Because of his liberal attitude, Alexander Pushkin was controlled, censored or banned by the tsar and his power apparatus. But that by no means ruled out the poet’s identification with the Russian empire and the strong state.
Alexander Pushkin in a painting by Orest Kiprensky, 1827.
The Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) spent six years of his short life in exile. In 1820 he was sent to the southern colonies because of nasty epigrams on high dignitaries such as Alexei Arakcheev, the Minister of War and head of the notorious military settlements, but also on Tsar Alexander I, where he could move relatively freely and therefore Moldova, the Caucasus and allowed to visit the Crimea. He visited twice – in 1820 and 1824 – the port city of Cherson in the Dnieper estuary, which was founded by Katarina the Great and built by his great-grandfather, Lieutenant-General Abram Hannibal. Anything but voluntary, as his stay in these exotic regions brought the poet a creative flowering and left a lasting mark on his oeuvre.
As the exile neared its end in 1824, the Moscow police opened the letter in which Pushkin wrote about his interest in “atheistic doctrines.” As a result, the poet got another banishment, which he no longer had to endure in the south, but on his mother’s estate, Mikhailovskoye in the Pskov region. However, the punishment may have saved him from involvement in the December 1825 Uprising in which many of his friends took part. Five leaders of the failed revolt were sentenced to hanging and the rest to forced labor in Siberia.
loyalty or adulation
Locked up in the country estate, the poet decided to demonstrate his loyalty to Tsar Nicholas I. In the poem “Stanzen” (1826) he recommends that he follow in the footsteps of his ancestor Peter the Great. Although his beginnings were marked by brutality, Peter later switched to sowing enlightenment with an “autocratic hand” and showing leniency towards his opponents. Be tireless and tough like him, and don’t act out of rancor, he admonishes the autocrat.
But his readers accused Pushkin of adulation. The poet betrayed his principles by praising not only the tsar but also the power apparatus as a whole. However, during the coronation celebrations in Moscow in early September 1831, Pushkin was granted a private audience with Tsar Nicholas, who assured him of his personal patronage and exemption from general censorship.
As late as 1827, Pushkin dedicated a beautiful poem to his imprisoned friends. “In the depths of Siberian mines / Preserve proud patience,” and he swore allegiance and friendship to them. Their suffering was not in vain, the time would come when their chains would fall. But his libertarian views, a distaste for the despotism that Pushkin shared with the Decembrists, seemed to reach their limits when he saw a threat to Russian dominance in Europe, which had been plagued by national republican movements since the 1830s believed.
The Poles, who longed for independence from the Russian Empire and believed that their constitution was in danger, decided in January 1831 to dismiss Nicholas I as “King of Poland in personal union”. As a result, he saw himself entitled to put down the uprising militarily. The invasion sparked a public campaign in France for military support for Polish freedom fighters. Pushkin responded to the French threats with an anti-European and anti-Polish poem, “The Slanders of Russia.”
“As always, the Russians know how to win”
In the poem he recommends the European public to keep their hands off the story of the “old quarrels of the Slavs among themselves” and their “family quarrels” of which they had no idea. You ignore “what Moscow or Praga reports / You keep silent, but does that help you?” and «Rather marvel at only Polish heroes / keep fomenting hatred against us». Pushkin attributes this hatred to Russia’s victory over Napoleon – “because we do not tremble and whimper / As you kneel before him [nicht] bent” – and he threatened the Europeans with war if they supported Poland militarily: “The old warrior” would show them. “Let all of Europe fight us / The Russians, as always, know how to win / From Perm to Tauria millions of men stand up / From Finland’s cliffs to the hot Colchis beach.”
The victory against Napoleon in the Patriotic War and the liberation of Europe legitimized Russia to repeat the triumphant march: «A forest of bayonets flashes! / You gossips, stir up your wild offspring, attack us! / There is space on Russia’s snowy plains / For unlimited rows of graves.»
Three weeks later, Pushkin wrote another militant poem, «On the Anniversary of Borodino». Personally reviewed by Nicholas I, both were published in a pamphlet along with an equally patriotic verse by Vasily Zhukovsky, poet and teacher of the future heir to the throne, Alexander II.
