Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Two days later, on Tuesday morning, the count entered Gogol’s room and found him weeping by the stove, where the last manuscript pages were burning: “Look what I did! I wanted to destroy a few things, which I set aside, but I burned everything! How powerful the devil is—look what he made me do!… Now it’s all lost.”

Tolstoy, realizing in horror that Gogol had burned the second volume of Dead Souls, tried to calm him down: “But you can remember it, can’t you?” Gogol stopped weeping. “Yes, I can, I can; it’s all in my head.” (He used to read entire chapters from the manuscript to his friends by heart, like poetry.)

But Gogol had no strength or desire to work or even to live. He never left his room again, lying on the couch with eyes shut and worry beads in his hands, no longer eating or interacting with people.

A week passed this way. The count called in the best doctors in Moscow. A concilium gathered: six doctors examined and palpated the suffering patient (his stomach was so soft and empty that they could feel the vertebrae of his spine through it) and decided that he needed to be bled. They attached six large leeches to his nose, overcoming his resistance.

Gogol groaned and screamed, “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” But they held his hands so that he would not tear off the leeches. They put a mustard plaster on his feet and ice on his head, and poured medicine into his mouth. After a few days of this torture, Gogol breathed his last, with the words “How sweet to die.”

.  .  .

Gogol’s death at age forty-two stunned the Russian intellectual elite. Turgenev, then thirty-three, proclaimed in the obituary published by the Moscow Gazette, “Yes, he died, that man whom we now have the bitter right given by death to call great; a man whose name marked an era in the history of our literature.”

It was soon discovered that Gogol had kept rough drafts of five chapters from the second volume of Dead Souls, which were published three and a half years later (to mixed reviews). In the meantime, the authorities reacted with bewilderment: how should they respond to Gogol’s demise? Fifteen years earlier, Nicholas I made sure that Pushkin’s end was presented as the death of a Christian. Why did he not want to use the death of the greatest advocate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” for the same propaganda purposes? Many felt that Gogol died “a Christian, saint, and monk.” (A posthumous inventory of his estate showed that all his possessions were worth a miserable 43 rubles, 88 kopecks.)

Paradoxically, Gogol’s evolution to fanatical Christianity and boundless loyalty to the tsar was too extreme and off-putting to the authorities in Russia. While demanding fealty to the state, they never trusted real fanatics and feared them. The administration needed dutiful servants, not idealistic knights on white chargers.

The authorities banned all obituaries for Gogol, and the tsar had Turgenev arrested for a month and then sent into exile to his country estate in Orlov Province for publishing one. (During his confinement, Turgenev wrote his powerful antiserfdom story “Mumu,” the drama of a deaf-mute servant of a cruel owner, who forced him to drown his beloved dog.)

This fear of uncontrollable, “freelance” ideological activity explained why Nicholas and his ministers so disliked the Slavophiles, an influential group of Moscow intellectuals who propagated a romantic theory that Russia should not emulate the West, but instead pursue its unique and independent cultural and political path.

The Slavophiles also believed in “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” but for them it was not a bureaucratic formula but a broad philosophical foundation for a national culture. They therefore criticized what they saw as ossified aspects of the contemporary Russian state. Calling for a free, nationally oriented Russian culture, the Slavophiles challenged the official line, but also the ideas of such radical antimonarchist Westernizers as Belinsky and Herzen.

The great Slavophile poet Alexei Khomyakov proclaimed that Gogol, Ivanov, and Glinka were the Holy Trinity of truly Slavophile artists. But the supreme power was just as uncomfortable with Alexander Ivanov as it was with Gogol. When the artist returned to St. Petersburg in 1858, after thirty years in Italy, the authorities did not know what to do with this mad mystic who babbled about the messianic destiny of the “Slavic tribe.”

Ivanov did not want to accept official commissions, which made him clearly unfit for service. Feeling injured and snubbed, he died two months after returning to his homeland, just two weeks short of his fifty-second birthday.

In the summer of 1844, Nicholas read an anonymous brochure in French, just published in Munich. It expressed bold ideas about Russia’s modern geopolitical role in Europe. The author wrote that as a result of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Western Europe (“The Europe of Charles the Great”) was at last face-to-face with Eastern Europe (“The Europe of Peter the Great”). This Eastern Europe, with Russia as its heart and soul, was the legitimate heir of Byzantium and must make one more decisive breakthrough, vanquishing Turkey and establishing hegemony in the Middle East.

Nicholas I told Count Benckendorff, chief of the gendarmes and his closest adviser, that he “found all my thoughts”¹² in that brochure and commanded him to find out the author. The omniscient Benckendorff already had: it was written and printed by someone he knew well, Fedor Tyutchev, forty years old, a former Russian diplomat in Munich and Turin, an amateur poet who had been living abroad for twenty-two years.

Tyutchev, Yevgeny Baratynsky, and Afanasy Fet are the three great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, unheralded in the West but revered by educated Russians. Leo Tolstoy rated Tyutchev higher than Pushkin. (Joseph Brodsky sometimes held Baratynsky at that level, while being more skeptical about Tyutchev’s standing.)

When Tolstoy read Tyutchev’s poetry aloud to his guests, he invariably wept: in his sophisticated proto- Symbolist philosophical miniatures, Tyutchev captured the most subtle emotional nuances, not unlike Tolstoy’s prose. Tyutchev began writing poetry at the age of ten, and when he was thirty-three, in 1836, Pushkin printed twenty-four of his poems in Contemporary.

Tyutchev called his poems “scribbles,” writing them hurriedly on scraps of paper that his wife then gathered up. His output was not large—around four hundred little poems over sixty-nine years of life, including pieces d’occasion, epigrams, and such.

He published his first book of verse when he was in his fifties, yielding to the urging of his friend Turgenev, who edited the publication. Tyutchev considered his true calling to be politics and political writing, and that is how Nicholas I noticed him.

Nicholas appreciated political poetry when it suited his propaganda goals. When he suppressed the 1831 Polish rebellion against Russian occupiers and Pushkin and Zhukovsky celebrated the victory with ultrapatriotic poems, the emperor issued the poems instantly in a special edition published by the military printing press.

At the time, the West supported the Poles. Western parliamentarians and journalists were especially vociferous. Pushkin’s poems, defending Russia’s position, was addressed to them. He intended to publish his anti- Western poems in the Paris press, but failed: Pushkin did not have the necessary contacts.