Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

But the honeymoon soon ended for the Tsar Liberator. It seemed that this reform and the important ones that followed (administrative, judicial, military) ultimately satisfied no one. The nobles worried about the erosion of their position as the leading political class. The peasants were unhappy with the small land allotments for which they had to pay high prices. The intelligentsia demanded a European-style constitution. The radicals among students, the so-called nihilists, dreamed of overthrowing autocracy altogether and establishing a “peasant” socialism in Russia.

Nikitenko wrote in horror in his diary, “To speak badly of the government and accuse it of all wrongdoing has become the fashion … Will the government have the strength to restrain this disorderly movement that threatens Russia with innumerable catastrophes? The main thing is a lack of national, patriotic feeling. Society is handicapped by the absence of lofty beliefs.”⁴

Karakozov’s attempt on Alexander II’s life was used by the authorities as an opportunity to instill “lofty beliefs” from above. As usual in such cases, cultural figures were quickly brought into play. Poetry in honor of the “savior of the emperor” Komissarov-Kostromskoy was hastily written by Prince Petr Vyazemsky, seventy-four, once Pushkin’s liberal friend and now a major official, and by Apollon Maikov, who had previously praised Nicholas I in his verse.

They were major poets, but not trendsetters. The ultrademocratic Nekrasov was one, and the authorities forced him—on pain of banning his progressive journal, Contemporary—to write an ode in honor of the “new Susanin.”

Son of the People! I sing of thee!

You will be glorified a lot!

You are great—like the weapon of God

Who directed your hand!

All three odes—by Vyazemsky, Maikov, and Nekrasov—were included in a deluxe presentation book, Osip Komissarov-Kostromskoy, Savior of the Emperor, published in Moscow and ornamented by a portrait of Komissarov and his wife. Some think that bad verse looks better on good paper, but it didn’t help here: even Nekrasov’s work looked pitiful.

Was that all the government could squeeze out of Russian culture for its large-scale propaganda campaign? (Further poetry dedicated to Komissarov, and there was a lot of it, was even worse.) They did not manage to create a “new Susanin.” That required authentic and not simulated “lofty beliefs” (both from the government and the cultural leaders), the absence of which was bemoaned by Professor Nikitenko. Glinka and Nicholas I had them: that is why their “cultural contract” brought about the great opera A Life for the Tsar, which still elicits “national, patriotic feeling” (as Nikitenko termed it). In Alexander II’s Russia, there was an apparent shortage of “lofty beliefs” and “patriotic feelings.”

The failure of this ambitious promonarchist cultural action in 1866 was symbolic of the ever-increasing alienation between the Romanovs and educated society. Autocracy was losing—slowly but inexorably—its former authority and its power over culture. The fear of the tsar’s wrath was gradually replaced with the fear of losing one’s audience. This was a historic transitional period.

The last great Russian monarchist writer was Fedor Dostoevsky. His road to apologist of the Romanovs was complicated and even dramatic. In 1847 the young Dostoevsky, already a famous writer, joined a socialist circle in St. Petersburg headed by Mikhail Petrashevsky. The police learned of the circle, and its members were arrested in 1849 on orders from Nicholas I. After an intensive investigation, supervised by Nicholas himself, the authorities sentenced twenty-one members of the Petrashevsky circle to hanging, including Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky later recalled, “We Petrashevskyites stood on the scaffold and heard out our sentence without the slightest repentance … almost every condemned man was certain that it would be carried out and we suffered through at last ten horrible, immeasurably horrible minutes awaiting death.” At the last moment, there was an announcement that Nicholas had commuted the death sentence to exile and hard labor in Siberia.

In Siberia, “contact with the people, fraternal unity with them in common misery, the understanding that you had become just like them,” transfigured Dostoevsky. The writer had not been an atheist (“In our family we knew the New Testament from early childhood”), but in Siberia he became a Russian Orthodox fundamentalist and turned from socialist to monarchist.

When he became tsar in 1855, Alexander II’s first act was to pardon the political “state criminals”—the Decembrists and Petrashevskyites, and in late 1859 Dostoevsky was at last allowed to return to St. Petersburg, where he resumed his literary career, publishing the sensational House of the Dead, a reportage of his years in Siberia. This was his only work that Tolstoy valued unconditionally.

Dostoevsky remained grateful to Alexander II for his mercy, and Karakozov’s assassination attempt in 1866 stunned him. When he learned of it, Dostoevsky, forty-one at the time, a small, lumpy, and unkempt man, rushed to see the poet Maikov, also a monarchist, and shouted in a trembling voice, “They shot at the tsar!”

Prince Meshchersky, the St. Petersburg publisher of the semi-official publication The Citizen and fierce opponent of liberal reforms, hired Dostoevsky as editor in 1873 (Dostoevsky started his famous Diary of a Writer there), and he recalled that the writer’s “soul burned with fiery loyalty to the Russian Tsar … I had never seen or met such a total and focused conservative … The apostle of truth in everything, major and trifling, Dostoevsky was as strict as an ascetic and as fanatical as a neophyte in his conservatism.”⁵

When he heard of the attempt on the tsar’s life, Dostoevsky was writing his novel Crime and Punishment, which may be his most popular work. The story of the St. Petersburg student Raskolnikov, who killed an old pawnbroker with an ax to prove to himself that he was a superman and could be compared to Napoleon, already posed the quintessential “Dostoevskian” question: “Am I a quaking creature or do I have the right?” Karakozov’s act of terrorism (which Dostoevsky interpreted in that proto-Nietzschean key) gave the writer the idea to express what “filled my mind and heart” in his 1872 novel, The Devils. “I don’t care if it turns out to be a pamphlet, I will have my say.”

Prince Meshchersky claimed that Dostoevsky hated revolutionaries. Dostoevsky poured out this hatred in The Devils. He based it on the trial of a revolutionary group led by the fanatic Sergei Nechaev, who had executed their comrade, accused by Nechaev of being a traitor in 1869.

Dostoevsky avidly followed the trial in the press. The newspapers were, as usual, an important source of inspiration for him in those anxious days. In 1867, Dostoevsky wrote to a friend, “Do you subscribe to any papers? Read them, for God’s sake, you can’t do otherwise nowadays, not to be fashionable but because the visible connection among all public and private affairs becomes stronger and clearer.”

Dostoevsky’s marked interest in “despised” newspapers was innovative for Russia. The police blotter created a background for allegedly real, “Dostoevskian” characters with their exalted speechifying and mad deeds in a phantasmagorical atmosphere.

Dostoevsky’s prose moves, breathes, pulses like a living organism, pulling the reader into its cruel, paroxysmal world (Dostoevsky was an epileptic). His words, sometimes running off in all directions, then gathering into a thick, sticky mass, form a fabric that yields to translation with difficulty. People who have marveled at the originals of Van Gogh’s tight-sprung paintings in museums, acutely feeling the bite of each nervous stroke, and then looked at the same works in reproductions, even faithful ones, will understand what I mean. Dostoevsky should be read in Russian.

In early March 1877, the frigate Svetlana (named after the popular ballad by the poet Zhukovsky, Alexander II’s tutor) sailed into the port of Norfolk, Virginia. On board the ship an eighteen-year-old marine guard was reading Dostoevsky avidly. He began with The Devils (which shook him to tears) and then intended to move on to Crime and Punishment. His nineteen-year-old cousin had sent him both books, supervising his reading.

The books were not brand-new—Crime and Punishment came out eleven years earlier, The Devils, six—but they still had far to go to before taking a place in the cultural canon, so the emotionally charged reading by a young naval officer was interesting from a purely sociological point of view. More notably, the young seaman was Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, grandson of Nicholas I and nephew of the ruling tsar, and his cousin Sergei was Alexander II’s son.

Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov (1858–1915) was a remarkable figure. He was the only Romanov to become a well-known poet (signing his verse K.R.). His father was a liberal and an advocate of Alexander II’s reforms. Konstantin grew up a liberal too. He and his cousin Sergei were tall, slender, and handsome, with a dreamy gaze, and they were close friends. But their political views were diametrically opposed, which was probably a sign of the times.

In 1879, Grand Duke Konstantin noted in his diary,

I argued with Sergei, we talked about what if we have a revolution. What will we do, the Romanovs? Would we have to leave Russia? That would be the worst disaster for me. I tried to expound the idea to Sergei that revolutions bring harm only to those against whom they are directed but they have a beneficial effect on the country. I gave him France as an example. Sergei was horrified by my theory and said, “Tu es à plaindre avec de pareilles idées” (“You are pathetic with such ideas”).⁶

Subsequently, both cousins became important bureaucrats. Grand Duke Sergei (who married for the sake of decorum but was a homosexual) was appointed Moscow’s general governor in 1891 by his brother, Emperor Alexander III, who valued his strict conservative views and administrative zeal. In 1905, Sergei was killed by a terrorist, but few people regretted it, among them Leo Tolstoy, who exclaimed upon learning of the assassination, “A horrible thing!” adding perspicaciously, “And it will be worse.”

K.R., a model family man and father of seven children, died mourned by many, as general inspector of the country’s military schools and also president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He was shattered by the death of his son, Oleg, twenty-three, also a gifted poet, in the First World War.

In 1918, after the victory of the Bolshevik revolution, three of his children who had been exiled to the Urals were executed together with the widow of Grand Duke Sergei (who had become a nun after her husband’s assassination): they were thrown down a mine shaft, and then grenades were thrown in after them. The victims did not die right away. Legend has it that even a few days later, feeble sounds of church hymns could be heard coming from the shaft.

In their letters, the great figures of Russian culture who knew him (Tchaikovsky, Fet, Dostoevsky) used the same words—“dear,” “charming,” “pleasant”—to describe the poetry and personality of K.R. His poems (love lyrics and religious meditations) are professional, traditional, sincere, and easily set to music, which many Russian composers did, including Tchaikovsky.

Amusingly, K.R.’s most famous work today is not his play King of Judea (with music by Alexander Glazunov), which he wrote on Tchaikovsky’s advice and which was very controversial in its time, nor his translation of Hamlet, long considered exemplary, but a simple poem he wrote in 1885, which begins with the words: “He’s dead, poor fellow! He lay a long time / In the military hospital …”

I remember the doleful song—whose authors no one knew; it was considered a folk song—being sung by Russian veterans begging in trains after World War II. It is still performed today, at tipsy parties, and now there is always some expert to inform the group that the words were written by Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov.

There is a curious episode in the complex history of Dostoevsky’s relationship with members of the Romanov family. In early 1878 the writer was visited by Admiral Dmitri Arsenyev, tutor of Alexander II’s sons, who came “in the name of the Sovereign, who would like Fedor Mikhailovich to have a beneficial effect with his conversations on the young grand dukes.”⁷

There is reason to assume that the flattering visit was prompted by a recent mini-scandal in the royal family. On December 25 the twenty-year-old Grand Duke Sergei recorded the following plaintive lines in his diary: “I recently had a very unpleasant story: Papa accused me of depravity and that Sasha V. aided me in it, and the slander insulted me bitterly. Lord help me! Amen!”⁸

We can only guess what the “unpleasant story” was and whether it was related to Sergei’s homosexuality, but it resulted in Alexander II’s wish, passed on by Admiral Arsenyev, for Dostoevsky to talk sense to his wayward son. Alexander II—and Alexander III after him—valued Dostoevsky’s loyalty to the ideals of autocracy and his oft-expressed idea that young people must be brought up in an Orthodox and highly moral spirit. Dostoevsky, in turn, was happy to influence the views of the Romanovs in a personal conversation.

On March 21, 1878, Dostoevsky had lunch in the Winter Palace with the grand dukes and their tutors. K.R. was present and noted his impressions of the writer in his diary: “This is a sickly looking man, with a thin, long beard and extremely sad and thoughtful expression on his pale face. He speaks very well, as if reading a prepared text.”⁹

Judging by subsequent invitations to luncheons and dinners with the Romanov family circle, Dostoevsky’s “edifying” conversation with the grand dukes was considered a success. K.R. was delighted: “I love Dostoevsky for his pure, childlike heart, for his profound faith and observant mind.”¹⁰

Dostoevsky told his wife that the grand dukes “have kind hearts and not run-of-the-mill minds and can hold their own in a discussion, sometimes espousing still immature convictions; but they also know how to treat opposing views of their interlocutors with respect.”¹¹

This idyllic picture, “the great Russian writer instructs members of the ruling dynasty on questions of morality and piety,” might not have taken place. While the Romanov family loved Dostoevsky’s The Devils for its satirical depiction of “nihilists” and revolutionaries, they had read only a radically bowdlerized version.

Dostoevsky was unable to publish the most important chapter of The Devils (called “At Tikhon’s”), which contained “Stavrogin’s confession.” The demonic Nikolai Stavrogin, a central character in the novel, confesses a grievous sin to the monk Tikhon that has been tormenting his conscience: he had raped an underage girl.

The conservative Mikhail Katkov, an influential adviser of Alexander II and later of Alexander III, and editor of the journal Russian Herald, which published The Devils in installments, rejected that chapter as “too real”—the topic and the writing seemed shocking, verging on pornography. We can be sure that if “Stavrogin’s confession” had been printed in the journal, Dostoevsky would never have been invited to meet with the young Romanovs—he would have been a scandalous figure.

Dostoevsky was in despair from this literary vivisection at first: the most striking episode of the novel was gone. But then he accepted it, apparently—albeit with pain—and did not include the skipped chapter in a separate edition of The Devils. It was never published in his lifetime, appearing for the first time in 1922.

There is a theory that Dostoevsky dropped the chapter that was so dear to his heart because he feared a new wave of talk (there had been whispers for a long time) that the episode with the little girl had autobiographical roots. There is no question that Dostoevsky had a morbid fixation on the topic: there are similar occurrences in other novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Raw Youth.

It is a very delicate issue. Contemporary Russian specialists speak cautiously about Dostoevsky’s possible nymphophilia.¹² His defenders foam at the mouth at this slander and gossip. But that “slander” was discussed by Turgenev and Tolstoy, which makes it at least a fact of the literary discourse of Dostoevsky’s era and therefore a fact of cultural history.

Dostoevsky wrote to his confidant, the poet Maikov, “Worst of all, my nature is vile and overly passionate, I always go to the last barrier everywhere and in everything, all my life I have crossed the line.” We know that Dostoevsky acknowledged his passion for gambling at roulette as one of his worst vices. He repented in his letters to his wife, Anna, calling himself every possible name: “feckless and base, a petty player”; “I’m worse than a beast”; and so on.

Dostoevsky’s “passion” is also recorded in his letters to his wife when it comes to sex. Despite the fact that she carefully excised (with an eraser) the most “indecent” passages when she prepared the letters for publication, a few things remain: “I kiss you every minute in my dreams, all of you, every minute, French kissing. I particularly love that about which was said: ‘and he was delighted and enthralled by that thing.’ I kiss that thing every minute in every manner and I intend to kiss it all my life.”¹³

When he got a letter from his wife with an innocent, even naive hint—“I have the most seductive dreams, and there is a lot in them of one very, very sweet and dear man, whom you know very well—guess who?”—he responded with a hot epistle in which she was later forced to erase twenty-eight lines from one page alone. Dostoevsky concluded his erotic outburst with a confession: “Anna, you can tell just from this page what’s happening to me. I’m in a delirium, I’m afraid I’ll have a fit. I kiss your hands and palms, and feet, and all of you.”¹⁴

. . .

There is a story that Turgenev told, recorded by the writer Ieronim Yasinsky, that Dostoevsky came to Turgenev once and started “nervously” telling him how he bought sexual favors from a twelve-year-old girl for 500 rubles. Turgenev interrupted him and ordered him from the house immediately, and Dostoevsky allegedly confessed that he had made it up to “amuse” Turgenev.¹⁵

We know that Turgenev considered Dostoevsky to be the Russian Marquis de Sade from his letter to the writer Saltykov-Shchedrin dated September 24, 1882. Turgenev wrote with disgust that de Sade “insists with particular pleasure on the perverted voluptuous bliss that comes from imposing sophisticated torture and suffering” and added, “Dostoevsky also describes in detail the pleasures of one such connoisseur in one of his novels.”¹⁶

By this Turgenev clearly meant “Stavrogin’s confession” from The Devils. Turgenev had an account to settle with that novel. Besides the fact that he was caricatured in it as the pathetic Westernizer writer Karmazinov, he was envious of the book’s great success.

