ABSTRACT
Alexander Pushkin had had three sources of income: his own salary, the help of his parents, and periodic royalties from his publishers. Not the first, the second, nor the third was obviously enough for his rather lighthearted everyday expenditures. Pushkin constantly had need of money, but now to his usual expenditures it was necessary to add two more. First of all, he needed an estimated sum of not less than several thousand rubles to get around the unlawfulness of the operation—the ferrying of the escapee in a boat’s hold beyond the borders of the empire. Secondly, no less a sum of money was evidently required in reserve as a minimum for subsistence in a new country, since, as he proudly noted himself, “I was never trained to the joiner’s craft; to teach I cannot go”.
