Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing

JOURNEYS TO A GRAVEYARD

ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

192

JOURNEYS TO A GRAVEYARD Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing By

Derek Offord

Founding Directors: P. Dibon† (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA)

Director: Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University, United Kingdom) Associate-Directors: J.E. Force (Lexington); J.C. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: M.J.B. Allen (Los Angeles); J.R. Armogathe (Paris); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J. Henry (Edinburgh); J.D. North (Oxford); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)

Journeys to a Graveyard Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing

By

Derek Offord University of Bristol U.K.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 1-4020-3908-5 (HB) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3908-9 (HB) ISBN-10 1-4020-3909-3 (e-book) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3909-6 (e-book)

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In memory of Dorothy Clare and Dorothy Joan

   

I want to go to Europe, Aliosha, I’ll go from here. I do know that I’m only going to a graveyard, but it’s a precious graveyard . . .  (Dostoevskii, The Brothers Karamazov, Book 5, Chapter 3)

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on dates, transliteration, names, references and translation Foreword

xi xiii xv

Introduction The genre of travel writing: its history, terrain, poles and boundaries Constructing national identity through travel writing The Russian corpus of travel writing: journeys in Russia, in a borderland and abroad

1 1 7 13

Chapter 1. Piotr Tolstoi: a travel diary Tolstoi’s life and journey Tolstoi’s diary A superficial tour of Western civilization Types of difference in Tolstoi’s universe

25 25 28 33 41

Chapter 2. Fonvizin: letters from foreign journeys Cultural westernization in the age of Catherine Fonvizin and his Letters from France Rejection of the “earthly paradise” The journey to the German states and Italy

49 49 53 58 65

Chapter 3. Karamzin: The Letters of a Russian Traveller Karamzin’s life and work The Letters of a Russian Traveller: authorial craft and purpose Switzerland

73 73 76 81

France England Russia

85 90 96

Chapter 4. Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands European politics and culture after the Napoleonic Wars Russian intellectual life in the age of Nicholas I Pogodin’s life, work and travelogue Bourgeois society Religion and politics Russia and the Slavs

103 103 108 119 125 130 135

Chapter 5. Botkin: Letters on Spain Botkin’s life and contribution to Russian thought Romantic Spain Affinities between Spain and Russia Spain as lesson for Russia

143 143 148 154 158

Chapter 6. Herzen: Letters from France and Italy Herzen and his place in Russian thought Revolution and reaction in Europe in 1848-1849 Herzen’s Russian Socialism Letters from France and Italy: genesis and genre The world of the villainous bourgeoisie The virtuous common people Europe and Russia: between varieties of nationalism

167 167 170 174 178 181 188 190

Chapter 7. Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions The post-Crimean context Between polemical journalism and fiction The bourgeois world revisited Europe, Russia and “Russian Europe” Radical Westernism and Native-Soil Conservatism

197 197 201 205 210 215

Chapter 8. Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border Saltykov-Shchedrin and the contexts of his travelogue Fact, fiction and topical comment in Across the Border Prussia, and France again Russia and her relationship to the west After 1 March 1881

221 221 228 231 239 244

Conclusion

249

Bibliography

255

Index of names and subjects

265

Index of place-names

283

Acknowledgements

This is a project that has been near to my heart for some years, crossing as it does boundaries between intellectual and literary history, exploring Russians’ thoughts on the place of their nation in European civilization as a whole, and indulging both my love of Russian culture and a passion for travel. The project builds on work published in the form of an article in The Slavonic and East European Review (SEER) in October 2000 on the travel writings of the eighteenth-century dramatist Fonvizin and the nineteenth-century novelist Dostoevskii. (I have drawn on this article in Chapters 2 and 7 of this book, and I thank the editors of SEER for allowing me to do so.) In the four and a half years since the publication of that article I have incurred many other debts of gratitude which it is a pleasant obligation to acknowledge now. I am grateful first of all to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) for the award of a four-month Research Fellowship in the period October 2002 to January 2003. (AHRB awards have greatly enhanced opportunities for research in fields such as my own in recent years.) This award enabled me to complete the research that underpins this book. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol for sheltering me from departmental duties during two further periods of research leave, one prior to the AHRB award, from February to May 2002, and one subsequent to it, for the same period in the current year. During the first of these periods of leave I was able to undertake the basic research for the chapters on Piotr Tolstoi, Karamzin, Pogodin, Botkin and Saltykov-Shchedrin. During the second period I have been able to deepen the examination of the context in which the travellers whom I examine were writing and to complete and thoroughly revise my manuscript. I am also much indebted to six scholars, four British and two American, who collectively have great expertise in the fields of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history that I cover, namely Charles Ellis, Richard Freeborn, Gareth Jones, Max Okenfuss, Richard Peace and James Scanlan. Each of these scholars read the manuscript of the entire book in the form that it had taken by the academic year 2003-2004. Their erudite and constructive comments and advice have led, I am sure, to numerous improvements, xi

xii Acknowledgement s including: a sharpening of the book’s thesis; provision of more extensive contextual information on political, social and cultural affairs in the countries in which the Russian writers were travelling; some cuts and reordering of material; reference to previous scholarship that I had initially omitted to mention; clarification of certain points that may have been obscure; and interpolation of useful additional information. In the light of these readers’ advice I have also allowed my Russian travellers, I hope, to speak for themselves to a somewhat greater extent than I did before. For all the assistance of these scholars, generously given, I am deeply grateful. I also thank the many other academic colleagues, both in the Russian field and several other fields (Classical Studies, French, German, Italian, Politics and Sociology), who have helpfully answered my questions, solved problems for me, directed me towards useful sources or made other suggestions on points of detail. These colleagues include Rohit Barot, Michael Basker, Judith Bryce, Richard Buxton, Kieran Flanagan, Natalya Gogolitsyna, Tony Grenville, Malcolm Jones, Catherine Léglu, Stephen Milner and George Sanford. I am grateful to Michael Howarth for his assistance with bibliographical matters and to other staff of the university library at Bristol, particularly the staff of the inter-library loans section, for dealing with a steady stream of requests over the last three years. I am very much indebted also to Mark Cox of my faculty’s computer support staff for his assistance with technical matters relating to layout and presentation of my typescript. Warm thanks are also due to Maja de Keijzer and Andrea Janga of Kluwer/Springer for their interest in this project and for their help and advice in the final stages of the book’s preparation. It goes without saying that for any errors, inconsistencies or other flaws that remain in my book in spite of the advice of all these colleagues and advisers I alone am responsible. The task of eventually bringing a substantial academic project to fruition, as any scholar knows, may also require a less tangible but more prolonged and burdensome form of support than help of the sort that I have already acknowledged. For that reason my deepest and fondest thanks are those that I offer to my wife, Dorinda (who also read my entire typescript in 2003 and is herself responsible for numerous improvements to it), and to my daughters, Catherine and Helen. All three of them have patiently endured my absorption in this project for far too long. Bristol, 29 April 2005

Note on dates, transliteration, names, references and translation

In 1700 Peter the Great adopted the Julian calendar, which was eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century, twelve days behind in the nineteenth and thirteen days behind in the twentieth. The Gregorian calendar, which western states had begun to adopt in preference to the Julian calendar in 1582, was not adopted in Russia until 1918. In this book dates are given in the Old Style (OS; i.e. according to the Julian calendar) when the event to which reference is made takes place in Russia and in the New Style (NS; i.e. according to the Gregorian calendar) when it takes place outside Russia. I have in most respects followed the system of transliteration used in The Slavonic and East European Review. The Russian soft sign has everywhere been transliterated with a prime ('). Russian surnames ending in -ɫɤɢɣ have been rendered with -skii instead of the commonly used form -sky. The Russian letter ɺ has been transliterated as io, except when it follows a hushing consonant, in which case it is rendered as o. Russian words printed in pre-revolutionary orthography (e.g. the titles of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals) have been transliterated from their modernized form. I have preferred transliterated first names (e.g. Aleksandr, Pavel, Piotr) to translated ones (Alexander, Paul, Peter), except in the case of monarchs and other members of the Russian royal family, who are familiar to the English reader from the translated form. Places are referred to by the name that was in use at the time of the journey in question (thus Memel instead of modern Klaipơda). The modern place-name, where it differs from the name used in the text, is given in the index of place-names. In the text of the book page references to the specific example of travel writing that is being examined in a particular chapter or section are given in brackets in the text itself. The version of the primary source to which these references relate is identified in the notes at the point where the first reference to the source in the chapter in question occurs. Dates in parentheses after the titles of works mentioned in the text are dates of first publication, not dates of composition. In the case of foreign (i.e. non-Russian) works that have gone through many editions and that are mentioned only in passing in the text no publication details are xiii

xiv Note on dates, transliteration, names, references and translation given other than the date of the first edition, unless reference is being made to a specific passage. The Russian title of each journal, newspaper or almanac mentioned in the text is given in the main index. Translations of material from foreign sources are my own unless otherwise stated. In translations of passages from the Russian I have not always adhered strictly to the punctuation of the original, since Russian practice differs in certain respects (and not merely in the area of delimitation of subordinate clauses) from English practice. I have of course also tried to render the spirit of the original Russian as well as its precise literal meaning. In quotations I have adapted spelling to the English standard used in this book (e.g. “marvellous” instead of “marvelous”). I have occasionally adapted the material in quotations in other ways as well (e.g. in respect of transliteration and presentation of numerals) for the sake of consistency. Where I have omitted material from a quotation or title I have indicated the omission by use of three spaced dots (i.e. . . .). Where on the other hand three dots are used without broad spacing (i.e. …) they indicate suspension points (Russian mnogotochie), a device that is more common in Russian than in English.

Foreword

“Russia,” Catherine the Great observed in the Instruction that she wrote for delegates to the Legislative Commission that she convoked in 1767, “is a European Power.”1 In a military and political sense Catherine’s claim was no doubt wellfounded. And yet in other major respects Russia’s credentials as a member of the “European” family of nations were suspect and remained so long after Catherine’s reign. The country was technologically, materially and culturally backward. Its economic and social structure was characterized until 1861 by the survival of serfdom and by the absence of a substantial, coherent commercial and industrial class. Its towns were small and underdeveloped and the centre of gravity of its life was rural. Western dress, manners, customs, education and ideas were adopted only by a small proportion of the population. Such westernization as took place widened the social divide between the educated class (which in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was drawn mainly from the nobility) and the illiterate, voiceless peasantry and caused acute anxiety among the elite about the nation’s inferiority. On the broadest level this book deals with the engagement of sections of the Russian elite over a period of more than a hundred years with the question on which Catherine had delivered such a confident judgement. That is to say, it explores one aspect of their attempt to ascertain the extent to which Russia was indeed “European,” to discover what Russia’s relationship to “Europe” in fact was and to decide what that relationship ought to be. (I shall not continue to place the terms “European” and “Europe” in quotation marks, but it should be borne in mind that these terms do in this book usually refer to cultural or more or less metaphysical constructs rather than to clearly defined geographical spaces, as also do the terms “the west,” “Russian” and “Russia.”) This Russian endeavour, of course, required knowledge of Europe, or at least a belief that Russians understood Europe. Such knowledge could be drawn from several sources. Firstly, in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, it came from acquaintance with foreigners who were resident on Russian soil, such as mercenaries, merchants, 1

Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 1767, ed. by Paul Dukes (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), p. 43.

xv

xvi

Foreword

physicians, diplomats, craftsmen and, in the late eighteenth century, tutors and governesses in the houses of the nobility. Secondly, from the mid-eighteenth century, it came to a large extent from voracious reading of foreign literature of one sort or another, both in the original and in translation. Thirdly, from about the same period, it also came from travel in the west and from the accounts that Russian travellers left of their journeys and experience there. It is with this latter source of knowledge about and supposed understanding of Europe that this book is specifically concerned. In examining pre-revolutionary Russian travel writing about western Europe I have two principal purposes. Firstly, I aim to characterize educated Russians’ perceptions of the foreign peoples, societies and cultures that exercised the greatest influence in their universe as their country emerged on to the European stage. Secondly, I aim to show the bearing that these perceptions had on Russians’ view of themselves as they grappled with the dilemmas to which westernization gave rise in their backward country. For comparisons with others, as Vera Tolz has put it in her recent study of the “invention” of the Russian nation, “help people to define who they are by gaining an understanding of who they are not.”2 It will of course become apparent that Russian thinkers and writers travelling at roughly the same period but standing at diverse points on the Russian political spectrum adopted different attitudes towards individual western countries. (It will also become clear that some writers modified their opinion of certain countries as conditions in those countries or the writers’ own outlooks changed or even as their journeys progressed.) And yet in the perceptions of Europe or the west that are presented by the writers I examine there is, I shall hope to establish, a coherence – after the early-modern period, at least – that transcends both perceived variations among the countries observed and the political differences among the Russian observers themselves. I shall also hope to demonstrate that perceptions were often shaped by preconceptions. For Russians travelled abroad with heavy cultural baggage, much of it supplied in advance by western European writings and by the developing Russian tradition of travel writing itself. We should not therefore expect my study on the whole to bear out the adage that travel broadens the mind, as perhaps it can only when travellers manage at least to some degree to separate themselves psychologically from their own society and to approach the foreign, as Edward Said recommends in his stimulating study of Orientalism, with spiritual detachment and generosity.3 The main destinations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian travellers were England, France, the German states (especially Prussia, before German unification in 1871), Italy and Switzerland, and it is on journeys or stays in these countries that the travel writings I examine are for the most part based. Spain provides the material for the major work of one traveller, Botkin, but is otherwise neglected. Scandinavia – excluding Finland, which was united with Russia in 1809, following the Russian defeat of Sweden – was of relatively little interest to Russian travellers, especially after the decline of Sweden as a major European power in the 2 3

Vera Tolz, Russia (London: Arnold, 2001), p. 155. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 259.

Foreword xvii

eighteenth century, and no work discussed here deals with it. The Low Countries did not usually detain Russians either, although one of the writers I examine, Pogodin, records some impressions of them. Portugal appears hardly to have interested them at all. Ireland too was rarely visited. (Annenkov, more adventurous and open-minded than most, did go there in the early 1840s, but his barely legible notes on his visit were not published.4) As for Wales and even Scotland, they seem usually not to have been clearly distinguished in the Russian consciousness from England, in spite of the nineteenth-century Russian enthusiasm for Walter Scott: it is “England” (Angliia) and “the Englishman” (anglichanin) that engage Russians’ attention. I should add, while defining the scope of my study, that I do not attempt to deal with Russian perceptions of North America, although arguably the continent might be included in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian construct of the west as a whole. The establishment of the independent republic as a result of the American War of Independence did serve as a source of inspiration to Radishchev and the Decembrists.5 Again, from the early-nineteenth-century writings of Chateaubriand and Cooper Russians derived a pleasing image of America as a natural paradise.6 Moreover, from the mid-nineteenth century, especially from the time of the publication of de Tocqueville’s epochal work Democracy in America (1835-1840),7 conflicting perceptions of America began to emerge in Russian thought and literature. On the one hand, America appealed to the radical Russian imagination as a workshop for utopian experimentation or as the territory of an emergent power with admirable institutions and practices in which the supposedly decaying civilization of Europe might be renewed. Herzen, for example, views America as the place to which history might be transferred when the old European world perishes, as he expects it will.8 Chernyshevskii makes favourable references to America’s low taxation and judicial system in his journalism of the late 1850s. Again, in his novel What is to be done? (1863) he has one of his characters, Lopukhov, praise America (or rather the northern states; the novel is written on the eve of the Civil War) as a land where women enjoy a greater degree of freedom than in Europe.9 The Populist thinker Bervi-Flerovskii holds up the United States as an exemplary republic,10 and in the 1870s a little-known participant in the Populist 4 See P. V. Annenkov, Parizhskie pis'ma, ed. by I. N. Konobeevskaia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1983; hereafter Annenkov, Parizhskie pisƍma), p. 449. No Russian traveller to Ireland is featured in Constantia Maxwell, The Stranger in Ireland: From the Reign of Elizabeth to the Great Famine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954). 5 America Through Russian Eyes, 1874-1926, tr. and ed. by Olga Peters Hasty and Susanne Fusso (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988; hereafter Hasty and Fusso), p. 7. 6 Ibid., p. 8. 7 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique. 8 “Le peuple russe et le socialisme,” in A. I. Gertsen [Herzen], Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954-1965; hereafter Herzen, SS), Vol. 7, p. 300. 9 N. G. Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaia sistema,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 16 Vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1939-1953; hereafter Chernyshevskii, PSS), Vol. 5, p. 333; idem, Chto delat'?, ibid., Vol. 11, p. 312. 10 See O. V. Aptekman, Vasilii Vasil'evich Bervi-Flerovskii po materialam b. III otdeleniia i D. G. P. (Leningrad: Kolos, 1925), p. 117.

xviii Foreword movement, Machtet, published some generally enthusiastic travel sketches on the basis of his stay in the country.11 On the other hand, one detects within the conservative stream of Russian thought the roots of the negative representation of America that would prevail in the twentieth century. Belinskii, in a defence of the divine right of kings written when he was under the spell of Hegel, defines America as a state whose idea lacks “essence” or “personality.”12 To Dostoevskii’s character Shatov in The Devils (1871-1872) America is a land of spiritualism, lynch-law, guns and vagrants and for Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment a journey there is a metaphor for suicide.13 Although North America thus had its place in Russian mental geography during most of the period with which this study is concerned, it was not a common destination for the Russian traveller until the late nineteenth century, when development of the iron steamship with screw propellers made the country more easily accessible to Europeans.14 Only then did there develop a corpus of works in which prominent writers recounted their experience of travel in America, such as Korolenko’s tale “Speechless” (1895), in which Korolenko’s natural man, an illiterate Ukrainian immigrant, is confronted with the soulless and politically corrupt modern city.15 Accounts of journeys to America are therefore excluded from this study on chronological grounds. In any case such canonical twentiethcentury Russian récits de voyage as Gor'kii’s set of three articles “In America” (1906), Esenin’s Iron Mirgorod (1923) and Maiakovskii’s My Discovery of America (1926), while they reuse features of nineteenth-century Russian representations of the bourgeois order in western Europe, also depict America as sui generis.16 It is not so much that in American urban industrial society the individual has been enslaved and dehumanized to a degree that Gor' kii has not seen – or for polemical reasons claims not to have seen – elsewhere.17 It is rather that this raw country seething with energy is at one and the same time a land of hitherto unknown technological wonders and a new nation by comparison with which Europe, in Esenin’s words, has the appearance of an “old-world country estate.” It is a land inhabited by a people not yet properly formed who have picked up the 11

See Hasty and Fusso, pp. 16-82. V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 Vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1953-1959; hereafter Belinskii, PSS), Vol. 3, p. 336. 13 F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-1990; hereafter Dostoevskii, PSS), Vol. 10, p. 112, and Vol. 6, pp. 215, 373, 384. 14 The same may be said of Mexico: see William Harrison Richardson, Mexico through Russian Eyes, 1806-1940 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1988). 15 V. G. Korolenko, “Bez iazyka,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, 10 Vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1953-1956), Vol. 4, pp. 7-145. 16 M. Gor'kii, “V Amerike,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 25 Vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1968-1976; hereafter Gor'kii, PSS), Vol. 6, pp. 237-273; Sergei Esenin, Zheleznyi Mirgorod, in his Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961-1962; hereafter Esenin, SS), Vol. 4, pp. 257-268; Vladimir Maiakovskii, Moio otkrytie Ameriki, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955-1961), Vol. 7, pp. 265-346. For English translations of these works, or extracts from them, see Hasty and Fusso, pp. 128-143, 144158 and 159-220 respectively. 17 Gor'kii, “Gorod Zholtogo D'iavola,” in his PSS, Vol. 6, pp. 237-250. 12

Foreword

xix

cigarette-ends thrown away by Europeans and are creating something “mighty” out of them.18 At the heart of my book is a close reading of nine texts on travels in western Europe by eight Russian authors: a travel diary written in 1697-1698 by Piotr Tolstoi, who spent over a year in Italy; two cycles of letters on journeys made by Fonvizin, the first in the 1770s to the German states and France and the second in the 1780s to the German states and Italy; Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller, based on his travels in the German states, Switzerland, France and England in 1789-1790; Pogodin’s Year in Foreign Lands, recording his extensive journeying in many countries in 1839; Botkin’s magnum opus, his Letters on Spain, which arise out of his visit to that country in 1845; Herzen’s Letters from France and Italy, which relate to the period 1847-1851; Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which deal principally with Dostoevskii’s visit to France and England in 1862; and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Across the Border, which originates in a trip undertaken by him to Germany and France in 1880. Most of the nine texts examined are substantial. Botkin’s Letters on Spain run to almost two hundred pages in the standard twentieth-century Russian edition of them and Tolstoi’s diary, Herzen’s Letters from France and Italy and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Across the Border to over two hundred pages each. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller occupy almost four hundred pages, while Pogodin’s Year in Foreign Lands occupies some eight hundred pages, albeit in a smaller format, in its midnineteenth-century edition. All the works examined arise from actual journeys undertaken by the authors themselves. With the exception of the last work, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Across the Border, which has a substantial element that is plainly derived from the author’s fantasy, they are not predominantly fictitious, although nearly all of them not only reflect the author’s consciousness but also reveal a degree of artifice and may even contain fabrication. Taken as a whole, these works – again with the exception of the first work, Tolstoi’s diary, which was not published until after the appearance of the last work, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Across the Border – comprise a literary tradition which itself became an aspect of what we might call the contemporary cultural reality with which each successive travelogue engaged. As background to my readings of these texts I devote an introductory chapter to a number of general subjects that are germane to all of them. In this introduction I briefly survey the genre of travel writing, indicate some of the polarities towards which travel writing may tend, and identify territory that is contiguous with the genre. I then broach the central preoccupation of the book, that is to say the explicit discourse in Russian travel writing on the nature of European civilization and the implicit concern that runs through this writing with the question of Russian national identity. In the final section of the introductory chapter I refer to the Russian corpus in the genre and offer a typology of it that is appropriate to my purpose of treating travel writing as a vehicle for national self-definition. 18

Esenin, SS, Vol. 4, pp. 257, 268.

xx

Foreword

My treatment of this subject-matter is informed by scholarship in other fields, notably the writings of classical scholars on travel narratives and alterity,19 historians on national identity and its invention and on nationalism,20 social anthropologists and classical scholars on ethnicity,21 and literary scholars on the genre of travel writing,22 particularly its use as a vehicle for representation of some “other,” usually in connection with colonization.23 The corpus of Russian writing about travels in western Europe is of course much greater than the already quite substantial body of work examined in detail here and a case could have been made for inclusion of yet more elements of the corpus in this book. It would have suited my purpose, for example, to discuss the several works by the reactionary journalist Grech describing his journeys to England, France, German states, Italy, Switzerland and other states in the age of Nicholas I,24 19 e.g. François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); idem, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier tales from ancient Greece, tr. by Janet Lloyd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); John Gould, Herodotus (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek SelfDefinition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 20 e.g. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992). On treatment of these questions with reference to Russia, see especially (in addition to the work by Tolz cited in n. 2 above): Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Alexander Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror: Four Lectures in Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Greenfeld, pp. 191-274; Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A study in identity and international relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Geoffrey Hosking, Russian People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London: HarperCollins, 1997); Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service, eds., Russian Nationalism Past and Present (London: Macmillan, 1998). 21 e.g. the editor’s influential introduction in Frederik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 9-38; Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London and East Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1993); Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic identity in Greek antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001). 22 e.g. Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962; hereafter Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars); idem, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Batten, Charles L. Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978); Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 23 e.g. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 24 e.g. N. I. Grech, Putevye pis'ma iz Anglii, Germanii i Frantsii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia N. Grecha, 1839); Pis'ma s dorogi po Germanii, Shveitsarii i Italii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia N. Grecha, 1843).

Foreword

xxi

or the various cycles of published “letters” and unpublished notes written by Annenkov on his visits to German states, France and Italy in the same period.25 I might have dealt more fully with Goncharov’s account of his voyage to the Far East in The Frigate Pallas, on the grounds that this account contains a sharply defined representation of England, in which Goncharov breaks his journey, and an attempt to reveal the English national personality as it finds expression in Britain’s colonies in South Africa and China.26 However, consideration of yet more authors, or fuller consideration of authors who have only a marginal place in the book as it is now constituted, would have made an already long work unwieldy. I have also wanted to avoid duplication. There would have been little profit, for instance, to be gained from an examination of the political position represented by Grech – that is to say, slavish loyalty to the established regime – since it corresponds quite closely to that of his rather more highly regarded contemporary Pogodin, who travelled in Europe in the same period as Grech and indeed met up with Grech at certain points during his own year in foreign lands. Similarly the moderate political stance of Annenkov is close to that of his friend Botkin, who is much the more readable travel writer of the two. Moreover, Annenkov’s perceptions are so lacking in acuity that it is not always clear how he intends the reader to construe the abundant raw material that he presents. Gogol ' tellingly compared Annenkov’s Parisian Letters, for example, to wax that had not taken shape and gently rebuked Annenkov for failing to pose any serious question in them.27 I also make no more than passing reference to the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian accounts, non-fictional or fictional, of journeys within Russia, or of journeys to areas bordering on Russia, such as the Caucasus, although such works, like the writings on western Europe that I do discuss, may help to construct a Russian identity and explore topical anxieties. Nor, finally, do I examine works that cannot be classified as examples of travel writing unless the genre is defined in a very broad way. Such works include, at the factual end of the axis between fact and fiction, accounts of scientific exploration in any region, or works with a purely informative intent, such as guide-books. At the opposite end of this axis stand works describing journeys that are purely imaginary, such as 25 Annenkov, Pis'ma iz-za granitsy (first published in Notes of the Fatherland in 1841-1843), and Parizhskie pis'ma (first published in The Contemporary in 1847-1848). The two cycles were republished in P. V. Annenkov i ego druz'ia: Literaturnye vospominaniia i perepiska 1835-1885 godov (St. Petersburg: Izdanie A. S. Suvorina, 1892; hereafter P. V. Annenkov i ego druzƍia), pp. 122-247 and 248369 respectively. They were again republished in Annenkov, Parizhskie pis'ma, pp. 5-83 and 84-162 respectively. In the mid-1840s Annenkov worked on further travel notes, on various German cities and Prague; these notes, which were not published in Annenkov’s lifetime, are printed by Konobeevskaia in Annenkov, Parizhskie pis'ma, pp. 234-280; see also pp. 556-557. On Annenkov’s travel writing see Derek Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T. N. Granovsky, V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin and K. D. Kavelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; hereafter Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals), pp. 108-113, 119-121. 26 See I. A. Goncharov, Fregat “Pallada,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952-1955), Vol. 2, pp. 5-324 and Vol. 3, pp. 7-414. An abridged version of the work has been edited and translated by N. W. Wilson as The Voyage of the Frigate “Pallada” (London: The Folio Society, 1965). 27 N. V. Gogol', Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 Vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1940-1952; hereafter Gogol', PSS), Vol. 13, p. 363.

xxii Foreword Vel' tman’s novel The Wanderer (1831-1832).28 No works of these predominantly factual or fictional kinds, I think, shed clearer light on the problems I explore than the texts I have chosen. Within the field delimited – that is to say, writings that are based on journeys by Russian travellers to western Europe over a period of some two hundred years and that are neither drily descriptive nor entirely fictional – the book aims at broad range in four respects. Firstly, it spans a long period, from the dawn of the Petrine age at the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the reign of the penultimate tsar, Alexander III, late in the nineteenth century. This span enables one to follow the main contours of Russian thought from the point at which the modern bureaucratic state is founded and the elite (represented by the first writer examined, Piotr Tolstoi) begins to be westernized to the point at which the state’s failure to undertake significant political modernization (an issue that is highly topical for the last writer discussed, Saltykov-Shchedrin) entails loss of the support of that elite. Secondly, the writers whose works are examined are associated with many forms of literary activity. Some (Fonvizin, Dostoevskii and Saltykov-Shchedrin) are chiefly remembered as imaginative writers, though imaginative writers of different sorts (a playwright, a novelist and a satirist). Karamzin is both a writer of fiction and a historian. Pogodin is first and foremost a historian and conservative publicist, although early in his career he also produced prose fiction and drama. Botkin is a critic of painting, music and literature, a translator and a dilettante. Herzen is perhaps primarily a social and political thinker, although he also wrote prose fiction and monumental autobiographical memoirs. The common interest of these writers of various descriptions in the genre of travel writing tends to underline the fragility – and in the Russian context at least, the inappropriateness – of the barriers that scholars have erected between imaginative literature, historiography and social and political thought. Thirdly, the works examined also represent a wide range of types of travel writing. At one end of the spectrum stands a meticulous diary apparently written for nobody, or almost nobody, but the writer himself, that is to say Tolstoi. Fonvizin’s two cycles of letters on his foreign journeys also seem not to have been intended in the first instance for publication but for circulation among small circles in salon society; unlike Tolstoi’s diary, though, they are highly selective, partial, witty and combative. Karamzin’s self-conscious and highly crafted Letters of a Russian Traveller oscillate between accurate record and informative observation, on the one hand, and varieties of pleasing fiction, on the other. Pogodin, like Tolstoi, produced an earnest record of his travels, but he wrote for publication and had keen polemical intent. Botkin’s Letters on Spain appear on the surface to be a traditional wide-ranging account of the society, history, culture and manners of a foreign people, but they too are rich in topical polemical and implicitly political content. In Herzen’s Letters from France and Italy the genre is exploited for the purposes of highly partisan political journalism and at the same time for romantic selfpresentation. Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions are located at a 28

A. F. Vel'tman, Strannik, 2nd ed., ed. by Iu. M. Akutin (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1977).

Foreword xxiii

boundary between such journalism and imaginative literature. SaltykovShchedrin’s Across the Border is imaginative politically charged satire that arises out of a real journey but relates to it only in a tenuous way. Fourthly, the travel accounts examined also represent a broad range of positions on the political spectrum, from the Official Nationality of Pogodin, through Dostoevskii’s conservative nationalism to the moderate liberal Westernism of Botkin, the libertarian socialism of Herzen and the late radical Westernism of Saltykov-Shchedrin. In the eighteenth century political positions were indistinct, because writers wished on the whole to civilize the existing form of government, autocracy, rather than to undermine or overthrow it and because political consciousness among the elite was relatively undeveloped. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, when government and public opinion diverged, political views crystallized and became more clearly defined, although the existence of censorship placed constraints on their expression. In order to fulfil the purposes that I stated at the outset (to characterize Russian perceptions of others and thereby of themselves), I try to keep in view three principal questions or sets of questions while examining this corpus of work by a range of writers of various political complexions who exploit the travelogue in different ways over a long period. Firstly, there is a set of questions relating to the nature of the travelogue as a literary form. What use do writers make, for example, of existing literary sources, including previous travelogues, both foreign and Russian? How credible and reliable are their accounts? What importance do they attach to factual detail and accuracy, on the one hand, and moral judgement and essential veracity, on the other? With what other literary forms does the travelogue overlap? What advantages does it offer the writer exploring identity through comparison of the Russian world with the world beyond Russia? It should be possible by addressing these questions to reveal the plasticity of the genre, explain its popularity in Russia in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century and establish a distinctive and important place for it in classical Russian literature at a junction between prose fiction and polemical journalism, or what was known as “publicism” (publitsistika). Secondly, and more importantly from the point of view of intellectual history, in what ways did Russian travel writing reflect the preoccupations of prerevolutionary Russian thought in general and follow its contours? What contribution did it make, for example, to discussion of the question that was central in Russian thought, namely the relationship of this emergent European nation to the western sources of its new civilization? What insight does it offer into the Russian response to the bourgeois world, which was in the ascendant in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, and to liberalism, the political outlook most closely associated with that world? An answer to these questions can be fashioned out of an account of writers’ treatment of diverse aspects of western civilization: its technology and material standard of living; its forms of civil, social and family life; its political institutions; its freedoms of the press and assembly; its judicial system, laws and rights; its various forms of Christianity and its religious practices and toleration; its manners and morals; and its ideas and arts.

xxiv Foreword Thirdly, and most importantly of all, what does the travel writing that I examine tell us about Russian perceptions of the Russian national self? How do accounts of journeys to the west serve the purpose of defining Russian identity through reflection on what Russians aspired to become or, more often, what they thought they were not and did not want to be? How did travellers’ characterizations of Europe or the west help to map and secure Russia’s own social, cultural, moral and spiritual territory within European civilization? To what extent are writers’ conceptions of identity shaped by ethnic and cultural stereotyping of both self and other rather than rigorous observation of the foreign countries they visited? What grounds did the authors in question find for assuming an air of national inferiority or superiority vis-à-vis the foreign peoples they encountered, or for expressing both a sense of inferiority and a sense of superiority simultaneously? The search for answers to these questions in Russian travel writing naturally coincided with the westernization of the Russian social elite and the later creation of a westernized intellectual and cultural elite (which came to be known as the intelligentsia), since these developments forced Russians to consider their own identity. In order properly to answer questions of the sort set out above each travelogue will need to be considered in both a historical context and an intellectual and literary one, for these contexts help to shape each writer’s perception of what he sees while he is abroad. Since the primary preoccupation of this study is the light that the accounts of journeys to the west throw on Russian experience and thought, rather than any light that they may cast on the societies encountered by Russians in the course of their travels, it is the Russian historical context that is paramount here. The travel writings of Fonvizin and Karamzin will therefore be set against the background of Russian imperial expansion and westernization and the coming of the Enlightenment to Russia in the age of Catherine (ruled 1762-1796). Those of Pogodin, Botkin and Herzen will be placed in the context of the flowering of Russian culture in the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) and the simultaneous parting of the ways between the bureaucratic state and an educated public refined by European art and morals. Dostoevskii’s travelogue will be discussed in the light of the radicalization of opposition to the Russian regime that took place in the years after the Crimean War in spite of the preparation and implementation of reforms, especially the emancipation of the serfs, in the early years of the reign of Alexander II (ruled 1855-1881). Saltykov-Shchedrin’s contribution to the genre, finally, will be considered against the background of the rise of the revolutionary movement in the 1870s and the onset of renewed reaction in the wake of the assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881. The works examined will also be placed in the context of the artistic and intellectual movements of the periods to which they belong. These movements range from the Sentimentalism, or Pre-Romanticism, of the late eighteenth century and the Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century, to mid-nineteenth-century Westernism in its liberal and more radical forms, various conservative nationalist doctrines (Official Nationality, Slavophilism, Native-Soil Conservatism and Pan-Slavism), Herzen’s Russian Socialism of the late 1840s and early 1850s and the revolutionary Populism of the 1870s. In considering such intellectual and cultural contexts it may often be

Foreword xxv

necessary also to refer to the prevailing or ascendant western ideas and movements that coloured the vision of the Russian writer, usually through influence prior to the journey in question. Nor, of course, can political developments in the western countries visited by the Russian travellers be ignored. In addition to such contextual information I shall in most chapters provide some biographical information, since the majority of the writers examined here are little known to a western readership and since the book is in any case not aimed exclusively at specialists in the Russian field. Finally, I supply a quite detailed, if not fully comprehensive, description of each writer’s itinerary (or at any rate the route that the writer’s narrator claims to have taken) in order to convey some impression of the scale and tempo of the traveller’s journey as well as to furnish a frame of reference for discussion of the work. With the exception of Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller and Herzen’s Letters from France and Italy, on which many modern scholars, both Russian and foreign, have written (notably Berkov and Makogonenko, Cross, Rothe, Hammarberg, Lotman and Uspenskii on Karamzin and Lampert, Malia, Acton, Berlin and Kelly on Herzen29), the works that I examine in depth have received rather little scholarly attention. The accounts of their foreign journeys left by Fonvizin, Dostoevskii and Saltykov-Shchedrin, it is true, have been discussed in the major biographies by Moser on Fonvizin, Frank on Dostoevskii and Kirpotin, El ' sberg, Makashin and Sanine on Saltykov-Shchedrin. However, less attention has been paid to these works than to other elements of the oeuvre of these writers, no doubt because to literary scholars the works have generally seemed less important than, or inferior to, the drama or prose fiction and because to intellectual historians the writers’ oeuvre as a whole has seemed to lie primarily in the domain of the literary scholar. On the remaining travel accounts that I examine the corpus of scholarly discussion is even more sparse, notwithstanding the work of Nikolai Tolstoy, Okenfuss, Pavlenko, Ol ' shevskaia and Travnikov on Tolstoi, Nicholas Riasanovsky on Pogodin and Egorov on Botkin. As for scholarly works of a more comprehensive nature on Russian travel writing, these too, as far as I am aware, are not numerous. The articles and monographs that do exist – for instance, by Roboli, Reuel Wilson, Ivashina and Schönle 30 – deal with fictional as well as non-fictional travel writing and tend to concentrate on the literary properties of examples of the genre (and in Schönle’s case on the author’s interest in personal rather than national self-fashioning). They also focus on the half-century from the 1790s to the 1830s. (A book by Mikhel ' son 29

Details of the works of these and other scholars who have written about individual writers examined in this study are provided in the notes to the chapters in question and in the section on secondary literature in the bibliography. 30 T. Roboli, “Literatura ‘puteshestvii,’ ” in B. Eikhenbaum and Iu. Tynianov, eds., Russkaia proza (The Hague: Mouton, 1963; reprint of 1926 ed.), pp. 42-73; Reuel K. Wilson, The Literary Travelogue: A Comparative Study with Special Relevance to Russian Literature from Fonvizin to Pushkin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); E. S. Ivashina, “O spetsifike zhanra ‘puteshestviia’ v russkoi literature pervoi treti XIX v.,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriia Filologiia, 1979, No. 3, pp. 3-16; Andreas Schönle, Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

xxvi Foreword which demonstrates the polemical thrust of Russian travel writing over a longer period is an exception to these tendencies, but it suffers from some of the typical flaws of Soviet scholarship.31) In fact it seems to be a commonplace in scholarship that by the 1830s “the moment of historical importance” of the travelogue had passed.32 By then, it is asserted, the genre had worn itself out.33 The non-fictional, “non-ironic branch of the travelogue” that emerged in the 1840s alongside the physiological sketch, it is argued, developed “on a totally different footing” from the earlier examples of the genre.34 And yet the grounds for such assertions seem brittle, particularly if the writings in question are approached from the vantage point of intellectual history as well as from that of literary history. For not only did travel writing prove as durable as the other western secular literary genres that Russians appropriated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the abovementioned twentieth-century examples of it would seem to attest. It also displayed a steady continuity both with respect to such literary properties as its capacity to vary tone and perspective, its accommodation of fact and fiction and its authors’ engagement with literary antecedents, and with respect to its capacity, on which this book will focus, to sustain a discourse about the relationship between the Russian self and the alien other.

31 V. A. Mikhel'son, “Puteshestvie” v russkoi literature (Rostov-on-Don: Izdatel'stvo Rostovskogo universiteta, 1974). This work is punctuated by value judgements about “obscurantism,” “antidemocratism” (by which Mikhel'son means an alleged lack of interest in the sufferings of the common people), “liberal hypocrisy,” “naturalism” (i.e. preoccupation with everyday details of no ideological significance) and “reactionary romanticism.” 32 Reuel K. Wilson, p. 124. 33 John Goodliffe, in his entry on Vel'tman in Neil Cornwell, ed., Reference Guide to Russian Literature (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), p. 868. 34 Schönle, p. 202.

Introduction

THE GENRE OF TRAVEL WRITING: ITS HISTORY, TERRAIN, POLES AND BOUNDARIES Travel writing is a literary genre – if indeed we may call it that1 – which has ancient roots in western civilization. In the classical world Herodotus, Strabo, Pausanius and Xenophon left notable examples of it. In the Middle Ages it often took the form of an account of a pilgrimage. During the Renaissance it was stimulated by voyages of exploration, conquest of newly discovered lands (the basis, for example, of Bernal Díaz’s True History of the Conquest of the New Spain), and the search for commercial opportunities (the spur for Marco Polo’s travels through Asia to the court of the Mongol emperor in China).2 The corpus was greatly enlarged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by adventurers, missionaries and diplomatic envoys such as Herberstein, Possevino, Fletcher and Olearius, all of whom produced influential and historically valuable accounts of Muscovy.3 The genre was further encouraged by, and itself helped to generate, the lateseventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century revolution in European thought that found expression in Biblical criticism, rejection of belief in miracles, deism and scientific developments such as Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood 1

The fact that the corpus of travel writing embraces works with such diverse content and formal characteristics leads one writer on the subject to conclude that it “cannot be a literary genre with a fixed definition any more than the novel is” and that it “is not even sui generis”: see Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, p. 282. 2 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632); Marco Polo, Il milione, tr. and with an introduction by Ronald Latham as The Travels of Marco Polo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958). 3 Sigmund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Comentarii (1549), translated as Description of Moscow and Muscovy, 1557, ed. by Bertold Picard, tr. by J. B. C. Grundy (London: J. M. Dent, 1969); Antonio Possevino, Moscovia (1586); Giles Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, ed. by Albert J. Schmidt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966; first published 1591); Adam Olearius, Beschreibung der moskowitischen und persischen Reise (1647), tr. and ed. by Samuel Baron as The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). There is an exhaustive recent bibliography of foreigners’ accounts of their visits to Muscovy: see Marshall Poe, Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Analytic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1995.

1

2

Introduction

and Newton’s formulation of laws of physics. It is with the vogue for travel and accounts of it, and the unsettling effect of these accounts, that Paul Hazard begins his celebrated book on this intellectual revolution in the early-modern period of European history. (This was the moment at which Piotr Tolstoi set out on his journey to the west.4) Whereas writers of the seventeenth-century Neo-Classical age, Hazard argues, shunned movement, because they were anxious to “preserve existing conditions” and to “avoid any change that might disturb an equilibrium so miraculously attained,” from the late seventeenth century the English, French, Germans and Italians travelled frantically. Philosophers such as Locke and Leibniz and even rulers, notably Russia’s Peter the Great, now aspired to see the world beyond their country’s borders.5 The main European destinations for western travellers in this period of intellectual and continuing geographical exploration were France, the German states, Italy and Spain. However, navigators, explorers, archaeologists, merchants, diplomatic envoys and missionaries also visited more distant and exotic lands, including Turkey, Egypt, Persia, India, Siam and Japan, and several of them (for instance, Rycaut, Lucas, Chardin, Tavernier and Kaempfer) left major accounts of one or more of these lands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.6 Throughout the eighteenth century the non-fiction travel account remained one of the most popular literary forms. Many of the leading English writers of the age – including Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Boswell and Johnson – tried their hand at the genre7 and were conscious of writing in what one scholar has called “a firmly defined tradition.”8 Accounts were produced of scientific expeditions, such as Brosses’s History of Voyages to the Lands of the Southern Hemisphere (1756), and journeys of exploration, such as Le Vaillant’s Journeys into Inner Africa (1790).9 There were wide-ranging surveys of foreign societies, customs, manners and morals, of which Moritz’s Travels of a German in England in the Year 1782 (1783)10 and Mercier-Dupaty’s Letters on Italy (1788) were much admired 4

The point is made by Max J. Okenfuss, “The Cultural Transformation of Petr Tolstoi,” in Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by A. G. Cross (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1983; hereafter Okenfuss, “The Cultural Transformation of Petr Tolstoi”), p. 229. 5 Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680-1715, tr. by J. Lewis May (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 17, 19-22. 6 Sir Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire . . . (1668); Paul Lucas, Voyage dans la Turquie, l’Asie, Syrie, Palestine, Haute et Basse Egypte (1711); Sir John Chardin [Jean Chardin], Voyage en Perse, et aux Indes orientales (1686), tr. as Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia (London: The Argonaut Press, 1927); Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier . . . en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes (1676); Engelbert Kaempfer, The History of Japan . . . Together with a Description of the Kingdom of Siam . . ., tr. by J. G. Scheuchzer (1727). 7 See e.g. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727); Henry Fielding, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755); Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (1766); James Boswell, An Account of Corsica (1768) and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785); Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775). 8 Batten, pp. ix, 3. 9 Charles de Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes; François Le Vaillant, Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique . . . 10 Karl Philipp Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782.

Introduction

3

examples.11 As the corpus of travel writing grew and the need for novelty in it increased, so travellers sought new ways of describing their destinations, for instance by concentrating attention on a particular aspect of a place, such as its agriculture, mineralogy, music, painting or sculpture. They also found new or less familiar destinations, such as Spain, Portugal, Sweden and indeed Russia,12 which was visited by quite numerous travellers in the eighteenth century, especially in the post-Petrine age, several of whom – for instance, Perry, Hanway, Richardson, Coxe and Masson – left accounts of their impressions of the country.13 At the same time new conceptions of the purpose of travel – which in any case was now within the means of a larger number of people and was becoming easier as a result of technological advances – began to develop. For example, travel came to be regarded, especially among members of the English nobility or upper middle class, as a means of completing a person’s education. Thus the Grand Tour became de rigueur for the English gentleman (and, in the second half of the century, for the young Russian nobleman too). Travel also afforded opportunities to appreciate natural beauty or experience aesthetic pleasure as well as to observe the manners, customs, philosophies, religions and forms of government of foreign peoples. It seemed even to enable people to discover themselves14 or to fulfil some urgent personal project, as was the case with Goethe’s journey to Italy in 1786, by which Goethe thought to cut himself off from his emotional, literary and cultural past and renew himself as man and artist.15 Shifts in the conception of travel were accompanied in the eighteenth century by changes in approaches to writing about the subject. The emergence of a conception of travel as a means of private self-development, for instance, created a market for guide-books and itineraries which duly began to appear in various languages on countries frequently visited or on individual cities of especial touristic importance in them, such as Naples, Paris, Rome and Venice.16 (In the nineteenth century whole series of such works with purely informative purpose would appear, such as Murray’s Handbooks and the exhaustive volumes produced by the German publishing house founded by Karl Baedeker.) Meanwhile authors whose primary purpose was not so much to provide systematic information about touristic sights and facilities as to offer pleasurable instruction, edify or amuse developed a range of narratorial personae. Smollett’s narrator in his Travels through France and Italy 11

Charles Mercier-Dupaty, Lettres sur l’Italie. Batten, pp. 92, 95. 13 John Perry, The State of Russia under the present Czar (1716); Jonas Hanway, Historical Account of British Trade over the Caspian Sea . . . (1753); William Richardson, Anecdotes of the Russian Empire . . . (1784); William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784); C. F. Masson, Mémoires secrets sur la Russie . . . (1800). Extracts from the works cited by Perry, Hanway, Richardson and Coxe are printed in Seven Britons in Imperial Russia, 1698-1812, ed. by Peter Putnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952). 14 Wladimir Berelowitch, “La France dans le ‘Grand Tour’ des nobles russes au cours de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 34, Nos. 1-2 (1993) (hereafter Berelowitch, “La France dans le ‘Grand Tour’”), p. 201. 15 See The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th ed., Vol. 8, p. 226. 16 Hazard, p. 22. 12

4

Introduction

(1766) is splenetic, Sharp’s in his Letters from Italy (1766) is misanthropic and Sterne’s, in his influential Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), is sentimental. Some travellers were “philosophic.” Others, such as William Gilpin, who hoped to arouse an emotional response to natural beauty in his readers, were “picturesque.”17 At the same time relatively dry and systematic description – which had characterized seventeenth-century French travel writing – gave way to more pleasing accounts strewn with piquant detail and personal opinion.18 Following Addison, who in his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) had violated the convention of his time that travel writers should not talk about themselves, authors began to punctuate descriptions of the countries they visited with reflections on their own experiences. On the whole travel writing became lighter: when the stock of useful subjects had been exhausted, the writer might resort to discussion of matters that were merely entertaining, and anecdote and chatty, trivial material became acceptable.19 Thus the genre of travel writing, to whose development in European literature I have briefly referred, was enjoying popularity in the west and developing in various directions there during the particular historical period, in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Russia began to imbibe western culture. It was then that Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller, the first major Russian contribution to the genre and a seminal text, were written. The genre possessed a capaciousness and flexibility that proved attractive to Karamzin (as these qualities would also to later Russian exponents of the genre), as he strove to enlighten his compatriots, to free the emergent Russian literature from the formal constraints associated with French Neo-Classicism and to test the potentialities of new literary forms. The genre is capable, for example, of accommodating a very broad range of subject-matter. Travel writers may describe or reflect on whatever they wish, concrete or abstract: a building, a city or village, a townscape or natural scenery and the thoughts and emotions excited by them. They may write about the galleries and museums that they have visited and the public ceremonies, events, religious services, plays, operas and private gatherings that they have attended. They may comment on the people they have encountered and record (or embellish) the conversations they have had with them. They may make observations on the politics, culture and manners of the country in which they have travelled. They enjoy similar freedom with regard to choice of sources. They may draw on, and give equal authority to, quite different types of data, both written and oral. They may, for instance, use factual documents such as guide-books or journalistic sources that are both informative and partisan, or works of imaginative literature, or the accounts of other observers of various nationalities, including earlier examples of travel writing. Equally they may report conversations, hearsay and anecdote. Moreover, travel writers may treat the wide range of admissible data about the reality they observe in diverse ways, cerebrally or emotionally, objectively or 17

Batten, p. 29. Berelowitch, “La France dans le ‘Grand Tour’”, p. 201. 19 Batten, pp. 5-6, 13, 109-110, 115. 18

Introduction

5

subjectively. They may confine themselves to impersonal observation or they may so freely express their opinions that the details of their journeys are obscured by their narrator’s pervasive personality.20 They may stand back from the material they present, like a historian, ethnographer or social scientist, and furnish their readers with lessons in these scholars’ subjects (although the value that their accounts have as a source of accurate information on the country observed is often limited and problematical). At the same time they have latitude to use sources with less discrimination than the scholar and may respond to what they see in the manner of an imaginative writer, whose ability to present plausible characters and sustain a narrative thread they must in any case possess. Again, travel writers may incorporate in their works varying proportions of fact and fiction. Between largely factual works such as scientific treatises and guidebooks which are apparently intended principally to inform,21 on the one hand, and works that are plainly fictional, such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), on the other, there lies a large area in which readers may find it difficult to decide how much credence to attach to what the travel writer tells them. For in many works of travel writing there is misleading fabrication. The problem is addressed by Percy Adams when he divides the corpus of travel writing into, on the one hand, “true travel accounts” and, on the other, “travel lies.” The former type of travel writing is exemplified for him by William Dampier’s New Voyage round the World (1691), the latter by the New Voyage to the East Indies (1715), a work that purports to be a truthful record written by a Captain William Symson but in fact consists largely of passages filched from other writers.22 Few travel writers, perhaps, are guilty of such egregiously deceitful invention as “Symson.” And yet many, perhaps a majority (including those Russian writers examined in depth in this book), stretch the truth in various ways, and not merely through partiality in their selection of material. For example, they may for the sake of a coherent narrative or powerful argument date or arrange events incorrectly, or claim that they have met people whom they have not met or say that they have visited places they have not visited.23 It should also be borne in mind – and the point is of great importance in this study of the Russian tradition – that a writer’s perception of the places visited may be affected by previous literary representations of the place, as allusions to textual models may suggest.24 It should not be assumed, then, that any piece of travel writing examined here is an entirely accurate and reliable report on what the author has seen, done and experienced. Finally, because of the broad spectrum of the genre (from the impersonal to the personal and the factual to the fictitious) and because also of what scholars have 20

Ibid., p. 83. I say “apparently intended” because even accounts of exploration and classification written in an informational or scientific mode may be read, as they are in Mary Louise Pratt’s influential study, as having the purpose of sanitizing and mystifying European expansionism by, for example, weaving all the planet’s life-forms “into European-based patterns of global unity and order:” Pratt, pp. 31, 78. 22 Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, pp. 1, 250-251, n. 48. 23 Batten, pp. 20-21. 24 The point is made by Schönle, pp. 8-9. 21

6

Introduction

called its “hybrid” or “syncretic” quality (that is to say, its capacity to accommodate such diverse elements as poetry, prose fiction, dramatic scenes, anecdote and ethnographic, geographic and historical material25), travel writing may overlap with a number of other literary genres, both fictional and non-fictional. For instance, since the travelogue recounts events in the life of an author during a trip that he or she has undertaken all travel writing might be regarded, it has been argued, as a form of autobiography.26 The genre also has much in common with, or may even take the form of, the epistle. Again, the centrality of an individualized character, the traveller, and the need for a narrative structure endow travel writing with some resemblance to prose fiction, especially the novel (particularly the novel in its picaresque form), in which it is an itinerant hero, or antihero, to whom the work owes its unity and coherence. At the same time the genre may shade into utopian or dystopian fiction, which necessarily often pretends to describe a journey to some imaginary destination removed in space or time from the author’s environment. Finally, it may border on historical fiction or historiography. For not only does travel writing often offer historical explanations for the present phenomena observed in the societies visited; it also shares with some historical fiction and historiography a concern to organize disorderly reality and characterize national personality. All these literary forms, incidentally, should be borne in mind throughout this study of travel writing, for one or other of them was utilized in works other than travel accounts by most of the Russian writers examined here and elements of them were incorporated in most of these writers’ travel accounts too. Travel writing, then, is free-ranging, moves easily between objectivity and subjectivity and back and forth across the border between fact and fiction, and may be contiguous with several other genres. It therefore offers writers opportunities to develop their cultural, moral, social and political interests with relatively little constraint or rigour. This open-ended quality undoubtedly helps to account for the popularity of the genre in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, among representatives of a young culture whose horizons were rapidly expanding but whose freedom of expression was usually circumscribed by the autocratic regime. And yet the prevalence of travel writing in Russia at that time is by no means fully explained in this way. More important still was the suitability of the genre as a vehicle for broad comparisons between Russia and the western world against which the Russian educated elite, from the age of Catherine, had begun to measure their nation. For travel writers, in responding to other civilizations, not only provide their readers with information of a sort about the places they observe but also reveal, explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously, the values and preoccupations of the nations, or classes or groups within nations, to which they themselves belong. It is to this capacity of travel writing – the capacity to furnish comparisons and thereby to help to fashion a sense of national identity – that we shall now turn.

25 26

Roboli, p. 48; Ivashina, pp. 3-9. Helen Carr, “Modernism and travel (1880-1940),” in Hulme and Youngs, p. 79.

Introduction

7

CONSTRUCTING NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH TRAVEL WRITING The habit of comparing Russia with the west that developed among the Russian educated elite in the late eighteenth century reflected a growing sense of nationhood in that stratum. This sense of nationhood sprang not merely from the encounters of the elite with western culture but also from their pride in Russian military prowess and territorial gains in the ages of Peter and Catherine. (Later, in the early nineteenth century, it would be further strengthened by the role of Russian forces in the eventual defeat of Napoleon.) For there is “nothing like being an imperial people,” Eric Hobsbawm has observed, “to make a population conscious of its collective existence as such.”27 The national pride to which the creation of empire gave rise is reflected in the imperial sublime manner of odists such as Lomonosov and Derzhavin,28 in the patriotic conception of the “son of the fatherland” to which writers such as Fonvizin appeal, and in the numerous expressions of national consciousness (for example, interest in Russian language and history and the Russian folk) that were long ago explored by Hans Rogger in an influential study.29 On the broadest level the production of a literature of a western type in the age of Catherine could itself be viewed as an exercise in the construction of nationhood, in so far as it represented a patriotic endeavour to create ab ovo what seemed to be an attribute of each major European nation with which Russia now found herself in competition. The new sense of nationhood, as well as being a source of pride, could have “therapeutic effects,” as Liah Greenfeld has put it in her own study of nationalism.30 For it served as an antidote to the disorienting uncertainty that the late-eighteenth-century Russian nobleman experienced about his political, social and cultural role at a time when his way of life was being transformed by his exemption from compulsory service to the state and by the rapid appropriation of European dress, manners, habits, ideas, artefacts and even language. And yet the new-found confidence of the educated elite was fragile. For westernization, while it made possible military and cultural successes that were cause for celebration, also inevitably pointed up Russia’s backwardness by comparison with the countries from whom the fruitful innovations in Russian life were chiefly drawn. The wholly derivative, western character of Russia’s new high culture troubled her intellectuals – the group on whom the task of articulating nationhood mainly fell – by calling into question the individuality and autonomy of their nation. The unease is manifested in the satirical depiction, in some literary works, of the so-called Gallomania that affected the Russian nobility in the age of Catherine. Contact with an older civilization from which so much was being borrowed could therefore occasion diffidence and anxiety, and these negative 27

Hobsbawm, p. 38. See Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). 29 See n. 20 to the Foreword above. 30 Greenfeld, p. 220. 28

8

Introduction

emotions might be deepened by the ignorance of Russia or the indifference or condescension towards her that Russian noblemen thought they encountered when they travelled in the west. The need to clarify Russia’s identity, to resolve uncertainty and allay anxiety, was made yet more urgent by the fact that the concept of nationhood was assuming great importance in the late eighteenth century in the western cultures from which Russia was by then borrowing. (It is after all at this point, the year 1780 to be precise, that Hobsbawm begins his classic study of nationalism.) And since the “dominance of the west in the world” at that time, as Greenfeld has argued, “made nationality the canon,” states which aspired to enter the “supra-societal system of which the west was the centre,” as did post-Petrine Russia, “had in fact no choice but to become nations.”31 Fortunately for Russians the western preoccupation with nationhood not only compelled them to engage with the subject; it also ensured that there were interests, ideas and concepts available for them to use when they addressed the task of fashioning the distinctive identity of their own that they now required. For it was at this time, in the late eighteenth century, that there began to develop in European thought that counter-current to the Enlightenment whose representatives, notably Herder, explored the supposed attributes of national identity, such as language and religion, and interested themselves in the cultural means by which peoples supposedly express their originality, such as their poetry, music, mythology, dress and custom. Even the notion of national distinctiveness, Volkstum, or narodnost', which became central to nineteenth-century Russian debate about national destiny, is itself a western borrowing.32 There is perhaps also a deeper reason than the growth of Russia’s empire, the anxiety induced by the westernization of Russian high culture and the canonical status of the concept of nationhood in western Europe, for the profound interest that the Russian elite showed from the late eighteenth century in the question of national identity. Emphasizing the historical association of what he terms “protonationalism” with the industrial age, Hobsbawm has conceived of the modern nation as an imagined community which fills “the emotional void left by the retreat or disintegration, or the unavailability of real human communities and networks.”33 Ernest Gellner argues in a similar vein, in his own influential study, that nationalism provides a focus for allegiance in a fluid, anonymous, delocalized society that requires a mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable work-force for the purpose of fulfilling that society’s aspiration for continuous economic improvement.34 The connection that both historians thus seem to establish between the search for national identity, on the one hand, and the dislocations of the modern industrial age, on the other, has striking validity in the case of Russia. For the need for a sense of nationhood was most keenly felt by Russian intellectuals, and 31

Greenfeld, p. 14. The term seems to have entered Russian from Polish and to have been first used by the poet Viazemskii in a letter of 1819: see Lauren G. Leighton, Russian Romanticism: Two Essays (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), p. 49. 33 Ibid., p. 46; Hobsbawm’s italics. 34 Gellner, especially pp. 22, 57. 32

Introduction

9

speculation among them about national identity was at its most intense, during precisely that period, the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when in western Europe bourgeois liberalism – which expressed the spirit of the industrial age most clearly and which Russian thinkers on the whole loved to hate – had its heyday. The Russian travel writers examined here, from Karamzin on, seem to articulate this connection, with varying degrees of consciousness and from various points on the political spectrum. In seeking an identity for their own nation most of them express apprehensions about western societies that are impersonal, about the breakdown of traditional practices and local ties and loyalties, and about capitalism and its commercial ethos – the sort of social and economic organization, in fact, that the post-Petrine bureaucratic state was introducing into Russia, and might in future extend, in the interests of empire-building and greater economic efficiency. Why, though, did Russian writers who were anxious about their nation’s relationship to western civilization and conscious of western ideas about national distinctiveness find the genre of travel writing peculiarly helpful when they tried to formulate the notions of national identity of which they felt in such need? An answer to this question lies perhaps in the fact that in their efforts to construct national identity, as Greenfeld and more recently Tolz have argued, Russia’s intellectuals proceeded principally by comparing Russia with the western world. Not only was the west, in Greenfeld’s words, “an integral, indelible part” of the Russian national consciousness, a fact without whose existence there “simply would be no sense in being a nation”; it also served as an “anti-model” in direct opposition to which an ideal image of Russia could be constructed.35 Travel writing which took the western world as its principal subject-matter afforded opportunities for such comparison of Russia with this anti-model that few other genres could match (although the novel could be used to similar effect, as it would be, for example, in Dostoevskii’s hands). Characterization of the foreign other implied a view of, or even invited explicit reflection on, the Russian self. By giving substance to the concepts Evropa (“Europe”) and zapad (literally “occident,” that is to say, the “west”)36 travel writers could also give substance to the concept Rossiia (“Russia”) and bring an image of themselves into sharper focus. They thus clarified Russianness37 in a way not dissimilar to the way in which Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, clarified Greekness through discourse in his Histories on Persians, Egyptians, Scythians and other alien peoples, or as Tacitus, in later antiquity, threw light on the perceived vices of the contemporary Roman character by reference to the rugged virtues of the more primitive tribes beyond the frontier of the Roman 35

Greenfeld, pp. 254-255; see also Tolz, especially pp. 44, 71, 170. It should be noted, though, that in the eighteenth century, when Russia self-consciously entered the European world, the conceptual division of Europe into north and south, which characterized the periods of the Renaissance and Reformation, still obtained in western Europe. Russians adopted this division, associating themselves with the “north.” It was in the nineteenth century that the primary opposition came to be an opposition between “west” and “east.” 37 The term russkost' has become current in the Russian language only very recently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the notion of identity that it implies is close to the notion conveyed by narodnost'. 36

10 Introduction Empire on the Rhine.38 The identity established by this contrastive means is primarily of the sort that social anthropologists define as “oppositional.”39 That is to say it is an identity according to which people, in the words of Thomas Eriksen, “are loyal and socially integrated chiefly in relation to the other.”40 It will be argued here, then, that throughout the long period covered by this study Russians found travel writing a useful vehicle for their attempts to construct, by contrastive means, an identity that befitted a powerful European nation in an age of nationalism. (The generalization, if the reference to an age of nationalism is removed from it, may apply even to Piotr Tolstoi, writing at the end of the seventeenth century.) However, it also has to be said that the relationship between their own nation and culture, on the one hand, and the foreign nations and cultures which Russian travel writers observed, on the other, was continuously shifting. As changes in this relationship took place, so the nature of Russian responses to the alien other, in its various forms, was bound to change too. Travel accounts written at different periods therefore exhibit somewhat different preoccupations and emphases and degrees of confidence or diffidence and hope or fear, as well as the influence of different European intellectual and cultural movements. On the broadest level the responses to the west that are examined in this book might be said to reflect Russia’s evolving relationship to the west at four stages in her history.41 The response of Tolstoi, written at the dawn of the Petrine age, precedes the establishment of Russia as a major European power, a status that Russia gained through Peter’s eventual defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721). When Tolstoi made his journey to Italy Peter had yet to acquire the foothold that he sought on the Baltic coast, or to found his northern capital, or to reveal his imperial intentions, which were finally confirmed by his assumption of the title “emperor” (imperator) in 1721. Thus in 1697 Russia had not yet self-consciously entered the European family of nations and begun to measure herself by a western yardstick. Tolstoi is therefore relatively untroubled by what he finds abroad: the foreign other represents no cultural threat and comparison with it implies no belittlement of Russia. His diary, like the accounts of later travellers, is ambivalent, to be sure. European technological superiority and the relative grace and ease of life for members of his own social class inspire in him a naïve awe. At the same time he is secure in the belief that since the fall of Constantinople to the Mohammedan Turks in 1453 Moscow has become the repository of the true faith, the “third Rome,” as his sixteenth-century ancestors had put it, and that a fourth Rome there would not be. He is therefore convinced that he is the representative of a purer form of Christianity than that which he encounters beyond his country’s borders, and it is 38 In his work de origine et situ Germanorum (i.e. the Germania), as argued by Ellen O’Gorman in her article “No Place like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus,” Ramus, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1993), pp. 135-154, especially pp. 146 ff. 39 Malkin, p. 7. 40 Eriksen, p. 67; Eriksen’s italics. 41 It should of course be added that there are differences, as well as similarities, between works that are more or less contemporaneous and that these differences could be great.

Introduction 11 primarily in such confident religious terms that he constructs a notion of Russian and foreign identity. The responses to the west that are offered by Fonvizin and Karamzin, whose travel accounts were written in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, belong to the period when Catherine the Great was rapidly extending the empire that Peter had bequeathed. Catherine’s wars against Turkey, in 1768-1774 and 1787-1791, which were punctuated by famous military victories on land and at sea, together with the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795, yielded large territorial gains. Fonvizin and Karamzin (whatever the misgivings of the former about Catherine’s autocratic methods and military adventures) are self-conscious spokesmen for this newly mighty state. They also represent an elite that had been europeanized as a result of Peter’s social and cultural reforms and Catherine’s continuation, indeed intensification, of these reforms. In fact they themselves are products of the European Enlightenment, which Catherine had done so much to introduce into Russia. Admittedly the two men react to the west in ways that are by no means identical. Fonvizin, while he himself helped to introduce western literary genres into Russia and promoted western ideas about virtuous kingship and the responsibilities that noble privilege entails,42 displayed in his letters on France a jaundiced attitude towards the western world which would come to be widely shared by nineteenthcentury writers (who were familiar with his text). Karamzin, on the other hand, seems at first sight an enraptured student of western civilization, a Westernizer avant la lettre. At the same time Fonvizin and Karamzin have much in common when they write about the west. They both conceived of the identity for which they were striving not in religious terms, as Tolstoi had done, but in the western secular terms in which the Russian elite described the world once Peter had effected his cultural revolution. Both exhibited pride in their nation at the moment when national feeling was stirring in the west but before the counter-current to the Enlightenment had enabled Russians to make use of the concept of narodnost'. Both betrayed simultaneous feelings of inferiority and superiority vis-à-vis the west. Furthermore, they both clearly felt that Russia, having been empowered by the Petrine reforms and the Catherinean Enlightenment, now needed to distinguish herself from her western mentors, especially France, which was the culturally dominant power in their age. Their travel accounts also reflect – though not to the same degree – a growing literary awareness and authorial self-consciousness, properties which are themselves the product of westernization. The accounts of the west written by Pogodin, Botkin and Herzen in the midnineteenth century (in the period 1839-1851 to be precise) pertain to an age when Russia had reached the zenith of her military power and self-confidence as a European nation. She had survived the French invasion of 1812 and played a leading role in the final defeat of Napoleon. A revolt in Poland in 1830-1831 had been easily put down. Imperial consolidation and expansion were continuing in the Caucasus, Central Asia and eastern Siberia. It is true that Pogodin, Botkin and 42

See Offord, “Denis Fonvizin and the Concept of Nobility: An Eighteenth-century Russian Echo of a Western Debate,” in European History Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2005), pp. 9-38.