In 1862, Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, in which he first introduced the revolutionary “nihilist” character in his protagonist Bazarov. The author himself and the critics declared Bazarov “the new hero of our times,” and he was the subject of endless debate and controversy. This was the peak of Turgenev’s topicality for Russian readers.

Dostoevsky conceived his novel in great part as a polemical response to Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s Bazarov was described by the author as “a grim, wild, big figure.” Dostoevsky’s nihilists are petty devils; he wanted to show how the Bazarov type had degenerated in post-reform Russia.

When he presented his Devils in 1873 to the future Emperor Alexander III, Dostoevsky explained in the accompanying letter that there was a straight line “from fathers to sons,” and that the Westernizers and liberals, like Belinsky and Turgenev, torn “from the native and unique sources of Russian life,” engendered contemporary terrorists.

Turgenev apparently was aware of Dostoevsky’s court maneuvers. In 1876, when Saltykov-Shchedrin asked why he wasn’t the tsarevich’s (that is, the future Alexander III’s) tutor, Turgenev responded proudly, although perhaps not quite sincerely, that he did not wish to be “the domestic author” of the Romanov family à la Dostoevsky: “You mention teaching the heir; but it was after Fathers and Sons that I distanced myself more than ever from the circle in which I basically never did have entrée and writing or working for which I would have considered stupid and shameful.”¹⁷

When Dostoevsky died on January 28, 1881 (a pulmonary artery burst, blood gushing from his mouth), the authorities did not know how to react. The day was saved by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who in 1880 became high procurator of the Holy Synod (in effect minister of religious affairs) and was one of the closest advisers of Alexander II, and subsequently of Alexander III (whose tutor he was), and even of Nicholas II.

Pobedonostsev, who was described by his enemies as a “clean-shaven bat in eyeglasses and on its hind feet,” was a powerful and unique figure. A lawyer by education, Pobedonostsev had a broad cultural outlook, adored the poetry of Tyutchev and Fet, and helped obtain state subsidies for Tchaikovsky.

Pobedonostsev’s views were extremely conservative. His lodestar was the ideological triad of the era of Nicholas I (whom he revered as the greatest Russian monarch)—“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” The religious philosopher and critic Konstantin Leontyev, who knew Pobedonostsev well, said, “He is a very useful man; but how? He is like frost: he prevents further rot; but nothing will grow around him.”

Pobedonostsev considered democratic ideas and parliamentarism “the great lie of our time.” He read the daily press closely and hated it, blaming it for revolutionary ferment. He maintained that in the new era the recently illiterate Russia had suddenly ended up “with newspaper instead of book in hand,” which was a “great disaster” for the country, leaving it vulnerable to liberal propaganda.

Dostoevsky considered Pobedonostsev his fellow ideologue and patron, and the latter esteemed the writer as a torchbearer of conservative philosophy; in 1880 he arranged an audience for Dostoevsky with the heir to the throne and his wife.

As soon as he learned of Dostoevsky’s death, Pobedonostsev wrote to the heir, “He was a close friend and I am sad that he is gone. But his death is a great loss for Russia, too. Among writers he—perhaps the only one—was a fervent preacher of the basic principles of Faith, Nationality, love of Homeland. Our miserable youth, lost like sheep without a shepherd, trusted him, and his influence was very great and beneficial.”¹⁸

Pobedonostsev asked the heir to request Alexander II to help the Dostoevsky family: “He was poor and left nothing but books.” The future Alexander III responded instantly, “I am very, very sorry about the death of poor Dostoevsky, it is a great loss and positively no one can replace him.”¹⁹

With a nudge from Pobedonostsev, the state shifted into full speed in organizing the funeral. On Pobedonostsev’s direct orders, the Alexander Nevsky Monastery (the central Russian Orthodox monastery) offered Dostoevsky’s widow space for his burial in their prestigious cemetery, the resting place of Karamzin and Zhukovsky, the favorite writers of the Romanovs. For a former state prisoner and convict who had never been in government service, this was unprecedented generosity. The imperial treasury paid for Dostoevsky’s funeral.

Dostoevsky’s widow received a letter from the minister of finances, which read, “The Emperor on the 30th day of this January beneficently decreed: in view of the services of your late husband to Russian literature, in which he held one of the most honorable places, you, esteemed madam, and your children will receive a pension of two thousand rubles a year.”²⁰ Alexander II also ordered that if the widow wished it, her children’s education would be paid for as well. Pobedonostsev became their guardian.

The daily newspapers, which Pobedonostsev so hated, gave enormous coverage to the tsar’s munificence. Alexander II was portrayed as the patron of Russian culture who knew, unlike his father, Nicholas I, how to forgive former dissidents. The moves from above coincided with public sentiment, and Dostoevsky’s funeral turned into a huge public event, imbued with symbolic meaning.

The coffin, enveloped in gold brocade and covered with wreaths, was borne by pallbearers from Dostoevsky’s apartment to the monastery, accompanied by an enormous procession (the newspapers said there were thirty thousand people). The St. Petersburg intelligentsia was present, as were students. The crowd sang the solemn prayer “Holy God” continually; many wept. Pobedonostsev could be satisfied.

The liberal Annenkov, a close friend of Turgenev’s, reported sarcastically to France,

What a pity that Dostoevsky could not see his own funeral—his loving and envious soul and his Christian and angry heart would have been soothed. No one else will ever have such a funeral. He is the only one given to the earth in this way, and before only Patriarch Nikon and Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov got something approximating his send-off. Be joyous, dear shade. You accomplished being added to the list of your predecessors of the holy and Byzantine type. Perhaps soon your relics will be sanctified and my children will hear the prayer, “Saint Fedor, intercede with God on our behalf.”²¹

Dostoevsky’s widow always said that if he had not died on January 28, 1881, he would have been killed by news of the “villainy of 1 March,” when a month after the writer’s death the Tsar Liberator Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb thrown by a terrorist. The antimonarchist fanatics, whom Dostoevsky had so feared and hated, had, it seemed, succeeded. Russia was in shock.

But Pobedonostsev was on top of the situation, as always. He knew his former student, the new emperor, Alexander III. He immediately sent him a confidential letter that formulated the policy of the new monarch: “You are receiving a Russia that is bewildered, shaken, swept off course, and thirsting to be led by a firm hand.”²²

CHAPTER 13

Alexander III, the Wanderers,

and Mussorgsky

On March 1, 1881, eleven-year-old Alexandre Benois, later a famous painter, heard the persistent ringing of the doorbell in his family townhouse in St. Petersburg. His father was being examined by the boy’s older cousin, Dr. Leonty Benois. When the boy answered the door he saw a terrified policeman who shouted, “Is Dr. Benois here? He’s wanted! The tsar was just killed! A bomb blew off his legs! The chief of police is wounded! Thirty-four wounds!”¹

As Benois later recalled, he almost passed out. They didn’t want to believe him when he ran into his father’s bedroom with the terrible news. “The Lord has spared the tsar so many times, we’re sure this time will be all right, too.” But the imperial standard had already been lowered to half-staff over the main gates of the royal residence, the Winter Palace, and people were kneeling and weeping on the palace square.

Benois later commented that the attitude toward revolutionaries changed sharply after the murder of Alexander II. Previously, the nihilists were almost trendy, but after the assassination they were roundly condemned both by the general public and by intellectuals.

Photographs circulated throughout Russia of Alexander II, immediately known as the Martyr Tsar, in his coffin. The photograph hung both in the study of Benois’s father and in the maid’s room. When the impressionable boy looked at the photograph—the tsar was in uniform, covered below the waist—he shivered with horror at the thought that there were only stumps instead of the emperor’s legs.

But there were two men who, while condemning the regicide, still dared to appeal to the new emperor to give Christian forgiveness to the terrorists. They were Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov, a fashionable religious philosopher, twenty-seven years old.

In his lecture to an audience of over a thousand people, the tall, thin, and pale Solovyov (considered to be the prototype of Dostoevsky’s favorite character, Alyosha Karamazov) called on Alexander III to pardon the killers, adding that if the regime rejected the Christian ideal of mercy then society should reject the regime.

Pandemonium followed those “seditious” words. Someone shouted, “You should be executed first, you traitor!” But many of Solovyov’s listeners, especially women, wept.

Tolstoy wrote a letter to Alexander III saying that the way to combat terrorists was not with executions but in the spiritual sphere. “There is only one ideal that can be opposed to revolutionary beliefs … that is the ideal of love, forgiveness, and responding to evil with good.”² Tolstoy asked Pobedonostsev to hand his letter to the emperor, but the high procurator of the Holy Synod refused. “Having read your letter, I saw that your faith is one thing and my and the Church’s faith is another, and that our Christ is not your Christ.”³

In the end, Tolstoy’s letter was forwarded to Alexander III by his brother, Grand Duke Sergei. In response, the emperor said “that if the attack had been on him, he could have pardoned them, but he did not have the right to forgive the killers of his father.” Five terrorists were hanged.

Pobedonostsev, who in his role as spiritual mentor wrote letters to Alexander III almost daily, advised the emperor to lock every door behind him personally, including his bedroom, and to look under tables and bed to see if there were terrorists lurking.

Alexander III, by no means a coward, big and very strong (he could bend iron bars), was so worked up that he mistakenly shot and killed a personal bodyguard when he thought the man was hiding a weapon behind his back. It turned out the poor officer was trying to conceal a cigarette from the tsar, who had entered the room unexpectedly.

The authorities faced a new cultural phenomenon: the accelerating demystification of the traditional image of the omnipotent and invulnerable Father Tsar. No one had been prepared for it, including the imperial security service: the assassination of Alexander II could have been prevented by the use of elementary precautions, nowadays routinely employed to protect every mid-level Russian oligarch.

The “ideological security service” also needed urgent reconstruction, but the Romanovs did not have enough gifted people to implement it. Pobedonostsev and his comrade and rival, the leading conservative journalist of the era, Mikhail Katkov, were intelligent, educated, and energetic, but their program was defensive and protective rather than positive and forward-looking. In addition, neither Pobedonostsev, Katkov, nor their fellow thinker Prince Meshchersky were good writers. They could not compete with the radicals—Nikolai Dobroliubov, Dmitri Pisarev, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

Prince Meshchersky admitted as much, complaining in a secret 1882 memorandum to Alexander III, “Whoever has stronger colors and sounds influences the public. For now the colors and sounds of the seditious press are stronger. We have to make every effort to send the public strong conservative sounds and colors.”⁴

Meshchersky was asking Alexander for a major subsidy for “sending conservative sounds.” The emperor’s reaction? “Not a bad idea and I’m not against helping Meshchersky.”⁵ But the only great Russian writer who was willing to work with Meshchersky—Dostoevsky—was dead by then, and the prince had no other writers of that caliber at his side.

It is no wonder that Alexander III sighed nostalgically for the days when the monarchs were advised by people like the poet Zhukovsky, the tutor of Alexander II: “Such personalities were not rare then, but now they are enormously rare.”⁶

Nevertheless, Alexander III and his advisers were certain that a conservative cultural policy would restore order and return the former stability. This was wishful thinking. They thought themselves realists, but in the cultural realm they often behaved like true Romantics, longing for a lost past.

Alexander III and his entourage did a lot to attract cultural figures: they met with writers, composers, and painters, awarded them subsidies and state pensions, and commissioned music, sculptures, and paintings, as well as monumental frescoes in churches. A good example is the friendly, albeit inconsistent, policy Alexander had for the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, the members of the 1870 Association of Traveling Art Exhibits.

The roots of the movement go back to 1863, when fourteen of the most talented students of the Imperial Academy of Arts, led by Ivan Kramskoy, refused to take part in the diploma exam and created an independent Art Artel, which functioned as a quasi-socialist commune: the artists rented a large apartment in St. Petersburg and lived and worked there together.

Outrage was the authorities’ initial reaction to this bold step. The Academy of Arts was an official institution, under the supervision of the emperor, who personally decided which artists to encourage and which to punish. The rebellion against the academy was therefore seen as rebellion against the monarchy. The “communal” lifestyle also raised suspicions.

The young rebels proved their métier rather quickly, organizing art exhibits independent of the academy and government. The leading Wanderers—Kramskoy, Vassily Perov, Nikolai Ge, Ilya Repin, and Ivan Shishkin—became famous and commercially successful artists. Grand Duke Vladimir, vice-president and then president of the academy, used the carrot-and-stick approach: he would threaten them with official punishments and then try to lure them back into the academy fold.

Still, it was Grand Duke Vladimir, twenty-four years old, curly-haired, handsome, with gray-blue eyes, who commissioned twenty-six-year-old Repin to paint The Volga Boatmen, a large work depicting a colorful group of eleven bedraggled muzhiks hauling a barge. This canvas made Repin’s reputation as a leading national painter. Volga Boatmen hung for many years in the billiard room of Prince Vladimir, who jokingly complained to Repin that he rarely got to see the painting: it was continually on loan to various European exhibitions.

The painting’s reception was a vivid illustration of the Wanderers’ position in Russian culture. According to Repin, the minister of transportation gave Repin a serious scolding for “showing Europe” the miserable wretches slaving under the broiling sun when “I have reduced that antediluvian method of transport to zero.”⁷

The liberals were also certain that Repin’s painting was hated “in the highest spheres” for its theme and “exposé” character. But at the same time, the grand duke, in love with the painting, would sometimes act as museum guide for his guests, lovingly explaining the background and psychology of each character in the work.

For all their intuitive preference for order and hierarchy, Alexander III and his entourage gradually realized that the official Academy of Arts, with its outmoded classicist norms, was out of touch with Russian life. The Wanderers, on the other hand, exhibited vivid scenes from provincial life, like Repin’s Procession of the Cross in Kursk Province, or topical works like Vladimir Makovsky’s Bank Failure, which revealed the vibrant, motley, and dramatic world of contemporary Russia.

The Wanderers interpreted even traditional religious subjects in a new way. Ge’s painting What Is Truth?, depicting Christ and Pontius Pilate, projected their conflict onto the contemporary world, so that Tolstoy, for example, saw them as a Russian governor and his prisoner. Conservatives, however, found Ge’s works on Christian themes repugnant, because of their excessive naturalism and contemporary allusions.

An indignant Pobedonostsev complained in 1890 to Alexander III,

I cannot avoid reporting to Your Imperial Highness about the general outrage elicited by Ge’s painting What Is Truth?, exhibited at the Wanderers’ show. People are angry not only at the painting but the artist, as well. People of every rank, returning from the exhibition, wonder: how can it be that the government permitted the public exhibition of a blasphemous painting, deeply offensive to religious feeling and at the same time unquestionably tendentious … And we must not forget that the traveling exhibition, after St. Petersburg, usually goes around cities in Russia. We can imagine the impression it will make on people and what—I dare to add—censure of the government, since our folk still believe that everything permitted by the government has its approval.

Alexander III, who sympathized with the Wanderers, in this case shared the orthodox emotions of his closest adviser, and wrote his resolution on the memorandum: “The picture is disgusting, write about this to I. N. Durnovo [the minister of internal affairs], I believe that he can ban it from traveling around Russia and remove it now from the exhibit.”⁸

The topically oriented Wanderers could not bypass something as sensational as the revolutionary nihilists. Repin devoted a cycle of paintings to them, the best depicting a priest with a cross visiting the prison cell of a condemned terrorist sitting on an iron bed.

His revolutionary refusing final confession is a man of enormous spiritual strength, suffering but righteous. We see a contemporary Jesus Christ, arms crossed, prison jacket open at his sunken chest. This was Repin’s response to his fellow Wanderer Kramskoy’s controversial painting Christ in the Wilderness (1872), where the same question of moral choice was interpreted in a much more conventional vein.

Repin had a complex relationship with the leader of the Wanderers, the charismatic Kramskoy. Kramskoy was both teacher and older comrade. It was Kramskoy who initiated a conversation with Repin one evening about Christ and His temptations: “Almost every one of us has to solve the fateful question, to serve God or mammon.”

Repin was stunned by Kramskoy’s profoundly personal reaction to the Bible. “Of course, I’ve read it all before, I even studied it with boredom and listened to it in church, sometimes without any interest … But now! Can it be the same book?”⁹

That made all the more bitter Kramskoy’s transformation from fiery advocate of artistic independence into a fashionable portraitist, who charged 5,000 rubles for each work and used his newfound fortune to build a luxurious two-story dacha and studio near St. Petersburg with vast grounds, strawberry patches, greenhouse, bathing pool, and a large staff.

