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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2022
In 1829 Pushkin visited his brother and friends in the Caucasus Corps, going on to participate in the capture of Erzurum. This marked a decisive shift in the international balance of power. Victory over Persia in 1827 and Turkey in 1829 transformed Russia into the dominant force in the Middle East for a generation until the Crimean War. Spectacular success was an almost accidental by-product of the 1825 Decembrist Revolt. Many serving Decembrists had been reduced to the ranks and exiled south. A transient, fractious combination of prudent commander and free spirits rose to rare quality of achievement. Pushkin's A Journey to Arzrum (Erzurum) celebrates his friends’ part in delivering for Russia and salutes the Russia they stood for. The literary challenge was steep. Its text had to pass muster with an infuriated Tsar Nicholas, his “personal censor”. Pushkin's skilfully drafted and structured narrative met the test, contriving at the same time to accommodate a pervasive running commentary and political messages about reconciliation, combining the best of Russia's talents and a better future. Typically innovative and beautifully written, the travelogue conducts the reader on a lively tour of the Caucasus with a rich store of incident and issues along the way.
I owe thanks to the late Nigel Jones, a genial “outchitel”, and to the many friends and colleagues who have sustained me on a long journey with Pushkin, already underway when Chris Bayly and I travelled via Erzurum to India in 1965. I am especially grateful to Firuza Melville whose own work illuminates much that is dealt with here, for kindly arranging an opportunity to present an outline to the Griboyedov 225th Jubilee Conference at Khmelita in 2020. I should like to thank my anonymous peer reviewer for helpful suggestions. Above all, my thanks go to Diana, Rebecca and Josh, for their lavish patience, support and stimulus.
2 Mikhail Pushchin, Encounter with Pushkin in Trans-Caucasia (note 485).
3 Potokski, N. B., Russkaya Starina Vol. 28 (1880) p. 583Google Scholar.
4 Appendix 8.
5 See Appendix 8.
6 Ivanovski, A. A., Russkaya Starina Vol. 9 (1874) pp. 392-329Google Scholar.
7 Benckendorff to the Military Governor of St Petersburg, 22 March 1829, Osten-Sacken to Strekalov, 12 May 1829 (note 178).
8 Benckendorff limited Departmental embarrassment by downplaying the trip to the Caucasus and pointing the finger at Pushkin (and Paskevich) over travel further south. Hence official correspondence about who issued onward authorisation—Akty Sobrannye Kavkazkoy Arkheograficheskoy Kommissieyu (henceforth AKAK) = Documents Collected by the Caucasus Archeographic Commission [in Russian] Vol. 7 (Tiflis, 1878) No. 923—and Benckendorff's letter, in Russian, to Pushkin of 14 October 1829 grilling him exclusively about Transcaucasia (“His Imperial Majesty, having learnt from newspaper reports that you, dear Sir, have been wandering beyond the Caucasus and visiting Arzrum, has most royally deigned to command me to ask you by whose leave you undertook this journey. I, for my part, most humbly request you to acquaint me with the reasons why you were not good enough to keep your word to me and proceeded into Transcaucasia without forewarning me of your intention to make this journey.”) Pushkin replied, urbanely, in French on 10 November pointing out that the army visit, which was what the Tsar took exception to, had been planned for Tbilisi (Je crus avoir le droit d'aller à Tiflis. Arrivé là, je ne trouvais plus l'armée), pleading thoughtlessness and pressing for fair treatment (Je supplie Votre excellence d’être en cette occasion ma providence). Benckendorff manoeuvred similarly to protect Bulgarin in 1830 (note 352).
9 N. V. Putyata, Russki Arkhiv (1899) No. 6 p. 351, reprinted in Pushkin in the Recollections of Contemporaries [in Russian] (Moscow, 1998) Vol. 2 p. 6.
10 M. A. Korf, Pushkin in the Recollections of Contemporaries Vol. 1 p. 106.
11 Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 8, 5 February 1830, a new approximately twice-weekly launched by Delvig and Pushkin. The Tsar approved the text. See T. Zenger, Nicholas I, Pushkin's Editor [in Russian] in A. S. Pushkin: Issledovaniya i materialy (Moscow, 1934) p. 518. He tended to focus on fine points of presentation (notes 91, 103 and 110).
12 “For reasons important to the author but not to the public” (Nabokov, Onegin (New York, 1964) Vol. 1 p. 334, Vol. 3 pp. 255-256). This meant politically risqué, like “would never have been published…details which are very unimportant for they concern me alone” (Second Draft Preface below). Katya Hokanson explores Onegin's successive itineraries and their resonances with the Journey in Writing at Russia's Border (Toronto, 2008) pp. 108-143.
13 Persia, Turkey and Poland.
14 Letter to Benckendorff of 11 April 1835 [in Russian]: “Exercising my priceless right [personal censorship by the Tsar], I am pleased to submit for His Majesty's inspection a work which I have very much wanted to publish, for the reasons explained in the preface.” To all surface appearance the text was innocuous. Nicholas had already approved The Georgian Military Highway; subtler content did not catch his eye and he made only minor deletions (note 11). As Pushkin informed the Censorship Office (letter of 28 August 1835), “In May the Tsar graciously returned my work to me, granting leave to publish it subject to excision of passages marked in his own hand.” See Y. L. Levkovich, Towards the Censorship History of “A Journey to Arzrum” [in Russian], Vremennik Pushkinshoy Kommissii 1964, pp. 34-37.
15 Draft Pushkin letter to Ushakov, mid-June 1836 (see note 51 and Appendix 5).
16 The Journey's apparent silence about obvious issues has troubled later readers, its scintillating surface serving to taunt some with emptiness. For example, “His words are chosen with extreme care, each controversial point deftly circumvented, and immaterial details consume many tedious pages”—Yuri Druzhnikov, Prisoner of Russia (New Brunswick/London, 1998) p. 420. Pushkin artfully exploits a chance hermaphrodite by way of apology (note 247): “Cut?” “No, divinely emasculated.”
17 Pushkin's article Aleksandr Radishchev (1836, rejected for publication by S. S. Uvarov). Earlier work in progress on Radishchev (1833-5) published by Annenkov as Thoughts along the Way was later retitled A Journey from Moscow to Petersburg.
18 About “A Journey to Arzrum” [in Russian] Vremennik Pushkinskoy Komissii 1936 Issue 2 pp. 57-73.
19 Note 208.
20 Research, confirming that the convoy description is at least partly stylised, and defence of Pushkin's accuracy have too readily assumed that the Journey accounts as factual narrative.
21 Reduced, for effect, from an earlier four.
22 An Arcadia characterised by his name and the much-loved pursuits of searching the woods for mushrooms and savouring them salted or pickled. Mushrooms otherwise meant ephemeral or upstart not psychedelic (ambrosia, honeydew). Lotus-eaters were euphoric stay-at-homes.
23 Travel Notes (below), omitted from the Journey.
24 Chapters 29, 32.
25 “…generous, manly, though perhaps somewhat unbending character…” (dispatch of 19 February 1829 to Political Department, Fort William (Kolkata), National Archives FO 60/31 f. 68). See note 191 and Appendix 7.
26 Note 200.
27 Note 288.
28 Erzurum (note 264).
29 Russo-Turkish War of 1828-9.
30 Eastern Travels under French Government Orders by Victor Fontanier (1796-1857), researcher for the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle (1821-29), vice-consul at Trabzon (1830-33).
31 Po-svoyemu (French de sa façon): fanciful. Fontanier (Chapter 18) was briefed by “officers of the Muscovite army” (p. 251) on lines summarised by Mikhail Pushchin (“…all the battles, resonant in reports, were just pursuits of the enemy…” Appendix 8). Rooting for Napoleon and French-led Asian conquest, he gladly debunked the campaign. Seen from Prussia, Paskevich rivalled der alte Fritz or Caesar (veni, vidi, vici) at Tokat (Lt-Gen. G. W. Valentini Traité sur la guerre contre les Turcs… (Berlin, 1830) pp. 377, 396). Lt.-Col., later Lt-Gen., William Monteith, British military adviser at Tabriz, had other axes to grind (note 191) but rated the campaign with Napoleon's crossing of the Alps (Kars and Erzeroum: With the Campaigns of Prince Paskiewitch, in 1828 and 1829… (London, 1856) p. 247).
32 “Military verdict” (voyenniye suzhdeniya) in the First Draft Preface (below), amended to rassuzhdeniya, “wrangling” (French discussion) or “thesis” (traité).
33 Fontanier (Note 30, p. 252) quoted in French. He or his informants have improved on Nadezhdin's and Bulgarin's recriminations (Appendix 1).
34 1804-60, later a leading Slavophile.
35 Count Ivan Ivanovich (Johann/Hans Karl Friedrich Anton von) Diebitsch (1785-1831), Commander-in-Chief in the Balkans.
36 Reflecting (obdumyvat’ = raflaichir) as travelogue should and the Journey will if readers are alert or primed.
37 Journey on author and travelogue on readers: A. N. Muravyov (1806-74), A Journey to the Holy Land [in Russian], (St Petersburg, 1832). “…He visited the Holy Land as a believer, a humble Christian, a simple-hearted crusader, thirsting to prostrate himself in the dust at the tomb of Christ-Saviour.—He crosses Greece engrossed in the one big idea, he does not attempt like Chateaubriand [Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem…1811] to exploit contrasting mythology from the Bible and the Odyssey. He does not pause, he rushes, he converses with Egypt's strange reformer [Muhammad Ali], penetrates the depths of the pyramids, sets off into desert relieved by black tents and camels, enters the Promised Land and at last from a hilltop suddenly spies Jerusalem…” (unfinished Pushkin review).
38 General Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich (1782-1856) of Zaporog Cossack descent. He and the future Tsar Nicholas were introduced in France by Tsar Alexander and struck up a rapport. Nicholas later served under Paskevich in the 1st Division of Guards and continued calling him “Sir” (otets-komandir: “father-commander”). Paskevich succeeded Yermolov (note 59) in 1827 as Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief in the Caucasus, was created Count of Erivan in 1827 and Prince of Warsaw in 1831.
39 Note 233.
40 Prince Alexander Chavchavadze (1786-1846), Georgian poet and A. S. Griboyedov's father-in-law. Chavchavadze had advanced from Armenia to Lake Van in 1828, withdrawing to winter at Beyazit (Doğubeyazit). Plans for a renewed easterly attack in 1829 were shelved when Griboyedov's assassination (note 191) necessitated manning the Persian front.
41 Commanding the garrison at Akhaltsik (Ahıska).
42 Plain Lieutenant-General Yakov Alekseyevich Potyomkin (1781-1831) who arrived late in the campaign.
43 Major-General Nikolai Nikolayevich Rayevski (1801-43), Paskevich's cavalry commander and a close friend. He was suspended from duty in December 1829 for “undue closeness” to exiled Decembrists under his command.
44 In French (Voyages, p. 241).
45 The omitted phrase (“the premier Russian poet”: le plus célèbre des poètes russes).
46 Bran’ (scolding, abuse), probably play on the Tiflis Gazette (No. 29 of 28 June 1829, Appendix 1: “…amid the terrors of the fray [also bran’]”). Pushkin had survived battle only to face a drubbing in the Press.
47 About not producing celebratory verse (Introduction, Appendix 1). The Journey ripples with answering squibs. Wolfe's elegy to Sir John Moore graces an Ossete funeral (note 106); a poet from the fountainhead of grandiloquence deflates bombast (note 135); one quote from Horace, master of the genre, toys with commemorating Decembrists (note 218); another dangles Rome's decisive defeat in the East (note 219); the victors receive their plaudit from a poet-like dervish (note 263) and critics are dispatched with fleas in their ears (notes 291-292).
48 Soğanlı Dağı (Onion Mountain) about 11 miles west of Sarıkamış and the range of surrounding peaks (Soğanlı Mountains).
49 Commander-in-Chief in the East (Şark Seraskeri). Both countries changed generals after Russian failure to break through in the Balkans and Turkish loss of Kars and Akhaltsik in 1828. Count Wittgenstein was replaced by Count Diebitsch (note 35), his chief-of-staff. Former Grand Vizier Mehmed Said Galip Pasha (1763-1829), Şark Seraskeri and Vali (Governor) of Erzurum, and Köse Mehmet Pasha, his military deputy, were succeeded by Salih Pasha (“Pasha of Maidan”: maden emini or superintendent of imperial mines) and Hakki Pasha, Governor of Sivas. They made a determined attempt to recapture Akhaltsik in February-March 1829 but failed to regain the initiative.
50 Hakki (note 49). Osman is a telling slip. Dislodging him was critical to concealing flanking movement on Hakki's camp and to keeping Hakki and the Seraskier apart. The engagement rates a breezy notice in Chapter 3, military significance blurred by chosen reporting style (note 215).
51 Playful dismissal of Fontanier (note 30, p. 252): “This summary, I realise, barely resembles the glowing accounts that reached us some years ago, but these accounts were, for officers in the know, an inexhaustible fund of mockery, and a poet noted for his imagination…”). Fontanier also highlighted the main barb (note 492) going the rounds (p 240: “The commander-in-chief Prince Paskevich did not, if public opinion is to be believed, possess great military talents but had admirable sang-froid, an unfailing doggedness and rare courage”). The official account of the campaign was compiled by a Paskevich adjutant, N. I. Ushakov, A History of Military Operations in Asiatic Turkey in 1828 and 1829 [in Russian] (SPb, 1836), translated into German by A. C. Lämmlein (Leipzig/Warsaw, 1838) and adapted into French by another Paskevich staff-officer, Félix de Fonton, La Russie dans l'Asie mineure ou Campagnes du Maréchal Paskevitch en 1828 et 1829 précédées d'un Tableau du Caucase (Paris, 1840). Ushakov sent Pushkin an inscribed copy, prompting a handsome if tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement (draft of mid-June 1836): “I was honoured, on return from Moscow, to receive your book and read it [avidly]. I do not presume to judge the work of a soldier-scholar but am enchanted by the clear, eloquent and vivid treatment. Henceforth, the name of the conqueror of Erivan, Arzr<um> and W<arsaw> will be linked with that of his brilliant historian. I was astonished to see that you had immortalised me too—at a stroke of the pen. You admit me to the temple of Fame, a man once permitted by the Count of Erivan [Paskevich] to ride after him into conquered Arzrum./With the deep<est> etc.” This is magisterial put-down of the History's comic account (Appendix 5) of Pushkin's charge into battle on 14 June (note 223).
52 Only equal to his trade responsibilities. Heightened interest in Anatolia led to Fontanier's appointment as French vice-consul and James Brant's (note 276) as British vice-consul at Trabzon in 1830. Fontanier later served in Basra (1838-40), where he clashed with the British and was recalled, and Singapore (1846-8) as Guizot's chosen Anglophobe. He resigned on monarchist principle at the start of the Second Republic.
53 Picking up on Northern Bee No. 138, 16 November 1829: “composition…inspired in the shelter of martial tents…” (Appendix 1). “Concerns” (zabot) is a veiled dig at Paskevich's laboured advance (“Paskevich was very troubled about [Paskevicha ochen’ zabotil] crossing the Saganlug Mountains…” Pushchin, Appendix 8).
54 Smooth dismissal of poetic obligation, exploiting a Bulgarin jibe that Pushkin (“French author”) “quietly crawls at the feet of the powerful for permission to wear an embroidered kaftan” (“An Anecdote”, Northern Bee No. 30, 11 March 1830). The man of principle “chases off two dogs” (kills two birds) “with one stone”, making short work of a Bulgarin stereotype purportedly from “the fable of Pilpai [Panchatantra], who throws stones at the heavens”. Pushkin found Paskevich's hospitality irksome. It was pressed on him after 14 June, limiting time he could spend with friends (Appendix 8).
55 Bran’ (note 46).
56 Narrowly defined. Pushkin also wrote poems (Appendix 2) including the satirical Oleg's Shield. “I read no satire…on the Arzrum campaign” held good: Oleg's lost heroics belonged to the European theatre.
57 A covered waggon (note 86) or here, more specifically, a nomad yurt (Pushkin's “wicker frame covered in white felt”, below).
58 About 130 miles (1 verst = 3,500 feet, just over a kilometre).
59 General Aleksei Petrovich Yermólov (1777-1861), Viceroy of the Caucasus, Governor-General of Georgia and Commander of the Detached Caucasus Corps (1816-27). See Appendix 8. Hero of the Napoleonic wars and a larger than life figure, he promoted development and ruled effectively through intimidation and exemplary punishment, curbing the mountaineers but leaving grievances that hardened, under Paskevich's successors, into three decades of khalidiyya (note 276) resistance to Russia. He courted controversy with liberal-baiting insistence on the cost-effectiveness of his methods and effortlessly generated legend, such as insulting the Shah by striding booted into audience in 1817 (a favour pressed for and granted). Dismissal by Tsar Nicholas transformed him, paradoxically, into a radical icon. Pushkin's A Captive in the Caucasus (1822) closed with the new glory of Yermolov (“Caucasus, bow your snowy head/Submit: Yermolov comes!”). The call was a natural preliminary to revisiting the Caucasus and seeing friends who lionised Yermolov. But there was no disguising the politics and the account, written for Travel Notes, was omitted from first publication.
60 Pyotr Aleksandrovich Yermolov (1747-1832), former director of prisons at Oryol. Yermolov sold the family estate at Lukyanchikovo, 12 miles east of Oryol, when his father died, moving to Moscow and acquiring the village of Osorgino to the west.
61 https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digital-collection/01.+Paintings/39195/ (accessed 19 June 2020). George Dawe (1781-1829), English portraitist, and his Russian assistants painted over 300 generals (including Diebitsch and Paskevich) for the Winter Palace 1812 Military Gallery.
