10 September — Emperor Nicholas proclaimed his son the official heir to the throne.
In June in St. Petersburg, a cholera riot was put down personally by Nicholas I. The people believed that cholera came from poison that doctors were pouring into the water and into wells. An eyewitness conveys the emperor’s words of 22 June as follows: “What are you doing, fools? Why did you decide that you are being poisoned? This is God’s punishment. On your knees, idiots! Pray to God! I will teach you!” Everyone fell to their knees.
An uprising of military settlers in Novgorod Province.
25 July — the emperor went there to suppress the unrest that had arisen.
3 August — A.S. Pushkin wrote to P.A. Vyazemsky in Moscow: “More than a hundred generals, colonels, and officers were slaughtered in the Novgorod settlements with every refinement of malice. The rebels flogged them, struck them in the face, mocked them, looted their homes, raped their wives; 15 doctors were killed; having murdered all their commanders, the rebels chose others for themselves—from engineers and transport officers. The sovereign arrived after Orlov. After berating the killers, he declared bluntly that he could not forgive them and demanded that the ringleaders be handed over. They promised and calmed down. But the Staraya Russa revolt has not yet ended. Military officials still do not dare show themselves in the street.”
8 August — a Supreme Manifesto appeared: “In the capital, in mid-June, the common people, incited by ill-intentioned persons, attempted to resist the authorities’ measures by force and came to their senses only when, by Our personal presence, they were convinced of the righteous indignation with which we learned of their riot... A villainy uncharacteristic of the good and Orthodox Russian people was committed in the town of Staraya Russa and in the districts of the Military Settlement of the Grenadier Corps.
Now proper order has been restored there everywhere: the guilty are being handed over to the government by the very misled people, and the principal among them will be subjected to exemplary lawful punishment.”
150 people will be punished with rods, 1,599 with running the gauntlet, 88 with the knout, 773 “correctively.” 129 rebels will die after corporal punishment or during it. Soon the Novgorod military settlements will be abolished altogether.
13 January — the Polish Sejm declared Nicholas I deprived of the throne. On 18 January a national government of Poland was formed, headed by A. Czartoryski. On 24 January a 115,000-strong Russian army under General Field Marshal I.I. Dibich entered Poland. On 13 February the battle of Grochów took place. On 14 May the Polish troops were defeated near Ostrołęka. The Polish uprising also spread to Lithuania. In the spring the uprising there was suppressed.
25–26 August — the battle for Warsaw. The city was taken by storm. From 27 August, order there began to be restored by the Viceroy of the Kingdom of Poland, I.F. Paskevich.
N.V. Gogol began his collection of stories, “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.”
23 January — A.S. Pushkin rented an apartment in the Khitrovo house on the Arbat, where after the wedding he would bring his wife. In February he married in Moscow, at the Church of the Great Ascension near the Nikitsky Gate. He remained engaged for almost a full year before the wedding. The bride’s mother, Natalya Ivanovna Goncharova, is fairly intelligent and well-read, but has bad, coarse manners. Everyone calls the future father-in-law, Nikolai Afanasyevich Goncharov, mentally impaired. Besides their daughter Natalya, they have several sons and two daughters—Katerina and Alexandra. In Yaropolets there are about two thousand souls, but she never has any money and everything is in perpetual disorder. In Moscow she lives almost in poverty, and when people come to see her, she tries to send them away before dinner or breakfast. The Goncharovs sometimes came to balls in torn shoes and old gloves. Pushkin urged that they be married as soon as possible, but the wedding kept being postponed. At Pushkin’s request, Princess Vyazemskaya also asked that the wedding be hastened. Natalya Ivanovna said outright that she had no money. Then Pushkin mortgaged his estate, brought 25,000, and asked that the dowry be made. On the very day of the wedding, Natalya Ivanovna sent word to Pushkin that it had to be postponed again—there was no money for a carriage. He sent money again. Pushkin arrived from Moscow in May 1831, but his wife would appear in society for the first time on 24 October at the Fikelmons’. She would be silent almost all the time. That summer in Tsarskoye Selo three writers lived there: Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and Gogol; they gathered every evening, talked, and read what they had written. In summer or autumn, Nathalie met the illegitimate daughter of Count Stroganov, Idalia Grigoryevna Poletika, the wife of a Chevalier Guard colonel nicknamed “the ladybug.” On 14 November 1831 Pushkin was enrolled for service in the College of Foreign Affairs with a salary of 5,000 rubles a year, and he was granted access to the state archives, allowing him to engage seriously in his work. This year he will finish “Eugene Onegin” and write “The Tale of Tsar Saltan.”
Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich died, the second son of Emperor Paul I, a participant in Suvorov’s campaign and the War of 1812, and from 1814 the de facto viceroy of the Kingdom of Poland;