Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Pushkin bitterly complained to a friend that Nicholas “courted his wife like a lousy officer; having his carriage pass under her windows several times in the morning, and in the evening, at balls, asking why her blinds were always shut.” Pushkin could learn this only from Natalie—was she trying to make him jealous? (In 1848, more than eleven years after Pushkin’s death, the emperor recalled during a dinner conversation how Pushkin spoke with him three days before the fatal duel: “I confess sincerely, that I suspected even you of courting my wife.”) The poet Anna Akhmatova, a great connoisseur of the Pushkin era and of human psychology, blamed Natalie for boasting about her conquests to Pushkin; Akhmatova felt this led to the catastrophe that ensued.

Pushkin was an insanely jealous man. Did he have any reason to suspect Nicholas of improper intentions? In the Soviet era, many historians said yes, stressing the emperor’s supposed “vile lust,” even though the most cynical contemporaries never presumed that the emperor’s attention to Pushkin’s wife was anything but innocent flirtation.

The final tragedy was not caused by Nicholas; however, without meaning to, he helped set the scene. Balls in St. Petersburg really were the place where numerous love affairs began, often ending in social scandals and sometimes in tragedy.

At a ball in 1835 or early 1836, Georges D’Anthès met Natalie Pushkin and apparently fell madly in love with her. He was a young cavalry officer, a French émigré and adopted son of Baron Jacob Burchard van Heeckeren, the Dutch ambassador. The tall, blond, and handsome D’Anthès cut a dashing social figure, and his attraction to Natalie soon was noticed. She was flattered, and enjoyed telling her husband about him.

This was a mistake. Pushkin was agitated, and only a spark was needed to set him off. That spark was an anonymous letter, which Pushkin and several of his friends received, bestowing a “diploma of cuckolds” upon him, implying that Natalie had succumbed to D’Anthès (which Pushkin considered a lie).

Pushkin challenged D’Anthès to a duel. Zhukovsky, terrified, managed to settle the affair: he told Nicholas, who then invited Pushkin to an audience, an extraordinary gesture. This conversation, unlike their meeting in the Kremlin in 1826, was not publicized; the topic was quite sensitive. The outcome was this: Nicholas made Pushkin give his word that he would not fight a duel (they were officially banned), and if new complications were to arise, he would promise to appeal to the tsar.

Pushkin was always proud of his noble ancestry and of being a man of honor, but he did not keep his word. On January 25, 1837, he sent an insulting letter to Baron Heeckeren in order to provoke a duel with his son.

The duel took place on January 27 at five in the evening outside St. Petersburg. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later, after receiving the final rites, in terrible suffering, at the age of thirty-seven. His last words were “It’s hard to breathe, I’m suffocating.”

The night after the duel, Pushkin sent word to the tsar that he was sorry for not keeping his word. In response, the emperor sent a note: “If God does not allow us to meet in this world, I send you my forgiveness and last advice: die a Christian. Do not worry about your wife and children: I will take care of them.”²¹

In fact, Nicholas paid all the late poet’s debts, assigned a pension to the widow and daughters and a special stipend for the sons, and ordered the publication, at state expense, of a collection of Pushkin’s works to benefit his family.

These were all signs of special attention (comparable to those given to Karamzin’s family after the historian’s death), and they stunned contemporaries: one courtier noted, “This is wonderful, but it’s too much.”²²

Only insiders knew that Nicholas rejected Zhukovsky’s request to accompany the financial generosity with a special imperial rescript. One was published upon Karamzin’s death, reiterating the official recognition of his outstanding achievements for the state. The tsar told Zhukovsky, “Listen, brother, I’ve done everything I can for Pushkin, but I won’t write the way I did for Karamzin; we barely forced Pushkin to die like a Christian, while Karamzin lived and died like an angel.”

Unexpectedly, Pushkin’s death incited a wave of nationalist emotions in St. Petersburg. Crowds gathered outside his apartment; according to Zhukovsky, some ten thousand people paid their respects to his body laid out in a coffin—a huge number for those days. Foreign ambassadors reported in their dispatches of a new “Russian Party,” and calls for “hanging foreigners.”

No less surprised than the ambassadors was Nicholas. On his orders, measures were taken to keep Pushkin’s funeral from turning into an opposition political demonstration: he had not gotten over the shock of the Decembrist rebellion of 1825.