, ‘Pushkin 1880: Fedor Dostoevsky Voices
the Russian Self-Image’, in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds), Commemorating
Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever
(Basingstoke, 2014), 203–23.
53. Marcus C. Levitt, ‘Pushkin in 1899’, in Boris Gasparov, Robert Hughes, and Irina
Paperno (eds), Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism (Berkeley, CA, 1992),
183–203. On the larger problem of Pushkin and copyright, see Ekaterina Pravilova, A
Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia
(Princeton, NJ, 2014), 215–33.
54. Sandler, Commemorating, 21–5 (citations at 22 and 25); Levitt, Russian Literary
Politics, 24–5.
55. Sandler, Commemorating, 31–46 (citation of Rostophina at 39).
56. ‘Na smert’ Pushkina: Sochinenie v stikhakh sovremennago Persidskago Poeta’,
Moskovskii nabliudatel’ 2 (1837): 297–304 (citation at 300).
Another random document with
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(Ah me, that crowded hour of glorious lives—
Ten of them, all from drives!)
Once only have you let me in,

Through all the knocks we've had together;
That time when, wanting four to win,
I fairly tried to tonk the leather—
And lo! a full-faced welt, without the least
Warning, went S.S.E.
A painful scene. In point of fact

I'm doubtful if I ought to hymn it;
Enough to say you went and cracked,
And left me thinking things like "Dimmit"
(And not like "Dimmit"), as I heard Slip call
"Mine!" and he pouched the ball.
Do you remember, too, the game

One August somewhere down in Dorset
When, being told to force the same,
We straightway started in to force it....
For half-an-hour or so we saw it through,
And scratched a priceless two;
Or how the prayer to play for keeps

And hang the runs, we didn't need 'em,
So stirred us, we collected heaps
With rather more than usual freedom;
Fifteen in fourteen minutes—till a catch
Abruptly closed the match?
* * * * * *
Well, well—the coming years (if fine)

Shall see us going even stronger;
So pouring out the oil and wine,
Let's sit and drink, a little longer;
Here's to a decent average of ten!
(Yours is the oil. Say when....)
—————
When Morning on the heels of Night

Picks up her shroud at five and after,
The diffident observer might
(Or might not) see, beneath a rafter,
A pensive rodent upside down. Well, that
Is (possibly) a Bat....
In any case I have not sung of that.
A SCRATCH LOT
I. THE CHOOSING OF THE DAY
As soon as I had promised to take an eleven down to Chartleigh I knew

that I was in for trouble; but I did not realise how great it would be until I
consulted Henry Barton. Henry is a first-class cricketer, and it was my idea
that he should do all the batting for us, and such of the bowling as the laws
allowed. I had also another idea, and this I explained to Henry.
"As you are aware," I said, "the ideal side contains five good bats, four
good bowlers, a wicket-keeper, and Henry Barton."
"Quite so," agreed Henry.
"That is the principle on which one selects an eleven. Now, I intend to

strike out a line of my own. My team shall consist of three authors or
journalists, two solicitors, four barristers, a couple from the Stock
Exchange, some civil servants and an artist or two. How many is that?"
"Nineteen."
"Well, that's the idea, anyhow."
"It's a rotten idea."
"No, it's a splendid idea. I wonder nobody has thought of it before. I

send a solicitor and a journalist in first. The journalist uses the long handle,
while the solicitor plays for keeps."
"And where does the artist come in?"
"The artist comes in last, and plays for a draw. You are very slow to-day,
Henry."
Henry, the man of leisure, thought a moment.
"Yes, that's all very well for you working men," he said at last, "but
what do I go as? Or am I one of the barristers?"
"You go as 'with Barton.' Yes. If you're very good you shall have an 'H'
in brackets after you. 'With Barton (H)'"
The method of choosing my team being settled, the next thing was the
day. "Any day in the first week in July," the Chartleigh captain had said.
Now at first sight there appear to be seven days in the week, but it is not
really so. For instance, Saturday. Now there's a good day! What could one
object to in a Saturday?
But do you imagine Henry Barton would let it pass?
"I don't think you'll get eleven people for the Saturday," he said. "People
are always playing cricket on Saturday."
"Precisely," I said. "Healthy exercise for the London toiler. That's why
I'm asking 'em."
"But I mean they'll have arranged to play already with their own teams.
Or else they'll be going away for week-ends."
"One can spend a very pretty week-end at Chartleigh."
"H'm, let me think. Any day in the week, isn't it?"
"Except, apparently, Saturday," I said huffily.
"Let's see now, what days are there?"
I mentioned two or three of the better-known ones.
"Yes. Of course, some of those are impossible, though. We'd better go

