Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

ALSO BY SOLOMON VOLKOV

The Magical Chorus:

A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn

Shostakovich and Stalin:

The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator

Conversations with Joseph Brodsky

St. Petersburg: A Cultural History

From Russia to the West:

The Musical Memoirs and Reminiscences of Nathan Milstein

Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky:

Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet, and Music

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Translation copyright © 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

This translation is from an unpublished Russian-language manuscript by Solomon Volkov, copyright © by Solomon Volkov.

All illustrations are from the personal collection of Solomon Volkov.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Volkov, Solomon.

Romanov riches: Russian writers and artists under the tsars / by Solomon Volkov; translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“Translation is from an unpublished manuscript”—T.p. verso.

“Published in … Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto”—T.p. verso.

“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

eISBN: 978-0-307-59552-2

1. Romanov, House of—History. 2. Romanov, House of—Art patronage. 3. Russia—Kings and rulers—Biography. 4. Authors, Russian—Biography. 5. Russian literature—History and criticism. 6. Artists—Russia—Biography. 7. Composers—Russia—Biography. 8. Arts, Russian—History. 9. Russia—Intellectual life. 10. Russia—History—1613–1917. I. Title.

DK37.8.R6V55 2011

700.9470903—dc22

2010045132

Jacket image: Crest of the Romanov Imperial House, Bettmann / Corbis

Jacket design by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Photo Insert

Introduction

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The First Romanovs: From Tsar Mikhail to Peter I

CHAPTER 2

Kantemir, Lomonosov, and Barkov

CHAPTER 3

Catherine the Great and the Culture of Her Era

PART II

CHAPTER 4

Paul I and Alexander I; Karamzin and Zhukovsky

CHAPTER 5

Alexander I, Zhukovsky, and Young Pushkin

CHAPTER 6

Nicholas I and Pushkin

PART III

CHAPTER 7

Lermontov and Briullov

CHAPTER 8

Gogol, Ivanov, Tyutchev and the End of the Nicholas I Era

PART IV

CHAPTER 9

Alexander II, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

CHAPTER 10

Herzen, Tolstoy, and the Women’s Issue

CHAPTER 11

Tchaikovsky and Homosexuality in Imperial Russia

PART V

CHAPTER 12

Dostoevsky and the Romanovs

CHAPTER 13

Alexander III, the Wanderers, and Mussorgsky

CHAPTER 14

Nicholas II and Lenin as Art Connoisseurs

Notes

A Note About the Author

A Note About the Translator

Tsar Mikhail (1596–1645), the first in the Romanov dynasty

Ivan Susanin, the peasant who saved Tsar Mikhail, as portrayed by the bass Ossip Petrov, in a photograph

The composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857), whose opera A Life for the Tsar (1836) glorified Mikhail’s accession to the throne in 1613

The second Romanov on the throne, Tsar Alexei (1629–1676)

Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar Alexei’s famous and controversial son

The poet and diplomat Antioch Kantemir (1709–1744), Tsar Peter’s apologist

The multitalented Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765)

Ivan Barkov (c. 1732–1768), the Russian François Villon

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) who was vilified in Soviet times as a “depraved and criminal woman”

The state minister Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816), Catherine’s most esteemed poet

Alexander I (1777–1825), Napoleon’s nemesis

Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Alexander’s court historian

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Russia’s greatest poet

The poet Vassily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), Pushkin’s mentor and protector

The popular fabulist Ivan Krylov (1769–1844)

Nicholas I (1796–1855), who called Pushkin “the wisest man in Russia”

The poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), Pushkin’s heir

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), in a drawing by his friend Alexander Ivanov

The painter Alexander Ivanov (1806–1858), Gogol’s protégé

The painter Karl Briullov (1799–1852), Nicholas I’s favored artist

The progressive critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), Gogol’s early advocate and later foe

The poet Fedor Tyutchev (1803–1873), Nicholas I’s unofficial spokesman

Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), the rebel and literary innovator

A young Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), whom Turgenev called a troglodyte for his directness and coarseness

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Russia’s most Westernized writer

Alexander II (1818–1881) who was educated by the poet Zhukovsky

Fedor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), the last great Russian pro-monarchist writer, in a wood engraving (1929) by Vladimir Favorsky

Grand Duke Konstantin (1858–1915), the future poet K.R. and Dostoevsky’s ardent admirer

Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) in a drawing (1881) by Ilya Repin. Alexander III personally banned a production of his opera Boris Godunov.

Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), the Romanovs’ most admired composer

Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1829–1889), a radical writer who influenced Lenin

Alexander III (1845–1894), who clamped down on revolutionaries

Painting (1885) by Ilya Repin depicting a revolutionary refusing final confession and communion

Nicholas II (1868–1918), the last Romanov to rule

Ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska (1872–1971), notorious for her affair with Nicholas when he was heir to the throne

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), who displaced Nicholas II as Russia’s autocratic ruler. He disliked opera and ballet. A sketch (1920) from life by Natan Altman

A young Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), a favorite writer of both Nicholas II and Lenin

The Bronze Horseman by Etienne Falconet—a dynamic Peter the Great on a rearing steed, erected by Catherine II in 1782

The official unveiling of the statue of Alexander III by Paolo Trubetskoy in 1909

The “private” portrait of Nicholas II (1900) by Valentin Serov. It depicts the last tsar sympathetically, but underscores his lack of leadership.

Introduction

The Romanov dynasty holds the central place in Russian history. It ruled the country for more than three hundred years, from 1613 to 1917. In that time, Russia became an enormous Eurasian empire, covering a sixth of the world’s surface and instilling fear and sometimes awe in its neighbors, who were beckoned by its vast expanses and the exotic mores and costumes of the ethnic groups inhabiting it, and later surprised and delighted by their amazing cultural achievements—Russian novels, music, ballet, and drama.

The majestic and often tragic history of the Romanovs has long attracted historians, and the flood of books and studies keeps increasing. Much has been written as well on the various cultural aspects of the Romanov era, but this book is the first to present an integrated narrative history of the complex and dramatic relations between the Romanov dynasty and Russian culture in all its multiplicity: not only with literature (the most researched theme until now) but also with art, music, ballet, and theater.

In that sense, this book is a “prequel” to my previous work, The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, which began where the present book ends; thus, together they form a history of Russian culture from Archpriest Avvakum to the present day.

Many still believe that the Romanovs allegedly “demonstrated an amazing indifference to all the arts except ballet, where their mistresses danced, and Guards military exercises, where their lovers marched.”¹

That is a caricature, of course. Yes, the Romanov men were first and foremost military by profession, which is understandable, but as most of them were people of excellent education, they took a lively interest in literature, architecture, music, painting, and theater, and some of them (especially Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas I) took a hands-on approach to culture building.

For the Romanovs, culture was the political instrument par excellence, and they may not have given much thought to the fact that Russian literature and art were arguably their greatest treasure. History, however, has confirmed the connection between control of the cultural process and stability: the more involvement by a Russian ruler with the culture, the stronger the regime.

In an autocratic state, which Russia was, personal relations between monarchs and the cultural elite inevitably took on greater significance. The rulers listened closely to the counsel of Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Karamzin, and Vassily Zhukovsky—even though their advice often irritated them.

Nicholas I called Alexander Pushkin “the wisest man in Russia” and tried to direct his work, albeit with mixed success. Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches are rumored to have given emotional impetus to Alexander II’s decision to emancipate the serfs. Alexander III read Fedor Dostoevsky’s novels avidly, loved the music of Peter Tchaikovsky, and collected the paintings of the Wanderers, whom he supported as truly national artists.

Created under the aegis of Nicholas I, the ideological slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” became an effective tool for cultural and political control for many years. The unwillingness or inability of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, to modernize the cultural policy of his predecessors was, I believe, one of the essential causes of the collapse of autocracy in Russia.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, there is no history, only biography. In this book I describe the relations between the Romanovs and “their” writers, poets, composers, and artists as the interaction of living people—gifted, ambitious, vain, impatient, capricious. Both sides clearly imagined themselves onstage, under the floodlights of world history, and acted accordingly.

Victor Shklovsky, one of the fathers of Russian formalism and biographer of Leo Tolstoy, told me in a conversation in Moscow in 1974 that his circle believed that personal dealings with major creative figures (and Shklovsky had known, among others, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, and Boris Pasternak) help you better understand the great writers of the past.²

When you see for yourself how the private emotions and public statements of cultural leaders correlate, Shklovsky maintained, you can make sounder judgments about the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of years past. Comparing the giants of yore with people you knew, you have greater focus in your perception of the legendary figures (for all the conditionality of such parallels), who are then no longer never-erring cardboard “geniuses” but real characters capable—as we all are—of making terrible mistakes and glaringly unjust statements.

I had many opportunities to see the wisdom of the old paradoxalist Shklovsky’s idea. Personal contact with Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, George Balanchine, and Joseph Brodsky helped me, I hope, to research and interpret historical materials on Russian culture in a less prejudiced way.

Shklovsky’s hypothesis applies even more to Russia’s leaders. Traditionally they have been considered to be “rulers from God,” in the words of Ivan the Terrible. Only members of the inner circle or specially selected and vetted “representatives of the people” could have access to them. What were the chances of a Russian Jewish intellectual like me looking the tsar in the eye, even for a second? None.

In Soviet times, the leaders of Russia managed to retain that aura of inaccessible omnipotence for a long time. Joseph Stalin was extremely successful in this regard (having learned much—especially in the sphere of cultural politics—from Nicholas I). His successors gradually lost that political capital.

There were so many jokes about Nikita Khrushchev in the last years of his reign. And yet … I remember the excitement I felt in September 1964 in Leningrad when, as a twenty-year-old conservatory student, I found myself in the crowd surrounding Khrushchev (security in those days was rather lax) as he entered the Kirov Theater on Teatralnaya Square with President Sukarno of Indonesia.

Khrushchev (who would be ousted by Leonid Brezhnev in a few weeks) passed by me just half a step away, smiling broadly; his face, contrary to what I read later about his depressed mood in those days, radiated energy and confidence. I was struck by the contrast between his tanned face and his snow-white short-cropped hair around a large bald spot: it literally glowed in Leningrad’s unusually bright autumnal sun, creating the effect of a halo.

Perestroika unexpectedly made contact with Russian leaders more possible, even for outsiders like me. I was lucky: living in America, I could “look into the eyes” (if not the souls) of a past, a future, and an acting president of Russia (respectively Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin) on their visits to New York.

I intersected with some of their closest comrades-in-arms or most prominent opponents (Yegor Ligachev, Alexander Yakovlev, Anatoly Sobchak, Vladimir Yakovlev, Yegor Gaidar, Grigory Yavlinsky, Boris Nemtsov). Sometimes it was merely a quick question and answer, on other occasions a longer conversation. Each meeting added a new and precious insight into the psychology of the political elite, reinforcing my image of national leaders (professional politicians) as a special—in both good ways and bad—human breed, living within its own moral and emotional realm.

The various aspects of the interaction of one such specific group (that is, the Romanov dynasty and their “inner circle”) with another special stratum (the Russian cultural elite) have attracted the attention of many remarkable people, whose writing and opinions have served as a guiding light for me.

I will name only a few here. They are Sergei Averintsev, Naum Berkovsky, Isaiah Berlin, James H. Billington, Andrei Bitov, Kornei Chukovsky, Leonid Dolgopolov, Natan Eidelman, Boris Eikhenbaum, Joseph Frank, Boris Gasparov, Lidia Ginzburg, Yakov Gordin, Lev Gumilev, Roman Jakobson, Vadim Kozhinov, Jay Leyda, Dmitri Likhachev, Lev Loseff, Martin Malia, Irina Paperno, Boris Paramonov, Richard Pipes, Dmitri Sarabyanov, Viktor Shklovsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Valery Sokolov, Georgy Sviridov, Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky), Elizabeth Valkenier, Igor Volgin, Richard S. Wortman, Daniel Zhitomirsky, and Andrei Zorin.

I am particularly grateful to those of the above mentioned who shared their views with me in unforgettable personal conversations.

The informed reader will see that this short list nevertheless encompasses a wide ideological spectrum: it includes liberals and conservatives, Marxists and anticommunists, nationalists and cosmopolites. Their ideas stimulated my work. I have always tried to be free of the ideological constraints that to this day hinder an unprejudiced study and evaluation of the political aspects of the treasure house that is Russian culture.

I am most grateful to Grisha and Alexandra Bruskin, Oleg and Tatiana Rudnik, Vagrich and Irina Bakhchanyan, Alexander and Irina Genis, Alexander and Irene Kolchinsky, Valery Golovitsev, and Yevgeny Zubkov for their support during the writing of this book. The illustrations were, as always, the responsibility of my wife, Marianna. The present book is once again the result of close and deeply satisfying collaboration with my translator, Antonina W. Bouis, and my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, whose ideas and suggestions were of immense help.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The First Romanovs:

From Tsar Mikhail to Peter I

On Friday, November 27, 1836, “everything that is the best in St. Petersburg”¹ (as a high courtier noted in his diary) gathered for the first performance of the long-awaited new Russian opera, Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. The premiere occasioned the opening of the Bolshoi Kamenny Theater, one of the capital’s most majestic buildings in those days. After the reconstruction, it held two thousand people, and it was packed; the tickets, despite the gala prices, had been sold out a month in advance.

Intriguing rumors about Glinka’s piquant (and, most importantly, “national”) music had been circulating in elite St. Petersburg circles for quite a while, and the seats in the orchestra and boxes held the cream of Russian culture—the poets Vassily Zhukovsky and Prince Peter Vyazemsky, the writer and musician Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, and the famous fabulist Ivan Krylov.

Some paid special respects to the man on the aisle seat in the eleventh row: thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Pushkin, the nation’s literary lion and trendsetter. An avid theatergoer, music lover, and ballet aficionado (particularly of pretty ballerinas), the usually lively and witty Pushkin seemed to be preoccupied “by a family affair.” No one suspected that two months later the poet would be felled in a duel over that family affair. Also in the audience was the as-yet-unknown eighteen-year-old Ivan Turgenev, then a student at St. Petersburg University, a young snob who would find Glinka’s music “boring.”²

The boxes held the important courtiers in splendid uniforms with gold braid and all kinds of orders on the chest and their dressed-up wives wearing diamonds (the same diary entry read: “aristocrats, stars, brilliance and beauty”). But all lorgnettes were fixed on the emperor’s box: Nicholas I was expected with his family. It was known that the emperor had approved the opera, attended rehearsals, and accepted the composer’s dedication—“To His Imperial Majesty.”

When Nicholas I, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, and the grand dukes and duchesses took their seats, the conductor raised his baton, and the light blue and gold curtain rose after the overture revealing a country landscape in the fashionable “Slavic” style, depicting the village of Domnino, near Kostroma.

It was a performance set in the Time of Troubles, a horrible period for Russia in the early seventeenth century: after the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1584, his sons died one after the other, ending the Riurikovich dynasty. This dynastic crisis led to Russia’s first civil war, peasant rebellions, foreign invasions, famine, and epidemics.

The country lay in ruins, empty, humiliated, and looted. The capital, Moscow, was in the hands of Polish usurpers for two years, from September 1610 to October 1612. Foreign observers were sure that Russia would never rise up from its knees and would simply die off and vanish.

Prerevolutionary Russian historians always attributed the miraculous deliverance from that national catastrophe to the rise of a new ruling dynasty, the Romanovs. It happened in February 1613, when the national Assembly of the Land was convened in Moscow, which had been liberated from the Poles, and after excruciatingly long negotiations elected Mikhail Romanov, sixteen years old, as the new tsar. Young Romanov with his mother and entourage were at the Ipatiev Monastery, near Kostroma, and the delegation of the assembly traveled there in March to anoint him tsar.

The new tsar set off for Moscow a few days later. It was then that the legendary exploit that became the basis of Glinka’s opera occurred.

Ivan Susanin, the peasant elder of the Romanovs’ ancestral lands, allegedly led Polish troops planning to kidnap the new tsar into impenetrable swamps. Susanin was killed by the enemy, giving his own life to save the young tsar—and, with him, the future of Russia.

That was the official legend, based on Tsar Mikhail’s decree, which in 1619 granted tax and other privileges to the relatives of the late Ivan Susanin, who, “suffering intolerable torture from those Polish and Lithuanian people, did not tell said Polish and Lithuanian people about us, Great Tsar, did not tell them where we were at that time, and the Polish and Lithuanian people did torture him to death.”³

This legend crystallized by the early nineteenth century, when the war with Napoleon aroused patriotic and monarchist feelings in Russian society. When Emperor Nicholas I, an unsurpassed master of ideological manipulation, ascended the throne in 1825, he supported and embellished the legend.

In October 1834, Nicholas I even made a special pilgrimage to the Ipatiev Monastery and Domnino village, where he reconfirmed all the privileges granted by his ancestor to the peasant hero’s offspring. Nicholas ordered a statue to be raised to Mikhail Romanov and Susanin in Kostroma, as his imperial ukase put it, for “our descendants to see that in Susanin’s immortal exploit … in sacrificing his life he did rescue the Orthodox Faith and the Russian Realm from foreign slavery.”⁴

At the same time Nicholas I also came up with the idea of creating a patriotic Russian opera in the “folk spirit.” That idea was obviously in the air, and it consumed the aspiring young composer Mikhail Glinka. When Glinka approached his friend Zhukovsky, a poet with excellent ties at court, he recommended the Susanin story to the composer as the subject for a “national” opera.

Zhukovsky discussed Glinka’s initiative with Nicholas I, who became so interested in the project that he recommended a good librettist, the thirty-four-year-old Baron Georg Rozen, personal secretary to the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. “Even though he is a German,” added Nicholas, “his Russian is excellent and can be trusted.”⁵

This was a unique example of direct personal involvement of a Romanov ruler in the creation of one of the milestones of Russian culture, an amazing event. But then everything connected to A Life for the Tsar was amazing and even mysterious, starting with its author, Mikhail Glinka.

You could rarely find another case of sheer genius contained in a totally inappropriate vessel. There was nothing to indicate that Glinka, a thirty-year-old musical dilettante from a poor provincial noble family, who was short, ugly, sickly, hypochondriacal, and led a raucous and bohemian life, could become the undisputed father of Russia’s music as much as Pushkin was the progenitor of Russian literature.

Moreover, the geniuses of Pushkin and Glinka were equal, with the only difference being that in logocentric Russia the poet stood in the center of cultural discourse while the composer inevitably ended up in the background. And of course, Pushkin’s biography was much more dramatic and paradigmatic. (In the West, the esteem for Pushkin and Glinka is still based primarily on respect for their preeminence in Russia.)

Even in his youth Glinka dreamed of writing a “Russian” opera. But how did he move from fantasy to reality? That happened in 1833 in Berlin, where Glinka studied composition for six months. The love-prone Glinka met seventeen-year-old Maria: “She had rather Israelite origins: tall, but not yet formed figure, with a very beautiful face, and she resembled a Madonna” (from Glinka’s Notes). The easily inflamed Glinka started sketching musical themes (in the Russian national style) that later were used in A Life for the Tsar.

