IV

★

The Petersburg Tutor

POBEDONOSTSEV’S entrée into high positions and into the centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg intellectual and social life was based on the artitcles he wrote in the late 1850’s concerning the history of serfdom and the need for judicial reform. These and the quality of his work on the old judicial system led to his appointment as a lecturer at Moscow University, where the clarity and vigor of his lectures persuaded Count Stroganov to recommend his appointment in 1861 as special tutor for the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich. Four months after the death of Nicholas in April, 1865, just before Pobedonostsev married, he was asked to become the tutor of the new heir, Alexander Alexandrovich, who became Alexander III in 1881. He accepted this appointment and moved to St. Petersburg in the fall of 1865, because he interpreted it as an imperial command and because he believed his future bride would prefer St. Petersburg and the increased salary and opportunity he would have.¹

Pobedonostsev came to know the future Alexander III briefly in 1861 when he taught Russian civil law to Nicholas Alexandrovich, but he paid little attention to him then. His initial impression of Alexander was not especially favorable, and his correspondence with Catherine Tiutchev, which was naturally quite discreet, contains some remarkably unflattering comments about Alexander and his wife, the Danish fiancée of his late brother, whom Alexander married on October 20, 1866. Beginning in December, 1866, Pobedonostsev met three times a week with Alexander, four times with the future empress, and twice a week with one of Alexander’s younger brothers, Vladimir. At first he considered Alexander a simple soul who was lazy and who used all of his energy trying to escape assignments. In December, 1868, he exclaimed that the future heir and his wife lived “like children in a wilderness, like sheep.” Catherine Tiutchev wrote in 1875 that she pitied him for wasting time bending his mind “to an almost childish level, without even the hope of creating a man.” Even after his pupil became tsar, Pobedonostsev often despaired of his understanding affairs of state and lamented his blind optimism.

The future empress also annoyed Pobedonostsev. She was homesick for Denmark, learned about Russia very slowly, seemed little interested in learning to speak Russian well, was often bored with her studies, and appeared empty-headed and dull. Moreover, Pobedonostsev did not enjoy reading to her in Russian, trying to persuade the young couple to speak Russian with each other, or assuming responsibility for their education in all fields of knowledge.

However, as the years passed and as he began to feel more comfortable with his pupils, he began to have hope. He thought that the happy marriage had made Alexander brighter, more cheerful, and more responsible, and that he had a “Russian heart.” The future empress made considerable progress in understanding her new country and its history, and Pobedonostsev began to enjoy breakfast with the couple and their small children, whom he considered a kind of ideal family. Moreover, his relations with Alexander’s younger brothers, Vladimir, Paul, and Sergei, were excellent, and Pobedonostsev began to feel at home in the various palaces to which his duties took him. The trips with the new heir through European Russia in the summers of 1866 and 1869 were both quite successful, and the Pobedonostsevs were invited in the summer of 1869 to travel to Denmark with the future ruler.²

Throughout the life of his charge, Pobedonostsev remained bothered by some of his personal habits, particularly his heavy drinking, and by what Pobedonostsev considered his lack of will and resolution. However, Pobedonostsev gradually acquired practical mastery over the mind of Alexander III. He benefited considerably from the authority he possessed as the scholarly professor, particularly since his pupil was not gifted intellectually, had not been prepared to be the heir until his older brother died suddenly, and tended to revere men who were well informed and who spoke with assurance and authority.

In any case, Pobedonostsev used his tutorial position to shape the views of his student. Alexander apparently was a young man of deep Orthodox faith before he came into contact with Pobedonostsev, but Pobedonostsev was immensely active in strengthening that faith and in emphasizing the ties between Orthodoxy and Russian national history. He persuaded Alexander to visit famous and beautiful monasteries and churches in northern Russia. He helped arrange summer tours to increase the heir’s knowledge of Russian economic resources and of the wealth of Russian historical and cultural tradition. He suggested that he and his wife read the historical novels of Zagoskin and Lazhechnikov; he had Professor Sergei M. Soloviev, then the most distinguished Russian historian, meet with him for a series of talks and discussion about the main forces in Russian history; and he arranged lectures and panel meetings with other Moscow and St. Petersburg scholars. After two or three years, Pobedonostsev began to send him books dealing with current problems, such as those by Samarin on the Baltic Germans, Schuyler on Central Asia, and Pogodin or Popov on the Balkan Slavs. He introduced the heir to Ivan Aksakov’s journal Moskva (Moscow), sent him the literature published by the panslav society, had him subscribe to Dostoevsky’s Grazhdanin (The Citizen), and had Dostoevsky read him selections from his novels. By 1873 or so, Alexander was not only heavily influenced by Pobedonostsev’s selections on Russian history and culture and on current issues, but began to turn to him for advice. The Balkan crisis and the Russo-Turkish War in 1877–78 brought them very close together; they talked and corresponded frequently about the issues and campaigns, and were in complete agreement. After the war, the creation of the Volunteer Fleet cemented their relationship because the heir was the honorary chairman of the Fleet and Pobedonostsev was vice-chairman and actual manager.