12 Introduction Herzen take fundamentally different views of the Russian autocratic state which, under Nicholas I, was now dedicated to the preservation of existing absolutist regimes, suppression of revolutionary forces and resistance to the emergence of the new nation states of which awakening peoples had begun to dream. And yet these writers’ accounts of their sojourns in the west are all imbued (if only implicitly, in the case of Botkin) with a sense that the Russian people have a destiny commensurate with the standing of the Russian imperial state, the greatest land power on the continent. Their attempts to articulate their respective conceptions of this destiny are informed by the ideas and cultural currents of post-Enlightenment Europe: the rediscovery of the Volk, German idealism, the European Romantic movement and the rise of nationalism. Their accounts are also steeped in reference, explicit or implicit, to the contemporary Russian debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles, that is to say, representatives of competing varieties of Russian nationalism. Observing the western countries they visit with these ideas and currents in mind, Pogodin, Botkin and Herzen all respond to the urban world that has been created by the industrial and commercial revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pogodin and Herzen, although they represent diametrically opposed political viewpoints (the one conservative monarchism and the other revolutionary republicanism), are equally revolted by the bourgeoisie, with its utilitarian ethos. They are also equally fearful of the arrival of capitalism in Russia as the old patriarchal way of life is broken down there. Moreover, they both conceive of Russian identity in terms that enable them to imagine that Russia will in some way finally surpass the west. At the same time a contrast begins to be drawn in travel writing in this period between, on the one hand, the great powers of northwestern Europe, Britain and France, where the bourgeois reigns, and, on the other, the more backward Mediterranean world represented by Spain (about which Botkin wrote) and Italy (which was as yet disunited). It is with the Mediterranean world, which is perceived as being relatively free of the bourgeois ethos (and with which Russia was not in competition, it should be noted), that Russia seems in these writings to have the greater affinity. On the literary level travel writing tends in this mid-nineteenth-century age of intense speculation about Russia’s place in Europe to become more overtly descriptive and to move further away than it had been in the late eighteenth century from the fictional polarity of the genre. The last two examples of Russian travel writing that are examined here, the accounts of journeys to the west by Dostoevskii and Saltykov-Shchedrin, were produced in the changed international and domestic conditions following Russia’s defeat by Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853-1856). Russia’s position among the Great Powers had been weakened by this reverse, and her selfconfidence had been badly shaken, factors which may partly account for the extent of Dostoevskii’s antipathy towards Russia’s erstwhile enemies. Both writers, from their different points on the political spectrum (romantic conservative nationalism in the case of Dostoevskii and radical Westernism in the case of Saltykov-Shchedrin), echo the critique of western civilization that had originated in the late eighteenth century and reached a crescendo in accounts such as those of Pogodin and Herzen

Introduction 13 in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular they continue the campaign that Pogodin and Herzen had waged against the bourgeoisie, whose fortunes had been revived in France following the defeat of revolutionary forces there in 1848. Indeed this campaign took on even greater urgency now, particularly for Saltykov-Shchedrin (who wrote his travel sketches almost twenty years after Dostoevskii had written his), since capitalism was belatedly establishing itself in Russia too after the emancipation of the serfs there in 1861. At the same time their formulation of national identity was sharpened by the emergence of new varieties of Russian nationalism: the Native-Soil Conservatism of which Dostoevskii himself was a leading exponent (and of which his travelogue is itself an expression), Pan-Slavism and the Populism that was promoted in the journal Notes of the Fatherland, which Saltykov-Shchedrin for many years helped to edit. In literary terms these writers’ travelogues also represented a further shift: the genre in their hands took on a more plainly fictional character and more overtly represented a contribution to the polemical journalism in which both these writers excelled. THE RUSSIAN CORPUS OF TRAVEL WRITING: JOURNEYS IN RUSSIA, IN A BORDERLAND AND ABROAD It remains, before I finally proceed to examine the individual examples of Russian travel writing that I have selected, to provide a brief survey of the classical Russian corpus in this genre. This survey should establish a Russian literary context in which to place the specific works examined here. It should also illustrate in general terms the ways in which travel writing has functioned in Russia as a means of shaping national identity. Examples of travel writing are to be found even in the literature of the Kievan and Muscovite periods of Russian history, notably the account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land left by the Abbot Daniil early in the twelfth century and the description of his journey to India by Afanasii Nikitin, an enterprising fifteenthcentury merchant from Tver'. However, it is only from the late seventeenth century, when the Muscovite state began to seek contact with the more advanced European world and men educated in a secular spirit began to look outside Russia for intellectual and cultural stimulation, that Russians started to travel to the west in any numbers and also acquired the habit of recording their impressions in writing. At first the journeys described were undertaken on behalf of the state, of which the traveller was a servant, but in time – and particularly after the Russian nobility was exempted from compulsory service to the state by an edict of Peter III in 1762 – they came to have many other purposes. A journey might be undertaken in search of a medical cure, for the sake of cultural tourism, or – if we are to judge by warnings against contraction of venereal disease in the loose environment of Paris – sexual tourism. It might be conceived as a means of personal development or enrichment or, to borrow words used by the French poet Lamartine about his own trip to the

14 Introduction orient, “a great act” of the traveller’s “inner life.”43 Later, in the nineteenth century, travel came to have yet more meanings for Russians: flight from civilized society in search of innocence, a passage into internal or external exile, a sociological expedition or a “going to the people,” pilgrimage or vagrancy. Frequently, of course, the journey that a writer describes is merely an episode or a metaphor within a work of fiction. The destiny that the metaphor illuminates might be personal or it might be national, inasmuch as the fate of the itinerant individual may serve as a symbol for the national destiny. The literary studies of the “superfluous man” of classical Russian fiction abound with references to journeying as futile search for meaning or refuge. Examples are Onegin’s journey in Russia, the Caucasus and Crimea, traced in a canto omitted from Pushkin’s finished novel in verse,44 and the journeys of the eponymous hero of Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin, to whichever acquaintance will briefly shelter him and ultimately, in increasingly demeaning modes of transport, to any backwater to which coachmen will deign to convey him.45 Travelling as a metaphor also famously occurs in Chaadaev’s first socalled “Philosophical Letter,” published in 1836 (but written in 1829). Here the educated Russian of the 1820s, aimless and without fixed abode, history, moral landmarks or identity (essentially the same “superfluous man” of the fiction of the period), is presented as a traveller with one foot in the air, more rootless even than the nomads who graze their animals on the Russian steppes.46 The metaphor occurs again as a symbol for the national destiny, but now in a more positive sense, at the end of Part I of Gogol'’s subverted epos, Dead Souls (1842). The troika of Gogol'’s antihero Chichikov is transformed as he flees from the scene of his attempts to purchase ownership of serfs who have died since the last census into an image of Russia hurtling towards some grand but as yet enigmatic destiny: Russia, where are you flying to? Answer! She gives no answer. The bells fill the air with their wonderful tinkling; the air is torn asunder, it thunders and is transformed into wind; everything on earth is flying past, and, looking askance, other nations and states draw aside and make way for her.47 The metaphor is deployed yet again at the end of Dostoevskii’s Devils, where Stepan Verkhovenskii’s final journey yields salvation in the form of recognition of simple truths known all along to the pious Russian common people but forgotten by the Westernist intelligentsia that had flourished in the 1840s, whom Verkhovenskii

43

Quoted by Said, p. 177. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 16 Vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1937-1949; hereafter Pushkin, PSS), Vol. 6, pp. 198-205. 45 Rudin, in I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos'mi tomakh (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1961-1968; hereafter Turgenev, PSSP), Sochineniia, Vol. 6, pp. 237-368, especially 351-353. 46 P. Ia. Chaadaev, Sochineniia i pis'ma P. Ia. Chaadaeva, ed. by M. Gershenzon, 2 Vols. (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipografii A. I. Mamontova, 1913-1914; hereafter Chaadaev, Sochineniia), Vol. 1, pp. 74-93. 47 Miortvye dushi, in Gogol', PSS, Vol. 6, p. 247. I have used David Magarshack’s translation in Gogol', Dead Souls (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 259. 44

Introduction 15 père represents.48 On the other hand, the journey to the west which Ivan Karamazov dreams of making, in order to crown his education and complete his search for meaning, will be, he predicts, a pilgrimage to a graveyard.49 However, it is not with works of fiction that contain the journey as a motif or metaphor that this book is chiefly concerned but with non-fictional, or largely nonfictional, works in which a journey is the organizing principle. Since it is the main aim of the book to explore the notions of identity at which Russians have arrived through their perception of otherness, it is appropriate to classify such works according to their narrators’ destinations. Three broad types of Russian travel writing may be identified using such a classification: accounts of journeys within Russia, accounts of journeys in a borderland and accounts of journeys to foreign states. Within each of these types, incidentally, one finds works that stand at the factual end of the spectrum mentioned in the first section of this introduction (such as accounts of exploration or scientific research or the guide-book) and, at the other end of the spectrum, works that are purely fictional, as well as the works of a more or less non-fictional nature that yield the richest material for a study of the shaping of national identity. It is with the third type of travelogue defined here, the account of a foreign journey (or more particularly a journey to western Europe), that this book is concerned. It may be useful, though, briefly to allude to Russian writing of the other two types as well, partly in order to demonstrate the range of the corpus that Russian writers produced in this genre but more importantly for the purpose of comparison and contrast with travel writing of the third type. The first type of Russian travel writing, the account of the journey within Russia’s borders, enjoyed considerable popularity in the early nineteenth century, when a taste for travel literature had been stimulated by Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (an account of a foreign journey) but the instability and warfare of the Napoleonic period militated against travel in the west. However, the works of this type that were produced at that time, such as Nevzorov’s Journey to Kazan', Viatka and Orenburg in 1800 (1803), were of ephemeral significance.50 Domestic travel writing was revived, and took on much greater importance, in the postCrimean period as the radical intelligentsia set out to construct an identity for the voiceless Russian popular mass, or narod, and sought to measure the people’s misery. Thus in his Vladimirka and Kliaz'ma (1861) Sleptsov retraced the steps of convicts taking the road to Siberian exile and described the conditions of workers and peasants and the social antagonisms he had observed in the factories and associated communities that had sprung up along that route as Russia began to undergo its belated industrial revolution.51 The genre unfolds on a panoramic, almost Tolstoyan scale in Bervi-Flerovskii’s Condition of the Working Class in 48

Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 10, pp. 479-507. Brat'ia Karamzovy, ibid., Vol. 14, p. 210. M. I. Nevzorov, Puteshestvie v Kazan', Viatku i Orenburg v 1800 godu (1803), in Landshaft moikh voobrazhenii: Stranitsy prozy russkogo sentimentalizma, ed. by V. I. Korovin (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1990; hereafter Korovin), pp. 440-499. See Ivashina, p. 11, for further examples. 51 Vladimirka i Kliaz'ma, in V. A. Sleptsov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1970), pp. 29-151. 49 50

16 Introduction Russia (1869), which helped to motivate the young men and women who were to undertake the ill-fated “going to the people” in 1874. Drawing on the experience of his own wanderings, both state-enforced and voluntary, from the Arctic tundra of the north to the semi-desert of the south and from the black-earth provinces of the Russian heartland to the Siberian taiga, Bervi-Flerovskii fused more or less factual material, including statistical data, with an emotional appeal to the compassionate intelligentsia for social justice.52 Later, in Chekhov’s Island of Sakhalin (1895), the genre becomes a vehicle for a penological study.53 In addition to such largely non-fictional but at the same time literary or polemical accounts of internal travel Russians themselves began in the nineteenth century to produce guide-books54 and a rich stock of ethnographic material on various nationalities within the Empire. At the opposite, purely fictional end of the spectrum of travel writing the domestic travelogue was soon found to afford rich opportunities for social comment. The outstanding early example of this variant of the genre is Radishchev’s incoherent but emotionally powerful Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a political manifestation of late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist sensibility. Radishchev exploits the device of the journey as a means of combining broad observation of lord and serf and the Russian administrative and judicial systems with certain notions derived from the Enlightenment in order to produce an indictment of autocratic government, lawless bureaucracy and the institution of serfdom.55 Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (1847-1852) and Nekrasov’s Who is Happy in Russia? (1866-1876) are further examples of overtly fictitious works in which Russian provincial journeying serves partly as a vehicle for observation of the life of the common people and implicit criticism of the regime from a humanitarian standpoint.56 The potency of the domestic travelogue, whether non-fictional or fictional, as a weapon for attacking Russia’s social and political order is indicated by the reaction of Catherine to Radishchev’s daring example of it. Radishchev was initially sentenced to death for his attack (a sentence commuted to Siberian exile, from which he was allowed to return only after the death of the empress whom he had offended). At the same time the domestic travelogue could function as a vehicle for a form of exploration. For wherever a travelogue was located on the scale between fact and fiction, an internal journey, no less than a foreign one, could result in discovery of some other that was unfamiliar to the author or narrator before the journey began. However, the otherness thus perceived is not the manifest, 52 N. Flerovskii [V. V. Bervi], Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Izdanie N. P. Poliakova, 1869). 53 A. P. Chekhov, Ostrov Sakhalin (Iz putevykh zapisok), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1974-1983), Sochineniia, Vols. 14-15, pp. 41-372. 54 e.g. Ivan Glushkov, Ruchnoi Dorozhnik dlia upotrebleniia na puti mezhdu Imperatorskimi Vserossiiskimi Stolitsami . . ., 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia tipografiia, 1802). 55 A. N. Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2 Vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1938-1941), Vol. 1, pp. 225-392. 56 Zapiski okhotnika, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, Vol. 4, pp. 7-388; N. A. Nekrasov, Komu na Rusi zhit' khorosho?, in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” Moscow, 1965-1967), Vol. 3, pp. 159-400.

Introduction 17 unsurprising and more or less stark otherness of a foreign nationality. Instead it is the equally striking otherness of aspects of Russian reality of which the educated narrator had previously been only dimly aware, particularly the otherness of the indigenous common people who were separated from the intelligentsia economically, socially and culturally as a result of the existence of serfdom and the eighteenth-century westernization of the elite. Thus Griboedov, in A Trip to the Country (1826), perceived the village as a foreign place inhabited by peasants whose mores the “damaged class of semi-Europeans” to which Griboedov belonged found quite alien.57 Turgenev’s noble narrator apprehends the Russian countryside in a similar way in the Sportsman’s Sketches. As he pursues his passion for hunting he is confronted by a peasantry whom he barely knows, although for transportation, safety and rewarding pursuit of his sport he is dependent on them. The unexpected peasant identities that unfold before him include resourceful entrepreneur, spontaneous man of nature, gentle opponent of blood sports, cowed victims of arbitrary brutality and inspired singer. A similar discovery is made by BerviFlerovskii some twenty years later, although his workers and peasants represent a somewhat different sort of otherness: they are a sturdy, independent people wedded to communal principles on which a socialist order may be based. The second type of Russian travel writing that I have identified describes or purports to describe journeying within a borderland where the geopolitical frontier is ill-defined but within which the traveller nevertheless does cross a boundary that separates what is perceived as Russian from what is not. The geographical location of this borderland shifts, of course, as the Russian Empire expands. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century a number of writers – Pavel Sumarokov (nephew of the better-known eighteenth-century dramatist), Izmailov and Shalikov – produced accounts of journeys in the Crimea (annexed by Russia in 1783) and the Ukraine (the eastern part of which had become a Russian dominion in 1667 and parts of which on the western bank of the Dnepr had fallen under Russian control in the reign of Catherine).58 Somewhat later in the Alexandrine age, when Russia invaded and occupied Finland, attention shifted to the “north.” Baratynskii, Batiushkov and Davydov, all of whom had served in the Russian army in Finland, conveyed in their poetry an image of that country that owed something to the vogue for the “north” nourished by European Pre-Romanticism. In 1809 Batiushkov also wrote a brief prose sketch in which Finland was characterized as a wild, gloomy, haunting, deserted space that might allure the Russian imagination.59 Later still, in 57 A. S. Griboedov, “Zagorodnaia poezdka (Otryvki iz pis'ma iuzhnogo zhitelia),” in his Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1953), pp. 388-390, especially p. 389. 58 P. I. Sumarokov, Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu (1800), in Korovin, pp. 290-391; idem, Dosugi krymskogo sud'i; ili, Vtoroe puteshestvie v Tavridu, 2 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia tipografiia, 1803-1805); V. V. Izmailov, Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu, 2nd revised ed., 4 Vols. (Moscow: Tipografiia Khristof. Klaudiia, 1805); P. I. Shalikov, Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (1803), in Korovin, pp. 516-570; idem, Drugoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1804). See Ivashina, p. 11, and Schönle, pp. 15, 88-98 and 112-122 on these authors. 59 “Otryvok iz pisem russkogo ofitsera o Finliandii,” in K. N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 2 Vols.

18 Introduction the 1820s, writers turned their gaze on the Caucasus as Russian colonization quickened there and as the ascendancy of the Romantic manner encouraged literary treatment of the confrontation between “civilized” Europeans and the “primitive” Caucasian peoples in their wild mountain landscape.60 Accounts of travels in the Caucasus from this period include Radozhitskii’s “Road from the River Don to Georgievsk over a Distance of 500 Versts” (1823) and Nechaev’s “Fragments of Travel Notes on South-Eastern Russia” (1826).61 The most popular contribution to travel writing on the Caucasus was made by the dashing officer Aleksandr Bestuzhev, who wrote under the pseudonym Marlinskii. Having been transferred there as a common soldier in 1829 following his exile to Finland and then Siberia for involvement in the Decembrist conspiracy, Marlinskii produced copious travel notes on the region, including his Letters from Daghestan (1832).62 The most enduring example of Russian travel writing on this borderland, though, is Pushkin’s Journey to Erzurum (1836), an account of the poet’s passage in 1829 through the North Caucasus, Georgia and Armenia, across the frontier into Turkey and via Kars to the frontline in Count Paskevich’s campaign against the Turks which ends, for Pushkin, with the taking of Erzurum by Russian forces.63 Like the account of the journey within Russia, the account of travels or sojourns in the Caucasian borderland had both variants with mainly informative purpose and variants that were overtly fictional (though fiction too could be perceived by Pushkin’s contemporaries as having ethnographic as well as literary significance). At the more scholarly end of the spectrum Bronevskii published The Latest Geographical and Historical News about the Caucasus (1823), which drew on the work of eighteenth-century explorers sent to the region by Catherine.64 In 1822 the journal Notes of the Fatherland even published a guide for travellers across the mountains.65 At the other end of the spectrum stand Pushkin’s early narrative poem

(Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1989), Vol. 1, pp. 93-99. On literary treatment of the northern borderland see especially Otto Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), and Cornwell, “Pushkin and Odoevsky: the ‘Afro-Finnish’ Theme in Russian Gothic,” in Empire and Gothic: The Politics of Genre, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2003), pp. 69-87. I am also indebted to an unpublished paper by Michael Basker on “Russian Poets on Finnish Impressions” delivered in Bristol in July 2000. Interest in Finland continued in the early years of the reign of Nicholas I. 60 The point is made by Reuel K. Wilson, p. xi, and Schönle, p. 15. 61 I. Radozhitskii, “Doroga ot reki Dona do Georgievska na prostranstve 5000 verst”; S. D. Nechaev, “Otryvki iz putevykh zapisok o Iugo-Vostochnoi Rossii.” On these accounts, which were published in journals, and more generally on Russian literature about the Caucasian borderland, see especially Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), to which I am indebted for the references. 62 A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Pis'ma iz Dagestana, in his Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1958), Vol. 2, pp. 5-60. On Marlinskii see Layton, Chapter 10. 63 Puteshestvie v Arzrum vo vremia pokhoda 1829 goda, in Pushkin, PSS, Vol. 8, Part 1, pp. 443-483; tr. by Birgitta Ingemanson as A Journey to Arzrum (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1974). 64 S. Bronevskii, Noveishie geograficheskie i istoricheskie izvestiia o Kavkaze, 2nd augmented ed., 2 Vols. (Moscow: S. Selivanovskii, 1823); see Layton, p. 28. 65 Layton, p. 54.

Introduction 19 “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1822), which offered a seminal imaginative representation of the region, Marlinskii’s novella “Ammalat-Bek” (1832), and Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (1840).66 In the post-Crimean period Lev Tolstoi, who saw action in the Caucasus in the early 1850s, offered a story of his own under the title “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1872) and in his tale “The Cossacks” (1863) placed in the foreground a group whose very identity was shaped by their historic association with the shifting frontier between the Russian state and the hostile aliens on its periphery.67 Under the oppressive rule of Nicholas I the southern borderland acquired value as a destination in which Russians could escape from futility, emptiness, frivolity and tyranny, and where they might find activity, danger, comradeship and contact with nature.68 It also functioned, as did the Russian heartlands, but in a rather different way, as a terrain in which Russian identity could be explored. As Susan Layton has shown, the Caucasus generated travelogues and literary studies that revealed an intense “self-interested curiosity about indigenous peoples of the empire’s periphery” at a time when national self-consciousness had been sharpened by victory over Napoleon.69 Quite numerous authors of pulp fiction legitimized aggressive Russian colonization in the region through depiction of savage Muslim alterity (while others, such as Radozhitskii, diverted attention from Russian rapacity by seeming to depopulate the region or venerate its natural beauty).70 At the same time yet other writers (notably Pushkin, Marlinskii and Lermontov), as representatives of a people living on the periphery of Europe and diffident about their own European credentials, exhibited a degree of sympathy for or even selfidentification with the “oriental” other that they encountered in the Caucasus. Thus Pushkin, while seeming at the end of his “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to approve of Russian subjugation of the Caucasian peoples, also appeared to admire the Circassian tribesman’s love of freedom, valour and rustic simplicity. Again, the Dagestanis and Russians who are set in opposition in Marlinskii’s writings reveal affinities of which Marlinskii is perhaps only dimly aware. The Russian as he is portrayed in Marlinskii’s “Ammalat-Bek,” for example, unleashes the orient within him by giving free play to Homeric aggressiveness expressed through martial savagery.71 And yet however appealing the military prowess, emotional authenticity and uninhibited eroticism that the local tribesmen seemed to exhibit by comparison with the mores of the jaded Russian elite, or whatever affinity Russians might feel 66 “Kavkazskii plennik,” in Pushkin, PSS, Vol. 4, pp. 91-117; M. Iu. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, in his Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1963), Vol. 2, pp. 361-492; “Ammalat-bek,” in Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Vol. 1, pp. 423-547. 67 “Kavkazskii plennik” and “Kazaki,” in L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 Vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1928-1958; hereafter L. N. Tolstoi, PSS), Vol. 21, pp. 304-326 and Vol. 6, pp. 3-150 respectively. 68 Francesca Wilson, Muscovy: Russia through Foreign Eyes, 1553-1900 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 263. 69 Layton, p. 89. 70 Ibid., pp. 156-174, 58-59. 71 Ibid., p. 129.

20 Introduction with the Asiatic other, Russians were bound also to experience an underlying sense of superiority over the relatively backward Caucasian peoples. In this theatre the Russians were conquering Europeans. The Caucasian borderlands were inexorably coming under Russian sway and local peoples – unlike Europeans – in the final analysis posed no threat to Russian society and culture. The third type of Russian travel writing, the type that this book examines, relates to a journey beyond Russia’s borders to other states with which Russians might want to compare their own. This element of the corpus does include some accounts of travel or stays in the east, such as the description by a naval officer Golovnin of his captivity in Japan in the years 1811-1813 and a record of a journey through Mongolia to China in 1820-1821 by a diplomat Timkovskii.72 However, the great majority of Russian accounts of foreign journeys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relate to travel in a westerly direction. Already in the Petrine age there were Russians besides Piotr Tolstoi – for example, Matveev and Sheremetev – who recorded in a notebook or diary or report what they had seen in western Europe during missions assigned to them by Peter.73 In the age of Elizabeth (ruled 17411761) Count Nikita Panin wrote a noteworthy series of letters to one of his superiors on his impressions of Scandinavia, where he served as a diplomat and where the nobility seemed to Panin to enjoy an enviable security under an impartial monarch who recognized personal merit as well as rank as a criterion for advancement.74 Later, in the age of Catherine, it became commonplace for the nobility to travel abroad and to keep some sort of record of such travel.75 It is to this age that our first major landmark in the corpus of Russian travel writing, Fonvizin’s Letters from France,76 belongs. Karamzin was therefore by no means the first Russian traveller in foreign lands who “bethought himself to take up the pen,” despite his immodest claim to this effect.77 It is true to say, though, that Karamzin’s Letters served as a model for future Russian travel accounts and that his contribution to the development and expansion of a Russian reading public greatly stimulated the demand for them. Those who tried to emulate him in the early years of the nineteenth century, such as Makarov, were undistinguished,78 but later in the 72 V. M. Golovnin, Zapiski flota Kapitana Golovnina o prikliucheniiakh ego v plenu u iapontsev v 1811, 1812, i 1813 godakh . . ., 2 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Morskaia tipografiia, 1816); E. Timkovskii, Puteshestvie v Kitai cherez Mongoliiu v 1820 i 1821 godakh, 3 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Med. Departamenta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1824). 73 On these early-modern Russian travellers see the article “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii…’” by the editors in Puteshestvie stol'nika P. A. Tolstogo po Evrope 1697-1699, ed. by L. A. Ol'shevskaia and S. N. Travnikov (Moscow: Nauka, 1992; hereafter Puteshestvie stol'nika P. A. Tolstogo), pp. 251, 267-269, and James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997; hereafter Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution), pp. 141-147. 74 See David L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 27-33. 75 See Chapter 2, Section 1 below. 76 On the titles given to Fonvizin’s letters see Chapter 2, n. 30 below. 77 “Lettre au Spectateur sur la littérature russe,” in N. M. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, ed. by Iu. M. Lotman, N. A. Marchenko and B. A. Uspenskii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984; hereafter Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika), p. 458. 78 P. I. Makarov, Pis'ma iz Londona (1803-1804), in Korovin, pp. 500-515.

Introduction 21 Alexandrine epoch more prominent men of letters, including the poets Batiushkov, Zhukovskii and Kiukhel'beker, tried their hand at the sketch on travel to the west.79 It was in the reign of Nicholas I, though, when educated Russians started to explore the west in greater numbers (and when members of social groups other than the wealthy nobility also began to travel), that the vogue for accounts of travel in western Europe reached a crescendo. It is to this period that the travel writings of Pogodin, Botkin and Herzen, together with those of authors who are not examined here, such as Grech and Annenkov, as well as many more ephemeral works,80 all belong. Nor did the appetite for accounts of foreign journeys diminish after the Crimean War, when cultural and intellectual life was reinvigorated, more clearly defined political positions were taken up and the subject of national identity remained topical. A further spate of récits de voyage attests to the continuing vitality of the genre in the late 1850s and early 1860s, for instance: Goncharov’s Frigate Pallas; a book To Friends from afar, drafted by the proponent of “organic criticism,” Grigor'ev, while he was abroad in 1857;81 the Parisian Letters (18581859) and London Notes (1859) published by the radical prose writer, poet and champion of women’s rights, Mikhailov;82 Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions; and sketches by other less well-known writers such as Evgeniia Tur.83 Lev Tolstoi’s early story “Lucerne” (1857), an expression of Anglophobia in the aftermath of the Crimean War, may be considered a fictional variant of the genre.84 When the reforming zeal of Alexander’s government was spent, as it was by the middle of the 1860s, and while a revolutionary movement intent on the establishment of a Russian form of socialism was developing, the account of the foreign journey was overshadowed for a while by the radical intelligentsia’s preoccupation with the Russian narod, which resembled another unknown people. And yet still the genre persisted in some form, as indicated by Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Across the Border and Korolenko’s Speechless, and at the turn of the century it was 79 “Puteshestvie v zamok Sirei,” in Batiushkov, Sochineniia, Vol. 1, pp. 99-108; “Puteshestvie po Saksonskoi Shveitsarii. Rafaeleva Madonna (iz pis'ma o drezdenskoi galeree). Otryvki iz pis'ma o Shveitsarii,” in V. A. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v triokh tomakh (St. Petersburg: Izdanie A. F. Marksa, 1906), Vol. 3, pp. 427-442; V. K. Kiukhel'beker, “Puteshestvie,” in Puteshestvie. Dnevnik. Stat'i (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), pp. 7-63. 80 e.g. A. Chertkov, Vospominaniia o Sitsilii, 2 Vols. (Moscow: Tipografiia A. Semiona, 1835-1836); Vladimir Stroev, Parizh v 1838 i 1839 godakh . . ., 2 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. Iogansona, 1842); A. Levshin, Progulki Russkogo v Pompei (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia P. P. Bocharova, 1843); M. Zh-k-va [M. S. Zhukova], Ocherki Iuzhnoi Frantsii i Nitstsy. Iz dorozhnykh zapisok 1840 i 1842 godov, 2 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo A. Ivanova, 1844). 81 See Wayne Dowler, An Unnecessary Man: The Life of Apollon Grigor'ev (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1995; hereafter Dowler, An Unnecessary Man), pp. 111-115. Grigor'ev’s travelogue was not published, though, and the manuscript is not extant. 82 M. L. Mikhailov, “Parizhskie pis'ma” and “Londonskie zametki,” published in Books 9-12 of Sovremennik for 1858 and Books 1-2 of Sovremennik for 1859 respectively. On Mikhailov see Jennifer Lonergan, “M. L. Mikhailov and Russian Radical Ideas about Women, 1847-1865” (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of Bristol, 1995). 83 See V. S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh “Vremia,” 1861-1863 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1972), pp. 170-171. 84 “Iz zapisok kniazia D. Nekhliudova. Liutsern,” in L. N. Tolstoi, PSS, Vol. 5, pp. 3-26.

22 Introduction revived in the embittered sketch “Beautiful France” (1906), in which Gor'kii indicts bourgeois France for the financial support it was providing for the tsarist government,85 as well as in Gor'kii’s aforementioned critique of America. Like the account of travel in a borderland, this third type of travel writing, the account of a journey to the west, whether non-fictional or fictional, seeks clarification or confirmation of Russian identity. However, unlike the account of travel in a borderland, it defines the Russian self not in relation to some comparatively primitive people who have come to be subjected to Russian state power but in relation to peoples with more efficient economic organization, a higher technological level, more sophisticated civil society and more mature cultures. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian accounts of travels in a westerly direction therefore tend to be informed by a sense of national inferiority which cannot be masked by the air of superiority that some Russian travellers (for example, Fonvizin, Pogodin, Herzen and Dostoevskii) also affect. In this respect Russian writing about travel to the west tends to differ from the writing produced in the same period by westerners travelling eastwards or southwards. It is true, of course, that there were westerners who imagined that they found in alien societies institutions, morals or customs that were superior to those that they observed at home. And yet those westerners travelled, like Russians in the Caucasus, as representatives of imperial powers that were extending their military, economic and cultural influence into the territory of weaker peoples. They therefore generally constructed their view of the foreign other with a conscious or sub-conscious preconception of superiority. Often their journeys also entailed, as one commentator has observed, a temporal displacement from the present condition of northern industrial societies to the more backward forms of social organization prevailing in predominantly agricultural societies (which could of course sometimes be represented in a pastoral vein and idealized as relatively innocent and pure communities).86 Russian travellers to the west, on the other hand, were all too likely to feel that they were moving into a more advanced world, a world to which Russia did not yet fully belong. This experience could give rise to diffidence and to the ressentiment, an “existential envy of the West,” to which Greenfeld drew attention in her study of five examples of nationalism,87 and thence to apparently confident claims about the perceived merit of Russia’s indigenous culture, claims that were no doubt designed to counter these negative emotions. The unsettling effect of travel to an apparently superior civilization could, however, be offset by crude ethnic stereotyping which served to polarize the opposition between a native self and the varieties of a foreign other that were to be found beyond the Russian frontier. Thus we are repeatedly confronted in Russian writing about foreign lands with lofty generalizations based on flimsy or isolated evidence and with glib characterization of whole peoples, or of classes such as the 85

“Prekrasnaia Frantsiia,” in Gor'kii, PSS, Vol. 6, pp. 174-182. Peter Dailey, “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?,” The American Scholar, Vol. 58, No. 2 (spring 1989), pp. 303-304. 87 Greenfeld, p. 250; see also pp. 15-16. 86

Introduction 23 French bourgeoisie that were held to be representative of a people as a whole. The English, for example, are consistently characterized as cold, calculating, prim or sombre. So gloomy is the Englishman, Dostoevskii tells his readers, that even when he dances he is serious and sullen, as if dancing were a duty.88 The stereotypes to which Russian writers resort when characterizing other peoples seem to fulfil precisely the functions to which Eriksen draws attention in his discussion of the phenomenon of stereotyping. They “inform the individual of the virtues of his or her own group and the vices of the others.” They are “crucial in defining the boundaries of one’s own group” and “contribute to defining one’s own group in relation to others by providing a ‘tidy’ map of the social world.” They may “help the individual to create order in an otherwise excruciatingly complicated social universe.” Perhaps they may even be seen “as the symbolic revenge of the downtrodden.”89 Travel writing about the west therefore had the capacity to overcome anxieties and to provide Russians with a measure of reassurance, security, certainty and meaning. Indeed it could have an empowering effect. It enabled Russians not only to define a world beyond their borders that was in certain respects disconcertingly superior to their own but also to come to terms with that world and even to seem to master it. Europe was transformed into something that could be known. It became an object rather than a subject: what might have seemed active and threatening was to some degree rendered passive and brought under control. In this regard the representation of the west in Russian thought in general and in Russian travel writing in particular might be likened to many western writers’ representation of the orient, as Edward Said conceives of it. Russia’s west, like the orient constructed by Said’s orientalists, is “a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics” that has primarily to do not with the world that is observed but with the world of the observer, who establishes a measure of authority by pinning down that world’s otherness.90 At the same time travel writing could also facilitate an urgently needed reconciliation of a sort between travellers and a native self from which the westernization of the educated class (who travelled) was widely supposed to have separated them. (Domestic travel, it will be recalled, tended to expose this separation.) This discovery (or rediscovery, or invention) of a native self and the consequent recovery of wholeness in the course of foreign travels sometimes gives Russian accounts of forays into alien lands the appearance of a homecoming. In this respect they have some affinity with the ancient Greek nostoi, poems of return to a home, of which The Odyssey is the outstanding example. The properties, both aggravating and soothing, that I have attributed to Russian accounts of journeys to the west are manifest in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury examples of the genre that I have selected for close examination in this 88 Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 5, p. 72. I do not argue, of course, that such stereotyping is exclusive to Russian texts. Fletcher’s sixteenth-century account of Russians – which was probably heavily indebted to the earlier account by Herberstein – provides a good example of stereotyping of Russians by an Englishman: see n. 3 to this introduction. 89 Eriksen, pp. 24-25. 90 Said, pp. 2-3, 12, 177.

24 Introduction book. Before turning to these, though, I shall deal with Tolstoi’s early-modern account of a foreign journey, which will help to place the later writers’ accounts in sharp relief.

CHAPTER 1

Piotr Tolstoi: a travel diary

TOLSTOI’S LIFE AND JOURNEY Piotr Andreevich Tolstoi (1645-1729) was a member of a noble family of Lithuanian origin that had begun to serve the Muscovite sovereigns as early as the fifteenth century. (This was the same family that would later produce the great novelist, Lev Tolstoi, the conservative statesman Dmitrii Tolstoi, who is mentioned in the final chapter of this book, and other notable literary figures.) The family prospered at court in the reign of Tsar Alexis (ruled 1645-1676) as a result of the marriage of Piotr’s father to a member of the Miloslavskii family, to which Alexis’s first wife belonged. In the 1670s Piotr himself served as a stol'nik, or table attendant, to Tsaritsa Natal'ia (a Naryshkina, Alexis’s second wife and mother of Peter I, who was born in 1672), and then to Tsar Fiodor Alekseevich.1 Prominence at court inevitably entailed involvement in the turbulent political events which, in the absence of an able male heir to the throne, followed the death of Alexis. As an ally of the Miloslavskii clan Tolstoi supported and indeed contributed to the incitement of the uprising of the strel'tsy, the Kremlin musketeers, in 1682, through which the Miloslavskiis sought to advance their interests against the Naryshkins. In the period 1686-1692 he served at the court of the ailing Ivan V,2 who ruled nominally under the regency of Sophia from 1682-1689 and then jointly with Peter from 1689 until his death in 1696, whereupon Peter became sole ruler. Tolstoi may have owed his survival, once Peter came to power, to the intercession of Fiodor Apraksin, a companion of Peter’s who was also the brother-in-law of Tolstoi’s elder brother Ivan. At any rate he was in sufficiently good odour to be appointed governor of the remote northern province of Velikii Ustiug, where in 1693 he received Peter as the tsar travelled north to Archangel to view the ocean for the first time. In 1696 he was present at the siege that ended with the capture of Azov from the Turks. The most pragmatic of men, Tolstoi had no doubt quickly understood 1 N. I. Pavlenko, Ptentsy gnezda Petrova (Moscow: Mysl', 1994), p. 199; Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 129, n.8. 2 Bushkovitch, p. 129, n. 8.

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where political power now lay and he was to remain a loyal and effective servant to Peter throughout his long reign. His high intelligence, polished manners and consummate political skill equipped him to fulfil the most difficult and delicate assignments. Peter, for his part, evidently valued Tolstoi greatly and is said to have remarked to him, when he caught him pretending to be asleep at a court drinking bout: “Oh head, oh head, were you not so wise, I would have ordered you chopped off long ago.”3 It was shortly after the Azov campaign, when Peter had become convinced of the importance of naval power as a means of gaining the upper hand over the Turks, that Tolstoi was dispatched on the prolonged journey that occasioned the composition of the diary which is the subject of this chapter. In 1697, shortly before Peter’s departure on his own version of the Grand Tour, his Great Embassy to the west, Peter ordered more than thirty chamberlains from his court to undertake military studies in Holland and the Adriatic. The particular task assigned to Tolstoi, who was among these chamberlains, was to travel to Venice to study maps and compasses, to learn how to operate a ship “both as in combat and as on a simple voyage,” to acquaint himself with tackle, instruments, sails, ropes and oars, “to try to be at sea in time of combat” or, failing that, “to try diligently to get into combat” and to obtain testimonials confirming that these instructions had been carried out (6).4 It is possible that Tolstoi volunteered for this mission as a means of confirming his loyalty to Peter, who would not have forgotten Tolstoi’s association with the Miloslavskiis and his role in the strel'tsy revolt. Equally it may be that Peter was still unsure that it would be safe for him to leave Tolstoi at large in Russia while he himself was abroad.5 Tolstoi began his overland journey from Moscow to Venice, which took him more than fifteen weeks to complete, in February 1697. On leaving Russia, via Mozhaisk and Smolensk, he passed first through Polish territory, breaking his journey at Mohylew, Borysów, Minsk and Warsaw, where he spent five days. He then crossed the border into the Holy Roman Empire and travelled via Racibórz and Opava in Silesia and Olomouc in Moravia to Vienna, where he paused for a further six days. From there he travelled south-west through the mountainous regions of Styria and Carinthia and out of the Holy Roman Empire into the Venetian domains of north-eastern Italy, reaching Venice itself in June. Venice was to be his main base in Italy for more than sixteen months, until the late autumn of 1698, but during 3 Quoted by Pavlenko, p. 254. For fuller biographical information on Tolstoi see Pavlenko, pp. 197279; Nikolai Tolstoy, The Tolstoys: Twenty-Four Generations of Russian History, 1353-1983 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), pp. 48-88; and Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” pp. 253-261. The quotation is from Pavlenko, p. 254. 4 The page references that are given in parentheses in the text of this chapter are to The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi: A Muscovite in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Max J. Okenfuss (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987; hereafter The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi). Quotations from the diary are given in Okenfuss’s English version. There is also a recent Russian edition of the diary (published after Okenfuss’s translation), viz. Puteshestvie stol'nika P. A. Tolstogo cited in n. 73 to the Introduction above. 5 As suggested by Nikolai Tolstoy, p. 49, and Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” p. 265.

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that period he made four trips by land or sea. In August 1697 he went by canal to Padua, where he spent five days. In late September he undertook his first nautical expedition, sailing down the Dalmatian coast and calling at several ports. In March 1698 he travelled overland via Verona into what was then a Spanish dominion, Milan. Finally, in June 1698, he left Venice again for an extended naval trip in the Adriatic, sailing once more down the Dalmatian coast before crossing the Adriatic to Bari and continuing by land to Naples, where he spent over a week. He then set sail again and went via Messina in Sicily to Malta, where he spent the best part of a further week. From Malta he sailed back to Naples and then travelled on by land to Rome, where he stayed for five days before returning to Venice in late August, via Florence, Bologna and Ferrara. In the autumn of 1698 this long sojourn in the west, punctuated by trips which suggest a considerable cultural curiosity on Tolstoi’s part, came to a premature and probably unwelcome end. In late October Tolstoi received a summons to return to Russia, no doubt because of the latest strel'tsy revolt, which had broken out while Peter himself was abroad and into which Peter was now conducting a ruthless investigation. Tolstoi obediently left Venice at once and, travelling with breathless haste by the same route as on his outward journey, he reached Moscow – where some 800 strel'tsy had already been executed and several hundred more were to be executed in February – in late January 1699. His absence from Russia at the time of the revolt was fortuitous, for had he been there suspicion as to his involvement may have been difficult to dispel given his previous association with the strel'tsy and the Miloslavskii clan which Peter detested. The knowledge and experience of naval affairs that Tolstoi had gained during his assignment to Venice does not seem to have been put to use on his return to Russia in January 1699.6 Instead, in 1701, after a period of inactivity, Tolstoi was sent to the Ottoman court at Istanbul as Russia’s first permanent minister there. The role was an important one, for it was imperative that the Turks be dissuaded from attacking Russia on her southern border, with the aim of reasserting their authority in the Azov region, at a time when Peter was embarking on his Northern War against the Sweden of Charles XII. It was also a role for which Tolstoi, who possessed a Machiavellian adroitness at intrigue, was well suited. He played the role skilfully, gathering intelligence and oiling palms. He remained in this difficult post, despite pleas to Peter to be relieved of it, until 1714, suffering two terms of imprisonment by the Turks, who were not fastidious about diplomatic niceties, when relations between the two countries were at their nadir.7 In 1716-1717 Tolstoi aided Peter in a diplomatic mission to the west, visiting Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris among other places. In 1717 he was dispatched to Vienna and thence to Naples in order to lure Peter’s son Alexis back to Russia following his flight from his demanding father. Tolstoi completed the task early in 1718 by dint 6 This lack of naval employment might tend to confirm the view that Peter’s reasons for sending Tolstoi to Venice were political rather than pedagogical. 7 Tolstoi’s diplomatic mission in Turkey is described by Pavlenko, pp. 210-243. See also Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” pp. 258-259.

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of the cunning and psychological insight that had held him in good stead at the Ottoman court. Alexis was finally incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, interrogated and tortured under Tolstoi’s direction, and in all probability put to death in Tolstoi’s presence when his father’s brutal enquiries into the extent of sympathy for his son among his opponents, real or imagined, had been completed.8 For his numerous services to his sovereign Tolstoi received huge rewards in the form of offices, honours, estates and serfs, monopolies and privileges. He also continued to lead a hedonistic life in old age, taking an Italian mistress, still often indulging his love of dancing and enjoying his vast wealth. He remained active in affairs of state too. In the period 1717-1722 he served as the first president of the College of Commerce. He was put in charge of a permanent Chancellery of Secret Investigations. He undertook further diplomatic duties. In 1722, although now approaching eighty, he accompanied Peter on his military campaign against Persia. In 1724 he organized and played a prominent part in the coronation of Peter’s wife, Catherine. Following Peter’s death in 1725 he enjoyed a period of influence under Catherine, now Empress Catherine I, as a member of the Supreme Privy Council, created early in 1726, which effectively governed the country. However, life was bound to become insecure for a man who had for long held such a privileged position under Peter once his protector was gone. In 1727 Tolstoi was arrested for opposing the proposed marriage between the infant Grand Prince Peter (grandson of Peter I, son of the murdered Prince Alexis, who ruled as Peter II from 1727 until 1730) and the daughter of Prince Menshikov, a favourite of Peter I. He was promptly exiled to the Solovetskii Monastery on an inhospitable island in the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, and there he died in 1729. TOLSTOI’S DIARY Throughout his twenty-three-month journey to Italy Tolstoi kept a diary or journal, and he made entries of various lengths from one line to several thousand words for some three hundred days in that period. (It was not until the 1880s, though, that the diary was published, at the instigation of the author’s descendant Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, who served as a minister under Alexander II and who, as it happened, was lampooned by Saltykov-Shchedrin in the last example of travel writing examined in this book.9) In the absence of a stated authorial purpose it is unclear precisely why 8 On Peter’s relations with and persecution of Alexis, and on Tolstoi’s role in the persecution, see especially Pavlenko, pp. 244-256; Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in Russia, tr. with an introduction by John T. Alexander (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 269-278, 285-286; Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 402-411; Bushkovitch, Chapters 9 and 10. 9 See Russkii arkhiv (1888), Book 1, No. 2, pp. 167-204, No. 3, pp. 321-368, and No. 4, pp. 505552; Book 2, No. 5, pp. 5-62, No. 6, pp. 113-156, No. 7, pp. 225-264, and No. 8, pp. 369-400. The printed version was based on a manuscript held in the library of the University of Kazan'. In the same year the work was published by Moscow University Press as a separate edition. See Okenfuss, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, pp. xxv-xxvi, and Ol'shevskaia and

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Tolstoi kept such a meticulous record of his journey. Tolstoi’s most recent Russian editors take the somewhat far-fetched view that Tolstoi intended, by recording impressions of both secular and religious life in foreign countries, to produce a document that might win him the approval of whichever of the two broad groups contending for supremacy in Russia at the beginning of Peter’s reign, traditionalists and reformers, eventually prevailed.10 Max Okenfuss, who has translated and edited the diary, more plausibly argues that Tolstoi wished to document fully all the steps he took to carry out Peter’s instructions, steps that seem prudent in view of Tolstoi’s earlier support for the mutinous strel'tsy.11 Tolstoi does indeed include information on the subject of his military studies. He carefully chronicles his two voyages in the Adriatic, the Mediterranean and the Tyrrhenian Sea and describes the places of military interest, such as fortresses and armouries, that he has visited. He also incorporates the copious evidence he has amassed, in the form of testimonials and certificates, that would attest to his diligence, intrepidity and mastery of nautical knowledge and skills (120, 182-183, 324-329).12 However, the scope of Tolstoi’s diary is much broader than it would have needed to be to satisfy Peter’s interest in his subject’s conscientious discharge of his duty, even supposing that Peter would have wanted to see it (and there appears to be no evidence that he was aware of its existence).13 Tolstoi compiles an immense catalogue of what to him is unfamiliar, and this catalogue occupies a far greater proportion of his diary than the record of his studies. His gaze falls on human inventions that are more or less unknown in Russia, or that occur beyond Russia’s western borders in a more advanced form, such as a newspaper, museums, galleries, zoos, bridges, mills, locks on waterways, fountains, clocks, gardens and a maze. He remarks on creatures that are unfamiliar to him, such as a whale, a tunny fish, a crocodile, lapdogs and fireflies, and on natural phenomena, such as thermal springs and volcanoes. He attempts to describe every major town in which he stays, the palaces and houses that he has seen and the hospitals, lazarettos, pharmacies, academies and libraries he has inspected. Above all he notes and often exhaustively describes the very numerous cathedrals, churches, chapels, shrines, monasteries and convents he has visited, the icons and relics he has been shown, and the masses, liturgies and vespers he has attended. Travnikov, “Arkheograficheskii obzor,” in Puteshestvie stol'nika P. A. Tolstogo, p. 292. 10 Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” p. 269. They also wonder whether the diary was conceived as a possible guide-book for Peter in the event of his visiting Italy in the course of his Great Embassy. (ibid., p. 267). 11 Okenfuss, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xix, and the text of the diary in The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 6, n. 3. 12 It is perhaps open to question, though, how diligently Tolstoi pursued his naval studies. One is inclined to think that he was slow to embark on them, since he was in Venice for over three months before he went to sea (The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 113). He does not tell us what studies, if any, he undertook on land during his three spells in Venice. His apparently touristic trips to Padua and Milan and from Bari to Naples, and from Naples back to Venice, and his stay on Malta occupied at least another two months in all. We might also wonder how serious were his attempts to enter into combat with the Turks, whom he seems to have spent much of his time at sea trying to evade. 13 Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” p. 269.

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Although the diary was thus much more than a mere log of diligent service, it does not seem to have been conceived by Tolstoi as a literary work to be published. It has an incomplete air: Tolstoi evidently had neither the leisure nor the inclination to complete certain entries and repeatedly remarks that he is unable to describe all the things he has seen “because time is short” or “because of the lateness of the hour” (97, 140; see also 73, 100, 131, 135, 180, 233). Nor, it seems, did he return in later years to his manuscript in order to supplement what he had written during his travels or to polish or correct it in any way. Nor does the diary provide such an intimate, personal account of Tolstoi’s experience as we might now expect from this written form. Indeed it is a largely depersonalized world that Tolstoi inhabits: few individuals, other than saints, merit mention by name in Tolstoi’s text. Not that we should be surprised by such lack of clarity of purpose or authorial presence and ambition. For the concepts of a writer and an authorial persona did not yet exist in Russia, there being no strongly developed sense of individual personality there. Even when the beginnings of a published literature did emerge, as an aspect of Peter’s westernization, the image of the writer fostered by Peter was, as W. Gareth Jones has put it, “that of a useful literary technician and propagandist,”14 not a reflective memoirist. In short, Russia at the beginning of the Petrine age lacked a secular literary tradition in which such texts as records of travels, a well-established genre in the west, could be embedded (although Russia did already have a corpus of bureaucratic and diplomatic reports, stateinye spiski, which no doubt affected Tolstoi’s presentation of his material and his language and style15). Moreover, Russian noblemen of Tolstoi’s time, as Lindsey Hughes has observed, rarely expressed their private thoughts in writing, even in diaries or correspondence.16 It therefore seems anachronistic and fanciful to suggest, as Tolstoi’s Russian editors do, that Tolstoi became a writer out of a sense of duty as a citizen or to describe his diary as a “carefully thought out literary work” in which the “material that is being poeticized” has been judiciously selected.17 One cannot be sure, though, on the basis of this apparent lack of literary care, art or ambition that Tolstoi’s diary was conceived as a purely private record of his journey. On the contrary, we may surmise that it was intended as a text to be read within Tolstoi’s family and circle of friends or acquaintances, perhaps with some instructive purpose. For there are fragments of evidence that suggest that Tolstoi does begin to conceive of readers of the diary other than himself. For example, aware that there is much more that is of architectural note in Venice than he has time to describe, and perhaps with some guide-book to the city that he has read or seen in mind, he makes the following remark, curious for a diarist anticipating no 14

W. Gareth Jones, “The Image of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Author,” in Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel de Madariaga, ed. by Roger Bartlett and Janet M. Hartley (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990; hereafter Jones, “The Image of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Author”), p. 59. 15 Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” pp. 283-284. 16 Hughes, Russia and the West: the Life of a Seventeenth-Century Westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Golitsyn (1643-1714) (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1984), p. 99. 17 Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” pp. 270-271.

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readership: “Those who wish to know about Venice in detail I refer to a reading of a history of Venice printed in the Italian language” (73; see also 134, 290). Tolstoi also seems to develop somewhat as a writer as his travels unfold and his diary grows. He begins to organize his descriptions in a rather more systematic way, as Okenfuss contends,18 eventually adding a characterization of the cities he visits to his account of what he personally has done and seen in them. Thus after his first few months in Venice, before he embarks on his first voyage on the Adriatic Sea, he provides a long and multi-faceted description of Venetian life (147-161). There are similar, if less extensive, passages in the final entries on Naples (207-211) and Malta (238-242). At the end of his stay in Rome he attempts a résumé of his impressions of the city, and now he separates this summary from the record of how he spent his days there (295-304; see also 314-315). Finally, in Bologna, in which he spends only one night, his whole entry takes the form not of a record of his own movements but of a report, headed “A Description of Bologna,” on the city’s streets, buildings, shops, monasteries, churches, governance, inhabitants, manners, food, foreign residents, gardens, fountains, institutions of learning, publishing house and lapdogs (317-318). He also seems in the later stages of his travels to see himself as engaged in a more ambitious scribal undertaking. Perhaps his new experiences, and in particular his quite numerous visits to libraries in the cities he visited, caused him to reflect on his own writing, produced in him a growing consciousness of the book as a concept and encouraged him to relate his own work to the volumes he had seen. At any rate he begins towards the end of his diary to refer quite frequently to it as a “book” (295, 315, 323, 333-335). That is not to say that Tolstoi ever overcomes his severe limitations as a writer. Admittedly he records information in a careful, unemotional, precise way. He has a fondness for noting measurement of distance and dimension, quantity, weight, price, value, population, temperature and geographical latitude. He is, however, a credulous observer. His first encounter with topiary near Bergamo leaves him convinced, it seems, that bushes may grow naturally in the shapes he sees. Approaching the city I saw a miraculous thing: around a garden there is a fence of bushes, and these bushes grow like a stone wall an arshin [approximately five feet] thick and two arshins high. Along this wall of bushes the bushes grow like various figures, such as a walking man with a spear, or with a halberd, or with a sabre; another is like a man on a horse with weapons; another is like an angel with wings; another is like a woman or a girl dressed in the French fashion; another is a figure like a barque with sails and with ropes; another is just like a Venetian gondola, that is, a boat, with an awning, and on it a man with an oar; others are like fountains of various shapes; others grow in the likeness of animals and beasts and birds of various sorts, and others are like fine vessels. In the corners of this garden the bushes grow just like towers, on top of which grow people in the shapes of soldiers with weapons. This thing is exceedingly marvellous and wondrous, since this bush grows in these various shapes. (129) 18

Okenfuss, “The Cultural Transformation of Petr Tolstoi,” pp. 230-231.

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It is clear as he leaves Bologna over five months later that Tolstoi has still not been disabused of this notion (318-319). More importantly, he does not possess the intellectual discrimination, aesthetic sense, concepts or terminology to describe what he sees with any degree of sophistication. Although by the time he reaches Florence the word “subtle” has entered his vocabulary (313), the words “fine” and “marvellous” continue to serve as his stock epithets. Confronted with the architectural grandeur of Verona some nine months after his arrival in Italy, he is still unable to move beyond rather banal and formulaic comments. The stone city of Verona is very large, and it has many large fine churches and homes of marvellous stone work. The town has fine stone bridges over a great water, and there are many such bridges. Verona is populous; around this town are many fine gardens and markets with many wares. The inns, that is, the stopover courts, are really fine. I stayed in this city until noon, and at noon I went to walk around Verona and to see how the town is built. The town is well constructed, and around the fortress is a strong moat, and this and the other fortresses are well done with a mathematical reasoning and are fortified, that is, strengthened very well. The pliats [piazza], that is, the square, in the city of Verona is fine, and all the decorations of this town are marvellous and very fine. (128) Together with this raw artlessness goes a lack of emotional engagement on the part of the writer with his subject-matter. In an entry in his diary that relates to his stay in Naples, for example, Tolstoi provides a long, meticulously detailed and entirely matter-of-fact description of the public execution of a man who had murdered a servant in the viceroy’s palace: the executioner took a large iron hammer and for a long time he waved the hammer with both hands over the head of the condemned man, and he struck the condemned man on the right temple and he broke his head even to the brain, and again he struck strongly with the hammer to his forehead, and again he broke his head, from which a great quantity of blood poured forth. Then he struck with the hammer upon his breast and then upon his private parts, and then upon his knees, and once again on his head and thus with the hammer did he beat him to death. And taking his stockings and shoes from him, the executioner descended from the wheel, and during this time that the executioner bound the condemned man and beat him, the confessor of the condemned man and all those who were in white attire and hoods knelt around the wheel on the ground and prayed for the soul of the condemned man, that God might forgive him his sins. This condemned man was by birth a Roman . . . His body, taken down from the wheel, was cut into quarters and strewn on a field a mile or so from Naples, so that all would be frightened to kill anybody in the viceroy’s palace. (204) Tolstoi, who had been invited to attend this spectacle by a Neapolitan nobleman, then concludes his description of his evening’s entertainment with a sentence distinguished by a detachment of a sort for which Flaubert and Maupassant would

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later strive in painful pursuit of their literary objectives, but which in Tolstoi transparently reflects an untroubled pre-modern consciousness. “Then I left the nobleman’s home,” he writes, “and went to my inn in the last hour of the day” (203204). In general there is in Tolstoi’s diary almost no questioning, reflection or expression of personal opinion on what Tolstoi has observed, only the recording of what seems to be given. (The absence of these deeper levels in Tolstoi’s text will be thrown into sharp relief by Fonvizin’s travel writing, produced eighty years later, not to mention Karamzin’s sentimental letters.) Tolstoi eats, drinks (except in Styria and Carinthia, where he believes the water is poisoned), sleeps, observes, prays and often marvels, but there is no evidence in the diary that he reasons or feels emotion, as eighteenth-century Classicists and Sentimentalists respectively were obliged to do. The naïve, unsophisticated, unreflective nature of Tolstoi’s diary distinguishes it from the travel accounts of near contemporaries from western countries, such as Chardin and Tavernier, including visitors to Russia, such as Olearius,19 and betrays the relative backwardness of the Muscovite world from which Tolstoi emanated. This world had as yet been only lightly touched by the revolution that was taking place in the European mind in the late seventeenth century. It is true that Muscovy had not been completely closed to foreign influence of a primarily practical, rather than intellectual, sort. Western phenomena such as paper mills, court theatricals, portrait painting, engravings, mirrors and a Baroque style of architecture, as well as some secular books, had penetrated it in the seventeenth century, especially during the reign of Peter’s father, Alexis, and western ways were promoted by certain prominent noblemen such as Ordyn-Nashchokin, Rtishchev and V. V. Golitsyn.20 However, it was only after Peter’s return from his Great Embassy that Russia was subjected to intense cultural westernization, exemplified by the creation of a newspaper, orthographic reform, the compulsory shaving of noblemen’s beards and the requirement that they wear European dress, the organization of social gatherings, the establishment of schools of various sorts and the foundation of an Academy of Sciences. In the historically backward, geographically and culturally isolated universe in which Tolstoi had been formed, unquestioning religious belief and superstition continued to hold sway over secular knowledge and suspicion of what was alien hindered reception of the unfamiliar. It was this Muscovite world that shaped the grid through which Tolstoi observed the early-modern west. A SUPERFICIAL TOUR OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION Tolstoi’s diary reveals, in its unsophisticated way, what seems noteworthy in western society to a nobleman emerging from Muscovy before the class to which 19

Okenfuss, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xiii. See Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution; Hughes, “The Seventeenth-Century ‘Renaissance’ in Russia: Western Influences on Art and Architecture,” History Today, Vol. 30 (February 1980), pp. 4145; Philip Longworth, Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), pp. 108109, 120-121. On V. V. Golitsyn see the monograph by Lindsey Hughes cited in n. 16 above. 20

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Tolstoi belonged had been exposed to substantial western influence, indeed before a nobility with a self-conscious corporate identity had come into being in Russia. In its pages we see how a panorama of novel buildings, objects, products, activities, institutions, practices and manners opens up before Tolstoi’s eyes, but without his ever seeming to become acquainted with ideas that inspired or agitated western civilization. The Russian traveller clearly experiences a certain shock on first contact with the European city, which indeed continued to disorient Russian travellers even in the nineteenth century. It should perhaps be borne in mind that St. Petersburg had not yet been founded when Tolstoi travelled through Europe to Venice. Even Moscow had neither the appearance nor the amenities of the numerous European cities situated within quite short distances of one another that Tolstoi visited. Warsaw, where Tolstoi arrived at the end of April 1697 after three months spent travelling out of Russia, is therefore a city of a different order from any that he has seen before. He duly marvelled at its castle, the royal residence, the “many fine gardens” and the steady flow of people and goods across the River Vistula (31). One might note, to deal first with superficialities, that the large, ancient cities of Europe were architecturally strange to the Russian visitor. Coming from a country in which the principal material employed for construction was timber (and in which it therefore frequently happened that towns were partially destroyed by fire), Tolstoi remarks repeatedly on the use of stone in all types of urban building. He is surprised too by the relative height of buildings, a characteristic that the use of stone in their construction made possible (34, 53, 55, 77). He is also clearly awed by the grandeur of the homes of the nobility and the wealthy commercial class (e.g. 34-36, 73) and by the magnificence of places of worship: I went to a place they call the Il-Domo [the Duomo, in Milan] in their language. This church is miraculous and glorious to the whole world. They began this church three hundred and twelve years ago and it is not yet complete, although they are building it incessantly. This whole church is done in white marble, and they have not laid a single brick or simple stone either in the walls or in the arches; but rather the outside and inside are all of slate, which is so well selected and arranged that one cannot tell that the church was not hewn out of a single stone. It is a most glorious work, and no church, they say, of such great and miraculous workmanship can be found in the whole world, except for the cathedral in Rome. (132-133) Moreover, the European city offered an unimaginably rich array of unfamiliar foodstuffs, wares, amenities, services and entertainments. Most striking in this connection is Tolstoi’s prolonged description of Venice (149-161), which conveys the opulence and colour of this cosmopolitan city. He notes the profusion of meat, fish, poultry, fruit, vegetables and flowers on sale there (75) and the assorted unfamiliar beverages (wines, liqueurs, lemonades, coffee and chocolate (149)). Venice also has “many marvellous master craftsmen,”

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gold and silver smiths, skitsarei [It. schizzare, to sketch], joiners, sculptors, painters, master stone-carvers, those who mould plaster, and others. There are many fine brass and tin and iron master craftsmen, and there are fine masters of carved and smooth ivory work; there are also masters of fine brass and wooden mathematical instruments, and all of the works of Venetian masters are fine, even those of the arms makers. (150) Then there are the city’s schools of philosophy and theology, its doctors and pharmacists, its gondolas, choirs, orchestras, theatres, gambling and prostitution. Tolstoi clearly enjoys Venice’s masquerades, carnival and popular entertainments (puppet shows, performing dogs and monkeys, jugglers, fire-eaters, tight-rope walkers and freak shows) (152-159). He also witnesses a firework display (155, 207), a festivity whose potential as a means of celebrating the achievements of a self-confident state, if not as a more carnivalesque popular entertainment, was soon to be discovered in imperial Russia. Tolstoi is struck too by the luxury, ease and refinement of European social life, especially for men of his own social class and for the wealthy commercial class which in the west aspired to equality with the nobility. The novelty of the social environment is immediately apparent in the passages in Tolstoi’s diary on Warsaw. This day after dinner I went to see senatorial homes and visited the home of the Lithuanian chancellor pan Radziwiáá. He has a large and very well-built home. The ceilings of his chambers are of Italian work in plaster, like carved alabaster; the chambers are numerous and richly adorned. One chamber is done in silken velvet, two rooms in gold brocade, two in golden silken brocade; and there are many furnishings of all sorts in these chambers. Then I was outside the city in the garden of the great crown marshal, the pan Lubomirski, where I saw a large and very fine building, many waterways, and, on all sides of this garden, good fountains. In the middle of the garden are built excellent palaces, and among them a bath was built . . . In the bath and in the palaces built around it, the exterior walls were done of plaster of fine workmanship, like carved alabaster. In many places the interior walls are decorated with shells and great mirrors placed on those walls, and with other excellently made things, the likes of which are impossible to describe. (35-36) In Vienna Tolstoi admires the horse-drawn coaches and the street-lights which burn all night outside people’s houses (53-55, 57-58). In Naples he remarks on the musical instruments and cabinets with glass ornaments that he sees in palaces and noblemen’s homes (208). He begins to relish the food that Europeans eat and the wines they drink (315). He develops a taste for refreshments such as iced sherbet and lemonade, to which he is treated in Naples and Malta (190, 226, 228, 229, 248), and for coffee, which he is given on a Maltese galley in Sicily (221). He participates with pleasure in new pastimes, such as promenading in Naples (190), and observes other unfamiliar habits, such as snuff-taking (301). He becomes acquainted with the garden as a place of tranquillity. Coming from a country where women are excluded from male society (as they also are among the Serbs whom he

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encounters on the Dalmatian coast (171)), Tolstoi notices too that in other European societies women play a more prominent social role and that they appear in public places without dishonour (34-35, 139, 157). In fact he comes to realize that Europeans in general comport themselves with a freedom that Muscovites did not enjoy. For example, the Venetians, Tolstoi observes, amuse themselves and constantly make merry and no one is dishonoured being together in this, and no one has any kind of fear doing this; all do whatever they wish according to their own will. This freedom is always present in Venice, and Venetians always live in this ease and without fear, without injury, and without painful obligations. (154) Tolstoi does not appear to believe, as many of his compatriots would in later times, that the relative ease and luxury of western life is indicative of or leads to a corruption of morals, for he makes few adverse comments on European mores. Venetian womenfolk, it is true, are in Tolstoi’s opinion “weak to the sins of the flesh,” as a result of which they may quickly enrich themselves but also suffer from syphilis (159), and the Venetians in general “sin much” during their carnival, when identities are concealed (154). On the whole, though, even the Venetians, whom Tolstoi has had the greatest opportunity to observe, are characterized as “wise, politic, and learned” (149). In other Italian cities conduct and morals are unimpeachable, if Tolstoi is to be believed. The Milanese, for instance, are “of good morals” (13). In Florence “the base people” are “godly, politic, and very courteous and righteous” (315). In Rome drunkenness is avoided by nobles and “base people” alike, “the sin of fornication is held to be a great mortal sin,” and women “have a sense of shame and are not brazen” (301). The Neapolitans, Tolstoi appears to believe, are loath not only to talk about drunkenness and fornication “but also to do them” (209). At a deeper level Tolstoi begins to become aware that in Europe his fellow noblemen have a sense of their dignity, a conception of honour and a different corporate identity from other classes, except insofar as wealthy merchants – a social group with which in Russia the court nobility would not rub shoulders – may rank with them. This identity is expressed in dress, privileges, conduct and heraldry. Tolstoi notes that the Neapolitan nobility tends to prefer French costume whilst the merchants “and other base people” dress in the old Spanish fashion (208-209; see also 75-76, 315). He sees that in Venice “nobility and honourable people” enjoy an exclusive right to walk on the shaded sides of the Piazetta di San Marco in the morning and evening (151).21 He is conscious of the fact that it is “dishonourable for a person of good birth” to go about on foot (215, 209, 320-321), and accordingly he remains in his hotel in Rome until he is able to hire a coach (262, 298). He remarks on the coats-of-arms that hang over the gates of noblemen’s houses (303). He also notices that the nobility’s consciousness of privileged identity entails a sense of social obligation, which finds expression in support for public charitable institutions such as the hospitals, lazarettos and pharmacies that are an omnipresent feature of the prosperous urban community. Tolstoi himself visits such 21

See also Okenfuss in The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 151, n. 65.

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institutions in Vienna, Milan, Naples, Malta and Rome (58-60, 134-135, 188, 200201, 229, 282-283, 288-289) and discovers that noblemen and their wives and daughters make a practice of caring for the sick “voluntarily for the sake of Christ” (288). Tolstoi takes an interest too in the manifestations of Europeans’ inventiveness and in the products of their craftsmanship. Already attuned to what would be the spirit of the Petrine age, he delights in the physical objects that Europeans can produce. He marvels at the skill that has enabled them to create the ceilings, floors, décor and furniture in the religious, civic and domestic buildings that they have constructed. He recognizes the technological prowess exemplified in church organs (100), the mills on the River Danube at Vienna (54) and on the River Po (321-322) and the locks on the Brenta Canal between Venice and Padua (97). Coming from a commercially undeveloped pre-industrial world in which life was ordered by the hours of light and darkness and by the cycle of the seasons, he is especially fascinated by the ubiquitous clock (particularly the clock with arresting accessories), which regulated life in the economically more efficient societies of the west.22 The first example that captivates him is the “large marvellous clock” on the gates of the Rathaus in Olomouc: as it “strikes the passing of the hours with a musical harmony” finely carved wooden figures emerge to beat on the bell or blow trumpets (49-50; see also 152-153). Most of all Tolstoi wonders at the ingenuity that has made possible the construction of fountains, which repeatedly engage his attention (e.g. 35, 58, 97, 273-276, 299), especially fountains displaying the love of ornate embellishment and optical illusion characteristic of the Baroque. In Malta, for instance, he is entranced by a fountain that can be made to throw a pomegranate up into the air and hold it there suspended on the jet (233-234). In the Vatican gardens he comes across another miraculous fountain which was most marvellously done like a great mountain and very high. From this mountain flow many waters into one garden spot of white stone, and the waters stand in a rather large pond. In the middle of this pond is a brass ship a sazhen' [a little over a metre] and a half in length and three arshins in width. On this ship are mastheads and yard-arms and cannon. When they allow water into this ship, the water causes the oars and sails and all the instruments that are needed on a ship to work; and waters rush out and give off a noise from the cannon on the ship as if they had been fired. (271) Such is the extent to which fountains have captured Tolstoi’s imagination that he even thinks it worth noting if they are mediocre, as is the case in Florence, where they do not live up to Roman standards (315), and in Bologna, where he sees “neither good nor bad fountains” (318). Tolstoi also encounters abundant evidence in Europe of a long tradition of intellectual enquiry, learning and education. He finds academies where the “higher sciences” are studied, including such subjects as philosophy, theology and 22

The clock had readily been accepted by the Roman Church and featured in church architecture but was not a feature of Russian Orthodox church architecture until the twentieth century (ibid., p. 49, n. 2).

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mathematics (42, 50, 201-202). In Bologna there is a printing-house as well as “academies and fine schools” (318). In some cities – for instance, Venice, Milan, Naples and Rome – he also visits libraries which house thousands of printed books and manuscripts in many languages (88-89, 135-136, 205, 271-272). And yet Tolstoi’s interest in western learning is of a very limited and mundane sort. Academies and libraries attract his attention, it seems, not because they are repositories of useful knowledge and civilized values but because they are ubiquitous features of the urban landscape in which western wealth or ingenuity are manifested. While he marvels at the number of books that libraries contain and at their antiquity, it is for the most part the physical properties of libraries that occupy him (except in the library of a Jesuit monastery in Naples, where his interest is engaged by a volume on Russia that is probably a copy of Herberstein’s book (205)). He conscientiously describes libraries’ dimensions and their bookcases and cabinets and the wood from which they are made, and he is fascinated by the globes that are almost invariably to be found in them (89, 135, 205, 272). Sometimes it is some custom or feature that is quite incidental to the academic or cultural function of the institution that engrosses him. Thus most of the passage that relates to the medical academy in Padua is devoted to description of a graduation ritual there (101) and the climax of his visit to the papal library in the Vatican is his description of a tapered spiral stone column (271). We thus come to the limit of Tolstoi’s understanding of the civilization with which he is first confronted in his middle age. He is only dimly aware, if he is aware at all, of a connection between the manifestations of western technological supremacy that he admires (some of which are rather trivial) and the evidence of cultural and intellectual life that he encounters. It is true, as Okenfuss observes,23 that one of Tolstoi’s rare reflections in his diary suggests that he does detect in Europe an attitude towards nature which is not found in his own country and which might offer the beginning of an explanation of the technological supremacy that is everywhere on display in the west. Europeans, Tolstoi has discovered, harness nature for their own ends. “Note the reasoning of the Italians who live here,” he remarks on seeing the hot springs at Avano Terme outside Padua, as if he assumes a reader now; “this water, which is a wonder throughout the world, is not regarded as a gift, but as something for every use” (103). Nevertheless his diary provides no grounds for thinking that the knowledge and curiosity that are passed on through the books housed in European libraries and through the teaching in European academies have sharpened the inventiveness of western peoples and enabled them to bring to their world the relative prosperity, refinement and mastery of nature that Tolstoi observes. Italian literary culture from the time of the Renaissance has also passed him by: although he spends some sixteen months in the great centres of Italian civilization not once does he mention or even allude to Bocaccio, Dante or Petrarch. Nor does Italian painting detain him, even in the Vatican.24 In general he appreciates paintings as examples of craftsmanship, as expressions of piety in 23 24

The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 103, n. 111. Ibid., p. 272, n. 25.

