Pyotr Vyazemsky about a meaning of letters as the special “handwriting leaks”

July 23, 2017, marks the 225th anniversary of the birth of Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky (1792-1878), one of the closest friends of Pushkin, a literary critic, a co-founder and a first chairman of the Russian Historical Society. There are as famous books in open access on the Presidential Library website and in the library stock, so the fullest his highnesses’ prince’s epistolary intercourse, making an atmosphere of the Pushkin epoch even more authentic and tangible.

Studying the epistolary exchange of Prince Vyazemsky provides enough for a deeper understanding of the personality of both Peter Andreyevich himself and his contemporaries, among whom were the most brilliant intellectuals of the time: A. S. Pushkin, P. Y. Chaadaev, N. M. Karamzin, a publisher of “Russky Arhiv” (Russian archives) P. I. Bartenev and others.

Of particular value are the long remaining letters of the historiographer N. M. Karamzin to his good-brother (brother-in-law — brother of his wife), Prince Pyotr Andreyevich, relatively recently published and available in digital format in the Presidential Library stock. Correspondence reveals the nature of the first Russian historiographer, in his own way free hearted and warm in letters to his friend-relative. From the Letter of N. M. Karamzin to Prince P. A. Vyazemsky. 1810-1826: “Tsarskoe Selo. June 2, 1816. …Having examined St. Petersburg’s printing houses, I am practically sure that it is impossible to print my history here: therefore, see you later in August. It is so expensive to live here. The Lyceum alumnuses come to see us: a poet Pushkin, a historian Lomonosov, and they make us laughing with their frankness. Pushkin is a wit.”

Future Pushkin's literary companion, a reviewer of “The Prisoner of the Caucasus / Cawcazskiy plennik,” “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray / Bahchisarayskiy fontan” and “The Gypsies / Tsygany,” and then — an employee of Delvig’s and Pushkin’s “Literaturnaya Gazeta / Literary newspaper” and Pushkin's “Sovremennik / Contemporary,” Peter Vyazemsky left us an invaluable correspondence with the poet, in which they both are lifelike. So close their ideological and emotional intimacy was, despite a seven-year age difference, which the young Pushkin preferred not to notice. They always remained themselves in their messages to each other — dangerously kidding, recounting fresh anecdotes and, at the same time, keep arguing a change of course of the “high-quality”, as they would say today, Russian press.

74 letters from Pushkin and 44 letters from Vyazemsky to each other survived. The poet was forced to burn the most sensitive and politically insecure letters of Vyazemsky to him in an alarming time, after the defeat of the Decembrists on the Senate Square. One of the letters to the poet intercepted by the censors accelerated his exile to Mikhailovskoye Village. “What would you say about French affairs? —Vyazemsky wrote to Pushkin on the night of 19-20 February 1820 from Warsaw. — Already three draft laws were submitted, two of which are digging under the very building of public liberties, threatening personal freedom and freedom of thought. I'm crying about France as my native. All friends of freedom entrusted it their hopes at interest: God save us from the second bankruptcy. If here experience was not in use, then where to seek the state wisdom on earth? Where should we put our hopes in transforming Russia?..”

Vyazemsky was among the founders of the “Arzamas” literary circle, which combined in its ranks V. A. Zhukovsky, K. N. Batyushkov, D. V. Davydov, A. S. Pushkin. A friendship that lasted twenty years, until the poet's, “the sun of our poetry,” deat, joined him with the latter.

In the rays of that “sun” a creative work of Vyazemsky himself was rapidly developing and refracting through the poetic ambiance. His critical articles and essays were published in leading newspapers of the time. In an electronic copy of 1935-year book of V. V. Vinogradov A language of Pushkin: Pushkin and a history of the Russian literary language is written that the “Westerner” Vyazemsky, for example, conducts a whole philological study on the legitimacy of Lomonosov’s use of Slavisms and the subsequent transformation of the Russian language: “Slavic words are good until they needed and essential, if they piece out a shortage of Russians. In the poetic language, they are good as synonyms, as an aid, permitted by poetic freedom and sometimes serving as the euphony of verse, rhyme or versification. End of story.

Prince Vyazemsky, according to sources, had a special talent for friendship, attracting to him never less educated, witty, and worried about the fate of their homeland contemporaries.

To this extent, his correspondence with one of the most radical thinkers of Pushkin's time Pyotr Chaadayev, published in 1897 and compiled as Letters from Prince P. A. Vyazemsky: from the papers of P. Y. Chaadayev, is indicative: “I wish I could to come to stay with you, to look at your mental movement, to listen to your disputes: there is nothing like that here. You all are very smart there in Moscow, but you have a shortage of practical life. You are capitalists, but your millions are all on credit papers for long-term periods and in shares, a revenue out of which is postponed without date, so that you do not have pocket money for your own needs and for the immediate needs of your close ones. …The book of Gogol attention has drawn our attention. It is so remarkable in the new direction, which is accepted by his mind.”

The prince Vyazemsky himself wrote about the importance of letters as sources of a special kind: “For me, there is nothing more entertaining or touching in reading than the letters that survived after people, who earned the right for our respect and sympathy. The most complete, most sincere literary notes do not have the expression of a true life in them, like letters breathe and flutter, written by fluent, often hurried and disseminated, but always, at least for that moment, giving away hand. Letters are the very life that you capture in the hot pursuit of it. As the family and home life of the ancient world, suddenly faded in the lava, found unhurt under the ruins of Pompeii, so here life is untouched and incorrupt, as it were, still glimmers in the cooled down ink.”

Since 1863, Vyazemsky mostly lived abroad and died in Baden-Baden on November 22, 1878. He was buried in St. Petersburg, in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.