Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

acquired for him all over Europe; he also had a good collection of medieval chastity belts.²¹

Briullov’s painting Bacchanalia, which had belonged to Nicholas, has survived. It was kept in a special frame with a lock and covered by a lithograph. When it was unlocked, Briullov’s painting appeared: a depiction of the Bacchae in a love scene with satyrs and an ass, a traditional erotic motif.

This may be one of the reasons for Nicholas’s indulgent attitude toward Briullov. His education, etiquette, and Christian morality demanded strict behavior of the emperor. Art and artists opened a window into another beckoning world.

All of St. Petersburg gossiped about the love affairs of fashionable artists. Orest Kiprensky, author of perhaps the best portrait of Pushkin (1827) and drawing teacher of Grand Duke Mikhail, was rumored to have murdered his Roman mistress and model. A long trail of colorful stories followed another prominent artist of the period, the Pole Alexander Orlovsky, a favorite of Grand Duke Konstantin: as a youth he had participated in the Polish uprising against Catherine II, then traveled around Europe with an Italian circus, and supposedly lived a life of drunkenness and revelry.

Settled in St. Petersburg with his French wife, who owned the capital’s zoo, Orlovsky became a master of lithography (taking pride in having introduced the technique to Russia). One of Orlovsky’s friends was Pushkin, who mentioned the artist in a frivolous fairy-tale poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820): “Take up your quick pencil, / Orlovsky, draw the night and battle.” But what “nocturnal battle” did Pushkin have in mind?

Orlovsky’s album of erotic drawings, dating to 1810–1821, was reproduced for the first time in Russia in 1991: a penis taking a walk, observed by a lovely lady; a caricature of an official with a phallus for a face; and so on. This made previously secret aspects of Orlovsky’s scandalous popularity more obvious.²²

Briullov’s love affairs were also the subject of much talk (a young Frenchwoman drowned herself in the Tiber over him). But most of the gossip was over his family drama. At the age of thirty-nine he married the eighteen- year-old beauty Emilia Timm, daughter of Riga’s burgomaster, and on the eve of the wedding learned from her that she was in an incestuous relationship with her father. Nevertheless, Briullov and Emilia wed, but according to the artist, her affair with her father continued.

Briullov applied for a divorce. Learning that Nicholas had taken a personal interest in the case, Briullov wrote an explanatory letter to Count Benckendorff: “The girl’s parents and their friends have slandered me in public, giving as the reason for the divorce a completely different circumstance, an alleged argument, which never happened, between me and her father while drinking champagne, as if I were a drunkard.”²³ (Briullov’s love of wine was no secret. Even Gogol, his devoted admirer, called the artist a “well-known drunk” in a letter to a friend.)

It was very hard to astonish St. Petersburg with excessive drinking: it was the natural attribute of the creative personality, since the legendary times of Lomonosov and Barkov. But incest was another matter, adding spice to the divorce case, and transforming it into a “story.”

Lermontov explained what that meant in his unfinished novel about high-society life, Princess Ligovskaya: “O! A story is a terrible thing; whether you behaved nobly or vilely, are right or not, could have avoided it or not, but if your name is mixed up in a story, you lose everything: the approval of society, career, respect of friends … Being caught up in a story! There can be nothing worse, no matter how the story ends!”

After Nicholas’s intervention, Briullov was granted his divorce almost immediately: it was decided that “relations between spouses were extremely sad” and “neither trying church repentance nor living apart for several months can bring about reconciliation.” But disapproving glances from high society followed Briullov for a long time.

An interesting phenomenon in Nicholas’s strict era was the allure of erotic poetry. Like nineteenth-century Russian erotic drawings, it had its roots in French erotic verse and lithographs.

Ivan Barkov, the scandalous poet of Catherine’s day who wrote obscene odes, ballads, and epigrams that circulated in innumerable copies, intrigued Pushkin. Pushkin as a great master of erotic poetry was a topic that in Russia was practically banned for a long time, and even now they try to tiptoe around it: the authorities still believe that writing about it would demean the image of the country’s greatest poet.

Yet the erotic line was always important for Pushkin. People sometimes forget that Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, which is now studied in schools, was considered indecent in its day.

The seriously obscene ballad “Barkov’s Shadow,” which specialists today almost unanimously ascribe to Pushkin, was not published in Russia until 1991—that is, after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In it, the defrocked priest Ebakov (“Fuckov”) is visited by the ghost of Barkov, who gives him fantastic sexual powers in exchange for the promise to praise Barkov everywhere.

“Barkov’s Shadow,” a dirty joke delivered with a non-Barkovian light touch, was a literary lampoon attacking Pushkin’s poetic opponents, who are thwarted by the towering figure of the legendary Barkov,

With lowered pants,

With fat prick in hand,

With sagging balls …

In this dangerous genre, which requires considerable panache and at the same time self-control to succeed, Pushkin had also a good teacher in the family: his uncle Vassily Pushkin (1766–1830), author of the frivolous poetic masterpiece “Dangerous Neighbor,” a hilarious tale of debauchery in a Moscow bordello.

Vassily Pushkin has two buxom whores whiling away the time between clients by reading the works of the author’s literary foe: “A real talent will find admirers everywhere!” This sarcastic line became popular. (“Dangerous Neighbor” fared better in Soviet times than “Barkov’s Shadow”—it was published several times, perhaps because Lenin once approvingly quoted a line from Vassily Pushkin.)

Young Pushkin’s erotic masterpiece was the narrative poem “The Gabrieliad,” written in 1821, when he wasn’t yet twenty-two. It does not contain a single vulgarity, which makes it all the more alluring. Its offense comes from the blasphemous plot, a parody of the Annunciation: the holy Mary gives herself “in the same day to Satan, archangel, and God.”

The poem, like many of its ilk, was circulated widely in anonymous handwritten, samizdat copies. It was forbidden fruit twice over, being both erotic and profane. The thunder struck in 1828 when the serfs of a retired officer reported to the metropolitan of St. Petersburg that their master read them a “blasphemous poem,” which turned out to be “The Gabrieliad.”

The case reached Nicholas, who inquired whether Pushkin was the author of those sacrilegious verses. Pushkin denied it at first, maintaining that “not in one of my works, even those of which I most repent, is there a trace of sacrilege.” But in the end, the poet tried repeating the gambit that he had played two years earlier in his historic conversation with Nicholas at the Kremlin: in a personal letter to the tsar he admitted his authorship. After that Nicholas stopped further investigation: “The case is known to me in detail and completely closed.”

As the French ambassador perceptively wrote of Nicholas, “He is appreciative of those who trust him and is hurt when he is not trusted … Inspiring fear and respect in those around him, he is at the same time a reliable friend and in his heartfelt tenderness often resembles a romantic young woman, although sometimes along with that feeling he displays incredible severity and implacability at the slightest mistake on someone’s