Spending the Night with Pushkin, or with Lee Harvey Oswald

Gogol and Pushkin in a Beer Bar, Brainstorming New Ideas for Plots

drawing by Yevgenia Dvoskina

Spending the Night with Pushkin, and with Lee Oswald

Interesting, how our paths sometimes cross those of the famous or notorious. In reading a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, I learned that in October, 1959, on his way into the Soviet Union—where he defected and requested Soviet citizenship—Oswald passed through Helsinki, Finland, and stayed at the Hotel Klaus Kirki. I myself stayed at this hotel several times in the 1990s, when I was taking students from Miami University in and out of Russia on study tours.

As for Aleksandr Pushkin, in 1829, on his way to the Caucasus, Pushkin passed through the ancient city of Yelets—located in Lipetsk Oblast’ and extant as early as 1146 AD. In his travel account, A Journey to Arzrum, Pushkin complains about the muddy roads near Yelets. Since he approached the city from the direction of Oryol, historians and amateur Pushkinists hypothesize that he spent the night at an inn located at the entrance to the city from that direction.

To commemorate the overnight stay of the great Pushkin, Yeletskian authorities placed a memorial plaque on the inn in 1949, but the plaque apparently disappeared when the building was torn down in the 1980s. On that site the Hotel Yelets was built and remains standing.

I made two trips to Yelets, in April and September of 2000. At that time I was a Fulbright Scholar in Russia, and was giving talks on the writer Ivan Bunin in several Russian cities. Bunin is the most renowned favorite son of Yelets; there are statues and memorials to him all over the city. In April the subject of my talk was Bunin’s most famous, and probably best story, “Light Breathing,” at the Yelets Pedagogical Institute—now upgraded to Yelets State University.

When my wife Natasha and I arrived by train we asked people at the station to tell us where the hotels were in Yelets. They corrected us: “the hotel—there is only one.” This, of course, turned out to be the Hotel Yelets, a thoroughly freezing Soviet-style establishment. But my memory of my stay there is warmed by the possibility that the immortal Pushkin snoozed through at least one earthly night on the same premises.

Information on Pushkin in Yelets comes from Yulia Skopich, “Pushkin Was Here (Perhaps),” in Russian Life, May/June, 2019, p. 44.

Bunin Caricature by Levine

Bunin's Head Looks Askance at Life

This is a detail of the head, from the Ivan Bunin monument in Yelets, Russia, unveiled in 1995. The sculptor is Yury Grishko. In the years of his emigration Bunin once visualized such statues in his honor:

"In some city square, where, early on a summer evening, slender-legged working-class children will chase each other around that statue with idiotic shrieks, while it stands there eternally mute and unmoving" (cited in Night of Denial, p. 613).

Little did he know what ignominy is in store for the man whose image is made into a monument. The last time I was in Yelets I noticed that vandals had written unseemly things all over Bunin's head, and one leg looked to have been broken off, then reattached. You wonder how far and wide the local police had to search, before they found that plundered leg. Then again there is the monumental problem of the pigeons.