Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here is what Catherine said to him one day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derzhavin later described (in the third person) these extraordinary audiences as the relationship of two people in love rather than empress and courtier: “It often happened that she grew angry and threw out Derzhavin, and he