Nicholas guarded his inner thoughts from those outside his family – he had always been known for his reticence and even his personal diary is a parsimonious source of self-revelation. But there was one area of his life where he left a trail of informative clues behind him. In Tsarskoe Selo, the former emperor became an avid reader. Summer in the Russian north is famous for its ‘white nights’, when the darkness is of short duration. In the long hours of daylight, when not sawing or chopping timber for the fire, Nicholas caught up with the literature that he had failed to examine in earlier years, and his choice of books illuminates the former emperor’s attempt to make sense of the recent extraordinary events.
The themes with which his mind was throbbing were the same as they always had been: duty, fate, religion, nationhood, military greatness and rulership. It had never been his habit to talk to his ministers about them. Now, of course, he anyway had no ministers to talk to, and when he touched on these subjects in conversation with courtiers such as Dolgorukov or Gilliard, he still acted the emperor: he was not seeking a genuine exchange of views with them and they themselves felt no temptation to breach his privacy. It would seem that Nicholas did not unburden himself even to Alexandra, who in turn buried herself in the Bible and Christian devotional tracts. Nicholas was adamant about the need to look strong and keep his dignity. It would seem that the only way he found to commune with the thoughts of others was to sit down with the works of favoured authors. His ‘interlocutors’ could not answer back, which was how he liked things to be. He had been brought up to assume that to be a Russian tsar was to be answerable to no one. Nicholas was a human fortress.
But he was a fortress with a heart. In the evenings, he cheered up his family by reading to them. He started with stories by Anton Chekhov.1 Then he chose Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear and The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sherlock Holmes had long been a Romanov favourite.2 Detective stories by other writers were popular, too, including those of Gaston Leroux, starting with Le mystère de la chambre jaune.3
In his own reading, he indulged his lifelong passion for the imperial army’s history by looking at two works that had appeared not long before the outbreak of the Great War: L. A. Kasso’s Russia on the Danube and General A. N. Kuropatkin’s Russia for the Russians.4 Kasso focused on the treaty of Bucharest of 1812 that had given ‘the best bit of Moldavia’ to the Russian Empire – in Kasso’s opinion, to the inestimable benefit of St Petersburg.5 Kuropatkin’s sprawling trilogy recorded Russian military campaigns from the distant Muscovite past to the twentieth century, and argued that in recent decades there had been a lamentable failure to pursue the objective of ‘Russia for the Russians’. Kuropatkin railed against the scale of foreign ownership in Russian industry, and he also contended that the empire’s own Jews exercised a malign influence upon the national interest. In a sharp burst of anti-Semitism, he repeated a story about a pamphlet found on the corpse of a Jewish soldier killed in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905. Kuropatkin cited the alleged secret instructions of a rabbi who urged Jews to infiltrate ruling circles throughout Europe. Supposedly there was a Jewish plot to secure authority by financial control, to treat Christianity as their enemy and to undermine whole countries by fomenting working-class discontent.6
Kasso was an imperial patriot and conservative, Kuropatkin a rabid racist and extreme nationalist. He loved ‘his’ army and never stopped thinking about it. For him, as always, the honour and greatness of the country lay in the hands of its armed forces. He continued to endorse the idea that triumphant alien forces were at work against the wellbeing of his beloved Russia. The very fact that Nicholas turned to books by Kasso, and especially by Kuropatkin, showed the direction his thoughts were taking.
Nicholas also read The History of the Byzantine Empire by F. I. Uspenski, who shone a light on the different historical paths taken by the lands of Eastern and Western Europe under the influence of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, respectively. Uspenski’s best chapters recounted the ill-fated attempt by Roman emperor Julian in the fourth century to abolish Christianity as the established state religion.7 The work contained lengthy quotations from Julian’s pamphlet titled The Beard-Hater.8 Uspenski did not confine himself to events in Byzantium but surveyed the early stirrings of nationhood and religious specificity throughout Europe and the Middle East until the era of the Muslim invasions.9 It was essentially a sequel to Edward Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and there was nothing like it in contemporary historical writing around the world. Nicholas, admittedly not someone given to effusive self-expression, found it ‘a very interesting book’.10
But if he had a favourite author at Tsarskoe Selo, it was not Conan Doyle or Kuropatkin or Uspenski but the poet and novelist Dmitri Merezhkovski. Day after day he read the series of novels grouped under the title of Christ and Antichrist. Merezhkovski himself was a leading member of the Symbolist literary group that included the poets Alexander Blok and Merezhkovski’s wife Zinaida Gippius; these were novels that offered a vivid reimagining of historical episodes from fourth-century Rome through to nineteenth-century Russia. Merezhkovski had a zeal for the social and religious traditions of old Russia. His quirky theology had got him into trouble with the Orthodox Church to the point that there were moves to excommunicate him. The experience of revolutionary ferment in 1905–1906 had deeply disturbed him, and although his series ranged from one country to another, it was current Russian problems that lay at the core of his concerns. Nicholas read each of the novels in the space of a few days.
