The Presidential Library Collections tell about bright Easter days in life of Alexander Pushkin

One can talk endlessly about Alexander S. Pushkin, whose 225th anniversary will be celebrated in June this year. Pushkin and the Decembrists, Pushkin and the Boldin autumn, Pushkin and his muses, Pushkin and ... for example, Easter, the most important religious holiday, which this year the entire Orthodox world will celebrate on May 5.

On Holy Saturday, 1830, April 5, Pushkin writes: "When I saw her for the first time, her beauty was barely noticed in society. I fell in love with her, my head was spinning; I asked her to marry me. Your answer, for all its vagueness, almost drove me crazy; that same night I left for the army. Ask me – why? I swear, I don't know how to answer, but an instinctive longing chased me out of Moscow: I couldn't bear your and your daughter's presence." The letter was addressed to Natalia Goncharova, the mother of the first Moscow beauty. Pushkin wrote it before repeatedly asking for the hand of her daughter Natalia (the first time he proposed in the spring of 1829). Peter Bartenev wrote the words of Sergei Goncharov, the brother of the poet's future wife, that at the first conversation about a possible marriage, "Pushkin was not refused; but they replied that it was necessary to wait." The poet did not give up trying to prove to Natalia's mother the sincerity of his feelings for her daughter: "God is my witness that I am ready to die for her... to please her, I agree to sacrifice everything I have been interested in in life, my free existence."

On April 6, Bright Sunday, Pushkin again proposed to Natalia Goncharova, and she agreed to become his wife. "Pushkin is charmed and enchanted," friends quipped. Prince Vyazemsky wrote: "You, our first romantic poet, should have married the first romantic beauty of the current generation."

Easter of 1830 was a happy one, perhaps the happiest in Pushkin's life. Entire volumes have been written about the poet's relationship with his bride and then his wife, thousands of pages of memoir and fiction have been published, documentary stories, literary essays and dramas have been written about them. But there are only two real sources that reveal the "eternal plot" with undeniable accuracy – Pushkin's letters to his bride, wife, mother of four of his children Natalia and the poet's poems dedicated to her.

When he was separated from his bride (he was in St. Petersburg, she was in Moscow), Pushkin stood for a long time in the bookstore of Ivan Slenin, admiring the canvas by the Italian artist, an ancient copy of the "Bridgewater Madonna" by Raphael, put up for sale. "I comfort myself by spending whole hours in front of a blonde madonna who looks like you; I would have bought her if she hadn't cost 40,000 rubles," the poet wrote to Natalia Goncharova on July 30, 1830. This painting became a source of inspiration for the poem "Madonna".

At the solemn Easter service in 1835, Pushkin was in the church of the Winter Palace. April 7th is on the calendar. On the same day, Pushkin wrote the poem "The Commander". After the service, he once again visited the Gallery of Winter Palace in 1812. He stopped in front of the portrait of Barclay de Tolly. Barclay was a hero who took full responsibility for the retreat in 1812, presenting his immortal successor Kutuzov with "the glory of rebuff, victories and complete triumph." Pushkin called his poem "sad reflections" about the honored commander.

Easter became sad for Pushkin in the following year 1836. During Easter Matins at 8 a.m. on March 29, his mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, died. She was severely ill for a long time. Already on Holy Thursday, doctors said that Nadezhda would not live to see Bright Sunday. But she did… Since Friday, Pushkin, having left his business, was almost constantly at his mother's side. Nadezhda's funeral took place on Tuesday of Easter week in the Preobrazhensky Cathedral. At Alexander's will, Nadezhda was burried on the hill of the Svyatogorsky monastery near the altar wall of the Uspensky Cathedral. The poet, the one of all the relatives, accompanied the coffin with the body of his mother to the Svyatye Gory. Then he made a contribution to rent a place for his own grave. He had been thinking about the place of his last resting place for a long time: the poet was thirty when he wrote: "But closer to the sweet limit / I would still like to rest."

Meanwhile, the literary life of the capital continued during Easter week. On Tuesday, March 31, censorship permission was given to print the first volume of Pushkin's Sovremennik. The poet's works were also presented on its pages: "Journey to Arzrum", "The Miserly Knight", the poem "Feast of Peter the Great".

And another evidence of the poet's modern from the book by V. Veresaev "Pushkin in life". As Alexander Rayevsky told, Pushkin, as a very young man in Odessa, "never missed ... matins on Bright Sunday and always called his comrades to "hear the voice of the Russian people" (in response to the priest's Christening: truly risen)."

The Presidential Library has a large number of documents and materials dedicated to the poet's life and work. Some of them are presented on the library's portal in a separate electronic Collection Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), which includes digital copies of books, articles, archival documents, abstracts of dissertations, videos, visual and other materials.