through the week and see which is best."
I don't know who Barton is that he should take it upon himself to make
invidious distinctions between the days of the week.
"Very well, then," I said. "Sunday."
"Ass."
That seemed to settle Sunday, so we passed on to Monday.
"You won't get your stockbroker on Monday," said Henry. "It's

Contanger day or something with them every Monday."
"Stocktaking, don't you mean?"
"I dare say. Anyhow, no one in the House can get away on a Monday."
"I must have my stockbrokers. Tuesday."
Tuesday, it seemed, was hopeless. I was a fool to have thought of

Tuesday. Why, everybody knew that Tuesday was an impossible day for
——
I forget what spoilt Tuesday's chance. I fancy it was a busy day for Civil
Servants. No one in the Home Civil can get away on a Tuesday. I know that
sounds absurd, but Henry was being absurd just then. Or was it barristers?
Briefs get given out on a Tuesday, I was made to understand. That brought
us to Wednesday. I hoped much from Wednesday.
"Yes," said Henry. "Wednesday might do. Of course most of the

weeklies go to press on Wednesday. Rather an awkward day for journalists.
What about Thursday?"
I began to get annoyed.
"Thursday my flannel trousers go to the press," I said—"that is to say,

they come back from the wash then."
"Look here, why try to be funny?"
"Hang it, who started it? Talking about Contanger-days. Contanger—it

sounds like a new kind of guano."
"Well, if you don't believe me——"
"Henry, I do. Thursday be it, then."
"Yes, I suppose that's all right," said Henry doubtfully.
"Why not? Don't say it's sending-in day with artists," I implored. "Not
every Thursday?"
"No. Only there's Friday, and——"
"Friday is my busy day," I pleaded—"my one ewe lamb. Do not rob me

of it."
"It's a very good day, Friday. I think you'd find that most people could
get off then."
"But why throw over Thursday like this? A good, honest day, Henry.
Many people get born on a Thursday, Henry. And it's a marrying day,
Henry. A nice, clean, sober day, and you——"
"The fact is," said Henry, "I've suddenly remembered I'm engaged
myself on Thursday."
This was too much.
"Henry," I said coldly, "you forget yourself—you forget yourself

strangely, my lad. Just because I was weak enough to promise you an 'H'
after your name. You seem to have forgotten that the 'H' was to be in
brackets."
"Yes, but I'm afraid I really am engaged."
"Are you really? Look here—I'll leave out the 'with' and you shall be
one of us. There! Baby, see the pretty gentlemen!"
Henry smiled and shook his head.
"Oh, well," I said, "we must have you. So if you say Friday, Friday it is.
You're quite sure Friday is all right for solicitors? Very well, then."
So the day was settled for Friday. It was rather a pity, because, as I said,
in the ordinary way Friday is the day I put aside for work.
II. THE SELECTION COMMITTEE
The committee consisted of Henry and myself. Originally it was myself

alone, but as soon as I had selected Henry I proceeded to co-opt him,
reserving to myself, however, the right of a casting vote in case of any
difference of opinion. One arose, almost immediately, over Higgins. Henry
said:
(a) That Higgins had once made ninety-seven.
(b) That he had been asked to play for his county.
(c) That he was an artist, and we had arranged to have an artist in the team.
In reply I pointed out:
(a) That ninety-seven was an extremely unlikely number for anyone to have
made.
(b) That if he had been asked he evidently hadn't accepted, which showed
the sort of man he was: besides which, what was his county?
(c) That, assuming for the moment he had made ninety-seven, was it likely
he would consent to go in last and play for a draw, which was why we
wanted the artist? And that, anyhow, he was a jolly bad artist.
(d) That hadn't we better put it to the vote?
This was accordingly done, and an exciting division ended in a tie.
Those in favour of Higgins 1

