In this new society with a literature that ruled minds, the emperor managed to live as if none of it were happening. Even his father, who had muzzled Russian literature, charmed the most famous writer of his time, inviting Pushkin to the palace. Nicholas went to the theater to watch Gogol’s dangerous comedy, The Inspector General, which exposed the state embezzlement of his officials. At the end, he uttered his famous phrase, “Everyone got lambasted, but none more than me.” The august self-criticism tamed the harsh comedy into a well-meaning call for ending embezzlement.
Even that mighty despot cared about having contact with influential writers. But Alexander II, the reformer, the student of the poet Zhukovsky, had no interest in writers. He did not wish to understand the power of the word in the society he had himself awakened. He did not understand that literature and the press were painting a portrait of his rule and shaping the minds of the youth. While reforming Russia, the two-faced Janus continued to live in the prereform period of his father’s reign, when the portrait of the regime was created by the Third Department, which also handled the minds of the youth.
He had aroused Russia irreversibly. The reprisals against Chernyshevsky and the Land and Freedom group did not stop the great ice flow in the thaw after his father’s severe winter. Everything was public now. There were political dinners where the Slavophiles and Westernizers argued furiously about Russia’s future. In fighting each other, they demanded further and almost instant changes from the government. “We want the newborn [that is, the society freed of serfdom] to have teeth on the first day and be able to walk on the second [this in a country where more than 80 percent of the country was illiterate]—we do not need administrative nannies with diapers and swaddling clothes.” That was the manifesto of the new era.
Passionate debates in the zemstvos, thunderous speeches by celebrated lawyers in overfilled courtrooms, charity balls with lectures by orators, public readings of their new works by great writers—disputes, meetings, and speeches were everywhere. They even managed to turn a funeral into a discussion. At Nekrasov’s burial, Dostoevsky put Nekrasov, with a few reservations, on a par with Lermontov and Pushkin. A few youthful voices interrupted him with shouts of “Nekrasov is higher! Higher!” Followed by applause.
The discussion of Nekrasov at his grave site moved to the press, where it continued to be argued.
CHAPTER 7
Anni Horibiles
Alexander not only had no interest in literature, he had no time for it. In 1865, he suffered a personal tragedy that became a tragedy for the country. He and his wife adored their son Niks, the heir to the throne. The handsome and incredibly gifted young man was a true European in his convictions and was to continue his father’s reforms. His teachers called him “Russia’s hope,” “a brilliant young man,” “a flexible and subtle intelligence fervently responding to everything new.” Everyone loved him. “The crown of perfection” was what Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich called him. His huge and clumsy brother, Sasha, loved him with touching fidelity.
Sasha was next in line. Aware of the rivalry between Alexander and Konstantin, the empress (who never could overcome her dislike of her younger son) did not give Sasha the education that Niks received. Sasha was intentionally not groomed to be Niks’s understudy.
This did not bother sweet Sasha, who was not interested in scholarship. Like all the Romanovs, he loved military affairs. He called himself “the parfait regimental commander,” although unlike the real guardsmen in his family, Sasha wasn’t very good at it.
He never danced at the balls, because he was ashamed of his clumsiness. He sat with the old men in a corner, a good vantage point for watching his beloved brother dance. Sasha was immensely strong; he could bend a horseshoe as a child, after which he would look to his brother for approval.
His constantly kind gaze, fat face, and canine loyalty prompted Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich (Uncle Misha) to call him Pug. The court called him Little Bulldog.
It was an accident. Alexander’s nephew, young Duke Nicholas of Leichtenberg, was a guest in the palace. Niks enjoyed gymnastics and wrestling, and so did his cousin. Niks suggested a wrestling match. The two Nicholases met, with Sasha looking on. During the match Niks hurt himself, right on the spine. “He hit himself so hard on the corner of the marble table, that if he had not been helped, he would have fallen,” recalled Alexandra Patkul. “My husband, the officer on duty at the Winter Palace under the tsar just then entered the room where Their Highnesses were playing in order to greet them. Seeing the heir pale and unable even to rise, my husband ran to fetch a glass of water, as no one had thought to do so. Then he inquired as to what had occurred and learned the details from Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich [Sasha]. He told Count Stroganov [Count Sergei Stroganov was Niks’s governor] to send for a doctor immediately, that a serious blow to the spine needed attention…but no energetic measures were taken.”
