Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

The dénouement of this quasi-Romantic drama, which could have been written by Friedrich Schiller, was swift—in fact too fast and sudden for some of his contemporaries, and therefore mysterious. Unexpectedly, Alexander announced that he would take his ailing wife for treatment to the remote town of Taganrog in the south of Russia. (Anton Chekhov was born there thirty-five years later.)

In a modest one-story house in that provincial town, the emperor and his wife lived for some two months, filled with spiritual talk, prayer, and, as far as we can judge, quiet family joys. Not long before his forty-eighth birthday, Alexander, who had been known for his robust health, caught a chill, which quickly turned into a fatal fever.

On November 19, 1825, the emperor died, far from the capital, the court, and his beloved army. (His wife died, just as suddenly, six months later.) This quick death on the outskirts of the empire stunned contemporaries and gave rise to instant rumors and legends. Alexander was said to have been murdered, or to have committed suicide, or to not be dead at all. The last version gained some credence and has its adherents to this day.

According to this version, Alexander traveled to Taganrog in order to fake his death. This was to be his chance to realize his dream, which he had shared with people close to him: to abdicate from the throne and live a private life. Proponents of this theory argued that a different person was buried in March 1826 in St. Petersburg, which was why it was a closed-coffin funeral, which is against Orthodox custom.

There are numerous historical works seriously debating the question of whether the holy man Fedor Kuzmich, who appeared in Siberia ten years after Alexander I was declared deceased, was in fact the emperor, who had fulfilled his longing for a different kind of life.²²

The mysterious elder Fedor Kuzmich, who had resolutely refused to tell anything about himself and was buried in Siberia in 1864, had a remarkable resemblance to Alexander I: the same height, slightly stooped, and with blue eyes; he spoke several languages and had undoubtedly belonged to higher society in his past.

In fact, the story of Fedor Kuzmich being Alexander was taken seriously at court and even in the Romanov family. Grand Duke Nicholas (the future Nicholas II) stopped in Tomsk on a return trip from Japan in 1891 to visit the elder’s grave at a local monastery.

But the greatest memorial stone for that legend is Leo Tolstoy’s short novella The Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fedor Kuzmich, written in 1905 but published only in 1912, after the writer’s death (and even then over ferocious objections from the tsarist censors).

When younger, Tolstoy had been very skeptical of Alexander, as can be seen in War and Peace, his epic novel about the War of 1812 against Napoleon. But Tolstoy became involved in the story of the monarch’s rejection of fame and power and his flight to the people when the topic started to be acutely relevant to the writer’s own situation.

In 1905, while working on the novella, Tolstoy made a notation in his diary about the way he saw his own life: “A mass of people, all festive, eating, drinking, demanding. Servants run and obey. And it is more and more painful for me to participate in this lifestyle and not condemn it.”

In The Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fedor Kuzmich, narrated by Alexander I, Tolstoy endows the emperor with his own thoughts and emotions: “I was born and lived forty-seven years of my life amid the most terrible temptations and not only did I not resist them, I relished them, being tempted and tempting others, sinning and forcing others to sin. But God looked down at me. And the vileness of my life, which I had been trying to justify to myself and to blame on others, at last was revealed to me in all its horror.”

Tolstoy’s Alexander I looks at things just the way the writer was thinking in 1905 as he prepared to run away from his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. “I have to do what I’ve long wanted to do: abandon everything, leave, vanish.”

Pushkin in 1829 said that Alexander was “a harlequin in person and in life.” The skeptical and rational Pushkin did not believe in the emperor’s mystical moods or his presumed repentance. Seventy-five years later, Tolstoy, tormented by his own moral dilemma, was inclined to believe in Alexander’s “desire to leave everything, brought on by repentance,” and in his escape, which Tolstoy tried to emulate in 1910, “without vanity, without thought of human fame, but for myself, for God.”