Consequently, by the late 1870’s Pobedonostsev had indeed become the “grey eminence” for the future Alexander III, even criticizing the tsar and government ministers in his letters to his pupil. Their relationship was close and reflected basic agreement on everything affecting the Russian state. Except for one short period late in the summer of 1879, when a cool spell developed because of the Grand Duke’s heavy drinking, they cooperated splendidly. Most important, Alexander III remained the student and disciple of Pobedonostsev in matters of public policy.³

Pobedonostsev’s position in the court between 1866 and 1880 was based on his role as a tutor in the royal family, but he did have other positions in the high bureaucracy. When he went to St. Petersburg in the fall of 1865, he was named a consultant to the Ministry of Justice, but there is no evidence that he actually worked in the Ministry. However, on February 19, 1868, the seventh anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs, Alexander II named him a Senator, an appointment which ended his worries about his career in the bureaucracy. He was at first placed in the second department, but in November, 1868, was shifted to the department which reviewed civil court cases, where he developed a special interest in wills. It is evident from his correspondence that he devoted enormous time to the Senate, generally working from twelve until seven each day except Saturday and Sunday, and that he found his colleagues of very low quality, lazy, and inefficient.

On January 1, 1872, Pobedonostsev was made a member of the Council of State, a promotion which he thought would make his work easier, although he remained a Senator and continued his tutoring duties as well. The Council of State was an advisory body to the Emperor concerning projected laws. Most of the important legislation or decrees of the nineteenth century were given their final review and final drafting in the Council. The Council at this time was also responsible for the administration of some important non-Russian areas, such as the Baltic provinces, Georgia, and Kamchatka, and one of its departments kept under review the ministries which dealt with economic and financial affairs. Pobedonostsev’s main responsibility was in the second department, which dealt with civil and ecclesiastical affairs and which in 1872 was headed by his old friend and teacher, Prince Oldenburg. Pobedonostsev’s work in this division of the Council of State almost certainly contributed to his appointment as Director General of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in April, 1880.

For the rest of his life he remained a member of both the Senate and the Council of State. He was most conscientious, faithfully attending the sessions of his own department and of the full Council of State as well. The special committees to which he was appointed no doubt reflect his own particular interests. After 1875 he was a member of the special committee named to review the work of the Ministry of Education; from 1876 through 1880, he served on a committee on prisons; and in 1877, he joined a committee to review the situation in the Baltic provinces, where Samarin had taught him that the power of the German Protestants must be reduced.

Pobedonostsev’s service in the highest levels of the bureaucracy naturally gave him some influence on Russian domestic policy, particularly in those fields in which he had considerable knowledge and strong points of view. At the same time, and perhaps more important, he came to have a clear understanding of the processes of the autocracy. His letters throughout the 1870’s are filled with complaints about the quality of his colleagues and of the Russian administration in general, the incredible inefficiency and waste of time within the Senate and the Council of State, and the need for more vigorous leadership and more efficient management. In fact, the substance of his later views about autocratic government and the need to surround the tsar with a small elite group of highly competent, well-trained advisors almost certainly reflects his experiences in the St. Petersburg bureaucracy, from 1866 until 1880 in particular.⁴

Pobedonostsev developed a powerful dislike for St. Petersburg when he lived there for several months in 1861–62 to serve on the committee appointed to define the basic principles for the judicial reform. The months he spent there in 1863–64 on the judicial reform committee and the forty-two years he lived there after the fall of 1865 only increased his discontent and restlessness in Peter’s capital. He retained his house on Bread Lane in Moscow and never purchased a home in St. Petersburg. He always felt in exile away from Moscow. Indeed, after he had lived in St. Petersburg for more than fifteen years, he wrote Catherine Tiutchev that it still seemed a foreign city and that he felt as though he were living in a brothel.⁵

The judicial reform campaign to which he devoted so much time and energy between 1859 and 1864 and his work with Kalachov, Zubkov, Zarudnyi, and the other members of the judicial committees brought him into stimulating contact with some of the most lively and learned people in Russia. Moreover, his scholarly work and his reputation as one of the liberals or reformers drew him to the attention of some of the leading salons in Moscow and in St. Petersburg at a time of relaxation when even official circles buzzed with fascinating projects and there was a kind of competition for the most articulate men of the day. Thus, Pobedonostsev was drawn into the circle of Prince Vladimir Odoevskii, in Moscow, when that celebrated critic and philanthropist moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow in the winter of 1862–63, and later into that of Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna, when Pobedonostsev went to St. Petersburg in 1865. The men and women he met in these groups helped to sustain his liberalism into the early 1870’s, when his native conservatism, the peculiar view he had of court and official life, and his reaction to Russian policies after the great reforms moved him into a ruthlessly reactionary position.

