Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

This may be one of the reasons for Nicholas’s indulgent attitude toward Briullov. His education, etiquette, and Christian morality demanded strict behavior of the emperor. Art and artists opened a window into another beckoning world.

All of St. Petersburg gossiped about the love affairs of fashionable artists. Orest Kiprensky, author of perhaps the best portrait of Pushkin (1827) and drawing teacher of Grand Duke Mikhail, was rumored to have murdered his Roman mistress and model. A long trail of colorful stories followed another prominent artist of the period, the Pole Alexander Orlovsky, a favorite of Grand Duke Konstantin: as a youth he had participated in the Polish uprising against Catherine II, then traveled around Europe with an Italian circus, and supposedly lived a life of drunkenness and revelry.

Settled in St. Petersburg with his French wife, who owned the capital’s zoo, Orlovsky became a master of lithography (taking pride in having introduced the technique to Russia). One of Orlovsky’s friends was Pushkin, who mentioned the artist in a frivolous fairy-tale poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820): “Take up your quick pencil, / Orlovsky, draw the night and battle.” But what “nocturnal battle” did Pushkin have in mind?

Orlovsky’s album of erotic drawings, dating to 1810–1821, was reproduced for the first time in Russia in 1991: a penis taking a walk, observed by a lovely lady; a caricature of an official with a phallus for a face; and so on. This made previously secret aspects of Orlovsky’s scandalous popularity more obvious.²²

Briullov’s love affairs were also the subject of much talk (a young Frenchwoman drowned herself in the Tiber over him). But most of the gossip was over his family drama. At the age of thirty-nine he married the eighteen-year-old beauty Emilia Timm, daughter of Riga’s burgomaster, and on the eve of the wedding learned from her that she was in an incestuous relationship with her father. Nevertheless, Briullov and Emilia wed, but according to the artist, her affair with her father continued.

Briullov applied for a divorce. Learning that Nicholas had taken a personal interest in the case, Briullov wrote an explanatory letter to Count Benckendorff: “The girl’s parents and their friends have slandered me in public, giving as the reason for the divorce a completely different circumstance, an alleged argument, which never happened, between me and her father while drinking champagne, as if I were a drunkard.”²³ (Briullov’s love of wine was no secret. Even Gogol, his devoted admirer, called the artist a “well-known drunk” in a letter to a friend.)

It was very hard to astonish St. Petersburg with excessive drinking: it was the natural attribute of the creative personality, since the legendary times of Lomonosov and Barkov. But incest was another matter, adding spice to the divorce case, and transforming it into a “story.”

Lermontov explained what that meant in his unfinished novel about high-society life, Princess Ligovskaya: “O! A story is a terrible thing; whether you behaved nobly or vilely, are right or not, could have avoided it or not, but if your name is mixed up in a story, you lose everything: the approval of society, career, respect of friends … Being caught up in a story! There can be nothing worse, no matter how the story ends!”

After Nicholas’s intervention, Briullov was granted his divorce almost immediately: it was decided that “relations between spouses were extremely sad” and “neither trying church repentance nor living apart for several months can bring about reconciliation.” But disapproving glances from high society followed Briullov for a long time.

An interesting phenomenon in Nicholas’s strict era was the allure of erotic poetry. Like nineteenth-century Russian erotic drawings, it had its roots in French erotic verse and lithographs.

Ivan Barkov, the scandalous poet of Catherine’s day who wrote obscene odes, ballads, and epigrams that circulated in innumerable copies, intrigued Pushkin. Pushkin as a great master of erotic poetry was a topic that in Russia was practically banned for a long time, and even now they try to tiptoe around it: the authorities still believe that writing about it would demean the image of the country’s greatest poet.

Yet the erotic line was always important for Pushkin. People sometimes forget that Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, which is now studied in schools, was considered indecent in its day.

The seriously obscene ballad “Barkov’s Shadow,” which specialists today almost unanimously ascribe to Pushkin, was not published in Russia until 1991—that is, after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In it, the defrocked priest Ebakov (“Fuckov”) is visited by the ghost of Barkov, who gives him fantastic sexual powers in exchange for the promise to praise Barkov everywhere.