Before Pushkin, Petersburg had known only praise. But Pushkin’s vision of the city was dualistic. His evaluation of the role of Peter and his reforms, of the civilizing effect of the city, and of the future of autocratic rule (that is, the past, present, and future of all Russia) seems in
Nicholas I did not live up to Pushkin’s hopes. Later Anna Akhmatova even felt that the tsar had tricked the poet consciously. Outraged, she told me that Nicholas “did not keep his word, and
More important, he also tricked the country, which had expected reforms from the young, energetic tsar. Gifted in many ways—he knew several languages, was a brilliant orator, and played the flute—Nicholas was fixated on order.16 He pictured Russia as a gigantic mechanism that had to function exactly as he (wisely) set it. An echo of Peter’s mania could be seen in that, and at first, the people, hypnotized, blindly obeyed the new emperor. But Nicholas lacked his predecessor’s monumental vision, and the times were quite different too. The tsar’s unwavering confidence in his own infallibility was no longer enough to drag Russia forward.
Nicholas was called by one ironic observer the “Don Quixote of autocracy.” But this peculiarly Russian Don Quixote tried fanatically to turn his capital into an army barracks, with no room for disobedience or any flash of independent thought. For only in the army, the emperor believed, could be found “order, strict, unconditional legality, where there are no ‘know-it-alls’ or the passion of contradiction…. everyone is subordinate in a single, definite goal, everything has its designation.” Nicholas often repeated, “I regard all human life as service,” and also, “I need people who are obedient, not wise.”
With this attitude, the emperor obviously began to regard Pushkin and other leading intellectuals expendable. Nicholas was not particularly upset by Pushkin’s death in 1837, at the age of thirty-seven, in a Petersburg duel. (By contrast, this tragic event would later be considered, by all literate Russians, one of the greatest catastrophes in Russia’s cultural history.) When another brilliant Russian poet, twenty-six-year-old Mikhail Lermontov, was killed in a duel in 1841, Nicholas is supposed to have said disdainfully, “A cur’s death for a cur.”
In the three decades of his austere reign (1825-1855), Nicholas I froze Petersburg and all Russia. Already in the era of Alexander I, the poet Vassily Zhukovsky complained that the residents of Petersburg “were mummies, surrounded by majestic pyramids, whose grandeur exists not for them.” Nicholas succeeded brilliantly in bringing Petersburg’s image even closer to his beloved barracks. The splenetic and wise friend of the late Pushkin, Prince Vyazemsky, noted sadly, “straight, correct, evened out, symmetrical, monotonous, and complete, Petersburg can serve as an emblem of our life…. In people, you can’t tell Ivan from Peter; in time, today from tomorrow: everything is the same.”
So it was in December 1828 that nineteen-year-old Nikolai Gogol came to this disciplined, haughty, cold city from the bright, gentle, warm Ukraine. The ambitious provincial—skinny, sickly, and bignosed—arrived in Petersburg with radiant dreams, confident of conquering the capital instantly. As with most young men, even those with talent, these dreams proved somewhat difficult to realize.
In one of his first letters home to his mother, young Gogol shared his impressions of the capital, revealing the sharp eye of its future vivisector:
Petersburg is a rather large city.* If you want to stroll its streets, with squares and islands in various directions, you will probably walk more than 100 versts, and despite its size, you can have anything you might need without sending far, even in the same building…. The house in which I live contains two tailors, one
Walking through the streets in the daytime, Gogol eagerly plunged into the bustling life of the capital. He spent hours peering into shop windows on Nevsky Prospect, which displayed such exotic fruits brought from overseas as oranges, pineapples, and bananas.
Unable to resist, Gogol ate in one French pastry shop after another. He visited the Academy of Arts, praised by Batyushkov, where the works of the professors and the best students were on display; Gogol formed close friendships with some of the latter.