62 Short, wide-sleeved coat (Turkish çekmen, çepken).
63 kinzhal (Arabic khanjar) dagger.
64 The pun is better, though still laboured, in Russian (Erivanski/Yerikhonski). Capture of Erivan, Tabriz and threat of further advance forced Persia to cede Nakichevan (Naxçıvan) and Erivan provinces to Russia in the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchai.
65 The Mustakil Serasker (Independent Commander-in-Chief) Ağa Hüseyin, who suppressed the janissaries for Sultan Mahmud II in 1826, successfully held the Turkish strongpoint of Shumen, Bulgaria, in 1828 preventing Russian breakthrough. Yermolov is referring to this and (nachal'stvovavshevo: previously in command) to Grand Vizier Kör Yusuf Ziyaüddin Pasha who repulsed the Russians there in 1810, reporting to the Sultan that he had “as many Russian heads as would build a bridge from Shumla to heaven”. See The Annual Register or a View of the History, Politics and Literature of the Year 1828 (London, 1829) p. 234. The barb is that the young Colonel Paskevich led one of the finer moments in the failed 1810 assault.
66 Count F. I. Tolstoy (1782-1846), the “American”. He had just (1 May) approached the Goncharovs with Pushkin's proposal of marriage to their daughter Natalya.
67 Fixing Yermolov as an out-and-out nationalist. The History of the Russian State (1818 onwards) by N. M. Karamzin, a pro-autocracy liberal, was well received not least on the right of politics. Hence the author's distress at Pushkin's jibe about schooling us in “the charm of the knout”. Yermolov did write Memoirs, concluding in 1826 and published posthumously. M. P. Pogodin and P. I. Bartenev both tried unsuccessfully to obtain his account of Pushkin's visit. But he did comment in early May 1829 to his cousin Denis Davydov: “Pushkin called. This was my first encounter with him and, as you may imagine, I viewed him with the liveliest interest. First occasions do not make for close acquaintance, but what power of great talent! I found myself moved, besides a spontaneous respect” Starina i Novizna 22 (Petrograd, 1917) p. 38.
68 Enthusiastically (Italian). This and other Italian touches were probably prompted by carriage Dante-reading. See Appendix 2: Tattoo. Yermolov is hitting out at Tsar Nicholas. Kurbski, Ivan IV's outstanding general, went on to lead the “Boyars’ Revolt”.
69 See Introduction. No Germanophobe (note 177), Yermolov was famous for winding up Court and army Germans, quipping for example at a group of generals in the Emperor's antechamber: “May I inquire, gentlemen, if any one amongst you speaks Russian?” J. F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908) p. 96.
70 Patronymic. Correct address was Aleksandr Sergey[ev]ich.
71 A. S. Griboyedov worked for Yermolov in the Caucasus (note 195). His play Woe from Wit, rejected by the censor and first published in 1833, was circulating in manuscript. Yermolov found Griboyedov unreadable not side-splitting: “This is poetry! It's not my friend Griboyedov's verse: getting my jaws round that makes them ache. Fortunately for me, Pushkin, hasn't written a single hexameter—a fine enough verse-form, no doubt, but it doesn't fit my mouth” (note 67, p. 39).
72 Belied even by Pushkin's careful text; hence omission (note 59).
73 Celebrated in 1828 (“I am at Kursk, dear friends,/At Poltoratski's tavern./Vivid the memory one tends/Of Maiden Lisa and Milady Kern” [E. P. Poltoratskaya and A. P. Kern, the owner F. M. Poltoratski's nieces]) by Anton Delvig (1798-1831), himself aptly commemorated, after his funeral, at the Yar (note 395) by Pushkin and other close friends. Poltoratski's continued to delight, its “most excellent wild duck” noted in 1841 by the geologist Murchison, an experienced traveller on Russian roads. See Wanderings in Russia (2004) p. 392).
74 Light carriage (calèche, barouche).
75 Probably fifteen.
76 Pushkin veils most dramatis personae behind an initial, common practice at the time. Identifications were added later. Count V. A. Musin-Pushkin (1798-1854), a distant relative sentenced as a Decembrist, had just been posted to the Tiflis Infantry Regiment. A comic description of his travelling arrangements written for the amusement of friends (Travel Notes) was omitted from the Journey.
77 Travel Notes homage, omitted from first publication, to the hanged Decembrist poet K. F. Ryleyev (1795-1826), who had served as an artillery officer nearby. The unattributed quote is from Peter the Great at Ostrogozhsk (1823) admired by Pushkin for its evocation of Cossack free spirit (“extremely original”, letter to Ryleyev, late May 1825).
78 Buddhist Mongols who migrated west in the seventeenth century. Their story is told in Pushkin's History of Pugachov (1833) and in De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars (1837).
79 A. O. Orlowski (1777-1832), Polish artist and lithographer resident in Petersburg.
80 She inspired the poem “To a Kalmyk girl” (Appendix 2). Pushkin's attempt to kiss her (Travel Notes) is omitted, probably as a hostage to critics (“Many will take my Kalmyk blandishments and my Circassian indignation together…” ibid.)
81 Goryachovodsk (“Hot Wells”). As Miss N. Trubitsyna, the historian George Katkov's aunt, patiently explained to a bemused 1960s student, this is the celebrated Pyatigorsk (“Five Mountains”). Renamed in 1830, it was the setting of Lermontov's novel, A Hero of Our Time, and his fatal duel in 1841.
82 Pushkin toured the Caucasus and Crimea with the Rayevski family in 1820. Aleksandr (1795-1868) was already at Pyatigorsk taking the waters for a wound or, as Yermolov put about, venereal disease. An early Russian “Byronist”, he impressed the young Pushkin. Here he displaces his younger brother Nikolai (Travel Notes) at the Podkumok, possibly for saturnine match with brooding nature. See also Appendix 4 All's quiet—the Caucasus… written at Georgievsk.
83 Besht(a)u (Turkic beş tav: “five mountains”) has five domes and is the tallest (4,593 ft.) of the five local peaks (Russian pyatigoriye).
84 Viceroy (namestnik) of the Caucasus, relocated to Tbilisi in 1801-2.
85 French occasion (happenstance: envoyer une lettre par occasion = send post with a chance traveller).
86 Covered waggons.
87 Bullock-carts.
88 Nogai Tartar.
89 Felt cloaks.
90 About 10 miles.
91 The Tsar deleted “rusting” and “crumbling” when censoring Pushkin's 1830 article The Georgian Military Highway (T. Zenger Note 11, p. 518). The amendment carried forward to the first edition of the Journey.
92 Some 20-30 years earlier. Count Ivan Vasilyevich Gudovich (1740-1820), a Ukrainian Cossack, captured the Black sea ports of Hajjibey (Odessa, 1789) and Anapa (1791) and governed the north Caucasus in the 1790s. He returned as Viceroy (1806-9) following Prince P. D.Tsitsiyanov's assassination (note 161).
93 N. B. Potokski, a 20-year-old from the Ukraine, travelled with this convoy (Meetings with Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin in 1829 [in Russian], Russkaya Starina 28 (1880) pp. 575-584, under the editorial disclaimer “In this article there are variances with the statements of Pushkin's biographers…”). Potokski is demonstrably (note 142) unreliable, notably so when he shares the limelight or parades inside knowledge. He says (p. 577) Pushkin dressed up in Circassian costume with dagger, sabre and pistol, that others copied him obtaining equipment from the Cossacks, that he organised horse-races to pass the time and that the officer in charge had to keep shepherding them back to the convoy. Pushkin, he adds, kept decorating fort buildings with amusing drawings and verse and one old custodian told while wiping it off, “This is Pushkin's work”, retorted, “Pushkin, Kukushkin, what's the difference, why deface government walls? The commandant holds us soldiers strictly to account for it.” According to Potokski, Pushkin urged him not to be angry, clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a silver coin.
94 Fortified village (Turkic awıl). Mansur (note 102) was defeated here in 1785. He regrouped further west in Circassia.
95 Pushkin omits that Musin-Pushkin and he added their graffiti, his own poignant with bachelor frustrations of marriage to a reading-public. See Travel Notes.
96 Storyline of Pushin's A Captive in the Caucasus (1822) set in Circassia and dedicated to Nikolai Rayevski (note 43).
97 Pushkin's spelling. Seal, emblem (Turkic damga).
98 West Caucasus tribes, Adyge, Çerkes (Circassian) and others, many of them eighteenth century converts from Christianity to Islam, who resisted Russia until the 1860s.
99 Mirnoi. See note 101.
100 The Genoese Giorgio Interiano noted in 1602: “As soon as a noble's son is two or three years old, he is entrusted to the tuition of one of the servants who teaches him daily to ride holding a bow, and when he sees a hen, bird, pig or other animal, trains him to shoot…” (della vita de’ Zichi, chiamati Ciarcassi [about the life of the Zichs, known as Circassians]).
101 “That truce was only artificial for each party waited for the appropriate opportunity to abrogate it. In such cases the Circassians used to say to the Russian ‘We are Mirnoi (a Russian word meaning “Submissive”) but our rifles are not’.” Shauket Mufti (Habjoka) M. D., Heroes and Emperors in Circassian History (Beirut, 1982), p. 143.
102 The Chechen Imam Mansur (1732-94) backed by the Ottomans. He was captured at Anapa in 1791 by Count Gudovich (note 92) and imprisoned at Schlüsselburg, then Solovetski Island in the White Sea. Mansur was a Sufi, foreshadowing the khalidiyya (note 277).
103 The Tsar deleted “It taxes our indolence less, however, in place of”, adding “and good example will be more effective than”. This was tidied up in the printed Georgian Military Highroad to read: “Good example, however, and the Living Word will be more effective than propagating dead letters and distributing…” In the first edition of the Journey Pushkin recast the sentence and, lost the insertion: “It is vain, however, in place of the Living Word to propagate…” (see note 91). New focus on Christianity and the moral high ground runs through Travel Notes and the Journey (notes 37, 208, 249). Pushkin stayed near the Scottish missionary colony of Karas or Shotlandka (Inozemtsevo, just north of Pyatigorsk) in 1820 and was probably struck, like Thomas Alcock, that Orthodoxy had better openings: “when an opportunity offers of converting an unfortunate Caucasian, the Greek [Russian/Georgian] priests have greater advantage and power, and apply it frequently with more success”. Alcock, Travels in Russia, Persia, Turkey, and Greece, in 1828-9 (London, 1831) p 25. Pushkin's unfinished poem Tazit explores “turn-the-other-cheek” Christianity as a counter to vendetta culture. Non-conversionist outreach to the mountaineers did achieve results in the 1850s (Appendix 6).
104 Descended from the Alani (“Aryans”, an Iranian people) who invaded Europe and North Africa with the Vandals in the fifth century. They were a major force in the southern steppes and Caucasus until the Mongol invasion. Ossete derives from Georgian Oseti (Alania).
105 Mountain hut.
106 Quoted in English from the Revd. Charles Wolfe's elegy (1817) “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna”. The Ossete is being buried as found like Moore in the Peninsular War (“No useless coffin enclosed his breast/ Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;/But he lay like …”). Bathos and memento mori serve to tease Paskevich and critics demanding panegyric (note 47).
107 Tazit (note 103), a thoughtful return to the world of A Captive in the Caucasus, opens with a heroicised version of this funeral.
108 Veils.
109 Child-hostages, held in trust (Arabic amanat) by a ruler to ensure subordinates’ loyalty.
110 The Tsar deleted “They are pitifully kept…Vladikavkaz days” (see note 91).
111 Baron E. K. Stjernvall-Walleen (1806-90), Musin-Pushkin's brother-in-law, a Tiflis Infantry Regiment officer on Paskevich's staff. Present since Novocherkassok, his measured response to nature in the raw now earns him a mention. The Swedish name is pronounced, and in Russian spelt, “Shernval”.
112 The Imatra Falls in Finland.
113 Quote from Derzhavin's ode “The Waterfall” (1794), inspired by the Kivach Falls in Russian Karelia
114 Gentle send-up of blasé companions: “matchless” and “never been to Finland”.
115 Major-General Prince F. A. Bekovich-Cherkasski (1790-1835), a Kabardian notable in Russian service whose family had converted to Christianity in the eighteenth century.
116 Kakheti Province. The best white from the Chavchavadze (note 40) estate at Tsinandali became one of Russia's most prized wines.
117 (Wine)skin (Turkic burduq).
118 Iliad 3.246-7 in E. Kostrov's translation (1787). In Travel Notes this partnered the nickname for Musin-Pushkin's carriage, dropped from the Journey (notes 76, 305). Pushkin admired Gnedich's new version (1829) but his less pithy “wine that gladdens the heart/In a goatskin…” loses the joke.
119 Notes 96, 103, 107. Pushkin was carrying a manuscript of the poem in his trunk—M. V. Yuzefovich, Pushkin in the Recollections of Contemporaries [in Russian] (SPb, 1998) Vol. 2 pp. 111-112—but found another copy in the commandant's hut (see Travel Notes). He presented the MS to Yuzefovich (note 257) from whom Rayevski (notes 43, 96) appropriated it as dedicatee.
120 P. V. Sheremetev (1799-1837) served briefly (1827-8) at the Russian Embassy in Paris. He was taking the waters at Kislovodsk when Pushchin (note 485, p. 102) and Pushkin stopped there in August 1829.
121 N. N. [N. A. Nefedyev (1800-60)], Notes during an Excursion from Astrakhan to the Caucasus and Georgia in 1827 [in Russian] (Moscow, 1829).
122 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rembrandt_-_Ganymede.jpg (accessed 19 June 2020). Wicked put-down of celebrated sight, in similar vein to insouciance at Kazbek (note 133). In the painting a crying baby urinates, as drawn to specialist attention by Greenleaf, Monika Frenkel, Pushkin's “Journey to Arzrum”: The Poet at the Border, Slavic Review, Vol. 50 (1991), p. 951Google Scholar. Rembrandt's apparent parody conveyed, in a lost idiom, innocence ascending to heaven in a Christianised version of the myth and Ganymede's transformation into the constellation Aquarius, meticulously demonstrated by Russell, Margarita, The Iconography of Rembrandt's “Rape of Ganymede”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1977), pp. 5-18)Google Scholar.
123 The “Post”, Cossack posting-station.
124 “If local tradition is to be believed, this castle belonged in the middle ages to a Princess Daria who exacted heavy tolls from all travellers, detained those who pleased her to share her bed and had lovers she found wanting thrown into the Terek.” J. F. Gamba, French Consul at Tbilisi, Voyage dans la Russie méridionale et particulièrement dans les provinces situées au-delà du Caucase, fait depuis 1820 jusqu'en 1824…Vol. II, (Paris, 1826) pp. 21-22. Growing interest in Queen Tamar (1184-1212) of Georgia and her court-poet Shota Rustaveli reassigned the castle and its traditions to her. Lermontov's ballad-version of the same legend is entitled Tamara (1843). The disclaimer lived on: “the Castle of Tamara…has no connection with the famous queen…” (Baedeker's Russia 1914).
125 Garbled derivation from dar-e-alan (gate of the Alani, note 104). Gate is dar, or dvara in Avestan, the oldest then known form of Persian.
126 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 6.12. Pushkin took this from Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815), Voyage dans les Steps d'Astrakhane et du Caucase (Paris, 1829) who follows (p. 216: “le fleuve Dyriodoris”) a scribal error in the Latin manuscript tradition. Pliny's actual “stinking stream” (amne diri odoris fluente) was very likely a misplaced detail from the Carpathians where a brackish river (Slatinic) flows into the Danube at Iron Gate.
127 Note 126. Potocki stayed with Count Gudovich (note 92) at Astrakhan in 1797 and toured the Caucasus. His fiction (The Saragossa Manuscript) was published in stages. Pushkin had copies of Avadoro, Histoire espagnole (Paris, 1813) and Dix journées de la vie d’ Alphonse Van Worden (Paris, 1814).
128 Trinity, the official Russian name for the Gorge, connected with the Georgian name (Tsminda Sameba: “Holy Trinity”) for the Monastery at Kazbek (Gergeti Church, note 133).
129 Mad Gully or Demon Gulch.
130 “End-man”, against whom others line up, in the Preobrazhenski Guards’ Regiment. The ruling prince was Mikhail Gavrielevich Kazbegi (1805-76). Potokski (note 93, p. 579) says he and Pushkin met him. The tavern-giant may have been an uncle.
131 Arabic dukkan, bench, shop.
132 Rough, locally made red wine (Caucasian and Cossack term, possibly Arabic sakar intoxicating drink).
133 Prominent feature (Turkic Çatir-dağ: “Tent-Mountain”) of the S.E. Crimean coastline. Rising impatience runs through Chapters 1-2, anti-climax through Chapters 4-5. Return yielded the vision (note 289) and poem Monastery at Kazbek (Appendix 2).
134 From Denis Davydov's Part-soldier (Polusoldat), 1826: “On the Caucasus his gaze is fixed,/Where Kazbek's snowy bulk/Props up the heavens’ rim.” The quote is homage to Davydov for leading the way (Appendix 8).
135 Mohammad Fazil Khan Garrusi (1784-1852), a court poet to Fath Ali Shah and Crown Prince Abbas Mirza (Appendix 6). The encounter encapsulates the Journey's fascination with East and West, ceremony and simplicity (note 47) in brilliant miniature. Pushkin takes “orientalism” (notes 156, 363, Appendix 3) more tellingly to task than modern commentators. Fazil Khan was one of a talented delegation, including the future prime minister Amir Kabir, accompanying Khosrow Mirza (note 147) to Petersburg. Exotics to their hosts, the visitors’ interest in Russia was practical. Similar contrast marked Paskevich's correspondence with Aqa Mir Fattah (note 457). Pushkin addressed an unfinished poem to Fazil Khan (Appendix 2) and would have relished Fazil Khan Shayda (“love-crazed scholar”, a Russian version of his name).