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places of worship and as adornments in the homes of princes and noblemen, but not as aesthetic products or as manifestations of European spirituality, creativity or vitality. The explanation for Tolstoi’s seeming inability to absorb anything of the west’s philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, poetry, prose, drama or science no doubt lies in the backwardness of his Muscovite world, to which reference has already been made. Classical learning, and the Latin humanist tradition that fostered it, had had no impact in that world, as Okenfuss has shown, except insofar as it was borne into Muscovy by Ukrainian immigrants who, under Polish influence, had been affected by the Renaissance and Reformation. Admittedly the court and the prikazy, or departments of the Muscovite bureaucracy, had begun to undergo a degree of polonization in the reign of Alexis, when a culture “which favoured the printed book over the manuscript” and a “world of unsystematic education but of endless curiosity” began to develop. And yet consciousness in Muscovy was still shaped by a Church that fostered superstition and spurned secular knowledge. Tolstoi, then, exemplifies the mentality of an Orthodox Muscovite servitor, standing, in Okenfuss’s words, “as evidence of the ignorance of the Classical world at the pinnacle of seventeenth-century Muscovite society.”25 That is not to say, of course, that it is remarkable that the outlook of a European of Tolstoi’s time, or indeed later times, should have been structured by religious life or that Tolstoi’s private life should have been organized by the religious calendar. What is striking, though, is the overwhelming dominance of the role that religion plays in Tolstoi’s consciousness. Christianity, in the Russian Orthodox form in which Tolstoi had known it during the five decades of his life before his departure from Muscovy, was, as Okenfuss observes, “not merely the most important aspect of [Tolstoi’s] earthly life, it was life itself.”26 Indeed if the diary has conscious purposes beyond Tolstoi’s desire to demonstrate diligence in fulfilment of obligations placed on him by his terrestrial master then these purposes are perhaps to record his perception of alien religious practice, document his conscientious observance of his religious duties as an Orthodox Christian and prove his fidelity to a higher, celestial, authority. Tolstoi’s text is therefore saturated with notes on the churches and religious institutions located in almost every place he has visited, their denomination and the forms of worship practised in them. These matters preoccupy Tolstoi from the moment he crosses the border from Russia into the kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In the first village he passes through he notes that there is a “blessed” Greek Orthodox church and a Catholic church and “quite a few Jews” (13). In Minsk he enumerates the monastic orders he finds there (26-27). In Venice and many other places he describes in detail the various services he attends (e.g. 141-147).27 Even during his voyage in the Adriatic in 1698 he is as concerned with 25 See Max J. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-modern Russia (London, New York and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995; hereafter The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism), especially pp. 64, 74, 136. 26 Okenfuss, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xii. 27 Some of these services are dealt with in the last section of this chapter, in which Tolstoi’s preoccupation with departures from Russian Orthodox practice is described.

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his inspections of churches and shrines as he is with his naval studies,28 exhaustively listing the relics he has been shown in monasteries in Dubrovnik and in a church in Bari (167-169, 179-180). It must be emphasized, moreover, if the attitude of this Muscovite traveller towards the early-modern European world is to be fully understood, that the faith Tolstoi displays is of a literal sort that was already being undermined in the west by scholarship and science. He credulously notes the miraculous properties associated with many of the icons and relics he is shown (e.g. 11, 20, 28, 41-42). In Mozhaisk, on his outward journey from Moscow, he finds an icon which “truly never fails to work miracles for those who come to it” (9). In Borysów he records what he has been told about a black spot that is supposed to have appeared on the image of the Virgin Mary on an icon when the icon was transferred by the Poles from an Orthodox monastery to a Catholic church: when the Moscow governor generals retreated from Borysów to Moscow, the holy icon of the Mother of God was transferred to the blessed Orthodox monastery of the Resurrection; and there the holy icon stayed for five years, and there was no black spot on the holy icon; but when the city of Borysów by treaty was granted back to the Polish crown, the Romans took this holy icon from the Resurrection monastery to their Catholic church; and when the icon was taken to the Roman church, at that moment on the icon the small black spot in the size of a Muscovite kopeck began to appear, and having appeared at that time, that spot remains to this very day; and many have tried to cover over that spot with colours, and many masters, iconographers, and painters have attempted to cover the spot on this holy icon, but they suffered from injured arms . . . (23-25) On the Dalmatian island of Korþula he sees an icon which is believed to have swum with divine help to the place where it now stands and which is said to have worked many miracles (117). Tolstoi never voices scepticism about the tales of miracles that are reported to him. He does not doubt, for example, that the yellow stream that appears to flow from a sore sculpted on a white stone column in Milan literally does begin to run as from a human wound whenever plague strikes the city (138-139). He seems to believe that the prophet Moses did indeed create a serpent in the desert to cure the Israelite people of the snake’s bite (131). He accepts without demur the story that vipers on Malta have not been poisonous since St. Paul shook a viper off his arm into the fire and damned all vipers on the island (232). In Bari he personally confirms that a miraculous warmth can be felt when one touches the lips of the relics of an archdeacon in a church there (180). His own life is seemingly touched by miracle too. A storm in the Adriatic which places him in mortal peril abates from the moment when he begins to say the canon to St. Nicholas (120). Nor does the trip abroad lessen his belief in the miraculous: when he returns to the icon in Borysów that he has seen on his outward journey he notes that there are now “more black places than before” (338).

28

See Okenfuss in The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 167, n. 4.

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TYPES OF DIFFERENCE IN TOLSTOI’S UNIVERSE Tolstoi’s awed description of western opulence and craftsmanship and his depiction of the ease of life for the European nobility and commercial class imply a clear recognition on his part that the European world was superior to his own in terms of prosperity, technological advancement and refinement of manners. He also identifies political, ethnic and religious difference between Russians and Europeans, or among various groups of Europeans, although only the last of these types of difference seems to have much importance for him. In the course of his travels Tolstoi comes across many political forms and practices that differ from those that obtain in his homeland, for example: the Polish parliament and oligarchy; the Venetian patriciate; the theocracy of Ferrara (320); the reception of petitioners by the doge of Venice (94); and the selection of the Prince of Ragusa from among the senators and conduct of all affairs there “as a general republic” (169-170). On the whole, though, political matters interest Tolstoi rather little. He notes when he arrives in Warsaw that an election is being held in which the Poles will choose their king, but the election concerns him not on account of the constitutional difference from Russia that it illustrates but because the influx of all the “great senators of the realm of both peoples,” Poles and Lithuanians, makes it impossible to find an inn in the city (31).29 He mentions the Polish parliament, or Sejm, only because it meets in a building adjacent to the royal palace, whose appearance he has described in detail (33). Whether this silence on political matters is due to a belief that “the format of a travel diary is not the place to find extended political commentary,” as Okenfuss contends,30 seems questionable. More probably it is due to the fact that Tolstoi does not trouble himself with evaluation of or speculation on forms of government. Those forms are a given, like so much else in Tolstoi’s world. There was no likelihood of the adoption of foreign political models or practices, as opposed to foreign social customs and technical inventions, in Russia, where it was the duty of the autocrat’s subjects to serve without demur. In any event political differences between states seem to play only a small part in organizing Tolstoi’s mental landscape. As far as differences in national character are concerned, Tolstoi is at pains to emphasize the alien nature of the Poles. While he himself may have been culturally polonized, like other late-seventeenth-century courtiers, as Okenfuss suggests,31 nevertheless he despises the Poles and virulently stereotypes them as fractious and drunken. (The latter part of the characterization seems somewhat daring, given the epic toping that western travellers from the time of Herberstein claimed to have observed in Russia at all social levels from the populace to the sovereign. Moreover, the practice continued unabated at Peter’s court.) Thus, apropos of a 29 Tolstoi was in Warsaw during the interregnum between John III Sobieski (ruled 1674-1696) and Augustus II, Elector of Saxony (1697-1733), whom the electorate had come to the capital to elect. 30 Okenfuss, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xii. 31 Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism, pp. 71-74.

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bridge of boats constructed over the Vistula to facilitate the coming and going connected with the election that is taking place at the time of his visit, Tolstoi expresses a personal opinion with rare directness: there are many fights and murders between Poles and Lithuanians; and many stay on that bridge to argue and to drink; they agree so little among themselves that by their arguing they have lost much of their state. And indeed when these drunks drink, they do not grieve and do not repent even though they are doubled over [from drinking]. And when there is no election in Warsaw, there is no bridge over the [Vistula]. From this one can understand the reasoning, or rather the drunken stupidity, of the Poles, for on these river ferries many people, cattle, and things useful to man are lost in high winds and turbulence on the river, and the Poles do not have good ferries for transport. (34) “In truth,” Tolstoi opines shortly afterwards, “in all affairs the Poles resemble cattle, in that they can perform none of their state matters without fighting and arguing; therefore, in all matters they want to repair to a field, so they can endlessly fight and perish in that barn without reflection” (37). And again, in a similar spirit, he observes that at the election the grand marshal of the nobility “determines the votes with decorum, insofar as all are not drunk” (38). One might attribute Tolstoi’s prejudice against the Poles to the fact that Poland is the first foreign country through which he passed and to the possibility that he was not yet attuned to and indulgent towards foreign ways. Perhaps it is also partly due to Russian resentment of the Polish invasion of Muscovy in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, or perhaps it simply reflects the ill-will that nations often bear towards their nearest neighbours. However, Tolstoi’s Polonophobia, whatever the reasons for it, is far from typical of his attitude towards Europeans in general. For on the whole Tolstoi does not find the European peoples whom he encounters objectionable or even particularly foreign. On the contrary, he is respectful and tolerant of them, as they are of him. He mixes easily not only with fellow Slavs (apart from the Poles), such as the Croats who inhabit the Dalmatian coast, but also with the noblemen of other nationalities (for instance, Austrian, Italian and Maltese) whom he meets. He seems comfortable in the cosmopolitan environment of Venice (76-77). Moreover, if we leave aside the case of the Poles, the diary seems free of specifically national stereotyping of European peoples. Not that it should surprise us that a sense of national distinctions is weaker in this text than in later examples of Russian travel writing. After all, in the early-modern world that Tolstoi inhabits, before the emergence of the nation-state, there was not yet the intense interest that Pre-Romantic and Romantic writers would display in those aspects of a people’s life and culture that differentiated them from other peoples, such as their language, history, literature, music, song, dress and customs. In any case the distribution of ethnic groups such as the Italians and Slavs among various polities (Venice, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the papal states and the Ragusan Republic) tended as yet to militate against the formation of a view of those groups as coherent and distinctive.

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In the final analysis it is not differences in political institutions or national character but religious difference that organizes Tolstoi’s universe and serves as his principal criterion for distinguishing the European peoples whom he observes from his own and for differentiating between other peoples. His universe contains lightly marked boundaries between Russian Orthodox believers and other Orthodox believers (for example, the Greeks), firmer boundaries between Christians who are Orthodox and Christians who are not Orthodox, and very sharply delineated boundaries between Christians and infidels. Since his own faith is firm and central to his being, his judgements about representatives of other faiths and his own relationship to them are certain. In this respect he may aptly be compared with the Archpriest Avvakum, the leader of the Russian Old Believers who was persecuted and finally martyred in 1682 for his refusal to accept the church reforms that had been introduced in the 1650s by Patriarch Nikon. Tolstoi’s religious quest, writes Okenfuss, was the same quest as Avvakum’s: the archpriest knew his one Holy Orthodox Faith would save him if only he were not tempted by Western novelties. Sent abroad by his Divinely-ordained tsar, Tolstoi dared to test his Faith with the profane and with every available species of foreign Christianity, because he knew with equal conviction that the One True Faith would reveal itself miraculously and save him. Both were lettered Muscovites, as both an outwardlooking prikaz culture and an introspective faithful had been around since Moscow emerged in the mid-fifteenth century.32 The paramountcy of faith – which is defined for Tolstoi not so much by doctrine as by externals such as forms of worship and styles of architecture – in the organization of Tolstoi’s mental landscape quickly becomes apparent in the diary. His crossing of the geopolitical border from Russia into Poland occasions none of the excitement and expectation that inform the accounts of later writers as they step into a different political, social and cultural environment for the first time, only an observation that people of various faiths live on the other side of the border (13). Of those foreigners who share Tolstoi’s faith, the Serbs seem hardly alien at all. Tolstoi likens them to Don Cossacks and finds them hospitable and considerate towards Muscovite people (171). It is perhaps significant in this connection that, as Okenfuss points out, Tolstoi does not describe liturgies that he attends in Serbian churches (173-174): doubtless he finds that they conform to Muscovite practice.33 Greek Orthodox practice, on the other hand, differs from Russian Orthodox practice in quite numerous ways that interest Tolstoi and to which he draws attention in prolonged descriptions of services that he has attended in a Greek church in Venice. A Greek church, unlike a Russian Orthodox church, has no gates in the doors of the iconostasis. The Greek metropolitan and the nuns are dressed like their Muscovite counterparts, but the metropolitan does not always don his garments in the same place. The service is conducted in a somewhat different way: the Eucharist is 32 33

Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism, p. 74. See The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 173, n. 12.

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received in a different place; a psalm which Tolstoi is accustomed to hearing in the Russian service is omitted; altar boys take part in the service; and co-celebrants of the liturgy are differently positioned. Moreover, the non-monastic clergy are celibate, whereas in Russia it was a requirement that they be married (78-85).34 Much more marked than the differences between Russian and Greek Orthodox practice, though, are those between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Christian practice. The foreignness of Vienna to Tolstoi, for example, is indicated by the fact that in this city there “are many western monasteries and churches of stone, built of fine craftsmanship and there is not a single monastery or church of the Greek faith in it” (53). Repeatedly Tolstoi dwells on the differences between the ritual, construction and arrangement of places of worship that he encounters in the non-Orthodox, especially Catholic, world, on the one hand, and what he is accustomed to find in the Russian Orthodox fold, on the other.35 The altars in Catholic churches, he observes, “are done in the Roman fashion [i.e. not hidden behind the central door of an iconostasis as in an Orthodox church], and Roman churches have a place where the clergy stand and sit [the sanctuary, which does not exist in an Orthodox church]” (15).36 Tolstoi notices that in a Carmelite church in Mohylew there are no holy gates in front of the altar (16), where he would expect to find them. He notes the presence of a sacristy on the left side of a Catholic church in Borysów and describes in detail the vestments of the priest and the celebration of the mass there, meticulously listing the ways in which what he sees diverges from Orthodox practice (21-23). Later, when he describes the mass at a Uniate church in Rome, he notes that the Uniates must pray for the pope and, in a reference to the Catholic insertion of the filioque into the creed in the early Middle Ages (an innovation that was later so to exercise the Slavophiles), he observes that the Uniates, like the Catholics, “philosophize about the procession of the Holy Spirit” (264). And yet even the otherness of European peoples who are not Orthodox is not strongly emphasized in Tolstoi’s diary, in spite of his meticulous attention to differences in religious observance among them. Indeed he points to the charitable work that the Catholic Church undertakes as an example of active Christian love (288). For in the final analysis almost all the groups that Tolstoi observes in his travels are Christians of one sort or another. The differences among them pale into insignificance in the presence of non-Christian peoples, of whom several make an appearance in the diary and towards all of whom Tolstoi is hostile. He has no sympathy for the Jews of Rome, who are very poor, because the pope has ordered that not a single Jew may trade in any new wares, and the Jews all trade in old clothing, and cheaply; in all things the Jews who live in Rome are crowded together, and are injured by the Romans. And during Passion Week every day a pensioner comes to the place where the Jews live and climbs upon a throne and speaks a sermon to which the 34

See Okenfuss, nn. 65-66, 71 (ibid., pp. 81-82, 84). For the information in this paragraph on differences in religious practice I draw heavily on the notes supplied by Okenfuss to his translation of Tolstoi’s diary. 36 The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 15, n. 27. 35

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Jews all must listen involuntarily; and anyone who does not want to listen to that sermon will be beaten by the Roman soldiers and forced to hear the sermon; and in this manner two or three Jews every year repent their wickedness, enter into Christianity, and become Catholics. (302-303)37 The Chinese fare no better in Tolstoi’s narrative. They are “idolators” whom Jesuit missionaries are now converting to the Christian faith, Tolstoi remarks apropos of a recent mission sent to Rome by the Manchu Emperor Kang Hsi (283). The most pernicious foreign presence in the work, though, is Turkish. The Turks, with whom Peter had recently been at war and with whom Tolstoi claimed in his diary to be seeking naval combat during the summer of 1698, are an ever-present scourge. They engage in intermittent warfare with the Dalmatian Slavs (174), threaten the cities of the Kingdom of Naples on the south-eastern seaboard of the Italian peninsula (176), impede the safe passage of ships between Sicily and Malta, and have recently caused serious damage to the imperial palace and city walls while besieging Vienna (55). Most importantly, the Turk, or the “cursed” or “damned Busurman,” as Tolstoi generally calls him (55, 171), is guided by the “Busurman al-Koran written by the hand of the false Busurman prophet Mohammed” (272). No Christian European, whatever his denomination, can be so alien as this infidel. By thus subscribing to the general European view of the Turk as the proximate barbarian Tolstoi exhibits a solidarity with the broad world of Christendom that militates against such a sharp sense of Russian difference from other Europeans as Russians of later generations would experience. *

*

*

The purpose of Tolstoi’s journey to the west was not self-fulfilment. Nevertheless his travel diary leaves us in no doubt that Tolstoi, unlike some later Russian travellers, derived much personal pleasure from his journey. He is nearly always pleased with his accommodation: he comments on the luxury, or at least comfort, of hotels in major cities (130, 261, 304, 309-310, 320), which seasoned travellers from other countries evidently found wanting.38 He is an appreciative and undemanding guest and seems grateful for the invitations he receives, for each cordial reception or indication of respect and for the warmth which the inhabitants of many places show towards foreigners in general and – so it appears to Tolstoi – towards Muscovites in particular (139, 149, 170, 209, 299, 315). As his travels proceed he seems to mix more easily with people of his station, perhaps because he is becoming more accustomed to western ways and developing facility in Italian. His attitude towards what he sees is seldom, if ever, disapproving. He is prepared to enjoy what the unfamiliar environment can offer, such as its food, wine, temperate 37

Fonvizin will take a similarly anti-Semitic attitude, but not Karamzin; see Chapters 2 and 3 below. The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, p. 150, n. 60. It is possible that Tolstoi hopes to demonstrate by references to the high quality of the accommodation allocated to him that his own status has been recognized. 38

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climate and, we may conjecture, its carnal pleasures.39 Even on the linguistic level Tolstoi demonstrates a receptivity to what is alien: the incorporation in his diary of a large number of neologisms might be construed as indicating an honest attempt to record novelty in a sympathetic or at least neutral way. It is open to question, though, whether Tolstoi’s prolonged contact with western societies brought about “a metamorphosis, a personal transformation” in Tolstoi, as his translator and biographer Okenfuss contends.40 The diary does not contain strong evidence to support the claim, for example, that with time Tolstoi became “more capable of inquiring into the substance of things, rather than satisfying himself with surface appearances.”41 European enlightenment, as opposed to European wealth and skill, seems barely to touch Tolstoi. He does not examine the intellectual and cultural soil from which Europe’s material achievements spring and remains unaware, it appears, of Europe’s philosophy, theology, political thought, literature, jurisprudence and rich classical heritage. Nor can the diary easily be made to yield the story of “the moral awakening of a Russian servitor” or the presentiment of “the ethical re-education of a nation over the next hundred years,” as Okenfuss also maintains.42 It is doubtful whether Tolstoi’s observation of a more compassionate attitude among the Catholic clergy than he was used to seeing among the Russian Orthodox clergy awakened his conscience or indeed developed in him a degree of self-consciousness. At any rate his enduring political pragmatism, exemplified by his infamous role in the entrapment, persecution and killing of Prince Alexis, would seem to suggest that his conduct remained unaffected by any new ethical considerations. Thus in sum Tolstoi’s outlook is quite distinct from the outlook of later Russian travellers whose consciousness, whatever their attitude towards the west, had been steeped in secular European thought and culture before their departure from Russia and whose perceptions of the west were shaped with western tools. Tolstoi does have some things in common with later writers, to be sure. Like many of them he notes the relative material wealth of the west, the abundance of foodstuffs and wares 39 One assumes Tolstoi is among the “visiting foreigners” with whom “many girls in masquerade hold hands” and stroll on the square at San Marco “and amuse themselves without shame” during the annual Venetian carnival (ibid., pp. 159-160, n. 76). 40 Okenfuss, “The Cultural Transformation of Petr Tolstoi,” p. 228. 41 Ibid., p. 231. 42 Okenfuss, “On Crime and Punishment: The Moral Awakening of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great,” History Today, Vol. 36 (September 1986), p. 25. Elsewhere Okenfuss presents the diary as an “exhilarating saga” in which we witness the creation of “the devout but enlightened prototype for the Shcherbatovs, Bolotovs, Novikovs, and Radishchevs who would later appear in Russia’s social history”: idem, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xviii. Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, in their Russian edition of Tolstoi’s diary, go further. For example, they claim that what they anachronistically call the “new generation of the Russian intelligentsia” would find in the diary “propaganda of the ideas of the Enlightenment, the notion of the priority of western culture,” that Tolstoi had “faith in the creative forces of the Russian intelligentsia” and that there is evidence in the diary of close attention to problems of aesthetics and ethics (Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” pp. 269, 270, 277). In general they endow Tolstoi with a higher state of historical, political and cultural awareness than his record of his journey really seems to warrant and at the same time play down its religious and superstitious dimension.

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available to its more well-to-do consumers and the populousness and vibrancy of its cities. On the other hand, he manifestly represents a pre-Enlightenment Muscovite world which was culturally dominated by a Church that set no store by learning and in which a sense of human dignity and individual personality was unknown. (The tension in Tolstoi’s temperament between the nobleman drawn to western pleasures and the Muscovite servitor steeped in Orthodox tradition is perfectly captured in the account of a foreign visitor to St. Petersburg who noticed that in opposite corners of the room in which he found Tolstoi there hung a picture of a naked woman and a depiction of a Russian saint.43) Nor is Tolstoi troubled by the need to define national identity that later writers felt, once the Russian nobility had experienced prolonged contact with the west. He sallies forth from Muscovy with fewer preconceptions about the inferiority or superiority of his own people vis-à-vis the peoples among whom he would find himself. He is therefore simultaneously less defensive about his native land and less hostile towards foreign lands, where he detects no signs of moribundity, than most of the more sophisticated travellers who will visit the west from the time of Catherine, to which we may now turn.

43

Ol'shevskaia and Travnikov, “‘Umneishaia golova v Rossii...,’” p. 261.

CHAPTER 2

Fonvizin: letters from foreign journeys

CULTURAL WESTERNIZATION IN THE AGE OF CATHERINE Although Peter the Great prepared the ground through his reforms for the development of a refined social, intellectual and cultural life in Russia, his primary domestic aims were to modernize the administration and the army, create a navy, spur industrial development and secure sufficient revenue to fund the prosecution of his prolonged Great Northern War against Sweden and his campaigns against Turkey (1695-1696 and 1711-1712) and Persia (1722-1723). Cultural westernization did not yet run deep. Indeed it was bitterly opposed: as a Prussian envoy reported in 1705, this “ very vexed nation” was “inclined to revolution because of their abolished customs, shorn beards, forbidden clothing, confiscated monastery property,” and “their divine service which has been altered in some places.”1 Nor, it should be emphasized, did Peter’s westernization entail any relaxation or softening of autocratic power. On the contrary, Peter exercised his power ruthlessly, demanded unconditional obedience and unremitting lifelong service from all his subjects, and aspired to regulate his subjects’ lives in minute detail. Under the empresses who succeeded Peter, especially Peter’s daughter Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, a broader cultural westernization of the upper stratum of society took place. The development of secular intellectual life, already nurtured by the Academy of Sciences planned by Peter and opened in 1726, was encouraged by the foundation of Moscow University in 1755 under the direction of the scientist, poet and grammarian Lomonosov. An Academy of Arts was opened in 1757 and an Academy of Letters in 1783. The court began to patronize European theatre, painting, opera and ballet. Catherine herself wrote pedagogical works and historical dramas besides her Instruction.2 She was familiar with, and in her Instruction promoted, some of the ideas of Montesquieu and Beccaria. She famously 1

Quoted by Bushkovitch, p. 243. On the role of Catherine in cultural life see especially Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Collected Essays by Isabel de Madariaga (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 195-295. 2

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corresponded with such leading men of letters of her time as Diderot and Voltaire. Printing and publishing expanded, the number of works translated from foreign languages increased markedly and several journals sprang up.3 In the linguistic sphere the cultural westernization of the second half of the century is reflected in the influx of numerous loanwords, especially borrowings from French rather than from German (which had been the major source earlier in the century) and relating in particular to the arts, taste and sensibility. A secular literature of a modern European sort also began to come into being. The roots of such a literature are to be found in the satires of Kantemir in the years after Peter’s death and in the reign of the Empress Anne (ruled 1730-40), in the earnest but talentless writings of Trediakovskii in the reigns of Anne and Elizabeth, and in Lomonosov’s odes and meditations in the age of Elizabeth. Building on the foundations laid by these early writers, others – notably the playwrights Aleksandr Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Kniazhnin and Ozerov, the poets Kheraskov and Derzhavin, the prose writers Emin, Chulkov and finally Radishchev and Karamzin – began in the age of Catherine to produce Russian examples of such western genres as the tragedy, the comedy, the comic opera, the epic poem, lyric poetry, the prose tale, the novel and, as we shall see, the travelogue, as well as further satires and odes. The notion of a community of writers with a sense of solidarity and mission began to develop too, as suggested by the use of the term uchonaia druzhina, or “learned guard,” which was applied to the literary triumvirate of Prokopovich, Kantemir and Tatishchev in the immediate post-Petrine period.4 The growing status of the writer is indicated by Lomonosov’s reworking of Horace’s “Exegi monumentum,” in which the poet trumpets his significance for posterity,5 and by Derzhavin’s creation of the role of the poet as national institution, a moral voice independent of and even superior to that of the earthly monarch.6 Eighteenth-century Russian literature had about it a certain artificiality, inasmuch as writers sometimes seemed to aspire more to conscientious imitation of western literary forms than to presentation of content that reflected recognizable native experience. Later critics would therefore look back on it as for the most part stilted and rhetorical. Nevertheless it also often exhibited the topical quality and civic tone that are so striking in the work of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. For Prokopovich, Kantemir, Lomonosov, Aleksandr Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Derzhavin and Radishchev (all of whom held government office or at least were close to the court and hoped to influence state policy or the heir to the throne or even, in Kantemir’s case, the succession) directly addressed or at least obliquely 3 See Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia 1700-1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). On the journalism of this period see A. V. Zapadov, ed., Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII-XIX vekov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Vysshaia shkola,” 1966), pp. 32-86. 4 Jones, “The Image of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Author,” pp. 59-60. 5 “Ia znak bessmertiia sebe vozdvignul,” in M. V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochineni, 10 Vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1950-1957; hereafter Lomonosov, PSS), Vol. 8, p. 184. 6 As argued by Anna Lisa Crone, The Daring of Deržavin: The Moral and Aesthetic Independence of the Poet in Russia (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2001).

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touched upon subjects of economic, social and political significance in their writings, for instance: Russia’s natural wealth; imperial conquest and martial prowess; education and upbringing; relations between husbands and wives and between parents and children; treatment of the peasantry and the domestic serf; the rights and obligations of the nobility; life and conduct at court; the characteristics of a despotic polity and the concept of the virtuous ruler; and most importantly, from our present point of view, the reception of western culture and values. It is important also to note that eighteenth-century Russian writers did not draw a clear distinction between writings that were artistic and writings that were not. The imported literary genres enumerated above merged in the oeuvre of many a writer with discourses on social, political or moral subjects and with translations (a substantial element of eighteenth-century Russian literature).7 They were vehicles for transmission of essentially the same topical and civic messages as those discourses and translations. Drama in particular served as a medium for the expression of the emergent civic consciousness, as Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter has recently shown.8 For the purpose of imaginative literature was not yet seen as aesthetic and a work of art was not created for its own sake. Nor was a literary career yet felt to be a vocation, let alone a professional occupation. On the contrary, it was an avocation, a civic task that was combined with, or even subordinate to, some other form of service in a field such as diplomacy, central government, provincial administration, advancement of science, or even theatrical management, as in the cases of Kantemir, Radishchev, Derzhavin, Lomonosov and Aleksandr Sumarokov respectively. On the broadest level literary activity, as the twentiethcentury poet Khodasevich observed, was in the eighteenth century a “direct participation in state-building,”9 a contribution to a patriotic endeavour in an age of imperial expansion to create a culture that could compare with those of the mature western peoples and therefore demonstrate Russia’s coming of age as a nation. Thus the writings of eighteenth-century authors belong to what Schönle has described as “the undivided, weakly structured field” known at that time as slovesnost', that is to say “letters,” as opposed to our narrower concept of “literature” (literatura).10 They have extra-artistic purposes and possess an essential unity that transcends generic distinctions. Towards the end of the century writers who were engaged in the production of a literature conceived in this broad way began to fall foul of the state, which, while refined and enlightened by comparison with what had gone before, remained 7

For the view that translation of texts representing the classical tradition had little impact on the Russian nobility see Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism. Even under Catherine, Okenfuss argues, support for publishing the classics in Russian was modest and short-lived and few bought the editions that did come out (pp. 149-157). “The Latin Classics were not published in Russia to any substantial degree” (p. 161). “The Latin book did not find a niche in Russian cultural life” (p. 157). “Russia’s nobility had consistently rejected the humanistic education of the west” (p. 235). The Russian gentry ignored “the repeated offering of Latin humanism for over a century” and preserved instead “the voyeuristic reading habits of the outwardly Orthodox Muscovite courtiers” (p. 193). 8 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 9 Quoted by Anna Lisa Crone, p. 218. 10 Schönle, p. 6.

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absolutist. Eighteenth-century European ideas emanating from Germany, France and England tended to undermine such regimes, hence Catherine’s severe response to Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Nobles’ dissatisfaction with their environment was nourished by Freemasonry, which began to gain a hold among them in the age of Catherine (and continued to exert a powerful and subversive influence in the reign of Alexander I (ruled 1801-1825), when it affected many of those who were to take part in the Decembrist Revolt of 1825). That is not to say that the enlightened eighteenth-century noblemen, even Radishchev, yet questioned monarchy as a form of government for Russia. On the other hand they did question the ills – abuse of power or arbitrary exercise of it; venality; cruelty towards subordinates and social inferiors; sycophancy – that they saw around them. Exempted from compulsory service to the state since 1762 by a decree of Peter III, and yet still imbued with the notion of service and seeking a new identity and role for their estate, some noblemen developed a social conscience and became alienated “superfluous men” avant la lettre, as Marc Raeff has pointed out.11 It is in this group that the independent, disaffected nineteenth-century intelligentsia has its origins.12 The cultural westernization of the Russian nobility in the eighteenth century as a whole and the growth in the latter part of the century of a critical attitude among the nobility towards aspects of the society it inhabited were greatly stimulated by the increased opportunities for travel in Europe. Peter’s practice of sending young men to study in the west in order to prepare them for service of some description was continued by his successors. Lomonosov, who studied at Marburg and Freiberg in the age of Anne, and Radishchev, who studied in Leipzig during the reign of Catherine, were among the beneficiaries of this policy. However, in the second half of the eighteenth century members of the high nobility, taking advantage of their new freedom and the leisure it entailed, also began to travel abroad for their own private purposes. Admittedly the journey undertaken for pleasure was not always differentiated in a nobleman’s mind from the journey undertaken in order to carry out some official assignment, since the ethic of the Russian nobility still did not encourage nobles to draw a clear distinction between public service and private interest. Often a private journey had some educational objective, for example to tutor a young aristocrat in such subjects as artillery, fortifications, fencing, dancing, music and foreign languages. Nevertheless an age had dawned in which the foreign journey could be voluntary and those who wished to travel could indeed do so. The great noble families began to devise meticulous itineraries, usually with Paris as a central point but also taking in other parts of France, Italy and Germany, and sometimes Spain, Holland and England too.13 11 Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 32. 12 It should be noted, though, that Raeff’s view that the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia had its roots in the europeanized eighteenth-century nobility does not go unchallenged: see, e.g., Michaël Confino, “À propos de la noblesse russe au xviiie siècle,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (November-December 1967), pp. 1163-1205, and Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism, p. 194. 13 See Berelowitch, “La France dans le ‘Grand Tour,’” especially pp. 193, 196, 198.

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The new opportunities for travel, as E. Waegemans has shown, led to debate among the nobility about the purposes of travel and discussion of its benefits and its pernicious effects. Some viewed the foreign journey as a possible source of knowledge and experience that would prove useful both to individual travellers and to one’s country. Others feared that travellers would become estranged from their native land and that exposure to foreign customs would weaken native virtues. If undertaken by a spoilt young lord for the wrong reasons, travel might corrupt morals, lead to financial ruin and even loss of health (through the contraction of syphilis).14 It also became commonplace to record the impressions garnered in the course of travel abroad. Many young travellers kept a journal while they were travelling, often on the instructions of parents who wished to know that the resources devoted to their offspring’s upbringing were being well spent or to show that the traveller was dutifully accumulating knowledge and experience and gaining facility in describing them. Not that Russian travellers immediately assumed, as Schönle has put it, “that their analytical observations and emotional responses would be of interest to a broad reading public.” However, as Russian readers became acquainted with European travel literature, in the original or in translation, and especially with the works to which reference has already been made by Chardin, Le Vaillant, Mercier-Dupaty, Moritz, Sterne, Tavernier and others, the compilation of travel notes came to seem a legitimate branch of literary activity and Russian examples of the genre began to appear.15 FONVIZIN AND HIS LETTERS FROM FRANCE Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (1744 or 1745-1792) is chiefly remembered as the leading dramatist of the age of Catherine.16 He is the author of two comedies, The Brigadier (1769)17 and The Minor (completed in 1781 and first performed in 1782),18 which are generally felt to be among the most successful works of eighteenth-century Russian literature. He also began, but did not finish, a further play, The Selection of a Tutor, a comedy in three acts written in the last years of his 14 E. Waegemans, “Betrachtungen über das Reisen in der russischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik, Vol. 30 (1985), No. 3, pp. 430-435. 15 Berelowitch, “La France dans le ‘Grand Tour,’” pp. 199-200; Schönle, p. 3. 16 The first biography of Fonvizin, based on careful research over a long period, is the poet P. A. Viazemskii’s Fon-Vizin (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Departamenta vneshnei torgovli, 1848). The principal modern secondary sources on Fonvizin’s life and work in general are G. P. Makogonenko, Denis Fonvizin. Tvorcheskii put' (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961); Charles A. Moser, Denis Fonvizin (Boston: Twayne, 1979; hereafter Moser, Denis Fonvizin); K. V. Pigariov, Tvorchestvo Fonvizina (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1954); and the exhaustive study in French by A. Strycek, La Russie des Lumières: Denis Fonvizine (Paris: Librairie des cinq continents, 1976). 17 Brigadir, in D. I. Fonvizin, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. by G. P. Makogonenko, 2 Vols (MoscowLeningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959; hereafter Fonvizin, SS), Vol. 1, pp. 45-103. In the following notes all references to the Russian versions of Fonvizin’s works are to this edition. 18 Nedorosl', ibid., pp. 105-177.

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life, after he had been partly paralysed by a stroke.19 However, the corpus of his work extends beyond drama. He wrote various satirical fragments, a notable political treatise, an admiring biography of his ministerial superior and benefactor, Count Nikita Ivanovich Panin, and a short prose tale, “Callisthenes” (1786), on the Greek historian who was thrown into prison by Alexander the Great.20 He was an energetic translator who produced renderings of Voltaire’s tragedy Alzire, a French life of the Roman Emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius by Antoine Thomas,21 and (from a French translation of the original) one of the classic texts of Confucian political philosophy, The Great Learning.22 He also left extensive cycles of letters on two of the foreign journeys that he made (to German states and France in 17771778 and to German states and Italy in 1784-1785), and it is on these travel writings that we shall dwell in this chapter.23 Like many other eighteenth-century men of letters Fonvizin held positions in the Russian administration and exhibited a breadth of interest in contemporary issues and a civic concern that link his writings, despite their predominantly moralistic tone, with the fiction and engagé journalism of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. He took up an appointment as a translator in the College of Foreign Affairs in 1762 and served as secretary to Catherine’s minister Elagin from 17631769. From 1769-1782 he was a secretary in the College of Foreign Affairs headed until 1781 by Nikita Panin; indeed one is inclined to see him as a spokesman for the Panin party in the court politics of the first two decades of Catherine’s reign.24 Like other eighteenth-century writers again, he is influenced, it would seem, by Stoicism, as represented by Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, and by European neoStoicism. He propounds the Stoic notion that the wise man is rich in poverty and serene in adversity as well as in good fortune and urges him constantly to strive for 19 Vybor guverniora, ibid., pp. 187-203. English versions of Fonvizin’s plays, including unfinished fragments, are to be found in Dramatic Works of D. I. Fonvizin, tr. by Marvin Kantor (Berne and Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang and Peter Lang, 1974). For treatment of Fonvizin’s drama from the literary historian’s point of view see Moser, especially pp. 49-85, and Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1985), especially pp. 151-171. Fonvizin’s plays are set in the context of early Russian comedy by David J. Welsh in his monograph Russian Comedy, 1765-1823 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1966), passim. 20 “Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennykh zakonakh,” in Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 254267; “Zhizn' grafa Nikity Ivanovicha Panina,” ibid., pp. 279-289; “Kallisfen: Grecheskaia povest',” ibid., pp. 28-39. For translations of all of these and other works of Fonvizin’s besides his drama see The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin, tr. with notes and an introduction by Walter Gleason (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985; hereafter Gleason). A translation of the “Discourse on Permanent Laws of State” is also to be found in Marc Raeff, Russian Intellectual History: an Anthology (New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966; hereafter Raeff, Russian Intellectual History), pp. 96-105. 21 “Slovo pokhval'noe Marku Avreliiu,” in Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 194-230. 22 ‘“Ta-Gio . . .,” ibid., pp. 231-253. English translations of Fonvizin’s rendering of this work are to be found in both Raeff, Russian Intellectual History, pp. 88-95, and Gleason, pp. 159-167. 23 The two journeys that gave rise to Fonvizin’s travel writing were his second and third foreign journeys. For Fonvizin’s fragmentary letters and notes relating to his first trip, made in 1762-1763, and his fourth journey, which was undertaken in 1786-1787 for medical reasons, see Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 317, 559-571. 24 See Ransel, especially pp. 269-277.

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moral perfection. (All the same, Fonvizin is careful to ensure in his dramas that the virtuous receive a substantial material reward.) As a nobleman and government official Fonvizin hopes to enlighten absolutism from within the charmed circle of the court. His ideal polity he conceives, according to a late Stoic or even Confucian model, as one in which good flows out from a sagacious absolute ruler to all his subjects. Since social well-being at any level, from family up to nation, depends, according to this doctrine, not on institutions but on the moral quality of individuals in positions of authority, upbringing, especially the upbringing of the future ruler, assumes great importance for Fonvizin.25 His work contains an element of court satire and a loathing, which was rather conventional in eighteenth-century Russian literature, of flattery, the vice by which courtiers were thought to exercise their malign influence. He also memorably satirizes the Russian nobility in his two major plays, or at least elements of the nobility, depicting them as coarse, ignorant, greedy, materialistic and selfish. In stark contrast to these inhabitants of dystopia he also portrays a utopian type of nobleman who is enlightened and altruistic, insists on the nobleman’s duty to serve his country as Peter the Great had required, and demands that noblemen demonstrate that they are morally worthy of their privileged social position. Fonvizin also addressed in his drama the question that has central importance in this examination of Russian travel writing, namely Russia’s relation to western Europe. Indeed The Brigadier constitutes one of the earliest major examples of treatment of this question, inasmuch as it scathingly satirizes the Gallomania which was already thought by some in the age of Catherine to have taken hold of the Russian nobility. Completed eight years before the first journey on which Fonvizin left extensive letters, the play ridicules Russian infatuation with the supposedly superior civilization of France. Two of Fonvizin’s characters in the play, the brigadier’s foppish son Ivanushka and the wife of his neighbour the councillor, assume that willingness to adopt French language, manners and fashion is an indication of personal merit. It is merely by dint of uttering French words or being in Paris that people, in the opinion of these characters, rise above the animal condition and achieve worth. Russianness, on the other hand, has for Ivanushka become a social defect: although his body was born in Russia, he says, his spirit belongs to the French crown.26 We should bear in mind, then, that Fonvizin had formed a conception of France, or at least of France as it affected the Russian nobility and manifested itself in Russia, long before he offered what appears to be a description of France that is based on his first-hand experience of that country. For Fonvizin, as for other writers examined here, foreign travel might then have provided a means of confirming preconceptions, of gleaning material that could be exploited in arguments that were topical at home. The journey that gave rise to Fonvizin’s first cycle of travel letters, in which France is minutely characterized, began in September 1777. Travelling with his 25 Fonvizin hoped, together with Panin, who was tutor to Catherine’s son Paul, to exercise a beneficial formative influence on the future Emperor, who ruled from 1796 to 1801. The hope was to prove misplaced. 26 See Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 1, pp. 68-70, 72 (i.e. Act II, Scene 6 and Act III, Scene 1 of the play).

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wife, Fonvizin proceeded, by horse-drawn carriage, through Belorussia and Poland, where the couple stopped in Warsaw, and on through Dresden, Leipzig, SaxeCoburg-Gotha, Eisenach, Fulda, Hanau, Frankfurt am Main, Mainz and Mannheim. Having then entered France they went via Strasbourg, Besançon, Bourg-en-Bresse and Lyon to Montpellier, where they spent the winter. In March 1778 they travelled in Languedoc and Provence, visiting Marseille, Aix, Avignon, Orange, Valence and Vienne, before passing through Dauphiné and Lyon to Burgundy – where they stayed in Mâcon, Chalon-sur-Saône and Dijon – and thence through Champagne to Paris. The spring and summer of 1778 they spent in the metropolis, and in the autumn they departed for home via Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), from where, in the last extant letter of his cycle, Fonvizin summarized his impressions of France and the French. The purpose of the journey, apart from seeing the sights, was to seek a cure for mme Fonvizin’s tapeworm, which was apparently effected by a doctor in Montpellier with a regime of herbs and walnut oil (428, 465).27 It is possible, it has been suggested, that Fonvizin had also been entrusted by his government with some diplomatic assignment connected with French recognition of the new American Republic.28 The nineteen extant letters that relate Fonvizin’s experience are addressed to three different persons. Nine letters, which are the most formal and may be considered a cycle in their own right, are addressed to Count Piotr Ivanovich Panin, brother of Fonvizin’s patron, and himself a prominent military man, who had led the suppression of the Pugachov Revolt of 1773-1774. A further eight are addressed to Fonvizin’s sister, Feodosiia Ivanovna Argamakova, and three others are addressed to Fonvizin’s friend Iakov Ivanovich Bulgakov, who, like Fonvizin, was a diplomat and man of letters. The extent to which the cycle of letters as a whole – to which we shall refer as Letters from France – was conceived as a work of belles-lettres is problematic. While Fonvizin’s letters to his sister are personal those to the eminent Panin – which rehearse substantially the same content – may reasonably be seen as more public literary documents intended not merely for the addressees but also for a broader circle of readers in Russia.29 Indeed some of the letters to Panin were already known in manuscript form in Fonvizin’s lifetime. Fonvizin had in mind a title, Notes on the First Journey, for the cycle30 and envisaged inclusion of them in an edition of his works which he was planning, but 27 All references to Fonvizin’s letters from his second journey in this chapter are to the text in Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 412-495. There is also a recent French translation of the letters in Denis Fonvizine, Lettres de France (1777-1778), tr. and with a commentary by Henri Grosse, Jacques Proust and Piotr Zaborov (Paris and Oxford: CRNS Éditions and Voltaire Foundation, 1995; hereafter Fonvizin, Lettres de France). 28 Jacques Proust, “Les Lettres de France dans l’espace littéraire français,” in Fonvizin, Lettres de France, p. 22. 29 For this reason it is from the letters to Panin that the extended quotations in this section of this chapter are all taken. 30 i.e. Zapiski pervogo puteshestviia. It should be noted though that in Fonvizin, SS, the cycle is published under the more accurate heading “Pis'ma iz vtorogo zagranichnogo puteshestviia (17771778).” In the Alexandrine period the letters came to be known as Letters from France to a Grandee in Moscow (Pis'ma iz Frantsii k odnomu vel'mozhe v Moskvu), and it is an abbreviated form of this Alexandrine title that is used here for the sake of clarity.

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which Catherine did not allow to be published, towards the end of his life. That the letters to Panin were perceived as belonging to Russia’s growing body of slovesnost' rather than as part of a purely personal correspondence is suggested by the fact that two of them were published in The Saint-Petersburg Journal in 1798 and republished, together with four others, in The Messenger of Europe in 1806. These six letters to Panin, together with the eight to his sister from abroad and two of those to Bulgakov were then included in an edition of Fonvizin’s works published in 1830 and reprinted in 1838, when the question of Russia’s relation to western Europe was again becoming intensely topical. The Letters from France are therefore located at a generic boundary between the unpublished diaries or epistolary accounts of Russian noblemen such as Tolstoi who travelled abroad at the behest of the state, on the one hand, and the literary genre of the travelogue composed by a self-conscious narrator, such as Karamzin, on the other. Fonvizin’s narrative in the Letters from France is brisk and varied. Fonvizin refers to current affairs such as the prospect of renewed war between Russia and Turkey (458-459, 468), the American War of Independence, and deteriorating relations between France and Britain (460, 440, 468). He reports French social gossip and news of scandalous incidents, such as the duel between the duc de Bourbon and the king’s brother (439-440, 469), and describes specific events, such as a sitting of the États du Languedoc in Montpellier, an assembly of representatives of the clergy, nobility and third estate which until the Revolution of 1789 exercised regional taxing powers over the south of France (421, 423-424, 457-458, 428, 461). He blends touristic description and comment on customs with social observation and personal reflection about French life and manners. He lends local colour to his narrative by use of foreign phrases, linguistic borrowing and neologism. His gifts as satirist and dramatist are on display in his descriptions of such scenes as a religious service in Montpellier where he is amused by the spectacle of servants ministering to their master the bishop and the severely cropped tonsure of the choristers (425-426), a religious procession which he gives the impression he has witnessed in Aix-en-Provence (485) and the public roasting of a pig in one of the main streets of Lyon (a spectacle that disgusts him (420, 455456)). Indeed we do need to remember when reading the Letters from France that Fonvizin is an accomplished dramatist and that the principal artistic quality of his drama is his skill at providing biting satirical commentary on what he perceives as contemporary vices through energetic portraits of negative types. His jaundiced view of the world and his satirical talent make him a splenetic traveller, or at least a splenetic travel writer in the fashion of Smollett. How then are we to read this rather embittered mélange? On one level, of course, Fonvizin’s Letters from France are based on observation of western European countries in the writer’s time and are not without significance as historical record. After all, Fonvizin is offering a view of French society and manners only just over a decade before the end of the ancien régime. The documentary aspect of the Letters was understandably emphasized by Soviet commentators, who took a view of belles-lettres as more or less objective representation of “reality” and found in Fonvizin’s cycle what they considered valid criticism of western European

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monarchic society.31 However, French scholars have recently argued that from a strictly documentary point of view the Letters are of rather “slender” interest, especially when one bears in mind the length of time Fonvizin spent in France, his command of French and the number of people he met and places he visited. Fonvizin eschews factual material of the sort provided by touristic guide-books authoritative in his time. Thus for a description of the whole series of French towns through which he has passed en route from Aix-en-Province to Paris he disdainfully refers his sister to the work of a French geographer (438). Nor does Fonvizin strive for accuracy or balance. Indeed he may be unreliable. His French editors point, for example, to factual errors in the Letters and contend that he could not actually have witnessed the religious procession in Aix-en-Provence which he appears to describe as an eye-witness.32 Moreover his presentation of his supposedly authentic observations is heavily influenced by literary models or impregnated with literary reference, as Jacques Proust has shown. The negative picture of French morals which Fonvizin painted was to a considerable extent affected by the opinions of French writers themselves, namely: Duclos, from whose Considerations on the Century’s Morals33 Fonvizin borrows, translates and paraphrases without acknowledgement; Molière, Voltaire, Antoine Thomas and Marmontel, to whom he refers; Destouches and Crébillon père, whom he cites; Montesquieu, whom he has one of his dramatic characters name as an example of the supremely sagacious political philosopher34 and whose pose of naive observer he occasionally adopts; and Rousseau, who is his sister’s favourite author (438, 452).35 We should therefore not attempt to read the Letters from France as the precise, balanced or fair-minded account of a curious traveller (although Fonvizin himself might have argued, in the way that Dostoevskii later would, that the picture he paints of French society was truthful in spirit if not full or reliable in terms of factual detail). It is more profitable to approach the Letters as a literary artefact of a highly polemical nature designed to further a search for national autonomy that had already begun in The Brigadier. REJECTION OF THE “EARTHLY PARADISE” Fonvizin accepts that there is much in France that is worthy of emulation. He admits to being impressed by the inventiveness of the French in arts and crafts, by the silk manufactories of Lyon, by that city’s sumptuous town hall and its monasteries and churches which house paintings by the grand masters, and by the compassion of the nurses in the city’s charitable hospital (456, 490). He applauds the French love of their country and sovereign (443) and admires the French theatre, particularly the comedy, which seems to him an imitation of nature that is 31 e.g. Makogonenko, “Russkaia proza v epokhu Prosveshcheniia,” in Russkaia proza XVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1971), p. 23. 32 See Fonvizin, Lettres de France, pp. 159-160, n. 14. 33 Charles Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1751). 34 Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 1, p. 200. 35 Proust, p. 25.

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truer than he could have imagined possible (477). It must also be said in Fonvizin’s defence that he suffered from poor health. He talks in his letters of his poor eyesight and severe headaches and the difficulty he experienced in walking for long periods in Montpellier, where there were no carriages. This factor may partly explain his intolerance of the discomfort occasioned by bad roads, sleepless nights in uncomfortable inns and bedding and eating habits to which he was not accustomed. However, Fonvizin is not a curious, tolerant traveller who adapts easily to foreign lands and takes pleasure in what he finds in them. He is unappreciative of much, perhaps most, of what he sees abroad, is disrespectful towards foreign culture and customs, and is at times xenophobic. He refers disparagingly to the Jewish inhabitants of the towns of Orsha in Belorussia, through which the Fonvizins pass on their way out of the Russian Empire, and Mir in Poland (413414).36 The couple find the Polish language so ridiculous and vile that in Warsaw they almost die of laughing at the theatre (416). Fonvizin is derisive about the scholars of Leipzig and perhaps disrespectful in the process towards the Latin humanist tradition.37 Some of them consider it their main merit, and the main human merit, that they can speak Latin, which even five-year-old children were able to do in Cicero’s time, though; others, ascending in their thoughts to the heavens, make sense of nothing that happens on earth; others have a really firm grasp of artificial logic but are extremely deficient in the natural version of it; in short, Leipzig proves incontrovertibly that learning does not breed reason. (454) In Frankfurt am Main he is shown the Golden Bull of the fourteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and the imperial archives but doubts whether it was worth clambering up into attics and down into cellars to see them (454-455). He grumbles about exorbitant tolls and crowds of beggars on the roads of minor German states (455) and about soiled personal linen, dirty napkins and poor service at the dinner table in France (429-431, 434). He ridicules French gait and gestures (434). A service for the dead which he and his wife attend in Strasbourg seems so pompous that the couple have to leave the church in order not to burst out laughing (418). Mme Fonvizin reportedly carries cotton-wool about with her in order to be able to block her ears to French music should the need arise (425). And yet it would be wrong to regard the Letters from France as consisting merely of gratuitous churlishness. Rather they offer a coherent, if hostile, view of the alien other which Fonvizin claims to find in France. At an almost instinctive level, one may suppose, Fonvizin is reacting adversely in his Letters to a more urbanized way of life than he knows in his backward, overwhelmingly rural homeland, or to a different form of urban life. He seems to be overwhelmed and disoriented by the noise, crowds, bustle, odours, stark contrasts and displays of sexuality in the city. It is impossible to imagine, Fonvizin tells his 36 For a further display of virulent anti-Semitism see the letter of 1786 from Fonvizin’s fourth journey in SS, Vol. 2, p. 568. 37 See n. 7 above.

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sister, how infinitely large and populous Paris is (438). Repeatedly – in Strasbourg, Lyon, Montpellier – he complains of the ugly, narrow streets which the sun cannot penetrate. French towns and cities seem full of rubbish, filth, stench and poisoned air (418, 420, 455). The “uncleanliness in the city is such,” he observes apropos of Paris, that it is very hard for people who have not completely turned into beasts to put up with it. There’s hardly a place where in summer you could open a window, because of the poisoned air. There are shops under every house so that people should have everything on hand and not have to go far for anything. In one there will be gleaming gold and fine apparel and in another, next to it, the carcass of a slaughtered animal will have been hung up, with blood pouring from it. There are streets where blood runs down the gutters because no special place has been set aside for an abattoir. I found the same abominable state of affairs in other French towns as well; they’re all so uniform that if you’ve seen one street you’ve seen the whole town, and if you’ve seen one town you’ve seen them all. Paris outdoes the others only in that it is ineffably more majestic on the outside and more vile on the inside. It’s wrong to say that the reason for this uncleanliness is that there are a lot of people. There are numerous small villages in France, but you can’t drive into any of them without holding your nose. (475) It is no wonder, therefore, that the French make so many perfumes, Fonvizin remarks: without them one would be asphyxiated (450). The French city seems to stir a social conscience too. Fonvizin hates to see extremes of wealth and poverty side by side (439, 489). He dwells on the presence of begging widows and orphans (a ubiquitous image in eighteenth-century Russian literature), and bemoans the hard-hearted treatment allegedly meted out to the poor by the rich (446-447). Last but far from least, the Russian nobleman cultivating an identity of Stoic self-denial is shocked by the ever-present thrill of flirtation which Paris offers: the city is a den of immorality, where prostitution is rife and men are lured to their ruin by les filles (439, 445-446, 476-477, 490). Fonvizin also disparages the laws and rights of which the French boast and institutions in which they seem to take pride. He acknowledges that the French system of law, which he spends some time studying under the supervision of a professor of philosophy whom he hires in Montpellier, is a wise edifice constructed by eminent spirits over many centuries, but he believes that the system has now been undermined by abuses and the extreme corruption of morals. In much the same way that Chernyshevskii, eighty years later, would question the value of the formal rights that liberals prized,38 Fonvizin complains that the freedom which every Frenchman considers his “first right” is an empty word, since a poor man cannot earn his crust except by servile labour (460). Fonvizin is unimpressed too by the États du Languedoc, whose opening ceremony in the year 1777 he claims to have attended. The assembly functions as a social space in which aristocrats and wealthy representatives may amuse themselves and display themselves in the hope 38

See “Bor'ba partii vo Frantsii pri Liudovike XVIII i Karle X,” in Chernyshevskii, PSS, Vol. 5, pp. 215-219.

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of gaining advancement at court (421, 428, 461). It also provides a stage for ritual oratory which serves to bolster the existing order by encouraging payment of a tax that is nominally voluntary, le don gratuit. Then the Count of Perigord delivered a speech, a very moving one, in which he described it as the duty of loyal subjects to pay their taxes punctually. This eloquence made many people shed some tears. The provincial administrator [intendant], for his part, also delivered a speech in which he spoke at length about the function of nature and art and praised the local climate and the industrious character of the inhabitants. Even the clear skies of the region, he opined, should promote the punctual payment of the tax. After this the Archbishop of Narbonne delivered a sermon. He went through the whole history of commerce and most eloquently described all the things about it that were beneficial and to be treasured and concluded by saying that with the aid of commerce, which he strongly commended to his audience, the Lord would reward them with twice the sum which they were now going to agree to pay to their sovereign. Each of these speeches was accompanied by a compliment to each of the speaker’s most noble fellow members of the assembly. The provincial administrator showered the archbishop with praise and the archbishop the provincial administrator; both praised Perigord and Perigord praised both of them. Then they all went into the cathedral where there was a service of thanksgiving to the Almighty for preserving among the inhabitants a unanimous will to pay voluntarily what would otherwise have been taken from them by force. (458) Thus Fonvizin is repelled by the eloquence that the French prize and that they exhibit in such fora (424, 447). He acknowledges that the French do weave words in a masterly way, but he believes that they speak for the sake of speaking, without forethought. (For that reason they have a stock of meaningless phrases, many of them verbose compliments, so that they may extricate themselves from any verbal impasse.) At worst, their verbal dexterity masks an essential insincerity and amorality (463-464). However, Fonvizin is concerned, as his objections to French eloquence indicate, not so much with social groups, institutions, rights, laws or political assemblies and their practices as with morals. For he believed that it was ultimately character – the character of the individual, the people and their ruler – that determined whether human conduct was good or bad and, consequentially, the degree to which a people enjoyed political stability, material prosperity, social well-being and personal happiness. Fonvizin’s main preoccupation in his Letters is therefore to define as precisely as possible some French essence, the national character of the French people (467, 480). The French, as Fonvizin perceives them, have no firm moral bearings. They have degenerated to such a state of fecklessness, he believes, that they will simply parrot the opinions of the person to whom they are speaking (462-463). They have a gift for flattery (the dangers of which are subsequently explained by Fonvizin in The

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Minor39 and “Callisthenes”). French men seem to display a “wild effrontery” and French women a “shameless indecency” (444). They are swayed by the dictates of ever-changing fashion (490). Their lives are dominated by a desire for entertainment. They are deceitful too: far from considering it shameful to dupe others, they think it foolish not to do so (481). They are hypocritical, as Fonvizin’s remarks on their oratory are intended to show. They all live exclusively for themselves, especially in Paris: friendship, blood ties, honour, gratitude are all considered chimerical (444). Appearances are more important to them than substance: they are more concerned with how to say things than with what to say and are therefore not much interested in pursuit of truth. They look only at the surface of things and are allegedly incapable of succeeding in sciences that require constant attention (474). Paramount among their vices is a mercenary, acquisitive spirit which prevails over the sense of honour that Fonvizin expects of a nobleman. All honour is in words only and the more nicely a person speaks the more you should be on your guard against some fraud. Neither breeding nor the external signs of honour in any way prevent people from stooping to the most despicable deceptions as soon as there is the slightest profit to be had. How many knights of the Order of St. Louis there are who make a living by ingratiating themselves with some foreigner and borrowing from him as much as his simple-heartedness will allow them to take and the very next day completely disappearing with the money from their creditor! How many people live off their spouses, sisters and daughters! In short, money is the first deity of this land. (462) This cupidity is encouraged by the need to find the means to pay for the amusements with which the French fill their lives in order to avoid the boredom they dread (474, 481). It has poisoned all strata of the population, including even the philosophes (476), who not only deny the existence of God, but also allegedly lack honour and elevate personal self-interest to the status of a divinity to which all morality may be sacrificed (482). In seeking explanations for the hostile view of the French other which pervades the Letters from France one should not overlook the possibility that on a personal level Fonvizin is upset by the difficulty of penetrating French society, especially Parisian society.40 He may be piqued by the indifference with which he thinks the French, despite their superficial cordiality, have greeted their Russian visitors. For although in other writings Fonvizin insists, in the Stoic fashion, on the need to cultivate a primarily moral conception of nobility, one suspects that he is in fact rather vain and acutely conscious of social position. Wherever he is – en route through Poland and Germany, in Montpellier or Paris – he likes to be fêted, complimented, invited to receptions and dinners and seated near to important personages, to receive enquiries after his wife’s health from his distinguished new acquaintances and to have his wife presented to their wives. Whenever he is courteously and respectfully received by worthy hosts he reports his gratification (414, 415-416, 418, 422, 451, 455, 457, 491). 39 40

See Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 1, p. 168 (Act V, Scene 1). See Fonvizin, Lettres de France, p. 125, n. 2; see also idem, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 475-476.

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And yet even if the Letters do from time to time betray pricked vanity they are also pervaded by a larger sense of wounded national pride and anxiety about the capacity of French culture to subjugate other peoples. The French consider themselves the “first nation in the world,” Fonvizin complains (433).41 The inhabitants of the capital in particular seem to their Russian visitor to display an overbearing self-assurance, an offensive air of superiority. The Parisians consider their city the capital of the world and the world they regard as their province. Burgundy, for example, they consider a nearby province and Russia a distant one. The Frenchman who comes here from Bordeaux and the Russian who comes from St. Petersburg are equally treated as foreigners. [The Parisians] think they have not merely the best customs in the world, but the best appearance, bearing and manners as well, so that the highest and politest compliment [they can pay] to a foreigner can be no more precisely put than in the following words: “Monsieur, vous n’avez point l’air étranger du tout, je vous en fais bien mon compliment! [Monsieur, you don’t seem foreign at all, I congratulate you on it!]” (472). Not surprisingly, therefore, the French strike Fonvizin as offensively ignorant about Russia or condescending towards the culture that he represents. The French provincial nobility seem not to have realized until they meet Fonvizin that Russians speak a language different from French or indeed that Russia exists (423). “God has made us not worse than them,” Fonvizin says defensively. He will not humiliate himself to gain entry to French society or allow himself to be relegated to the status of a “Wallachian” (a byword for savage in the eighteenth century) in order to win acquaintances (476). Worse still than the affront which Fonvizin experiences as a Russian in France is the fear – which may in the last analysis explain his largely negative view of France – that French cultural imperialism is impeding the struggle of his own emergent nation for individuality. French culture crosses geographical frontiers with disconcerting ease. France has become a model for the whole of Europe, the “supposed centre of human knowledge and taste” (464, 467, 490). Thus the Letters fulfil a similar function to The Brigadier: they challenge the perceived infatuation of some of Fonvizin’s compatriots with an alien culture that threatens to deprive Russia of the possibility of national distinctiveness and autonomy. Fonvizin is at pains, for example, to counter the Gallomania of both the community of Russian nobles, Count Razumovskii, the Shuvalovs and the Stroganovs, who live in Paris in the French manner (438-439), and those acquaintances in Russia who delude themselves and others by talking of France as an “earthly paradise” (444, 450). It is because of the perceived threat that French culture represents to Russia that Fonvizin takes pleasure in pointing out the existence, alongside the good things he has seen in France (far fewer than he had expected), of all the things (far more numerous than he had imagined) that seem altogether bad, even barbaric, and from which he hopes God will protect Russia (467, 480). He is inclined to think that disaffected young Russian noblemen might be sent to France with salutary effect: 41

Fonvizin uses the word “natsiia” for “nation.”

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in France young Russian noblemen would quickly learn that tales of the superiority of French civilization were false, that wise and worthy people were rare in all countries, and that it was as possible to be happy in Russia as anywhere else (449, 467). We should at this point recall that Fonvizin is a spokesman for enlightened absolutism and a representative of a nascent political opposition to Catherine. After all, he presents himself in several works as an enemy of servile Russian courtiers. He is the author of a discourse written only a few years after his return from France on the need for fundamental laws, and a critic in both his major plays of the philistinism of the provincial nobility and of harsh treatment of serfs. And yet the reservations about life and government in Russia that he already has at the time of his departure and is to articulate even more strongly after his return in no way help Fonvizin to view the west in rosy terms. On the contrary, it is as if travel stirs his patriotism (and in this respect, as in others, he prefigures many later travellers). The experience of his stay in France strengthens Fonvizin’s sense of the simple virtues and bright prospects of his homeland. Dismissing the Frenchman’s freedom as merely formal, for example, he offers the following comparison. Looking at the condition of the French nation I have learned to differentiate between freedom granted by the law and real freedom. Our people does not have the former but it enjoys the latter to a considerable degree. The French, on the other hand, have the right of freedom but live in utter servitude. The king, while constrained42 by laws, has at his disposal full power to trample on the laws. Les lettres de cachet are enactments relating to a named individual by means of which the king sends people into exile or puts people in prison; nobody dares to question the reasons for them and they can very easily be obtained from the sovereign by deceit, as thousands of examples attest. Every minister is a despot in his own department. His favourites share his absolute power [samovlastie] with him and apportion it among their own favourites. What I have seen elsewhere [i.e. in Russia] I have seen in France too. All people seem to have been made to be either a tyrant or a victim. Injustice [nepravosudie] in France seems the harsher because it emanates directly from the government itself and extends to all. (485-486) Fonvizin contends that the Russian provincial nobles, whom he satirizes in his plays) are infinitely superior to those he finds in France (423). Nor is the Russian peasant materially worse off than his French counterpart, he claims: indeed the condition of the Russian peasantry is compared favourably with that of the French peasantry in what are considered the most fertile and abundant French rural provinces in which Fonvizin travels (466). Again, “good faith,” that “first law in people’s hearts” without which temporal laws are meaningless, has quite disappeared in France, but in Russia some of it remains (462). Together with this view of Russia as relatively innocent and uncorrupted goes an early articulation of 42 In the edition of Fonvizin’s letters that I have used the Russian text has “unconstrained” at this point. For comment on Fonvizin’s original text and this departure from it in Makogonenko’s edition see Fonvizin, Lettres de France, pp. 39-41.

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the notion that was to be cherished in the nineteenth century, among the revolutionary Populists for instance, that backwardness might be an advantage and that the future belonged to new nations. “Nous commençons et ils finissent [We are beginning and they are ending],” Fonvizin observes in a letter to Bulgakov. People in France may have started to live before people in Russia, but the Russians can give themselves the form they want as they too start to live, avoiding the inconveniences and evils that they see have taken root in France (493). The sub-text of the Letters from France, then, reveals as much about Russia as the surface text reveals about France. Perhaps conceived before their author’s departure from Russia, they continue Fonvizin’s attempt already evident in The Brigadier to counter a perceived threat of erosion or even obliteration of national distinctiveness by the steady percolation of the world’s pre-eminent culture into Russia. By sharply characterizing the French people and rejecting their fashions, ideas and, most importantly, their morals, Fonvizin produces an implicit Russian declaration of independence, as befitted a nation that was now building an empire of its own. THE JOURNEY TO THE GERMAN STATES AND ITALY From the summer of 1784 to the summer of 1785 Fonvizin again travelled abroad with his wife, this time in the German states and Italy. On this occasion he had a commercial aim (to buy paintings and other objets d’art for sale in Russia) as well as a touristic and perhaps also a polemical purpose. Setting out from St. Petersburg the Fonvizins went via Narva, Riga, Memel, Königsberg and Frankfurt an der Oder to Leipzig, where they paused before passing on through Nuremberg, Augsburg, Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass into Italy. From Bozen (Bolzano) they proceeded to Trient (Trento), Verona, Mantua, Modena and Bologna to Florence. A visit was made to Pisa, and from there a day-trip to Lucca. The couple then went on via Livorno and Siena to Rome, where they spent the winter and where Fonvizin fell ill. In the spring they travelled north through Perugia and Rimini, visited Bologna and Modena once more, and then via Reggio and Parma to Milan. In May they briefly visited Venice. On their way home they made a detour to visit Baden, near Vienna, where the ailing author took the waters. In several places Fonvizin inspected and bought paintings (513-514), and as he was returning to Russia at the end of his journey he reported to his sister that he had forwarded seventeen large crates of purchases to his business partner, a Dutch entrepreneur named Klostermann (550). Eighteen letters written during this journey survive. They are addressed to Fonvizin’s sister Feodosiia, and through her to other members of the family. There are also two extant letters to Piotr Panin, one from Rome in April 1785 and one from Baden in June, and a brief note from Vienna in June 1785 to a Russian artist living abroad. In reading all these letters, or at least those that Fonvizin wrote to his sister, we should bear in mind that they seem to represent only one side of a correspondence: Fonvizin is always eager to receive letters from Feodosiia, is frustrated when her letters do not reach him, and is delighted when he does receive

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them. Moreover, Fonvizin is ritually dismissive about what he writes, especially during the early part of his journey. Repeatedly he claims that his letters do not deserve to be read, because he and his wife have seen nothing worthy of note, at least until they reach Leipzig, and he insists that he writes only because he knows his sister is interested in every detail about the two of them (501, 503-504, 508). All the same there are grounds for viewing Fonvizin’s letters on his third foreign journey as a text with integrity and seriousness of purpose. Fonvizin refers to them as a daily record of what he has seen and done, a “journal” (e.g. 503-504), and clearly conceives of this journal as a work which his sister might read to their friends, not as the individual letters arrive, because each letter in itself might mean nothing, but as a whole (508-509). Read in this way, this second cycle of letters yields a no less coherent narrative than the Letters from France, and a narrative that is just as lively, graphic and caustic. As on his travels in France in the previous decade, Fonvizin grumbles continually. Travelling again proves an almost unremitting torment for him. Carriages are often uncomfortable and prone to break down, nights are sleepless, inns filthy and prices exorbitant. The couple are plagued by fleas, bedbugs and mosquitoes. Food is not to their liking. They are afflicted by ailments that range from aching teeth that need to be extracted, in his wife’s case, to colic and frequent disabling headaches (some of which seem to be induced by the rages which sluggish and disobedient postilions repeatedly provoke in him), in the case of Fonvizin himself. They are incommoded in Riga by a waiter who spills a dish of greasy food over Fonvizin’s clothes (502) and by the din of crickets on the way to Memel (504). Repeatedly Fonvizin goes to a theatre only to find it cramped, poorly lit, dirty, stuffy or damp, and the performance execrable, and usually he feels unable to endure more than the first act of the play, if that (505, 513, 520). He seems, if his account is to be believed, to delight in gratuitous rudeness. For instance, he declines when in Innsbruck to go to pay his respects to the sister of Joseph II of Austria, because it is his “rule” not to present himself to any court anywhere, and he turns down what seems to be a gracious invitation to him to stay with her (516-518). Nor is Fonvizin impressed by monuments or architectural sights of a sort that eighteenth-century westerners now admired. (In fact it is worth bearing in mind as one reads Fonvizin’s disparaging missives that Italy, like Paris, was a destination without which, James Buzard has pointed out, the English gentleman’s Grand Tour would have lost its purpose. For the Italian cities, particularly Rome, Florence and Venice, were “the home of classical civilization, both in its original (ancient Roman) and its recreated (Renaissance) manifestations.”43) In a slighting sentence at the end of his description of Verona, for example, Fonvizin claims almost to have forgotten to mention the city’s famous colosseum and, having remembered it, makes no comment on it other than that it was covered by lizards basking in the sun (523-524). Pisa, once illustrious, is now desolate, its streets overgrown with grass (535). Like Piotr Tolstoi before him, Fonvizin does not seem to notice, or does not think it worth commenting on, the vestiges of ancient Rome. Most egregiously, 43

James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and after (1660-1840),” in Hulme and Youngs, p. 39.

