Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  When Pushkin finally arrived in Odessa in the hot July of 1823, he came with a literary and public celebrity that made the transfer of his exile something of a public event. He was never at a loss for dinner invitations or drinking partners. He was known to the city’s substantial number of prostitutes, who were well acquainted with Greek and Italian sailors but rather less familiar with poets. He had spent the last three years wandering the empire’s far-flung borderlands (albeit in a good deal of luxury) and now found himself sloshing through dust and mud to attend a salon or late-evening supper. “I am again in Odessa and still cannot become accustomed to the European mode of life,” he wrote to his brother, Lev, in August.5

  The city had changed considerably since the time of de Ribas and Richelieu. The population was growing rapidly, on its way to tripling in size by mid-century to nearly 116,000 people. Occupying the site of the old Turkish fortress, a handsome stone palace for the new governor-general would soon rise at one end of Nikolaevsky Boulevard, to be completed by 1830. The state rooms on the ground floor were outfitted with doors, shutters, and chimney pieces from the Mikhailovsky Palace in St. Petersburg, the residence of the late Paul I (and the site of his murder). A billiard hall, a grand dining room, a large salon, and a library were decorated with elegant English furniture, while a separate “Turkish” chamber had a soaring ceiling, gilded fixtures, Persian carpets on the floor, and silk-covered divans arrayed around the walls. A library held the finest private collection of books, pictures, and samples of scientific instruments in the entire empire.6

  Elsewhere in the town, plastered facades with tile- or iron-covered roofs were going up around a circular plaza, soon to be flanked by a new local museum, public library, and government buildings. Hotels run by Genoese and other foreign entrepreneurs dotted the city. A selection of bars and lesser eating establishments catered to new arrivals. At the height of the commercial season, from April to October, the population could swell by as many as ten thousand people, as laborers, wagon-drivers, Russian and Polish landowners, and foreign merchants descended on the port, which still enjoyed the privilege of free trade with the wider world.7 Were it not for the exoticism of this transient population, noted an English visitor during Vorontsov’s tenure, “Odessa may be said to be Petersburgh in miniature.”8

  Pushkin was still in his early twenties when he moved to Odessa, and he soon began his pursuit—and occasional conquest—of the local notables, married and single, young and old. There was the twenty-seven-year-old Karolina Sobaska, still technically married to a wealthy Odessan businessman but living openly with the commander of military colonies in New Russia—while also working secretly as a government spy to ferret out political radicals. There was Amaliya Riznich, with a pronounced Roman nose and already pregnant when they first met.

  Pushkin was a giddy and voluble correspondent on matters of love and sex, gossiping in infantile detail with many of his friends. “I’ll be glad to serve you / With my crazy conversation,” he wrote to Filipp Wiegel, a closeted gay friend who was serving as a tsarist official in Kishinev. “But, Wiegel,—spare my arse!”9 But the most telling record of Pushkin’s loves during his days in Odessa comes from an unexpected source: his own doodles. In the marginalia of an early draft of his masterpiece Evgeny Onegin, a work he began in Bessarabia and continued while working for Vorontsov, tiny portraits of women and men frame the text—friends, acquaintances, people he saw on the street, and one after another of his obsessive loves. There, amid an angelic choir of widows and ingénues, dark-haired foreigners and fine-featured Russians, is a woman seven years his senior, someone with whose likeness he decorated the manuscript more often than any other—Vorontsov’s wife, Lise.

  Alexander Pushkin. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  WHEN EXACTLY Lise and Pushkin first met is uncertain, but the small size of Odessa’s high society and the necessarily public life of the governor-general’s wife meant that they would have encountered one another at some point early in Pushkin’s stay. He had taken rooms in the Hôtel du Nord, located on Italian Street, but soon moved to another hotel nearer the sea, at the corner of Deribasovskaya and Richelieu streets, where he could take in the fresh air and recuperate after his sojourn in Bessarabia. (A desperate need to breathe the rejuvenating sea air was one of the reasons he had adduced for requesting a transfer to the coast.) From there, he regularly made his way to a calendar of events that packed the long, warm social season.

