The widow intended to have Alexander Sergeyevich buried from Saint Isaac's Cathedral, but was refused: the priest regarded the duel as a suicide and declined to conduct the funeral service for the poet

The widow intended to have the funeral service for Alexander Sergeyevich held in Saint Isaac's Cathedral, but was refused: the priest regarded the duel as a suicide and declined to bury the poet. Other churches refused too. Far too many believed that Pushkin had in effect quit this life by going out to that duel, and in any case, within half a year or so he would simply have had nothing to live on or to keep his family with, and beyond that lay penury, disgrace, hunger and the debtors' prison.

It took two days to find a place for the farewell. The Stable Church was hardly the most obvious choice, for it was a court church, and services were held in it only by the highest leave, which, strangely enough, was granted. Nicholas I personally gave the order: the petition was submitted to him by Benckendorff on behalf of Natalya Nikolayevna's relative Stroganov. It was, of course, a political gesture: the funeral service for the great Russian poet was thereby given something of the character of a state occasion.

For three days Pushkin's coffin stood in his house, and more than THIRTY THOUSAND people came to take their leave.

The mood in society was unambiguous: grief crystallised around itself all those of a protesting disposition, and talk began that foul foreigners had killed Pushkin, first shooting him and then doctoring him to death. Rumours spread of mass demonstrations being prepared against the domination of foreigners. An army of 60,000 was assembled on Konyushennaya Square. After the service the coffin was quietly carried down to the funeral vault, a storeroom where the hearse was kept on which the body of Emperor Alexander I had been brought from Taganrog.

In accordance with his wish «not to be buried in the swamp», the interment took place outside Petersburg. Few among the authorities, presumably, would have cared to have in the capital a grave that would become a place of pilgrimage for the opposition-minded. A.S. had himself bought a plot at the Svyatogorsky Monastery, where a year earlier he had buried his mother. To that place, near Mikhailovskoye, which was mortgaged and about to go under the hammer, the cortege with the body raced in some 19 hours, sped along by a travel warrant issued by the Emperor.

Only two of his close ones travelled with the coffin: his old nurse-minder Nikita, who had been assigned to little Sasha Pushkin back in boyhood, and his friend Alexander Turgenev, who had bargained with the Emperor for the right to leave for Paris in return for making this journey. A few villagers and acquaintances from the estate came to the grave. The coffin was placed in a shallow pit and dusted with snow; it would be properly buried only in the spring.

The Emperor took upon himself the debts, which ran to many thousands, and in exchange acquired, in effect, the right to censor Pushkin's archive.