ABSTRACT
Mikhail Vorontsov was trying to speed up matters, but they were developing slower than he liked. In asking the authorities to hurry a decision to remove Alexander Pushkin from Odessa, he was passing off the blame for what could happen in any way he could: he was signalling opportunely, and wanted it to happen without unnecessary fuss, without laying it on too thick, and even without conveying the real reason. The piece of evidence that they found was an intercepted letter of Pushkin’s, apparently written to Wilhelm Kuchelbecker. The Englishman William Hutchinson, who was called by Pushkin “the only intelligent atheist” and a “sprat” who “struts around among us with his vacancy and his gibberish”, for some reason hasn’t attracted enough attention from scholars. This man was the Vorontsovs’ personal family doctor and came back with them from abroad.