  Lise enjoyed creative socializing, and the galas, balls, and suppers she organized were renowned across the empire. “It was difficult to leave Odessa,” complained a contemporary Russian visitor, “since I did not want to absent myself from the company of the count and countess, the likes of which are not to be found in other parts.”10 The grand Vorontsov palace was not yet in existence during Pushkin’s time in Odessa, but the later parties that Lise staged there give some sense of the fêtes she probably organized even in lesser quarters.

  A visitor to the Vorontsov palace might have descended into the residence’s grand salon around nine o’clock in the evening. A band would already be playing as the guests, some masked and others in fancy dress, perhaps in the tunic and trousers of a Russian coachman or the lace apron of a Swiss peasant, turned quadrilles on the parquet floor. Suddenly, a giant sugarloaf might glide onto the dance floor, out of which would pop an old man doing a lively jig. Amid the dancers, dressed in the brocaded and corded coatee of a Hussar cavalryman, was the Countess Vorontsova herself, welcoming the guests who had just arrived from their country estates or from the streets leading off Nikolaevsky Boulevard: General Lev Naryshkin, Vorontsov’s cousin, and his wife Olga; her family, the Potockis, the great Polish-Russian landholders; Baron Rainaud, a French hotelier (and Pushkin’s landlord); the Shcherbinins and the Blarembergs, the Pushchins and the Raevskys.11

  With his newfound commercial success and a rebounding reputation—“The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” was on its way to publication, and printers were clamoring for rights to further editions of “The Captive of the Caucasus”—Pushkin’s natural swagger only increased. He may have met the countess in the autumn or early winter of 1823, perhaps at a seasonal ball or at one of the governor-general’s twice-weekly entertainments, over a session of parlor games or whist. Pushkin fell for her as quickly as Vorontsov had done just a few years earlier.

  His affections, by all accounts, were returned. Lise was known to enjoy the flirtatious interactions that even a provincial city such as Odessa had raised to a high art. Pushkin’s witticisms and impromptu verses were a striking contrast to Vorontsov’s business-like bearing. More important, the governor-general, following established form among Russia’s noble class, had himself already taken a mistress, Olga Naryshkina, nearly a decade younger than Lise. Olga was married to a prominent general, but the affair was a public secret.12

  In the bitter winter of 1823–24, with the edges of the Black Sea encrusted in salty ice and the winds howling down unpaved streets from the flatlands beyond, the poet and the countess developed a relationship that soon became the scandal of Odessa society. The affair was probably consummated in early February, when Vorontsov was away in Kishinev, an encounter that Pushkin noted in the marginalia of the Evgeny Onegin manuscript as “soupé chez C. E. W.”—“had supper with Countess Elise Woronzoff,” using the French initials of her name.

  As winter gave way to spring, and with the return of the governor-general to the city, the couple began meeting at a country villa owned by Baron Rainaud, the prominent hotelier. Rainaud had constructed a bathing area in the seaside cliffs bordering his rural estate. The hideaway, detached from the city but still close enough for the two lovers to slip away to throughout the season, produced one of the more plainly erotic of Pushkin’s short verses:

  Love’s refuge is ever filled

  With a coolness, murky and damp.

  There the waves, unabashed,

  Never silence their prolonged roar.13

  T
he affair was apparently not the first for Lise. Like many couples of the era, she and her husband had settled into an arrangement that allowed both partners a considerable degree of sexual license. The problem was Pushkin’s insistence on flouting a relationship that was intended, by social convention, to remain decorously unspoken. As one of Pushkin’s biographers has noted, the poet bent to the common temptation of despising those one has injured.14 His weapon of choice was the epigram. “Half milord, half shopkeeper” was one quick summary he gave of Vorontsov’s character. “Half hero, half ignoramus” was another.