Those against Higgins 1
The Speaker gave his casting vote against Higgins.
Prior to this, however, I had laid before the House the letter of
invitation. It was as follows (and, I flatter myself, combined tact with a
certain dignity):—
"DEAR——, I am taking a team into the country on Friday week to

play against the village eleven. The ground and the lunch are good. Do you
think you could manage to come down? I know you are very busy just now
with
Contangers,
Briefs,
Clients,
Your Christmas Number,
Varnishing Day,
(Strike out all but one of these)
but a day in the country would do you good. I hear from all sides that you
are in great form this season. I will give you all particulars about trains later
on. Good-bye. Remember me to——. How is——? Ever yours.
"P.S.—Old Henry is playing for us. He has strained himself a little and
probably won't bowl much, so I expect we shall all have a turn with the
ball."
Or, "I don't think you have ever met Henry Barton, the cricketer. He is
very keen on meeting you. Apparently he has seen you play somewhere. He
will be turning out for us on Friday.
"P.P.S.—We might manage to have some bridge in the train."
"That," I said to Henry, "is what I call a clever letter."
"What makes you think that?"
"It is all clever," I said modestly. "But the cleverest part is a sentence at
the end. 'I will give you all particulars about trains later on.' You see I have
been looking them up, and we leave Victoria at seven-thirty A.M. and get
back to London Bridge at eleven-forty-five P.M."
The answers began to come in the next day. One of the first was from
Bolton, the solicitor, and it upset us altogether. For, after accepting the
invitation, he went on: "I am afraid I don't play bridge. As you may
remember, I used to play chess at Cambridge, and I still keep it up."
"Chess," said Henry. "That's where White plays and mates in two
moves. And there's a Black too. He does something."
"We shall have to get a Black. This is awful."
"Perhaps Bolton would like to do problems by himself all the time."
"That would be rather bad luck on him. No, look here. Here's Carey.
Glad to come, but doesn't bridge. He's the man."
Accordingly we wired to Carey: "Do you play chess? Reply at once."
He answered, "No. Why?"
"Carey will have to play that game with glass balls. Solitaire. Yes. We
must remember to bring a board with us."
"But what about the chess gentleman?" asked Henry.
"I must go and find one. We've had one refusal."
There is an editor I know slightly, so I called upon him at his office. I

found him writing verses.
"Be brief," he said, "I'm frightfully busy."
"I have just three questions to ask you," I replied.
"What rhymes with 'yorker'?"
"That wasn't one of them."
"Yorker—corker—por——"
"Better make it a full pitch," I suggested. "Step out and make it a full
pitch. Then there are such lots of rhymes."
"Thanks, I will. Well?"
"One. Do you play bridge?"
"No."
"Two. Do you play chess?"
"I can."
"Three. Do you play cricket? Not that it matters."

"Yes, I do sometimes. Good-bye. Send me a proof, will you? By the
way, what paper is this for?"
"The Sportsman, if you'll play. On Friday week. Do."
"Anything, if you'll go."
"May I have that in writing?"
He handed me a rejection form.
"There you are. And I'll do anything you like on Friday."
I went back to Henry and told him the good news.
"I wonder if he'll mind being black," said Henry. "That's the chap that
always gets mated so quickly."
"I expect they'll arrange it among themselves. Anyhow, we've done our
best for them."
"It's an awful business, getting up a team," said Henry thoughtfully.

"Well, we shall have two decent sets of bridge, anyway. But you ought to
have arranged for twelve aside, and then we could have left out the chess
professors and had three sets."
"It's all the fault of the rules. Some day somebody will realise that four
doesn't go into eleven, and then we shall have a new rule."
"No, I don't think so," said Henry. "I don't fancy 'Wanderer' would allow
it."
III. IN THE TRAIN
If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is ingratitude. Take the case of

