The Church of the Ascension, painted in yellow ochre, stands in a large open space between Bolshaya and Malaya Nikitskaya Streets near the site of one of the old gates into Moscow. Here in 1831 Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, married Natalia Goncharova, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the land.
In a course of the ceremony, the story goes, a prayer book fell from a lectern and the flame from a candle was snuffed out by a puff of wind from an open door. "Tous les mauvais augures," ("All the bad omens") Pushkin said in the preferred language of the Russian aristocracy.
To a large degree he was right. Pushkin and Natalia went to live for a short time in a little blue villa on Moscow's Old Arbat before moving to St Petersburg, the capital of Imperial Russia and scene of palace intrigues and petty rivalries among an ignoble nobility.
On January 27th 1837 Pushkin set out by sleigh to Chernaya Rechka outside the capital to fight a duel with the French Cavalry officer Georges d'Anthes. Natalia's honour was at stake. The poet, severely wounded, was brought to his house at Number 12 on the Moyka embankment. Natalia's attempt to enter the study, where her husband lay on a sofa, was greeted with a firm "N'entrez pas!"
Two days later Pushkin died in agony from a wound that today's medicine would surely have treated successfully. "Moroshki, moroshki," he cried, asking to be fed cloudberries. Natalia, still optimistic that he would survive, fed him some berries and juice from a small spoon. Some time later Pushkin uttered the words "Life is done." At 2.45 p.m. Dr Yefim Andreyevsky, president of the Russian medical society, closed the dead poet's eyes.
Pushkin had believed his popularity was on the wane. Contemporary accounts tell, however, of 10,000 people filing past his body between the afternoon of his death on January 29th and the evening of January 31st. Today he is loved by millions.
The Church of the Ascension in Moscow remains open for worship and can be visited at most times of the day. It is best visited, perhaps, on Sunday mornings during the long Orthodox Liturgy, with its exquisite choral music. In these circumstances, one can picture oneself back in Pushkin's time. The little blue house on the Arbat where the couple lived for a short few months after their marriage is a museum devoted to the poet, his life and works.
The real pilgrimage, to Pushkin's memory must, however, be made in St Petersburg. If one is in a hurry, and unconcerned at the record of the Tupolev 154, one can fly to the northern capital's Pulkovo airport. It is far more atmospheric, though, to take the midnight train from what is still known in Moscow as the Leningrad Station. The wide gauge of Russia's railways allows for spacious accommodation. A two-berth "SV" is preferable to a four-berth "Coupee". The journey through the heartland of Russia is punctuated by stops at Tver, where one crosses the Volga, and at Bologoye, where a great steam engine decked out in Soviet insignia stands as a monument on the main platform.
One arrives at St Petersburg in the early hours of the morning. The house on the Moyka, charged as it is with the memory of Pushkin, is open as a museum. The return of capitalism has resulted in the re-opening, under the same name if not the same management, of Wolf and Berenger's, a pastry shop on the corner of the Moyka and the city's main artery, the Nevsky Prospekt.
Here Pushkin sipped lemon-flavoured water with his friend and second Konstantin Danzas in preparation for the fatal duel. Intrepid travellers may wish to visit the duelling ground at Chernaya Rechka. It can be reached by the city's comprehensive metro system.