136 “Name for Persian caps,” Pushkin notes here with an asterisk. Turkic papak a.k.a. “Astrakhan”.
137 Potokski (note 93, pp. 579-580) claims that Pushkin led an expedition here to an Ossete aul two versts away, wearing a Turkish fez and a red cloak. He insisted that the crowd be told that he had grown up locally as a captive and was in fact a devil (shaitan) The locals drew back, throwing stones. The party were rescued by the Kobi post commandant and his Cossacks. Almost a preview of the Yezidi chief Hasan Aga (note 228).
138 Mountain of the Cross.
139 Major Boris G. Chilyayev (1798-1864), a mining engineer, the administrator of mountain peoples on the Georgian Military Highway. His brother and Pushkin's were fellow officers in General Rayevski's Nizhni-Novgorod Regiment. Other convoy-members named in the letter (24 May 1829) are Lt.-Col. P. E. Bauman of artillery and Musin-Pushkin.
140 Lt. Col. N. G. Ogaryov, in charge of wartime maintenance and upgrade of the Georgian Military Highway. O * * * (“Or–” in Travel Notes) may be the hussar-poet N. N. Orzhitski (1796-1861), an attendee at Ryleyev's 13 December pre-Revolt meeting. Reduced to the ranks, he fought the Persian campaign, became a cornet in the Nizhni-Novgorods and probably served on till 1832.
141 Tynyanov (note 18) took this for misdating of the 1817 fall mentioned by Gamba (note 124, p. 24) and Kotzebue, Narrative of a Journey into Persia…1817 (1819) p. 33, who similarly reports folk-wisdom about a seven year cycle. But Nefedyev (note 121) corroborates Pushkin, recording another in May 1827 (“Such a slide occurred a month before us, and in late June we made our way through great masses of snow”). The incident inspired three Pushkin poems (The Fall, In Rocky Walls… and Caucasus. See Appendix 2).
142 The inscription ran: “To the glory of God, in the governorship of Georgia of Infantry-General Yermolov, Major David Kananov, administrator of mountain peoples, 1824”. The earliest cross on the summit may go back to King David of Georgia, Queen Tamar's (note 124) grandfather. In 1816 Yermolov celebrated the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig at Kazbegi's (note 314) previous cross, with toasts to the Tsar, the allied armies and himself—Kotzebue (note 141, p. 39). Potokski (note 93, p. 580) helpfully control-tests his accuracy here, reporting that the cross was put up in 1817 in honour of Yermolov by Colonel Kananov. He has date and rank wrong and has misconstrued the text (V slavu boga, v upravlenie—“to the governorship”).
143 Fontanier (note 30) collected specimens in Georgia with Gamba in 1824. See G. Cuvier, Receuil des Eloges Historiques…(Paris, 1861) III p. 282. He returned in the winter of 1826 to recuperate from travels in Persia (Travels…1829, Asiatic Turkey p. 1). Gamba's (note 124, p. 35) howler Mount St Christopher for Mountain of the Cross (Krestovaya) is celebrated in Lermontov's Hero of our Time.
144 Potokski (note 93, p 581) claims they ran here into “Baron Felkerzam” (an authentic Paskevich adjutant: Ivan Yegorovich/Edmund von Felkersam, 1803-70) carrying a victory report and trophies to Petersburg and that Pushkin urged everyone to hurry or they would miss the fighting. They may have learnt of the army's departure from Tbilisi (19 May), contributing to urgency the next day (26 May), Pushkin's 30th birthday.
145 At Kvesheti.
146 Turkic katιr.
147 Khosrow (Chosroes) Mirza (c 1814-1884), seventh son of Abbas Mirza (“by the blessing of God, I have thirty others, and can afford to sacrifice one boy to the Russians, should they feel disposed to retaliate on his head the murder of Grebayedof [Griboyedov]” British Library IOR/L/PS/9/90 p. 383, May 1829) and grandson of Fath Ali Shah, was leading the agreed mission of apology to Petersburg. See Appendix 6 and Firuza Melville's engaging account of their tour, Khosrow Mirza's mission to St Petersburg in 1829 in Iranian-Russian Encounters: Empires and Revolutions since 1800, (ed.) S. Cronin (London/New York, 2013). His gifts included the Shah Diamond and 18 illuminated manuscripts (National Library of Russia: O. V. Vasilyeva Manuscripta Orientalia Vol. 2, No. 2 1996 p. 19) which Professor Senkovski of Petersburg University was urging government to collect (AKAK 7.536). The diamond, looted from Delhi in 1739 by Nader Shah, is inscribed with tughras (royal cyphers) of Burhan Nizam Shah II of the Deccan Sultanate of Ahmadnagar and Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. Fath Ali added his in ah 1242 (1826/7). The tughra itself (ṣaḥeb-qiran qajar fath ‘ali shah sultan 1242) is linked to celebration of 30 lunar years on the throne, for which ṣaḥeb-qiran (“lord of [felicitous astrological] conjunction) coins were issued from ah 1241. Drilled for attachment to throne or person and slightly resembling a tomb (maqbara), the Shah is now in the Kremlin.
148 Introduced by Shah Abbas (1587-1629). The Tbilisi-minted silver abbasi remained Georgia's currency until replaced (at a rate of 5:1) by the silver rouble in 1833. The silver rouble was worth about 75 US cents or 3 shillings (15p) sterling in money of the day.
149 For making so free (French). The governor was R. S. Yagulov, a retired Major in the police service.
150 Bandit-chief hero of the 1798 novel by Goethe's brother-in-law Vulpius (1762-1827).
151 Russian bogatyr (like Turkish bahadır, Hindi/Urdu bahadur, Hungarian batory, from Mongol ba[ğa]tur, “champion”). Pushkin's 30th birthday (26 May), with its optical illusion, Persian prince and knockabout nightcap, now closes to the strains of a mock-epic Battle of the Hero and the Fleas. Strenuous effort had won some 25 miles.
152 Ghartiskari, Cossack post and last posting-station before Tbilisi.
153 “Pompey's Bridge” at Mtskheta with a tower at either end. Robert Lyall (Travels in Russia, the Krimea, the Caucasus and Georgia, London 1825, p. 504) calls it “picturesque” and prints an illustration. Displaced in the 1920s by a hydroelectric scheme, it is now a ruin. In 65 bce. Pompey surprised Artoces [Artag] of Iberia at “Acropolis” [Armaz-tsikhe, “citadel of the moon-god Armazi”, on Mount Bagineti opposite Mtskheta] forcing him to retreat across the Cyrnus [Kura, Mtkvari]. Artoces burnt the then bridge which Pompey reconstructed (Dio Cassius 37.2-5).
154 Chisinau in Moldova, where Pushkin spent 1820-23 in exile.
155 The Maidan, or Gorgasali Square, adjoining Metekhi Bridge (G. G. Gagarin 1847 print: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-c1c1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 (accessed 28 June 2022).
156 Impishly apt quote, in English. “Teflis is celebrated for its natural warm baths,” Tom Moore (1779-1852) notes, citing the Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal. The future Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna (Princess Charlotte of Prussia) played Lalla Rookh opposite her husband Nicholas in a celebrated divertissement at Berlin in 1821 and the name stuck. The bath-house divestissement simultaneously tops and debunks Moore. Pushkin thought his orientalism, unlike Byron's, slavish and overdone (notes 363, 376), probably the more so for V. A. Zhukovski's imitations and tributes to Alexandra, which may have doubled as prep for their Russian lessons. In the poem, Lāla Rŭkh (“Red-Face” or “Tulip-Cheek”), daughter of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, travels to Kashmir to marry the “King of Bactria” who, in turn, impersonates a minstrel entertaining her en route. In this final song a Georgian girl regales the future Emperor Jahangir and his wife Nur Mahal at the Shalimar Gardens to the refrain “…if there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this”. The famous Persian couplet, originally written for Delhi, was applied by Jahangir to Kashmir and later inscribed on the diwan-i-khas of the Red Fort, a designer-vision of paradise whose gardens unfold towards Kashmir. Pushkin editions faithfully preserve the misprint maiden's for maidens’.
157 Always to good effect (Italian).
158 Notez bien (mark my words).
159 General N. N. Rayevski (note 43).
160 P. S. Sankovski (1793-1832). Tsar Nicholas first learnt that Pushkin had gone to the Caucasus from the Gazette's report of 28 June (Appendix 1).
161 Prince Pavel Tsitsiyanov (Paata Tsitsishvili, 1754-1806), Viceroy of the Caucasus from 1802. He brought Mingrelia (western Georgia) under Russian protection, annexed Ganja (Elizavetpol) and Karabakh but was assassinated during surrender negotiations at Baku.
162 Aqa Mohammad Khan (1742-97) who seized the throne of Persia in 1796 and founded the Qajar dynasty. He reasserted control of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, prompting the crisis in Georgia that led to Russian annexation. Castrated as a child-hostage, he designated his nephew Fath Ali as heir.
163 The decree of annexation was issued in 1801. Monarchist resistance ended in April 1802, when most Georgian nobles took the oath of allegiance to the Tsar.
164 Lezgian (Daghestan) folk-dance.
165 Identified a century later as “Spring Song” by the Georgian poet Dimitri Tumanishvili (d. 1821). The original and the translation made for Pushkin, which he polished, were published by L. B. Modzalevski and V. D. Dondua (“Record of a Georgian Song in Pushkin's Archive” [in Russian], Vremennik Pushkinskoy Kommissii 1936 Issue 2 pp. 297-301).
166 Contrasting regular Georgian wine use with Russian drinking-bouts and taste for spirits. The American missionaries Eli Smith and H. G. O. Dwight noted: “That the people of Georgia are among the hardest drinkers in the world, is well known…The wine which it [Kakheti Province] produces is not bad, and is so abundant, that the best is but about four cents the bottle, while the common is less than a cent. The ordinary day's ration for an inhabitant of Tiflis, from the mechanic to the prince, is said to be a tonk, measuring between five and six bottles of Bordeaux! and the quantity drunk at their revels is perfectly incredible.” Smith and Dwight, Researches…in Armenia: including a journey through Asia Minor, and into Georgia and Persia…(Boston, 1833), p. 216.
167 Red from Azerbaijan.
168 Georgian marani (cellar). The pitcher is kvevri.
169 Malmsey (malvaziya), originating from Monemvasia in the Peloponnese.
170 Tbilis-kalaki (warm city), misprinted “kalar” in J. A. Güldenstädt's Geographical and Statistical Description of Georgia and the Caucasus [in Russian] (SPb, 1809) p. 181.
171 Count N. A. Samoylov (1800-1842), Yermolov adjutant, cousin and childhood companion of General N. N. Rayevski (note 43).
172 Also told of Yermolov: “The governor practised the tradition of the Caucasians when they wanted to try good swords, i.e. smiting the necks of oxen with them, and with one stroke he beheaded a bull or buffalo” (Shauket Mufti (note 101) p. 127). Gen. A. A. Vel'yaminov (1785-1838), Yermolov's chief of staff, may have been another, possibly Pushkin's “V”.
173 9th rank of the imperial civil service in pursuit of the 8th (“College [Ministry] Assessor”). “Rank…coveted” was a well-known line from A. N. Nakhimov's (1782-1814) “Elegy” (“Weep, bureaucrat…”), a squib on civil service promotion exams, part of Speranski's reforms.
174 Russian goryachka. Probably typhus, typhoid or malaria, all endemic. Cholera, a newer arrival which dogged the campaign, was “plague” (chuma). Gamba (note 124, p. 167) says Tbilisi fevers were treated first with calomel (mercurous chloride) and ipecacuanha (emetic root), then quinquina (quinine bitters). Fonton (note 51, p. 41) mentions fevers in the Caucasus leading to tetanus and “violent remedies, such as mercury and arsenic, administered in large doses”. Smith and Dwight (note 166, p. 206) were told, possibly polite fiction for tourists, that “bilious affections” were not endemic but “inflamatory [sic] fevers, especially in the form which is commonly called a stroke of the sun” were common.
175 N. M. Sipyagin (1785-1828), Military Governor of Tiflis.
176 Russian likhoradka, milder fever.
177 Pushkin was on edge. He stayed at Matassi's (Pushkin Street), dining out across the Mtkvari at Salzmann's. See A. Haxthausen, Transcaucasia… (London, 1854) p. 46 and F. F. Tornau, Memories of a Russian Officer [in Russian] (Moscow, 2002) p. 179. The best beer was imported but Salzmann's was popular, not least with Yermolov who had encouraged him to establish Georgia's first brewery. Paul Matassi's (Tornau, p. 191) gourmet admirers included Gamba (note 124 p. 52) and Lev Pushkin (letter to Yuzefovich, 20 December 1836).
178 S. S. Strekalov (1792-1856), Sipyagin's successor, tasked with overseeing Pushkin. Baron D. E. von der Osten-Sacken, Paskevich's chief of staff, wrote to him on 12 May: “The well-known poet, retired 10th class official Aleksandr Pushkin, left Petersburg for Tiflis in March, and since he is under secret surveillance on H.I.M.'s instructions, I have the honour to inform you of the fact, by order of His Lordship [Paskevich], and humbly request that you do not omit to organise the requisite surveillance on his arrival in Georgia” (AKAK 7.922).
179 En route to India or from Tabriz. Lt. Col. Monteith (note 31), charged by both sides with supervising Persian treaty indemnity payments (“…this eventually led to my accompanying the Russian army to Tiflis…”, p. 303) and helping draw the new Russo-Persian frontier, was in the area until September (FO 249/27 pp. 253, 256-257, letters of 1 and 8 September 1829). In Russian protocol Pushkin (10th class) ranked with army lieutenants.
180 Paskevich had agreed. He already had a campaign artist (Appendix 8).
181 Telety (Route from Tiflis to Arzrum: 14 versts) and Kody (25). Pushkin's “quote” carries a built-in quip (“alien [salon] stars”), as in “Night has many charming stars, Moscow's host to many beauties” (Onegin 7.52.1-2), foreshadowing the morning's veiled cavalcade.
182 Bolshiye Shulavery (52 versts) or Samisy (72). See Route. V. A. Manuilov, Pushkin Lived Here [in Russian] (Leningrad, 1963) p. 167, has 91½ versts. This is Akzibeyuk (note 184) the following morning.
183 Lalvar, redrawn as the Georgian-Armenian border in 1918. Bezobdal further south (correctly placed in the chapter summary and Route: “Bezobdal Pass”, now Pushkin Pass) marked the nineteenth century border.
184 Still called Wolf's Gate (Armenian Gaili Dur) on modern maps. Ağzıbüyük (“great mouth” of Satan, according to Kotzebue (note 141, p. 75) was the Turkic name for pass and mountain.
185 Jelal-Oghlu (Route): Stepanavan.
186 Gargar.
187 Pushkin's and general spelling at the time.
188 “Mushroom-eater” (see Introduction). Griboyedov's body left Nakichevan at the frontier under military escort in May and was buried in Tbilisi on 18 July. The encounter (11 June) is stylised, certainly in detail. Pushkin may have visited Griboyedov's grave in August; so Potokski (note 93, p. 582) in an embroidered account of his return to Tbilisi. I owe to Firuza Melville sight of S. A. Fomichev's masterly summary of our understanding: The Griboyedov Episode in “Journey to Arzrum”, The Pushkin Perspective [in Russian] (Yazyki Slavyanskoy Kul'tury, 2007) pp. 247-254. He also highlights Pushkin's debt to Batyushkov's tribute to Lomonosov and Bulgarin's role in scotching earlier publication of Pushkin's encounter.
189 Nash (our): national institution and one of a circle of friends like W. K. Küchelbecker and A. A. Bestuzhev (note 288), caught up in or close to the Decembrist movement.
190 In French.
191 Griboyedov visited Tehran to present his credentials and was killed with most of his staff in a riot on 30 January/11 February 1829 or 6 Shaban ah 1244, almost a year to the day after the signing of the Treaty of Turkmenchai. The message, obscured by governments but self-explanatory and simply summarised for Paskevich by Aqa Mir Fattah (Appendix 6) who “knows all the affairs and intrigues of the Persian Court”, was “that the Persian government is not as afraid of the Russians as supposed” (AKAK 7.653). It was a blow to prestige, more transient than massacre of British in Afghanistan in 1842. Fath Ali Shah, skilfully semi-extricated, was soon jesting darkly with visitors: “he spoke of the dreadful massacre, and humorously said we must not tell our envoy he had anything to do with it”. Alcock (note 103, p. 76). The joke was that the British, who had part-funded war reparations to draw a line under Persia's 1827 defeat and were collaborating with Russia on Greece, were taking him to task for imperilling the peace while simultaneously talking down his involvement to avert conflict. Russia, constrained by war with Turkey, settled for apologies and nominal punishments. The instructive account is Maltsov's, Griboyedov's No. 2 in Tehran (Appendix 7). Paskevich and the Foreign Ministry differed over interpretation of events, as they had over Treaty negotiation. The Ministry blamed “the late Griboyedov's precipitate bursts of zeal” (AKAK 7.665) and by implication Paskevich's championship of him. Paskevich blamed the British (AKAK 7.653): “it may be supposed that the English were no strangers at all to involvement in the insurrection that flared up in Teheran (though, perhaps, they did not foresee its fatal consequences”). He was clear that the British were helping the Persians minimise territorial loss in frontier delineation and believed, wrongly, that they were encouraging Persian military moves and overtures to Turkey. But the real inwardness was that the Ministry and the British, whom the Tsar had wanted kept out of Treaty negotiation (AKAK 7.503), had jointly indulged Persian limit-pushing with results now plain to see. Paskevich's line clearly hit home. By later in the year the Ministry had fallen in with his scepticism, an anticipation of Anglo-Russian clashes to come in Central Asia and the Crimea. The Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, protested in London to Prince Lieven about Paskevich's hostility and the stand-off still echoes in Monteith (note 31, pp. 223-229) who takes Fonton (note 51, pp. 402-408) to task for more “misrepresentations” than feature in his book. The British bogeyman became a fixture in Abbas Mirza's charm offensives with Russia, sometimes quaintly scripted with Persian lines. Semino (note 451), a member of Khosrow Mirza's mission, explained in private audience with the Tsar that the “catastrophe was engineered by the English, who could not abide Griboyedov because of his arrogant treatment of them”, detailing “all the machinations of the English”. A. S. Gangeblov, Reminiscences of a Decembrist [in Russian], (Moscow, 1888) p. 165. Leonid Arinshtein, in A. S. Griboyedov: Materials for a biography [in Russian] (ed.) S. A. Fomichev (Leningrad, 1989) pp. 108-133, gamely revived conspiracy theory, proposing that Wellington and British mission members worked unofficially together to stir up trouble for Russia. Wellington, however, was driving peace and Qajar survival, with no trace of local British official challenge or presence in Tehran that might have spared Captain Macdonald (Appendix 7) his journey there and investigation.