Carey. Carey, you may remember, professed himself unable to play either
bridge or chess; and as we had a three-hour journey before us it did not look
as though he were going to have much of a time. However, Henry and I,
thinking entirely of Carey's personal comfort, went to the trouble of buying
him a solitaire board, with glass balls complete. The balls were all in
different colours.
I laid this before Carey as soon as we settled in the train.
"Whatever's that?"
"The new game," I said. "It's all the rage now, the man tells me. The
Smart Set play it every Sunday. Young girls are inveigled into lonely
country houses and robbed of incredible sums."
Carey laughed scornfully.
"So it is alleged," I added. "The inventor claims for it that in some

respects it has advantages which even cricket cannot claim. As, for
instance, it can be played in any weather: nay, even upon the sick bed."
"And how exactly is it played?"
"Thus. You take one away and all the rest jump over each other. At each
jump you remove the jumpee, and the object is to clear the board. Hence the
name—solitaire."
"I see. It seems a pretty rotten game."
That made me angry.
"All right. Then don't play. Have a game of marbles on the rack
instead."
Meanwhile Henry was introducing Bolton and the editor to each other.
"Two such famous people," he began.
"Everyone," said Bolton, with a bow, "knows the editor of——"

"Oh yes, there's that. But I meant two such famous chess players.
Bolton," he explained to the editor, "was twelfth man against Oxford some
years ago. Something went wrong with his heart, or he'd have got in. On his
day, and if the board was at all sticky, he used to turn a good deal from
QB4."
"Do you really play?" asked Bolton eagerly. "I have a board here."
"Does he play! Do you mean to say you have never heard of the
Trocadero Defence?"
"The Sicilian Defence——"
"The Trocadero Defence. It's where you palm the other man's queen
when he's not looking. Most effective opening."
They both seemed keen on beginning, so Henry got out the cards for the
rest of us.
I drew the younger journalist, against Henry and the senior stockbroker.
Out of compliment to the journalist we arranged to play half-a-crown a
hundred, that being about the price they pay him. I dealt, and a problem
arose immediately. Here it is.
"A deals and leaves it to his partner B, who goes No Trumps. Y leads a
small heart. B's hand consists of king and three small diamonds, king and
one other heart, king and three small clubs, and three small spades. A plays
the king from Dummy, and Z puts on the ace. What should A do?"
Answer. Ring communication-cord and ask guard to remove B.
"Very well," I said to Dummy. "One thing's pretty clear. You don't bowl
to-day. Long-leg both ends is about your mark. Somewhere where there's
plenty of throwing to do."
Later on, when I was Dummy, I strolled over to the chess players.
"What's the ground like?" said the editor, as he finessed a knight.

"Sporting. Distinctly sporting."
"Long grass all round, I suppose?"
"Oh, lord, no. The cows eat up all that."
"Do you mean to say the cows are allowed on the pitch?"
"Well, they don't put it that way, quite. The pitch is allowed on the cows'
pasture land."
"I suppose if we make a hundred we shall do well?" asked somebody.
"If we make fifty we shall declare," I said. "By Jove, Bolton, that's a
pretty smart move."
I may not know all the technical terms, but I do understand the idea of
chess. The editor was a pawn up and three to play, and had just advanced
his queen against Bolton's king, putting on a lot of check side as it seemed
to me. Of course, I expected Bolton would have to retire his king; but not
he! He laid a stymie with his bishop, and it was the editor's queen that had
to withdraw. Yet Bolton was only spare man at Cambridge!
"I am not at all sure," I said, "that chess is not a finer game even than
solitaire."
"It's a finer game than cricket," said Bolton, putting his bishop back in
the slips again.
"No," said the editor. "Cricket is the finest game in the world. For why?
I will tell you."
"Thanks to the glorious uncertainty of our national pastime," began the