The first, Death of the Gods, had the Roman emperor Julian as its central character calling himself the Antichrist. Julian ruled from AD 361 to 363 and overturned the decree of his half-uncle Constantine that had designated Christianity as the empire’s sole official religion. Merezhkovski depicted Christians as being in constant internal strife, a widely found phenomenon in twentieth-century Russia. The novel described a Julian who was willing to discuss theology with the Christian members of his family and entourage. Julian appears in a light that is far from unsympathetic, but he is also seen as bull-headed and resistant to well-intended advice. As his life and reign come to a bloody end in battle with the Sassanid Empire of the Persians, the last line of the novel runs: ‘Night and Tempest, hand in hand, were striding on apace.’ Merezhkovski failed to make clear whether he regarded Julian as the genuine Antichrist of centuries of Christian theological thinking. His main implicit purpose was to point to the imperfection of life on earth even among Christians. Truth, for him, lay with God alone.
Nicholas recorded: ‘I finished reading Julian, which I liked.’11 The hero of the second volume, The Gods Resurrected, was Leonardo da Vinci.12 Some of the finest passages deal with the way in which the painter gave thought to how he should render the likeness of Jesus Christ. The novel examines Renaissance artists, preachers and thinkers such as Savonarola and Machiavelli and highlights mankind’s relationship with God. But apart from vignettes on Leonardo’s painterly musings, the writing has many longueurs. The sharpest chapter depicts a witches’ sabbath – Merezhkovski was never one to let his religious devotion get in the way of letting rip with his insalubrious imaginings. The city of Florence is depicted as wild, bustling and unseemly. The Gods Resurrected ends with a pedagogical prediction that, after the decline of Rome itself and Byzantium, Russia will become the ‘Third Rome’.13 Merezhkovski had a sermonizing streak. He was declaring that his country alone had the potential to show Europe the way to salvation – and with his millenarian convictions he felt sure that this remained true in the twentieth century.
Nicholas turned keenly to Peter and Alexei, the final novel in the Christ and Antichrist trilogy.14 Its focus was on one of the turning points in modern Russian history, the reign of Peter the Great. The content was inflammatory. At the heart of the novel is the terrible relationship between Peter and his son Alexei. Peter is brutal in the extreme. The worst of his abuses is seen in his treatment of the Church, its doctrines and its practices. A sharp contrast is drawn with Tsarevich Alexei, who appears calm, studious and reverent. When father and son fall out, Alexei calls him the Antichrist – this was evidently what Merezhkovski himself thought about Peter. The book closes with a prediction:
‘One day all things will end in Russia with a terrible revolt, and the autocracy will fall because millions of people will cry out to God against the tsar,’ wrote the Hanoverian resident Weber from St Petersburg, announcing the death of the tsarevich.15
Published months before the revolutionary emergency of 1905, Peter and Alexei came to be seen as a prophecy of the troubles to come, and its popularity continued to rise.
In his diary, Nicholas commented that Peter and Alexei was well written and made a ‘heavy’ impression.16 The apocalyptic prediction of the Romanov autocracy’s collapse must have touched a nerve. So too, probably, did the very name of the tsarevich. Indeed Nicholas seems to have had an obsession about those of his own ancestors who had encountered trouble with the question of succession. There were several such tsars, from Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century through to Alexander I, who reigned from 1801 to 1825. Strict though they could be, the official censors refrained from banning writers from examining the pros and cons of past rulers. Nicholas evidently found some solace in this literature during his own period of trauma. But whereas Peter killed his son Alexei, Nicholas had given up his throne rather than be separated from his own child. The poignant difference can hardly have escaped Nicholas’s notice. Everything else we know about him makes it highly likely that he also endorsed Merezhkovski’s hostility to Peter’s transformation of Russia: Nicholas would have felt a tug of sympathy for the Russian traditions that his ancestor trampled.
After finishing the Christ and Antichrist series, he picked up Merezhkovski’s novel Alexander I. With its unflattering portrait of authoritarian rule, the novel suggests that the country was roughly mishandled during most of the reign. But it also deals fondly with Alexander’s wife Elizaveta and his daughter Sofia by his mistress Maria Naryshkina. Merezhkovski portrayed the Romanov family in a gentle light, as when in 1824 young Sofia ponders what is worrying her father:
She looked him straight in the face. She saw that he was thinking or had just been thinking about something else, something personal – perhaps something as terrible as what was happening to her. But about what? She suddenly remembered: 11 March was the anniversary of the death of Emperor Pavel I. She knew what a day this was for him; she knew that grandfather had not died a natural death and that her father was always thinking about this and being tormented by it even though he never spoke to anyone about it. If she did not know all about it, she could make guesses. How many times she had wanted to talk and ask questions, but she had not dared.17
Merezhkovski also wrote kindly of the Decembrist plotters, who sought to bring about radical reform when Alexander died in 1825 and was succeeded by his younger brother Nikolai, as decent men who thought that everything had gone to the bad in Russia. One of them, the poet Kondraty Ryleev, exclaims: ‘The children of Russia took Paris and liberated Europe: pray God that they’ll liberate Russia!’18
Nicholas’s fascination with the lives of past tsars continued throughout the summer. These were not the books that he read to his family in the evenings, and there is no sign that he discussed them with Alexandra, far less with any member of his retinue. But he wanted to sort out his own mind, and Merezhkovski’s fevered imaginings about Russian history were his way of achieving this. He kept it all to himself.