Polish historians suspect that the poem “The Slanderers” was actually written on behalf of the tsar, who wanted to make the popular poet a propagandist for his state ideology. Pushkin himself was convinced that the existence of Poland as a sovereign state was contrary to Russian interests, but this did not lessen his enthusiasm for Polish heroism.
As early as July 1831, he suggested to the head of the secret police, the third department of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancellery, Alexander von Benckendorff, that he found a political journal with the following argument: «. . . while we stand united against the Polish rebels, day by day, if not yet with arms, then . . . ambushed with rabid lies. . . Allow Russian writers to dismiss the outrageous and ignorant attacks of foreign newspapers.” Although Pushkin’s views were in line with the government line, the publication of the journal was not approved.
Opportunistic and indecently servile
The publication of the “slanderers of Russia” stirred up the public, which at the time could only express themselves personally in the form of letters. Liberal contemporaries were outraged by Pushkin’s “military coat poetry”. In a letter to his brother, Ivan Turgenev described him as “barbarians in relation to Poland”.
Poet and critic Pyotr Vyazemsky condemned the ode as opportunistic and indecently servile. If we had freedom of speech, he wrote in his “Diary,” Pushkin would never dare, “Paskevich’s [der Oberbefehlshaber der russischen Truppen in Polen] to sing about victories. . . And what sacrilege to put Borodino on a par with Warsaw! Russia is shouting against this lawlessness.” In his “Notebooks” Vyazemsky criticized the poem even more extensively: “Why should reborn Europe love us? Are we contributing at least a dime to the treasury of common reconnaissance? We are a brake on the peoples’ path to gradual moral and political perfection. We are outside Europe, but gravitate around Europe. ‘The slanderers’ could answer him bluntly: We hate, or rather we despise you, because in Russia it doesn’t seem embarrassing for a poet to write and publish poems like this.”
Battle of Borodino participant and philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, who was later declared insane by Nicholas I for «denigrating» Russian history, praised Pushkin: «Now you have finally become a national poet; You have recognized your calling. . . The poem against Russia’s enemies is particularly noteworthy.” Colonel Alexei Filosofov was fascinated by the “richness of abstract thoughts and sublime Russian sentiments”. But overall, the supporters’ camp seems to have been smaller than the critics’.
The victory in the Patriotic War in 1812 against the European invaders and the Russian campaign to Paris had awakened freedom and republican aspirations among the Russian elite and made them rebel against tyranny. The brutal reckoning with the Decembrists and the suppression of the Polish uprising were followed by a reactionary turn based on a national-chauvinist imperial ideology.
Unthinkably fantastic future
In December 1832, Minister of Public Enlightenment Sergei Uvarov submitted a report to the Tsar in which he developed his concept of protecting youth from revolutionary ideas. “Thorough education, which is indispensable in our century, should be accompanied by deep conviction and warm faith in the truly Russian conservative principles of orthodoxy, autocracy and folklore, which are a last salvation and a sure premise of the strength and greatness of our fatherland.”
Almost at the same time, the head of the secret police, Graf von Benckendorff, formulated Russia’s special path as superlatives in his private notes: “Russia’s past was amazing, its present is more than great, as far as the future is concerned, it is higher than anything the wildest imagination could imagine can paint.”
Pushkin was under surveillance all his life. His mail was checked, his works checked by the Tsar himself, and he was forbidden to travel abroad. The freedom he wished his friends martyred in Siberian exile was a rare commodity for the poet himself. However, this by no means ruled out identification with the Russian empire and the strong autocratic state. Not least thanks to Pushkin’s national-patriotic poetry against unruly Poland and its European supporters, anti-European resentment was blessed with the higher orders of genius. From then on, it was to shape the self-image of the Russian educated class as a cultural nation.
At the beginning of June, “Days of Pushkin’s Poetry and Russian Culture” are said to have been organized in the city of Kherson, which was occupied by Russian troops. A billboard with the poet’s portrait was erected to commemorate the occasion. The headline reads: “Kherson is the city with Russian history.”
Sonya Margolina, Born in Moscow in 1951, lives as a publicist and author in Berlin.