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Venice barely warrants mention, and what Fonvizin does have to say about the city is almost entirely negative. He writes from there, he says, only in order that his sister should not be without news of his journey, for he has only a few remarks to make about the place. These remarks, moreover, are dominated by images of death and mourning. The first view of Venice, as we approached it from the sea, surprised us very much; but we soon sensed that one could not live here unless one had to. Imagine people who live and move only on water, for whom the beauty of nature has altogether died and who, in order to move two steps forward, have to do so afloat. Furthermore the city is immensely mournful. The buildings are ancient and blackened; the many thousands of gondolas are painted black because other colours are prohibited. As you travel round Venice you think of a funeral, all the more because the gondolas resemble coffins and the Italians go about in them lying down. The heat-waves, combined with the dreadful stench from the canals, are so unbearable that we shan’t stay here for more than a couple of days more. (548-549). As for Italian gardens, so admired by Tolstoi, they are to Fonvizin incomparably inferior to gardens “in the north” because they are left to Nature, which sometimes needs help from art (523). Admittedly the foreign lands that Fonvizin observes during his third journey, like France, are not altogether without merit in his eyes. Occasionally the generally negative impression of life abroad is mitigated by a pleasant town, a tolerable meal, a clean and tidy inn or an act of kindness (e.g. 506-507, 511). Fonvizin likes a bath with taps to which he has access in Leipzig and wishes that in Russia there were an amenity so pleasant and hygienic (509). He is delighted by the clean table-cloth and napkins at his inn in Nuremberg and the pastries which are served to him there (513). In Augsburg he admires a new type of harpsichord recently invented by Stein and he is enchanted by a recital on it given by Stein’s daughter (515). He appreciates the quality of the mountain roads that make it safe to travel in the Alps (516). In Trient he marvels at the murals and the organ in the cathedral (520) and, in Florence, at the Palazzo Pitti and its art gallery, the Boboli gardens, the cathedral and the hospital (529-531). In Rome he acknowledges the grandeur of St. Peter’s (538). He is also struck, as Tolstoi had been, by the charitable works encouraged by the Catholic Church, remarking upon the cardinals who wash and bandage sick beggars and the Roman noblewomen who feed female beggars (555). Everywhere in Italy he takes pleasure in viewing the paintings of the Italian masters (524, 529, 548). As against these merits, though, Fonvizin finds flaws in the German lands and in Italy that are as profound as those he had encountered in France in 1777-1778. No doubt his renewed antipathy to the west owes something to his continuing revulsion at the European city. This revulsion becomes apparent at an early stage of the outward journey. Königsberg, which Fonvizin had visited before, seems with its narrow streets and tall buildings gloomier than ever (505). Frankfurt an der Oder reminds him of a prison (506-507). For one reason or another (conveyance of

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refuse, the storing of rotting grapes in cellars, polluted canals) the European city is overpoweringly malodorous (505-506, 523, 549). It is also the nidus of social problems, a place where every sort of social distress is on unavoidable display and where the juxtaposition of opulence and squalor, architectural splendour and human misery is offensively stark (e.g. 523). In Rome, for example, not a day goes past without his wife weeping from pity, whenever she goes out, at the sight of people who suffer excruciatingly: people without arms or legs, blind people, people with terrible diseases, people who are naked or barefoot, and people starving to death lie around everywhere outside churches in the rain and hail. And that’s not to mention those wretched people who are to be found in clusters with sores over their faces, people with no nose or with eyes disfigured by terrible diseases; in short, Rome is a hell on earth for mankind. You see people in hellish torment here. How many thousands there are who do not know what a shirt is. In summer they go about as our forefather Adam did [and] in winter they are covered in rags instead of a smock, with their stomachs bare. That’s how fashionably they dress here while the pope and the cardinals live in mansions the like of which the greatest sovereigns do not possess. (537-538) Italy in general is a land of “unparalleled” poverty where people who are for any reason unable to work, if only for a short period, quickly fall into debt, hence the ubiquitous beggars (533). Italian governance is also found wanting. Fonvizin cannot see, for example, why the Venetian government is admired, since the Venetians, the wealthiest people on earth, seem to tolerate famine by forbidding people to bake bread in private homes, allowing bakers to pay the police for the right to mix bad flour with good (not that they know how to bake bread anyway), and punishing protest at such abuses with great severity (523). He complains about the lack of organization in the countryside and the lack of police in the towns of the Venetian domains: all do as they please with no fear of government (an assertion that seems somewhat at odds with Fonvizin’s earlier remark about the severity of Venetian laws) (545). As for sophisticated polite society, it seems not to exist in Italy. Hosts and hostesses tend to be miserly: guests are given nothing to eat or drink, not even water, and one’s throat dries up from the stuffiness of the atmosphere. The leading lady of Florentine society does not keep a lantern in her porch. The day after one has been received at a person’s house the host’s servants come round asking for money. The Fonvizins feel cut off from the world here: had it not been for other foreigners such as the papal nuncio and the English minister they would have had nowhere to put themselves (528, 532, 535). Italy is an intellectual as well as a social backwater: Pisa, for example, has a university, but God knows what is done there, for its professors are ignorant of everything that goes on beyond the Alps (535-536). The Catholic Church comes in for particular criticism. Fonvizin’s misgivings about it are first aroused in Trient: the large collection of barrels of fine old wines which he is shown in the bishop’s palace there should not be regarded, as he thinks it is, as something to boast about in an ecclesiastical institution (520). Most

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importantly, he uses his observations on the mass celebrated in St. Peter’s in Rome on Easter Sunday as a means of conveying a view of the Catholic Church as secularized, politicized, hierarchical and tending to dilute or lose religious essence. (In this respect he anticipates nineteenth-century Slavophiles and Native-Soil Conservatives.) The service is magnificent, to be sure, but it is more like a secular ceremony than a solemn religious service. It is a sovereign that I saw rather than a high priest, courtiers rather than spiritual disciples. The most aristocratic people of the locality, the cardinals, serve him [i.e. the pope] with slavish abasement and the next moment they themselves proudly require slavish abasement from those who are subordinate to them. The upshot is that the papal service is nothing but an adoration of the pope himself, for even the rite of worship of the Creator by his creatures is quite an act of pride: it is not the pope who comes to the altar to take communion but the sacraments, when they have been blessed, are brought to him on his throne and he takes not a step towards them! (542) The status of the pope as a secular ruler seems to be affirmed by the positioning of the papal guards, who wear hats and hold halberds, around the altar on which the offering to God is made. Likewise the practice of placing the pope on his sedia gestatoria, his portable throne, once the mass is over, and bearing him up to a window from which he blesses the crowds in St. Peter’s Square, strengthens the impression of him as the divine object of worship. The Church’s members, moreover, seem to be denied equality of access to their God by the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which is so offensive to Orthodox believers. The pope kisses the first cardinal, who kisses the next, and so on through the whole clergy, so that his blessing, like an electric charge, has become very weak by the time it reaches the last priest (542-543; see also 554). In addition to the evidence that Fonvizin’s journey to Italy seemed to furnish of social distress, political irresponsibility or severity, intellectual and social backwardness, and the deviation of the Catholic Church from the Christian norm as the Orthodox understood it, Fonvizin must have felt that he had again discovered material that would corroborate a negative view of western personality. As in France, so in Italy it was above all human conduct, and the national character which conduct supposedly revealed, that most concerned this satirical and didactic dramatist, Stoic and corrector of morals. Fonvizin takes the measure of Italian mores in Bozen, his gateway to the country. The people here, in this partly German-speaking area, have an Italian way of life, that is to say “there is a great deal of swinishness” (519). It is not just that the Italians have the irritating habit of shouting and constantly laughing loudly (521). They are all “immensely malicious and the most despicable cowards.” There is no honour among them. Even people of aristocratic breeding are swindlers, like the man in Florence who tried to sell Fonvizin a painting which he claimed was the work of an Italian master but which the local artists whom Fonvizin consulted (more honest than other Italians, one presumes) confirmed was worthless, as Fonvizin had suspected (533-534). Italians are explicitly compared to the local mosquitoes: unlike the mosquitoes Fonvizin

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has encountered elsewhere, whose approach one can hear, the Italian variety are perfidious and fall silently on their victims (526). Italian failings are particularly apparent among the loathsome Bolognesi, who mar Fonvizin’s enjoyment of Bologna’s cultural treasures and among whom not a day seems to have passed without some unpleasantness. Not that one would quarrel with them, because they are the most vengeful and treacherous people on earth: they do not fight duels (like honourable aristocrats, we must infer) but lurk behind doors and stab people in the back, often killing the wrong person (525). Most memorably, Fonvizin’s description of the theatre in Florence turns into a discussion of local morals that appear even more corrupt than the morals that Fonvizin thought he had exposed in France in 1777-1778. Boxes at the theatres in Florence are unlit, Fonvizin asserts, because the ladies do not like people to see what they get up to. Each lady sits with her cicisbeo [i.e. gallant] and does not want their affair to be hindered by the lighting. Morals in Italy are corrupted to a far greater extent even than in France. The wedding day here is the day of the divorce. No sooner has a girl got married than she straightaway has to choose for herself a cavaliere servente [i.e. a knight who serves her] who will not abandon her for a moment from morning till night. He travels everywhere with her, takes her everywhere, always sits next to her, deals and shuffles for her when she is playing cards, in short he is her servant, and when he has brought her home alone in a carriage [and delivered her] to her husband he does not leave the house until she goes to bed with her husband. If she has a tiff with her lover or cicisbeo her first husband tries to bring them together again, and equally the wife tries to maintain concord between her husband and her lover. Any lady who did not have a cicisbeo would be despised by the public at large because she would be felt to be either unworthy of adoration or a crone. (531) Such habitual female infidelity has a ruinous effect on the nobility, a social class whose role and responsibilities constantly preoccupied Fonvizin. It tends to encourage ignorance, since young men are too busy courting their lady to find the time to study. It also tends to impoverish the nobility, since fathers, convinced always that their wives’ children are somebody else’s offspring, see no likelihood of their estates passing on down their family and therefore allegedly squander their wealth (531-532). As in the Letters from France, so in the letters from Fonvizin’s third journey abroad there are occasional asides that indicate a certain confidence on Fonvizin’s part that Russians, when confronted with European civilization, need not be ashamed of their own nation. Remarking on the numerous hunchbacks and the mass of insistent beggars who plague him in Leipzig, for example, Fonvizin surmises that there are more people afflicted by grief, anger or need in a little land like Saxony than in the whole of Russia (510). Having observed all the German lands on the route from St. Petersburg to Nuremberg, he asserts “without prejudice” that a comparison is heavily in favour of Russia and the Russians.

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Here in general everything is worse than ours: the people, the horses, the land, the supply of victuals, in short everything is better in our country, and we are human beings to a greater extent than the Germans are [my bol'she liudi, nezheli nemtsy]. This certainty has taken root in my soul, whatever anyone might say. (508) Again, on observing what he perceives as the squalor of Bozen, he immediately forms the opinion that Italians eat bread so poor in quality that beggars would disdain it in Russia and that the Italians consider water clean that a Russian would regard as slops (519). Indeed experience of Italy in general bolsters Russian selfconfidence. For although Fonvizin’s perception of Italy is organized on the same lines as his perception of France and is rooted in similar essentialist ethnic stereotyping, Italian civilization, unlike French civilization, poses no threat to Russia. Since it is only the arts that “merit attention” in Italian society, and since in all other respects Italy scarcely resembles “Europe” (537), Italy can make no claim to superiority over Russia. In fact so primitive does Italian society seem to the Fonvizins that they come to bemoan the lack of French culture in it and yearn for French books and newspapers and for contact with people who speak French (535). Here, in other words, the newly westernized Russian nobleman may experience psychological security through a sense of equality or even superiority. *

*

*

Fonvizin is himself a product of and major contributor to the cultural westernization of Russia in the eighteenth century. He is after all the main Russian exponent of comedy in the neo-classical style, to whose conventions he adhered quite closely in his two major plays. He also exploits other western literary genres and is affected by western notions, such as a Stoic conception of virtue and Montesquieu’s conception of the obligation of a nobility driven by a sense of honour to assume moral leadership of the nation. Even in his condemnation of French, especially Parisian, civilization (which is essentially the fading civilization of the France of the Grand siècle), he represents a new European ethic as Wladimir Berelowitch has argued. This ethic sets work above leisure, simplicity above luxury, sensibility of the soul above rhetoric, moral perfection above the external marks of civilization and the natural above the artificial.44 And yet Fonvizin’s response to the westernization of Russia, or rather the westernization of the Russian court and nobility, is ambivalent. His representation of France, far from confirming the value of the civilization from which he had absorbed so much, amounts to a spirited attack on it and implicitly supports the aspiration of Russia, an emergent nation, to cultural independence from it. In this respect the Letters from France may be seen as an early example of a response to westernization that was to become rather typical in the nineteenth century, when debate about Russia’s relationship to Europe became even more intense. (The 44

Berelowitch, “La France dans le ‘Grand Tour,’” pp. 201, 204.

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topicality of the Letters from France for a later generation was pointed up in the 1830s and 1840s by Belinskii, who regarded Fonvizin as one of the most interesting eighteenth-century writers and compared Fonvizin’s Letters favourably with Karamzin’s more tolerant and better known Letters of a Russian Traveller.45) Fonvizin’s letters from Italy too, like his Letters from France, breathe disdain for what is alien. It is hard to believe that Fonvizin is visiting Italy in the same age as Winckelmann, who had arrived in Rome in 1755 and wrote about it in his History of Art among the Ancients as a monument to the artistic beauty of the ancient Greek world, or Goethe, who with Winckelmann’s book as a guide also felt himself reborn as a result of his travels there. However, the letters from Italy reveal no anxieties of the sort that pervade the Letters from France about the threat that foreign cultural imperialism poses to Russia. On the contrary, Fonvizin’s Italy helps to affirm the worth of his own nation. Thus the two cycles of letters, taken together, show how the travel diary, in Fonvizin’s hands, is being turned into an embryonic literary genre (a genre that was itself being appropriated from the west, it should be emphasized), in which it was possible to construct a mental landscape fit for a people conscious of their youth in the European family but sensing their developing strength.

45

Belinskii, PSS, Vol. 8, p. 634; ibid., Vol. 9, p. 677; see also Vol. 1, p. 59, and Vol. 7, p. 119.

CHAPTER 3

Karamzin: The Letters of a Russian Traveller

KARAMZIN’S LIFE AND WORK Born into a noble family in the province of Simbirsk, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826) was educated first in a boarding school in Simbirsk and then, from 1775-1781, in Moscow. He served briefly in the Preobrazhenskii Guards Regiment in St. Petersburg, but in 1785 returned to Moscow, where he frequented the literary circle of the Freemason and publisher Novikov and devoted himself to journalistic activity. Over the years 1785-1789 he produced a number of translations of English, French and German works, including Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. From 1787, together with the young poet Petrov, he edited a journal entitled Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind, in which his translations and some of his earliest original prose works and poems were published. In 1789-1790 he undertook the foreign journey which gave rise to the Letters of a Russian Traveller, the work that firmly established his literary reputation. A substantial part of these Letters (but not the sections on Paris) was first published in instalments in the course of 1791-1792, soon after Karamzin’s return to Russia. Further material, including fragments of the material on England, came out in 1794-1795. A foretaste of the material on Paris was provided in a synopsis of his as yet not fully published work that was included by Karamzin in a “letter” that appeared in a Hamburg journal in 1797.1 However, it was not until 1801, when a freer climate prevailed following the accession of Alexander I, that the Letters were published in full, by which time Karamzin had no doubt revised his material on France in 1789-1790 in the light of the more violent course that the revolution there had subsequently taken.2 1 See “Lettre au Spectateur sur la littérature russe,” in Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, ed. by Iu. M. Lotman, N. A. Marchenko and B. A. Uspenskii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), pp. 456-463, especially pp. 459-461. 2 The complete cycle of Letters of a Russian Traveller was republished in collections of Karamzin’s works that came out during his lifetime, in 1803, 1814 and 1820. On the publication history of the Letters see N. A. Marchenko, “Istoriia teksta ‘Pisem russkogo puteshestvennika,’” ibid., pp. 607-612. There are several modern editions of the Letters, e.g. the edition in N. M. Karamzin, Izbrannye sochineniia, 2 Vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1964;

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Following his return from his foreign journey, Karamzin came to dominate Russian literary life for over a decade. This pre-eminence was partly due to the success of the Letters of a Russian Traveller, but it was also due to Karamzin’s fiction and to his publishing and accomplished editorial activity. For Karamzin played the leading role in the creation of a new literature of feeling that was exemplified by his highly popular tales “Poor Liza” (1792), “Natal'ia, the Boyar’s Daughter” (1792) and “The Island of Bornholm” (1794), as well as by the Letters of a Russian Traveller.3 He also edited and published two journals, The Moscow Journal (1791-1792) and The Messenger of Europe (1802-1803), and three substantial almanacs, Aglaia (two volumes, 1794-1795), Aonides (three volumes, 1796-1799), and A Pantheon of Foreign Literature (also three volumes, 1798).4 This career as a writer of short prose fiction and journalist effectively ended in 1803, when Karamzin was appointed Imperial Historiographer. He now devoted himself to the task of writing a history of Russia. The fruit of this labour was his History of the Russian State, eight volumes of which were published in 1816-1817 and a further four volumes of which appeared between 1821 and 1829.5 He also made a contribution to the conservative tradition of Russian political thought with a Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, which he presented in 1811 to Alexander I (ruled 1801-1825).6 By now Karamzin clearly saw himself, like Fonvizin and Derzhavin in the age of Catherine, as a moral leader of the educated nobility, exhorting members of that class to fulfil their patriotic duty, and as a self-appointed mentor to his sovereign, although his views were hardly more welcome to Alexander I than Fonvizin’s and Derzhavin’s had been to Catherine.7 hereafter Karamzin, IS ), Vol. 1, pp. 79-601; Karamzin, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), Vol. 1, pp. 56-504; and Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, pp. 5-388. It is the latter edition, based on the version contained in the edition of Karamzin’s collected works published in 1820 and cited in full in n. 1 above, to which page references in parentheses in the text of this chapter relate. The Letters have been translated in an abridged version by Florence Jonas, under the title Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790 (New York and London: Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press, 1957). This edition has now been superseded by a translation of the whole work, with dense annotation, by Andrew Kahn: Nikolai Karamzin: “Letters of a Russian traveller” (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003). 3 “Bednaia Liza”; “Natal'ia, boiarskaia doch'”; “Ostrov Borngol'm:” see Karamzin, IS, Vol. 1, pp. 605-621, 622-660 and 661-673 respectively. 4 On Karamzin’s journalism see Zapadov, pp. 95-99, 108-111. 5 Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, 12 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Voennaia tipografiia Glavnogo shtaba, 1818-1829). 6 Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii, tr. by Richard Pipes as Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959; hereafter Karamzin’s Memoir). 7 A useful brief summary of Karamzin’s career is provided by Anthony Cross in Cornwell, pp. 417418. For a longer comprehensive introduction see the monograph by Natalya Kochetkova, Nikolay Karamzin (Boston: Twayne, 1975). See also J. L. Black, ed., Essays on Karamzin: Russian Man-ofLetters, Political Thinker, Historian, 1766-1826 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975); Berkov and Makogonenko in IS, Vol. 1, pp. 5-76; and especially Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow: Kniga, 1987). There is a large literature on Karamzin’s early prose writing, including the Letters of a Russian Traveller: see especially Henry M. Nebel Jr., N. M. Karamzin: A Russian Sentimentalist (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967); Hans Rothe, N. M. Karamzins europäische Reise: Der Beginn des russischen Romans (Bad Homburg, Berlin and Zürich: Verlag Gehlen, 1968); Cross, N. M. Karamzin: A Study of

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It may be useful when considering the Letters of a Russian Traveller to bear in mind two aspects of Karamzin’s contribution to Russian letters as a whole, both of which are pronounced in the Letters. Firstly, as a writer nurtured in the age of Catherine and against the larger background of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, Karamzin conceived his literary activity as a broad endeavour to raise the cultural level of his society and introduce it to modern European civilization, mould its taste and cultivate a Russian reading public. This essentially patriotic conception of literary activity explains Karamzin’s preoccupation in the 1780s and 1790s with translation and journalism. It also explains the breadth of Karamzin’s intellectual interests and the scope of his literary endeavours, which need to be viewed as a coherent contribution to Russian slovesnost' rather than as an untidy amalgam of discrete elements such as poetry, prose fiction, philology, political thought and historiography. Secondly, Karamzin played a leading role in undermining the Neo-Classicism that had been the dominant cultural manner in Russia during the first half of Catherine’s reign and in asserting in its place Pre-Romanticism, or what in Russia goes under the name of “Sentimentalism.”8 Whereas the Neo-Classicist – typified by Aleksandr Sumarokov – set reason at a premium and feared the destabilizing effect of passion, the Sentimentalist valued sensibility above all and tested the capacity of literary characters and readers to be emotionally affected. In a short aesthetic credo published in 1794, entitled “What an Author Needs,” Karamzin explicitly underlines the point: the artist must have not merely talent, knowledge and a lively imagination but also a “kind and tender heart.”9 Unlike Neo-Classical authors, who were invisible and supposedly dispassionate, Sentimentalists are conspicuous in their works and emotionally embroiled in them. They conduct an intimate dialogue with their readers and promote an illusion of authenticity by insisting that they are able through personal experience or evidence on which they have stumbled to verify the truth of what they describe. The mood of narrators is therefore at least as important in the work of Sentimentalists as the characters they portray and the events they relate. It oscillates between a joyful empathy with other human beings and exquisite sensitivity to the beauty of Nature, on the one hand, and melancholy inspired by contemplation of human suffering and reflection on the transience of human life and achievement, on the other. Sentimentalist literature His Literary Career (1783-1803) (Carbondale and Edwardsville, London and Amsterdam: Southern Illinois University Press and Feffer and Simons, 1971; hereafter Cross, N. M. Karamzin); Roger B. Anderson, N. M. Karamzin’s Prose: The Teller in the Tale: A study in narrative technique (Houston: Cordovan Press, 1974); Gitta Hammarberg, From the idyll to the novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For treatment of the Letters in particular see especially Lotman; Lotman and Uspenskii, “‘Pis'ma’ Karamzina i ikh mesto v razvitii russkoi kul'tury,” in their edition of Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, pp. 525-606; and Andrew Kahn, “Nikolai Karamzin’s discourses of Enlightenment,” in his edition of Nikolai Karamzin: “Letters of a Russian traveller,” pp. 459-551. 8 For discussion of these terms and a statement of the case for treating them as essentially synonymous in Russia see the essay by G. S. Smith, “Sentimentalism and Preromanticism as Terms and Concepts,” in Russian Literature in the Age of Catherine the Great, ed. by A. G. Cross (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976), pp. 173-184. 9 “Chto nuzhno avtoru,” in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 2, pp. 120-122.

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also has a broader social ambit than Neo-Classicism. Sentimentalists may portray more humble and ordinary members of society than Neo-Classical writers had thought it acceptable to introduce into a work of art. Finally, they aim to attract a wider readership, appealing to a greater extent than Neo-Classical writers to readers belonging to social strata below the enlightened nobility and to female readers.10 THE LETTERS OF A RUSSIAN TRAVELLER: AUTHORIAL CRAFT AND PURPOSE It is important when reading the Letters of a Russian Traveller to beware of identifying the persona who narrates the journey with the traveller and author himself, as one might reasonably have done in the case of Piotr Tolstoi and, somewhat more reservedly, Fonvizin. For one thing Karamzin, although he was still only twenty-two when he set out on his journey, was evidently already a more mature, complex, knowing and ambitious man than his disingenuous, idealistic young narrator. He may also have exercised a greater measure of travel writer’s licence than the earlier writers who have been examined in transmuting the raw material furnished by his journey into his récit de voyage. For example, his chronology is unreliable. The Letters describe a journey through the German lands, Switzerland, France and England that apparently lasted from the spring of 1789 until the autumn of 1790. And yet Karamzin was back in Russia, Iurii Lotman has pointed out, in July 1790, over a month before his narrator. He must therefore have spent less than the three months in England that his narrator seems to have spent there (which may account for the reader’s impression that the section on England in the Letters is less closely related to the author’s personal experience than the other sections). Lotman even doubts that Karamzin went directly from Strasbourg to Switzerland in the August of 1789 and that he remained in Switzerland for seven months, suggesting that he travelled instead from Strasbourg to Paris in order to meet a Muscovite Mason to whom he was then close (a liaison that Karamzin subsequently wished to conceal).11 In short the reader of the Letters is confronted with a self-conscious literary text in which literal veracity is less important than experimentation with a new genre and manner, authorial self-fashioning and the establishment of a personal space for the author in the growing body of Russian slovesnost'. Karamzin’s Letters are written in a far more positive tone than Fonvizin’s accounts of his foreign journeys. There are, admittedly, negative sides to western life as Karamzin’s narrator perceives it, such as the stench of Berlin’s sewers and Prussian inquisitiveness (33-35). More importantly, as we shall see in later sections of this chapter, the narrator has anxieties about revolutionary France and expresses reservations about the English character. Nevertheless Karamzin’s narrator is a 10 It might be added that the travelogue, with its broad range and lightness of touch, is an ideal vehicle for literature promoting individual sensibility and emancipating itself from the formal constraints of the rule-bound Classicism that had until recently held sway in Russia. 11 Lotman, pp. 17, 30-31, 79, 81-82, 101, 175; see also Lotman and Uspenskii, pp. 536-540. Lotman’s view does not go unchallenged, though: see, e.g., Schönle, p. 232, n. 65.

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gregarious, tolerant and appreciative traveller, not a carping, ill-disposed one. His impressions of the townscape and landscape, the culture and the everyday life of the countries he visits are predominantly sympathetic, even effusively enthusiastic. Moreover, these impressions are conveyed in a lively, elegant, varied, highly readable and above all celebratory narrative that provides a model of which all nineteenth-century Russian travel writers had to take account and against which the efforts of some of Karamzin’s successors – especially Pogodin and Annenkov – seem insipid. The work derives an apparent spontaneity and artlessness from the illusion that it consists merely of personal letters to the narrator’s friends in Russia, of whom he often thinks with longing (10, 14, 83, 167, 211, 323) and whose letters he is delighted to receive (32, 156, 216, 244). This illusion is bolstered by the pretence that the Letters are published just as they were written, that is to say that they record impressions jotted down not at leisure in a study but on scraps of paper, in pencil, as he was travelling (393). On one level the Letters are of course a compendium of information on the western European landscape and townscape that Karamzin had seen and the intellectual and cultural life of the several western peoples whom he had observed, and for Karamzin’s contemporaries they did indeed have pedagogic significance.12 They are a patchwork of accounts of the castles, palaces, cathedrals, libraries, galleries, theatres and opera-houses that the narrator has seen; reports of conversations and encounters he has had; portraits of his many travelling companions, whom he characterizes with the skill of the writer of fiction; entertaining anecdote; observation of social customs and manners; provision of historical information; discussion of literary questions; and even interpolated tales of medieval romance or misfortune. There is much detail on such mundane matters as the cost of meals in inns (11-12, 58, 86, 120, 194, 212-213), the excellence of the larks, pies, asparagus and cherries one may eat in Leipzig and the general cheapness of board and lodging in Saxony (64-65), the ugliness of women’s coiffure in Strasbourg (96) and the relative merits of German and French postilions. At a more elevated level there are numerous accounts of meetings that the young traveller has had with prominent philosophers, poets and scientists, or pseudoscientists, for example: Kant (20-21); Herder (72-73, 75-76); Wieland (74-77); Weisse, a writer of children’s literature, some of which Karamzin had himself already translated into Russian (67-68)13; the founder of physiognomics Lavater, whom the narrator visits many times in Zürich, and whom he admires (106-112, 116-118, 120-124)14; and the Swiss naturalist and philosopher Bonnet, two of whose works he proposes to translate into Russian (167-175, 184-185, 188). The Letters as a whole are infused with a sense of local colour, conveyed by the inclusion of snatches of conversation in German, French and English, and by the use of numerous neologisms from these languages. However, Karamzin, like Fonvizin, pointedly dissociates his work from travel writing of the purely informative kind. He makes it clear to his readers that it 12

Cross in Cornwell, p. 418. See also the endnotes in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 1, p. 792. 14 Karamzin had corresponded with Lavater from Moscow before his departure. 13

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should not be expected of him that he will merely communicate statistical or geographical information, which may readily be found elsewhere (393). Rather it is as a record of intensely personal experience that Karamzin presents his work to his readers. The narrator himself emphasizes this subjective quality: he has described what he has seen, heard, felt and thought (393). He has created, as he famously puts it at the end of his labour, a “mirror of [his] soul” (388). His own personality stands in the foreground and gives coherence to the collection of disparate elements of which the Letters are composed. As a Sentimentalist – and we must remember that Karamzin began to write up the Letters after his return from Russia at the time when he was also producing his two major tales in the Sentimentalist manner, “Poor Liza” and “Natal'ia, the Boyar’s Daughter” – he displays his sensitive heart and vaunts his capacity to be strongly affected (40). His emotional diapason is as broad as the subject-matter of his text, embracing awe, reverence, respect, joy, gaiety and melancholy. Beauty, as manifested in art and Nature, gladdens him wherever it is found (51, 78, 92-93, 276-277). He is touched by examples of kindness, solicitude, hospitality (8, 147-148) and virtue (62-63). His sensitivity is sharpened by keen awareness of his own mortality (of which he is reminded by graveyards (311)), and of the transience of the achievement of whole peoples, kingdoms and cities (a subject on which ruins prompt reflection (147)). Above all Karamzin’s narrator has a keen sense of the shared humanity of peoples in all times and places. He is able to empathize with his fellow human beings irrespective of the nationality, class or age to which they belong. He shows compassion for those who suffer, finding it hard to eat with a clear conscience, for example, when under the window of each post-station on the road to Fontainebleau there are beggars with pale faces and tattered clothes (213). As a peace-loving soul he is repelled by the thought of war with its bloodshed and distress (24). He is shocked by a pile of human bones that stands near Murten by the road to Lausanne as a monument to the defeat of Charles the Bold, a duke of Burgundy who had tried to subjugate the Swiss in 1476. I shuddered, my friends, at this sorry spectacle of our perishability. O Swiss! How can you take joy in such a melancholy trophy? The Burgundians were your fellow human beings. Oh, if you had washed the remains of the thirty thousand unfortunates with your tears and committed them to the earth with your blessing, and erected a black monument at the site of your victory, and inscribed on it these words: “Here the Swiss fought for their land, and they were victorious, but they took pity on those whom they had vanquished,” then I would have praised you from my heart. Cover up this monument to barbarity, cover it up! Take pride in the name of a Swiss, and forget not your most noble name, the name of human being! (146-147) This universal humanism, which brings to mind the outlook of Montaigne, prompts the narrator when he is in Frankfurt to write with feeling and sympathy – and in a tone strikingly different from Fonvizin’s – about the Jews. There are over seven thousand Jews here. They all have to live on the same street, which is so unclean that you cannot go down it without holding your

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nose. It is pitiful to look at these unfortunates whom mankind has so humiliated! Their clothes, for the most part, are soiled rags through which you can see their bare bodies. On Sundays, at the hour when the service begins in the Christian churches, their street is locked up and the poor Jews are confined like prisoners in their cage until the end of the service; and likewise they are locked up at night. In addition to this constraint, if a fire should break out in the town then it is their duty to convey water to it and put it out. (88) He approves of people who know how to love, warming to Rubens who seems to him always to be painting his own wife in his portraits of other women (247-248). His ability to experience the ecstasy of personal absorption in the cosmos is repeatedly demonstrated by the fact that he is so easily moved to tears. For example, he weeps with happiness at the beauty of Nature on the banks of the Elbe (56), cries like a baby when a two-week headache passes and he realizes that the illness has not blunted his capacity to feel (166-167), and sobs intermittently throughout the rest of his travels (e.g. 188, 280, 323, 334, 363). The self-absorption of Karamzin’s narrator marks a new departure in Russian travel writing. Tolstoi’s journey to Europe was undertaken in the service of the state. Fonvizin’s first journey may have had an official dimension and his second journey certainly had a commercial one. Karamzin’s travels, on the other hand, seem to have been conceived as a means above all to personal fulfilment and literary advancement. It is “in order to gather agreeable impressions and enrich [his] imagination with new ideas,” as he puts it to Wieland, that the narrator has embarked on his journey (76). More generally travel, the narrator reflects, nourishes the heart and spirit and promotes love of humanity. Furthermore, by crossing borders and viewing new objects humans experience their freedom and their sacred pre-eminence in the universe. It is sweet and joyous, my friends, to cross over from one land into another, to see new objects with which our very soul seems to be renewed, and to feel man’s priceless freedom, by virtue of which he may genuinely call himself the king of earthly creation. All other living things, which are bound to certain climes, are unable to move beyond the boundaries that Nature has determined for them, and they die where they were born; but man, through the force of his powerful will, steps from clime to clime. Everywhere he seeks delight and finds it. Everywhere he is Nature’s favourite guest and everywhere she opens up new sources of pleasure for him. Everywhere he rejoices at his being and blesses his humanity. (93) Such a personal view of travel as “a pure quest for enjoyment” devoid of “any notion of utility,” Schönle has pointed out, was “unprecedented at a time and in a country that knew foreign travel mostly as a state-sponsored or -controlled institution, or as an escape from political repression.” Not that this novel attitude to travel met with universal approval. Karamzin’s aristocratic contemporaries were displeased by Karamzin’s presumptuous belief that he had improved as a result of travelling and by his exploitation of genteel conduct (that is to say the Grand Tour)

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as material for a literary text through which he might assert himself as an author (a professional vocation).15 Besides serving as a means of enlightening Karamzin’s compatriots, displaying the narrator’s sensibility and revealing his thirst for self-enrichment, the Letters also function on yet another level. For they are, as Roboli observed, a sort of literary encyclopaedia,16 a work of reference on contemporary literary fashion. The narrator’s manner is transparently affected by Rousseau, progenitor of the cult of feeling, and Gessner, the author of prose idylls that were popular in the second half of the eighteenth century (124-125; 307-312), Thomson and Young, precursors of the English Romantic poets, and Kleist, who helps him to appreciate the beauty of spring (39). The narrator alludes to the novels of Richardson and Fielding – about which he implausibly claims to have had conversations with a chamber-maid in his rented lodgings in London (336) – as models for a new, post-classical type of literature which incorporates much trivial, inconsequential detail (393). His representation of England has a particularly literary nature and incorporates continental, especially French, stereotypical notions of the English that irritated British reviewers.17 Moreover, Karamzin frequently refers to his western forerunners in the genre of travel writing, or compares himself to them, or draws on their work, and even makes, or tries to make, the acquaintance of some of them. For example, he is aware of sketches about Switzerland written by Coxe, the Englishman who had also described his journey in Russia in the 1770s (151).18 He distances himself from Chardin, Lucas and Tavernier, who are too restless for him. (In their unceasing search for new experience these travellers can spend ten or twenty years in foreign lands without pining for the people among whom they grew up. They therefore have not struck the balance that Karamzin desires between love of novelty and obedience to habit and they seem to lack the fidelity to family and friends and the tender, sensitive heart that the Sentimentalist prizes (165-166).) He praises MercierDupaty (222), about whose Letters on Italy his Swiss acquaintance Bonnet apparently argues with his wife (174). In Calais he is conscious of Sterne’s presence (323-325). He expresses admiration for the writings of Le Vaillant, at whose home he calls (but Le Vaillant is not there) (298), and Moritz, whom he does meet and whose Journey of a German in England in the Year 1782 he has read with great pleasure (45-47). He meets Barthélemy, of whose Journey of the Young Anacharsis in Greece (1788)19 he learns in Leipzig (61-62) and whom he addresses with awe (251-252, 255). Thus The Letters of a Russian Traveller function on several levels and are far from being the fresh, immediate work that Karamzin strives to make them seem. 15

Schönle, pp. 42-43, 230-231, n. 57. Roboli, pp. 50-51. 17 Lotman, p. 177. 18 In Paris Karamzin’s narrator meets one of Coxe’s friends and travelling companions (Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, pp. 222-223). Coxe wrote two works on Switzerland: Sketches of the Natural, Political and Civil State of Switzerland (1779) and Travels in Switzerland (1789). 19 Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Le Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, dans le milieu du quatrième siècle avant l’ère vulgaire. 16

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They are both an informative log of a journey of exploration in the west and a poetic account of the narrator’s exploration of his own sensibility. They are also a guileful creation, carefully polished by the author on his return from Russia and saturated with literary allusion and borrowing, in which Karamzin experiments with a new literary manner and carefully positions himself in relation to other travel writers. And yet to question the literal veracity of the Letters and draw attention to the self-consciousness, authorial craft and literary models that help to shape them is by no means to diminish the importance of the representations that they offer of foreign lands and peoples for a Russian readership. For it is not the accuracy or reliability of Russian travel accounts (perhaps of any travel accounts), it is argued here, that determines their place and influence in the intellectual and cultural tradition to which they belong. What is more telling is the degree to which the perceptions of foreign lands and peoples that travel accounts contain answer certain national needs or satisfy a particular thirst at a given historical moment. SWITZERLAND Karamzin (or his narrator, at any rate) arrived in Switzerland in August 1789. First he visited Basel, Rheinfelden, Brugg and Zürich, where he paused, then Schaffhausen, Eglisau, Baden, Aarau and Bern. In late August and early September he made an excursion to the Bernese Oberland, visiting Thun, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, the Haslital, Meiringen and Lake Brienz before returning to Bern. He then travelled via Lausanne and Vevey to Geneva, where he says he rented a room and spent the winter. As in other countries Karamzin conscientiously viewed places or things of cultural and historical interest, such as a monument to Erasmus in Basel (98), the arrow with which William Tell supposedly shot the apple from his son’s head, and which was displayed in Zürich (109), and the Café littéraire in Lausanne where French, German and English newspapers were available (148).20 The considerable importance of the description of Karamzin’s stay in Switzerland within the Letters as a whole may be gauged from the fact that the description occupies roughly one-quarter of the work (i.e. pp. 97-189). It is noteworthy that Karamzin is less favourably impressed by the western parts of Switzerland that he visits towards the end of his stay than by the central and eastern parts that he has visited first. He thinks that Lausanne, for example, is not a pleasant city: it lies partly in a pit and partly on a slope, so that wherever one wants to go one has to walk either uphill or downhill, and its streets are dirty, narrow and poorly paved (148). In particular he seems discomfited, as Schönle has pointed out, by the intrusion of French culture into the notion of Swissness that he has formed in

20 The narrator also viewed paintings by Holbein in the public library in Basel, including his painting of Christ taken down from the cross. His response to this painting is of some literary-historical interest, since it is echoed by Dostoevskii, who we know had read Karamzin’s Letters (see Chapter 7 below), in his novel The Idiot. Karamzin sees nothing divine in Holbein’s painting, only a dead man portrayed in a natural way (Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, p. 98).

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the German-speaking parts of the country.21 He notes with seeming regret that in Lausanne, where French manners exercise an influence, social intercourse is relatively free and people play cards all the time (154), as they do in the international Francophone society of Geneva (156, 185). On the other hand his perception of the German-speaking parts of the country – and it is this perception that predominates in his representation of Switzerland – is overwhelmingly positive. Switzerland as manifested in its German-speaking regions is a country whose air, both literally and figuratively, is bracing. It is a land of freedom (97). Karamzin notes the participation of the lower orders – for example, bakers, cobblers and tailors – in the assemblies which make the laws, declare war, conclude peace and raise taxes (100). He is also favourably struck by the order and productivity of the Swiss countryside and attributes the farmers’ prosperity mainly to the fact that they are free and independent and pay the government only one tenth of what they produce in tax (127). Switzerland’s wealth is thrown into relief by the relative poverty that the narrator imagines to exist in Savoy, which he surveys across Lake Geneva from the Swiss shore (155) and where the people are idle, the land lies untilled and the villages are deserted (182). There is, however, more to German-speaking Switzerland than a benign political system and economic well-being. For it is also a land of “picturesque Nature” (97). In order to appreciate the novelty of Karamzin’s treatment of Switzerland in Russian writing we should note that neither Piotr Tolstoi nor Fonvizin had responded enthusiastically to mountain landscape. Indeed the emotional response to Nature in general that is characteristic of Pre-Romantic literature from the second half of the eighteenth century is altogether absent from their travel writing. The Alpine scenery through which Tolstoi had passed in Styria and Carinthia on his way to Venice evoked in him only anxiety and disgust. The narrow, dangerous road over the mountains, on which accidents were frequent, was “very miserable and difficult,” and there was an incessant unwelcome noise from the river below. Moreover, the people of the region were wretched and poorly formed and suffered from goitres that were caused, Tolstoi was told, by drinking water that was unfit for human consumption.22 Fonvizin too found the mountains and abysses of the Austrian Tyrol terrifying and experienced relief and a sense of liberation when after ten days he came down into the lowlands of northern Italy.23 Karamzin’s radiant depiction of the Alps, on the other hand, reflects the emergence in European culture of a positive response to mountain scenery which, Marjorie Hope Nicolson has argued, does not long predate the Romantic period.24 No doubt affected by Haller’s influential poem of 1729, “The Alps,”25 Karamzin conceives of the mountain landscape as a fresh, majestic natural setting (of the sort 21

Schönle, pp. 60-61. The Travel Diary of Peter Tolstoi, pp. 65-66; see also p. 69. 23 Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 516, 521-522. 24 See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), especially pp. 1-4. 25 Albrecht von Haller, Die Alpen. During his literary apprenticeship in Moscow Karamzin had also translated a poem by Haller in which the poet locates the causes of evil not in social conditions but in human nature: see Berkov and Makogonenko, in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 1, pp. 8-9. 22

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that the Caucasus would become for Russians in the 1820s), in which educated people corrupted by modern social life might glimpse their pure prelapsarian selves. His traveller delights in the various waterfalls at Schaffhausen and in the Bernese Oberland (113-114, 132-133, 138-139). Climbing Wengenalp and passing the peaks of the Jungfrau and the Eiger – and influenced also, perhaps, by Burke’s disquisition on the sublime26 – he experiences awe in the presence of infinity. As he stands on the summit of his first Alpine peak, attained after a long, steep ascent during which he has felt a frisson of danger at the distant sound of tumbling snow, his being is suffused with an unusual peace and joy. All earthly cares, all the troubles, thoughts and feelings that degrade man’s noble essence are left behind in the valley, and I looked down with pity on the inhabitants of Lauterbrunnen, with no feeling of envy that at this very moment they were taking pleasure in the spectacle of the silver Staubbach waterfall lit up by the rays of the sun. Up here the mortal senses his lofty identity, forgets the country on earth from which he comes and becomes a citizen of the universe. Up here, when he regards the ridges of the rocky fastnesses, fettered by chains of ice and shrouded in snow on which the centuries barely leave a perceptible trace, he forgets time and his thoughts plunge into eternity. Up here his heart trembles in awe when he thinks of the omnipotent Hand that has raised these masses of matter up to the heavens and will one day cast them down into the depths of the ocean. (134) However, it is not only the beauty and sublimity of the mountains that Haller’s poem “The Alps” exalts, but also the moral purity of the people who inhabit the mountains. Nor is Haller the only writer to serve as a model for Karamzin in this respect. Karamzin’s narrator is also enchanted by Gessner, the “Swiss Theocritus,” whose “incomparable” and imperishable idylls we find him reading in Zürich and whom he holds up as a model for writers and an exemplar of virtue and innocence (44, 122, 124-125).27 Karamzin’s search for the Arcadia depicted by these writers begins in the Letters even before the narrator encounters the Swiss landscape. Prussia, the narrator ruefully observes on his outward journey, is not Arcadia, and the eighteenth century is not the golden age (42), but parts of Saxony do resemble it. The narrator constructs an idyll in his mind as he travels down the bank of the Elbe on a beautiful day. Every country-dweller walking across a meadow seemed to me a happy mortal who had in abundance everything that a human needs. He is healthy through his labours, I thought, and joyful and happy in his hour of rest, surrounded by his peaceable family, sitting next to his faithful wife and watching his children play. 26 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). The horror associated with the sublime informs Gothic writing, of which Karamzin’s tale “The Island of Bornholm” is an early Russian example. 27 Collections of Gessner’s idylls were first published in 1756 and 1772. On Gessner see John Hibberd, Salomon Gessner: His Creative Achievement and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Gessner too had influenced Karamzin even before he went abroad: a translation of one of Gessner’s idylls, published in 1783, is Karamzin’s first known literary publication.

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He again reflects on the purity of rural morals in the environs of Frankfurt: watching children playing with their mother, he poetically muses that “all the ingredients of true happiness that the beneficent being pours into the vessel of human life are felt more strongly by our heart amid the beauties of the countryside” (86). However, it is in Switzerland that life is most innocent, even in the city. You may not find in any other European city, my friends, such unspoiled morals and piety as in Zürich. Here at least the rules of marital fidelity are still strictly observed, and any wife who dared plainly to break them would become an object of general contempt. Here a mother considers the upbringing of her children her main function; and since even the wealthiest inhabitants of Zürich keep no more than one maid-servant every housewife has a lot to do in the home; she is not weighed down by idleness, that mother of many vices, and rarely goes visiting. Theatres, balls, masquerades, clubs, sumptuous dinners and suppers! You are unknown here. (120) Women gather only in small groups and indulge only in such pleasures as conversing and reading Gessner, Klopstock or Thomson. They dress simply and do not think about French fashion or use rouge. People do not play cards. The wise lawgivers of Zürich realized that luxury damages freedom and good morals and they tried to prevent it from percolating into their republic. The men here do not wear silk or velvet, the women do not wear diamonds or lace, and no-one wears furs in winter. It is forbidden to travel around in carriages. Houses are simply furnished. Foreign wines are consumed only for medicinal purposes (119-120). It is in the rural areas of German-speaking Switzerland, though, that the dream of the idyll is most fully realized. These areas are for the narrator a pastoral locale inhabited by people of primeval innocence who resemble the poor peasant girl Liza in Karamzin’s contemporaneous tale before the invasion of her world by the feckless, corrupted urban gentry in the person of Erast. The narrator proceeds through them in a state of ecstasy, at one with the cosmos, reconciled with a beneficent providence (from which he asks forgiveness for his youthful rebellion) (102-103), and fusing landscape and morality in his imagination. In the mountains outside Zürich, he finds a remote spot that Nature herself has guarded with high walls; here, he thinks, vice cannot penetrate (111). He experiences a state of bliss once more as he travels down the Rhine one evening in a small boat. The roaring waves swiftly bore our little boat along between the fertile banks of the Rhine. Day was turning into evening. I was so content, in such good spirits; the rocking of the boat so pleasantly stirred my blood; the sun shone down upon us so magnificently through the green lattices of the spreading trees which at various points crown the high bank; the hot gold of its rays merged so

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beautifully with the pure silver of the Rhine’s spume; secluded huts stood out so proudly among the little vineyards which constitute the wealth of the peaceable families that dwell in the simplicity of Nature – oh my friends, why were you not with me! (114) In an effusion of empathy with the delightful shepherds and tender shepherdesses of Meiringen he attempts personally to partake of the pastoral innocence of the Alpine folk by making a gift of a medallion that he has on his person to a bride whose betrothal celebrations he comes across (140). The Alpine folk, then, as represented by the simple-hearted mountain shepherds who invite him into their cabins and share their dairy produce with him (134, 136), live simple, innocent lives that are pastoral both literally and metaphorically. Karamzin’s Swiss idyll is at one point slightly marred by the sight of children begging, not because they are needy but because there is easy money to be made from tourists (125-126). Nor is his presentation of the idyll wholly without selfirony: mountain shepherds laugh at the narrator when he tells them that he admires their carefree life and that he wants to help them milk their cows (134). Nevertheless, readers seem to be encouraged by the narrator to take his representation of Switzerland more or less at face value, as a Pre-Romantic objection to modernity, rather than as a wicked irony. After all, the simple shepherd who fetches water from a mountain stream for the thirsty traveller prompts in him a wistful sadness that he was not born in those times when, he imagines, all people were shepherds and brothers. In that golden age people supposedly enjoyed all the true pleasures, such as love, friendship and delight in Nature, whereas nowadays, the narrator complains, their hearts are not at ease (137-138). At the broadest level this eighteenth-century pastoral manner might be seen as a reaction to, or escape from, the onset of the industrial revolution and the urbanization of western societies. And yet these developments did not represent an immediate threat to the Russian social fabric nor, it seems, were they at the forefront of Karamzin’s attention in his Letters. One is therefore inclined to take the Swiss idyll primarily as an antidote to, or means of insulating oneself from, modernity in its political and ethical forms, as they were developing in revolutionary France and bourgeois England. FRANCE According to Karamzin’s narrative, the Russian traveller first entered France from the German Rhineland early in August 1789 but within days moved on to Switzerland. When he finally returned to France in March 1790 he travelled to Lyon, up the Saône through Burgundy to Mâcon and Chalon-sur-Saône, then by carriage to Fontainebleau and on to Paris. He remained in the capital for some three months, during which he thoroughly explored the city and its environs. He also made trips to Versailles and to Ermenonville, where Rousseau had spent his last weeks and was buried. The stay in Paris dominates the letters on France and is the centre-piece of the Letters as a whole.

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The form of the letters on France is somewhat different from the form of those letters that relate to the narrator’s stay in Switzerland. For one thing Karamzin’s writing begins at this point to lose some of its apparent spontaneity. Although the pretence of the format of letters to friends is maintained, passages are now given headings indicating the places or types of episode described (for example, “The Louvre,” “A Meeting at the Opera,” and “Miscellany”). Moreover, narrative yields in places to description of the sort found in the guide-books to which Karamzin had recourse but whose style he had previously spurned. He interpolates in his narrative a great deal of touristic description of buildings such as the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Palais du Luxembourg and the Palais-Royal (246-251), academies (257-259), the royal library and observatory (270-271), the Invalides (271-272), the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and many Parisian churches (281-287), and the palace, gardens and zoo at Versailles (292-297). There is also a lengthy description of Parisian theatre and opera (231-242). Lest the letters should take on an unrelieved dryness Karamzin intersperses his sightseeing with passages of a crafted fictitious quality, notably what seems to be a preliminary sketch for his tale “Poor Liza:” in a deserted castle in the Bois de Boulogne the narrator encounters an old woman who has lost everything, including her beloved daughter Luiza with whom she had lived an idyllic life in a better time when people had more goodness (243). Like Fonvizin, Karamzin is conscious of the role that Paris has played for many centuries as the “model for the whole of Europe, the source of taste and fashion.” On all continents people speak of it with awe (214-215). It is likened to Calypso’s island (216; that is to say, the home of the enchantress who detains Odysseus for seven years). It is the greatest and most famous city on earth (217), the “capital of magnificence and magic” (219). Like Fonvizin again, Karamzin is somewhat disconcerted by Parisian life. Indeed his impressions of the metropolis resemble Fonvizin’s to such an extent that one wonders whether some of the images he uses are already becoming clichés in Russian representation of the western townscape. Passing through the suburb of Saint-Antoine he is shocked by the sight of people dressed in rags, poor housing and narrow, dark, dirty streets on which pedestrians are soaked by water from the gutters or splashed with mud from the road when it rains (215, 219-220). He is repelled by the constant juxtaposition of luxury and filth, rotten apples and herrings alongside a fine jeweller’s shop, the stench of dirt and blood flowing from butchers’ stalls mingling with the fragrance emanating from a parfumerie (219). The variety of objects, crowds, noise, bustle and speed of word and action are disorienting to the Russian traveller, particularly since he had become accustomed to the relatively slow pace of Swiss life, and he is overcome by a sense of his own insignificance (215, 217, 221). Nor is Karamzin much more enamoured of French society or character than Fonvizin had been. He encounters a cold politesse that he considers unattractive (274). He comes not to expect to find sincerity or a sympathetic heart in France (200). Noting the French love of public entertainment, he mockingly wonders how Parisians manage to amuse themselves over the Easter period when the theatres close for a fortnight (242). He alludes without demur to the opinion of Sterne’s Yorick that the French are “too important.” They are “frivolous” and inconstant:

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they may fall passionately in love with “truth, glory and great undertakings,” but their moments of ardour or loss of self-control can have terrible consequences. They are phrasemongers (222) and too much given to witty repartee (319-321, 384). The narrator is no more favourably impressed than Fonvizin had been by French eloquence (319). France, then, is an antipodes to German-speaking Switzerland, where society is unsophisticated and morals are pure. The contrived nature of French civilization is pointed up by a further contrast in Versailles. Here the palace gardens, laid out in the French style and awesome in their perfection, represent art (and in terms of cultural manner, Neo-Classicism). On the other hand the garden designed on the English model at the Trianon, where Marie-Antoinette amused herself with her friends, with its agreeable disorder and simple rustic beauty, represents Nature (and Pre-Romanticism) (295, 297). Not that the narrator finds it easy to choose between the conflicting currents of his day. There is no doubt that it is Rousseau, the sensitive, magnanimous creator of a good and happy natural man, who possesses those qualities that he most admires (149-153, 312). This preference is clearly expressed in his account of his pilgrimage to Rousseau’s resting-place at Ermenonville, where he finds the names of the “rural singers” Theocritus, Virgil and Thomson inscribed on a wild monument and where the props of pastoral life (reed-pipes and shepherds’ crooks and garlands) hang from the branches of trees under which Rousseau used to like to sit and rest (308). And yet he does acknowledge the merits of Voltaire, such as the power of his irony and his contribution to the struggle for religious toleration, even though he feels no warmth for him (159, 289). Nor is the narrator himself above recourse to the guile that characterizes French society, as a change in his attitude towards the women he encounters would seem to indicate. Once in France, he slips from the worship of female innocence and purity that is in keeping with his pastoral mood in Switzerland to an affected gallantry and knowing awareness of the flirtatious dimension to relations between the sexes. Besides describing the magnificence of French civilization and making observations on French society and character, Karamzin does of course address the subject of the revolution that had broken out in France while he was abroad. However, his attitude towards the French Revolution (or at least, the attitude that he takes towards it from his vantage point at the dawn of the Alexandrine age28) is not 28 It is argued by Makogonenko (who as a Soviet scholar is concerned to present the least conservative picture of his subject possible) that although Karamzin gives the appearance of having let his contemporaneous opinions stand when he came to write the letters on France, he in fact held a more indulgent view of the revolution at the time that he observed it than he did in the late 1790s when he came to compose the part of his work that dealt with it: see Berkov and Makogonenko, pp. 11-13, 20-21. Lotman and Uspenskii (pp. 556-559) also draw attention to evidence of Karamzin’s implicit expression of sympathy for the revolution in its early stages. At the same time, Lotman points out, Karamzin’s characteristic concern to accommodate opposing points of view was reflected even during the early stages of the revolution in his implicit defence, in a review of work by Kheraskov, of autocratic government: see Lotman, pp. 211-221. It should be added that it is evident from Karamzin’s fictitious dialogue between Melodor and Filalet, written in the winter of 1793-1794, by which time Louis XVI had been executed and the Jacobin terror had begun, that Karamzin was by then harbouring grave doubts as to where the humanistic values of the Enlightenment might lead: see “Melodor k Filaletu” and “Filalet k

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so straightforward as the attitude of later travel writers such as Pogodin and Herzen towards revolutionary events in their own time. The early manifestations of the French Revolution do not seem to trouble the traveller greatly. He first hears of the “latest Parisian events,” by which he means the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, while he is in Frankfurt, but he does not dwell on them (84). On arrival in France, in August, he finds that villages in Alsace are in revolt and villagers are sewing cockades on their hats.29 In Strasbourg soldiers are disobeying their officers and behaving in an unruly way in the streets and at the theatre. Outside the city there are reportedly bands of robbers pillaging monasteries. And yet the narrator seems strangely unperturbed. He finds the atmosphere quite good-natured, and having reported the public mood proceeds to describe at length the city’s majestic Gothic cathedral, from the top of whose vertiginous tower he looks down on the people who swarm about like insects on the streets below (94-95). Further echoes of the revolution reach him while he is in Switzerland. In Basel he witnesses the touching reunion of a French noble family: a mother and father who had been forced to flee their burning castle in the face of villagers threatening to kill them are found by their son and daughter in the hotel where Karamzin is staying (99-100). In Geneva, on the border with France, there are clearer rumblings in October 1789 of political events: people are talking about the decrees of the National Assembly and wealthy Genevois who have invested money in France are afraid that they will be ruined (156, 160). Even when he returns to France the following spring, though, he remains aloof from revolutionary developments, commenting in flippant mood that the French are too preoccupied with their revolution to share his interest in finding the location of a pair of lovers whose tale Sterne has told in Tristram Shandy (208). Nor do revolutionary events distract his attention from beautiful sunsets and good food and wine (213) or from the theatre and opera which he visits every day during the first month of his stay in Paris (231). The narrator does at last reflect at length on the French Revolution and take a view on it in a letter dated April 1790, after his arrival in Paris. It should not be assumed, he cautions, that the whole nation had taken part in the drama being played out in France. The vast majority looked on, made judgements, wept, laughed and applauded or whistled as at the theatre (226). The narrator’s own hostility to the common people and their tribunes now becomes firm and clear. Already in Lyon he had been cheered by the sight of women praying in a church, an indication that piety had not yet been destroyed in France (204-205). He thinks the people have become “the most terrible despot” and believes that the poor are idlers who have not wanted to work “since the age of the so called French freedom” (209210). In Paris he twice visits the Popular Assembly and reports in negative terms on the appearance, demeanour and behaviour of the members and the conduct of the debates, in which he sees not the slightest “solemnity” or “majesty” (317-319). He relates stories or makes remarks that vindicate his view of the French Revolution as folly or even “tragedy.” He warns that Greece and Rome provide lessons on the Melodoru,” in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 2, pp. 245-258. 29 i.e. knots of blue, white and red ribbon, to display support for the revolution.

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danger of revolutions and makes dark references to hemlock (the poison administered to those sentenced to death in ancient Athens) and the Tarpeian Rock (the cliff on Capitoline Hill in Rome from which traitors were thrown to their deaths). He stresses the risks of playing on the people’s grievances and warns that revolution is an “open sepulchre for virtue” (226).30 He is confident that his hero Rousseau, had he been alive, would have declared himself the “first enemy of the revolution” (312). Repelled by the audacious new republicans who have taken an axe to the sacred tree of monarchy in the vain hope of creating a better world, Karamzin defends the record of the ancien régime. The French monarchy, he maintains, had produced great rulers, great ministers and great individuals of other sorts. Under its peaceful protection the sciences and the arts had flourished, social life had been civilized, the poor man had found bread for himself (or so Karamzin claimed) and the rich man had enjoyed his surplus (227-228). He also offers a sympathetic portrait of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who, when Karamzin arrived in Paris in the spring of 1790, were still at liberty and whom he claims to have seen in church. The king he describes as composed, mild and magnanimous, a “friend of mankind,” and the queen as beautiful and majestic. He takes comfort from the reaction of the public to the young dauphin whom he says he has seen playing in the Tuileries on another occasion, concluding on the basis of this episode that the French people are still attached to the monarchy (225). Later in his narrative his indignation is aroused by the thought of the mob attempting to arrest the king and queen at Versailles in October 1789 and he compares Versailles without the court to a body without a soul (294-295). Karamzin’s argument against revolution and in favour of royalty is principally an argument from the need for political stability. Any individual with a good heart, he contends, will dream of “utopia,” and over time a golden age may indeed come about, imperceptibly, as a result of the advance of reason and enlightenment and through sound upbringing and the inculcation of good morals. However, violent disturbances, Karamzin argues, are invariably disastrous for a society, and indeed for the insurgents themselves, since they end their days on the scaffold. Wise people therefore appreciate the danger of change and live quiet lives. Any form of government is preferable to anarchy and brings peace and well-being. Every longestablished human society has been a sanctuary for good citizens and even in the most imperfect one there is a marvellous order and harmony. In any case, Karamzin weakly pleads, we should entrust ourselves to Providence, which surely has its plan and controls the hearts of rulers (226-228). In the end the sentimental traveller prevails in the Letters over the aggrieved monarchist. As he leaves France the narrator reflects that he has lived quietly and gaily there, a citizen of the world who has calmly contemplated the turbulence of Paris from an Olympian height. Neither the aristocrats nor the Jacobins have done him any harm. He has heard arguments but not taken part in them (321). Nevertheless Karamzin’s highly rhetorical and emotional remarks on the French 30

The reference is to Romans, Chapter iii, Verse 13: “Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit . . .”

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Revolution in the Letters reveal the faith in the monarchic principle of government and the instinctive conservatism that were eventually to find clear expression in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia and his History of the Russian State.31 They reflect the eighteenth-century belief, to which Fonvizin also subscribed, that virtue in the ruler and good morals in the ruler’s subjects are pre-requisites for a successful polity. (They also reflect the naive view necessarily held by proponents of enlightened absolutism that monarchs are amenable to the rational arguments of wise advisers.) At the same time the Letters reveal neither comprehension of the long-term economic and political causes of the French Revolution nor understanding – despite the vaunted capacity of the narrator to empathize with his fellow humans – for those whose grievances drive them to fight for political change. Readers of the Letters should not be surprised that after his return from abroad Karamzin, in his persona as conservative political thinker rather than sentimental cosmopolitan traveller, insisted that people have no grounds for complaining about their lot in life and reflected on the responsibilities of the Russian nobleman as serf-owner.32 ENGLAND In June 1790 Karamzin has his narrator sail from Calais to Dover and then travel by horse-drawn coach through Kent to London. (The length and danger of the crossing of The Channel, in the course of which the resilient narrator gallantly assists a seasick Englishwoman, are somewhat exaggerated, one suspects (326-327).) If we are to believe Karamzin’s narrative, he again engaged in intensive sightseeing and cultural tourism. He describes visits to Newgate Prison (340-341) and Bedlam (341-343), the Stock Exchange and the Royal Society (344-345), St. Paul’s Cathedral (346-348), the Tower of London (348-349), the British Museum (363364), the Royal Hospital for naval pensioners at Greenwich (355-356) and the amusement ground in Vauxhall Gardens, which delighted him (357). He also attended a Quakers’ meeting (343-344) and a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in Westminster Abbey, where he claims to have seen the royal family (George III was on the throne at the time) and Pitt the Younger (334-335). He says that he was present at the re-election of Fox as Member of Parliament for Westminster and that he heard an election speech by the radical politician John Horne Tooke (358-359). He attended debates in both Houses of Parliament and a sitting of the impeachment of Warren Hastings at Westminster (371-373). He also visited Richmond, Kew Gardens, Pope’s house at Twickenham, Barnet, Hampton Court and Windsor 31 Karamzin did not, however, insist that monarchy was the ideal form of government for all nations. In fact he appears to accept Rousseau’s contention that the size of a country was an important factor to consider when judging which form of government suited a country best. Thus while he saw absolutism as essential for large countries such as France (and Russia), he accepted that republican government might be suitable for small countries such as Switzerland: see Berkov and Makogonenko in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 1, p. 45. 32 “Nechto o naukakh, iskusstvakh i prosveshchenii,” ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 122-142; “Pis'mo sel'skogo zhitelia,” ibid., pp. 288-296, especially p. 296.

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Castle and its park (351-355). He seems, however, not to have strayed beyond London and its environs once he had arrived in the capital from Dover. It is especially difficult to decide how literally to take what Karamzin says about his stay in England. One is inclined to think that the section of the Letters on England contains an even less reliable record of Karamzin’s movements and experience than his accounts of the earlier parts of his journey. There would seem, for example, to be much licence or pure invention in his description of an excursion to Windsor that he claims to have made with some Russian friends. He says that he and his companions had to walk much of the way from London to Windsor (a distance of some twenty miles from central London) because no horses were available and that they consequently arrived too late in the day for the horse races that they had hoped to watch. He then implausibly claims that the party (or perhaps it was only the narrator now) wandered past the king’s daughters, who were playing outside the castle, and inspected the paintings inside (351-354). On leaving the castle he loses himself for some hours in a reverie in Windsor Park, but now he seems to be alone and whether this episode takes place immediately after his tour of the castle (in which case it must be getting very late in the day) or on another occasion is unclear (354-355). One must also doubt the truthfulness of his description of his first sight of London, on a June day from a distance of some three miles on the road from Rochester: the city is swathed in “fog” and the column of the Monument rises “through the smoke and gloom” (330).33 Nor is the image of England as fog-bound even in mid-summer, which Karamzin fondly reuses during and at the end of his stay (364, 380), the only cliché to which he resorts in his representation of England. He also offers a stylized panegyric to English women, who are likened to lilies tinged with pink (327), and vouchsafes to his Russian readers that their alleged habit of dining exclusively on roast beef or beef-steak makes the English phlegmatic, melancholy and prone to suicide (329, 383). The narrator’s seemingly increased recourse to fabrication and cliché in his letters on England may be partly explained by the fact that Karamzin never comes to know the English well, even though they have frequently appeared in his narrative in Switzerland (125, 130, 148-149, 160, 182-183) and in France (193, 211, 213, 256), where he has been disturbed by their rowdy behaviour in a hotel (324-325). This relative unfamiliarity may be due, in turn, to the fact that Karamzin has a much less sure command of English than of German and French and communication with the natives is correspondingly more difficult in England than in the German lands, Switzerland or France (338, 369). Moreover, he apparently spends much less time in the company of the native inhabitants of the country when he is in England than he does when he is in the German lands, Switzerland and France and much more time with his compatriots, including the Anglophile ambassador Vorontsov (337-338, 351, 355, 358, 360, 363). At any rate he seems 33 The trope of foggy Albion is often recycled, for example by Makarov and Herzen (both of whom claim to be observing conditions in London in August): see Korovin, p. 500, and Herzen, SS, Vol. 11, p. 10. As E. H. Carr wryly observes, the unseasonable phenomenon that Herzen claims to have witnessed was not reported in The Times: see Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1968; first published 1933), p. 107.

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now less the traveller attempting to empathize with the people among whom he finds himself, more the foreigner observing another society as an outsider. England as Karamzin’s narrator perceives it does have many positive aspects. London is less magnificent but neater, cleaner and apparently less polarized than Paris, with which the narrator compares London at length. London is beautiful! What a difference from Paris! There things are huge and filthy, here they are simple and surprisingly clean. There splendour and squalor are in eternal opposition, here there is the uniformity of general sufficiency. There the pallid residents emerge from palaces in tattered rags, here Health and Happiness emerge with a noble and tranquil air from little brick houses, Lord and artisan, cleanly dressed and almost indistinguishable. There a man makes his laboured way in a wretched cab, powdered and all dressed up, here a country squire gallops along in a handsome carriage drawn by a pair of proud horses. There it’s muddy, cramped and gloomy, here everything is dry and smooth – everywhere there’s space and light, in spite of the large number of people. (331; see also 327, 329, 336-337, 342) The narrator admires London’s street lighting (332), the politeness with which people address one another in its coffee-houses and the informality with which business is conducted (338). England as a whole seems a wealthy country densely populated by people engaged in useful activity. The road from Dover to London is full of carriages, coaches and riders; everywhere there are well-dressed people and the countryside is lush (329). As he enters London the narrator is struck by the mass of ship’s masts on the Thames and observes that London is the hub of world trade (330). Nor is he offended by such wealth, as Karamzin’s countrymen later tended to be. On the contrary, it gladdens the heart, by furnishing you with a striking example of human enterprise, of the way in which peoples become morally closer to one another, and of public enlightenment! Let the rich man, surrounded by the products of all lands, think in his pride that the principal object of commerce is to gratify his feelings! By nourishing countless numbers of people commerce nourishes activity in the world and conveys from one part of the world to another useful inventions of the human mind, new ideas and new ways of making life agreeable. (336) The narrator even celebrates the invention of money, which he thinks brings many benefits, and muses that a piece of gold, or rather a piece of paper sent from Moscow to London, acts “like a magic talisman,” endowing him with power over people and things (355). The narrator also finds much to respect in English law, institutions and culture. He applauds English legislators for their humanity and for taking every precaution to protect the innocent. He describes at some length, and with evident approval, the procedure of trial by jury, the right of defendants to object to the presence on the jury of men who might be biased against them, the opportunity afforded to both prosecution and defence to put their cases, the practice of calling witnesses, the

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judge’s summing-up, the retirement of the jury to consider their verdict “solely according to the dictates of conscience,” and the onus on the judge to sentence strictly in accordance with the provisions of the law. It pleases him that under this judicial system an innocent man may be saved by a “dim sense of truth” that runs contrary to the evidence (339-340). Indeed the English reluctance to throw a person into prison without irrefutable proof of guilt must have seemed attractive to a man coming from a country where application of the laws was capricious and the judiciary notoriously venal (360).34 Sight of the Magna Carta in the British Museum prompts him to reflect on the political and personal liberty that the English enjoy thanks to their political system: what I found most interesting of all was the original of Magna Carta, or the famous agreement that the English concluded with their King John in the thirteenth century, which serves as the basis of their constitution. Ask an Englishman what its chief benefits are. He will tell you: “I live where I want; I am assured of what I have; I fear nothing but the laws.” Give a gloss on Magna Carta: in it the king conferred these rights on the English on oath. And when? At a time when all other European peoples were as yet sunk in dismal barbarism. (364) He notes toleration of religious dissent (343) and praises England’s charitable institutions, particularly the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, where former sailors are well cared for (355-356). As for English letters, he admires the historical writing of Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, the descriptive poetry of Thomson and the novels of Fielding and Richardson (368-369). Shakespeare, whom he sets above the French Neo-Classical dramatists (233), he reveres on account of the plausibility of his characters, the interest of his plots and his psychological insight (368-369; see also 90, 205). Most positive of all in Karamzin’s account of England is his rosy representation of English domestic life as a “picture of good morals and family happiness.” Indeed it is as if he now transfers the idyll that had been enacted by the innocent Alpine folk in Switzerland to the English aristocratic and bourgeois hearth. This idyll cannot be realized quite in the city itself, which is a seat of vice. Instead the scene shifts to some village outside the city, where there are cottages entwined with roses up to the roof and shaded by dense trees, in which well-to-do Londoners live, transforming themselves into country-dwellers in the summer months. Every Sunday, so he claims, the narrator goes to some church outside the city to hear a sermon and to gaze at the contented married couples praying merely for the preservation of what they have. From church the family goes home to its cottage with a little garden that reminds the narrator of the Eden in Milton’s epic, but without the serpent of temptation, for here the women have no adulterous relationships. The English wife – unlike the women whom Fonvizin had observed 34 At the same time this respect for the law helped in the narrator’s opinion to explain the high incidence in England of footpads, highwaymen, housebreakers and pickpockets who were unlikely to be apprehended unless caught red-handed and in the presence of witnesses (Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, p. 360).

