Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Nicholas II continued acting as her patron all those years. As she later recalled, “[W]henever I had to turn to him, he fulfilled my requests without demur.”⁹ His beneficence was not affected by the fact that she moved on from him to being the mistress of first one and then another of his cousins, both grand dukes.

The diaries of Nicholas II are peppered with references to attending ballets at the Maryinsky—works by Tchaikovsky, Don Quixote and Daughter of the Pharaoh (“Pavlova danced divinely”).¹⁰ For the tsar these were evenings of great pleasure, a refined mix of aesthetics, nostalgia, and eroticism. Lenin, however, saw nothing but an aristocratic bordello.

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Lenin’s theatrical and musical tastes were quite different from the tsar’s. In the Soviet Union his comments on Beethoven, recorded by Maxim Gorky, were quoted endlessly:

I know nothing better than the Appassionata, I could listen to it every day. Astonishing, sublime music. I always think with pride, perhaps naïvely: what miracles people can create! … But I can’t listen to music frequently, it affects my nerves, I want to say sweet nothings and pat people on the head, people who live in a filthy hell but can create such beauty. But today you can’t pat anyone on the head—they’ll bite your hand off, and they should be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, even though we, ideally, are against any violence.¹¹

Those are intriguingly frank words, and they are confirmed in other memoirs of how Lenin reacted to music: it “upset,” “wearied,” “acted too strongly” on him. The musical impressions of Nicholas II, noted in his diaries, are just the opposite—“very beautiful,” “a beautiful opera,” “marvelous concert.”

These were two different ways of perceiving culture: for Nicholas II it was a pleasant entertainment; for Lenin, emotional torture. One was a British gentleman (everyone noted Nicholas’s anglicized manner) and the other a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia, absorbing culture intensely, overly so.

Like Nicholas II, Lenin was not tall, not very striking, but a rather sympathetic person. (They both rolled their Rs in a charming way. The choreographer George Balanchine told me about the tsar’s Rs; as a young dancer—then called Georgy Balanchivadze—he met Nicholas II in 1916.)¹² But in every other way, Lenin was the complete opposite of Nicholas. He was immeasurably more energetic, persistent, focused, and power hungry.

Nicholas II was a profoundly private and reserved man whom birth and destiny made ruler of a great country at a moment of acute crisis. The obligation to be monarch clearly wearied him; that may be why he abdicated.

Lenin, on the contrary, was a born leader, elbowed his way to power, grabbed it despite the misgivings of his closest comrades, and held on to it tightly until his physical strength faded. (He died in 1924, at the age of fifty-three. Peter I, with whom Lenin was frequently compared for boundless energy and revolutionary zeal, also died at the age of fifty-three, two centuries earlier.)

Nicholas II was brought up by his family and the imperial court. We do not know for sure whether a work of Russian culture ever wrought a life-changing shock for him. But we do know that about Lenin.

A decisive factor in Lenin’s development was What Is to Be Done?, the novel by the leading revolutionary author Nikolai Chernyshevsky, written when he was imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg and somehow passed by the censors for publication in 1863, in the most popular magazine of the time, Contemporary. Lenin admitted that Chernyshevsky’s novel “plowed me up profoundly.”

Lenin’s reaction was not unique. The revolutionary youth of the 1860s saw the novel as a revelation. What was the secret of its success? In our day the work seems rather flat and boring, despite the author’s clumsy attempt to enliven a preachy treatise with a naive, semi-detective plot. What Is to Be Done? appeared in the right place at the right time. Tectonic cultural shifts occurred in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861: education spread, the press grew livelier, and moral values were debated fiercely.

The old ways of life were discredited, and new ideals had not yet taken root. In that situation, the young generation thirsted for a “life textbook.” For some, Chernyshevsky’s novel became that textbook.

Chernyshevsky wrote his novel as a polemic against Turgenev’s recently published Fathers and Sons. He felt that Turgenev had caricatured revolutionaries as “nihilists.” So Chernyshevsky gave them another name—“new people”—and, most importantly, elaborated a detailed encyclopedia of everyday life for anyone who wanted to become a “new person”: the right way to live, work, love, eat, and rest.