Merezhkovski was no admirer of Nicholas and in 1907 had written in a piece that could be published only in France:
We believe that sooner or later there will arrive the thunderous voice of the Russian revolution in which the Archangel’s trumpet will resound over the old European cemetery, announcing the resurrection of the dead.19
He declared:
In the house of the Romanovs, as in the house of the Atreids, a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation. Murder on top of adultery, blood over the mud – ‘the fifth act of the tragedy played in a house of tolerance’. Peter kills his son, Alexander I his father, Catherine II her husband . . . God’s unction on the Tsar’s forehead turned into a curse, into the mark of Cain.20
This blustery analysis raised the question of the dynasty’s fitness to rule Russia. Nicholas himself looked for an answer in N. K. Shilder’s historical monograph about Emperor Paul, who ruled from 1796 until his assassination five years later.21 The true centrepiece of the work was the reign of Paul’s mother, Catherine the Great, who ascended the throne in 1762. Catherine became empress by colluding in the killing of her husband, Peter III, who was Paul’s father. Shilder conducted research on all three rulers and concluded that only Catherine deserved any respect despite the nefarious methods used in her accession. But while judging Paul an inadequate successor to his mother, he offered the consoling thought that his reversals of her policies left her basic achievements intact. Paul, he decided, failed to fulfil ‘the sacred duties’ of the monarchy and treated the Russian people as mere slaves. His assassination by a group of disgruntled ex-army officers was therefore unmourned – in Shilder’s telling phrase, he ‘thought of building himself an impenetrable court but only made his own grave’.22 The volume suggested that the only pity was that Paul’s son and heir Alexander I also fell short of public expectations, especially when he made the grim martinet Alexei Arakcheev his chief of staff. Arakcheev strove to turn Russia into an armed camp. According to Shilder, this sowed the seeds of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, seeds which germinated in the humiliation of the Crimean War.23
Nicholas in typically clipped fashion commented: ‘Very interesting.’24 There is no sign that he endorsed Shilder’s implicit approval of the desirability of some kind of reform. More likely he was intrigued by the saga of intergenerational family conflict and its political implications. His opinions about what should or could be done about the governance of Russia remained unchanged.
When not reading about his Romanov predecessors, he often chose books dealing with the theme of confinement, rescue or escape. Several of them were about the French Revolution. In the winter of 1917–1918 he turned to Victor Hugo’s Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three), a novel set in the time of a royalist revolt against the Republic in the late 1790s.25 The leader of the rebels was the Marquis de Lentenac who lands by ship in Brittany. In Paris the government under Maximilien Robespierre sends commander Gauvain against him.26 Lentenac is captured but escapes, and although Hugo’s sympathies were unmistakably with the revolution and against the guillotined Louis XVI, he gives scope for Lentenac and other royalists to appear in a sympathetic light. Gauvain fails to behave strictly in accord with the government’s policies and indeed deliberately facilitates Lentenac’s flight from captivity. In the crisis that follows, the authorities charge Gauvain with treason and have him executed.27 While Nicholas must have warmed to Lentenac’s selfless heroism, he would surely have been disconcerted by Hugo’s picture of the Revolution’s objectives. Nicholas himself was a casualty of dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Another book that focused on imprisonment and its traumas was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, set in the post-Napoleonic era. The leading character, Edmond Dantès, is wrongfully sentenced to imprisonment in the Château d’If. After being driven near to suicide, he succeeds in communicating with a dying fellow prisoner who discloses the whereabouts of a vast, hidden treasure on the island of Monte Cristo. By clambering into the same prisoner’s coffin, he gets himself buried alive as a means of escaping the prison. After breaking his way out of the coffin, he secretly regains his freedom. His first task is to find the treasure and make his fortune. Then he returns to France to hunt down those who were responsible for bringing him to court and seeks vengeance against them through a series of complicated schemes involving disguise and other trickery. As Dantès comes to terms with his anger, he often refrains from doing his worst to his potential victims. Dumas’s novel is a study in maltreatment, cunning, determination and the futility of revenge. It is doubtful that Nicholas was willing, like Dantès, to forgive his enemies or even to overlook what he regarded as the wrong they had done him. He was perhaps more drawn to the portrait of nobility in conditions of intense stress. Nicholas was determined to face his difficulties with stoicism.