Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Nicholas I saw Russian culture as the Neva River, flowing within the granite embankments constructed by autocracy. Its rare and desperate attempts to overflow could and should be blocked. Under Alexander III, Russian culture was a turbulent flow refusing to stay in its allotted bed. By now, it could not be fully controlled by royal command.

CHAPTER 14

Nicholas II and Lenin as Art

Connoisseurs

The son of Alexander III, after his father’s unexpected death in 1894 from nephritis, took the throne as Emperor Nicholas II, and was the last Romanov to rule the country. Nicholas became emperor at the age of twenty-six, even though he was not ready to lead, as he himself admitted. The new sovereign ruled at an increasingly turbulent time, until 1917, when—faced with a growing revolutionary wave and under pressure of his closest advisers—he was forced to abdicate.

After this revolution (which was to be called the February Revolution), Russia suddenly became the freest democratic republic in the world, and power was in the hands of a coalition of moderate liberals and socialists. But the Provisional Government proved to be really provisional: in the fall of 1917, it was ousted by the Bolsheviks, the radical wing of Russian social democracy headed by Vladimir Ulyanov (his nom de guerre was Lenin). In 1918, the Bolsheviks executed the deposed monarch and his family.

The Bolshevik regime, which many considered ephemeral, turned out to be quite tenacious, lasting—with some mutations—until 1991. Thus, Nicholas II ended the three-hundred-year-old history of the Romanov dynasty, and Lenin opened the seventy-four-year-old history of the Soviet Union. It is therefore useful to compare the cultural worldview of these two leaders in order to understand how much their cultural baggage influenced their political decisions and fate.

In Soviet times, they tried to present Nicholas II as an underachiever who did not even know the main authors of Russian literature, Turgenev and Tolstoy.¹ On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn in 1989 said of Lenin, whom he hated, “He had little in common with Russian culture.”² Obviously, both these extremes were dictated by political prejudices.

Nicholas II was two years older than Lenin, one born in 1868, the other, in 1870. Both were well-educated, one at home, the other at a gymnasium (Lenin was the son of the inspector of public schools from the provincial city of Simbirsk). Lenin was an outstanding student, which could not be said of Nicholas II, but both studied conscientiously.

All the Romanovs considered themselves professional military men, therefore the accent in Nicholas’s education was on military matters. Lenin got a law degree from St. Petersburg University. But their fundamental cultural baggage was remarkably similar, because in the reign of Alexander III (1881–1894) a unified national cultural canon was formed in Russia.

By that time, the cult of Pushkin as the greatest national poet was established, while the previously sanctioned official reverence for Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, and Zhukovsky dimmed significantly. Only the fabulist Krylov remained popular of the old classics. The grand figure of Gogol was no longer controversial, and his greatness was recognized, like Pushkin’s, by both the right and the left. Turgenev was making his way to classic status, especially his early prose, A Sportsman’s Sketches. Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov was also included in the canon.

The scattered accounts of contemporaries confirm that this cultural canon was strongly ingrained in both Nicholas and Lenin. Moreover, it was received by both explicitly as canon—that is, as mandatory cultural knowledge as necessary for every educated person as brushing teeth and washing hands.

It is noteworthy that neither Nicholas II nor Lenin ever rejected this canon publicly. In Nicholas’s case that is understandable: to a great degree the canon was formulated from above and therefore reflected the views of the authorities. Much more curious is Lenin’s obvious acquiescence.

It is clear in Lenin’s attitude toward Pushkin. For Nicholas, Pushkin was a classic. When he was heir, he played Onegin in a family dramatization of Eugene Onegin, and according to the rather patronizing notation in the diary of his uncle, Grand Duke Konstantin (the poet K.R.), “He declaimed Onegin’s monologue very sweetly and clearly. Only in his voice could you hear that he was quite nervous.”³ The first official Russian literary prize, instituted under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, was called the Pushkin Prize for a reason: the authorities saw his name as the most authoritative.

But Lenin was another matter. Early on, he fell under the influence of revolutionary ideologues, one of whom was Dmitri Pisarev, notorious for his vicious attacks on Pushkin, like this sarcastic pronouncement: “No Russian poet can inspire in his readers such total indifference to the people’s suffering, such profound scorn for honest poverty, and such systematic revulsion for honest labor as Pushkin.”

While Pisarev’s rebuke may sound very “Leninist” in spirit and style today, Lenin himself, albeit a faithful student of Russian nihilists and radicals of the 1860s, never attacked Pushkin in public (nor did he praise him particularly).

We can guess Lenin’s real attitude toward Pushkin from a curious incident recounted by Nadezhda Krupskaya, his widow. In 1921, Lenin and Krupskaya visited a Moscow student dormitory to see a daughter of Inessa Armand, the recently deceased love of Lenin’s life (and Party comrade). Lenin, Krupskaya, and Armand had a Party menage a trois for a rather long time.

The students were happy to see Lenin and bombarded him with questions. Lenin, in turn, asked them, “What are you reading? Do you read Pushkin?” The response was, “Oh, no. Pushkin was a bourgeois. We read Mayakovsky.” Lenin, who did not like the avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, said only, “I think Pushkin is better.”

Krupskaya added naively in her account, “After that Ilyich [as the Party comrades called him] was a bit kinder to Mayakovsky,” because the name reminded him of “the young people, full of life and joy, ready to die for Soviet power, unable to find the words in contemporary language to express themselves and seeking that expression in the hard-to-understand poems of Mayakovsky.”⁴

The blinkered Krupskaya did not notice the grotesqueness of her image of young people “full of life and joy” yet “ready to die,” or the ruthlessness of her childless spouse, pleased by the sight of that young cannon fodder. And it’s interesting how casually Lenin took the quintessentially nihilist putdown of Pushkin as bourgeois: did he think so, as well, but did not want to say?

Given Lenin’s reputation for pitiless debate, his defense of Pushkin from the revolutionary youth seems rather timid. “Pushkin is better than Mayakovsky”? Lenin was devastatingly scathing about Mayakovsky (“nonsense, stupid, double stupidity and pretentiousness”),⁵ so that was faint praise indeed. It is obvious that for Lenin Pushkin was merely a name, part of the official canon. He wouldn’t get into an argument over Pushkin.

But in one aspect, Pisarev’s view of Pushkin as the teacher of “parasites and sybarites” was clearly absorbed by the revolutionary leader: Lenin’s disparaging attitude toward ballet and opera.