Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

So the whole idea of being Derzhavin’s successor was Pushkin’s later poetic invention, and it worked. But there were other writers who were truly authoritative for Pushkin, whom he idolized. Their names, Nikolai Karamzin and Vassily Zhukovsky, are little known in the West but revered in Russia. Both were multifaceted talents, but Zhukovsky was most famous as a translator, and Karamzin as the author of the multivolume History of the Russian State. They did not hold any official government position but still managed to play a much more important role in Russia’s political and cultural history than the poet-ministers Derzhavin and Dmitriev.

Karamzin was sixteen years older than Zhukovsky. He was a nobleman with Crimean Tatar roots that went back to the sixteenth century, born in the provincial city of Simbirsk (where Vladimir Lenin would be born), where Karamzin was noticed as a cute five-year-old in a silk camisole by eleven-year-old Ivan Dmitriev (who much later was known, according to wags, for noticing cute boys).

Later Karamzin and Dmitriev served together in a Guards regiment in St. Petersburg; Karamzin returned to Simbirsk, where he earned a reputation as a social lion and fervent cardplayer who dreamed, according to Dmitriev, of “winning the heart of a fiery, black-browed Cherkessian girl” and in the meantime indiscriminately read everything he could get his hands on, from German philosophy to the latest French novels.

Karamzin’s interest in the recent intellectual fad for Freemasonry brought him to its center in Moscow, to the circle of the Mason Novikov, where to the astonishment of his old friends he turned from a wastrel into a “pious student of wisdom” (while still retaining his cheerfulness) and also made his debut as a writer in Novikov’s magazine for children.

The key episode in Karamzin’s seemingly uneventful life (he died in 1826, not reaching sixty) was his only trip to Europe in 1789–1790, during which he had a half hour’s conversation in Königsberg with the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, “a tiny, thin old man, extremely white and gentle”² (they discussed the topical question of the discovery of new lands and exchanged views on China). In Paris, arriving at the right time in the right place, Karamzin listened to the fiery speeches of the revolutionaries Mirabeau and Robespierre at the National Assembly.

Back in Russia, Karamzin published “Letters of a Russian Traveler,” based on his European trip, in the magazine he founded, Moscow Journal. This catapulted him into the spotlight as the leader of Russian sentimentalism, which arose in imitation of European models: Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Karamzin’s most popular work of that period was his novella Poor Liza, about a poor peasant girl, seduced and abandoned by a rich young man, who drowns herself in a Moscow pond. Several generations of Russian readers, particularly women, wept over Poor Liza and other works by Karamzin, discovering their own spirituality and the value of their inner emotional world.

Sometimes a poet’s biography resembles the popular narratives of his era. The true story of the childhood and adolescence of Vassily Zhukovsky could be the plot of a typical Karamzin work, just as capable of jerking tears from sensitive souls. The future great poet was the bastard child of Afanasy Bunin, a wealthy provincial landowner of sixty-seven. His mother was a young Turkish slave, brought to Russia in 1770 as a gift to Bunin from his serfs who had fought in the Russo-Turkish War. She was christened as Elizabeth.

The son of Bunin and Elizabeth was given the patronymic and family name of his godfather, Andrei Zhukovsky, a hanger-on in the Bunin household. Bunin loved his Turkish mistress and his son. He was already married, but according to people who knew, “his wife, having had several children with him, left the marital bed and allowed his freedom of choice in the demands of Hymen.”³

It became a multicultural ménage à trois. The Turkish woman was installed as the Bunins’ housekeeper, coming to the lady of the house, Maria, for instructions, which she received while standing. But when Bunin moved permanently from the big house to the small cottage where Elizabeth lived, his wife broke off all relations with her. Elizabeth took the first step toward reconciliation: she brought her three-month-old son to the big house and placed him silently at the lady’s feet. Maria wept and gave in: peace was reestablished.