Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Nicholas found Zhukovsky’s image of Pushkin as an Orthodox national poet and monarchist attractive also because it fit the new ideological formula “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” conceived by his minister of national education Sergei Uvarov and approved by the monarch in 1833 as the state doctrine.

Historians point out that Uvarov (a liberal in his youth, a friend of Pushkin’s, who had reoriented himself and made a brilliant career under Nicholas) created the triad as a polemical response to the slogan of the French Revolution—“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”—using a Russian military battle cry during the war with Napoleon: “For Faith, Tsar, and Homeland!”⁴

Minister Uvarov was a smart and cynical man. In 1835 a subordinate recorded in his diary Uvarov’s political and cultural credo: “We, that is, people of the nineteenth century, are in a difficult position: we live among political storms and turbulence. People are changing their way of life and themselves, agitating, moving forward. But Russia is still young, virginal, and must not taste, at least not yet, these bloody troubles. We must continue her youth and in the meantime educate her.”⁵

Nicholas I’s policies (as were those of almost every Russian ruler after him, to the present day) were intended to maintain the country’s cultural “innocence” for as long as possible. At some point the emperor decided that Pushkin, much more suitable as the instrument of cultural manipulation now that he was dead, could be used for this purpose. That is why the tsar eventually approved the legend that Zhukovsky created. There was, however, a subversive element in the legend.

The oppositionist aspect of Pushkin’s posthumous image was also formulated by the clever Zhukovsky, in the letter to Benckendorff: “Russia’s first poet” fell “victim of a foreign libertine,” who was outrageously shielded by the government and police.

Zhukovsky’s description of the great poet as victim of the intrigues and hypocrisy of the upper circles was directly influenced by a poem that circulated throughout Russia right after Pushkin’s death, written by an unknown twenty-two-year-old Hussar, Mikhail Lermontov.

The effect of his poem, “The Death of a Poet,” was an illustration of the clichéd story of the young genius who wakes up famous one day. Brought up by a wealthy grandmother, Lermontov started writing at fourteen and at sixteen noted, “I am either God or no one!” He had written about three hundred poems before “The Death of a Poet”—that is, almost three-fourths of his lyric output—and also twenty-four epic poems and five dramas. But by 1837 only one poem and one epic poem had been published, both attracting little notice.

But “The Death of a Poet” stunned contemporaries, one of whom later recalled, “I doubt that a poem in Russia ever had such a huge and universal effect.”⁶ Lermontov spoke out against Pushkin’s persecutors passionately and powerfully:

You, greedily crowded around the throne,

Executioners of Freedom, Genius, and Glory!

You hide behind the law,

The justice and truth must be silent!

There is so much bitterness and anger in the poem that we tend to forget that Lermontov began writing it the minute he heard of the duel and finished his verse obituary (the first fifty-six lines) while Pushkin was still alive—he was in such a hurry to express his emotions.

“The Death of a Poet” was Lermontov’s “graveside homily and simultaneously his throne speech,”⁷ with thousands of copies flooding St. Petersburg. Lermontov was immediately declared Pushkin’s heir, and, inspired by the sudden fame, he wrote the last sixteen lines, ending with the famous words:

And you will not be able to wash away with your black blood The Poet’s righteous blood!

A copy of the poem, with someone’s caption “Call to Revolution,” was immediately brought to Nicholas. At the same time, the emperor received a denunciation from Count Benckendorff: “This poem is insolent and its ending is shameless free-thinking, more than criminal.”⁸

Nicholas irritably minuted in response, “Fine poem, I must say … For now I have commanded the senior medic of the guards corps to visit this gentleman and determine if he is mad; and then we will deal with him in accordance with the law.”⁹

As punishment for his “seditious” poem, Lermontov was sent to the army in the Caucasus, where a war continued between Russian troops and intransigent mountain tribes. (He was soon returned to St. Petersburg through the efforts of his influential grandmother.)

Lermontov’s reputation as the reincarnation of Pushkin was thereby entrenched, which was a paradox, for his creative credo was rather anti-Pushkin in its radical Romanticism, darkened by ennui and wild passions.