Princess Dagmar, Niks’s Danish fiancée, arrived soon afterward. The petite and charming Dagmar was madly in love with him. She rode very well, so a fox hunt was organized in Peterhof. When Niks leaped up into the saddle, his face contorted in pain. His father asked what was wrong, but instead of an answer Niks spurred the horse and, with a cry of pain, almost fell from the saddle. No one treated this incident seriously, but in a short time the tsarevich began to change. He lost a lot of weight and he began to hunch over when he walked. His father did not understand and angrily chided him for “walking like an old man.” Niks tried to overlook the pain, thereby doing greater damage to himself.
Eventually, he was given a thorough physical. The court physician, Dr. Botkin, went into the tsar’s study with his report. The emperor came out, pale with shock. The blow to the spine had led to the development of a horrible disease, tuberculosis of the bone.
Niks was sent to Nice for treatment. He grew worse, and Sasha was granted permission to join him. In April 1865 the tsar received a telegram with more bad news: The illness had spread to the brain. The heir’s days were numbered. They sent word to Copenhagen, and Dagmar and her mother headed for Nice.
The tsar and his entire family set out to see Niks for the last time. They held a service at the Kazan Cathedral before departing. The family prayed. “We traveled with one thought—would God allow us to find him still alive…. The train flew at terrifying speeds,” wrote the heir’s governor.
In Berlin they were met by King Wilhelm, the heir’s uncle Willy. The monarchs embraced in silence. In the Prussian station, a car with Dagmar and her mother was added to the imperial train. The women wept. In Paris, the train was met by Napoleon III. The tsar “was grateful for the look of grief on his face.”
With unprecedented speed for those days—three days and nights—they reached Nice. No one had ever traveled that fast from St. Petersburg. The train platform in Nice was filled with weeping Russians. Everyone loved Niks.
He was dying in the Villa Bermont, which Alexander later bought. The whole family came in. Niks lay in bed with a cheerful face, or rather, a cheerful smile on his waxy, emaciated face. Dagmar and mother stood at the bed, with the giant Sasha behind the petite Danish women.
The empress rushed to Niks. He kissed them all; he was alert and awake. But that night he had a wonderful delirium, addressing deputations with speeches, commanding regiments, explaining his father’s achievements, quoting Latin, and speaking of the needs of the Slavs oppressed by the Turks. “We all blamed ourselves for not having it written down,” Lieutenant General Litvinov, his governor, later recalled.
In his confession, Niks said he felt guilty for being impatient and sinfully wanting to die soon. The family and Dagmar came back into the room. Niks joked, “Isn’t she wonderfully sweet, Father?”
April 12 was his last day. The tsar’s family was staying across the street in the Villa Verdie, purchased for their arrival. At six, the governor rushed in to awaken them. He was dying. His medication was making him vomit. Dagmar kneeled at his bed and wiped his chin. He held her hand and then said
, “Papa, take care of Sasha, he is such an honest, good man.”
“After two, he raised his hand and caught Sasha’s head in his right, and he seemed to be reaching for Princess Dagmar’s head with his left…his tongue weakened and he said his last words. Holding the empress by the hand and indicating her to Dr. Harman, he said in French, ‘Take good care of her,’” recalled Litvinov.
The family legend tells the story a little differently: On his deathbed Niks allegedly embraced his brother’s head with one hand and with the other took his fiancée’s hand. He placed her hand in his brother’s hand. This justified what happened later.
Dagmar wrote to her father in Copenhagen: “I thank God that I reached him in time, my darling treasure, and that he recognized me in his final minute. I will never ever forget the look he gave me when I approached him. No, never! The poor Emperor and Empress! They were so attentive to me in my, and their, sorrow; his poor brothers, especially the oldest, Sasha, who loved him so nobly—not only as a brother but as his only and best friend. It is very difficult for him, poor thing, because now he must take his beloved brother’s place.”
