Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

In a rare occasion, the praise of the tastemakers coincided with the autocrat’s approval; thus, the reaction of the cautious high officials and their wives, who filled the orchestra seats and boxes, was predetermined. They had watched closely to see how the unfamiliar and puzzling music was received in the imperial box. The tsar’s demonstrative tear had its magical effect: soon after, the entire theater resounded with the sobs of the fashionable audience.

A special treat highlighted the finale: Zhukovsky had suggested the mind-boggling panorama of Mikhail Romanov in a gilded cart entering Red Square with the Kremlin in the background and being met by the joyous crowd, which was cleverly magnified by cardboard figures that created the illusion of an endless mass of people (the equivalent of today’s computerized effects in film).

According to the report in the government newspaper, “at the end of the opera the author of the music was unanimously called out and received a most gracious sign of good will from the Crowned Patron of fine arts accompanied by the audience’s loud clapping.”¹⁵ Glinka was called into the imperial box, where he was thanked first by Nicholas I and then by the empress and their children.

Soon after, the composer received a royal gift: a ring with a topaz, circled with three rows of “marvelous diamonds,” costing 4,000 rubles, an impressive sum in those days.

Glinka’s opera was instantly taken to heart by St. Petersburg’s educated circles: “In societies of the capital, large and small, brilliant and modest, they discuss that masterly work by our young composer and even dance quadrilles made up of his delightful melodies.”¹⁶

Nicholas I could be pleased: the work created under his auspices and even with his participation had entered life and history. The artistic elite considered A Life for the Tsar as entrée for Russian music onto the European stage. But for the emperor it was more important that the opera vividly fixed in the public mind the idyllic and patriotic story of the accession to the throne in 1613 of the first Romanov tsar.

The true events of young Mikhail Romanov’s accession were, of course, much more complex and cynical than what Nicholas I wanted to present more than two hundred years later. The person selected to be tsar in 1613 was, in the caustic remark of the great Russian historian Vassily Kliuchevsky, “not the most talented, but the most convenient … Mikhail Romanov is still young, his mind is not mature, and he will do our bidding.”¹⁷ Many thought and hoped that Tsar Mikhail would not last long on the throne. But he persevered, and reigned for a mostly uneventful thirty-two years.

In 1645, after Mikhail’s death, the boyars swore in his sixteen-year-old son, Alexei, who turned out to be a much more significant figure. His contemporaries dubbed Alexei “the Most Gentle,” and he is best known today as the father of the reformist Peter the Great.

Compared to his famous son’s intense activity, Alexei’s thirty-year reign may be seen as a time of stagnation. But it was in that period, which was in fact rather turbulent, that the innovative trends, which became so visible under Peter I, first manifested themselves in Russia.

Alexei was intensely religious, a quality that reappeared in later Romanovs. He prayed first thing in the morning, and as an experienced churchgoer could make a thousand or fifteen hundred bows to the ground in the course of several hours of prayer. (Since the tsar tended to be corpulent, those bows also served as a good fitness workout.)

Alexei was well versed in religious rituals, interfering in church services and correcting the monks. He fasted strictly eight months of the year, during which time he dined no more than three times a week, the rest of the time taking only black bread with salt. (Also a good habit.) Alexei performed these rituals easily, without strain or pretense.

Kind by nature, “with meek features and gentle eyes,”¹⁸ the tsar could still sometimes lose his temper and beat the person who angered him. But he would just as quickly calm down, and people did not bear grudges against him.

Still, the royal piety and kindness did not avert the great church schism, so fateful for Russia, or the cruel conflict between the tsar and the greatest writer of the period, Archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620 or 1621 to 1682), author of the famous Life, the first autobiographical work written in Russia.

Both tragedies were closely related. The church schism was the result of the ecclesiastical ambitions of Tsar Alexei and his “bosom friend” Patriarch Nikon. They both envisioned a universal Orthodox empire with Moscow as its center—the realization of an idea first proposed in 1510 by the elder Filofey (Philoteus) of the Elizarov Monastery, that Moscow would be the Third Rome (after the fall of the Second Rome, Constantinople).