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in Italy – strolls arm in arm with her husband, not with a lover, or cicisbeo (Karamzin uses the same word as Fonvizin). She is an exemplary mother and spouse: during the day she will be found at her handiwork or a book or the piano, reading or writing or tutoring her children in anticipation of the moment when her husband returns from his business to the bosom of his family. The perceived purity of English private life in general and of English women in particular characterizes the aristocracy as well as the middle classes whom Karamzin seems in the main to be observing. It is the ability to enjoy family life over and above their achievements in trade, science and architecture that marks the English out in Karamzin’s eyes as an enlightened people (364-367). Karamzin’s picture of English domestic tranquillity and innocence bolsters the strong preference that he harbours for private life in the home over public life in society. He does not suggest, he pleads, that marriage should serve to confine people to the home and cut them off from society, for which they have a need. However, social life as he conceives of it consists in the sharing of ideas and feelings within a close circle of friends of one’s choice and those, Karamzin contends, are to be found primarily among one’s relations. If he envies his ancestors anything then it is their attachment to those close to them, an attachment, one may infer, that is under threat in the modern age. For “sweet unions of kinship” are the “firmest buttress of good morals.” An idyllic family life may therefore afford protection against the dissipation to which spiritual emptiness can lead and which the Russian traveller seems to associate with his native beau monde. His observation of idealized English womanhood gives him grounds for upbraiding women who prefer social self-display to being with their children and fall into temptation. (His moralizing is reminiscent of that of Fonvizin’s Starodum in The Minor, for whom bad morals stem from poor parental example.) Men too are taken to task for preferring to be “shrewish slaves rather than intelligent, courteous, civil masters of the tender sex.” Like his idyllic representation of Switzerland, Karamzin’s reflections in his account of England on the superiority of private domestic life over public social life satisfy a Rousseauesque craving for innocence and simplicity and seem to foreshadow Lev Tolstoi’s juxtaposition of metropolitan society and the rural hearth. They also of course expose the oppressively patriarchal nature of the romantic conservative vision, in which the “gentle female heart” is expected always obediently to follow the male example (366-367). In spite of the fact that the narrator thus finds much that is positive in England, in the final analysis he is surprisingly cool towards the English way of life and English character and even detects pronounced negative features that will become stereotypical in Russian travel writing. He is no advocate of English democracy or the limitation of royal powers: his account of the House of Commons is purely descriptive and the tone of a passage on Cromwell is wholly critical (348).35 He discovers a seamy side of London life: a letter which begins with description of an innocent and gentle young maid in the narrator’s lodgings ends with reference to 35 The narrator makes the point, though, that all civil institutions must be in conformity with the character of the people for whom they are designed: what is good in England may be bad in another land (ibid., p. 383), and the reverse must also apply.

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the dregs of society in their underground taverns and with remarks that hint that children are hired out by their mothers as prostitutes (370-371). As for the national character, in general Karamzin’s narrator finds the English proud, cold and unwelcoming, and he does not really enjoy their society, in spite of the quality of some of their customs and their achievements in art and learning (339, 345, 355). In their colonies, he is sure, they behave like wild beasts (372). Most importantly, the narrator associates the Englishman’s ability to create wealth with a moneygrubbing spirit. He is straightaway convinced that he has been fleeced by customs officers in Dover and is irritated when, on arrival at his hotel there, he is surrounded by a pack of men clamouring for payment for the trivial services that they have offered him since he disembarked (328). He deplores what he takes to be an English fondness for showing off wealth (339). Finally, surveying a panorama of the countryside around London, he jibs at the sight, wherever one looks, of fences that demarcate people’s private property (378). This coolness towards the English causes the narrator radically to revise the view of them that he says he has held prior to his visit to their country. He had felt on arrival that he was entering a part of the world that he had loved since childhood (327). As a boy, he says, he had thought that to be an Englishman was to be brave, magnanimous, sensitive and truly human. However, having now observed the English at close quarters he has come to think that the preconception must have been implanted in him by fiction and that it is false. It is not just that he cannot bear the damp, gloomy climate of their country or its fog and coal smoke. He also finds the English character unattractive or even, in some respects, repellent. Enlightened, sober-minded, well-informed, honest and reliable the English may be, but Karamzin also perceives them as taciturn and dull. If he had to pin an epithet on them then he would call them “morose” (ugriumymi). Their assertion of freedom to live as they wish and to do as they like, so long as it does not run counter to the welfare of others, makes them somewhat eccentric. In moral terms they are like wild oaks, all of a kind but all different. They also exhibit a certain xenophobia: the expression “French dog,” which he thinks used to be applied by the London rabble to any foreigner, may now have gone out of fashion, but in general, he believes, the English consider foreigners as “imperfect, pitiable people.” Worst of all, in commerce, politics and their personal affairs the English are egoists who weigh up all things in terms of personal profit. They are swayed more by their minds than by their hearts, and mind always directs itself towards self-interest, like a magnet towards the north. This stereotypical definition of English character, provided by the narrator in the concluding pages of his Letters, just before he returns to his native land, implicitly establishes a foil for the character of the lively, expressive, expansive Russians, who are in the narrator’s mind throughout his travels and to whose characterization in the Letters we should finally turn (380-384).

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Chapter 3 RUSSIA

Although at a superficial level the subject-matter of the Letters of a Russian Traveller is of course the western European lands that the traveller visits, at a deeper level the Letters are also concerned with Russia. For not only are they pervaded by nostalgia for the Russia that the traveller has left behind; they are also strewn with reflections on Russian history, culture and language and on the relationship of Russia to the civilization that the narrator is observing. It is clear from the first page of the Letters that the traveller carries with him on his journey the emotional baggage of his homeland. He yearns for the friends from whom he tearfully parts and for familiar places and objects, such as the writingtable at which he gave expression to his immature thoughts and feelings and the window at which he would sit in melancholy in the rays of the rising sun (5). Leaving his beloved homeland is a means of appreciating his attachment to it, and he pines for it (108-109, 193). Wherever he has travelled he has borne with him his consciousness of being Russian and a pride in his nationality that reflects the growth of empire from Peter’s time. He points out to his readers that before Peter the city of Narva was merely a border town (9). He notes that Russian troops succeeded in taking the citadel in Memel in 1757, during the Seven Years War, although it was very strong (13). He comes across reminders of the more or less recent presence of Russian imperial troops, for example near Danzig (27) and in Berlin (35). He encounters a heightened foreign awareness of and curiosity about Russia (52), an interest in the war that Russia was currently prosecuting against the Turks (18, 34) and fear of Russian military might as represented by the Cossacks (30). He tries to make German scholars whom he meets in Leipzig aware of the developing literature of his country, referring them to such works as Kheraskov’s epic poems and reading them some Russian verses in the hope of demonstrating their harmony (66). He echoes Lomonosov in taking pride in the native wealth and supple versatility of the Russian language. Honour and glory to our language, which in its native wealth, with virtually no foreign admixture, flows like a proud, majestic river: it roars and thunders, and all of a sudden, if need be, it becomes muted and babbles like a gentle brook and sweetly seeps into the soul, forming every metre that is contained within the rise and fall of the human voice!36 (370) He accordingly deplores the use of French in Russian high society: apropos of the unwillingness of an English lady whom he meets in London to speak French to him, he remarks that Russians too should be ashamed to behave like parrots and apes and that they should develop their own language as a vehicle for the expression of their thoughts (338). What this emergent nation lacks, however, is a good historical narrative of her own. Karamzin believes that this deficiency is due not to any intrinsic dullness in Russian history but to the fact that no Russian writer of sufficient ability has yet 36

See Lomonosov’s preface to his Russian Grammar, in Lomonosov, PSS, Vol. 7, p. 391.

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attempted to produce an account of it. To provide a history of Russia that would be of interest to foreigners as well as Russians is therefore an urgent patriotic task. A narrative was required that would enable Russia to represent herself as she wished to be represented to foreigners who were ignorant of her or who had failed to understand her correctly. Historiography thus conceived is not an accurate scholarly record of past events. Rather it is an imaginative exploration of national identity, a form of literary creation akin to fiction in which sensibility is exhibited. In these respects it resembles the travel writing – and also the historical tales – on which Karamzin is engaged early in his career as a man of letters. Indeed historiography for Karamzin is complementary to travel writing, inasmuch as it attempts directly to characterize an object, Russia, that in his travel writing is largely characterized more obliquely by reference to perceptions of other countries. In order to produce this characterization Russian historians would require skills which the artist, especially the sentimental artist, was expected to possess, such as taste, psychological insight and an ability to write with feeling, as well as intellect. They might enliven and embellish their material as an artist would. They would also be selective, passing quickly over what is “unimportant,” such as the genealogy of the early Russian princes, internecine strife and the Polovtsian raids of the Kievan period and dwelling on events and features which reveal the “nature of the Russian people and the character of [Russia’s] ancient heroes and other outstanding individuals” (252-253). A historical narrative of the sort that Karamzin has in mind, written by a historian endowed with a critical, philosophical mind and “noble eloquence” like Tacitus and the British historians whom Karamzin admired, would establish Russia’s place within the European family of nations that Karamzin the traveller was exploring. To this end Karamzin envisages comparisons between certain western and Russian rulers. Vladimir (under whom Christianity was adopted by the Kievan state, in 988 according to the chronicles), the traveller contends, is Russia’s Charlemagne. Ivan the Terrible, who crushed the boyars, is its Louis XI. Boris Godunov, the regent whose ill-fated reign (1598-1605) preceded the Time of Troubles, is its Cromwell (252-253). There is, however, one Russian sovereign, Peter the Great, for whom Karamzin can find no western counterpart, or indeed any counterpart anywhere, and the absence of his like offers a welcome presentiment of Russia’s superiority over its western neighbours. Like Prokopovich, Kantemir and Lomonosov before him, Karamzin portrays Peter as a peerless and flawless exemplar of the enlightened absolute monarch. His narrator makes frequent reference to Peter in the Letters. He is moved (to tears, of course) by a French melodrama in which Peter is extolled (239-241). In Windsor Castle he dwells admiringly on a portrait of Peter painted by Kneller while Peter was in London (353). He bolsters his approval of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich by quoting a remark attributed to Peter during the monarch’s stay in London (356). Most importantly, the bronze statue of Louis XIV in Lyon prompts him to offer a comparison of Peter with the Sun King, from which Peter emerges as much the greater sovereign.

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Chapter 3 In the middle of a large square, bedecked with dense rows of trees and surrounded on all sides by magnificent mansions, there stands on a marble pedestal a bronze statue of Louis XIV, [a statue] of the same size as the monument to our Russian Peter, although these two heroes were in no wise equal in the magnitude of their spirit and deeds. His subjects brought glory to Louis, whereas Peter brought glory to his subjects; the former contributed up to a point to the progress of enlightenment, [whereas] the latter, like a radiant god of light, appeared on mankind’s horizon and cast light on the profound darkness around him. During the reign of the former thousands of hardworking Frenchmen were forced to leave their native land, [whereas] the latter drew skilled and useful foreigners to his state. The former I respect as a strong King, the latter I revere as a great man, a Hero, a benefactor of mankind and my own benefactor. (198-199)

He approves the idea of placing a statue to Peter on a wild rock – he is alluding to Falconet’s recently erected bronze horseman on the bank of the Neva – because the rock strikingly symbolizes the state of Russia before Peter’s transformation of the country (198-200). It was Peter who by the exercise of his will and might brought about the sudden and rapid transformation that Russians had undergone in the eighteenth century (253-254). Karamzin’s view of Peter, the westernizing tsar, cannot be disentangled from his attitude towards the more general question of cultural borrowing, which had become intensely topical in the reign of Catherine and had so perplexed Fonvizin. Karamzin’s acceptance of westernization finds expression in many ways in the Letters. On the jocular level it informs his favourable answers to questions about Russia put to him by a French noblewoman who wonders in which country French nobles fleeing from the revolution should seek refuge. He boasts to her of the speed with which Russians have acquired enlightenment from their western teachers and have developed polite society and all its pleasures (290-291). On a more serious level Karamzin’s preparedness to appropriate from the west what Russians might find useful is implicit in his incorporation of numerous loanwords in his text. He also addresses the issue of borrowing explicitly. It was quite reasonable, he argues in defence of Peter, to seek out what had already been discovered; indeed it would have been unreasonable for Russians not to have built ships, formed a regular army and established academies and factories on the grounds that they themselves had not invented these things. He also denies that Russia has been imitating the west in a servile way or borrowing things that were unnecessary to her. In order to prove his point he launches into a defence of Peter’s insistence that his nobles adopt western dress and shave off their beards. Peter, he argues, declared war on all ancient Russian ways not merely because they were coarse and outdated in themselves but also because they obstructed the introduction of other, more important and useful novelties. It was necessary to overcome inveterate Russian obstinacy in order to make Russians “flexible” and capable of learning and borrowing. He does not believe, though, that such borrowing will imperil the native self or diminish Russian individuality. Indeed he is openly dismissive of concerns

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that the Russian character might be changed as a result of westernization or that Russia might lose its “moral physiognomy” (253-254). Karamzin’s attitude towards westernization and his reverence for Peter suggest an enlightened cosmopolitanism. What is national, he proclaims, is as nothing compared to what is common to all mankind. It is more important for Russians to be human beings than to be Slavs (254). This declaration chimes with the narrator’s proud profession of empathy with all fellow humans. And yet perhaps we should not take Karamzin’s apparent cosmopolitanism too literally. For it does not sit easily with the romantic idealization of pre-Petrine Muscovy in the contemporaneous historical tale “Natal'ia, the Boyar’s Daughter.” Here another narrator expresses affection for those bearded ancestors who are disparaged in the Letters and looks back nostalgically on a time when Russians “attired themselves in their own clothes, walked with their own gait, lived according to their own custom, and spoke their own language in accordance with their own heart.”37 Nor in the final analysis is Russian participation in the cultural and intellectual life common to all mankind an end in itself. Rather it is a means of realizing the ambitious national intention to “get on level terms” (sravniat'sia) with other nations in order in due course to “surpass” (prevzoiti) them. It was for this reason that Peter had drawn back the curtain that concealed the achievements of human reason from Russians, with the result that within just a few years the Russians had almost caught up (dognali) with the Germans, French and English, who at the beginning of Peter’s reign, Karamzin surmises, had been at least six centuries ahead of them (253254).38 This vocabulary of drawing level with, surpassing and overtaking, which was to become such a pronounced feature of Russian political discourse over the following two centuries, discloses the core of the Letters and reveals in embryonic form a pragmatic Russian Westernism that was no less patriotic than the varieties of Russian nationalism that would shortly spring up. It should be added, finally, that Karamzin, as a representative of an emergent nation, draws some comfort from the cyclical view of history that was fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century. Musing on the ages that it has taken to turn the primeval environment that he sees along the banks of the Saône in Burgundy into the opulent landscape that he observes, the narrator contemplates the possibility that in centuries to come this region, now so full of the fruits of human industry, will have degenerated into a habitat for wild beasts. For civilizations such as those of ancient Syria, Egypt and Greece rise and fall; peoples are like spring 37

“Natal'ia, boiarskaia doch',” in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 1, p. 622. In an article published in The Messenger of Europe in 1802 Karamzin seemed to retreat somewhat from the proto-Westernist position adopted in the Letters. It was now time, he argued, for Russians to stop imitating other peoples and to become themselves: see “O liubvi k otechestvu,” in Karamzin, IS, Vol. 2, pp. 280-287, especially p. 287. Later, in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, Karamzin is critical of Peter for “uprooting ancient customs,” “weakening the spirit of brotherly national unity,” imitating foreign practices, corrupting Russian civic virtues, using tyrannical methods and founding a new capital in the northern wastes: see Karamzin’s Memoir, pp. 120-127 (Pipes’s translation). On Karamzin’s changing view of Peter’s borrowing see Plekhanov’s essay “M. P. Pogodin i bor'ba klassov,” in G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniia 3rd ed., 24 Vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1923-1927), Vol. 23, pp. 69-71. 38

100 Chapter 3 flowers, which in time fade. This mournful mood has been captured by Ossian, whose Fingal the narrator starts to read during his travels (68, 71). Sooner or later, the narrator suggests, perhaps with a tinge of Schadenfreude, the fate may befall even France, which is at present the finest country on earth in many respects. However, declining civilizations are replaced by fresh ones. More specifically northern Europe, currently represented by Germanic culture, is assuming the position once held by the lands of Homer and Plato, which are now populated, according to Karamzin, by ignorant and barbaric peoples (212). And it is as a “northern barbarian,” that is to say the representative of fresh cultural forces, that Karamzin presents himself, especially when he playfully casts himself in the role of Anacharsis, the young Scythian hero of Barthélemy’s popular moralizing novel who for the sake of his education wanders through Greece in the fourth century BC. Indeed Barthélemy himself, who is said to love “the north,” obligingly affirms the narrator’s identification with Anacharsis when he receives him in Paris, or so the narrator would have us believe. Anacharsis, Barthélemy tells the narrator, is “not foreign” to his Russian guest, for the narrator too is young and travels to enrich his mind (251-252). Thus together with the mantle of a noble traveller the narrator receives a promise of his people’s futurity. *

*

*

The fact that the Letters of a Russian Traveller were written and published over a long period in which epochal historical events were taking place makes it hard to be sure whether Karamzin himself, at the time of his journey, held the opinions that they seem to convey. Moreover, Karamzin’s broad toleration, or his desire to present himself as possessing it, lend his thought an eclectic quality that also makes it difficult to pin down his personal views. Several conflicting currents swirl through the Letters. Karamzin’s distaste for mercenariness and for a strong sense of private property seems to run counter to his celebration of trade and the circulation of money. His declared compassion and his gentle pacifism do not sit well with his pride in Russian military prowess and imperial conquest. As a citizen of the world who rises above national partisanship he wishes to partake of universal human achievement but he also patriotically advertises the credentials of his own emergent people. No wonder Herzen once observed that Karamzin’s thought lacked coherence, an overarching idea, or deep conviction.39 It also has to be re-emphasized that Karamzin is not a reliable, more or less objective observer of the western nations he visits. He adopts various poses, such as that of melancholy traveller, or simply affects to lose himself like a grain of sand “in a whirlwind of predetermined contingencies” (332). He allows his imagination free play. The travelogue in his hands is a vehicle for fictions as well as facts, albeit fictions that have a greater seeming authenticity than the novel. His text is strewn

39

Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 7, p. 60.

Karamzin: The Letters of a Russian Traveller 101 with clichés and mannered characterizations. In representing the various nationalities he encounters he resorts to fanciful generalizations (384). Nevertheless the stylized landscape that Karamzin creates with the help of clichés, stereotypes, foreign literary models and of course his own considerable literary skill took on a reality of its own, as skilful literary representations do, and had a powerful effect on Russian perceptions of various forms of the European other. The French, in this landscape, have created a glittering civilization, but owing to their volatility are in danger of destroying it. The English may seem industrious, enlightened and refined, as Moritz has found them (46), and their law, literature and family life are admirable, but they are at bottom calculating, mercenary egoists. The Swiss – or at least the German-speaking Swiss – seem still to live in a golden age of morals, which, alas, the political and economic currents of the modern world are sweeping away elsewhere. On the other hand, the Russians themselves possess attributes that promise a radiant future, such as military prowess, a rich and supple language, literary potentiality, a history as capable as any other of being recounted in a poetic narrative and a past ruler of incomparable genius. In order to fulfil their destiny they must continue down the path that Peter had shown them, assimilating the fruits of western culture and especially of the Enlightenment. Westernization did not threaten their national identity but would enable them to surpass western achievement. Enthusiasm for cultural borrowing did not imply advocacy of political transformation, though: the Letters of a Russian Traveller contain no radical ideas that are discordant with the overt conservatism of Karamzin’s later thought, in which he argued, as Herzen interpreted him, that “savage peoples love freedom and independence, civilized peoples order and tranquillity.”40

40

Ibid., p. 61; see also ibid., p. 427.

CHAPTER 4

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands

EUROPEAN POLITICS AND CULTURE AFTER THE NAPOLEONIC WARS The thought of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian travellers to whom we now turn (Pogodin, Botkin and Herzen) must be set in the context of the political, economic, cultural and intellectual developments of the half century that followed the French Revolution, the great historical event that had helped to determine the way in which Karamzin and his contemporaries looked upon the world. France, the nation which had established a republic and prosecuted a revolutionary war culminating in the invasion of Russia in 1812, had been defeated in the course of 1813 and Napoleon’s Grand Empire had ceased to exist with the French retreat across the Rhine. In March 1814 Napoleon had abdicated and in 1815, following his escape from exile in Elba and his further defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he had been dispatched to the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) the victorious European powers (Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia) set about bringing peace and order to the continent by reviving the principle of monarchic legitimacy and taking steps to forestall future French expansion. To these ends the Bourbon dynasty was restored in France in the person of Louis XVIII (although the new king was forced to accept a charter sanctioning the principles of 1789 and the Napoleonic reforms). In 1814 another Bourbon, Ferdinand VII, regained the Spanish throne, which he had briefly occupied in 1808, and repudiated a liberal constitution that had been accepted in 1812. In Naples Ferdinand IV, who had ruled there until he took flight from Napoleon in 1806, was reinstalled in 1816 as Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, and reintroduced absolute rule (until forced by a rising in 1820 to grant a constitution). To the north of France William I became King of the United Netherlands and to the south-east the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was strengthened by the restoration of the house of Savoy. The states of central Italy once more came under the temporal rule of the pope. In central and eastern Europe the hereditary monarchs of Austria, Prussia and Russia, the so-called “northern courts,” all of which had national minorities within their territory and portions of a dismembered Poland to control, had a common interest in preserving the European order that had been restored. 103

104 Chapter 4 It was not long, though, before the Concert of Europe to which the Austrian, British, Prussian and Russian governments had pledged themselves at Vienna broke down, as a result of British reluctance to intervene in order to suppress nationalistic and revolutionary agitation wherever it might erupt. In any case the survival of the order cherished by the conservative statesmen of eastern Europe, led by the Austrian state chancellor Metternich,1 was imperilled by the continuing vitality of national, economic and social forces that these statesmen could not entirely control. In 1821 the Greek subjects of the Turkish Empire revolted and eventually they succeeded in creating an independent Greek state, which was guaranteed by Britain, France and Russia in their London Protocol of February 1830. This successful outcome to a struggle for the establishment of a nation state from within an ailing despotic empire gave heart to nationalists and liberals elsewhere and helped to encourage revolutionary disturbances in many parts of Europe in 1830. These disturbances began in France, where Charles X, the inept younger brother and successor of Louis XVIII, who had died in 1824, pursued a policy of favouring the old nobility against the rising bourgeoisie and attempted a coup d'état, tightening censorship, dissolving the Chamber of Deputies and disenfranchising three-quarters of the electorate. An insurrection staged by workers, students and the petty bourgeoisie over the period 27-29 July 1830 led to the abdication of Charles and the enthronement in his place of his cousin, Louis-Philippe, the head of the Orléans branch of the royal family and the favoured candidate of constitutional monarchists headed by the historian Thiers.2 The July Monarchy, as the regime of Louis-Philippe came to be known, represented the interests of the upper bourgeoisie whose tastes this “Citizen-King” was thought to share. The overthrow of the regime of Charles X in France helped to precipitate uprisings or unrest in 1830-1831 in Belgium, Switzerland, the papal states of central Italy, various parts of the German Confederation and Poland. In the states of north-western Europe, where representative institutions already existed and a powerful middle class was developing, political groups of a liberal complexion which supported some form of constitutional government made progress as a result of the turbulence of 1830-1831, whereas in the domains of the authoritarian monarchs of central and eastern Europe Metternich’s system remained intact. Thus, in the former of these two blocs, an electoral law of 1831 enfranchised all French males over the age of twenty-five who paid at least two hundred francs in direct tax and almost doubled the electorate. The rebellion of August 1830 in Brussels soon led to the recognition of Belgium as an independent state ruled by a constitutional monarch. Most Swiss cantons established more liberal constitutions than they had had before. In Britain, it should be added, the Reform Bill introduced by Earl Grey’s Whig government in 1832 provided for redistribution of seats in the House of Commons in such a way as to give political representation to areas with a growing population, especially the great cities of the north and midlands, and thereby helped to bring about a shift of political power from the large landowner 1

Metternich was Chancellor from 1821, having been minister of foreign affairs from 1809. See David H. Pinkney, The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 2

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 105 and country squire to the newer industrial aristocracy and urban middle class. In the central and eastern bloc, on the other hand, opposition was soon subdued. The liberal measures promised by princes of the German Confederation in response to the disturbances of 1830 did not materialize. Risings in the Italian cities of Modena, Parma and Rome were suppressed by Austrian troops. In Poland the rebellion had been quelled by Russian forces by the autumn of 1831. The political and ideological division that was thus opening up between north-western Europe and central and eastern Europe, and the nature of government on the two sides of this divide, has been well described by Geoffrey Bruun. The peoples of north-western Europe, with the British in the lead, had developed institutions of representative government. But in central and eastern Europe the older system of monarchical despotism still fought to maintain itself; and the disposal of the national revenue, the command of the army, the censorship of the press, and the liberties of the individual remained in the hands of ministers who were responsible not to the nation but to the Crown. In the reactionary states of Europe the people remained subjects, in the liberal states they had become citizens.3 The existence of this growing political divide is of course registered in the accounts of nineteenth-century Russian travellers to the west and the divide becomes an important factor in the travellers’ attempts to fashion a contrastive identity for their own nation. However, in order fully to understand the generally negative response of these travellers to the western political institutions and activity that they observe, it needs to be borne in mind that the democracy that was taking root in the economically and politically more advanced nations in the midnineteenth century was still very limited by twenty-first-century standards. In the period between 1830 and 1848 – the period in which Pogodin, Botkin and Herzen all arrived in the west for the first time – only a very small proportion of the adult male population was entitled to vote in France or Britain. Even after the French electoral reform of 1831 the number of Frenchmen who were enfranchised was a mere 166,000, or 0.5% of the population.4 Similarly the British Reform Act of 1832 served to increase the size of the electorate only by some 217,000, to approximately 650,000 (less than 4% of the total to which the population of the country had risen by 1841), since in Britain too the right to vote was subject to a property qualification.5 It is also worth noting in this connection that none of the demands made by the Chartists in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s (demands which included universal manhood suffrage, secret ballot and the abolition of a property qualification for those standing for election to the House of Commons) was met at this time. Thus while it is true that the propertied classes in France and Britain 3 Geoffrey Bruun, Nineteenth-Century European Civilization, 1815-1914 (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 23. 4 As incomes increased the number rose to a little over 240,000 in 1846, or 0.7% of the population; see H. A. C. Collingham, with R. S. Alexander, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 18301848 (London and New York: Longman, 1988), p. 71. 5 David Thomson. England in the Nineteenth Century. The Pelican History of England, Vol. 8. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 74.

106 Chapter 4 secured better political representation in the 1830s than they had enjoyed before, the social revolution and redistribution of wealth that extensive electoral reform might entail remained a distant prospect. To their complaints about the political under-representation of the mass of the population and consequent social inequality critics of mid-nineteenth-century parliamentary democracy could add others: for example, lack of continuity in government policy, frequent political deadlock and the seeming inability of politicians to remedy serious social problems. On the broadest level the political and social developments in western Europe on whose effects mid-nineteenth-century Russian travellers would comment were the product of an economic revolution that was already beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century but whose consequences did not become entirely clear until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This economic revolution is associated with the mechanization of industry, improvements in agricultural methods and food production, the advent of steam transportation, the building of better roads and the development of a financial system that supported entrepreneurial activity by the provision of loans and flotation of stocks. Visitors to the west, or at least to Britain and France, were confronted by various outward signs of the revolution. The stagecoach was being replaced by railway carriages drawn by a steam-engine. Population was flowing rapidly into the towns. There was a conspicuous increase in social problems such as unemployment, poverty, crime, drunkenness and prostitution. The townscape, with its new municipal buildings and public amenities as well as its disfiguring factories, was changing. The economic revolution was accompanied, indeed partly generated, by rapid advances in scientific knowledge – in such fields as engineering, physics, chemistry and geology – and by the development of an empirical, positivistic way of looking on the world which resulted in numerous discoveries and inventions. And yet the artists and thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century stubbornly refused to celebrate the mundane practical achievements of their age or its pragmatic, utilitarian spirit. As the material benefits of the rationalistic outlook became apparent, so Romanticism flourished, setting feeling, imagination, intuition and inspiration above reason and calculation and seeking escape from current reality in flights of exoticism, orientalism and medievalism. In fact the realm of letters in this age is notable for its critique of the industrial, increasingly urbanized world in which the bourgeoisie was in the ascendant. This critique came from both ends of the political spectrum. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie could be viewed with haughty disdain by an aristocracy who dreamed nostalgically of a pre-industrial, predominantly rural society, real or imagined, in which its privilege was not challenged. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie was detested in the name of social justice by those who claimed to speak on behalf of its victims, the exploited working class, and who looked forward to a day when an egalitarian utopia might come into being. The anti-rationalist and anti-bourgeois mood of European literary culture in the first half of the nineteenth century was informed by a poetic and sympathetic interest in the common people or “folk.” This interest had originated among European intellectuals, as Peter Burke has shown, in the late eighteenth and early

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 107 nineteenth centuries. It was stimulated in particular by an essay of 1778 in which the German philosopher Herder argued that among ancient peoples, such as the Hebrews, Greeks and northern European peoples of early times, poetry was a divine expression of the life of an organic community unspoiled by modern mores. Jacob Grimm contended in a similar spirit that popular poetry was not the work of a single author but of a people as a whole, and that it was a natural phenomenon that simply grew, a “poetry of nature” (Naturpoesie). These ideas spawned collections of national folksongs in, for example, Finland, Germany, Russia, Serbia and Sweden. Other forms of popular literature became fashionable too, such as satirical broadsheets, chapbooks, puppet plays and folktales, the most notable early example of which was the collection of “fairy tales” published by the Grimm brothers in 1812. This enthusiasm for popular culture was reflected in the arts (witness the Russian literary vogue for the ballad in the early nineteenth century and the use of folk motifs in Russian opera from the 1830s). The discovery of the common people, incidentally, was an enterprise in which travellers could participate. The tour of the Western Isles of Scotland undertaken by Johnson and Boswell, for instance, to which reference was made in the introduction, had what now seems the somewhat precious purpose of speculating “upon the remains of pastoral life” and observing the primitive inhabitants of the Highlands who reminded the travellers of Indians.6 Looking at this surge of interest in popular culture as an aspect of a movement in learned, elite culture, Burke finds that what is new in Herder and the Grimms and their followers is, first, the emphasis on the people, and second, their belief that “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc.” were all part of a whole, expressing the spirit of a particular nation. In this sense [popular culture] was discovered – or was it invented? – by a group of German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth century.7 Burke advances many possible reasons, and reasons of different sorts (aesthetic, intellectual and political), for this discovery or invention.8 (The reasons pertain as much to Russia as to the other nations to which Burke refers, most of which, like Russia, were situated on the cultural periphery of Europe.) The enthusiasm for popular culture represented a revolt against “art” as artifice. It set great store by what was construed as natural and simple, even wild and primitive, and thus broke free at last from the wearisome constraints of Classicism. (The vogue for Shakespeare and Ossian, for both of whom Karamzin expressed admiration, it will be recalled, was indicative of this revolt.) Equally the enthusiasm for popular culture represented a rebuff to the Enlightenment, with its elitism and respect for reason. In many countries it was also associated with the rise of nationalism. For as 6 See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), Chapter 1, and Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, Ll. D., ed. by R. W. Chapman (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 90, 250. 7 Burke, p. 8. 8 Ibid., pp. 9-14.

108 Chapter 4 Burke argues with particular reference to the Belgians, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Scots and Serbs, it amounted to a series of “nativistic” movements in the sense of organized attempts by societies which were under foreign domination to revive their traditional culture. Thus it could serve as an instrument with which to counter French cultural domination in late-eighteenth-century Spain, to oppose French hegemony in early-nineteenth-century Germany after the Napoleonic invasion, to restore pride in Sweden after the loss of Finland to Russia in 1809, and at the same time to allay anxiety among the Finns about loss of cultural identity under Russian sovereignty.9 That is not to say that all apparent traces of popular cultures that were detected by European intellectuals were authentic. For the discoverers’ records were strewn with vague assumptions and misconceptions or highly questionable assertions about the nature of popular culture, especially the antiquity of the traditions that were supposedly being brought to light and their freedom from contamination by the urban, learned or alien ways to which this predominantly rural culture was being contrasted.10 But then authenticity, or mere scholarly accuracy, mattered much less, to the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia at least, than the poetic and in the last analysis political potentiality of insights into popular culture as a means of constructing a conception of nationhood. RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE AGE OF NICHOLAS I It is perhaps axiomatic that in an autocratic polity the personality of the autocrat, or of the autocrat’s most powerful ministers, mentors or advisers, leaves a firm imprint on the nation. Even when measured by the standards of such polities, though, the reign of Nicholas was notable, or so it seemed to Nicholas’s contemporaries, for the degree to which the dominating personality of the Emperor affected the character of Russian life. An austere, humourless, unforgiving man, Nicholas valued form and appearances. He had a passion for order and regimentation which he sought to apply far beyond the military milieu (in which he personally felt most at ease), extending the requirement that his subjects wear uniforms, for example, to university students. He demanded blind obedience. Driven by powerful religious conviction and a sense of duty and convinced that he enjoyed divine authority for his actions, he devoted his life to battle with every internal and external force that seemed to him to threaten his Empire and the principles of autocracy and Orthodoxy on which he believed it was based. Indeed he saw it as his mission to defend monarchic regimes beyond his borders as well as his own and came to be known as the “gendarme of Europe.” The way in which Nicholas exercised power was affected by the circumstances in which he came to it, as well as by his character. Having acceded to the throne in December 1825 in the face of a mutiny by Guards officers who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to him, he personally supervised the investigation into this so9

Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 20-22.

10

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 109 called Decembrist Revolt and ordered the execution of five of the ringleaders of the conspiracy and the banishment to Siberia of many others. The revolt ensured that his reign would have a repressive beginning. In 1826 he established a new secret police force, the so-called Third Section, entrusted not merely with the detection and eradication of subversive ideas but with the broader task of regulating the behaviour of all the ruler’s subjects in minute detail. Private correspondence was routinely opened and read by the authorities. Censorship was strengthened and came in due course to be exercised by up to a dozen different agencies. Perceived political transgressions might bring down punishments ranging from mild official displeasure to banishment to the provinces, dispatch to the Caucasian front line, imprisonment and Siberian exile and ultimately, if not execution, then at least the threat of it. During the last seven years of Nicholas’s reign, which came in retrospect to be known as the “seven dismal years” (mrachnoe semiletie), the regime became even more repressive as Nicholas strove to combat the ideas and movements that had led to the revolutionary disturbances in western and central Europe in 1848-1849.11 It was in this age of reaction and repression, paradoxical as it might seem, that Russian cultural and intellectual life suddenly came into full bloom. Major early landmarks in classical Russian literature appeared during Nicholas’s reign, including most of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman,” much of his lyric poetry and all of his prose, the entire oeuvre of Gogol' and Lermontov and the early writings of the classical novelists Dostoevskii, Goncharov and Turgenev, the poet Nekrasov and the satirist SaltykovShchedrin. Literary criticism, dominated by Belinskii, set about evaluating the literature that was being created, moulding taste, establishing a canon and enquiring into the relationship of art to reality, the function of the artist and the criteria for the judgement of art. The corpus of historical scholarship, represented by Granovskii, Pogodin and others, grew rapidly on the foundations laid by Karamzin. A body of letters began to be formed in which philosophical, historical, theological and cultural questions were vigorously debated. At the more or less private level this intellectual life was conducted at soirées in the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg and in the drawing-rooms of nobles’ houses on their rural estates. At the more public level it was nurtured by the so-called “thick journals” such as The Moscow Observer, Notes of the Fatherland and The Contemporary that sprang up in the age of Nicholas in spite of the repressive conditions. While numbering only a few thousand subscribers at best, these journals exercised a powerful formative influence on the nation’s intellectual development.12 11

The standard work on Nicholas in English is W. Bruce Lincoln’s Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (London: Allen Lane, 1978). For shorter surveys of Nicholas’s reign see Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), Part 3, and David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801-1881 (London and New York: Longman, 1991), Chapters 5-7. On the revolutionary disturbances of 1848-1849 see the second section of Chapter 6 below. 12 See Deborah A. Martinsen, ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The survey of Russian journals from 1840-1880 by Robert L. Belknap (pp. 91116) is the most pertinent contribution from our point of view here.

110 Chapter 4 It was also in the age of Nicholas that a section of the educated class among whom this cultural and intellectual life was conducted began to be transformed into what has come to be known as the intelligentsia. One might define the intelligentsia as representing an embryonic public opinion in a state where heterodoxy and pluralism were not officially tolerated. Its members were united not by a common social background or economic position – indeed they have an uprooted air, seeming divorced or alienated from the milieu from which they originate – but by a shared interest in and commitment to ideas, art and, in due course, social and political change. Within the ranks of this group the wealthy noble man of letters, such as Herzen or Turgenev, was joined by the professional writer of humbler social origin, such as Belinskii. The intelligentsia approached ideas and literary culture with great seriousness and hope, conceiving of them as means of reforming or even regenerating society and civilization. They also aspired to intellectual independence. They were in effect a “critically thinking minority,” to use a phrase given currency in the 1860s by Lavrov. It was therefore inevitable, in the conditions of Nicholas’s Russia, that their utterances would often have a political, subversive air where in freer societies they might have none. These qualities – social deracination, passionate commitment to ideas and culture, intellectual independence – gave the intelligentsia a sense of isolation, beleaguerment and solidarity that was in fact highly stimulating. The blossoming of Russian literature, in the broad sense of the term, and the birth of the intelligentsia were indicative of the fact that for Russians who were educated – or largely self-educated – the 1830s and 1840s were an age of cultural exploration and growth of the spirit akin to the western European Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Russian noblemen of the late eighteenth century, Fonvizin and Karamzin prominent among them, had prepared the ground for this exploration and growth. Now in the period following the Napoleonic Wars curiosity in western nations intensified and nourished the disaffection that was to characterize the intelligentsia and eventually undermine the regime. This curiosity was partly satisfied by the renewed opportunity to travel freely. (The habit of travel had been interrupted, of course, by the Napoleonic Wars.) Some, such as Granovskii and Turgenev, attended foreign universities. The wealthier individuals among the Russian elite – noblemen such as Annenkov, Herzen and Turgenev, and also, from a merchant background, Botkin – were able to fund their own version of the Grand Tour and settled comfortably for long periods in European cities. Here they could view western paintings (a subject to which some travellers, especially Annenkov and Botkin, devote considerable attention in their travel writing), observe western social structures, institutions and political life and absorb (or repudiate) western values.13 For these men travel was no longer primarily a journey of personal self-discovery, as it had been for Karamzin, let alone a fulfilment of obligations to the state, as it had been for Piotr 13 On the whole, the exodus did not become an emigration in the age of Nicholas, as it was to do in the following reign, when Russian revolutionary organizers established bases abroad, especially in Switzerland, France and England, or when “men of the forties,” such as Annenkov, feeling passés in post-emancipation Russia, retired from the fray to settle in sanctuaries such as Dresden.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 111 Tolstoi. To some extent, of course, foreign journeys represented for them a form of escapism from an especially oppressive regime at a time when hopes of social reform and cultural relaxation had been dashed. In this respect the gravitation towards the west had something in common with the taste for the exotic, the enthusiasm for the tropics, that was exhibited, as Paul Fussell has pointed out, by Englishmen at the time of the First World War.14 The larger project in which Russian travellers were engaged in the age of Nicholas, though, was discovery of a civilization that they sensed was in many ways superior to their own and clarification of their own national identity and destiny in relation to that superior civilization. As voyage of national rather than personal self-discovery their travelling even amounted to a new if nebulous form of service that replaced the nobleman’s service to the state, which in its nineteenth-century bureaucratic form was now discredited. The other principal means of satisfying curiosity about the west in the age of Nicholas, besides travel, was voracious reading of what westerners had written. Educated Russians now devoured foreign literatures (especially the works of Byron, Scott and then Dickens from English literature, Schiller and Hoffman from German, and Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and then George Sand and Eugène Sue from French). They also imbibed German philosophy, first the philosophy of Schelling and then that of Hegel. Isaiah Berlin, in his still fresh essay on the impact of German idealism in Russia, characterizes the Romantic, more specifically Schellingian mode of explanation of the universe, which could illuminate life, thought, art and religion as the sciences could not, in the following way. The romantic metaphysicians returned to ways of knowing which they attributed to the Platonic tradition; spiritual insight, “intuitive” knowledge of connections incapable of scientific analysis. Schelling (whose views on the working of the artistic imagination, and in particular about the nature of genius, are, for all their obscurity, arrestingly original and imaginative) spoke in terms of a universal mystical vision. He saw the universe as a single spirit, a great, animate organism, a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage into another. Individual human beings were, as it were, “finite centres,” “aspects,” “moments” of this enormous cosmic entity – the “living whole,” the world soul, the transcendental Spirit or Idea . . .15 Everything that exists is a unique aspect or articulation of this “Spirit” or “Idea,” or “Absolute,” as Schelling also called it, and the more of an aspect, the more vividly articulated, the “deeper,” the “more real” it is. A philosophy is “true” in the proportion in which it expresses the phase which the Absolute or the Idea has reached at each stage of development. A poet possesses genius, a statesman greatness, to the degree to which they are 14 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 3-8. 15 See Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. 136-149. The quotation is from pp. 137-138

112 Chapter 4 inspired by, and express, the “spirit” of their milieu – state, culture, nation – which is itself an “incarnation” of the self-realization of the spirit of the universe conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity. And a work of art is dead or artificial or trivial if it is a mere accident in this development. Art, philosophy, religion are so many efforts on the part of finite creatures to catch and articulate an “echo” of the cosmic harmony.16 Schelling’s beguiling pantheism, then, is the confession of an ardent heart. It represents a reaction against the attempts of philosophers of the Enlightenment and their early-modern predecessors to establish rational doctrines about the observable universe beyond the self. Reinterpreting the world in spiritual terms and expressing scepticism about the powers of reason itself, Schelling and the German Romantics17 invoked feeling as a guide to reason. Truth would be apprehended through a higher form of understanding than that which the thinkers of the Enlightenment were capable of reaching through the use of empirical method, deduction and induction, and ratiocination. Understanding of this sort might be more readily attainable by the artist (the poet, dramatist or painter) than by the historian or philosopher. Or rather the genius who would be sensitive to the spirit or essence of a phenomenon, the truth that might be concealed beneath misleading appearances on the surface of reality, would be an artist, in whatever medium he expressed himself. The mysterious and almost inexpressible nature of truth thus apprehended was suggested by the famous aphorism of the poet Tiutchev, one of Schelling’s Russian disciples: “a thought articulated is a lie.”18 The ideas of Schelling and other German Romantics were taken up in Russia as early as the 1820s by the Society of Wisdom-lovers (whose members are usually known as the liubomudry). This society was founded in 1823 and continued to hold meetings until it was felt prudent to cease to do so, formally at least, after the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Its meetings were chaired by Prince Odoevskii, who was to become a writer of prose fiction and an important cultural figure in the age of Nicholas. Its regular members included the future Slavophiles Ivan Kireevskii and Kosheliov and the gifted young poet Venevitinov, who acted as the society’s secretary. Occasional members included the future supporters of Official Nationality, Pogodin – the main subject of this chapter – and Shevyriov. By promoting German philosophy in Russia, and by turning away from the political ideas that interested the Decembrists, the liubomudry laid important foundations for Slavophilism and Official Nationality, to which we shall shortly turn, and also for the reception of Hegelianism.19 16 Ibid., p. 139. On the reception of Schelling and German idealism in Russia see also Alexandre Koyré, La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929). 17 The German Romantic school, which had flourished at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, included, apart from Schelling, the Schlegel brothers (Augustus and Friedrich, both critics and scholars), the poet Novalis, the novelist, dramatist, critic and translator Tieck and the theologian Schleiermacher. 18 “Mysl' izrechonnaia est' lozh',” in “Silentium”; see F. I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatelƍ, 1957), p. 126. 19 On Odoevskii and the liubomudry see Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 113 Hegel – in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), his Logic (1812-1816) and other works – built a philosophy that was more systematic than Schelling’s mystical doctrine but which, like Schelling’s, was designed to demonstrate an organic link between the individual consciousness and the outer world, subject and object. Hegel sought a principle that would enable him to find unity where there was apparent duality, to reconcile the opposed terms in each pair, such as mind and matter, that philosophers constantly come upon. With a love of seeming paradox, he attempted to reveal unity in endless differentiation by means of what he described as a dialectical method. His dialectic has a triadic movement, from thesis to antithesis and thence to a synthesis of these two previous aspects of a whole or moments of a process. Each stage of the dialectic supersedes the preceding stage. And yet it does not entirely supersede it, because it incorporates all previous stages as moments of the whole. In his Philosophy of History, formulated in his lectures in Berlin in the 1820s, Hegel attempted to apply the dialectic to the study of history, which he conceived as the progress of spirit from a state of pure being or mere consciousness (embodied, Hegel imagined, in the orient) towards absolute knowledge, the Absolute Idea (which would find expression, Hegel believed, only in a monarchic state). The leading role in the introduction of Hegelian ideas into Russia in the 1830s was played by a gentle, charismatic young nobleman, Stankevich, who led a circle that consisted at first of students of Moscow University and then, after Stankevich had completed his studies in that institution, a broader group that at one time or another embraced Belinskii, Granovskii, the future revolutionary Bakunin and the future Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov. By the early 1840s Hegel’s influence in Russia had surpassed that of Schelling and his system had come to intoxicate not merely students in Moscow and other universities but educated society as whole. The reasons for Russian intellectuals’ infatuation with German philosophy in the age of Nicholas I, if indeed they can be defined precisely, may be numerous. To some extent the ground for reception of German idealism had been prepared by the influx of mystical ideas in the masonic circles that were formed in Russia in the late eighteenth century, even as Russia was receiving the Enlightenment. After all, some of these ideas also lay behind the new German philosophy.20 More importantly, the Schellingian attempt to discover an inner world through which the noble self could commune with the spirit that pervaded the universe must have consoled young men who were denied more overt, social or political channels for their idealism in the oppressive, serf-owning Russia of the 1820s and 1830s. Hegel, for his part, enabled Russians to glimpse the liberating possibility that there might be divine meaning and hidden harmony in their national life, just at the point when the deflating experiences of the post-Napoleonic period – the official obscurantism

Enlightenment to Marxism, tr. from the Polish by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 74-80, and Neil Cornwell, The Life, Times and Milieu of V. F. Odoevsky, 1804-1869 (London: Athlone Press, 1986), especially pp. 74-120. 20 D. I. Chizhevskii, Gegel' v Rossii (Paris: Dom knigi and Sovremennye zapiski, 1939), pp. 9-10.

114 Chapter 4 of the last years of the reign of Alexander I, the failure of the Decembrist Revolt, the repression in the early years of Nicholas’s reign – had begun to make the nation’s life seem irrational and devoid of purpose. Perhaps the nature of German idealism in general and of Hegelianism in particular also satisfied a spiritual need among men in whose eyes the native religious doctrine – or at least the official Church of their native land – had been discredited, as Orthodoxy and the Orthodox Church had for many (but by no means all) of those who imbibed German philosophy in the 1830s. For Schelling and Hegel seemed to furnish a comprehensive explanation of the universe and their explanation was couched in spiritual terms and – in the case of Schelling’s doctrine, at least – had a poetic tone. Again, Hegelianism seemed briefly to provide Russians with a means of synthesizing the secular knowledge that they had gained as a result of their introduction to western enlightenment and their pre-Petrine tradition of spirituality. It offered them the prospect of integrity or wholeness in a world in which the personality – as Dostoevskii would try later to demonstrate with such profundity in his fiction – was in danger of fragmentation. Most important of all, German idealism was a vehicle for a national philosophical awakening in Russia, a means by which Russians could achieve philosophical self-consciousness. In this respect the process of absorbing an influential contemporary corpus of philosophy was perhaps more important than any specific ideas drawn from that corpus, despite the clear bearing that some elements in it had on Russian preoccupations in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, as we shall see. The great significance of German idealism for Russians as a means to the attainment of self-knowledge, together with the sanctity of this moment of selfdiscovery and, at the same time, the vague, elusive nature of what was being received, are all deftly expressed in a passage in Turgenev’s first novel Rudin. (This novel, published in 1856, offers a retrospective evaluation of the Russian intelligentsia in the years in which it was most strongly attracted to German idealism.) Here Turgenev’s character Lezhnev fondly recalls his student years, the discussions that took place in the circle inspired by his beatific fellow-student Pokorskii (for whom Turgenev used Stankevich as a model) and the awakening knowledge of the universe that Rudin seems to have succeeded in conveying: an elegant order was being instilled in everything that we knew, all things that had been scattered were suddenly being brought together and were taking shape and growing before us, like an edifice, everything was becoming brighter and spirit wafted all around... Nothing remained fortuitous or without sense: in all things rational necessity and beauty were finding expression, everything was taking on a meaning that was at one and the same time clear and mysterious, each of life’s separate phenomena was in harmony [with the rest], and we ourselves, with a sort of sacred awe and a sweet flutter of the heart, felt as if we were living vessels of eternal truth, instruments of truth who had been called upon to accomplish something great...21 How though, in more concrete terms, did Russians profit from German idealism? 21

Turgenev, Rudin, in PSSP, Vol. 6, p. 298.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 115 What in particular did they derive from it, besides a heightened philosophical awareness, that aided them in the mid-nineteenth century when they undertook that attempt at national self-definition in which travel writing, it is claimed here, played such an important part? An answer to these questions is complicated not merely by the technical difficulty and opacity of the philosophical systems in question but also by the fact that Hegelianism, being capable of both a conservative interpretation and a revolutionary interpretation, could serve the purposes of conflicting political currents. One the one hand, it could be construed as demonstrating that all historical contingency is in fact explicable as the product of a rational process and therefore as requiring acceptance of what is. Thus at the end of the 1830s Belinskii used Hegelianism briefly to reconcile himself with the tsarist order – as did Bakunin too – and to mount a defence of autocracy that was shortly to embarrass him.22 On the other hand, the Hegelian dialectic furnished grounds for thinking that the present order contained the seeds of its own antithesis, as Marx was to argue in relation to the capitalist order in western Europe. Thus Bakunin, having consorted with so-called Left or Young Hegelians in Berlin and Dresden, was able before long to equate Hegel’s concept of antithesis with destruction of the existing order,23 while Herzen famously came to look upon Hegelianism, as he put it in his memoirs, as the “algebra of revolution.”24 It is possible, despite these difficulties, to identify specific ways in which German idealism was particularly helpful to Russians who were engaged in a quest for self-definition. For the new German philosophy did support the notion of national distinctiveness which ran counter to the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and which was nourished by the search for manifestations of popular culture that were mentioned in the previous section. It promoted a view of the nation as a unique collective that developed in accordance with its own principles. Both Schelling and Hegel subscribed to the idea that each historic nation had its own mission or vocation.25 (Not that all nations were “historical.”) An historical nation could make a distinctive contribution to the general life of mankind by leading the world through the stage that the dialectic had reached and enabling mankind to accomplish the transitions that were necessary at the given moment in the progress of the Spirit towards the perfection of the Absolute Idea. Furthermore, peoples resemble individual organisms, when viewed through the lens of German idealism, inasmuch as they pass through various stages of existence: they too are born, develop, attain maturity, grow old and die. Peoples who are now dominant, it may be inferred, will not always be so, whereas peoples who are still immature may yet find that they have a great destiny. Hegel’s system even encouraged the further use of the contrastive method that Russians had already begun to deploy in the eighteenth century, it is argued here, 22 See, e.g., his review of a book on the Battle of Borodino, published in 1839, in Belinskii, PSS, Vol. 3, pp. 325-356, especially 330 ff. 23 See, e.g., M. A. Bakunin, Selected Writings, tr. by Steven Cox and Olive Stevens, ed. and introduced by Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 58. 24 Herzen, SS, op. cit., Vol. 9, p. 23. 25 Frederick C. Copleston, Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986; hereafter Copleston, Philosophy in Russia), p. 38.

116 Chapter 4 when they attempted to define their national personality. For while seeking a key to unity in the universe, Hegel also emphasized the duality from which the search for harmony begins, the ceaseless contest between opposing aspects or moments in the dialectical process. Hegelian virtue, after all, is achieved only through struggle leading to eventual triumph over an opposite from which it can be distinguished. Thus holiness, for Hegel, is a consciousness of sin combined with a consciousness of victory over sin.26 Truth, then, is knowable only through experience of difference. The spirit of Russia, according to this dialectical way of thinking, could be discovered by those who succeeded in defining the spirit of what Russia was not, that is to say the west. Or to put it another way, Russia could be represented as an antithesis to the west’s thesis, and in due course Russia’s own emergent civilization would have to be accommodated in the synthesis, the higher stage towards which the Spirit was ineluctably progressing. It is tempting to suggest, finally, that even the notion that only a suprarational form of understanding could reveal the truths discovered by German idealism was itself put to use by Russian intellectuals in their quest for means of distinguishing Russia from the west. For Russia’s peculiarly enigmatic quality, which made her essence unknowable to all but those endowed with spiritual, poetic insight, could itself be presented as a distinctive national attribute. “It is not with the intellect that Russia is to be understood,” Tiutchev proudly proclaimed.27 Uncertainty about Russia’s own cultural identity in the wake of the rapid but superficial westernization of the country in the eighteenth century; dissatisfaction with the oppressive nature of Russian autocracy after the Napoleonic Wars; awareness of liberal and nationalist movements elsewhere in Europe; increased familiarity with the west through travel and reading; the new philosophical consciousness in general and specific notions appropriated from German idealism: all these factors combined in the age of Nicholas to renew and reinvigorate debate about the relationship between Russia and Europe. A starting-point for the debate was provided by the famous “Philosophical Letter” written in 1829 – but not published until 1836 – by Chaadaev, a witty, sceptical habitué of the Moscow salons who was familiar with the ideas of Schelling (and indeed had met Schelling in Karlsbad in 182528). Chaadaev designated Moscow “Necropolis,” the “city of the dead,” and represented the Russians as a people with no history, stable values or fixed points, as rootless as the nomads who drifted in the steppes on their country’s periphery – an unhistorical people, in fact, for whom the outlook, in Schellingian or Hegelian terms, was cheerless. Discussion of the problem that Chaadaev had so arrestingly identified, conducted now within the framework provided by Romanticism and German idealism, dominated Russian intellectual life in the 1840s. One group of participants in this discussion, the so-called Westernizers (Annenkov, Belinskii, Botkin, Granovskii, Herzen, Turgenev and others), embraced 26 Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1924, 30th impression), p. 211. 27 “Umom Rossiiu ne poniatƍ : ” see Tiutchev, p. 230. 28 Chizhevskii, p. 48.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 117 western culture as the source of the enlightenment and progress of which they believed Russia was in urgent need. (The patriotic motivation of these thinkers, it should be noted, makes it plausible to view even Russian Westernism as a variety of nationalism, as Liah Greenfeld has argued.29 In any case the Westernizers, like their conservative opponents, had absorbed the German ideas discussed above, which could be made to serve nationalistic purposes.) The Westernizers admired Peter the Great on the grounds that he had supposedly given Russia the opportunity to participate in modern civilization. Some of them flirted with the materialism preached by the German Young Hegelians, expressed approval of the Jacobin faction in the French Revolution as against the more moderate Girondins, and expectantly observed the propagation of socialist ideas in the France of LouisPhilippe. The other main faction in the discussion of national identity in the 1840s, the socalled Slavophiles, was a close-knit group that included Khomiakov, the Kireevskii brothers, the Aksakov brothers and Samarin. The Slavophiles feared that westernization would undermine Russians’ religious faith and their patriarchal way of life. They admired the Russian peasant as a supposedly pious Orthodox Christian and a bearer of brotherly values. In the spirit of the age they interested themselves in native culture, including popular culture. (Konstantin Aksakov’s philological research, whatever its academic shortcomings, and Piotr Kireevskii’s collection of Russian folk songs reflected that interest.) Although the Slavophiles’ preoccupation with national distinctiveness and their polarized conception of Russia and the west were clearly shaped by recent German ideas, they were critical of Hegel’s system, which they regarded as indicative of the sterile rationalism of the western mind. They preferred the more mystical ideas of Schelling, particularly the overtly religious “positive” philosophy elaborated by Schelling towards the end of his life. As for the Slavophiles’ political views, they accepted autocracy as an appropriate form of government for Russia, on the grounds that political leadership was a distraction from the life of the spirit on which the Russian people wished to concentrate and that the burden of it was therefore best borne by one person rather than many. They abhorred Peter the Great as the destroyer of the old Muscovite way of life, which they viewed with nostalgia, and shunned Peter’s creation, the city of St. Petersburg, preferring Moscow, which they regarded as the seat of Russian values.30 Slavophiles, with their attachment to Orthodoxy, their view of the Russian people as passive and peaceable, their acceptance of autocracy and their belief that 29

Greenfeld, pp. 263-265, 535 n. 140. There is a large literature on Slavophilism: see, e.g., Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965); Abbott Gleason, European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Peter K. Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism: A Study in Ideas, Vol. 2, I. V. Kireevskij (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1972); idem, K. S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); idem, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism: Iu. F. Samarin (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, tr. by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; hereafter Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy). 30

118 Chapter 4 Russia was qualitatively different from and superior to the west, had much in common with proponents of the doctrine that came to be known as “Official Nationality.”31 This doctrine, which we should now call a state ideology, loomed over the Russian cultural landscape for some three decades and affected both domestic and foreign policy. It was first formulated in 1833 by Count Uvarov, who was Nicholas’s Minister of Education from 1833 to 1849.32 Official Nationalists held that the three principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality were the foundations for Russia’s well-being and strength and gave the nation its distinctive character. They emphasized the absolute nature of the sovereign’s power and its supposedly divine source. “Nationality” (narodnostƍ), the vaguest principle of the three, found expression, they argued, in the obedience of the Russian people to the autocrat, their devotion to the Orthodox Church, their peace-loving character and even the supposed superiority of their language to other languages. The three principles could serve as an antidote to the sickness by which Russians would be infected if they continued to embrace western civilization.33 Where Official Nationalists tended to differ from Slavophiles was in their enthusiasm for the modern Russian bureaucratic state and for Peter the Great, who was seen as having founded it (and to whom Nicholas himself looked back for inspiration).34 It should also be noted that there were divisions among supporters of Official Nationality itself. Intellectuals such as Pogodin who understood “nationality” as implying veneration of national character, particularly the national character of Slavs and other Orthodox believers, were dismayed by Nicholas’s legitimism, that is to say his instinctive support for states ruled by absolutist regimes, such as the Ottoman Empire, which suppressed ethnic minorities who were developing a sense of their own identity. Although the parting of the ways between government and educated public opinion that was beginning to manifest itself towards the end of the age of Catherine became marked in the reign of Nicholas, the doctrine of Official Nationality did command substantial support among intellectuals and writers. Outside the ranks of the administration its proponents tended to be scholars or journalists. The former group included four prominent professors: Pogodin; Shevyriov, who was a specialist in the fields of old Russian literature and literary criticism and who held a chair at Moscow University from 1837 until 1857; 31 Plekhanov, who wrote perspicuously on Pogodin in the early twentieth century, insisted that Official Nationality and Slavophilism were essentially similar: see Plekhanov, Sochineniia, Vol. 23, pp. 45-101. On Official Nationality see also Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969; 4th impression; first published 1959; hereafter Riasanovsky, Nicholas I). The Russian term for the doctrine is ofitsialƍnaia narodnostƍ; however, the term did not come into use until after the reign of Nicholas. 32 On Uvarov see especially Cynthia H. Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). 33 As argued by Shevyriov in an emblematic article of 1841, quoted by Plekhanov, Sochineniia, Vol. 23, p. 47. 34 See Riasanovsky, “Pogodin and Shevyrëv in Russian Intellectual History,” in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Collected Writings, 1947-1994 (Los Angeles: Charles Schlacks, 1993), pp. 72-85, for further discussion of the relationship between Slavophiles and Official Nationalists.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 119 Ustrialov, who held the Chair of Russian History at St. Petersburg University from 1834 until 1870; and Senkovskii, who occupied the Chair of Oriental Languages at St. Petersburg University from 1822 to 1847. Senkovskii also devoted a large part of his energy in the period 1834-1847 to editing a popular journal, The Reading Library, in which his own tales, articles and feuilletons were published. Most notorious among the proponents of Official Nationality were the unscrupulous pair Bulgarin and Grech who, either single-handedly or for long periods together, edited the journal The Son of the Fatherland and the newspaper The Northern Bee. Official Nationality was also endorsed by various minor writers, such as the playwright Kukol'nik and the historical novelist Zagoskin and, at some point and to some degree, by more renowned literary figures such as Zhukovskii, Tiutchev and Gogol'. Some of the proponents of Official Nationality, Nicholas Riasanovsky has observed with Pogodin, Shevyriov and Grech in mind, were loyal but blunt, unsophisticated, unquestioning men who were patriotic in a narrow-minded way and saw the world in simple terms.35 Of the rest Bulgarin was vain, greedy, boastful and unprincipled and Senkovskii frivolous as a writer and obsessive, eccentric and unbalanced as a personality.36 POGODIN’S LIFE, WORK AND TRAVELOGUE Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (1800-1876) was a self-made man. He was the son of a serf who was emancipated by his master in 1806. In 1814 he was sent to a school in Moscow and in 1818 entered Moscow University, where he showed particular interest in early Russian history and Slavic studies. Having graduated in 1821 and then written a master’s dissertation on the origins of the Russian state, he embarked in 1826 on an academic career in Moscow University and in 1835 took up the Chair of Russian History there. He combined his academic career with journalism, editing The Moscow Messenger (from 1827 to 1830) and (from 1841 to 1856) The Muscovite, in which Official Nationality was propagated. In 1844 he resigned from his academic post but he remained prominent in public life as journalist, prolific writer on historical and political topics and much-sought-after speaker at dinners and other public events.37 His life as student, academic and editor was spent mainly in Moscow, and it was in this city rather than the more westernized capital St. Petersburg that he had his spiritual home, as the titles of the journals that he edited

35

Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, p. 52. We might note the irony of the fact that the proponents of this essentially chauvinistic doctrine included two Poles (Bulgarin and Senkovskii), and that the doctrine was propagated with the approval of a ruler who, although born in Russia, had German parents, married a Prussian princess and presided over an administration in which ethnic Germans – e.g. Benckendorff, Kankrin, Kleinmikhel' and Nessel'rode – played important roles. 37 The major source on Pogodin’s life and work is N. Barsukov’s uncritical multi-volume (but unfinished) Zhiznƍ i trudy M. P. Pogodina, 22 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1888-1910), which contains much unpublished material from Pogodin’s writings, including his diaries. For a brief biographical survey see Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 52-58. 36

120 Chapter 4 suggest and as one would expect of a conservative nationalistic intellectual of his generation. Pogodin was an autocratic, arbitrary, irascible and acquisitive man. Even his admirers acknowledged his tactlessness. At the same time he showed a practicality in the management of his affairs that was rare in the intelligentsia of his time.38 He appears to be describing a man after his own heart when in his travelogue he expresses admiration for a wealthy Russian entrepreneur whom he meets in a spa town: Pogodin listens avidly to the entrepreneur’s “lectures,” which are based on familiarity with all walks of Russian life, and he reflects that “bookish and armchair occupations mean nothing, or very little, by comparison with [practical] experience” (iv, 74-75).39 He was also a man of prodigious energy who was capable to a degree unusual among his contemporaries of sustained application. The corpus of his writings is very large.40 The greater part of this corpus consists of scholarly writings on early Russian history, but he wrote prolifically on many other subjects as well. Early in his career he produced a number of tales of a rather liberal nature and historical dramas, including one on Peter the Great.41 He also wrote many articles expressing his social and political views, some of which were subsequently collected into books, as were some of the numerous public speeches he delivered at festive occasions. The travelogue that is the subject of this chapter ran to four volumes. However, for all his productivity and versatility, Pogodin’s writings lack polish and have an untidy, unfinished air. For some thirty years, Gogol' unkindly wrote, Pogodin had scurried about like an ant without ever presenting his thoughts in a well-ordered, well-considered way.42 Pogodin’s historical research was directed towards the goal of demonstrating that Russia had “different earth, blood, religion, bases, in short a different history” from the western world.43 Whereas in the west Christianity had been introduced by the sword, in Russia, Pogodin believed, it had been introduced peacefully, by the cross. Again, in the west the Middle Ages were a period of feudal tyranny whereas in Russia at the same period there was a “considerable degree of self-government” and “patriarchal freedom,” land was held in common and the peasants discussed their affairs in a democratic assembly, the mir.44 Pogodin also appropriated for his own purposes the thesis of the French historian Thierry, who maintained that the existence of class struggles in western states such as France and England resulted from the fact that in these countries a native people (the Gauls and Anglo-Saxons respectively) had been conquered by an alien one (the Franks and the Normans) 38

See Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 56-58, on whom I have drawn for this sketch of Pogodin’s character. 39 M. P. Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiakh, 1839: Dorozhnyi dnevnik (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1844; hereafter Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiakh). References in parentheses in the text of this chapter are to this edition. On publication of the work, which was not well received, see Barsukov, Vol. 7, pp. 384-388. 40 For a useful bibliography of Pogodin’s writings see Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 278-280. 41 Pogodin, Povesti. Drama (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1984). See also Barsukov, Vol. 2, pp. 295297, and Vol. 4, pp. 13-26. 42 Gogol', PSS, Vol. 13, p. 496. 43 Barsukov, Vol. 4, p. 9. 44 Ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 52-53.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 121 from which the nobility was subsequently drawn. Russia, on the other hand, so Pogodin’s argument ran, was free of any lingering hostility between conqueror and conquered. Its society was based instead on harmony among its constituent peoples since, according to the Normanist view of the foundation of the Russian state to which Pogodin subscribed, it was by invitation that the Scandinavian Varangians had come to rule over the indigenous Slav tribes.45 It is not coincidental that historiography began to preoccupy Russians in the period in which travel writing flourished, and more particularly that it was in the field of historiography that two of the travel writers examined here, Karamzin and Pogodin, made their greatest contribution to Russian letters. For in a sense historiography and travel writing fulfilled similar functions, or constituted different approaches to the same enterprise. Travel writers explored their people’s identity in the present by reference to contemporary societies in foreign terrain, while historians helped their people to arrive at an understanding of themselves by reference to their own past. It is also notable that proponents of Official Nationality were particularly active in both fields. Shevyriov and Ustrialov, like Pogodin, were academic historians, while Bulgarin, Grech and Senkovskii, as well as Pogodin, all produced travel sketches of one sort or another.46 The journey on which Pogodin’s essay in the genre of travel writing was based was made in 1839.47 Pogodin was accompanied on this journey by his wife (except during his brief visit to London) and in many places also spent much time in the company of other Russians, especially Gogol', who guided him round the sights of Rome, and Shevyriov. Having reached Italy via Warsaw, Prague and Vienna, Pogodin paused in Venice, spent a month in Rome in the spring and then travelled by stage-coach to Naples, from which he visited Pompeii, Herculaneum and Vesuvius. From Naples he sailed to Marseilles, calling at Civitavecchia, Livorno (from which he made a brief excursion to Pisa) and Genoa. Next he proceeded to Grenoble and Lyon, up to Fontainebleau and on to Paris, where he arrived at the beginning of May. In June he took the stage-coach to Boulogne and sailed to London by way of the Thames estuary. During his five-day stay in the English capital he made excursions to Hampton Court, Richmond, Greenwich and Windsor. A plan to visit the industrial cities of Birmingham and Manchester had to be abandoned, though, for lack of time (iii, 212). After a few more days in France Pogodin went to Brussels, where he found little to interest him, and thence to Antwerp, Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden, The Hague and Rotterdam. He then took a 45

See Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, p. 135; Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, pp. 47-48. e.g. Bulgarin, Letniaia progulka po Finliandii i Shvetsii v 1838 godu, 2 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ekspeditsii zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag, 1839); Baron Brambeus [pseudonym of Senkovskii], Fantasticheskie puteshestviia Barona Brambeusa (1835), in O. I. Senkovskii, Sochineniia Barona Brambeusa (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1989), pp. 25-186, tr. by Louis Pedrotti as The Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus (New York, etc.: Peter Lang, 1993). Grech’s contributions to the genre are cited in n. 24 of the Foreword above. Senkovskii’s sketches, it should be noted, belong entirely to the realm of fantasy. 47 The journey of 1839 was not Pogodin’s first trip abroad, though: he had already travelled extensively in Europe in 1835, visiting Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Bonn, Heidelberg and Vienna and establishing contact with a number of Slavic scholars in the Austrian Empire in the process: see Barsukov, Vol. 4, pp. 312-331. 46

122 Chapter 4 boat up the Rhine to Cologne, Bonn, Mainz and Frankfurt and travelled on by land to the spa town of Marienbad in Bohemia, where he spent a month taking the waters, having complained of chest pains and deteriorating eyesight (iv, 63-85). He spent a further two weeks in Switzerland, where he inspected Zürich, the Bernese Oberland, Bern, Lausanne and Geneva. He also viewed Mont Blanc and made an excursion into France to visit Ferney, where Voltaire had lived from 1758. He then re-entered Italy and visited Milan, Piacenza, Parma, Modena and Florence. Finally, in October, he began his return journey to Russia, travelling rapidly through Mantua, Verona, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz, Vienna, Brno, Cracow and Warsaw before finally crossing the Russian border and hurrying back to Moscow. His account of this journey was published in The Muscovite in 1843 under the title “From Travel Notes”48 and then in 1844, in four volumes, under the title A Year in Foreign Lands, 1839: A Travel Diary.49 One is inclined to think, as one surveys Pogodin’s breathless itinerary, that he is striving to out-travel Karamzin, who is undoubtedly a model for him as both traveller and historian. Pogodin’s reverence for Karamzin dates from his youth and continued throughout his life. In a letter of 1825 Pogodin ventured to tell Karamzin that it was from him that he had begun to learn “the good, the language and History” and he dedicated his master’s dissertation to him.50 He based his own lectures on Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, which he constantly re-read.51 Later in his life he was to edit two volumes of materials relating to Karamzin’s biography.52 Karamzin is a presence in A Year in Foreign Lands too. Visiting the Palais-Royal Pogodin reflects on the different political conditions obtaining at the time of Karamzin’s stay in Paris and his own (iii, 5). On an excursion to Versailles he recollects that Karamzin had been there fifty years before (iii, 23). During an oration he attends at the Sorbonne his attention wanders and he composes in his mind a eulogy to Karamzin (iii, 57). In the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris he reflects in a rather Karamzinian elegiac manner on those who lie there (they include Molière and La Fontaine), empathizing with them as a man “from the far north,” from a country they do not know (iii, 94). Like Karamzin’s sensitive narrator, Pogodin presents himself as a “peaceful person” who cannot bear firearms and is dismayed at the cruelty of mankind (iii, 192-193). Pogodin too included many mundane details in his text, particularly details of the cost of meals and accommodation and the relative cost of living in various countries.53 He even 48

i.e. ‘Iz putevykh zapisok.’ The journey of 1839 is dealt with by Barsukov, Vol. 5, pp. 214-323, who, however, draws mainly on the travel diary in this section of his work. 50 Barsukov, Vol. 1, p. 294. 51 See Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 178-180. 52 Pogodin, ed., Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, po ego sochineniiam, pisƍmam i otzyvam sovremennikov. Materialy dlia biografii, 2 Vols. (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1866). 53 References to costs are legion in Pogodin’s travel diary: see, e.g., Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiakh, Vol. 2, p. 208; Vol. 3, p. 45; Vol. 4, pp. 68, 108, 110, 146-148, 150. Sometimes Pogodin is taken aback by high charges, for example for meals in Boulogne and Switzerland (Vol. 3, p. 175; Vol. 4, p. 123) and hotels in Switzerland (Vol. 4, pp. 111, 129). More often, though, he is pleasantly surprised by the cheapness of western goods and services, such as meals, wine, excursions, accommodation, clothes, books and fares (e.g. Vol. 2, pp. 180-181; Vol. 3, pp. 10-11, 15, 43, 113, 155, 207; Vol. 4, pp. 549

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 123 penned a distinctly Karamzinian preface to his diary in which he claimed to have made no alterations to the notes that he had jotted down as he was travelling, lest they lose their spontaneity.54 And yet Pogodin is quite a different sort of traveller from Karamzin and Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller serve as a model for Pogodin’s Year in Foreign Lands only on a superficial level. Unlike Karamzin, Pogodin has little interest in people or capacity to empathize with them. Far from being receptive to alien ways of doing things he is on the whole intolerant. He is impatient and becomes irritated if things do not go his way, if he has to wait, or if he cannot do everything he had hoped to do when he hoped to do it. He rarely allows himself to enjoy the experience of being in a place. In fact he gives the appearance of being a neurotic tourist who systematically, even frantically, visits every building or institution that might be considered noteworthy. Occasionally he strikes a desperate note, presenting lists of places that he fears he may not have time to visit (e.g. iii, 81-82), or he expresses regret that he cannot allow the pace of his tourism to slacken. “What a pity,” he complains, as he remarks upon the pretty chalets and gardens of Interlaken, that we cannot stay here just for a day and admire their beauties. Time is passing. It’s already 22 August and we still have [to see] Geneva, Mont Blanc, Simplon, Lake Maggiore, Milan, Bologna and Florence and by 12 October NS I need to be in Moscow. We’ll have to take just a superficial look at it all. Off we go. (iv, 129-130) So furious is the pace and so relentless the sight-seeing that he frequently exhausts himself (and presumably his wife as well). Thus the entries in his diary repeatedly refer to his ending a day collapsing on his bed from fatigue (e.g. iii, 46, 224-225; iv, 97, 149-150). One senses in the nature of Pogodin’s travelling something of the ambition that drove him as a scholar and made possible his huge literary output. One also detects beyond this ambition an obsessive, unhappy person who at a deep level lacked self-esteem, no doubt partly as a result of his social background, and who perhaps for that reason cherished the certainties provided by Official Nationality. Nor, it must be said, does Pogodin’s text have the elegance or polish of Karamzin’s. In fact, with the exception of Piotr Tolstoi, Pogodin is the most artless narrator examined here. Occasionally he produces a memorable passage (for example, when he describes the Neapolitan lazzaroni, as we shall see) but for the most part his text lacks colour, drama or excitement. Dry descriptions are punctuated by naive exclamation and scattered aperçus. At times the text resembles 7, 177). Herzen’s charge that Pogodin frightens his readers with the high cost of travelling in the west is therefore unwarranted, although Herzen does have grounds for calling Pogodin’s account a “diary of income and expenditure” (Herzen, SS, Vol. 5, p. 16; see also p. 41). Herzen, incidentally, wrote a short parody of Pogodin’s work entitled “Putevye zapiski g. Viodrina” (ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 108-110). The name that Herzen has invented (Viodrin) is derived from the obsolete or dialect word viodro, denoting “fine weather,” and therefore echoes Pogodin’s name, which brings to mind the standard word for “weather,” pogoda. 54 Barsukov, Vol. 7, pp. 384-385.

