Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Turgenev reacted angrily to his defeat. When he returned to Paris, he told friends how much he “hated all the lies and falsehoods of Dostoevsky’s sermon” and how everyone “seemed to lose their minds, awed by the incongruous nonsense from Dostoevsky, how all of them, as if drunk or on drugs, practically climbed the walls … and cried, and wept, and embraced as if it were Easter.”¹⁷

Some seven months later, Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg at the age of fifty-nine of hemorrhage in his throat, and two and a half years after that, in Bougival outside Paris, in terrible suffering from spinal cancer alleviated only with massive doses of morphine, Turgenev died at the age of sixty-four.

A few years before his death, Turgenev wrote in his diary, “Midnight. I am at my desk again; below, my poor friend is singing something in her completely broken voice; and my soul is darker than the darkest night … The grave seems in a hurry to swallow me up: like an instant, the day flies by, empty, meaningless, colorless … I have no right to live, nor any desire to do so; there is nothing more to do, nothing to expect, nothing even to want.”¹⁸

CHAPTER 10

Herzen, Tolstoy, and the Women’s Issue

After the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the moral climate changed: the poet Tyutchev called it a thaw. A contemporary marveled, “Everyone senses that a huge stone has been lifted from each of us, and that it is easier to breathe.”¹ The new monarch, Alexander II, sent clear liberal signals.

Expectation of reforms was in the air, clearly needed after the disastrous Crimean War. From the abolition of serfs to fashions and hairdos, everything was subject to debate. Suddenly, there was talk of the “new man.”

While Russia was backward, the Russian elite was in the avant-garde when it came to navel gazing and sophisticated emotions. While millions of Russian serfs lived under medieval laws, a handful of refined minds experimented with new relations between the sexes and the “emancipation of the flesh.”

Russia had no real bourgeoisie, but the radical intellectuals were already rejecting bourgeois views of morality. The American cultural historian Marshall Berman dubbed this “the modernism of underdevelopment,” when culturally innovative models were debated in a bubble, based on social fantasies and dreams.²

One of those isolated dreamers was the great Russian dissident and social philosopher Alexander Herzen, born in the fateful year of confrontation with Napoleon, 1812 (he was saved from a burning house as an infant during the fire of Moscow), to the family of Moscow millionaire Ivan Yakovlev, who named his illegitimate but beloved son (his mother was a poor German woman) Herzen, from the German das Herz, the heart.

Brilliantly educated, Herzen grew up a rebel; reading Pushkin, Schiller, and Rousseau (he knew German and French fluently from childhood and then added Italian and English) awakened in him, as he later recalled, “an insuperable hatred of all slavery and all tyranny.” Inevitably, Herzen was sent by Nicholas I into exile in the provinces. In 1847, Herzen and his family fled to Europe: “I was beckoned by distant vistas, open struggle and free speech.”

Herzen was a short, plump gentleman, clean shaven, with long hair combed straight back in the Moscow manner, very mobile, and his constant inner agitation made him speak standing, quickly, in a loud voice. When he settled in Paris, Herzen transformed himself: he grew a stylish beard, cut his hair, and traded the clumsy Moscow long frock coat for a fashionable Parisian jacket.

Cosmopolitan at heart, Herzen quickly plunged headlong into the turbulent life in Paris—political, cultural, and social—that was in such sharp contrast with his Moscow existence, swallowing up all the latest books and splashing happily in the “sparkling sea,” as he called it, of the European press. He entered Parisian democratic and socialist circles, and leftists of every rank, stripe, and nationality delighted in Herzen’s heartfelt speeches denouncing serfdom and other horrors of the autocratic Russia they all hated.

It was difficult to make such an impression on this brilliant group of ambitious and confident activists who lived in a dizzying world of bold ideas and pitiless polemics, and Herzen would not have been able to do it, had he not arrived in Paris a very wealthy man.

In Moscow, Herzen inherited a lot of money from his father, but that just alienated him from his old friends there. Herzen recalled that “the appearance of some silver tray and candelabra in his new household stunned his friends into silence: sincerity and fun vanished as soon as they encountered ready comfort.”³