Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

These cozy, almost family relations continued for some two years: Derzhavin continued to bore the empress with his dreary reports but also pleased her with new poems, and for his ode “On the Taking of Izmail” (an important victory over the Turks) Catherine gave him another diamond-encrusted snuffbox with the generous note, “I did not know all this time that your trumpet was as loud as your lyre was pleasant.”¹⁷

In that brief comment, Catherine, like a perceptive literary critic, captured the most important aspects of her favorite poet’s style. Derzhavin was an incomparable trumpeter of Russia, praising her glory with clarity and directness, but at the same time his lyre sang the pleasures of private life—love, friendship, culinary delights, and nature’s beauty.

Derzhavin died in 1816, outliving Catherine by almost twenty years. He served her successor, Paul I, and even Paul’s son, Alexander I, who came to the throne after Paul was assassinated in 1801. But the new rulers did not love Derzhavin the way Catherine had.

When Derzhavin, sent into retirement in 1812 by Alexander I, decided to remind the emperor of his existence by sending a plan of defense against Napoleon’s army, the old poet was ignored. And today his achievements as government figure are forgotten, but not his muscular baroque poetry.

Three days before his death, Derzhavin wrote the beginning of his new (and unfinished) ode with diamond on a slate, summing up his profoundly pessimistic outlook on the vanity of political activity in general and his administrative efforts in particular. Those lines are his political auto-obituary. But many Russians repeat them to this day, which is proof of Derzhavin’s poetic grandeur:

Time’s river in its flow

Sweeps away all human endeavor

And drowns in the depths of oblivion

Peoples, kingdoms, and tsars.

PART II

CHAPTER 4

Paul I and Alexander I;

Karamzin and Zhukovsky

Old man Derzhavin noticed us / And blessed us, gravebound …”

There probably isn’t a Russian who doesn’t know those lines, from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. They’ve become an aphorism, repeated every time talk turns to succession of generations, the passing of the torch from fathers to sons. And it is somehow accepted that this was exactly the symbolic and historic way that Derzhavin, the greatest Russian poet of the eighteenth century, “blessed” Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet of all time.

It was much more complicated than that. Pushkin was fifteen when he met the seventy-one-year-old Derzhavin at public examinations at the Lycée, the privileged school at Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial summer residence outside St. Petersburg. Count Alexei Razumovsky, minister of education, who personally supervised all the Lycée’s examinations, invited Derzhavin.

It was January 8, 1815. Derzhavin sat at the table with the teachers; the students answered questions, standing two feet away from him. Pushkin later described Derzhavin: “Our examination wearied him. He sat propping up his head. His face was expressionless; his eyes murky; lips drooping … He dozed until the Russian language examination began. He perked up and his eyes sparkled; he was transformed.”

Pushkin, who was considered a poetic wunderkind at the Lycée, had been selected to recite his ode “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” to Derzhavin: “I don’t remember how I ended my reading, I don’t remember where I ran. Derzhavin was delighted; he demanded to see me, he wanted to embrace me … They searched for me but did not find me.”

Thus, according to Pushkin, Derzhavin did not offer any important advice then, and the scene became symbolic only later, propped up by Pushkin’s later poetic depiction in Eugene Onegin. Actually, Derzhavin anointed the poet Vassily Zhukovsky as his successor: “To you I leave, Zhukovsky, / My ancient lyre …” In turn, Zhukovsky told Derzhavin, “Your poems are a school for poets.”

Here is what Pushkin wrote to a friend just ten years after the Lycée exams: “I’ve reread all of Derzhavin, and here’s my final opinion. That eccentric understood neither Russian grammar nor the spirit of the Russian language (which is why he is beneath Lomonosov) … There are only eight odes and a few excerpts worth saving and the rest should be burned.”

In addition, as friends remembered, Pushkin disliked Derzhavin the man—allegedly he “acted like a scoundrel” in the affair of the Pugachev rebellion.¹

As an army officer, Derzhavin participated in the brutal suppression of the bloody rebellion started in 1773 by the Cossack Emelyan Pugachev, which shook the very foundations of Catherine II’s empire. Pushkin wrote down the story he got from the poet and minister of justice Ivan Dmitriev, describing Derzhavin giving the order to hang two rebels. Pushkin added indignantly, “Dmitriev insisted that Derzhavin hanged those two peasants more out of poetic curiosity than actual necessity.”