No More Learning

In one of his letters it is
recorded that no less than six Pushkins signed the Charta declaratory
of the election of the Romanoff family to the throne of Russia, and
that two more affixed their marks from inability to write.

In 1811 he entered the Lyceum, an aristocratic educational
establishment at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, where he was
the friend and schoolmate of Prince Gortchakoff the Russian
Chancellor. As a scholar he displayed no remarkable amount of
capacity, but was fond of general reading and much given to
versification. Whilst yet a schoolboy he wrote many lyrical
compositions and commenced _Ruslan and Liudmila_, his first poem
of any magnitude, and, it is asserted, the first readable one ever
produced in the Russian language. During his boyhood he came much
into contact with the poets Dmitrieff and Joukovski, who were
intimate with his father, and his uncle, Vassili Pushkin, himself
an author of no mean repute. The friendship of the historian
Karamzine must have exercised a still more beneficial influence
upon him.

In 1817 he quitted the Lyceum and obtained an appointment in the
Foreign Office at St. Petersburg. Three years of reckless
dissipation in the capital, where his lyrical talent made him
universally popular, resulted in 1818 in a putrid fever which
was near carrying him off. At this period of his life he scarcely
slept at all; worked all day and dissipated at night. Society was
open to him from the palace of the prince to the officers'
quarters of the Imperial Guard. The reflection of this mode of
life may be noted in the first canto of _Eugene Oneguine_ and the
early dissipations of the "Philosopher just turned eighteen,"--
the exact age of Pushkin when he commenced his career in the
Russian capital.

In 1820 he was transferred to the bureau of Lieutenant-General
Inzoff, at Kishineff in Bessarabia. This event was probably due
to his composing and privately circulating an "Ode to Liberty,"
though the attendant circumstances have never yet been thoroughly
brought to light.
An indiscreet admiration for Byron most likely
involved the young poet in this scrape. The tenor of this
production, especially its audacious allusion to the murder of
the emperor Paul, father of the then reigning Tsar, assuredly
deserved, according to aristocratic ideas, the deportation to
Siberia which was said to have been prepared for the author.
The intercession of Karamzine and Joukovski procured a commutation
of his sentence. Strangely enough, Pushkin appeared anxious to
deceive the public as to the real cause of his sudden disappearance
from the capital; for in an Ode to Ovid composed about this time
he styles himself a "voluntary exile. " (See Note 4 to this volume. )

During the four succeeding years he made numerous excursions amid
the beautiful countries which from the basin of the Euxine--and
amongst these the Crimea and the Caucasus. A nomad life passed
amid the beauties of nature acted powerfully in developing his
poetical genius. To this period he refers in the final canto of
_Eugene Oneguine_ (st. v. ), when enumerating the various influences
which had contributed to the formation of his Muse:

Then, the far capital forgot,
Its splendour and its blandishments,
In poor Moldavia cast her lot,
She visited the humble tents
Of migratory gipsy hordes.

During these pleasant years of youth he penned some of his most
delightful poetical works: amongst these, _The Prisoner of the
Caucasus, The Fountain of Baktchiserai_, and the _Gipsies_. Of the
two former it may be said that they are in the true style of the
_Giaour_ and the _Corsair_. In fact, just at that point of time
Byron's fame--like the setting sun--shone out with dazzling lustre
and irresistibly charmed the mind of Pushkin amongst many others.
The _Gipsies_ is more original; indeed the poet himself has been
identified with Aleko, the hero of the tale, which may well be
founded on his own personal adventures without involving the guilt
of a double murder. His undisguised admiration for Byron doubtless
exposed him to imputations similar to those commonly levelled
against that poet. But Pushkin's talent was too genuine for him to
remain long subservient to that of another, and in a later period
of his career he broke loose from all trammels and selected a line
peculiarly his own.