Prince Odoevskii, who was especially close to Pobedonostsev during the last two or three years of the latter’s residence in Moscow, resembled some of the other Muscovites who contributed most to his education and training. Born in 1803, Odoevskii was educated in Moscow boarding schools and at Moscow University, where he studied in a faculty of which Pobedonostsev’s father was a member. By the late 1820’s, he had acquired a reputation as an original and independent literary critic and as a man of burning social conscience. Indeed, his learning was so considerable, the range of subjects about which he wrote with wit and wisdom so great, and his position in the main salons late in the 1830’s so commanding that even critics such as Belinsky considered him a great writer. At that time, Odoevskii was a brilliant defender of the political and social system, praised the landed aristocracy and saw no need to abolish serfdom, declared that social inequality reflected only the nature of man, and believed that progress could best be achieved if the bureaucracy were better educated and more virtuous. He wrote in 1835 that “government service is the only way Russians can serve their country.” He was a man of considerable human sympathy, however, and he was the founder of a society for aiding the poor which flourished for more than twenty years.⁶

Odoevskii’s literary reputation began to decline in the 1840’s, when his creative energies and production failed to satisfy the high expectations he had created. Perhaps because his estates ceased to be profitable at the same time, in 1846 he became Assistant Director of the St. Petersburg Public Library (now the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library), a position he retained until he was named a Senator in 1862 and returned to Moscow. During the 1850’s, he became a convinced partisan of the movement to abolish serfdom, and in the 1860’s he was an enthusiastic advocate of the other changes which followed emancipation. He was a particular advocate of increased freedom of thought and expression, expanded education, civil rights, and prison reform. However, while he saw the need for radical reform of the social structure and of the courts and local government, he did not believe constitutional monarchy was possible in Russia because of the “insufficient development of the Russian people.” Indeed, he thought Russia would not be ready for an elected parliament for a century, and he considered that educating the landowning nobility was the country’s central problem.

Enthusiastic, full of good cheer, a profound believer in education and in progress, convinced that the day on which the serfs had been emancipated was the happiest day of his life and that Alexander II was “the greatest of Russian tsars,” Odoevskii brought a fresh new spirit and tone to Pobedonostsev’s life. He was given special responsibility in the Senate for working in the eighth department, in which Pobedonostsev then held a high position. A hard worker who arrived at his office every morning before any of the clerks, Odoevskii brought his lunch with him and reminisced with Pobedonostsev as they relaxed in his quiet office. Odoevskii worked closely with Pobedonostsev for his first six months as a Senator, trying to master the main principles and procedures. In addition, he invited Pobedonostsev to his handsome old home on Smolensk boulevard, where Pobedonostsev met prominent and young artists and writers whom Odoevskii thought lively and interesting. Urbane, a polished and charming conversationalist whose mind and tongue ran nimbly over all the important events and people of the previous forty years, Odoevskii dazzled and delighted the young bureaucrat and scholar. In an essay he wrote about Odoevskii when he died in 1869 and in a letter he wrote about him thirty-five years later, Pobedonostsev spoke with most unusual affection about “the last of the good old days” and of the warmth, sympathy, and generous high hopes which Odoevskii radiated. When Pobedonostsev left Moscow for St. Petersburg, he cut off the influence toward a relaxed, humane, and optimistic view of life which Odoevskii had provided.⁷

Until her death in January, 1873, the Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna and her salon helped make St. Petersburg somewhat resemble Moscow for the young jurist and scholar and kept his political views respectably close to the center. The Grand Duchess represented a liberalizing and humanizing force like that of Prince Odoevskii. Indeed, her death probably contributed seriously to the conservatism which burgeoned in Pobedonostsev during the years after 1864 and which became a rigid and relentless philosophy before 1880.

The Grand Duchess was born in Stuttgart in 1803 and educated largely in Paris. In December, 1823, she married a younger brother of Nicholas I, the Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, who left her a widow in 1849. Even during the icy reign of Nicholas I, she drew around her interesting and exciting men and women. Blessed with enormous energy and greatly interested in assisting others, she helped establish schools and hospitals, created a program for helping the wounded during the Crimean War, and sponsored young writers and artists. Anton Rubinstein wrote that he never met her equal. Pobedonostsev was impressed by her sense of dignity, the grace and style she sought to impress upon Russian society, the confidence she patiently encouraged in talented young men and women, and the sensible and reasonable approach she displayed toward developing improved social institutions for Russia.

