Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

number in the opera and the most famous tenor aria in Russian music. (I doubt Pushkin could have imagined such a rendering of his parody.)

Tchaikovsky accomplished this radical emotional transformation of Pushkin’s text because of his identification with Lensky. For Tchaikovsky, Lensky is the victim par excellence, which was how he saw himself.

The choreographer George Balanchine, who came from the old St. Petersburg and had known people who had been Tchaikovsky’s friends, often told me that the composer considered himself a martyr, the victim of society that rejected and persecuted his sexual orientation, this essential component of his ego.³⁰ This was also the posthumous perception of Tchaikovsky’s image in Russian intellectual circles, succinctly summarized by Boris Asafyev, the best authority on the composer’s works: “Tchaikovsky, finally, was a martyr.”³¹

Describing Lensky, Pushkin tosses away a line that for Tchaikovsky could have been the key to his identification with Lensky; the poet mentions Lensky’s “fear of vice and shame.” The composer wrote about Lensky to Nadezhda von Meck: “Isn’t the death of an enormously talented young man over a fatal confrontation with society’s view of honor profoundly dramatic and touching?”

In Tchaikovsky’s opera the real “couple” is not Onegin and Tatiana, whose love is the center of Pushkin’s narrative, but Tatiana and Lensky.

According to Tchaikovsky, Lensky’s death is the consequence and result of his “otherness,” and Tatiana survives only because she submits to the dictates of high society and “bon ton,” even though that brings her to a spiritual breakdown.

This is a George Sandian interpretation of Pushkin’s work, coming via Herzen and Turgenev, whom the composer admired and read avidly. That is why Turgenev had reacted so sensitively to Tchaikovsky’s innovative promotion of Lensky to major protagonist (less perceptive contemporaries did not notice this radical shift).

Transforming Pushkin’s work into a Turgenevian novel with a hidden agenda, Tchaikovsky feared that his Onegin was doomed to remain a work “for a few” (although, like every author, he hoped for a miracle). The miracle took place: this was the opera that made Tchaikovsky the most popular Russian composer.

It happened gradually. First the Russian public bought the piano scores of Onegin. The demand for the sheet music grew steadily as more amateur singers began to study excerpts from the opera— primarily, Tatiana’s letter scene and Lensky’s aria before the duel. A typical reaction is in von Meck’s letter of September 24, 1883, to Tchaikovsky: “When I hear the duel scene on the piano, I cannot express in words what I feel. I come to a state where I can only say, ‘Ah, I can’t take it anymore!’ whereas when I read the same scene in Pushkin, I merely say, ‘Poor little Lensky!’ ”

Eugene Onegin started to sell out every performance. The box office success increased the number of new productions. The opera became the absolute champion on every index: popular love of Russian audiences, number of performances, and, subsequently, critical esteem. By now it could be said that Tchaikovsky’s interpretation is more entrenched than Pushkin’s original approach. Thus, Tolstoy’s attempt to nip the success of this opera in the bud failed, adding to the eternal quandary: how is the cultural canon formed, and who plays the more important role in the process—the experts or the consumers?

PART V

CHAPTER 12

Dostoevsky and the Romanovs

On Monday, April 4, 1866, Emperor Alexander II took his customary stroll in St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden. He liked his daily constitutional, perhaps imitating his father, Nicholas I. Besides the obvious health benefits, it gave the forty-seven-year-old ruler, tall and stately, with mustache and lush sideburns and slightly bulging eyes with a gentle gaze, a sense of unity with his people. He was not accompanied by retinue or bodyguards.

After his walk, Alexander headed toward his waiting carriage at the Summer Garden entrance. A pistol shot rang out from the crowd of gawkers. The assailant was a young student, Dmitri Karakozov, who belonged to a secret revolutionary society. He missed (he had an ancient double-barreled pistol), but the bullet whizzed by so close that it burned the emperor’s military cap.

The terrorist was instantly captured. Alexander came up to him and asked, “Who are you?” The student replied, “I am a Russian.” Then, turning to the stunned people around him, he shouted, “Folks, I shot for you!”

Alexander immediately went to the Kazan Cathedral, where a service of thanksgiving for his miraculous salvation was held. Then he returned to the Winter Palace. The investigative machine was set in motion, to dig up the roots of this unprecedented act of terrorism in Russia.

It seemed incredible that a Russian could lift his hand against the monarch, anointed by God. The authorities and the public at first assumed that the conspiracy was headed by Poles, who were constantly rebelling and demanding separation from Russia. (The most recent uprising had been cruelly suppressed by Alexander II in 1863.) Hence Alexander’s question to the assailant.

The masses rejoiced that the tsar was unharmed and cursed the foreign Poles. At the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the scheduled ballet, The Pharaoh’s Daughter, was replaced by a special performance of Glinka’s 1836 classic opera, A Life for the Tsar, in which the peasant Ivan Susanin heroically saved the founder of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Mikhail, from the villainous Poles in 1613.

Tchaikovsky was at the Bolshoi that night and he wrote to his family,

I think the Moscow audience went beyond the bounds of sense in their outburst of enthusiasm. The opera was not really performed, for as soon as the Poles appeared onstage, the whole theater shouted, “Down with the Poles!” and so on. In the last scene of Act 4, when the Poles are supposed to kill Susanin, the actor playing him started fighting the chorus members who played Poles, and being very strong, knocked down several of them, while the rest of the extras, seeing that the audience approved this mockery of art, truth, and decency, fell down, and the triumphant Susanin left unharmed, brandishing his arms, to the deafening applause of the Muscovites.¹

In an attempt to maximize the propaganda windfall, the authorities decided to create a “new Susanin,” so as to promote loyalty to the tsar. They picked a young peasant, Osip Komissarov, who happened to have been near the terrorist attacking Alexander II. The police announced that Komissarov had pushed Karakozov’s elbow just when he pulled the trigger, thereby saving the tsar. The new myth benefited from the fact that Komissarov, like the legendary Susanin, came from Kostroma Province, thus creating a direct line between the two heroic promonarchist exploits, separated by two and a half centuries.

Komissarov was presented to Alexander II at the Winter Palace, and to the cries of “Hurrah!” from the staff he was embraced by the emperor and elevated to the nobility, becoming Komissarov-Kostromskoy. General Petr Cherevin, in charge of the Karakozov investigation, cynically noted in his diary, which was published posthumously, “I find it quite politic to invent such an exploit; it is a forgivable fabrication and one that influences the masses beneficially.”²

It is difficult to imagine the psychological shock Alexander II experienced after this totally unexpected attempt on his life. The emperor sincerely believed himself to be the