When Glinka, prompted by news of his father’s death, had to return to Russia, he first longed to return to Berlin and Maria, with whom he was “in constant correspondence,” but in St. Petersburg he met Maria Ivanova, “a kind, naïve half-German.” Pushkin’s sister fumed, “Michel Glinka has married a certain Miss Ivanova, a young thing without money or education, quite homely, and who to top it off hates music.”⁶

But it was this marriage (which ended in scandalous divorce) that encouraged Glinka to finish his opera as if on a single breath: “The weather was beautiful and I often worked with the door opened into the garden, drinking in the pure, balsamic air.”⁷ As Anna Akhmatova noted in a poem a century later, “If you only knew the rubbish / from which poetry grows, knowing no shame.”

As it sometimes happens (but very, very rarely) in these situations, everything around A Life for the Tsar moved smoothly. Glinka was immediately accepted into Zhukovsky’s circle, which met in the Winter Palace, where the poet lived as Tsarevich Alexander’s tutor, “a select company, consisting,” as the composer put it, “of poets, literary men and in general refined people.”⁸ Among the guests were Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol (who read his new comedy, The Marriage, when Glinka was there), Prince Vyazemsky, and Prince Odoevsky.

Pushkin and Zhukovsky took a lively interest in the libretto of A Life for the Tsar, and the latter wrote verses for the opera’s final pro-monarchistic apotheosis and in particular for the concluding march-like chorus, “Glory!,” which for many years was considered the unofficial anthem of Russia: “Glory, glory, our Russian Tsar! Our God-given Sovereign Tsar!” In the opera, the people gathered on Red Square in Moscow greet the triumphant entrance of the new monarch, Mikhail Romanov, with this vivid, majestic (but not pompous—it was Glinka at his best) music accompanied by two brass bands.

As Glinka reminisced, “As if by magic I suddenly had the plan for the entire opera and the idea of juxtaposing Russian music to Polish music; and then, many themes and even details of their development—all lit up in my head at once.”⁹

The music for A Life for the Tsar was composed at a feverish pitch, ahead of the libretto. Baron Rozen often had to submit texts to fit quite complex melodic lines and ornate rhythmical figures. Glinka was satisfied: “Zhukovsky and the others used to joke that Rozen had tucked away already prepared verses into his pockets, and all I had to do was say what sort I needed, that is, the rhythm, and how many lines, and each time he would pull out just as much as was needed of each sort, out of different pockets.”¹⁰ It sometimes seemed that Glinka didn’t care at all about the words in his opera, as long as they were easy for the vocalists to sing: “Write whatever you want as long as you remember to always go to an ‘a’ or ‘ee’ for the high notes.”¹¹

Assured of his own genius, overly ambitious, and often quite capricious, Glinka was inexplicably offered friendly collaboration at every turn. As a result, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Prince Odoevsky, Count Vladimir Sollogub, and Nicholas I himself were all involved in the opera’s creation. Everyone, it seems, understood the cultural and historical significance of what was happening before their very eyes.

Only stupid and greedy theatrical officials tried to sabotage the work during rehearsals. The director of the theater wrote rude letters to Glinka alleging, as the composer later recalled, “that I was forcing the artists to sing in a room filled with tobacco smoke, which was bad for their voices.” But the patronage of Nicholas I protected the inexperienced author, who under other circumstances would have been brought to his knees.

The opera was first called Ivan Susanin, then A Death for the Tsar, and got its final name, A Life for the Tsar, at the wish of Nicholas I: “He who gives his life for the Sovereign does not die.”¹² For that title alone, Nicholas I deserves to be listed among the collaborators of Glinka’s opera.

At the premiere, connoisseurs were astounded by the opera’s innovative style and originality. Prince Odoevsky best expressed that feeling of an avant-garde breakthrough: Glinka was able “to elevate folk song to tragedy.”¹³ It was done without sentimentality or melodrama, in the Glinka style—lyrical, but pure and restrained.

Gogol, in his influential “Petersburg Notes of 1836,” captured the delight of Glinka’s fans: “He happily melded in his creation two Slavic musics; you can hear where the Russian speaks and where the Pole: one brings the broad melody of Russian song, the other the rash motif of the Polish mazurka.”

The first audience was particularly moved by the scene in which Susanin bids farewell to life and then dies at the hands of the Poles. The choristers depicting Poles attacked the singer “with such frenzy that they tore his shirt, and he had to defend himself for real” (from Glinka’s Notes). Susanin died with the words “Our Tsar is saved.” At the moment even the severe Nicholas I shed a tear, but after the performance he told Glinka, “It is not good that Susanin is killed on stage.”¹⁴ Naturally, the necessary changes were made.

In a rare occasion, the praise of the tastemakers coincided with the autocrat’s approval; thus, the reaction of the cautious high officials and their wives, who filled the orchestra seats and boxes, was predetermined. They had watched closely to see how the unfamiliar and puzzling music was received in the imperial box. The tsar’s demonstrative tear had its magical effect: soon after, the entire theater resounded with the sobs of the fashionable audience.

A special treat highlighted the finale: Zhukovsky had suggested the mind-boggling panorama of Mikhail Romanov in a gilded cart entering Red Square with the Kremlin in the background and being met by the joyous crowd, which was cleverly magnified by cardboard figures that created the illusion of an endless mass of people (the equivalent of today’s computerized effects in film).

According to the report in the government newspaper, “at the end of the opera the author of the music was unanimously called out and received a most gracious sign of good will from the Crowned Patron of fine arts accompanied by the audience’s loud clapping.”¹⁵ Glinka was called into the imperial box, where he was thanked first by Nicholas I and then by the empress and their children.

Soon after, the composer received a royal gift: a ring with a topaz, circled with three rows of “marvelous diamonds,” costing 4,000 rubles, an impressive sum in those days.

Glinka’s opera was instantly taken to heart by St. Petersburg’s educated circles: “In societies of the capital, large and small, brilliant and modest, they discuss that masterly work by our young composer and even dance quadrilles made up of his delightful melodies.”¹⁶

Nicholas I could be pleased: the work created under his auspices and even with his participation had entered life and history. The artistic elite considered A Life for the Tsar as entrée for Russian music onto the European stage. But for the emperor it was more important that the opera vividly fixed in the public mind the idyllic and patriotic story of the accession to the throne in 1613 of the first Romanov tsar.

The true events of young Mikhail Romanov’s accession were, of course, much more complex and cynical than what Nicholas I wanted to present more than two hundred years later. The person selected to be tsar in 1613 was, in the caustic remark of the great Russian historian Vassily Kliuchevsky, “not the most talented, but the most convenient … Mikhail Romanov is still young, his mind is not mature, and he will do our bidding.”¹⁷ Many thought and hoped that Tsar Mikhail would not last long on the throne. But he persevered, and reigned for a mostly uneventful thirty-two years.

In 1645, after Mikhail’s death, the boyars swore in his sixteen-year-old son, Alexei, who turned out to be a much more significant figure. His contemporaries dubbed Alexei “the Most Gentle,” and he is best known today as the father of the reformist Peter the Great.

Compared to his famous son’s intense activity, Alexei’s thirty-year reign may be seen as a time of stagnation. But it was in that period, which was in fact rather turbulent, that the innovative trends, which became so visible under Peter I, first manifested themselves in Russia.

Alexei was intensely religious, a quality that reappeared in later Romanovs. He prayed first thing in the morning, and as an experienced churchgoer could make a thousand or fifteen hundred bows to the ground in the course of several hours of prayer. (Since the tsar tended to be corpulent, those bows also served as a good fitness workout.)

Alexei was well versed in religious rituals, interfering in church services and correcting the monks. He fasted strictly eight months of the year, during which time he dined no more than three times a week, the rest of the time taking only black bread with salt. (Also a good habit.) Alexei performed these rituals easily, without strain or pretense.

Kind by nature, “with meek features and gentle eyes,”¹⁸ the tsar could still sometimes lose his temper and beat the person who angered him. But he would just as quickly calm down, and people did not bear grudges against him.

Still, the royal piety and kindness did not avert the great church schism, so fateful for Russia, or the cruel conflict between the tsar and the greatest writer of the period, Archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620 or 1621 to 1682), author of the famous Life, the first autobiographical work written in Russia.

Both tragedies were closely related. The church schism was the result of the ecclesiastical ambitions of Tsar Alexei and his “bosom friend” Patriarch Nikon. They both envisioned a universal Orthodox empire with Moscow as its center—the realization of an idea first proposed in 1510 by the elder Filofey (Philoteus) of the Elizarov Monastery, that Moscow would be the Third Rome (after the fall of the Second Rome, Constantinople).

In order to make this dream a reality, Patriarch Nikon started church reforms that would bring the Russian Orthodox ritual closer to the Greek—the Balkans were envisioned as part of the new empire. In particular, Nikon ordered all members of the church to make the sign of the cross not with two but with three fingers, and repeat “Hallelujah” not twice but three times, like the Greeks. The liturgy and the rituals of christening and repentance were simplified and the corresponding changes entered into church books.

As is customary in Russia, this was done hastily and unceremoniously. Nikon’s reforms upset and angered many believers, who considered them the work of Satan. The defenders of the old faith, who resisted even after they were anathemized, were branded “raskolniki,” “breakers-off,” but they called themselves Old Believers.

One of their leaders was a former friend of Nikon’s, the young and charismatic Avvakum, who at thirty-one had already been elevated to the rank of archpriest. In Moscow Avvakum, who preached at the important church of the Kazan Mother of God on Red Square, caught the attention of Tsar Alexei, who appreciated his “pure and irreproachable and God-emulating life.”¹⁹

Avvakum later remembered one episode in particular. The tsar came to the Kazan church for Easter and wished to see the archpriest’s young son, who was out playing somewhere. Alexei, as Avvakum later recalled, “sent my own brother to bring the child and stood for a long time waiting until my brother found the boy outside. He gave him his hand to kiss, but the boy was stupid and did not understand; he saw that he was not a priest, so he did not want to kiss it; the Sovereign brought his hand up to the child’s lips himself, then gave him two eggs and patted him on the head.”²⁰

But the tsar’s goodwill did not protect the archpriest from harm. When the persecution began of Old Believers, Avvakum and his wife were exiled to Siberia. There, under harsh conditions, they lived for eleven years.

In 1664, after ridding himself of the power-hungry Nikon, the tsar returned Avvakum to Moscow. He wanted this outstanding priest as his ally and therefore, according to Avvakum, treated him gently: “When he walked past my yard, he would bless himself and bow to me, often asking about my health. One time, sweetly, he even dropped his hat bowing to me.”²¹

Alexei even offered Avvakum the position of royal spiritual adviser. But as soon as Avvakum realized that the tsar had gotten rid of Nikon but had no intention of abandoning his church reforms, he wrote Alexei an angry letter. Their subsequent meeting in church was described vividly by Avvakum: “I stood before the tsar, bowing, looking at him, saying nothing. And the tsar bowed to me, stood looking at me and saying nothing. And so we parted.”²²

Avvakum and three of his friends were exiled to the small town of Pustozersk in the north, in a “place of tundra, cold, and no trees,” where they spent the last fifteen years of their lives (1667–1682). In Pustozersk the quartet of disobedient Old Believers unleashed a storm of dissident writing, sending incendiary letters to their associates that were distributed across the country in specially constructed wooden crosses with secret compartments. Three of the men were punished, their tongues cut out and the fingers of their right hands chopped off—so they could not conspire together or write their rebellious letters, or cross themselves with two fingers.

The tsar spared only Avvakum, causing him to fall into a deep depression: “I wanted to die, not eating, and I did not eat eight days and more, but the brothers forced me to eat.”²³ Avvakum and his “brothers” were placed in separate dug-out cells that had only a small window through which food was thrown down to them.

Avvakum sarcastically described his life in the dugout: “where we drink and eat is where we defecate, and then put the shit on a shovel and out the window! … I imagine that our Tsar Alexei does not have a chamber like this.”²⁴ So the treasure of ancient Russian literature, The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, was written by the author in proximity to his own shit—a symbolic picture, to be sure.

Avvakum’s fierce energy found an outlet in obsessive writing: of the nearly ninety works that have survived, more than eighty were written in prison. The most famous is Life, first published in 1861, after almost two hundred years in secret circulation among the Old Believers. Life stunned Russian readers with its vibrancy, colorful descriptiveness, and bold mix of Church Slavonic and colloquial Russian, often coarse but always expressive.

Of course, one of the reasons for the popularity of Avvakum the writer was Avvakum the personality—the archpriest was a martyr writer, and that always impressed Russian readers. His oppositionist attitude toward earthly powers elicited respect and awe in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the long-awaited repeal of serfdom. Avvakum referred to the tsar, who was traditionally still called “God’s anointed,” as being “anointed with filth.”

When Tsar Alexei died in 1673, the triumphant Avvakum thundered curses from Pustozersk: “Poor, poor, mad little tsar! What have you done to yourself? … where is the purple porphyry and royal crown ornamented with beads and precious stones? … Go to hell, you son of a whore!”

The final punishment came in response to this and other attacks from Avvakum; the new tsar, Fedor, ordered that Avvakum and his three friends be burned alive in 1682 “for great slander on the Royal House.” In the following years, tens of thousands of Old Believers all over Russia, inspired by the example of Avvakum, perished in “gari,” mass self-immolations. No writer could have ever dreamed of such grandiose and terrifying fiery memorials.

In the year of Avvakum’s horrible death, a lively and intelligent ten-year-old boy named Peter took the throne; he grew up to be a six-foot-six colossus and did not physically resemble his “Most Gentle” father in the least. Peter I was a muscular man with a springy step, and swung his arms so wildly as he walked that he frightened people. The effect was intensified by his huge bulging eyes and the nervous tic that marred his face at the slightest bit of agitation or tension.

Perhaps it was because of this marked contrast with the corpulent and kindly Tsar Alexei that people refused to recognize Peter as his true son: “The Sovereign is not of Russian stock and not the son of Tsar; the real son was switched in infancy with a foreigner in the German quarter.”²⁵

Another popular legend had the real Peter immured in Riga, his place on the throne taken by a foreign impostor. They also called Peter the Antichrist. There was a death penalty for such talk in Russia, but the rumors did not cease, especially among the Old Believers.

Ironically, for all the external differences, Peter I inherited a lot from his father. Like his father, he had a volatile temper; he loved to read and write; he was curious about foreign marvels; and he also shared Alexei’s dislike of overly power-hungry church officials and his love of all things military.

All the Romanovs, without exception, were particularly interested in military issues. That is quite understandable. As leaders of an enormous kingdom, they were obliged to care about its security and interests. Russia was continually defending itself or expanding. A mighty army was necessary, and its preparedness was always the main concern of Russian rulers.

No army exists in a social vacuum. It always mirrors the general state of affairs in the country, its social fabric, and the state of its economy, trade, and education. While examining the Romanovs’ attitude toward Russian culture, we should always remember that the majority of the important cultural initiatives of all the Russian monarchs were propelled by interests of state security (and personal security as well).

In that sense Peter’s father was no exception. Foreigners reported that “in military matters he is knowledgeable and fearless.”²⁶ Tsar Alexei participated in several military campaigns and saw with his own eyes his army’s shortcomings. That led to his attempts to reform it: he invited foreign mercenaries to Russia, and from Europe he purchased cannons with iron cannonballs, thousands of muskets, and tons of gunpowder.

In Alexei’s reign, Russia started building weapons factories—and needed foreigners again. A long line of unemployed European masters in the most varied professions made its way to Russia: foundry workers, stonemasons, weavers, clockmakers. And after them came architects, painters, teachers of languages, “politesse,” and dance. As Kliuchevsky summarized it, “They started with foreign officers and German cannons and ended with German ballet.”²⁷

Thus, the famous reforms of Peter I did not come out of thin air, but followed his father’s lead. In that sense, Peter can be considered a good son. It is another matter that Peter’s reforms took on an incredible acceleration, which created the illusion of a radical break with Russia’s past.

Instead of the break metaphor, some contemporary scholars offer another—a single flow, albeit rather turbulent at times. In the framework of that current, both national traditions and European innovations coexisted and interacted in Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

According to the populist critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, Peter I “cast off the ancient, obsolete forms in which the highest authority existed before him; but the essence remained the same even under him … In a sailor’s jacket, with an ax in his hand, he held his kingdom just as terrifyingly and powerfully as had his predecessors dressed in porphyry and seated on a golden throne with a scepter in their hands.”²⁸

Peter’s attitude toward culture in general, and literature and art in particular, was utilitarian. His main goal was the creation of a strong, modern army and navy. This attitude was reflected in the books of Peter’s personal library, in which most of the more than fifteen hundred volumes were devoted to military studies and shipbuilding, followed by historical works and books on architecture and parks.

In his desire to strengthen “order and defense,” Peter shook up the country. His radical cultural initiatives were part of that shake-up. Merely a listing of those initiatives is impressive: an unprecedented secularization of culture; the establishment in 1703 of Russia’s first printed newspaper, Bulletin on Military and Other Affairs, Worthy of Being Known and Remembered, Occurring in the Muscovite State and Other Neighboring Countries; and the expansion of the network of printing presses that began producing “civil” books—that is, set in the new, simplified type.

Later, the great scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov drew a parallel between this last innovation and the tsar’s enforced Europeanization of his subjects’ appearance: “Under Peter the Great not only the boyars and their wives, but even the letters threw off their wide fur coats and dressed in summer clothing.”²⁹

One of the most notable steps in the change of Russia’s political and cultural image was the establishment in 1703 of the city of St. Petersburg in the mouth of the Neva River; it became the official new capital in 1712. The tsar was particularly proud of that action, fantastic in both its boldness and irrationality, and he never failed to include it in lists of his main achievements. In terms of culture, St. Petersburg became a laboratory for elaborating the architectural and behavioral models that Peter wanted to extend throughout the country.

Private brick buildings, European-style parks, and streets paved with stones and illuminated by streetlamps first appeared in Russia in St. Petersburg. Peter’s favorite creation was the Summer Garden, which abutted his summer residence; he had personally drawn the original plans for it. An inveterate teacher, the tsar told his gardener, “I want people who stroll here in the garden to find something edifying.”³⁰

Rejecting the gardener’s suggestion to place books on the benches, Peter ordered sculptural groups depicting the characters of Aesop’s fables, which he loved, for the park. The groups ornamented the fountains. A metal sign at each fountain gave the fable’s text in large letters. Peter liked to gather strollers and explain the meanings of the depicted stories.

Another educational measure was the installation of a Roman marble statue of Venus, bought on Peter’s orders in Italy in 1719. This was a direct challenge to the Orthodox Church, which banned sculptural depictions of people in general (it was considered pagan idolatry), and of naked women in particular.

In Russia, the marble Venus was immediately dubbed the “white she-devil,” and of course would have been vandalized if Peter had not prudently posted guards. Bringing stunned (and probably secretly indignant) guests over to his beloved Venus, Peter tried to teach them the basics of mythology, which he knew rather well.

Still, Peter’s erudition was basically utilitarian. The great German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, at one time Peter’s adviser, recalled the tsar’s statement that he found more beauty in well-working machinery than in lovely paintings. According to Alexandre Benois, Peter made a great mistake: wanting to reform Russian art, he took as his model provincial Dutch culture, bringing in second-rate masters and thereby slowing Russia’s artistic progress.

Benois did not understand that Peter was not interested in importing the most fashionable or sophisticated European art; he wanted what he considered most useful and necessary for Russia’s current needs.

What Peter needed most of all were craftsmen who could build and design St. Petersburg; he insisted that the European architects, sculptors, and artists he hired be jacks-of-all-trades. By that time in Europe, the leading artists were primarily narrow specialists: some did portraits, others still lifes, and still others historical paintings.

