ABSTRACT
In Moscow and later in Petersburg, rumors spread that the author Alexander Pushkin had successfully escaped from Bessarabia to Greece. The young Fyodor Tyutchev is known to have spoken about it with Pogodin. Hopes for change in Russia are always bound up with external events. It is natural that a secret society of officer-conspirators, future Decembrists, would connect the revolutionary situation in Greece with the beginnings of an analogous situation in Russia. In the literature one can read that in Kishinev Pushkin became even more radical than he had been in Petersburg, and this came to pass under the influence of the Decembrists. But in reality the development of the poet went in a different direction, and, although his friends were always better philosophers and politicians than Pushkin was and always influenced him, there remained a gulf of understanding between them.
