Pushkin's 1828 letter to Delvig about children expecting to meet a sugar poet

The other day a neighbour gave a gathering, and I was due to attend. The children of his kinswoman, a spoilt set of urchins, insisted on going too; their mother brought them raisins and prunes and thought to slip away from them quietly, but Pyotr Markovich (Poltoratsky) stirred them up; he ran to them: “Children! Children! Your mother is deceiving you! Do not eat the prunes, go with her; Pushkin will be there; he is all sugar, and his backside is an apple; he will be cut up, and each of you will get a little piece.” The children burst into tears: “We don’t want prunes, we want Pushkin!” There was nothing to be done: they were taken along, and they came running up to me, licking their lips, but, seeing that I was not sugar but leather, they were utterly dumbfounded.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, in a letter to Anton Antonovich Delvig in the middle of November 1828.

Illustration: Venetsianov. Portrait of the Panaev Children with Their Nurse. 1841. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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Pushkin's 1828 letter to Delvig about children expecting to meet a sugar poet

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