Peter expected that the artists he brought to Russia would be able to paint formal portraits of the tsar and high officials; capture such amusing curiosities as bearded ladies or two-headed children; restore old paintings; paint palace walls; and depict the parades and festivities marking Peter’s victories. In addition, the visiting artists were supposed to train Russian apprentices.

Naturally, well-known and self-respecting artists had no intention of signing such contracts, and mostly craftsmen and hack artists came to Russia. Their students were a rather sorry lot, too: “Peter felt that anything could be learned given willingness and diligence—and therefore the selection for artists was made the way it was for seamen or artillery-men—by force.”³¹

And this despite the fact that Russia had its own majestic centuries-old painterly tradition. I am speaking of course about icons (without going into their purely religious significance), those astonishing, magical, and spiritually elevating artifacts of medieval Russian culture. But Peter, even though, like all Russian tsars, he grew up contemplating icons, obviously did not perceive icon painting as useful. It was a reflection of his ambivalent attitude toward the church.

While a believer, Peter nevertheless was deeply suspicious of the church hierarchy. Remembering the conflicts between his father and Patriarch Nikon, Peter eventually did away with the patriarchy, informing the gathered church officials that from that moment on they would be ruled by the Government Synod, appointed by the tsar; that is, Peter placed himself as the de facto head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Among its other goals, this move was an attempt to put Russian culture under the autocrat’s direct control and away from the influence of the church—an attempt that succeeded in many respects.

Under Peter, icon painting was downgraded to a level commensurate with carpentry, weaving, and sewing. Since icon painting methods could not be used to illustrate scientific books or execute blueprints and drafts, engravers and their work, which was useful for information and propaganda, came to the fore.

A typical figure in that sense was the engraver Alexei Zubov, a leading master of the Petrine period. His father had been an icon painter in the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Mikhail, and served Peter’s father as well. Zubov was sent to study with a visiting Dutch engraver who instructed the Russian youth, “Everything that I see or think about can be cut into copper.”³²

For a hereditary icon master, such ideas must have been heretical—icon painting was not about reproducing life but about executing the traditional painterly formulas that had been perfected over generations. But Zubov quite quickly turned into an able professional engraver. He moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg and became the first inspired portrayer of the new capital; his majestic 1720 composition, The Triumphal Entrance into St. Petersburg of Captured Swedish Frigates, preserved for us the vital force and visual charm of the young city.

Peter liked Zubov’s work, and he was given important commissions, such as his famous Depiction of the Marriage of His Royal Majesty Peter I and Ekaterina Alexeyevna in 1712, where more than one hundred feasting ladies and cavaliers hail the newlyweds, and the face of the future Catherine I is significantly larger than the faces of the ladies around her (a vestige of the icon painting tradition).

Peter was famously tightfisted, but a good professional could count on a tolerable salary. A timely reminder of one’s accomplishments could help. Zubov received 195 rubles a year, a good sum, three times more than some of his Russian colleagues but half what foreigners got (a humiliating practice that later Romanovs retained). In 1719, Zubov complained to the tsar that in view of the city’s “high cost of all foodstuffs there is nothing to feed my family and pay my debts.”³³

We do not know if the tsar raised his salary then, but it is clear from his petition to Peter in 1723 that Zubov did not live in such constrained circumstances as he tried to portray earlier. Zubov addresses the monarch as “His Most Serene Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia Peter the Great, Father of the Fatherland and Most Merciful Sovereign.” (Emperor and Father of the Fatherland were new titles given to Peter two years earlier by the Government Senate; he was named “the Great” then, too.) After the formalities, Zubov moved on to the point: when the artist was traveling in his own carriage on business to the home of Prince Dimitri Kantemir, he was attacked by two robbers, who tried to steal his horse and beat his servant, “and when they started beating me and my man, I screamed. Hearing my screams, they, the robbers, ran off.”³⁴

This passage is interesting not only because it reveals that an artist had his own carriage and servant, and not only because it is a vivid description of a typical attack by robbers for that time, but also because it mentions the man Zubov was going to see—Dimitri Kantemir.

Serene Prince Dimitri Kantemir was an exotic figure, yet characteristic of the Petrine era. The former ruler of Moldavia, which was then under Turkish rule, Kantemir spent many years of his youth as a hostage in Constantinople, where the Turks treated him with the greatest respect and allowed him to get a brilliant education.

Dimitri Kantemir became a polyglot, and his History of the Ottoman Empire, written in Latin and later published in French and English, received the approval of the philosopher Denis Diderot and Voltaire, who used it as a source for his tragedy Mahomet (1739). (And in the early twenty-first century in New York, I witnessed Turkish melodies and marches still being performed in the notation made more than three hundred years earlier by Kantemir.)

In 1711, a year after he inherited the Moldavian throne from his father, Dimitri Kantemir tried to free his country from the Turks, entering into a secret alliance with Peter I. That time, the attempt failed. Kantemir and his family fled to Russia, where he settled.

In Russia, Kantemir, just a year younger than Peter, became his chief adviser on all eastern and Turkish problems. Peter bestowed many gifts on Kantemir, gave him the highest-rank title of serene prince, and supported his historical research. Zubov illustrated one of Kantemir’s books, On the Mohammedan Religion.

One of Dimitri’s four sons, Antioch, was a wunderkind. In 1718, at the age of ten, Antioch gave a public speech in Greek at the Moscow Slavic-Greco-Latin Academy. In 1722 Antioch accompanied his father, who with Peter went on the legendary Persian Campaign, in which Russia tried to push the Ottoman Empire and Iran out of Transcaucasia. Peter’s army took Derbent and, later, Baku.

Antioch could observe Peter up close for seven months. The unbearable heat made Peter cut off his hair; it was carefully saved and made into a wig, which to this day ornaments the head of the famous “wax person,” the posthumous sculptural depiction of Peter the Great in life size, seated on a throne, created in 1725 by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli the elder and now located at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

We can imagine the shock felt by young Kantemir when Peter, fifty-two years old, his health undermined by his tempestuous lifestyle, died unexpectedly in 1725 (it is thought now that he had prostate cancer or an inflammation of the bladder). The tsar’s funeral was held in St. Petersburg’s Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, a prolific writer and close comrade-in-arms of Peter’s in church affairs, began his speech at the emperor’s grave with the emotional words that were memorized by Russian schoolchildren for almost two centuries: “What is this? What have we lived to see, O Russians? What do we see? What are we doing? Burying Peter the Great!”³⁵

His graveside sermon was not long; it should have taken fifteen minutes but lasted almost an hour because it was interrupted by the sobs and wailing of mourners. The speech and other panegyric works by Prokopovich celebrating the emperor became the foundation of the myth of Peter the Transformer, one of the most enduring cultural paradigms of Russian history.

Peter the Great was and perhaps remains the most popular Russian political figure of the new era, like Napoleon in France. Everyone agrees that his reforms were extraordinary in scope and significance. The disagreements come in the assessment of those reforms. He has his apologists and many severe critics.

Heated discussions about Peter’s role have continued for almost three hundred years, with alternating prevalence of the arguments pro and contra. The emperor’s proponents maintain that he led Russia onto the European stage, without which all of Russia’s subsequent great cultural achievements would have been impossible.

But at what price? counter their opponents. “The artificial state constructed by Peter moved for two centuries from crisis to crisis, engendering ever greater anger of its citizens, until it collapsed in blood and flames.”³⁶

It is doubtful that this argument will be resolved any time soon. The point is this: after Peter the Great, all political leaders of Russia, to this day, look over their shoulders at the first Russian emperor, imitating him or rejecting him, but inevitably measuring themselves against him.

This reaction is typical for the great cultural figures of Russia as well. None remained indifferent to Peter’s ideas and legacy. In their polemics about Peter the Great, they defined their own place in the continuing cultural and historical debates about Russia’s fate and path.

CHAPTER 2

Kantemir, Lomonosov, and Barkov

Atioch Kantemir was one of the first creators of the cultural mythos about Peter the Great. The diplomat, master of political intrigue, and biting satiric poet had as a youngster fallen under Peter’s hypnotic charm and remained the tsar’s zealous apologist throughout his brief and turbulent life, until his death of stomach cancer in Paris in 1744, where he was the Russian ambassador. He was only thirty-five.

Kantemir’s satires mocking the opponents of Peter’s reforms were popular in intellectual circles, where copies circulated. But Russian poets, from Vassily Zhukovsky to Joseph Brodsky, were always Kantemir’s greatest admirers. In 1810, Zhukovsky noted, “We have in Kantemir our Juvenal and Horace,” adding that Kantemir “never uses four words when three will do”¹—the highest praise a poet can pay another. Brodsky, who compared Kantemir to John Donne, enjoyed reading me his sarcastic lines about a hypocritical monk: “He pities people who died in lust, / But secretly stares at a rounded bust.”

Kantemir’s satires were paradoxically (but typically, for Russian literature) first published in London in French in 1749 and only printed in Russia eighteen years after the poet’s death, in an edition by Ivan Barkov. Even as late as 1851, Emperor Nicholas I could not accept the audacity of Kantemir’s attacks on the clergy: “In my opinion, there is no possible use in reprinting Kantemir’s works.”² Yet Kantemir was the first Russian poet to achieve recognition in the enlightened circles of eighteenth-century Europe.

Sent to the West in 1732 by Peter I’s niece, Empress Anna Ioannovna, Kantemir learned only belatedly in Paris of one of the most dramatic episodes in Russian history: on the night of November 25, 1741, a squad of three hundred Imperial Guards led by Peter’s daughter, the thirty-two-year-old blue-eyed blonde Elizabeth, burst into the Winter Palace, the imperial residence. The guards bore Elizabeth (who wore a very becoming brass cuirass on her pretty head) on their shoulders and declared her empress.

This brought an end to “the era of palace coups”: in the twenty-seven years since the death of Peter the Great the throne had been occupied by Catherine I, Peter II, Anna Ioannovna, and the infant Ioann IV, none of whom played a significant role in the development of Russian culture.

Elizabeth I was a different matter. In the twenty years of her reign (she died in 1761) even the most stubborn foes of Peter the Great had to admit that his reforms had become irreversible: Russia was speeding along the European path. And even more importantly: the Europeanized culture that had been forcibly implanted by Peter had not only taken root among the Russian elite but had begun taking on definite national features, under the clear encouragement of the new empress.

In that sense the figure of Mikhail Lomonosov is symbolic. His multifaceted talents and the wealth of his contributions to culture caused him to be called the Russian Leonardo da Vinci. He was a legend in his lifetime, and to this day there is probably no Russian who does not know a few details of his colorful biography.

Everyone heard the story of the peasant lad who at nineteen, in 1730, ran away from home in a northern coastal village and with a load of frozen fish reached Moscow, where he miraculously got into school and then grew up to be a major scholar and poet, experimenting with electricity, creating mosaics, fighting against the German preponderance in the Academy of Sciences, and founding Moscow University, the first in the land.

Nikolai Nekrasov’s tear-jerking poem “The Schoolboy,” written in 1856, more than ninety years after Lomonosov’s death, was instantly included in Russian textbooks and canonized the legend of “How a muzhik from Archangel / Through his own and God’s will / Became wise and great.”

A close look at some of the “miracles” in Lomonosov’s life yields quite rational explanations for them. Of course, Lomonosov was a man of almost supernatural abilities, but many very “earthly” circumstances promoted his career.

For a start, Lomonosov was lucky to be born to a family of a “state” peasant—that is, a free one, not a serf. His father was prosperous: he owned land and fishing rights and carried cargo (more than eighty-six tons) on his own two-masted boat, St. Archangel Mikhail. When the village was rebuilding the church that had burned down, Lomonosov’s father contributed more than anyone else to the fund—18 rubles. (For comparison: at that time carpenters in St. Petersburg were paid between 12 and 24 rubles a year, depending on their qualifications.)

The legendary “load of frozen fish,” with which Lomonosov traveled for three weeks from Archangel Province to Moscow, is a very exotic stroke. But fishing was the main (and very profitable) business of the coastal peasants. If Lomonosov’s fellow villagers had been fur traders, the young man would have reached the capital with a “load of sable,” which is not nearly as touching.

The miraculous way Lomonosov got into the Slavic-Greco-Latin Academy (the same one attended by young Antioch Kantemir) was described in his official biography of 1784 this way: in the capital the poor youth “knew not a single person”; after spending the first night in Moscow in the fish stalls, Lomonosov “fell to his knees, raised his eyes to the nearest church and begged God to have mercy.”³

So the next morning a majordomo, come to buy fish, recognized Lomonosov as a fellow villager and took him home. Two days after that, the majordomo’s friend dropped by—a monk from the monastery where the elite academy was housed. The majordomo interceded on Mikhail’s behalf, the monk was willing, and the lad was accepted as a student at the academy with an annual stipend of 10 rubles.

In order to get in, Lomonosov had to say he was the son of nobility, since peasant children were not accepted in seminaries at the time. For some reason the abbot of the monastery believed him—had the monk put in a good word for his friend’s countryman?—and things were settled.

Today’s skeptical reader is unlikely to see “God’s providence” or even good fortune in this chain of events; it is more like the expected result of a network of useful acquaintances, which worked in Lomonosov’s day just as it does in ours.

Throughout his life, Lomonosov always found numerous patrons who got him out of situations that would have ruined anyone else’s career. Lomonosov, who was big and strong not only mentally but physically, also had a quarrelsome nature and a preference for strong drink that led to brawls, which were not suitable for the scholarly milieu in which he found himself. (Even his surname means “nosebreaker” in Russian.)

In 1736, Lomonosov was sent to Germany to study mining and chemistry at the university in Marburg (where 176 years later another great Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, was to study philosophy). Outraged reports soon flew from Marburg to Russia about his “excessively boisterous life and passion for the female sex.” Then Lomonosov got into an argument with his professor: “He made terrible noise, banging with all his might on the partitions, shouting out the window, and swearing.”⁴

This habit of blowing up over the least thing, or even without a reason, remained throughout Lomonosov’s unfairly short life (he died in 1765 at the age of fifty-three). He left Germany for St. Petersburg, where he was hired at the Academy of Sciences. Here again he behaved scandalously, bursting into a neighbor’s house in search of his sheepskin jacket. With bared saber in his hand, Lomonosov threatened the neighbor and his guests and hacked up all the furniture; the innocent neighbor’s wife, terrified, jumped out the window. The young scientist, apparently drunk, was pacified by six patrolmen, who dragged him to the police.

And once again, as had happened in Germany, the incident was covered up by someone, even though Lomonosov already had a record of “fighting and dishonorable behavior.”

This unusual leniency on the part of the authorities is not difficult to explain. From the moment of her accession to the throne, Empress Elizabeth I made it a policy to promote “national cadres” in all spheres, including science. All her advisers urged this policy; in their opinion, Peter’s promotion of foreigners, especially Germans, to positions of leadership had gotten out of control under his successors.

There was no open declaration of “Russia for Russians” under Elizabeth, but things were moving in that direction. Well-built, strong, energetic, and full of ideas, Lomonosov proclaimed that “the Russian land can give birth to her own Platos and quick-minded Newtons.” He seemed a convenient symbolic figure (despite the excesses of his character) to Elizabeth’s ministers.

The young genius quickly showed what he could do. While still studying in Germany, in 1739 he sent a “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification” to the academy, elaborating his ideas on modernization of Russian verse. The “Letter” and other important works by Lomonosov—“Short Guide to Rhetoric,” “Russian Grammar,” and particularly “Preface on the Usefulness of Church Books in the Russian Language,” set the stylistic norms for Russian writing for at least the next hundred years. Contemporary literary Russian is in many ways the child of Lomonosov.

Pushkin summed up the achievements of this extraordinary man concisely: “Lomonosov was a great man. Between Peter I and Catherine II he appears as a unique champion of enlightenment. He created the first university. It would be better to say that he himself was our first university.”

. . .

Lomonosov was a genial host. He received guests in the garden of his house in St. Petersburg, wearing a Chinese robe and seated at an oak table set with an abundance of food and drink, including salted pickles and fish brought by countrymen from Archangel. Perhaps the most curious of Lomonosov’s drinking friends was his faithful collaborator Ivan Barkov.

Nothing is clear or reliable in Barkov’s brief biography: his father’s name, exact year of birth, and circumstances of his death (it is supposed that he committed suicide when he was thirty-six or thirty-seven).⁵ For ten years Barkov worked for Lomonosov as clerk and editor. He was also highly regarded as an excellent translator from French, German, and Latin. His edition of the first Russian publication of Kantemir’s satires, mentioned earlier, was well received.

But that is not what made Barkov famous in Russia. He is known (for some, just by reputation) as the author of the most indecent poems in the history of Russian poetry. The genre itself—pornographic poetry—is still described as “Barkovism.” Barkov’s poems were considered unfit to print for more than two hundred years, but were circulated in Russia in numerous handwritten copies and memorized by dozens of generations of students, evidence of their indisputable poetic expressiveness and power.

Some of the greatest Russian poets—Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nekrasov—were his admirers and imitators; each tried his hand at Barkovism.

Pushkin compared Barkov to François Villon, the notorious medieval French poet and reveler. Pushkin was clearly drawn to the figure of Barkov, who was described by people who had known him in his youth as merry and insouciant—a description that fits Pushkin as well.

For Pushkin, who was constantly searching for the parameters of the place of the poet in Russian society, Lomonosov and Barkov clearly represented the two poles of a possible behavioral model: one proud, even arrogant, overly concerned about his honor and overreacting to criticism from the mighty; the other, liberated and carefree. Pushkin maintained, paradoxically, that “poetry, God forgive me, must be foolish.” This claim was later interpreted by Mikhail Bakhtin in his groundbreaking book on François Rabelais: “Barrels of wine will burst if from time to time vents are not opened and air let in. We humans are all poorly made barrels that will burst from the wine of wisdom, if that wine is constantly fermenting in awe and fear of God. They need air to keep from spoiling. That is why we permit ourselves certain days of foolishness (stupidity) in order to return with greater ardor to the service of the Lord.”

Barkov’s parody verses are Rabelaisian in character, and, curiously, he parodied his mentor Lomonosov (who apparently and surprisingly did not take offense). For example, Lomonosov’s “Psalm 145” begins thus:

Praise for the All-High Lord

Try, my spirit, to send …

Barkov’s version is almost the same:

Praise for the almighty hero

Try, my spirit, to send …

However, Barkov’s ode is “To the Cock.”

In Barkov’s funny parody of a typical classical tragedy, Prince Limprick and his brother Fuckalot are rivals for the beauty Pussymila. She complains about Limprick: “He may be a prince in his reason, but in his cock he is a slave.” The poem has juicy descriptions of violent sexual acts both hetero- and homosexual, still astonishing in their unrestrained language. At the end, the powerful Fuckalot triumphs.

Ironically, Pushkin predicted that the first book to come out in Russia after the repeal of censorship would be the complete works of Barkov. In that prediction, as in many other things, Pushkin was a true prophet: soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, not just one, but three editions of Barkov’s obscene poems appeared.

In fact, 224 years after his death, Barkov became a best-selling author and a timely one, originating the ocean of obscene literature that flooded the Russian book market in the uncensored post-Soviet period.

Thus, in the late twentieth century Barkov turned out to be more interesting for readers and writers than his mentor Lomonosov, whose poetry had become the domain of specialists.

