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Pushkin's Button
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FYI -- Has anyone read the book yet? Note almost a paragraph-worth of VN
towards the end of the review.
Galya Diment
Pistols at 20 Paces
An account of Aleksandr Pushkin's last grand gesture.
Pushkin's Button
By Serena Vitale.
Translated by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild.
355 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
By RICHARD LAMB
On the afternoon of Jan. 27, 1837, on a snow-covered field outside St.
Petersburg, Aleksandr Pushkin was wounded in a duel with a young Frenchman.
Carried home, the gutshot poet reclined upon a sofa in his study, blithely
attitudinizing until the agony of peritonitis became too much. ''Scream, it'll
help a little,'' a friend advised him. At 2:45 P.M. on Jan. 29, he died. Since
then, thousands of pages in his native Russian have been devoted to what may
be the most tragically unnecessary death of any great writer.
Serena Vitale, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Pavia,
Italy, has written a vivid, meticulous account of that death. Set in a Europe
where libel laws had not yet quite supplanted the code duello as a means of
settling grievances, ''Pushkin's Button'' is a delightful combination of
retrograde pleasures (court balls, the demise of a doomed genius) and primary
sources. Her formidable skills as a scholarly detective led her to family
archives, 19th-century diplomatic records and letters. The result, capably
translated by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild, is both illuminating and
pathetic.
''It's Balzac,'' a society woman wrote her husband about the state of
affairs that would lead to the duel. ''It's Victor Hugo. It's the literature
of our time. It's sublime, it's ridiculous. A sneering husband publicly
gnashing his teeth. A pale and lovely wife destroying herself with dancing
that lasts entire evenings. A pale and thin young man laughing convulsively.''
It was, she said -- in a phrase that neatly underlines the scale of the
tragedy without being in any way true -- a drama so sad as to silence even
gossip.''
Vitale opens with the less celebrated duelist, a young adventurer named
Georges d'Anth<heart>s who, in late 1833, made his way to St. Petersburg with
a letter of introduction to a high official. En route he met the wealthy and
homosexual Dutch Ambassador to the court of Czar Nicholas I, Jacob van
Heeckeren, who formally adopted him. Commissioned in an exclusive regiment,
d'Anth<heart>s proved a poor officer, though when not engaged in punishment
drill his adroitness in the ballroom endeared him to society.
In no time d'Anth<heart>s began gathering around himself an immense
emotional snarl. His adoptive father had given him money and position. In
return he craved the young man's attentions. D'Anth<heart>s, while attached to
his benefactor, rebelled by paying illicit court to some of the city's most
beautiful wives. Soon he had chosen the toast of all Petersburg to play
opposite him in a star-crossed passion. She was Mrs. Aleksandr Pushkin, and
fatally -- if not for her -- she seemed to encourage this display.
The liaison appears not to have gone much farther than intimate dance-floor
conversations and perhaps some stolen kisses. It was, however, very public.
Many sympathized. Of the 24-year-old Natalya Pushkin, the Austrian
Ambassador's wife wrote ''there is something so ethereal and stirring about
her entire person,'' adding ''what a harsh fate it is to be a poet's wife,
especially a poet like Pushkin.'' Natalya might not have disagreed. She didn't
like poetry. Her husband made her jealous (with cause: there is reason to
believe he was sleeping with her sister Aleksandra).
Pushkin was impulsive, self-consciously Byronic and madly energetic. ''When,
as a youth, he pirouetted in a waltz or mazurka, provincial ladies took him
for a foreigner, a demon or a Freemason,'' Vitale writes. But by 1836 the
once-lionized writer's popularity was slipping. He was short of money and,
among other things, missing a decorative button on his overcoat. Most
productive during sojourns in the country (sometimes enforced by the Czar, who
regarded him as subversive), he was now distracted by family life and the busy
capital.
In November of 1836, Pushkin was informed by several of his closest friends
that they had received letters in the form of a spurious official certificate
naming him to the ''Society of Cuckolds'' and listing two of the city's most
extravagantly horned spouses as officers of the organization. Vitale
catalogues several possibilities for the identity of the anonymous letter
writer, but she lays the blame chiefly upon one Prince Pyotr Dolgorukov. He is
also Vladimir Nabokov's candidate, put forth in the weird, painstaking
1,000-page textual museum of Pushkiniana that Nabokov appended to his
translation of the verse novel ''Eugene Onegin.'' Known as le bancal, which
has come through French and Italian to appear here as ''the wobbly'' (Nabokov
offers ''bowlegs''), Dolgorukov was an associate of Heeckeren's with a ''flair
for the underhanded, an enthusiasm for gossip, intrigue, swindles.''
