Zhukovsky’s friends called him the “children’s Aristotle,” for he taught the heir not only Russian literature but also geography, history, and even arithmetic. True, Zhukovsky wrote poetry much less, but it sometimes seemed that he did not regret it: “I do know that the world of children is my world, and that I can act with pleasure in that world, and that I can find total happiness in it.”
There was a reason Zhukovsky spoke longingly of “total happiness” in the closed world of the Romanov family, living in their sumptuous residence, the Winter Palace, where he was given a spacious and comfortable apartment. He suffered a painful crisis in 1823, and the wound never healed for him.
In 1805, at the age of twenty-two, Zhukovsky first recorded in his diary words of love for Maria (Masha) Protasova, his stepsister’s daughter, aged twelve. It was a passionate but ultimately platonic feeling: despite the grown-up Masha’s love for him, her devout mother never gave her blessing for them to marry. In 1823, at the age of thirty, Masha died, after a few years of marriage to another man.
This sad story dominated Zhukovsky’s oeuvre for more than thirty years and imbued the poet’s worldview with religious and mystical tones. Both he and Masha had always talked and written to each other about “trusting Providence.” Zhukovsky’s “To Emperor Alexander” was also based on providential rhetoric. Perhaps that was what touched a secret string in the emperor’s soul, for he was always in search of trusted advisers and a word of spiritual approval.
This inclination toward mysticism increased sharply after Alexander’s victory over Napoleon. Napoleon’s fame as military leader was legendary, and so the inexperienced Russian tsar’s triumph could easily be interpreted as God’s will. The Bible was now always on Alexander’s bedside table, and he saw himself as the weapon of Providence. The goal of his state policy became the affirmation of Christian morality in international relations.
As leader of the anti-Napoleonic coalition, Alexander had enough power to attempt bringing those ideas into life. After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), on Alexander’s initiative, the victorious nations—Russia, Austria, Prussia, and England—formed the Holy Alliance. Its purpose would be to instill Christian principles in the management of Europe.
We can imagine Alexander’s thinking: while the power-hungry Napoleon was celebrated for constant warfare, the pious Russian emperor would be remembered for the permanent peace that would come from following Christian ideals. To achieve this goal, Alexander made substantial foreign policy concessions and was extremely disillusioned by the cynical behavior of his Western partners, who stubbornly refused to be guided by “the commandments of love, truth, and peace,” as Alexander dreamed.
The Russian elite, first deliriously patriotic after the victory over Napoleon, sobered up gradually, and some people even began expressing dissatisfaction with their mystically inclined ruler. Reports of such ingratitude drove Alexander to melancholic despair that bordered on clinical depression.
Zhukovsky’s melancholy and mystical ballads were balm for Alexander’s soul. And the emperor may have appeared as the ideal personage of his poetry and certainly the constant object of Zhukovsky’s thoughts. Never before or since had tsar and poet been so close.
“He took Paris, he founded the Lycée.” Thus Pushkin summarized the almost quarter-century reign of Alexander I, equating the glorious historical event with the relatively modest educational project, one of many liberal initiatives of the early years of Alexander’s rule.
And yet, October 19, 1811, when the Imperial Lycée was opened in Tsarskoe Selo, became a legendary day in Russian culture, first of all because among the thirty boys in the first class of the school, that day standing in three rows in the big, light-filled recreation hall of the four-story Catherine Palace, was the curly-haired, lively, and quick son of a Moscow nobleman, twelve-year-old Alexander Pushkin.
As one of the students recalled, they were presented to Alexander I, who came to the schooclass="underline" “After the speeches, each came up to the table and bowed to the emperor, who regarded us kindly and patiently returned our clumsy bows.”6
Alexander wanted to create an elite, closed boarding school for “educating youths especially intended for important state service.” Originally, the tsar’s younger brothers, the Grand Dukes Mikhail and Nicholas (the future emperor), were to be educated there too, but their mother objected. Nevertheless, the royal treasury spent lavishly on the Lycée: the boys had luxurious accommodations and the best professors.
Pushkin, however, was not interested in his studies. In math class, he wrote poetry, brow furrowed and lips pursed. The professor of mathematics let it pass: he enjoyed Pushkin’s epigrams mocking the school doctor (who chuckled at Pushkin’s jabs at the math professor).
Pushkin was called to the blackboard to work on an algebra problem; the teacher watched compassionately as the young poet shuffled his feet and scribbled formulas endlessly in chalk. When he got tired of waiting, he interrupted Pushkin’s suffering: “Well, what did you get? What does X equal?”
“Zero.”
“Pushkin, in my class, everything comes out zero for you. Go back to your seat and write poetry!”7
Everyone indulged the wunderkind, including the royal patron of the Lycée, Emperor Alexander I. As one of the poet’s classmates put it delicately, Pushkin “liked sometimes, secretly from the authorities, to make sacrifices to Bacchus and Venus”—that is, to drink and traipse after maids.
Once Pushkin found himself in the dark corridor of the tsar’s palace and grabbed the maid of Princess Varvara Volkonskaya, lady-in-waiting of the tsar’s wife. Hugging and kissing her, he discovered to his horror that it was not the maid but the elderly princess—a scene out of a French farce. Pushkin ran off, but the princess complained to the emperor, who scolded the Lycée’s director, Egor Engelhardt: “What is happening? Your pupils not only steal apples from my orchard, now they won’t even leave my wife’s ladies-in-waiting in peace!”
The director pleaded on behalf of Pushkin: “The poor lad is desperate: he came for my permission to write to the princess and beg her pardon.” Alexander was forgiving: “Let it be, I’ll have a word on his behalf; but tell him it’s the last time.”
With those words, Alexander hurried to catch up with his wife, whom he saw in the distance, but managed to whisper to the overjoyed Engelhardt: “La vieille est peut-être enchantée de la méprise du jeune homme, entre nous soit dit” (“The old maid may be delighted by the young man’s mistake, just between us”).8
Such encounters with the world of the tsar’s family—real and potential (after all, the future Nicholas I, just three years older than Pushkin, could have been a classmate at the Lycée)—had to have fired young Pushkin’s imagination: next to him, palpably close, personified history took place. This was a heady sensation, whose influence must be stressed also because for more than a hundred years first liberal and then Soviet scholars diligently minimized the significance of young Pushkin’s contacts with the court of Alexander I.
For Pushkin’s generation, the cult of historical personality was typical—first embodied by the romantic figure of Napoleon, an ordinary Corsican officer who rose to the peaks of fame and power and, in the words of sixteen-year-old Pushkin, destroyed “Europe’s divine shield.”