Wealth and fame ruined Kramskoy, Repin thought. “Among his friends, Kramskoy had long lost his charm … They called his portraits dry, officious, his painting old-fashioned, colorless, and tasteless.” It reminded Repin of the sorrowful tale of the fall of an artist, described by Gogol in “The Portrait.” Kramskoy gained entrée to the highest government circles, and painted the coronation of Alexander III, but he never could finish the work he had planned ten years earlier, Rejoice, King of Judea.

Kramskoy developed an addiction to morphine, aged rapidly, grew gray, and whenever anything upset him, he would clutch his heart, breaking off the conversation, cautiously sinking to his Persian ottoman in his chic St. Petersburg apartment. “Nothing left of the passionate radical,”¹⁰ Repin concluded bitterly. Kramskoy died of a heart attack before reaching fifty, during a portrait session, brush in one hand, palette in the other, without a cry or moan.

Just a month before Kramskoy’s death, the composer Alexander Borodin, fifty-three, also succumbed to a heart attack. Borodin was one of the most important members of a group of Russian composers (which also included Modest Mussorgsky, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev, and César Cui) dubbed the Mighty Bunch, known in the West as the Mighty Five. The received wisdom was that there was a lot in common between the Mighty Bunch and the Wanderers: both artistic associations were traditionally described as outsiders rebelling against official art and espousing “realism” in their works.

It was more complicated than that. The Wanderers were trained at the Academy of Arts, receiving a superlative professional polish. The Bunch, on the other hand, learned from one another (under the supervision of the strict and suspicious Balakirev). This had a negative effect on their technical prowess and hindered their composing (especially for Mussorgsky and Borodin).

However, freedom from the routine conservatory methods allowed the Bunch to make bold artistic breakthroughs that subsequently influenced Puccini, Debussy, and Ravel, and made their music admired in the West. The Wanderers, on the other hand, remained a local Russian phenomenon.

It is true that both the Wanderers and the Mighty Bunch were nationalists and proponents of social relevance for art. But several of the pillars of the Wanderers (Repin, Vassily Surikov, Victor Vasnetsov, especially in their later years) moved away from the naturalistic approach that originally brought them national fame. The Bunch was always marked by an attraction to fantasy and vivid exoticism. Mussorgsky could even be called a proto-expressionist.

Alexander III was also a nationalist, perhaps the most sincere and consistent of all the Romanovs beginning with Peter I (only two women could rival him in that regard—Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great). Under Alexander III the imperial court, which used to communicate in French and German, suddenly spoke Russian. They stopped drinking French wines, which were replaced, to the dissatisfaction of many courtiers, by “Crimean vinegar.”

The continual marriages to German princesses by his predecessors made Alexander III’s “Russian” blood rather dubious, but he looked like a fairy-tale folk hero: a broad-shouldered giant with reddish blond hair and a stern look. The Wanderer Surikov considered Alexander III a true representative of the Russian people: “There was something grand about him.”¹¹

Alexander III created the first museum of national art—today the world-famous Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. It is hard to overestimate the ideological and practical significance of that gesture: it was declared at the summit of authority that Russian art has museum value, not a view shared by many at the time.

The tsar’s collection highlighted the works of the Wanderers. He also patronized the great playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, whose delicious comedies of merchant life corresponded to the Wanderer aesthetic. In 1884, Alexander III bestowed an annual pension of 3,000 rubles on Ostrovsky, followed by a “special audience,” joking as they met, “I hope you know who I am, and I know you. I am very pleased to see you at the palace.”¹²

One would have expected Alexander to support the Bunch as well, but that did not happen. There is a simple explanation. In those days, many connoisseurs disliked the works of the Mighty Bunch: they seemed ugly, vulgar, and crass. Mussorgsky’s music was mercilessly mocked by both Turgenev and Saltykov-Shchedrin.

Alexander III loved Tchaikovsky’s music. Today it may seem that one can love Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky both, but back then the two geniuses seemed—to themselves and others—to represent polar opposites in music. The usually gentle and tactful Tchaikovsky exclaimed wrathfully, “I send Mussorgsky’s music to the devil with all my heart; it is the most banal and vile parody of music.” Mussorgsky responded in kind.

So it comes as no surprise that Alexander III, who had pushed through Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin into the repertoire of the imperial theaters, would have personally crossed off a new production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov from the planned season in 1888 of the Maryinsky Theater.

That fact led the Soviet critics to proclaim that the highest authorities had been implacably hostile to Mussorgsky. In fact, Mussorgsky had a patron at the very top: Terty Filippov, who had served more than twenty years in the State Comptroller’s Office (he was its director; in fact, Filippov reported personally to the monarch between 1889 and his death in 1899). Controlling the revenues and expenses of all state and public funds, Filippov was one of the most powerful officials in the land.

Filippov was a curious and even extravagant character. The illegitimate son (according to gossip) of a provincial postmaster, he made his fantastic state career thanks to his reputation as an effective manager, honest and incorruptible—very rare in Russia, both then and now.

Filippov’s friends, impressed by his erudition in cultural and religious matters, saw him as a potential minister of education or high procurator of the Holy Synod. But Pobedonostsev was high procurator and very wary of Filippov as a possible rival.

The views of both men were similar: they were staunch conservative defenders of the autocracy and the Orthodox Church. Yet there had been a time when Filippov was an ardent reader of Belinsky’s articles and George Sand’s novels, a “ruthless atheist” and almost socialist. His outlook changed, but traces of his Bohemian youth remained.

Filippov was a music lover, with a pleasant tenor, who enjoyed singing folk songs and organized a pretty good choir at the Comptroller’s Office. He became a leading expert on Russian antiquity, studying old manuscripts, icon painting, and church music. This led to a close friendship with the composer Balakirev, the guru of the Mighty Bunch, who introduced Filippov to Mussorgsky.

Mussorgsky was undoubtedly the most talented member of the Mighty Bunch, but no one in the group understood it. They treated him the way a family might a gifted but wayward child, despairing of his eccentric behavior, intemperate drinking, excessive (in the opinion of others) self-regard, and inability to work in an organized and concentrated manner (attention-deficit disorder, perhaps). In their correspondence and conversations about Mussorgsky, words like “complete idiot,” “almost an idiot,” and “clouded brain” came up frequently.

When Mussorgsky was composing, people tugged at him from all sides with endless advice and criticism, friendly and otherwise. The press hated him. When his opera Boris Godunov (based on Pushkin) was shown for the first time in 1874 at the Maryinsky Theater, the critics were like attack dogs: “ugly monotony,” “cacophony in five acts and seven scenes,” and “stinking object.” They were particularly exercised over the “blasphemous” tampering with the text of Pushkin’s tragedy.

Even Cui, a fellow member of the Mighty Bunch, smacked Mussorgsky in print: “There are two main flaws in ‘Boris’: chopped-up recitative and scattered musical thoughts, making the opera potpourri-like in places.” These flaws, in Cui’s opinion, were the result of “careless, self-satisfied, and hasty composing.”¹³

His friend’s hostile attitude bewildered Mussorgsky. “Behind this mad attack, this flagrant lie, I see nothing, as if soapy water had spread in the air.”¹⁴

Not surprisingly, Mussorgsky started his next opera, Khovanshchina (or “Khovansky Affair”), about the war the young Peter the Great and his cohort fought against the rebel streltsy (musketeers) and Old Believers, in 1682, feeling totally isolated. One of the few who came to his aid then was Filippov.

First Filippov created a sinecure for him in the State Comptroller’s Office, and when the composer turned out to be incapable of performing even nominal office duties and fled his job, Filippov (with a few friends) took on paying Mussorgsky a private pension so that he could concentrate on Khovanshchina.

Filippov was eager for Mussorgsky to complete the opera also because he was particularly interested in the schism, considering it the epochal event in Russian life. Pobedonostsev viewed the Old Believers as enemies undermining Russian Orthodoxy. His deputy commented, “No one has caused as much harm to the Church in her struggle with the schism as Filippov.”¹⁵

Filippov and Mussorgsky had lively discussions about the schism. The state comptroller provided Mussorgsky with books on its history, including his own writings. The composer read them avidly and used them to write his own original libretto for Khovanshchina, but he did not complete the opera, dying in 1881 at the age of forty-two. The funeral took place at the prestigious cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, arranged by Filippov and Pobedonostsev working together for once. Rimsky-Korsakov completed and orchestrated Khovanshchina.

Khovanshchina is perhaps the greatest political opera of all time. It does have a love subplot, but it is clearly secondary. The main thing is the clash of different political forces, expressed in music of such power and passion that the opera comes across as an expressionist thriller.

Mussorgsky conjured up idealists, opportunists, traitors, political pragmatists, and religious martyrs, who lived on the stage like real people. The self-immolation of the schismatics in the finale invariably moves one to tears. This opera will always be timely for Russia, since it probes the secrets of the Russian soul perhaps even more deeply than Mussorgsky’s more famous work, Boris Godunov.

A comparison of Khovanshchina with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, composed in 1834–1836, seems inevitable. Both operas deal with the Romanov struggle for power, but the approach of the two composers is strikingly different. Glinka portrayed the unity of monarch and people; his opera, created under the aegis and with the direct involvement of Nicholas I, instantly became the musical emblem of Russian autocracy. Khovanshchina was largely ignored by the Romanovs.

Glinka’s enemies of the Russian monarch are foreigners—the Poles; the center of Mussorgsky’s opera is the civil war inside Russia. For Glinka, the divine prerogatives of Mikhail Romanov were a given. Mussorgsky’s sympathies are with the rebels, even though intellectually he understands the inevitability of Peter’s victory.

Glinka’s opera is heroic and static, while Mussorgsky’s opera is fluid, contradictory, and profoundly tragic. The composer of Khovanshchina feels deeply for Russia and mourns its fate. Filippov may have had an idea of how to use it for patriotic propaganda, but it remained a puzzle for Alexander III.

When the Wanderer artist Surikov tackled the schism theme powerfully in his 1887 painting Lady Morozova, depicting an Old Believer being driven off into exile while the crowd of onlookers cheer and jeer her, the emperor and his entourage were also ambivalent. Surikov described Alexander’s visit to the show. “He came up to the painting. ‘Ah, that’s the yurodivy [holy fool]!’ he said. He figured out all the faces. My throat dried up from nervousness: I couldn’t talk. The rest, they were like gundogs all over the place.”¹⁶

Most of the Mighty Bunch, unlike many of the Wanderers, came from quite respectable families. But their aesthetic was revolutionary, in the artistic, not political, sense. The Wanderers, as they moved on, became singers of the new, bourgeois Russia. Alexander III is sometimes called the first bourgeois ruler of Russia. And in fact, in cultural issues, the emperor had very bourgeois tastes—and uncountable riches.

Under Alexander’s patronage Carl Fabergé flourished; in his St. Petersburg workshops the jeweler set up production of all kinds of expensive trinkets in a gaudy à la Russe style—from tableware to cigarette and cardholders, excessively ornamented in gold, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.

The peak of this style, which subsequently became so aesthetically attractive to the nouveau riche, were the Easter eggs commissioned by Alexander III (and, after him, by Nicholas II)—essentially tricky jewelry toys with simple but effective “secrets,” the better to demonstrate the wealth of royal clients.

The design of the eggs bordered on kitsch. A toy like that—be it a tiny gold chick hidden in a gold egg or a miniature copy of the equestrian statue of Peter I in St. Petersburg, also enclosed in a gold egg encrusted with precious stones—cost between 15,000 and 30,000 rubles (ten of Tchaikovsky’s annual pensions).

Fabergé eggs gave Alexander III enormous pleasure, while the music of the Mighty Bunch gave him indigestion. Therefore when the emperor canceled the production of Boris Godunov in 1888 at the Maryinsky (Khovanshchina had been rejected by the imperial theater administration five years earlier), he also put a question mark next to the planned production of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor.

Alexander knew absolutely nothing about Borodin’s music, but since it came from the camp of the Bunch he considered it suspect. (The opera, unfinished before Borodin’s death, was completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov and his student Alexander Glazunov.)

It seemed as if Prince Igor was going nowhere, at least in the near future. But the St. Petersburg millionaire Mitrofan Belyaev got involved. A good-looking man with an artistic mane of hair and a fashionably trimmed beard (as portrayed by Repin), he was simultaneously typical of the times and unusual. The son of a timber merchant, Belyaev fell in love with music as a child and then, influenced by the personality and compositions of the young Glazunov, decided to found a series of symphonic concerts and a music publishing house that would promote only Russian music.

Belyaev followed the example set by the Moscow merchant Pavel Tretyakov, who used his considerable fortune to gather a unique collection of Russian art, now famous as the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Such generous private support exclusively for national art was still rare in Russia, but it reflected the desire of the new capitalists to assert their taste on the local cultural scene. For Alexander III their activity posed a certain dilemma: he should have hailed their philanthropy, but they were also competing with him, sometimes directly.

At the Wanderer exhibits the emperor would sometimes learn to his chagrin that paintings he liked had already been purchased by Tretyakov. To solve this ticklish hierarchical dilemma, the Wanderers had to compromise: Alexander III got the right of first refusal for all their works.

To get Prince Igor onto the Maryinsky Theater stage, Belyaev came up with a complicated gambit in which he was apparently helped by Pobedonostsev, Alexander III’s adviser. Belyaev decided to publish the opera score, a very expensive proposition. A memorandum appeared on the emperor’s desk, asking for permission to present him a copy of the luxurious edition. The memorandum indicated that the late composer had been a professor at the Imperial Medico-Surgical Academy and an actual state councilor (the civilian equivalent of a major general).

The memorandum went on to explain that Borodin’s opera was based on the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a great epic of medieval Russian literature, and that excerpts had been performed with enormous success in Russia and abroad. It concluded with the assurance that Borodin’s opera “belongs to the number of those works that bring great honor to our Homeland.”¹⁷

The memorandum, pushing every needed button, succeeded: Alexander III agreed to accept the gift from Belyaev. And that, according to court ritual, was tantamount to the monarch’s permission to perform Borodin’s opera on the imperial stage.

This unexpected turn of events encapsulated the new relationship between the Russian autocrat and the national capitalist elite, which was trying—cautiously, respectfully, but with growing persistence—to move its cultural values to the forefront.

After Alexander’s nod, the wheels of the court machinery spun feverishly. Vast sums were budgeted for the production of Prince Igor from the imperial treasury. The prologue, in which the legendary Prince Igor starts his campaign against the nomadic Polovtsian tribes, had 180 people onstage, and the later famous episode with the exotic Polovtsian dances had more than two hundred.

From Central Asia, annexed under Alexander II, the local military governor sent a rich collection of Turkmen weapons, ornaments, and costumes, which were studied and reproduced by the opera’s designers. The scenery used motifs from the popular paintings of Vassily Vereshchagin, who had depicted life and landscapes of Central Asia with ethnographic accuracy.

The premiere of Prince Igor in October 1890 was a triumph of a Russian opera. The subject—the clash between the ancient Russian prince and Asian tribes—resonated with Russia’s recent wars in Central Asia. The authorities had realized at last that the opera of the suspicious Bunch member, if you made the effort, could be used to support the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” formula.

In the case of Prince Igor, the concept was not realized as crude propaganda, but rather through subtle artistic contrasts between the Russian and Polovtsian camps, as represented by the strong and masculine Russian hero and the orgiastic world of the wild Polovtsians (with the show-stopping dances). It was done with such sweep and color and numerous refined and enchanting details that the attractive wrapping made the propaganda filling go down easily, leaving almost no bad aftertaste.

The St. Petersburg press made much of the great love of the “simple” public for Prince Igor and—which came as a surprise—of the opera subscribers (that is, higher society). The answer was easy: this unprecedented public unanimity was founded on nationalism.

Nationalism was the common ground that allowed monarchists and traditionalists (who loved the glorification of the unity of people and autocrat) to embrace the opera as much as the Westernizing aesthetes, like Benois, who later swore that before Prince Igor he had been mistaken about Russian history: “I thought the ancient Russians were savages or stupid, pathetic slaves of the nomads, not proud and noble masters. Borodin’s opera juxtaposed with amazing persuasion the European, Christian world with the Asian one.”¹⁸

It was a new phenomenon, compared to Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which was practically commissioned by Nicholas I. Prince Igor had in fact been imposed on Alexander III by a Russian millionaire, an interloper on the cultural scene. The emperor was not very pleased. He would have preferred to set the country’s cultural agenda personally, as his grandfather had done for so long.

Nicholas I saw Russian culture as the Neva River, flowing within the granite embankments constructed by autocracy. Its rare and desperate attempts to overflow could and should be blocked. Under Alexander III, Russian culture was a turbulent flow refusing to stay in its allotted bed. By now, it could not be fully controlled by royal command.

