Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

When he got a letter from his wife with an innocent, even naive hint—“I have the most seductive dreams, and there is a lot in them of one very, very sweet and dear man, whom you know very well—guess who?”—he responded with a hot epistle in which she was later forced to erase twenty-eight lines from one page alone. Dostoevsky concluded his erotic outburst with a confession: “Anna, you can tell just from this page what’s happening to me. I’m in a delirium, I’m afraid I’ll have a fit. I kiss your hands and palms, and feet, and all of you.”¹⁴

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There is a story that Turgenev told, recorded by the writer Ieronim Yasinsky, that Dostoevsky came to Turgenev once and started “nervously” telling him how he bought sexual favors from a twelve-year-old girl for 500 rubles. Turgenev interrupted him and ordered him from the house immediately, and Dostoevsky allegedly confessed that he had made it up to “amuse” Turgenev.¹⁵

We know that Turgenev considered Dostoevsky to be the Russian Marquis de Sade from his letter to the writer Saltykov-Shchedrin dated September 24, 1882. Turgenev wrote with disgust that de Sade “insists with particular pleasure on the perverted voluptuous bliss that comes from imposing sophisticated torture and suffering” and added, “Dostoevsky also describes in detail the pleasures of one such connoisseur in one of his novels.”¹⁶

By this Turgenev clearly meant “Stavrogin’s confession” from The Devils. Turgenev had an account to settle with that novel. Besides the fact that he was caricatured in it as the pathetic Westernizer writer Karmazinov, he was envious of the book’s great success.

In 1862, Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, in which he first introduced the revolutionary “nihilist” character in his protagonist Bazarov. The author himself and the critics declared Bazarov “the new hero of our times,” and he was the subject of endless debate and controversy. This was the peak of Turgenev’s topicality for Russian readers.

Dostoevsky conceived his novel in great part as a polemical response to Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s Bazarov was described by the author as “a grim, wild, big figure.” Dostoevsky’s nihilists are petty devils; he wanted to show how the Bazarov type had degenerated in post-reform Russia.

When he presented his Devils in 1873 to the future Emperor Alexander III, Dostoevsky explained in the accompanying letter that there was a straight line “from fathers to sons,” and that the Westernizers and liberals, like Belinsky and Turgenev, torn “from the native and unique sources of Russian life,” engendered contemporary terrorists.

Turgenev apparently was aware of Dostoevsky’s court maneuvers. In 1876, when Saltykov-Shchedrin asked why he wasn’t the tsarevich’s (that is, the future Alexander III’s) tutor, Turgenev responded proudly, although perhaps not quite sincerely, that he did not wish to be “the domestic author” of the Romanov family à la Dostoevsky: “You mention teaching the heir; but it was after Fathers and Sons that I distanced myself more than ever from the circle in which I basically never did have entrée and writing or working for which I would have considered stupid and shameful.”¹⁷

When Dostoevsky died on January 28, 1881 (a pulmonary artery burst, blood gushing from his mouth), the authorities did not know how to react. The day was saved by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who in 1880 became high procurator of the Holy Synod (in effect minister of religious affairs) and was one of the closest advisers of Alexander II, and subsequently of Alexander III (whose tutor he was), and even of Nicholas II.

Pobedonostsev, who was described by his enemies as a “clean-shaven bat in eyeglasses and on its hind feet,” was a powerful and unique figure. A lawyer by education, Pobedonostsev had a broad cultural outlook, adored the poetry of Tyutchev and Fet, and helped obtain state subsidies for Tchaikovsky.

Pobedonostsev’s views were extremely conservative. His lodestar was the ideological triad of the era of Nicholas I (whom he revered as the greatest Russian monarch)—“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” The religious philosopher and critic Konstantin Leontyev, who knew Pobedonostsev well, said, “He is a very useful man; but how? He is like frost: he prevents further rot; but nothing will grow around him.”

Pobedonostsev considered democratic ideas and parliamentarism “the great lie of our time.” He read the daily press closely and hated it, blaming it for revolutionary ferment. He maintained that in the new era the recently illiterate Russia had suddenly ended up “with newspaper instead of book in hand,” which was a “great disaster” for the country, leaving it vulnerable to liberal propaganda.

Dostoevsky considered Pobedonostsev his fellow ideologue and patron, and the latter esteemed the writer as a torchbearer of conservative philosophy; in 1880 he arranged an audience for Dostoevsky with the heir to the throne and his wife.