124 Chapter 4 a museum catalogue, as for instance when Pogodin lists the contents of the Museo burbonico in Naples (ii, 176-179). There are countless rooms in this richest of museums, which definitely comes second only to the Vatican Museum, and as far as things relating to private life in antiquity are concerned it is undoubtedly first, indeed the only one. A room with ancient papyri, which are unfolded before your eyes by a machine invented specially for the purpose. A room with small bronze objects for everyday use. A room with ancient glass objects, about twelve hundred in number. Here you can see smooth glass and polished glass, transparent and coloured glass, bottles for wine and water, fruit-bowls, vessels for tears or medicines, window panes . . . (ii, 177) His anticlimactic account of his arrival in Paris stands in strong contrast to Karamzin’s accounts, fabricated as they may be, of his own approaches to Paris and London. The closer we got to Paris, the more my impatience increased. The waters along the Seine are nice. I confess I was ill-at-ease, almost in disarray. The thought that I was about to see Paris, which I had heard, read and thought about so much ever since I was young, had quite an effect on me. Such is the power of the imagination. And here at last is Paris... (ii, 210) Admittedly Pogodin’s account becomes somewhat less descriptive and correspondingly more reflective during his stay in Paris and London, but as he begins to make his way home through Belgium, Holland and the German states it becomes in places drier than ever. If Pogodin’s text lacks the grace and charm of Karamzin’s, and was accordingly far less influential, nevertheless the perception of European life that it offers provides insights that are just as revealing as Karamzin’s into Russian attitudes towards the west and into the attitudes towards the Russian self to which travel in the west gave rise. Pogodin too presses travel writing into service as a vehicle for comparison of western and Russian civilization and for Russian self-analysis. In the several countries that he visits he finds varying amounts of material of different sorts – economic, social, religious, political – for this comparison. In Italy there is more material that is of interest to him on religious life than in other countries, while in France politics are at the forefront of his attention and in England economic matters. In the final analysis, though, it is a generalized sombre image of European civilization that Pogodin wishes to conjure up and this image he will juxtapose with a rosy image of Russia. Insofar as he perceives in “Europe” an essential unity that overrides the continent’s innumerable cultural, linguistic, social and political differences, fundamental religious distinctions and continual military conflicts he resembles his contemporary Chaadaev. His evaluation of Europe, on the other hand, is antithetical to that of Chaadaev. Indeed there are grounds for interpreting Pogodin’s travelogue as an attempt to provide not only a sequel to

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 125 Karamzin’s odyssey but also a mirror image of Chaadaev’s recently published “letter.” For in Pogodin’s work Chaadaev’s characterization of Europe and Russia – a civilization based on shared religious faith and sound values, on the one hand, and a sort of barbarism with no futurity, on the other – are reversed. BOURGEOIS SOCIETY It is important when reading A Year in Foreign Lands to bear in mind the fact that Pogodin views western society through the prism of the Romantic tradition and the Schellingian idealism which had attracted the liubomudry and that he is correspondingly repelled by the rationalistic stream of European thought flowing from the French Enlightenment. The Romantic tradition, which manifests itself in conservative nationalist thought such as Slavophilism and Official Nationality no less than in the social rebellion exemplified by Byron and Lermontov, is reflected in Pogodin’s text in various ways. For one thing Pogodin takes a critical view of the eighteenth-century philosophes in general and Voltaire in particular, especially on the grounds that they had failed to understand the benefits that Christianity had brought to mankind and indeed that they had sought to undermine religion (iv, 162). At the same time Pogodin’s sympathy for Schelling is apparent in his report of a conversation that he has with the German naturalist Oken, whom he happens to meet in Italy (iv, 189-202).55 (Oken was a disciple of Schelling’s who held that life is derived from some vital force that cannot be wholly explained in scientific terms.) Moreover, Pogodin has at least a partial sympathy for Rousseau, whose writings had intoxicated him in his student days and whose view that civilized society was morally corrupt Pogodin still found attractive (iii, 121, 170; iv, 161). Pogodin also admires Chateaubriand, especially his work The Genius of Christianity (1802),56 of which Pogodin translated a substantial part in his youth (iii, 109).57 On a more general level Pogodin’s interest in the Middle Ages, his fervent nationalistic feeling, his concern to discover his own people’s historical past and his jaundiced references to the vanity of human strivings and the transience of human achievements all provide further confirmation of his affinity with the Romantic tradition. It is therefore not unreasonable to read Pogodin’s critique of foreign lands as an expression of Romantic protest against the arithmetical spirit of the modern age (iii, 119) and the dehumanization of the individual in bourgeois society. It is true that Pogodin’s account of his year abroad is not an unrelieved catalogue of criticisms of life in western Europe. Pogodin recognizes the civic value of the Museo burbonico in Naples (ii, 179). Having viewed the Duomo in Milan, he 55 Pogodin, in common with many members of his generation, had revered Schelling in his youth: see Barsukov, Vol. 1, pp. 279-281; Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 57, 174, 176-177; and Thaden, “The Beginnings of Romantic Nationalism in Russia,” in American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 13 (1954), pp. 517-518. By the time of Pogodin’s journey Schelling was under attack from the Young Hegelians. 56 François René Chateaubrand, Le Génie du christianisme. 57 Barsukov, Vol. 2, pp. 148-149.

126 Chapter 4 acknowledges that the westerner has left magnificent monuments (iv, 175). As he approaches Amsterdam he is charmed by the appearance of prosperity, industriousness, variety, cleanliness and elegant simplicity in the Dutch landscape: from the outside Holland seems like utopia (iv, 12).58 He remarks on the excellence of Parisian cafés (iii, 10). He is impressed by certain European services and amenities that are unfamiliar to him or more efficient than those in Russia, such as horse-drawn omnibuses (iii, 83-88) and the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, to which entry is free (iii, 157-159). He is delighted when a letter which he realizes he has posted in Paris without having made the necessary payment is promptly returned to him on request at the post office (iii, 142). He commends to his countrymen the Dutch method of shoeing horses, which prevents horses from kicking and injuring the blacksmith (iv, 20). He accepts that there are aspects of foreign governance relating to judicial and financial matters and to the police, postal services and customs that Russia might profitably borrow (iii, 154). He harbours no doubts about the value of the rational secular knowledge and ratiocination in which the west excels. He believes that the acquisition of a broad store of knowledge, including some knowledge of sciences such as botany, engineering and anatomy, is essential in modern education (iv, 24-25). Nor is he dismissive of western technological achievement, as exemplified by London’s trains, steamships with funnels that retract as they pass under the bridges of the Thames, and the tunnel being dug under the Thames at the time of Pogodin’s visit by Isambard Brunel (whom Pogodin chances to meet and by whom he is enchanted) (iii, 197-200). He accepts that to restrict the use of machinery would be to halt the human mind on one path of development, a “poor policy” (iv, 128). Nevertheless the things that Pogodin admires in European societies are superficial, incidental details and they are offset by pervasive, fundamental flaws. Pogodin is shocked by the dirtiness of the urban environment, for example in Rome (ii, 33) and in Marseilles, the streets of which are “absolutely vile” and littered with rubbish (ii, 195, 200). Like Fonvizin and Karamzin, he is repelled by poverty, particularly when it is strikingly juxtaposed with architectural splendour or natural beauty (ii, 33-36, 125). In Reggio, where his party is surrounded by a crowd of dishevelled, half-naked young girls impertinently begging, the “savagery” and “barbarity” of what he sees provokes a tirade that might equally belong to a Christian socialist. Rich men and grandees! Leading the life of sybarites in your marble and gilded mansions, gorging yourselves on choice victuals, intoxicating yourselves on precious wines, indulging your hearing and sight on magnificent spectacles, hearing yourselves flattered by the servile domestics, you know not how people in huts live, what bitter tears are shed there, what vices engendered by your influence nestle there, or how the divine image is being effaced by your noxious breath! (iv, 203-204) 58 Pogodin’s view of Holland, however, may be unusually indulgent on account of Peter the Great’s admiration for the country and the impact that it therefore had on Russia. After all, it was Holland, Pogodin suggests, that gave birth to St. Petersburg. Moreover, one needed to study Holland in order properly to understand Peter’s reforms: Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiakh, Vol. 4, p. 12.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 127 The first thing that catches Pogodin’s attention when he wakes up on his first morning in Paris is the sight of boys and old men and women rummaging in piles of rubbish in the streets and picking out bits of rag, iron, glass or china (iii, 2-3). The scene will contrast starkly with his inspection of the Palais-Royal, a place where Parisians may find everything that they need, including a coffee-house, restaurants, a theatre, shops and newspapers (iii, 7). Similarly, in London the sight of a dignified and haughty lady, whom Pogodin takes to be an immensely wealthy English aristocrat, alighting from a carriage outside one of the city’s finest hotels moves him to reflect on social inequality in the western world. The doors open and out of the little carriage jumps peri [i.e. a Persian fairy], rosy-cheeked and fair-haired. But it is not her beauty that I want to talk about now – she was not beautiful – but there was such haughtiness, independence and composure in her face that I could not help but be struck. It was obvious from her every movement that she scorns and disregards everything: nothing seems important or meaningful to her, nothing surprises her, her wealth cannot be accurately calculated and she does not know the value of it and does not even understand what it means to be wealthy, still less what want and poverty are. (iii, 211) Most importantly, Pogodin is repelled by the underlying materialism of bourgeois society. Anything is available in the shops of the Palais-Royal, but one needs money to buy it. Money, money, that’s the alpha and omega of the Palais-Royal. Here one thinks about money and worries about money and nothing else. All thoughts are directed to money, [all] desires, speeches, movements, subterfuges. Money is what eloquence, sensitivity, all straining of the mind, all the inventiveness of the imagination are for. (iii, 5-6) Presenting himself as an “enemy of all luxury,”59 Pogodin flees from the bewitching wares on display and seeks refuge in a tranquil garden (iii, 7). The mercenary spirit is also in evidence in Frankfurt, where the “first person” is Rothschild (iv, 50).60 However, it is in England that this spirit is most fully developed. The English are driven by a desire ceaselessly to accumulate capital. Their heart is made of gold and it resides in the Bank of England (iii, 190-191). Viewing the warehouses and wharves along the Thames estuary from the river as he approaches the city, Pogodin is immediately struck not only by the volume of 59 Pogodin’s response to luxury chimes with that of the Slavophiles. Ivan Kireevskii, for example, castigates westerners for their alleged obsession with wealth and for inventing a “science of luxury,” as he designates the discipline of political economy: see his (later) article “O kharaktere prosveshcheniia Evropy i o ego otnoshenii k prosveshcheniiu Rossii,” in I. V. Kireevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, ed. by M Gershenzon (Moscow: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1911; hereafter Kireevskii, PSS), Vol. 1, pp. 214-215. 60 It was in Frankfurt that the banking house of Rothschild was founded, in the eighteenth century, and the family continued to have a branch there after it had established the branches in other European cities (London, Naples, Paris and Vienna) that enabled it to accumulate such wealth and power by the time of Pogodin’s journey to the west.

128 Chapter 4 the commercial activity in which the English engage but also by the power of their acquisitive urge. Here it is, the universal bazaar, here is the capital of a people who buy and sell with lust in their eyes and worldly pride, [a people] who labour with all their might, rack their brains, contrive, invent, freeze at the poles and bake at the equator with the sole object of acquiring more and more for themselves; a people who are wealthier and poorer than any in the world, a people among whom the right of the individual has developed more than it has anywhere else, among whom a man’s home is his castle, and so on and so forth. (iii, 177) The repugnant commercialism of the English is exemplified by their stratagem of placing attractive and alluringly dressed women at stalls in order to tempt customers to buy lottery tickets (iii, 186) and by their use of men in sandwichboards to advertise products. At first Pogodin is merely amused by the spectacle of men in sandwich-boards on the streets of London, but on reflection he becomes indignant that an individual should be placed in such a degrading position. He does not exist, he does not act, he is wooden, dead, he goes around with no object of his own, to right and left, it’s all the same to him. He merely moves – there is something especially insulting to human dignity here! (iii, 185) He baulks at the subordination of the individual human being to the unceasing pursuit of profit in English society. There are merchants in London for whom the Stock Exchange is the whole world; they know nothing other than the Exchange. There are clerks who sit and write day and night in the candlelight in their dark offices, leaving them only for essential rest. There are people who live under the open sky and shiver in the open air at night. Is this really civilization? Even if there were only a few such freaks of society they would all be living signs of a human race that, if not wholly distorted, is at least becoming so. (iii, 138-139)61 Pogodin’s condemnation of the dehumanized bourgeois world as a whole has an almost theological tone that is accentuated by the Slavonicisms, archaisms and biblical references with which his text is littered. The bustle of London’s warehouses, for example, prompts a quotation from the Gospel according to Luke that underlines the loss of concentration on spiritual life in this commercial world: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things,” he exclaims (iii, 195).62 In fact Pogodin sees the western city as inherently evil. Thus at one of the most ecstatic moments of his journey, as he stands in the belfry at the top of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, far beyond the reach of the clamouring passions that stir the weak human heart, he vividly imagines the golden calf and conceives the immense city spread out below him as Babylon (iii, 95-96). 61 It should be noted in passing, though, that this image of London has been formed in Pogodin’s mind on the basis of anecdotal evidence before he has arrived in the city. Again the writer travels with preconceptions that shape his perception of what he sees. 62 The reference is to Luke, Chapter x, Verse 41.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 129 No relief from bourgeois values is available to Pogodin in Europe. Nowhere among the peoples who are not Slavs is an idyllic counter-vision to the dystopia of modern European “civilization” to be found. In particular the idyll is strikingly absent in the locale where his mentor Karamzin had found it, Switzerland. Admittedly it seems that Pogodin’s enjoyment of Switzerland is impaired by bad weather, irregular transport and an allegedly deceitful guide. It is also true that Pogodin acknowledges the natural beauty of the country (e.g. iv, 104-105, 113-114, 117-120) – although he lacks the palette to depict it in an arresting way – and that, like Karamzin, he experiences a sense of the divinity of human beings when he contemplates mountains, lakes and waterfalls (iv, 130, 145-146). However, his delight in the feelings that landscape can evoke is tempered by his disenchantment with modernity: there is a great deal, he muses, “that is beautiful in the human soul, but alas, it sinks ever deeper” (iv, 136). Moreover, such charm as Switzerland possesses is due solely to its landscape, not to its savage inhabitants. Nature in Switzerland, Pogodin remarks, is “beautiful and rich, but the people are poor and unhappy all the same: we kept on coming across such pinched and ragged-looking people that it was pitiable to look at them . . .” (iv, 125). The shepherds who inhabit scattered huts on the mountainous road to Chamonix seem quite wild. What faces! Barely humans! It’s terrible to look at them. Oh, how many beasts there still are among human beings. What an indictment of the so-called enlightenment and condition of our civil societies! (iv, 149) Some peasants who are briefly fellow passengers give Pogodin some idea of the “coarseness of local mores.” These mountain-dwellers are pale, worn-out, sickly, and have the “terrible goitres” that earlier travellers had observed. Thus in the heart of Europe, where Karamzin had found a bucolic paradise, Pogodin encounters human misery as great as he can imagine in any barbaric land (iv, 147, 151, 158159). Nor does Pogodin find any comfort in a Rousseauesque conception of the common people who inhabit any of the other western countries that he visits. There are no intrinsically noble peasants, workers or paupers here. On the contrary, the people whom Pogodin sees on the road to Naples are “vermin” and in the Bay of Naples the local populace is “terrible, unbearable” (ii, 158, 171). The common people in France are “very stupid and uneducated,” as if they were another tribe. In Germany Pogodin looks with disgust at “gapers” in the villages on feast days: the “village principle” reveals itself in every look and movement (iii, 140). Most strikingly, he is revolted by the sight of the Neapolitan lazzaroni and he develops his revulsion into a philippic against European civilization, so-called, as a whole and against Russian admirers of it. He likens the lazzaroni to savages who inhabit the Pacific islands (and in the process he anticipates Dostoevskii’s critique of the Victorian notion of progress in Notes from the Underground). What sort of creatures are they? Surely not people, citizens of a well-ordered state! . . . How can you Europeans brag about your enlightenment and boast of your civilization . . . A thousand scribblers in France, a million in Germany and a hundred in Russia . . . there is your enlightenment. What is it worth when you

130 Chapter 4 look into the inside of France, England or Austria . . . The human race, they say, is marching towards perfection. It has a long way to go. There are one or two precious fruits on this tree, but what of the rest? A whited sepulchre. (ii, 163164; Pogodin’s italics)63 To Pogodin the lazzaroni are not human beings but frutti di terra (“fruits of the earth”), analogous to the frutti di mare (“fruits of the sea”), that tasteless, odourless marine rubbish with which the lazzaroni fill their stomachs. Such revolting specimens of humanity ought to disabuse the Russian disciples of Hegel of their view that one should reconcile oneself with reality, or at least with reality in its western European forms. You philosophers, especially Hegelians, especially our home-grown journalist “windbags,” look for half an hour at the Neapolitan lazzaroni, the Hungarian Slovaks, the Parisian convicts (and one could add, I think, many factory workers of Manchester and Birmingham), and taste the frutti di mare, and then try to prove that everything is good, necessary and rational. Perhaps everything is good except frutti di mare, everything is necessary except Neapolitan lazzaroni, and everything is rational except you! (ii, 165-166) Thus western civilization, while it might boast inventions or procedures that Russians could usefully appropriate, was more or less repugnant to Pogodin in all the places he visited and at all social levels. Not even the latest word of western philosophy, which in 1839 intoxicated many of Pogodin’s compatriots, including Belinskii and other Westernizers, could make it yield acceptable meaning. RELIGION AND POLITICS As a proponent of Official Nationality and, on a more general level, as a conservative nationalist whose thought was informed by the Romantic currents of his age, Pogodin attached great importance when he was evaluating a society to the religious beliefs held by its members, or to the absence of such beliefs. In Italy he finds grounds for mockery or censure of Catholicism and Catholics. Admittedly his representation of the Catholic Church is not completely one-sided. He acknowledges that the Jesuit Order has done much good and that Europe might have been the poorer but for the papacy, and he approves of the aim of the apostolic mission to disseminate the Christian faith (ii, 73-74, 77). All the same his attitude towards Catholicism is predominantly negative. He pokes fun at the appearance of the Catholic clergy: he is amused by the sight of shorn Capuchin friars, prelates in their violet stockings and young monks in their round black hats (ii, 6). His text also contains the more serious objections that are traditionally levelled at Catholicism by the Orthodox. Pogodin evidently believes, for example, that the Catholic Church has compromised its spiritual role by its involvement in worldly 63 The biblical reference is to Matthew, Chapter xxiii, Verse 27: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 131 affairs, that it functions as a secular state with the pope at its head and that it is a hierarchical organization rather than a brotherhood of equals. He tends to buttress these beliefs by persistent association of the Catholic Church with pagan Rome. He casts doubt on the pontiff’s status as a specifically Christian authority, for instance, by contending that the pope is an ancient Roman as well as a Christian (ii, 19). Again, he underlines the Church’s aggressive exercise of secular power by imagining the young, healthy, manly prelates whom he sees at a service in St. Peter’s as Roman Senators debating the prosecution of a war (ii, 99). Pogodin’s objections to Catholicism are most pronounced in a description of a service in St. Peter’s in Rome during Holy Week. (He writes here in terms so similar to those used by Fonvizin in one of his letters from his journey to Italy that one wonders whether he was familiar with Fonvizin’s text.) Watching the pope sitting on his throne in a tiara Pogodin imagines he is looking at former popes before whom the west had trembled. The so-called “apostles,” selected from pilgrims who had come to Rome to worship, seem like terrified subordinates of a fearful master. (Pogodin applies to the pope the same epithet, groznyi, “dread” or “terrible,” that is applied to Russia’s Ivan IV.) They sit down, stand up or kneel whenever a sign is given to them. The pope, surrounded by his retinue, quickly passes round them. The service resembles a “spectacle” and it lacks “reverence” (ii, 96-97). Like Fonvizin, Pogodin deplores the fact that the pope does not go to the altar to take communion but has the sacraments brought to him. The focus of attention in a great Christian rite seems to have been shifted from Christ, the Lord’s flesh and blood, to an ordinary mortal (ii, 112-113). Even more troubling to Pogodin than the form that Christianity had taken in Italy was the fact that in other European countries religion was degenerating or disappearing altogether, to be replaced by politics. It was not merely that the divine spark was being extinguished in bourgeois society, as we have seen. It was also that the “spirit of communion [obshchenie]” that seemed to Pogodin to characterize western peoples as a whole, and that found expression among the Italians in a zeal for religious propaganda, was now manifested elsewhere in feverish political proselytism (ii, 73-74). This development was most marked in France, where to Pogodin’s dismay religious belief appeared to have crumbled (iii, 102, 220-222). The dominance of politics and topical issues in the French world was all the more striking as a result of the fact that Pogodin came to France from the seemingly timeless Italian world, with its antiquities and Roman ruins. He at once realized that in France he was in a secular world that was concerned with “interests of the minute,” deputies, parliamentary debates, ministerial shuffles, presidents, rates of exchange and fashion (ii, 197-198). His objections to French political life, which complement his critique of the materialistic values of the bourgeois world, also apply, up to a point, to English political life. However, it is French politics that preoccupy him most, because he perceives France as prone to revolutionary tendencies and less stable politically than England. Pogodin has no more respect for French institutions than Fonvizin had shown some sixty years before. For one thing, he questions whether freedom of the press is an indisputable good. He seems disconcerted that French journalists reporting

132 Chapter 4 political debate reflect the views of the party under whose patronage their paper is published and that to arrive at the truth (which, curiously, he equates with some middle ground) one has to compare the reports in all the journals, find the average, collate the variants and restore the distorted text (iii, 42-43). Furthermore, Pogodin forms a low impression of the French legal system. Although he comes away from the Palais de Justice in Paris thinking that the admirable judicial procedure he has witnessed must render miscarriages of justice impossible, he is quickly persuaded by the coachman who drives him home that in France a poor man is never exonerated and that a rich man is never found guilty, because he can afford a good lawyer. Pogodin’s sweeping conclusion about French justice offers reassurance to Russians who might feel defensive about the judicial system in their own land: the “forms are somewhat smoother here, somewhat more refined, somewhat more splendid,” he concedes, but at bottom the French system is no better than the Russian (iii, 144-146). Most importantly, Pogodin is intensely disappointed by the debates that he attends at French, and English, elected assemblies. The Chamber of Deputies in Paris he compares unfavourably with old Russian representative institutions with which he is familiar as an historian. He had expected – on the basis of his knowledge of the Russian chronicles, one may assume – to find in the Chamber of Deputies elected representatives who bring from all corners of the state the information on local affairs and wishes that a government requires. In fact the speakers he hears in Paris seem to him to be engaged in essentially useless activity, presenting superfluous advice or justifying themselves against various charges. Nor do the deputies who do not speak stand any higher in Pogodin’s esteem than those who do: instead of listening respectfully to the orators they merely tolerate them for a few minutes, retaining the right to show boredom and impatience. Thus the legislature as exemplified by the Chamber of Deputies seems unworthy of its exalted role (iii, 38-41). Nor is the Chamber of Peers, a session of which Pogodin also attends, any more worthy of respect than the Chamber of Deputies: lacking the power to veto any decision, its members obediently go with the flow of the Chamber of Deputies, or rather of public opinion in general (iii, 132). British democratic institutions are viewed even less favourably. The “wild clamour” in the House of Commons during the speech that Pogodin hears there strikes him as undignified in the highest council of the state. In any case debates in the House of Commons are an empty formality, Pogodin argues, since Members of Parliament enter the chamber with their minds already made up and the votes for and against a motion are pledged before debate begins (iii, 153, 188-189).64 All these gibes, as well as implying the superiority of Russia’s own democratic credentials to those of the more liberal north-western European nations, capture very well the imperfect, limited, continually evolving nature of western parliamentary institutions at this time. Not that Russian observers were alone in drawing attention to the shortcomings of such institutions or voicing reservations about their efficacy. And yet such reservations perhaps tended to be more typical 64

Pogodin also conscientiously visits a sitting of the parliament in Zürich, by which he is rather bored: Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiakh, Vol. 4, pp. 108-109.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 133 among Russian intellectuals than among their western counterparts, owing no doubt to the weak, inchoate nature of the middle class in Russia as well as to the exceptionally repressive political conditions there. Like Fonvizin before him and many Russian thinkers after him (notably Chernyshevskii, as well as Herzen and Dostoevskii among those who are dealt with here), Pogodin is also suspicious of the eloquence for which western democratic institutions provide a forum. Perhaps this suspicion stems partly from the lack of public stages for orators in Russian life other than the theatre, which Fonvizin had exploited, or the lecture theatre, which Granovskii was transforming in the 1840s into a rudimentary political space. Be that as it may, Pogodin is expressing a widespread sentiment in the Russian intelligentsia when he presents western orators as engaged in futile, self-serving activity. The orators at the Chamber of Deputies seem to exhibit amour-propre rather than love of virtue (iii, 40-41). Those in the Chamber of Peers contrive to speak in a polished manner about an essentially trivial subject (in this case the proposed limitation of the number of members of the Order of the Legion of Honour) (iii, 132-133). The “orators” of the Sorbonne – for members of the academic profession also have the capacity for oratory, which Pogodin considers a distinguishing characteristic of the French people – are for the most part not gentlemen or teachers but lackeys among whom “everything is for show” (iii, 74-75, 78). Seen in this light, the major political and academic institutions of western Europe are not so much instruments of popular representation or education as arenas for vainglorious self-display. The “liberal spirit” that reigns in France, then, is a sham. Pogodin thinks he exposes this sham by luring some interlocutors, who turn out to be American colonists visiting their homeland, into arguing against the abolition of the slave trade on the pragmatic grounds that slaves were their “capital” and that they would be ruined if they lost them. Presenting himself as an inoffensive “peaceful citizen of the far north,” where there are no plantations, Pogodin puts it to these acquaintances that “trading in human beings, even black ones, is sinful” (ii, 193). (To the modern reader, of course, the racism inherent in Pogodin’s use of the word “even” undermines his apparent humanism.) He thus attempts simultaneously to demonstrate that “liberalism” takes flight when the humane values it espouses come into conflict with the economic interests of the propertied classes and to disarm western critics of Russian serfdom. In any case he regards the normal political activity that he observes in France as self-defeating. In Marseilles, for example, he finds Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists all arguing with one another, with the consequence that the port is not cleaned and useful plans remain unconsidered for years on end (ii, 198-199). Later, in Paris, he observes that the constant changes of ministers make it impossible for any efficient person to do any good (iii, 69). He is bemused by France’s political flux and instability and shifting coalitions (iii, 11-12; see also 162-163). Indeed he sees politics in France as a form of worldly delusion: deputies in the parliamentary chamber ought, he thinks, to visit the Père-Lachaise Cemetery and reflect on human vanity and mortality (iii, 93-94). Distasteful and futile as legal political activity in France under Louis-Philippe undoubtedly seems to Pogodin, it troubles him less than the spectre of revolution.

134 Chapter 4 From the moment he arrives in France he is preoccupied with the political turbulence there. He finds the country in a nervous, irritable condition (ii, 206). Not that he is averse to witnessing revolutionary events of the sort for which the French seem to have a predilection. If he could see a “little revolution [revoliutsiiku], even just a bit of one,” he would be entirely satisfied. For Paris without a revolution is like a painting without colours (iii, 25). The city is a “political Vesuvius” (iii, 70). Mutinousness is rife, a fact that Pogodin attributes to the Frenchman’s hostility to power in any form and to the breakdown of religious faith (iii, 102). In due course, on 12 May, the French oblige him with street disturbances and talk of guns, bloodshed and the National Guard (iii, 59-60). Pogodin despises the insurgents. Surely, he asks his maid the following day, the National Guard is able to “deal with such bastards” (iii, 65). Nor does he have time for the parliamentary discussions reported in the press as to whether the “criminals of 12 May” should be tried by jury or the Chamber of Peers. He finds the debate arcane: what is important to him is that the insurgents should be sentenced quickly and punished severely for the sake of public order (iii, 101-102). He seeks no explanation of the causes of political discontent beyond human perversity. In other ways too, besides showing hostility towards revolutionary agitators, Pogodin often betrays an instinctive inclination in A Year in Foreign Lands to support the social and political status quo. He expects the lower orders to be respectful of authority, for example, and takes it for granted that boorishness is needed to enforce discipline. He is shocked by the behaviour of a French peasant who is rude to an official and opines that people everywhere will be insubordinate if one does not shout at them (ii, 198). He deplores challenges to established authority, especially to monarchic authority: he comments facetiously, for instance, on the desire to limit the power of the English sovereign that is implied by the tradition that the sovereign may not enter the City of London without permission from the Lord Mayor (iii, 191). Standing in the Place de la Concorde, he muses that the “good Louis XVI” deserved a better fate than to end his life there on the scaffold at the hands of an impassioned mob (iii, 8). It is consistent with this authoritarian outlook that Pogodin conceives of a government as the “guardian and mentor of a people” and is prepared to confer wide-ranging, perhaps all-embracing, powers on it. Thus he wonders as he observes the sickly mountain-dwellers of Switzerland why the Swiss authorities allow people to settle in regions with an insalubrious climate (iv, 158-159). That is not to say, though, that governments should squander resources on charity, a subject to which Pogodin returns several times in the course of his travelogue. While it is right, he believes, to make generous provision for those who have served their country it is wrong to provide more than a Spartan standard for those who are poor. He is therefore pleased to see that a charitable institution that he visits in Lyon is rather dirty. Such squalor is preferable, he thinks, to the relative luxury of such institutions in Russia, which he affects to believe are housed in magnificent mansions where tasty sauces are served to the residents with a silver spoon (ii, 204-205; iv, 21, 59-60).

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 135 RUSSIA AND THE SLAVS Pogodin has used his travelogue, then, to establish a comprehensively negative image of life in western Europe. Whereas Chaadaev had detected in Europe the notions of justice, law and order and a moral principle that infused society, Pogodin found there dirt, poverty, inequality, materialism, flawed institutions, disrespect for authority and, in France, a proclivity to sedition and revolution. Nor was the west free of faults that Russia’s detractors condemned in Russian life, such as a corruptible judiciary and the use of bribery, or “constitutional shillings” as Pogodin puts it (iii, 178-179). That the civilization thus characterized is alien to Russia is a central thesis of A Year in Foreign Lands. Its alterity is pointed up, perhaps, even by Pogodin’s use in his title of the word chuzhoi (“foreign”), which bears a strong sense of otherness. More explicitly, Europe’s alterity is affirmed by Pogodin’s constant reference to his fatherland, his many expressions of devotion to it and the consciousness of his own national identity that manifests itself in various ways. Of all the travelogues examined in this study in none, perhaps, does the sense of the author’s journey consist more clearly in its being a prelude to his return. The homeland exerts a strong gravitational pull on Pogodin throughout his stay abroad. To meet his compatriots abroad affords him especial pleasure (ii, 139). Conversely, standing in a cemetery in Rome he reflects that a Russian grave far from home brings a peculiar despondency (ii, 93). And what joy he derives from his homeward journey (iv, 215). All images of his travels are forgotten as Moscow, Ivan the Great, the striped barrier at the frontier and the sentry’s cry of “Who goes there!” dominate his waking and sleeping consciousness (iv, 216). Not that his homecoming is without irritations familiar to his compatriots, such as a long search in customs and unhelpful station-masters (iv, 225, 227-228), but Pogodin does not seem to mind them. At last he sees the golden domes of the Kremlin, and it is with the wish “Long live our mother Moscow!” (iv, 228; Pogodin’s italics) that his work ends. Pogodin’s text also has a strong patriotic, even chauvinistic, flavour which it derives, no doubt, from his consciousness of the rise of nationalism in Europe as a whole. Often he favourably compares what he sees abroad to some equivalent object in Russia. The place of burial of a medieval Swiss hermit to which pilgrims flock is marked only by a simple stone grave and a humble church: what a contrast to Russian places of pilgrimage which gleam with silver and gold (iv, 125-126). Pogodin cannot accept that anything that impresses him abroad is not bettered or at least equalled by something in Russia. Thus he qualifies his initial impression that the “most excellent” Place de la Concorde is the finest square in Europe by concluding that it is on a par with the square in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (iii, 9). He rejoices in and wishes to encourage anything that reflects well, or may reflect well, on his fatherland. His heart swells with pride whenever he hears of some Russian who with brush or pen or sword or spoken word has helped to raise his country’s standing (ii, 133). Noting with approval that the French record their history for posterity and that the English commemorate great Englishmen from all walks of life in Westminster Abbey, he seeks to stimulate interest among

136 Chapter 4 his compatriots in their own achievement and to celebrate it appropriately. He complains that he has not seen a single picture depicting Russian history in Moscow or St. Petersburg. And yet Russia too has many “remarkable, original, truly worthy people, although they are of a different character from the western ones,” he insists as he looks at the paintings, statues and busts of great Frenchmen at Versailles (ii, 210; iii, 19-21, 30, 182-183). At the same time Pogodin is offended by fellow-Russians who do not seem to him to live up to his own standards of patriotism. He is saddened, for example, that hardly any of the Russian aristocratic travellers who visit Rome take the trouble to look up the Russian artists living in the city and he cannot understand how “national feeling” can be so dulled (ii, 128). He also rails at Russians who seem too cosmopolitan. On leaving the Baths of Caracalla in Rome he hears Russian speech among another group of tourists entering the building and deliberately speaks to his companions in Russian in order to elicit a response from these compatriots, but to his dismay they pass by in silence, as if they were foreigners. He believes that national and even human feeling has become coarsened in such people. He confesses to “jingoism” (kvasnoi patriotizm): while he is abroad he is ready to embrace anyone who utters a Russian sound (ii, 51). He is unable to speak about his country “sine ira et studio,” that is without indignation or partisanship. He could not emulate the Englishman he meets on a German road by speaking ill of his homeland (iv, 98-99).65 The sense of Russianness that Pogodin experiences is inseparable in his mind from profession of the Orthodox faith, of which he is inordinately proud. He visits a Russian church in Rome because he wants to pray to the Russian God, but is a little disappointed by the condition of the church: he would have wanted it to be more splendid, so that Catholics might see the majesty and dignity of the Russian manner of worship and church architecture (ii, 54-56). He believes that Russian Orthodox ceremonies are incomparably more reverential than the Catholic services he attends in Rome (ii, 97). And as he watches a Roman abbot striving to explain his thoughts to his attentive students, he formulates a more substantial comparison of these two branches of the Christian faith. Whereas a “spirit of propaganda, a desire to convert, a centrifugal [ektsentricheskaia] force,” are characteristic of the Roman Church and the west, there is in the Greek Church and the east a more profound inner spirituality and concentration or, as Pogodin puts it in his awkward way, a “self-deepening [samouglublenie] and a centripetal force” (ii, 64). No less essential an attribute of Russiannness, from the point of view of the Official Nationalist, is devotion to autocracy, for which Pogodin is a shameless apologist. Like Karamzin – and also like his contemporary adversaries, the Westernizers – Pogodin revered Peter, whom he regarded, in spite of Peter’s hostile attitude towards the Church, as a model for later autocrats, a “human God.”66 This 65 The phrase “sine ira et studio” belongs to the Roman annalist Tacitus and was often used in the Russian intelligentsia in Pogodin’s time. For liberal Westernizers such as the historian Granovskii and the literary critic Druzhinin the dispassionate attitude that it described was a virtue that the Russian intelligentsia needed to cultivate. For Pogodin this attitude seems to be a vice. 66 Barsukov, Vol. 1, p. 211.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 137 adulation informs Pogodin’s account of his excursion to Saandam in Holland, where Peter had stayed during his Great Embassy. Pogodin describes the little house in which Peter had lived in adoring detail and departs from it in awe as from a holy sanctuary (iv, 14-15).67 Where Pogodin differs profoundly from the Westernizers, though, is in his slavish devotion to the institution of autocracy in its nineteenth-century form and to its present representative, Nicholas. His royalism is most effusively expressed in a passage in which he describes a journey he has made from London to Hampton Court and in the course of which he falls to thinking about the improvements that he believes await the Russian peasants as a result of the reforms planned by the Ministry of State Properties recently set up by Nicholas under the direction of Kiseliov. With tears welling in his eyes Pogodin reflects upon the Russian God, the epic nature of Russian history, the system of government which is the source of all good in Russia, and the autocrats Peter and Nicholas, whose days he implores the Lord to prolong. It is this reverie on Russia’s history, current affairs and benevolent form of government, rather than any pleasure or useful insight furnished by any of the European countries through which he is travelling, that Pogodin reckons the sweetest experience of his yearlong journey (iii, 201-203). Many other qualities, besides devotion to Orthodoxy and autocracy, are associated by Pogodin in his travelogue with Russian national character, and they tend to be illuminated by contrast with western defects. Unlike western peoples, particularly the English, the Russians as Pogodin represents them are not materialistic or mercantile. Russian trade would never rival that of England because commerce was not in the spirit of Russian people. Moreover, Pogodin believed that the Russian people exhibited that domesticity that Karamzin had valued: they were attached to their hearth and could be happy only in their family milieu, in the peasant hut or izba (iii, 191). They also had a receptivity that gave Pogodin grounds for optimism that they would learn everything that they might need to absorb from other civilizations (iii, 75). They possessed generosity of spirit too. Pogodin’s heart begins to pound when in a spa town a dining companion who turns out to be a Russian general pours him a glass of wine from his bottle. This is the first and last glass of wine Pogodin has been given for nothing during his whole journey, he claims, and the gesture epitomizes “everything” for him, his “country, history and the Russian character” (iv, 79-80). The expansive Russian nature, thus conceived, jibs at the limits to which the western nature submits. Commenting on the Italians through observation of their gardens, where everything is “clipped, almost shaven,” Pogodin chides them for their “primness, refinement [he does not use the word in a positive sense] and proportionality,” which are disagreeable to a “northerner” who loves what is “wild, free, spacious and severe” (ii, 101). (What Pogodin considers a fault in Italian horticulture – namely its mastery of Nature – would have been 67 Pogodin’s early play on Peter had glorified the ruler’s sense of duty to Russia and shortly after his journey Pogodin produced a panegyric assessment in which Peter is depicted as a colossal figure who affected every area of Russia’s subsequent life and equipped it to compete and survive in the larger world: Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 105-110; idem, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 109-113.

138 Chapter 4 regarded by Fonvizin, it will be recalled, as a virtue in it.) As for the Russian common people in particular, they represented a striking contrast to their brutish western counterparts such as the rural dolts whom Pogodin says he encounters in Germany (iii, 140). Their piety and good nature may be inferred from the recommendations concerning subject-matter that Pogodin makes to Russian artists working in Rome. Attempting to divert these artists’ attention from foreign subjects, such as the repellent lazzaroni whom one of their number was planning to paint, Pogodin suggests instead native subjects such as pilgrims on their way to a holy site or peasants and artisans returning to their villages after work or stopping to rest on the road, their various postures expressing their relaxed, composed manner (ii, 130-131).68 However, the Russian people are not the only people whom Pogodin admires. He also feels an affinity with fellow Slavs, especially those who were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, of whose emergent self-consciousness he was aware and about whom he wrote copiously. So confident is he that the Slavs as a whole are characterized by a peculiar political quiescence that he advances the absurd proposition that the people of the Vendée, in western France, must be the descendants of a Slavonic tribe that has become Frenchified, since, unlike the rest of the Gallic tribe, they had remained loyal to landowners and kings even in revolutionary times (iii, 70-71). (Conversely he seeks to explain the fact that the Polish nobility, the szlachta, do not display the characteristics that he associates with Slavs, particularly political obedience, by speculating that they are descendants of some Latin tribe that has become Slavonicized.) The travelogue also reflects Pogodin’s aggrieved view that the Slavs were the most ancient inhabitants of Europe but that their culture had been obliterated by the more aggressive peoples who had conquered territory that Slavs had once occupied. The point is illustrated by a comparison of the Slavs to Columbus: it was Columbus who had discovered the New World, but it was after the later explorer Amerigo Vespucci that the New World had been named. The Slavonic world, Pogodin contended, was a “palimpsest” on which “glorious ancient outlines” had been obscured until his own time “beneath ugly alien signs.” The Slav revival in which he took pleasure involved competition with, indeed a sort of liberation from, peoples such as the Germans who had “obliterated the Slavonic name from chronicles, history and the face of the earth” (iii, 131). Indeed Pogodin’s own life’s work may be seen as part of the labour of the Slavs – and other European peoples, such as the Celts, Greeks and Magyars – to construct distinctive national identities on the basis of their language, religion, literary traditions (both written and oral), music, songs, dress and customs. Questions relating to the history of the Slavs repeatedly engage Pogodin’s attention in A Year in Foreign Lands. The Macedonian Slavs Cyril and Methodius, 68 It should be noted, though, that Pogodin, like other proponents of Official Nationality, had an essentially pessimistic view of human nature and even harboured reservations about the Russian common people. The Russian peasants, he wrote in 1826, would not become “human beings” until they were forced to do so; they were “wonderful,” but as yet wonderful “only in potentiality,” for in actuality they were “base, horrible and beastly” (Barsukov, Vol. 2, p. 17).

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 139 who were the first to introduce Slav peoples to Christianity and literacy, in the ninth century, qualify for entry to his pantheon of Russian saints (ii, 56). He is constantly looking out for traces of the Slavs in the places he visits. He hears, for example, that certain sounds, melodies, words or distinctive elements of dress in the region of Meiringen in Switzerland may be of Slavonic origin (iv, 140). He regrets the dearth of historical scholarship on the Slav peoples (iv, 37) and gently reproves the French historian Guizot, whose scholarship he admires, for omitting from his story a whole half of the picture, that is to say the picture of the Slav states of eastern Europe, which “represent important variants of all western institutions” (iii, 105). He maintains warm relations with ŠafaĜík and Vaclav Hanka, Czech scholars who played an important part in the Czech national revival.69 He converses with the Polish poet Mickiewicz, who at the time of Pogodin’s journey was in exile in Paris, about the “Slavonic monuments, that is to say remnants of language, civil society and learning,” which are coming to light as a result of the efforts of Slav scholars (iii, 130-131). He is sympathetic to the attempts that other Slav peoples were making to define their national identities. Observing apropos of the desire of the Belgians to use Flemish instead of Dutch that the “language movement” is a noteworthy phenomenon of the age, he notes that Slavs too, for example the Bulgarians under Turkish rule and the Ruthenes in Galicia, are fighting to assert their own languages and to establish their own literatures. It is a sore point, in this context, that the Russians continued to speak a foreign language, French, in their drawing-rooms (iv, 3-4), or so Pogodin claims (the point seems dated by the 1840s). At the same time Pogodin had little patience with fellow Slavs who had repudiated what he believed to be natural expressions of the Slav spirit and who seemed resistant to Russian hegemony in the Slav world. His quite lengthy description of his encounter with Mickiewicz in Paris is indicative of his attitude towards such renegades. Pogodin essays what seems to him a charitable explanation of the change that he believes Mickiewicz’s attitude towards Russia has undergone since the days when he lived in Moscow. When “revolution” broke out in Poland (Pogodin has in mind the uprising of 1830-31, to which reference was made at the beginning of this chapter) Mickiewicz, who was at that time in Rome, was dismayed by it and criticized the insurgents who were bringing ruin on his country. His subsequent abuse of Russia Pogodin attributes to the influence of Polish émigrés in Dresden, where Mickiewicz settled after the revolt, with whom Mickiewicz felt it dishonourable to disagree. He did not have the strength of character, Pogodin conjectures, to point out to his irresponsible compatriots the error of their ways or to use his poetry to reconcile them with necessity and affirm the eternal union of Russia and Poland for the good of both states. However, Pogodin thinks on the basis of something that he has been told in Rome that Mickiewicz’s “sudden apostasy” has now ended and he resolves to advise Mickiewicz when he sees him to throw himself at the mercy of the magnanimous Russian sovereign. He also plans to pen a defence of Russian policy towards 69

On Pogodin’s contact with these and other Slav scholars in 1835 and on his admiration and organization of financial support for ŠafaĜík, see ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 313-319, 326-327, 331-334, 416-429.

140 Chapter 4 Poland in which he would furnish Mickiewicz with historical proof of the necessity70 of Polish unification with Russia, the form of which, however is very vague (it “belongs to politics” and “depends on those or other circumstances”) (iii, 128-130). Thus Russian civilization, and the civilization of other Slavs so long as they remained faithful to what Pogodin defined as their character and traditions, seemed to Pogodin to antedate and to be qualitatively different from the mainstream of European civilization. Russian civilization was also in his opinion superior to western civilization by virtue of the religious faith that Russians professed, their political organization under an autocrat rather than representative institutions, and the national character of the Russian people, which was notable for its lack of materialism or seditiousness. No flaws in Pogodin’s homeland could tarnish this idealized image of Russia. Contesting the view held by some that certain elements of the decoration of St. Peter’s in Rome spoil the whole, he is moved to compare the cathedral to Russia: one may find here and there a feature which is not beautiful but it in no way mars the overall effect of grandeur and beauty (ii, 21). At the same time his occasional remarks in a Romantic or biblical vein on the transience of human greatness (e.g. ii, 36; iv, 53) served, as similar remarks by his mentor Karamzin had done, to suggest the frailty of European civilization and the plausibility of impending Russian ascendancy over the apparently more advanced nations of the west. Thus, as he views the now deserted Campo vaccino, the site of the ancient Roman Forum where once the destinies of whole kingdoms and peoples had been decided, Pogodin reflects with Solomon on the vanity of vanities and seems heartened by this apparent evidence of western perishability (ii, 9). *

*

*

Pogodin used the travelogue, it has been argued here, in order to make a statement about the relationship between Russia and the west as an Official Nationalist perceived it at a time when the educated class was again undergoing intense cultural westernization and when opposition to the tsarist state in its modern bureaucratic form was hardening. He did not disapprove of limited borrowing of a practical nature from the countries he visited in 1839, but he bitterly reproved compatriots who seemed to have a cosmopolitan outlook and set himself against fundamental change in Russia on a western model. For one thing, he saw nothing in the west beyond a superficial level that was worthy of emulation. In common with other Russian commentators at both the conservative and radical ends of the political spectrum he found in the west a jarring discrepancy between wealth and poverty (although, like Karamzin before him and Goncharov after him, he did respect England’s cleanliness and orderliness). He also questioned the value of the freedoms and institutions prized by western peoples and offered what in retrospect seems a classic Russian conservative critique of mid-nineteenth-century 70

The Russian word neobkhodimostƍ, which Pogodin uses here, might also be translated as “inevitability”; the ambiguity of the concept is a rich source of confusion.

Pogodin: A Year in Foreign Lands 141 parliamentary democracy. He was dismayed by the alleged tastelessness and absurdity of modern French culture, into which he thought the vaudeville provided an accurate insight (iii, 15; see also 91), a view shortly to be echoed by Herzen and Dostoevskii. He perceived in western European civilization a Roman legacy that to the Russian, whose Orthodox culture had its source in Byzantium, seemed grand but severe (ii, 7). He rejected criteria of a sort that a westerner or Westernizer might have used for the evaluation of a society, such as acknowledgement of individual rights and freedoms and the existence of laws and institutions that protect them, religious toleration, relative prosperity and a capacity to progress. Nor would he have expected institutional change to have a beneficial effect in western countries, because he regarded the flaws in those countries as products of the nature of the western peoples and the underlying spirit and values of their societies. Pogodin’s critique of the west relies to some extent on ethnic stereotyping and even xenophobia, though no more so than the critiques of Fonvizin in the eighteenth century and Herzen and Dostoevskii in his own. The English he considers a proud, offhand people among whom wealth is the principal criterion for judging others (iv, 98, 103, 115). In a possible echo of an aphorism of Fonvizin’s he expresses the wish that the French possessed as much reason as wit (iii, 58).71 Among the Germans the dominant characteristic is “mechanicalness” (mashinalƍnostƍ) of every sort, “logical, historical, psychological” (iv, 87-88; see also 194). His stereotyping is sometimes comparative: the French are “turbulent political revolutionaries,” whereas the Germans are “turbulent in their studies but ever so quiet [smirnekhonƍki] in the town-square” (iii, 139-140). As for nonEuropean peoples, the Chinese and Japanese, while they do have many noteworthy things that the more advanced Europeans cannot produce, are deemed “savages” (iv, 26). Again we encounter in a Russian text a strong current of anti-Semitism: the celebrated actress Rachel, whom Pogodin sees performing on one of his visits to the theatre in Paris, is described as “a little Yid” (iii, 79), and when Pogodin mentions the Jewish quarter of a city – for example, in Amsterdam, Interlaken and Cracow – it is almost always with a sneer (iv, 19, 129, 225). In opposition to his crude perceptions of foreign character Pogodin offers in his artless diary a classic definition of Russian character as it tended to be perceived by the nationalistic nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Both implicitly by contrast with other peoples and through explicit comment on Russians themselves, Pogodin portrays the Russians as peaceful, home-loving, unacquisitive, generous and capable of drawing on the best of other people’s customs. Russians are free of the moral corruption which it had been Rousseau’s service to identify in the so-called civilized societies of the west. They have not been dehumanized by the calculating pursuit of profit that has come to reign in England. Nor, finally, have they been lured into the frenzied but shallow political activity that has filled the vacuum left by the weakening of religious faith in France.

71 “The Frenchman,” Fonvizin had said in his Letters from France, “possesses no reason and would consider it the misfortune of his life to possess it, for it would make him reflect when he could be having a good time”; see Fonvizin, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 480-481.

CHAPTER 5

Botkin: Letters on Spain

BOTKIN’S LIFE AND CONTRIBUTION TO RUSSIAN THOUGHT As the eldest son of a wealthy Moscow tea-merchant, Vasilii Petrovich Botkin (1811-69) emanated from a social stratum, the kupechestvo, that was despised in equal measure by both the predominantly aristocratic “men of the 40s” and the more plebeian men and women who came to the fore in the intelligentsia in the 1860s. Nevertheless by dint of his aesthetic sensibility and application as an autodidact, Botkin won acceptance among the leading men of letters of his day. He was at one time or another close, for example, to Bakunin, Belinskii, the poet Fet (who married one of Botkin’s sisters), Granovskii, Herzen, Nekrasov, Lev Tolstoi and Turgenev. He played a role in the production of three of the journals whose emergence was indicative of the growth of intellectual life and the development of a public opinion in Russia from the 1840s to the 1860s, namely The Moscow Observer, Notes of the Fatherland and The Contemporary. His voluminous correspondence with Belinskii, especially intense in the period 1838-1843 when Belinskii was undergoing his famous transformation from advocate of Hegelian “reconciliation with reality” to apostle of socialism and revolutionary terror, was itself, in the view of the pre-revolutionary Russian scholar Pypin, a notable literary phenomenon.1 A connoisseur of the arts (Botkin wrote on music and painting as well as literature) and endowed with a finely developed artistic taste, Botkin was one of the readers whose opinion Turgenev valued most; in fact Botkin was the only person apart from Dostoevskii, Turgenev once said, who had entirely understood the character of Bazarov in his novel Fathers and Children.2 He was also an omnipresent guest, when he was not abroad, at the convivial social gatherings that played such an important part in the intellectual and cultural life of the age of Nicholas, gatherings which Herzen fondly describes in his memoirs. Indeed it was Botkin who taught his contemporaries round the dining-table, Herzen recalled, “that a man may equally find ‘pantheistic’ delight in contemplating the 1 A. N. Pypin, Belinskii: ego zhiznƍ i perepiska, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Knigoizdatel'stvo “Kolos,” 1908), p. 271. 2 Turgenev, PSSP, Pisƍma, Vol. 4, p. 381.

143

144 Chapter 5 dance of the sea waves and of Spanish maidens or savouring the songs of Schubert and the aroma of a turkey stuffed with truffles.”3 While playing an important role in the emergent intelligentsia, Botkin did not, however, desert the milieu into which he had been born. He helped to cultivate his own numerous siblings (there were eight brothers and five sisters), of whom Sergei became an eminent specialist in the field of medicine and two others became prominent in the art world. He worked intermittently in the family business in the 1830s and 1840s and did not completely withdraw from it until the mid-1850s. This social allegiance should perhaps be borne in mind when one comes to consider Botkin’s stance in the debate in the intelligentsia in the 1840s on the role of the bourgeoisie and his response to Victorian England in the 1850s, which was untypically sympathetic. Botkin’s personality too, like his class loyalty, was somewhat ambivalent. He was known for an irascibility that sometimes caused him to erupt at the slightest provocation, while also seeming to display a serenity that calmed the volatile Belinskii. Moreover his liking for philosophical abstraction and his undoubted aspiration towards the ethereal co-existed with an earthy hedonism. He was prone to debauchery that shocked friends such as Annenkov, who reported that Botkin had sunk during one stay in France into a “whirl of Parisian love affairs and every other sort of adventure.”4 The ascetic Belinskii chided him for “indecency, drunkenness, lust, gluttony and [various] other deadly sins” and called him a “sinful old goat.”5 Botkin was a central figure among the Westernizers who in the 1840s and 1850s hoped to civilize Russia by means of the introduction of western ideas and culture into their country and who instinctively opposed the Slavophile notion that the seeds of Russia’s futurity lay in a spiritually pure and socially harmonious prePetrine world. However, Westernism was an amorphous body of thought that embraced thinkers who were eventually to stand at quite different points on the political spectrum. Whereas Bakunin, Belinskii and Herzen would at one time or another take up radical and even revolutionary socialist positions, including 3

Herzen, Byloe i dumy, in SS, Vol. 9, p. 114. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960), p. 331; see also D. V. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961), p. 119. 5 Belinskii, PSS, Vol. 12, p. 81. The fullest accounts of Botkin’s contribution to Russian intellectual life are to be found in B. F. Egorov, “V. P. Botkin – literator i kritik”, Uchonye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, Vol. 139 (1963), pp. 20-81, Vol. 167 (1965), pp. 81-122, and Vol. 184 (1966), pp. 33-43; and Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals, pp. 79-105. See also Egorov, “V. P. Botkin – avtor ‘Pisem ob Ispanii,’” in V. P. Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, ed. by B. F. Egorov and A. Zvigil'skii (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1976; hereafter Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii), pp. 265-286; and Offord, “Vasilii Petrovich Botkin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 277, Russian Literature in the Age of Realism, ed. by Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (Detroit, etc.: Thomson Gale, 2003), pp. 48-53. On Botkin’s role in literary debates see also Edmund Kostka, “A Trailblazer of Russian Westernism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 18 (1966), pp. 211-224; George Genereux, “Botkin’s Collaboration with Belinskij on the Puškin Articles,” Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1977), pp. 470-482; idem, “The Crisis in Russian Literary Criticism: 1856 – the Decisive Year,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 17 (1982), pp. 117-140; Egorov, Borƍba esteticheskikh idei Rossii serediny XIX veka (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1982); and Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare: Russian Literary Theory, 1855-1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4

Botkin: Letters on Spain 145 anarchism, others – Annenkov, Granovskii and Botkin himself – came to occupy cautious evolutionary positions that in the Russian context were described as “liberal.” These moderate Westernizers advocated toleration of viewpoints different from their own, humanitarian reform and preservation of what they considered valuable in the existing society, culture and values rather than the extensive destruction that Belinskii and Bakunin contemplated with equanimity. In the late 1850s they opposed the demand for utility in art that was by then being made by the epigones of the radical Westernizers of their generation and insisted instead on the value of art as an end in itself. (In the politically febrile atmosphere after the Crimean War, when the radical wing of the intelligentsia led by Chernyshevskii was seeking far-reaching social change, this aesthetic standpoint seemed to indicate acceptance of the status quo.) Finally, in the 1860s, when political opinions were becoming sharply polarized, Botkin took up frankly conservative positions, bitterly attacking the younger radical thinkers and supporting the ruthless Russian suppression of the Polish Revolt of 1863. Botkin provided a useful service for his contemporaries in translating various German and English writings, including Thomas Carlyle’s work On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History (1841),6 but his original literary output, while diverse, was neither voluminous nor, for the most part, impressive. He did not try his hand at fiction and left no memoirs and his few essays in the field of literary criticism were prolix. As a writer of travel sketches, though, he was fluent, readable and somewhat more prolific. At three points in a period of some twenty-five years he resorted to this genre, reflecting at each point the current mood of a section of the intelligentsia and debates taking place in it. Firstly, there is a set of three sketches based on his travels in the west in 1835, namely “A Russian in Paris” (1836), “Fragments of Travel Notes about Italy” (1839), and “A Letter from Italy” (1842).7 Secondly, and most importantly, he produced a cycle of Letters on Spain, which was based on his journey to that country in 1845. Finally, in 1859 he wrote two essays on the basis of a stay in England in that year.8 It is on the Letters on Spain that this chapter will focus, but it may be useful first to dwell briefly on the early sketches, since they are examples of literary experimentation in what was to become Botkin’s favoured genre and since they explore themes that inform the Letters on Spain or strike notes that resonate in them. In the manner familiar to readers of Karamzin, Botkin strives in his early sketches to make his account of his travels seem personal and spontaneous. He uses the conventional frame of a letter to friends, frequently addressing imagined readers and sustaining the illusion of communication with them by means of questions and

6 Botkin’s translation of Carlyle was first published in The Contemporary in three instalments in late 1855 and early 1856. It is reprinted in the first edition of his collected works: see V. P. Botkin, Sochineniia, 3 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdanie zhurnala “Panteon literatury,” 1890-1893), Vol. 2, pp. 3-63. 7 “Russkii v Parizhe (1835). Iz putevyh zapisok”; “Otryvki iz dorozhnykh zametok po Italii”; and “Pis'mo iz Italii.” These sketches are republished in Botkin, Sochineniia, Vol. 1, pp. 3-34, and idem, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 195-220. 8 See the first section of Chapter 7 below.

146 Chapter 5 exclamations (e.g. 195-197, 199, 202, 219).9 At the same time the early sketches, like Karamzin’s exemplary text, breathe a literariness that belies their claim to immediacy (and also makes one suspect the authenticity of the descriptions they contain). Botkin’s record of his impressions of Venice, for example, seems to be structured by some lines from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) that he quotes (214). The bewitching aspect of the city as he observes it during a midnight ride in a gondola is associated in his imagination with his “magical Hoffman with his tender Annunziata and his dashing gondolier” and with Marino Faliero, a Renaissance doge who was the subject of a tragedy by Byron (215).10 As far as their content is concerned, the early sketches are of interest here in three respects. Firstly, they betray the enthusiasm for national stereotyping that is so pronounced a feature of classical Russian thought in general and of Russian travel writing in particular. The twenty-four-year-old author confidently generalizes about the English, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the Spaniards, and situates the Russians too in his European portrait gallery. In the first sketch, for instance, he contrasts French and English character, applying to the former the durable topoi of passion, turbulence and imaginativeness and to the latter the topoi of cold rationality and mercenariness, to which is now added a tendency to compartmentalize the different aspects of their life, religious, political, moral and social.11 Every Englishman is a complex being: on one side of his life there is religion, on another there are his political views, on a third the rules of morality and conduct. Talk to an Englishman about religion and he will be reluctant to respond. His rules of faith were decided upon when he was young and he adheres to them rigidly. Perhaps he is even an atheist in the depths of his heart but he will dissemble or keep his counsel, out of habit or some sense of respect for the overriding influence that the education and morals of the people as a whole have on the individual member of society. He feels no link between religious and political ideas. Something is missing from this people. They are constituted in such a way that they are great and vast, but sombre. The Frenchman is not like that, nor is France, a country which rages like a storm and has passions and intense views . . . (198) As for the Russians, “people of the north” who have heard only the distant roar of European life, they may find it confusing when they are drawn into the “civil maelstrom” of Paris, with its passionate and numerous parties and points of view. And yet they are not wholly dissimilar to the charismatic French, it would seem, 9

All page references in parentheses in the text of this chapter are to the edition of Pisƍma ob Ispanii edited by Egorov and Zvigilƍskii and cited in n. 5 above. 10 The references are to Hoffman’s “Doge und Dogaresse” from the cycle Die Serapionsbrüder (1819-1821) and Byron’s Marino Faliero: Doge of Venice (1821). Faliero (1274-1355) was doge from 1354-1355 and was tried and executed with his accomplices when a plot that he led was discovered by the nobles. 11 The view that the English were capable of compartmentalizing the different areas of their being (religious, social, economic and so forth) was also to find support in the Slavophile camp: see the article by Ivan Kireevskii cited in n. 59 to Chapter 4 above, in Kireevskii, PSS, Vol. 1, pp. 210-211.

Botkin: Letters on Spain 147 inasmuch as they too are unpredictable, contradictory and perhaps self-confident (197-199).12 Secondly, the early sketches implicitly assert the importance of the particular epoch in which Botkin was living by conveying a sense of historical flux and promoting a belief in the pregnancy of certain historical moments. (This belief, which was no doubt encouraged by reading of Hegel, runs through all the midnineteenth-century travelogues examined in this book.) Botkin has an exhilarating awareness of the rise and fall of civilizations and repeatedly juxtaposes moribund old worlds and fresh new ones. Thus in Rome the ruins of the Forum, triumphal arches, and the Colosseum prompt observations about how the seemingly allpowerful and invulnerable classical civilization was superseded by the mysterious, dynamic force of Christianity. The years go by; the tree of new life grows, people flock to its mysterious canopy – and all of a sudden Rome notices, in perplexity, that this strange thirst for an unseen world is eating away at the root of its existence and destroying its civil order. In wonderment it surveys its new adversary: Rome does not understand, it knows of no arms with which to fight this adversary. Of what use will swords be now, when this weak, defenceless adversary joyfully allows itself to be killed and, as it dies, speaks of love and eternal life! Rome grew troubled. A battle rages – an extraordinary, unprecedented battle between the strongest and the weakest. How difficult it is for the light that regenerates mankind to make its way – it is difficult, and yet with every day that passes it gains ground. And see how convulsively the old world tosses about as it dies. It is to no purpose that you drench your amphitheatres with the blood of Christians or call your people together to applaud the Christians’ doom! The people clap but they leave the theatre deep in thought: they already have a dim premonition of the divine mystery... It is in vain, O wearied world, that you open the gates of your city to your adversary when at last you are exhausted, and it is to no purpose that you elevate this adversary to the throne of your emperors [the reference is to the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century]; it is implacable: it will destroy you and scatter your remains over the earth... (218) Sight of the Duomo in Milan occasions similar thoughts on mankind’s renewal in the medieval world (207). Again, Venice is presented as a place of faded grandeur, a once beautiful city now in decline, empty and lifeless (210, 213-214). Contemporary Paris stands on the border between the past and the future (199). Thirdly, in various ways – for example, through medievalism, gloomy nostalgia, exoticism and preference for what is supposedly natural and uninhibited over what is civilized and constrained – Botkin’s early travel sketches reflect the Romanticism that was the prevailing cultural movement of the 1830s in Russia. Visiting the Duomo, for instance, Botkin flees in his imagination from the refined civil society of the modern age into a supposedly poetic medieval era unaffected by classical learning, science and enlightenment. It pleases him 12

For generalizations on the Germans and Italians, see Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 198, 208.