CHAPTER 14

Nicholas II and Lenin as Art

Connoisseurs

The son of Alexander III, after his father’s unexpected death in 1894 from nephritis, took the throne as Emperor Nicholas II, and was the last Romanov to rule the country. Nicholas became emperor at the age of twenty-six, even though he was not ready to lead, as he himself admitted. The new sovereign ruled at an increasingly turbulent time, until 1917, when—faced with a growing revolutionary wave and under pressure of his closest advisers—he was forced to abdicate.

After this revolution (which was to be called the February Revolution), Russia suddenly became the freest democratic republic in the world, and power was in the hands of a coalition of moderate liberals and socialists. But the Provisional Government proved to be really provisional: in the fall of 1917, it was ousted by the Bolsheviks, the radical wing of Russian social democracy headed by Vladimir Ulyanov (his nom de guerre was Lenin). In 1918, the Bolsheviks executed the deposed monarch and his family.

The Bolshevik regime, which many considered ephemeral, turned out to be quite tenacious, lasting—with some mutations—until 1991. Thus, Nicholas II ended the three-hundred-year-old history of the Romanov dynasty, and Lenin opened the seventy-four-year-old history of the Soviet Union. It is therefore useful to compare the cultural worldview of these two leaders in order to understand how much their cultural baggage influenced their political decisions and fate.

In Soviet times, they tried to present Nicholas II as an underachiever who did not even know the main authors of Russian literature, Turgenev and Tolstoy.¹ On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn in 1989 said of Lenin, whom he hated, “He had little in common with Russian culture.”² Obviously, both these extremes were dictated by political prejudices.

Nicholas II was two years older than Lenin, one born in 1868, the other, in 1870. Both were well-educated, one at home, the other at a gymnasium (Lenin was the son of the inspector of public schools from the provincial city of Simbirsk). Lenin was an outstanding student, which could not be said of Nicholas II, but both studied conscientiously.

All the Romanovs considered themselves professional military men, therefore the accent in Nicholas’s education was on military matters. Lenin got a law degree from St. Petersburg University. But their fundamental cultural baggage was remarkably similar, because in the reign of Alexander III (1881–1894) a unified national cultural canon was formed in Russia.

By that time, the cult of Pushkin as the greatest national poet was established, while the previously sanctioned official reverence for Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, and Zhukovsky dimmed significantly. Only the fabulist Krylov remained popular of the old classics. The grand figure of Gogol was no longer controversial, and his greatness was recognized, like Pushkin’s, by both the right and the left. Turgenev was making his way to classic status, especially his early prose, A Sportsman’s Sketches. Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov was also included in the canon.

The scattered accounts of contemporaries confirm that this cultural canon was strongly ingrained in both Nicholas and Lenin. Moreover, it was received by both explicitly as canon—that is, as mandatory cultural knowledge as necessary for every educated person as brushing teeth and washing hands.

It is noteworthy that neither Nicholas II nor Lenin ever rejected this canon publicly. In Nicholas’s case that is understandable: to a great degree the canon was formulated from above and therefore reflected the views of the authorities. Much more curious is Lenin’s obvious acquiescence.

It is clear in Lenin’s attitude toward Pushkin. For Nicholas, Pushkin was a classic. When he was heir, he played Onegin in a family dramatization of Eugene Onegin, and according to the rather patronizing notation in the diary of his uncle, Grand Duke Konstantin (the poet K.R.), “He declaimed Onegin’s monologue very sweetly and clearly. Only in his voice could you hear that he was quite nervous.”³ The first official Russian literary prize, instituted under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, was called the Pushkin Prize for a reason: the authorities saw his name as the most authoritative.

But Lenin was another matter. Early on, he fell under the influence of revolutionary ideologues, one of whom was Dmitri Pisarev, notorious for his vicious attacks on Pushkin, like this sarcastic pronouncement: “No Russian poet can inspire in his readers such total indifference to the people’s suffering, such profound scorn for honest poverty, and such systematic revulsion for honest labor as Pushkin.”

While Pisarev’s rebuke may sound very “Leninist” in spirit and style today, Lenin himself, albeit a faithful student of Russian nihilists and radicals of the 1860s, never attacked Pushkin in public (nor did he praise him particularly).

We can guess Lenin’s real attitude toward Pushkin from a curious incident recounted by Nadezhda Krupskaya, his widow. In 1921, Lenin and Krupskaya visited a Moscow student dormitory to see a daughter of Inessa Armand, the recently deceased love of Lenin’s life (and Party comrade). Lenin, Krupskaya, and Armand had a Party ménage à trois for a rather long time.

The students were happy to see Lenin and bombarded him with questions. Lenin, in turn, asked them, “What are you reading? Do you read Pushkin?” The response was, “Oh, no. Pushkin was a bourgeois. We read Mayakovsky.” Lenin, who did not like the avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, said only, “I think Pushkin is better.”

Krupskaya added naively in her account, “After that Ilyich [as the Party comrades called him] was a bit kinder to Mayakovsky,” because the name reminded him of “the young people, full of life and joy, ready to die for Soviet power, unable to find the words in contemporary language to express themselves and seeking that expression in the hard-to-understand poems of Mayakovsky.”⁴

The blinkered Krupskaya did not notice the grotesqueness of her image of young people “full of life and joy” yet “ready to die,” or the ruthlessness of her childless spouse, pleased by the sight of that young cannon fodder. And it’s interesting how casually Lenin took the quintessentially nihilist putdown of Pushkin as bourgeois: did he think so, as well, but did not want to say?

Given Lenin’s reputation for pitiless debate, his defense of Pushkin from the revolutionary youth seems rather timid. “Pushkin is better than Mayakovsky”? Lenin was devastatingly scathing about Mayakovsky (“nonsense, stupid, double stupidity and pretentiousness”),⁵ so that was faint praise indeed. It is obvious that for Lenin Pushkin was merely a name, part of the official canon. He wouldn’t get into an argument over Pushkin.

But in one aspect, Pisarev’s view of Pushkin as the teacher of “parasites and sybarites” was clearly absorbed by the revolutionary leader: Lenin’s disparaging attitude toward ballet and opera.

Pushkin adored the ballet (and ballerinas). For the radical Pisarev that was a readymade target, and he gleefully mocked Pushkin’s “useless poetry,” attractive only to “those mentally challenged subjects who can be thrilled by ballet poses.” Not being “mentally challenged,” Lenin resolutely dismissed opera and ballet as a “piece of purely landowner culture.”⁶

It is hard to deny a certain logic in Lenin’s thinking. Opera and, even more so, ballet, under the personal patronage of the Romanov family, held a special place in the official Russian culture.

The professional theater, including musical theater, began in Russia as court entertainment. Tsar Alexei, father of Peter I, invited musicians from Europe “who know how to play various instruments, such as: organs, horns, pipes, flutes, clarinets, trombones and viola da gambas along with vocal performance, and also other instruments.”⁷ (The money to support theater and ballet came from the Salt Chancery for many years: the state had the monopoly on the salt trade, and part of the enormous salt income went to actors, singers, dancers, and musicians.)

After various perturbations, the imperial theaters were moved to the Ministry of the Court, which ran (through the Directorate of the Imperial Theaters) the Maryinsky and Alexandrinsky theaters in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi and Maly theaters in Moscow. In fact, they were the personal theaters of the Romanov family: a display window of their vanity, a platform for elaborating their ideological projects, but also a place for relaxation and merriment and, last but not least, a high-class and exciting harem.

Nicholas I sometimes took over the rehearsals of ballets and liked to hang around backstage, where the ballerinas ran around in tights; Alexander III never missed a dress rehearsal of an opera or ballet, much less the premieres.

Alexander III also introduced the tradition of emperor and family attending the graduation exams of the ballet school. After the performance, the young dancers were presented to the tsar and his wife, and at the dinner that followed, the young grand dukes flirted with their lovely companions.

At one such dinner in 1890, the graduating ballerina seated next to Alexander III was Mathilde Kschessinska, small, dark, muscular, very talented, and incredibly ambitious. She drank tea between the huge, flabby emperor and his miniature heir (who took after his mother), the future Nicholas II, a shy young officer with dreamy gray-blue eyes.

Alexander III told them with a benign smile, “Watch it now, don’t flirt too much.” The heir timidly spoke to Kschessinska, pointing to the unornamented white mug before her: “You probably don’t drink from such plain mugs at home?”⁸

That was the prelude to their famous and stormy affair, which lasted from 1892 until the spring of 1894, when the heir’s engagement was announced to Princess Alix Hesse-Darmstadt, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Alexandra.

Kschessinska had a brilliant career at the Maryinsky and dictated all her conditions there. Although detractors claimed that her special place at the theater was due to her high connections, the majority of the press and public received her with enthusiasm and considered her among the great stars of the Maryinsky.

Marius Petipa, the great choreographer and creator of Don Quixote, La Bayadère, and Raymonda (to music by Glazunov) and The Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky), worked happily with Kschessinska. She always recalled proudly how Tchaikovsky came to her dressing room after her performance in Sleeping Beauty in 1893, praised her, and promised to write a new ballet just for her.

At the turn of the century, the era of Petipa, master of Petersburg classicism in ballet, was closing. Kschessinska, always brazenly chasing after success, befriended innovators, appearing in the experimental ballets of Mikhail Fokine and even traveling to Europe with the Diaghilev troupe, where her partner was the legendary Vaclav Nijinsky. But she lost out to the new stars—Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina. Nevertheless, Kschessinska did not give up, and in 1916, at the age of forty-four, she debuted successfully in Giselle, that gem of the Romantic repertoire.

Nicholas II continued acting as her patron all those years. As she later recalled, “[W]henever I had to turn to him, he fulfilled my requests without demur.”⁹ His beneficence was not affected by the fact that she moved on from him to being the mistress of first one and then another of his cousins, both grand dukes.

The diaries of Nicholas II are peppered with references to attending ballets at the Maryinsky—works by Tchaikovsky, Don Quixote and Daughter of the Pharaoh (“Pavlova danced divinely”).¹⁰ For the tsar these were evenings of great pleasure, a refined mix of aesthetics, nostalgia, and eroticism. Lenin, however, saw nothing but an aristocratic bordello.

. . .

Lenin’s theatrical and musical tastes were quite different from the tsar’s. In the Soviet Union his comments on Beethoven, recorded by Maxim Gorky, were quoted endlessly:

I know nothing better than the Appassionata, I could listen to it every day. Astonishing, sublime music. I always think with pride, perhaps naïvely: what miracles people can create! … But I can’t listen to music frequently, it affects my nerves, I want to say sweet nothings and pat people on the head, people who live in a filthy hell but can create such beauty. But today you can’t pat anyone on the head—they’ll bite your hand off, and they should be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, even though we, ideally, are against any violence.¹¹

Those are intriguingly frank words, and they are confirmed in other memoirs of how Lenin reacted to music: it “upset,” “wearied,” “acted too strongly” on him. The musical impressions of Nicholas II, noted in his diaries, are just the opposite—“very beautiful,” “a beautiful opera,” “marvelous concert.”

These were two different ways of perceiving culture: for Nicholas II it was a pleasant entertainment; for Lenin, emotional torture. One was a British gentleman (everyone noted Nicholas’s anglicized manner) and the other a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia, absorbing culture intensely, overly so.

Like Nicholas II, Lenin was not tall, not very striking, but a rather sympathetic person. (They both rolled their Rs in a charming way. The choreographer George Balanchine told me about the tsar’s Rs; as a young dancer—then called Georgy Balanchivadze—he met Nicholas II in 1916.)¹² But in every other way, Lenin was the complete opposite of Nicholas. He was immeasurably more energetic, persistent, focused, and power hungry.

Nicholas II was a profoundly private and reserved man whom birth and destiny made ruler of a great country at a moment of acute crisis. The obligation to be monarch clearly wearied him; that may be why he abdicated.

Lenin, on the contrary, was a born leader, elbowed his way to power, grabbed it despite the misgivings of his closest comrades, and held on to it tightly until his physical strength faded. (He died in 1924, at the age of fifty-three. Peter I, with whom Lenin was frequently compared for boundless energy and revolutionary zeal, also died at the age of fifty-three, two centuries earlier.)

Nicholas II was brought up by his family and the imperial court. We do not know for sure whether a work of Russian culture ever wrought a life-changing shock for him. But we do know that about Lenin.

A decisive factor in Lenin’s development was What Is to Be Done?, the novel by the leading revolutionary author Nikolai Chernyshevsky, written when he was imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg and somehow passed by the censors for publication in 1863, in the most popular magazine of the time, Contemporary. Lenin admitted that Chernyshevsky’s novel “plowed me up profoundly.”

Lenin’s reaction was not unique. The revolutionary youth of the 1860s saw the novel as a revelation. What was the secret of its success? In our day the work seems rather flat and boring, despite the author’s clumsy attempt to enliven a preachy treatise with a naive, semi-detective plot. What Is to Be Done? appeared in the right place at the right time. Tectonic cultural shifts occurred in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861: education spread, the press grew livelier, and moral values were debated fiercely.

The old ways of life were discredited, and new ideals had not yet taken root. In that situation, the young generation thirsted for a “life textbook.” For some, Chernyshevsky’s novel became that textbook.

Chernyshevsky wrote his novel as a polemic against Turgenev’s recently published Fathers and Sons. He felt that Turgenev had caricatured revolutionaries as “nihilists.” So Chernyshevsky gave them another name—“new people”—and, most importantly, elaborated a detailed encyclopedia of everyday life for anyone who wanted to become a “new person”: the right way to live, work, love, eat, and rest.

Essentially, it was a reference work masquerading as a novel, a method. (Chernyshevsky disarmingly believed that he had written a poetic and entertaining novel, similar to works of Dickens and The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.)

His enemies ridiculed him, but the novel’s impact was just what the author wanted: the story of how an emancipated “new woman,” while setting up a quasi-socialist sewing factory, develops progressive amorous relations with two young “new men” became the bedside reading of Russian radicals for decades, replacing the once-popular novels of George Sand.

Lenin was most influenced by another character from the novel, Rakhmetov, who trains for underground activity: he lives ascetically, not drinking wine, or touching women, or eating white bread (just black), doing without sugar, reading only necessary books and meeting only necessary people, and preparing physically and mentally (he even sleeps one night on a bedding filled with nails) for the coming revolution. Gorky later noted that the intense Lenin cultivated self-imposed restraints that were akin to “self-torture, self-mutilation, Rakhmetov’s nails.”¹³

Lenin first read What Is to Be Done? at the age of fourteen, and he did not like the novel then. (He was enthralled by Turgenev, Chernyshevsky’s antipode, and he could quote long passages from Turgenev’s novels by heart.) But it was a favorite book of Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, a student at St. Petersburg University.

Alexander Ulyanov joined an underground student group that plotted to assassinate Alexander III. The police arrested them in 1887; five of the prisoners who refused to plead guilty and ask for pardon were hanged, including Alexander. This stunned Lenin. He reread What Is to Be Done? and decided to become a professional revolutionary, a “new man.”

Going from soft and poetic Turgenev to stern and dogmatic Chernyshevsky was a dizzying transformation, and Lenin achieved it not without considerable effort. Certainly along the way there were doubts and regrets. Just how difficult that road was is evinced by Lenin’s painfully conflicting attitude toward music. Actually, it is the only window into the young Lenin’s soul and its agonies.

Lenin could have repeated the words of the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata: “And really, music is a strange thing … They say that music elevates the soul—nonsense, lies! … It doesn’t elevate or debase the soul, it irritates it … In China music is a state affair. And that is how it should be. A person cannot be permitted to hypnotize someone or many people and then do what he wants with them.”

There are accounts of Tolstoy listening to music and weeping, his face reflecting “something like horror” as he wept. The writer Romain Rolland commented that “only with such richness of spirit as Tolstoy’s, music can become threatening to a person.”¹⁴ Rolland was referring to heightened emotional arousal, present in complex personalities, of which Lenin clearly was one.

For Lenin, music had both sweet and tormenting associations. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata reminded him of his childhood: it had been played frequently by his mother and his beloved younger sister, Olga, who died of typhus when she was only nineteen.

