ABSTRACT
In the beginning of August of the year 1824 a horse-drawn carriage took Alexander Pushkin through the steppes toward the backwoods of Russia, into a village officially named Mikhailovskoye but commonly referred to by its natives as Zuyevo. A hundred and nineteen of Pushkin’s letters from Mikhailovskoye survive to this day, as do a number of letters addressed to him. There exist memoirs, reports of informers to the secret police, researchers’ monographs. Government functionaries calculated that the renewed exile after Odessa would benefit Pushkin’s creative concentration, thus serving Russian literature. From Odessa, Count Mikhail Vorontsov, the governor of Novo-rossiysky province, notified the civil governor of Pskov, Boris Aderkas, as to the impeding arrival of the versifier Pushkin, “who spreads in his letters injudicious and dangerous thoughts.” Symbolism of the sea pervades much of Pushkin’s later poetry.