Grand Duchess Helen’s greatest forte was identifying promising young men and in creating an atmosphere in her home which contributed to the flowering of their abilities. After the death of her husband and during the thaw of the first decade of the reign of Alexander II, she acquired enormous influence in the higher levels of Russian political and intellectual life. She was one of the earliest and most effective advocates of emancipation and also labored successfully for the other reforms, especially of the courts and of local government. Thus, she identified Nicholas Miliutin, one of the architects of emancipation, as early as 1846, helped give him the social graces and connections in high circles which he needed, prodded her nephew, Alexander II, to make use of Miliutin and others like him, and used her influence during the years from 1856 through 1861 to help break the various log jams which threatened on occasion to prevent or delay or cripple this great achievement. She and Miliutin freed her serfs in 1856 in a move designed to serve as a model for others who were interested but paralyzed by the complex problems involved.

Pobedonostsev came to the attention of Grand Duchess Helen when his articles on the court system were published, and he was drawn into her lively reformist circle when he went to St. Petersburg in 1861. There he encountered the men whom the Grand Duchess thought the most exciting and able in Russia. Fluent in several languages and interested in European culture, she also introduced him to interesting and important foreign visitors, who added an international touch to her soirées. Mikhailovsky Palace therefore became one of the few places in St. Petersburg for which Pobedonostsev had any affection. The musical soirées and the charity teas became of less political importance after 1863, when Miliutin’s position declined somewhat and the Polish uprising dampened the enthusiasm of many for further changes. The Grand Duchess in the last ten years of her life therefore accented charities and the arts in her gatherings, which remained among the most international and stimulating in St. Petersburg.⁸

Grand Duchess Helen not only introduced the shy and reserved Pobedonostsev to some of the great names of Russian political and social life and to interesting foreign visitors, but she also gave him some insight into the ways of the world. Moreover, when Pobedonostsev brought his very young, provincial bride to the capital city in 1866, the great lady adopted the youngster, introduced her to St. Petersburg, and made her home a place of enlightenment and refuge. When the Grand Duchess died, at the age of 70, she was the closest friend in St. Petersburg of both Pobedonostsev, who was then forty-five, and of his wife, who was only twenty-five.⁹

Grand Duchess Helen’s closest friend and associate was another widow of wide culture and humane views, great energy, intellectual ability, and forcefulness, Baroness Edith Raden, whom Pobedonostsev met in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1861–62 and who remained a close and humanistic friend until her death in September, 1885. Born in Kurland in a Baltic German family, Baroness Raden served at the court of Alexander II as a lady-in-waiting and was particularly close to the empress. She travelled extensively in western Europe with Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna after the Crimean War, and she helped to arrange her soirées and other parties. Well educated, fluent in French as well as in German, vigorous and orderly in everything she undertook, she joined the Grand Duchess in efforts to promote reform in Russia and to bring together important and fascinating people.

Pobedonostsev was impressed by Baroness Raden’s intellectual ability, energy, and self-assurance. He paid tribute to her remaining faithful to Lutheranism without adopting “the fanaticism so common among Germans.” He exulted when she overcame the temptation to join the Catholic Church when a spiritual crisis and a visit to Rome tempted her. He rejoiced when she developed a great fondness for Orthodox Church services and for Russian history and tradition. He was similarly impressed by her remarkable charitable activities.

After 1866, Baroness Raden brought Pobedonostsev and his wife into her cultured circle. She helped to widen his intellectual horizons and to shake briefly his profound belief that only convinced members of the Russian Orthodox Church could be truly patriotic. Pobedonostsev listened to the long discussions which she had with Iurii Samarin, a burning nationalist, critical of the position and role of the Baltic Germans, and to her vigorous defense of the virtues of the German aristocracy, their provincialism, love of work, and conservatism. After she died in 1885, Pobedonostsev helped Samarin’s son publish their long correspondence on this issue, as well as all of Samarin’s other works. It is interesting that Pobedonostsev did not attack the Baltic Germans for their power at court or their authority in the Baltic area until after Baroness Raden died.¹⁰

Pobedonostsev helped to introduce Baroness Raden to old Muscovite religious and cultural traditions, particularly when she lived for some time in Kostroma, one of his favorite old Russian cities and one which had a convent which he thought particularly handsome and excellent. She, in return, brought Pobedonostsev into contact both with numerous Western cultural influences and with the waning Slavophil centers at the court, in particular with Samarin, who led a resolute campaign to reduce the privileges of the Baltic Germans until he died in 1876—in Germany—and to unify Russia under the direct rule of Russians. Samarin was a member of the circle of Grand Duchess Helen in the 1850’s and was an earnest advocate of emancipation as early as 1856. Moreover, although he had become conservative by 1870 and was strongly antisemitic, throughout his life he supported “freedom of conscience, absolute and for everyone without restriction.” He defended the cultured and civilized Slavophil doctrines of Khomiakov against more repressive programs, and he did not join the panslav movement in the 1870’s. Thus, Samarin in general reflected the culture and urbanity of the Grand Duchess and Baroness Raden and therefore influenced Pobedonostsev as they did.¹¹