Beethoven was also associated with his deepest love: in 1909 Lenin began his affair with Inessa Armand, thirty-five, a Russian revolutionary of French descent, a beautiful and independent woman, an accomplished pianist. Inessa idolized Beethoven, and Lenin often listened to her play his sonatas. He particularly liked Inessa’s interpretation of the Pathétique, which he said he could listen to “ten, twenty, forty times … and each time it captivates me and delights me more and more.”¹⁵

Abroad as a revolutionary émigré, Lenin lived in a classic ménage à trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Inessa Armand. This union, based as much on emotions as on the commonality of interests and ideology, was undoubtedly inspired by Chernyshevsky’s ideas on married life, as expressed in What Is to Be Done?

This is another reason why Lenin blew up at a Party comrade who said the novel was primitive and without talent. “This is a work that gives you a charge for your entire life. Works without talent do not have that kind of influence,”¹⁶ Lenin said. Obviously, Lenin defended Chernyshevsky much more energetically than he had Pushkin.

Inessa Armand died of typhus in 1920; she was buried by the Kremlin Wall. Her death was a terrible blow to Lenin and hastened his own death. He could no longer listen to Beethoven without emotional pain: the sounds reminded him of too much. Lenin, a true follower of Chernyshevsky, firmly decided that listening to music was “an unproductive waste of energy.”¹⁷ (I heard about this statement of Lenin’s in 1994 in Oslo from ninety-eight-year-old Maria Dobrowen, widow of the pianist Issai Dobrowen, who had played for Lenin.) Like a real “new man,” Lenin squashed his emotions. The politician in Lenin won over the private person. Nicholas II was just the opposite.

Lenin’s attitude toward dramatic theater was complicated, as it was toward music. We know about it from Krupskaya’s reminiscences. “Usually we’d go to the theater and leave after the first act. The comrades laughed at us, for wasting money.”

Krupskaya explained that it was not because Lenin was bored at the theater. On the contrary, he followed the action onstage with too much intensity and agitation, and therefore “the mediocrity of the play or falseness of the acting always jangled Vladimir Ilyich’s nerves.”

But when a production touched him, he could weep. There is evidence of this from a friend of Lenin’s abroad. In Geneva, at a play starring the celebrated Sarah Bernhardt, he was astonished to see Lenin furtively wiping away his tears: “The cruel, heartless Ilyich was weeping over La Dame aux camélias.”¹⁸

Lenin liked the Art Theater founded in 1889 in Moscow by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, although he did not become a habitué. For him this theater was part of the canon of topical “realistic” art—along with the Wanderers’ paintings, Tchaikovsky’s music, and the works of Chekhov. Here the tastes of Nicholas and Lenin were identical: for both of them it was the same mainstream cultural paradigm.

Nemirovich-Danchenko’s archives contain a draft of his letter dated April 19, 1906, to Count Sergei Witte, then chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, with a request to inform Nicholas II that the Art Theater was on the brink of financial collapse and needed a state subsidy. Nemirovich-Danchenko “most respectfully” pointed out that the theater’s recent tour in Europe was a great artistic success and was seen as evidence “of the power of Russia’s spiritual strengths.”¹⁹

The Art Theater was saved then by an eccentric Moscow millionaire, and the letter to Count Witte was never sent. But after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Lenin became leader of the new Russia, the Art Theater faced financial disaster again and applied to Lenin for help. Lenin agreed instantly to give them money. “How else? If there is a theater that we must rescue and preserve from the past at any cost, then it is of course the Art Theater.”²⁰ (As we know, Lenin was not so generous toward opera and ballet.)

This was part of Lenin’s cultural strategy: he felt that in Communist Russia the place of religion as “opium for the masses” should be taken by theater, and in his opinion, the Art Theater was best suited for that role. But precisely because Lenin understood the theater’s importance in the political and cultural upbringing of the people, he reacted so aggressively to its “errors.”

For Lenin, one such “error” was the Art Theater’s production in 1913 of a stage version of Dostoevsky’s The Devils. A scandal broke out over the play, elicited by an open letter in the popular newspaper The Russian Word from Maxim Gorky, the most famous Russian writer of the time, calling Dostoevsky the “evil genius” of Russian literature and The Devils a slanderous mockery of the revolution.

Gorky maintained that staging Dostoevsky in the current tense political situation was “a dubious idea aesthetically and certainly harmful socially” and called on “everyone who sees the need for healing Russian life to protest against the production of Dostoevsky’s novels in theaters.”²¹

Gorky’s anti-Dostoevsky letter created a sensation. Dostoevsky’s name was taking on the status of cultural symbol then. His rejection of revolution, expressed with such anger in The Devils, made the late writer a topical and controversial political figure whom conservative forces were pushing into the national cultural canon, against the fierce resistance of the progressive camp. For the Romanov family, Dostoevsky was “their” author, having expressed vividly their innermost thoughts on the Orthodox Church and autocracy being organic for Russia and on the harm of atheistic and socialistic ideas, spread by revolutionary “devils.”

Many noted writers of the period attacked Gorky, blaming him for daring to defame Dostoevsky, the new “literary saint.” Only Lenin and the Bolsheviks defended Gorky. Their newspaper accused the writers ganging up on Gorky of “going with the reactionaries against the proletariat—that is the main reason for the forgiveness of Dostoevsky and his reactionary writing and of the anger against Gorky.”²²

Lenin called The Devils genius but “disgusting.” When angry, Lenin called Dostoevsky “archterrible,” but in other moments admitted that his novels had “lively pictures of reality,”²³ a rare example of his ambivalence. Lenin would remind people that Nicholas I had condemned Dostoevsky to death, “pardoned” him only after a humiliating preparation for hanging, and then exiled him to hard labor. Lenin considered The House of the Dead Dostoevsky’s best book; as we remember, so did Tolstoy.

It is telling that Nicholas II never met a single great Russian writer, which he could have easily done. One of Nicholas’s favorite ways to relax was to read aloud in the evening from a novel (in Russian, English, or French) to his wife and children. He read them Tolstoy and Chekhov, but never tried to talk to the authors. Why? Maybe because of his famous reticence, which some attributed to his shyness and others characterized as secretiveness, hypocrisy, and slyness?

Apparently, Nicholas II did not like to argue and did not know how to do it. In conversations, he never contradicted others, but invariably remained true to his own convictions. It is clear that a meeting with Tolstoy would inevitably lead to confrontation. But Nicholas II preferred not to meet even with Chekhov, known for his delicacy and tact.

He certainly would not have wanted to meet Gorky, even though the writer was very popular, not only in Russia, but in the West. Gorky declared himself a socialist early on—yet his works continued to be published in mass printings. He had a romantic biography, working numerous exotic jobs (dishwasher on ships, student in an icon-painting studio, night watchman at a railroad station, extra in the theater), and walking all around Russia—which made him the idol of the public.

The paradox is that Gorky’s grandfather had been a wealthy man (who went bankrupt) while Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf. Still, the literary roots of both writers were in the mass literature of the times.

Chekhov started out in pulp fiction magazines of the 1880s with names like Grasshopper, Alarm Clock, and Shards, where he was paid a few kopecks a line and published not only short stories but also jokes, parodies, theater reviews, and courtroom reports.

His early, “funny” pieces were Nicholas II’s favorites. The tsar was also a great fan of Chekhov’s early comedies, like The Bear and The Marriage Proposal. Lenin was more interested in the late, “serious” Chekhov.

Gorky also had a “lowbrow” literary ancestry. One of the most popular heroes of mass literature in Russia then was the fearless “bandit Churkin,” the local Robin Hood. The stories of his adventures were read until the ink wore off. The protagonists of Gorky’s early stories were tramps and rebels, similar to the heroes of the “bandit” stories. But Gorky, unlike Chekhov, was a political radical. By 1889, when he was twenty-one, Gorky was arrested for revolutionary activity.

A writer like that naturally would not find approval from Nicholas II, and the tsar was upset to learn in March 1902 that Gorky was elected an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Nicholas II learned about it in The Citizen, Prince Meshchersky’s conservative publication (he read every issue from front page to last), where the selection—which took place under the aegis of Nicholas’s uncle, Grand Duke Konstantin (the poet K.R.), president of the academy—was described as “a challenge directed at all educated Russia of Pushkin and Karamzin, all of loyal Russia.”²⁴

Nicholas II demanded an explanation from the minister of internal affairs and wrote “More than original” on his memorandum. He was outraged by the fact that they made an honorary academician of a writer under investigation: “In today’s confused times, the Academy of Sciences permits itself to elect such a man into its milieu.”²⁵

The academy backtracked immediately, declaring Gorky’s election “invalid.” This must have put Grand Duke Konstantin in an awkward position, yet he could not disobey the sovereign.

Nicholas intended “to sober up at least a bit the state of the minds in the Academy.” But what he got instead, as it often happens, was a greater scandal. Among the protests, his favorite writer Chekhov, who previously avoided political gestures, refused his title as honorary academician, which had been awarded him earlier.

Chekhov’s letter to the academy was characteristic of the new situation, when public reputation and independence were more important to a writer, artist, or actor than the government’s approval. In his letter, Chekhov recalled that he was the first to congratulate Gorky on his honorary title: “I congratulated him sincerely, and now for me to recognize the election as invalid—that contradiction does not fit in my mind and my conscience.”²⁶

All the leading papers wrote about the scandal, fueling Gorky’s popularity. Here it was, a clear sign of crisis of power: the tsar tried to punish a writer, but instead only increased his appeal.

In the final analysis, Nicholas II lost this small skirmish with Gorky. But, naturally, he did not even notice his defeat—it was about some “despicable tramp.” The revolution of 1917 was fifteen years away.

. . .

On Stalin’s order, the legend about the great friendship between Lenin and Gorky was created in the Soviet Union, based on several cleverly cropped quotes from Lenin’s writings on and to Gorky. But a close reading of the texts reveals a much more complex picture. It was not a friendship of equals. Lenin, who was two years younger, nevertheless behaved like a strict, demanding teacher dealing with his talented but errant student.

Lenin never stopped lecturing and chastising Gorky. In one letter, we find: “Why are you behaving so badly, chum? You’re overworked, tired, nerves on edge. This is unacceptable … No one to supervise you and you’ve let yourself go?” In another, “What are you doing? It’s terrible, really!”²⁷ And so on.

In one of his articles, Lenin quotes Gorky as telling him, with an “inimitably sweet smile” in private conversation, “I know I’m a bad Marxist. We artists are all slightly irresponsible.” Lenin comments sarcastically, “It’s hard to argue with that … but then why does Gorky take on politics?”²⁸

Lenin scolded Gorky before the Bolshevik revolution for his “ideological vacillation” and propaganda of “incorrect” (from Lenin’s point of view) philosophical theories; after the revolution, when Lenin was leader of Russia, he was irritated by Gorky’s endless attempts to save intellectuals who had offended the Bolsheviks and were threatened with prison or execution. He learned that Gorky divulged Lenin’s confidential views, expressed in private conversations with the writer, to the “counterrevolutionaries.”²⁹ That was too much.

Their relationship ended with the Bolshevik leader pushing Gorky out of Russia in 1921, writing, “Leave, get treatment. Don’t be stubborn, I’m asking you.” As one of his Party comrades said of Lenin, “Ilyich loved anyone the party needed. Tomorrow, if that comrade should take the wrong position, Ilyich would drop all relations with him, and he would be ruthless toward him.”³⁰

Lenin never really praised Gorky by using the lofty words he found for Leo Tolstoy or even Chernyshevsky. Gorky reluctantly admitted that. In his memoirs, quoting Lenin’s reaction to his political novel The Mother (“A very timely book”), he added, “That was the only, but extremely valued, compliment from him.”³¹

Lenin wrote, “Literary work should become part of the whole proletarian movement, ‘a cog and wheel’ of the one and only, great social-democratic machine.” For Lenin, culture was a political instrument. “Writers must certainly join party organizations. Publishing houses and warehouses, stores and reading rooms, libraries and various book dealers—all that must belong to the party.”

Lenin formed this politicized utilitarian view of culture early and retained it throughout his life. Gorky tried many a time to persuade him that this was a mistake. He was the only major writer Lenin knew well, and Lenin valued the opportunity to talk with him, but he never yielded on any point.

Gorky took his revenge for Nicholas II’s persecution with his pamphlet Russian Tsar (1906), where he described the tsar this way: “A miserable soul, a despicable soul, inebriated by the blood of the hungry people, sick with fear, a small, greedy soul.”

Gorky settled his accounts with Lenin, too, but in a different way, writing a seemingly loving essay after his death; in fact, it was a polemic against Lenin. It is Gorky’s masterpiece, on which he worked for almost ten years.

For Gorky, Lenin was a politician par excellence (“while I have an organic revulsion for politics,” noted Gorky). Earlier, when Lenin was alive, Gorky spoke even more frankly about him in the press: “A talented man, he has all the qualities of a leader as well as the requisite absence of morality and ruthless attitude toward the life of the masses.”

In his memoirs, Gorky analyzes Lenin in a more nuanced way. His Lenin admits, “I know little of Russia.” Nevertheless, he believes that he has a very good understanding of the Russian people: “The Russian masses have to be shown something very simple, very accessible. Soviets and communism are simple.”

Gorky’s Lenin is secretive (“He, like no one else, knew how to keep quiet about the secret storms of his soul”) and cruel: “ ‘What do you want?’ he would ask in surprise and anger. ‘Is humanity possible in such an unprecedented, fierce fight? Where is there room for soft-heartedness and magnanimity?’ ”

Gorky stressed Lenin’s “untrusting, hostile” attitude toward intellectuals. For Gorky, Lenin is a “strict teacher,” and the leader’s words remind him of “the cold sparkle of iron filings.” Then Gorky makes an about-face and, commenting on Lenin’s hidden pride in Russia and Russian art, which he had noticed, calls Lenin a “great child.” The errant student finally put his late teacher in his place. The writer had the last word.

Gorky’s unusual portrait of Lenin is the only psychologically perceptive depiction of the revolutionary leader made from life. It is worth comparing it to the no less unusual portrait of Nicholas II painted by one of the great Russian artists, Valentin Serov, in 1900.

Like Gorky, Serov was a masterful portraitist. His picture of Nicholas is important because of the artist’s unprecedented closeness to the model: for the first time in the history of the Romanov dynasty, the monarch posed obediently for many hours and days, fulfilling all the painter’s demands. (In 1920, the artist Natan Altman spent 250 hours in the course of six weeks in the Kremlin, sculpting Lenin’s bust while the Bolshevik leader worked, mostly ignoring Altman.)³²

Serov was called prickly, capricious, and mean—both as a man and as a portraitist. Stocky, clumsy, hands always in pockets, Serov occasionally interrupted his grim silence to utter a gloomy aphorism through gritted teeth clenching a smoldering cigar.

His habits and looks did not keep Serov from becoming the favorite portraitist in prerevolutionary high society, and for almost a decade (1892 to 1901) he was the unofficial court painter of the Romanovs.

Serov was feared for his outspokenness, but he was respected for his honesty and sure mastery. A contemporary noted, “Patience and meekness were needed by anyone wanting to be painted by Serov.”³³

Nicholas II ordered his “private” portrait as a gift for Empress Alexandra. In it, he is seated, leaning forward, his hands clasped wearily on the table, gazing quietly. He wears a shabby military tunic. (Nicholas II was known for wearing old, patched clothing at home.) It depicts Nicholas as a person sympathetically, even as it underscores his main political liability: the lack of energy and leadership.

Both Lenin and Gorky liked to talk—they had verbal diarrhea. While Serov and Nicholas II were famously taciturn, their relationship during work on the portrait turned into a mini-play.

Serov, who hated asking for anything, found himself requesting a subsidy for the art journal The World of Art, published by his friend Sergei Diaghilev. Even more unexpectedly, Nicholas (who, like Lenin, disliked the “decadents,” considering Diaghilev chief among them) agreed to give 15,000 rubles of his personal funds to support the journal. Nicholas later extended the subsidy for another three years.

The sovereign agreed to yet another request from Serov: he ordered the release from prison of Savva Mamontov, a railroad magnate and patron of the arts, who was under investigation for alleged embezzlement. However, the emperor and the artist found themselves in conflict over Serov’s work.

Empress Alexandra, who considered herself a fair painter, came in during one of the sessions and started telling Serov how to improve the portrait. In response the artist, infuriated by this inappropriate art lesson, handed her his palette with the words, “Well, then, Your Majesty, you should do the painting, since you draw so well!”

Alexandra blew up, turned on her heel, and left; Nicholas, caught in the middle, ran after her and returned with an apology: the empress “went a bit overboard.”

The scene was unpleasant and humiliating for all the participants. Serov announced that he would no longer continue as court artist and demanded 4,000 rubles for the portrait, double the amount Nicholas had offered.