journalist, from his next Monday's article.
"No, thanks to the fact that it is a game in which one can produce the
maximum of effect with the minimum of skill. Take my own case. I am not
a batsman, I shall never make ten runs in an innings, yet how few people
realise that! I go in first wicket down, wearing my M.C.C. cap. Having
taken guard with the help of a bail, I adopt Palairet's stance at the wicket.
Then the bowler delivers: either to the off, to leg, or straight. If it is to the
off, I shoulder my bat and sneer at it. If it is to leg, I swing at it. I have a
beautiful swing, which is alone worth the money. Probably I miss, but the
bowler fully understands that it is because I have not yet got the pace of the
wicket. Sooner or later he sends down a straight one, whereupon I proceed
to glide it to leg. You will see the stroke in Beldam's book. Of course, I miss
the ball, and am given out l.b.w. Then the look of astonishment that passes
over my face, the bewildered inquiry of the wicket-keeper, and finally the
shrug of good-humoured resignation as I walk from the crease! Nine times
out of ten square-leg asks the umpire what county I play for. That is
cricket."
"Quite so," I said, when he had finished. "There's only one flaw in it.
That is that quite possibly you may have to go in last to-day. You'll have to
think of some other plan. Also on this wicket the ball always goes well over
your head. You couldn't be l.b.w. if you tried."
"Oh, but I do try."
"Yes. Well, you'll find it difficult."
The editor sighed.
"Then I shall have to retire hurt," he said.
Bolton chuckled to himself.
"One never retires hurt at chess," he said, as he huffed the editor's king.
"Though once," he added proudly, "I sprained my hand, and had to make all
my moves with the left one. Check."
The editor yawned, and looked out of the window.
"Are we nearly there?" he asked.

IV. IN THE FIELD
It is, I consider, the duty of a captain to consult the wishes of his team
now and then, particularly when he is in command of such a heterogeneous
collection of the professions as I was. I was watching a match at the Oval
once, and at the end of an over Lees went up to Dalmeny, and had a few
words with him. Probably, I thought, he is telling him a good story that he
heard at lunch; or, maybe, he is asking for the latest gossip from the Lobby.
My neighbour, however, held other views.
"There," he said, "there's ole Walter Lees asking to be took off."
"Surely not," I answered. "Dalmeny had a telegram just now, and Lees
is asking if it's the three-thirty winner."
Lees then began to bowl again.
"There you are," I said triumphantly, but my neighbour wouldn't hear of

it.
"Ole Lees asked to be took off, and ole Dalmeny" (I forget how he
pronounced it, but I know it was one of the wrong ways)—"ole Dalmeny
told him he'd have to stick on a bit."
Now that made a great impression on me, and I agreed with my friend
that Dalmeny was in the wrong.
"When I am captaining a team," I said, "and one of the bowlers wants to

come off, I am always ready to meet him half-way, more than half-way.
Better than that, if I have resolved upon any course of action, I always let
my team know beforehand; and I listen to their objections in a fair-minded
spirit."
It was in accordance with this rule of mine that I said casually, as we

were changing, "If we win the toss I shall put them in."
There was a chorus of protest.

"That's right, go it," I said. "Henry objects because, as a first-class
cricketer, he is afraid of what The Sportsman will say if we lose. The editor
naturally objects—it ruins his chance of being mistaken for a county player
if he has to field first. Bolton objects because heavy exercise on a hot day
spoils his lunch. Thompson objects because that's the way he earns his
living at the Bar. His objection is merely technical, and is reserved as a
point of law for the Court of Crown Cases Reserved. Markham is a socialist
and objects to authority. Also he knows he's got to field long-leg both ends.
Gerald——"
"But why?" said Henry.
"Because I want you all to see the wicket first. Then you can't say you
weren't warned." Whereupon I went out and lost the toss.
As we walked into the field the editor told me a very funny story. I
cannot repeat it here for various reasons. First, it has nothing to do with
cricket; and, secondly, it is, I understand, coming out in his next number,
and I should probably get into trouble. Also it is highly technical, and
depends largely for its success upon adequate facial expression. But it
amused me a good deal. Just as he got to the exciting part, Thompson came
up.
"Do you mind if I go cover?" he asked.
"Do," I said abstractedly. "And what did the vicar say?"
The editor chuckled. "Well, you see, the vicar, knowing, of course, that
——"
"Cover, I suppose," said Gerald, as he caught us up.
"What? Oh yes, please. The vicar did know, did he?"
"Oh, the vicar knew. That's really the whole point."
I shouted with laughter.
"Good, isn't it?" said the editor. "Well, then——"

"Have you got a cover?" came Markham's voice from behind us.
I turned round.
"Oh, Markham," I said, "I shall want you cover, if you don't mind. Sorry
—I must tell these men where to go—well, then, you were saying——"
The editor continued the story. We were interrupted once or twice, but
he finished it just as their first two men came out. I particularly liked that
bit about the——
"Jove," I said suddenly, "we haven't got a wicket-keeper. That's always

the way. Can you keep?" I asked the editor.
"Isn't there anyone else?"
"I'm afraid they're all fielding cover," I said, remembering suddenly.