192 The little finger of his left hand was crippled in an exchange of shots with A. Yakubovich at Tbilisi in 1819. Griboyedov insisted on completing the duel, held over from 1817 (note 195). Yakubovich, a crack-shot, aimed precisely “to spoil his piano playing”.
193 Both joined the Foreign Ministry in that year.
194 Force majeure. Pushkin's calque (moguchikh obstoyatel'stv = circonstances puissantes/impérieuses) did not take. It now reads strikingly, at a remove from its bilingual milieu.
195 In 1817 his partner Count A. P. Zavadovski fatally injured Count V. Sheremetev in the first exchange of a “doubles” duel over the dancer Istomina. The second exchange (note 192) was postponed. The Foreign Ministry posted Griboyedov out of scandal's way, assisting Yermolov in his role as ambassador to Persia.
196 1818-23 and 1825-8.
197 1823-4.
198 The Foreign Ministry sent A. M. Obreskov (1790-1885) out to the front to negotiate the Treaty of Turkmenchai to its brief. Paskevich used Griboyedov, Countess Paskevich's cousin. Sent back to Petersburg with the result, Griboyedov was appointed H. I. M.'s Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Persia.
199 Nino or Nina (1812-57) daughter of Prince Alexander Chavchavadze (note 40). They were a musical couple. Nino was pregnant and stayed behind at the Russian Consulate in Tabriz, then with the Macdonalds. The child, born prematurely, survived only briefly. Nino never remarried, spending her later years at Tsinandali (note 116) where she died of cholera.
200 Pointedly sidelining the memoir by Griboyedov's close associate Bulgarin, Reminiscences of the Never-to-be-forgotten A. S. Griboyedov [in Russian], Son of the Fatherland, 1830.
201 Count N. A. Buturlin, adjutant to the War Minister (Count A. I. Chernyshev). M. V. Yuzefovich (note 119, pp. 106-107) says Buturlin's mission was to spy on a Decembrist relative (Count Z. G. Chernyshev, Nizhni-Novgorod Regiment) whose property the Minister was intent on seizing and that his reports were instrumental in Rayevski's (note 43) suspension.
202 Captured in August 1828 and re-attacked in February-March 1829. The garrison under General Bebutov was relieved by Generals Burtsov and Muravyov.
203 Cholera was spreading and would lead to the first major outbreak in Western Europe.
204 The priest supposes Pushkin to have come from the west rather than the north. There was scope for confusion at the Amamly (Spitak) crossroads.
205 Bekant (Route), now Metz [Great] Parni.
206 Gyumri (aka Alexandropol, Leninakan).
207 “Province” in European usage. The Sultan's standard carried four horse or yak tails. Pashas were graded by the lesser number (1-3) on theirs.
208 Gyumri is overlooked by the Aragats (four-peaked volcano) but Ararat (twin peaks, some 80 miles SSE) was sometimes visible. According to Kotzebue (note 141, p. 87), it “greeted [Yermolov's party] awhile” here in 1817 “and then disappeared”. A. A. Ivanovski of the Third Department (note 6) had majored on Ararat, the “cradle of mankind”, as reason for visiting the Caucasus. The mountain now obliges, sustaining a significant vision, like Kazbek (Chapter 5; Appendix 2). Ravens are traditionally connected with death. Kazn’ (“execution”) could also mean “chastisement”. But its primary Biblical connotation (Exodus 11.1) is death of the firstborn. Pushkin is, implicitly, contemplating hanged Decembrists and the challenge of moving on après le deluge. Church Slavonic vran (“raven”) and golubytsa (“dove”) add sacramental tone. In Pushkin's History of Pugachov (1833) the raven symbolised revolt and a future reckoning: the captured Pugachov is made to say “I am not the raven but his fledgling. The raven still flies.” Pushkin sketched the five hanged Decembrists in E. N. Ushakova's album. Similar decoration features in a copy of Ivanhoe (note 386) which he presented en route south in March to a schoolmaster in Tver Province whose father had known the pioneering radical Radishchev (T. G. Tsyavlovskaya, Vremennik Pushkinskoy Kommissii 1963, pp. 5-30). I owe Nadezhda Tarkhova a debt of gratitude for directing me at Khmelita to T. I. Krasnoborod'ko's conclusive demonstration that this is not Pushkin's work but later embroidery—Story of a hoax (Fake Pushkin annotations in Walter Scott's ‘Ivanhoe’), Legends and Myths about Pushkin [in Russian] (SPb, 1994).
209 Barley River (Turkish arpa çay).
210 Tribute and quip. The lower town was captured, after bitter wrangling between Paskevich, Muravyov and others (Appendix 8), and the citadel then surrendered. See Fonton (note 51, pp. 290-291), Monteith (note 31, p. 165). Pushkin used Kars, challenging but scalable, as a nickname for Natalya (note 66) and her mother (“Mamma Kars”), completing his own marital conquest in 1831.
211 The poem “To a Kalmyk girl” (Appendix 2).
212 I. G. Burtsov (1794-1829), imprisoned as a Decembrist and transferred to the Caucasus in 1826. Prominent in the relief of Akhaltsik (note 202) and throughout the campaign until his death at Hart (note 284).
213 Against Hakki Pasha (note 49) encamped with a force of 20,000 at Millidüz. The Russians were at “Kotanly” (Route from Tiflis to Arzrum).
214 Down the Zivin (Süngütaşı) road to flank Hakki from the west (Route).
215 Chuzhdy (alien, French étranger), introducing the bemused observer who will guide us bottom-up through the military action, with overview deferred to the end of the chapter. The technique emphasises incoherence, luck and sheer farce, hinting at the reality that Paskevich targeted Hakki but coped in the event with taking on the serasker. The “campaign's fate” is sardonic welcome for advance: Paskevich's extended preparations (note 53, Appendix 8) nearly allowed the Turks to combine forces. Lone wandering across the battlefield, at odds with supervision others report, teases nannying hosts, while comic sketch-writer Quixote effortlessly upstages the Byronic hero destined for the dunce's cap in Ushakov's “Temple of Fame” (note 51, Appendix 5). It is just detectible, at the margins of the narrative, that Pushkin spent the Battle of Kayınlı on 19 June with Paskevich and Rayevski.
216 V. D. Volkhovski (1798-1841), schoolfriend and Paskevitch's Chief Quartermaster.
217 Mikhail Pushchin (1800-1869), younger brother of Pushkin's schoolfriend Ivan Pushchin, now a lieutenant and linchpin of Paskevich's intelligence, supply and engineering (Appendix 8).
218 Horace, Odes 2.14 (Eheu fugaces…): “Alas, dear Postumus, the fleeting years slip by…” The quote echoes and updates the opening line of a poem by Delvig marking Pushkin's year's farewell to school (“Six years have flown by like a dream”, Six Years. A Celebratory Song. Pupils of the Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo, 1817. Words by Pupil Baron Delvig. Music V. Tepper [in Russian] (SPb, 1835). Applying Horace to these particular old friends sketches, however lightly, an ode to Decembrists. This one comes with integral punch-line (absumet heres Caecuba dignior/ servata centum clavibus…“[Our moment has come and gone.] Worthier inheritors will open up the jealously guarded vintages”). Conventional loyalties at Georgievsk (All's quiet—the Caucasus… Appendix 4) have given way to reflection on Decembrism and the passage of time.
219 Horace Odes 2.9 (Non semper imbres…): “Nor, dear Valgius, in Armenia is the ice frozen all year round…” Learned geographical colour, used by Morier for a journey past Ararat (“Introductory Epistle” to Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824)), and a message: if this goes wrong, the consequences may be lasting. Roman eastward expansion ground to a halt in 53 bce, when Parthia (Persia) overwhelmingly defeated the triumvir Crassus at Carrhae (Harran). Augustus declined to renew the offensive, negotiating instead a frontier settlement and repatriation of Crassus’ legionary standards. Horace is marking their return in 20 B.C. feted at Rome as a diplomatic and military triumph. His opening, conventional show of reluctance to celebrate probably also appealed to Pushkin (note 47).
220 Rayesvski, Pushkin, Pushchin, Semichev (note 221) and Pushkin's younger brother Lev (Pushchin, Appendix 8).
221 Major N. N. Semichev (1792-1830) banished to the Caucasus as a Decembrist and transferred from the Akhtyr Hussar Regiment to the Nizhni-Novgorod Dragoons.
222 Loose encircling formation inspired, like the wheeling tulughma of the Mongols and Mughals, by nomad hunting technique.
223 P. T. Basov, commander of the Basov Don Cossack Regiment. Pushkin famously attempted to join the fray. He was rescued by Semichev (Appendix 5). Pushchin (Appendix 8) also credits himself and Yuzefovich. Pushkin's poem Delibash (Appendix 2) and an ink-sketch of himself on horseback with a lance relate to this episode. Fonton (note 51, p. 429) says the skirmish was prompted by Hakki's appearance in the front line. Paskevich will have confronted Pushkin about straying into danger, as well as limiting opportunity to spend time with Decembrist friends. Potokski (note 93, p. 583) claims Volkhovski (note 216) told him as much, adding a fictitious open rift with Pushkin sent home and storming off.
224 Hakki's camp (note 213). “The very detailed reconnaissance of Hagki Pasha's camp, carried out by me on 15, 16 and 17 June, convinced me that there was no possibility of attacking him frontally or from the left wing where my Corps was positioned…” (Paskevich's 23 June victory report, AKAK 7.792). See also Northern Bee, supplement to No. 85, July 1829 and Annuaire historique universel pour 1829 par C. L. Lesur (Paris, 1830), Appendice, Documens historiques (IIe partie) p. 84. Paskevich disliked the textbook error of exposing his line of communication to the enemy but steeled himself to attack Hakki from the rear.
225 Staff-Captain Baron P. E. von der Osten-Sacken of the Nizhni-Novgorod Dragoons, wounded in the leg (AKAK 7.790), younger brother of Baron D. E. (note 178, Appendix 8).
226 Commanders (Azeri bəy, Persian beg). One was Farhad Bek, to whom the poem “From Hafiz” (Appendix 2) is dedicated, deputy-commander of the first (Karabakh) of four cavalry regiments recruited locally during the winter. They proved outstanding troops, winning repeated praise in Paskevich's reports. The Karabakhs were in the forefront of fighting on 17 June (note 230). Paskevich called to thank them and accompanied them back into camp to cheers all round. See Fonton (note 51, p. 434).
227 Ezidi Kurds whose religion is a blend of Islamic and older elements. The devil-worship tag rested partly on dualist (Zoroastrian/Manichaean) features, partly on presumption that they adopted Sunni Islam under the twelfth-century Sufi Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir al-Umawi, then reneged.
228 Undeflected from so promising a subject, Pushkin searched out a fuller account (Note on the Yezidi Sect). Yezidism fronts for the real dynamic at these dinners, where comparison between this devil's and the Decembrists’ plight may have sparked memorable humour. The closing quip is, probably, that the politically marginalised must profess correctness but can be presumed to keep up the faith in secret. The ghoulish (urodlivy) interlocutor was Hasan Aga, his red cloak a gift from Prince Chavchavadze (note 40) at the capture of Toprakkale (Eleşkirt) in 1828. His Hasanli tribe, from the Doğubeyazit area, were resettled in Russian Armenia. See Guest, John S. The Yezidis (London/New York, 1987) p. 62Google Scholar.
229 Baron B. A. Friederichs (1797-1874), Major-General since May 1829.
230 A critical preliminary to the Battles of Kayınlı and Millidüz highlighted, by slip of the pen, in the Preface (note 50). Hakki Pasha deployed Osman to occupy the high ground around Bardiz, blocking the Zivin road and covering the serasker's advance. The Karabakhs, reinforced by Friederichs, dislodged him. See Fonton (note 51, pp. 432-434).
231 “Hunker-su” (note 343), just short of Bardiz and descent to Zivin.
232 Army-German flang (flank) rather than Russian krylo (wing) or storona (side). Light-hearted defiance (note 215): Pushkin had already ensured he was kept out of the fighting (note 223), fiercest on Burtsov's front (note 235; Appendix 8).
233 Major-General N. N. Muravyov (1794-1866), elder brother of A. N. (note 37). See Appendix 8. He had reconnoitred Khiva for Yermolov, publishing A Journey to Turkmenia and Khiva in 1819 and 1820 [in Russian] (Moscow, 1822) as well as parodying Pushkin—A Captive in Kirghizia (Moscow, 1828). Retiring in 1837, he was badly needed in the Crimean War, appointed Viceroy and achieved Russia's only notable success, the recapture of Kars (1855). Nicholas had died by then. The handle “M of Kars” (Muravyov-Karski), much canvassed in the Press, was conferred by Alexander II. Muravyoy “gave the order to fire” is deadpan summary of a battlefield difference with Paskevich (Appendix 8).
234 Irregular cavalry (Turkish delibaş, “madcap”) a.k.a. Bashi-Bazouk (başɩbozuk, “deranged”). The first of the 30,000 men the serasker was bringing up from Erzurum.
235 Burtsov just succeeded in holding Hakki at bay, with timely reinforcement from Major-Generals Pankratyev and Sergeyev (Paskevich's report, note 224), while the main force engaged the serasker. See also Pushchin's account (Appendix 8).
236 Colonel Count I. O.Simonich (d. 1850), Dalmatian commander of the Georgian Grenadier Regiment, later Russian ambassador to Persia (Appendix 7). Paskevich (note 224) and Pushkin have Rayevski leading the charge. Fonton (note 51, p. 447) and others feature Simonich.
237 The serasker had dug in for the night, counting on the Russians to do likewise. Paskevich, however, learnt from one of the prisoners, Mamiş Ağa, a Circassian by name and former chief of janissaries at Erzurum, “that the seraskier was present in person on that high ground, had arrived the previous evening with his vanguard, 12 to 15 thousand of whom had mustered during the course of the day and were encamped near Zevinn, where the rest of his troops were expected at any moment. In the light of this information I decided in the field to press the advantage I had gained and attack the seraskier without a moment's delay, to prevent him joining forces with Hagki-Pasha.” Paskevich times the renewed attack at six o'clock with pursuit broken off at nine (report, note 224); Fonton (note 51, p. 449). Pushchin tells it differently: the serasker had already fled and Paskevich should have pursued at once rather than break for dinner (Appendix 8).
238 Jocular. Rayevski led the first cavalry charge (note 236) and commanded the centre in the renewed attack but from the rear. Pushchin explains that Rayevski was limiting his exposure in the front line “because of his senior position” (Appendix 8). Pushkin was clearly with Rayevski after dinner and may have been sent with the note to Paskevich. A. S. Gangeblov (note 191, p. 187) describes similar messenger-duty earlier in the day: “Pushkin …did not leave his [Rayevski's] side even during the battles with the enemy. So it was during the great Saganlu engagement [Kayınlı]. We pioneers stayed behind to cover the staff and occupied the high ground where Paskevich, on horseback, was following the course of the fighting. When the main body of Turks had been thrown back and Rayevski and the cavalry started chasing them, we caught sight of a horseman galloping towards us at full tilt: it was Pushkin wearing a short jacket and a small top-hat on his head. Reining in his horse two or three paces from Paskevich, he doffed his hat, delivered Rayevki's message and, reply received, dashed off back to him, Rayevski.”
239 Serving with the Don Cossacks. His artillery played a key part in the renewed attack (Paskevich, note 224).
240 Zivin [Süngütaşı] (Route from Tiflis to Arzrum).
241 Neapolitan Baroque painter (1615-73), poet and supporter of Masaniello's 1647 revolt against Spain. Noted for powerful, “pre-romantic” landscapes and back in vogue as a Romantic icon, Rosa sets a glowering tone that lingers overnight. Comic reference to S. E. Raich's (1792-1855) Salvator Rosa (Nadezhdin's Telescope 1831 No. 15 p. 51), breathing his vatic “sacred fire” over contemptuous patrons—plus himself, poem and Zivin—is probably intended. Inspirational tutor to Lermontov and Tyutchev, Raich's own verse (including translations of Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso) was less touched by genius. “Weariness and the morning heat…on the fresh grass [Ustalost’ i utrenni zhar…na svezhuyu travu]”, as the Battle of Millidüz gets underway next morning (Chapter 4), may reprise D. P. Oznobishin's (1804-77) Salvator Rosa (1833), restoring pastoral calm shattered by its memorably infelicitous last line: “…Weary [ustaly], the beloved of the gods rested./But more often amid the fruitless slopes of Solfarata [volcano near Naples], He sought refuge under a withered laurel,/And at midday, tired by the sun's heat [ot solnechnovo zhara],/Na lavu khladnuyu glavu svoyu sklonyal [On lava cold his head (or On the lava his cold head!) did lay]”.
