Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This notable shift in readers’ perceptions was in great part due to the wild fad for Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, which had swept Russia. Pushkin himself, asking his brother to send new books to the country from the capital, admitted, “Walter Scott! It’s food for the soul.”

Pushkin began experimenting with historical fiction: his unfinished The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (about Pushkin’s African ancestor), and then Dubrovsky (also unfinished, about a noble robber, with an obvious bow to the great Scotsman’s Bride of Lammermoor) and “The Captain’s Daughter,” about the adventures of a young officer during the rebellion led by the Cossack Emelyan Pugachev during the reign of Catherine the Great, are clearly modeled on Scott’s “Scottish” novels.

Pushkin hoped that his historical fiction would capture the readers’ slipping attention, “for is not poetry always the pleasure of a small number of the select, while novellas and novels are read by all, everywhere?” But as it often happens, his competitors, incomparably less talented, knew better what the mass audience craved.

Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (the first “moral-satirical novel” on a Russian theme) sold like hot pirozhki: four thousand copies in three weeks. Zagoskin’s Yuri Miloslavsky, or Russians in 1612, also sold well, even though it cost 20 rubles; it was read “in hotels and workshops, by simple folk and at the royal court,”¹³ and Nicholas I gave the author a ring.