"But, look here, it's the chance of a lifetime for you. You can tell 'em all that
——"
But he was trotting off to the pavilion.
"Can anybody lend me some gloves?" he asked. "They want me to keep

wicket. Thing I've never done in my life. Of course I always field cover in
the ordinary way. Thanks awfully. Sure you don't mind? Don't suppose I
shall stop a ball though."
"Henry," I called, "you're starting that end. Arrange the field, will you?
I'll go cover. You're sure to want one."
Their first batsman was an old weather-beaten villager called George.

We knew his name was George because the second ball struck him in the
stomach and his partner said, "Stay there, George," which seemed to be
George's idea too. We learnt at lunch that once, in the eighties or so, he had
gone in first with Lord Hawke (which put him on a level with that player),
and that he had taken first ball (which put him just above the
Yorkshireman).
There the story ended, so far as George was concerned; and indeed it
was enough. Why seek to inquire if George took any other balls besides the
first?
In our match, however, he took the second in the place that I mentioned,
the third on the back of the neck, the fourth on the elbow, and the fifth in
the original place; while the sixth, being off the wicket, was left there.
Nearly every batsman had some pet stroke, and we soon saw that George's
stroke was the leg-bye. His bat was the second line of defence, and was
kept well in the block. If the ball escaped the earthwork in front, there was
always a chance that it would be brought up by the bat. Once, indeed, a
splendid ball of Henry's which came with his arm and missed George's legs,
snicked the bat, and went straight into the wicket-keeper's hands. The
editor, however, presented his compliments, and regretted that he was
unable to accept the enclosed, which he accordingly returned with many
thanks.
There was an unwritten law that George could not be l.b.w. I cannot say
how it arose—possibly from a natural coyness on George's part about the
exact significance of the "l." Henry, after appealing for the best part of three
overs, gave it up, and bowled what he called "googlies" at him. This looked
more hopeful, because a googly seems in no way to be restricted as to the
number of its bounces, and at each bounce it had a chance of doing
something. Unfortunately it never did George. Lunch came and the score
was thirty-seven—George having compiled in two hours a masterly
nineteen; eighteen off the person, but none the less directly due to him.
"We must think of a plan of campaign at lunch," said Henry. "It's

hopeless to go on like this."
"Does George drink?" I asked anxiously. It seemed the only chance.
But George didn't. And the score was thirty seven for five, which is a
good score for the wicket.
V. AT THE WICKETS
At lunch I said: "I have just had a wire from the Surrey committee to
say that I may put myself on to bowl."
"That is good hearing," said Henry.
"Did they hear?" asked Gerald anxiously, looking over at the Chartleigh
team.
"You may think you're very funny, but I'll bet you a—a—anything you
like that I get George out."
"All right," said Gerald. "I'll play you for second wicket down, the loser
to go in last."
"Done," I said, "and what about passing the salad now?"
After lunch the editor took me on one side and said: "I don't like it. I
don't like it at all."
"Then why did you have so much?" I asked.
"I mean the wicket. It's dangerous. I am not thinking of myself so much
as of——"
"As of the reading public?"
"Quite so."
"You think you—you would be missed in Fleet Street—just at first?"
"You are not putting the facts too strongly. I was about to suggest that I
should be a 'did not bat.'"
"Oh! I see. Perhaps I ought to tell you that I was talking just now to the
sister of their captain."
The editor looked interested.

