Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

leading revolutionary author Nikolai Chernyshevsky, written when he was imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg and somehow passed by the censors for publication in 1863, in the most popular magazine of the time, Contemporary. Lenin admitted that Chernyshevsky’s novel “plowed me up profoundly.”

Lenin’s reaction was not unique. The revolutionary youth of the 1860s saw the novel as a revelation. What was the secret of its success? In our day the work seems rather flat and boring, despite the author’s clumsy attempt to enliven a preachy treatise with a naive, semi-detective plot. What Is to Be Done? appeared in the right place at the right time. Tectonic cultural shifts occurred in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861: education spread, the press grew livelier, and moral values were debated fiercely.

The old ways of life were discredited, and new ideals had not yet taken root. In that situation, the young generation thirsted for a “life textbook.” For some, Chernyshevsky’s novel became that textbook.

Chernyshevsky wrote his novel as a polemic against Turgenev’s recently published Fathers and Sons. He felt that Turgenev had caricatured revolutionaries as “nihilists.” So Chernyshevsky gave them another name—“new people”—and, most importantly, elaborated a detailed encyclopedia of everyday life for anyone who wanted to become a “new person”: the right way to live, work, love, eat, and rest.

Essentially, it was a reference work masquerading as a novel, a method. (Chernyshevsky disarmingly believed that he had written a poetic and entertaining novel, similar to works of Dickens and The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.)

His enemies ridiculed him, but the novel’s impact was just what the author wanted: the story of how an emancipated “new woman,” while setting up a quasi-socialist sewing factory, develops progressive amorous relations with two young “new men” became the bedside reading of Russian radicals for decades, replacing the once-popular novels of George Sand.

Lenin was most influenced by another character from the novel, Rakhmetov, who trains for underground activity: he lives ascetically, not drinking wine, or touching women, or eating white bread (just black), doing without sugar, reading only necessary books and meeting only necessary people, and preparing physically and mentally (he even sleeps one night on a bedding filled with nails) for the coming revolution. Gorky later noted that the intense Lenin cultivated self-imposed restraints that were akin to “self-torture, self-mutilation, Rakhmetov’s nails.”¹³

Lenin first read What Is to Be Done? at the age of fourteen, and he did not like the novel then. (He was enthralled by Turgenev, Chernyshevsky’s antipode, and he could quote long passages from Turgenev’s novels by heart.) But it was a favorite book of Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, a student at St. Petersburg University.

Alexander Ulyanov joined an underground student group that plotted to assassinate Alexander III. The police arrested them in 1887; five of the prisoners who refused to plead guilty and ask for pardon were hanged, including Alexander. This stunned Lenin. He reread What Is to Be Done? and decided to become a professional revolutionary, a “new man.”

Going from soft and poetic Turgenev to stern and dogmatic Chernyshevsky was a dizzying transformation, and Lenin achieved it not without considerable effort. Certainly along the way there were doubts and regrets. Just how difficult that road was is evinced by Lenin’s painfully conflicting attitude toward music. Actually, it is the only window into the young Lenin’s soul and its agonies.

Lenin could have repeated the words of the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata: “And really, music is a strange thing … They say that music elevates the soul—nonsense, lies! … It doesn’t elevate or debase the soul, it irritates it … In China music is a state affair. And that is how it should be. A person cannot be permitted to hypnotize someone or many people and then do what he wants with them.”

There are accounts of Tolstoy listening to music and weeping, his face reflecting “something like horror” as he wept. The writer Romain Rolland commented that “only with such richness of spirit as Tolstoy’s, music can become threatening to a person.”¹⁴ Rolland was referring to heightened emotional arousal, present in complex personalities, of which Lenin clearly was one.

For Lenin, music had both sweet and tormenting associations. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata reminded him of his childhood: it had been played frequently by his mother and his beloved younger sister, Olga, who died of typhus when she was only nineteen.

Beethoven was also associated with his deepest love: in 1909 Lenin began his affair with Inessa Armand, thirty-five, a Russian revolutionary of French descent, a beautiful and independent woman, an accomplished pianist. Inessa idolized Beethoven, and Lenin often listened to her play his sonatas. He particularly liked Inessa’s interpretation of the Pathetique, which he said he could listen to “ten, twenty, forty times … and each time it captivates me and delights me more and more.”¹⁵

Abroad as a revolutionary emigre, Lenin lived in a classic menage a trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Inessa Armand. This union, based as much on emotions as on the commonality of interests and ideology, was undoubtedly inspired by Chernyshevsky’s ideas on married life, as expressed in What Is to Be Done?

This is another reason why Lenin blew up at a Party comrade who said the novel was primitive and without talent. “This is a work that gives you a charge for your entire life. Works without talent do not have that kind of influence,”¹⁶ Lenin said. Obviously, Lenin defended Chernyshevsky much more energetically than he had Pushkin.

Inessa Armand died of typhus in 1920; she was buried by the Kremlin Wall. Her death was a terrible blow to Lenin and hastened his own death. He could no longer listen to Beethoven without emotional pain: the sounds reminded him of too much. Lenin, a true follower of Chernyshevsky, firmly decided that listening to music was “an unproductive waste of energy.”¹⁷ (I heard about this statement of Lenin’s in 1994 in Oslo from ninety-eight-year-old Maria Dobrowen, widow of the pianist Issai Dobrowen, who had played for Lenin.) Like a real “new man,” Lenin squashed his emotions. The politician in Lenin won over the private person. Nicholas II was just the opposite.

Lenin’s attitude toward dramatic theater was complicated, as it was toward music. We know about it from Krupskaya’s reminiscences. “Usually we’d go to the theater and leave after the first act. The comrades laughed at us, for wasting money.”

Krupskaya explained that it was not because Lenin was bored at the theater. On the contrary, he followed the action onstage with too much intensity and agitation, and therefore “the mediocrity of the play or falseness of the acting always jangled Vladimir Ilyich’s nerves.”

But when a production touched him, he could weep. There is evidence of this from a friend of Lenin’s abroad. In Geneva, at a play starring the celebrated Sarah Bernhardt, he was astonished to see Lenin furtively wiping away his tears: “The cruel, heartless Ilyich was weeping over La Dame aux camelias.”¹⁸

Lenin liked the Art Theater founded in 1889 in Moscow by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko, although he did not become a habitue. For him this theater was part of the canon of topical “realistic”