Anatomy of a Murder

When I picture bookstore browsers pausing in front of “Pushkin’s Button,” the cognoscenti puzzle,”Pushkin’s button? Can they possibly have dug up something we don’t already know about Pushkin?” The rest ask simply, “Who’s Pushkin?” One of the paradoxes of global culture is that the more its many media clamor for our attention, the less we are able to keep up with even the masterpieces of other national literatures. While in American imaginations 1999 may mark the world’s graduation to a new millennium of unprecedented global and technological interaction, Russia is gearing up to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of its national poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).

Mark Twain, even as he had his own iconic white outfits photographically imprinted on the public’s imagination, admonished us that not “the clothes and buttons of the man” but his thoughts should be the focus of a writer’s biography. “Pushkin’s Button” embeds the still-mysterious story of Pushkin’s last years, love(s) and works, duel and death in a richly costumed and often comic portrayal of Russia’s repressive court society during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, “the gendarme of Europe.” It will keep all constituencies of readers fastened to their seats, as they watch Petersburg’s lofty denizens leave no moment of the hurtling Pushkin scandal unrecorded or not speculated upon.

When Serena Vitale chose to begin her history with Pushkin’s end, she knew she would have many layers of varnish to strip away. She took as her mottos two statements by the two great women-poets and Pushkinists, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. From Tsvetaeva a provocative phrase: “The critic: investigator and lover. . . .” And from Akhmatova the exhortation: “If, thanks to a long series of documents that have come to light, these lies can now be destroyed, it is our duty to destroy them.” Vitale rewrites Pushkin not as the pathetic victim of Tsarist conspiracies (and Soviet conspiracy theory) but as the tragic enactor of a poeticized, disintegrating script of aristocratic codes from which neither he nor his chorus of contemporaries could fly free.

Pushkin was born into an age obsessed with historiography and historical novels and into a newly literate aristocratic society eager to record its gossip and historical observations in its correspondences and diaries. Quick-eyed society girls, Pushkin’s large circle of writing friends and enemies, as well as the perpetually note-taking spies and journalists who worked for Nicholas I’s secret service, the notorious “Third Section,” swelled the records. Famous from age 20 for his political missteps and for a kaleidoscopic array of literary works--romantic and comic narrative poems (“The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” “The Gypsies,” “Count Zero”), dramas (“Boris Godunov”--the future “libretto” for Mussorgsky’s national opera), his incandescent novel-in-verse “Eugene Onegin” and ghost story “The Queen of Spades” (Tchaikovsky’s future operas)--Pushkin was as avidly watched and mythologized as his fellow bards in Europe: Byron, Goethe and Hugo.

“Pushkin’s Button” begins with a wave of epitaphs--the European diplomatic and journalistic dispatches that reported Pushkin’s death “at the apex of his career” in a duel over the honor of Pushkin’s mythically beautiful young wife, Natalya, with her brother-in-law, Baron Georges D’Anthes. The duel, one dispatch observed, “was provoked by the dead man with a blindness and frantic hatred well worthy of his Moorish origins.” Already we sense the shaping presence of the Othello subtext. The great-great-grandson of Ibragim Gannibal, a captive North African prince presented to Peter the Great and reared as his adopted son, and a woman of ancient Russian boyar stock, Pushkin sported his multicultural origin and looks with Byronic flair. Yet, during his lengthy courtship and betrothal to Natalya Nikolaevna Goncharova, the 17-year-old “first beauty of Moscow,” the Othello and Desdemona theme began to flicker ominously in a few of Pushkin’s short lyrics, letters and prose sketches.

In 1834, when the handsome French-Alsatian D’Anthes was admitted into the prestigious Imperial Horse Guards’ regiment under the protective wing of the Dutch envoy, Baron Jacob Derk Anne Borchard van Heeckeren-Beeverweerd, the roles of Cassio and his evil genius Iago were filled. Alternately deflected and fanned by a horrified and prurient audience, the five acts smoldered on to their appointed tragic end. The circulation of an anonymous letter announcing Pushkin’s election to a “Secret Society of Cuckolds” in the autumn of 1836 made Pushkin’s private efforts to put his house in order obsolete. His first, scathing challenge to D’Anthes failed to draw blood: D’Anthes was on duty, Heeckeren pleaded a two-week postponement, and most unbelievably, D’Anthes begged for the hand of Natalya’s homely sister, Catherine, who had already proven her love for him. Cornered by his friends and relatives into accepting the marriage, Pushkin found that his new “brother-in-law” had scarcely abandoned his original and very public passion for Pushkin’s wife. Friends’ intercessions fell on Pushkin’s maddened ears. He addressed his next challenge still more insultingly to Heeckeren and was answered at last by D’Anthes.

