Let Our Fame Be Great (13 page)

The city was stunned, and the government's response was swift. The cobbles were scrubbed, the palace façade repaired, the bodies slipped under the ice on the river. By morning, it was as if nothing had happened. Then the conspirators were arrested. One of them, Alexander Bestuzhev, did not wait for a knock on his door. Wearing his full, gorgeous dragoons dress uniform, he walked into the Winter Palace and gave himself up as a traitor. That was the last that St Petersburg society would ever see of him. He would never dance or gamble in the halls of the great houses again. But in his verse, he would scandalize them, and do more to popularize the Caucasus than even the great Pushkin himself.

Bestuzhev was taken to the Peter and Paul fortress, the squat camp on the river Neva with its one soaring golden spire, where he and his fellow ‘Decembrist' conspirators were locked up for six months of interrogation and trial. They tangled each other in a dense mesh of confessions, revealing all the secrets of their one-time secret society, and ruining the chances of change in Russia for almost a century.

The new tsar believed he had been preserved on his throne by a miracle. His own father was killed by plotters disgusted by his brief rule, and here were young, aristocratic officers confessing that they too had wanted to kill their sovereign, his brother. They had, however, been beaten to it by the tsar's death from natural causes and thus launched their premature and ill-fated rising.

‘The beginning of the reign of Emperor Alexander was marked with bright hopes for Russia's prosperity. The gentry had recuperated, the merchant class did not object to giving credit, the army served without making trouble, scholars studied what they wished,
all spoke what they thought, and everyone expected better days. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented the realization of these hopes, which aged without their fulfilment,' said Bestuzhev in a lengthy letter to the new tsar. He only joined the movement in 1823 and was just sixteen when Napoleon was defeated, but he did not hesitate to invoke the glory of his fellow plotters who had marched across Europe.

‘[T]he military men began to talk: “Did we free Europe in order to be ourselves placed in chains? Did we grant a constitution to France in order that we dare not even talk about it, and did we buy at the price of our blood priority among nations in order that we might be humiliated at home?”'

Behind the closed cell doors, however, Bestuzhev was less defiant. He opened up all the secrets of the conspiracy. His biographer, Lauren Leighton, does not blame him for having done so although she concedes his evidence sent his best friend, Kondraty Ryleyev, to the gallows. He managed to shield his brothers but otherwise it is hard to agree with her positive assessment of him. He gained beneficial treatment for himself as a result of his betrayal. While five of his fellows were hanged – including the similarly named Bestuzhev-Ryumin – he was sent to Siberia to live in exile, before being posted to the Caucasus to serve as a common soldier.

Many of the former Decembrists had been writers, while Bestuzhev and his betrayed friend Ryleyev had published a literary magazine. Only Bestuzhev, presumably because of his cooperation, was allowed to keep writing after his disgrace. But he was forced to use a pen-name. As a writer, Alexander Bestuzhev, the dandy and the wit, was dead. Alexander Marlinsky, the daredevil and hero, was born in his place.

He had signed himself Marlinsky, a nom de plume that derived from the name of a pavilion outside St Petersburg, before but only now was the name to become famous throughout Russia. Decades later, Russians would remember thrilling over his stories, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev even confessed to having kissed the name Marlinsky on a journal cover.

None of his vast readership knew his real identity, or of his revolutionary past, but he swayed them with his lurid, romantic prose, his
lust for action. For ten years he ruled Russia's literary scene, before disappearing as rapidly as he had appeared. A modern reader will share the opinion of some contemporary Russian critics, who as early as 1834 were complaining that his writing was awful. Nevertheless, you have to admire his sheer hard work and exuberance.

During his seven years of service in the Caucasus, he was persecuted, sent into battle again and again, spied on, beaten, envied and slandered. His own brother was mistreated so viciously that he went insane. Yet he constantly wrote letters to his sisters and his brothers – three of whom had also been Decembrists – and had time to effectively invent the Russian novel. He set it in the Caucasus.

