In 1905, while working on the novella, Tolstoy made a notation in his diary about the way he saw his own life: “A mass of people, all festive, eating, drinking, demanding. Servants run and obey. And it is more and more painful for me to participate in this lifestyle and not condemn it.”
In
Tolstoy’s Alexander I looks at things just the way the writer was thinking in 1905 as he prepared to run away from his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. “I have to do what I’ve long wanted to do: abandon everything, leave, vanish.”
Pushkin in 1829 said that Alexander was “a harlequin in person and in life.” The skeptical and rational Pushkin did not believe in the emperor’s mystical moods or his presumed repentance. Seventy-five years later, Tolstoy, tormented by his own moral dilemma, was inclined to believe in Alexander’s “desire to leave everything, brought on by repentance,” and in his escape, which Tolstoy tried to emulate in 1910, “without vanity, without thought of human fame, but for myself, for God.”
Would Pushkin have agreed with Tolstoy’s passionate idea? He never did forgive Alexander I for his persecution. But Tolstoy’s assumptions about Alexander might easily have struck a chord with the poet Zhukovsky. The early-nineteenth-century mystic and the early-twentieth-century Christian anarchist would probably have had much food for spirited conversation.
CHAPTER 6
Nicholas I and Pushkin
Emperor Nicholas I called December 14, 1825, the “fateful day.” It became one of the most famous dates in Russian history: three thousand rebels—soldiers and sailors, led by several dozen officers, who came to be known as the Decembrists—came out onto Senate Square in St. Petersburg, to keep Nicholas, the younger brother of Alexander I, who had died less than a month previously, from becoming the new monarch of Russia.
The Decembrist uprising was like a sudden lightning bolt, and could have destroyed the empire. Part of the blame for this catastrophe was Alexander’s: he ignored reports of growing conspiracies, and his instructions on succession were exceptionally befuddled. (Many thought that the next tsar would be his brother Konstantin, next in age. Only a select few knew Alexander intended to make Nicholas his heir.)
The Decembrists took advantage of the confusion. They told the rebel soldiers that they would swear allegiance to Konstantin, while their real goal was the introduction of a constitution and the repeal of serfdom. The soldiers on Senate Square shouted, “Constitution, hurrah!,” believing it to be the name of Konstantin’s wife.
Most of the Decembrists were noble and courageous men, but they acted foolishly. The rebels who assembled around the Bronze Horseman, the monument to Peter the Great, had no idea what to do, their leaders vacillated, and their plans changed. Nicholas, displaying determination and firmness, surrounded the mutineers with troops loyal to him.
At first Nicholas had hoped to avoid bloodshed. But the rebels responded with bullets when ordered to give up, fatally wounding Count Miloradovich. It grew dark. As Nicholas I later recalled, “I had to put an end to this, otherwise the rebellion could spread to the rabble.” A loyal general said, “
“Long live freedom!” was the mutineers’ response to the first round. But they fled after the second and subsequent rounds. It was over in fifteen minutes. The number of losses is still in dispute: officially, there were fewer than one hundred; unofficially, more than a thousand. In any case, Nicholas won the battle, as his personal fate and the future of the Romanov dynasty had hung by a thread that day.
That evening the leading Decembrists were arrested and brought to the Winter Palace, hands tied behind their backs. The new tsar’s quarters resembled a military camp. In full uniform with scarf and saber, Nicholas sat in on the interrogations until dawn, using his formidable range of acting skills: tall and impressive, with a profile from an antique cameo, he stared with his piercing gray eyes at the rebels and was alternately stern, gentle, angry, kind. Some Decembrists behaved cockily, even insolently; others fell to the tsar’s feet and tearfully begged forgiveness.
Hiding his fear and shock, Nicholas tried to find out the roots and causes of this attempted revolution. In his memoirs he wrote, “[T]he statements by the prisoners were so varied, expansive and complex, that it required especial firmness of mind to keep from getting lost in that chaos.”2
Despite the confused accounts, an important detail immediately caught the new emperor’s attention: during the interrogations, the Decembrists kept quoting Pushkin’s freedom-loving poetry to explain their ideology. This made Pushkin a marked man.
By that time, Pushkin had spent sixteen months in exile in the village of Mikhailovskoe, Pskov Province, in his family estate. He had been sent there, to be supervised by the local authorities, on Alexander’s personal orders. In 1824, the emperor struck Pushkin from government service. The poet had desired that himself, but life in the sticks of the countryside did not suit him at all. Still, Alexander, angered by Pushkin’s defiant behavior, kept the poet in Mikhailovskoe.
Alexander’s sudden death brought hope to the nearly desperate Pushkin, prepared to do almost anything to escape the countryside. News of the rebellion of December 14 began reaching Mikhailovskoe. Learning of its failure, Pushkin panicked; he later explained to Prince Vyazemsky, “I’ve never liked rebellion and revolution, that is true; but I was in contact with almost all of the conspirators and in correspondence with many of them. All inciting manuscripts were attributed to me, the way all the lewd ones go by Barkov’s name.”
Pushkin hoped for help from his mentors, Karamzin and Zhukovsky, who had retained their privileged court positions under the new emperor. Zhukovsky knew that the Investigative Commission was trying to tie Pushkin to the Decembrists. He wrote from St. Petersburg to Pushkin at Mikhailovskoe: “You are not involved in anything—that is true. But each of the conspirators had your poetry in his papers. This is a poor way to make friends with the government.”3
After the Investigative Commission, the Supreme Criminal Court took over the case. Pushkin wrote to a friend, “I impatiently await the decision on the fate of the wretches … I have firm hopes in the magnanimity of our young tsar.”