Nicholas had a courtier scold Serov for “taking advantage of the situation and setting a too high fee,” basically calling him a rip-off artist. Insulted, Serov asked for an apology.

Nicholas retreated and paid the demanded sum, but after that privately referred to the artist as “terribly insolent.” This was yet another farcical situation, not at all commensurate with previous ideas of what the relationship between monarch and subject should be in Russia.

The subsequent story of the painting was telling. In a surprise for everyone, Serov’s “private” portrait was exhibited with the World of Art group in St. Petersburg in January 1901. The painting was presented without any particular pomp. Traditionally in Russia, all depictions of monarchs were controlled diligently: the Ministry of the Imperial Court handled these matters.³⁴ That this unprecedentedly “domestic” portrait of the sovereign was shown publicly and presented with marked modesty was a sign of the times. The emperor even visited the show the day before it opened. Yes, he wanted people to see and love him this way: simple, quiet, gentle.

The initial effect was what Nicholas had intended. Everyone said (and wrote) that the sovereign in Serov’s portrait “looks into your soul.” But Serov’s later commentary was quite different: “Yes, yes, childlike pure, honest, kind eyes. Only executioners and tyrants have them.”³⁵

Serov’s contempt for Nicholas II was fixed on January 9, 1905: on that fateful day, army troops in St. Petersburg shot at a peaceful workers’ demonstration for better wages. Serov happened to observe the shooting and was horrified.

In a wrathful letter to his friend Repin, Serov, as an artist, vividly described the tragic event:

What I saw from the windows of the Academy of Arts on 9 January I will never forget—the restrained, majestic, unarmed crowd walking toward the cavalry attack and rifle scope—a horrible vision. What I heard afterward was even more incredible in its horror. Did the fact that the sovereign did not deign to come out to the workers and receive their petition mean they must be attacked? And who had decided on that attack? No one and nothing can remove that stain.³⁶

Serov’s portrait of Nicholas II is one of the few outstanding works that embody the perception of the Romanov dynasty in the mirror of Russian culture. The first was the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, erected by Catherine the Great and still considered St. Petersburg’s calling card.

The Bronze Horseman—a dynamic Peter on a rearing steed that is Russia—was immortalized by Pushkin and remains in the Russian mind as the image of a forward-looking ruler. The work radiates energy, joy, and grandeur.

Another symbolic sculptural depiction of a Romanov, which immediately elicited comparisons with the Bronze Horseman, was the statue of Alexander III, erected in 1909 by Nicholas II. The sculptor was Prince Paolo Trubetskoy, of Russian heritage but in fact, like Falconet, a foreigner: he was born in Italy to an American mother, he grew up and was educated there, and came to Russia already an accomplished master, spending even less time there than Falconet.

Trubetskoy was an eccentric: he refused to read newspapers or books (and was proud of it) and was a fanatical vegetarian, even training the wolf and bear that lived in his studio to stick to a vegetarian diet.

Trubetskoy did a bust of Leo Tolstoy (also a vegetarian) that delighted the writer, so Tolstoy gave him his books. When the sculptor forgot them in the hallway when he left, Tolstoy was amused. (Nicholas II also liked Trubetskoy’s apparent naïveté.)

Trubetskoy spoke Russian poorly and knew nothing about Russian history or politics, but he studied Falconet’s monument closely and considered his statue of Alexander III to be in competition with it. His portrait of a Romanov is a polar opposite of Falconet’s work: Trubetskoy depicted the tsar as a “fat-assed martinet,” to use Repin’s description, squashing beneath him a heavy, stubborn horse—symbol of a different Russia.

None of the higher officials wanted to have this monument in the imperial capital—its satirical overtones were painfully obvious—but the work pleased Alexander III’s wife: “Looks like him.” When the statue was unveiled at the square in front of the railroad station (like Falconet, Trubetskoy had left St. Petersburg before the event), everyone gasped. While people were awed by the statue of Peter I, they “laughed and wept inside” over the statue of Alexander III (as the essayist Vassily Rozanov described the reaction of Russian intellectuals).

The artist Benois, who had observed Alexander III up close, was a great admirer of his. Benois claimed that the prerevolutionary flourishing of Russian culture that is sometimes ascribed to the patronage of Nicholas was in fact primed by the reign of his father. If that giant had lived another twenty years, Benois went on, “The history of not only Russia but the world would have been different and certainly better.”³⁷ But even Benois described Trubetskoy’s work as “a monument characteristic of a monarchy doomed to destruction.”

An acute observer, Benois felt that even though Nicholas II was “a nice man,” he fatally “lacked those special gifts that allow one to play with dignity the role of head and leader of a gigantic state.”³⁸ Serov demonstrated that in his portrait, which thus became the final piece in the trinity of notable portrayals of Romanov rulers: from tsar-as-leader to tsar-as-keeper to “non-tsar.”

While the Bolsheviks never tampered with the Bronze Horseman, they tagged the statue of Alexander III with a mocking epigram caption by the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny:

My son and my father were executed in my lifetime

While I reaped the fate of posthumous ignominy,

I stand here as a cast-iron scarecrow for the country

That threw off the yoke of autocracy forever.

In 1937, Trubetskoy’s work was concealed in the courtyard of the Russian Museum (founded by Alexander III). Now, the monument-caricature stands outside the Marble Palace of St. Petersburg.

The fate of Serov’s portrait of Nicholas II was even more dramatic. During the capture of the Winter Palace in 1917, the revolutionary soldiers found the portrait in the family’s private quarters and dragged it out to Palace Square, stabbing it with their bayonets, trying to tear it into pieces.

A few young artists were nearby and they appealed to the soldiers, telling them it was the work of the famous Serov and should be preserved for the museum. The soldiers, surprisingly amenable, gave up the portrait they had been attacking so furiously (they had already poked out both eyes). In that piteous state, the portrait was given to the Russian Museum. Fortunately, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow retained an unharmed author’s copy of Serov’s masterpiece.

A politician’s cultural baggage may be his weapon and capital, but it can turn into a huge weight around his neck. Lacking natural political instincts, Nicholas II came to dubious conclusions while reading Russian literature. His diaries suggest that he read like an ordinary consumer of culture.

Lenin, on the contrary, read Russian literature with a political scalpel in his hand—that was the way his mind worked. He may have consciously deprived himself of the “culinary” pleasure (in Bertolt Brecht’s phrase) of reading, but his pragmatic approach to culture worked better from a political point of view and fed his revolutionary activity.

These contrasting approaches resulted in contrary readings of Tolstoy by Nicholas and Lenin. For Nicholas II, Tolstoy was primarily a patriotic military writer. Nowadays that may seem incongruous, since we know the late Tolstoy as a man who passionately rejected all forms of violence and hated war. Also, in his later years, Tolstoy often repeated Samuel Johnson’s aphorism about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel. This did not mean that he did not consider himself a Russian patriot. But official patriotism as an instrument of state policy sickened him.

These positions coupled with his rejection of official Russian Orthodoxy brought Tolstoy into conflict with Russian autocracy. He wrote harsh accusatory letters to Alexander III and to Nicholas II. His works were strictly censored and often banned. But that had not always been the case.

Tolstoy made his name as a war writer. After his first novellas (Childhood and Adolescence), the works that had the greatest impact on the Russian public were his Sevastopol Stories, about the defense of Sevastopol in 1854–1855, during the Crimean War against the British and French.

Alexander II particularly liked one of the stories, “Sevastopol in December,” and he gave orders to keep Tolstoy out of the line of fire. Tolstoy’s first book, which included the Sevastopol tales, was simply called War Stories. Tolstoy was planning to publish a special magazine for soldiers, Military Leaflet, to inculcate patriotic feelings, but Nicholas I did not approve the idea.

In general, the young Tolstoy treated his military service with great enthusiasm and ardor, and until the end of his life, despite his rejection of violence and war, he continued to consider himself a military man. In that particular sense, he and Nicholas II were on the same wavelength.

Nicholas II read Tolstoy’s War Stories to his heir, eight-year-old Alexei, not only about Sevastopol but also “The Raid” and “The Wood Felling” (early stories about the war in the Caucasus, where Tolstoy also fought). Apparently, the emperor used those tales as edifying material—for he saw his son (despite his hemophilia) as a future brave officer: a true Romanov simply could not be a civilian.

War and Peace is Tolstoy’s most celebrated work, but when it was first published in a magazine in 1865–1866, it was first of all perceived as a highly controversial account of the war against Napoleon and was roundly criticized from that point of view.

Tolstoy was a historical determinist. Therefore, in describing Russia’s battles with Napoleon in 1805–1807 and then the Patriotic War of 1812, he insisted that their outcome and the course of historic events in general did not depend on emperors or military leaders or their orders, as was traditionally believed: “In order for the will of Napoleon and Alexander (the people on whom events seemed to depend) to be executed, a coincidence of endless circumstances was necessary.”

For Tolstoy, both Napoleon and Alexander I were just puppets who thought that they were puppeteers; they were only “the unconscious weapon for the achievement of historical universal goals.”

According to Tolstoy, Napoleon and Alexander I considered themselves to be national leaders, practically demigods, and therefore the writer presented them in a caricatured way in the novel. Tolstoy’s sympathy was with the phlegmatic Russian commander Kutuzov, who “understands that there is something more powerful and significant than his will—it is the inevitable course of events.”

For him, Kutuzov’s highest wisdom was his historical fatalism. Viktor Shklovsky, a Tolstoy biographer, commented that the real Kutuzov was no fatalist, he was merely an aging man who husbanded his strength.³⁹ But Tolstoy turned him into the spokesman of his idea, and now we see Kutuzov through the prism of War and Peace.

Despite irritated reviews by military experts who accused the writer of distorting historical facts, Tolstoy’s interpretation of Commander Kutuzov found resonance with Nicholas II, who was a religious fatalist. When he was twenty-six, he wrote to his mother, “God alone wills all, He does everything for our good, and we must accept His holy will with prayer!” His invariable calm response to the apocalyptic predictions and moaning of his officials and entourage was “It’s all God’s will.”

His identification with Kutuzov as depicted in War and Peace is obvious here. When, in 1915, Nicholas took on the command of the Russian army that was waging war against the Germans, he behaved exactly like Tolstoy’s Kutuzov: he didn’t interfere in tactical decisions, concerning himself mainly with improving the morale of soldiers and officers. He earnestly believed that would guarantee victory in the war.

Nicholas II thought he understood the Russian people, understood his soldiers, and knew how they would behave in a difficult moment. He was sure they all shared his profound faith in God and supported the emperor’s divine right to rule Russia.

His mistaken belief was created in part by his perception of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Every reader of War and Peace remembers its protagonists: the delightful Natasha Rostova and her noisy, silly, and charming family; Natasha’s fiancé, the ambitious and brave Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and his eccentric father; the fat, clumsy, and kind Pierre Bezukhov. Tolstoy’s creations remain with you forever as you go through life.

But one of the most memorable characters (despite the relatively few pages devoted to him) is a peasant soldier, Platon Karataev, whom Pierre Bezukhov befriends while in French captivity. For Tolstoy, Karataev is a symbol of the Russian people: he is pious, patient, and gentle. No trials or temptations can confuse his clear mind and Christian soul.

Nicholas II imagined that the Russian nation and the Russian army consisted of millions of peasant Karataevs, who, he was sure, would never fall for the antimonarchist propaganda of a bunch of revolutionary “devils.” Lenin also read Tolstoy and also drew political conclusions, but they were directly opposite.

According to Lenin’s analysis, Tolstoy was predicting a successful Russian revolution. In an article written in 1908 on the occasion of the writer’s eightieth birthday, “Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” Lenin maintained that even though “Tolstoy’s ideas are a mirror of the weakness and inadequacies of our peasant rebellion,” the situation was changing every day: “The old pillars of peasant economy and peasant life, pillars that have held up for ages, are breaking down with extraordinary speed.”⁴⁰

Lenin admitted that Tolstoy was “an artist of genius who gave us not only incomparable pictures of Russian life but first-rate works of world literature.” But Lenin, a cynical professional politician, did not fall under the magical spell of Tolstoy’s “realism,” and did not confuse the literary characters with actual people.

Also, Lenin saw in Tolstoy’s novels what Nicholas II preferred not to notice—“mountains of hatred, anger, and desperate determination,” felt by the peasants who were already prepared, in Lenin’s opinion, “to sweep out the official church, and the landowners, and the landowner government.”

The February Revolution of 1917 occurred almost spontaneously, without plan, organization, or leadership. During those days Russia’s capital overflowed with crowds of revolutionary soldiers and sailors—the main force of the rebellion. Some historians, then and now, characterized the crowd as a gathering of “devils.” This is hardly an objective assessment. But it is also unlikely that there were many Platon Karataevs from War and Peace among the rebels.

One of the most remarkable descriptions of the February Revolution came from its witness Vassily Rozanov, a perceptive essayist. Rozanov was one of the first to be struck by how quickly Imperial Russia collapsed, in just two, at most three, days. “The remains of the police crawled out of the attics and surrendered. The troops rolled over like an avalanche to the side of the rebellion, and attempts to return power by military force to the old hands looked like attempts to weave a knout out of sand. Everything was falling apart.”⁴¹

Rozanov was amazed to hear of an old peasant declaring that “the former tsar should be skinned strip by strip.”⁴² Rozanov was shocked: there’s your holy Russian muzhik, there’s your Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and War and Peace.

According to Rozanov, the Russian revolution was fed and prepared by Russian culture: “There is no doubt that Russia was killed by literature. Of the ‘corrupters’ of Russia, there is not a single one without a literary background.”⁴³ And the last Russian tsar, lamented Rozanov, turned out to be inadequate, and broke down.

There has been a fatal “rift between the monarchy and literature,” Rozanov concluded bitterly. And as a result, “Literally, God spat and blew out the candle.”⁴⁴ The vast empire slipped out of the Romanovs’ hands, and with it, its biggest treasure—the great Russian culture.

Yet the Romanovs will remain forever in the history of that magnificent culture, where Catherine the Great quarrels and makes up with Derzhavin and Nicholas I with Pushkin, Karamzin mentors Alexander I, Zhukovsky brings up the future Alexander II, Alexander III listens attentively to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and Nicholas II reads Tolstoy’s stories to his son.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Konstantin Pleshakov, Sv. iskusstvo [Sacred art] (Moscow, 2003), p. 15.

2. Viktor Shklovsky, in conversation with the author.

CHAPTER 1

The First Romanovs: From Tsar Mikhail to Peter I

1. Russkii arkhiv, 1910, vol. 2, p. 377.

2. Vadim Kozhinov, Tiutchev (Moscow, 1994), p. 218.

3. Quoted from M. I. Glinka, Issledovaniia i materialy [Research and materials] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), p. 16.

4. Quoted from Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ [Russian biographical dictionary], vol.: Suvorov-Tkachev (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 177.

5. M. I. Glinka, p. 26.

6. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva M. Glinki [Chronicle of the life and work of M. Glinka], in two parts, part 1 (Leningrad, 1978), p. 88.

7. M. Glinka, Literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska [Literary works and correspondence], vol. 1 (Moscow, 1973), p. 268.

8. Ibid., p. 266.

9. Ibid., p. 267.

10. Ibid.

11. Quoted from V. A. Sollogub, Povesti. Vospominaniia [Novellas, reminiscences] (Leningrad, 1988), p. 576.

12. Quoted from T. Livanova, Vl. Protopopov, Glinka, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1955), p. 176.

13. V. F. Odoevskii, Izbrannye muzykal’no-kriticheskie stat’i[Selected musical criticism] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1951), p. 31.

14. Glinka, vol. 1, p. 275.

15. Quoted from A. Gozenpud, Russkii opernyi teatr XIX veka (1836–1856) [Russian opera of the nineteenth century (1836–1856)] (Leningrad, 1969), p. 37.

16. Ibid., p. 69.

17. Quoted from V. S. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia [Works], in nine volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1988), p. 62.

18. Ibid., p. 308.

19. Zhitie Avvakuma i drugie ego sochineniia [Avvakum’s Life and other works] (Moscow, 1991), p. 62.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 52.

22. Ibid., p. 54.

23. Ibid., p. 396.

24. Ibid.

25. Quoted from N.B. Golikova, Politicheskie protsessy pri Petre I po materialam Preobrazhenskogo prikaza [Political processes under Peter I from materials of the Preobrazhensky office] (Moscow, 1957), p. 169.