There is no evidence that Pobedonostsev or any of his family took part in the famous controversy between the Slavophils and the Westerners in the early 1840’s concerning the nature of Russia and its future. His father died in 1843 as an old man. He had not engaged in controversies of any kind, particularly over philosophy or the philosophy of history, and it is quite unlikely that he was even interested in the quarrel. His brother Sergei was in his most active period, but he wrote for both Westerner and Slavophil journals and showed no partiality in or even knowledge of the dispute. Constantine himself was a youngster in the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg while the battle raged in Moscow, but he must naturally have been aware of the issues, even though he may not have understood them fully or taken even a modest position. When he had completed his schooling and had begun his work in the Senate, the formal discussion was ended. Moreover, he was never especially interested in abstract ideas; he thought all such discussions wasteful and even harmful. In any case, there is no evidence concerning his stand in this controversy, and it is almost certain that he concentrated entirely upon his own work and ignored the dispute. Samarin, who revered Khomiakov and who had long discussions with Baroness Raden in the apartments of Grand Duchess Helen about the nature of Russia, was therefore of especial importance because he introduced Pobedonostsev directly to the Slavophil doctrine and to the Slavophils active in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the twenty years after the Crimean War.

Pobedonostsev’s service as a tutor to the tsar’s children opened other avenues into the Slavophil circle. At the end of the tour through European Russia in the summer of 1863 with Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich, he vacationed briefly in the Crimea with the imperial family. There he became acquainted with one of the ladies-in-waiting, Anna Tiutchev, a daughter of the celebrated Slavophil poet, who was tutoring the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna and the Grand Duke Sergei. This friendship led to Pobedonostsev’s acquaintance with the great poet. Moreover, Anna Tiutchev in January, 1866, married Ivan Aksakov, the irrepressible and often irresponsible tribune of the panslav movement with whom Pobedonostsev was in frequent, sometimes cautious, contact until Aksakov died in January, 1886.¹²

At the time Pobedonostsev became acquainted with Fedor Tiutchev, the romantic poet had become a deep conservative. Yet he had approved the reforms instituted by Alexander II, although he had not advocated any of them. Moreover, despite being chairman of the committee responsible for censoring foreign literature and a member of the committee which kept the Russian press under review, he believed the restrictions too tight, even during the thaw after 1856, and urged that writers and journalists be given more freedom. A man who spent a large part of his life abroad, partly as a diplomat, Tiutchev spoke French and German and was as familiar with the works of Lamartine, Heine, and Goethe as he was with those of Pushkin. Nevertheless, after the Crimean War in particular, he was violently anti-Western, often denouncing the West, especially the Papacy, and speaking of “the eternal antagonism of East and West”—in fluent French. He was also a vigorous panslav. He attended the celebrated Moscow congress of panslavs in 1867, and he saw this movement, led by the Russians, as an important weapon for revenge over those who had triumphed in the Crimean War.

Pobedonostsev was a great admirer of Tiutchev, his poetry, and his profound Russian nationalism. Indeed, one of Tiutchev’s poems attacking Lutheranism so excited Pobedonostsev that he could barely sleep after reading it. He enjoyed evenings at the Tiutchevs’ or parties which the poet attended. He even helped Tiutchev’s youngest son obtain a position in the Senate in Moscow when he graduated from the School of Jurisprudence in 1867, the kind of favor he ordinarily refused to seek for anyone, even close relatives.¹³

Tiutchev’s son-in-law, Ivan Aksakov, was born just four years earlier than Pobedonostsev and completed four years of schooling in the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg in 1842. Aksakov then worked in the Senate in Moscow. It seems most likely that Pobedonostsev and Aksakov would have met, but there is no evidence that they were acquainted before Anna Tiutchev and Aksakov were married in January, 1866. The Aksakovs lived for the next twenty years in Moscow, and the correspondence between Anna Aksakov and Pobedonostsev was often strained and sometimes broken because of some of Aksakov’s policies as a newspaper publisher and editor. Pobedonostsev wrote, “There are few men as pure and honest and with such a burning love for Russia and for everything Russian” as Aksakov. Even when he was bitterly annoyed with Aksakov for his attacks on the government’s policy in the Russo-Turkish War in 1877–78 and at the Congress of Berlin, Pobedonostsev admitted it was impossible not to love and respect Aksakov, and to appreciate his patriotism and his love for the Russian people. However, he thought him a child in political and administrative affairs, and noted that Aksakov “goes in a straight line” and did not know that “curves rule” in human affairs. Above all, he thought him irresponsible in his continued defense of the judicial reform of 1864, his struggle for more freedom for the press, and his efforts for religious freedom for the Old Believers. However, in spite of the frequent friction between Aksakov and Pobedonostsev, Anna Aksakov kept open the line of communication, providing Pobedonostsev another important link with the Moscow Slavophils and panslavs and with those members of the court who shared Aksakov’s vigorous, nationalistic views.¹⁴