CHAPTER 3

Catherine the Great and the Culture of Her Era

An engraved portrait of Ivan Barkov has survived: a round, youthful face, plump lips, and an open, dreamy gaze—the textbook image of a young poet, brow unmarred by the years of drunkenness, debauchery, humiliation, and punishments that led to his sad end. But there were moments of triumph in Barkov’s tragic life.

One of them, if legend is to be believed, was the occasion when Barkov was invited to the court of Empress Catherine II, who was brought to power by the Imperial Guards in 1762. Allegedly, Catherine asked Barkov to say a few lines impromptu. He raised his glass of wine and proclaimed, “To the health of the gates through which all mankind entered life!” The empress is said to have replied instantly, “And I drink to the health of the key that unlocks those gates without a knock!”¹

Barkov’s biography is skimpy on precise information and rich in legend and anecdote. In this case, what is important is not the veracity or apocryphal nature of this story but that the names of Catherine the Great and Barkov are intertwined in historical memory. This probably reflects the attitude toward the empress, in whose lifetime popular pornographic caricatures depicted her in flagrante delicto with her lovers (I saw one at a New York Public Library exhibit in 2003).

The legend of Catherine’s debauched ways is very persistent, remaining in the public mind (both in Russia and in the West) for more than two centuries. It is not surprising, since the greatest minds insisted upon it, among them young Pushkin (“The corrupt sovereign corrupted her state”) and Alexander Herzen (“The history of Catherine II cannot be read in the presence of ladies”).

In Soviet times, she was vilified in serious monographs and textbooks: “depraved and criminal woman” and “semiliterate slut who turned the tsar’s house into a whorehouse.”²

Yet when diligent historians compiled a documentary list of Catherine’s lovers, it contained between twelve and eighteen men for the period from 1753 to 1796—that is, on average one affair for every two and a half years.³ A monastic lifestyle? Hardly. But a promiscuous nymphomaniac? That is not a conclusion that would be drawn either in our day or in the rather dissolute eighteenth century.

There was another widespread charge (both then and now) from the opposite side: Catherine II was a hypocrite, “a Tartuffe in skirt and crown” (Pushkin again). But here this makes no sense at all: it is just as silly to accuse a political figure of hypocrisy as it would be to rebuke a zebra for its stripes; hypocrisy and politics are, alas, inseparable. Catherine was perhaps the first politician in the modern sense on the Russian throne—in any case, the first empress politician.

Her predecessor, Elizabeth I, came to the throne as the legitimate daughter of Peter the Great. Catherine II had to fight for the throne, and she conducted that fight just like a modern political candidate: kissing babies, listening patiently to old people, and saluting the military.

Catherine wrote about it in her memoirs, extremely frank for a professional politician: “I tried to gain the affection of everyone, from young to old; I never overlooked anyone and made it a rule to think that I needed everyone and to act accordingly in order to gain general approbation, in which I succeeded.”⁴

Given in marriage on the orders of Elizabeth I to Peter the Great’s grandson (and her nephew), the future Peter II, the fourteen-year-old German princess was brought to Russia in 1744, and that homely, ambitious, calculating, and phenomenally gifted young woman eventually took over the throne, realizing her long-held plans.

The future Catherine II put all her prodigious effort into turning from a German into an ultra-Russian: she learned to speak, read, and write fluently in Russian; she converted to Russian Orthodoxy, using every opportunity to show her allegiance to her new faith; and, most importantly, from her early years she surrounded herself with friends who were Russian nobles and officers. She learned much from Elizabeth I, whom she observed closely and patiently, in particular how cleverly she used the institution of favoritism in the interests of strengthening her power.

Elizabeth continued Peter’s change of ruling class within the framework of absolute monarchy. Peter the Great had marginalized the boyars and made the military caste the country’s new elite. It had its own crème de la crème: two Guards regiments, each with three thousand bayonets. These were the tsar’s most loyal people, his favorites, his emissaries in varied fields from industry to culture. And they eventually became the striking fist of the new force—the Russian nobility (dvoriane), who placed Elizabeth I on the throne in 1741.

Elizabeth clung to power by using their support. Her favorites were not simply and not only her lovers, they were also her most trusted proponents. Sexual proximity guaranteed political loyalty.

For Catherine, this was one of the most important political lessons she mastered. She used the Guards to ascend to the Russian throne in 1762 and absorbed Elizabeth’s method of generous rewards to her favorites, which so outraged not only contemporaries but later generations as well.

Yet it is clear that the shower of gold that fell on lucky lovers created a new power stratum loyal to the empress. “Old money” took generations to accrue, sometimes centuries, while a favorite of Elizabeth I could become a millionaire in a year or two.

Seizing the throne, Catherine reinforced her positions in the same way: she gave away money (hundreds of thousands of rubles at a time), expensive jewelry, huge estates, and serfs—her famous lover Grigory Potemkin received no fewer than 44,000 serfs.

A parallel is obvious with the turbulent 1990s, when the same method was used to create a group of loyal oligarchs who successfully masterminded the reelection of Boris Yeltsin to the presidency. But Catherine II, who reigned for thirty-four years, also managed to create a quiet life for her new elite, without the continual threat of arrest or expropriation of property, and in that sense her reign is comparable to the Brezhnev years.

Obviously, Catherine did not like Elizabeth, who played the role of demanding and unpredictable mother-in-law. In her Notes of Empress Catherine II, she describes her as being indolent, messy, and not very bright. Catherine the Great’s Notes is a malicious, prejudiced, and self-serving book, as memoirs should be, especially political ones. It makes clear that for Catherine, Elizabeth I was too much a “person of the Baroque,” while she justly considered herself a leading exponent of the new trend—Classicism.

Elizabeth did not stint on the construction of sophisticated and eccentric palaces. Her favorite architect was the Italian Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who was brought to Russia when he was sixteen and grew up to be the greatest master of Russian Baroque. Rastrelli designed the enormous light blue palace, sumptuously ornamented in gold, for Tsarskoe Selo outside St. Petersburg, which was Elizabeth’s main residence for a while. In St. Petersburg itself, Rastrelli created the marvelous complex of the Smolny Monastery.

His most famous work is the Winter Palace, in its final form, the building in which the Hermitage Museum is now housed. It was begun in 1754 and completed in 1762, under Catherine II. The Winter Palace has more than a thousand rooms, around two hundred doors and as many windows, and more than a hundred staircases.

The facade of the palace, with its complicated, eye-catching design of four hundred columns, which Rastrelli treated as sculptural elements, works magically with the interiors, embodying Elizabeth’s idea that her “empire has reached such prosperity as it had never seen before.”

But Catherine II, even though she accepted the Winter Palace as a posthumous gift from Elizabeth, which remained the official imperial residence until the end of the Romanov dynasty, looked down her nose at the architectural excesses. For her and her enlightened entourage, the Baroque style was “low, poor taste.” Catherine II unceremoniously dispatched the sixty-two-year-old Rastrelli into retirement.

If Rastrelli’s Winter Palace may be considered the cultural symbol of Elizabeth’s reign, then the symbol for Catherine would be the equestrian monument to Peter the Great by the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet (the Bronze Horseman, as Pushkin later called it). Falconet resembled Rastrelli in his independence, stubbornness, bad temper, and the fact that as a foreigner he obtained immortality through projects realized in Russia.

Denis Diderot, a famous French philosophe, had suggested bringing Falconet to St. Petersburg from Paris to Catherine. Diderot maintained a correspondence with Catherine, who considered herself a philosophe monarch, for many years and even visited St. Petersburg as her guest.

It was suggested that Falconet was Diderot’s greatest gift to Russia. The sculptor, at fifty, came to St. Petersburg with his seventeen-year-old student Marie Ann Collot, spent twelve years (1766–1778) working on the monument, and returned to France, unwilling to wait for its unveiling in 1782. The reason behind his unexpected departure was the conflict of the irritable and self-confident sculptor with Ivan Betskoy, president of the Academy of Arts and de facto minister of culture under Catherine.

This Betskoy was a remarkable man. He spent many years in Europe, where in 1728 he met the beautiful young Duchess Anhalt-Zerbst (the mother of the future Catherine II) and became her lover. Catherine was born a year later; rumor had Betskoy as the father (the husband of the frivolous duchess was twice her age).

Later Betskoy took an active part in the Guards’ coup of 1782 that led his presumed daughter to the throne. Catherine treated Betskoy kindly, even tenderly, but with a touch of irony, like a loving daughter who has surpassed her father. She valued his mind and European education and his close relations with the French philosophes she so admired.

As a progressive, Betskoy was a fan of Classicism, which should have made him an ally of Falconet’s. But no: two powerful personalities clashed, and life in the capital turned into hell for the paranoid Falconet. Betskoy controlled the sculptor’s every step, accusing him of being slow (for good reason), of wasting state funds (also not without reason), and even of making serious artistic errors (the most controversial).

In particular, Betskoy maintained that Falconet had overly cut down the huge granite boulder intended for the pedestal, which had taken two and a half years to deliver to St. Petersburg (especially for this project). When the dynamic statue of Peter the Great (his head modeled by Collot) on horseback was placed on the pedestal, wags said it looked like “a small cliff squashed by a big horse.”

Still, Falconet’s main critic and adviser was, naturally, Catherine II, for whom the project was propaganda of the first order. That would explain the unusual fact that almost the day after his arrival in St. Petersburg, Catherine began systematic correspondence with him, which continued for many years.

In their letters, the empress and the sculptor discussed literally every detail of the monument: from the spot where it would be located to the emperor’s costume (a stylized Roman toga) to the character of the horse (Catherine worried it would turn out to be a “dumb animal”).

In almost every letter Catherine tried to calm and encourage Falconet, who constantly complained about his real and imaginary enemies: “Just laugh at the fools and go your way. That is my rule.”⁵

The sculptor’s farewell gift was the inscription he suggested for the pedestal: “For Peter I erected by Catherine II.” The empress changed it to: “For Peter I Catherine II,” an editing masterpiece of her political and literary acumen. Those words, which subtly but indubitably turned her into the legitimate heir of Peter the Great, should be enough to bury the myth of “semiliterate slut.”

. . .

Moreover, when everything Catherine II wrote (including the memoirs, historical plays, comedies, opera libretti, stories, magazine articles and pamphlets, philosophical and historical works—for example, “Notes Regarding Russian History,” intended for her grandsons—and the numerous translations, personally composed decrees and laws, and her voluminous correspondence, with such international luminaries as Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert) is collected and published, it will run to a long line of heavy tomes.

The empress was a tireless worker, rising no later than six in the morning, and sitting down to writing, writing, writing, using two new pens a day. No Russian monarch before or after covered so much paper: of course she had the right to consider Elizabeth lazy. Yet Catherine was no graphomaniac: she had a self-deprecating view of her literary works.

Catherine, cleverly following in the footsteps of Elizabeth, whom she so disliked, continued to russify Peter’s cultural project as much as possible; the poet Prince Vyazemsky later summed up the paradox this way: “The Russian wanted to make Germans of us; the German tried to turn us into Russians.”⁶

Still, for Catherine, Peter remained the example and model; how close she measured up to him is subject for debate. But the constant unfavorable comparisons seem unfair now and based on anti-intellectual or sexist prejudices, since, as we know, her workday with paper and pen was no less intense than Peter’s celebrated days at the lathe or in shipbuilding, wielding his ax.

Catherine was not a spendthrift like Elizabeth, but she spent more generously on culture than Peter had. A good example is her acquisition of paintings, engravings, drawings, sculptures, and works in porcelain and silver that formed the basis of the Hermitage collections. She often said—coyly, no doubt—that she knew nothing about art. But which great figure with a famed art collection could claim to have done it all to his or her own taste? They all turned to professional advisers.

The appearance of Catherine’s agents at Parisian art auctions panicked her competitors: she outbid them for some of the Hermitage’s acclaimed Rembrandts, Murillos, and Turners this way. It was the first huge invasion of Russian money into the European art market.

Even the philosophe Diderot, who admired Catherine, had doubts at first about the success of her collecting (“It is impossible that Russia would ever accumulate enough painting that could inspire a true taste for art”),⁷ but soon he would write from Paris to his friend Falconet in St. Petersburg: “I am eliciting real public hatred, and do you know why? Because I am sending you paintings. The art lovers are howling, the artists are howling, the wealthy are howling.”⁸

A comparison of the efforts of Peter I and Catherine II in the area of book publishing and journalism is telling. Peter achieved a breakthrough: in the last quarter century of his life, almost two thousand books and brochures were printed.⁹ The problem was that most of these publications lay like rubbish in warehouses: Peter’s selections did not excite the reading public. After the emperor’s death, the unsold backlog was cut up or burned, and many books were used for wrapping.

Catherine’s publishing policy was much more successful. She gave Russians translations of Homer, Cicero, Tacitus, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding.

She also sponsored the satirical journal All Sorts and Sundry, begun in 1769, which was modeled on the English political magazines of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Catherine wrote articles and allegorical tales for the magazine, expressing her political views and mocking the Russian elite’s laziness, dissipation, and kowtowing to the West. She continued to support such magazines; for example, when the Freemason and writer Nikolai Novikov, a shrewd and worldly pioneer of Russian journalism, wanted to start his satirical The Painter in 1772, the empress gave him 200 rubles.

The Painter was quite biting. Besides the exposés, so dear to Catherine’s heart, of the brainless scions of the nobility and the frivolous fashion plates at court, the magazine raised the painful serfdom issue. An anonymous article, now attributed to Alexander Radishchev, the first radical writer in Russian literature, depicted in grim tones the miserable condition of serfs. (In the beginning, Catherine not only tolerated such attacks, she encouraged them.)

Eventually, even with the moral and financial support of the empress, the satirical magazines began to wither: there were too many of them and not enough readers. Wisely, Catherine did not insist on the viability of her initiative and instead made a bold move in 1783, permitting private publishing in Russia for the first time; the state no longer had a monopoly on the printed word. (Of course, this also relieved Catherine of the financial burden of supporting book publishing and journalism.)

Catherine was right in assuming that the private publisher would be a better judge of what books the people wanted. New publishing houses mushroomed all over Russia. The result was a sharp increase in new books—but even more importantly, the book business became profitable. Novikov’s Tipograficheskaya Kampaniya, founded in 1784, had huge revenues, reaching 80,000 rubles a year.

At some point, Novikov became a monopolist: almost half the books in Russia were published by his company. Russian translations of Molière, Beaumarchais, Milton, Sterne, Goldoni, and Lessing were printed in elegant and relatively inexpensive editions. Novikov also published Russian authors, such as Lomonosov, and encyclopedias, reference books, dictionaries, and textbooks, which were sold in Novikov’s bookshops.

Novikov created the first ladies’ magazine in Russia, which had not only pictures of the latest Parisian fashions, but texts by serious writers. He also founded the first magazine for children, where Nikolai Karamzin (the future historian) made his debut. Karamzin later recalled that Novikov “sold books the way wealthy Dutch or English merchants sell their products: that is, with intelligence, intuition, and long-range planning.”¹⁰

. . .

One would have expected the wild success of Novikov’s publishing to please Catherine: it confirmed the wisdom of her decree allowing private printing houses. But the empress was concerned that Novikov belonged to the growing number of Russian Freemasons and published Masonic literature. The Europe-based quasireligious union, with its secret rituals and ideas of universal brotherhood and moral self-perfection, was brought to Russia in the 1730s.

Even though there were many Masonic adepts in her entourage, Catherine did not approve of it: “A small-time, useless pastime that leads to nothing. Does a person who does good for the sake of good really need that foolishness?”¹¹

At first “that foolishness,” the Masonic lodges and rituals, merely irritated the empress. She mocked the Masons as “monkeys” and “shamans” in her comedy The Siberian Shaman, where they were depicted as crooks and extortionists.

Gradually, Catherine began to perceive Masonry as a political threat: she received reports of Russian Freemasons establishing secret contacts with the heir to the throne—her son, Paul—and of their ties with the anti-Russian Prussian Masons.

Soon, Catherine branded Russian Masonry as the “new schism.” The government banned one Masonic book after another for heresy, but Novikov did not stop distributing them by underground means. When Novikov was arrested in 1792, many banned books were seized from his stores and warehouses.

Freemasonry was now interpreted as a dangerous religious heresy. Deviations from Orthodoxy were punished severely. Novikov was condemned to death, which Catherine commuted to fifteen years in a St. Petersburg prison.

She had commuted another sentence two years earlier of another seditious writer—Alexander Radishchev, author of the daring anti-monarchic critique Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Earnest and incorruptible, Radishchev, who was an early collaborator with Novikov (and eventually became head of customs in St. Petersburg), published his pamphlet in 1790 on a home printing press in 650 copies, of which only twenty-five went on sale. The tone of his work was set by the famous phrase from his introduction: “I looked around me and my soul was wounded by human suffering.”

Written in the then-popular genre of travelogue, Radishchev’s book was a howl of horror at the sight of the difficult lot of serfs and a “satirical call to outrage” (from a later review by Pushkin) against their masters, the heartless landowners: “The Russian people are very patient, and they suffer to the extreme, but when their patience ends, nothing will be able to contain it from turning to violence.” Those words sounded a terrible warning.

It is not often that a work with such limited circulation creates such a fuss. Radishchev’s timing was very bad. In Paris the revolutionary “ferocious monsters,” as Catherine called them, had stormed the Bastille, which gave the empress a serious fright: it became clear that it was just one step from small books to major upheavals.

Even though Journey was published anonymously, Radishchev was quickly identified, arrested, tried, and, like Novikov, sentenced to death, which Catherine commuted to Siberian exile.

The cases of Novikov and Radishchev are usually used as evidence of Catherine’s cruelty to Russian writers. A hundred and fifty years after her death, the influential philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev maintained that the martyrology of the Russian intelligentsia began with the persecution of Novikov and Radishchev.

Of course, the treatment of Novikov and Radishchev was harsh. Still, they had knowingly broken the rules. We can denounce the excessive severity of domestic law in the Russian Empire of the period, but it would be unfair to accuse Catherine of personal sadism, as is often done to this day.

Peter the Great personally tortured rebel streltsy (members of his Imperial Guards); during his reign, in 1689, the important poet Silvester Medvedev was beheaded, but for some reason Medvedev did not make it into any future martyrologies. The persistent rumors that Catherine’s investigator had Novikov and Radishchev tortured are rejected by the most recent archival research.

Pushkin is sometimes used as a reference, since he wrote about Catherine’s cruelties in his notes. But Pushkin, as we know, based one of his famous “little tragedies” on a rumor that has been totally discredited in our time: that the composer Antonio Salieri poisoned Mozart. Just as Salieri was not a poisoner, Catherine did not torture her writers.

It was another matter that the empress had no intention of being an obedient student of writers and philosophes, be they even such European intellectual superstars as Diderot and Voltaire. Catherine truly was interested in their views and could enjoy endless philosophical discussion with them, but running a huge empire soon taught her a dirty little secret known only by professional politicians: theory, however brilliant, is one thing, and daily political practice is quite another.

When Diderot came to St. Petersburg in 1773 at Catherine’s invitation, with the right to unlimited access to the empress, he flooded her with his utopian ideas and proposals: how to emancipate the serfs immediately, how to organize agriculture and the army properly, how to improve education in the schools drastically. Seeing how attentively Catherine listened, Diderot grew extremely animated, gesticulating, grabbing the empress’s hands, and thought that she would turn his wise suggestions into reality without delay.

