Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Wanderers, as they moved on, became singers of the new, bourgeois Russia. Alexander III is sometimes called the first bourgeois ruler of Russia. And in fact, in cultural issues, the emperor had very bourgeois tastes—and uncountable riches.

Under Alexander’s patronage Carl Faberge flourished; in his St. Petersburg workshops the jeweler set up production of all kinds of expensive trinkets in a gaudy a la Russe style—from tableware to cigarette and cardholders, excessively ornamented in gold, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.

The peak of this style, which subsequently became so aesthetically attractive to the nouveau riche, were the Easter eggs commissioned by Alexander III (and, after him, by Nicholas II)—essentially tricky jewelry toys with simple but effective “secrets,” the better to demonstrate the wealth of royal clients.

The design of the eggs bordered on kitsch. A toy like that—be it a tiny gold chick hidden in a gold egg or a miniature copy of the equestrian statue of Peter I in St. Petersburg, also enclosed in a gold egg encrusted with precious stones—cost between 15,000 and 30,000 rubles (ten of Tchaikovsky’s annual pensions).

Faberge eggs gave Alexander III enormous pleasure, while the music of the Mighty Bunch gave him indigestion. Therefore when the emperor canceled the production of Boris Godunov in 1888 at the Maryinsky (Khovanshchina had been rejected by the imperial theater administration five years earlier), he also put a question mark next to the planned production of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor.

Alexander knew absolutely nothing about Borodin’s music, but since it came from the camp of the Bunch he considered it suspect. (The opera, unfinished before Borodin’s death, was completed and orchestrated by Rimsky- Korsakov and his student Alexander Glazunov.)

It seemed as if Prince Igor was going nowhere, at least in the near future. But the St. Petersburg millionaire Mitrofan Belyaev got involved. A good-looking man with an artistic mane of hair and a fashionably trimmed beard (as portrayed by Repin), he was simultaneously typical of the times and unusual. The son of a timber merchant, Belyaev fell in love with music as a child and then, influenced by the personality and compositions of the young Glazunov, decided to found a series of symphonic concerts and a music publishing house that would promote only Russian music.

Belyaev followed the example set by the Moscow merchant Pavel Tretyakov, who used his considerable fortune to gather a unique collection of Russian art, now famous as the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Such generous private support exclusively for national art was still rare in Russia, but it reflected the desire of the new capitalists to assert their taste on the local cultural scene. For Alexander III their activity posed a certain dilemma: he should have hailed their philanthropy, but they were also competing with him, sometimes directly.

At the Wanderer exhibits the emperor would sometimes learn to his chagrin that paintings he liked had already been purchased by Tretyakov. To solve this ticklish hierarchical dilemma, the Wanderers had to compromise: Alexander III got the right of first refusal for all their works.

To get Prince Igor onto the Maryinsky Theater stage, Belyaev came up with a complicated gambit in which he was apparently helped by Pobedonostsev, Alexander III’s adviser. Belyaev decided to publish the opera score, a very expensive proposition. A memorandum appeared on the emperor’s desk, asking for permission to present him a copy of the luxurious edition. The memorandum indicated that the late composer had been a professor at the Imperial Medico-Surgical Academy and an actual state councilor (the civilian equivalent of a major general).

The memorandum went on to explain that Borodin’s opera was based on the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a great epic of medieval Russian literature, and that excerpts had been performed with enormous success in Russia and abroad. It concluded with the assurance that Borodin’s opera “belongs to the number of those works that bring great honor to our Homeland.”¹⁷

The memorandum, pushing every needed button, succeeded: Alexander III agreed to accept the gift from Belyaev. And that, according to court ritual, was tantamount to the monarch’s permission to perform Borodin’s opera on the imperial stage.

This unexpected turn of events encapsulated the new relationship between the Russian autocrat and the national capitalist elite, which was trying—cautiously, respectfully, but with growing persistence—to move its cultural values to the forefront.

After Alexander’s nod, the wheels of the court machinery spun feverishly. Vast sums were budgeted for the production of Prince Igor from the imperial treasury. The prologue, in which the legendary Prince Igor starts his campaign against the nomadic Polovtsian tribes, had 180 people onstage, and the later famous episode with the exotic Polovtsian dances had more than two hundred.

From Central Asia, annexed under Alexander II, the local military governor sent a rich collection of Turkmen weapons, ornaments, and costumes, which were studied and reproduced by the opera’s designers. The scenery used motifs from the popular paintings of Vassily Vereshchagin, who had depicted life and landscapes of Central Asia with ethnographic accuracy.

The premiere of Prince Igor in October 1890 was a triumph of a Russian opera. The subject—the clash between the ancient Russian prince and Asian tribes—resonated with Russia’s recent wars in Central Asia. The authorities had realized at last that the opera of the suspicious Bunch member, if you made the effort, could be used to support the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” formula.

In the case of Prince Igor, the concept was not realized as crude propaganda, but rather through subtle artistic contrasts between the Russian and Polovtsian camps, as represented by the strong and masculine Russian hero and the orgiastic world of the wild Polovtsians (with the show-stopping dances). It was done with such sweep and color and numerous refined and enchanting details that the attractive wrapping made the propaganda filling go down easily, leaving almost no bad aftertaste.

The St. Petersburg press made much of the great love of the “simple” public for Prince Igor and—which came as a surprise—of the opera subscribers (that is, higher society). The answer was easy: this unprecedented public unanimity was founded on nationalism.

Nationalism was the common ground that allowed monarchists and traditionalists (who loved the glorification of the unity of people and autocrat) to embrace the opera as much as the Westernizing aesthetes, like Benois, who later swore that before Prince Igor he had been mistaken about Russian history: “I thought the ancient Russians were savages or stupid, pathetic slaves of the nomads, not proud and noble masters. Borodin’s opera juxtaposed with amazing persuasion the European, Christian world with the Asian one.”¹⁸

It was a new phenomenon, compared to Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which was practically commissioned by Nicholas I. Prince Igor had in fact been imposed on Alexander III by a Russian millionaire, an interloper on the cultural scene. The emperor was not very pleased. He would have preferred to set the country’s cultural agenda personally, as his grandfather had done for so long.