Nicholas II was two years older than Lenin, one born in 1868, the other, in 1870. Both were well-educated, one at home, the other at a gymnasium (Lenin was the son of the inspector of public schools from the provincial city of Simbirsk). Lenin was an outstanding student, which could not be said of Nicholas II, but both studied conscientiously.
All the Romanovs considered themselves professional military men, therefore the accent in Nicholas’s education was on military matters. Lenin got a law degree from St. Petersburg University. But their fundamental cultural baggage was remarkably similar, because in the reign of Alexander III (1881–1894) a unified national cultural canon was formed in Russia.
By that time, the cult of Pushkin as the greatest national poet was established, while the previously sanctioned official reverence for Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, and Zhukovsky dimmed significantly. Only the fabulist Krylov remained popular of the old classics. The grand figure of Gogol was no longer controversial, and his greatness was recognized, like Pushkin’s, by both the right and the left. Turgenev was making his way to classic status, especially his early prose, A Sportsman’s Sketches. Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov was also included in the canon.
The scattered accounts of contemporaries confirm that this cultural canon was strongly ingrained in both Nicholas and Lenin. Moreover, it was received by both explicitly as canon—that is, as mandatory cultural knowledge as necessary for every educated person as brushing teeth and washing hands.
It is noteworthy that neither Nicholas II nor Lenin ever rejected this canon publicly. In Nicholas’s case that is understandable: to a great degree the canon was formulated from above and therefore reflected the views of the authorities. Much more curious is Lenin’s obvious acquiescence.
It is clear in Lenin’s attitude toward Pushkin. For Nicholas, Pushkin was a classic. When he was heir, he played Onegin in a family dramatization of Eugene Onegin, and according to the rather patronizing notation in the diary of his uncle, Grand Duke Konstantin (the poet K.R.), “He declaimed Onegin’s monologue very sweetly and clearly. Only in his voice could you hear that he was quite nervous.”3 The first official Russian literary prize, instituted under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, was called the Pushkin Prize for a reason: the authorities saw his name as the most authoritative.
But Lenin was another matter. Early on, he fell under the influence of revolutionary ideologues, one of whom was Dmitri Pisarev, notorious for his vicious attacks on Pushkin, like this sarcastic pronouncement: “No Russian poet can inspire in his readers such total indifference to the people’s suffering, such profound scorn for honest poverty, and such systematic revulsion for honest labor as Pushkin.”
While Pisarev’s rebuke may sound very “Leninist” in spirit and style today, Lenin himself, albeit a faithful student of Russian nihilists and radicals of the 1860s, never attacked Pushkin in public (nor did he praise him particularly).
We can guess Lenin’s real attitude toward Pushkin from a curious incident recounted by Nadezhda Krupskaya, his widow. In 1921, Lenin and Krupskaya visited a Moscow student dormitory to see a daughter of Inessa Armand, the recently deceased love of Lenin’s life (and Party comrade). Lenin, Krupskaya, and Armand had a Party ménage à trois for a rather long time.
The students were happy to see Lenin and bombarded him with questions. Lenin, in turn, asked them, “What are you reading? Do you read Pushkin?” The response was, “Oh, no. Pushkin was a bourgeois. We read Mayakovsky.” Lenin, who did not like the avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, said only, “I think Pushkin is better.”
Krupskaya added naively in her account, “After that Ilyich [as the Party comrades called him] was a bit kinder to Mayakovsky,” because the name reminded him of “the young people, full of life and joy, ready to die for Soviet power, unable to find the words in contemporary language to express themselves and seeking that expression in the hard-to-understand poems of Mayakovsky.”4
The blinkered Krupskaya did not notice the grotesqueness of her image of young people “full of life and joy” yet “ready to die,” or the ruthlessness of her childless spouse, pleased by the sight of that young cannon fodder. And it’s interesting how casually Lenin took the quintessentially nihilist putdown of Pushkin as bourgeois: did he think so, as well, but did not want to say?
Given Lenin’s reputation for pitiless debate, his defense of Pushkin from the revolutionary youth seems rather timid. “Pushkin is better than Mayakovsky”? Lenin was devastatingly scathing about Mayakovsky (“nonsense, stupid, double stupidity and pretentiousness”),5 so that was faint praise indeed. It is obvious that for Lenin Pushkin was merely a name, part of the official canon. He wouldn’t get into an argument over Pushkin.
But in one aspect, Pisarev’s view of Pushkin as the teacher of “parasites and sybarites” was clearly absorbed by the revolutionary leader: Lenin’s disparaging attitude toward ballet and opera.
Pushkin adored the ballet (and ballerinas). For the radical Pisarev that was a readymade target, and he gleefully mocked Pushkin’s “useless poetry,” attractive only to “those mentally challenged subjects who can be thrilled by ballet poses.” Not being “mentally challenged,” Lenin resolutely dismissed opera and ballet as a “piece of purely landowner culture.”6
It is hard to deny a certain logic in Lenin’s thinking. Opera and, even more so, ballet, under the personal patronage of the Romanov family, held a special place in the official Russian culture.
The professional theater, including musical theater, began in Russia as court entertainment. Tsar Alexei, father of Peter I, invited musicians from Europe “who know how to play various instruments, such as: organs, horns, pipes, flutes, clarinets, trombones and viola da gambas along with vocal performance, and also other instruments.”7 (The money to support theater and ballet came from the Salt Chancery for many years: the state had the monopoly on the salt trade, and part of the enormous salt income went to actors, singers, dancers, and musicians.)
After various perturbations, the imperial theaters were moved to the Ministry of the Court, which ran (through the Directorate of the Imperial Theaters) the Maryinsky and Alexandrinsky theaters in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi and Maly theaters in Moscow. In fact, they were the personal theaters of the Romanov family: a display window of their vanity, a platform for elaborating their ideological projects, but also a place for relaxation and merriment and, last but not least, a high-class and exciting harem.
Nicholas I sometimes took over the rehearsals of ballets and liked to hang around backstage, where the ballerinas ran around in tights; Alexander III never missed a dress rehearsal of an opera or ballet, much less the premieres.
Alexander III also introduced the tradition of emperor and family attending the graduation exams of the ballet school. After the performance, the young dancers were presented to the tsar and his wife, and at the dinner that followed, the young grand dukes flirted with their lovely companions.
At one such dinner in 1890, the graduating ballerina seated next to Alexander III was Mathilde Kschessinska, small, dark, muscular, very talented, and incredibly ambitious. She drank tea between the huge, flabby emperor and his miniature heir (who took after his mother), the future Nicholas II, a shy young officer with dreamy gray-blue eyes.
Alexander III told them with a benign smile, “Watch it now, don’t flirt too much.” The heir timidly spoke to Kschessinska, pointing to the unornamented white mug before her: “You probably don’t drink from such plain mugs at home?”8
That was the prelude to their famous and stormy affair, which lasted from 1892 until the spring of 1894, when the heir’s engagement was announced to Princess Alix Hesse-Darmstadt, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Alexandra.