But here is what Catherine said to him one day:

Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with great pleasure to everything that your brilliant mind has produced; but all your great principles, which I understand very well, while making wonderful books, will not manage a state. In all your transformational plans, you forget the difference in our situations: you work only on paper, which bears everything, it is soft, smooth, and does not stop your pen or imagination; whereas I, the poor empress, work on human skin, which, on the contrary, is very irritable and ticklish.¹²

These words had a sobering effect on Diderot. From that moment on, the philosophe no longer made practical suggestions. Was Diderot disillusioned by the empress? Of course. But should he have had the illusions in the first place? The idea that people of culture “know better” how to run a country is close to the heart of the intellectual elite all over the world and therefore ever fashionable in elevated circles. But is it always correct and applicable?

Let’s take a look at the governmental activity of the great poet Gavrila Derzhavin, who became minister of justice. (Only one other Russian poet, Ivan Dmitriev [1760–1837], ever reached such administrative heights.)

Derzhavin’s brilliant career is doubly remarkable, because it was truly the result of his literary talents rather than his administrative ones. Derzhavin was born in 1743 in a poor noble family, and was so weak as an infant that his parents followed the folk remedy of wrapping him in dough and putting him in a warm oven so that he would “get a little bit of life” (as the poet recalled in his memoirs).¹³ After fifteen years in the army, Derzhavin retired, and published his first book of poems anonymously.

His literary and career breakthrough at the age of forty came with his ode “Felitsa,” dedicated to Catherine, which opened the first issue of a new magazine, Interlocutor of Lovers of the Russian Word (1783), and began solemnly and resonantly (as do all his best poems): “Godlike Tsarevna of the Kirghiz-Kaisatsky Horde!” Derzhavin used the imaginary Kirghiz Tsarevna Felitsa (from the Latin felicitas, happiness) to praise Catherine. “Felitsa” was a daring attempt to combine tribute to the empress with satirical attacks on some of her courtiers.

The publisher of the magazine, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova (the empress’s best friend), presented her the freshly printed issue, and the next day, when summoned by Catherine, found her august patroness with the open magazine in her hands and in tears: “Who can know me so well to describe me so pleasantly that it makes me weep like a fool?”¹⁴

Learning the author’s name (Derzhavin’s ode was also published anonymously), Catherine decided to reward him. The poet was lunching at the home of his director (he was already a clerk in the Senate) when a messenger brought him a paper parcel with the inscription “from the Kirghiz Tsarevna.” Derzhavin’s boss grumbled, “What are these gifts from the Kirghizians?” But he quickly caught on once he saw what was inside the parcel: a French diamond-encrusted gold snuffbox and five hundred gold coins. With a forced smile, the man congratulated Derzhavin, “but from that time hatred and anger crept into his heart so that he could not speak calmly with the newly celebrated versifier,”¹⁵ concluded Derzhavin in his frank and stern (as he himself was) recollections of that memorable day.

The ode that so pleased Catherine speeded up Derzhavin’s career tremendously: in 1784 he became governor of Olonetsk Province and then, in 1785, governor of Tambov Province. In 1791, Catherine made Derzhavin her personal state secretary, with the special unprecedented right to report to her “whenever he observed any illegal Senate decision.”

Derzhavin performed his administrative duties with great zeal and seriousness, wearying Catherine with detailed explanations of confusing and complex judicial cases, while what the empress needed from him was his poetry: she kept hinting that he should write more odes like “Felitsa.”

Catherine wanted Derzhavin to be her chronicler and glorifier and not pester her with “such requests as women asked his mother-in-law and wife,” as she irritably put it. The direct and intense Derzhavin “often bored her with his truth,” and she had to cut him off from time to time.

It is easy to imagine them together: both tall and imposing, but Derzhavin sinewy, thin, and narrow-faced, while the empress was plump, full-breasted, with beautiful neck and arms and an ugly long chin on a high-browed face. He would sit before her on a chair—back straight, his army training—surrounded by piles of papers and reading, reading, reading in a steady voice, while she sat back comfortably on a low down-stuffed chaise, listening while knitting and looking over at Derzhavin with her intelligent blue eyes.

Derzhavin later described (in the third person) these extraordinary audiences as the relationship of two people in love rather than empress and courtier: “It often happened that she grew angry and threw out Derzhavin, and he would get huffy and promise himself to be careful and say nothing to her, but the next day when he entered, she would see right away that he was angry: she would start asking about his wife, his home life, would he like something to drink, and more such gentle and kind talk, so that he would forget all his chagrin and become candid once again.”¹⁶

These cozy, almost family relations continued for some two years: Derzhavin continued to bore the empress with his dreary reports but also pleased her with new poems, and for his ode “On the Taking of Izmail” (an important victory over the Turks) Catherine gave him another diamond-encrusted snuffbox with the generous note, “I did not know all this time that your trumpet was as loud as your lyre was pleasant.”¹⁷

In that brief comment, Catherine, like a perceptive literary critic, captured the most important aspects of her favorite poet’s style. Derzhavin was an incomparable trumpeter of Russia, praising her glory with clarity and directness, but at the same time his lyre sang the pleasures of private life—love, friendship, culinary delights, and nature’s beauty.

Derzhavin died in 1816, outliving Catherine by almost twenty years. He served her successor, Paul I, and even Paul’s son, Alexander I, who came to the throne after Paul was assassinated in 1801. But the new rulers did not love Derzhavin the way Catherine had.

When Derzhavin, sent into retirement in 1812 by Alexander I, decided to remind the emperor of his existence by sending a plan of defense against Napoleon’s army, the old poet was ignored. And today his achievements as government figure are forgotten, but not his muscular baroque poetry.

Three days before his death, Derzhavin wrote the beginning of his new (and unfinished) ode with diamond on a slate, summing up his profoundly pessimistic outlook on the vanity of political activity in general and his administrative efforts in particular. Those lines are his political auto-obituary. But many Russians repeat them to this day, which is proof of Derzhavin’s poetic grandeur:

Time’s river in its flow

Sweeps away all human endeavor

And drowns in the depths of oblivion

Peoples, kingdoms, and tsars.

PART II

CHAPTER 4

Paul I and Alexander I;

Karamzin and Zhukovsky

Old man Derzhavin noticed us / And blessed us, gravebound …”

There probably isn’t a Russian who doesn’t know those lines, from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. They’ve become an aphorism, repeated every time talk turns to succession of generations, the passing of the torch from fathers to sons. And it is somehow accepted that this was exactly the symbolic and historic way that Derzhavin, the greatest Russian poet of the eighteenth century, “blessed” Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet of all time.

It was much more complicated than that. Pushkin was fifteen when he met the seventy-one-year-old Derzhavin at public examinations at the Lycée, the privileged school at Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial summer residence outside St. Petersburg. Count Alexei Razumovsky, minister of education, who personally supervised all the Lycée’s examinations, invited Derzhavin.

It was January 8, 1815. Derzhavin sat at the table with the teachers; the students answered questions, standing two feet away from him. Pushkin later described Derzhavin: “Our examination wearied him. He sat propping up his head. His face was expressionless; his eyes murky; lips drooping … He dozed until the Russian language examination began. He perked up and his eyes sparkled; he was transformed.”

Pushkin, who was considered a poetic wunderkind at the Lycée, had been selected to recite his ode “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” to Derzhavin: “I don’t remember how I ended my reading, I don’t remember where I ran. Derzhavin was delighted; he demanded to see me, he wanted to embrace me … They searched for me but did not find me.”

Thus, according to Pushkin, Derzhavin did not offer any important advice then, and the scene became symbolic only later, propped up by Pushkin’s later poetic depiction in Eugene Onegin. Actually, Derzhavin anointed the poet Vassily Zhukovsky as his successor: “To you I leave, Zhukovsky, / My ancient lyre …” In turn, Zhukovsky told Derzhavin, “Your poems are a school for poets.”

Here is what Pushkin wrote to a friend just ten years after the Lycée exams: “I’ve reread all of Derzhavin, and here’s my final opinion. That eccentric understood neither Russian grammar nor the spirit of the Russian language (which is why he is beneath Lomonosov) … There are only eight odes and a few excerpts worth saving and the rest should be burned.”

In addition, as friends remembered, Pushkin disliked Derzhavin the man—allegedly he “acted like a scoundrel” in the affair of the Pugachev rebellion.¹

As an army officer, Derzhavin participated in the brutal suppression of the bloody rebellion started in 1773 by the Cossack Emelyan Pugachev, which shook the very foundations of Catherine II’s empire. Pushkin wrote down the story he got from the poet and minister of justice Ivan Dmitriev, describing Derzhavin giving the order to hang two rebels. Pushkin added indignantly, “Dmitriev insisted that Derzhavin hanged those two peasants more out of poetic curiosity than actual necessity.”

So the whole idea of being Derzhavin’s successor was Pushkin’s later poetic invention, and it worked. But there were other writers who were truly authoritative for Pushkin, whom he idolized. Their names, Nikolai Karamzin and Vassily Zhukovsky, are little known in the West but revered in Russia. Both were multifaceted talents, but Zhukovsky was most famous as a translator, and Karamzin as the author of the multivolume History of the Russian State. They did not hold any official government position but still managed to play a much more important role in Russia’s political and cultural history than the poet-ministers Derzhavin and Dmitriev.

Karamzin was sixteen years older than Zhukovsky. He was a nobleman with Crimean Tatar roots that went back to the sixteenth century, born in the provincial city of Simbirsk (where Vladimir Lenin would be born), where Karamzin was noticed as a cute five-year-old in a silk camisole by eleven-year-old Ivan Dmitriev (who much later was known, according to wags, for noticing cute boys).

Later Karamzin and Dmitriev served together in a Guards regiment in St. Petersburg; Karamzin returned to Simbirsk, where he earned a reputation as a social lion and fervent cardplayer who dreamed, according to Dmitriev, of “winning the heart of a fiery, black-browed Cherkessian girl” and in the meantime indiscriminately read everything he could get his hands on, from German philosophy to the latest French novels.

Karamzin’s interest in the recent intellectual fad for Freemasonry brought him to its center in Moscow, to the circle of the Mason Novikov, where to the astonishment of his old friends he turned from a wastrel into a “pious student of wisdom” (while still retaining his cheerfulness) and also made his debut as a writer in Novikov’s magazine for children.

The key episode in Karamzin’s seemingly uneventful life (he died in 1826, not reaching sixty) was his only trip to Europe in 1789–1790, during which he had a half hour’s conversation in Königsberg with the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, “a tiny, thin old man, extremely white and gentle”² (they discussed the topical question of the discovery of new lands and exchanged views on China). In Paris, arriving at the right time in the right place, Karamzin listened to the fiery speeches of the revolutionaries Mirabeau and Robespierre at the National Assembly.

Back in Russia, Karamzin published “Letters of a Russian Traveler,” based on his European trip, in the magazine he founded, Moscow Journal. This catapulted him into the spotlight as the leader of Russian sentimentalism, which arose in imitation of European models: Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Karamzin’s most popular work of that period was his novella Poor Liza, about a poor peasant girl, seduced and abandoned by a rich young man, who drowns herself in a Moscow pond. Several generations of Russian readers, particularly women, wept over Poor Liza and other works by Karamzin, discovering their own spirituality and the value of their inner emotional world.

Sometimes a poet’s biography resembles the popular narratives of his era. The true story of the childhood and adolescence of Vassily Zhukovsky could be the plot of a typical Karamzin work, just as capable of jerking tears from sensitive souls. The future great poet was the bastard child of Afanasy Bunin, a wealthy provincial landowner of sixty-seven. His mother was a young Turkish slave, brought to Russia in 1770 as a gift to Bunin from his serfs who had fought in the Russo-Turkish War. She was christened as Elizabeth.

The son of Bunin and Elizabeth was given the patronymic and family name of his godfather, Andrei Zhukovsky, a hanger-on in the Bunin household. Bunin loved his Turkish mistress and his son. He was already married, but according to people who knew, “his wife, having had several children with him, left the marital bed and allowed his freedom of choice in the demands of Hymen.”³

It became a multicultural ménage à trois. The Turkish woman was installed as the Bunins’ housekeeper, coming to the lady of the house, Maria, for instructions, which she received while standing. But when Bunin moved permanently from the big house to the small cottage where Elizabeth lived, his wife broke off all relations with her. Elizabeth took the first step toward reconciliation: she brought her three-month-old son to the big house and placed him silently at the lady’s feet. Maria wept and gave in: peace was reestablished.

Bunin had hothouses built on his rich estate and grew lemons and apricots, unknown in Tula Province, as well as exotic flowers. Little Vassily Zhukovsky was another hothouse flower, growing up amid his numerous stepsisters. With his curly hair, dusky skin, and big eyes, he resembled his Turkish mother.

But Maria saw a resemblance to her only son, who had studied at Leipzig University and upon his return to Russia committed suicide over an unhappy love affair, like young Werther in Goethe’s novel. She basically adopted Zhukovsky, but he always called her “grandmother,” saving “mother” for Elizabeth.

The master of the house loved hunting, feasting, and women, but Maria adored books, receiving the latest works from Moscow and St. Petersburg, thereby acquiring most of the books published by the Mason Novikov. Many of his almanacs and magazines served as abundant food for thought for young Zhukovsky. Maria did not know foreign languages, but her son’s governors had taught him to speak, read, and write fluently in French and German (later, he mastered English as well). With time, Russia read the best poems by Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Thomas Gray in Zhukovsky’s translations, which remain exemplary to this day.

Zhukovsky’s artistic gifts became evident when he was four. According to family lore, Vassily drew a copy of an icon on the floor with chalk; seeing it, the maid fell to her knees in prayer—it was a miracle! The boy immediately put an end to the religious ecstasy by claiming his author’s rights.

Zhukovsky’s public literary debut was a performance in a private house of his tragedy Camillus, or Liberated Rome, based on Plutarch. The twelve-year-old author was also the director and an actor, appearing in a red cape and a “Roman” helmet of gold paper with ostrich feathers, bearing a big wooden sword.

The audience had to pay a 10-kopeck admission (his “grandmother” was let in for free, as an exception). The tragedy’s success inspired a new play, but it was an embarrassing flop. Zhukovsky later claimed that this failure contributed to his lifelong insecurity about his writing abilities.

Zhukovsky tended to be overly self-analytical, dreamy, and absent-minded—the typical hero of sentimental prose. His father died when Zhukovsky was eight, leaving him nothing in his will. His “grandmother” gave him 10,000 rubles—a considerable sum, but Zhukovsky still felt miserable.

He later recalled bitterly, “I took every kindness to me as pity. Yes, I had not been left or abandoned, I had a corner, but alas, I felt no one’s love; consequently, I could not repay love with love.”⁴

An exaggeration? Probably. A pose? Unlikely. Pure at heart, Zhukovsky was not a poseur.

The sentimental age in Russia gave rise to the ideal sentimental monarch, Alexander I, grandson of Catherine the Great and son of Emperor Paul I. In the remarkable line of Romanov rulers, Alexander I may be the most mysterious figure. His name is still surrounded by legends.

He was born to be happy but grew up, as Alexander Herzen put it, a “crowned Hamlet”—ambivalent, insecure, and given to mystical urges. His childhood gave no clue to the fateful zigzags and dramatic situations in his adult life.

Catherine adored her intelligent and gentle first grandson. She had hated Elizabeth I for taking away her son, Paul, but Catherine repeated (consciously? unconsciously?) the same stratagem: torn away from his parents, Alexander became the favorite toy of the empress.

There is a great similarity (little noted) between the childhood years of Alexander and Zhukovsky. Naturally, the future tsar and the future poet grew up in quite different conditions, but the psychological situation was approximately the same: the powerful grandmother who did not like the mother; the absent father, temperamental and hysterical; a sense of instability about the world and one’s place in it.

Both boys found escape in the theater. Young Zhukovsky performed in his own plays, while eight-year-old Alexander delighted Catherine in a performance of her own anti-Masonic play, The Deceiver. They grew up to be magnetic personalities; a courtier once said that Alexander was “un vrai charmant.” The same could be said of Zhukovsky.

Catherine left detailed instructions on bringing up Alexander and his younger brother, Konstantin. They were forbidden to torment animals, to kill birds, butterflies, and flies, and were trained not to fear mice and spiders, to take care of their dogs and horses, and to remember to water their flowers.

The highborn children were schooled in gymnastics, fencing, and swimming; in the summer they were told not to be ashamed of their tan and in the winter not to fear the cold and to bear pain without medicine if possible. Catherine instructed, “Teach the children not to interrupt, not to rush to express their opinion, not to speak too loudly or persistently, but simply, without raising their voice.”

All this was good and reasonable. Yet dreamy and mystically inclined Alexander, like Zhukovsky, acutely sensed the absence of an important spiritual vitamin: “Catherine was a wise and great woman, but as for teaching the heart in the spirit of true piety, the St. Petersburg court was … like almost everywhere else. I sensed an emptiness and my soul was tormented by a vague foreboding.”⁵

This vague foreboding came true. At the age of twenty-three, Alexander took part in a real tragedy, fully comparable to the grimmest of Shakespeare’s imaginings. Catherine intended to make Alexander heir to the throne, bypassing her son, Paul. Both father and son knew this. What could be more dramatic? Catherine’s cold-blooded manipulations wounded both.

When Catherine was struck by apoplexy in 1796, Paul, then forty-two, took the throne. Derzhavin described the event succinctly and energetically: “Immediately everything in the palace changed: rattling spurs, jack boots, broadswords, and as if they were conquering a city, army people burst into the rooms with great noise.”⁶

The first, quite understandable, impulse of the new emperor was to annul his mother’s ukases, which he considered unfair. The persecution of Masons was stopped, their leader Novikov was released from prison, and Radishchev returned from Siberian exile.

But unlike his mother, Paul was an utterly unpredictable ruler. Here is a typical story: on the basis of a denunciation, the emperor sent the well-known playwright Vassily Kapnist to Siberia for his pointed comedy Chicane. Then he decided to see the play for himself, in a private setting. The only viewers of the performance were Paul I and his son Alexander. After the first act the emperor decreed that Kapnist be returned from exile immediately. After the second, that the author be rewarded.

Censorship was virulent in Paul’s reign: with a general decline in printed matter (almost a third less than under Catherine), the number of banned books grew, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published under Catherine’s aegis.

Paul had been terrified by the French revolutionary storm of 1789. He felt that Louis XVI “would still be alive and reigning if he had been firmer.”⁷ Thus came Paul’s notorious imperial decree of 1800: “Since books brought in from abroad wreak the corruption of faith, civil laws and decency, from now on we order that any kind of foreign book, in any language, be seized before entering our state, and music as well.”⁸ As a result, sheet music of works by Bach, Haydn, and Mozart were confiscated on Russia’s borders.

Paul’s decrees, regulating things large and small, rained upon the country. He banned topcoats and vests, round hats and wing collars, appearing in public places wearing spectacles, combing hair onto the forehead (it was supposed to be combed back), growing sideburns, dancing the waltz, or applauding in theaters.

No one knew what would be permitted or banned tomorrow, who would be sent to Siberia or for what, or be punished with rods—one could get up to a thousand blows. Everyone trembled in fear. The demoralized and embittered elite started to whisper and then gradually say out loud that Paul was mad.