26. Quoted from Utverzhdenie dinastii. Istoriia Rossii i doma Romanovykh v memuarakh sovremennikov XVII–XX vv. [Assertion of the dynasty: The history of Russia and the House of Romanov in the memoirs of contemporaries, XVII–XX centuries] (Moscow, 1997), p. 288.

27. Kliuchevskii, vol. 3, p. 264.

28. N. A. Dobroliubov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works], in six volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1936), p. 195.

29. Quoted from I. E. Berenbaum, Knizhnyi Peterburg [Literary St. Petersburg] (Moscow, 1980), p. 12.

30. Podlinnye anekdoty o Petre Velikom, sobrannye Yakovom Shtelinym [True anecdotes about Peter the Great, collected by Jacob Staehlin], part 1, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1820), p. 208.

31. Abram Efros, Dva veka russkogo iskusstva [Two centuries of Russian art] (Moscow, 1969), p. 38.

32. Quoted from Pervye khudozhniki Peterburga [First artists of St. Petersburg] (Leningrad, 1984), p. 98.

33. Ibid., p. 123.

34. Ibid., p. 126.

35. Panegiricheskaia literatura petrovskogo vremeni [Panegyric literature of the Petrine era] (Moscow, 1979), p. 279.

36. Quoted from Solomon Volkov, Istoriia kul’tury Sankt-Peterburga s osnovaniia do nashikh dnei [History of the culture of St. Petersburg from its founding to the present] (Moscow, 2001), p. 9. English translation: St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York, 1995).

CHAPTER 2

Kantemir, Lomonosov, and Barkov

1. V. A. Zhukovskii, Estetika i kritika [Aesthetics and criticism] (Moscow, 1985), pp. 204, 206.

2. Quoted from Antiokh Kantemir, Sobranie stikhotvorenii [Collected poems] (Leningrad, 1956), p. 31.

3. Quoted from Evgenii Lebedev, Lomonosov (Moscow, 1990), p. 28.

4. Ibid., p. 99.

5. I.S. Barkov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii [Complete collected poems] (St. Petersburg, 2005), p. 31.

CHAPTER 3

Catherine the Great and the Culture of Her Era

1. I.S. Barkov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii [Complete collected poems] (St. Petersburg, 2005), p. 563.

2. M. N. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v chetyrekh knigakh [Selected works in four volumes], vol. 3 (Moscow, 1967), p. 115.

3. See A. Kamenskii, Pod seniiu Ekateriny … [Under the protection of Catherine …] (St. Petersburg, 1992), p. 122.

4. Zapiski imperatritsy Ekateriny Vtoroi [Notes of Empress Catherine II] (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 233–34.

5. Quoted from A. Kaganovich, “Mednyi Vsadnik”: Istoriia sozdaniia monumenta [“The Bronze Horseman”: History of the making of a monument] (Leningrad, 1975), p. 94.

6. P. A. Viazemskii, Stikhotvoreniia. Vospominaniia. Zapisnye knizhki [Poems, memoirs, notebooks] (Moscow, 1988), p. 252.

7. Quoted from V. F. Levinson-Lessing, Istoriia kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha (1764–1917) [History of the Hermitage picture gallery, 1764–1917] (Leningrad, 1985), p. 61.

8. Ibid., p. 74.

9. I. E. Barenbaum, Knizhnyi Peterburg [Literary St. Petersburg] (Moscow, 1980), p. 32.

10. Ibid., p. 74.

11. Quoted from Kamenskii, p. 397.

12. Quoted from N. Eidel’man, Mgnoven’e slavy nastaet [The moment of glory is upon us] (Leningrad, 1989).

13. Russkie memuary. XVIII vek [Russian memoirs, eighteenth century] (Moscow, 1988), p. 133.

14. Quoted from G. R. Derzhavin, Stikhotvoreniia [Poetry] (Leningrad, 1957), p. 32.

15. Russkie memuary, p. 151.

16. Ibid., p. 162.

17. Quoted from V. Khodasevich, Derzhavin [Derzhavin] (Moscow, 1988), p.143.

CHAPTER 4

Paul I and Alexander I; Karamzin and Zhukovsky

1. A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of A. S. Pushkin by his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1974), p. 196.

2. N. M. Karamzin, Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika [Letters of a Russian traveler] (Leningrad, 1984), p. 20.

3. Quoted from Viktor Afanas’ev, Zhukovskii [Zhukovsky] (Moscow, 1986), p. 7.

4. Dnevniki V. A. Zhukovskogo [Journals of V. A. Zhukovsky] (St. Petersburg, 1901), p. 27.

5. Quoted from M. I. Bogdanovich, Istoriia tsarstvovaniia imperatora Aleksandra I i Rossiia v ego vremia [History of the reign of Emperor Alexander I and the Russia of his time], vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1869), pp. 18–19.

6. Russkie memuary. XVIII vek [Russian memoirs, eighteenth century] (Moscow, 1988), p. 165.

7. Quoted from V bor’be za vlast’. Stranitsy politicheskoi istorii Rossii XVIII veka [Struggle for power: Pages from the political history of eighteenth-century Russia] (Moscow, 1988), p. 323.

8. Ibid., pp. 363–64.

9. N. M. Karamzin, Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii v ee politicheskom i grazhdanskom otnosheniiakh [The memoir on ancient and modern Russia in political and civic aspects] (Moscow, 1991), p. 46.

10. Quoted from S. F. Platonov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii [Lectures on Russian history] (Moscow, 1993), p. 649.

11. See Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla … Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII—pervoi treti XIX veka [Feeding the double-headed eagle … Literature and official ideology in Russia from the last third of the eighteenth century to the first third of the nineteenth] (Moscow, 2001).

12. Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII–XIX vekov [History of Russian journalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] (Moscow, 1973), p. 101.

13. Karamzin, p. 48.

14. Quoted from Afanas’ev, p. 131.

15. I. A. Krylov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of I. A. Krylov by his contemporaries] (Moscow, 1982), p. 242.

CHAPTER 5

Alexander I, Zhukovsky, and Young Pushkin

1. Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla … Literatura i gosudartstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII—pervoi treti XIX veka [Feeding the double-headed eagle … Literature and official ideology in Russia from the last third of the eighteenth century to the first third of the nineteenth] (Moscow, 2001), p. 269.

2. Ibid., p. 272.

3. Quoted from Russkie memuary. Izbrannye stranitsy. 1800–1825 gg. [Russian memoirs: Selected pages, 1800–1825] (Moscow, 1989), pp. 453, 471.

4. Quoted from Viktor Afanas’ev, Zhukovskii [Zhukovsky] (Moscow, 1986), p. 175.

5. Perepiska A. S. Pushkina. [Correspondence of A. S. Pushkin], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1982), p. 379.

6. A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of A. S. Pushkin by his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1974), p. 77.

7. Ibid., p. 88.

8. Ibid., p. 91.

9. T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (New York, 2002), p. 31.

10. B. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1990), p. 61.

11. Ibid., p. 11.

12. Quoted from N. Ia. Eidel’man, Tvoi XVIII vek. Prekrasen nash soiuz … [Your eighteenth century, How splendid is our union …] (Moscow, 1991).

13. Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim [Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky] (Moscow, 1998), p. 307.

14. Quoted from S. F. Platonov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii [Lectures on Russian history], p. 668.

15. Quoted from Rossiiskie samoderzhtsy. 1801–1917 [Russian tsars, 1801–1917] (Moscow, 1994), p. 75.

16. A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, p. 134.

17. Ibid., p. 98.

18. Ibid., p. 103.

19. Ibid., p. 208.

20. Ibid., pp. 221–22.

21. Quoted from Rossiiskie samoderzhtsy, p. 83.

22. See G. Vasilich, Imperator Aleksandr I i starets Fedor Kuz’mich [Emperor Alexander I and the elder Fedor Kuzmich] (Moscow, 1911); Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, Legenda o konchine imperatora Aleksandra I v Sibiri v obraze startsa Fedora Kuz’micha [Legend of the death of Alexander I in Siberia under the identity of the elder Fedor Kuzmich] (St. Petersburg, 1907); K. V. Kudriashov, Aleksandr I i taina Fedora Kuz’micha [Alexander I and the mystery of Fedor Kuzmich] (Petrograd, 1923); L. Liubimov, Taina imperatora Aleksandra I [Mystery of Emperor Alexander I] (Paris, 1938); N. Ia. Eidel’man, Iz potaennoi istorii Rossii XVIII–XIX vekov [From the secret history of Russia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] (Moscow, 1993); K. V. Chistov, Russkie narodnye sotsial’no-utopicheskie legendy XVII–XIX vv. [Russian popular utopian legends of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries] (Moscow, 1967); Dva monarkha [Two monarchs] (Moscow, 1991); Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii, Aleksandr I [Alexander I] (Moscow, 2000).

CHAPTER 6

Nicholas I and Pushkin

1. Quoted from the collection 14 dekabria 1825 goda i ego istolkovateli [14 December 1825 and its exponents] (Moscow, 1994), p. 332.

2. Ibid., p. 336.

3. Perepiska A. S. Pushkina. [Correspondence of A. S. Pushkin], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1982), p. 112.

4. Quoted from Leonid Vyskochkov, Nikolai I [Nicholas I] (Moscow, 2003), p. 125.

5. Quoted from N. Eidel’man, Pushkin. Iz biografii i tvorchestva. 1826–1837 [Pushkin: From his biography and works, 1826–1837] (Moscow, 1987), p. 9.

6. Ibid., pp. 33, 35.

7. A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of A. S. Pushkin by his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1974), p. 122.

8. Eidel’man, Pushkin, p. 62.

9. Ibid., p. 63.

10. On this, see Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich i Stalin: Khudozhnik i tsar’ (Moscow, 2004), pp. 59–79. English translation, Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator (New York, 2004).

11. A. V. Anikin, Muza i mamona. Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie motivy u Pushkina [Muse and Mammon: Socioeconomic motifs in Pushkin] (Moscow, 1989), p. 180.

12. Perepiska Pushkina, vol. 2, p. 120.

13. N.I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni [Notes on my life] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), p. 704.

14. Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vols. 16–18 (Moscow, 1934), pp. 101, 105.

15. Pisateli-dekabristy v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of the Decembrist writers by their contemporaries], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1980), p. 247.

16. Iu. M. Lotman, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Biografiia pisatelia [Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: Biography of a writer] (Leningrad, 1981), p. 135.

17. T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (New York, 2002), p. 546.

18. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 40 (1999), p. 84.

19. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, p. 192.

20. Anna Akhmatova, in conversation with the author.

21. Quoted from R. G. Skrynnikov, Pushkin. Taina gibeli [Pushkin: The mystery of his death] (St. Petersburg, 2005), p. 319.

22. Eidel’man, Pushkin, p. 400.

CHAPTER 7

Lermontov and Briullov

1. A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of A. S. Pushkin by his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1974), p. 122.

2. Quoted from V. A. Zhukovskii—kritik [V. A. Zhukovsky, critic] (Moscow, 1985), p. 246.

3. Ibid., pp. 251–52.

4. See the collection Rossiiskie konservatory [Russian conservatives] (Moscow, 1997), p. 105; and the collection Kontekst—1989. Literaturno-teoreticheskie issledovaniia [Context 1989: Studies in literary theory] (Moscow, 1989), pp. 10, 38.

5. Aleksandr Vasil’evich Nikitenko, Zapiski i dnevnik [Notes and journal], in three volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2004), p. 362.

6. M. Iu. Lermontov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of M. Iu. Lermontov by his contemporaries] (Moscow, 1989), p. 18.

7. Alla Marchenko, S podorozhnoi po kazennoi nadobnosti. Lermontov: Roman v dokumentakh i pis’makh [With travel papers on official business. Lermontov: The novel in documents and letters] (Moscow, 1984), p. 233.

8. M. Iu. Lermontov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, p. 486.

9. Ibid.

10. See Emma Gershtein, Sud’ba Lermontova [Lermontov’s fate] (Moscow, 1964), p. 98.

11. Quoted from ibid., p. 101.

12. Ibid.

13. See M. Iu. Lermontov, Izbrannoe [Selected works] (Moscow, 1953), p. 11.

14. Quoted from Lermontov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, pp. 342, 470.

15. Quoted from Gershtein, p. 112.

16. Ibid., p. 113.

17. Quoted from V. Turchin, Epokha romantizma v Rossii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva pervoi treti XIX stoletiia. Ocherki [The Romantic era in Russia: A history of Russian art in the first third of the nineteenth century. Essays] (Moscow, 1981), p. 80.

18. Quoted from Galina Leont’eva, Karl Briullov (Leningrad, 1976), p. 319.

19. Quoted from ibid., p. 192.

20. Quoted from A. V. Kornilova, Karl Briullov v Peterburge [Karl Briullov in St. Petersburg] (Leningrad, 1976), p. 105.

21. Leonid Vyskochkov, Nikolai I [Nicholas I] (Moscow, 2003), p. 570.

22. See Literaturnoe obozrenie, 11 (1991).

23. Quoted from Kornilova, p. 131.

24. Quoted from Alla Marchenko, S podorozhnoi po kazennoi nadobnosti. Lermontov: Roman v dokumentakh i pis’makh [With travel papers on official business. Lermontov: The novel in documents and letters], pp. 101–02.

25. Quoted from Lermontov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, p. 206.

CHAPTER 8

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

1. Quoted from Vikentii Veresaev, Gogol’ v zhizni [Gogol in life] (Moscow, 1990), p. 183.

2. Quoted from P. V. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominaniia [Literary memoirs] (Moscow, 1983), p. 59.

3. Quoted from Veresaev, p. 184.

4. Quoted from Igor’ Zolotusskii, Gogol’ [Gogol] (Moscow, 1979), p. 193; Nikolai Pervyi i ego vremia [Nicholas I and his times], vol. 2 (Moscow, 2000), p. 278.

5. Quoted from Annenkov, p. 355.

6. R.-M. Rilke, Vorpsvede. Ogiust Roden. Pis’ma. Stikhi [Worpswede, Auguste Rodin, letters, poetry] (Moscow, 1971), p. 389.

7. Annenkov, p. 49.

8. Ibid., p. 401.

9. Nikolai Pervyi i ego vremia, vol. 2, p. 208.

10. Quoted from Iu. Mann, V poiskakh zhivoi dushi [In search of the living soul] (Moscow, 1984), p. 125.

11. Quoted from Aleksandr Vasil’evich Nikitenko, Zapiski. Dnevnik [Notes and Journal], in three volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2004), p. 561.

12. Quoted from Kirill Pigarev, F. I. Tiutchev i ego vremia [F. I. Tiutchev and his times] (Moscow, 1978), p. 124.

13. Quoted from Sovremenniki o F. I. Tiutcheve. Vospominaniia, otzyvy i pis’ma [F. I. Tiutchev in the words of his contemporaries: Memoirs, reviews, and letters] (Tula, 1984), p. 14.

14. Quoted from F. I. Tiutchev, Lirika [Lyric poetry], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1965), p. 361.

15. Quoted from Vadim Kozhinov, Tiutchev (Moscow, 1994), p. 319.

16. N. Ia. Eidel’man, Gertsen protiv samoderzhaviia. Sekretnaia politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVIII–XIX vekov i vol’naia pechat’ [Herzen vs. autocracy: The secret political history of Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the independent press] (Moscow, 1984), p. 10.

17. Quoted from Vyskochkov, Nikolai I [Nicholas I], pp. 605–06.

CHAPTER 9

Alexander II, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

1. Quoted from the collection Aleksandr Vtoroi: Vospominaniia. Dnevniki [Alexander II: Memoirs and diaries] (St. Petersburg, 1995), p. 76.

2. Quoted from E. P. Tolmachev, Aleksandr II i ego vremia [Alexander II and his times], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1998), p. 79.

3. D. V. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia [Literary memoirs] (Moscow, 1987), p. 133.

4. Ibid., p. 294.

5. Ibid.

6. A. Ia. Panaeva (Golovacheva), Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow, 1986), p. 210.

7. Ibid., p. 212.

8. Quoted from G. A. Bialyi and A. B. Muratov, Turgenev v Peterburge [Turgenev in St. Petersburg] (Leningrad, 1970), p. 69.

9. Panaeva, p. 115.

10. I. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of I. S. Turgenev by his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1969), pp. 175, 178.

11. Ibid., p. 319.

12. Quoted from B. Ia. Bukhshtab, A. A. Fet. Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva [A. A. Fet: A study of his life and work] (Leningrad, 1974), p. 33.