242 “General Paskevich had barely left Zevinn castle to rejoin his infantry at Karaurgan (Route from Tiflis to Arzrum) when the main building went up with a tremendous report. Some fleeing Turks had caused the explosion by firing powder stores located there, but the incident claimed only a few victims” (Fonton, note 51, p. 453). “General Paskiewitch himself had a very narrow escape, the enemy having fired a train leading to the magazine in Zavinn, which blew up a few minutes after he had quitted it” (Monteith, note 31, pp. 257-258). The meteor portends ill-omen, not it turns out for Paskevich but Pushkin's friends (Appendix 8).
243 Hakki's first appearance in the narrative (note 215).
244 In French. Deadpan Paskevich self-parody, for the amusement of his “enemy-chasing” critics (Introduction, Appendix 8).
245 Pushkin takes the second battle (Millidüz) largely as read. Paskevich learnt from a deserter that Hakki's force were unaware of the serasker's defeat and sent in a prisoner with the news. Simultaneous surrender negotiations and fighting culminated in Pankratyev successfully storming the Turkish camp and Colonel Verzilin capturing Hakki. See Paskevich (note 224); Fonton (note 51, pp. 454-459).
246 R. R. von Anrep (d. 1830), commanding the Combined Uhlan Regiment. He had been a Guards officer at Tsarskoye Selo while Pushkin was at school.
247 “He was a man, with breasts like a woman. He had undeveloped t[esticles] and a small p[enis] like a boy's. We asked if he had been gelded. ‘God,’ he replied, ‘castrated me’” (Latin). The hermaphrodite rags travelogue's fondness for the bizarre, at the limit of perceived decency like Ganymede's subliminal discharge over Darial (note 122). More importantly, he embodies and graphically explains the Journey's sphinx-like quality (see Introduction): “Cut [censored]?”—“No, divinely emasculated”, meaning victim of Higher Power (vis maior, force majeure, Act of God) like Griboyedov (note 194) but also conduit of high inspiration like an oracular shaman (note 248) or the lone wanderer's horse (notes 215, 232). “Pseudo” (mnimy), not strictly accurate, may hint that the author's voice will return. Latin remained medical and polite convention for anatomical detail. Pushkin had polished his reading the poets.
248 From Potocki (note 126, p. 211). He identifies feminised Nogai Tartars with Hippocrates’ Scythian anarieis (probably Indo-Iranian a [not] + nar [man]) and androgynous Scythian shamans (enarees) mentioned in Herodotus (Histories 1.105, 4.67). Hippocrates is discussing Scythian infertility and the feminine lifestyle of eunoukhiai (“eunuch-like men”). The hermaphrodite's reply draws on his analysis of causes: “The natives place responsibility on God… I too regard these conditions as divine…but…none is without its natural cause…” Hippocrates points the finger at excessive horseriding” (On Airs, Waters and Places 22).
249 From Potocki's companion volume Histoire primitive des peuples qui ont habité anciennement ces contrées (Paris, 1829), p. 226: “This affliction is not unknown in Turkey where the name khoss is given to all beardless people and they pass for men of bad character.” Potocki calls his effeminate Nogais kos (inadvertently bringing the Persian house down: kos = vagina). He means Turkish köse (Persian kuseh) “beardless” (catamite, trickster, clown), not hünsa (Arabic khunsa) “hermaphrodite” or Persian hīz (Hindi/Urdu hijṛa) “transvestite”.
250 Çoban Dede Köprüsü (Old Shepherd's Bridge) at Köprüköy (Keprikyov: Route from Tiflis to Arzrum). The camp in the valley was at Ardos (Değirmenler) where Paskevich despatched his victory report to the Tsar (note 224).
251 “Fort Hassan”, Pasinler.
252 6.4 metres or about 20 feet.
253 Kislovodsk mineral water. In popular etymology nart-sane, drink of the Narts, heroes of epic tale preserved among various peoples of the Caucasus.
254 Paskevich sent Mamiş Ağa (note 237) to Erzurum with the proclamation and had just heard back that leading townspeople favoured surrender (Lesur, note 224, p. 90; Fonton, note 51, p. 469). Darkening mood reflects political crackdown (Appendix 8), while Paskevich “debating” (rassuzhdat’: note 32) under fire with Muravyov is the campaign in cameo.
255 Europeans (frenk, farangi).
256 Cannon Hill.
257 M. V. Yuzefovich (1802-89), Rayevski's adjutant, who shared a tent with Pushkin's brother Lev.
258 “The tops of all the houses in Erzeroom are flat and overgrown with thin grass.” Charles Stuart, Journal of a Residence in Northern Persia…(London, 1854) p. 103.
259 In French.
260 Albanians.
261 “The commander-in-chief was there with his staff, mounted on a grey Trukhmen [Stavropol Turkmen]; there were a few officers on foot, Pushkin was standing alone in the open in front of the commander-in-chief. Suddenly, there was a first shot from the 21st brigade battery. Pushkin cried out, ‘Splendid!’ The commander-in-chief asked, ‘Where did it go?’ Pushkin turned towards him: ‘Straight into the town!’—‘Lousy, not splendid,’ said Iv[an] Fyod[oro]vich.” E. V. Brümmer, Service of an Artillery Officer [in Russian] Kavkazski Sbornik Vol. 16 (1895) p. 83. With surrender negotiations dragging on, Paskevich stepped up the pressure by occupying Top Dağ and the peace party then emerged with the keys to the citadel. See Lesur (note 224, p. 91), Fonton (note 51, pp. 474-475). His concern will have been not to imperil the surrender with stray sighting shots. Pushkin, still raring for action and defiantly rooting for beleaguered heroicism (Appendix 8), hits back (“The Count tarried a while”) with critique of Paskevich's caution.
262 Paskevich, born in Poltava, showcased the anniversary in his report (AKAK 7.794; Lesur p. 89). Pushkin echoes, implicitly reproaching Nadezhdin with damning his Poltava (note 291) and demanding victory verse (Appendix 1).
263 The (poet-) dervish with the unwanted salutations teases critics calling for panegyric (note 47, Appendix 1). The gloss is playful. “Skin” (ox-hide) explained burdyuk (wineskin) in Chapter 1. French outre (leather-bottle) flags liquid content and anarchic fun (outre, outré: something “else”). Three subordinate (two-tail) pashas were declared prisoner (Appendix 8) and sent to Tbilisi with the Seraskier. They were Osman, Ahmet Abdullah and Abisha [Biblical Avishai/Abishai] Abdullah (Fonton, note 51, p. 472; Monteith, note 31, p. 278). The scrawny pasha will have been one of the last two.
264 There was no fixed Roman alphabet spelling until 1928. Ibn Battuta calls the town arz al-rum (“land of Rome”, a name-label or “Byzantium begins here”: broadly true till 1071). Many prefer Arzen al Rum, the “Byzantine Arzen” (capital of ancient Arzanene and later Muslim principalities, destroyed by the Seljuks in the eleventh century).
265 Backwater and antithesis of Jerusalem (note 37) suit Pushkin's book. The terrain had been regularly fought over since antiquity. Recapture by Grand Duke Nicholas and General Yudenich was romantically marked. In John Buchan's Greenmantle (1916) Flecker's Golden Road (1913) re-routes to Erzurum, conducting a new band of free spirits to a triumphant journey's end. Their Mikhail Pushchin (Appendix 8), modelled on Aubrey Herbert, sabotages German relaunch of Ottoman jihad, infiltrating himself as Islamic champion and leading a charge at the town walls Pushkin (note 261) might have approved. His “green ephod of the prophet” or “Kaaba-i-hurriyeh” (cassock [qaba] of freedom) was probably inspired by the hirkai şerif (“Noble Mantle”), a revered relic preserved at Topkapı.
266 Studied vagueness. The Persian ambassador, en route to England, orders a thieving footman's ears cut off. His retinue return the man to Persia, defiantly sending kid's ears to the Pasha of “Arz Roum”, who was demanding jurisdiction, to make believe the punishment had been carried out. J. J. Morier, Hajji Baba in England (1828) Chapter 7. Pushkin taught himself English and read it fluently but incomprehensibly—Yuzefovich (note 119, p. 114) like Akhmatova reciting Byron: “although she read English fairly freely, her pronunciation of it made it impossible to understand more than a word or two”. Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind…(Washington, 2004) p. 71.
267 The French botanist J. P. de Tournefort (1656-1708) Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717) Lettre VII.
268 De Bouillon who captured Jerusalem in 1099. The First Crusade travelled overland, through Anatolia.
269 Pushkin's journey had already climaxed, explicit in the narrative from Ak-Dağ onwards. Erzurum has large medreses (seminaries) and smaller mosques, one of which (Lala Mustafa Pasha Camii) is the work of Sinan, the Ottoman master-architect (Süleymaniye, Istanbul; Selimiye, Edirne) whose school contributed to the Taj Mahal. The Three Tombs (Üc Kümbetler, in a cemetery just south of the old town) combine Georgian, Armenian and Seljuk styles. Pushkin is fairer to the two smaller than the largest, Emir Sultan's (Saltuk), founder of the Saltukid Seljuk dynasty, twelfth-century rulers of the area. The clock-tower, in the fort, still stands.
270 Sultan Mahmud's abolition of the janissaries and introduction of new nizam troops in European uniform. In decentralised eastern Turkey, Galip Pasha (note 49) “had brought such a spirit of conciliatory moderation to accomplishing his master's wishes that he had headed off any bloodshed”. Fonton (note 51, p. 236).
271 The first 29 lines, lightly reworked, of a 45 line Pushkin poem (17 October 1830) about bloody suppression of the janissaries at Istanbul in 1826. Its ending recycled three lines from a 1827 Pushkin poem (“What a night! A bitter frost…”) about Moscow executions under Ivan IV's oprichina (secret police). The 1830 poem closed with janissary slaughter across Turkey and a wrathful Sultan (“Allah is great!”). Tongue-in-cheek rivalry between tradition and modernity (Kazan rivalling Moscow = Tartar cat may look at True-Orthodox king) yields a “satiric” booby prize for Fontanier (note 30) while hinting at army reform as a factor in Turkish defeat (notes 237, 254) and at Russian disputes over the home-grown versus the imported. Tsar Nicholas’ opponents scorned Teutonic style at Court as an import too far (Introduction).
272 V. D. Sukhorukhov (1786-1860). Don Cossack Sotnik (Lieutenant) and historian, cited in Pushkin's History of Pugachov (1833). Another target of the War Minister Count Chernyshev, under surveillance as a suspected Decembrist. Pushkin tried, unsuccessfully, to have his confiscated research papers returned.
273 See notes 54 and 207. “George Fowler” was received here on Sunday 21 July/2 August, two days after Pushkin's departure: “We were conducted to the large saloon, or hall of audience, which was filled with officers glittering in their stars and orders. The scene was more like a prince's levee than that of a general-in-chief.” Three Years in Persia…(London, 1841) Vol. 2, p. 311. Fowler, who published extensively about Turkish and Russian history and the Crimean War, leaves few biographical clues. Three Years reads as the work of an Anglo-Persian insider, well-informed and well-supplied with documents, a George Willock fan (“so ably set forth in Blackwood's Magazine”, Vol. 1, p.202) and concerned like Willock (note 469) to free Fath Ali of blame for Griboyedov's murder. He even flaunts a variant identity embellished into a Farsi tughra (monogram) sealing his preface. To a modern eye this reads “George Andrews” but he will have meant “George the Explorer” (Richardson's 1806 Persian, Arabic and English Dictionary, s.v. andaruz: “examiner, explorer, spy”). We are left with a Victorian charade in which two comedy Georges—Sportsman and Explorer—invite us to guess a third, the answer quite likely “guillemot” (Willock).
274 Mush (Muş), west of Lake Van, was ruled by a Kurdish dynasty. This was Ibrahim Bey, the young Emin Pasha's uncle (Fonton, note 51, pp. 488, 532). Paskevich occupied Mush after Hart (note 284), deposing Emin and installing Ibrahim (AKAK 7. 814). Pushkin's MS (prosit’ u nevo mesta svoyevo plemyannika) was misprinted in The Contemporary (mesta dlya svoyevo plemyannika: “to solicit a post for his nephew”).
275 Brother.
276 Selim Pasha of Mush, executed in 1827/8. He fought invading Persians in 1821. See Baddeley (note 69, p. 142). But he may have helped them the following year: “Selim Pasha, a Kurdish rebel” as noted in The Annual Register or a View of the History, Politics and Literature of the Year 1822 (London, 1823) p. 279. In 1827 Galip Pasha (note 49) led an expedition to Mush while Persia was fighting Russia and brought Selim back to Erzurum, where in June Dr F.-E. Schulz (a cuneiform studies pioneer murdered by Kurds near Baskale in 1829) reported that he was being treated “with much distinction”, no doubt pending a ferman from Istanbul (Journal Asiatique 1828, pp. 137-138). Selim's son Emin fought the Russians for Galip in 1828 (Fonton, note 51, pp. 341, 368, 370-371; Journal Asiatique 1829, p. 380) then reverted to classic frontier diplomacy, pledging neutrality to Russia but probably supporting an attack on Doğubeyazit in June 1829. James Brant (note 52) now British Consul at Erzurum visited Emin, long since restored, in 1838 and learnt that Selim was executed “about 30 years ago” when Emin was “a youth of about 15 years of age”. Brant, Notes of a Journey through a part of Kurdistan, in the Summer of 1838, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 10 (1840) pp. 348-351. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (s.v. Mush) follows Carl Ritter, Erdkunde… X (Berlin, 1843) p. 678, in dating Emin's accession accordingly. But Kurdish estimates, as Brant remarks (p. 353), were stylised. 30 years meant long ago like similar expressions in a number of languages.
277 Beybulat Taymazoğlu (Taimazov/Taimiyev, 1778/9-1831), Chechen hero and leader of a major revolt (1824-6) put down by Yermolov. Rebuffed by Persia and Turkey, he then led accommodation with Russia and was murdered in the early stages of Ghazi Muhammad's (“Kazi Mullah”) new jihad. Muhammad (d. 1832) and Shamil who led resistance from 1834 to 1859 were Imams within the khalidiyya, a Naqshbandi Sufi revival that swept the Sunni world. Adherents included Sultan Mahmud II's Circassian first wife and their son Sultan Abdul Mejid (1823-61). The Kurdish founder, Sheikh Khalid Zia al-Din Baghdadi (1779-1827), had studied in India with, and obtained ijaza (certification) from, Shah Ghulam Ali (a.k.a. Sheikh Abdullah) of Delhi (1743-1825), returning to Baghdad and settling later in Damascus. The khalidiyya promoted stricter shari'a observance among the mountain people and emphasised bonding (rabita) between the initiate (murid) and his instructor (murshid). Sheikh Khalid's immediate successors, all Daghestanis, were less well known to the wider world than Muhammad or Shamil. The fifth Sheikh, Jamaluddin al-Ghumuqi al-Husayni (d. 1869), led his followers south into the Ottoman Empire after Shamil's defeat. Beybulat was a professional soldier, operating with Khalidi support.
278 Mikhail Pushchin escorted the pashas (Appendix 8). In 1836 the geologist William Hamilton met Salih Pasha at Kirmasli [Kirmasti, now Mustafakemalpaşa] where he was “Agha” and had been “banished…as a punishment for his misfortune”. See Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia (London, 1842) Vol. 1. He blamed defeat on the “defection of his troops”. Hamilton (p. 189) styles him “Caber Valesi—misprint for “Caban [Keban] Valesi” (ibid. p. 229), director of mines—Salik Pacha seraskier of Erzeroum”, reporting deadpan (p. 82) a likely joke that he was “Kirketli [?korkulu: scary] Jacoub Pacha”—possibly the confidant of Murad II and Mehmed II, Hekim Yakup Pasha (formerly Giacomo da Gaeta, an Italian Jew) who disappeared in the succession struggle between Beyazid II and Jem, accused of poisoning Mehmed.
279 More Paskevich send-up: disciplinarianism delivers on a forgotten promise. Captain Ignacy Jakimowicz Abramowicz (1793-1867), ex-grande armée Pole, Paskevich's orderly and the “viper in [the] bosom” who helped turn him against Sacken, Rayevski and Pushchin (Appendix 8), is now immortalised in “oriental novel”, an apt curtain-raiser on later roles as Warsaw police chief (1844-51, 1861-2) and chairman of the directorate of the Warsaw Theatre (1842-62). In 1843 he deported the unscrupulously self-promoting Lola Montes, who retaliated by claiming to have spurned Paskevich, the Viceroy, and blackening him. Tsar Nicholas had fun teasing his “father-commander” and the tale was revived in Max Ophuls’ 1955 film Lola Montes. Tomashevski (10 volume collected works, 1977-9 edition, Vol. 6, note to p. 473) was misled by an officer-list into ruling out the identification, first made by E. G. Weidenbaum and substantiated by Pushchin (Appendix 8). The interpreter may have been Captain Vereshchagin, captured and castrated in 1804. He served at the court of Hossein Ali Mirza Farmanfarma, Governor of Shiraz, who was still resisting efforts to release him in 1826 when war broke out.