As Karamzin later summed it up, “Russians regarded this monarch as a dangerous meteor, counting the minutes and impatiently waiting for the last one. It came, and the news of that throughout the land was like emancipation: in houses and on the street people wept with joy, embracing the way they do on Holy Easter.”⁹

Karamzin’s description of the way residents of the capital greeted the overthrow of Paul’s four-year reign was apt. At midnight on March 11, 1801, a group of conspirators burst into the Mikhailovsky Castle, the newly built residence for Paul in St. Petersburg. While the Imperial Guards tried to stop them, their commander, Lieutenant Sergei Marin, a poet and adventurer, unexpectedly switched sides, pointing his pistol at Paul’s defenders. Confused, they surrendered; Paul’s fate was sealed. Marin was the second poet after Derzhavin (who took part in the “revolution,” as he called it, that brought Catherine to the throne in 1762) to participate in a palace coup in Russia.

Paul leaped out of bed in his nightshirt and tried to hide, but the armed intruders caught him, beat him, and then strangled him with a scarf. Their leader, Count Peter Palen, “an enlightened cynic” in Catherine’s mode, quickly went to Alexander’s rooms. The heir had been warned of the conspiracy, but he had not expected his father to be killed.

Learning of the fatality, Alexander fell to the floor, groaning, “How dare you! I never wanted that and did not order it!” The impatient conspirators found the “despair rather natural but inappropriate.” Palen cut off Alexander’s moaning: “C’est assez faire l’enfant! Allez régner!” (“Enough of this childishness! Go rule!”)¹⁰

That was a rather rude send-off. But perhaps Alexander was stung more painfully by his mother (who at forty-one was suddenly a widow) in the morning, who said coldly and scornfully, “I congratulate you, now you are emperor.” Hearing those words, the new monarch, twenty-three, fainted.

Alexander I was tormented by his father’s assassination all his life, and it probably hastened his untimely end. Of course, he had not strangled his father with his own hands, but everyone blamed Alexander for the regicide and patricide (or, at least, so it seemed to him). It’s not clear what was worse: to feel responsible for his father’s death or for the sacrilegious murder of the imperial figure.

In the former, Alexander broke God’s commandment and man’s laws. In the latter, he violated the principle that was the foundation of the state that he would now lead, that of the sacredness of the divine person of the tsar, which was particularly important in Russia, where the sovereign, especially during the early Romanov reign, symbolized the unity and prosperity of the nation.

Alexander, who appeared in public with red-rimmed eyes, could find some comfort, albeit cold, in Karamzin’s description quoted above of the joy of the residents of the capital. This apparent happiness was reinforced also by the stark contrast in physical appearance between the short, hunched, rickety Paul, with a pug nose in the center of his chapped face and always hoarse voice, and his tall, slightly stoop-shouldered, and handsome son, a blue-eyed blonde with polite, gentle manners.

Karamzin published a special edition of his new poem, “To His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, Autocrat of All Russia, on His Accession to the Throne,” in which he expressed the emotions and hopes of Russia’s cultural elite: “It is spring for us, / We are with You!”

Alexander I hastened to justify the hopes, in the first few days of his rule pardoning twelve thousand people arrested by his father, permitting foreign publications into Russia again, and repealing the limitations on travel to and from the country decreed by Paul I.

Calling in some of his young liberal friends, Alexander started to discuss potential radical reforms: limitations on the autocracy, and abolition of serfdom. Even though things never went beyond loquacious debates, the conservatives of the court grew extremely concerned.

They panicked even more when Alexander I, in an obvious attempt to turn vague talk of reform into concrete action, made Mikhail Speransky, an open liberal, his closest administrative councilor and then secretary of state.

These actions came on top of the zigzags in foreign policy that flabbergasted Russian public opinion: first Alexander joined the Austrians against Napoleon, but then, after several military failures, the most famous being the humiliating defeat at Austerlitz, he concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with the French emperor, signed in 1807 in a special ceremonial tent on a barge on the Niemen River.

The alliance with Napoleon did not please the Russian elite. The outrage of the conservative opposition reached the boiling point. Their unofficial leader became Alexander’s favorite sister, the beautiful, educated, and energetic Grand Duchess Ekaterina. She was seen as the patroness of Russian culture; Derzhavin, then sixty-four, dedicated elated odes to her.¹¹

Russian patriots were particularly pleased by her refusal of Napoleon’s hand and demonstrative marriage to Georg Oldenburg, a modest Prussian prince in Russian service. When Prince Oldenburg was made governor of Tver Province, the grand duchess settled in provincial Tver, where her salon became the center of oppositionist intrigues.

Karamzin began visiting, calling her “the demigoddess of Tver.” She saw him as the man best able to formulate a conservative program.

It was at the request of Ekaterina that Karamzin wrote his famous “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia,” a political manifesto of outstanding literary quality. Through the grand duchess, Karamzin sent the “Memoir” to Alexander in March 1811. It came to be a symbolic moment in the history of Russian culture.

Karamzin’s evolution from author of elegant sentimental novellas to energetic and influential political journalist and, later, to the greatest Russian historian was gradual but steady. Karamzin, like Novikov before him, had the personality of a natural enlightener. (This may have been characteristic of Masons; or perhaps people with these qualities were drawn to Masonry.)

In 1802, Karamzin took charge of Russia’s first political magazine, The Herald of Europe, which quickly grew in popularity: it had twelve hundred subscribers, an impressive number for those days. He was the first Russian editor to draw a salary, a substantial one: 3,000 rubles a year.¹²

In 1803, with the help of his older friend, the poet and Mason Mikhail Muravyev, who had taught young Alexander Russian literature, Karamzin petitioned the emperor to be named official historian of Russia. In principle, this was not an unusual request. In that period, the Russian government was assigning knowledgeable people to research topical military or political issues—embryonic think tanks, without special privileges or the crown’s personal involvement.

Karamzin received more attention: Alexander by special decree made him historian of the Russian Empire, with a stipend of 3,000 rubles (had he made inquiries about Karamzin’s magazine salary?). Also, Karamzin was not expected to prepare a text by a certain deadline, as were the other advisors. All that was expected—only!—was that one day he would write the first “real” history of Russia.

Thus, Karamzin was charged with the responsibility for a unique national project and fell under the emperor’s personal patronage. There had been earlier attempts to write the history of Russia, but they were unreadable. Alexander, who was an admirer of Karamzin’s poetry and prose, wanted a work on a European level, a narrative that would combine the seriousness and depth of research with entertaining and elegant style.

Alexander got more than he had expected. In 1811 in Tver, at his sister’s salon, the emperor enjoyed the author’s reading of excerpts from the first volumes of The History of the Russian State. Then, on the evening before his departure, Alexander read the manuscript of “The Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia.” As a result, Alexander was markedly cold in his farewells to Karamzin.

What was the cause of the emperor’s overnight reversal in attitude toward his historian?

The text Alexander read by candlelight that night began with a brief outline of Russian history from the beginning until 1801, brilliantly written: an inspired poem in prose. Then came an evaluation of the political achievements of the first years of Alexander’s reign and Karamzin’s recommendations—the part that upset and angered the emperor greatly.

Never had a Russian writer with access to the court dared to criticize his sovereign so sharply and practically to his face. The paradox was that Karamzin did it in order “to protect the emperor from himself.”

Alexander dreamed of reform and with the help of his adviser Speransky explored some possibilities for implementing them, while Karamzin, with the passion of a gifted poet and the skill of a professional political journalist, tried to warn him off.

In small, private conversations, Alexander spoke of the need to limit autocracy, but Karamzin maintained the opposite: “Autocracy founded and resurrected Russia … What except unlimited single rule could create unity in this vast country?”¹³

The irony of the situation was that Karamzin, in his heart of hearts a republican (as he himself admitted sometimes), after many years of studying Russian history came to the conclusion of the need and benefit for Russia of an autocratic ruler. It was just the reverse with Alexander I: his long-held ideas of liberal reforms came from his reason, but in his heart he still was an absolute monarch.

That may be why Alexander’s autocratic impulses prevailed: in 1812 he suddenly fired the liberal Speransky and sent him into exile. There is no doubt that Karamzin’s “Memoir,” by its timely appearance, played an important role in this dramatic political turnaround. It is just as obvious that both men—tsar and poet—made a corresponding note in their memory.

At the same time, Alexander’s relations with Napoleon—described in Karamzin’s “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia” as “a genius of ambition and victory”—deteriorated. The short Napoleon somehow always managed to look down at the Russian emperor, which irritated Alexander immensely. He wrote to his smart sister, Ekaterina, “Bonaparte thinks I am nothing but a fool. He laughs best who laughs last.” (Napoleon, in his turn, said in 1812: “In five years I will be master of the world: only Russia is left, and I will crush her.”)

On June 11, 1812, the French army of 600,000 men led by Napoleon invaded Russia. The Russians called this the Patriotic War. At first, it went very badly for Russia: its army, forced by the French, retreated toward Moscow. At the very beginning, Alexander personally led the troops, but in the face of failure he turned over command to the old and experienced military leader Mikhail Kutuzov, who fought Napoleon near the village of Borodino on August 26, 1812.

The battle, later vividly portrayed in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was a meat grinder, with close to 100,000 men of both armies wounded or dead. It was so confused that both sides claimed victory.

When we think of the Battle of Borodino, we imagine it through the eyes of the fictional Pierre Bezukhov from Tolstoy’s novel. But there was a real observer of that clash of two giant camps, a person in many ways similar to Bezukhov, just as much a dreamer with a lofty and pure soul: the poet Zhukovsky. “We stood in the bushes at the left flank, which the enemy was pressing; shells flew at us from an invisible source; everything around us roared and thundered; huge clouds of smoke rose along the entire semicircle of the horizon, as if from a universal fire, and finally with a terrible white cloud enveloped half the sky, which quietly glowed above the battling armies.”

Zhukovsky had joined the army as a corporal, serving in the staff of one-eyed Kutuzov and working in propaganda: he wrote leaflets, proclamations, and daily bulletins. That practical activity gave birth to his patriotic verse cantata “A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors.”

It was a veritable hymn to the might of the Russian army. Zhukovsky mentioned many brave officers by name, finding encouraging words for each one. For that reason, the rather long poem circulated instantly throughout the Russian army in manuscript copies. As one officer noted in his diary of 1812, “We often read and discuss ‘A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors,’ Mr. Zhukovsky’s latest work. Almost all of us have already memorized it. What poetry! What an inexplicable gift to rouse the spirits of soldiers!”¹⁴

Another popular poem in those days was the fable “Wolf in the Dog House.” This small masterpiece by Ivan Krylov (1768–1844), whose aphorisms are so ingrained in Russian culture that they are often taken for folk proverbs, described the current military and political situation: after Borodino, Napoleon tried to reach peace with Kutuzov, but was rebuffed.

In the fable, the wolf (Napoleon) sought easy pickings in the sheep manger but by mistake ended up in the dog house (Russia), where he was surrounded by dogs and tried to negotiate with the experienced dog keeper (Kutuzov), who breaks off the clever wolf’s entreaties:

You are gray, and I am gray-haired,

I know your vulpine nature well,

And hence my custom:

I only talk peace with wolves

After I have skinned them.

There was a story about this fable: allegedly Krylov had guessed Kutuzov’s strategy—to exhaust Napoleon’s troops—and so Kutuzov liked declaiming it to his impatient young officers who were straining to enter battle with the French again. Reading from the manuscript Krylov had sent him and reaching the words, “You are gray, and I am gray-haired,” Kutuzov would stress the words and “remove his cap and point to his hair. Everyone present was delighted by that spectacle and joyous exclamations resounded all around,”¹⁵ a witness recounted. Krylov’s short fable was more effective than a long military explanation.

In executing his clever plan, Kutuzov made a great sacrifice—he surrendered ancient Moscow to Napoleon. Going against public opinion and Alexander I’s will, Kutuzov declared, “The loss of Moscow does not mean the loss of Russia … By yielding Moscow we will prepare the end for the enemy.”

Hysterical official propaganda urged the majority of Muscovites to evacuate the city hastily, and Napoleon entered an empty city, which met him with fires that consumed more than two-thirds of Moscow in a few days.

Napoleon blamed the arson on the Russians; the Russians accused the French. In the end, the French army, left without housing and food, abandoned Moscow, with Napoleon cursing “that terrible country” and “those Scythians.” As the wise Kutuzov had predicted, it was the beginning of the end of the French emperor.

CHAPTER 5

Alexander I, Zhukovsky, and Young Pushkin

Pursuing Napoleon’s vanishing army, Alexander’s troops entered Europe in January 1813. Kutuzov died soon after. Napoleon still managed to gather a new force, but it was clear that his star was waning.

The famous “Battle of the Nations” at Leipzig opened the way to Paris for Alexander I and his allies. The day Russian troops entered the French capital, Alexander smugly told one of his generals, “Well, what will they say in St. Petersburg now? Wasn’t there a time when they adored Napoleon and took me for a simpleton?”

Europeans, liberated from Napoleon, called Alexander “king of kings,” like Agamemnon in The Iliad. He also became a patron of the arts throughout Europe: Beethoven dedicated his violin sonatas op. 30 to him, and later the tsar supported young Chopin, giving him a diamond ring.

In Russia, he was deified and the title of “Blessed” was bestowed upon him, which Alexander I modestly refused. Among the chorus of praise Zhukovsky’s crystalline and strong voice stood out with his 1814 ode “To Emperor Alexander.”

Starting out as a pensive lyric poet, Zhukovsky, to the surprise of many (and perhaps himself), confidently moved to the unofficial spot of number one state poet, replacing the elderly Derzhavin. In his “Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors,” Zhukovsky came up with an apt poetic description of the political and mythos-making role of culture: “Bards are allies of leaders; / their songs give life to victories.” In his epistle “To Emperor Alexander” we find another important aphorism, “The voice of the lyre is the voice of the people,” which delighted the young Pushkin.

In his verse, Zhukovsky praised “the Blessed” but also gave his monarch bold and unusual advice, all the more prescient because it was later echoed in the thoughts, fate, and posthumous legend of Alexander I:

Leave for a time your magnificent throne—

The royal throne is surrounded with unfaithful praise—

Cover your royal brilliance, alone enter

The crowd, and listen to the murmur.

Pushkin knew this poem (and many others by Zhukovsky) by heart, and even ten years later proudly commented, “This is how a Russian poet speaks to the tsar.”

“To Emperor Alexander” became Zhukovsky’s pass into the imperial palace, turning him into “the new state poet, probably the last in the empire’s history and certainly the last to be accepted in equal measure by the authorities and by educated society.”¹

It was a remarkably intricate political and cultural dance, with the poet and the court taking careful steps toward each other, wary of appearing vain, silly, vulgar, or insincere. The initiator of the rapprochement with Zhukovsky was the royal family: back in the spring of 1813, the widow of Paul I, Maria Fedorovna, rewarded Zhukovsky for his “Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors” with an expensive ring and ordered a special edition of the poem.

On his part, Zhukovsky wrote the epistle to Alexander with great care, unlike “Bard,” which was written in the field and almost as an improvisation. This time Zhukovsky intended “to add his name to Alexander’s monument,” as he put it.

The poem was not presented directly to Alexander. First Zhukovsky sent it to his mother, the dowager empress, through his friends at court. Even though at first she had blamed her son for Paul’s assassination, she and her circle now acted as the tsar’s cultural advisers.

A cautious step-by-step procedure ensued. First Maria Fedorovna heard Zhukovsky’s ode in a small family circle (the grand dukes and duchesses), read aloud by one of the courtiers, while she followed along with a copy in her hand. Everyone was delighted: “Marvelous! Excellent! C’est sublime!” When the family circle decided that Alexander, “who floats above flattery,” would “feel the power of the poet’s genius,” another copy of Zhukovsky’s poem was sent to the emperor in Vienna.²

At the same time, the empress invited Zhukovsky to her residence in Pavlovsk, outside St. Petersburg, in order to meet him. He lived there for three days, and on the first he read his ballads to a small circle, while at the next, reading for a larger group, he declaimed “A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors” and “To Emperor Alexander.”

Zhukovsky and his manner of reading charmed Maria Fedorovna; as a memoirist noted, “to know Zhukovsky and not love him was impossible,” he was “a combination of child and angel.”³

The result was an invitation for Zhukovsky to accept the coveted post of “reader to the empress” (yet another important step up the court hierarchical ladder). This impressed Alexander. He also knew that Zhukovsky had received the rank of staff captain and the Order of St. Anna, Second Degree, for the war against Napoleon: that is, he had proven his loyalty not only in poetry but in action.

An imperial decree on December 30, 1816, was a formal response to the gift edition of Zhukovsky’s poems accompanied by a letter from the poet. The decree read: “To the minister of finances. Observing attentively the work and gifts of the prominent writer, Staff Captain Vassily Zhukovsky, who has enriched our literature with excellent works, many of which are devoted to the glory of the Russian forces, I order that as a sign of my good will and to provide him the financial security needed for his work to give him a pension of four thousand rubles a year from the state treasury. Alexander.”⁴

There was more. In 1817, Zhukovsky was asked to teach Russian to the bride of Grand Duke Nicholas (the future Emperor Nicholas I), the Prussian princess Charlotte, who upon converting to Russian Orthodoxy took the name Alexandra Fedorovna. Zhukovsky, who spoke German fluently, was expected to work with her for an hour every day on Russian language and literature. The rest of the time Zhukovsky was free, and his salary was 3,000 rubles from Alexander and 2,000 from the duke, as well as a free apartment in his palace.

And then came the crowning achievement of Zhukovsky’s service to the house of Romanov: in 1826, Nicholas I officially hired the poet as governor for his eight-year-old son Alexander (later Emperor Alexander II). By that time, Zhukovsky was practically part of the family. He accompanied Alexandra Fedorovna to Moscow, where she bore a son, and commemorated the festive occasion with a special poem, which, in particular, captured for us Nicholas’s rare display of emotion at the sight of mother and child (which the poet had witnessed):

Seeing the child, the young father knelt

Before the saved mother

And in the heat of love wept, at a loss for words.

Nicholas I already knew what a perfect pedagogue Zhukovsky could be for a blue-blooded child. There is a lively description of him in action in a letter to Pushkin from his friend the poet Anton Delvig: “Zhukovsky, I think, is lost irretrievably to poetry. He is teaching Grand Duke Alexander Russian, and I am not joking when I say that he is devoting all his time to creating a primer. For each letter he draws a little figure, and for syllables he draws pictures. How can you blame him! He is imbued with a great idea: to educate, perhaps, the Tsar. The possible benefit and glory of the Russian people consoles his heart.”⁵

Zhukovsky’s friends called him the “children’s Aristotle,” for he taught the heir not only Russian literature but also geography, history, and even arithmetic. True, Zhukovsky wrote poetry much less, but it sometimes seemed that he did not regret it: “I do know that the world of children is my world, and that I can act with pleasure in that world, and that I can find total happiness in it.”

There was a reason Zhukovsky spoke longingly of “total happiness” in the closed world of the Romanov family, living in their sumptuous residence, the Winter Palace, where he was given a spacious and comfortable apartment. He suffered a painful crisis in 1823, and the wound never healed for him.

