The Pushkins’ First Ball at Their Arbat Home

Today, the formal drawing room at No. 53 on the Arbat has patterned parquet floors, bronze chandeliers and heavy curtains. The museum has recreated the interior using examples from Pushkin’s era; it is not a room preserved exactly as it stood in February 1831. The address, however, is genuine. Here, on the second storey, Alexander and Natalia Pushkin held their first family ball on 27 February. We know about the evening thanks to a guest who sat down to write a letter the next morning.

The letter has an unexpected theme. Alexander Bulgakov described the dancing and supper, praised both hosts, then recorded society’s surprise that the poet had set up a household. The wedding was already over; what stayed with the guest was how the newlyweds welcomed people into their rented apartment. His account reveals a change that the ceremonial date alone cannot show.

The house had already undergone several changes. It was almost completely destroyed in the Moscow fire of 1812 and rebuilt by 1816. In January 1831, it belonged to the Khitrovo family. On 23 January, Pushkin went to the brokers’ office in the Prechistenskaya district and signed a six-month lease: the rooms on the second storey and mezzanine, together with a kitchen, stables and carriage shed, cost two thousand roubles in paper money.

An address for a new life

The lease was detailed and matter-of-fact. It listed the rooms and the rental period, from 22 January to 22 July. Behind this businesslike record lay a practical need: after the wedding, the couple needed somewhere to bring their belongings and invite their loved ones. Pushkin rented part of the house; he did not own the entire mansion. The owners, who usually occupied the ground floor, were then staying in Oryol.

The museum does not give an exact date for the poet’s move. But by 10 February, he had already told Krivtsov to write to him ‘on the Arbat, at the Khitrovo house’. Those few words in a letter are more reliable than a later image of a furnished interior: Pushkin now had an address he could give to a friend. The wedding was eight days away. The Arbat apartment was only just becoming part of his life, yet his correspondence was already passing through it.

Pavel Nashchokin helped set up the household. According to the museum, he arranged for servants to be hired for the Arbat apartment and gave Pushkin a tailcoat to wear at his wedding. Such errands rarely feature in formal accounts of the poet, though a reception could hardly take place without them. They connect the forthcoming ball to the ordinary work of preparing a home: before opening the doors to guests, daily life had to be put in order.

On 17 February, the day before his wedding, Pushkin gathered friends here for a bachelor’s luncheon. They included his brother Lev, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Nikolai Yazykov, Denis Davydov and other Moscow acquaintances. The apartment had already hosted its first sizeable gathering. But the next evening its role changed: after the wedding ceremony at the Church of the Great Ascension by the Nikitsky Gates, Pushkin brought Natalia Goncharova to the Arbat.

Nashchokin, Pyotr Vyazemsky and his eleven-year-old son Pavel welcomed the newlyweds at the house. The wedding supper was held here, with the poet’s brother Lev overseeing it. Pavel Vyazemsky later left an account of the drawing room, giving it a history beyond the museum’s reconstruction. For the family, 18 February marked the beginning of a brief period of life on the Arbat that lasted until mid-May.

On 24 February, Pushkin wrote to Pyotr Pletnyov that he was ‘married and happy’. The letter went from Moscow to St Petersburg. By then, the couple had also been out together: the researcher Boris Modzalevsky cites evidence that they attended a ball on 20 February and a Moscow masquerade on the 22nd. A few days later, the roles were reversed. Now the Pushkins welcomed guests in the very apartment whose address the poet had recently given his friends.

The evening of 27 February

The ball took place on 27 February. The gathering was small and, according to Bulgakov, there was plenty of dancing. The number of guests might have seemed modest for a grand society event; for the newlyweds’ first gathering at home, something else mattered more. They hosted it on their own terms. The guests entered an apartment for which Pushkin himself was responsible under the lease, rather than someone else’s salon where he was an invited poet.

Bulgakov was among the guests and described the evening in a letter the very next day, 28 February. He noted that both hosts treated their guests well, that there was plenty of dancing and that supper followed. The letter moves from one observation to the next with the quick pace of someone recounting yesterday’s celebration to a person close to them. At the end, he even mentioned the weather: Moscow had been swept by a blizzard and bitter cold, which continued into the following day.