280 The 16 volume collected works continues “Mr. A<bramovich>”. The 10 volume prints “Mr A.” throughout (see note 279). “Mr A.” is retained here, to avoid diluting his veil's part in the original fun.
281 Not a quote from the Qur'an but sexual innuendo (“unite and part”) and a call for Christian and political (“imprison and release”) absolution. The words (svyazyvat’ i razvyazyvat’) were ordinary parlance for the Church's power to “bind and loose” sin, traditionally derived from Matthew 16.19 and 18.18 (svyazat’ and razreshit’ in the Slavonic and Russian texts). Renewed familiarity with Hebrew and Aramaic demonstrated that the Matthew formula really means “forbid and permit” (Greek deo [bind] = ‘asar [bind/prohibit] and luo [release] = hitir [untie/allow]). The Church now rests remission of sin on the clearer authority of John 20.23.
282 Count P. P. Konovnitsyn (1802-30), a Decembrist reduced to the ranks in 1826. Now an Ensign in the Kazan Sappers.
283 Cholera, also jargon for political crackdown (“Sacken, whose tent stood like a plague-spot”: Appendix 8). The beggar recalls Pangloss (“The next day, as he went walking, he met a beggar, all covered in scabs, with rotted eyes…The apparition stared at him, shed some tears and fell on his neck. Candide recoiled in horror.” Voltaire, Candide Chapters 3-4). Pangloss's syphilis was an Old World price (necessary in this “best of worlds”) for the bounty of the New (“we would have no chocolate, no cochineal.”) His rapid cure (“he only lost an eye and an ear”) held out mixed hope for other suffering utopians. The plague scenes may double as send-up of the new conformism (“abandoned by all Paskevich's minions”: Appendix 8).
284 Paskevich had sent Burtsov to occupy Bayburt on the road to Trabzon. The Vali of Trabzon, another Osman Pasha, now Şark Seraskeri in succession to Salih Pasha, stirred up the Laz (a local Georgian people) and Burtsov was killed attempting to clear the further fort of Hart (Aydıntepe).
285 Pushkin's MS text, printed in modern editions. In The Contemporary “grievous” was omitted and “fatal” toned down to “grievous”. Paskevich and Pushkin were at one about criticality. He took the field immediately—hence his invitation—making short work of Hart and the Laz. A ceasefire in European Turkey brought hostilities to a close soon after.
286 Declining Paskevich's offer (as Pushchin earlier declined Burtsov's: Appendix 8) tells against Yuri Druzhnikov's thesis (note 16, Chapter 33) that Pushkin's overriding purpose was escape abroad. Pushkin voices the impulse, drily, at the Turkish frontier (Chapter 2), using black bread (Chapters 1 and 2) to map a companion theme, travel-induced homesickness. See also Traveller's Complaints (Appendix 2).
287 Inscribed “Arzrum, 18 July 1828”, now on display at the Pushkin Museum and Memorial Apartment, St Petersburg. Paskevich had a taste for trophies. A sumptuous pavilion captured during the Persian campaign was re-erected and stood for many years on his estate at Homel, the modern town's central park.
288 A. A. Bestuzhev (1797-1837; see Introduction), en route from Siberian exile to take up post as a private in the 14th Chasseurs, just missed Pushkin near Kvesheti. Pushkin to Sankovski, 3 January 1833: “If you see A. Bestuzhev sometime, do give him my regards. We met on Gut-gora without recognising one another…” Bestuzhev to Polevoy, 9 March 1833: “Do say there's no such thing as fate! I was galloping madly through the cliffs of the Caucasus and met his [Pushkin's] carriage: they told me he was at Boris Chilyayev's home, Boris is my old schoolmate; I charged off, arrived there—where was he?.. He had just left and, as luck would have it, they had given him a guide to the new detour road, so he did not meet me! I was tearing my hair in frustration—how many things I would have unburdened to him, how much I would have learnt from him, and fate kept us apart for so long, perhaps endless years. Tell him from me: you are Russia's hope—don't betray her, don't betray your generation; don't drown your talent in a puddle; don't sleep on your laurels: laurels bare their thorns for genius—inspirational, spurring thorns; laurels are poppy-soft only for mediocrities.” Russki Vestnik Vol. 32 (1861) p. 436). Bestuzhev is ribbing Pushkin about an old dispute. He had postulated that a new literature requires genius before medocrity (A glance at Russian literature… [in Russian], Polar Star, 1825). Pushkin dismissed this, patiently demonstrating that patterns vary (letter to Bestuzhev, late May/early June 1825).
289 This inspired the poem Monastery at Kazbek (1829, Appendix 2).
290 R. I. Dorokhov (1801-52), a desperado reduced to the ranks, now an Ensign in the carabineers. Pushchin (note 449, pp. 99-100), outraged at Dorokhov's treatment of his batman on the journey, was only persuaded with difficulty by Pushkin to travel on to the spas with them. Pushkin lost 10,000 roubles (an advance from Rayevski) at Pyatigorsk to a Guards officer named Astafev, while playing Bank with him and Dorokhov.
291 Parting shot at one critic. N. I. Nadezhdin's (1804-56) article in Vestnik Yevropy (1829 No. 8, pp 287-302) dismissed the poem Poltava as an outmoded product of the “aristocratic” school disdaining the new concern with social issues (serfdom). The review took the form of a dialogue, with Nadezhdin cast as “classical scholar”. Pushkin turns this into “sexton”, a combined dig at style and origins: Nadezhdin's father had been a village schoolmaster.
292 And at another. Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 3, 11 January 1830, printed a previously unpublished Fonvizin manuscript, A Conversation at Princess Khaldina's. Bulgarin, sniping at early Gazeta issues, misconstrued reference in it to (planned) new universities and questioned authenticity (Northern Bee No. 10, 25 January1830). He was dismissed by Pushkin (LG No. 7, 31 January 1830) and drew a letter from Fonvizin's editor, Ivan Salayev (LG No. 10, 15 February 1830). Zdravomysl (“Head-screwed-on”), narrator and advocate of sensible reform in Fonvizin's skit, takes a bow to remind us of Bulgarin's discomfiture and that there are enduring standards. In Pushkin's spoof Zdravomysl replaces “Anonymous”, retired proof-reader and member of Nadezhdin's stock-cast of dialogue-review characters. The communion-bread woman (“Romantic” Flyugerovski in the review) may flag the saving (note 280), cathartic quality of this last laugh which like Denis Davydov's “native star” (Appendix 8) would characterise the Journey.
293 Disingenuous. Pushkin had not avoided Sankovski (note 160) or the publicity (Appendix 1) which alerted the Tsar to his travels (Introduction).
294 Bulgarin (Appendix 1). “Aristarch” meant a malignant critic. Aristarchus of Samos’ Alexandrian edition of Homer was greeted with outrage in the second century bc, like Textual Criticism of the Bible in the nineteenth century.
295 Fontanier (note 30, pp. 244-245) compresses a two-year campaign into one, selecting and reordering events. Kars was captured before Akhaltsik.
296 Fontanier.
297 Goryachovodsk/Pyatigorsk (note 81).
298 The Third Department were party to plans for the army visit condemned by the Tsar (Introduction, note 178). Onward travel to Tbilisi at own initiative may be designed to limit their exposure. Pushkin struggled over whether to lead with friends (first draft) or brother (second) and sensibly dropped these preliminaries.
299 Northern Bee (Appendix 1).
300 Medieval, old-fashioned.
301 Russian State Library, Moscow (LB = Lenin Library), 16 volume Academy of Sciences Collected Works vol. 8 pp. 1027-1043. Pushkin reworked Travel Notes (see Introduction), tightening and polishing characteristically, for incorporation into Chapter 1. Content liable to draw political objections, or embarrass friends or himself, was omitted. Related manuscript material (vol. 8 pp. 1043-1046) includes two fragments relevant to Chapter 5, two Chapter 1 variants and outline plans for the travelogue. Ian M. Helfant, Sculpting a Persona: The Path from Pushkin's Caucasian Journal to Puteshestvie v Arzrum, Russian Review Vol. 56 (1997) pp. 366-382, traces progressive depersonalisation. Spontaneity—e.g. Pushkin's jibe (below) at armchair missionaries—becomes calm display of eloquence never quite overwhelmed by attendant anarchy. Caucasus Corps “debate” (Appendix 8), refashioned as narrative art-form, delivers for publication.
302 Nautical term (manyovry = French manoeuvres): the drivers are negotiating the mud between Oryol and Yelets.
303 Morskikh evolyutsiy. Evolutions is Cooper: “The Rover himself had disappeared; but it was not long before he was again seen at his elevated look-out accoutred for the conflict that appeared to approach, employed, as ever, in studying the properties, the force, and the evolutions of his advancing antagonist” or “But the vessel of the Rover was in view, in all the palpable and beautiful proportions of her admirable construction. Instead of lying in a state of rest, as when he left her, her head-yards had been swung, and, as the sails filled with the breeze, the stately fabric had begun to move gracefully, though with no great velocity along the water. There was not the slightest appearance however, of any attempt at escape in the evolution.” J. Fenimore Cooper, The Red Rover (1827), Chapters 26, 29. Pushkin is parodying this or, less likely, The Pilot (1823). Annette Olenina (1808-88), a 1828 marital prospect, adopted Red Rover as a topical nickname for Pushkin. Flattered by the attention (“the most interesting man of his time”) but discouraged by a politically correct father, she left a spiky sketch of graceless appearance and manners, irresistible to biographers: A. A. Olenina, Pushkin in the Recollections of Contemporaries [in Russian] (SPb, 1998) Vol. 2 p. 76.
304 Mestechko (Polish miasteczko, Yiddish shtetl): small town or market village, familiar to the Russian army from postings in Poland and the ex-Polish western provinces.
305 Russian Otradnaya (“delightful”) alluding to Iliad 3.246-7 (oinon euphrona: “merry wine”) in Kostrov's translation (vino, otradu nashu: “wine, our delight”, note 118).
306 Innovative (sila rastitel'nosti) but comprehensible language: Pushkin dropped the French gloss ([puissance de] végétation) from the Journey.
307 “Different peoples boil different kashas [gruel]” meaning “To each his own”. Adapted from the closing lines (“Different peoples/Boil a different kasha”) of N. A. L'vov's (1751-1803) poem Dobrynya, a heroic song (1796).
308 Legendary Kabardian warrior.
309 “Snake” and “Bald”. The fifth was Zheleznaya (“Iron”).
310 The Pyatigorsk development architects, the brothers Giuseppe and Giovanni Bernardacci from Lugano, brought to the Caucasus by Yermolov in 1822. Pushkin first wrote: “I spoke candidly [iskrenno] to Zhe… and Zhi…”, meaning he told them they were ruining the place. They were certainly in Pyatigorsk later in the summer, designing a dome to commemorate Khosrow Mirza's visit (7-14 June), approved by him in December, inscribed with the prince's chosen quote from the Shahnama and still standing on Mashuk.
311 Musin-Pushkin had married Emilia Karlovna Stjernvall-Walleen in 1828. A variant toys with which was the lucky one, she (schastlivaya) or he (schastlivets: “lucky fellow”). Pushkin responds (Onegin 4.22 adapted) with the trials of marriage to a reading-public.
312 Probably “at the commandant's”(u kom<endanta>).
313 So, oddly, the 16 volume collected works, at variance with “Sh<eremetev>” (note 120) in its Journey text.
314 Major Kananov's (note 142) replaced crosses put up by Count Pavel Sergeyevich Potyomkin in the late eighteenth century and Mikhail Kazbegi's (note 130) father in 1809, continuing an old tradition on Krestovaya (Georgian Jvari: cross). Lermontov remarks in A Hero of Our Time on the oddity and persistence of association with Peter the Great. Peter, who came no nearer than Daghestan, was dropped from the Journey.
315 Transposed north of Lars in the Journey.
316 Strayed or whored, expurgated in the 16 volume collected works. The 10 volume collected works prints “b–la” in both places, indicating that Pushkin wrote bludila (possibly frequentative bludnichala in the longer blank).
317 Bastard (vyblyadok, partly transcribed in the 10 volume collected works: “vyb–ka” and “vyb-kom”).
318 “Arzrum…Sword” all relate to the downbeat closing stage of the visit (notes 279, 283, Appendix 8). “18 July” (slip or misprint for 18 June) might represent Paskevich discussing battlefield behaviour with Pushkin ahead of Kayınlı (note 223), seen as turning-point and first earnest of political crackdown. The Journey rations the day to a single sentence.
319 This line began as “Road to Kars”. “Gumry. Gergery” were a first insertion, “Ararat. Frontier” a second. The theme is frontier. Gumry, last strongpoint on the road to Kars, hosts the “Ararat” vision. Gergery (Gərgər) in Azerbaijan was Griboyedov's coffin's last stop inside Persia on 30 April (AKAK 7.686), another Gergery (Gargar, today in Armenia) just north of Bezobdal (“Pushkin Pass”), where Pushkin locates his encounter, its point of re-entry to Georgia. “Ararat, Frontier” subdivides “Gumry” between Ararat vision and Arpachai crossing. Meeting Griboyedov was not an afterthought but planned.
320 “Skirmish” is 14 June (note 223). “Reconnaissance” may refer to post-skirmish view of Hakki's camp (Chapter 3) or Pushchin (Appendix 8) activity.
321 Notice sur la Secte des Yézidis from Pushkin's library copy of Description du Pachalik de Baghdad…Par M*** [J. B. L. J. Rousseau] (Paris, 1809). This was Silvestre de Sacy's translation of the Dominican missionary Padre Maurizio Garzoni's article Della Setta delli Jazidj, originally published in Sestini, Viaggi e opusculi diversi (Berlin, 1807). Pushkin extracted it, possibly for Decembrist resonances, but did not use it. Much of the content had appeared in Chapter 19 of Morier's Ayesha, Maid of Kars (1834), a romance in oriental masque played out between two English aristocrats hounded by a Yezidi villain during the 1826-8 Russo-Persian war. Morier, comprehensively if innocently, turns reality (Appendix 8) on its head: his Russian commander-in-chief (“a fine old man, of most prepossessing appearance, of mild and conciliatory manners…” Chapter 25) is won over by the sheer daring of the hero's swashbuckling exploits.
322 Shiites. Garzoni implicitly identifies “Sheikh Yazid” with the Ummayad Caliph Yazid who defeated and killed Husayn ibn Ali, Muhammad's grandson, at the battle of Karbala in 680 sealing the Sunni-Shia schism.
323 Scored out in manuscript, probably a concession to the Russian church.
324 Found in Pushkin's papers together with the note on Yezidis. Tomashevski (10 volume collected works) identifies the hand as Anton Delvig.
325 Telet.
326 Koda.
327 Shaumyani
328 “Samiski”. Smith and Dwight (S & D, note 166) p.196 say “no village was near”.
329 S of Lalvar, a.k.a. Ağzıbüyük (note 183). “At a distance from any village” (S&D p.195).
330 Jelal Oghlu (Stepanavan).
331 Gargar.
332 “A few Cossack cabins” (S&D p. 188)
333 Hamamli (Spitak).
334 Pernik (Mets Parni).
335 Gyumri (aka Alexandropol/Leninakan).
336 Camuşlu (“Jamishly”, S&D p. 175)
337 Halefoğlu.
338 By the Kars-su (Chapter 2), probably at Yukarı [Upper] Kotanlı just beyond Benliahmet.
339 Probably near Çiplakli.
340 Between Asboğa and Sarıkamiş: Fonton (note 51, p. 216).
341 On high ground, just north of Soğanlı dağı.
342 Micingirt (Inkaya).
343 Hünkâr-su, 10 versts on, 5 short of Bardiz/Gaziler where the road descends: Fonton (note 51, pp. 439-40).
344 Zek (Sırataşlar). Fonton (note 51, pp. 452-454) says the 19 June camp was on the “Isti-su” [Isisu] by Karaurgan covering the junction of the road from Inkaya.
345 Horasan.
346 Süngütaşi.
347 Değirmenler.
348 Köprüköy.
349 Hasankale (Pasinler).
350 Spectacularly maladroit. Sankovski means Horace's propemptikon (Odes 1.3) wishing Virgil well on what turned out to be his fatal last journey, to Greece in 19 bc
351 Yevgeni Velski, an anonymous parody (by Dr. M. Voskresenski)
352 Echoing Onegin 7.35.3-4 (“Like mindless verse…” printed as review heading). Bee publisher N. I. Grech, Memoirs of My Life [in Russian] (Moscow, 2002), Chapter 12, links Bulgarin's animus against Pushkin with Literaturnaya Gazeta hiring O. M. Somov, sacked by Bulgarin from the Bee. But Princess Khaldina (note 292) and Pushkin's play Boris Godunov were also factors. Bulgarin read Godunov for the Third Department, going on to take the Tsar's advice (Benckendorff to Pushkin, 14 December 1826) to turn it into a historical novel. His Dmitri the Pretender (1829) redrew Pushkin's embattled Tsar, brought down by Macbeth-like guilt over the death of the real Dmitri and loss of popular support, as a national hero fighting off Polish-Catholic conspiracies. This was Third Department Polish collaborator leading with chin. Delvig's review (LG No. 14, 7 March 1830) duly landed the invited blows, questioning Bulgarin's loyalty to Russia and detecting an unhealthy interest in spies and spying. Bulgarin's counter-attacks of 11 March (note 54) and 22 March (above) drew a Pushkin broadside (LG No. 20, 6 April: On the Memoirs of Vidocq) and a widely circulated epigram (On Bulgarin, Appendix 2) branding him a government spy. The Tsar, already stung by the Bee for welcoming Zagoskin's 1829 historical novel Yuri Miloslavski (“We advise him [Zagoskin] not to listen to those who will praise him to his face and assure him that he is a born writer of such things…” No. 9, 21 January 1830), took Pushkin's part. He instructed Benckendorff: “I forgot to tell you, my dear friend, that in today's [22 March] Bee there is again a most unjust and most vulgar article directed against Pushkin; there will apparently be a continuation of this article: I suggest you summon Bulgarin and forbid him in future to publish any criticism whatever of literary works and, if possible, forbid his paper [from publishing literary criticism].” Benckendorff deflected this, appealing slyly to the Tsar's anger about Pushkin's army visit. See T. J. Binyon, Pushkin (London, 2002) pp. 253-255, 314-317, quoting Third Department correspondence from M. K. Lemke Nicholas’ gendarmes and literature 1826-1855… [in Russian] (SPb, 1909). Bulgarin's complaints about victory verse were probably prompted by Paskevich (note 497) and Benckendorff.