Now Sasha was the heir. His teachers were saddened, for they knew his limited capabilities. Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna begged the tsar to make the next son in line, Vladimir, the heir. He was no great star, either, but he was not as stubborn and dim as Sasha, or rather, as it was put more gently, he was not burdened by such “static thought.”
Alexander was too depressed by his loss to think about making changes.
The heir was given many new teachers. Famous historians, jurists, and economists who had been teaching Niks now tried to fill in the gaps in Sasha’s education. As one of them, the legal historian Boris Checherin, said, “We took on a hopeless task.”
Everything the older brother had, the younger brother liked enormously. The new heir liked Dagmar, too. Sasha was very monogamous in his love. As a youth he had fallen in love with Princess Meshcherskaya and touchingly kept her slipper, which a servant stole for him. The princess had to be given away in marriage, and his father sternly lectured him.
He never had another infatuation until now. As Sasha dreamed of Dagmar, he wrote in his diary, “I keep thinking of Dagmar and pray every day that He arrange what will be my happiness for all my life.”
He spoke to his father, told him that he loved Dagmar and wanted to marry her. It had seemed to him in Nice that she would not mind. His somewhat stupefied father wrote to Copenhagen, inviting Dagmar to St. Petersburg. The emperor soon learned that Sasha’s perception had been correct.
From Sasha’s diary: “Her mother wrote that she would not like to send Dagmar to us now, because she needed peace and she must bathe in the sea.” That meant that they agreed to the marriage, but it had to be postponed, otherwise Europe would think that she was in a hurry to marry Dagmar off to the new heir. “As for me, that’s all I think about. I pray to God for Him to arrange this and bless it,” the heir wrote simply.
The proprieties were observed, several months were allowed to pass. Autumn came and Dagmar was ready to travel. The engagement was announced.
She arrived in September, to glorious weather, clear and sunny. The obligatory festivities began—balls, illuminations, fireworks. This was torture for the clumsy heir, who hated to dance. He declared his refusal to dance, and kept his word, to the consternation of court and family.
Count Sergei Sheremetyev, who played with Sasha when they were children and was later appointed his adjutant, recalled in his memoirs, “In general, the tsarevich was impossible in the role of fiancé. He showed himself in public only because it was his duty, he felt a revulsion for illuminations and fireworks. Everyone pitied the bride, deprived of the graceful and gifted bridegroom and forced to join another without love, a crude, unpolished man with bad French. That was the reigning assessment in court circles.”
But she was not the one to be pitied. Russia was.
The bride conquered everyone. Dagmar regarded life with radiant eyes, and her simplicity and charm boded well for family life, although Sheremetyev wrote the truth: Not everyone in court accepted this hasty switch from the dead brother to the live one.
They did not understand that her small and graceful body belonged not to Niks or Sasha but had been intended from birth for the heir to the throne. That is why her mother bore her. Her mother married off her daughters and sons with great cleverness. Dagmar’s sisters and brothers were related to all the royal houses from England to Greece. Dagmar’s mother was called “the mother-in-law of Europe.” Through her numerous offspring, the Danish queen amusingly created a united Europe.
From the day their engagement was announced, petite Dagmar was in charge of enormous Sasha. Once they were married, he never left her side. When she went to visit Denmark, he sat lost in her rooms, like a big hound that had lost his master.
Sasha always had to be a sidekick, always in love. First it was Niks, now it was Dagmar, yet he was the new heir to the throne of the Russian Empire. Dagmar, whose new Orthodox name was Tsarevna Maria Fedorovna, “Minny” in the family, was very happy in her new country.
If only she had known then what awaited her in Russia. She would see the death of her husband, Alexander III, and of her four sons. The first two of her children died early: Alexander in infancy, followed by Georgy, who died of tuberculosis. In 1917, she survived the revolution and the abdication from the throne by her sons Nicholas and Mikhail, and their deaths. Mikhail was executed in Perm. The last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was executed in Ekaterinburg and, with him, her grandson, the tsarevich, and her four granddaughters. She would also outlive her favorite brother, King George of Greece, killed by a shot in Thessalonica. She would see the end of the great empire and the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty and live out her days in a foreign land.
