Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

The February Revolution of 1917 occurred almost spontaneously, without plan, organization, or leadership. During those days Russia’s capital overflowed with crowds of revolutionary soldiers and sailors—the main force of the rebellion. Some historians, then and now, characterized the crowd as a gathering of “devils.” This is hardly an objective assessment. But it is also unlikely that there were many Platon Karataevs from War and Peace among the rebels.

One of the most remarkable descriptions of the February Revolution came from its witness Vassily Rozanov, a perceptive essayist. Rozanov was one of the first to be struck by how quickly Imperial Russia collapsed, in just two, at most three, days. “The remains of the police crawled out of the attics and surrendered. The troops rolled over like an avalanche to the side of the rebellion, and attempts to return power by military force to the old hands looked like attempts to weave a knout out of sand. Everything was falling apart.”⁴¹

Rozanov was amazed to hear of an old peasant declaring that “the former tsar should be skinned strip by strip.”⁴² Rozanov was shocked: there’s your holy Russian muzhik, there’s your Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and War and Peace.

According to Rozanov, the Russian revolution was fed and prepared by Russian culture: “There is no doubt that Russia was killed by literature. Of the ‘corrupters’ of Russia, there is not a single one without a literary background.”⁴³ And the last Russian tsar, lamented Rozanov, turned out to be inadequate, and broke down.

There has been a fatal “rift between the monarchy and literature,” Rozanov concluded bitterly. And as a result, “Literally, God spat and blew out the candle.”⁴⁴ The vast empire slipped out of the Romanovs’ hands, and with it, its biggest treasure—the great Russian culture.

Yet the Romanovs will remain forever in the history of that magnificent culture, where Catherine the Great quarrels and makes up with Derzhavin and Nicholas I with Pushkin, Karamzin mentors Alexander I, Zhukovsky brings up the future Alexander II, Alexander III listens attentively to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and Nicholas II reads Tolstoy’s stories to his son.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Konstantin Pleshakov, Sv. iskusstvo [Sacred art] (Moscow, 2003), p. 15.

2. Viktor Shklovsky, in conversation with the author.

CHAPTER 1

The First Romanovs: From Tsar Mikhail to Peter I

1. Russkii arkhiv, 1910, vol. 2, p. 377.

2. Vadim Kozhinov, Tiutchev (Moscow, 1994), p. 218.

3. Quoted from M. I. Glinka, Issledovaniia i materialy [Research and materials] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), p. 16.

4. Quoted from Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ [Russian biographical dictionary], vol.: Suvorov-Tkachev (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 177.

5. M. I. Glinka, p. 26.

6. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva M. Glinki [Chronicle of the life and work of M. Glinka], in two parts, part 1 (Leningrad, 1978), p. 88.

7. M. Glinka, Literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska [Literary works and correspondence], vol. 1 (Moscow, 1973), p. 268.

8. Ibid., p. 266.

9. Ibid., p. 267.

10. Ibid.

11. Quoted from V. A. Sollogub, Povesti. Vospominaniia [Novellas, reminiscences] (Leningrad, 1988), p. 576.

12. Quoted from T. Livanova, Vl. Protopopov, Glinka, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1955), p. 176.

13. V. F. Odoevskii, Izbrannye muzykal’no-kriticheskie stat’i[Selected musical criticism] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1951), p. 31.

14. Glinka, vol. 1, p. 275.

15. Quoted from A. Gozenpud, Russkii opernyi teatr XIX veka (1836–1856) [Russian opera of the nineteenth century (1836–1856)] (Leningrad, 1969), p. 37.

16. Ibid., p. 69.

17. Quoted from V. S. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia [Works], in nine volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1988), p. 62.

18. Ibid., p. 308.

19. Zhitie Avvakuma i drugie ego sochineniia [Avvakum’s Life and other works] (Moscow, 1991), p. 62.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 52.

22. Ibid., p. 54.

23. Ibid., p. 396.

24. Ibid.

25. Quoted from N.B. Golikova, Politicheskie protsessy pri Petre I po materialam Preobrazhenskogo prikaza [Political processes under Peter I from materials of the Preobrazhensky office] (Moscow, 1957), p. 169.

26. Quoted from Utverzhdenie dinastii. Istoriia Rossii i doma Romanovykh v memuarakh sovremennikov XVII–XX vv. [Assertion of the dynasty: The history of Russia and the House of Romanov in the memoirs of contemporaries, XVII–XX centuries] (Moscow, 1997), p. 288.

27. Kliuchevskii, vol. 3, p. 264.