353 Arranged in Journey order. Composition and publication dates are footnoted.
354 Fair copy dated “22 May Kap-koy [Vladikavkaz]”. First published in Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 38, 5 July 1830. See Chapter 1 and Travel Notes and, for the MS as posting-warrant at Kars, Chapter 2. On the poem as literary parody, see Appendix 3: Derzhavin's Ode to Felitsa.
355 Pushkin's text kibitka (note 86).
356 Tea-sandwiches.
357 Pushkin regarded Alfred de Vigny, billed as France's answer to Walter Scott, with contempt. Cinq-Mars (1826) was about a Louis XIII favourite executed in 1642 for plotting against Cardinal Richelieu.
358 You don't “lightly esteem” (slegka…tsenish’), in earlier draft “denigrate” (branish’).
359 “But where is he?” (Italian): husband-hunting young lady sends herself up. In earlier draft she sang “Ha c'est très bien or ma dov’è” or “Il mio caro, ma dov’è” (“Where is my beloved?”). Vado, ma dove? (“I go, but where?”), a popular da Ponte/Mozart aria written in 1789 for a revival of Il burbero di buon cuore, with opening words borrowed from Didone abbandonata (Metastasio/Sarro, Venice 1724; Metastasio/Galuppi, Petersburg 1766), regularly cited in commentaries, is at most a background reference. The tenor line Ma dov’è… from Rossini's La donna del Lago (1819), pointed out to Shapir (note 419) by I. A. Pil'shchikov, would cross-dress the young lady as subliminal Scottish highlander, a different joke.
360 The latest dance, recently introduced in Paris.
361 At the opera.
362 Note 134. These unfinished drafts were first published in Russkaya Starina 1884.
363 Farsi, literary language of much of the Turkic world, including the Mughal and Qajar dynasties, was revered among non-Iranians as a medium of high culture, like Greek at Rome. Respect for the major Persian authors, transmitted by munshis (Hindustani teachers), pervades European orientalising literature. Hafez-e-shirazi (fourteenth century) and Sheikh Saadi (twelfth century) also of Shiraz, masters of the ghazal (love-song), were the poets most admired and imitated by the Romantics. Pushkin was equivocal, praising Byron for setting his own stamp on oriental models and criticising Moore for slavishly reproducing Saadi's and Hafez's “childishness” (rebyachevstvo) and “ugliness” (urodlivost’) alongside their virtues (letters to Vyazemski of 2 January 1822 and March/April 1825). The famous “quote” from Saadi with which Pushkin's Fountain of Bakhshisarai (1822/3) opens (“Many like me have visited this fountain; but some are no more, others roam afar”) is actually conflation of a Russian line (Filimonov's “Some friends are no more, others are at a remove”) with text from Moore's Lalla Rookh (“…a fountain on which some hand had rudely traced those well-known words from the Garden [Bustan] of Sadi: ‘Many like me have viewed this fountain, but they are gone [mais ils sont loin in Pichot's French translation] and their eyes are closed forever!’” Nabokov, Onegin Vol. 3, pp. 245-250). Pushkin re-worked the Bakhshisarai “quote”, by then carrying in-built reference to Decembrists, for All's quiet—the Caucasus… (Appendix 4) and to close Onegin (10.51: “‘Some are no more, and others far off,’/As Sadi once said”). Pushchin's “I… never met them again on life's journey, some of them survived” (Appendix 8) is an instance of the formula in wider use. Pushkin explores the ghazal, as adopted and elaborated in Europe, and his own misgivings further in From Hafiz (below).
364 Probably 1829. First published in 1884 (Russkaya Starina). An unfinished experiment in mirroring, visually on the page and metrically, the narrowness of the Darial Gorge.
365 Probably 1829. First published in 1884 (Russkaya Starina).
366 MS dated 1829. First published in Anton Delvig's Northern Flowers for 1831 (SPb, 1830). A virtuoso composition, with four rhyming lines to each stanza (a a a a) and two half-lines (b b) exploring broken rhythms of the event. The fall is the 1827 avalanche (note 141).
367 The wind.
368 Unfinished draft probably 1829, also about the 1827 avalanche. First published in 1930 (Collected Works, Krasnaya Niva).
369 MS dated 1829. Reworked in 1830 and published in Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 1, 1 January 1831. An overview of the Darial gorge, the descent into Georgia and the 1827 avalanche. Pushkin's line, imperfectly reproduced, is iamb-anapaest-iamb-anapaest with an a b b a c c rhyming scheme, intensifying to a a a a b b in the final stanza.
370 Otrada: the alcoholic “good cheer” enjoyed by Homer's heroes and Musin-Pushkin's passengers (notes 118, 305).
371 First published in Northern Flowers for 1831 (SPb, 1830). Pushkin has a regular sequence of alternating six and four foot iambic lines. His last line runs: “It cannot not love” (chto ne lyubit’ ono ne mozhet). The poem began, north of the mountains, as a reaffirmation of Decembrist loyalties, personified probably by Maria Volkonskaya, née Rayevskaya. It ended as a tribute in the blooming Aragva valley (Chapter 1) to Natalya Goncharova. The process of composition marks stages in Pushkin's 1829 rite of passage. See Appendix 4 All's quiet—the Caucasus…
372 First published in Annenkov's Works of Pushkin (1855). An evening tattoo reminds Pushkin of schooldays at the Tsarskoye Selo Lycée, punctuated by sounds from the nearby garrison. Dante-reading would, strictly, imply a location north of Kobi where he abandoned carriage. But this is quite likely the tattoo featured in Chapter 2 (Kars, 12 June) with Dante added for effect.
373 First published in Northern Flowers for 1832 (SPb, 1831). The MS is annotated “Sagan-lu”: the 14 June skirmish (note 223, Appendix 5). A Delibash, or Bashi-bazouk, was a Turkish irregular cavalryman (note 234). Marina Tsvetayeva tells engagingly in My Pushkin (1937) how as a seven-year-old she irresistibly grasped the sense of the poem, despite authoritative misinformation that delibash meant a Circassian banner. The mock-heroics rest partly on traditions of epigram and popular nonsense verse, waggishly detected in Tumanishvili (note 165) and soon to enjoy literary vogue.
374 Cossack formation (note 222).
375 So dedicated in the manuscript. I. K. Yenikolopov says sheyer means “army” or “regiment” in Azeri (Towards the history of the poem “Don't be warlike glory's captive” [in Russian] Vremennik Pushkinskoy Kommissii 1975 p. 93) but does not explain (possibly əsgər [Turkish asker] “troops” or şir “lion” as a regimental emblem). If Pushkin met the term, he will have been punning: “Poem I” (the better-known Arabic she'r, Azeri şer) “for Regiment I” (Karabakhs).
376 The poem was first published in the Tsarskoye Selo Almanach 1830 (SPb). Dated 5 July 1829 during Pushkin's stay in Erzurum, it relates to the fighting in mid-June. “Glory's captive” (ne plenyaisya…slavoy), still rumbling on years later in Fonton (Appendix 5), was probably comment on Pushkin's 14 June antics (note 223). Witticism may have been sparked by A Captive in the Caucasus, fond of “games of glory” (line 347), the MS of which was passing round at the time (note 119). “From” Hafez means in imitation, in a “Persian” style popularised by the Romantics, innocent of the ghazal's prosody and rhyming scheme (a a, b a, c a…). The genre, closely associated with Sufi mystics and pederastic motifs inherited with gnosticism from the Hellenistic world, is often as indeterminate between spiritual and earthly love as the Song of Songs. For Pushkin, beautiful boys were no doubt a factor in the “childishness” and “ugliness” of Saadi and Hafez (note 363). Like the exchange with Fazil Khan (Chapter 1), the pastiche pits stylised form and everyday life, highlighting the gulf between fixed poetic convention and the reality of a young Turk with “girlish” face and skull shot away (Chapter 3). Pushkin even-handedly reports Azeri (Chapter 4) and Ottoman male favourites, his references to Salih Pasha's pages (Chapters 4-5) carrying a hint that the serasker's personal lifestyle did not promote maximum war effort.
377 Pushkin's text: “O beautiful/handsome young man [O krasavets molodoy]!”
378 “Christian” in one MS variant. Lines 3-4 leave vague which side the youth is on. He is not Farhad Bek, as a sketch preserved in E. N. Ushakova's papers confirms, showing a mature young man with a military moustache. The “favourite” in Chapter 4, sobbing beside another, mortally wounded Azeri Bek (“Umbai Bek from Karabakh”, Yenikolopov; AKAK 7.792), might qualify. But “Christian” suggests the thought is Turks fighting Russians rather than Russians and Karabakhs entering battle together. The Muslim regiments led the enemy-chasing in the Soğanlɩ and were noted for their indiscriminate slaughter of Turks, fleeing, wounded and dying.
379 Azra'il, a post-Qur'anic name for the Angel of death.
380 First published in Annenkov's Works of Pushkin (1855).
381 Dontsy (Don Cossacks), pointing to the 14 June skirmish (note 223).
382 Pushkin's text: “of battle and tents”.
383 Pushkin did bring home a whip (nagaika: braided Cossack crop) and a balalaika. The presentation-sword from Paskevich, taken by his son to Mikhailovskoye, hangs today on the study wall of his apartment at 12 Moyka. A Lermontov short story Ashik-Kerib (1837), authentic Turkic/Azeri ballad written up following release from detention for his poem on Pushkin's death, may allude passingly to 1829. Its balalaika-playing “Poor Minstrel” wanders south from Tbilisi and, after exchanging with retainers about not playing to order, entertains the Pasha of Khalaf (Ḥalab/Aleppo variant or khilaf: “contrary argument”, “falsehood”). Miraculously transported back via Erzurum and Kars, he arrives just in time to rescue his bride from a scheming rival.
384 Pushkin's text: “I love my Missis”.
385 Probably inspired by conversation with homebound Cossacks (Travel Notes).
386 First published in Northern Flowers for 1831 (SPb, 1830). Kazbek and its “majestic wreath” were a highlight of Onegin's shelved Caucasus tour (Nabokov, Onegin Vol. 3 p 264, stanza [XIIC] line 14). In the Journey, Kazbek (Chapter 5) echoes and contrasts the mountain-top vision of Ararat (Chapter 2). Ararat is collective reconciliation, Kazbek a more personal ascent.
387 Pushkin's text: “beyond-the-clouds” (zaoblachnuyu), a “transnebular” zone like the “Transcaucasia” (zakavkazye) dangled before Pushkin (note 208) then ruled off-limits (Introduction) by the Third Department. Bulgarin's review of Onegin Chapter 7 (Appendix 1) had conceded lower trajectory: “We beheld with joy the flight beneath-the-clouds [podoblachny] of the bard of Ruslan and Lyudmila but now regretfully…” (Northern Bee No. 39, 1 April 1830). The adjective's association with the Caucasus harked back at least to Denis Davydov's Part-soldier (note 134, Appendix 8) where the “Alagöz” (Aragats) is footnoted: “Cloud-defying [zaoblachnaya] mountain on the frontier of Erivan district”.
388 MS dated 1829. First published in Literary Supplements to Russki Invalid [The Russian Pensioner] 1831. It relates to passing by or through the Ukraine on the return journey.
389 The “quiet Don” (tikhi Don), Sholokhov's title for his 1928-40 novel, issued in English as And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) to avoid confusion with popular university fiction like Masterman's An Oxford Tragedy (1933). Paradoxically, the phrase reached back to South Yorkshire, independent-minded and once untamed (dikoye polye) like the Ukraine. In the 1820s the Cossacks’ Don flowed in solidarity with the “gentle Don”, or “soft and gentle river Don”, of Ivanhoe (1819) admired in Russia as a tale of national and emancipatory struggle, its hero (Ivangoe, only latterly Ayvengo) patently a crypto-Slav. Kovtyrev, whose 1826 translation Pushkin carried in March 1829 (note 208), understood his task, curbing jocularity (“In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don…” or “Dans ce beau canton de l'heureuse Angleterre arrosé par le Don…” in the Defauconpret text from which he worked) to open nobly (“In one of the best parts of England, where the River Don flows…”).
390 Enemy-chasing (see Introduction).
391 At the Turkish-Russian border (note 209), homeward-bound.
392 Pushkin's text: “dashing riders/raiders” (dlya nayezdnikov likhikh).
393 Probably 1829. First published in Northern Flowers for 1832 (SPb, 1831).
394 Note 86.
395 Restaurant on Kuznetski Most in Moscow, opened by Tranquille Yard in 1826.
396 A main street in E. Moscow.
397 Natalya Goncharova and his father's betrothal gift (200 serfs at Boldino).
398 First published in Northern Flowers for 1830 (SPb, 1829). A squib on the closing stages of the European campaign, sparked by contemporary reference to Oleg (as Nadezhdin, Appendix 1). Diebitsch broke through in the Balkans and captured Edirne on 8/20 August 1829. He was not well-resourced for further advance but moved towards Istanbul, prompting the Turks to open peace negotiations which resulted in signature of the Treaty of Adrianople [Edirne] on 2/14 September. Parallel war and diplomacy were not new. The humour is contrast between heroic style and deliberation, the standing controversy in Paskevich's camp (Introduction, Appendix 8). It is implicit, as asserted openly in Once again we're crowned in glory (below), that the war was won in Asia rather than Europe.
399 Norseman. Oleg of Novgorod, according to a chronicle, advanced to Constantinople in 907, hung his shield on the gates in token of victory and then departed.
400 Tsargrad (Greek Basileuousa), the imperial capital.
401 Probably 1829. First published by Shlyapkin, From Pushkin's Unpublished Papers [in Russian], 1903.
402 Minimising Diebitsch's victory in the spirit of Oleg's Shield (above) and embracing the success in Asia of Paskevich and Decembrist friends (Appendix 8).
403 Black Sea.
404 Probably 1829. First published in 1930 (Collected Works, Krasnaya Niva).
405 M. T. Kachenovski (1775-1842) editor of Vestnik Yevropy (European Herald), later rector of Moscow University. Zoilus (c 400-320 bc), the first Homeric “scholar”, outraged contemporaries by pointing out errors in the hallowed texts. His name, like the Alexandrian editor Aristarchus’ (note 294), became synonymous with malignant criticism.
406 N. I. Nadezhdin (note 291).
407 Probably 1829. First published in 1930 (Collected Works, Krasnaya Niva).
408 European Herald.
409 Kachenovski (note 405).
410 Nadezhdin. In Pushkin's text the seminarist “takes the stage” (vzoshyol).
411 See note 352. Written in 1830, in circulation by mid-April and calculated to blacken Bulgarin by openly branding him a spy. Bulgarin attempted to limit the damage, doctoring the last line to read “…Faddei Bulgarin” and brazenly promoting his version as authentic: “An epigram by a well-known poet is circulating round Moscow and arrived here for distribution to interested persons. We print it as a service to our opponents and readers and to preserve this priceless product from the corruptions of copyists” (Son of the Fatherland 1830 No. 17). Pushkin's original was published, after Bulgarin's death, by Nikolai Ogaryov, Russian undercover literature of the nineteenth century [in Russian] (London, 1861) and Nikolai Gerbel [Härbel], Poems by A. S. Pushkin not included in the latest collection of his works [in Russian] (Berlin, 1861). It entered the Pushkin corpus with Yefremov's 1880 Collected Works.
412 Leader of the 1794 uprising against Russia.
413 Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), the leading Polish poet. Pushkin's line runs: “Kosciuszko's a lyakh, Mickiewicz's a lyakh! (an old, familiar term for Pole, like “Polack” in English).
414 Police-spy. The “memoirs” of E. F. Vidocq (1775-1857), ghost-written and partly fabricated by Louis François l'Heritier de l'Ain, had been a publishing sensation of 1828-9. An ex-criminal, Vidocq was appointed first director of the Sûreté Nationale in 1813.
415 “Buffoonin”, as it were. Russian figlyar’ (“clown”) is Polish figlarz from figiel (“trick”), obsolete Yiddish (related to German fügen, “to join, fit”) preserved in Polish. Vyazemski had launched this nickname for Bulgarin in 1825.
416 Believed to have been written in 1832. By then, Pushkin and Natalya were married and had a daughter, Maria, born in May. The incomplete draft looks back at the 1829 tour, marking a waystation towards the Journey. It was first published by Shlyapkin (note 401) in 1903, corrected by I. S. Zilbershtein (From Pushkin's Papers, 1926) and critically edited by N. V. Izmailov and B. V. Tomashevski in 1930 (Collected Works, Krasnaya Niva).
