From two 1824 letters by Aleksandr Pushkin to Aleksandr Kaznacheev. The first is in response to an assignment to investigate the extermination of locusts that Pushkin refused to undertake; the second concerns his resignation from the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he worked for seven years. The letters are included in Pushkin: Documents Toward a Biography 1799–1829, published last year in Russia by Iskusstvo. Count Woronzof, the deputy authority of the province of Bessarabia, was Pushkin’s boss. Kaznacheev was the head of Woronzof’s chancellery. Pushkin later admitted to a friend that he lied about his aneurysm in order to gain his…