Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

I will name only a few here. They are Sergei Averintsev, Naum Berkovsky, Isaiah Berlin, James H. Billington, Andrei Bitov, Kornei Chukovsky, Leonid Dolgopolov, Natan Eidelman, Boris Eikhenbaum, Joseph Frank, Boris Gasparov, Lidia Ginzburg, Yakov Gordin, Lev Gumilev, Roman Jakobson, Vadim Kozhinov, Jay Leyda, Dmitri Likhachev, Lev Loseff, Martin Malia, Irina Paperno, Boris Paramonov, Richard Pipes, Dmitri Sarabyanov, Viktor Shklovsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Valery Sokolov, Georgy Sviridov, Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky), Elizabeth Valkenier, Igor Volgin, Richard S. Wortman, Daniel Zhitomirsky, and Andrei Zorin.

I am particularly grateful to those of the above mentioned who shared their views with me in unforgettable personal conversations.

The informed reader will see that this short list nevertheless encompasses a wide ideological spectrum: it includes liberals and conservatives, Marxists and anticommunists, nationalists and cosmopolites. Their ideas stimulated my work. I have always tried to be free of the ideological constraints that to this day hinder an unprejudiced study and evaluation of the political aspects of the treasure house that is Russian culture.

I am most grateful to Grisha and Alexandra Bruskin, Oleg and Tatiana Rudnik, Vagrich and Irina Bakhchanyan, Alexander and Irina Genis, Alexander and Irene Kolchinsky, Valery Golovitsev, and Yevgeny Zubkov for their support during the writing of this book. The illustrations were, as always, the responsibility of my wife, Marianna. The present book is once again the result of close and deeply satisfying collaboration with my translator, Antonina W. Bouis, and my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, whose ideas and suggestions were of immense help.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

The First Romanovs:

From Tsar Mikhail to Peter I

On Friday, November 27, 1836, “everything that is the best in St. Petersburg”¹ (as a high courtier noted in his diary) gathered for the first performance of the long-awaited new Russian opera, Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. The premiere occasioned the opening of the Bolshoi Kamenny Theater, one of the capital’s most majestic buildings in those days. After the reconstruction, it held two thousand people, and it was packed; the tickets, despite the gala prices, had been sold out a month in advance.

Intriguing rumors about Glinka’s piquant (and, most importantly, “national”) music had been circulating in elite St. Petersburg circles for quite a while, and the seats in the orchestra and boxes held the cream of Russian culture—the poets Vassily Zhukovsky and Prince Peter Vyazemsky, the writer and musician Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, and the famous fabulist Ivan Krylov.

Some paid special respects to the man on the aisle seat in the eleventh row: thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Pushkin, the nation’s literary lion and trendsetter. An avid theatergoer, music lover, and ballet aficionado (particularly of pretty ballerinas), the usually lively and witty Pushkin seemed to be preoccupied “by a family affair.” No one suspected that two months later the poet would be felled in a duel over that family affair. Also in the audience was the as-yet-unknown eighteen-year-old Ivan Turgenev, then a student at St. Petersburg University, a young snob who would find Glinka’s music “boring.”²

The boxes held the important courtiers in splendid uniforms with gold braid and all kinds of orders on the chest and their dressed-up wives wearing diamonds (the same diary entry read: “aristocrats, stars, brilliance and beauty”). But all lorgnettes were fixed on the emperor’s box: Nicholas I was expected with his family. It was known that the emperor had approved the opera, attended rehearsals, and accepted the composer’s dedication—“To His Imperial Majesty.”

When Nicholas I, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, and the grand dukes and duchesses took their seats, the conductor raised his baton, and the light blue and gold curtain rose after the overture revealing a country landscape in the fashionable “Slavic” style, depicting the village of Domnino, near Kostroma.

It was a performance set in the Time of Troubles, a horrible period for Russia in the early seventeenth century: after the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1584, his sons died one after the other, ending the Riurikovich dynasty. This dynastic crisis led to Russia’s first civil war, peasant rebellions, foreign invasions, famine, and epidemics.

The country lay in ruins, empty, humiliated, and looted. The capital, Moscow, was in the hands of Polish usurpers for two years, from September 1610 to October 1612. Foreign observers were sure that Russia would never rise up from its knees and would simply die off and vanish.