417 Pushkin's line: “Of my bygone youth” (minuvshey yunosti moyey).
418 A draft has “No rowdy…I craved/Of feasts” (Ne shumnikh…zhazhdal ya/Pirov: 16 Volume Collected Works Vol. 3, Book 2, note to p. 1063). Youthful revels are being contrasted with reunion dinners in camp (Chapter 3). The logic led on to what was sought and found, a challenge deferred for the Journey.
419 As pointed out by the late M. I. Shapir, On the inequality of the equal: Pushkin's missive To a Kalmyk girl against the background of the macroevolution of Russian poetic language in Text and Commentary (Round table in honour of Vyacheslav V. Ivanov's 75th birthday) [in Russian], Nauka (Moscow, 2006).
420 Nobles (Turkic variant of Persian mirza), meaning her paladins (vel'mozhy) at Court.
421 Meaning law-making.
422 Pegasus: she does not write poetry.
423 Catherine's term for Freemasons.
424 You conceived and wrote Prince Khlor at your desk.
425 See note 363.
426 Pushkin's text: “pure” (chista).
427 Pushkin's line: “And [so too] the tenderness of [your] girlish dreams”.
428 Pushkin's text: “at joyous rest” (v radostnom pokoye).
429 Artful (izgnaniye zemnoye): the human condition or Irkutsk.
430 The child is reciting the standard thanksgiving (molit’ za) for a parent. Friends and family would understand that he was interceding for his father's pardon.
431 The “Decembrist” quatrain (“Day after day…endures”) has troubled commentators assuming a love-poem. S. M. Bondi remarked on first publishing the second stanza: “Can these four quatrains be considered a whole, complete poem? I think not. It is no accident that Pushkin scrapped the third quatrain, and the transition from it to the fourth sounds somewhat forced”: New Pages of Pushkin [in Russian] (Moscow, 1931) p. 26.
432 Letter of 19 October 1830 in French. M. P. Sultan-Shah, M. N. Volkonskaya on Pushkin in her letters of 1830-32 [in Russian], Pushkin: Issledovaniya i materialy (Moscow/Leningrad, 1956) Vol. 1 pp. 257-267.
433 Letter of 20 March 1831 (Sultan-Shah).
434 Note 48.
435 Paskevich.
436 Note 341.
437 Jocular: Pushkin is bursting with Paskevich's hoped-for victory ode.
438 Probably unaware that the jibe had been addressed (From Hafiz, Appendix 2).
439 Pushkin's fatal 1837 duel.
440 Amir Abbas Haidari, Modern Persian Reader (London, 1975) p. 5.
441 Commemorative anthology of Fath Ali's Literary Circle or “Royal Society”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (EI) s.v. Fath Ali Shah Qajar. So dated by Iraj Afshar (EI s.v. Fazelkhan Garrusi, Mohammad).
442 Fazil Khan's early life is summarised, with sources, by Afshar (note 441). The Anjoman was reprinted in Tehran in 1997. An illuminated manuscript copy sold at Christie's in London in 2007 for £875. Saba's reputation still stands high. The view that he had surpassed Ferdowsi was much canvassed (E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Vol. 4, p. 309) and ridiculed (Afshar) at the time.
443 Marina Alexidze, Fazel Khan Garrusi and Tbilisi, Iran and the Caucasus (Leiden) Vol. 7, No. 1, p. 127. Mirza Abul Hasan Khan Shirazi led the Persian diplomatic mission to London in 1809 and was the original of Mirza Firouz in Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan and Hajji Baba in England. A government veteran, he had signed the Treaty of Golestan with Russia in 1813.
444 Mohammad Salih Shirazi (c 1790-1845), a secretary to Abbas Mirza. He accompanied Sir Gore Ouseley and Morier on travels in Persia in 1811-12, was sent to England by Abbas Mirza in 1815 and studied at Oxford. He brought back a printing press and fonts, establishing a printing business at Tabriz and acquiring more presses from Russia in 1829. He later switched to lithograpically reproduced calligraphy, which proved popular, and brought out the first Persian newspaper (Kaghaz-e akhbar: “The Newspaper”) at Tehran in 1836/7. His travelogue (Safarnama-ye Mirza Salih Shirazi), including an account of English Parliamentary government, was reissued in Tehran in 1968. He collaborated with William Price on A Grammar of the Three Principal Oriental Languages…to Which is Added a Set of Persian Dialogues (London, 1823).
445 Alexidze (note 443) p 126. The Qaim Maqam neatly celebrates Fazil Khan's origins and originality: his official drafting is the envy of Mani (a fellow-Hamadani) and his Arzhang (Manichaean scripture). The letter is preserved, with other correspondence Fazil Khan took to Tbilisi, in the Georgian Academy of Sciences.
446 A Winter Journey through Russia…(London, 1839) Vol. I p. 4.
447 Mohammad Khan Zangana (d. 1841), commander-in-chief of the Azerbaijan, later the Persian, army (EI s.v. Amir(-e) Nezam by A. Amanat). On the mission and audience: AKAK 7.698, P. P. Suchtelen, Russki Arkhiv 1889 and The Persian Embassy of 1829 [in Russian], Rossiiski Arkhiv Vol XII (Moscow, 2003) pp 187-241.
448 Secretary to Abbas Mirza and future foreign minister (1834-38).
449 Hajji Baba Afshar who studied medicine in England 1811-19 (FO 60/30 f. 192), physician to Abbas Mirza and later Mohammad Shah.
450 “Great Commander”, reforming prime minister of 1848-51. Mohammad Taqi Farahani (1807-52) was then an Azerbaijan army administrator and secretary to Zangana (note 447). He himself became Amir Nezam (“Commander of the New Model Army”) in 1848, using the lesser title as premier.
451 Sardinian ex-captain in Napoleon's army and adjutant to Abbas Mirza. Colonel of engineers at the siege of Herat, later a general. See note 191.
452 He wrote up their travels: Safarnama-ye Khosrow Mirza [Khosrow Mirza's travelogue] ed. M. Golbon (Tehran, 1970).
453 “[He] declared a wish to receive holy baptism and settle in Russia. It is highly probable that this wish resulted from having…presented H.I.M. with a laudatory poem where he so magnified the merits of Russia and so belittled all other states by comparison, not excluding his own country, that he fears suffering punishment for it on return to Persia.” (Nesselrode, probably over-interpreting, to Paskevich, 16 October 1829, AKAK 7.705).
454 Mirza Mustafa Akhundov, adding that Fazil Khan wore his hair long to cover the disfigurement. Alexidze (note 443, p. 128).
455 I. K. Yenikolopov, The poet Mirza-Shafi [in Russian] (Baku, 1938) p. 57: “schools” of the Aliyevo (Shia) and Omarovo (Sunni) ucheniye (doctrine). The Shia mosque was the Shah Abbas adjoining Metekhi Bridge (visible with dome and distinctive minaret in Gagarin's 1847 Maidan print: note 155). Gamba's (note 124, p. 167) 1820s Sunni mosque near the Parsi atesh-gah (between St George's and Bethlehem churches) may or may not have been distinct from the eighteenth century Ottoman mosque (in Botanic Street, above the baths) destroyed by Nader Shah and restored in 1846-51 by Giovanni Scudieri, Vorontsov's chief architect from Odessa. Rebuilt in 1895, it now serves Sunni and Shia. The Shah Abbas was demolished in 1950/1 for a new bridge.
456 Meaning top-ranking interpreter of shari'a in mainstream (etna-‘ashariya: “Twelver”) Shia Islam, in today's terminology ayat-ollah (“sign of God”: Qur'an 41.53 “We shall show them our signs on the horizons and in their own selves”) or marja taqlid (“source of emulation”).
457 Monteith (note 31, pp 143-146); Dana Sherry, Mosque and State in the Caucasus, 1828-1841, Caucasus and Central Asia Newsletter, Issue 4 (Berkeley, 2003) pp. 3-8. Aqa Mir Fattah was installed at Tbilisi in what is now “Mushtaidi” [mojtahed's] Park. He helped the Russians rally South Caucasus Shia opinion against the Sunni Kazi Mullah's (note 277) propaganda. Sherry (p. 4) remarks of his correspondence with the Russian authorities (AKAK Vol. 8): “Contrary to stereotypes of ‘Oriental’ rhetoric and in contradistinction to Paskiewicz's flowery letters to the mujtahid, Mir-Fettakh wasted no time on niceties before launching into his demands.”
458 Meaning late-medieval depiction of Aesop as an archetype of monstrosity and deformity.
459 Afshar (note 441).
460 Possibly ruler as trustee (amin): if you surrender yourselves (like child-hostages: note 109) he will honour his commitments. Arabic was the mountaineers’ literary language. Beybulat's (note 277) letter of November 1929 to Paskevich (AKAK 7.886) is an example.
461 Alexidze's English translation (note 443, p. 131). Two government-funded Muslim schools were opened in Tbilisi, Shia on 18 April 1847, Sunni on 10 May 1848 AKAK 10.107 (Tiflis 1885). Vorontsov regarded them as highly successful, opening 8 more in 1849 and hoping to carry the initiative into the heart of Daghestan where, as he noted, long-established madrasas spread their different message (Memorandum of 18 January 1850, AKAK 10.105).
462 1837/8 in Aryanpur (note 463). Afshar (note 441) prefers 1843. Alexidze (note 443, p. 131) quotes “1853 or 1854”.
463 Aryanpur Az Saba ta Nima [From Saba to Nima] (Tehran, 1972) Vol. I, pp. 54-55, reasserted by Afshar (note 441).
464 A. Z. Rozenfel'd, New Translations of Pushkin into Persian (1950s-1970s) [in Russian], Vremennik Pushkinshoy Kommissii 1981 p. 129, note 28.
465 D. S. Komissarov, Puti razvitiya novoy i noveyshey persidskoy literatury [Lines of development of modern and latest Persian literature] (Moscow, 1982) pp. 22-29.
466 National Archives FO 60/31 ff. 54-7 = British Library IOR/L/PS/9/90 pp. 57-61; Bombay Courier 16 May 1829, reprinted in The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies, Vol. 28 (1829) pp. 625-256; Fowler (note 273) Vol. I pp. 203-208.
467 FO 60/31 ff 50-2 = IOR/L/PS/9/90 pp 65-67; The Asiatic Journal… pp. 749-750 reprinted from the Calcutta Government Gazette.
468 Iranian crores (500,000): 4m. tomans, 16m. silver roubles (AKAK 7.528), Sicca Rs. 2.4 crore (IOR/L/PS/9/91 p 71) or some £2.4m. sterling.
469 Narrative of the Proceedings of the Russian Mission to Persia, from 20 December, 1828, to 11 February 1829 (Blackwood's Magazine Vol. XXVIII, September 1830 pp. 496-512), written as if from within the Russian camp, is an Anglo-Persian version of events compiled by George Willock. Pushkin met him, or his naval brother Edward, at Pyatigorsk in 1820. It is clearly based on extensive Persian input, its resemblances to Hajji Baba and picaresque-style knowing asides pointing to a strong editorial hand. Presented as translation from a Farsi original (journal of a “scribe and accountant” to a mehmandar), acknowledged as such by Monteith (note 31, p. 228), more guardedly by the traveller J. B. Fraser (“As to its authority it bears the stamp of that in every line, nor do I doubt that it has originated in something of the sort which it purports to be, a native journal or account of the whole proceeding”: letter of 30 June 1830, Blackwood Archive MS 4027 pp. 118-9, National Library of Scotland), it is broadly characterised by Dr John McNeill (British mission doctor, later ambassador: “an account…drawn up by my friend Major George Willock which is by far the most authentic and accurate that has been put together…”: letter of 10 January 1830, Blackwood Archive MS 4028 p. 11). The scribe's name is never given. His unnamed mehmandar (“the Khan”) is identifiable among the three attached to Griboyedov as Nazar Ali, one of Willock's likeliest sources of help. The Narrative retells the story in the spirit of British efforts to talk down Fath Ali's responsibility, as both Macdonald and Monteith did, and limit conflict with Russia. Baddeley (note 69, p. 204, footnote 1) with no such agenda drew the opposite conclusion (“Monteith emphatically denies Feth Ali's participation (p. 227). Probably, however, he did instigate, or at least approve of, the attack on Yakoub without intending harm to the Russian mission.”) Willock majors on three main allegations against the Russians, that the mission's Georgians and Armenians behaved provocatively, that Griboyedov was highhanded with the Shah and that the female captives’ honour was insulted. McNeill is likely to have shown it to Fath Ali, whose literary tastes (Appendix 6) ranged widely and who may well have encouraged the project. He prized his copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica presented by the Government of India, allegedly had it recited to him in full, adding “mastery” of it to his titles, and was indignant at his portrayal in Hajji Baba.
470 Attendants, lit. carpet-spreaders.
471 Free of why and wherefore [lit. how much] (mubarra az chun o chand): unaccountable, on a higher plane or “transcending quality and quantity” (Browne).
472 Conventional Prophet Muhammad formula broadened, Browne notes, for a Christian addressee. “Those who do well” (peshwayan farkhunda) means auspicious leaders such as the Shah and Tsar.
473 Darogha, a Mongol term also underlying Russian doroga (administrative district): Zell-e Soltan's vazir Mohammad Ali Khan (Ronald Macdonald FO 249/27 p. 196: “with his police establishment”) or a subordinate.
474 Mojtahed (note 456). Mirza Masih was “banished the Kingdom” (Macdonald, 21 August 1829, FO 249/27 p. 249) and withdrew to his residence in the holy city of Karbala.
475 Constantly (dam-ba-dam), “every moment” (Browne).
476 Alcock (note 103, p. 41).
477 John Law (Lord Ellenborough, President of the Board of Control of the East India Company), A Political Diary 1828-30 (London, 1881) Vol. II, April 12 1829 and other entries. Crown Rule was introduced in India after the 1857 Rebellion. Closer in form to the Boyars’ (note 68) than the Decembrists’ Revolt, the Rebellion left a polarised heritage like the Decembrists and became iconic in later struggle for Indian independence and democracy.
478 Meaning with similar outspokenness.
479 Alcock pp. 41-43.
480 N. N. Muravyov-Karski The First Capture by Russian Forces of the Town of Kars (June 1828) [in Russian], Russki Arkhiv No. 3, 1877, pp. 315-356.
481 Ibid. p 336 ff. See also Baddeley (note 69, p. 187).
482 Memoirs of Mikhail Ivanovich Pushchin [in Russian] Russki Arkhiv No. 12, 1908, p. 539.
483 A. S. Gangeblov (note 191, pp. 198-199).
484 Muravyov (note 480, p. 332).
485 Pushkin in the Recollections of Contemporaries [in Russian] (SPb 1998) Vol. 2 pp. 97-99. Originally published by L. I. Maykov Pushkin (SPb, 1899) pp. 387ff.
486 In Encounter and other accounts the serasker arrives for the Battle of Kayınlı on 19 June, while his main force was still moving up from Hassan-Kale.
487 Cyrillic MS k and n confused. Pushchin will have written Haki (Hagki in Encounter).
488 Preliminaries to the engagement with the serasker's forward troops: “I met General Muravyov placing cannon…” (Chapter 3).
489 Sacken: Lesur (note 224, p. 85), Baddeley (note 69, p. 217).
490 Pushchin is embroidering. Paskevich (Lesur, note 224, p 85; AKAK 7.792) cannot have meant abandoning the standard Caucasus Corps defensive square formation. He was, more likely, winding Burtsov up: contemptuous drum-rolls, as at Top-Dagh, would have completed the spectacular.
491 Pushchin's version is designed to show that Paskevich, rather than Sacken, was responsible for ineffective pursuit. Most sources have the serasker present during the renewed engagement and fleeing afterwards. Baddeley (note 69, p. 219) says Sacken was court-martialled over pursuit of fugitives from Hakki's camp the following day, 20 June.
492 Pushchin (note 482, p. 539) links Sacken's disgrace to an article in the Journal des Débats “where among other things it was said of Paskevich that he was a man of very ordinary talents, that the success of his campaigns in Persia and Turkey was to be attributed to the capabilities of his chief of staff and many others sent to the Caucasus for their part in the conspiracy of 14 December”. The double victory opened the way to cracking down on dissent, necessarily tolerated earlier.
493 Pushchin (note 482, pp. 540-542).
494 Pushchin (note 482, pp. 542-543).
495 Monteith (note 31, pp. 302-303).
496 Baddeley (note 69, p. 224). On novelty and brilliance of tactics, he cites Fonton (note 51, pp. 537-545): use of terrain to contain and divide the enemy, defensive squares and other deployments designed to limit the effectiveness of irregular cavalry, use of artillery, attention to protecting supplies and keeping his force concentrated. On preparations he quotes Monteith (pp. 300-310: supplies, plague-containment, steadiness and regularity of advance, keeping his troops fresh for the major engagements.
497 Letter of 2 October 1831, Russki Arkhiv 1875, III, p. 460. The similarity of Bulgarin's language (Northern Bee No. 35, 22 March 1830: Appendix 1) suggests communication from Paskevich to the Third Department.
498 Letters from Pushkin's mother Nadezhda to his sister Olga Pavlishcheva, of 23 and 28 May 1833.
499 Letter to Nicholas, February 1837 (Russki Arkhiv 1897 I p. 19).
500 Notes 208, 281.
501 M. P. Alekseyev, W. Scott and D. Davydov, Anglo-Russian Literary Connections (Eighteenth-1st half Nineteenth Century) [in Russian], Literaturnoye nasledstvo Vol. 91 (Moscow, 1982); Gleb Struve, Russian Friends and Correspondents of Sir Walter Scott, Comparative Literature Vol. 2, No. 4, Duke University Press (1950) pp. 307-21.