"About the pad of the gardener?" he said.
"About you. She said—I give you her own words—'Who is the tall,
handsome man keeping wicket in a M.C.C. cap?' So I said you were a well-
known county player, as she would see when you went in to bat."
The editor shook my hand impressively.
"Thank you very much," he said. "I shall not fail her. What county did
you say?"
"Part of Flint. You know the little bit that's got into the wrong county by
mistake? That part. She had never heard of it; but I assured her it had a little
bit of yellow all to itself on the map. Have you a pretty good eleven?"
The editor swore twice—once for me and once for Flint. Then we went
out into the field.
My first ball did for George. I followed the tactics of William the First
at the Battle of Hastings, 1066. You remember how he ordered his archers
to shoot into the air, and how one arrow fell and pierced the eye of Harold,
whereupon confusion and disaster arose. So with George. I hurled one
perpendicularly into the sky, and it dropped (after a long time) straight upon
the batsman. George followed it with a slightly contemptuous eye... all the
way....
All the way. Of course, I was sorry. We were all much distressed. They
told us afterwards he had never been hit in the eye before.... One gets new
experiences.
George retired hurt. Not so much hurt as piqued, I fancy. He told the
umpire it wasn't bowling. Possibly. Neither was it batting. It was just
superior tactics.
The innings soon closed, and we had sixty-one to win, and, what
seemed more likely, fifty-nine and various other numbers to lose. Sixty-one
is a very unlucky number with me—oddly enough I have never yet made
sixty-one; like W.G. Grace, who had never made ninety-three. My average

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1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution Paul

Stephanie Ireland, David McDonald, Elizabeth Nelson, Willard Sunderland, and

0.1 St. Petersburg and its environs xviii

5.1 Number of newspapers in Russia, 1801–47 89

Transliteration and Terminology

Do you not find something grand in Russia’s present situation,

1837 was significant, at times openly dramatic; a few contemporaries—for

0 100 200 mi ASTRAKHAN

Figure 0.2. The provinces of European Russia. Map by Bill Nelson.

Alexander I Constantine Alexandra Elena Maria Catherine Olga Anna Michael

Alexandra Fedorovna Nicholas I

Alexander II Maria Olga Alexandra Constantine Nicholas Michael

Figure 0.3. The Romanov Dynasty, 1796–1881.

Frenchman Went A-Courtin’

Broadly regarded as the father of the modern Russian language, Alexander

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 11

Figure 1.1. Alexander Julius Klünder, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Lithograph,

began to show Natalia ‘signs of admiration completely inadmissible in relation to

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 13

Another attempt at reconciliation in mid-January failed, after which d’Anthès’s

handful of people present at dawn on 6 February when, after a final liturgy,

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 17

The Immediate Aftermath

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 19

As we shall see, Nicholas was indeed concerned about potential public

Of Myths and Cults

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 21

News of me will pass through the whole of great Russia

As Sandler comments, Pushkin’s prediction of immortality ‘seems proleptically to

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 23

Apollon Grigoriev was perhaps premature when he declared in 1859, ‘Pushkin is

He Fell, Slandered by Rumour 25

8. Dolli Fikel’mon, Dnevnik, 1829–1837: Ves’ Pushkinskii Peterburg, ed. V. V. Savitskii

Once only have you let me in,

A painful scene. In point of fact

Do you remember, too, the game

Or how the prayer to play for keeps

Well, well—the coming years (if fine)

When Morning on the heels of Night

I. THE CHOOSING OF THE DAY

As soon as I had promised to take an eleven down to Chartleigh I knew

"Quite so," agreed Henry.

"That is the principle on which one selects an eleven. Now, I intend to

"Well, that's the idea, anyhow."

"It's a rotten idea."

"No, it's a splendid idea. I wonder nobody has thought of it before. I

"And where does the artist come in?"

Henry, the man of leisure, thought a moment.

But do you imagine Henry Barton would let it pass?

"H'm, let me think. Any day in the week, isn't it?"

"Except, apparently, Saturday," I said huffily.

"Let's see now, what days are there?"

I mentioned two or three of the better-known ones.

"Yes. Of course, some of those are impossible, though. We'd better go

"Very well, then," I said. "Sunday."

That seemed to settle Sunday, so we passed on to Monday.

"You won't get your stockbroker on Monday," said Henry. "It's

"Stocktaking, don't you mean?"

"I must have my stockbrokers. Tuesday."

Tuesday, it seemed, was hopeless. I was a fool to have thought of

"Yes," said Henry. "Wednesday might do. Of course most of the

I began to get annoyed.

"Thursday my flannel trousers go to the press," I said—"that is to say,

0.1 St. Petersburg and its environs xviii

5.1 Number of newspapers in Russia, 1801–47 89