Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Zhukovsky, with the tsar’s support, declared an active, energetic monarch the goal of his training, and developed a rather tight schedule for Alexander: reveille at six a.m., lights out at ten p.m. After prayers and breakfast, there were five hours of classes (with an hour break), two hours for lunch (with a walk and rest before and after), more classes from five to seven, then gymnastics and dinner. Before bed, there was time for reflection and diary writing, which Zhukovsky considered mandatory.

Nicholas believed that as a Romanov, the heir “must be military to the bone, otherwise he will be lost in our age.”¹ Zhukovsky disagreed: “The passion for military craft will cramp his soul: he will become accustomed to see the people as his regiment and his Homeland as a barracks.”²

Following Zhukovsky’s curriculum, Alexander read The Iliad, Don Quixote, and Gulliver’s Travels and, in Russian literature, works by Karamzin and Pushkin; once, Pushkin read aloud his ultrapatriotic poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” in the heir’s presence. Zhukovsky and the fabulist Krylov read and explained their own writings to him.

The young heir learned to shoot and fence, and he rode well and danced gracefully. Like his father, he liked to draw (especially sketches of new military uniforms) and loved opera (especially Rossini and Glinka, for his A Life for the Tsar). Alexander and his two classmates published a children’s magazine called “The Ant Hill,” which was supervised by Nicholas I personally.

Alexander was brought up to be rather broad-minded with a European worldview (he knew English, French, German, and Polish), and he grew up to be much milder and more compassionate than his severe father. Zhukovsky enjoyed a good cry (a tribute to Romantic ideals) and taught his pupil not to be ashamed of tears. The poet wanted to form a clement sovereign. Zhukovsky had released his serfs, a rare gesture that even Pushkin had not attempted. He taught Alexander that serfdom was evil.

Tellingly, Nicholas did not oppose this. He had long contemplated emancipation of the serfs but never took the step: he was afraid it would shatter the empire. Nicholas refused to pardon the Decembrists he had exiled to Siberia, despite the requests from Zhukovsky and others. But he listened to his son. When Alexander and Zhukovsky and their retinue traveled through Russia in 1837 (part of the heir’s education), Alexander met the Decembrists in distant Siberia and was horrified by their ordeal. He asked his father to at least ameliorate their living conditions, which was done. (Later, when he became tsar, his first act was to pardon the Decembrists.)

Zhukovsky considered bringing up Alexander to the Russian throne as the most important work of his life—his best poem. In 1841 he retired from his post as tutor and moved to Germany, having married a Romantic maiden almost a third his age. After bearing two children, his wife fell into a deep depression (it was hereditary), spending weeks at a time in bed. Zhukovsky lived in despair: “My poor wife is like a skeleton, and I can’t alleviate her suffering: there is nothing to relieve her of her black thoughts!”

Zhukovsky went blind, but continued to record his poems with a machine he invented. He died in Baden-Baden at the age of sixty-nine. His body was shipped to St. Petersburg, where he was buried at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, next to the grave of Karamzin. The proximity was symbolic. If not for Pushkin, Zhukovsky and Karamzin would be considered the fathers of the new Russian literature: Karamzin of prose, and Zhukovsky of poetry. The rare combination of talent, grace, and kindness that these two men embodied was probably not seen again in Russian culture until Anton Chekhov.

On February 6, 1856, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich went to a dinner given by Contemporary (arguably the best Russian magazine of the time). The monthly dinners celebrating the latest issue were a tradition started by the editor, the great poet Nikolai Nekrasov, at the helm from 1847.

Grigorovich was bringing another of the magazine’s authors with him—the clumsy, ugly, and passive-aggressive Count Leo Tolstoy. The twenty-seven-year-old count had already published several prose pieces in Contemporary, including the novellas Childhood and Adolescence and sketches from his experiences in the Crimean War, but he still did not feel like an insider.

On the way, the gentlemanly Grigorovich gave the grumpy Tolstoy advice on how to behave at the dinner—not in the sense of social etiquette (the magazine’s crowd did not care about that) but in terms of political correctness. Grigorovich worried that the young count, the only of the magazine’s authors to sport a military uniform, had an embarrassing inclination to shoot from the hip, making provocative pronouncements—for example, that Shakespeare was nothing more than an empty phrasemonger.