148 Chapter 5 to look at the clash of castes, communities and spiritual and political power, it pleases the imagination to wander through these ruins, the monuments of the Middle Ages. But surely the temples and buildings of the Greeks and Romans are more beautiful than these dark churches with their lacy carvings, spires and long columns which are lost in the gloomy heights of their vaults. What is artistic in these castles overgrown with grass and perched on cliff-tops, with their towers and long, gloomy halls where ancient arms and trophies of the hunt rather than works of art served as decoration? What is there in this way of life without civil society or civilization, this semi-savage way of life of people who always relied on the power of weapons, as against the way of life of the ancients with their art and laws which we still marvel at and emulate? No, the Middle Ages are closer to my heart . . . (206-207) In Venice Botkin is similarly enchanted by the façade of the Doge’s Palace because it reminds him of a tale “full of images of the sensuous dreaminess of the orient” (211). And in Paris, finally, the high point of Botkin’s stay is a meeting with the leading Romantic poet, dramatist and novelist Victor Hugo, whom he idolizes. Hugo’s face, as Romanticism requires of its heroes, has nobility and a touch of melancholy and pensiveness. Questioned by Hugo about Russian poetry, Botkin again conforms to Romantic taste by dwelling on primitive popular culture as exemplified by folk song and alluding to the nomadic life of the gypsies (201-202). It turns out, finally, that the Romantic mood is closely associated with Spain, for it was there that Hugo was brought up and from there that he drew his poetic inspiration. Hugo’s Spain, as Botkin imagines it in his sketch of 1836, is a luxuriant, picturesque, exotic land inhabited by a people whose mores Botkin believes to be more African than European. It was this early image of Spain, constructed long before he personally set foot in that country, that Botkin would develop in his Letters on Spain. ROMANTIC SPAIN In September 1843 Botkin married a French seamstress with whom he had had a brief affair. The wedding ceremony, which is described with ironic wit by Herzen in his memoirs,13 was conducted with pomp in the grand setting of the Kazan' Cathedral on Nevskii Prospekt in St. Petersburg. The marriage did not survive the newly-weds’ voyage from Russia to France and the couple parted on arrival there. However, Botkin remained in the west, mainly in France itself, until 1846 and it was during this second stay abroad that he made his visit to Spain, which Annenkov described as one of several “hygienic intermissions” in Botkin’s Parisian debauches.14 He travelled in Spain in the summer and autumn of 1845,15 the same 13

Herzen, Byloe i dumy, in SS, Vol. 9, pp. 255-262. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominaniia, p. 331. 15 It is not entirely clear how long Botkin spent in Spain, though it was not as long as the dates he assigns to his letters would seem to indicate. One of the editors of the Soviet edition of the Letters suggests that he was in the country from mid-August to late October 1845: see A. Zvigil'skii, 14

Botkin: Letters on Spain 149 year, incidentally, in which the composer Mikhail Glinka visited the country. According to the Letters, Botkin entered Spain from south-west France at Irún, passed through Vitoria and Burgos and paused in Madrid. He then went further south, through Aranjuez and La Mancha, crossed the Sierra Morena and travelled extensively in Andalucia, where he visited Córdoba, Écija, Seville, Cádiz, Jeréz, Málaga and Granada. He also called at the ports of Algeciras and Tarifa and the British colony at Gibraltar and made a brief excursion to Morocco. The journey gave rise to seven literary letters, six of which were published in The Contemporary between 1847 and 1849 (three of them before the revolutionary events in France in February 1848 and three after) and the last of which came out, under the title “Granada and the Alhambra,” in 1851.16 In 1857 the whole cycle was published in St. Petersburg in an essentially unrevised separate edition.17 The Letters on Spain have merits of the sort that are characteristic of accomplished travel writing. Blending description, narrative, reflection and reported dialogue or song, Botkin provides a varied, lively and colourful account of scenery, places of touristic interest, culture, local life and customs. He evokes barren, deserted, melancholy landscapes scorched by the summer sun. He describes in a readable way the monumental cathedrals in Burgos, Seville and Cádiz, the grand mosque in Córdoba, the alcázar, or Moorish fortress, in Seville and the Alhambra and the Generalife in Granada. He visited the Prado in Madrid and other galleries and writes knowledgeably and at length on Spanish painting, especially on Murillo, who he thinks expresses a deep religiosity (68-74). He offers a vivid reenactment of the trial of the eighteenth-century statesman Olavide by the Inquisition (44-46). He depicts life on the streets and in the squares of Spanish cities (e.g. 13-20) and the types he sees there, such as water-carriers and coachmen. He informs his readers about Spanish food, drink, dress, manners, dance (e.g. 8586, 156) – in which he is eventually persuaded to take part (166) – and even the courting habits of the young men and women of Seville (89-90). He samples sherry in Jeréz (108), sees the apes of Gibraltar (116), and in Tangier witnesses a Jewish wedding (131) and an Arab festival which ends with a man eating a live snake (133-134). He also provides a long and dramatic account of a bull-fight. At last the beast’s fury has reached its peak and only now may the real battle commence, the battle of one against one: the sound of a trumpet summons the matador. The enraged beast rushes round the arena, the chulos18 and banderilleros19 have concealed themselves, the arena is empty. At this point the “Tvorcheskaia istoriia ‘Pisem ob Ispanii’ i otzyvy o nikh sovremennikov,” in Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, p. 295. 16 The Letters are printed in Botkin, Sochineniia, Vol. 1, pp. 35-283, and idem, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 5-194. There is also a French edition of them: Vassili Botkine, Lettres sur l’Espagne, tr. and ed. by Alexandre Zviguilsky [Zvigilƍskii] (Paris: Centre de recherches hispaniques, 1969). There is a more marked political element in the three Letters that predate the revolutionary events in France in 1848 than in the later letters: see Egorov, “V. P. Botkin – avtor ‘Pisem ob Ispanii,’” in Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 275-276. 17 Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Eduarda Pratsa, 1857). 18 i.e. the bull-fighter’s assistants. 19 i.e. the men who throw the banderillas, barbed darts, into the bull.

150 Chapter 5 matador enters in the most magnificent Andalusian costume, a red cloak slung casually over his left shoulder, [and] in his right hand he holds a short sword and in his left a red cape (muleta).20 He walks haughtily, his every step is considered and deliberate. He salutes the corregidor, the town governor,21 with his sword and comes to a stop. Now the solemn moment has arrived. The bull, panting with rage, catches sight of the matador and charges at him – but as if sensing a terrible enemy, it suddenly stops [and] observes him, considering how to strike. Chiclanero is young, handsome, dressed in satin, velvet and gold, and is wonderfully wellbuilt. He casts his red cloak off his shoulder; his every movement is decisive and composed. (59-60) At the same time the Letters are rich in information and comment on Spanish history and politics, the roles of the state, Church and various social classes, and economic matters such as industrial development, landholding practices and taxation. The Letters have further qualities that enable them to succeed as a travelogue, besides colour, variety and zest. For one thing they have that air of spontaneity for which the travel writer strives but which the use of a first-person narrative form does not necessarily provide. Botkin achieves this effect by means of several devices, as well as by use of the familiar form of a correspondence with friends.22 He tends, for example, to be digressive (27) and absent-minded (27, 99, 191). Moreover, the Letters have an aura of credibility that comes of Botkin’s apparent authority as an observer of the country he is visiting. Botkin seems, after all, to have facility in the Spanish language, if readers are to judge by his habit of reporting snatches of Spanish conversation and his liberal use of Spanish words and phrases (which Belinskii, however, found pretentious23). He also leads his readers to believe that he has had quite frequent and extensive personal contact with Spaniards of various political sympathies to whom he repeatedly refers, especially a certain Don Vicente (11, 18, 21, 26, 29-30, 47). He seems to have read widely about the country, claiming to have perused various newspapers, historical works and other travel writing, or what purports to be travel writing, while composing his Letters. He cites, for instance, late-sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century volumes by Pérez de Hita which he has used as a source on the life of the Moors of Granada (183-184),24 a work by the seventeenth-century French Countess d’Aulnoy

20

i.e. the matador’s stick with a red cloth attached to it. Strictly speaking, the mayor or chief magistrate. 22 The Letters do in fact seem to have been based on letters written to friends and family from Spain, though they were reworked and expanded after Botkin’s return: see Zvigil'skii, p. 288. 23 Belinskii, PSS, Vol. 12, p. 337; see also Zvigil'skii, p. 296, who wonders whether Botkin was as competent in Spanish as he would have his readers believe. 24 Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada (1595-1619). The book went through many editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. English, French and German editions of it were published in the first half of the nineteenth century and further Spanish editions came out in the 1830s and 1840s. 21

Botkin: Letters on Spain 151 (which may, however, be an adroit compilation based on other writings25), and a travelogue by the nineteenth-century Frenchman Laborde (105).26 It may be that it was Botkin’s success in appearing spontaneous and authoritative, more than anything else, that made the Letters seem fresh to Botkin’s contemporaries: although to the modern reader the image of Spain that the Letters purvey may seem contrived, both Belinskii and Gogol' praised Botkin for writing about Spain without preconceptions.27 Thus Botkin handled the genre of travel writing with some literary skill and success. More important from our point of view here, though, is the image that he constructed of the country he visited and the pertinence of that image to the preoccupations of the Russian intelligentsia in which he enjoyed respect at the time of his journey. Botkin’s representation of Spain, for all the apparent authenticity of his multifaceted observations about the country, seems to have its origins in Romantic texts similar to those that had coloured his early sketches about France and Italy. These literary models may have included Chateaubriand’s novella “The Last Abencerraje” (1826), set just after the fall of the Moorish civilization in southern Spain in 1492.28 Most probably they also included the “‘Arabesque’ sketches” grouped under the title The Alhambra (1832) by Washington Irving, who had travelled in Spain in 1829 (with a member of the Russian Embassy in Madrid, as it happened29) and who is mentioned in the Letters (189). At any rate Botkin depicts Spain in a similarly “romantic” light (the epithet belongs to Irving30). His Spain too is a captivating locale inhabited by a people whose character and society are strikingly different from the western national characters and societies with which Russian travellers, including Botkin himself, had previously been chiefly concerned. This “romantic Spain” differs from what Botkin perceives as Europe in at least three specific ways. Firstly, Spain is a wild, dangerous place and the Spaniards are given to carefree criminality. (Botkin gives the impression that he enjoys the ever-present air of physical danger, although in fact he was famously timid.) Violence is rife. There are often knife fights (83, 137). Brigandage is an omnipresent threat (e.g. 150-155) 25 Marie Catherine La Mothe, comtesse d’Aulnoy, Relation du voyage d’Espagne (1690). On this work, and the possibility that d’Aulnoy had not even visited Spain, see Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, pp. 97-100. 26 Alexandre Louis Joseph de Laborde, Itinéraire descriptif de l’Espagne (1808). 27 Belinskii, PSS, vol. 10, p. 353; P. V. Annenkov i ego druzƍia, p. 502. 28 Chateaubriand, “Le dernier Abencérage.” Botkin does not mention Chateaubriand in the Letters but one may assume, given Chateaubriand’s popularity in Russia in the 1820s and 1830s, that he had read this tale. Evidently there were further unacknowledged sources, fictional and non-fictional: see Chernyshevskii’s equivocal review of the 1857 edition of the Letters in Chernyshevskii, PSS, Vol. 4, pp. 223-224; see also Zvigil'skii, pp. 288-289. 29 Geoffrey Crayon [Washington Irving], The Alhambra, 2 Vols. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1832). Botkin also refers explicitly (Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 173-174) to an Arab literary work of the eighth century that seems to shape his view of Moorish civilization (of which he speaks with certainty and as if he is providing objective description). Part of this work was known to Europeans through a nineteenth-century translation: see Antar, A Bedoueen Romance, tr. from the Arabic by Terrick Hamilton (London: John Murray, 1819). 30 Irving, p. 15.

152 Chapter 5 of which Botkin becomes aware when he takes his first stage-coach, from the border town of Irún: a dozen rifles and trabucos (a type of musketoon) were loaded up on top of our stage-coach and two soldiers were positioned among them so that they could return fire in the event of our being attacked by bandits. However sceptical one might be about all the rumours and tales about bandits, nevertheless when your stage-coach is armed like a moving fortress you can’t help thinking about them occasionally. My travelling companions advised me to have on my person, whenever I was travelling round Spain, just the amount of cash that I needed to get from one large town to the next, about two or three hundred francs, and to keep the rest of my money in the form of promissory notes; these three hundred francs are also needed to spare oneself bad treatment at the hands of bandits who, if a traveller turns out to have no money on him, or very little money, take out their dissatisfaction with him by beating him up. (6) By the time Botkin hears of a recent robbery as he crosses La Mancha he claims to anticipate a hold-up with the same excitement with which one might await the rising of the curtain at a new play (39). When he goes riding in the country outside Málaga he is advised to carry a gun with him (136). He also frequently alludes to smuggling (e.g. 149-150), which, like brigandage, is admired rather than condemned by the Spaniards. The sense of mortal peril is maintained during a storm at sea, in which Botkin, as a passenger on a ferry, witnesses the capsizing of another ship off Gibraltar with the apparent loss of all hands on board (111-113). Secondly, Spain is exotic. It has a vitality that is expressed in its guitar-playing and dance (28-29), the street life of its cities, especially the southern cities such as Málaga (135-136), and the presence of gypsies (87, 187-188). In particular it has the “African” quality that Botkin had long since admired in Hugo’s work. This quality is especially pronounced in the south of the country, where Botkin’s imagination is most stimulated. Thus in Andalucia, under the “African sun,” Botkin thinks he sees the colours of the African desert (69, 137, 177, 187). The kinship of this region with Africa, whose air and dust is borne in by the simoom, lends it great charm in Botkin’s “northern” eyes (101). Curious as it might seem to the modern reader, this African quality is also what renders the south of Spain “oriental.” The coalescence of what is perceived as “African” and what is perceived as “oriental” is explained by the fact that it is from North Africa that the Moors emanated who conquered Spain in the early eighth century and flourished in Andalucia until the late fifteenth century.31 Like Irving, who feels that an “Arabian spice . . . pervades everything in Spain,”32 Botkin emphasizes this “oriental,” Moorish ingredient of 31 Botkin’s conception of the “orient,” and indeed the conception of the orient in the writings of Russian thinkers of his time in general, deserves a separate study. The “orient,” in Botkin’s landscape, is a misty concept that seems to embrace most territory, apart from America, that is inhabited by peoples who are not European. At the same time Botkin admits that Europeans actually know very little of the inner life, character and mores of the oriental peoples, in spite of the plethora of histories of them and accounts of journeys to the orient. He also expresses unease about European assumptions of superiority over oriental peoples and about aggressive European colonialism. 32 Irving, pp. v-vi.

Botkin: Letters on Spain 153 Spanishness. Córdoba, for example, he regards as a completely Moorish city; there is nothing in it that reminds him of European mores and customs (47). Like Irving too, Botkin takes a highly sympathetic view of the Moors. Just as for Irving they were “a brave, intelligent and graceful people, who conquered, ruled and passed away,”33 so for Botkin they were a “noble tribe,” a “brilliant, poetic people” (50): I know of nothing more fantastic in the history of mankind than the sudden appearance of the Moorish tribe, the wonderful period in which they shone, and their disappearance. The Arabs had long since roamed as nomadic tribes in Asia, raising cattle, farming and pillaging or hiring themselves out to Asian and African rulers. In 610 AD they suddenly awoke to the voice of Mohammed. An unprecedented enthusiasm stirred the wild tribes of the deserts; hitherto immobile, they arise like an irresistible whirlwind and spread the word of the prophet throughout the Earth. In just a few years Islam comes to rule from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the Ganges. But at this point their warlike spirit is regenerated too: suddenly they are possessed by a passion for learning and knowledge and those same people who in a blaze of fanaticism had burned down the magnificent library at Alexandria now begin voraciously to seek out and collect the relics of Greek and Roman wisdom and to disseminate them in a plethora of translations . . . The very history of this noble tribe resembles a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. The learned travels which Arab scholars subsequently undertook continually augmented the mass of works called forth by this general trend towards knowledge and learning . . . The Arabs studied astronomy, medicine, mathematics, botany, music and poetry . . . (49-50) Botkin writes with compassion about the Moors’ defence of Málaga during a long siege in 1487 (138) and with melancholy about the fall of Granada, which represents for him the dying moments of a “knightly, brilliant tribe” that is descending into the eternal night of death (171-172). He also deplores the Spaniards’ fanatical persecution of the Moors after their defeat of them (139-142) and their ruthless elimination of traces of Moorish civilization. He is particularly indignant at the burning of Arab books in 1492 (as many as a million, it is said) and the tasteless construction, begun in 1528, of a Christian temple in Gothic style in the middle of the grand mosque in Córdoba (50, 53).34 Thirdly, Botkin attributes to the Spanish people and their society an innocent authenticity that stands in stark contrast to the refinement encountered in those centres of European civilization, especially Paris, that had been considered exemplary by Russians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Spanish people have a “poetic charm” (5, 7-8). They indulge their physical senses in a manner that is pleasing to the carnal side of Botkin’s nature: no shame is attached to the human body in Spain, as it is, Botkin thinks, in northern lands (9697). Spanish houses are not richly decorated or furnished and have an admirable 33

Ibid., pp. 82-83. It should be added that Botkin does qualify his portrayal of the Moors by acknowledgement that their civilization was not without elements of cruelty, bloodthirstiness and barbarity: see Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, p. 172. 34

154 Chapter 5 simplicity (27-28). The Spaniards are not spoiled by material comforts (38). Their society, as Botkin perceives it, has that naturalness for which Karamzin had commended the English in the late eighteenth century and which must have had even greater value for the jaundiced observer emanating from the europeanized salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow that were being presented in a negative light in the 1830s and 1840s in the Russian society tale. At Spanish social gatherings Botkin claims to find a carefree gaiety from which other societies would benefit (28). Apropos of evening promenades in Seville, he observes that social intercourse is unconstrained, conversation lively and laughter spontaneous. These promenades do not resemble similar occasions in Europe, let alone Russian social gatherings, at which people are to be seen with “such strained, studied faces and manners” (88). Indeed a pleasing naturalness seems innate in the Spanish character and distinguishes it from, and renders it superior to, character of a more refined, bookish type. Thus the fact that the women of Seville do not read is a merit: their “witty ignorance” is preferable to the refined charm, the “cloying bookishness,” of European ladies (91). Even the Spanish peasant, who is viewed elsewhere in Europe as ignorant and superstitious, is in fact cultivated, Botkin assures his readers, not in a bookish sense but in the deeper sense of having a highly developed nature that is reflected in oral culture (191). At first sight the exotic, “oriental,” natural Spain that Botkin had depicted might seem far removed from Russian experience. Up to a point it replicated the Caucasus as Russians had been representing it in the 1820s and 1830s. No doubt its difference from Russia similarly enhanced its attractiveness in Russian eyes. And yet Spain’s difference from the rest of Europe also endowed it with a certain affinity with Russia. By virtue of its “romantic” attributes Spain exemplified a civilization that to some degree resembled Russia as some Russians might have liked to see their country or furnished a model for it. Read as a Romantic discourse on a backward European country the Letters yield abundant material that may be construed not merely as informative about Spain but also as food for thought for a Russian readership. This material, as we shall see in the following two sections, concerns the relationship of Spain to Europe, the country’s historical destiny, the Spanish national character, the relationship between social classes, the conduct of the nobility and industrial development. AFFINITIES BETWEEN SPAIN AND RUSSIA An association between Spain and Russia is established in the reader’s mind early in the first of Botkin’s Letters from Spain by a comparison of the cheerless, treeless, deserted landscape of Old Castile with the infinite plains of Botkin’s homeland. Like Russia, Spain was little known or understood in Europe, Botkin asserts. It was situated on Europe’s periphery, belonging geographically to the European continent but in other respects not being part of it. The centres of western civilization were less distant from Spain than from Russia, to be sure, but Spain too was separated from those centres, by its natural border, the Pyrenees (11).

Botkin: Letters on Spain 155 Furthermore, Spain, like Russia, is sui generis: normal European notions do not apply to it. In fact in order to come to any judgement about Spain one must cease to compare it with Europe (31). Politically, for example, things are not what they would seem to a European from another country to be: the terms “constitution,” “party,” “political doctrine,” “will of the people” have their specific senses in Europe but when applied to Spain take on another meaning (22). The otherness of Spain when measured by the western yardsticks to which Botkin has become accustomed (and it should be remembered that he visited Spain after a prolonged stay in France) is underlined by his frequent use of the word “Europe” as an entity that does not seem to include Spain. Botkin’s Spain also has extensive historical affinities with Russia. Some of these affinities are explicitly stated, but Botkin would seem to imply many more. For one thing Spain’s development – like Russia’s – is quite different from that of the rest of Europe (32) and has similarly resulted in isolation and backwardness. Russia had been marginalized as a result of the vassal status of the Muscovite rulers to the Mongols during the period when western Europe was experiencing the Renaissance; Spain had been fragmented by its long period of subjugation to and struggle with the infidel invaders, the Moors (23). (The comparability of the two nations’ experience is pointed up by the fact that Botkin uses the same word, “yoke” (igo), to describe the Moorish dominion in Spain as is used by Russians to describe Tatar suzerainty in their own country (24, 33).) The Moorish occupation of Spain had had the effect of preserving a civilization that in some respects belonged to the Middle Ages as much as to modern times (24-25), as did semi-feudal preemancipation Russia. Engaged for seven centuries in their struggle with the Moors, and then preoccupied after their defeat of the Moors with the discovery and conquest of America, Spaniards – like Russians – had been untouched by the movements that had liberated other Europeans from medieval barbarism (70). This isolation accounted for the indeterminate nature of Spanish political movements and the consequent failure, in spite of much debate and legislation, fundamentally to reform the country’s finances, judicial system and administration or to eliminate bribery and corruption (77-78). However, Spain, like Russia, was now trying to break off the “crust of ignorance” under which it had languished (23). Certain other historical parallels between Spain and Russia, besides their common fate of foreign occupation and consequent backwardness, might be read into Botkin’s text. Seeking historical explanations as to why Spain had turned out differently from other European countries which also had a feudal past, Botkin hints at a similarity in the way in which the two countries have been governed: . . . the feudal structure of Spain was shared with Europe: so why is it only in Spain that it has left such ruinous traces? Is it not because in Europe, when there was a bad structure, there was always a government which, although it too was sometimes also bad, always more or less revolved within the circle of ideas of the civilization of its time? In Spain there was never a government in any shape or form: there was only caprice with all its personal delusions and passions; the administration never had any laws other than its own whim and its own personal interests. Thus it was before and thus it is even now. (12-13)

156 Chapter 5 Again Botkin links Spanish experience to that of Russia by his choice of vocabulary: when he characterizes the conduct of Spanish governments as dictated not by any clear principles but by proizvol (“caprice,” “whim” or “arbitrariness”) (13), he is using a term that was habitually applied by Russian writers to their own autocracy. Perhaps the fact that Spain had long been ruled by foreign dynasties (the Habsburgs and the Bourbons) (23) would have struck a chord with Russian readers too, given the Germanic blood in their own royal dynasty. Moreover, the Spaniards, in 1808, had staged what Botkin describes as a “noble,” “heroic” uprising against Napoleon’s invading army, as had the Russians in 1812. There may even be a cryptic reference to the Decembrist Revolt in Botkin’s observation that when Napoleon had been defeated the Spanish government took to suppressing the public spirit and patriotism that had been exhibited by the Spanish people, who were loath after the Napoleonic Wars to surrender their new-found independence (77). Certainly Botkin echoes his contemporaries’ common conception of Russia’s destiny as enigmatic when he describes Spain as a “living riddle,” employing a word (zagadka) often used in the Russian literature of the day to characterize Russia herself. He seems in this connection to have in mind Gogol'’s famous image of Russia as a troika when he contends that Spain “goes not knowing where its road will lead it, without definite aim, without any plan and in complete ignorance of the morrow.” Never before had Europe seen such a spectacle (32).35 Like Russia again, Spain had been forced to confront her isolation in the eighteenth century. Owing to the fact that it was ruled by an alien dynasty, the Bourbons, and thanks to the efforts of a number of enlightened statesmen, Spain was at that time superficially exposed to foreign, especially French, influence. Philip V (ruled 1700-174636) derided Spanish national dress and introduced the French frock-coat. The Bourbons also brought with them the French language, which served as a conduit for fresh ideas. A “window into Europe” was thus opened up for this country that was suffocating in its medieval ignorance. (Yet again Botkin’s terminology calls to mind a Russian parallel: Peter had resolved to “cut a window through into Europe,” as Pushkin had expressed it in his narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman.”) New ideas, including the ideas of the French encyclopédistes, made their way in the Madrid academies, timidly at first, and suddenly found patronage under Philip’s son, Charles III (ruled 1759-1788). Once adopted by powerful statesmen they began to inform official policy. For example, Count Olavide, governor of Seville, on whom Botkin admiringly writes at length, helped to banish the Jesuits from Spain, brought foreign colonists into Andalucia, encouraged an influx of population, laid roads and developed industry in the Sierra Morena (43). A further analogy with Russia is implied by a reference to the reign of Catherine II, the foreign ruler who had exposed Russia to the French Enlightenment and whom mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberals respected as an enlightened westernizing monarch. However, the terms in which the reference is couched suggest that Botkin believes that Russia had made more progress than Spain towards Enlightenment ideals at that stage (46). For Spain, to its misfortune, had 35 36

Gogol'’s passage is quoted in the third section of Chapter 1 above. Except for the period January to August 1724.

Botkin: Letters on Spain 157 lacked a monarch like Peter the Great who was capable of steering it steadfastly on this new course (108). Troubled by the predicament of relative isolation and backwardness, Spaniards had in the nineteenth century embarked on a debate about modernization and their country’s relationship to the rest of Europe that must have seemed to Botkin not dissimilar to the Russian debate in which he himself was an active participant. For thirty years, Botkin tells his readers, Spain had been convulsed in the attempt to “tear herself away from her past” and “at the same time to preserve all her old, cherished traditions.” She was refashioning her constitution “in a foreign manner” but retaining “all her old ghastly administration” (12). Spanish attitudes towards national characteristics and innovation based on foreign models were divided on lines that were familiar to the Russian intelligentsia. Apropos of his discovery that in polite society in Madrid Spaniards speak French and women dress in French clothes and consider it improper to dance Spanish dances such as the bolero and fandango, Botkin comments on the opposing factions that he believes he observes in Spanish society. Looking at all these “educated” Spaniards I think that strictly speaking Spain is divided into two parties: the old and static Spain and the Spain committed to the ideas and institutions of France and England. One lacks nationality [narodnostƍ; again Botkin’s term has resonance in the Russian context] and national roots, the other lacks a feeling of futurity and the new interests of the state.37 If the people here are so hostile to all civilizing principles this is chiefly because the principles come from foreigners. It is hard to imagine the profound contempt in which the people hold los afrancesados [the Frenchified], but on the other hand even the republican exaltados [literally ‘impassioned ones’ or ‘hotheads’] have nothing national about them... Does the grievous struggle that has been wearing Spain down for so many years not stem from the impotence of both these parties? One is alienated from its own country, the other from its epoch; one comprises inhabitants of France and England who have forgotten Spain, the other comprises eleventh-century Goths and Cantabrians38 who have no understanding of industry or the sources of national wealth, who are against unity and who see no further than their village belfry and the rights of their local community. One group would rather go back to the Middle Ages, the other would rather mould Spain on the model of France and England . . . (27) It is clear that the conservative patriots whom Botkin describes, with their parochial horizons and nostalgia for a distant past, are associated in his mind with Russia’s Slavophiles. And yet Botkin shows sensitivity, as in fact the Russian Westernizers generally did, to the danger of diluting national distinctiveness in pursuit of a more modern and civilized society inspired by western ideas. He is therefore careful not to endorse undiscriminating Spanish absorption of foreign culture and describes 37 Botkin does not arrange his categories in this sentence in the order that he has used in the previous sentence. The party that lacks nationality is the party that is committed to the ideas and institutions of France and England. 38 i.e. inhabitants of a region of northern Spain.

158 Chapter 5 both factions in the Spanish debate as equally impotent, empty and “chimerical” (27). Commenting at another point in the Letters on the sight of dandies who ape French fashion in Cádiz, he accepts that national peculiarities, as reflected for example in dress and customs, have “charm.” He regrets that civilization – by which he means a superior imported culture – in its early stage arouses a great deal of empty aping, encourages an impersonal, characterless, prosaic standard and tends to “erase national dress, customs and, in a word, what lies nearest to the heart of a people.” Peoples should of course free themselves from the prejudices of exclusivity and aspire to knowledge and tolerance; but it is regrettable if the onset of civilization tears up some beautiful flowers together with the weeds (98-99). These cautionary words about the possible adverse effects of modernization according to some western model might be seen as an attempt on behalf of the more moderate faction that was forming among the Westernizers to reconcile conflicting opinion in the Russian intelligentsia by assimilating the strongest argument of their Slavophile opponents. SPAIN AS LESSON FOR RUSSIA On one level, then, the Letters on Spain furnish evidence of various explicit or implied similarities between Spain and Russia, including similarities in the two countries’ landscape, geographical position, historical isolation and attitudes towards the reception of foreign culture. Inasmuch as they address a contemporary Spanish dilemma that was shared by Russians about the need for modernization, the Letters represent an oblique contribution to the debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles. However, Spain as Botkin perceives it also yields material that is pertinent to the debate that by the late 1840s was taking place within the Westernist camp itself between its moderate members, notably Granovskii, and the more radical, socialist Westernizers, especially Herzen. Botkin attempts in the Letters to bolster the case for a moderate, “liberal” form of Westernism39 by two arguments, which, however, do not co-exist easily. Firstly, he contends that responsible conduct on the part of a dominant class ensures social justice, harmony and stability. Secondly, he mounts a defence of the bourgeoisie in contemporary society. The first argument that reflects Botkin’s moderate Westernist standpoint, the argument which concerns the social benefits of exemplary conduct by a privileged minority, draws on discussion in the Russian intelligentsia in the 1840s of the western institution of knight-errantry and the chivalrous behaviour associated with it. The Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii, like the Official Nationalist Pogodin, had represented medieval knights, each living within his own domain, as exemplifying 39 The Soviet scholar Mikhel'son regards Botkin’s “liberalism” as only a veneer that masks his “political indifference, conservative nihilism and aestheticism:” see Mikhel'son, p. 75. However, Mikhel'son is reading the Letters on Spain not in their original context of the debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 1840s but in the light of Chernyshevskii’s socialist critique of liberalism in the late 1850s when the Letters were republished.

Botkin: Letters on Spain 159 the aggressive individual assertiveness of the western personality.40 On the other hand, the Westernizers, especially the moderate Westernizers, represented the knighthood as an honourable, magnanimous, civilizing influence in medieval life. In particular Granovskii, who was himself regarded as a somewhat quixotic character, wrote admiring essays on the late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century French knight Pierre Terrail de Bayard and on the Spanish hero celebrated in the epic of El Cid.41 Botkin, while in Burgos, dutifully visited the birthplace of El Cid, the “symbol of feudal and knightly Spain” (10) and elsewhere in the Letters he devotes some attention to the subject of knight-errantry. Not that Botkin believes that the institution is an indigenous European phenomenon. Rather he thinks that it originated with the Moors, whose chivalric poetic romances, he believes, provided the prototype for the troubadours who first appeared in Provence and flourished from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries (172-173).42 In no country, though, did knight-errantry survive for so long as in Spain, where it persisted even in the fifteenth century (145 n.). Indeed it seems to Botkin that exemplary “old, knightly qualities” have continued to characterize the Spanish nobility down to his own time (26). Most importantly, from the point of view of the nineteenth-century observer, they have shaped the concept of the caballero, or gentleman, who is distinguished by a sense of self-worth, politeness, naturalness and generous hospitableness (26, 29-30, 55-56, 144-145).43 Nor are the virtues of the caballero, in Botkin’s opinion, exclusive to the nobility, for the Spaniards as a whole are a people “so noble, fine and full of dignity” (11). Thus a poor man whom Botkin tries to reward for guiding him to the house of an acquaintance in Madrid refuses to take payment, saying that although he is poor he is a caballero (30; see also 144). Even servants are proud, not servile (168-169), and Spanish beggars are the most dignified and least importunate in the world (49). The admirable qualities that Botkin perceives in the Spanish character in general and in the privileged class in particular make for a society, Botkin would have his readers believe, in which people perceive themselves and others as endowed with an essential human equality and treat each other with mutual respect whatever their social station and in spite of differences in wealth. The Spanish nobleman is not proud or haughty and the common man does not envy him; the only 40

“V otvet A. S. Khomiakovu,” in Kireevskii, PSS, Vol. 1, pp. 116-118. These essays are printed in T. N. Granovskii, Sochineniia, 4th ed. (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipografii A. I. Mamontova, 1900), pp. 540-550 and 420-437 respectively. 42 Botkin derives the view that Provençale poetry had its roots in Arab romance – a thesis that has been revived in some form at various times since the mid-nineteenth century – from a book by Claude Fauriel, Histoire de la poésie provençale (1847): see Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 172-173. 43 It is consistent, incidentally, with Botkin’s predilection for the chivalric ethos that he should display in the Letters an attitude towards women in general and towards Spanish women in particular that is both admiring and patronizing. Invoking Byron to support his case, he effuses on their beauty, charms and naturalness (Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 68, 90-91, 137, 155-158) and their supposed difference from women of other nationalities, such as French women, who are coquettes by nature, he alleges, and whose elegance is carefully rehearsed (ibid., pp. 25-26, 97, 99-100). In this respect too Botkin is speaking in a tone that was unexceptionable among the moderate Westernizers, indeed among the Westernizers of the 1840s in general, all of whom were products of the Romantic period in their attitudes towards the other sex. 41

160 Chapter 5 distinction between them is wealth, there is no other. There reigns here complete equality of tone between estates [i.e. social classes], and the most delicate intimacy in the way that they treat one another. It is not just the burgher who deals with the nobleman on a completely equal footing, but the peasant, the unskilled labourer and the water-carrier [as well]. If they are offered entry to the house of a Spanish grandee they will go in and come and sit down and talk with their noble host in a tone of absolute equality. (32-33) Botkin thinks that this mutual respect is demonstrated by the fact that the polite plural form of the personal pronoun “you” (usted) is used by a general when he addresses the ordinary soldier or by a gentleman when he addresses his servants (26-27). Even the system of land-holding, Botkin maintains, attests to this inherent sense of equality among Spaniards. The Spanish nobility, he claims, has from ancient times dealt very mildly with tenants on its land. The tenant has enjoyed the benefit of long-established renting arrangements, has often been granted permission to defer payment of rent, and in some regions has been protected by certain laws, for example laws that require a proprietor to give notice to a tenant who does not pay his rent before evicting him. There is in some places an arrangement under which a proprietor lets out his land for a rent fixed in perpetuity, from which point the lessee, so long as he duly pays the agreed rent, may enjoy the land as his own property irrespective of changes in the value of land or money (35-36). In order to explain the enviable sense of equality and consequent social harmony which he believed he observed in Spain Botkin resorted to a thesis of Thierry’s which Pogodin, it will be recalled, had exploited for his own conservative nationalist purposes. After the fall of the Roman Empire and the conquest of Europe by the barbarians, Botkin argued, each land was occupied by a conquering tribe, whose members became lords, and a vanquished tribe, whose members became vassals. Thus the history of France and England, Botkin claims in a casual generalization, was “nothing but the gradual liberation of the vanquished tribe.” In Spain, on the other hand, the nobleman and peasant did not belong to different tribes, the one victorious and the other vanquished. On the contrary, all Spaniards were victors once the Moors had been expelled and all traces of Islam had been eradicated. Nobles were respected by the common people as compatriots of ancient Christian lineage who had liberated Spain from foreign occupation. There was no “abyss of conquest” between noble and peasant of the sort that one encountered elsewhere in Europe (32-34). In commending the attitude of the Spanish nobility towards the common people and claiming that the common people did not resent the nobility (32), Botkin appears to be offering advice and hope to the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, which was troubled by the inhumanity of serfdom and the gross inequalities that serfdom perpetuated.44 The utopian social relations that Botkin believes he has observed in Spain stand in sharp contrast to the relations between the often brutally 44 The subject continued to be of interest in the late 1850s, when the Letters on Spain were republished in a single volume and when, following Alexander’s initiation of preparations for the emancipation of the serfs, the intelligentsia was discussing the terms on which emancipation should take place.

Botkin: Letters on Spain 161 authoritarian lord and the cowed or cringing serf that are presented by Botkin’s contemporaries as typical in their own country. The Letters on Spain therefore seem to contain a tacit plea for the emancipation of the Russian serfs. In this respect they have something in common with Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, which began to appear in 1847, the same year as the Letters, inasmuch as some of the sketches too help to undermine the legitimacy of serfdom by treating peasants as human equals of their masters. At the same time Botkin’s beguiling image of the Spanish common people as free, clear-minded and sensible (25) perhaps provided a glimpse of what might be expected of a people not oppressed by serfdom and gave encouragement to those who were unsure as to what the social consequences of abolishing serfdom might be. By attempting, albeit very cautiously and obliquely, to bring greater humanity to social relations in Russia and to hasten the basic social reform of emancipation of the serfs, the moderate Westernizers also hoped to avert revolution, which they greatly feared and for which their more militant fellow Westernizers Bakunin and Belinskii expressed a taste. (This fear would be intensified shortly after the Letters on Spain began to be published by the European eruptions of 1848; and of course readers of the complete edition of Botkin’s cycle of letters, published in 1857, were able to look back on those disturbances, and on the “seven dismal years” that had followed them in Russia.) Botkin’s representation of Spain was reassuring to Russians who feared revolution, insofar as the Letters posited the feasibility of, and implicitly argued for, an evolutionary form of social development. The perceived human equality of Spaniards of all social stations; the respect of the upper class for the dignity of the lower; a system of land tenure that was not oppressive; and the fact that the peasants were of the same ethnic origin as the nobility, not descendants of a people conquered by the ancestors of the nobility: all these factors, Botkin believed, held Spain together in spite of apparently irreconcilable differences between political parties, conflicting attitudes towards innovation according to foreign models and the fissive effect of regional loyalties. They made it improbable, even though Spain appeared to be fractious and prone to civil unrest, that the “revolutionary spirit” would affect the Spanish people and that the country would be subjected to the revolutionary upheavals that had at one time or another shaken England, France and Germany. Continuing social stability on a similar basis might not seem unfeasible in Russia. At any rate it would not be necessary to concede material equality, for the demands of the common people were evidently modest. The Spaniards were unlikely to clamour for liberation so long as they had enough bread, wine and sun, Botkin remarked patronizingly, and even the very poor had woollen trousers and a woollen cape for winter (37).45 The second argument that reflects Botkin’s moderate Westernist standpoint in the Letters – namely the argument that concerns the role of the bourgeoisie in western civilization and the question as to whether Russia herself would benefit 45 Nevertheless Botkin expressed concern that the Spaniards (the common people, as well as “europeanized” Spaniards) were growing indifferent towards religion, as indicated by the small size of church congregations and the recent burning of monasteries and killing of monks (Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 81-82).

162 Chapter 5 from the emergence of such a class – also needs to be viewed in the context of debate within the Russian intelligentsia at the time when the Letters were being written. The Slavophiles and Official Nationalists such as Pogodin were not alone in considering the bourgeoisie a product of the selfish materialism that poisoned western civilization. Radical Westernizers also held this view. Herzen’s utterances about the bourgeoisie have a bitter ironical edge, as the following chapter will reveal. Belinskii, for his part, lectured Botkin on the eternal shame that the “sovereignty of capitalists” had brought to contemporary France. Woe to the state headed by a bourgeoisie, Belinskii thundered in a tirade laced with anti-Semitic sentiments: it would be better for a country to be governed by an “idle, profligate riff-raff covered in rags,” for that riff-raff would be more likely than the bourgeoisie to display “patriotism, a sense of national worth and a desire for the common welfare.”46 Botkin, on the other hand, stood out in the mid-nineteenthcentury Russian intelligentsia by virtue of the more balanced view that he took of the bourgeoisie. He did assure Herzen, it is true, that he was not “among the partisans of the bourgeoisie” and that nothing repelled him so much as the “spirit and morality” of that estate.47 To Annenkov, moreover, he insisted that it was the working class, as the oppressed class, that had all his sympathy. Nevertheless he did feel obliged to defend the French bourgeoisie in the face of Herzen’s depiction of it – in Botkin’s words, in a letter to Annenkov – as some sort of “rotten, revolting, pernicious monster which devours all that is beautiful and noble in mankind.” He even went so far as to exclaim: “God grant that we [i.e. the Russians] may have a bourgeoisie!”48 In the Letters on Spain he makes a substantial public contribution to this debate, seeking to demonstrate the extent to which a country is disadvantaged if it lacks a firmly established bourgeoisie and the values associated with that class. One of the most striking features of Spain as Botkin perceives it is economic backwardness. (Again it is worth remembering that Botkin comes to the country from the more prosperous France of the July Monarchy.) Trade and industry in Spain, Botkin observes, are virtually non-existent (75-76). Only two places are exempt from this generalization: Cádiz, a commercial port with a disposition to free trade, whose inhabitants have been much more affected than other Spaniards by European ideas, manners and dress (94), and Catalonia, especially Barcelona, where manufactured goods are produced (101-102).49 Catalonia in particular, by contrast with the rest of Spain, points up the advantages of the promotion of trade and industry and the bourgeois value of assiduity. Here the people have an “enterprising, active, decisive character” and, by virtue of the relatively high level of industrial development in the region, enjoy prosperity and political influence (102). Nor are the pernicious effects of the absence or weakness of a bourgeoisie in Spain as a whole confined to the economic sphere. Botkin remarks, for example, 46

Belinskii, PSS, Vol. 12, pp. 446-452. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Vol. 62 (1955), p. 46. 48 P. V. Annenkov i ego druzƍia, pp. 542, 551. 49 Botkin adds, though, that Barcelona could not satisfy the industrial needs of all of Spain and that in Cádiz trade now seemed depressed and most of the trading-houses were in English or German ownership (Botkin, Pisƍma ob Ispanii, pp. 102, 93-94). 47

Botkin: Letters on Spain 163 that “enlightenment” (which a middle class is just as concerned to promote, he believes, as trade and industry) is retarded (37) and that art and science are neglected and ambition and social aspiration are repressed (42). The reasons that are advanced in the Letters for Spain’s industrial and commercial underdevelopment are varied and numerous. Underdevelopment is due at least in part, Botkin believes, to the Spaniards’ ancient and deep-rooted aversion to hard work and their belief that idleness is more noble than work, especially trade (75-76). During the long struggle against the Moors Spaniards had come to believe that only military activity had political significance and moral worth. While any man might be ennobled for military action (hence the large number of hidalgos, or soldier-landowners) the merchant or craftsman was held in low esteem. In any case the shrewdness associated with trade was repugnant to Castilian honour. The fact that it was chiefly Arabs who practised crafts tended further to demean the crafts in Spanish eyes. Even the business of the bandit and the smuggler seemed nobler than that of the merchant or craftsman on account of the dangers inherent in it (103105). Moreover, Spain’s economic backwardness was exacerbated by government policies, as well as by feudal attitudes and prejudices. For instance, the mercantilist view held by Philip II that gold was the sole source of wealth and the consequent hoarding of precious metals by the state led to a reduction in the value of those metals. The cost of labour and industrial products rose as a result of emigration to the colonies and the expulsion of the Moors, who had contributed most to crafts and industries. Government attempts to force down the price of essential domestic goods by setting the prices at which factory-owners were allowed to sell them had the effect of ruining factory-owners. For long periods the population was not engaged in useful economic activity: in some places holidays on which nobody worked amounted to one third of the year. The country became depopulated (106108). The Spanish economy in the age in which Botkin observes it is blighted by a tariff system that encourages smuggling, with the result that state revenue is reduced. Factory-owners, taking advantage of the protection they are afforded by the tariff, do not trouble to produce better or cheaper goods and industry consequently stagnates. The red tape associated with the simplest customs operation impedes trade without bringing any benefit to the state or the nation’s industry (102-103). Whatever the explanation for Spain’s economic backwardness, a solution to the problem could only be found, Botkin believed, with the aid of a bourgeoisie and the bourgeois ethic. One of the lessons Botkin derives from his travels in Spain is that in order to raise their nation to the first rank a people had to toil, educate, foster industry and cultivate belief in the value of hard work. There were no magic solutions that would bring glory and wealth to a nation overnight. Botkin quotes Guizot in an attempt to illustrate the point (79-80), though it was controversial to do so, since Guizot, the champion of the bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy, was held in low esteem by the radical Westernizers. Botkin’s relative sympathy for the bourgeoisie is also indicated by his positive references to political economy, that is to say the discipline that defined, guided and legitimated industrial and commercial

164 Chapter 5 activity. Political economy, he argued, should not be derided and could not be overlooked. Nothing serves as such an accurate barometer of the level of enlightenment of a society as its politico-economic arrangements and its politico-economic concepts, measures and dispositions, and the most reliable way of depicting the civilization of any country would be to describe its economic relations and institutions. (102) This acknowledgement of the importance of political economy, which is untypical in the Russian intelligentsia at this time, is accompanied by sneers at the Slavophiles, who spurned the discipline, and a reassessment of the English, who prized it. Political economy, which Romantics and feudal people view as a science that is too material and shop-keeperly, a science of traders, has in our time become the science of the way in which states are governed, and it is by virtue of the fact that it has placed politico-economic laws at the basis of its system of government that England has demonstrated the high level of its civilization. (102-103) Thus no European country aspiring to an important role – and the cryptic reference to the Slavophiles left readers in no doubt that the point must apply to Russia as well as to Spain – could any longer afford to ignore the need for commercial and industrial development or to despise the social class that was chiefly responsible in the modern age for stimulating and managing it. By drawing attention to Spain’s economic underdevelopment and the consequences of that underdevelopment beyond the economic sphere, and also by defending the role and ethic of the bourgeoisie, Botkin implicitly constructs a case by analogy for the promotion of a bourgeoisie and its values in Russia. In the final analysis it has to be said, though, that there is a tension in the Letters between what Botkin commends and what he admires. On the one hand, the bourgeois value of assiduity and the discipline of political economy that he champions belong to the modern, prosaic, utilitarian world of mid-nineteenth-century western Europe. (That world may have proved more acceptable to Botkin than to most of his contemporaries in the Russian intelligentsia because he himself emanated from the merchant milieu.) On the other hand, the feudal knightly code of honour that Botkin eulogizes, the medieval tradition of romance associated with that code, and the utopian vision that Botkin constructs of a people living simple, natural lives in a society which is harmonious in spite of material inequality – all these things belong to the less practical, more poetic world imagined by the Romanticism that was the dominant cultural manner in Europe as a whole at the time when Botkin’s outlook was being shaped. The two worlds – the bourgeois and the chivalric – are essentially irreconcilable and it is perhaps indicative of a weakness in the liberal Westernist position that Botkin should have tried to accommodate them both in his Letters on Spain.

Botkin: Letters on Spain 165 *

*

*

Botkin’s travel writing reflects the cultural moods of his age. His magnum opus, the Letters on Spain, perpetuates various Romantic topoi that were commonplace among his generation and that had appeared in his earlier experimental travel sketches. Indeed the Letters are suffused with a quintessentially Romantic blend of exoticism, love of chivalry, exaltation of the sensual and the spiritual, and interest in national distinctiveness. The positive image of the Spaniards as a people endowed with oriental characteristics (which at one point Botkin identifies as the sybaritism, fantasy and naturalness of the “south”) are thrown into sharp relief by the predominantly negative stereotype of the sullen and mercenary English whom Botkin briefly encounters in their colony at Gibraltar (114). The Letters also reflect the debates that were taking place within the midnineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia about such matters as modernization and westernization, revolutionary and evolutionary paths of social development, and the nature and role of the bourgeoisie. By sympathetically examining the predicament of another country that was peripheral to the mainstream of European civilization Botkin establishes a kinship of a sort between Spain and Russia. He seeks an essentially Westernist solution to the riddle of how backward nations in general may civilize themselves and become more prosperous without losing their sense of national identity. However, while taking issue with the Slavophiles, whom he regarded as opponents of necessary progress, Botkin also expressed views that revealed the fissure that was developing in the 1840s within the so-called Westernist camp to which he himself belonged. The extent of the social reform that Botkin would have welcomed, for example, was evidently modest by comparison with what was envisaged by Bakunin, Belinskii and Herzen, and the tempo of its implementation would have been too measured in the eyes of these more radical thinkers. Moreover, Botkin’s idealized portrait of the chivalrous caballero leads us to believe that the Russian nobleman would have continued to enjoy wealth and social pre-eminence in Botkin’s reformed world, although by showing respect to his social inferiors he would have contrived not to exacerbate social conflict or increase political instability. Finally, Botkin set himself apart from both romantic conservatives such as the Slavophiles and Official Nationalists, on the one hand, and the radical Westernizers of his generation, on the other, by his attitude towards the bourgeoisie. Because he placed greater emphasis than they on the need for economic development, and no doubt also because of his own social origin, Botkin was prepared to offer an unusually warm appreciation of the contribution that the bourgeoisie had made to European civilization. It is perhaps for this reason that his perception of Europe as a whole is not darkened by images of perishability or moribundity of the sort that occur in the majority of other major nineteenth-century Russian accounts of travel in western Europe, most notably in Herzen’s Letters from France and Italy, which are the subject of the following chapter.

CHAPTER 6

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy

HERZEN AND HIS PLACE IN RUSSIAN THOUGHT Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen (1812-1870), or Herzen, as he is generally known in English, was the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, Ivan Iakovlev, and his German mistress. (The name Herzen, derived from the German “Herz,” which was given him by his father, indicated that he was a child of the heart.) In 1829 he entered Moscow University, a beacon of free thought in the early part of Nicholas’s reign. In 1834 he was arrested, together with his close friend since 1825, Ogariov, for involvement in a circle that had been discussing the ideas of the French utopian socialists. There followed periods of exile in the remote provincial town of Viatka, where he served in the local bureaucracy, and Vladimir, nearer to Moscow. In 1838, after a romantic courtship – involving exalted correspondence, an attempt by the guardian of his future bride to marry her off to another suitor and an elopement – he married Natalie Zakhar'ina, a first cousin. A brief period of service in the Ministry of the Interior in 1840 came to an end when he was again exiled, to Novgorod, for making injudicious comments about the police in a letter to his father that was opened by the authorities. At the end of this second period of internal exile, in 1842, Herzen settled in Moscow, where he began to participate in earnest in the intellectual life of the day. His principal early writings are his series of essays Dilettantism in Science (1843) and Letters on the Study of Nature (18451846) and a novel, Who is to blame? (1845-1846), that is notable primarily for its treatment of the oppressive nature of Russian provincial life and its portrait of a “superfluous man.”1 In January 1847 Herzen set out from Moscow with his wife and three children, his mother, the major-domo of his household, a children’s nurse and two dependants on the foreign trip which would provide the basis for the Letters from France and Italy. Although Herzen later represented his departure from Russia as a flight from tsarist oppression, the trip was not originally conceived as a journey into permanent emigration. Rather it was a pilgrimage to the capital of Romantic 1

Diletantizm v nauke, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 3, pp. 7-88; Pisƍma ob izuchenii prirody, ibid., pp. 91-315; Kto vinovat?, ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 9-209.

167

168 Chapter 6 sensibility and political liberty, Paris, where Herzen and his wife hoped to find relief from a Weltschmerz that perhaps stemmed not only from a political cause but also, E. H. Carr has suggested, from loss of freshness in their marriage.2 However, the revolutionary events of 1848 (to which we shall turn shortly), Herzen’s enthusiastic response to them and the measures taken by the tsarist authorities to ensure that the revolutionary wave did not reach Russia soon made Herzen’s return to his homeland unthinkable. For nearly six years, from the moment when the Herzens had said their fond farewells to friends at a post-station outside Moscow, Herzen led an unsettled existence, travelling and spending periods in Paris, Rome, Naples, Geneva and Nice. It was also a time of severe tension, distress and misfortune in Herzen’s family circle. During the years 1849-1851 his wife conducted a passionate affair with the German poet Herwegh. In 1851 his mother and second son, the deaf-mute Kolia, perished in an accident at sea. Finally, in 1852, Natalie died, exhausted by pleurisy, the birth of a further child and the emotional stresses of recent years. Nevertheless from a literary point of view the period following Herzen’s departure from Russia was highly productive, yielding not only the Letters from France and Italy but also the cycle of essays From the Other Shore (1850)3 (a work that Herzen himself was inclined to regard as an achievement that he would not surpass) and a series of essays in which he sought to furnish a western readership with political, social, literary and historical information on and insights into Russia. Herzen is undeniably a figure of central importance in the history of classical Russian thought and he has accordingly received much attention in western scholarship.4 He was a leading Westernizer in the 1840s, standing with Belinskii on the radical wing of the Westernist camp and showing an early enthusiasm for the philosophical materialism and utopian socialism that the more moderate Westernizers were reluctant to embrace. His writings on the Russian people and the institutions of the peasant commune (obshchina or mir) and the workers’ cooperative (artelƍ) helped to lay foundations for Populism, the broad socialist theory that inspired the Russian revolutionary movement throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Through his establishment of a Free Russian Press in London, where he settled in 1853, and especially by editing the journal The Bell (published in the period 18571867), he stimulated, provided a medium for and contributed to debate about social and political reform in Russia after the Crimean War. In My Past and Thoughts (1861-1867), an autobiographical work after the manner of Goethe’s From My Life, 2

Carr, The Romantic Exiles, p. 24. S togo berega, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 6, pp. 7-142. 4 The main works in this literature are, in order of date of first publication: Carr, The Romantic Exiles; Berlin, “Alexander Herzen,” in Russian Thinkers, pp. 186-209 (hereafter Berlin, “Alexander Herzen”); E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 171-259; Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Aileen M. Kelly, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998; hereafter Kelly, Toward Another Shore); idem, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999; hereafter Kelly, Views from the Other Shore). 3

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 169 Poetry and Truth (1811-1822), he left a sparkling and historically valuable account of the intellectual life of his generation.5 In his writings in general he addresses and provides arresting insights into questions that are of cardinal importance in Russian thought: the relationship between Russia and the west; the relationship between the individual and the state; the respective benefits to be derived from revolution and evolution, if indeed there is a choice; and the question as to whether any human activity is a means to an end or an end in itself. He warns of the terrible power of ideological abstractions over people’s lives and argues that the purpose of a generation’s existence is to live life, not to prepare the ground for a possibly better life for some future generation. He is an enemy of subservience to oppressive systems of any kind, intellectual and religious as well as political. He also writes, it should be added, with a perspicuity, elegance, wit and zest that are not common among nineteenth-century Russian thinkers and that are singularly lacking in the work of the other two major radical thinkers of his day, Belinskii and Chernyshevskii (both of whom, however, exercised a greater influence than Herzen on mid-nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life). Alongside the many merits of Herzen’s writing, which have been much admired by British scholars, particularly Isaiah Berlin and Aileen Kelly, there are certain shortcomings which it is useful to bear in mind when reading his Letters from France and Italy. Herzen is inclined, for example, to assert opinion as incontestable fact and present vague, unsubstantiated generalizations as to what obtains “everywhere” or what “everything” indicates. He is much given – pace Berlin, who finds in him not a “trace of Byronic self-dramatization”6 – to posturing. Once in exile, he presents himself, for instance, as a noble martyr who has made a mature and rational decision to sacrifice “everything” to human dignity and free speech.7 In a dedication to his son he offers From the Other Shore as a “monument” to his struggle and as the “protest of an independent individual” against “absurd idols” and obsolete ideas.8 He exudes conviction in his unerring rectitude and in order to demonstrate it produced a quantity of explanations, self-justifications, replies to critics and prefaces to his own works that few writers can have equalled. He engages in jejune punditry about international affairs. He is prone to crude stereotyping of ethnic groups and social classes.9 He persisted in mistakenly believing that western civilization was in terminal decline – one of the “two or 5 For the Russian text see Herzen, SS, Vols. 8-11. For an English version see Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, tr. by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, 4 Vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968). 6 See Berlin’s introduction to Alexander Herzen, “From the Other Shore” and “The Russian People and Socialism,” tr. by Moura Budberg and Richard Wollheim (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956; hereafter Berlin, “Introduction”), p. xvi. 7 S togo berega, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 6, p. 13. See also Herzen’s preface of 1854 to Pisƍma iz Frantsii i Italii, ibid., Vol. 5, p. 7. 8 Herzen, SS, Vol. 6, p. 7. 9 Berlin accepts that Herzen was capable of a “sweeping prejudice” that he expressed in “diatribes against entire nations and classes,” but he makes light of it on the grounds that the diatribes “are the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against an oppressive milieu, and of a genuine and highly personal moral vision which makes them lively reading even now:” see Berlin, “Alexander Herzen,” p. 205.

170 Chapter 6 three ideas” that he admitted were “particularly dear” to him and that by the early 1860s he had been repeating “for about fifteen years.”10 The notion that the old bourgeois world was dying and that Europe was completing its role, indeed approaching a “cataclysm,” underpinned what came to be known as Herzen’s “Russian Socialism,” a doctrine that he formulated in a set of articles, “letters” and a short book written and first published abroad in the years 1849-1854.11 Russian Socialism suffers from what is perhaps the most serious weakness in Herzen’s thought, namely his erection of idols of his own – notably the working man, the Russian peasant, the peasant commune, the Slav personality – in place of those that he has rejected. This doctrine receives relatively little attention in the writings of Berlin and Kelly.12 And yet the Letters from France and Italy can hardly be properly understood without reference to it. For the two sets of writings (on the one hand, the travel account which, on the face of it, concerns the west and, on the other hand, the articles, letters and book that proclaim the feasibility of socialist utopia in Russia) were contemporaneous and at bottom constitute two sides of the same nationalistic coin. It is therefore essential to preface a discussion of the Letters from France and Italy with a brief account of Herzen’s writings on Russian Socialism. Both the writings on Russian Socialism and the Letters from France and Italy need, in turn, to be set in the context of the revolutionary disturbances that broke out in several parts of Europe in the early months of 1848 and their aftermath. For both these sets of writings represent a response to those disturbances and an attempt to come to terms with disappointment at the ultimate failure of the “revolutions” of 1848 as seen from the Russian socialist’s point of view. REVOLUTION AND REACTION IN EUROPE IN 1848-1849 The European revolutionary events of 1848, like those of 1830, stemmed from Paris, but the overthrow of the July Monarchy seems less easily explicable as a result of its proximate cause than the overthrow of the regime of Charles X had been. In the 1830s, it is true, the July Monarchy had been unstable. Legitimists had 10

Kontsy i nachala, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 16, p. 160. Herzen’s characterization of the Russian peasant and his idealization of the peasant commune are abundantly illustrated in the following works, which were first published in French, Italian, German or English: “La Russie,” SS, Vol. 6, pp. 150-186; “Lettre d’un russe à Mazzini,” ibid, pp. 224-230; Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibid., Vol. 7, pp. 9-132; “Le peuple russe et le socialisme,” ibid., pp. 271-306; “La Russie et le vieux monde,” ibid., Vol. 12, pp. 134-166. On the notion that the bourgeois world was in its death throes see especially Vol. 7, p. 273, and Vol. 12, pp. 134, 144, 148. 12 In her entry on Herzen in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, for example, Kelly has four columns on Herzen’s philosophy of history and only slightly over one on his Russian Socialism, most of which is given over to Herzen’s own defence of himself against the charge made by contemporaries and later historians that his belief that the commune contained the seeds of an advanced form of socialism represented a messianic faith at odds with his critique of utopian thought: see the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 10 Vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), Vol. 4, pp. 406-409. Kelly glosses over Herzen’s eulogies to the muzhik and the Slav character, on which see the third section of this chapter. 11

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 171 attempted in 1832 to ignite an uprising when the Duchesse de Berry, mother of the grandson of Charles X, landed in southern France. Later in the decade, when a more positive image of Napoleon had developed, as a man of talent who had risen through the ranks rather than as a ruthless autocrat, Napoleon’s nephew LouisNapoleon emerged as a Bonapartist pretender, and in 1836 and again in 1840 he led attempts to launch an invasion. (In 1846 he escaped to England after being sentenced to life imprisonment.) There were also attempts to assassinate the king, Louis-Philippe. Moreover, the discontent of the working class, fanned by republican agitators, erupted in an insurrection in Lyon in 1831, when some 15,000 workers confronted the National Guard, and in further serious outbreaks of violence in Lyon and Paris in 1834. And yet by the 1840s, in the period immediately preceding the revolution of 1848, the government had stabilized the country by pursuing a sober foreign policy and by adopting a policy of moderation in domestic affairs, cleaving to the juste milieu, or golden mean, between absolute monarchy and radical republicanism. Indeed under the leadership of the historian Guizot, who served as foreign minister and led the constitutional monarchists, relative prosperity had been achieved.13 At the same time many factors had by 1848 weakened the July Monarchy. In 1846, following serious crop failure, food became scarce and expensive and unemployment rose. There was evidence of corruption among the ruling elite. Leading men and women of letters were alienated from the government. Episodes from the revolution of 1789 were glorified in historical writing by Michelet and the poet Lamartine. The utopian socialism preached by Louis Blanc, Cabet, Fourier and Proudhon gained a considerable following. Those who complained that the property qualification deprived them of political representation were famously – and provocatively – advised by Guizot: “Enrichissez-vous! [Get rich!].” Pressure on the government to introduce reforms had therefore increased by the beginning of 1848 and was exerted – since public political meetings were prohibited – through the organization of banquets. When the government, anticipating disorder, banned a banquet that was planned for 22 February, protesting students and workers clashed with police. On 23 February some forty demonstrators were killed by troops outside the home of the unpopular Guizot – whom the king had in fact agreed to replace – and the following day, when a mob threatened the royal palace, LouisPhilippe, fearing civil war, abdicated. The Chamber of Deputies, besieged by a mob, now appointed a provisional government which, under pressure from republican leaders who were threatening to form a government of their own, co-opted four radical leaders, including Louis Blanc, and proclaimed a republic (that is to say, the Second Republic). One faction in this government, led by Lamartine, aspired to the creation of a state serving the interests of the middle class; the other, represented by Blanc, sought far-reaching social and economic reforms. In the face of demands from the Parisian workers, among whom Blanc’s standing was high, the provisional government began to create national workshops to assure full employment. It also set up a commission 13

On the economic growth and industrial and financial developments of these years see Pinkney, Decisive Years in France: 1840-1847, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 23-49.

172 Chapter 6 (the so-called Luxembourg Commission) under the presidency of Blanc to attempt to reconcile the interests of employers and employees. Universal manhood suffrage was proclaimed, immediately increasing the size of the electorate from some 200,000 to nine million. However, Lamartine, who had been appointed foreign minister, resisted radical pressure to support national rebellions elsewhere, fearing that French attempts once again to spread revolution abroad would precipitate military retaliation on the part of the other major European powers. Moreover, support for a social revolution, as opposed to the political revolution that had taken place, was modest outside the working-class districts of Paris and other major cities. Moderates and conservatives therefore found themselves much better represented than socialists in the Constituent Assembly that was elected on 23 April (by which time the national mood had in any case changed). Some five hundred of the eight hundred and eighty seats in this assembly went to moderate republicans and a further three hundred to monarchists of various complexions (Bonapartists, Legitimists and Orleanists). Socialists secured only about eighty seats. Refusing to accept the outcome of the election and provoked by the decision of the new assembly to abolish the national workshops and the Luxembourg Commission, socialist agitators and the Parisian proletariat staged a fresh insurrection which lasted from 23 to 26 June (the so-called June Days). This insurrection was put down, with much bloodshed, by General Cavaignac on the instructions of the Constituent Assembly. In the months following the June Days a new constitution was drafted which provided for the election, by universal manhood suffrage, of a president, for four years, and representatives to a single legislative chamber, for three years. On 10 December 1848 Louis-Napoleon was elected president, as the candidate of the Party of Order, with the support of some five-and-a-half million as opposed to two million for all other candidates. In the elections to the new legislative assembly, in May 1849, radicals improved their position, securing some two hundred seats, while moderate republicans suffered a severe setback, securing only some eighty seats. Monarchists, on the other hand, won as many as five hundred seats, although the monarchist grip on the assembly was weakened by continuing divisions between the Legitimists and the Orleanists. The new body adopted various reactionary measures, disenfranchising one-third of the electorate and curtailing freedoms of press and assembly. Nor did the reverses suffered by those who had supported the insurrections of 1848 end there. Having failed to secure an amendment to the constitution, which prohibited a second consecutive term of office for the president, Louis-Napoleon carried out a coup d’état on 2 December 1851. A further new constitution did restore universal manhood suffrage but at the same time reduced the powers of the elected assembly and extended the president’s term of office to ten years. A rising in one of the working-class districts of Paris was crushed and a plebiscite held which confirmed overwhelming support for Louis-Napoleon. A year later, on 2 December 1852, the Second Empire was established, with Louis-Napoleon as its emperor, Napoleon III. A rapid transition from revolutionary insurrection to renewed dictatorship was thus completed. The insurrection in Paris in February 1848 sparked off uprisings in the Austrian

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 173 Empire and many parts of Germany and Italy. In Vienna demonstrations in March led to the resignation of Metternich, the abolition of censorship and the promise of a constitution, and after further disorders in May the emperor Ferdinand I fled with his family to Innsbruck. The Hungarian diet, taking advantage of the collapse of central authority in Vienna, passed laws in April 1848 which provided for farreaching home rule and in April 1849 the Hungarian rebels, led by Kossuth, declared Hungary an independent republic. A policy of Magyarization in Hungary in 1849, in turn, prompted risings among non-Magyar groups of the Austrian Empire, including Croats, Romanians, Serbs and Slovaks. There were risings against governments in the states of the German Confederation too, though most were relatively mild, and concessions such as the appointment of liberals to ministerial positions were granted. In Berlin, where more serious rioting took place in March, King Frederick William IV was forced to promise that Prussia would be merged in a united Germany under a national constitution and in May a parliament convened at Frankfurt am Main to prepare such a constitution. In Italy, where a rising had already taken place in Palermo in January 1848, before the first insurrection in Paris, King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, Leopold II (the Grand Duke of Tuscany), King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia and Pope Pius IX were all forced by the wave of Italian patriotism to grant constitutions and to support the national movement against Austrian control of Lombardy and Venetia. In March there were successful popular revolts against Austrian rule in Milan and Venice and Charles Albert declared war on Austria. In November the pope, who had antagonized patriots by the equivocal nature of his support for the Italian nationalist movement, was forced to flee Rome in disguise and in February 1849 a newly elected constituent assembly declared the city a democratic republic. However, as in France so in other parts of Europe the successes of democratic and nationalist forces in 1848-1849 were shortlived. Vienna was retaken by Austrian imperial troops in October, after a further uprising there, and harsh punishment was inflicted on the rebels. In May 1849 the Russian army intervened in Hungary, at the request of Francis Joseph I, the new Austrian emperor, allowing Austrian forces to re-enter the country (and confirming Nicholas’s determination to preserve the existing European order). Continuing Hungarian resistance was crushed by the Austrians at the Battle of Temesvár in August 1849. In the states of the German Confederation political progress was slowed by divisions between liberals and more radical politicians and between supporters of the Grossdeutsch movement, who sought a Great Germany led by Austria, and supporters of the Kleindeutsch movement, who viewed Prussia as the natural leader of the German world. In December 1848 Frederick William IV of Prussia dissolved the constituent assembly that had been meeting in Berlin and began to reassert royal prerogatives. Then in 1849 he refused to accept the imperial crown that the Frankfurt parliament offered him, thereby rejecting the constitution drafted by that parliament, the rump of which, meeting in Stuttgart, was finally broken up by troops in June 1849. New uprisings in the German states in the first half of 1849 gained little support beyond intellectuals, students and radical politicians and by the summer of 1849 the revolution had been extinguished there. In Italy Austrian forces led by the aged

174 Chapter 6 Marshal Radetzky defeated the army of Charles Albert at Custoza in July 1848 and subsequently re-established control in Lombardy and Venetia. Charles Albert, having been persuaded by Piedmontese democrats to renew the war with Austria, was defeated even more decisively by Radetzky at Novara in March 1849, whereupon he abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II. In Naples Ferdinand II regained power in a coup in May 1848 and then reconquered Sicily. Another democratic insurrection was crushed by Austrian troops in Livorno in May 1849. In July 1849 Leopold was reinstated in Tuscany, from which he had fled earlier in the year. At the same time Rome was besieged by forces from France and in July 1849 Louis-Napoleon, president of what was still the Second French Republic, brought to an end the Roman Republic led by Mazzini and Garibaldi and restored unlimited papal rule. Venice surrendered to Austrian forces in August 1849. It was against this background of republican, socialist and nationalist uprisings and repressive counter-measures that Herzen spent his first years in emigration. The failure of the uprisings induced in him bitterness and despair. The hopes nourished by the idealistic Westernizers of his generation for the liberation of the human personality and the renewal of European civilization had been dashed. Parliamentary democracy, even with universal manhood suffrage, had failed to secure victory for the working class with whom the aristocrat Herzen claimed his sympathies lay. If the uprisings of 1848 had represented a culmination of Romantic frustration, then defeat of the revolutionary forces marked the end of Romantic resistance to the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Faced with these reverses, and yearning for a homeland to which return was now unthinkable, Herzen transferred his hopes for social, moral and political regeneration to the Russian peasantry, among whom he thought he was discovering the bases for a distinctive national form of socialism. HERZEN’S RUSSIAN SOCIALISM There had already been interest in French utopian socialism in Russia in the 1840s, particularly in the teachings of Fourier and his imagined ideal community, the socalled phalanstery. This interest indicated, on the one hand, a renewed respect for the stream of European thought that flowed from the Enlightenment and for French culture and, on the other hand, a cooling on the part of one wing of the Russian intelligentsia towards German idealism and the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment. It found expression in fervent discussions among the officials and young men of letters who gathered regularly at the St. Petersburg home of an eccentric nobleman, Petrashevskii, who was an admirer of Fourier. In 1849 the authorities, alarmed by the disturbances elsewhere in Europe, arrested many of the Petrashevtsy, as the members of these circles were known, and sentenced those whom they considered most dangerous to death. (The sentence was commuted only at the last moment, as the condemned men awaited execution.)14 Thus the ground 14

On the Petrashevskii circles see especially Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 175 for the development of socialist ideas in Russia had already been prepared by the time Herzen wrote his essays on Russian Socialism, although the Petrashevtsy had not given those ideas such a distinctive nationalistic tinge as Herzen now imparted to them. The belief that the old world was in its death throes enabled Herzen to hope that fresh nations might enter the historical arena and that Russia could gain a voice. Indeed Russia’s lack of history now seemed to give her an advantage over countries imprisoned by their past. (Herzen thought that Chaadaev, who in his “Apology of a Madman” had made a similar point,15 might claim him as his protégé.16) Admittedly Russia was indeed the tsarist despotism that the French Marquis de Custine had recently described in scathing terms in an acclaimed récit de voyage published in 1843, Russia in 1839 (vi, 158-161).17 However, the westernized bureaucratic state that Peter had established – a state more German than Russian (vii, 125) and most faithfully served by Germanic functionaries from Russia’s eighteenth-century Baltic acquisitions (vii, 49) – was fragile and transient. Within that part of the Russian nobility that was educated but not compromised by presence at court, the “intellectual centre” of a future revolution was being formed (vi, 178). Representatives of this “centre,” Russians who had passed through western civilization (like Herzen himself, the reader is bound to infer), would act as intermediaries between revolutionary Europe and the Russian people (vii, 291). It was a further source of hope to Herzen that the Russian common people had distinctive virtues that found expression in the peasant commune. This institution had been brought to Russian attention by another book by a foreign traveller, Baron von Haxthausen.18 Although Haxthausen, a Prussian aristocrat, had believed that the commune might serve a conservative cause by providing a bulwark against the creation of a landless proletariat, Herzen appropriated his discovery for a socialist purpose. The commune as Haxthausen had described it had striking merits for Herzen: it governed its own internal affairs, like a miniature republic, took responsibility for all its members and did not recognize private property. It embodied the communal spirit on which a socialist utopia would have to be based (vi, 161-165). It also seemed to Herzen – though not to Haxthausen – to be a democratic institution, since the village elder, according to Herzen, had only Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, tr. from the Italian by F. Haskell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), pp. 79-89; Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 75-83; John L. Evans, The Petraševskij Circle, 1845-1849 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974); J. H. Seddon, The Petrashevtsy: A Study of the Russian Revolutionaries of 1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). On Dostoevskii’s involvement in these circles see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 18211849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 239-291. 15 “Apologie d’un fou,” in Chaadaev, Sochineniia, Vol. 1, pp. 231-232. 16 See Herzen, SS, Vol. 6, p. 518. 17 Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839. References to Herzen’s writings on Russian Socialism which were cited in n. 11 above, will be incorporated in the text in this section, by volume number (in Roman numerals) and page number(s) (in Arabic numerals). 18 August von Haxthausen, Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben, und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russland (1847), tr. by Robert Faire as The Russian Empire, its People, Institutions, and Resources, 2 Vols. (London: Frank Cass, 1968).

