Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Kantemir, Lomonosov, and Barkov

Atioch Kantemir was one of the first creators of the cultural mythos about Peter the Great. The diplomat, master of political intrigue, and biting satiric poet had as a youngster fallen under Peter’s hypnotic charm and remained the tsar’s zealous apologist throughout his brief and turbulent life, until his death of stomach cancer in Paris in 1744, where he was the Russian ambassador. He was only thirty-five.

Kantemir’s satires mocking the opponents of Peter’s reforms were popular in intellectual circles, where copies circulated. But Russian poets, from Vassily Zhukovsky to Joseph Brodsky, were always Kantemir’s greatest admirers. In 1810, Zhukovsky noted, “We have in Kantemir our Juvenal and Horace,” adding that Kantemir “never uses four words when three will do”¹—the highest praise a poet can pay another. Brodsky, who compared Kantemir to John Donne, enjoyed reading me his sarcastic lines about a hypocritical monk: “He pities people who died in lust, / But secretly stares at a rounded bust.”

Kantemir’s satires were paradoxically (but typically, for Russian literature) first published in London in French in 1749 and only printed in Russia eighteen years after the poet’s death, in an edition by Ivan Barkov. Even as late as 1851, Emperor Nicholas I could not accept the audacity of Kantemir’s attacks on the clergy: “In my opinion, there is no possible use in reprinting Kantemir’s works.”² Yet Kantemir was the first Russian poet to achieve recognition in the enlightened circles of eighteenth-century Europe.

Sent to the West in 1732 by Peter I’s niece, Empress Anna Ioannovna, Kantemir learned only belatedly in Paris of one of the most dramatic episodes in Russian history: on the night of November 25, 1741, a squad of three hundred Imperial Guards led by Peter’s daughter, the thirty-two-year-old blue-eyed blonde Elizabeth, burst into the Winter Palace, the imperial residence. The guards bore Elizabeth (who wore a very becoming brass cuirass on her pretty head) on their shoulders and declared her empress.

This brought an end to “the era of palace coups”: in the twenty-seven years since the death of Peter the Great the throne had been occupied by Catherine I, Peter II, Anna Ioannovna, and the infant Ioann IV, none of whom played a significant role in the development of Russian culture.

Elizabeth I was a different matter. In the twenty years of her reign (she died in 1761) even the most stubborn foes of Peter the Great had to admit that his reforms had become irreversible: Russia was speeding along the European path. And even more importantly: the Europeanized culture that had been forcibly implanted by Peter had not only taken root among the Russian elite but had begun taking on definite national features, under the clear encouragement of the new empress.

In that sense the figure of Mikhail Lomonosov is symbolic. His multifaceted talents and the wealth of his contributions to culture caused him to be called the Russian Leonardo da Vinci. He was a legend in his lifetime, and to this day there is probably no Russian who does not know a few details of his colorful biography.

Everyone heard the story of the peasant lad who at nineteen, in 1730, ran away from home in a northern coastal village and with a load of frozen fish reached Moscow, where he miraculously got into school and then grew up to be a major scholar and poet, experimenting with electricity, creating mosaics, fighting against the German preponderance in the Academy of Sciences, and founding Moscow University, the first in the land.

Nikolai Nekrasov’s tear-jerking poem “The Schoolboy,” written in 1856, more than ninety years after Lomonosov’s death, was instantly included in Russian textbooks and canonized the legend of “How a muzhik from Archangel / Through his own and God’s will / Became wise and great.”

A close look at some of the “miracles” in Lomonosov’s life yields quite rational explanations for them. Of course, Lomonosov was a man of almost supernatural abilities, but many very “earthly” circumstances promoted his career.

For a start, Lomonosov was lucky to be born to a family of a “state” peasant—that is, a free one, not a serf. His father was prosperous: he owned land and fishing rights and carried cargo (more than eighty-six tons) on his own two-masted boat, St. Archangel Mikhail. When the village was rebuilding the church that had burned down, Lomonosov’s father contributed more than anyone else to the fund—18 rubles. (For comparison: at that time carpenters in St. Petersburg were paid between 12 and 24 rubles a year, depending on their qualifications.)