Gaily, on Jan. 27, 1837, Pushkin set off for a duel that he had deliberately framed to be lethal: Fought at 10 paces, it was to be repeated in the case of an inconclusive result. Eugene Onegin’s duel had already sketched the outcome:

The clock of doom had struck as fated;

the poet, without a sound,

let fall his pistol on the ground.

--”EUGENE ONEGIN,” CHAPTER 6, STANZA 30

--except that Pushkin, thinking his shot had also struck home, let out a triumphant yell. Bravely facing down the torment of his mortal wound, even as he secured the tsar’s protection for his widow and orphans, three days later Pushkin died. By then his home on the Moyka canal was surrounded not only by high society but by students, tradespeople, the many anonymous readers he did not know he had. When the threat of popular tumult (against “foreigners and doctors”) gathered around the impending funeral, plans for a state ceremony suddenly changed course. As the secret police busied themselves with impounding his papers, Pushkin’s body was whisked out of Petersburg by night and buried near his estate at Mikhailovskoe, leaving a still more indelible image in the minds of his mourners. With the expulsion of the two suddenly hateful foreigners, Russian-educated society rallied around its martyred young poet Pushkin as its first truly national symbol, eventually necessitating his elevation into a state-sponsored classic and a national institution--first by the Russians, then by the Soviets, and now again by the nostalgic Russian state.

What are Vitale’s new sources, and what new light do they shed on the scandal’s dramatis personae and their motivations? Rather than hide her scholarly activity behind an impeccably impersonal text and footnotes, Vitale pulls her reader into the hot pursuit of archival pay dirt, the factual dead-ends and acrobatic hypotheses of the scholar-as-sleuth. She excitedly describes her luckiest find: “Paris, early summer 1989, 152 winters and 153 springs since Georges d’Anthes mortally wounded Pushkin. The attic of an apartment in the sixteenth arondissement, a worn gray suitcase, old business papers belonging to the apartment’s distinguished elderly owner, photographs, postcards, prints, personal letters. Then all at once what you dream of yet dare not hope for: a bundle of old letters, from another era, another world. . . . Buried--or hidden?--for more than a century and a half in the private files of the Heeckeren family.” The intimate correspondence of D’Anthes and Heeckeren does not conclusively confirm or contradict the rumored nature of their bond (were they lovers? father and bastard son? both?), but it allows Vitale to add human coloring to their patriotically blackened portraits.

Separated from Pushkin by less than six degrees (they were both descended from a 12th century Kievan prince Radsha), D’Anthes owed his meteoric rise in Russian court society to his looks, his luck with high-born wives and a likable wit that even Pushkin was not immune to. Both men enjoyed playing the role of the proverbial thorn in the side--one of the connotations, in fact, of il bottone, the Italian word for button and the original title of the book. D’Anthes possessed as well a sensible cautiousness that prompts Vitale to liken him to the social-climbing heroes of Stendhal, Balzac and Pushkin himself (who, she says, preemptively caricatured his type in Hermann’s obsessive pursuit of the “Queen of Spades”). Yet D’Anthes’ letters to Heeckeren also make perfectly clear the helpless reality of his own passion for Natalya; he triumphantly specifies the date on which she confessed her reciprocal love (Feb. 14, 1836), while, like Pushkin’s heroine Tatyana, she insisted on her formal fidelity (“the rest does not belong to me”), and he strenuously begs Heeckeren to intercede for him.

Meanwhile, Pushkin’s efforts to maintain Natalya’s stellar status at court began to break the household’s already shaky finances. Like a drumbeat, receipts from various Petersburg pawnshops attest to Pushkin’s tightening financial predicament: his wife’s opulent black shawl, valued at 1,250 rubles, a white shawl, a silver coffeepot. Pushkin scratches implausible calculations of the profits he expects to garner from his literary magazine, the Contemporary, on the back of a letter--but forgets to include the outlay. He chafes against his appointment to the lowly rank of “Kammerjunker” at Nicholas I’s court--a device, he assumes, that is meant to ensure Natalya’s radiant presence at all the tsar’s balls. Every rank had its specially designed uniform and buttons, and they were expected to be naglukho zastegnuty, “buttoned up to the chin.” Pushkin instead paraded in his old bekesh, a coat of Persian cut, with one button demonstratively hanging by a thread.

