Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

That conspiratorial theory, so typical for Russian history, with its secrets and mysterious deaths of national leaders, is still kept alive by several suspicious circumstances: the suddenness of Nicholas’s death, its coincidence with bad news from the Crimean front, and the contradictions in the official reports on the emperor’s final illness.

Dying in the Winter Palace, where he lay on a simple iron bed under a soldier’s overcoat rather than a blanket, Nicholas I spoke haltingly with a rasp to his heir, Grand Duke Alexander: “I hand over command, unfortunately not in the good order I would have liked, leaving you many worries and concerns.”

Those bitter words concerned the military and diplomatic situation, the only one that worried Nicholas. The failure in the war in the Crimea revealed the great vulnerability of his empire.

Nicholas had no idea that he was leaving yet another legacy to his son—a group of young men, his subjects, who would constitute the glory and pride of nineteenth-century Russian culture. They were Ivan Turgenev, thirty-six, Afanasy Fet, thirty-four, Fedor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Nekrasov, both thirty-three, Alexander Ostrovsky, thirty-one, and Leo Tolstoy, twenty-six.

All these young lions formed in Nicholas’s reign, when, according to yet another great contemporary of Nicholas I, the dissident Alexander Herzen, “educated Russia, with a ball and chain, eked out a pathetic existence in profound, humiliating, insulting silence.”

This polemical evaluation of cultural life under Nicholas as an intellectual desert was taken up by Soviet propaganda and survived for three-quarters of a century, turning into dogma. The real situation was not quite so black-and-white.

Let us recall such cultural titans as Pushkin, Gogol, and the composer Glinka, who all interacted with Nicholas. It is true that Catherine II was in close contact with the poet Derzhavin, and Alexander I with Karamzin and Zhukovsky. But in those days the Russian cultural elite was a compact group and its members naturally were part of the court circle as well.

The situation under Nicholas I was different: Glinka and Gogol had no entrée into royal circles. Their promonarchist views were not the result of special status in the court, but rather were formed at least in part thanks to the emperor’s skillful attitude and personal attention.

It should be no surprise that his contemporaries often had diametrically opposed views of Nicholas, influenced by their political convictions. In the opinion of conservative writer and critic Konstantin Leontiev, Nicholas I was the “ideal autocrat the likes of which history has not produced in a long time.”¹⁷

The radical liberal Herzen, on the contrary, saw in Nicholas misfortune for Russia and considered him one of the “military leaders who have lost everything civilian, everything human, and have only one passion left—to rule; narrow mind, no heart at all.”

Nicholas I’s historical standing was hopelessly damaged by the humiliating failure in the Crimean War. Even the monarchist and nationalist Tyutchev was disillusioned in his former idol.

Since Nicholas’s own main criterion for a nation’s grandeur was its military might, the severity of this judgment was warranted. The army created by Nicholas, his beloved child, did not stand the test. However, the ideological triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” developed under his aegis, proved to be much stronger. While sometimes vanishing from the cultural horizon, it has survived in its basic form to this day. It was used, with modifications to suit changing political realities, under Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II, and later even by Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and Vladimir Putin. For the Soviet leaders, orthodoxy was the Communist ideology, autocracy—the rule of the Party—and nationality remained. Under Putin, the triad morphed again: Russian Orthodoxy was returned, autocracy became paternalistic rule, and nationality persisted as nationalism.

PART IV

CHAPTER 9

Alexander II, Tolstoy,

Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

Alexander II, the son of Nicholas I, who took the throne on February 19, 1855, had been prepared for the role of monarch—thanks to the poet Zhukovsky—as none of his predecessors or descendants were or would be.

Zhukovsky oversaw the heir’s education for twelve years, from 1826 until 1838. All the classes throughout the period were guided by his detailed plan, approved by Nicholas. Zhukovsky concentrated on Russian literature and Russian history, and other experienced instructors taught the many other subjects.