  Those ill-considered lines—which circulated widely in several different versions—clearly reflected Pushkin’s public attitude toward Vorontsov. It was a careless and dangerous way of behaving. Vorontsov was not only his lover’s husband—and by rights deserving of some public respect, even though now a known cuckold—but also Pushkin’s boss. After all, the poet’s only reason for being in Odessa was to serve on the governor-general’s staff. A dismissal without a recommendation for further employment meant that Pushkin would be in genuine exile, wandering about the Russian plains without promise of aid or station, and still prevented from returning to St. Petersburg. But Vorontsov was in a bind too. Since the tsar had banished Pushkin, the sovereign’s express permission was necessary to remove him from the governor-general’s care. “Deliver me from Pushkin,” Vorontsov wrote to the Russian foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, in the spring of 1824. “He may be an excellent fellow and a good poet, but I don’t want to have him any longer, either in Odessa or Kishinev.”15

  Suddenly, in one of those miraculous and disastrous occurrences for which Odessa was already becoming famous, a new calamity descended on the city and provided the vehicle of Vorontsov’s unexpected deliverance: an infestation of locusts. The surrounding countryside was routinely subjected to massive locust attacks, a nearly annual occurrence that could ruin crops, denude trees, and eat up fodder intended for cattle and horses. Millions of insects, their wings clacking and popping overhead, formed a black cloud that hung like thick smoke over fields and gardens.

  Once the locusts had arrived, the options for local citizens were tragically—and comically—few. The main recourse was to create enough noise to scare the insects away. One English lady, living with her merchant husband in a country villa, organized an annual parade to deal with the pests. First came her husband swinging a large bell, then the gardener banging on a watering bucket, then the footmen clanging on shovels, followed by the housemaids striking pots and kettles, and lastly the children tapping with toasting forks on tea boards.16 Even in the city, wrote one visitor upon arriving by ship, “a fearful battle [was] raging between the inhabitants and the ruthless enemies of vegetation. Every noisy weapon, from pistol to a mortar, from kettle-drum to a tin casserole, was rattling like thunder in the hands of the horrified citizens, for the purpose of defending their little domains.”17

  Like Richelieu during the plague crisis a decade earlier, Vorontsov reckoned that more information about the relative size of each year’s locust brood could contribute to devising a better strategy for dealing with the expected attack. In May, the governor-general officially ordered Pushkin to proceed through several rural districts and survey the extent of the locust egg population, assess the efficacy of efforts to destroy the eggs before they hatched later in the summer, and offer his conclusions in a written report.

  It was a shocking assignment. Pushkin had never penned a single official document throughout his time in government service. Rustication, to count locust eggs no less, was clearly a calculated rebuff. Pushkin protested in writing. He was a littérateur of some renown, he said. He was a self-confessed failure as a government official and would make a hash of the job. He had an aneurysm that might pop at any moment. None of that persuaded Vorontsov. Pushkin was soon dispatched on his mission against the tiny invaders.18

  Vorontsov’s move had its desired effect. After a few weeks in the countryside, Pushkin submitted his resignation from the civil service. It was a foolhardy move, but perhaps the only honorable one he could make. He had publicly embarrassed a man of considerable power. Odessan society had turned against him, not for over-stepping the bounds of sexual propriety but for doing so in such an ungentlemanly fashion. By the middle of the summer, his fate had been decided. Vorontsov petitioned the central authorities for the poet’s removal from Odessa, and the tsar responded favorably.

  But the affair and Vorontsov’s personal feelings toward Pushkin probably played a secondary role in the governor-general’s decision to seek his transfer from Odessa. Given the customary randiness of Odessa’s high society, flamboyant adultery and unseemly talk of it were hardly news. The more important of Pushkin’s transgressions—one that was as typically Odessan as the promiscuity of the provincial gentry—involved the rumor of revolution.

  A FEW YEARS before his arrival in Odessa, Pushkin wrote to a correspondent about a series of “occurrences of importance not only for our land, but for all Europe.”19 In 1814 a secret organization of Greek patriots called Philike Hetairia, or the Society of Friends, had been founded in Odessa. Their goal was to rally the Greek diaspora throughout southeastern Europe and launch a revolt to wrest ancient Christian lands—from Constantinople to the Greek mainland—from the control of the Ottoman Muslims. Odessa provided the ideal environment for hatching revolutionary plans.

  It was a city that political radicals could enter with relative ease, located far from other major centers of imperial governance. A climate of social freedom was readily apparent. Public smoking, fashions that bordered on the scandalous, and public discussion of contentious issues from international affairs to taxes were relatively uncommon privileges in St. Petersburg or Moscow. But they were part of normal street life in Odessa. Dozens of secret societies—some quasi-religious such as the Freemasons, others vaguely political and modeled on the Italian Carbonari, still others secret for the sake of being secret—enrolled radical intellectuals, public officials, and sons of noble families.