13. A. L. Ospovat, “Kak slovo nashe otzovetsia …” O pervom sbornike Tiutcheva [“Not ours to know the impact of our words”: On the first collection of Tiutchev] (Moscow, 1980), p. 46.

14. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, vol. 2, p. 153.

15. Ibid., p. 197.

16. F. M. Dostoevskii and A. G. Dostoevskaia, Perepiska [Correspondence] (Leningrad, 1976), p. 347.

17. Quoted from L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Reminiscences of L. N. Tolstoy by his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1978), p. 281.

18. Quoted from Perepiska I. S. Turgeneva [Correspondence of I. S. Turgenev], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1986), p. 483.

CHAPTER 10

Herzen, Tolstoy, and the Women’s Issue

1. Quoted from Kirill Pigarev, F. I. Tiutchev i ego vremia [F. I. Tiutchev and his times] (Moscow, 1978), p. 165.

2. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982), p. 232.

3. P. V. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominaniia [Literary memoirs] (Moscow, 1983), p. 314.

4. Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vol. 62 (Moscow, 1955), p. 381.

5. Quoted from V. Prokof’ev, Gertsen [Herzen] (Moscow, 1979), p. 32.

6. A. Ia. Panaeva (Golovacheva), Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow, 1986), p. 139.

7. Annenkov, pp. 288–89.

8. Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vol. 64 (Moscow, 1958), p. 298.

9. Perepiska I. S. Turgeneva [Correspondence of I. S. Turgenev], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1986), p. 557.

10. Ibid.

11. Quoted from B. Ia. Bukhshtab, Literaturovedcheskie rassledovaniia [Investigations in literary criticism] (Moscow, 1982), p. 105.

12. Ibid., p. 103.

13. P. A. Kropotkin, Zapiski revoliutsionera [Memoirs of a revolutionary] (Moscow, 1966), p. 240.

14. G. A. Tishkin, Zhenskii vopros v Rossii: 50–60–e gody XIX v. [The women’s issue in 1850s and 1860s Russia] (Leningrad, 1984), pp. 213–14.

15. Prince Meshcherskii, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow, 2001), p. 332.

16. L. N. Tolstoi, Perepiska s russkimi pisateliami [Correspondence with Russian writers], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1978), p. 464.

17. Anna Akhmatova, in conversation with the author.

18. Ibid.

19. Quoted from Aleksei Zverev and Vladimir Tunimanov, Lev Tolstoi [Leo Tolstoy] (Moscow, 2007), p. 443.

20. M. Gor’kii, Literaturnye portrety [Literary portraits] (Moscow, 1983), p. 155.

21. Ibid., p. 199.

22. Quoted from Zverev and Tunimanov, p. 466.

23. Ibid., p. 465.

24. L. L. Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Taneeve [Reminiscences of Taneev] (Moscow, 2003), pp. 65–66.

25. Gor’kii, p. 168.

CHAPTER 11

Tchaikovsky and Homosexuality in Imperial Russia

1. P. I. Chaikovskii, Perepiska s. N. F. von Mekk [Correspondence with Nadezhda von Meck], vol. 2 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1935), p. 63.

2. P. I. Chaikovskii, Pis’ma k rodnym [Correspondence with family], vol. 1 (Moscow, 1940), p. 268.

3. Chaikovskii, Perepiska, p. 63.

4. Dnevniki P. I. Chaikovskogo. 1873–1891 [Tchaikovsky journals, 1873–1891] (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923), p. 209.

5. Quote from A. Shol’p, “Evgenii Onegin” Chaikovskogo. Ocherki. [Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: Essays] (Leningrad, 1982), p. 15.

6. P. Chaikovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska [Complete collected works: Literary works and correspondence], vol. 6 (Moscow, 1961), p. 100.

7. Quoted from Lev Tolstoi i muzyka. Khronika. Notografiia. Bibliografiia [Leo Tolstoy and music: Chronicle, bibliography of musical scores, bibiliography] (Moscow, 1977), pp. 149–50.

8. L. Tolstoi, Perepiska s russkimi pisateliami [Correspondence with Russian writers], p. 185.

9. Ibid., p. 187.

10. M. Chaikovskii, Zhizn’ Petra Il’icha Chaikovskogo [Life of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky], in three volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1997), p. 232.

11. G. A. Larosh, Izbrannye stat’i [Selected articles], part 2 (Leningrad, 1975), p. 104.

12. See, for instance, interview with Mikhail Buianov, president of the Moscow Academy of Psychotherapy, “Was Tchaikovsky a Homosexual?” in Argumenty i fakty, 49 (2003), p. 20.

13. Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2009), p. 98.

14. M. Chaikovskii, Zhizn, vol. 2, p. 11.

15. Théodule-Armand Ribot, Volia v ee normal’nom i boleznennom sostoianii [The will in its normal and diseased state] (St. Petersburg, 1894), p. 121.

16. Vospominnaniia o P. I. Chaikovskom [Reminiscences of P. I. Tchaikovsky] (Moscow, 1979), p. 399.

17. Ibid., p. 400.

18. Ibid., pp. 130–31.

19. P. I. Chaikovskii, Al’manakh [Anthology], part 1 (Moscow, 1995), p. 127.

20. Aleksandr Poznanskii, Samoubiistvo Chaikovskogo: Mif i real’nost’ [Suicide of Tchaikovsky: Myth and reality] (Moscow, 1993), p. 40.

21. E. Feoktistov, Za kulisami politiki i literatury. 1848–1896 [Behind the scenes of politics and literature, 1848–1896] (Moscow, 1991), p. 238.

22. See, for instance, A. Suvorin, Dnevnik [Diary] (Moscow, 1992), pp. 371, 374, 376–77; A. Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa [The last three autocrats] (Moscow, 1990), pp. 104, 161, 178, 299.

23. See Novyi mir, 5 (1999), pp. 189–90.

24. Quoted from K. K. Rotikov, Drugoi Peterburg [The other Petersburg] (St. Petersburg, 1998), p. 407.

25. Novyi mir, 5 (1999), p. 189.

26. Quoted from Neizvestnyi Chaikovskii [The unknown Tchaikovsky] (Moscow, 2009), p. 19.

27. Chaikovskii, Al’manakh, part 1, p. 123.

28. Ibid.

29. See Truman Bullard, “Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: Tatiana and Lensky, the Third Couple,” in Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centennial Symposium (Westport, Conn., and London, 1999), pp. 157–66.

30. George Balanchine, in conversation with the author.

31. Igor’ Glebov (Boris Asaf’ev), Chaikovskii: Opyt kharakteristiki [Tchaikovsky: Essay of a characterization] (St. Petersburg and Berlin, 1923), p. 45.

CHAPTER 12

Dostoevsky and the Romanovs

1. P. Chaikovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska [Complete collected works: Literary works and correspondence], vol. 5 (Moscow, 1959), pp. 106–07.

2. Zapiski P. A. Cherevina [Memoirs of P. A. Cherevin] (Kostroma, 1918), pp. 4–5.

3. Aleksandr Vasil’evich Nikitenko, Zapiski i dnevnik [Notes and journal], in three volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2004), pp. 244-45.

4. Ibid., pp. 302, 304.

5. Prince Meshcherskii, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow, 2001), p. 307.

6. Quoted from Igor’Volgin, Koleblias’ nad bezdnoi: Dostoevskii i russkii imperatorskii dom [Hovering over the abyss: Dostoevsky and the Russian imperial house] (Moscow, 1998), pp. 271–72.

7. A. G. Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow, 1971], p. 326.

8. Quoted from Volgin, p. 302.

9. Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vol. 86 (Moscow, 1973), p. 135.

10. Ibid., p. 136.

11. Dostoevskaia, p. 327.

12. See, for instance, Novyi mir, 5 (1999), pp. 195–215.

13. F. M. Dostoevskii and A. G. Dostoevskaia, Perepiska [Correspondence] (Leningrad, 1976), p. 293.

14. Ibid., pp. 285, 291.

15. See Sredi velikikh: Literaturnye vstrechi [Among the greats: Literary encounters] (Moscow, 2001), pp. 355–57.

16. Perepiska I. S. Turgeneva [Correspondence of I. S. Turgenev], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1986), p. 305.

17. Ibid., p. 294.

18. Quoted from Igor’ Volgin, Poslednii god Dostoevskogo [Dostoevsky’s last year] (Moscow, 1986), p. 486.

19. Quoted from Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty [Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev and his correspondents], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Minsk, 2003), p. 34.

20. Quoted from Volgin, Poslednii god Dostoevskogo, p. 487.

21. Quoted from B. Bursov, Lichnost’ Dostoevskogo [Dostoevsky the person] (Leningrad, 1974), p. 131.

22. Quoted from K. P. Pobedonostsev, Velikaia lozh’ nashego vremeni [The big lie of our time] (Moscow, 1993), p. 340.

CHAPTER 13

Alexander III, the Wanderers, and Mussorgsky

1. Aleksandr Benua, Moi vospominaniia [My memoirs], in five volumes, vols. 1–3 (Moscow, 1980), p. 382.

2. Quoted from Lev Tolstoi i russkie tsari [Leo Tolstoy and the Russian tsars] (Moscow, 1995), p. 23.

3. Quoted from Aleksei Zverev and Vladimir Tunimanov, Lev Tolstoi [Leo Tolstoy] (Moscow, 2007), p. 359.

4. Quoted from Iu. B. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v kontse XIX veka [Autocracy and nobility in the late nineteenth century] (Leningrad, 1973), p. 90.

5. Ibid.

6. Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty [Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev and his correspondents], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Minsk, 2003), p. 246.

7. I. E. Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe [Far and near] (Leningrad, 1982), p. 293.

8. Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty, vol. 2, pp. 498–99.

9. Repin, p. 152.

10. Ibid., p. 185.

11. Vasilii Ivanovich Surikov, Pis’ma. Vospominaniia o khudozhnike [Letters, memoirs] (Leningrad, 1977), p. 187; Maksimilian Voloshin, Liki tvorchestva [The faces of creativity] (Leningrad, 1988), p. 343.

12. Quoted from V. Lakshin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovskii [Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky] (Moscow, 1976), p. 504.

13. Quoted from A. Orlova, Trudy i dni M. P. Musorgskogo. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva [Works and days of M. P. Mussorgsky: Chronicle of his life and work] (Moscow, 1963), p. 360.

14. Modest Petrovich Musorgskii, Pis’ma, biograficheskie materialy i dokumenty [Letters, biographical materials, and documents] (Moscow, 1971), p. 176.

15. Quoted from A. Gozenpud, Russkii operny teatr XIX veka. 1873–1889 [Russian opera of the nineteenth century, 1873–1889] (Leningrad, 1973), p. 107.

16. Surikov, Pis’ma. Vospominaniia, p. 187.

17. Quoted from A. Gozenpud, Russkii operny teatr na rubezhe XIX-XX vekov i F. I. Shaliapin. 1890–1904 [Russian opera at the turn of the twentieth century and F. I. Chaliapin, 1890–1904] (Leningrad, 1974), p. 28.

18. Benua, Moi vospominaniia, vols. 1–3, p. 650.

CHAPTER 14

Nicholas II and Lenin as Art Connoisseurs

1. See, for instance, M. K. Kasvinov, Dvadtsat’ tri stupeni vniz [Twenty-three steps down] (Moscow, 1978), pp. 82, 128.

2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika [Essays on society and politics], in three volumes, vol. 3 (Yaroslavl, 1997), p. 332.

3. Teatr,12 (1992), p. 127.

4. Quoted from the collection V. I. Lenin o literature [V. I. Lenin on literature] (Moscow, 1971), p. 226.

5. Quoted from Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vol. 65 (Moscow, 1958), p. 210.

6. A. V. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia [Memoirs and impressions] (Moscow, 1969), p. 195.

7. Quoted from S. K. Bogoiavlenskii, Moskovskii teatr pri tsariakh Aleksee i Petre [Muscovite theater under Tsars Alexis and Peter] (Moscow, 1914), p. 19.

8. Matil’da Kshesinskaia, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow, 1992), p. 29.

9. Ibid., p. 48.

10. Nicholas II, Dnevniki [Journals] (Moscow, 2007), p. 13.

11. M. Gor’kii, Literaturnye portrety [Literary portraits] (Moscow, 1983), p. 40.

12. George Balanchine, in conversation with the author.

13. Gor’kii, p. 37.

14. Quoted from Lev Tolstoi i muzyka. Khronika. Notografiia. Bibliografiia [Leo Tolstoy and music: Chronicle, bibliography of musical scores, bibliography] (Moscow, 1977), p. 22.

15. Quoted from A. G. Latyshev, Rassekrechennyi Lenin [Lenin declassified] (Moscow, 1996), p. 291.

16. V. I. Lenin o literature [V. I. Lenin on literature] (Moscow, 1971), p. 254.

17. Maria Dobrowen, in conversation with the author.

18. Quoted from the collection Prometei [Prometheus], vol.8 (Moscow, 1971), p. 61.

19. See L. Freidkina, Dni i gody V. I. Nemirovicha-Danchenko [Life of V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko] (Moscow, 1962), p. 219; I. Solov’eva, Nemirovich-Danchenko [Nemirovich-Danchenko] (Moscow, 1979), pp. 211–12.

20. Quotes from Simon Dreiden, Spektakli. Roli. Sud’by [Plays, roles, and destinies] (Moscow, 1978), p. 22.

21. Quoted from M. N. Stroeva, Rezhisserskie iskaniia Stanislavskogo. 1898–1917 [Directorial pursuits of Stanislavsky, 1898–1917] (Moscow, 1973), p. 304.

22. Quoted from Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vol. 72 (Moscow, 1965), p. 539.

23. Lenin o literature, p. 263.

24. Grazhdanin, 3 March 1902.

25. Quoted from Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. M. Gor’kogo [Chronicle of the life and work of A. M. Gorky], part 1 (Moscow, 1958), p. 372.

26. Quoted from Russkaia literatura kontsa XIX–nachala XX v. 1901–1907 [Russian literature at the turn of the twentieth century: 1901–1907] (Moscow, 1971), p. 373.

27. Lenin o literature, pp. 148, 150.

28. Ibid., pp. 157–58.

29. See Bol’shaia tsenzura: Pisateli i zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov. 1917–1956 [Censorship on a grand scale: Writers and journalists in the Soviet Union, 1917–1956] (Moscow, 2005), p. 29.

30. Prometei [Prometheus], vol. 8, p. 61.

31. M. Gor’kii, V. I. Lenin (Moscow, 1974), p. 7. (Quotations hereafter taken from this edition.)

32. Natan Altman, in conversation with the author.

33. Abram Efros, Profili [Profiles] (Moscow, 1994), p. 15.

34. See S. I. Grigor’ev, Pridvornaia tsenzura i obraz Verkhovnoi vlasti (1831–1917) [Court censorship and the image of the Crown, 1831–1917] (St. Petersburg, 2007).

35. Quoted from Valentin Serov v vospominaniiakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov [Valentin Serov in the memoirs, diaries, and correspondence of his contemporaries], vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1971), p. 296.

36. Valentin Serov v perepiske, dokumentakh i interv’iu [Valentin Serov in correspondence, documents, and interviews], vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1989), pp. 6–7.

37. Aleksandr Benua, Moi vospominaniia [My memoirs], in five volumes, vols. 1–3, p. 634.

38. Ibid.

39. Viktor Shklovsky, in conversation with the author.

40. This and subsequent quotations from V. I. Lenin, Lev Tolstoi, kak zerkalo russkoi revoliutsii [Leo Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian Revolution] (Moscow, 1970).

41. Quoted from the collection Pod sozvezdiem topora: Petrograd 1917 goda—znakomyi i neznakomyi [Under the sign of the ax: Petrograd, 1917—the familiar and the unknown] (Moscow, 1991), p. 50.

42. Ibid., p. 56.

43. V. V. Rozanov, Nesovmestimye kontrasty zhitiia. Literaturno-esteticheskie raboty raznykh let [Life’s incompatible contradictions: Literary-aesthetic works of various dates] (Moscow, 1990), p. 553.

44. Ibid., p. 546.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Solomon Volkov is the award-winning author of several notable books about Russian culture, including The Magical Chorus, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, and Shostakovich and Stalin, published worldwide. After moving to the United States from the Soviet Union, he became a cultural commentator for Voice of America and later for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, broadcasting to the Soviet Union (and, later, Russia), where he discussed contemporary artistic developments in his former homeland. He lives in New York City with his wife, Marianna.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

The prizewinning translator Antonina W. Bouis is known for her work with contemporary Russian literature.