Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

All this was good and reasonable. Yet dreamy and mystically inclined Alexander, like Zhukovsky, acutely sensed the absence of an important spiritual vitamin: “Catherine was a wise and great woman, but as for teaching the heart in the spirit of true piety, the St. Petersburg court was … like almost everywhere else. I sensed an emptiness and my soul was tormented by a vague foreboding.”⁵

This vague foreboding came true. At the age of twenty-three, Alexander took part in a real tragedy, fully comparable to the grimmest of Shakespeare’s imaginings. Catherine intended to make Alexander heir to the throne, bypassing her son, Paul. Both father and son knew this. What could be more dramatic? Catherine’s cold-blooded manipulations wounded both.

When Catherine was struck by apoplexy in 1796, Paul, then forty-two, took the throne. Derzhavin described the event succinctly and energetically: “Immediately everything in the palace changed: rattling spurs, jack boots, broadswords, and as if they were conquering a city, army people burst into the rooms with great noise.”⁶

The first, quite understandable, impulse of the new emperor was to annul his mother’s ukases, which he considered unfair. The persecution of Masons was stopped, their leader Novikov was released from prison, and Radishchev returned from Siberian exile.

But unlike his mother, Paul was an utterly unpredictable ruler. Here is a typical story: on the basis of a denunciation, the emperor sent the well-known playwright Vassily Kapnist to Siberia for his pointed comedy Chicane. Then he decided to see the play for himself, in a private setting. The only viewers of the performance were Paul I and his son Alexander. After the first act the emperor decreed that Kapnist be returned from exile immediately. After the second, that the author be rewarded.

Censorship was virulent in Paul’s reign: with a general decline in printed matter (almost a third less than under Catherine), the number of banned books grew, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published under Catherine’s aegis.

Paul had been terrified by the French revolutionary storm of 1789. He felt that Louis XVI “would still be alive and reigning if he had been firmer.”⁷ Thus came Paul’s notorious imperial decree of 1800: “Since books brought in from abroad wreak the corruption of faith, civil laws and decency, from now on we order that any kind of foreign book, in any language, be seized before entering our state, and music as well.”⁸ As a result, sheet music of works by Bach, Haydn, and Mozart were confiscated on Russia’s borders.

Paul’s decrees, regulating things large and small, rained upon the country. He banned topcoats and vests, round hats and wing collars, appearing in public places wearing spectacles, combing hair onto the forehead (it was supposed to be combed back), growing sideburns, dancing the waltz, or applauding in theaters.

No one knew what would be permitted or banned tomorrow, who would be sent to Siberia or for what, or be punished with rods—one could get up to a thousand blows. Everyone trembled in fear. The demoralized and embittered elite started to whisper and then gradually say out loud that Paul was mad.

As Karamzin later summed it up, “Russians regarded this monarch as a dangerous meteor, counting the minutes and impatiently waiting for the last one. It came, and the news of that throughout the land was like emancipation: in houses and on the street people wept with joy, embracing the way they do on Holy Easter.”⁹

Karamzin’s description of the way residents of the capital greeted the overthrow of Paul’s four-year reign was apt. At midnight on March 11, 1801, a group of conspirators burst into the Mikhailovsky Castle, the newly built residence for Paul in St. Petersburg. While the Imperial Guards tried to stop them, their commander, Lieutenant Sergei Marin, a poet and adventurer, unexpectedly switched sides, pointing his pistol at Paul’s defenders. Confused, they surrendered; Paul’s fate was sealed. Marin was the second poet after Derzhavin (who took part in the “revolution,” as he called it, that brought Catherine to the throne in 1762) to participate in a palace coup in Russia.

Paul leaped out of bed in his nightshirt and tried to hide, but the armed intruders caught him, beat him, and then strangled him with a scarf. Their leader, Count Peter Palen, “an enlightened cynic” in Catherine’s mode, quickly went to Alexander’s rooms. The heir had been warned of the conspiracy, but he had not expected his father to be killed.

Learning of the fatality, Alexander fell to the floor, groaning, “How dare you! I never wanted that and did not order it!” The impatient conspirators found the “despair rather natural but inappropriate.” Palen cut off Alexander’s moaning: “C’est assez faire l’enfant! Allez régner!” (“Enough of this childishness! Go rule!”)¹⁰