Of all Pobedonostsev’s friends, Catherine Tiutchev was clearly the closest and exerted the most influence. Pobedonostsev became acquainted with Catherine through her sister Anna, and the two exchanged a total of more than five hundred letters between 1866 and Catherine’s death in Moscow on March 11, 1882. They were brought together originally by their roles at court and by their interest in court politics. Catherine served as a lady-in-waiting for the Empress between 1859 and 1862, when her poor health (tuberculosis) forced her to retire and to divide her life between Moscow and a country estate at Varvarino.

The interests which Pobedonostsev and Catherine Tiutchev shared were fortified by their common affection for the Russian Orthodox faith and for Moscow. She kept him in contact with his native city and served as a confidante to whom alone he could entrust his views concerning policies, conflicts within the court and the high bureaucracy, and even the faults of the emperor, the heir to the throne, and other members of the imperial family. Pobedonostsev was often so candid in his letters to Catherine Tiutchev that he worried that they be read in the post, so he had them delivered by hand by friends who were going to Moscow. A week after she died, he obtained all of his correspondence with Catherine from her sister Anna, retaining it until he died in 1907. This voluminous correspondence not only serves as a splendid source concerning fifteen years of Russian history, but provided him a test of his attitudes and views against the shrewd and critical mind of an uncommonly perceptive woman who knew well the atmosphere and the people of which he wrote.

Catherine Tiutchev was indeed a remarkable woman. Educated in part in Europe, fluent in English, French, and German, and of independent judgment, she served as a stimulating intellectual correspondent, criticizing books and artitcles he had written, reading Emerson or Le Play at his suggestion, and in turn persuading him to read some of the volumes which most excited her, from eighteenth century memoirs of Russian, Prussian, Austrian, or French statesmen to Bossuet, de Maistre, Stein, Froude, Carlyle, and Palmerston. She was also frank in her criticism when he advocated policies restricting the rights of Old Believers or throttling the Russian press. Indeed, her death, and that of Baroness Raden in 1885, removed important humanistic influences from Pobedonostsev, who had already become thoroughly repressive in his policies.¹⁵

Most of the women Pobedonostsev met socially in Moscow and St. Petersburg were married and considerably older than he. However, when he married on January 9, 1866, at the age of thirty-eight, he selected a young girl of eighteen, the daughter of a landowner near Mogilev in Smolensk province who was a niece of one of his classmates in the School of Jurisprudence and a member of a family known well by Baroness Raden. Pobedonostsev’s marriage to Catherine Alexandrovna Engelhardt was a very important step in his life. His engagement, July 14, 1865, came as a complete surprise to Anna Aksakov and his other friends. Indeed, the letter in which Pobedonostsev announced his betrothal is extraordinarily revealing:

I have always loved children, loved to become acquainted with them, loved to join them in their childish games. Ten years ago, God sent me a dear child, my Katia, a seven-year-old girl, niece of my classmate Engelhardt, when I visited him in the country. I came to know her as any child, recognized her deep soul, and became attached to her with all my heart. I sought to awaken her to the good and the true. I talked with her about God, I prayed with her. I read to her and taught her, I sat with her for hours and days, and she grew up and developed before my eyes. The more I looked into her soul, the more deeply I devoted myself to her and confided my soul to her. She loved me deeply and tenderly with all her childish soul, and my first happiness was looking into her soul, standing over it, guarding it, bringing joy to it.

The years passed, my Katia grew up, and fear fell upon me: what will happen when my child grows up before my very eyes into a young lady? She grew up and there was a time when it seemed my Katia had left me and had got out of my hands. That was a difficult time, that time when I lived in Petersburg and in Tsarskoe Selo.

It seemed to me that my Katia was lost for me, but now I see that God at that time was testing me and punishing me. He punished me, but he did not put me to death. I do not know how—I know that I did not do it but that God did—my Katia again returned to me. But then last year all dissolved in misunderstanding; we entered into new relations in shyness and timidity. Our relations were only pale shadows of our earlier ones, and I began to think that all was ended and began to close all the doors around myself and to abandon all hope. However, I felt that I was necessary for her, that her heart fully believed in me alone, that she trusted in and relied upon me alone— but whether or not she loved me, that I did not know and could not find out.

