Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

On Friday, November 27, 1836, “everything that is the best in St. Petersburg”¹ (as a high courtier noted in his diary) gathered for the first performance of the long-awaited new Russian opera, Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. The premiere occasioned the opening of the Bolshoi Kamenny Theater, one of the capital’s most majestic buildings in those days. After the reconstruction, it held two thousand people, and it was packed; the tickets, despite the gala prices, had been sold out a month in advance.

Intriguing rumors about Glinka’s piquant (and, most importantly, “national”) music had been circulating in elite St. Petersburg circles for quite a while, and the seats in the orchestra and boxes held the cream of Russian culture—the poets Vassily Zhukovsky and Prince Peter Vyazemsky, the writer and musician Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, and the famous fabulist Ivan Krylov.

Some paid special respects to the man on the aisle seat in the eleventh row: thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Pushkin, the nation’s literary lion and trendsetter. An avid theatergoer, music lover, and ballet aficionado (particularly of pretty ballerinas), the usually lively and witty Pushkin seemed to be preoccupied “by a family affair.” No one suspected that two months later the poet would be felled in a duel over that family affair. Also in the audience was the as-yet-unknown eighteen-year-old Ivan Turgenev, then a student at St. Petersburg University, a young snob who would find Glinka’s music “boring.”²

The boxes held the important courtiers in splendid uniforms with gold braid and all kinds of orders on the chest and their dressed-up wives wearing diamonds (the same diary entry read: “aristocrats, stars, brilliance and beauty”). But all lorgnettes were fixed on the emperor’s box: Nicholas I was expected with his family. It was known that the emperor had approved the opera, attended rehearsals, and accepted the composer’s dedication—“To His Imperial Majesty.”

When Nicholas I, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, and the grand dukes and duchesses took their seats, the conductor raised his baton, and the light blue and gold curtain rose after the overture revealing a country landscape in the fashionable “Slavic” style, depicting the village of Domnino, near Kostroma.

It was a performance set in the Time of Troubles, a horrible period for Russia in the early seventeenth century: after the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1584, his sons died one after the other, ending the Riurikovich dynasty. This dynastic crisis led to Russia’s first civil war, peasant rebellions, foreign invasions, famine, and epidemics.

The country lay in ruins, empty, humiliated, and looted. The capital, Moscow, was in the hands of Polish usurpers for two years, from September 1610 to October 1612. Foreign observers were sure that Russia would never rise up from its knees and would simply die off and vanish.

Prerevolutionary Russian historians always attributed the miraculous deliverance from that national catastrophe to the rise of a new ruling dynasty, the Romanovs. It happened in February 1613, when the national Assembly of the Land was convened in Moscow, which had been liberated from the Poles, and after excruciatingly long negotiations elected Mikhail Romanov, sixteen years old, as the new tsar. Young Romanov with his mother and entourage were at the Ipatiev Monastery, near Kostroma, and the delegation of the assembly traveled there in March to anoint him tsar.

The new tsar set off for Moscow a few days later. It was then that the legendary exploit that became the basis of Glinka’s opera occurred.

Ivan Susanin, the peasant elder of the Romanovs’ ancestral lands, allegedly led Polish troops planning to kidnap the new tsar into impenetrable swamps. Susanin was killed by the enemy, giving his own life to save the young tsar—and, with him, the future of Russia.

That was the official legend, based on Tsar Mikhail’s decree, which in 1619 granted tax and other privileges to the relatives of the late Ivan Susanin, who, “suffering intolerable torture from those Polish and Lithuanian people, did not tell said Polish and Lithuanian people about us, Great Tsar, did not tell them where we were at that time, and the Polish and Lithuanian people did torture him to death.”³

This legend crystallized by the early nineteenth century, when the war with Napoleon aroused patriotic and monarchist feelings in Russian society. When Emperor Nicholas I, an unsurpassed master of ideological manipulation, ascended the throne in 1825, he supported and embellished the legend.

In October 1834, Nicholas I even made a special pilgrimage to the Ipatiev Monastery and Domnino village, where he reconfirmed all the privileges granted by his ancestor to the peasant hero’s offspring. Nicholas ordered a statue to be raised to Mikhail Romanov and Susanin in Kostroma, as his imperial ukase put it, for “our descendants to see that in Susanin’s immortal exploit … in sacrificing his life he did rescue the Orthodox Faith and the Russian Realm from foreign slavery.”⁴

At the same time Nicholas I also came up with the idea of creating a patriotic Russian opera in the “folk spirit.” That idea was obviously in the air, and it consumed the aspiring young composer Mikhail Glinka. When Glinka approached his friend Zhukovsky, a poet with excellent ties at court, he recommended the Susanin story to the composer as the subject for a “national” opera.

Zhukovsky discussed Glinka’s initiative with Nicholas I, who became so interested in the project that he recommended a good librettist, the thirty-four-year-old Baron Georg Rozen, personal secretary to the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. “Even though he is a German,” added Nicholas, “his Russian is excellent and can be trusted.”⁵

This was a unique example of direct personal involvement of a Romanov ruler in the creation of one of the milestones of Russian culture, an amazing event. But then everything connected to A Life for the Tsar was amazing and even mysterious, starting with its author, Mikhail Glinka.

You could rarely find another case of sheer genius contained in a totally inappropriate vessel. There was nothing to indicate that Glinka, a thirty-year-old musical dilettante from a poor provincial noble family, who was short, ugly, sickly, hypochondriacal, and led a raucous and bohemian life, could become the undisputed father of Russia’s music as much as Pushkin was the progenitor of Russian literature.

Moreover, the geniuses of Pushkin and Glinka were equal, with the only difference being that in logocentric Russia the poet stood in the center of cultural discourse while the composer inevitably ended up in the background. And of course, Pushkin’s biography was much more dramatic and paradigmatic. (In the West, the esteem for Pushkin and Glinka is still based primarily on respect for their preeminence in Russia.)

Even in his youth Glinka dreamed of writing a “Russian” opera. But how did he move from fantasy to reality? That happened in 1833 in Berlin, where Glinka studied composition for six months. The love-prone Glinka met seventeen-year-old Maria: “She had rather Israelite origins: tall, but not yet formed figure, with a very beautiful face, and she resembled a Madonna” (from Glinka’s Notes). The easily inflamed Glinka started sketching musical themes (in the Russian national style) that later were used in A Life for the Tsar.

When Glinka, prompted by news of his father’s death, had to return to Russia, he first longed to return to Berlin and Maria, with whom he was “in constant correspondence,” but in St. Petersburg he met Maria Ivanova, “a kind, naive half-German.” Pushkin’s sister fumed, “Michel Glinka has married a certain Miss Ivanova, a young thing without money or education, quite homely, and who to top it off hates music.”⁶