Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Zhukovsky went blind, but continued to record his poems with a machine he invented. He died in Baden-Baden at the age of sixty-nine. His body was shipped to St. Petersburg, where he was buried at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, next to the grave of Karamzin. The proximity was symbolic. If not for Pushkin, Zhukovsky and Karamzin would be considered the fathers of the new Russian literature: Karamzin of prose, and Zhukovsky of poetry. The rare combination of talent, grace, and kindness that these two men embodied was probably not seen again in Russian culture until Anton Chekhov.

On February 6, 1856, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich went to a dinner given by Contemporary (arguably the best Russian magazine of the time). The monthly dinners celebrating the latest issue were a tradition started by the editor, the great poet Nikolai Nekrasov, at the helm from 1847.

Grigorovich was bringing another of the magazine’s authors with him—the clumsy, ugly, and passive-aggressive Count Leo Tolstoy. The twenty-seven-year-old count had already published several prose pieces in Contemporary, including the novellas Childhood and Adolescence and sketches from his experiences in the Crimean War, but he still did not feel like an insider.

On the way, the gentlemanly Grigorovich gave the grumpy Tolstoy advice on how to behave at the dinner—not in the sense of social etiquette (the magazine’s crowd did not care about that) but in terms of political correctness. Grigorovich worried that the young count, the only of the magazine’s authors to sport a military uniform, had an embarrassing inclination to shoot from the hip, making provocative pronouncements—for example, that Shakespeare was nothing more than an empty phrasemonger.

Grigorovich particularly asked Tolstoy not to berate George Sand, for he had often heard the count attack the celebrated French novelist and feminist. They “fanatically adored” her at Contemporary, Nekrasov and his closest associate, the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and the magazine’s constant contributor, liberal writer Ivan Turgenev.

Later Grigorovich recalled, “At first, the dinner went well; Tolstoy was rather taciturn, but toward the end he gave in. Hearing praise for Sand’s latest novel, he abruptly declared that he hated her, adding that the heroines of her novels, if they existed in real life, should be put in stocks and driven around the streets of St. Petersburg as a lesson.”³

Nekrasov was offended and wrote to a friend about Tolstoy’s outburst: “What nonsense he babbled at my dinner yesterday! The devil knows what’s in his head! He says such stupid and even nasty things. It would be a shame if these traits of landowning and military influence do not change in him. An excellent talent will be lost!”⁴

Turgenev was also outraged: “I almost quarreled with Tolstoy—really, it’s impossible for ignorance not to show in one way or another. The other day, at Nekrasov’s dinner, he said so many trite and crude things about G. Sand that I can’t even convey it all.”⁵

In our day, very few people read the novels of George Sand (she wrote almost sixty) with the same interest as progressive intellectuals all over Europe did at the time; people look at her books today primarily because they have heard about her notorious affairs with Chopin, Alfred de Musset, and Prosper Merimee. But in the mid-nineteenth century, Sand’s works were perceived as more than romans a clef or entertaining super-romantic narratives; they were textbooks of life.

Dostoevsky recalled that he considered Sand then as the head of a movement for a radical social renewal of humanity. The adoration of Sand in Russia was particularly fervent, and Dostoevsky explained why: “Only this was permitted, that is, novels, the rest, practically every thought, especially from France, was strictly banned.” (According to Dostoevsky, the Russian censors made a huge error in allowing the works of George Sand.)

Turgenev was a “georgesandista,” and the most ardent Westernizer among them. He had read Shakespeare, Byron, and Schiller in their original languages as a child. Later, in St. Petersburg, he argued with Nekrasov and his other friends from Contemporary that even Pushkin and Lermontov, “if you look closely,” were only imitating European geniuses like Shakespeare and Byron.⁶

Early on as a writer, Turgenev focused on the West, measuring himself against Western literary criteria, and declaring, according to friends, “No, I’m a European at heart, my demands of life are also European! … At the very first chance, I’ll flee without looking back, and you won’t see hide or hair of me!”⁷

In order to realize his European ambitions, which were rather unusual even for his elite cosmopolitan circle, he needed a starting point in the West. The fulfillment of Turgenev’s dream, strangely enough, came via George Sand.

In early 1842 the Paris glitterati were excited: the new left-radical magazine La Revue independante started serializing George Sand’s sensational novel Consuelo, a story about the adventures of a fictional great singer in eighteenth-century Venice. The novel’s immediate success was due in part to it being a roman a clef: the readers easily recognized the heroine as contralto Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a close friend of the author.

Viardot’s life did resemble a novel, or a fairy tale. Born to a family of singers from Spain (her older sister was the famous mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran), she debuted in Paris in 1838 at the age of seventeen, stunning the public with her phenomenal vocal gifts (she had a range of two and a half octaves) and her exceptional musicality.

Pauline was not pretty, she was tiny with an enormous nose and mouth, bulging eyes, and wide hips, but the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, enchanted by her talent and intellect, proposed to her. She rejected him and, taking George Sand’s advice, married the theater impresario and liberal journalist and translator (Dostoevsky read Don Quixote in his French rendering) Louis Viardot, who was more than twenty years her senior. Le tout Paris gathered in their salon, and the brilliant Pauline, who also played piano and composed, was its main star.

La Revue independante was an influential promoter of socialist ideas in France and Europe. Amazingly, by hook or crook, the journal reached St. Petersburg, where it was devoured by progressives. Given the Russians’ adoration of George Sand, the adventures of Consuelo/Pauline Viardot were a hot topics in the Russian capital.

By this time, Turgenev was a rather well known poet—tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, and a dandy (multicolored vests, lorgnette). However, his domineering mother thought he was too flighty.

His personal life was confused: he was having an affair with a sister of Mikhail Bakunin, later a notorious anarchist (Bakunin had more than brotherly feelings for her as well), but had a child with a serf laundress of his mother. He did not renounce his daughter, Pelagia, which would have been unseemly, given her strong resemblance to him.

Turgenev’s life changed in an instant when Pauline Viardot came to perform in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1843. She came to the capital because Nicholas I wanted a court Italian opera—he sang and played flute and trombone and loved Italian music. On his orders, the best singers were brought to Russia for huge fees. It was a cultural revolution for St. Petersburg, and the public went wild with heated arguments and endless gossip.