Why Was Nicholas I Called the Wooden Tsar

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.

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 later depict with vivid resonance: as the Marquis notes, "the Russia of the spirit and faith" was being squandered by an influx or infestation of Western modernity and empty materialism (123).

"So many Russians cried out" because of the "failure to recognize the intensity of the unhappiness in other echelons of Russian society," notes the Marquis, speaking of the divide between the haves and have-nots and the problems that arose as a consequence of the squandering and corruption of the ruling elites. In Karolina Pavlova's "Double Life," the sense is the same: Russians living two lives essentially -- one face for one world, another for another world -- the same person split in two directions.

In "Double Life," the heroine Cecily is raised to be exceedingly proper in high society so that she never turns her head the wrong way or talks to a gentleman longer than she should. She is constrained the empty and meaningless courtesies which but allows herself to be part of a marriage that cements her in this same world of politeness and meaninglessness.

Yet her "double life" is found in her love of poetry which serves as a romantic vision of life -- a vision, of course, that would erupt later in Russia and be shown with all its horrible underbelly by Russian writers like Dostoevsky in novels like Demons and Crime and Punishment. Or there is Pushkin's poem, which begins, "Save me from madness, God, I beg ..

" -- a line that only a Russian of the 19th century could write, because Russia was one of the most devout Orthodox nations undergoing a completely liberal transformation that was causing the collective to experience a kind of split mind. Pushkin noted it.