Children's Letters of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich to Vasily Zhukovsky: Review, Publication, Commentary

The article solves the problem of archival sources, textological preparation and scientific commenting on the letters from Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich to his mentor, poet Vasily Zhukovsky. They have not been known until today, which created source gaps both in the biography of Emperor Alexander II and in the biography of his educator. Archival searches allowed to find four letters of the Grand Duke in the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature and 48 letters in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. All of them underwent textological preparation in accordance with modern requirements, were decoded and provided with textological references. With a detailed scientific commentary, the article publishes 10 child's letters of the Grand Duke of 1826-1833, as well as one letter to Vasily Zhukovsky from Karl Merder, the tutor of the prince. The article describes the composition and chronology of the letters of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich of 1826-1852 and offers their holistic review, which allows us for the first time to completely reconstruct the nature of the epistolary dialogue between the teacher and the student. The Grand Duke's letters are concise and stereotypical in content and communication formulas used. Typically, from a quarter to half of their text is occupied by etiquette expressions: messages about receiving a letter from Zhukovsky, regret about a long separation, congratulations on a certain event, wishes for a happy family life, and, finally, greetings from himself and from the members of the imperial family. This formulaic design is so stable that it immediately puts communication on a role track. The etiquette roles realized by the Grand Duke in correspondence were changing significantly. Thus, the first children's letters of 1826-1833 focus on the communication of a caring teacher and a grateful student. Their central part is occupied by a detailed chronicle of classes, a report on what was completed as part of educational courses with various mentors. Another essential component of the role was the care of the mentor's health. Finally, the third hypostasis of Alexander in his child's letters to Zhukovsky was the role of the chronicler of family and court life. The role-playing organization of the letters of 1840-1852 has a different structure and reflects the new status of Alexander: a family man burdened with numerous household and official activities, but retaining a grateful memory of the former mentor. As a result, home-family themes are an absolute dominant, obscuring even the turbulent political events of 1848-1850. The letters along this family axis contain brief messages about the birth of children, about the health of the wife, himself, the empress and sisters, about regular holidays, for example, about the memorable anniversary of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, about weddings and losses, as happened with Alexander's sister Alexandra Nikolaevna, about his current duties and trips to Ukraine and the Crimea (1845), Germany (1847), the Caucasus (1850), Tula and Orel (1851). The analysis of the letters allows concluding both about the poet's solid status in the field of the “family monarchy” of Nikolay's reign and about the role assigned to Alexander exclusively as a private person, but not as a subject of power or politics.

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