Russian Foreign Office

The Russian Foreign Office appears in the book as the institutional setting for Alexander Pushkin’s early career in imperial service, and as a position he lost and later regained through changes in the Tsar’s favor. Its significance in the narrative lies less in its internal workings than in the way appointment, expulsion, and restoration mark the poet’s shifting relationship with imperial authority.

Appointment and Petersburg Life

After leaving the Lyceum in 1817, Pushkin obtained an appointment in the Russian Foreign Office at St. Petersburg. The capital offered him access to society ranging from a prince’s palace to the officers’ quarters of the Imperial Guard. His lyrical talent made him popular, while his days of work and nights of dissipation formed the turbulent background against which the novel’s account of the young Eugene Oneguine is set.

The account describes Pushkin’s early years in the capital as an intense double life: he scarcely slept, worked during the day, and pursued dissipation at night. In 1818, this pattern culminated in a severe fever that nearly killed him. The Foreign Office appointment thus sits alongside, rather than apart from, the social and personal excesses associated with his first period in Petersburg.

Exile and Expulsion

In 1824, an intercepted letter expressing atheistical sentiments became the ostensible reason for Pushkin’s banishment from Odessa to his family estate at Mikhailovskoe. The narrative also reports claims that Count Vorontsoff’s personal pique contributed to the decision, leaving the precise cause contested. What followed institutionally was clear: Pushkin was placed under police surveillance and expelled from the Russian Foreign Office by the Tsar’s express order for bad conduct.

Vorontsoff’s letter to Count Nesselrode portrays Pushkin as ambitious and susceptible to the praise of admirers, while dismissing him as a feeble imitator of Byron. The official judgment contrasts with the narrator’s presentation of a rising poet whose talents were acknowledged even by his critic. The episode makes expulsion from the Foreign Office part of a broader conflict over who could recognize and judge Pushkin’s literary worth.

Restoration and Later Service

After ascending the throne, Nicholas I pardoned Pushkin and received him back into favor. The poet was restored to his position in the Russian Foreign Office and also appointed Court Historian. The narrative reports that, during an interview, Nicholas was said to have promised that he alone would henceforth censor Pushkin’s works. Restoration therefore joined renewed official employment to a personal imperial arrangement concerning the poet’s writing.

Pushkin’s later work increasingly connected literary activity with historical inquiry. At the Emperor’s request, he gathered materials for a projected history of Peter the Great, and he completed a history of the revolt of Pugachev. The Russian Foreign Office is not described as the source of these projects; rather, its role in the account is to mark Pushkin’s return to official standing as his career broadened into court-sponsored historical work.