For his part, Pushkin was convinced that the letters came from Heeckeren and
d'Anth<heart>s directly. He immediately dispatched a written challenge to
d'Anth<heart>s. Through the diplomat's tactful intercession the duel was
avoided. There followed a period of months in which Pushkin sulked at parties,
raged, threatened his wife and needled d'Anth<heart>s in an antagonism as
ardent as the Frenchman's flirtation with Natalya. D'Anth<heart>s, in a move
widely seen as a definitive end to the dispute, agreed to marry Natalya's
sister Yekaterina. Yet Pushkin was not appeased. In a letter to Heeckeren he
accused the Ambassador of acting ''as pimp'' for his adopted son. It was a
deliberate insult.
So that January day, the angry poet faced his brother-in-law at the
prescribed distance of 20 paces. An experienced duelist, Pushkin waited for
the other man to fire first; that meant d'Anth<heart>s would have to stand
stock-still when it was Pushkin's turn to fire. Pushkin, hit by
d'Anth<heart>s's first shot, was elated when his shot knocked d'Anth<heart>s
down. The Frenchman, however, was only slightly hurt, giving rise to
generations of conjecture about the pistols used and whether he'd been wearing
body armor, frowned upon but available.
Pushkin received a death sentence for dueling that in Gogolesque fashion
couldn't be carried out because he was dead. His widow was briefly a favorite
of the Czar and later married a general. D'Anth<heart>s was conveyed to the
Russian border. He had, before the nation quite grasped the scale of its loss,
many defenders. Later, he commented more than once that had it not been for
the duel he would have had ''an unenviable future as a regimental commander
with a large family and meager resources in some small town in provincial
Russia.'' As it was, he had a successful political career in France and died
in 1895, at 83, surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Richard Lamb is assistant editor of The New Leader.
Sunday, March 7, 1999
<A HREF="aol://4344:104.nytcopy.6445375.574106743">Copyright 1999 The New York
Times</A>
towards the end of the review.
Galya Diment
Pistols at 20 Paces
An account of Aleksandr Pushkin's last grand gesture.
Pushkin's Button
By Serena Vitale.
Translated by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild.
355 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
By RICHARD LAMB
On the afternoon of Jan. 27, 1837, on a snow-covered field outside St.
Petersburg, Aleksandr Pushkin was wounded in a duel with a young Frenchman.
Carried home, the gutshot poet reclined upon a sofa in his study, blithely
attitudinizing until the agony of peritonitis became too much. ''Scream, it'll
help a little,'' a friend advised him. At 2:45 P.M. on Jan. 29, he died. Since
then, thousands of pages in his native Russian have been devoted to what may
be the most tragically unnecessary death of any great writer.
Serena Vitale, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Pavia,
Italy, has written a vivid, meticulous account of that death. Set in a Europe
where libel laws had not yet quite supplanted the code duello as a means of
settling grievances, ''Pushkin's Button'' is a delightful combination of
retrograde pleasures (court balls, the demise of a doomed genius) and primary
sources. Her formidable skills as a scholarly detective led her to family
archives, 19th-century diplomatic records and letters. The result, capably
translated by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild, is both illuminating and
pathetic.
''It's Balzac,'' a society woman wrote her husband about the state of
affairs that would lead to the duel. ''It's Victor Hugo. It's the literature
of our time. It's sublime, it's ridiculous. A sneering husband publicly
gnashing his teeth. A pale and lovely wife destroying herself with dancing
that lasts entire evenings. A pale and thin young man laughing convulsively.''
It was, she said -- in a phrase that neatly underlines the scale of the
tragedy without being in any way true -- a drama so sad as to silence even
gossip.''
Vitale opens with the less celebrated duelist, a young adventurer named
Georges d'Anth<heart>s who, in late 1833, made his way to St. Petersburg with
a letter of introduction to a high official. En route he met the wealthy and
homosexual Dutch Ambassador to the court of Czar Nicholas I, Jacob van
Heeckeren, who formally adopted him. Commissioned in an exclusive regiment,
d'Anth<heart>s proved a poor officer, though when not engaged in punishment
drill his adroitness in the ballroom endeared him to society.
