What sustained the family’s morale was their love for each other and their Christian faith. Consequently, if the Soviet authorities had wanted to crush their spirit, the obvious way would have been to separate Nicholas and Alexandra from their children and confiscate their devotional texts. What would equally have unhinged Nicholas would have been a ban on his access to literature. The Urals Soviet authorities refused him permission to request material from a local library as he had done in Tobolsk, and the fact that his senior retainers were barred from the Ipatev house meant that he could no longer borrow volumes from them. Alexandra continued to sink into learned studies of Christianity, and the imperial couple ceased to have the vibrant conversations that had sustained their marriage during their years in power. But Nicholas could still turn to the books that they had brought along from Tobolsk as well as those he found on the shelves of the Ipatev house, and he used them to steady his thoughts.
The first book that Nicholas read was Alexandra’s, a copy of Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck’s Wisdom and Destiny, in the original French.1 It was a collection of aphoristic musings that won a wide readership in the pre-war years, and it was on the strength of it that Maeterlinck had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. Nicholas finished it quickly; he was so impressed that he read it aloud to the family for their evening edification.2
With its languorous style and portentous content, Wisdom and Destiny has long since lost its admirers. Nicholas never recorded what he liked about it but he was probably encouraged by the pages where Maeterlinck pleaded for sympathy for Louis XVI’s difficulties during the French Revolution:
Let us rather imagine ourselves in his place, in the midst of his doubt and bewilderment, his darkness and difficulties. Now that we know all that happened it is easy enough to declare what should have been done; but are we ourselves, at this moment, aware of what is our duty? Are we not contending with troubles and doubts of our own? And were it not well that they who one day shall pass judgment upon us should seek out the track that our footsteps have left on the sands of the hillock we climbed, hoping thence to discover the future? Louis XVI was bewildered: do we know what ought to be done? Do we know what we best had abandon, what we best had defend? Are we wiser than he as we waver betwixt the rights of human reason and those that circumstance claims? And when hesitation is conscientious, does it not often possess all the elements of duty?3
If any ruler had trudged through a comparable vale of tears, it surely was Nicholas of Russia in March 1917.
Nicholas had tried do the right thing by his own lights, which was precisely what Maeterlinck claimed for Louis XVI:
There is one most important lesson to be learned from the example of this unfortunate king: and it is that when doubt confronts us which in itself is noble and great, it is our duty to march bravely onwards, turning to neither right nor left of us, going infinitely further than seems to be reasonable, practical, just. The idea that we hold today of duty, and justice, and truth, may seem clear to us now, and advanced and unfettered; but how different will it appear a few years, a few centuries later!4
It is easy to imagine how these words would have comforted a man who had marched ‘bravely onwards’, convinced that he was carrying out his duty in defiance of hostile political demands.
According to Maeterlinck, moreover, Louis XVI was an early victim of the impact of a new and disturbing set of ideas upon his kingdom:
And is there a thing in this world can be more reassuring, or nearer to us, more profoundly human, than an idea of justice? Louis XVI may well have regretted that this idea, that shattered his peace, should have awakened during his reign; but this was the only reproach he could level at fate, and when we ourselves murmur at fate our complaints have much the same value.5
France in the late eighteenth century had been one of the crucibles of the European Enlightenment with its commitment to rationality, science and justice as well as to the removal of nonsensical traditions and oppression from on high. Russia at the start of 1917 suppurated with campaigns to create a more just society. These were not new campaigns but rather had been cultivated for decades by enemies of the tsarist order. Nicholas had always rejected them, and after falling from power, he never queried his assumptions. The likelihood is that he found some consolation, however misplaced, in the sentiments that Maeterlinck expressed.
He may also have been comforted by the author’s contention that rulers were not culpable for their lapses in anticipation:
It is good that the hand should believe that all is expected, foreseen; but good, too, that we should have in us a secret idea, inviolable, incorruptible, that will always remember that whatever is great most often must be unforeseen. It is the unforeseen, the unknown, that fulfil what we never should dare to attempt; but they will not come to our aid if they find not, deep down in our heart, an altar inscribed to their worship. Men of the mightiest will – men like Napoleon – were careful, in their most extraordinary deeds, to leave open a good share to fate.6
Maeterlinck painted a picture of politics as an untameable force of nature:
These feverish hours of history resemble a storm that we see on the ocean; we come from far inland; we rush to the beach, in keen expectation; we eye the enormous waves with curious eagerness, with almost childish intensity. And along comes one that is three times as high and as fierce as the rest.7
It is not hard to imagine that a Russian emperor who had made so many avoidable mistakes might have found succour in the idea that history could bring even the mightiest of tsars to his knees.