Natalia Nikolaevna herself invited Bulgakov to dance. In his letter, he stressed that he took to the floor at her request and at the urging of the elderly Prince Yusupov. This brief episode shows the hostess more clearly than many later depictions: she takes part in the reception and chooses her own partner. Bulgakov remembered not only her beauty, which he praised enthusiastically, but also this gesture of her own initiative.

Bulgakov also mentioned the elderly Prince Yusupov among those present. The prince said he would have danced if he had had the strength. This detail gives a sense of the evening’s scale. The letter provides neither a complete guest list nor a picture of where everyone stood in the drawing room. It preserves a few precise moments from a small gathering.

Supper followed the dancing. Bulgakov called it a success, then recorded society’s surprise: Pushkin, who had previously lived in inns, suddenly had a ‘household’. The word is plainer than ‘domestic happiness’ and better captures the guest’s impression. He saw a supper table, a reception and two people welcoming friends together. These observable details, rather than any guess at the hosts’ feelings, form the documentary heart of the evening.

That surprise marks the story’s turning point. The January lease confirmed that Pushkin had rented rooms; the February ball showed his acquaintances how those rooms had become a home. The document could list a kitchen and carriage shed, but it could not record Natalia Nikolaevna inviting a guest to dance or the company lingering over supper. Bulgakov left an account of the reception. In it, the change is visible through the hosts’ actions.

What remained after the guests had gone

Bulgakov left at almost three in the morning. He was glad he lived nearby and could send his carriage home for about six hours. This practical detail sits alongside his praise for the supper in the letter. After the dancing and the meal, the guest’s account moves beyond the apartment doors: the blizzard and cold continued in Moscow.

A few days later, a reply came from St Petersburg. On 3 March, Ekaterina Karamzina wrote to Pushkin with her congratulations and thanked Natalia Nikolaevna for the note she had added to her husband’s letter. Karamzina did not describe the Arbat ball and had not witnessed it. Her letter shows something else: the first days of the marriage were already becoming part of the friends’ correspondence, and Natalia Nikolaevna was taking part in that circle in her own name.

Pavel Vyazemsky, who was a child at the time, later remembered Pushkin’s drawing room: lilac wallpaper with raised flowers and a book of Kirsha Danilov’s poems on a small shelf beside the sofa. His recollection concerns the home, not the precise arrangement of its furnishings at the ball on 27 February. But it adds a rare visual detail of the Arbat apartment to Bulgakov’s letter, preserved by someone who had been inside.

In March, Pushkin wrote to Pletnyov again about practical matters. He said that he had married and somehow managed to set up a household without taking on private debts. After Easter, he planned to travel towards St Petersburg and was considering staying in Tsarskoye Selo. The letter does not diminish the joy of the February evening. It shows that behind the table Bulgakov saw lay financial calculations, help from Pushkin’s father and questions about where the couple would live next.

The move came before the Arbat lease expired: on 15 May, the Pushkins left for Tsarskoye Selo. The agreement signed in January gave them the rooms until 22 July. Almost two months remained only on paper. The house stayed on the Arbat, while their first family ball lived on in a guest’s letter, with its dancing, supper and the surprise of a man who had seen Pushkin with a household of his own.

Today The A. S. Pushkin Memorial Apartment on the Arbat gives that letter a place on the map again. Its patterned parquet floors and restored curtains help us imagine the space, but they cannot take the place of the evidence. Set the museum furnishings aside in your mind, and the documents remain: a six-month lease, a letter giving a new address and an account of a guest’s late departure. Between them lies one evening after which, for Pushkin, the word ‘home’ was no longer merely a hope.

Sources

1. The State Museum of A. S. Pushkin. A. S. Pushkin Memorial Apartment on the Arbat
2. A. S. Pushkin Museum-Reserve ‘Boldino’. After the Wedding: Letters from February–March 1831
3. B. L. Modzalevsky. Notes on Pushkin’s Letters, 1831–1833
4. Alexander Vaskin. How Alexander Pushkin Came to Live on the Arbat... Publication of the Tenancy Agreement in ‘Moskva’ Magazine