  As a free port, the city attracted more and more ships each year. New political ideas were filling up Odessa’s numerous restaurants and drinking establishments just as wheat was filling up the newly constructed silos near the harbor. “A gentleman, with whom I am acquainted calls Odessa the world’s end,” reported an English visitor in the early 1820s, “it is, certainly, a place by itself—a singular spot—a semi-oriental city.”20 Its very location, far removed from the Russian imperial capitals and looking out on a teetering Ottoman Empire, allowed the city to become a hotbed of political intrigue. Italians seeking to throw off Bourbon kings or establish a constitutional monarchy, Greeks and Romanians desiring an end to Muslim domination, and Russians pushing a reformed version of tsarist autocracy all found haven there.

  Philike Hetairia’s members were generally disorganized, truculent, and only waveringly loyal, but their underground machinations linked up with geopolitical changes already taking place in the rest of Europe. Farther to the south, patriots in Greece revolted against their Ottoman rulers and declared independence. Soon, other Ottoman dependencies—such as Odessa’s immediate neighbors to the west, the Romanian principalities of Moldova and Wallachia—launched their own bids for freedom. In February of 1821, a ragtag army under Alexandros Ypsilantis, a Greek in Russian military service and one of Philike Hetairia’s leaders, crossed the Prut River separating Bessarabia from the Ottoman vassal principality of Moldova, seeking to spark a full-scale uprising of Christian peasants—the event that Pushkin referred to as “occurences” of importance to both Russia and Europe. Contemporary observers compared it to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the beginning of what many hoped would be a large-scale uprising of Balkan and Mediterranean Christians against the Muslim empire. Romantics from across Europe flocked to the Greek cause, just as their fathers had moved east to join Catherine’s army and navy a generation earlier. Lord Byron—whose work had been an inspiration to Pushkin—died during the Greek war for
independence a few years later.

  The Greek revolt inaugurated a decade of struggle for the future of southeastern Europe. Greek guerrillas and irregular troops—the klephts and armatoloi, dressed in their colorful highland garb and wielding scimitars and deadly long muskets—staged small attacks and pitched battles against Ottoman forces throughout the 1820s. Conservative European powers, at first wary of any hint of revolution, gradually sought to manage the Greek crisis through diplomatic overtures to the Ottoman sultan. Russia joined the struggle informally in 1827, helping to destroy an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet in the Mediterranean at the Battle of Navarino. A year later, Russia entered a brief war with the sultan (1828–29) to ensure freedom of shipping on the Black Sea, which had been placed in peril by Ottoman efforts to quell the Balkan rebels.

  Odessa was the birthplace of the Greek revolution, and sympathies there were strong. The problem for Russian authorities was that revolution—like locusts and the plague—was not choosy about its host. What had begun as a movement among Greek-speaking soldiers and intellectuals aimed against the Muslim Ottomans could easily infect Russia itself. Mutinies against the tsar were not unknown. The elite Semyonovsky Guards in St. Petersburg had revolted in the fall of 1820 in protest over harsh military discipline. The mutiny was quickly suppressed, but it illustrated the fact that Russia was not immune to the revolutionary feelings circulating throughout Europe. Secret societies such as Philike Hetairia were the chief vector for spreading ideas of liberty and political reform.

  Pushkin had long been suspected of flirting with radical ideas, and his sojourn on the southern frontier had only increased his antipathy to the harshest elements of the tsar’s policies. Vorontsov was able to use those suspicions to his advantage. In his written complaints to central authorities, he hinted at Pushkin’s radical, perhaps even republican, politics—gleaned as much from the reports of provincial gossips as from the writer’s own occasional poems in praise of liberty. By the summer of 1824, St. Petersburg had become convinced of the dangers of leaving the poet relatively unsupervised in the hothouse environment of Odessa. Pushkin was to be dismissed from public service, but he still needed to be watched. Otherwise, “making use of his independent position, he will, without doubt, disseminate more and more widely those harmful ideas which he holds and will oblige the authorities to employ against him the most severe measures,” wrote Nesselrode to Vorontsov.21