Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

A copy of the poem, with someone’s caption “Call to Revolution,” was immediately brought to Nicholas. At the same time, the emperor received a denunciation from Count Benckendorff: “This poem is insolent and its ending is shameless free-thinking, more than criminal.”⁸

Nicholas irritably minuted in response, “Fine poem, I must say … For now I have commanded the senior medic of the guards corps to visit this gentleman and determine if he is mad; and then we will deal with him in accordance with the law.”⁹

As punishment for his “seditious” poem, Lermontov was sent to the army in the Caucasus, where a war continued between Russian troops and intransigent mountain tribes. (He was soon returned to St. Petersburg through the efforts of his influential grandmother.)

Lermontov’s reputation as the reincarnation of Pushkin was thereby entrenched, which was a paradox, for his creative credo was rather anti-Pushkin in its radical Romanticism, darkened by ennui and wild passions.

Even more curious was the beneficent attention that some of his works—for example, his blasphemous narrative poem “The Demon” (about the fatal love of a fallen cherubim for a mortal woman and his battle with God over her soul), not published in his lifetime—received in the salon of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Nicholas’s wife. (More understandable is why the deeply religious empress copied lines from Lermontov’s touching “Prayer” into her diary when she mourned her father’s death.)¹⁰

According to Lermontov, Nicholas learned that he wrote poetry when he was still at the military school (Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas’s brother, was head of the school) and in all probability kept an eye on his work. This is what the emperor had to say about “The Demon”: “The poem is undoubtedly good, but its subject matter is not particularly pleasant.” (Later Anton Rubinstein based his 1871 opera, which is still hugely popular in Russia, on the poem.)

By far more notorious was Nicholas’s reaction to A Hero of Our Times, Lermontov’s prose masterpiece, published in St. Petersburg in 1840.

The novel is actually a chain of short stories united by a single hero: Pechorin, an officer and self-absorbed cynic who flaunts his immorality. Pechorin is the literary younger brother of Pushkin’s Onegin and precursor of Russian literature’s “superfluous man.” For Lermontov, he is the hero of our times, but Nicholas was attracted to another character in the novel: Captain Maxim Maximych, a veteran of the war in the Caucasus, a simple soldier with a mustache of silver and a heart of gold.

Nicholas read A Hero of Our Times on board the ship that brought him from Germany to Russia in June 1840. On his travels, he wrote letters to his wife, who remained in Germany for treatment. In one letter (written in French), he said that he found the novel “well written,” but from the ethical point of view deserving strong condemnation:

Such novels ruin the mores and coarsen the character. And even though you read those feline sighs with revulsion, they still have a morbid effect, because you eventually get used to believing that the whole world consists only of such people, who even when they perform apparently good deeds act only out of vile and filthy considerations. What kind of a result can that yield? Scorn or hatred of humanity! But is that the goal of our existence on earth? People are too inclined as it is to become hypochondriacs or misanthropes, so why prompt or encourage such tendencies with this kind of writing?¹¹

Nicholas finds Captain Maxim Maximych incomparably more worthy than the egocentric Pechorin: “The captain’s character is sketched successfully. As I began the novella, I hoped and was heartened to think that he would be the hero of our days … However the captain appears in this work only as a hope that is finally unrealized, and M. Lermontov did not manage to follow that noble and simple character.”¹²

Paradoxically, Nicholas’s point of view triumphed in Stalin’s day, when it was declared that Lermontov, by then firmly established in the national pantheon, “condemns Pechorin’s egotistical character, his narrow individualism, which is juxtaposed in the novel to the humanity and simple-heartedness of Maxim Maximych.”¹³ Thus, Nicholas I extended his hand across a century to Soviet Lermontov specialists.

At the same time, those specialists accused the emperor of allegedly personally organizing the poet’s death. Although many mysteries remain in Lermontov’s brief life (he died at twenty-six), the known facts do not support this conspiracy theory.

Lermontov was ugly—short, bowlegged, with a large head and small (but expressive) eyes. He was morbidly vain and incredibly volatile. (Pushkin was a saint compared to Lermontov.) That mix was a surefire recipe for catastrophe.

The military habit of solving all sorts of conflicts with a duel must have been in Lermontov’s blood. He was always living dangerously: it suited his character and his idea of a Romantic poet. For his duel with the son of the French ambassador over a woman, Nicholas had Lermontov exiled to the Caucasus again, where he argued with an old school friend, also an officer, and was killed in a duel in 1841.

The death of the young poet, who had written for only thirteen years and had accomplished so much in such a short time (and promised so much more), stunned Russian readers. Against the background of universal mourning, Nicholas’s crude epitaph, recorded by several memoirists, stood out: “A dog’s death for a dog!” (Or, in a milder version that was still outrageous: “Serves him right.”)¹⁴

This ugly remark was explained by the historian Peter Bartenev in 1911. According to Bartenev, Nicholas said it at tea, in a family setting, right after receiving word of the fatal duel, and elicited a “bitter rebuke” from his elder sister, Maria. After that reaction from his family, the emperor went out to meet his courtiers with a completely different statement: “Gentlemen, I have received word that the one who could have replaced Pushkin has been killed.”¹⁵

In the family circle, Nicholas, who considered Lermontov, like Pushkin, a good poet but a bad person (and an even worse servant), could have barked out a remark with soldierly directness. But outside that room, he spoke as politician, head of state, and father of the nation.

As a man, Nicholas could have been outraged by Lermontov’s inglorious death (as he saw it), especially since dueling had been banned by the emperor and was punished severely. But Nicholas also understood that Lermontov’s death, like Pushkin’s four years earlier, would not add any glory to his reign. His final words were damage control.

Much more humane was the simple and sincere response from the empress, who wrote to a friend, “A sigh for Lermontov and his broken lyre that had promised Russian literature to become its leading star.”¹⁶

Before his final departure for the Caucasus, Lermontov and a friend dropped in on the German fortune-teller who lived in St. Petersburg and was famous for having told Pushkin that he would be killed over a woman at the age of thirty-seven by a tall, blond man.

Knowing that her prediction had come to pass, Lermontov asked her about his fate: would the tsar allow him to retire? Would he return to St. Petersburg? People said that “the answer was that he would never be in St. Petersburg again, nor be retired from service, but that another retirement awaited him, ‘after which you will not ask