Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Its theme was a dramatic historical event in the early seventeenth century: the fall in 1605 of Boris Godunov, the clever boyar who had usurped the throne. The Time of Troubles followed, ending in 1613 with the coronation of Mikhail, the founder of the Romanov dynasty.

A powerful impulse for writing Boris Godunov came from reading volumes 10 and 11 of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, a monumental work that began publication in 1818 and was an instant sensation, literary and political. Pushkin called Karamzin “the first historian and the last chronicler” of Russia.

Tall, pale, and elegant, thirty-three years older than Pushkin, Karamzin was a father figure for him: gentle, attentive, kind, and pointedly calm. But Pushkin would not be Pushkin without complicating this almost idyllic relationship: he fell in love with Karamzin’s wife, who was twenty years his senior. Some Pushkin scholars believe that she remained the great love of his life.

Pushkin devoured the first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History (from Russia’s origins to 1560). The following three volumes covered events until the start of the seventeenth century. (The final, twelfth volume, would have brought the narrative to the election of Mikhail Romanov; Karamzin’s death before his sixtieth birthday interrupted the work.)

Pushkin wrote that Karamzin discovered ancient Russia as Columbus had America. He borrowed the plot and many details of his Boris Godunov from Karamzin, and did not conceal it: the tragedy is dedicated to Karamzin “with reverence and gratitude.” But Pushkin did not fail to indicate the other sources of his inspiration: ancient Russian chronicles and Shakespeare.

As an experiment in “Shakespearean” tragedy, the work is not a complete success: it never became a repertory staple, and in the West is better known through Modest Mussorgsky’s operatic interpretation. But as an essay on political power in Russia, Boris Godunov was a breakthrough unsurpassed to this day; many lines are still used as aphorisms: “Living authority is hated by the masses. They love only the dead”; and the succinct statement on the inhuman burden of power, symbolized by the tsar’s crown, that has been quoted by Russians for almost two hundred years: “Oh, how heavy is the crown of Monomakh!”

Studying Karamzin’s History and working on Boris Godunov confirmed Pushkin in his dream to become a “state” writer, whose opinions would be listened to by rulers. He learned in Karamzin’s work that distant relatives in the Pushkin line had taken part in the 1613 election of the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail. Now Pushkin had yet another reason to be angry with Alexander I and all the Romanovs: “Ingrates! Six Pushkins signed the election paper! And two made a mark, unable to write! And I, their literate descendant, what am I? Where am I?”

Pushkin realized that after Nicholas quashed the Decembrist rebellion, the only way to implement his newly discovered mission as “state” writer was under the aegis of the monarchy: if not in union, then at least in dialogue.

So the scene of the meeting of Nicholas I and Pushkin on September 8, 1826, in Moscow, where the emperor had urgently summoned the poet six days after his coronation from his exile in Mikhailovskoe, went as if rehearsed, even though both participants had improvised. Its success was due in part to the actors’ typecasting: the stern but just and merciful Tsar and the independent, impulsive, but honest genius Poet who sincerely wants to serve his country.

Nicholas set the tone for the scene: “My brother, the late emperor, exiled you to the countryside, while I free you of that punishment on the condition that you write nothing against the government.” Pushkin’s reply: “Your Majesty, I no longer write anything against the government.”⁶

Then came the tsar’s key question: “What would you have done if you were in St. Petersburg on 14 December?” Pushkin’s honest admission—“I would have stood in the ranks of the rebels”—was arguably the watershed in this historic conversation: Nicholas hated weasels, but he respected forthrightness and honesty (even in his foes).

His reminiscences show how he reacted to Pushkin’s openness: “When I later asked him: had his thinking changed and would he give me his word to think and act differently in the future if I set him free, he vacillated for a very long time and only after a long silence he offered me his hand with the promise to change.”⁷