After dinner was over, the Commandant’s wife guided them up a steep hillside, to a little lowly mound, marked by one humble stone. “Bestushev-Marlinski, you know,” she went on to explain, “was condemned to be quartered alive by Nicholas the First, for his share in the Decembrist Uprising, which he steadily refused to disavow. But by some caprice in the heart of him who never knew mercy, he changed the sentence to exile for life in Siberia, and wrote under it the now famous—So be it, Nicholas! That was early in the summer of 1826, before the crowning of Nicholas.
“In 1828, the young Czar was beginning fresh wars in his new Caucasian possessions, for peace and safety here at Derbend, and also for the city of newly discovered wealth in oil, over the mountains, Baku. He had need of trained officers. He remembered Bestushev who had refused to disavow his guilt. Above all things Nicholas revered the truth. He changed his sentence again. He sent him, this time, to the Caucasus. But lest he be accounted too merciful, he stripped him of military honors, and made him a soldier in the ranks.
“In the bloody and perilous warfare that was being waged continually here, Bestushev, who had now changed his name to Bestushev-Marlinski, rapidly won promotion and became an officer again. Then he came to live right here, in the old bullet-shattered, smoke-blackened Fortress of Derbend,” pointing to walls above their heads marked by many sieges.
“Not long after his promotion, he fell in love with a young and beautiful girl, of poor family, in the village, by name, Oline Nesterzof. After a time she came to live with the writer.
“One night some Russian officers from Petersburg, were being banquetted in the very room where we have just been dining. When they were well under influence of wine, a friend of Bestushev, who had drunk too heavily, laughing, wagered he could prove the lovely Oline Nesterzof was untrue to her poet-lover. This enraged Bestushev to such degree he lost his head and took the wager. For days thereafter the friend of Bestushev spied upon the young and innocent girl, who was barely nineteen at that time, in order to win his wager. Finding it impossible to do so by fair means, he made a plot with other young friends of the poet—who had been present at the banquet—in order to play a trick upon him, and gave to Bestushev, at length, the ‘framed’ proof of her falsity.
“The emotional, unrestrained nature of Bestushev was deeply affected by treachery of the girl he sincerely loved. The very next day when Oline Nesterzof, ignorant of what had happened, and Bestushev were alone together in a room of this old Fortress of Derbend, a shot was heard. Bestushev, palled, disheveled, ran out to the courtyard, waving his arms wildly, calling for help. Oline Nesterzof was found upon the floor dying, having been shot through the breast. She was still able to speak, however. In her great and forgiving love for Bestushev, she declared that in attempting to clean his pistol she had shot herself by accident. This noble declaration of the dying girl, made in the presence of a priest, under the last rites of the Church, saved Bestushev from the death penalty.”
“And this is her grave, you say?” asked Dumas with emotion, looking down upon the humble marker of stone, which Bestushev had made. The only adornment upon the piece of marble was a rose, which the poet carved there, and which was now blackened with powder, broken. Beneath the rose one Russian word, sondba, was engraved, which means an Act of Fate. On the other side were her name and age.
Here lies the body of
Mademoiselle Oline Nesterzof
Born 1814. Died 1833.
Dumas was deeply touched by the humble grave and its story. He stood silent some time beside the pitiful, lonely, little mound of the ill-fated girl, hidden beneath grim walls of the Fortress of Derbend. Then he took his note book. He wrote a verse, something rare from hands of that single-hearted prosateur. He handed it to Commandant of the Fortress, asking him to have it engraved beneath the word fatality, with his name attached, as lasting memory of his visit to Derbend. Dumas said he loved poetry but he left the writing of it to other people.