I arrived here July 4 and spent a whole week troubled. We both felt that we could not even talk freely and easily about anything so long as we could not clear up this misunderstanding, but neither of us could say a word about it. The position was becoming impossible, and I in fear decided to tell all to my Katia. Then there was a whole day of fear and agitation. Finally, I heard the word my soul had waited for, and my happiness appeared before all. Oh, to what a wide-open place God has brought me from sorrow and darkness.¹⁶

The Engelhardts were a Baltic German family who had moved into the Mogilev-Smolensk area, where Mrs. Pobedonostsev had a number of relatives who were landowners. Close relatives also resided in Warsaw, and an uncle of Mrs. Pobedonostsev, Baron von Engelhardt, was a celebrated astronomer in Dresden at that time. These family connections, her knowledge of Western languages, and her interest in Western culture increased Pobedonostsev’s interest in Europe, which was already strong. Thus, although he had not been able to travel abroad before his marriage, he visited Europe more than twenty times before the turn of the century, accompanied in every case by his wife.¹⁷

Catherine Engelhardt was in some ways an ideal companion for Pobedonostsev, but her age, shyness, health, and the problems her family created certainly had a powerful influence in making him a lonely, gloomy, and ferociously antisocial statesman. No photographs of her have survived, even though she lived until 1932. Moreover, none of her friends or acquaintances has left descriptions of her. Even foreign visitors, such as the archbishop of York, who visited her school and commented upon her excellent English and French and upon her wide knowledge, provide us no information concerning her physical appearance. She was a woman of deep religious faith who enjoyed Orthodox religious services and who looked forward to spending Passion week in a monastery, usually the Sergiev monastery, between St. Petersburg and Peterhof. She possessed a clear and retentive mind, loved to read both Russian and Western literature, and appreciated travel and life abroad. When he was ill, she often read him French novels or English history. She had a particular fondness for Pushkin, and in 1888, Pobedonostsev had published a handsome limited edition of Pushkin poems which she had selected, Severnye tsvety (Northern Flowers), which he presented to Russian and foreign friends. In 1897, the Holy Synod printing office published her translation of a popular sentimental English novel, The Mighty Atom, by Minnie Mackay, under the pseudonym of Marie Corelli, who was a kind of Fannie Hurst in late Victorian England. The Mighty Atom was a most effective attack upon what the French call “lay schools,” or schools in which there was no religious education, and Mrs. Pobedonostsev’s translation reached a fifth edition in 1911. She probably also assisted her husband in the numerous translations he made from English, of which her command was conspicuously better than his.¹⁸

There is no record of any discontent or dissatisfaction on Pobedonostsev’s part with his wife, except for the great disappointment, expressed often in the first years of their marriage, that they had no children. However, just as his solitary and quiet life of work in his office and in his study must have made life dreary for his young bride, so her inability to meet effectively even the minimal social obligations St. Petersburg imposed must have annoyed and hampered him. While the young and provincial Mrs. Pobedonostsev was perfectly at ease in small groups, especially with Pobedonostsev’s elderly friends, she was unable to conduct a satisfactory conversation in large gatherings. Basically, therefore, Mrs. Pobedonostsev’s social life in the 1870’s was restricted to the circle of two grandes dames, both almost fifty years older than she. Indeed, she had been married fifteen years before she met her husband’s closest friend and correspondent, Catherine Tiutchev. By 1890, perhaps even before that, she had abandoned society altogether, except for brief appearances at those formal palace functions which they found it impossible to escape. As a young man in a family which much enjoyed the theater, Pobedonostsev had frequently attended the opera and the theater, but he saw only one play during the last thirty years of his life, although he continued to read the works of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and other great dramatists.¹⁹

In 1880, Mrs. Pobedonostsev was drawn into two charitable activities which absorbed a considerable amount of her time and energy thereafter. When her husband helped establish and then directed for several years the Volunteer Fleet (used in time of peace to ferry troops and convicts to the Russian Far East and to engage in trade with China and designed to provide a reserve of cruisers for naval war), she became interested in the island of Sakhalin and the welfare of the convicts, their families, and others who lived there. Consequently, in 1880 she began annual campaigns to collect funds, food, clothing, and books for Sakhalin. The Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna also persuaded her to establish a school for girls interested in teaching in rural areas, and St. Vladimir’s occupied a great deal of her time after 1880. The school had approximately one hundred students. It emphasized religious instruction, and Mrs. Pobedonostsev sought to prepare young ladies who would marry priests and help them establish parish schools.²⁰

Mrs. Pobedonostsev influenced Pobedonostsev’s working habits and isolation in other ways as well. Perhaps because of the St. Petersburg climate, perhaps because she was frail, she was constantly ill. Pobedonostsev’s correspondence with Catherine Tiutchev and even with some of the Orthodox church hierarchy is studded with references to her continued poor health. She was seriously ill only through the winter of 1875–76, and she died in 1932, twenty-five years after her husband, but her constant poor health strengthened his tendency to live a solitary existence and to attend social functions and court affairs only when absolutely necessary.