In 1805, at the age of twenty-two, Zhukovsky first recorded in his diary words of love for Maria (Masha) Protasova, his stepsister’s daughter, aged twelve. It was a passionate but ultimately platonic feeling: despite the grown-up Masha’s love for him, her devout mother never gave her blessing for them to marry. In 1823, at the age of thirty, Masha died, after a few years of marriage to another man.

This sad story dominated Zhukovsky’s oeuvre for more than thirty years and imbued the poet’s worldview with religious and mystical tones. Both he and Masha had always talked and written to each other about “trusting Providence.” Zhukovsky’s “To Emperor Alexander” was also based on providential rhetoric. Perhaps that was what touched a secret string in the emperor’s soul, for he was always in search of trusted advisers and a word of spiritual approval.

This inclination toward mysticism increased sharply after Alexander’s victory over Napoleon. Napoleon’s fame as military leader was legendary, and so the inexperienced Russian tsar’s triumph could easily be interpreted as God’s will. The Bible was now always on Alexander’s bedside table, and he saw himself as the weapon of Providence. The goal of his state policy became the affirmation of Christian morality in international relations.

As leader of the anti-Napoleonic coalition, Alexander had enough power to attempt bringing those ideas into life. After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), on Alexander’s initiative, the victorious nations—Russia, Austria, Prussia, and England—formed the Holy Alliance. Its purpose would be to instill Christian principles in the management of Europe.

We can imagine Alexander’s thinking: while the power-hungry Napoleon was celebrated for constant warfare, the pious Russian emperor would be remembered for the permanent peace that would come from following Christian ideals. To achieve this goal, Alexander made substantial foreign policy concessions and was extremely disillusioned by the cynical behavior of his Western partners, who stubbornly refused to be guided by “the commandments of love, truth, and peace,” as Alexander dreamed.

The Russian elite, first deliriously patriotic after the victory over Napoleon, sobered up gradually, and some people even began expressing dissatisfaction with their mystically inclined ruler. Reports of such ingratitude drove Alexander to melancholic despair that bordered on clinical depression.

Zhukovsky’s melancholy and mystical ballads were balm for Alexander’s soul. And the emperor may have appeared as the ideal personage of his poetry and certainly the constant object of Zhukovsky’s thoughts. Never before or since had tsar and poet been so close.

“He took Paris, he founded the Lycée.” Thus Pushkin summarized the almost quarter-century reign of Alexander I, equating the glorious historical event with the relatively modest educational project, one of many liberal initiatives of the early years of Alexander’s rule.

And yet, October 19, 1811, when the Imperial Lycée was opened in Tsarskoe Selo, became a legendary day in Russian culture, first of all because among the thirty boys in the first class of the school, that day standing in three rows in the big, light-filled recreation hall of the four-story Catherine Palace, was the curly-haired, lively, and quick son of a Moscow nobleman, twelve-year-old Alexander Pushkin.

As one of the students recalled, they were presented to Alexander I, who came to the school: “After the speeches, each came up to the table and bowed to the emperor, who regarded us kindly and patiently returned our clumsy bows.”⁶

Alexander wanted to create an elite, closed boarding school for “educating youths especially intended for important state service.” Originally, the tsar’s younger brothers, the Grand Dukes Mikhail and Nicholas (the future emperor), were to be educated there too, but their mother objected. Nevertheless, the royal treasury spent lavishly on the Lycée: the boys had luxurious accommodations and the best professors.

Pushkin, however, was not interested in his studies. In math class, he wrote poetry, brow furrowed and lips pursed. The professor of mathematics let it pass: he enjoyed Pushkin’s epigrams mocking the school doctor (who chuckled at Pushkin’s jabs at the math professor).

Pushkin was called to the blackboard to work on an algebra problem; the teacher watched compassionately as the young poet shuffled his feet and scribbled formulas endlessly in chalk. When he got tired of waiting, he interrupted Pushkin’s suffering: “Well, what did you get? What does X equal?”

“Zero.”

“Pushkin, in my class, everything comes out zero for you. Go back to your seat and write poetry!”⁷

Everyone indulged the wunderkind, including the royal patron of the Lycée, Emperor Alexander I. As one of the poet’s classmates put it delicately, Pushkin “liked sometimes, secretly from the authorities, to make sacrifices to Bacchus and Venus”—that is, to drink and traipse after maids.

Once Pushkin found himself in the dark corridor of the tsar’s palace and grabbed the maid of Princess Varvara Volkonskaya, lady-in-waiting of the tsar’s wife. Hugging and kissing her, he discovered to his horror that it was not the maid but the elderly princess—a scene out of a French farce. Pushkin ran off, but the princess complained to the emperor, who scolded the Lycée’s director, Egor Engelhardt: “What is happening? Your pupils not only steal apples from my orchard, now they won’t even leave my wife’s ladies-in-waiting in peace!”

The director pleaded on behalf of Pushkin: “The poor lad is desperate: he came for my permission to write to the princess and beg her pardon.” Alexander was forgiving: “Let it be, I’ll have a word on his behalf; but tell him it’s the last time.”

With those words, Alexander hurried to catch up with his wife, whom he saw in the distance, but managed to whisper to the overjoyed Engelhardt: “La vieille est peut-être enchantée de la méprise du jeune homme, entre nous soit dit” (“The old maid may be delighted by the young man’s mistake, just between us”).⁸

Such encounters with the world of the tsar’s family—real and potential (after all, the future Nicholas I, just three years older than Pushkin, could have been a classmate at the Lycée)—had to have fired young Pushkin’s imagination: next to him, palpably close, personified history took place. This was a heady sensation, whose influence must be stressed also because for more than a hundred years first liberal and then Soviet scholars diligently minimized the significance of young Pushkin’s contacts with the court of Alexander I.

For Pushkin’s generation, the cult of historical personality was typical—first embodied by the romantic figure of Napoleon, an ordinary Corsican officer who rose to the peaks of fame and power and, in the words of sixteen-year-old Pushkin, destroyed “Europe’s divine shield.”

The War of 1812, when Guards regiments heading to fight Napoleon passed the Lycée, gave Pushkin and his schoolmates new, more real heroes. Now for Pushkin the “men of history” were the young Russian officers who went for glory. Almost a quarter century later, Pushkin still recalled how hard it was for him to remain in school, “envying those who walked off to die past us.”

Dreams of glory and immortality made his head spin. A military career was impossible then because of his age; its surrogate was poetic triumph. A fellow Lycée student, Anton Delvig, published a poem in 1815 in a prestigious magazine, in which he called his sixteen-year-old friend Pushkin “immortal.”

That golden ticket, given by a peer, was supported by approval from the professors, older colleagues, and, through them, the court and royal family. The poem “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo,” which Pushkin recited during his examinations in the presence of the old poet Derzhavin, had been commissioned by his professor Alexander Galich; at the examination rehearsal, an important official heard the poem and was delighted—Count Razumovsky, minister of education.

Even earlier, Ivan Martynov, director of the ministry department that oversaw the Lycée (where his own son was a student), asked the young Pushkin to write an ode, “On the Return of the Sovereign Emperor from Paris in 1815.” This ode for Alexander I, with an accompanying letter from Pushkin, was given by Martynov to Count Razumovsky, who presented it to the emperor.⁹

Another notable step in the relations between young Pushkin and the royal family was the commission of a poem for the marriage of Alexander’s sister, Anna, and the heir to the Dutch throne, Prince William of Orange, who had fought at Waterloo.

This commission came through the court historian Karamzin, who had become the poet’s mentor. The performance of Pushkin’s poem, set to music, was described in the official communiqué as follows: “Groups of settlers of both sexes performed dances, games, and, united, sang a chorus that expressed their love for the brave Prince, the object of this festivity. After that chorus, couplets were sung in honor of his great successes at the famous victory.”¹⁰

Alexander’s mother, the dowager empress Maria Fedorovna, made special note of Pushkin’s offering, sending him a gold watch and chain. According to one story, Pushkin lost the watch immediately; according to another, he “squashed it under his heel on purpose.”¹¹

On June 9, 1817, the twenty-nine graduates of the Lycée were presented to Alexander I in order of achievement, with an announcement of the rank bestowed and awards of gold and silver medals. Pushkin was the twenty-sixth to be called: his successes were very modest, except for Russian and French and fencing. There was no chance of a medal.

The rank he was awarded upon graduation was collegiate secretary, which was part of the tenth class in the official Table of Ranks. Seventeen of his fellow graduates were in the higher ninth class. (Pushkin achieved that just before his death.) Alexander smiled benignly at them all, but for Pushkin, who had enjoyed a personal triumph at the previous examinations in the presence of the great Derzhavin, this ceremony must have been humiliating.

Once Alexander inquired of the students, who was first in the class? Pushkin replied, “We don’t have any firsts, Your Imperial Majesty, we’re all second.” And suddenly it became painfully clear that there actually was a division into first, second, and last, and that the wunderkind poet would have to sign official papers as “10th-class Pushkin.”

He had to find his revenge in another field, where Pushkin knew his true worth—poetry. The old and wise Lycée director Engelhardt had written perceptively in his record, “Pushkin’s highest and ultimate goal is to shine, with his poetry.”¹²

He rarely appeared at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was assigned after graduation: civil service bored him, and Pushkin, unlike Derzhavin, never did become an official.

After six years of being cooped up at the school, the twenty-year-old poet led a wild life in St. Petersburg: wine, young actresses, all-night orgies. In a letter to a friend, Pushkin described his life in 1819: “Everything goes on as usual: the champagne, thank God, is good, and the actresses, too—the first flows, the latter fuck—amen, amen. As it should be.” The letter ends on an amusing note: “I love you—and hate despotism. Farewell, dear one.”

Freethinking was fashionable in his circle. In order to be popular, you had to write dissident poems. The social commission was in the air, and at eighteen Pushkin responded to it with an ode “To Liberty.” It is a gem of political poetry, containing three exceptionally bold stanzas on a topic forbidden at the time—the murder of Paul, Alexander’s father, in 1801.

Only whispers were heard about that terrible episode in Russian history, and suddenly there came this fiery poetry. It is no surprise that the ode immediately became samizdat: it was copied, passed around, and enthusiastically memorized and declaimed at young people’s parties.

Inevitably, the poem reached Alexander I. His father’s assassination was an unhealed wound, and we can only imagine his reaction when he read:

O shame! O horror of our days!

Like animals the Janissaries burst in!

Ignominious blows fell,

The crowned villain died.

Pushkin was balancing on a knife edge here. On the one hand, he called Paul I a crowned villain. On the other, he called his murder horrible. As we know, Alexander did not sanction the killing. Still, he felt deep guilt for the crime. Surprisingly, Alexander “did not find reasons for punishment” when he read the ode, according to a contemporary.

A mysterious note has survived, written by Pushkin in December 1824 (a year before the tsar’s death), “An Imaginary Conversation with Alexander I.” Pushkin has the tsar praise “To Liberty,” in words he wanted to hear: “There are three very good stanzas here. While behaving very imprudently, you did not try to blacken me in the eyes of the people by spreading ridiculous slander. You may have unfounded opinions, but I see that you respected the truth and personal honor even in the Tsar.”

This text proves how significant the dialogue—actual and imaginary—with Alexander was in Pushkin’s mind. The intensity of the dialogue is confirmed by other politically tinted poems of the young Pushkin—for instance, his elegy “The Village” (1819), which was as popular among readers as “To Liberty.”

In “Liberty,” Pushkin talked about Russia’s need for a “reliable roof of law.” In “Village,” he turned to another urgent theme, serfdom: “Will I ever see, O friends, the people unfettered / and slavery fallen at the Tsar’s command.”

Once again, Pushkin touched a sensitive string in Alexander’s heart; the emperor was studying a number of projects on emancipating the serfs. After reading “The Village,” Alexander had Pushkin thanked in his name “for the good feelings elicited by this poem.” Alexander’s words went deep into Pushkin: seventeen years later, not long before his death, he quoted them in his poetic testament, “The Monument,” a variation on Horace’s “Exegi monumentum …”

And long will I be beloved by the people,

For eliciting good feelings with my lyre.

People who knew him recalled Pushkin’s independent, proud character and legendary volatility. Some attributed these qualities to his African heritage: his maternal grandfather, Abram Gannibal, came from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia (although now scholars think that he was from the territory of modern Cameroon).

In Russia, Gannibal became one of Peter the Great’s favorites, rising to the rank of general in Elizabeth’s reign. Pushkin’s mother was a cheerful, insouciant woman “with lovely Creole looks”; Pushkin inherited her curly hair and dusky complexion. Prince Vyazemsky recalled that Pushkin’s younger brother, Lev, “resembled a white Negro.”

Hot African blood and aristocratic Russian pride (his father could trace his family to the time of Prince Alexander Nevsky—that is, the thirteenth century) made a dangerous mix. But it was not genetics that made Pushkin’s relationship with the Romanovs so complex and difficult. He was the right man in the right place at the right time, and he paid dearly for it. Pushkin would conduct a paradigmatic cultural experiment labelled “poet and authority in Russia,” in which he himself was the subject. He got the starring role in this symbolic parable that became entrenched as one of the most influential Russian cultural myths. Pushkin lived up to the great role, even if, at the end, it cost him his life. This, and not just his exquisite poetry, is Pushkin’s incomparable significance for Russian history.

Of course, Russian poets before Pushkin tried to position themselves vis-à-vis the Romanovs—for example, Lomonosov and Derzhavin (who both left their own paraphrase of the ode by Horace). Even more important were the later attempts by Karamzin and Zhukovsky. But Pushkin is the most influential model, remaining the example of dialogue with the state for many generations of the Russian cultural elite to our day.

By writing the ode “To Liberty” and “The Village,” Pushkin basically “threw stones in the permitted direction,” to use Joseph Brodsky’s expression about similar liberal escapades of the young Moscow poets in the second half of the twentieth century.¹³ Later scholars, especially Soviet ones, interpreted those poems as terribly “revolutionary,” never mentioning Alexander I’s benign reaction.

I have already mentioned that the poet and emperor were on the same emotional wavelength about the need for the rule of law and the evils of serfdom. This explains in part why Alexander I, upon receiving denunciations of budding underground organizations whose aim was the abolishment of serfdom and the introduction of a constitution, reacted rather indifferently. As he threw one such report into the burning fireplace, Alexander commented on the republican ideas of the conspirators: “You know that I once shared and supported these illusions; it is not for me to punish them!”¹⁴ Three weeks before his death, the tsar admitted in a private conversation, with a sigh, “And still, whatever people may say about me, I lived and died a republican.”¹⁵

These musings cannot be dismissed as pure hypocrisy. Alexander demonstrated this ambivalence at a dangerous time for Russian autocracy. The victory over Napoleon had seismic international effects and brought about important changes inside Russia. While energizing Russia’s educated classes, especially young people, the epic war had wearied and disillusioned Alexander I.

The emperor returned to Russia gray-haired, heavier, and suddenly aged. His irritability had increased sharply, and his reactions were unpredictable. He became much more conservative.

By contrast, the young Russian officers who had picked up revolutionary ideas in Europe had become radicalized. Many of them were friends and acquaintances of Pushkin. They saw that the poet shared many of their views, but they refrained from inviting him to join any of their organizations.

Later, a beautiful legend took root that the revolutionaries did not bring Pushkin into their plans because they wanted to protect his genius from possible repercussions. But Prince Vyazemsky, who knew them well, quite reasonably noted that some of the conspirators, poets themselves, did not rate their own literary potential lower than Pushkin’s; they simply did not trust him. In their opinion, he was merely “the Aeolian harp of liberalism at the feasts of young people, responding to any which wind.”¹⁶

It didn’t matter. Pushkin was starting to claim the role of poetic spokesman for the political opposition to Alexander I. Finally, he wrote a satire that managed to insult the emperor personally. In the satire, Pushkin has Alexander returning from Europe (he calls him the “nomadic despot”) and declaring,

O be happy, people: I am well fed, healthy, and fat;

The newspaper writers glorify me;

I drank and ate and promised—

And I’m not exhausted by work.

Pushkin’s frequent jabs at Alexander spread through the capital instantly. One of them was particularly popular. After a tame bear cub escaped its chain in the park at Tsarskoe Selo and attacked the emperor, Alexander ran away. The poor bear cub was put down. Acerbic Pushkin quipped, “Finally one good man was found, and even he was a bear!”¹⁷

Angered, Alexander ordered the military governor of St. Petersburg, Count Mikhail Miloradovich, to start a dossier on Pushkin. We know the tsar’s stated intentions: “Pushkin should be exiled to Siberia: he’s inundated Russia with outrageous poems; all the young people know them by heart.”¹⁸

Count Miloradovich called in the poet. Pushkin showed up, and when Miloradovich announced that he was sending a police officer to Pushkin’s apartment to seize all his manuscripts, the poet quickly responded, “Count! All my poems are burned! There is nothing in my apartment; but if you wish, everything will be found here,” and he pointed to his head. “Better give me pen and paper, and I will write everything down for you.”

Sitting at the table, Pushkin filled an entire notebook, pleasing Miloradovich with his spontaneous frankness. The governor shook the poet’s hand and cried, “Ah, c’est chevaleresque!” The very next day he reported to the tsar and handed him Pushkin’s manuscript with the words, “Here is everything that is spread to the public, but you would be better not to read it, Sire!”

Alexander asked, “And what have you done with the author?” Hearing that the governor had pardoned Pushkin in the emperor’s name, Alexander frowned and grumbled, “Isn’t that premature?”¹⁹ He still wanted Pushkin sent to Siberia. But Karamzin was already petitioning on the poet’s behalf.

In the end, Pushkin was not sent to Siberia, but he was exiled from St. Petersburg and dispatched to the south of the country. Liberal St. Petersburg society perceived this imperial act as “a declaration of war against freethinking,” meant “to strike horror” in real and potential oppositionists. The consequences were predictable: “What has happened to liberalism? It vanished, went underground; all grew quiet. But that is when it started being dangerous.”²⁰

There was something providential in Pushkin being the first victim (“you could say, the only martyr then,” as an observer put it) of yet another switch in Alexander’s domestic policy. The man who liberated Europe from Napoleon’s rule and who had once been beloved by all was once again feeling alone, misunderstood, and deceived, as he had in his youth.

Not a single one of his ideas—constitutional reform, abolition of serfdom, or the ideal pan-Christian alliance of European monarchs—had come to pass. Alexander I lamented that people “had forgotten him, like an abandoned fad,” feared that he would die at the hands of conspirators, as had his father and grandfather, and concluded bitterly, “I no longer have any illusions about the gratitude and loyalty of people and therefore have turned all my thoughts to God.”²¹

The dénouement of this quasi-Romantic drama, which could have been written by Friedrich Schiller, was swift—in fact too fast and sudden for some of his contemporaries, and therefore mysterious. Unexpectedly, Alexander announced that he would take his ailing wife for treatment to the remote town of Taganrog in the south of Russia. (Anton Chekhov was born there thirty-five years later.)

In a modest one-story house in that provincial town, the emperor and his wife lived for some two months, filled with spiritual talk, prayer, and, as far as we can judge, quiet family joys. Not long before his forty-eighth birthday, Alexander, who had been known for his robust health, caught a chill, which quickly turned into a fatal fever.

On November 19, 1825, the emperor died, far from the capital, the court, and his beloved army. (His wife died, just as suddenly, six months later.) This quick death on the outskirts of the empire stunned contemporaries and gave rise to instant rumors and legends. Alexander was said to have been murdered, or to have committed suicide, or to not be dead at all. The last version gained some credence and has its adherents to this day.

