Why Was Nicholas I Called the Wooden Tsar Essay

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Nicholas and Russia

Nicholas I has gone down in history as "the wooden tsar" for a number of reasons. First, on a purely superficial level, it could be said that this name supported the solid features that he displayed as tsar -- "his physical beauty and his majestic bearing" as Nicholas V. Riasanovsky notes in his words on Nicholas I (Cracraft 268). Nicholas, like so many wooden churches and cathedrals in Russia, stood as the "Christian conscience of Russia" -- a notion of embodiment passed on from one ideological generation to the next. Yet Nicholas, as Emperor of Russia, displayed rather little of the humanity needed for a truly father-figure position such as Emperor: instead, he was more soldierly and stolid in demeanor -- concerned primarily with adherence to minute details. His will was inflexible like iron and he had an extreme singleness of purpose, which caused him to overlook a variety of issues that were deserving of attention. Although orthodox in his religion, the bureaucracy under him was extraordinarily corrupt and Nicholas appeared to be insensible of this. For these reasons, his inflexible will, his features, his bearing, and his insensibility to human problems (entirely consumed as he was with reactionary politics), Nicholas has been called "the wooden tsar."

The portrayal of high society by the Marquis de Custine and in Karolina Pavlova's "Double Life" reveals a world that is at once connected to all the intrigues and inner workings of the upper echelons of Russian society and yet at the same time is disconnected from reality -- the reality of the everyday Russian or the nature of the wars, administrations, and actions going on in Russia adding to the empire's disasters -- though, of course, they know the stories and the latest gossip.

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This was a world reflected in the works of Tolstoy, such as War and Peace, and the poems of Pushkin. Pushkin in fact was banished by Alexander I, the predecessor of Nicholas I, for writing "revolutionary" works: he highlighted some of the social issues of the time that Nicholas would inherit once taking the throne. That Pushkin was given the low court rank of kammerjunker by Tsar Nicholas I so that his beautiful wife could have occasion to attend the court balls only reinforces the notion of the sort of world that Russian High Society was at this time: superfluous, superficial, elegant, but lacking soul. Not only Pushkin but Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well as Gogol would note this lack -- and one of Gogol's most famous works would appropriately be titled Dead Souls.

The world depicted by Marquis de Custine is a world of much the same sensibility: yet there is the recognition among society members of the split consciousness that Dostoevsky would….....

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