The Presidential Library illustrates Pushkin’s duel and his last days

February 10 is a Memorial Day of the greatest Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. This year marks the 185th anniversary of his death.

After being wounded in a duel, Alexander Pushkin no longer got out of bed. He died painfully, being fully conscious. In order not to worry his wife, he ordered to hide from her the danger of his condition, which the doctors, at his request, frankly declared fatal. “We did not hear a single complaint, not a single reproach, not a single cold, callous word. If he asked the doctors not to take care of the continuation of his life, to let him die sooner, it was only from the fact that he knew about the inevitability of his death and suffered the most severe torment”, - recalled eyewitnesses of the last days of the poet. To Dal’s words: “Don’t be ashamed of your pain, moan, it will be easier for you”, - Pushkin answered: “It’s ridiculous that this nonsense overpowers me!” Hellish pain was for him only bodily "nonsense"...

This person in the life of Alexander Sergeevich was Georges Charles Dantes, the adopted son of the Dutch envoy in St. Petersburg, Baron Louis Heckeren. Contemporaries describe him in different ways. In the essay by the critic Boris Nikolsky Pushkin's Last Duel (1901), Dantes is presented as "a noisy and brilliant drone, bringing great animation everywhere with his self-satisfied buzzing". In turn, Prince Alexander Trubetskoy, whose memoirs were published in one of the issues of the Russkaya Starina magazine for 1901, calls Dantes "an excellent comrade and exemplary officer" and adds: "He was very handsome, and constant success in the ladies' society spoiled him - he treated the ladies in general, like a foreigner, bolder, more cheeky than we Russians, and as spoiled by them - more demanding: if you want, more impudent, more impudent than was even accepted in our society”.

Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkina, the poet’s wife, who “was so beautiful that she could afford the luxury of not having any other virtues”, she shone in Petersburg society and made a strong impression on Dantes. On her part, in relation to the baron, according to Prince Peter Vyazemsky, "there was nothing criminal, but there was a lot of inconsistency and carelessness". Pushkin, Prince Trubetskoy testified, "was not at all jealous, but, as he himself put it, Dantes was disgusting to him with his manner, his language, less temperate than it should be, as Pushkin believed", As for the Frenchman, according to Boris Nikolsky, he wanted to "annoy Pushkin, make him funny" and "it's impossible not to recognize Heckeren's leadership".

On November 4, 1836 Pushkin received an anonymous message that placed the poet in the order of "cuckolds". It was a hint of his wife's infidelity, and then Pushkin challenged the alleged offender Dantes to a duel. The letter fell into the hands of Heckeren, and he, having accepted the challenge for Dantes, asked him to postpone it. Two days later, a rumor appeared about the proposed wedding of Dantes and Ekaterina Goncharova, the sister of Natalya Nikolaevna. The wedding took place on January 10, 1837. Pushkin and Dantes actually became relatives. However, the poet's resentment did not subside. But now all the poet's anger was directed at Heckeren Sr. On January 26, 1837 he sent him an insulting letter, in which, according to Vyazemsky, "he stained both the old man and the young man with indelible reproach". On the same day, Dantes challenged Pushkin to a duel. Pushkin could not find a second in any way, and only the next day, January 27 at about 12 o'clock, Konstantin Danzas became him. By half past two, Danzas and d'Archiac, Dantes' second, worked out and wrote down the conditions for the duel. “The time of the duel is the fifth hour of the day; place - behind the Commandant's dacha”.

Danzas went to Pushkin, who was waiting for him at Wolf and Beranger's confectionery on Nevsky Prospekt. After drinking a glass of water or lemonade, according to Danzas, Pushkin left the confectionery with him and they rode in a sleigh across the Trinity Bridge. According to Vikenty Veresaev “On the Palace Embankment they met Mrs. Pushkin in the carriage. Danzas recognized her, hope flashed in him, this meeting could fix everything. But Pushkin's wife was short-sighted, and Pushkin looked the other way"; and also “on the day of the duel, friends drove both opponents through a place of public festivities, stopped several times, dropped their weapons on purpose, hoped for the beneficent intervention of society, but all their efforts and hints were unsuccessful”.

According to the story of the seconds, because of the strong wind, the place of the duel was chosen in a small pine forest, they trampled a path in deep snow - Pavel Shchegolev says in the book The Duel and the Death of Pushkin: Research and Materials (1917).

After the duel it was difficult to carry the wounded Pushkin on his hands to the sleigh, which was more than half a verst away. Danzas and d'Arshiac, with the help of cabmen, dismantled the fence of poles that prevented the sleigh from approaching, and then with their combined forces carefully seated the wounded man in the sledge. The poet was taken to the city in a carriage sent by Gekkeren for Dantes. When they arrived at the house on the Moika, where Pushkin lived, he asked to send for people to take him out of the carriage and warn his wife that the wound was not dangerous. To carry out the master, the valet took him in an armful. "Are you sad to carry me?" Pushkin asked him. “He was brought into the office; he himself ordered clean linen to be brought to him; undressed and lay down on the sofa… Pushkin was on his deathbed”.

Many researchers turn to the tragic story of the duel and death of Pushkin, not only talking about those tragic days from the recollections of witnesses and contemporaries, but also analyzing the events and intrigues that led the poet to a fatal ending. These and other materials are available on the Presidential Library’s portal in the electronic collection Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837).