In no time d'Anth<heart>s began gathering around himself an immense
emotional snarl. His adoptive father had given him money and position. In
return he craved the young man's attentions. D'Anth<heart>s, while attached to
his benefactor, rebelled by paying illicit court to some of the city's most
beautiful wives. Soon he had chosen the toast of all Petersburg to play
opposite him in a star-crossed passion. She was Mrs. Aleksandr Pushkin, and
fatally -- if not for her -- she seemed to encourage this display.
The liaison appears not to have gone much farther than intimate dance-floor
conversations and perhaps some stolen kisses. It was, however, very public.
Many sympathized. Of the 24-year-old Natalya Pushkin, the Austrian
Ambassador's wife wrote ''there is something so ethereal and stirring about
her entire person,'' adding ''what a harsh fate it is to be a poet's wife,
especially a poet like Pushkin.'' Natalya might not have disagreed. She didn't
like poetry. Her husband made her jealous (with cause: there is reason to
believe he was sleeping with her sister Aleksandra).
Pushkin was impulsive, self-consciously Byronic and madly energetic. ''When,
as a youth, he pirouetted in a waltz or mazurka, provincial ladies took him
for a foreigner, a demon or a Freemason,'' Vitale writes. But by 1836 the
once-lionized writer's popularity was slipping. He was short of money and,
among other things, missing a decorative button on his overcoat. Most
productive during sojourns in the country (sometimes enforced by the Czar, who
regarded him as subversive), he was now distracted by family life and the busy
capital.
In November of 1836, Pushkin was informed by several of his closest friends
that they had received letters in the form of a spurious official certificate
naming him to the ''Society of Cuckolds'' and listing two of the city's most
extravagantly horned spouses as officers of the organization. Vitale
catalogues several possibilities for the identity of the anonymous letter
writer, but she lays the blame chiefly upon one Prince Pyotr Dolgorukov. He is
also Vladimir Nabokov's candidate, put forth in the weird, painstaking
1,000-page textual museum of Pushkiniana that Nabokov appended to his
translation of the verse novel ''Eugene Onegin.'' Known as le bancal, which
has come through French and Italian to appear here as ''the wobbly'' (Nabokov
offers ''bowlegs''), Dolgorukov was an associate of Heeckeren's with a ''flair
for the underhanded, an enthusiasm for gossip, intrigue, swindles.''
For his part, Pushkin was convinced that the letters came from Heeckeren and
d'Anth<heart>s directly. He immediately dispatched a written challenge to
d'Anth<heart>s. Through the diplomat's tactful intercession the duel was
avoided. There followed a period of months in which Pushkin sulked at parties,
raged, threatened his wife and needled d'Anth<heart>s in an antagonism as
ardent as the Frenchman's flirtation with Natalya. D'Anth<heart>s, in a move
widely seen as a definitive end to the dispute, agreed to marry Natalya's
sister Yekaterina. Yet Pushkin was not appeased. In a letter to Heeckeren he
accused the Ambassador of acting ''as pimp'' for his adopted son. It was a
deliberate insult.
So that January day, the angry poet faced his brother-in-law at the
prescribed distance of 20 paces. An experienced duelist, Pushkin waited for
the other man to fire first; that meant d'Anth<heart>s would have to stand
stock-still when it was Pushkin's turn to fire. Pushkin, hit by
d'Anth<heart>s's first shot, was elated when his shot knocked d'Anth<heart>s
down. The Frenchman, however, was only slightly hurt, giving rise to
generations of conjecture about the pistols used and whether he'd been wearing
body armor, frowned upon but available.
Pushkin received a death sentence for dueling that in Gogolesque fashion
couldn't be carried out because he was dead. His widow was briefly a favorite
of the Czar and later married a general. D'Anth<heart>s was conveyed to the
Russian border. He had, before the nation quite grasped the scale of its loss,
many defenders. Later, he commented more than once that had it not been for
the duel he would have had ''an unenviable future as a regimental commander
with a large family and meager resources in some small town in provincial
Russia.'' As it was, he had a successful political career in France and died
in 1895, at 83, surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Richard Lamb is assistant editor of The New Leader.
Sunday, March 7, 1999
<A HREF="aol://4344:104.nytcopy.6445375.574106743">Copyright 1999 The New York
Times</A>