Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

The planned funeral service in St. Isaac’s Cathedral was moved to a small church, the coffin delivered at night, under police escort. From there, still under police guard, the body was hastily moved to the Svyatogorsk Monastery, not far from Pushkin’s family estate in Pskov Province.

A St. Petersburg newspaper printed a small obituary: “The sun of poetry has set! Pushkin passed away, in his prime, in the midst of his great life work!” The next day the editor was called on the carpet by the chairman of the capital’s censorship committee, who demanded, “Why this publication about Pushkin? Why such honor? Was Pushkin a military leader, a minister, a statesman? Writing little verses does not yet mean a great life work.”

The editor was told that the criticism came from Sergei Uvarov, minister of education. But behind that strict reprimand loomed the regal figure of Nicholas I.

PART III

CHAPTER 7

Lermontov and Briullov

The Pushkin mythos began to form while he was still alive. In the fall of 1833 he wrote to his wife in St. Petersburg from his family estate, “Do you know what the neighbors say about me? Here’s how they gossip about me working: How Pushkin writes poetry—he has a decanter of the finest liqueur before him—he downs a glass, another, a third—and starts writing! That’s fame, dear.”

The poet as drunkard and libertine: that was one of the most popular images of the creative figure then, harkening to the Barkov tradition and entrenched among the general public, as well as the elite. Baron Modest Korff, who had studied with Pushkin at the Lycée and knew him well, was a high official and confidant of Nicholas I, and he described the poet this way: “Always without a kopeck, always in debt, sometimes even without a decent tail coat, endlessly in trouble, frequently dueling, closely acquainted with all the inn keepers, whores and wenches, Pushkin represented a person of the filthiest depravity.”¹

Such a tirade about Karamzin or Zhukovsky was impossible: they were “angels.” That was also a legend, of course, and like any legend it was created by people. One of the authors of the posthumous image of Karamzin was Zhukovsky himself.

With Pushkin dead, Zhukovsky attempted to create a new image for him, too. He wrote two “historic” letters about Pushkin with that in mind. One, dated February 15, 1837, was addressed to the poet’s father, but actually intended for wide distribution; accordingly, it was printed in Contemporary soon after.

Zhukovsky’s other letter, written at the same time, was also planned as a historical document. It was to chief of the gendarmes Benckendorff, who had supervised Pushkin on Nicholas’s command.

These letters initiated a radical transformation of Pushkin’s image. Any memory of the dissipated, hard-drinking, freethinking poet had to be erased. In its stead, Zhukovsky offered a new concept of Pushkin: the national genius, true Christian, and loyal subject of the tsar, who sent a message to Nicholas from his deathbed, “I hate to die; I would be all His.”²

These letters belong to Zhukovsky’s highest creative achievements. He accomplished his intricate mission of changing public opinion of Pushkin with great care, choosing precisely the right words—his Pushkin dies “with a calm expression” and “radiant thoughts,” surrounded by a pious crowd of mourners, and is transfigured by death: “there was something striking in his immobility, amidst that movement, and something touching and mysterious in that prayer that could be heard amidst the noise.”³

This new Christian image of Pushkin was not cut from whole cloth. In going through Pushkin’s papers on the tsar’s orders (and in the presence of a vigilant gendarme general), Zhukovsky discovered not only the unpublished “Bronze Horseman” and another masterpiece, his testament-like “The Monument” (after Horace), but also a cycle of poems on biblical themes, known to no one; Zhukovsky was particularly struck by the verse transposition of St. Efraim of Syria’s prayer for Great Lent, “Lord and Master of my life …”

The poem, probably written a few months before Pushkin’s death, was so sincere and powerful that Zhukovsky took it to Nicholas, who was also quite moved by it. The empress asked for a copy of Pushkin’s prayer for herself.

This “new, improved” Pushkin—a firm Christian and faithful servant of the Sovereign, carefully presented by Zhukovsky—proved to be an extremely successful construct, surviving eighty years, until the revolution of 1917. In the Soviet era this image of Pushkin was, of course, rejected and replaced with just the opposite—Pushkin as flaming atheist and revolutionary. But the old image rose once again from the ashes, like the Phoenix, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, by now lasting longer than some of Zhukovsky’s best poems.