Paradoxically, Gogol’s evolution to fanatical Christianity and boundless loyalty to the tsar was too extreme and off-putting to the authorities in Russia. While demanding fealty to the state, they never trusted real fanatics and feared them. The administration needed dutiful servants, not idealistic knights on white chargers.
The authorities banned all obituaries for Gogol, and the tsar had Turgenev arrested for a month and then sent into exile to his country estate in Orlov Province for publishing one. (During his confinement, Turgenev wrote his powerful antiserfdom story “Mumu,” the drama of a deaf-mute servant of a cruel owner, who forced him to drown his beloved dog.)
This fear of uncontrollable, “freelance” ideological activity explained why Nicholas and his ministers so disliked the Slavophiles, an influential group of Moscow intellectuals who propagated a romantic theory that Russia should not emulate the West, but instead pursue its unique and independent cultural and political path.
The Slavophiles also believed in “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” but for them it was not a bureaucratic formula but a broad philosophical foundation for a national culture. They therefore criticized what they saw as ossified aspects of the contemporary Russian state. Calling for a free, nationally oriented Russian culture, the Slavophiles challenged the official line, but also the ideas of such radical antimonarchist Westernizers as Belinsky and Herzen.
The great Slavophile poet Alexei Khomyakov proclaimed that Gogol, Ivanov, and Glinka were the Holy Trinity of truly Slavophile artists. But the supreme power was just as uncomfortable with Alexander Ivanov as it was with Gogol. When the artist returned to St. Petersburg in 1858, after thirty years in Italy, the authorities did not know what to do with this mad mystic who babbled about the messianic destiny of the “Slavic tribe.”
Ivanov did not want to accept official commissions, which made him clearly unfit for service. Feeling injured and snubbed, he died two months after returning to his homeland, just two weeks short of his fifty-second birthday.
In the summer of 1844, Nicholas read an anonymous brochure in French, just published in Munich. It expressed bold ideas about Russia’s modern geopolitical role in Europe. The author wrote that as a result of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Western Europe (“The Europe of Charles the Great”) was at last face-to-face with Eastern Europe (“The Europe of Peter the Great”). This Eastern Europe, with Russia as its heart and soul, was the legitimate heir of Byzantium and must make one more decisive breakthrough, vanquishing Turkey and establishing hegemony in the Middle East.
Nicholas I told Count Benckendorff, chief of the gendarmes and his closest adviser, that he “found all my thoughts”12 in that brochure and commanded him to find out the author. The omniscient Benckendorff already had: it was written and printed by someone he knew well, Fedor Tyutchev, forty years old, a former Russian diplomat in Munich and Turin, an amateur poet who had been living abroad for twenty-two years.
Tyutchev, Yevgeny Baratynsky, and Afanasy Fet are the three great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, unheralded in the West but revered by educated Russians. Leo Tolstoy rated Tyutchev higher than Pushkin. (Joseph Brodsky sometimes held Baratynsky at that level, while being more skeptical about Tyutchev’s standing.)
When Tolstoy read Tyutchev’s poetry aloud to his guests, he invariably wept: in his sophisticated proto-Symbolist philosophical miniatures, Tyutchev captured the most subtle emotional nuances, not unlike Tolstoy’s prose. Tyutchev began writing poetry at the age of ten, and when he was thirty-three, in 1836, Pushkin printed twenty-four of his poems in Contemporary.
Tyutchev called his poems “scribbles,” writing them hurriedly on scraps of paper that his wife then gathered up. His output was not large—around four hundred little poems over sixty-nine years of life, including pièces d’occasion, epigrams, and such.
He published his first book of verse when he was in his fifties, yielding to the urging of his friend Turgenev, who edited the publication. Tyutchev considered his true calling to be politics and political writing, and that is how Nicholas I noticed him.
Nicholas appreciated political poetry when it suited his propaganda goals. When he suppressed the 1831 Polish rebellion against Russian occupiers and Pushkin and Zhukovsky celebrated the victory with ultrapatriotic poems, the emperor issued the poems instantly in a special edition published by the military printing press.
At the time, the West supported the Poles. Western parliamentarians and journalists were especially vociferous. Pushkin’s poems, defending Russia’s position, was addressed to them. He intended to publish his anti-Western poems in the Paris press, but failed: Pushkin did not have the necessary contacts.
Tyutchev, on the other hand, was a professional diplomat with a vast network of influential European intellectuals (he was friends with the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the poet Heinrich Heine) and a good understanding of their psychology. Nicholas decided it would be a terrible waste not to use such a person for pro-Russian propaganda in the West, especially since that was Tyutchev’s ardent wish.
. . .
On the emperor’s orders, Tyutchev was quickly reinstated to service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He made a strange official. Of medium height, frail, with a pale, clean-shaven face and unruly, prematurely gray hair, carelessly dressed, seemingly clumsy and distracted, Tyutchev spent all his time in St. Petersburg’s high-society salons.
He spoke French better than Russian and, eagerly turning the conversation to foreign policy, would instantly become the center of attention at every gathering, so witty and to the point were his opinions.
Seemingly casual improvisations, his political aphorisms and bon mots spread throughout the capital and regularly appeared in dispatches of foreign ambassadors in St. Petersburg. Tyutchev’s commentaries were all the more effective because they so little resembled the dull official statements of the authorities. One perceptive observer noted that these “spontaneous” chats in society were Tyutchev’s “real job.”13
Tyutchev effectively executed delicate special assignments for the tsar. Nicholas was terribly upset by the French revolution of 1848. The emperor was prepared to play his assumed role of gendarme of Europe and defender of European monarchy. Tyutchev wrote a large article in French, “La Russie et la révolution,” stating that the only obstacle to a European revolutionary explosion was the Russian “Christian Empire.”
Nicholas read it in manuscript and had it printed in Paris as “Mémoire présenté à l’empereur Nicolas depuis la révolution de février, par un russe, employé supérieur aux affaires étrangères,” in an extremely limited edition of twelve copies. Tyutchev’s brochure was sent by special channels to the political leaders of France, including Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the republic. The French correctly regarded this as a “quasi-official document,” and it was widely quoted in the European press.
The international situation was unfavorable for Russia then. France, with Napoleon’s defeat in the War of 1812 a distant memory, wanted to limit Russia’s role as arbiter in European affairs; so did England. Both countries were worried by Russia’s pressure on Turkey, which Nicholas I called “the sick man of Europe.” England feared that if Russia affirmed itself in the Balkans, home to millions of Orthodox Slavs, it would be a major threat. Anti-Russian rhetoric ran high in the European press.