The Presidential Library illustrates Ivan Pushchin - lyceum student, Decembrist and a friend of the great poet

15 May 2020

May 15, 2020 marks the 222th anniversary of the birth of one of the leaders of the uprising on Senate Square on December 14, 1825, a member of the secret society "Union of Welfare", first-year student Ivan Ivanovich Pushchin (1798 - 1859). “My first friend, my friend is priceless…”, - wrote Alexander Pushkin in a poem dedicated to Jeanne, as his lyceum students called him. And this title the closest comrade of the poet from lyceum times confirmed with his whole life, including writing in the Siberian exile the most complete and reliable memories of his genius friend.

Lyceum meant a lot to graduates. It was here that under the influence of lectures of the best professors the ideals were formed, which the lyceum students carried through their whole lives, while remaining faithful to the lyceum fraternity and loyalty to friends.

In August 1811, Pushchin's grandfather, Admiral P. I. Pushchin, took his grandson to count A. K. Razumovsky, the story of which is illustrated in Ivan Pushchin’s “Notes of Ivan Pushchin about Pushkin”.

The status of this educational institution in Russia was high, as were the thoughts of its best graduates, whose dreams of a better future for the Fatherland finally brought them to Senate Square on December 14, 1825.

But then, in 1811, they were just children who were friends, homesick, read a lot.

The friends were very similar - both had a mobile, creative, free nature with an obvious difference in temperaments: the restless choleric Alexander and the balanced sanguine Ivan. In this situation, the coeval of the future genius performed with him, in fact, the role of an older brother, either comforting a friend in failures, or reasoning for excessive playfulness. “Pushkin sometimes put himself in a difficult position by inappropriate jokes, awkward quips, not being able to get out of it later. As a neighbor, I often, when everyone was already falling asleep, interpreted with him in an undertone through the partition about some absurd case of that day; here I saw clearly that, by tickling every nonsense, he attributed some importance, and this worried him. Together, we knew how to smooth out some roughness..."

Soon after leaving the Lyceum, Pushchin entered the first secret society - the “Sacred Artel”, founded by guard officers in 1814, which included A. N. and M. N. Muravyov, P. Koloshin, I. Bursov, V. Valkhovsky, V. Kuchelbecker. In 1817, Ivan Pushchin became a member of the secret society "Union of Salvation", and in 1818 - "Union of Welfare". 

It should be noted that Ivan Pushchin, realizing the great talent of his friend, fraternally persistently pushed Pushkin away from participating in the upcoming plot, but at the same time openly expressed his liberal views to him, that is covered in “Notes of Ivan Pushchin about Pushkin”.

In January 1825, Pushchin visited his lyceum friend Alexander Pushkin, who was in exile in Mikhailovskoye. In his notes, Pushchin writes: “I sat down with A. I. Turgenev and asked if he had any assignments to Pushkin, because I would be with him in Genvar. "What! Do you want to go to him? Don't you know that he is under double supervision - both police and spiritual?”. “I know all this; but I also know that one cannot fail to visit a friend after five years of separation in his present position”.

Description of the meeting in Mikhailovskoyy was the culmination of the notes.

Later there was the Senate Square, the arrest, the Shlisselburg Fortress, the painful waiting for the sentence, according to which the execution was replaced by Pushchin with a link to Siberian mines, and a long way to the place of serving the sentence. In December 1827, we learn from “Letters by G. S. Batenkov, I. I. Pushchin and E. G. Toll” (1936), an electronic copy of which is available in the Presidential Library, Pushchin writes from Irkutsk to his father: “We took the philistine horses with gendarmes and a private bailiff, who is so kind that he allows us to remove the chains at night, which we do with caution, because these people are looked after, and any good can make them unpleasant”.

They say a lot about the life of the exiled line from a letter to one of the directors of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, E. A. Engelhardt from Chita in March 1830: “I have nothing special to say about myself. I have already suffered a lot and still have more to come in the future, if God wants to extend my incised life; but all this I expect as it should to a person who understands the cause of things and their indispensable connection with the fact that sooner or later they must triumph, despite the efforts of people who are deaf to the instructions of the age".

Lilia Dobrinskaya, the author of the preface to the series of postcards “Portraits of the Decembrists” by A. Rybakov (2014), draws a very accurate conclusion: “The Tsar celebrated the victory - the enemy was defeated and locked up in prison. But the Decembrist Lunin was right, who said: “You can get rid of people, but you can’t get rid of their ideas” ... For all subsequent generations, the Decembrists were unconditional heroes, because, according to Herzen, they “woke the soul of a new generation””.