27 January — A.S. Pushkin is mortally wounded in a duel. At his bedside gathered Zhukovsky, Prince and Princess Vyazemsky, Arndt, Spassky, Turgenev. Arndt was sent with a letter from the Emperor granting forgiveness, advising him to die as a Christian, to confess and receive Communion, and promising to look after his wife and children. The Pushkins’ regular family doctor was Ivan Timofeevich Spassky, professor at the Medico-Surgical Academy, junior obstetrician of the Vyborg District. He was present in those days as well.
29 January — Pushkin died. People talk about him, gossip. A pension; debts to the state treasury of 43,333 rubles and to private individuals 92,500 rubles; ten thousand for the funeral. At midnight gendarmes, police, spies appeared; the public were not allowed in. At one o’clock the coffin was taken to the Konyushennaya Church; a requiem was sung.
1 February — in the church, the liturgy began at half past ten. A crowd gathered along the Moika and on the square. Ambassadors with their retinues and wives, generals, aides-de-camp.
2 February — Zhukovsky came to A.I. Turgenev with news that the Emperor had appointed him to escort Pushkin’s body to his final resting place.
15 February — having lost their way, they arrived in Trigorskoye in a terrible blizzard. The guests were put up for the night, and it was ordered that the body be taken to Svyatye Gory together with peasants from Trigorskoye and Mikhaylovskoye, who had been assigned to dig the grave. But there was no need to dig it: the ground was frozen solid. They broke through the ice with a crowbar to make room for the box with the coffin, which was then covered with snow.
In February, following her husband’s advice, Natalia Nikolaevna left with the children for Polotnyany Zavod. Already in spring, when the thaw began, the archimandrite, the hundred-year-old elder Gennady, ordered the box to be taken out and buried in the ground for good.
In March, an official announcement appeared about Dantes’s demotion and exile for the killing of Chamber Junker Pushkin.
L.S. Pushkin, a captain, from 20 January to 21 February took part in a combat expedition as part of the Grebensky Cossack Regiment. On the day his brother was dying, the regiment was moving from the Groznaya Fortress to the Mataransky Gorge. Lev learned of his brother’s death only on 15 March and immediately set out to go to Paris and challenge Dantes to a duel, but his friends dissuaded him. By the way, he never fought duels.
K.K. Danzas was Pushkin’s second. After the duel he was brought before a military court and subjected to two months’ arrest, though with permission not to leave the poet until his final hour. After two months in the fortress he was released. For a long time he would serve in the St. Petersburg Engineering Command, then fall out with his superiors and be sent to the Tenginsky Regiment, where he would become the direct commander of M.Yu. Lermontov.
M.Yu. Lermontov, at the time Pushkin died, was ill.
7 February — he wrote the final lines of “The Death of the Poet”.
18 February — he was arrested. Nicholas ordered that “...the senior physician of the Guards Corps visit this gentleman and ascertain whether he is mad...” An investigative case was opened over the poem: “On the impermissible verses written by Cornet of the Life Guards Hussar Regiment Lermontov, and on the dissemination thereof by Provincial Secretary Raevsky.”
25 February — in the case about the verses, the verdict was announced: Cornet Lermontov was transferred in the same rank to the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment, and Provincial Secretary Svyatoslav Afanasyevich Raevsky was ordered to be kept under arrest for one month, and then sent to Olonets Governorate for employment in service at the discretion of the local civil governor.
In March — M.Yu. Lermontov was sent to the active army in the Caucasus, where the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment was stationed. He would return from exile, but for a duel with the son of the French envoy, Barant, he would be exiled to the Caucasus a second time—to the Tenginsky Infantry Regiment.
Alexander Ivanovich Odoevsky, a Decembrist, after ten years of penal servitude, was transferred as a private to the Caucasus to the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment—the same one to which Lermontov was sent. At the beginning of December he was traveling from Tiflis to Vladikavkaz.
The first railway in Russia—the Tsarskoye Selo Railway, 25 versts long—was built by private individuals; the government provided neither subsidies nor guarantees. The only essential condition for the entrepreneurs was that the line was left in their use for an indefinite term. Construction lasted two years and cost 42 thousand rubles per verst, including civil structures (stations, guard huts, and the like).
In Odessa there were cases of bubonic plague.
In Great Britain, Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and she would rule until the end of the century. The Victorian era began.
The bankrupt Swedish industrialist Immanuel Nobel, fleeing creditors, set foot on Russian soil. By government order he established the production of mines and earned enough money to pay off his creditors, expand his enterprise, and provide his children with a decent education. His sons—Robert, Ludvig, and Alfred—took lessons from the best Russian professors.
Anatoly Demidov, owner of the Ural metallurgical works, commissioned the French engineer Le Play to investigate the possibility of mining coal in the Donets coalfield. In 1839 production would amount to 15 thousand tons; by 1871—already 250 thousand tons.