From Eugene Onegin to Boris Godunov, the works of the great Romantic poet Alexander Pushkin remain at the heart of Russian culture. Now his direct descendant, the London-based writer and lyricist Marita Phillips, has created what she believes is the first stage version of his turbulent life story to be written in any language.
Her opera, Pushkin, will tell of the radical poetry that first brought him into conflict with the state and yet was to establish him as the literary soul of Russia and the man still credited with reinventing the language of the country’s literature.
Phillips, 63, has spent 15 years working on the libretto for her opera, which culminates in the tragic early death of the writer in 1837 in a duel with his wife’s suspected lover.
Growing up in Britain, she was always aware of her Russian literary heritage. “I had been given a book of Pushkin’s fairy stories as a child, and the idea of telling his story has been in my heart for a long time. After all, Russian history is so violent and colourful it is easy to become interested.”
Her opera, which features eight principal characters and a “huge chorus”, is to be sung in English and will be staged this July at Grange Park Opera in Surrey. Phillips’ words, together with extracts from the poet’s verse, have been set to music by the Russian composer Konstantin Boyarsky. Until now, Phillips said, Russians have steered away from straight biographical representations of Pushkin on stage because such a direct approach is regarded as almost sacrilegious.
Even during the communist period, Pushkin was a proud Soviet mascot. School classrooms were supplied with copies of his portrait, and anniversaries of his birth and death were marked with special memorabilia, from matches to bars of soap. “There had never been a poet with a universal sympathy like Pushkin’s,” wrote the 19th-century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Despite her ancestry, Phillips suspects she will never gauge the full depth of his writing genius. “I would have to be a really excellent Russian speaker for that,” she says. “What fascinates me, though, is the way he can make such a mess of his own life but have an incredibly accuracy and truth in his work.”
Pushkin’s contemporary, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, appears to have agreed. Speaking at the opening of a monument to Pushkin in Moscow, he said: “The very essence, all the features of his poetry, chime with the features and essence of our people.”
“Pushkin, who had black ancestry, had a complicated relationship with Nicholas I,” Phillips said. “The tsar wanted to use his association with the writer to shore up his own popularity, but Pushkin had been in trouble ever since he left college in St Petersburg and published his radical poem Ode to Liberty. He was exiled from both St Petersburg and Moscow in 1820, staying in Odessa in the south of Russia.”
This apparent bad luck in fact saved the writer from being arrested for taking part in the Decembrist uprising of 1825 in St Petersburg. The opera concludes with a Gypsy prophecy addressed to the tsar: “The house of Romanov will die. And you – you will be remembered only as the tsar who lived in the time of Pushkin.”
Phillips’s perspective on the story is unique because her bloodline leads straight back to both the men who dominated the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, Pushkin and the tsar. Remarkably, the grandchildren of both men met by chance in the south of France and fell in love. “The tsar was a real obstacle in Pushkin’s life, so the marriage of their descendants in 1891 was something neither would ever have imagined,” said Phillips this weekend.
“The elopement of the tsar’s grandson, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich, and Pushkin’s granddaughter Countess Sophie von Merenberg and their marriage in San Remo, Italy, caused a big scandal in Russia – so much so that Grand Duke Michael’s mother Sofia died of a heart attack shortly after she heard about it. The duke was blamed and told not to come back.”
Phillips has also uncovered private photographs from family albums that offer glimpses of the glamorous household that Sophie and her disgraced husband once ran in an English stately home.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, rich Russian residents have become a prominent feature in the British capital yet few remember that an illustrious branch of the Pushkin family once lived in great style in north London. Financed by a lucrative mineral water business in Russia, the couple lived first at Keele Hall in north Staffordshire and then at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath in London.
During their time at the house, which the family of five rented from Lord Mansfield from 1910 to 1917, it was equipped with a tennis court, golf course and a high diving board set up above a pond as a training facility for Olympic divers. The grand duke became an active participant in the local social life, and in 1912 he became president of the Hampstead General Hospital, presenting it with the first ambulance to operate outside the City of London the following year.
Yet just before setting up home at Kenwood, the tsar’s grandson revealed that exile from his homeland was a constant sorrow. In the preface to his novel, Never Say Die, he wrote of the unfair reaction to his morganatic marriage, adding: “Belonging, as I do, to the imperial blood, and being a member of one of the reigning houses, I should like to prove to the world how wrong it is in thinking – as the majority of mankind is apt to do – that we are the happiest beings on this earth.
“There is no doubt that we are well situated, but is wealth the only happiness in the world?”