The igniting spark was tossed suddenly: On Nov. 4, 1836, a number of identical letters were delivered to Pushkin’s closest friends, announcing his induction into the Secret Society of Cuckolds, and stamped with what looked like a parody of a Masonic seal. Pushkin quickly jumped to a series of conclusions, which allowed him to pursue D’Anthes and “his pimp,” Heeckeren, as the perpetrators of the letters and the just targets of his duel of honor. Another lucky discovery--a letter by the French ambassador Aimable-Guillaume de Barante hidden in a secret police archive in Nantes--describes the physical appearance of the anonymous letters in detail, and puts Vitale in a position to reopen the vexed question of other suspects: Sergey Uvarov, architect of Nicholas I’s nationality policy and target of Pushkin’s recent satire, “On the Recovery of Lucullus”; Count and Countess Nesselrode; Ivan Gagarin; and Piotr Dolgorukov, eccentric keeper of the Russian aristocracy’s genealogical charts, “The Truth About Russia.”

Two torn-up drafts of Pushkin’s letter to Heeckeren, pieced together with fanatical assiduity by Vitale herself, testify to the single-mindedness with which Pushkin tried to force “the old man,” Heeckeren, to fight him. Pushkin insists that he, the omniscient husband, had all along dictated his wife’s replies and behavior just as Heeckeren, an “obscene old woman,” had dictated his son’s. Collating her many documentary sources, Vitale is able to prove that, for all his bluster, Pushkin had no evidence that Heeckeren had written the anonymous letter. Nor was he able to restore himself to a standard of dignified behavior, but continued with his heated public outbursts to turn against him the opinion of “a narrow-minded province of gossips . . . whose unyielding, deadly rituals Pushkin not only declined to shun but actively, zealously took part in.” It did not help for his poetic mentor Vasily Zhukovsky to remind Pushkin that his own life--barring its poetry--was a moral mirror-image of D’Anthes’. Precisely: There was no way to recover an honorable image of himself but through the purifying blood ritual of the duel.

Similarly, there was no better way for Russian society to exonerate itself than as a nation of mourners gathered around its dead poet. As the social and political climate in Russia changed, so did each generation’s style of Pushkinian navel-gazing (another colloquial meaning of il bottone is, of course, belly button). Most of these myths retained their basic martyrological structure--whether propelled by a Russian-Christian (anti-Western), art-for-art’s-sake, proto-revolutionary, pro-Stalinist or neo-nationalist cause. The most horrifying juxtaposition of state-sponsored spectacles was orchestrated in 1937. Erecting monuments and throwing festivals all over Russia in honor of Pushkin’s death, the solidifying Soviet state appropriated Pushkin’s “eternally revolutionary” works and especially his death at the hands of the old regime as its founding myth. On the same front pages, newspapers triumphantly recorded Stalin’s show trials against thousands of “enemies of the state,” among them the writers Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel.

Liberating the national poet from his cult’s pieties, Vitale has restored to Pushkin a will to power that exhibited itself as absolutely in its aesthetic mastery as in its drive to self-immolation: a Nietzschean vision. The world of Petersburg pleasures--clothing, streets, public events, jokes, balls and literary controversies--springs up vividly under her pen, yet all are caught up in an accelerating danse macabre that is filtered through Vitale’s Modernism-imbued lens. A grisly Nabokovian Fate presides over every artistically choreographed detail: Thus Pushkin’s missing button is answered by the single button in the double row of D’Anthes’ military uniform and overcoat, which deflected the bullet Pushkin had aimed at his heart.

In the most famous of his last poems “The Monument,” Pushkin wrote, “Not all of me will die. . . .” It is no insult to say that not all of Pushkin’s artistry or character is enclosed between the covers of this book. One hopes that the dangling thread of “Pushkin’s Button” will lead bookstore browsers back to the Pushkin shelf, loaded with competing new translations of “Eugene Onegin,” “The Captain’s Daughter,” “The Belkin Tales,” “The Little Tragedies,” the tender love lyrics and saucy erotica, and the irrepressible collected letters to his many friends and lovers.and thence, perhaps, to Ralph Fiennes’ film-version of Onegin, anticipated to open in movie theaters by the end of the year. Or so the chain-reaction runs in the Pushkinist’s fondest dreams, as Russia and America exchange lighter glances at the end of the twentieth century.