As one might expect, there is a real episode behind this. In a letter of May 20, 1828, Prince Peter Vyazemsky describes to his wife his visit, in the company of the poet Adam Mickiewicz, to Priiutino, the country house of the Olenin family (Olenin père was an amateur painter and the director, if I'm not mistaken, of the St. Petersburg public library) some 17 versts east of St. Petersburg. At the Olenins', they found Pushkin with his "amorous grimaces" (Pushkin was at the time in love with Anette Olenine, whom he even desired to marry). Vyazemsky praises to his wife the picturesque surroundings but adds that mosquitoes turn the place into a veritable hell (sushchiy ad). "I never saw such a plenty of them. One can not stop for a moment chasing them away with one's hands. One involuntarily dances the Komarinskaya [a popular Russian dance, whose name comes from komar,** a mosquito]. I couldn't have lived one day here. The next day I would have gone mad and fractured my skull against the wall. Mickiewicz said que c’est une journée sanglante. Pushkin was all pimpled and, besieged by mosquitoes, tenderly exclaimed: 'sladko!'" (see Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi sbornik 'Krasnoi panoramy'," Nov., Leningrad 1929, p. 49, or "Pushkin v neizdannoi perepiske sovremennikov" in "Literaturnoe nasledstvo," vol. 58, 1952, or T. G. Tsiavlovskaya's article "Dnevnik A. A. Oleninoi").

I visited Priiutino last September. The Olenin house (now a museum) is still there, standing, like the Ardis mansion, which it resembles, even if only two stories high, with a subtle interplay of pale brick and purplish stone, on a romantic eminence above a picturesque park, or rather forest. In the best tradition, I discovered priapic verses carved in a bower nearby, but I will refrain from quoting them here (not because of their obscenity, but because, dating from a much later epoch, they are clearly not by Pushkin).

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