People had counted on reforms from Nicholas, but he tightened the screws instead; they had expected mercy, but he vengefully hanged five leaders of the Decembrist uprising. After Pushkin, many other major writers including Gogol had offered to become enlightened allies of the Russian autocracy. Their civic aspirations were rejected and Nicholas created the “Third Division of His Imperial Highness’s Own Chancellery,” the precursor of the Soviet ideological secret service.
Nicholas’s role in forming the image of Petersburg can be compared negatively to that of Peter the Great. Peter reached out to the young Russian intelligentsia. Under Nicholas, Petersburg stopped being a city in which a principled intellectual could have an honest career. Even writers who sold out were rewarded unenthusiastically. The days of Catherine the Great, when a successful poem in praise of the empress and her capital could receive a royal recompense, say, a gold snuffbox sprinkled with diamonds, were gone for good. A touring Italian singer like the famous tenor Giovanni Rubini was more likely to be so rewarded.
A contemporary complained that under Nicholas I, “little attention was paid to Russian literature”; the government had based its strength “on a million bayonets instead of a philosophical dream. There was no profit in being considered an archmonarchical essayist.”20 On the contrary, in intellectual circles it had become quite fashionable to abuse the Petersburg so beloved of Nicholas: cruel, bureaucratic, officious, where even the streets were attention-straight, as if on parade. “That granite, those bridges with chains, that neverending drumming, all that has a depressing and overwhelming effect,” a hotheaded Slavophile summed up in disgust.
Following in the footsteps of Gogol, hurling a challenge and waving a fist at the capital, since one couldn’t threaten the emperor, was considered a sign of artistry and freethinking. These temperamental and amusing attacks on Nicholas’s Petersburg would make a wonderful anthology. And the prose and poetry of Apollon Grigoryev (1822-1864) are among the most inspired of the lot.
A great fan of Grigoryev’s, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok later characterized him as a stormy and tormented youth with the soul of Dmitri Karamazov. Grigoryev moved from patriarchal Moscow at the age of twenty-one to Petersburg, supported by Freemason friends. He said he “was transported to another world. This was the world of Gogol’s Petersburg, the Petersburg in the era of its miragelike originality. … a strange and
I believe Grigoryev was the first to apply the many-meaninged Russian word
Even in Russia, which loves its poets, Grigoryev is not very popular. He was too bohemian: he drank wildly with Gypsies (when he didn’t have enough money for vodka, he drank cologne and kerosene, a habit that remains among Russian alcoholics today), married a prostitute, and died in Petersburg—a few days after release from debtors’ prison—from a stroke following a violent argument with his publisher.
I remember the fascination with which I opened a volume of Grigoryev’s poems. It was in 1959; I was fifteen, in my second year in Leningrad, where I had moved from Riga to study. Like multitudes before me, I was enchanted by the beauty and magic of Leningrad’s white nights. They begin in May, and it was wonderful on a night like that to stop with a sweetheart on the bridge aptly called Bridge of Kisses, and declaim from
What a shock it was to come across a demonic picture of a white night, stylistically similar to the invective of Grigoryev’s peer Charles Baudelaire:
