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1. Roots and Contexts
- University of Wisconsin Press
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9 In 1825, soon before her marriage to the poet Anton Del’vig, Sofia Mikhailovna Saltykova wrote to one of her girlfriends: “A propos, le cher Pouchkin a été renvoy é au village chez son père pour de nouvelles folies.” If we cut off Saltykova’s letter here, it would be unclear in early nineteenth-century usage what kind of behavior had warranted Pushkin’s latest bout of trouble with the authorities. He could have been insubordinate, written a dirty poem, hit on his superior’s wife, spilled wine on his boots, beaten somebody up, verbally abused someone, and so on. The truly puzzling thing for a twenty-first-century Westerner is that, in this particular historical and cultural context, there was relatively little difference between these behaviors. Saltykova continues, “Tu sais qu’il était près de [Mikhail] Vorontsoff , eh bien, celui-ci lui a donné une soumission pour laquelle il devait absolument partir; il n’en a rien fait, et a composé une Satyre sur Vorontsoff. Каковъ мальчикъ? Je suis persuadée qu’il fera de nouveaux vers dans sa retraite, qui seront plus piquants encore.”1 She has three distinct behaviors in mind, all of which she describes with the word “folies”: insubordination, ridicule of one’s superior, and writing a trifling lampoon. Moreover, these are just Pushkin’s “nouvelles folies,” the most recent in a series of such behaviors that got Pushkin exiled in the first place: insubordination; demonstrative sloth; writing epigrams that ridiculed important officials, as well as politically charged odes; incitement to regicide; debauchery, and more. When writing in Russian, Pushkin’s contemporaries used the word shalost’ to describe this broad range of behaviors. Aleksandr Strudza, for example, wrote that Pushkin was exiled “for the shalost’ of his muse.”2 This was the same Pushkin who was wont to do things like dress down a senior official in the coarsest language in the middle of a crowded theater.3 Or attend a gathering at a regional governor’s house wearing see-through pantaloons and no underwear.4 Or pass an engraving of the regicidal killer Louis Pierre Louvel around another crowded theater after inscribing it with the phrase “A Lesson to Tsars.”5 And all these behaviors came under the single heading of shalosti. Pushkin was not the last man Mikhail Vorontsov ejected from Odessa for shalosti . A few months later, Pushkin’s distant relative Mikhail Dmitrievich Buturlin (1807–76) was similarly punished. Buturlin came into Vorontsov’s service in 1824, soon after returning to Russia from Florence, where he lived seven years from the age of ten. When he began his military service, Buturlin was still unused to Russian behavioral norms and felt more at home in Florence, where he returned after Vorontsov turned him out in 1825. In his memoir, he complains, “I make no 1 Roots and Contexts 10 Roots and Contexts excuses for my frivolous behavior in Odessa; but I still think that Count Vorontsov was excessively severe with regard to my childish shalosti.”6 Buturlin’s Odessa shalosti are no less heterogeneous than Pushkin’s. He describes three of them in his memoir. First, when a vaudeville artiste by the name of Madame D’Angeville came on tour to Odessa, her show included the performance of Italian arias in vaudeville contexts. Buturlin, who spent his adolescence in Italy and considered himself a master musician, took great affront at such a travesty of Italian opera. He chose a rather odd means of asserting his authority as a moderator of imported cultural practice, though. Eschewing more civil options, he instead urged a group of friends in the audience to catcall poor Madame D’Angeville when she came to the arias. He fancied that the rest of the audience would find this funny, and that the laughter would turn into general derision of Madame D’Angeville. Instead, her admirers in the audience became so annoyed that a fistfight ensued. Second, Buturlin got so carried away with a boar hunt that he ran one of Vorontsov’s prized Limousine geldings to death. Buturlin admits to some willfulness in this act, as he despised Vorontsov for his chilly condescension despite the fact that the latter gave him free use of his stable of superb horses. Mostly, though, this is a loss of control: Buturlin, drunk with the pursuit, simply got carried away. The third episode was the last straw for Vorontsov. One night, Buturlin got into an argument with a certain Schwarz about the singing abilities...