Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Pushkin wrote great prose that is now the pride of not only Russian but world fiction of the nineteenth century: his novellas The Coffinmaker, The Station Master, and The Queen of Spades paved the way for Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk. But the contemporary press and readers gave Pushkin’s prose a cold shoulder. Pushkin was sure that he wrote “simply, briefly, and clearly” (and entertainingly), while the readers demanded more melodrama, color, plot twists, horrible secrets, and secret horrors.

Pushkin had to face facts: he was no longer the readers’ idol. This filled his heart with bitterness, which was confirmed by hard numbers. Even at the best of times he received a chervonets (10 rubles) per line of verse, while the truly popular Krylov was paid a thousand chervonets for each of his short fables.

Pushkin’s attempts to guarantee himself a stable income (and independence) as a freelance writer failed, as did his later plan to get rich by publishing his own journal, Contemporary.

There was one last way, which suddenly became open thanks to Nicholas’s benevolence: take up the vacant post of state poet (the Zhukovsky model) or state historian (the Karamzin model). Karamzin was dead, Zhukovsky ill and depressed, while Pushkin, inspired by his work on Boris Godunov, felt strong enough to replace both. He had every reason to assume that Karamzin and Zhukovsky saw him as an heir.

It would be wrong to presume that Pushkin’s aspiration to be “counselor to the tsar” was based only on greed or vanity (although D. S. Mirsky in 1934 accused him of being a “lackey” and “vulgar conformist”).¹⁴ That “inspiration is not for sale” Pushkin believed to the end of his days. But the inexorable evolution of his professional and political outlook eventually made him a “liberal conservative,” according to his friend Prince Vyazemsky.

Pushkin still demanded certain freedoms for himself and the elite and still thought the emancipation of the serfs necessary, but by now he firmly believed that these goals could be achieved not by revolutionary means, but through universal education, which could be inculcated in Russia only by the tsar: “Since the Romanov house came to the throne, our government has always been in the forefront of enlightenment. The people follow lazily and sometimes reluctantly.”

The mature Pushkin, despite his French-based education and cosmopolitan orientation, could be called a patriot, even a nationalist, albeit a paradoxical one: “Even though personally I am heartily attached to the Sovereign, I am far from pleased by what I see around me; as a writer, I am irritated, as a man with honor, I am offended, but I swear that I would not want to change my homeland or have another history than the history of our ancestors just as God gave it to us.”

That Pushkin, with that system of views, Nicholas had every reason to call “my Pushkin.” Nevertheless, their differences would have inevitably grown: after all, the tsar was leader of a huge empire, while Pushkin was only one of his fifty million subjects, however much a genius (“the wisest man in Russia”).

Later commentators on the relationship between Nicholas I and Pushkin seem to have forgotten this obvious gap in their respective hierarchical positions. Soviet scholars in particular seemed to think that the sole priority of Nicholas’s reign was to provide ideal conditions for Pushkin’s life and work.

But Nicholas I was not at all like King Ludwig II of Bavaria, for example, who tried to satisfy every whim of Richard Wagner. The Russian emperor was stern and valued subordination to law and order above all.

His exemplar in this was his great-grandfather, Peter the Great, the first ruler in Russia to make serving the state the main criterion for evaluating any person, from emperor to serf. For Nicholas I (as for Peter, too) the army was the model for society: “There we see order, strict unconditional abidance of the law, no know-it-alls or contradictions … I look at human life only as service, for everyone serves.”

In this, Nicholas’s ideological orientation on Peter the Great was obvious to many of his contemporaries, including Pushkin, who in late 1826 wrote an ode to the tsar called “Stanzas” (“In hopes of glory and goodness …”), in which he directly compared the emperor to his legendary ancestor and called on him to follow Peter’s example: “to sow enlightenment” boldly, to be “like him, tireless and hard, / and like him, without rancor” (the latter a hint to Nicholas to show mercy to the Decembrists exiled in Siberia).

The poem, approved by Nicholas and published, cost Pushkin dearly: it finally destroyed his reputation as dissident poet. Many of his friends (but not Zhukovsky) shunned him; behind his back they called him “court toady” (as both Karamzin and Zhukovsky had been called). Nor were the Decembrists, languishing in Siberia, pleased by Pushkin’s verse appeal on their behalf—on the contrary, they thought it “completely dishonorable.”¹⁵

Pushkin’s tragedy was that, having left the liberal camp, he never won the complete trust of conservative circles: the tsar and his court never considered him “one of them.” Pushkin complained that the attitude toward him was “one minute rain, sun the next.”

Nicholas would commission Pushkin to do a special memorandum on national education (a sign of high trust) and have him told that he was reading Eugene Onegin “with great pleasure,” but then he would suggest that he rewrite Boris Godunov as “a historical novella or novel, like Walter Scott” and “clean up” “The Bronze Horseman,” perhaps Pushkin’s greatest work (the author, showing considerable willpower, declined both proposals); sometimes he treated Pushkin in a gentle and friendly manner, and sometimes he “gave me a dressing down,” as the poet put it.

Some commentators tend to see this ambivalent behavior as evidence of Nicholas’s congenital hypocrisy. They interpret the tsar’s talk with Pushkin in the Kremlin on September 8, 1826, as a kind of “contract” that Nicholas violated, thereby “deceiving” the poet.

But Pushkin could never be the emperor’s equal partner. Nicholas viewed his relationship with the poet in a completely different paradigm: the stern but just pedagogue and his talented but unruly student; or, perhaps, the strict parent and his headstrong child (which would later be the relationship between Lenin and Maxim Gorky).

In that paradigm, approval or punishment is determined by the pedagogue/father not within the framework of some nonexistent—and impossible, in that situation—contract, but in response to the behavior of the student/child.

From the point of view of Nicholas, Pushkin’s behavior frequently left much to be desired: parties, cards, women, and blasphemous poems (the infamous “Gabrieliad,” Pushkin’s frivolous satire on the Bible story of the virgin birth).

One can be indignant about Nicholas’s position, but could it have been any different? In decrying the emperor’s treachery, did Pushkin scholars try to see the situation not from Pushkin’s point of view (which they all do) but from Nicholas’s?

Even the outstanding expert on the Pushkin era Yuri Lotman described Nicholas as “untalented, uneducated, and dull … tormentedby uncertainty, suspicious, painfully aware of his mediocrity and terribly envious of bright, merry, and successful people.”¹⁶ Lotman seems to be describing his boss at a state university in Soviet times rather than the autocrat of all Russia, who, as Lotman correctly pointed out elsewhere, was absolutely certain of his divine right to rule.