Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Nicholas II was two years older than Lenin, one born in 1868, the other, in 1870. Both were well-educated, one at home, the other at a gymnasium (Lenin was the son of the inspector of public schools from the provincial city of Simbirsk). Lenin was an outstanding student, which could not be said of Nicholas II, but both studied conscientiously.

All the Romanovs considered themselves professional military men, therefore the accent in Nicholas’s education was on military matters. Lenin got a law degree from St. Petersburg University. But their fundamental cultural baggage was remarkably similar, because in the reign of Alexander III (1881–1894) a unified national cultural canon was formed in Russia.

By that time, the cult of Pushkin as the greatest national poet was established, while the previously sanctioned official reverence for Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, and Zhukovsky dimmed significantly. Only the fabulist Krylov remained popular of the old classics. The grand figure of Gogol was no longer controversial, and his greatness was recognized, like Pushkin’s, by both the right and the left. Turgenev was making his way to classic status, especially his early prose, A Sportsman’s Sketches. Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov was also included in the canon.

The scattered accounts of contemporaries confirm that this cultural canon was strongly ingrained in both Nicholas and Lenin. Moreover, it was received by both explicitly as canon—that is, as mandatory cultural knowledge as necessary for every educated person as brushing teeth and washing hands.

It is noteworthy that neither Nicholas II nor Lenin ever rejected this canon publicly. In Nicholas’s case that is understandable: to a great degree the canon was formulated from above and therefore reflected the views of the authorities. Much more curious is Lenin’s obvious acquiescence.

It is clear in Lenin’s attitude toward Pushkin. For Nicholas, Pushkin was a classic. When he was heir, he played Onegin in a family dramatization of Eugene Onegin, and according to the rather patronizing notation in the diary of his uncle, Grand Duke Konstantin (the poet K.R.), “He declaimed Onegin’s monologue very sweetly and clearly. Only in his voice could you hear that he was quite nervous.”³ The first official Russian literary prize, instituted under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, was called the Pushkin Prize for a reason: the authorities saw his name as the most authoritative.

But Lenin was another matter. Early on, he fell under the influence of revolutionary ideologues, one of whom was Dmitri Pisarev, notorious for his vicious attacks on Pushkin, like this sarcastic pronouncement: “No Russian poet can inspire in his readers such total indifference to the people’s suffering, such profound scorn for honest poverty, and such systematic revulsion for honest labor as Pushkin.”

While Pisarev’s rebuke may sound very “Leninist” in spirit and style today, Lenin himself, albeit a faithful student of Russian nihilists and radicals of the 1860s, never attacked Pushkin in public (nor did he praise him particularly).

We can guess Lenin’s real attitude toward Pushkin from a curious incident recounted by Nadezhda Krupskaya, his widow. In 1921, Lenin and Krupskaya visited a Moscow student dormitory to see a daughter of Inessa Armand, the recently deceased love of Lenin’s life (and Party comrade). Lenin, Krupskaya, and Armand had a Party ménage à trois for a rather long time.

The students were happy to see Lenin and bombarded him with questions. Lenin, in turn, asked them, “What are you reading? Do you read Pushkin?” The response was, “Oh, no. Pushkin was a bourgeois. We read Mayakovsky.” Lenin, who did not like the avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, said only, “I think Pushkin is better.”

Krupskaya added naively in her account, “After that Ilyich [as the Party comrades called him] was a bit kinder to Mayakovsky,” because the name reminded him of “the young people, full of life and joy, ready to die for Soviet power, unable to find the words in contemporary language to express themselves and seeking that expression in the hard-to-understand poems of Mayakovsky.”⁴

The blinkered Krupskaya did not notice the grotesqueness of her image of young people “full of life and joy” yet “ready to die,” or the ruthlessness of her childless spouse, pleased by the sight of that young cannon fodder. And it’s interesting how casually Lenin took the quintessentially nihilist putdown of Pushkin as bourgeois: did he think so, as well, but did not want to say?