His most famous work is
Ammalat Bek
, which reflected his deep knowledge of the Caucasus. On arriving in Dagestan, he had rapidly added the Turkic and Persian dialects spoken there to the thirteen or so languages he already knew, and would disappear for days at a time into the mountains, where he could pass as a local.
Ammalat Bek
is steeped in Dagestani legend, since it reflects the true story of a rebel who was captured by the Russians and sentenced to death. A Russian officer called Verkhovsky intervened to save him, and the two men became friends. But nine years later, Ammalat killed his protector, then dug up his body and chopped off his head. According to legend, Ammalat had been in love with the daughter of one of the local khans and forced to kill the Russian to win her hand. Using these raw materials, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky created an imaginative tissue of journal entries, letters, descriptions and more to tell the story of the failure of Verkhovsky, a sensitive man, to bridge the gap between himself and his Muslim friend. As a work of ethnography, it has some interesting passages, but, as a novel, it is almost unreadable. The writing is overblown, the plot is absurd and the noble heroism of the protagonist seems unlikely. Here, for example, is Ammalat's reaction to pleading with his beloved to elope with him.

‘Speak not so. If the sacrifice is unusual, my love also is unusual. Command me to give my life a thousand times, and I will throw it down like a copper poull [coin]. I will cast my soul into hell for you – not only my life. You remind me that you are the daughter of the Khan; remember, too, that my grandfather wore, that my uncle
wears, the crown of a Shamkhal! But it is not by this dignity, but by my heart, that I feel I am worthy of you; and if there be shame in being happy despite of the malice of mankind and the caprice of fate, that shame will fall on my head and not on yours,' cries Ammalat, provoking confusion in Sultanetta, who knows not what to do.

‘Torn now by her maiden fear, and her respect for the customs of her forefathers, now by the passion and eloquence of her lover, the innocent Sultanetta wavered, like a light cork, upon the tempestuous billows of contending emotions.'

Despite the apparent impossibility of enduring such prose for long, the book sold in huge numbers, and he was able to support his whole family with the proceeds. At one point, he had 50,000 roubles, a vast sum, in assets just from his writing.

His life, however, was miserable. Holed up in the small town of Derbent on the shore of the Caspian Sea, he amused himself with seducing officers' wives, with drinking and with writing. In the process, he made himself far more interesting than anything in his books.

A later account of his life by a Russian writer tells how he used to creep out over the rooftops of the town by night, dagger in hand, and into the chambers of the local ladies. The beautiful wife of an officer, who was besotted with him despite being lusted over by the whole garrison, would visit him in secret whenever her boorish husband played cards all night. ‘And so it was this lucky lady who was the object of the most tender and ardent passion of our writer, our unlucky hero upon whom fate had not seen fit to bestow the pleasures of a legal domestic happiness. This woman gave herself to him completely, without holding anything back. Neither the fear of punishment at her husband's hand for her infidelity, nor fear of obstacles and dangers, no nothing could keep her from meeting her beloved,' the account says.

One night she dressed in her husband's uniform to avoid notice as she slipped through the streets to Bestuzhev's house. But she was spotted by a Georgian junior officer who, guessing what was afoot, tried to force her to submit to him instead. She pretended to consent, stepped back, then hit him in the face and ran off to her lover, telling him all. The next day, Bestuzhev threatened to punish the officer ‘in
the Caucasus style' and the officer was so scared he asked for an immediate transfer.

Although many of these stories of a rake and a cad may have been spread to demean Bestuzhev's reputation among a public who still remembered his charm, wit and grace in the capital, they succeeded mainly in creating the legend of a Byronic hero who suffered unceasingly, and was irresistible to women. It was an image he did not try to restrain.

‘Not by talent, but by fate I am like Byron,' he wrote in one of his many letters. ‘What calumny was not cast his way? What did they not suspect him of doing? So it is with me as well. My greatest misfortunes appear to others to be crimes. My heart is clean, but my head is bespattered by disgrace and slander.'

He began to suffer from disease, being cooped up in forts where cholera was rife. In fact, it was a miracle that he survived at all, since in some of the forts the whole strength of the garrison would die over the course of a year. His hopes for freedom were raised by two promotions: the second to ensign, the rank enjoyed by the aristocratic boys sent to join the army in their teenage years.

