Bessarabia, the region to which Alexander Pushkin was transferred in 1820, marks the beginning of the exile that removed him from the capital but opened onto years of travel and poetic development. The book connects the place both to the uncertain political circumstances of his transfer and to writing undertaken there.

Transfer and Exile

In 1820 Pushkin was assigned to the bureau of Lieutenant-General Inzoff at Kishineff in Bessarabia. The account considers this transfer probably a consequence of his composing and privately circulating an “Ode to Liberty,” while stressing that the circumstances had never been fully brought to light. His admiration for Byron may also have contributed to the trouble. The ode’s allusion to the assassination of Paul I was sufficiently daring, by aristocratic standards, that a sentence of deportation to Siberia was reportedly contemplated. Karamzine and Joukovski intervened, and the sentence was commuted.

Pushkin then appeared to mislead the public about why he had abruptly left the capital. In an ode to Ovid written around this time, he presented himself as a voluntary exile, although the account places his move within a political dispute and an altered sentence. Bessarabia thus signifies not simply a change of residence but the distance between the public explanation and the uncertain circumstances behind it.

A Base for Travel and Writing

The four succeeding years brought numerous excursions through the countries around the Euxine basin, including the Crimea and the Caucasus. The account describes this nomadic life amid natural beauty as a powerful influence on the development of Pushkin’s poetic genius. Bessarabia belongs to this wider period of movement: it is the named place of his transfer and, in the volume’s note, the place where the poem’s closing winter image was written.

That image appears in the opening canto of Eugene Oneguine: its note identifies Bessarabia as the place of composition for the lines about being unable to endure the northern cold. The brief geographical annotation ties the poem’s imagined contrast with the north to the poet’s actual location in exile, making Bessarabia both a biographical setting and a point of reference within the verse.