write to
you, my poor friend, Sergei Lvovitch. What could I say to you,
overwhelmed as I am by the national calamity which has just fallen upon
us all, like an avalanche, and crushed us beneath its ruin? Our Pushkin
is no more! This terrible fact is unhappily true, but nevertheless it
still appears almost incredible. The thought, that he is gone, cannot
yet enter into the order of common, evident, every-day ideas; one still
continues, by mechanical habit as it were, to seek him; it still seems
so natural to expect to see him at certain hours; still amid our
conversations seems to resound his voice, still seems to ring his lively
childlike laugh of gaiety; and there, where he was wont to be seen in
daily life, there nothing is changed, there are hardly even any marks of
the melancholy loss we have undergone--all is in its common order, every
thing is in its place; but he is gone from us, and for ever. It is
hardly conceivable! In one moment has perished that strong and mighty
life, full of genius, and glowing with hope. I will not speak of you,
his feeble and unhappy father; I will not speak of us, his mourning
friends. Russia has lost her beloved, her national poet. She has lost
him at the very moment when his powers had reached their maturity, lost
him when he had reached that climacteric--that point at which our
intellect, bidding farewell to the fervid, and sometimes irregular force
of youth agitated by genius, devotes itself to more tranquil, more
orderly powers of riper manhood, fresh as the first period, and if less
tempestuous, yet certainly more creative. What Russian is there who does
not feel as if the death of Pushkin had torn away one of his very
heart-strings? The glory of the present reign has lost its poet--a poet
who belonged to it, as Derjavin belonged to the glory of Catharine, or
Karamzin to that of Alexander.

The first terrible moments of agony and bereavement are over for you;
you can now listen to me and weep. I will describe to you every detail
of your son's last hours--details which I either saw myself, or which
were related to me by other eyewitnesses. On Wednesday the 27th
January/8th February, at ten o'clock in the evening, I called at the
house of the Prince Viazemskii, where I was told that both he and the
princess were at Pushkin's, and Valueff, to whom I afterwards went,
addressed me on my entrance with the words:--"Have you not received the
Princess's note? They have sent for you long a