According to this version, Alexander traveled to Taganrog in order to fake his death. This was to be his chance to realize his dream, which he had shared with people close to him: to abdicate from the throne and live a private life. Proponents of this theory argued that a different person was buried in March 1826 in St. Petersburg, which was why it was a closed-coffin funeral, which is against Orthodox custom.

There are numerous historical works seriously debating the question of whether the holy man Fedor Kuzmich, who appeared in Siberia ten years after Alexander I was declared deceased, was in fact the emperor, who had fulfilled his longing for a different kind of life.²²

The mysterious elder Fedor Kuzmich, who had resolutely refused to tell anything about himself and was buried in Siberia in 1864, had a remarkable resemblance to Alexander I: the same height, slightly stooped, and with blue eyes; he spoke several languages and had undoubtedly belonged to higher society in his past.

In fact, the story of Fedor Kuzmich being Alexander was taken seriously at court and even in the Romanov family. Grand Duke Nicholas (the future Nicholas II) stopped in Tomsk on a return trip from Japan in 1891 to visit the elder’s grave at a local monastery.

But the greatest memorial stone for that legend is Leo Tolstoy’s short novella The Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fedor Kuzmich, written in 1905 but published only in 1912, after the writer’s death (and even then over ferocious objections from the tsarist censors).

When younger, Tolstoy had been very skeptical of Alexander, as can be seen in War and Peace, his epic novel about the War of 1812 against Napoleon. But Tolstoy became involved in the story of the monarch’s rejection of fame and power and his flight to the people when the topic started to be acutely relevant to the writer’s own situation.

In 1905, while working on the novella, Tolstoy made a notation in his diary about the way he saw his own life: “A mass of people, all festive, eating, drinking, demanding. Servants run and obey. And it is more and more painful for me to participate in this lifestyle and not condemn it.”

In The Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fedor Kuzmich, narrated by Alexander I, Tolstoy endows the emperor with his own thoughts and emotions: “I was born and lived forty-seven years of my life amid the most terrible temptations and not only did I not resist them, I relished them, being tempted and tempting others, sinning and forcing others to sin. But God looked down at me. And the vileness of my life, which I had been trying to justify to myself and to blame on others, at last was revealed to me in all its horror.”

Tolstoy’s Alexander I looks at things just the way the writer was thinking in 1905 as he prepared to run away from his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. “I have to do what I’ve long wanted to do: abandon everything, leave, vanish.”

Pushkin in 1829 said that Alexander was “a harlequin in person and in life.” The skeptical and rational Pushkin did not believe in the emperor’s mystical moods or his presumed repentance. Seventy-five years later, Tolstoy, tormented by his own moral dilemma, was inclined to believe in Alexander’s “desire to leave everything, brought on by repentance,” and in his escape, which Tolstoy tried to emulate in 1910, “without vanity, without thought of human fame, but for myself, for God.”

Would Pushkin have agreed with Tolstoy’s passionate idea? He never did forgive Alexander I for his persecution. But Tolstoy’s assumptions about Alexander might easily have struck a chord with the poet Zhukovsky. The early-nineteenth-century mystic and the early-twentieth-century Christian anarchist would probably have had much food for spirited conversation.

CHAPTER 6

Nicholas I and Pushkin

Emperor Nicholas I called December 14, 1825, the “fateful day.” It became one of the most famous dates in Russian history: three thousand rebels—soldiers and sailors, led by several dozen officers, who came to be known as the Decembrists—came out onto Senate Square in St. Petersburg, to keep Nicholas, the younger brother of Alexander I, who had died less than a month previously, from becoming the new monarch of Russia.

The Decembrist uprising was like a sudden lightning bolt, and could have destroyed the empire. Part of the blame for this catastrophe was Alexander’s: he ignored reports of growing conspiracies, and his instructions on succession were exceptionally befuddled. (Many thought that the next tsar would be his brother Konstantin, next in age. Only a select few knew Alexander intended to make Nicholas his heir.)

The Decembrists took advantage of the confusion. They told the rebel soldiers that they would swear allegiance to Konstantin, while their real goal was the introduction of a constitution and the repeal of serfdom. The soldiers on Senate Square shouted, “Constitution, hurrah!,” believing it to be the name of Konstantin’s wife.

Most of the Decembrists were noble and courageous men, but they acted foolishly. The rebels who assembled around the Bronze Horseman, the monument to Peter the Great, had no idea what to do, their leaders vacillated, and their plans changed. Nicholas, displaying determination and firmness, surrounded the mutineers with troops loyal to him.

At first Nicholas had hoped to avoid bloodshed. But the rebels responded with bullets when ordered to give up, fatally wounding Count Miloradovich. It grew dark. As Nicholas I later recalled, “I had to put an end to this, otherwise the rebellion could spread to the rabble.” A loyal general said, “Sire, il n’y a pas un moment à perdre; l’on n’y peut rien maintenant; il faut de la mitraille!” (“Sire, there’s not a moment to lose; we have to shoot!”) Nicholas hesitated: “Vous voulez que je verse le sang de mes sujets le premier jour de mon règne?” “Pour sauver votre Empire.” (“You want me to spill the blood of my subjects on the first day of my reign?” “To save your Empire.”) The emperor gave the order to the artillery: “Fire!”¹

“Long live freedom!” was the mutineers’ response to the first round. But they fled after the second and subsequent rounds. It was over in fifteen minutes. The number of losses is still in dispute: officially, there were fewer than one hundred; unofficially, more than a thousand. In any case, Nicholas won the battle, as his personal fate and the future of the Romanov dynasty had hung by a thread that day.

That evening the leading Decembrists were arrested and brought to the Winter Palace, hands tied behind their backs. The new tsar’s quarters resembled a military camp. In full uniform with scarf and saber, Nicholas sat in on the interrogations until dawn, using his formidable range of acting skills: tall and impressive, with a profile from an antique cameo, he stared with his piercing gray eyes at the rebels and was alternately stern, gentle, angry, kind. Some Decembrists behaved cockily, even insolently; others fell to the tsar’s feet and tearfully begged forgiveness.

Hiding his fear and shock, Nicholas tried to find out the roots and causes of this attempted revolution. In his memoirs he wrote, “[T]he statements by the prisoners were so varied, expansive and complex, that it required especial firmness of mind to keep from getting lost in that chaos.”²

Despite the confused accounts, an important detail immediately caught the new emperor’s attention: during the interrogations, the Decembrists kept quoting Pushkin’s freedom-loving poetry to explain their ideology. This made Pushkin a marked man.

By that time, Pushkin had spent sixteen months in exile in the village of Mikhailovskoe, Pskov Province, in his family estate. He had been sent there, to be supervised by the local authorities, on Alexander’s personal orders. In 1824, the emperor struck Pushkin from government service. The poet had desired that himself, but life in the sticks of the countryside did not suit him at all. Still, Alexander, angered by Pushkin’s defiant behavior, kept the poet in Mikhailovskoe.

Alexander’s sudden death brought hope to the nearly desperate Pushkin, prepared to do almost anything to escape the countryside. News of the rebellion of December 14 began reaching Mikhailovskoe. Learning of its failure, Pushkin panicked; he later explained to Prince Vyazemsky, “I’ve never liked rebellion and revolution, that is true; but I was in contact with almost all of the conspirators and in correspondence with many of them. All inciting manuscripts were attributed to me, the way all the lewd ones go by Barkov’s name.”

Pushkin hoped for help from his mentors, Karamzin and Zhukovsky, who had retained their privileged court positions under the new emperor. Zhukovsky knew that the Investigative Commission was trying to tie Pushkin to the Decembrists. He wrote from St. Petersburg to Pushkin at Mikhailovskoe: “You are not involved in anything—that is true. But each of the conspirators had your poetry in his papers. This is a poor way to make friends with the government.”³

After the Investigative Commission, the Supreme Criminal Court took over the case. Pushkin wrote to a friend, “I impatiently await the decision on the fate of the wretches … I have firm hopes in the magnanimity of our young tsar.”

But many in Nicholas’s entourage urged him to punish the rebels severely. When Nicholas asked one of the hard-liners whether he thought that a death sentence would be too harsh, he replied, “On the contrary, Sire, we fear that you will be too merciful.” Nicholas countered, “Neither one—there’s a need to give a lesson: but I hope that no one will argue with me about the best right of Sovereigns—to forgive and soften punishment.”⁴

Was Nicholas being hypocritical? Or did he sincerely believe himself to be a merciful person? When the court sentenced the five revolutionary leaders to being quartered, Nicholas changed that to hanging; some others were condemned to hard labor for life instead of hanging. More than 120 men were sent to Siberia. Pushkin and his friends shuddered.

Pushkin, who knew all the executed men personally, obsessively drew a scaffold with five hanged men while writing his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, and added the caption, “And I could have been …”

Pushkin wrote to Zhukovsky, “Perhaps it would please His Majesty to change my fate. Whatever my thoughts may be, political and religious, I keep them to myself and do not intend to madly contradict the generally accepted order.”

Meanwhile, Zhukovsky went abroad, Karamzin died. Pushkin was left without protection at the court. Now the young tsar would decide the poet’s fate by himself. Paradoxically, this was better for Pushkin.

Thirty-year-old Nicholas, imperious and determined, hated being pressured. He apparently sincerely esteemed Karamzin and Zhukovsky, but for him they were still Alexander’s people, and despite all his protestations of great love for his older brother, Nicholas was jealous of him.

In Russian history, a new strong ruler usually rejected the policies of his predecessor and selected a more distant model to emulate. That was the case with Peter I, Elizabeth I, and then Catherine II, Paul I, and Alexander I: each tried as quickly as possible to erase the memories of the previous monarch’s achievements, starting their own reign on a clean page.

Nicholas I was no exception: he did not orient himself on Alexander I but on Peter the Great. Like his brother, Nicholas was an excellent actor, but unlike Alexander, he wore his mask (or masks) much more comfortably. He was not burdened by his power, he relished it.

Nicholas I read a lot—primarily books on military issues, geography, and history, but also fiction, mostly foreign. One of his favorite writers was Sir Walter Scott, whom he met in 1816, when he traveled to England as a duke. Curiously, Scott predicted to Nicholas that he would be the tsar (there was no hint of it at the time), which elicited an embarrassed response: “Fortunately, poets are not oracles.”

When Nicholas became emperor, literature became another stage on which he decided to wrestle with his late brother: Alexander had banished the poet, so he, the new ruler, would allow Pushkin to rehabilitate himself.

In late August 1826, in Moscow for his coronation, he ordered “Pushkin to be sent here.”⁵ Nicholas knew little about Pushkin. But he intuited that there was an opportunity for an effective symbolic gesture. But, as people would say a century later, “it takes two to tango.” The presumed paradigm required a ready partner. Would the stubborn, volatile, and insolent Pushkin take the part?

As it happened, Pushkin was ready for a dialogue with the tsar. The shift in his position was due to the political situation, the advice of friends, and age, but also to the completion of his tragedy Boris Godunov, ten months before Nicholas summoned him. Pushkin proudly informed a friend, “My tragedy is finished; I read it out loud, alone, and I clapped my hands and shouted, Bravo, Pushkin, Bravo, you son of a bitch!”

Its theme was a dramatic historical event in the early seventeenth century: the fall in 1605 of Boris Godunov, the clever boyar who had usurped the throne. The Time of Troubles followed, ending in 1613 with the coronation of Mikhail, the founder of the Romanov dynasty.

A powerful impulse for writing Boris Godunov came from reading volumes 10 and 11 of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, a monumental work that began publication in 1818 and was an instant sensation, literary and political. Pushkin called Karamzin “the first historian and the last chronicler” of Russia.

Tall, pale, and elegant, thirty-three years older than Pushkin, Karamzin was a father figure for him: gentle, attentive, kind, and pointedly calm. But Pushkin would not be Pushkin without complicating this almost idyllic relationship: he fell in love with Karamzin’s wife, who was twenty years his senior. Some Pushkin scholars believe that she remained the great love of his life.

Pushkin devoured the first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History (from Russia’s origins to 1560). The following three volumes covered events until the start of the seventeenth century. (The final, twelfth volume, would have brought the narrative to the election of Mikhail Romanov; Karamzin’s death before his sixtieth birthday interrupted the work.)

Pushkin wrote that Karamzin discovered ancient Russia as Columbus had America. He borrowed the plot and many details of his Boris Godunov from Karamzin, and did not conceal it: the tragedy is dedicated to Karamzin “with reverence and gratitude.” But Pushkin did not fail to indicate the other sources of his inspiration: ancient Russian chronicles and Shakespeare.

As an experiment in “Shakespearean” tragedy, the work is not a complete success: it never became a repertory staple, and in the West is better known through Modest Mussorgsky’s operatic interpretation. But as an essay on political power in Russia, Boris Godunov was a breakthrough unsurpassed to this day; many lines are still used as aphorisms: “Living authority is hated by the masses. They love only the dead”; and the succinct statement on the inhuman burden of power, symbolized by the tsar’s crown, that has been quoted by Russians for almost two hundred years: “Oh, how heavy is the crown of Monomakh!”

Studying Karamzin’s History and working on Boris Godunov confirmed Pushkin in his dream to become a “state” writer, whose opinions would be listened to by rulers. He learned in Karamzin’s work that distant relatives in the Pushkin line had taken part in the 1613 election of the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail. Now Pushkin had yet another reason to be angry with Alexander I and all the Romanovs: “Ingrates! Six Pushkins signed the election paper! And two made a mark, unable to write! And I, their literate descendant, what am I? Where am I?”

Pushkin realized that after Nicholas quashed the Decembrist rebellion, the only way to implement his newly discovered mission as “state” writer was under the aegis of the monarchy: if not in union, then at least in dialogue.

So the scene of the meeting of Nicholas I and Pushkin on September 8, 1826, in Moscow, where the emperor had urgently summoned the poet six days after his coronation from his exile in Mikhailovskoe, went as if rehearsed, even though both participants had improvised. Its success was due in part to the actors’ typecasting: the stern but just and merciful Tsar and the independent, impulsive, but honest genius Poet who sincerely wants to serve his country.

Nicholas set the tone for the scene: “My brother, the late emperor, exiled you to the countryside, while I free you of that punishment on the condition that you write nothing against the government.” Pushkin’s reply: “Your Majesty, I no longer write anything against the government.”⁶

Then came the tsar’s key question: “What would you have done if you were in St. Petersburg on 14 December?” Pushkin’s honest admission—“I would have stood in the ranks of the rebels”—was arguably the watershed in this historic conversation: Nicholas hated weasels, but he respected forthrightness and honesty (even in his foes).

His reminiscences show how he reacted to Pushkin’s openness: “When I later asked him: had his thinking changed and would he give me his word to think and act differently in the future if I set him free, he vacillated for a very long time and only after a long silence he offered me his hand with the promise to change.”⁷

The audience in the emperor’s Kremlin office lasted at least an hour (some sources put it at two hours), an incredible amount of time given the tsar’s busy schedule. It was also long enough for the tsar and the poet to come up with a striking finale to this symbolic play. Pushkin walked out of the office together with Nicholas “with tears in his eyes, cheerful, energetic, happy.” The tsar, tenderly indicating the poet, loudly said to the courtiers, “Gentlemen, now Pushkin is mine!”⁸ That same evening, he told a courtier that Pushkin was “the wisest man in Russia.”

The practical result of this brilliant performance was Pushkin’s release from general censorship so that his “personal” censor would be the tsar himself. But even more important was the enormous public resonance of that meeting, as reflected in the memoirs of the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz: “It was an unheard-of event! It has never been seen that the tsar would speak with a man who in France would be considered a proletarian and who in Russia has much less significance than a proletarian in our country, for Pushkin, albeit of noble birth, had no rank in the administrative hierarchy.”⁹

There were political and economic reasons why this meeting of the tsar and the poet became paradigmatic for Russian culture. Nicholas’s reign was the zenith of Russian autocracy and in many ways the model of authoritarian rule in Russia. In particular, in the twentieth century Stalin learned a lot from Nicholas, although the Soviet dictator hid this carefully, insisting instead on parallels with other tsars, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.¹⁰

Pushkin became a symbolic figure, too, not only as the father of new Russian literature and as its most popular and arguably greatest figure, but as its first professional. Two of Pushkin’s maxims (he admitted they were a bit cynical) are still used as professions de foi by many Russian writers: “I write for myself, but I publish for money” and “Inspiration is not for sale, but a manuscript can be sold.”

Pushkin was seriously concerned with questions of authors’ rights, censorship, fees, and publishing, and he worked as a journalist and an editor. His attitude toward these issues was ambivalent. He wanted popularity with the mass readers, but on his own terms. His self-esteem and ideas of aristocratic honor and dignity (the poet, as we know, was very proud of his six-hundred-year-old ancestry) did not allow him to follow the capriciously changing tastes of readers as easily as some of his more clever and successful (and now forgotten) colleagues—Mikhail Zagoskin, Ivan Lazhechnikov, Osip Senkovsky, and Faddei Bulgarin. They were paid more and sold more than Pushkin in their lifetimes.

Of course, young Pushkin had enormous success. The exotic “Romantic” poems (imitating Byron) that he wrote after visiting the Caucasus and the Crimea in 1820—“Prisoner of the Caucasus,” “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” and, later, “The Gypsies”—were a hit. A bookseller paid Pushkin 3,000 rubles for the first edition of “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” but upped it to 10,000 for the second edition.

The slim and elegant volume Poems by Alexander Pushkin, which appeared in St. Petersburg two weeks before the Decembrist uprising, was also met enthusiastically: costing 10 rubles (a mid-level bureaucrat’s monthly salary was 60 rubles), twelve hundred copies were sold out quickly, bringing the author pure profit of 8,000 rubles.¹¹

Eugene Onegin was a sensation; Pushkin started publishing it in installments in 1825. The public was intrigued by the new genre—“novel in verse”—and by the unusual free form of presenting the material and the charm of the poetry. (“Charm” was the operative word used by many contemporaries for Onegin.) The first chapter had two printings (2,400 copies, extraordinarily large for poetry).

The publisher declared Eugene Onegin a “gold mine” and told Pushkin, “Your imagination has never created, and probably never will, a work that with such simple means moved such an enormous mountain of money.”¹²

The plot of Onegin is quite simple and known now to every Russian schoolchild: the St. Petersburg dandy Eugene Onegin moves to the country and rejects the meek love of the provincial young lady Tatiana, kills his best friend, the poet Lensky (suitor of Tatiana’s sister, Olga) in a meaningless duel, and then, after a lengthy absence, returns to St. Petersburg, where he meets Tatiana again. Now she is a well-known society lady, married to a distinguished general. This time Onegin is at her feet, but she remains faithful to her husband.

The magic of Pushkin’s novel was not in this simple story but in the innumerable digressions and author’s asides—melancholy, philosophical, playful, mocking—creating the illusion of a heart-to-heart chat with the reader. Threading words in a playful chain of these inimitable digressions that contained a treasure chest of future popular aphorisms, Pushkin in fact was creating a new literary language.

The opening chapters were the subject of lively discussion. According to the magazine Moscow Herald (1828), young and old, society ladies, and young girls and their suitors all chattered on about: “What is Tatiana like, Olga like, Lensky like.” But subsequent chapters pleased the mass audience less and less.