Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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