another, a third—and starts writing! That’s fame, dear.”
The poet as drunkard and libertine: that was one of the most popular images of the creative figure then, harkening to the Barkov tradition and entrenched among the general public, as well as the elite. Baron Modest Korff, who had studied with Pushkin at the Lycee and knew him well, was a high official and confidant of Nicholas I, and he described the poet this way: “Always without a kopeck, always in debt, sometimes even without a decent tail coat, endlessly in trouble, frequently dueling, closely acquainted with all the inn keepers, whores and wenches, Pushkin represented a person of the filthiest depravity.”1
Such a tirade about Karamzin or Zhukovsky was impossible: they were “angels.” That was also a legend, of course, and like any legend it was created by people. One of the authors of the posthumous image of Karamzin was Zhukovsky himself.
With Pushkin dead, Zhukovsky attempted to create a new image for him, too. He wrote two “historic” letters about Pushkin with that in mind. One, dated February 15, 1837, was addressed to the poet’s father, but actually intended for wide distribution; accordingly, it was printed in
Zhukovsky’s other letter, written at the same time, was also planned as a historical document. It was to chief of the gendarmes Benckendorff, who had supervised Pushkin on Nicholas’s command.
These letters initiated a radical transformation of Pushkin’s image. Any memory of the dissipated, hard- drinking, freethinking poet had to be erased. In its stead, Zhukovsky offered a new concept of Pushkin: the national genius, true Christian, and loyal subject of the tsar, who sent a message to Nicholas from his deathbed, “I hate to die; I would be all His.”2
These letters belong to Zhukovsky’s highest creative achievements. He accomplished his intricate mission of changing public opinion of Pushkin with great care, choosing precisely the right words—his Pushkin dies “with a calm expression” and “radiant thoughts,” surrounded by a pious crowd of mourners, and is transfigured by death: “there was something striking in his immobility, amidst that movement, and something touching and mysterious in that prayer that could be heard amidst the noise.”3
This new Christian image of Pushkin was not cut from whole cloth. In going through Pushkin’s papers on the tsar’s orders (and in the presence of a vigilant gendarme general), Zhukovsky discovered not only the unpublished “Bronze Horseman” and another masterpiece, his testament-like “The Monument” (after Horace), but also a cycle of poems on biblical themes, known to no one; Zhukovsky was particularly struck by the verse transposition of St. Efraim of Syria’s prayer for Great Lent, “Lord and Master of my life …”
The poem, probably written a few months before Pushkin’s death, was so sincere and powerful that Zhukovsky took it to Nicholas, who was also quite moved by it. The empress asked for a copy of Pushkin’s prayer for herself.
This “new, improved” Pushkin—a firm Christian and faithful servant of the Sovereign, carefully presented by Zhukovsky—proved to be an extremely successful construct, surviving eighty years, until the revolution of 1917. In the Soviet era this image of Pushkin was, of course, rejected and replaced with just the opposite—Pushkin as flaming atheist and revolutionary. But the old image rose once again from the ashes, like the Phoenix, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, by now lasting longer than some of Zhukovsky’s best poems.
Nicholas found Zhukovsky’s image of Pushkin as an Orthodox national poet and monarchist attractive also because it fit the new ideological formula “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” conceived by his minister of national education Sergei Uvarov and approved by the monarch in 1833 as the state doctrine.
Historians point out that Uvarov (a liberal in his youth, a friend of Pushkin’s, who had reoriented himself and made a brilliant career under Nicholas) created the triad as a polemical response to the slogan of the French Revolution—“Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”—using a Russian military battle cry during the war with Napoleon: “For Faith, Tsar, and Homeland!”4
Minister Uvarov was a smart and cynical man. In 1835 a subordinate recorded in his diary Uvarov’s political and cultural credo: “We, that is, people of the nineteenth century, are in a difficult position: we live among political storms and turbulence. People are changing their way of life and themselves, agitating, moving forward. But Russia is still young, virginal, and must not taste, at least not yet, these bloody troubles. We must continue her youth and in the meantime educate her.”5
Nicholas I’s policies (as were those of almost every Russian ruler after him, to the present day) were intended to maintain the country’s cultural “innocence” for as long as possible. At some point the emperor decided that Pushkin, much more suitable as the instrument of cultural manipulation now that he was dead, could be used for this purpose. That is why the tsar eventually approved the legend that Zhukovsky created. There was, however, a subversive element in the legend.
The oppositionist aspect of Pushkin’s posthumous image was also formulated by the clever Zhukovsky, in the letter to Benckendorff: “Russia’s first poet” fell “victim of a foreign libertine,” who was outrageously shielded by the government and police.
Zhukovsky’s description of the great poet as victim of the intrigues and hypocrisy of the upper circles was directly influenced by a poem that circulated throughout Russia right after Pushkin’s death, written by an unknown twenty-two-year-old Hussar, Mikhail Lermontov.
The effect of his poem, “The Death of a Poet,” was an illustration of the cliched story of the young genius who wakes up famous one day. Brought up by a wealthy grandmother, Lermontov started writing at fourteen and at sixteen noted, “I am either God or no one!” He had written about three hundred poems before “The Death of a Poet”—that is, almost three-fourths of his lyric output—and also twenty-four epic poems and five dramas. But by 1837 only one poem and one epic poem had been published, both attracting little notice.
But “The Death of a Poet” stunned contemporaries, one of whom later recalled, “I doubt that a poem in Russia ever had such a huge and universal effect.”6 Lermontov spoke out against Pushkin’s persecutors passionately and powerfully:
You, greedily crowded around the throne,
Executioners of Freedom, Genius, and Glory!
You hide behind the law,
The justice and truth must be silent!
There is so much bitterness and anger in the poem that we tend to forget that Lermontov began writing it the minute he heard of the duel and finished his verse obituary (the first fifty-six lines) while Pushkin was still alive—he was in such a hurry to express his emotions.
“The Death of a Poet” was Lermontov’s “graveside homily and simultaneously his throne speech,”7 with thousands of copies flooding St. Petersburg. Lermontov was immediately declared Pushkin’s heir, and, inspired by the sudden fame, he wrote the last sixteen lines, ending with the famous words:
And you will not be able to wash away with your black blood The Poet’s righteous blood!
