Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

An acute observer, Benois felt that even though Nicholas II was “a nice man,” he fatally “lacked those special gifts that allow one to play with dignity the role of head and leader of a gigantic state.”³⁸ Serov demonstrated that in his portrait, which thus became the final piece in the trinity of notable portrayals of Romanov rulers: from tsar-as-leader to tsar-as-keeper to “non-tsar.”

While the Bolsheviks never tampered with the Bronze Horseman, they tagged the statue of Alexander III with a mocking epigram caption by the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny:

My son and my father were executed in my lifetime

While I reaped the fate of posthumous ignominy,

I stand here as a cast-iron scarecrow for the country

That threw off the yoke of autocracy forever.

In 1937, Trubetskoy’s work was concealed in the courtyard of the Russian Museum (founded by Alexander III). Now, the monument-caricature stands outside the Marble Palace of St. Petersburg.

The fate of Serov’s portrait of Nicholas II was even more dramatic. During the capture of the Winter Palace in 1917, the revolutionary soldiers found the portrait in the family’s private quarters and dragged it out to Palace Square, stabbing it with their bayonets, trying to tear it into pieces.

A few young artists were nearby and they appealed to the soldiers, telling them it was the work of the famous Serov and should be preserved for the museum. The soldiers, surprisingly amenable, gave up the portrait they had been attacking so furiously (they had already poked out both eyes). In that piteous state, the portrait was given to the Russian Museum. Fortunately, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow retained an unharmed author’s copy of Serov’s masterpiece.

A politician’s cultural baggage may be his weapon and capital, but it can turn into a huge weight around his neck. Lacking natural political instincts, Nicholas II came to dubious conclusions while reading Russian literature. His diaries suggest that he read like an ordinary consumer of culture.

Lenin, on the contrary, read Russian literature with a political scalpel in his hand—that was the way his mind worked. He may have consciously deprived himself of the “culinary” pleasure (in Bertolt Brecht’s phrase) of reading, but his pragmatic approach to culture worked better from a political point of view and fed his revolutionary activity.

These contrasting approaches resulted in contrary readings of Tolstoy by Nicholas and Lenin. For Nicholas II, Tolstoy was primarily a patriotic military writer. Nowadays that may seem incongruous, since we know the late Tolstoy as a man who passionately rejected all forms of violence and hated war. Also, in his later years, Tolstoy often repeated Samuel Johnson’s aphorism about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel. This did not mean that he did not consider himself a Russian patriot. But official patriotism as an instrument of state policy sickened him.

These positions coupled with his rejection of official Russian Orthodoxy brought Tolstoy into conflict with Russian autocracy. He wrote harsh accusatory letters to Alexander III and to Nicholas II. His works were strictly censored and often banned. But that had not always been the case.

Tolstoy made his name as a war writer. After his first novellas (Childhood and Adolescence), the works that had the greatest impact on the Russian public were his Sevastopol Stories, about the defense of Sevastopol in 1854–1855, during the Crimean War against the British and French.

Alexander II particularly liked one of the stories, “Sevastopol in December,” and he gave orders to keep Tolstoy out of the line of fire. Tolstoy’s first book, which included the Sevastopol tales, was simply called War Stories. Tolstoy was planning to publish a special magazine for soldiers, Military Leaflet, to inculcate patriotic feelings, but Nicholas I did not approve the idea.

In general, the young Tolstoy treated his military service with great enthusiasm and ardor, and until the end of his life, despite his rejection of violence and war, he continued to consider himself a military man. In that particular sense, he and Nicholas II were on the same wavelength.

Nicholas II read Tolstoy’s War Stories to his heir, eight-year-old Alexei, not only about Sevastopol but also “The Raid” and “The Wood Felling” (early stories about the war in the Caucasus, where Tolstoy also fought). Apparently, the emperor used those tales as edifying material—for he saw his son (despite his hemophilia) as a future brave officer: a true Romanov simply could not be a civilian.

War and Peace is Tolstoy’s most celebrated work, but when it was first published in a magazine in 1865–1866, it was first of all perceived as a highly controversial account of the war against Napoleon and was roundly criticized from that point of view.