Pobedonostsev’s elderly mother-in-law lived with the newly married couple until she died after a prolonged illness in May, 1874. Three years later, Mrs. Pobedonostsev’s eighty-four-year-old aunt succumbed after living with them for more than a decade. Pobedonostsev’s wife not only served as nurse for these two old ladies during their last painful months, but also assumed responsibility for raising her younger brother and sister in their home. Vladimir, who was born about the time the Pobedonostsevs were married, was a very heavy burden because he too was afflicted with poor health and may have been mentally retarded. The Pobedonostsev correspondence of the 1870’s is full of references to the labor he caused Mrs. Pobedonostsev, who had to care for him and tutor him.

Sonia Engelhardt, Mrs. Pobedonostsev’s headstrong and melancholy younger sister, caused even more trouble. He was never able to control this young lady, who defied him in her reading habits, in her diet of chocolates, and in her tantrums. In the spring of 1877, against his wishes, she volunteered to serve as a nurse with the Russian forces in the Balkans. There, exhausted by overwork, she acquired typhus. Her health was so damaged that Mrs. Pobedonostsev had to leave her husband to take care of her. Moreover, while serving in a field hospital in Bulgaria, Sonia fell in love with a member of General Skobelev’s staff, Colonel A. A. Bogoliubov, who was so badly wounded during the war that he was not able to come to St. Petersburg for more than two years. Pobedonostsev had then to agree most reluctantly to their marriage, although the colonel was badly crippled and had no position or promise of one.

Several months after Sonia’s marriage, Bogoliubov was appointed to the customs office in Baku. However, he had hardly been there a year when he died of typhus. Mrs. Pobedonostsev, who had made all of the arrangements for the marriage, then had to assume responsibility for the funeral. Sonia lived with the Pobedonostsevs for the next fifteen years, constituting a heavy drain because of her fits of despondency, her poor health, and her general helplessness.²¹

Two other trials and tragedies harassed the Pobedonostsevs early in the 1880’s, tended to isolate them from the social world, and strengthened their intense dislike for public opinion. It is quite likely that there was little real warmth or affection between the Pobedonostsevs by 1880 or so, and the young wife—thirty-five years old in 1882, when her husband was fifty-five—may on occasion have resented the cheerless and ascetic life they led. In any case, in the fall and winter of 1882, malicious rumors were common in St. Petersburg that the Pobedonostsev marriage was collapsing and that Mrs. Pobedonostsev was going to divorce him and marry Nicholas Baranov, a fiery and irresponsible captain who had been cashiered from the navy in December, 1879, but who served before and after that as Pobedonostsev’s deputy director of the Volunteer Fleet. The rumors almost certainly had no foundation, except perhaps a certain restlessness and lack of deep happiness on the part of Mrs. Pobedonostsev. However, the gossip did circulate. Pobedonostsev, a man of great propriety and then the lay head of the Synod of the Orthodox Church, must have been profoundly upset. His withering scorn for society, for idle minds and gossip, and for the outside world in general was enormously increased.²²

The second scandal involved Mrs. Pobedonostsev’s father, Alexander Alexandrovich Engelhardt, and was even more important because it was discussed in the Ministry of Finance for two years and flurries of comment appeared in the press. In April, 1883, Pobedonostsev made his only personal plea to the tsar for a special favor in order to keep the case of “the senile old man” from the courts and to close the issue by administrative order. This petition was quietly honored during the celebrations surrounding the coronation of Alexander III the next month. However, the scars left by this affair on Pobedonostsev were deep and affected his attitude toward his associates and the press from that time forward.

Engelhardt was raised in a wealthy, luxury-loving, relaxed landowning family, but the family and clan fortunes had all evaporated by the time Pobedonostsev married his daughter. Sometime in the late 1860’s or early 1870’s, Pobedonostsev obtained a position for his father-in-law in the customs office in Taganrog. In May and June, 1881, he and thirty-four other officials were accused of embezzlement of state funds over a long period of time. Many of those whom Pobedonostsev had angered late in April of that year for the way in which he had upset the plans of General Loris-Melikov and most other government leaders for some slight modification of the autocratic government, referred to generally as the “Loris-Melikov constitution,” must have rejoiced at these charges. Pobedonostsev was deeply hurt, and was bewildered when even his landlady accepted the truth of the charges and when most of his associates treated him as the relative of a known thief.

The Pobedonostsevs suffered several harrowing periods, especially in the summer of 1881, when a zealous official in the Ministry of Finance made the charges public, and in March, 1882, when the Ministry of Finance debated whether or not to bring the men to trial. Boris Chicherin, who had been a friend of Pobedonostsev’s since they were colleagues on the law faculty of Moscow University, broke with Pobedonostsev at this time because of his policy on the Loris-Melikov plan and because the government official who posed as the most righteous of all intervened to protect a relative. Chicherin also asserted that his ruthlessness toward the bureaucracy and toward the press increased enormously at that time.²³