Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Inessa Armand died of typhus in 1920; she was buried by the Kremlin Wall. Her death was a terrible blow to Lenin and hastened his own death. He could no longer listen to Beethoven without emotional pain: the sounds reminded him of too much. Lenin, a true follower of Chernyshevsky, firmly decided that listening to music was “an unproductive waste of energy.”¹⁷ (I heard about this statement of Lenin’s in 1994 in Oslo from ninety-eight-year-old Maria Dobrowen, widow of the pianist Issai Dobrowen, who had played for Lenin.) Like a real “new man,” Lenin squashed his emotions. The politician in Lenin won over the private person. Nicholas II was just the opposite.

Lenin’s attitude toward dramatic theater was complicated, as it was toward music. We know about it from Krupskaya’s reminiscences. “Usually we’d go to the theater and leave after the first act. The comrades laughed at us, for wasting money.”

Krupskaya explained that it was not because Lenin was bored at the theater. On the contrary, he followed the action onstage with too much intensity and agitation, and therefore “the mediocrity of the play or falseness of the acting always jangled Vladimir Ilyich’s nerves.”

But when a production touched him, he could weep. There is evidence of this from a friend of Lenin’s abroad. In Geneva, at a play starring the celebrated Sarah Bernhardt, he was astonished to see Lenin furtively wiping away his tears: “The cruel, heartless Ilyich was weeping over La Dame aux camélias.”¹⁸

Lenin liked the Art Theater founded in 1889 in Moscow by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, although he did not become a habitué. For him this theater was part of the canon of topical “realistic” art—along with the Wanderers’ paintings, Tchaikovsky’s music, and the works of Chekhov. Here the tastes of Nicholas and Lenin were identical: for both of them it was the same mainstream cultural paradigm.

Nemirovich-Danchenko’s archives contain a draft of his letter dated April 19, 1906, to Count Sergei Witte, then chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, with a request to inform Nicholas II that the Art Theater was on the brink of financial collapse and needed a state subsidy. Nemirovich-Danchenko “most respectfully” pointed out that the theater’s recent tour in Europe was a great artistic success and was seen as evidence “of the power of Russia’s spiritual strengths.”¹⁹

The Art Theater was saved then by an eccentric Moscow millionaire, and the letter to Count Witte was never sent. But after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Lenin became leader of the new Russia, the Art Theater faced financial disaster again and applied to Lenin for help. Lenin agreed instantly to give them money. “How else? If there is a theater that we must rescue and preserve from the past at any cost, then it is of course the Art Theater.”²⁰ (As we know, Lenin was not so generous toward opera and ballet.)

This was part of Lenin’s cultural strategy: he felt that in Communist Russia the place of religion as “opium for the masses” should be taken by theater, and in his opinion, the Art Theater was best suited for that role. But precisely because Lenin understood the theater’s importance in the political and cultural upbringing of the people, he reacted so aggressively to its “errors.”

For Lenin, one such “error” was the Art Theater’s production in 1913 of a stage version of Dostoevsky’s The Devils. A scandal broke out over the play, elicited by an open letter in the popular newspaper The Russian Word from Maxim Gorky, the most famous Russian writer of the time, calling Dostoevsky the “evil genius” of Russian literature and The Devils a slanderous mockery of the revolution.

Gorky maintained that staging Dostoevsky in the current tense political situation was “a dubious idea aesthetically and certainly harmful socially” and called on “everyone who sees the need for healing Russian life to protest against the production of Dostoevsky’s novels in theaters.”²¹

Gorky’s anti-Dostoevsky letter created a sensation. Dostoevsky’s name was taking on the status of cultural symbol then. His rejection of revolution, expressed with such anger in The Devils, made the late writer a topical and controversial political figure whom conservative forces were pushing into the national cultural canon, against the fierce resistance of the progressive camp. For the Romanov family, Dostoevsky was “their” author, having expressed vividly their innermost thoughts on the Orthodox Church and autocracy being organic for Russia and on the harm of atheistic and socialistic ideas, spread by revolutionary “devils.”