Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

1845 with the following spooky directions: “I will that my body not be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear.” Like everything written by Gogol, this strange request can be interpreted not only literally but also symbolically. Gogol explained that he had “witnessed many sad occurrences resulting from our irrational haste in all matters” and expressed the hope that his posthumous voice would remind people of “circumspection,” the same word Pushkin used in chiding Belinsky in 1836.)

Russia’s Millennium, a monument designed by Mikhail Mikeshin and erected in 1862 in Novgorod, depicts the main figures of Russian history (a list approved by Emperor Alexander II), and the sculptor shows a sorrowful Gogol leaning on a radiant and angelic Pushkin.

Readers are generally aware that Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy did not get along. But a legend persists about the incredible closeness of Pushkin and Gogol: after all, Pushkin hailed the young genius from Ukraine, laughing till he dropped at his satirical works and sighing over the elegiac ones, and he gave him the plot ideas for the comedy The Inspector-General and the epic Dead Souls. But were relations between Pushkin and Gogol truly so idyllic?

Gogol was the sole manufacturer of the legend, and it remains one of his greatest creations. Making his acquaintance in St. Petersburg in May 1831, Gogol sat down to write an article about Pushkin, proclaiming him the chief national poet and adding that “Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and perhaps the unique manifestation of the Russian spirit: this is Russian man in his evolution, the way he might appear two hundred years hence.”

This was shameless flattery, of course, but so inspired that it became very popular in Russia and is quoted to this day, when it should be clear that Gogol’s prediction was unlikely to ever come true.

There is no doubt that the thirty-two-year-old Pushkin came to like Gogol, ten years younger, an oddly dressed, short provincial with lanky blond hair, pointy nose, and sly gaze. He liked his works, full of attractive Ukrainian exotica, and his raconteur’s gift of telling funny stories. (Gogol could tell scabrous jokes just as easily; a friend marveled, “it was Ukrainian salo [lard] sprinkled with Aristophanes salt.”) ¹

Pushkin immediately hired Gogol to work at his magazine; Contemporary needed “golden pens.” But this brought about their first serious conflict: Pushkin commissioned a manifesto from Gogol for the first issue, but its cocky tone offended many readers. Consequently, Pushkin had to disassociate himself from the article, deeply wounding Gogol’s vanity.

Presumably, it had been Pushkin’s little revenge on Gogol for stealing a plot Pushkin had intended to use himself—about a petty crook who arrives in a provincial town where he is taken for an important official from the capital traveling incognito. Laughing, Pushkin told his wife, “You have to be careful around this Ukrainian: he steals from you, and you can’t even complain.”²

Gogol wrote the comedy on Pushkin’s theme, The Inspector-General, in record time, and immediately started reading it in influential salons in the capital, hoping to get it onstage faster this way. Gogol was a master manipulator, having learned early in his youth the secrets of “reading minds, influencing hearts, and flattering with tenderness” and developing a virtuoso ability “to subordinate other people’s wills,” according to a memoirist.

Through Zhukovsky’s good offices, Gogol managed to interest Nicholas I in The Inspector- General—the tsar liked it “very much.”³ That was the green light for the play: it sailed past all the dangerous censorship reeds and was quickly accepted by the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater. From its completion (on December 4, 1835) to its premiere on the country’s main stage (on April 19, 1836) took only four and a half months, and a month after that the play was presented in Moscow, too.

At the very same time that The Inspector-General was being rehearsed onstage at the Alexandrinsky Theater with Gogol present, the composer Glinka was in the building lobby, working with the soloists and chorus on his new opera A Life for the Tsar, while the opera theater was being renovated.

The patriotic grand opera about the rise of the Romanov dynasty and a biting satire attacking the Russian bureaucracy were both supported by Nicholas I, who brought them to the stages of his theaters—evidence of how broadly the tsar interpreted the ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” (Nicholas also liked two other great Russian comedies that scared his censors: Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit and Alexander Ostrovsky’s Don’t Get into Someone Else’s Sleigh.)

At the premiere, Nicholas and his heir, the future Alexander II, sat in the royal box, laughing wholeheartedly and applauding demonstratively, prompting the applause of the aristocrats who had filled the hall, knowing that the tsar would attend.

Some ministers hissed angrily, “Why did we bother to come for this stupid farce? As if there is a city like this in Russia! Couldn’t Gogol portray one decent, honest man?” But because the monarch liked the play, they could not express themselves openly. Still, it was a mystery to many courtiers why Nicholas had approved a play that mocked the authorities so blatantly.

When the performance was over, the actors heard the emperor’s loud voice as he came onstage from his box: “Everyone got what he deserved in this play, and I more than the others!”⁴ The leading actors were given a raise and valuable presents. Gogol, who had been paid 2,500 rubles for the play, also received a gift from the tsar.

This was the first of the financial handouts from the imperial treasury that Gogol would request and receive until the end of his life. Pushkin asked for money with great reluctance, considering it extremely humiliating. Gogol, much more practical, was a great fund-raiser and usually got what he wanted (mostly with the help of Zhukovsky).

Pushkin did not show up at the premiere of The Inspector-General: was he demonstrating his unhappiness over the stolen plot? The fact is that Pushkin suddenly became alienated from Gogol, and at the very moment when the young writer was hysterical. After the premiere, Gogol fell into a panicked state: “Everyone is against me. Esteemed officials scream that nothing is sacred to me. The police are against me, the merchants are against me, the writers are against me. If not for the high protection of the Sovereign, my play would never have been staged. Now I see what it means to be a comedy writer. The slightest hint of truth—and everyone rises up against you, not just one person, but entire strata.”

So Gogol took Pushkin’s coolness—perhaps overreacting—as betrayal. Six weeks after the premiere, in June 1836, Gogol fled Russia for Europe, whining to a friend, “A contemporary writer, a comedy writer, an observer of morals must be far away. No man is a prophet in his own land.” From Hamburg, Gogol complained in a letter to Zhukovsky, “I did not have time and could not say good-bye even to Pushkin; of course, that is his fault.” On that bitter note, Gogol’s personal relationship with Pushkin ended.

In Europe, Gogol learned of Pushkin’s death. From that moment, Gogol seemed to forget how Pushkin had injured his feelings. He began integrating Pushkin into his own mythos, sending letters from Rome to various Russian friends, all with much the same message: “My loss is greater than anyone else’s … My life, my highest pleasure died with him … I never undertook anything, I never wrote anything without his advice. Anything that is good in me I owe to him.”

Although settling in Rome, Gogol did not become a dissident. On the contrary, he quickly distanced himself