Kishineff is the place in Bessarabia to which Pushkin was transferred in 1820, marking a decisive turn from life in the capital to political exile. The account connects the move—whose circumstances it says were never fully clarified—to his writing, and the poem’s own suggestion that he left voluntarily contrasts with the biographical narrative of a sentence commuted through influential intervention.

Transfer and Exile

In 1820 Pushkin was transferred from his post in the Russian Foreign Office to the bureau of Lieutenant-General Inzoff at Kishineff in Bessarabia. The account presents the transfer as probably arising from his composition and private circulation of an “Ode to Liberty,” while stressing that its precise circumstances had not been thoroughly brought to light. It also suggests that Pushkin’s admiration for Byron may have contributed to the trouble.

The ode’s audacious allusion to the assassination of Paul I, father of the reigning tsar, made the work politically dangerous in the account’s description. A sentence of deportation to Siberia was said to have been prepared, but Karamzine and Joukovski interceded and secured its commutation. Kishineff thus figures not merely as a destination, but as the outcome of a threatened harsher punishment and the intervention that altered it.

A Disputed Account of Departure

The biographical narrative says Pushkin appeared anxious to mislead the public about why he had suddenly disappeared from the capital. In an Ode to Ovid composed around this time, he styled himself a “voluntary exile.” The phrase presents departure as chosen, whereas the account frames the transfer as a consequence of politically charged writing and a commuted sentence. That tension makes Kishineff a point where the poet’s self-presentation and the biographer’s account of political constraint diverge.

Place in the Poem’s Composition

The volume’s introductory material dates Eugene Oneguine as written in 1823 at Kishineff and Odessa. A separate note identifies a line about being unable to endure northern cold as written in Bessarabia. Together, these details associate Kishineff and the surrounding region not only with Pushkin’s exile but also with the composition of the poem: the place of enforced removal becomes part of the work’s literary setting and history.