In 1879, after leaving Russia forever, Alexander Fyodorovich Onegin began purposefully amassing his Pushkin collection: lifetime editions, collections of the poet’s works, almanacs and magazines of the Pushkin era, books about Pushkin, newspaper clippings, posters, any mentions of the poet and various “little trinkets” related to him. Onegin embarked on this mission on the advice of the writer Ivan Turgenev and the artist Pavel Zhukovsky, son of the poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky.
This collection acquired special value when, in 1882–1883, Pavel Zhukovsky presented Onegin with about 60 authentic Pushkin manuscripts that he had inherited from his father and had not yet published. Among them were the original edition of “Count Nulin”, titled “The New Tarquin”, as well as a page from the Chisinau diary of 1821, fragments of “Egyptian Nights” and a draft of a lengthy article “On Milton and the Chateaubriand Translation of ‘Paradise Lost’”, the Boldino manuscript of “Voivode” (imitations of Adam Mickiewicz) and the sketch “O poverty! And have I learnt at last the bitter lesson…” (unfinished translation of Barry Cornwall’s poem).
Later, Onegin received two large envelopes from Pavel Zhukovsky, written by his father. They contained papers preserved by Zhukovsky relating to Pushkin’s duel and death, custody of his children and property, the magazine “Sovremennik” and the collection of the poet’s works compiled after his death. Vasily Zhukovsky stayed at the bedside of the dying Pushkin. Following his death, Zhukovsky settled the affairs of the Pushkin family and sought to document all the events of the last months of the poet’s life, carefully preserving drafts of his own letters written during those days, and encouraging eyewitnesses of the events in one form or another to write down their recollections. Decades later, when the time came for historical reflection on the tragic events of late 1836 — early 1837, those documents and testimonies helped restore the sequence of events surrounding Pushkin’s death.
From then on, Onegin gave himself entirely to the museum — the “little museum”, as he called it. The collection gradually grew, and the manuscript, book, and museum departments were formed. In a sense, it became the prototype of the Pushkin House, which was established in St. Petersburg in the early 20th century.