But during the engagement festivities she was so happy that it made people glad just to look at her. The poet Tyutchev called it “Dagmar’s happy week.”
Her mother-in-law, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, was more restrained in her attitude toward her. Everyone noticed. “She cooled the outbursts of her kindness, as if to stress the betrayal of her favorite son,” wrote Count Sergei Sheremetyev. It was painful to look at her young daughter-in-law, who reminded her of her youth and young love. Now her relations with her husband were very different. She had given birth to their last child five years earlier. Tuberculosis—the result of the damp climate of St. Petersburg—and frequent childbirth had shattered her.
The empress retained her sense of humor. Every morning, her husband, Alexander, whom she called Sasha, maintained their ritual: He came to her rooms for their coffee, to give her a kiss, ask about the children, and remark that she “looked wonderful today.” One day, she responded angrily. “The only thing I’m wonderful for is the anatomical theater—a teaching skeleton, covered with a thick layer of rouge and powder.” She laughed bitterly. But that was just for a moment.
The group around the empress grew smaller. Her salon, once the top attraction, emptied. The death of the heir seemed to draw a line summing up her life. Dr. Botkin explained to the tsar that her lung disease made it impossible for her to fulfill her matrimonial duties. She and Alexander sighed in relief. Those “duties” had not been fulfilled for many years, anyway, but now the falseness of the situation disappeared. That part of life was closed to them and therefore, he was not really cheating on her any more.
They had a different relationship now. She became fervently devoted to religion and good works. Her office was filled with icons and she constantly spoke to him of newfound undecayed saints’ relics.
The court began calling the empress a saint. The court, which had not liked her, now did not like the young beauties who went through the revolving door of the emperor’s bedroom.
The emperor’s amusements were becoming more exotic. He invited a French troupe of actors, who performed dialogues from the banned works of the Marquis de Sade for a select audience. Court rumors had them showi
ng more than dialogues.
He also had a chief mistress. From the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich: “22 November 1861. For lunch with wife to Tsarskoye Selo. At the Orlov Gates met Sasha on horseback and behind him Alexandra Sergeyevna Dolgorukova, also on horseback and completely alone. The conclusion is not difficult. Painful.”
Kostya wrote “painful” not because he was so moralistic, but because lady-in-waiting Princess Alexandra Dolgorukaya was an extremely predatory lady.
She was considered a true beauty. “However, if no one is looking at her, you will see to your astonishment that she is not beautiful!” Anna Tyutcheva wrote. “Long-limbed, flat chest, bony shoulders, zinc-white face.” But no sooner did the princess notice “an interesting man’s gaze” than her lithe body straightened, a blush appeared on her cheeks, and all her movements took on a dangerous grace. She acquired a feline friendliness.
The pussycat should have been called a tigress. Her body and sly and ingratiating smile ensnared her quarry. She was incomparable and yet a typical court beauty. Her interests were limited to the court, intrigue, and gossip. She had mastered the school for scandal, she knew how to give left-handed compliments that would please the devil himself.
As befits a master of court intrigue, she was a brilliant actress. Once she had slept with the tsar, she found a clever way to announce her relationship. The empress was reading the Dictionary of History and Geography in her sitting room, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting. The tsar came in and Alexandra Dolgorukaya prompted fainted. The tsar hurried to her side. She was pale, her pulse was weak. The tsar, flustered, held her in his arms too long. The empress remained calm and dignified, continuing to leaf through her book.
The empress tolerated the liaison stoically. As had happened before, Alexander’s passion faded, and the lady-in-waiting was retired. He arranged a marriage to his adjutant general and wrote her a gallant letter. “My spiritual wound will not soon heal, and my poor heart, which you read like a children’s book, will suffer for a long time. Farewell forever.”
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