Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Pushkin was balancing on a knife edge here. On the one hand, he called Paul I a crowned villain. On the other, he called his murder horrible. As we know, Alexander did not sanction the killing. Still, he felt deep guilt for the crime. Surprisingly, Alexander “did not find reasons for punishment” when he read the ode, according to a contemporary.

A mysterious note has survived, written by Pushkin in December 1824 (a year before the tsar’s death), “An Imaginary Conversation with Alexander I.” Pushkin has the tsar praise “To Liberty,” in words he wanted to hear: “There are three very good stanzas here. While behaving very imprudently, you did not try to blacken me in the eyes of the people by spreading ridiculous slander. You may have unfounded opinions, but I see that you respected the truth and personal honor even in the Tsar.”

This text proves how significant the dialogue—actual and imaginary—with Alexander was in Pushkin’s mind. The intensity of the dialogue is confirmed by other politically tinted poems of the young Pushkin—for instance, his elegy “The Village” (1819), which was as popular among readers as “To Liberty.”

In “Liberty,” Pushkin talked about Russia’s need for a “reliable roof of law.” In “Village,” he turned to another urgent theme, serfdom: “Will I ever see, O friends, the people unfettered / and slavery fallen at the Tsar’s command.”

Once again, Pushkin touched a sensitive string in Alexander’s heart; the emperor was studying a number of projects on emancipating the serfs. After reading “The Village,” Alexander had Pushkin thanked in his name “for the good feelings elicited by this poem.” Alexander’s words went deep into Pushkin: seventeen years later, not long before his death, he quoted them in his poetic testament, “The Monument,” a variation on Horace’s “Exegi monumentum …”

And long will I be beloved by the people,

For eliciting good feelings with my lyre.

People who knew him recalled Pushkin’s independent, proud character and legendary volatility. Some attributed these qualities to his African heritage: his maternal grandfather, Abram Gannibal, came from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia (although now scholars think that he was from the territory of modern Cameroon).

In Russia, Gannibal became one of Peter the Great’s favorites, rising to the rank of general in Elizabeth’s reign. Pushkin’s mother was a cheerful, insouciant woman “with lovely Creole looks”; Pushkin inherited her curly hair and dusky complexion. Prince Vyazemsky recalled that Pushkin’s younger brother, Lev, “resembled a white Negro.”

Hot African blood and aristocratic Russian pride (his father could trace his family to the time of Prince Alexander Nevsky—that is, the thirteenth century) made a dangerous mix. But it was not genetics that made Pushkin’s relationship with the Romanovs so complex and difficult. He was the right man in the right place at the right time, and he paid dearly for it. Pushkin would conduct a paradigmatic cultural experiment labelled “poet and authority in Russia,” in which he himself was the subject. He got the starring role in this symbolic parable that became entrenched as one of the most influential Russian cultural myths. Pushkin lived up to the great role, even if, at the end, it cost him his life. This, and not just his exquisite poetry, is Pushkin’s incomparable significance for Russian history.

Of course, Russian poets before Pushkin tried to position themselves vis-à-vis the Romanovs—for example, Lomonosov and Derzhavin (who both left their own paraphrase of the ode by Horace). Even more important were the later attempts by Karamzin and Zhukovsky. But Pushkin is the most influential model, remaining the example of dialogue with the state for many generations of the Russian cultural elite to our day.

By writing the ode “To Liberty” and “The Village,” Pushkin basically “threw stones in the permitted direction,” to use Joseph Brodsky’s expression about similar liberal escapades of the young Moscow poets in the second half of the twentieth century.¹³ Later scholars, especially Soviet ones, interpreted those poems as terribly “revolutionary,” never mentioning Alexander I’s benign reaction.

I have already mentioned that the poet and emperor were on the same emotional wavelength about the need for the rule of law and the evils of serfdom. This explains in part why Alexander I, upon receiving denunciations of budding underground organizations whose aim was the abolishment of serfdom and the introduction of a constitution, reacted rather indifferently. As he threw one such report into the burning fireplace, Alexander commented on the republican ideas of the conspirators: “You know that I once shared and supported these illusions; it is not for me to punish them!”¹⁴ Three weeks before his death, the tsar admitted in a private conversation, with a sigh, “And still, whatever people may say about me, I lived and died a republican.”¹⁵