Maeterlinck stressed that fate plays a big part in human events and that faith in rationality is faith misplaced:
We shall not become wise through worshipping reason alone, and wisdom means more than perpetual triumph of reason over inferior instincts. Such triumphs can help us but little if our reason be not taught thereby to offer profoundest submission to another and different instinct – that of the soul.8
Nicholas, ever the fatalist, had found an author who spoke to his instincts.
After Wisdom and Destiny, he turned to Russian literature, and in particular to N. A. Leikin’s Neunyvayushchie rossiyane (Undespondent Russians), not a part of the nineteenth-century classical canon but a lively source of insight into society below the level of the aristocracy and the high command.9 Something inside Nicholas told him that he knew too little about his people, and perhaps he was at last beginning to recognize that he had been wrong to ignore and despise Russia’s merchantry in his years on the throne.10 Leikin, a friendly rival of Anton Chekhov until his death in 1906, had been famous for his articles about merchants in the Peterburgskaya gazeta. His usual focus was on the capital’s commercial class, from which he himself was descended. Leikin’s tone was humorous and sympathetic towards merchants and professional people of middling achievement, with all their foibles. While affectionately itemizing their clothes, food and manners, he punctured their social snobbery.11 But beneath his satire, Leikin was a proud Russian. He depicted the towns of Russia as an ethnic melting pot in which Russian culture was peacefully and properly triumphing over its rivals in the empire.12
Nicholas also read books that took a grimmer view of Russian society. Engineer Ipatev had left behind the collected works of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin on his shelves, and it was not long before Nicholas was reading The Golovlëv Family.13 This was a novel that offered an unsparing indictment of small-town life and trade. Old man Golovlëv, a penny-pinching merchant, tyrannized his sons and turned them into copies of his own resentful, unimaginative nature. Readers in the nineteenth century took Saltykov-Shchedrin to their hearts as an observer of the stagnant pools that required stirring before Russia could make progress. Nicholas did not record how he reacted to the novel and it is not even certain that he read it to the dispiriting end. (If he did, his resilience under house arrest was truly extraordinary.)
After Saltykov-Shchedrin, he moved on to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. For educated Russians, this was one of the great national classics, and – if we are to take his diary entries as a guide – he had never looked at it before his detention in Ekaterinburg. Tolstoy, despite his worldwide fame, had continued to suffer restrictions by the censors through to his death in 1910; he had also been excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. But there was something about War and Peace that powerfully appealed to Nicholas. The novel dwells on Russia’s travails in a time of invasion and defeat by Napoleon’s Grande Armée followed by victory. When Nicholas fell from power in early 1917, Russia had not yet been defeated, not by a long way. But it was a moment of gathering crisis and conditions at the front went from bad to worse once he abdicated. Furthermore, the Brest-Litovsk treaty signalled a military and territorial loss to the Germans as grievous as that which had been suffered at French hands in 1812. By the end of the same year, the Russians had exposed the logistical weaknesses in Napoleonic strategy, and the Grande Armée was pushed into a humiliating retreat as Napoleon himself fled to Paris and personal safety.
Such was Nicholas’s enthusiasm for War and Peace that in the May evenings he read the novel’s huge final section to his family.14 There were searing chapters about the burning of Moscow in 1812 by Russian authorities seeking to deprive the French of the fruits of its military victory. One of the heroes, Pierre Bezukhov, sets out on an abortive personal mission to assassinate Napoleon. Meanwhile, the Russian armies are regrouped for a counter-attack and soon the French are pushed into a humiliating retreat. It is not hard to imagine that the depiction of defeated French armies uplifted the mood of Nicholas and his family – perhaps the same fate awaited the German occupiers. The Romanovs were clinging to remnants of hope.