Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

From Central Asia, annexed under Alexander II, the local military governor sent a rich collection of Turkmen weapons, ornaments, and costumes, which were studied and reproduced by the opera’s designers. The scenery used motifs from the popular paintings of Vassily Vereshchagin, who had depicted life and landscapes of Central Asia with ethnographic accuracy.

The premiere of Prince Igor in October 1890 was a triumph of a Russian opera. The subject—the clash between the ancient Russian prince and Asian tribes—resonated with Russia’s recent wars in Central Asia. The authorities had realized at last that the opera of the suspicious Bunch member, if you made the effort, could be used to support the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” formula.

In the case of Prince Igor, the concept was not realized as crude propaganda, but rather through subtle artistic contrasts between the Russian and Polovtsian camps, as represented by the strong and masculine Russian hero and the orgiastic world of the wild Polovtsians (with the show-stopping dances). It was done with such sweep and color and numerous refined and enchanting details that the attractive wrapping made the propaganda filling go down easily, leaving almost no bad aftertaste.

The St. Petersburg press made much of the great love of the “simple” public for Prince Igor and—which came as a surprise—of the opera subscribers (that is, higher society). The answer was easy: this unprecedented public unanimity was founded on nationalism.

Nationalism was the common ground that allowed monarchists and traditionalists (who loved the glorification of the unity of people and autocrat) to embrace the opera as much as the Westernizing aesthetes, like Benois, who later swore that before Prince Igor he had been mistaken about Russian history: “I thought the ancient Russians were savages or stupid, pathetic slaves of the nomads, not proud and noble masters. Borodin’s opera juxtaposed with amazing persuasion the European, Christian world with the Asian one.”¹⁸

It was a new phenomenon, compared to Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which was practically commissioned by Nicholas I. Prince Igor had in fact been imposed on Alexander III by a Russian millionaire, an interloper on the cultural scene. The emperor was not very pleased. He would have preferred to set the country’s cultural agenda personally, as his grandfather had done for so long.

Nicholas I saw Russian culture as the Neva River, flowing within the granite embankments constructed by autocracy. Its rare and desperate attempts to overflow could and should be blocked. Under Alexander III, Russian culture was a turbulent flow refusing to stay in its allotted bed. By now, it could not be fully controlled by royal command.

CHAPTER 14

Nicholas II and Lenin as Art

Connoisseurs

The son of Alexander III, after his father’s unexpected death in 1894 from nephritis, took the throne as Emperor Nicholas II, and was the last Romanov to rule the country. Nicholas became emperor at the age of twenty-six, even though he was not ready to lead, as he himself admitted. The new sovereign ruled at an increasingly turbulent time, until 1917, when—faced with a growing revolutionary wave and under pressure of his closest advisers—he was forced to abdicate.

After this revolution (which was to be called the February Revolution), Russia suddenly became the freest democratic republic in the world, and power was in the hands of a coalition of moderate liberals and socialists. But the Provisional Government proved to be really provisional: in the fall of 1917, it was ousted by the Bolsheviks, the radical wing of Russian social democracy headed by Vladimir Ulyanov (his nom de guerre was Lenin). In 1918, the Bolsheviks executed the deposed monarch and his family.

The Bolshevik regime, which many considered ephemeral, turned out to be quite tenacious, lasting—with some mutations—until 1991. Thus, Nicholas II ended the three-hundred-year-old history of the Romanov dynasty, and Lenin opened the seventy-four-year-old history of the Soviet Union. It is therefore useful to compare the cultural worldview of these two leaders in order to understand how much their cultural baggage influenced their political decisions and fate.

In Soviet times, they tried to present Nicholas II as an underachiever who did not even know the main authors of Russian literature, Turgenev and Tolstoy.¹ On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn in 1989 said of Lenin, whom he hated, “He had little in common with Russian culture.”² Obviously, both these extremes were dictated by political prejudices.