Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

In the fall of 1837, eleven years after that meeting with the emperor, Polezhaev died in a military hospital in Moscow, exhausted by tuberculosis and alcoholism. Alexander Herzen described what happened to the poet’s body in his book of memoirs, My Past and Thoughts: “When a friend came to claim the body for burial, no one knew where it was; the soldier’s hospital trades in corpses: it sells them to the university, to the medical academy, it boils down skeletons, and so on. Finally, he found the body of poor Polezhaev in the cellar—it lay beneath others, and rats had gnawed off a foot.”

“Sashka” and other unprintable poems by Polezhaev became widely known, especially in military schools. This was an important subculture, since military service was central in the value system of the Russian elite: it was considered the only worthy occupation.

Drinking, debauchery, gambling, coarse and dangerous practical jokes, and hazing were typical military rituals. Dirty poems were an important component, and they were copied down in special underground notebooks. Lermontov had such a notebook with Polezhaev’s “Sashka” and other obscene works.

It is not surprising that Lermontov tried his hand at this genre. His so-called “Hussar” poems (“Peterhof Holiday” and “Ulan Woman,” among others) were popular at the military school where Lermontov was enrolled and later in the Guards, which were headed by Grand Duke Mikhail.

“Ulan Woman,” which graphically depicts group rape, was “the cadets favorite poem; probably even today the old notebook is secretly passed from hand to hand,” wrote a friend of Lermontov’s in 1856. Surely Grand Duke Mikhail knew the poem. The poet assumed that Mikhail gave it to his brother, Nicholas. But in this case, no punishment followed.

This was because, unlike Polezhaev’s works, Lermontov’s indecent poetry had no political underpinnings and as such became an accepted part of the Guards’ rituals. Lermontov’s obscenities were seen as mischief among one’s peers, while Polezhaev was an outsider: quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.

But naturally, Lermontov’s licentious poems (like similar works by Barkov and Pushkin) could never become part of the official culture. For the Romanovs, these “illegal” works by great poets (which could be read with a grin for relaxation—let’s not forget the tsar’s collection of erotica) made their creators somewhat unsavory.

Grand Duke Mikhail had Lermontov’s “Ulan Woman” in mind when he commented on Lermontov’s “The Demon”: “We had the Italian Beelzebub, the English Lucifer, the German Mephistopheles, and now there is the Russian Demon. That means there is more deviltry around. I just don’t understand who created whom: did Lermontov create the spirit of evil or did the spirit of evil create Lermontov?”²⁵

CHAPTER 8

Gogol, Ivanov, Tyutchev, and

the End of the Nicholas I Era

The literary sensation of the spring of 1835 was an essay by Vissarion Belinsky, a rising star of Russian criticism, which appeared in issues 7 and 8 of Telescope, a Moscow magazine. It was called “On the Russian Novella and the Novellas of Mr. Gogol,” and ecstatically praised two recently published collections by the twenty-six-year-old writer, which included his “Notes of a Madman,” “Nevsky Prospect,” and “Taras Bulba.”

Belinsky ended on an extremely high note: “What is Mr. Gogol in our literature? What is his place? … At the present time he is the head of literature, head of the poets; he is taking the place left by Pushkin.”

This provocative statement (later the critic would be dubbed “furious Vissarion”) hit two targets, pulling Pushkin from the literary throne and crowning young Gogol.

In his lifetime, Pushkin was buried more than once as a writer, but Belinsky was a particularly persistent gravedigger, writing that even in 1830 “the Pushkin period ended, since Pushkin himself ended, and with him his influence.” And this, even more painful (about the still-living Pushkin): “He died or maybe he’s just in a coma for a time.”

This was a hatchet job. What could Pushkin have felt reading these vicious attacks, while writing “The Bronze Horseman” and other poetic masterpieces?

Tellingly, Pushkin did not explode and merely rebuked Belinsky ironically in an anonymous note in his magazine, Contemporary: “If he combined his independence of thought and wit with more scholarship, more reading, more respect for tradition, more circumspection—in a word, more maturity, we would have a marvelous critic in him.”

The extremely ambitious Gogol was naturally very flattered by Belinsky’s praise. But it also put him in a corner: Gogol had positioned himself from the start as Pushkin’s most loyal student. He could not publicly agree with burying his idol alive.