Note 73 — Chapter 30 OUR ‘OPPONENTS’ The Slavophils and Panslavism—Homyakov—The Kireyevskys—K. S. Aksakov—P. Y. Tchaadayev

At first the national hymn was very naïvely sung to the tune of ‘God save the King,’ and indeed it was scarcely ever sung. It was among the innovations of Nicholas. From the time of the Polish War the national hymn composed by Colonel Lvov of the Corps of gendarmes was, by Imperial command, sung at all the royal festivities and at large concerts.

The Emperor Alexander was too well educated to like crude flattery; he listened with disgust in Paris to the Academicians’ despicable speeches grovelling at the feet of the Conqueror. On one occasion meeting Chateaubriand in his vestibule he showed him the last number of the Journal des Débats, and added: ‘I assure you I have never once seen such dull abjectness in any Russian paper.’ But in the time of Nicholas there were literary men who fully justified his Imperial confidence, and outdid all the journalists of 1814 and even some of the prefects of 1852. Bulgarin wrote in the Northern Bee that among the other advantages of the railway between Moscow and Petersburg, he could not think without emotion that the same man would be able to hear a service for the health of his Imperial Majesty in the morning in the Kazan Cathedral, and in the evening in the Kremlin! One would have thought it difficult to excel this awful absurdity, but there was found a literary man in Moscow who surpassed its author. On one of Nicholas’s visits to Moscow a learned professor wrote an article in which, speaking of the immense mass of the people crowding before the palace, he added that the Tsar had but to express the faintest desire—and those thousands rushing to carry it out would gladly fling themselves into the river Moskva. The sentence was erased by S. G. Strogonov, who told me this charming anecdote.