Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

“Barkov’s Shadow,” a dirty joke delivered with a non-Barkovian light touch, was a literary lampoon attacking Pushkin’s poetic opponents, who are thwarted by the towering figure of the legendary Barkov,

With lowered pants,

With fat prick in hand,

With sagging balls …

In this dangerous genre, which requires considerable panache and at the same time self-control to succeed, Pushkin had also a good teacher in the family: his uncle Vassily Pushkin (1766–1830), author of the frivolous poetic masterpiece “Dangerous Neighbor,” a hilarious tale of debauchery in a Moscow bordello.

Vassily Pushkin has two buxom whores whiling away the time between clients by reading the works of the author’s literary foe: “A real talent will find admirers everywhere!” This sarcastic line became popular. (“Dangerous Neighbor” fared better in Soviet times than “Barkov’s Shadow”—it was published several times, perhaps because Lenin once approvingly quoted a line from Vassily Pushkin.)

Young Pushkin’s erotic masterpiece was the narrative poem “The Gabrieliad,” written in 1821, when he wasn’t yet twenty-two. It does not contain a single vulgarity, which makes it all the more alluring. Its offense comes from the blasphemous plot, a parody of the Annunciation: the holy Mary gives herself “in the same day to Satan, archangel, and God.”

The poem, like many of its ilk, was circulated widely in anonymous handwritten, samizdat copies. It was forbidden fruit twice over, being both erotic and profane. The thunder struck in 1828 when the serfs of a retired officer reported to the metropolitan of St. Petersburg that their master read them a “blasphemous poem,” which turned out to be “The Gabrieliad.”

The case reached Nicholas, who inquired whether Pushkin was the author of those sacrilegious verses. Pushkin denied it at first, maintaining that “not in one of my works, even those of which I most repent, is there a trace of sacrilege.” But in the end, the poet tried repeating the gambit that he had played two years earlier in his historic conversation with Nicholas at the Kremlin: in a personal letter to the tsar he admitted his authorship. After that Nicholas stopped further investigation: “The case is known to me in detail and completely closed.”

As the French ambassador perceptively wrote of Nicholas, “He is appreciative of those who trust him and is hurt when he is not trusted … Inspiring fear and respect in those around him, he is at the same time a reliable friend and in his heartfelt tenderness often resembles a romantic young woman, although sometimes along with that feeling he displays incredible severity and implacability at the slightest mistake on someone’s part.”²⁴

It was this somewhat mystifying duality that made Nicholas I so terrifyingly unpredictable (like Stalin later). Just a little more than a month after the audience he granted Pushkin in Moscow on September 8, 1826, which was so favorable for the dissident poet, Nicholas subjected another poet in Moscow to a harsh interrogation with tragic results.

The night of July 28 the young Alexander Polezhaev, a recent graduate of Moscow University and author of the poem “Sashka,” a satirical and very licentious imitation of the recently published first chapter of Eugene Onegin, was brought to the palace. That nocturnal summons (in fact, an arrest) was the result of an informant’s report to Nicholas that students at Moscow University were lewd drunkards, full of dangerous ideas. As an illustration, a manuscript copy of “Sashka” was appended.

Polezhaev’s poem, still printed only with cuts in Russia, is a bizarre example of Russian Romanticism, combining openly dissident statements (“Oppressing minds with chains, my stupid Homeland!”) with outright obscenity: “Flee, sadness and sorrows, into your fucking mother’s cunt! We haven’t fucked for such a long time / in such divine company!”

It has been said that Russians take every romantic idea to its extreme by trying to realize it in real life. This certainly holds true for Polezhaev’s strange fate. His life was changed irreversibly in 1826 by his encounter with Nicholas. The emperor commanded the poet to read his poem aloud. “I will show you what young men are studying at the university,” the tsar said to the minister of education, standing there, white with fear.

When the reading was over, Nicholas addressed the minister again: “What do you have to say? I will put an end to this libertinism, I will root it out!” He turned to Polezhaev: “You need to be punished as an example to others.”

Polezhaev was drafted as a soldier and sent with the infantry to the Caucasus, where he spent almost four years fighting in Chechnya and Dagestan, while continuing to write poetry.