In 1802, Karamzin took charge of Russia’s first political magazine, The Herald of Europe, which quickly grew in popularity: it had twelve hundred subscribers, an impressive number for those days. He was the first Russian editor to draw a salary, a substantial one: 3,000 rubles a year.12
In 1803, with the help of his older friend, the poet and Mason Mikhail Muravyev, who had taught young Alexander Russian literature, Karamzin petitioned the emperor to be named official historian of Russia. In principle, this was not an unusual request. In that period, the Russian government was assigning knowledgeable people to research topical military or political issues—embryonic think tanks, without special privileges or the crown’s personal involvement.
Karamzin received more attention: Alexander by special decree made him historian of the Russian Empire, with a stipend of 3,000 rubles (had he made inquiries about Karamzin’s magazine salary?). Also, Karamzin was not expected to prepare a text by a certain deadline, as were the other advisors. All that was expected—only!—was that one day he would write the first “real” history of Russia.
Thus, Karamzin was charged with the responsibility for a unique national project and fell under the emperor’s personal patronage. There had been earlier attempts to write the history of Russia, but they were unreadable. Alexander, who was an admirer of Karamzin’s poetry and prose, wanted a work on a European level, a narrative that would combine the seriousness and depth of research with entertaining and elegant style.
Alexander got more than he had expected. In 1811 in Tver, at his sister’s salon, the emperor enjoyed the author’s reading of excerpts from the first volumes of The History of the Russian State. Then, on the evening before his departure, Alexander read the manuscript of “The Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia.” As a result, Alexander was markedly cold in his farewells to Karamzin.
What was the cause of the emperor’s overnight reversal in attitude toward his historian?
The text Alexander read by candlelight that night began with a brief outline of Russian history from the beginning until 1801, brilliantly written: an inspired poem in prose. Then came an evaluation of the political achievements of the first years of Alexander’s reign and Karamzin’s recommendations—the part that upset and angered the emperor greatly.
Never had a Russian writer with access to the court dared to criticize his sovereign so sharply and practically to his face. The paradox was that Karamzin did it in order “to protect the emperor from himself.”
Alexander dreamed of reform and with the help of his adviser Speransky explored some possibilities for implementing them, while Karamzin, with the passion of a gifted poet and the skill of a professional political journalist, tried to warn him off.
In small, private conversations, Alexander spoke of the need to limit autocracy, but Karamzin maintained the opposite: “Autocracy founded and resurrected Russia … What except unlimited single rule could create unity in this vast country?”13
The irony of the situation was that Karamzin, in his heart of hearts a republican (as he himself admitted sometimes), after many years of studying Russian history came to the conclusion of the need and benefit for Russia of an autocratic ruler. It was just the reverse with Alexander I: his long-held ideas of liberal reforms came from his reason, but in his heart he still was an absolute monarch.
That may be why Alexander’s autocratic impulses prevailed: in 1812 he suddenly fired the liberal Speransky and sent him into exile. There is no doubt that Karamzin’s “Memoir,” by its timely appearance, played an important role in this dramatic political turnaround. It is just as obvious that both men—tsar and poet—made a corresponding note in their memory.
At the same time, Alexander’s relations with Napoleon—described in Karamzin’s “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia” as “a genius of ambition and victory”—deteriorated. The short Napoleon somehow always managed to look down at the Russian emperor, which irritated Alexander immensely. He wrote to his smart sister, Ekaterina, “Bonaparte thinks I am nothing but a fool. He laughs best who laughs last.” (Napoleon, in his turn, said in 1812: “In five years I will be master of the world: only Russia is left, and I will crush her.”)
On June 11, 1812, the French army of 600,000 men led by Napoleon invaded Russia. The Russians called this the Patriotic War. At first, it went very badly for Russia: its army, forced by the French, retreated toward Moscow. At the very beginning, Alexander personally led the troops, but in the face of failure he turned over command to the old and experienced military leader Mikhail Kutuzov, who fought Napoleon near the village of Borodino on August 26, 1812.
The battle, later vividly portrayed in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was a meat grinder, with close to 100,000 men of both armies wounded or dead. It was so confused that both sides claimed victory.
When we think of the Battle of Borodino, we imagine it through the eyes of the fictional Pierre Bezukhov from Tolstoy’s novel. But there was a real observer of that clash of two giant camps, a person in many ways similar to Bezukhov, just as much a dreamer with a lofty and pure souclass="underline" the poet Zhukovsky. “We stood in the bushes at the left flank, which the enemy was pressing; shells flew at us from an invisible source; everything around us roared and thundered; huge clouds of smoke rose along the entire semicircle of the horizon, as if from a universal fire, and finally with a terrible white cloud enveloped half the sky, which quietly glowed above the battling armies.”
Zhukovsky had joined the army as a corporal, serving in the staff of one-eyed Kutuzov and working in propaganda: he wrote leaflets, proclamations, and daily bulletins. That practical activity gave birth to his patriotic verse cantata “A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors.”
It was a veritable hymn to the might of the Russian army. Zhukovsky mentioned many brave officers by name, finding encouraging words for each one. For that reason, the rather long poem circulated instantly throughout the Russian army in manuscript copies. As one officer noted in his diary of 1812, “We often read and discuss ‘A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors,’ Mr. Zhukovsky’s latest work. Almost all of us have already memorized it. What poetry! What an inexplicable gift to rouse the spirits of soldiers!”14
Another popular poem in those days was the fable “Wolf in the Dog House.” This small masterpiece by Ivan Krylov (1768–1844), whose aphorisms are so ingrained in Russian culture that they are often taken for folk proverbs, described the current military and political situation: after Borodino, Napoleon tried to reach peace with Kutuzov, but was rebuffed.
In the fable, the wolf (Napoleon) sought easy pickings in the sheep manger but by mistake ended up in the dog house (Russia), where he was surrounded by dogs and tried to negotiate with the experienced dog keeper (Kutuzov), who breaks off the clever wolf’s entreaties:
You are gray, and I am gray-haired,
I know your vulpine nature well,
And hence my custom:
I only talk peace with wolves
After I have skinned them.
There was a story about this fable: allegedly Krylov had guessed Kutuzov’s strategy—to exhaust Napoleon’s troops—and so Kutuzov liked declaiming it to his impatient young officers who were straining to enter battle with the French again. Reading from the manuscript Krylov had sent him and reaching the words, “You are gray, and I am gray-haired,” Kutuzov would stress the words and “remove his cap and point to his hair. Everyone present was delighted by that spectacle and joyous exclamations resounded all around,”15 a witness recounted. Krylov’s short fable was more effective than a long military explanation.