Alexander Pushkin

An unwanted journey

On the twenty-first of September eighteen twenty, a twenty-one-year-old poet arrives in Chișinău. He has not come of his own free will. Born in Moscow in seventeen ninety-nine, he is already known in the literary circles of the capital. His name is Alexander Pushkin, and the tsar wants to keep him as far from Saint Petersburg as possible. He will live in this city for three years. The house where he spent his first months is still standing.

Poems that offended

Pushkin had written political poems, such as his Ode to Liberty. He had also become a voice for radical young writers. Tsar Alexander the First was not amused. In May eighteen twenty, the young poet was transferred to the south. He travelled by way of the Caucasus and the Crimea. His destination was Chișinău, the capital of Bessarabia, the land between the Prut and the Dniester that Russia had annexed in eighteen twelve.

A city full of news

In Chișinău he worked under General Ivan Inzov, who governed the region. The city lay close to the Ottoman Empire. In eighteen twenty-one, the Greek uprising broke out, and Pushkin became involved with the Filiki Eteria, the secret society that had prepared it. He kept a diary about it.

Poems from the south

Here he worked on two long romantic poems, The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. They made him known to a wide public. The Prisoner of the Caucasus came out in eighteen twenty-two. These were stories of captivity and impossible love, written by a man who was not allowed to leave. In eighteen twenty-three, Pushkin moved on to Odessa, where he clashed with the authorities once again.

The house on Anton Pann Street

The small house at number nineteen, Anton Pann Street, became a museum on the tenth of February nineteen forty-eight. Pushkin lived there for about three months. Inside are prints and paintings, decorative art from his time, and editions of what he wrote in Bessarabia. The building is protected as an architectural monument of national importance. According to the city, it is one of only two houses in the world where Pushkin lived that survive.

A monument for the city

In eighteen eighty-five, Chișinău was given a monument to Pushkin, designed by the sculptor Alexander Opekushin. The townspeople paid for it themselves, with a thousand gold roubles. Only Moscow had a Pushkin monument earlier. The bust stands at the start of the Aleea Clasicilor, the avenue of bronze busts of Romanian and Moldovan writers. After Chișinău and Odessa came one more exile, to his mother's estate near Pskov. Pushkin died in Saint Petersburg in eighteen thirty-seven, after a duel. His bust in the park is now the oldest surviving monument in the city that once received him against his will.