But he was still marched unceasingly from skirmish to skirmish, until, finally, he was sent the whole way across the Caucasus to the Black Sea coast. ‘Driven as I am from region to region, never spending two months in one place, without quarters, without letters, without books, without newspapers, now exhausted by military duties, now half dead from illness – will I never be able to take a deep breath . . .? Who will be worse off if I am better off? Is it so difficult to throw a man a grain of happiness?'

Apparently it was; he still hoped for a pardon from the tsar but he should have known he would not get one. The tsar had turned down his case for a medal when he helped defend Derbent in 1830, and was a man who bore a grudge. None of the Decembrists would be allowed to return to their former lives. In 1837, the tsar visited the Caucasus and Bestuzhev hoped he might have a chance to personally plead his case, but it was not to be. The tsar did not stop at the fort where he was based, a request to move to Crimea was blocked and despair closed around him.

‘I embrace you my dear brother. If God does not grant that we meet again, be happy. You know that I have loved you greatly. This, however, is not an epitaph. I don't think about dying, nor do I long for it to come soon. However, in any event it is best to bid you farewell. When you show this letter to mother, do not reveal this part; why worry her needlessly?' he wrote in words stripped free of his habitual posing. In fact, for once, he comes across as rather brave.

On 7 June 1837, he was part of a force sent by sea to Cape Adler to subdue the local Circassians. But the soldiers were outnumbered, and were forced to fall back. He volunteered – as was his habit – to run forward to tell the advance party to retreat. He got there just as it was cut off, and landed in the thick of a battle that was to be his last. He was seen leaning against a tree, bleeding heavily, but his body was never found.

Bestuzhev was dead, but his legend continued, especially since Marlinsky – his alter ego – vanished suddenly with no explanation given. The secret of the writer's real identity had been kept well. Legends abounded as to his fate. One writer recorded being asked if it was true that Marlinsky had changed sides and was leading the mountaineers against the Russians. Another veteran of the Caucasus wars recalled that his brother used to call him ‘Ammalat'.

Alexandre Dumas recounted hearing about Bestuzhev – or Bestuchef, as he called him – when he passed through Russia in the 1850s. In the town of Nizhny Novgorod, he claimed to have met the French wife of the Decembrist Ivan Annenkov, who possessed a bracelet and a jewel which she said Bestuzhev had whittled out of a link of metal chain during their stay in Siberia. ‘These two ornaments were a true symbol of poetry, because it transforms all it touches,' wrote Dumas.

He later passed down the shore of the Caspian Sea to Derbent, where Bestuzhev had lived for so long. And although he got most of his facts wrong, he did recount a fascinating version of one of the most peculiar episodes of Bestuzhev's life, which dates from the winter of 1832 – 3.

That year, the townsfolk in Derbent were starving. Bestuzhev, to arm himself against robbers or even cannibals, kept a pistol under his
pillow to be secure while he slept. One day, as he and a friend were sitting in his room, Olga Nestertsova, the sixteen-year-old daughter of his landlady, came in to deliver laundry. She may have been his lover, for while ‘frisking' (as she put it later) she jumped onto the bed, set off the pistol and shot herself.

The bullet passed through her chest, and she lived on for two more agonizing days before drowning in her own blood. While she still lived, she testified that Bestuzhev was not to blame and he was cleared by a trial, but the legend was born that he had shot her in a fit of jealous rage. Although she is unlikely to have been his only lover, if indeed she was at all, she became a symbol of truth and fidelity for the local community.

Dumas recounted hearing the story of the girl, whom he called Oline Nesterzof, while he stood looking at her gravestone, on which was carved a blasted rose and the single word ‘fate'.

According to the story he heard, which had developed over the twenty years since Bestuzhev died, Olga and the poet had lived together for a year in perfect happiness. But one evening he and three friends got drunk, and Bestuzhev boasted of his mistress's faithfulness. One of his companions wagered that he could seduce her if he tried – a bet that Bestuzhev unwisely accepted. And soon, the friend returned with proof of his conquest. Dumas unleashed all his melodramatic skills to describe what happened next.