It is well-known that the tsar Peter I was a
drunkard. And so was his namesake, Pyotr Abramovich Gannibal (son of Abram
Petrovich Gannibal, Peter's god-child; in fact, Pyotr Gannibal received his name
after Peter I). In Tynyanov's "Pushkin" (1936; Part
One: Childhood: 1.1.6) Pyotr Annibal says to his
sister-in-law (the poet's maternal grandmother):
- Я, сударыня сестрица, - сказал он Марье
Алексеевне, - настойки в простом виде не пью, я ее перегоняю. Я возвожу в
известный градус крепости. Чтоб вишня, горечь, чтоб сад был во
рту.*
VN must have read Tynyanov's novel. In his EO
Commentary (Vol. 2, p. 295) he writes: "Incidentally, Pyotr
Gannibal, our poet's granduncle and country neighbor, was, like the MS Larin, a
passionate distiller of gin, vodka."
*Apologies, I find this passage too
difficult to translate. Let me just say that [G]annibal mentions gradus
kreposti (alcohol percentage) of the liquor he distills. Normally,
gradus means "degree" and krepost', "fortress."
One is reminded of Petropavlovskaya krepost', the Peter-and-Paul
Fortress in St. Petersburg, and its commander Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov
(brother of VN's great-grandfather, 1787-1852).
According to Bulgarin, Pushkin's
great-grandfather, Ibrahim (Abram) Gannibal was acquired for a bottle of
rum. Bulgarin's coarse article in Northern Bee provoked Pushkin to
compose Moya rodoslovnaya ("My Pedigree," 1830). A hundred years later,
G. Ivanov in his Chisla review of Sirin's novels rudely called
VN kukharkin syn ("son of a [female] cook"). Vivian Calmbrood
responded with the poem Nochnoe
puteshestvie ("Night Journey," 1931), in which he attacked Ivanov as
"Johnson."
Alexey Sklyarenko