ABSTRACT
Alexander Turgenev’s brother Nikolay Turgenev reproached Alexander Pushkin for accepting a salary and cursing the giver of it at the same time. Nikolay Turgenev appealed to his conscience: he should show more restraint in his antigovernment epigrams. A consolation for Pushkin was his affair with one of the most unusual women in Petersburg. That was Yevdokiya Golitsyna, she of “Princess Nocturne,” the “heavenly princess” who was considered an eccentric by her women friends. The conflict of mind and heart, passing through Pushkin’s whole life. However disgusting the state, power, people, might have been, everything that was going on, that was turning the poet into an indifferent creature like all the others—if there was someone to fall in love with, to lose one’s head over, it meant that all wasn’t lost, it meant one could be happy even when and where it was impossible.