176 Chapter 6 limited powers and was bound by the wishes of the peasants as expressed in their assembly (vi, 164-165). The survival of the institution had enabled the Russian people to preserve rights that before the brutal centralization of the state by the Muscovite grand princes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been expressed in the veche, a popular assembly in free cities such as medieval Novgorod and Pskov (vii, 33). Herzen views the peasant commune as a distinctively Slavonic rather than an exclusively Russian institution, claiming that it is even stronger among the Bulgarians, Montenegrins and Serbs than it is among the Russians, and that where it has not survived among the Slavs its disappearance has been due to Germanic influence (vi, 163). However, since the Russians are Slavs the commune does reflect their specific genius. It is on the strength of the supposed centrality of the institution in the Russian peasant world that Herzen makes the grand claim that the Russian “natural” way of life corresponds more closely to the socialist ideal than the way of life of the “civilized Germano-Roman world” (vi, 167). In fact, the commune has served as an instrument of Russian national salvation: it had sheltered the Russian people from the Tatars, the tsars, westernized landowners and German bureaucracy and had fortunately survived until the modern age when socialism was being born (vii, 288). By providing the basis for an alternative form of social organization in Russia in an age when capitalism was making rapid advances elsewhere it would enable Russia to avoid some of the phases of development that other European nations had undergone. Or at least Russia would pass through such phases only “in the same way that a foetus passes through the inferior stages of zoological existence” (vi, 167-168; xii, 152). Herzen thereby provided the basis for the Populist claim that was to dominate Russian revolutionary thought from the 1860s to the late 1880s: Russia could bypass capitalism and proceed directly to a form of socialism based on the peasant commune. Herzen’s enthusiasm for the institution of the commune went hand in hand with romanticization of the Russian people,19 especially the Russian peasant, who in Herzen’s opinion regarded the communal way of life as uniquely legitimate and viewed the world outside the commune as coercive (vii, 286). There was a great strength in the Russian people, Herzen asserted, that had enabled them through all their suffering to retain self-confidence, an “open and handsome countenance” and a “lively mind” (vi, 162-163). Herzen’s Russian peasant speaks a rugged, democratic and patriarchal language and has an “almost southern vivacity.” He possesses “so much strength, so much agility, so much intelligence” and a “beauty” that Herzen considers virile (vi, 172; vii, 10). Faults that are attributed to the Russian people by their detractors, such as a tendency to cheat, religious fanaticism and slavish devotion to the autocrat – if they are indeed to be found at all – stem from poverty and ignorance and are in any case to some extent common to all 19 The term peuple (Russian narod) has a convenient ambiguity. It may have the broad sense of a people as a whole but is also used to refer to the popular masses, the common people, in particular. On occasion Herzen uses the word muzhik as a near synonym for the term peuple or narod in this second sense.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 177 European nations (vi, 173). In their dealings among themselves the Russian peasants are honest and trustworthy, as proved – so Herzen claims – by the fact that they never enter into written contracts, very rarely engage in legal disputes and share land in their communes and money in their artelƍ (vi, 173; vii, 286-287). It is yet another virtue of the Russian peasants in Herzen’s eyes that they are indifferent to religion and free of the fanaticism allegedly found in various western European countries (vi, 173-174). In short, the muzhik is the “man of the future Russia” just as the worker is the “man of the regenerated France” (vii, 291). Herzen’s yearning for a social revolution based on the supposedly egalitarian institutions and admirable character of the Russian peasant shades into idealization of the Slavs in general and gives rise to vague Pan-Slavist dreams. The Slavs are a strong and intelligent race, richly endowed with various abilities, though somewhat lacking in energy and initiative (which lack represents a feminine characteristic in Herzen’s opinion; vii, 25). Centralization is contrary to their spirit (vii, 280; xii, 151). They have a great “elasticity” of character that enables them to understand other nationalities and receive their cultures (vii, 68-69). Their “flexibility” is indicated by the ease with which they supposedly acquire the language, customs, art and technology of other peoples (xii, 154). Herzen also maintains that there is a tendency to unity in the Slav world that has been apparent since the end of the Napoleonic era (vii, 277). He even offers the fanciful hypothesis that an attempt by Nicholas I to take Constantinople would end with the fall of tsarism and the establishment of a new Russia at the head of a democratic federation of Slavs (vi, 230). Constantinople is the centre towards which the Greco-Slav world gravitates and it will be the capital of the united Slavs, whilst the German émigrés who rule Russia will “go home” (xii, 165). It bears repeating, finally, that there is no doubt a personal sub-text beneath the doctrine of Russian Socialism that has been described here. The recently arrived émigré found it hard to settle in the alien societies and politically unstable environments of France and Italy. He was bitterly disappointed by the defeat of the European left in 1848 and profoundly shaken by personal misfortunes. In these circumstances he experienced a sense of displacement and futility. Wounded by the foreign contempt for Russia that had infused Custine’s book, by the haughty ignorance of Russia that he encountered in the west and by western Russophobia nourished by Russian repression in Poland in 1830-1831 and in Hungary in 1849, he was eager to defend his nation against its European detractors and to assert its merits, indeed to attribute to it a capacity to rejuvenate Europe.20 All these factors – the ideas embodied in the doctrine of Russian Socialism and the personal anxieties that may have lain behind them – need to be borne in mind as one reads the Letters on France and Italy.

20

It was on account of Herzen’s dreams about Russian renewal of the sick west that Marx refused to appear on the same platform as Herzen in London: see Carr, The Romantic Exiles, p. 124.

178 Chapter 6 LETTERS FROM FRANCE AND ITALY: GENESIS AND GENRE The Letters from France and Italy, as eventually assembled in Russian editions in the mid-1850s, represent a conflation of four groups of “letters.” Firstly, there are four “Letters from the Avenue Marigny,” written in the spring and summer of 1847 in Paris, where Herzen had arrived in March that year, following his departure from Russia in January. These letters, which were first published in The Contemporary in 1847, offer a characterization of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe and of the bourgeoisie which that regime favoured. Secondly, there are four “Letters from the via del Corso,” written in Italy, to which Herzen had travelled in 1847, via Lyon, Avignon and Nice, and where he stayed from November 1847 to April 1848. It was during this period, for most of which the Herzens lived in Rome, that the abovementioned uprisings in Sicily, Milan and Venice and the wave of Italian patriotism forced Ferdinand II and Pope Pius IX to grant constitutions. The “Letters from the via del Corso” attempt to catch the mood in Italy in the period immediately preceding the uprising in Palermo in January 1848 and the first weeks after its outbreak. Herzen intended them, like the “Letters from the Avenue Marigny,” to be published in The Contemporary. However, the change in the political climate in Russia that followed the revolutionary disturbances in the west – it was the beginning of the “seven dismal years” with which the reign of Nicholas I ended – thwarted that plan. Thirdly, there are three letters in a cycle entitled “Again in Paris,” written after Herzen had hurriedly returned to France following the resignation of Guizot and the abdication of Louis-Philippe in February 1848. These letters chart the course of the reaction precipitated by the unsuccessful attempt by socialists on 15 May 1848 to dissolve the Constituent Assembly and set up a new revolutionary government. They were written not for immediate publication but for circulation among friends in Russia, to whom Herzen hoped they could be delivered by returning travellers such as Annenkov. The second and third of these groups of letters (that is to say, the “Letters from the via del Corso,” and “Again in Paris”) were published in German in 1850, following the success of the German edition of From the Other Shore that had appeared in Hamburg in that year.21 All three groups of letters (that is to say the “Letters from the Avenue Marigny,” the “Letters from the via del Corso” and “Again in Paris”), together with three new letters dated 1850-1851 from Nice and a further addendum, a “Letter to Ribeyrolles,” were collected into a Russian edition that was published in London in 1854. A second Russian edition, also published in London, appeared in 1858.22 Within this amalgam of various groups of “letters” Herzen included much material of a sort that is commonplace in the travel sketch. He describes street scenes (though as a revolutionary tourist he concentrates on political events rather than everyday life), introduces some dialogue and relates a somewhat incongruous 21 Briefe aus Italien und Frankreich (1848-1849) von einem Russen, Verfasser des “Vom andern Ufer” (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1850). 22 The 1854 edition was dated 1855. It is the London edition of 1858 that is reproduced, with Herzen’s prefaces to both the 1854 and 1858 editions, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 5, pp. 7-224, and it is to the text in SS that all references in parentheses in the text of this chapter hereafter relate.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 179 encounter with lazzaroni in Naples (119-122), which he also visited just after Ferdinand II had been forced to grant an amnesty to political prisoners there. (Perhaps the subject of the lazzaroni was suggested to Herzen by Pogodin’s treatment of it, or perhaps he wished to try his hand at something in the style of the physiological sketch that was currently in vogue in Russia.) He characterizes Parisian life through its theatre, briefly surveys Italian history, offers some reflections on painting and occasionally describes landscape. He also makes the travel writer’s usual claim as to the immediacy and freshness of his record. In his preface to the first Russian edition of the Letters, for example, he tells the reader that the letters were written “to the sound and thunder of events” (7).23 In his fifth letter, replying to Russian criticisms of the “Letters from the Avenue Marigny” that have reached him in Italy, he protests that they were just a few notes jotted down in a rough-and-ready fashion while he was busy with other things (88-89). Moreover, while assuring his readers that he is not going to “describe” what he has seen, because “everybody knows Europe” now (15), he does place his work in the Russian tradition of travel writing by referring at the outset to works by Fonvizin, Karamzin and Pogodin that have been examined here, and also to works by Fiodor Glinka and Grech (16). Later he alludes to travel writing by Heine and Dickens (78). He does not mention Custine in his text, but we know that he had read Russia in 1839 when it came out in 184324 and we should not rule out the possibility that he wishes in the Letters from France and Italy to prove that bourgeois France is no better than the tsarist despotism that Custine had described. Despite the presence in the Letters from France and Italy of stock elements of the travel sketch and Herzen’s apparent location of the work in the now established Russian tradition, the work as a whole exhibits an indeterminacy of the sort that was to characterize My Past and Thoughts and that it is difficult in this instance to see as a literary virtue. After the opening pages, the motif of the journey as movement through geographical space is weak, particularly in the last six letters of the fourteen. Insofar as the Letters do record a journey, it is a historical journey between what Herzen calls the “station of 1848 and the station of 1852” (201) and a personal spiritual journey from the old world represented by bourgeois Europe towards an imagined new socialist world inhabited by freedom-loving spirits such as himself. And yet the semblance of the travel sketch does provide Herzen with a suitable vehicle for two elements, autobiography and combative political journalism, both approached in the manner of an artist, that are of central importance in his writings and lend them their distinctive formal character. On one level Herzen’s imaginative use of the loose form of the “letter” allowed his gaze to range freely over the broad range of subjects in which his coruscating intellect took an interest and enabled him to indulge the predilection to which he once confessed for digressions and parentheses.25 On another level, though, the highly personal nature of the form also permitted Herzen legitimately to stand at 23 See also the preface to the second edition of the Letters (SS, Vol. 5, p. 9) and the preface to the German edition of 1850 (ibid., p. 453). 24 See Herzen’s diary entries in SS, Vol. 2, pp. 311-313, 315, 340. 25 Kontsy i nachala, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 16, p. 158.

180 Chapter 6 the heart of his work, albeit against the background of a broad historical canvas, as might the central character of a nineteenth-century novel. The character that Herzen the narrator presents in the Letters from France and Italy is a noble exile and morally irreproachable observer of human imperfections that range from weakness, indecision and obtuseness to greed and cruelty. He thinks highly of himself. He has been “candid,” Herzen assures the reader in his preface to the first Russian edition of the Letters (7). Of all crimes he is furthest from idolatry (89). He adopts a tone of immeasurable superiority to his surroundings, as when in October 1847 he disdainfully leaves Paris whose ugly moral decline he cannot bear (68). Herzen’s centrality to his text is not compromised by competition for attention with the large family entourage that we know accompanied Herzen on his extra-textual journey. There is no indication in the “Letters from the Avenue Marigny,” for example, that Herzen is not alone, and curiously the only reference in the work to a Russian fellow-traveller is to “T.” (115), the landowner Tuchkov, who in the seventh letter turns up in Italy.26 This narrator controls all encounters and dialogue and may always indulge a witticism whose irony his interlocutor is not capable of appreciating (71), or worst his verbal adversary, who quickly admits his error (86), or demonstrate his selfpossession in a difficult situation and his reliability as a keeper of promises (118122). He is capable not only of portraying himself in a favourable light (as Herzen would in “A Family Drama,” the chapter in My Past and Thoughts in which he gives his own version of his wife’s affair with Herwegh) but also of imposing on his life’s course a pattern and even an apparent intentionality that it may not have had. Thus Herzen misrepresents his flight from Paris in 1849. One could assume from his account in the twelfth letter of the cycle that he went directly from Paris to Marseilles and thence to Nice (which was at that time a Savoyard city, not a French one). In fact he went from Paris to Geneva, in haste and without his family, in June 1849, because the French authorities had begun to arrest and imprison opponents and in particular had turned their attention to foreign revolutionaries on French soil. (His wife and children followed, accompanied gallantly by Herwegh.) Later in 1849 Herzen returned from Switzerland to Paris with his mother, in order to discuss with the house of Rothschild the transfer of his mother’s wealth from Russia, and he remained in Paris for this reason for over five months.27 In the last analysis it is tempting to read the Letters from France and Italy, like so much else that Herzen wrote, as a narrative conceived as a means of giving order to Herzen’s own experience. Through it the author might triumph over his superfluousness (felt before his departure from Russia and reflected in Who is to blame?), his rootless wandering (that was to continue for the rest of his life), and the personal misfortunes that had begun to buffet him. Alongside the carefully crafted autobiographical element there is in the Letters from France and Italy a highly polemical component. As well as being personal documents the Letters are political pamphlets which contain a characterization of 26 Tuchkov was in fact travelling with his two daughters, one of whom was to become Ogariov’s wife and then Herzen’s partner. 27 Carr, The Romantic Exiles, pp. 52, 61, 71.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 181 the July Monarchy and the ministry of Guizot, an embittered account of the collapse of the French revolution after February 1848, and a discussion of the differences between monarchy and a republic. Their theme is Herzen’s disenchantment with the bourgeois civilization that he finds in the west and their structuring principle is dramatic juxtaposition of two distinct sets of characters and personified social classes, to whom moral and psychological traits and even physical features are tendentiously attributed.28 On the one hand, there are the embodiments of vice: the French bourgeois, the liberal statesmen who represent their interests and the monarchs who preside over regimes under which the bourgeois flourish. On the other hand, there are the embodiments of virtue: the common people, represented by the Parisian worker and the Italian peasant; the spokesmen or champions of the common people; and the Russian peasantry who are about to find their voice. These opposing sets of protagonists will be examined separately in the following two sections. THE WORLD OF THE VILLAINOUS BOURGEOISIE Herzen acknowledges, as one would expect a member of the Russian Westernist camp to do, that Europe has a mature civilization and a rich history. It has lived in a way that Russia has not. Admittedly the achievement of ancient Rome was built with the labour of slaves. In later times the European peasantry was worn out by toil in order to create material conditions in which other classes could live an “historical” life. And yet it could not be denied that the ancient Romans and the classes benefiting from the labour of the peasants in medieval and early-modern Europe truly did live. The evidence for this assertion peeps out from behind every hewn stone. In Ghent, for example, the Rathaus, cathedrals and markets attest to vigorous municipal activity, while the numerous knights’ castles perched on European hill-tops indicate to Herzen a life which, even if at bottom it was vampiric, was sumptuous and superficially noble (20, 22, 85-86).29 However, this old world, Herzen is convinced, is dying. By autumn 1847 evidence for the claim was everywhere to be found in the modern “centre” of the old world (68), Paris, which Herzen had approached with awe as in the past men approached Jerusalem and Rome (141). Death in literature, death in the theatre, death in politics, death on the tribune, the walking corpse Guizot on the one hand and the infantile babble of the grey28 Herzen endows political enemies, as a novelist might endow fictional characters, with physical as well as moral characteristics designed to turn the reader against them. In the liberal Pope Pius IX Herzen sees a “transparent fleshiness” and small eyes that express “carefree satiety:” Pisƍma iz Frantsii i Italii, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 5, p. 90. The expression of Ferdinand II, the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies, whom Herzen says he sees in Naples in 1848, exhibits sensuousness and sly cruelty (ibid., p. 114). Thiers is an old man of short stature with a round belly and skinny legs and he has the expression of a roguish butler (ibid., p. 194). 29 In the polemic about knight-errantry, as with respect to other subjects, Herzen seems to be taking up an intermediate position between Granovskii and Botkin, on the one hand, and the Slavophiles, on the other.

182 Chapter 6 haired opposition on the other: how awful! Somewhere down in the depths, far away, deep moans were occasionally to be heard. They seemed to emanate from a strong, healthy breast. But on the outside Paris was like a crater that had cooled and turned to mud and slush. (68) Later, when the revolutions of 1848 have failed, Herzen sees the repression after the June Days, when General Cavaignac had brutally put down the workers’ uprising in Paris, as a further sign of the terminal illness of decrepit Europe (199). The ruling class in the moribund western dystopia that Herzen depicts is the bourgeoisie, epitomized by the Parisian proprietor, shop-keeper and rentier, that is to say people wealthy enough to qualify to vote through payment of at least two hundred francs per annum in direct taxes (29, 33). As a counter-weight to the nobility under the ancien régime and in a transitional phase of historical development the bourgeoisie had once had some merit, Herzen concedes, but it had proved unable to “cope with its victory.” While the nobility lost its rights and the people starved or shed their blood on the battle-fields of Europe the bourgeoisie profited from trade, enjoyed the benefits of the Continental System,30 acquired political power and set up a National Guard to keep down the mob that it had incited to revolt on its behalf (34-35). The mores of the class were expressed in the vaudeville, which Parisians queued to watch and which with its smutty innuendo had become as characteristic a product of French culture as transcendental idealism had been of German (29, 37). To a certain extent the bourgeois was personified on the stage by Figaro, Beaumarchais’s cunning, shifty, effervescent barber. However, by the 1840s Figaro was no longer a poor man outside the law who sided with the hungry, as he had been in Beaumarchais’s time, but a legislator who regarded the poor as idle vagrants. For the moment this bourgeoisie was audacious and arrogant and played the aristocrat, philanthropist and statesman. And yet in truth it had neither a great past nor a future (33-34). At the heart of Herzen’s critique of the bourgeois order is the allegation that the behaviour of the bourgeoisie is governed by mercenary considerations above all others, that money is the lever that now sets everything in motion (58). This allegation is pursued in the Letters, and particularly in the “Letters from the Avenue Marigny,” with a bitterness that is no doubt explained by the mood of the Romantic period in which Herzen’s outlook was formed and by the traditional disdain for commerce among the Russian aristocracy, as well as by the polemical thrust of the Letters. In contrast to the idealistic revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie concerns itself exclusively with income, scoffs at selflessness and is driven by utility alone. The former [i.e. the eighteenth-century revolutionaries] subordinated gain to ideas, the bourgeoisie subordinates ideas to gain. The former shed blood for rights; the bourgeoisie loses rights but saves its blood. It is selfishly craven and is capable of rising to heroism only in defence of property, growth and profit. (64) 30

i.e. Napoleon’s plan to exclude Britain from participating in European commerce.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 183 Abandoning the values prized by the French nobility – patriotism, courage and honour – the bourgeois, then, has devised a morality based on arithmetic and financial power (34-35). Having obliterated love of his neighbour and succumbed to a passion for “money-grubbing, profit-making, stock-jobbing” (142), he does not necessarily view thieving as a crime, Herzen thinks, for the ability to make a fortune might wipe away any stain (36). Life has thus been reduced to a means of minting coins, and the state, judicial system and army have been transformed into instruments for the protection of property (63). It is in keeping with the ethos of the bourgeoisie that economic questions should have come to dominate French intellectual and political life. This preoccupation with economic questions is to Herzen a regrettable reaction to the preoccupation of the revolutionary and Romantic periods with ideas and principles. Those idealists who in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had concerned themselves exclusively with political interests have been replaced by utilitarians driven by economic interests alone (63-64). Debates about the rights of man, state policy and patriotism, Herzen contends, have been rendered redundant by political economy (58), whose importance, it will be recalled, Botkin emphasized in his Letters on Spain. This discipline, for all its apparent practicality, has become an abstract science of wealth and the development of resources [and] has come to regard human beings as a living productive force, an organic machine; it treats society as a factory, the state as a marketplace; in its role as engineer it has concerned itself with the use of the least force to obtain the greatest result [and] with discovery of the laws of increase of wealth. (61) Herzen’s protest at the ascendancy of material interests, the utilitarian ethic of the capitalist world and the mechanical nature of life in general in industrial societies goes together with a regret characteristic of the Romantic age in which Herzen was nurtured at loss of human warmth, or “poetry” in the broad sense in which Russians used the term in the mid-nineteenth century. The material or prosaic side of life has altogether excluded the idealistic or poetic side. A “poetry of soullessness” now prevails (60, 194). Even the traveller is affected by this loss of poetry, which Herzen implicitly laments in the first letter of his cycle when he offers an ironical prediction about the improvement that railways will soon bring to the traveller’s lot. Europe will be effaced from human memory as it is transformed into certain fixed points lit by streetlamps where travellers may avail themselves of buffets with wine-glasses in them. The new Captain Cooks will get off the trains and venture into the interior and report on the morals and lives of people who do not live by the railway. Herzen also envisages an effortless itinerary, appropriate to the iron age, between Königsberg (the first major city beyond Russia’s western border) and America: the engine whistled and off it clattered: Berlin – four minutes to take on water; Cologne – three minutes to grease the wheels; Brussels – five minutes to get a ham sandwich; Valenciennes – four minutes to prove to the French government that it can’t find any cigars hidden away; Paris – fifteen minutes to get by

184 Chapter 6 omnibus from one platform to another; Le Havre – three minutes for transfer to the steamship… and then to New York . . . (16) Later, as Herzen rides by horse-drawn transport through France en route for Italy, he explicitly bemoans the loss of poetry in western life: he travels smoothly but tediously, “like a machine,” without conversations, arguments, station-masters or orders for fresh horses (69). In ruing the materialism of the modern age and its loss of poetry Herzen the Westernizer shares a concern of the Slavophiles. However, he does also take issue with the Slavophiles when he asserts that the question of material well-being is inevitably paramount (for a mob will remain a mob until it has food and leisure) and when he insists that nations that have developed beyond a mythical, patriarchal stage of existence must address this question. It is the Slavophiles that he has in mind when he speaks in his text of inveterate “romantics” and “idealists” who oppose attempts at economic modernization, maintain that the people will abandon religion if material progress is made, idealize the supposedly pure and independent life of a rural settler trusting to providence, and regard poverty as a school for life (58-59). At the same time Herzen is also embarking on a dispute with fellow Westernizers. For the Letters from France and Italy, or more particularly the “Letters from the Avenue Marigny” that were published as early as 1847, also constitute Herzen’s own provocative contribution to the debate among the Westernizers about the assumed qualities and defects of the bourgeoisie, its past contribution to European life and its future prospects. Herzen’s regret at the modern preoccupation with economic issues; his disdainful attitude towards the discipline of political economy; his denunciation of bourgeois conduct and values; and his denial that the bourgeoisie had a bright future: all these elements of the Letters from France and Italy contribute to an image of the dominant western class that stands in stark contrast to that presented by Botkin in his Letters on Spain. Herzen himself underlines his differences with his erstwhile allies in the Westernist camp on this matter when he states in his fifth letter, in response to the criticisms that he knows his “Letters from the Avenue Marigny” have elicited, that he is no more prepared to bow down to “Parisian novelties,” that is to say the revered French economic and social model, than he is to the “Russian antiquities” worshipped by the Slavophiles (89).31 It is not just the mercenary nature and utilitarian ethic of the bourgeoisie and the overriding concern of that class with economic questions that Herzen attacks in the Letters from France and Italy, but also the political institutions, vaunted rights and legal system that underpin the bourgeoisie’s hegemony. In short the Letters constitute an attack on liberalism, through which the ascendant social class in France finds political expression. In this respect they furnish a model that was to serve writers at the conservative end of the political spectrum, such as Dostoevskii, as well as radical socialist writers such as Chernyshevskii, whose attacks against 31 Herzen had already thrown down the gauntlet in a letter dated 31 December 1847 (Herzen, SS, Vol. 23, p. 52). As the bourgeoisie reasserted itself in France after the disturbances of 1848 he became more belligerent, writing to his Moscow friends on 2 August of that year that all defenders of the bourgeoisie, like them, had “fallen flat on their faces in the mud” (ibid., p. 80).

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 185 Russian “liberals” in 1858 coincided with publication of the second Russian edition of Herzen’s Letters. The hard-won political and social benefits of life in the west – for example, constitutions; freedoms of speech, the press and assembly; the right to organize political parties; political representation and the broadening of suffrage; the separation of powers; an independent judiciary; and increasing prosperity – must have seemed attractive to the Westernizers in the Russian intelligentsia when viewed from the vantage-point of their own autocratic and economically backward country. And yet Herzen, having inspected these benefits at close quarters, finds in them no more substance than had Fonvizin or Pogodin. The “multi-coloured decorations of constitutional France” cannot conceal from him the disease which he believes is devouring its innards (9). The rights that the bourgeoisie values, and that it gained some credit for championing while it was in opposition to Louis XVIII and Charles X,32 are of no actual use to the people as a whole, he claims (66). Freedom of speech and thought and the press he dismisses as a “noble caprice rather than a true necessity” among the French (176). In any case these freedoms are in practice very limited. Herzen is aggrieved that in 1847 the Parisian prefecture prohibited the singing of the hymn to the liberal Pope Pius IX that had been advertised in the programme for a public concert, a restriction that he sees as symptomatic of the moral depth to which Paris has sunk (80-81). As for representative government, he considers it of dubious value, at least in the French context. The Constituent Assembly, the first outcome of universal manhood suffrage, is pusillanimous, he thinks, and concerned only with questions of secondary importance. It is a bordello, a second-hand market that loses respect within days of its opening on 4 May 1848 (135, 137). Indeed he believes that in any state that is monarchic, or where powers are divided as constitutionalists would wish, or where there is a “religious conception of representation, or police centralization of the whole state in the hands of a ministry,” then universal suffrage is in practice as much of an optical illusion as the equality preached by Christianity (161-162). Thus in spite of the extension of the franchise in 1848, government in France, in Herzen’s estimation, remained a means of upholding the economic interests of the bourgeoisie, as it had been since the revolution of July 1830 to which liberals often referred admiringly (66). In 1831-1834, the early years of the July Monarchy, the government of newspaper-owners, philanthropists, historians and liberals, advocates of the juste milieu, had solved the question of wages, famine and other disorders by the brutal suppression of the workers’ uprisings in Lyon, on which Herzen reflects as he passes through that city on his way to Italy in the autumn of 1847 (71). And now in the Paris to which Herzen came in 1847 the bourgeoisie dominated political life: [the] publication of a journal, the election of a deputy, a vote in the Chamber [of Deputies] – all this was a commercial transaction thinly concealed by a 32

It was apropos of the reigns of these two kings that Chernyshevskii wrote one of his principal attacks on liberalism in 1858: see n. 38 to Chapter 2 above.

186 Chapter 6 conventional form of words. Bankers wielded extreme power in all public matters. The Ministry [of Guizot] feared a clash with the capitalists more than any other evil. (142) Later, in the spring of 1848, the political representatives whom Herzen sees arriving in Paris from the provinces to take their places in the Constituent Assembly are limited people with the mean eyes of proprietors and the fat noses and narrow brows of provincial money-grubbers who will fashion a republic with the shop-keeper’s yardstick and the grocer’s set of weights as their criteria (174). Repeatedly Herzen vilifies individual statesmen who are associated with the detested bourgeois order. Guizot (who was a Protestant) is presented as a “Calvinist priest, a sober, bilious, unfeeling fanatic” who oppresses the proletariat (140, 145). Odilon Barrot, who presides over the commission investigating the uprising of June 1848, is an “obtuse liberal” (156). The members of the provisional government that is set up in Paris after the abdication of Louis-Philippe, including Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin, are treacherous or weak (133). Indeed it is Lamartine who most clearly exemplifies the failings of liberalism in Herzen’s eyes. In a classic Russian characterization of the western European liberal Herzen depicts him as a man corrupted by power who let slip the opportunity to lead France, indeed Europe as a whole, towards true democracy when conservative forces were at their weakest after the February declaration of a republic (167-168). Frightened at the success of the opposition to the July Monarchy, he agreed to bring troops into Paris in April 1848 (171-172). He is not averse to proposing revolutionary toasts in the safe environment of a banquet or to writing daring little articles in journals but his first instinct, once he is swept to power, is to re-establish order and rein in the people (150). His essential emptiness is betrayed by his oratory, as exemplified by an ingratiating report to the Constituent Assembly. It resembles whipped cream: you think you are going to put a whole spoonful in your mouth, but in fact you get just a few drops of milk with some sugar (135). He is weak and “effeminate.” He avoids extremes and attempts to reconcile opposites, without understanding that this oscillation between extremes, this supreme, all-embracing fairness devoid of any inner principle or fixed idea amounts either to supreme heartlessness (like the whole philosophy of Cousin33) or to egoistic Epicureanism, dissipation. Lamartine found in his heart the [poetic] sounds with which to extol white lilies and those who serve the Church and Napoleon, and – and in fact committed himself to nothing; Lamartine is a dictator, he has come to love the Republic and the people, and from this height has wanted to take pleasure in the whole world, sympathizing with the hungry worker, cherishing the luxury of the rich, shedding a tear for the Duchess of Orléans and extending chivalrous magnanimity to his political foes; there was only one thing for which he had no sympathy, the revolution, for he thought it was unnecessary after the proclamation of the Republic! And that was the sort of person who stood at the head of the democracy that was emerging, accommodating two turbulent 33

A contemporary French thinker noted for his eclecticism.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 187 currents with the gentleness of his soul, yielding to both and rendering both of them impotent. (160-161) After the June Days Lamartine’s place in Herzen’s demonology is usurped by Thiers, the truest representative of the contemporary majority, the French Party of Order. Thiers is “a wit, a grey-haired gamin, a prankster and a chatterbox, a liberal bathed in the blood of Lyon,” a “Figaro who typically expresses bourgeois France.” His sole god is capital (194). Nor does the liberal Pope Pius IX, of whom Herzen writes in his letters from Italy, fare any better. Pius, as Herzen portrays him, is weak, lacks courage and introduces half-measures that satisfy only those who pursue the golden mean (94-95, 124). Thus liberals in general are essentially “the most dreadful conservatives” (13). Together with Herzen’s attack on the political life of bourgeois France goes a critique of the country’s legal system. Herzen deplores what he considers the empty formalism and inhuman severity of the law-courts, the medieval attire of the judges, lawyers and prosecutor, the obscure, formulaic language of the judiciary and their cold, bombastic oratory, and the apparent desire of prosecutors to have defendants sentenced to the severest possible punishment (67). The French judicial system, like the country’s political system, is an instrument that serves those who rule: it has been used by successive governments to send their enemies to a penal colony or to have them executed.34 This perceived bias inclines Herzen to what might be described as a judicial relativism. He has no more respect for law as such than for democracy (given its failure to bring about social revolution). He therefore does not consider legality to be binding on a whole people in all circumstances. When a people rebels it bears in itself the “living source of justice and the legality” of the given moment, he argues somewhat obscurely; it does not proceed according to a paragraph of the legal code but makes new law. The French mass, according to this reasoning, was not really guilty of disorder when it broke into the Constituent Assembly in Paris on 15 May 1848: it was merely showing justifiable contempt for a representative body that had been elected legitimately in a formal sense but did not enjoy what we might now call moral legitimacy. Thus the common people, in Herzen’s eyes, can do no substantial wrong. Although from the legal point of view they were not right to protest violently, there was another, higher justice, Herzen supposes, that was on their side (172-173). Herzen’s judicial relativism, incidentally, is matched by an historical relativism according to which the reactionary “terror” in the June Days of 1848 is more reprehensible by far than the terror unleashed in 1793 by the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, whose “faith and energy” Herzen admires (159).35 It should be noted, finally, that while the alien representative of evil against which Herzen inveighs in the Letters from France and Italy is primarily a social class, the bourgeoisie, rather than an ethnic group, nevertheless the invective against that class does shade at times into tirades against the French national 34 England fares better in the Letters in this respect: there the people do have recourse to the law and the law is binding on the government as well as the people: see Pisƍma iz Frantsii i Italii, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 5, p. 172. 35 For Herzen’s specious arguments in this connection see ibid., pp. 154-155. See also pp. 185-186.

188 Chapter 6 character, of which miserliness is said to be typical. These tirades – which, pace Isaiah Berlin, can hardly pass for incomparably perspicacious analysis of France in 1848 – bear sufficiently close resemblance to Fonvizin’s jaundiced remarks about the French to warrant suspicion that Herzen has been affected by them. The French, Herzen asserts, feel no need to go to the heart of things and lack intellectual boldness and initiative. They have an “adolescent, frivolous character.” They raise every truth to the status of dogma. They are clever and adept in their particular circle but stupid and vulgar outside it. They are people of routine. They are hypocritical: there is no people in the world who would shed so much blood in pursuit of freedom, nor any people who have a poorer understanding of what freedom actually is or who make less attempt to introduce freedom into their public and private life and their legal system. They are abstract, religious and fanatical and have no respect for the individual person or concern for their neighbour. They allegedly love terror and have a passion for power. Every Frenchman is in his soul a police commissioner who likes standing to attention; put galloon on his hat and he becomes an oppressor (142, 173-176). Negative national characteristics, then, transcend class distinctions. THE VIRTUOUS COMMON PEOPLE In opposition to his negative representation of a mercenary bourgeoisie and the political order that serves its interests Herzen strives in the Letters from France and Italy to establish a positive image of a working class and peasantry fit to inhabit a socialist utopia. Herzen’s tendency to think in class stereotypes and his generalized idealization of the working man are well illustrated by a comment in a letter that he wrote to the actor Shchepkin in April 1847, soon after his arrival in Paris: “the poorer a person is here,” Herzen confidently declared, “the further he seems from the meshchanin [i.e. bourgeois] in a good direction.”36 It is a distinction that is pursued in the Letters from France and Italy, in which Herzen explicitly divides Paris into two social parts. On the one hand, there is the Paris of the wealthy upper bourgeoisie, which is entitled to elect its political representatives. On the other hand, there is the Paris which is disenfranchised, the Paris of honest labourers and their wives who dance happily of a Sunday evening and whose children play on the city’s pavements unmolested by other members of their class (32-33). The latter, disenfranchised Paris lies beyond a border, in this instance a property qualification (za tsenzom), in much the same way that an alien people live beyond a territorial frontier (za granitsei or za rubezhom). To the foreigner this “Paris of secret societies, workers, martyrs of the idea and martyrs of life” which is located behind the “sumptuous decorations of artificial tranquillity and wealth” that adorn the Paris of the bourgeoisie, is invisible (141). And yet Herzen is sure that it is there, places his faith in it and pays homage to it. The “poor, heroic” common people will hear no reproach from him (153, 155). Unlike the bourgeoisie, they behave in an 36

Ibid., Vol. 23, p. 21.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 189 exemplary way, as shown, Herzen contends, by the good order that he believes prevailed in Paris during the February days of 1848. (Not that Herzen can have observed this good order personally, since he was in Rome.) Thanks to the people’s forbearance bankers, judges and policemen – representatives of the bourgeoisie on whom Herzen evidently thinks the people might understandably have sought vengeance – went about in safety (150). Moreover, whereas the political representatives of the bourgeoisie, that is to say liberals, are consistently reviled in the Letters, socialist champions of the common people are lauded. Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon are clear-sighted analysts of bourgeois society (66). Barbès is a man of heroic courage who is ready to give his last drop of blood for the republic. Blanqui is distinguished by his thoughtful and broad-ranging outlook and possesses “an incredible energy of spirit” (168-169). However, it is not in France but in Italy that the idealized common people find their purest western European expression. Herzen is enchanted by the serious, proud air which he claims to observe among the people whom he encounters en route from Rome to Naples. This is the flower of the Romance tribe, every woman is an exemplar of regular classical beauty and every man could serve as a model for a painter, and what grace in their movements and poses, and what elegant proportions! You know these people, for instance, from prints of the paintings of Robert. Perhaps you have even done the painter an injustice by finding a certain theatricality in the bearing of his characters; it seems theatricality to us because in everyday life we are not accustomed to seeing such elegant forms, such an aristocratic breed of humans in whom dexterity and grace are as innate as daring is innate in the Russian youth or a passion for galloping in the Russian coachman. But in fact Robert has caught the character of the Romance peasant with startling accuracy in his “reapers” and he has not omitted to coat all his faces, even the faces of people who are dancing, with a slight haze of pensiveness and melancholy. (108-109) As in France, so in Italy Herzen also admires the people’s champions, particularly the man known as Ciceruacchio, a “simple, honest Roman plebeian,” the “idol of the mob, tribune of the drinking-houses and popular meetings.” He clearly approves of what we might now term Ciceruacchio’s populist style of politics, exemplified by his adoption of simple dress, manner and language and his readiness to play a popular Italian game with a lord’s coachman and to go to an inn with a soldier following an audience with the pope (106). In France the qualities of the common people are more latent than overt and it is the character of the bourgeoisie that seems to Herzen most typically to represent the nation. In Italy, which is not industrialized and has not undergone a revolution favouring the third estate, and where the town-dwellers do not seem to Herzen to constitute a bourgeoisie, the situation is the reverse. Here it is the character of the common people that Herzen takes to be typical of the people as a whole. Everything Italian, irrespective of social class, is endowed with the same grace and grandeur as the common people of Campagna. The faces and figures of the

190 Chapter 6 Romans, for example, preserve ancient signs of valour and nobility and their popular movements have a certain majestic and gloomy poetry (95). Moreover, their national character renders the Italians especially attractive from a political point of view to the Russian socialist who is observing them. Unlike the French, the Italians have a highly developed self-respect and respect for the individual. They do not “represent” democracy [Herzen’s italics], as the French are held to do, but “have it in their mores” (76). They have a tradition of municipal freedom, selfgovernment and resistance to monarchism, in short those anarchic tendencies that were to make them so dear to Bakunin, who in his later years devoted much energy to fomenting revolution in Italy.37 The methodical, cold system of government introduced by the Germans is intolerable to them. No people, Herzen avers, is less attuned than the Italians to discipline and a tightly policed society. Their “elusive disorderliness” has been their salvation and has made possible the Risorgimento (98-102), the national revival and struggle for liberation and unification in the postNapoleonic period. In sum the character of the Italian people produces an environment that contrasts sharply with that in France, where the bourgeoisie reigns. Italy, unlike France, is not on the verge of death. On the contrary, it is alive, energetic, healthy and fortifying. It is a land of authentic feeling where the jaundiced traveller once again sees animated faces and tears and hears ardent words. The crossing of the border from France into Italy marks the beginning of a personal moral recuperation for which Herzen will be eternally grateful to that country (77).38 EUROPE AND RUSSIA: BETWEEN VARIETIES OF NATIONALISM While the Letters from France and Italy relate to Herzen’s life in the west after his departure from Russia and on the surface deal almost entirely with western political, social, economic and cultural matters, Herzen nevertheless remains preoccupied in them with his own nation, as he was in the essays of the same years in which he had formulated his Russian Socialism. Russia is never far from his mind as he recounts his journey to Paris in the first letter. The thought of Cologne and its colossal Gothic cathedral is squeezed out by the memory of a long row of peasant huts and crunching snow (21) and there are extended reflections in the letter on the relationship between Russia and the west. In fact it is only in relation to a construct of Russia that Herzen’s juxtaposition of western classes and peoples (bourgeoisie and workers or peasants, the French and the Italians) and their respective vices and virtues takes on its full significance. The references to Russia 37 See especially T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1988). 38 It is consistent with his positive view of the Italian people that Herzen’s description of his journey to and stay in Italy should be invested from time to time with a sense of the poetry that bourgeois life so conspicuously lacks: see e.g. Pisƍma iz Frantsii i Italii, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 5, pp. 73-75. And of course in Italy the “whole poetry of life” may be recovered by the traveller opposed to the utilitarian ethic of the age as he contemplates works of art (painting, sculpture and poetry) that are strictly speaking “unnecessary:” ibid., p. 86.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 191 and the comparisons of what is observed in the west with what obtains in Russia help him to fulfil what is perhaps the tacit purpose of the Letters, namely to clarify and cast a favourable light on the enigmatic destiny of his own people. It should be noted first of all that Herzen’s attention strays in places in the Letters beyond Europe and its peoples. Most remote from the educated westerner are peoples who to Herzen’s mind are evidently not entirely human, and to whom he refers in what we should now consider a racist observation at the end of the first letter. He lives in an age, he writes with his characteristic flippant wit, when one may observe “wild people” in Africa and “tame animals” in a zoo: in Africa the people are like monkeys and in the Parisian Jardin des Plantes the monkeys are like people (27). Less remote than Africa, but still beyond the borders of the world inhabited by what Schelling and Hegel had thought of as “historical” peoples, that is to say peoples capable of making a significant contribution to human civilization, is Asia or the “orient.” Herzen parrots the Hegelian view according to which the orient is a place where individuals and generations change but “real life” (nastoiashchii byt; a conveniently vague term) represents “the hundredth repetition of one and the same theme with tiny variations brought about by contingencies such as harvest, famine, epidemic, cattle-plague and the character of the shah and his satraps.” There are “no experiences” (keine Erlebnisse) in such life, Herzen argues in the first letter, and the history of the Asiatic peoples is therefore “tedious” (23). In a later letter, in a similar vein, he contrasts the supposed passive contentment of the east with the supposed dynamic striving of the west, alluding to Hegel’s image of India as a woman who, having given birth to a beautiful child, wishes for nothing more, an outlook quite different from that of France, which “wants everything” but is exhausted by frequent and difficult labour (59). Reference to what lies beyond Europe brings Europe, and Russia too, into sharper focus. Herzen leaves readers in no doubt that they should not be tempted to compare Russia with the orient, despite any superficial resemblance that may be suggested by the association of both Russia and the orient with despotic government, economic backwardness and the supposed passivity of their popular masses. In the first of the Letters from France and Italy he confidently asserts that Russia’s self-awareness gives it the opportunity to overcome its predicament and places it well in advance of Asia (23). However, it does not follow that because Russia does not belong to the orient it lies wholly within Europe, or that it conforms to any of the models – the English, the French and the German – that Herzen believes his contemporaries have lazily assumed to be obligatory for any nation wishing to participate in “European life” (98). On the contrary, Russia is sharply differentiated from Europe. Even though he is a non-believer and might be expected to make no claims for Orthodoxy, Herzen points up religious difference to Russia’s advantage. The ritual of the eastern Church, he declares on the basis of his observation of a mass in Rome, perhaps echoing Pogodin, is far more beautiful and majestic than that of the Catholic Church, which seems to lack poetry, art and the spirit of religion (91). More importantly, Herzen’s pervasive sense of Russian superiority to the French model of civilization is conveyed not only by the contemptuous tone of his observations on French life but also by an explicit

192 Chapter 6 comparison that is prompted by his observation of the landscape as he travels through Provence. There is one thing that offends the eyes and grieves the Slavonic soul: high stone walls with broken glass atop them separate off orchards, vegetable gardens and even fields on occasion. They somehow serve to perpetuate exclusive ownership, they are a sort of brazen assertion of a property right. The road is dusty and hard for a pauper and the offensive wall reminds him continually of the fact that he is poor and that he does not even have a view of the horizon. You cannot imagine how gloomy these walls make the fields and soil; here and there trees peep through them like prisoners; the most charming landscapes are spoilt by them. The Russian village is not to be found in Europe. The spirit of the rural community in Europe is nothing but the spirit of the police. What do these scattered houses walled off from one another have in common? Everything about them is separate, they are linked only by a common boundary. What can the rich householders have in common with the hungry workingmen to whom the community grants le droit de glaner? (74)39 “Long live the Russian village, gentlemen,” he exclaims wistfully, as he observes this evidence of French fragmentation, individualism and materialism. The Russian village, by contrast with the European village, has “a great future” (74). Rejection of French civilization – whose achievements seemed no less awesome to Herzen’s generation in the 1840s than they had to Fonvizin’s in the 1770s – furnishes one means of self-definition. Another, more positive means is provided by observation of supposed similarity between Russians and Italians and their respective histories and destinies. Italians, by virtue of the fact that they are apparently capacious, expansive, freedom-loving and the very antithesis of the bourgeois, are rather similar to what Russians fancy themselves to be. Reflecting in his sixth letter on the opportunities that the anarchic nature of the Italian people has given them, Herzen makes the following comparison. The peasant of middle Italy resembles a crushed rabble as little as the Russian muzhik resembles [an item of] property. Nowhere except in Italy and Russia have I seen poverty and hard work pass with such impunity over a man’s face, without distorting anything in his noble and manly features. Such peoples have a secret thought, or rather not so much a thought as an untapped force that they themselves do not realize as yet, a force that will give them the opportunity to endure the most overwhelming misfortunes, even the condition of serfdom. (103; Herzen’s italics)40 Moreover, Italy, like Russia, was sui generis: it did not conform to any of the 39 The French phrase means “the right to glean” and refers to the peasants’ right to gather corn left behind by the reapers after the harvest. 40 Herzen has already attempted to establish a similar sort of equation between the Russian and the French working man in the third of his “Letters from the Avenue Marigny.” The poor man, he writes here, requires cunning, self-possession, a “steadfast, uncompromising will,” the same qualities as those needed by the Cossack on the Caucasian frontier, because both are constantly face to face with a crafty and malicious foe: ibid., Vol. 5, p. 48.

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 193 normally accepted models for European civilizations. (In this respect it also resembled Botkin’s Spain; indeed Herzen himself suggests that nowhere other than Spain is more enigmatic than Italy.) Herzen goes to some lengths to persuade his readers of the exceptional nature of Italian historical development. When the rest of the world had forgotten ancient Rome, he tells them, Italy preserved Rome’s memory. When in north-western Europe centralized states were being created, the Italian lands, apart from Piedmont and Naples, continued to be free of monarchic government (98). The reader could infer that there was a political similarity of a sort between mid-nineteenth-century Italy, which was losing faith in the papacy, and Russia, where the educated class was disenchanted with the country’s oppressive autocracy. The parallel between Italy in the period of its awakening and Russia, which was now exploring its own consciousness, is most obviously suggested by Herzen’s recourse to a Russian image in order to convey his impression of the Risorgimento. He invites his readers to think of Russian peasants when they celebrate some festival and, dressed in their best clothes, put aside all thought of such tribulations as the feudal dues they have to pay, the military conscription to which they are periodically subject and the marriages that are forced upon them by their masters (78). As a work capable of being read as a discourse on Frenchness, Italianness and Russianness, the Letters from France and Italy represent a contribution to the debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles about the relationship between Russia and Europe in which Herzen had been taking part before his departure from his homeland. The position that Herzen adopts in the first letter, which is concerned with the relationship between Russia and Europe in a historical perspective, would have been essentially unobjectionable to his fellow-Westernizers. Herzen attacks the Slavophiles for allegedly believing that everything that belongs to the common pool of European civilization is alien to Russia. He asserts that it was with the Petrine cleavage of the nation that Russia’s “real history” began. He maintains, pace the Slavophiles, that the new, westernized Russia is still Russia and denies that westernization has fundamentally altered the Russian character or deprived it of any quality. Eighteenth-century Russian grandees, he argues, remained Russian after they had adopted the refinements of Versailles and their heroic sons who in 1812 repulsed Napoleon were no less fully Russian than their fathers. It is merely that the borrowed forms enabled Russia the better to develop and express herself (23-25). (Karamzin had taken a similar view, it will be recalled.) Nor is Herzen at odds with Westernizers of his generation when, like Botkin, he warns against obliteration of national difference and chides people who belong to the “common European civilization” for estimating everything by a French or English yardstick or by the measuring-rod of German philosophy (76; Herzen’s italics; see also 103). At the same time the favourable observations that Herzen makes in the Letters from France and Italy on the Russian peasants and their institutions echo those that he was making concurrently in his essays on Russian Socialism and bring him closer to the Slavophiles than might have been thought probable before his departure from Russia. For example, he admiringly presents the peasant commune and the workers’ co-operative as having the character of a true republic that derives

194 Chapter 6 unity from the consanguinity of its members and has an inner social equality, unlike a polity that is a republic by virtue only of its external political form (182). He invokes communal landholding as a possible source of Russia’s salvation (14). In much the same way as the Slavophiles he seems to attribute to the Russian common people a natural goodness that creates in them an admirable aversion to formal procedure, contractual agreements and coercive institutions. The Russian peasants and workers are able, as Herzen puts it, to live “without plumes, protocols, officials and non-commissioned police officers” (183). It is true that the Christian dimension of the Slavophiles’ admiration for the way of life of the Russian common people is absent from Herzen’s depiction of it. And yet Herzen’s notion of a simple community operating according to informal rules – Gemeinschaft rather than Gesellschaft in the terms postulated later by the German sociologist Tönnies, as Andrzej Walicki has pointed out41 – well accords with the Slavophile vision. And indeed Herzen’s affinities with the Slavophiles in the years following his departure from Russia, besides a shared enthusiasm for the commune and belief in the disposition of the common people towards a supposedly natural way of life, are quite numerous. The Slavophiles, after all, also loathed the bureaucratic state, expressed doubts as to the usefulness of western political and legal forms, deplored bourgeois morals and condemned the materialism that they believed they had detected in western life as exemplified by preoccupation with the discipline of political economy. Herzen himself provided some grounds for comparison of himself with the Slavophiles when, in yet another cycle of “letters,” Ends and Beginnings (1862-1863), he allowed a fictional detractor to characterize his doctrine as “a still fermenting brew of Slavophile socialism.”42 There is one further respect in which Herzen provides material in the Letters, as in his contemporaneous essays on Russian Socialism, that would prove fruitful to a movement, Populism, that emphasized Russian national distinctiveness to a greater extent than Westernism. Unlike Botkin, or any other liberal Westernizer, Herzen advanced the notion that Russia’s backwardness might be beneficial. He raises the subject in the first letter of the cycle when he compares the Russians with the Baltic peoples who are the Russians’ immediate western neighbours and who in Herzen’s text stand, up to a point, for Europeans as a whole. The people of Ostsee [i.e. the Baltic region] have been formed, have closed themselves in and preserved what they have created and are going no further forward. We [i.e. Russians] have indeterminacy in all things, they have a sense of proportion; we have not become fixed and we are searching, they have come to a halt and have lost something. We inwardly mock external forms and infringe them without remorse, but for them form comes first and is more important than anything else; we strain towards what is new, they champion what is old. We have the advantage over them that we have fresh forces and hope, they have the advantage of secure and established rules; we are able, they 41

See Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, pp. 169-175. Kontsy i nachala, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 16, p. 194. The cycle is translated in My Past and Thoughts, pp. 1680-1749. I have in this instance quoted the translation cited, with one alteration of spelling: see p. 1745. 42

Herzen: Letters from France and Italy 195 are cultivated; they, like every European, are familiar with the basic civil catechism, we in this regard have tabula rasa [i.e. a blank tablet, on which anything can be written]. (26) The point is reworked in the preface to the second Russian edition of the Letters: Europe resembles a vessel sinking with a valuable cargo (that is to say, its culture and historical legacy) which it cannot jettison, whilst Russia has only artificial ballast which it can throw overboard so that it can go in full sail into the open sea (13-14). Thus even a traveller who apparently left Russia as a Westernizer, no less than the Official Nationalist Pogodin, used his travelogue not in order humbly to describe the ways in which western civilization was superior to his own but to assert that western civilization was moribund and that his own emergent nation, being relatively untainted by it, had the means to surpass it. *

*

*

The reading of the Letters from France and Italy that has been offered in this chapter challenges the reverential view of Herzen as a writer who has an exceptional claim to authority as an observer of what Isaiah Berlin called the European “scene” in 1848. It is not taken for granted here that the Letters have a great deal of what some students of travel writing call “truth value.” Rather they are viewed as a literary text that possesses a degree of fictionality and in which Herzen, as an artist, allows his imagination free play. Nor is it accepted that Herzen is quite undogmatic, above idolatry and posturing and without vanity, or that his judgement is reliable, or that he has some special moral standing, let alone that he is entitled to almost uniquely heroic personal status. It is maintained instead that if the Letters from France and Italy are examined with no more indulgence than the writings of any other thinker then they may be seen to argue a case that is ill-conceived, crude and in various respects far from admirable. They are founded on the erroneous assumption that the bourgeois world was in its death throes. They derive their force and vitality from polemical depictions of whole classes and peoples that are stylized and stereotypical and lack nuance. They are interspersed with rhetorical denunciation of the bourgeoisie and xenophobic vilification of an imagined French national character, on the one hand, and misty idealization of the Italian common people, Italian national character and the Russian peasant, on the other. They contain a racist witticism about negroes and casual generalization about “Asia” that does not now bear scrutiny. They approach temporal law and historical brutality with a striking moral relativism. They serve as a vehicle, as travel writing often does, for a self-regarding narrator who in this instance wishes to display himself in a noble role somewhat similar to that of the doomed Romantic poète maudit. To make these points is by no means to argue that nothing that Herzen says is admirable or that the features of his writing to which attention has been drawn in this chapter are exceptional among Russian (or non-Russian) writers of Herzen’s age. Nevertheless it does seem important, given the awe in which Herzen is sometimes held, to assert that his writings, including the Letters from France and

196 Chapter 6 Italy, exhibit features that may detract from the heroic status accorded to him and to ensure that in any scholarly examination of Herzen these features receive attention commensurate with their prominence in his oeuvre. It has also been the purpose of this chapter to show that once again in a work of Russian travel writing the discourse on the European other has a sub-text which explores the relationship between Russia and Europe and thereby contributes to contemporary debate within the Russian educated elite. In advancing his own view of this relationship Herzen takes up a position that is neatly antithetical to that of the Roman annalist Tacitus, to whom he refers in two works of the period when the Letters from France and Italy were being written. Tacitus, realizing that the ancient Roman civilization was dying, gazed beyond his own horizon, Herzen observes, and wrote a book about the Germans, a people who were perceived as barbarians but to whom the future belonged.43 Herzen, casting himself in the role of representative of an emergent nation, has explored the mature civilization beyond his own national boundary and explained why he thinks it has had its day and is now doomed. He has used the west as a source of material to confirm a view of Russia, perhaps conceived before he went abroad,44 which was independent of both the camps, Westernist and Slavophile, that he had left behind but which perhaps also owed something to both of them. Certainly the view of Russia that is set out in the Letters helped Herzen to salvage hope for the future from the wreckage of his voyage. The Letters, together with From the Other Shore, he says in his preface to the second Russian edition of them, are his “pilgrim’s ‘Odyssey:’” having begun with a cry of joy on leaving the oppressive Russia of Nicholas I, in which he had suffered two periods of exile and one of police surveillance, he had finished, while still physically in exile, with a spiritual return to his homeland. On the brink of moral ruin he had been saved by faith in Russia. In the face of the triumphant march of death that is represented by political developments in France from the suppression of the workers’ uprising by Cavaignac in June 1848 to LouisNapoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851, Herzen has resurrected his youthful faith in socialism and been spiritually reborn (10). His intellectual wanderings, like the epic journey of Homer’s hero after the fall of Troy, represent both a voyage of self-discovery and a homecoming.

43 See “La Russie,” in Herzen, SS, Vol. 6, p. 153; the passage is included also in Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibid., Vol. 7, p. 19. The reference is to Tacitus’s Germania; see n. 38 to the Introduction above. 44 As suggested by Malia, pp. 337 ff.

CHAPTER 7

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

THE POST-CRIMEAN CONTEXT The failure of the European revolutions, which had reduced Herzen to despair, temporarily increased both the prestige of the Russian state and the self-confidence of its autocrat. For, in Hugh Seton-Watson’s words, Russia and Britain were the only countries in which revolution had not for a time triumphed. Russia had stood alone on the Continent against the flood, had prevailed, and had saved Europe. To men of liberal or radical views Russia was the supreme enemy. They hated her, but they respected her, and recognized that she was indeed the greatest European Power. Yet both the Tsar and his enemies overrated Russia’s strength. Her economy was still backward, her communications still wretched, and her people still serfs.1 Within a few years this illusion of invulnerability, which had developed in the age of imperial expansion under Catherine and then as a result of the heroic defence of the fatherland against Napoleon, was to be exposed by defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856). The proximate causes of the Crimean War included Louis-Napoleon’s desire to secure from the Turks privileges for Catholics at the Holy Places in Jerusalem, a Russian wish to protect the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire and, when that wish was not satisfied, Russian occupation of the Romanian principalities south and east of the River Prut. However, at bottom the cause of the war, A. J. P. Taylor has argued, was something of much greater moment, namely the need of the great powers to remake the “European system,”2 and its effect was to alter the balance of power in Europe. It shattered both the myth and the reality of Russian power. Whatever its origin, the war was in essence an invasion of Russia by the west; of the five invasions of Russia in modern times3 it was by far the most successful. After 1856 Russia 1

Seton-Watson, p. 316. A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 61. 3 Taylor has in mind Napoleon’s invasion in 1812; the German invasions in the First World War 2

197

198 Chapter 7 carried less weight in European affairs than at any time since the end of the Great Northern War in 1721; and the predominance which she had exercised at Berlin and Vienna before 1854 she was never to wield again until 1945. The rulers and peoples of Europe west of the Vistula were free to make of Europe what they would. If Russia was indeed the tyrant of Europe, then the Crimean War was a war of liberation. This liberation delivered Europe first into the hands of Napoleon III, then into those of Bismarck.4 The terms imposed on Russia at the end of the Crimean War were set out in the Treaty of Paris in 1856. The Black Sea was neutralized, so that Russia could not maintain naval forces there (a condition that the Russian government greatly resented). Independent Danubian principalities were created, thus ending Russian domination of what was shortly to become a Romanian state. The southern part of Bessarabia, which had been taken by Russia in 1812, was returned to Moldavia. Unpalatable as it was, this settlement did not entail significant loss of territory. (In any case the loss of southern Moldavia would shortly be more than offset by the extension of Russian control over large areas of eastern Siberia; this expansion was recognized by China in the Treaty of Peking in 1860, which enabled Russia in that year to found Vladivostok as its far-eastern capital on the shore of the Pacific Ocean.) Nor did defeat in the Crimea threaten Russia’s status as an important European power, let alone the survival of the regime. Nevertheless the psychological impact of the defeat was very great. It undermined national morale, generated self-doubt, exposed the backwardness of Russia’s economic and social structure and demonstrated the need for far-reaching reform. As it happened, discussion of change was facilitated by the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and the accession to the throne of the more liberal Alexander II. In 1856 Alexander himself initiated public debate about the abolition of serfdom. Legislation was prepared and the serfs were emancipated in February 1861, and over the next few years there followed extensive judicial, economic, educational and military reforms and reform of local government. In the freer atmosphere of the early years of Alexander’s reign cultural and intellectual life again began to flourish after the “seven dismal years.” Many important works of imaginative literature belong to this period, including Lev Tolstoi’s Sebastopol Stories (1855-1856), Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Provincial Sketches (1856-1857), Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (1859), Ostrovskii’s play The Thunderstorm (1860) and Turgenev’s first four novels. Journalism was reinvigorated: certain journals were revived and new ones sprang up. Journals also began to reflect more distinct positions on the political spectrum as political views themselves became more distinct. Slavophilism underwent a revival. Within the Westernist camp the division between moderate liberal and more radical socialist elements that was already apparent in the 1840s became sharper. The moderate men, who in the main belonged to the generation that had matured under Nicholas, advocated gradual peaceful change and increasingly emphasized the need for (1915) and the Second World War (1941); and the allied intervention in 1918 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the Anglo-French invasion of 1854. 4 Taylor, p. 82.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 199 political stability. The more radical men, the younger “men of the 60s” as they came to be known, were impatient for thoroughgoing transformation and in the last analysis looked with equanimity on the prospect of revolutionary upheaval. To some extent these two factions within the post-Crimean Westernist intelligentsia represented the standpoints of different social classes as well as different generations. The surviving “men of the 40s,” with the exception of Botkin, were on the whole members of the nobility. Among the younger generation, on the other hand, there is a preponderance of so-called raznochintsy, that is to say men (and now women too) of various lower social backgrounds, such as the petty bourgeoisie, the merchant class, members of embryonic professional groups and – a most influential element – the sons of the lower clergy. The leader of the radical faction of the Westernist intelligentsia was Chernyshevskii, himself a popovich,5 as the sons of priests were jocularly known, but at the same time a thinker of a thoroughly secular stamp. Chernyshevskii consistently advocated the application of the method of the natural sciences – observation, measurement, analysis, formulation of laws – to the solution of intellectual problems of every description. He propounded a view of beauty as rooted in reality, not on a transcendent plane, and demanded that works of art have utility. He preached a crude philosophical materialism, denying the existence of a spiritual dimension in human beings and arguing that human character was conditioned by environment. He identified egoism as the sole source of human actions, rejecting the conventional view – fundamental to Christian belief – that humans may also be motivated by altruism. He judged actions not by any absolute standard of intrinsic goodness but in relation to the usefulness of their consequences: the best action for Chernyshevskii is the action that is useful to the greatest number of people. Like Herzen (towards whom Chernyshevskii was cool, however), he defended the peasant commune as an indigenous basis for a postfeudal socialist order, although unlike Herzen he did not associate the institution with any specific attributes of the Slavonic character. He also indicted western European liberalism, thereby implicitly attacking his opponents on the moderate wing of the Russian Westernist camp. In this period of reinvigorated self-analysis, which followed the “seven dismal years” at the end of the reign of Nicholas I and the Crimean débâcle, accounts of foreign travel again became popular in Russia. Indeed there was a spate of such accounts, to which I made reference in the last section of the introduction. These writings no doubt reflected the need among educated Russians to come to terms with the striking evidence of Russian backwardness that the Crimean experience had furnished and to find ways of re-establishing national self-respect, either by rapid modernization on a western model or by formulation of a new mission inspired by distinctive Russian, or Slavonic, values. It is worth noting, though, that just as Russia’s position in Europe had now changed, so too the balances between the western European nations that Russians were observing were shifting and that these new balances affected Russian mental geography. Admittedly France, which had dominated the Russian imagination over the eighty years prior to the Crimean 5

The word is derived from pop, “priest,” and the patronymic suffix -ovich.

200 Chapter 7 War, retained a central place there. For there still seemed a possibility, in the age of Napoleon III, that that nation would renew the attempt of the new emperor’s uncle to establish hegemony in Europe. In any case, the 1850s, the first half of the period of the Second French Empire, were years of unprecedented and conspicuous economic growth in France, when industrial production and foreign trade surged, the railway network was extended, investment banks were founded and the first department store was opened. And yet it is arguable that even before it had become impossible for France, for reasons explained in the following chapter, to maintain the myth of la grande nation, Britain had come to assume equal importance in Russian minds, despite her greater distance from Russia and her relative inaccessibility to Russians. After all, with her industrial might, strong financial infrastructure, unrivalled navy, extensive and expanding overseas colonies and domination of international trade, Britain was now the greatest European power. This partial shift in the Russian intellectual landscape, which was probably due not merely to Britain’s industrial and commercial ascendancy but also to a heightened Russian sensitivity to Britain’s military capability as a result of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, was reflected in Russian travel writing, although perceptions of Britain differed, of course, depending upon the writer’s political viewpoint. From the point of view of liberal Westernizers such as Botkin, Turgenev and the anglophile literary critic Druzhinin, mid-Victorian Britain had many virtues, such as the freedom and vigour of its press and parliament and the power of public opinion.6 It is, for example, a generally favourable, if still somewhat equivocal, depiction of England and the English that emerges from the two articles that Botkin wrote in 1859 on the basis of a stay in London in that year. It is true that Botkin subscribes to the conventional view that the English are moved by calculation rather than impulse and that they are by nature cold, unemotional, serious and selfimportant. However, he also values certain supposed traits in the English character and features of British society that seem exemplary in a politically unstable world. The English as Botkin now perceives them accommodate themselves to what they have inherited from earlier generations and at the same time modernize what will no longer pass muster. They are not utopian idealists but sober realists who take human nature as it is. They are protected from the revolutionary upheavals of the age by their social self-discipline, the philanthropic work they undertake in order to alleviate social distress and the responsible conduct of their aristocracy. Botkin points up these English virtues by simultaneously inveighing against French character (which some twenty-five years earlier he had favourably compared with English character) and against French social and political life and institutions.7 From the point of view of Russian radicals, on the other hand, Britain seemed less attractive. In his Ends and Beginnings, in which Herzen reiterated his fond beliefs that western civilization was in its death throes and that it was not inevitable that Russians would follow the bourgeois path, the English are predictably included 6 See Offord, “In Search of Victorian Virtues: the Russian Liberals’ View of Britain in the 1850s,” Quinquereme, Vol. 8, No. 2 (July 1985), pp. 173-187. 7 “Dve nedeli v Londone” and “Priiuty dlia bezdomnykh nishchikh v Londone,” in Botkin, Sochineniia, Vol. 1, pp. 284-318 and 319-338 respectively, especially pp. 288-290, 333.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 201 among those European peoples who are as well suited to life in bourgeois society as fish are to life in water.8 Herzen’s critique of Britain from the radical perspective is strikingly congruent with the polished description of the country provided by the politically conservative (but not nationalistic) novelist Goncharov in The Frigate Pallas. Goncharov spent roughly a month in England in late 1852 while the ship on which he was sailing underwent repairs off Portsmouth en route between the Baltic and the Far East and he took advantage of the pause in his journey to form his own impression of the collective personality of the English nation.9 Admittedly the English as Goncharov perceives them have some admirable qualities. They are an industrious, inventive, “tidy, refined people” and have a healthy respect for knowledge and desire to disseminate it (35, 38-39, 72). Moreover, their capital city, a teeming ant-hill, has an energy, and even a poetry of a sort, for which the Russian visitor is unprepared. The engine of modernity, the steam locomotive, “bursts into this glittering ocean” that is illuminated by gas-light and “rushes at roof-top level” above an exquisite kaleidoscope of streets drenched in brilliant light and colour (35). For all that Goncharov’s depiction of the English is overwhelmingly negative. They are rather pompous, haughty, taciturn and self-regarding. They are disdainful of or at least cool towards other nationalities (36-37). They have “stand-offish ways and inflexible morals and manners” (207). There is something formal and hypocritical about them (36). They exhibit a dull conformity: their expressions betray “reverence for the herd” (36-37). They are “a wretchedly commercial” people (212). Their noiseless, orderly capital lacks the “vigorous fermentation of life” (42). They have reduced human beings to machines (51-52). In their practicality they have effectively eliminated Nature and introduced into their existence a Gradgrindian utilitarianism according to which everything is “calculated, weighed and valued as if voices and facial expressions were taxed too, as well as windows and carriage axles” (42).10 Both the renewed urgency of the problem of national self-definition in the wake of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and the increased interest in Britain that followed the war are reflected in the Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) by Fiodor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii. BETWEEN POLEMICAL JOURNALISM AND FICTION Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes stand at the boundary between polemical journalism 8

Herzen, Kontsy i nachala, in Herzen, SS, Vol. 16, pp. 129-198, especially pp. 167-172, 196-198. Quotations from Goncharov in this paragraph are from the (abridged) translation of Goncharov, The Voyage of the Frigate “Pallada,” ed. and tr. by N. W. Wilson (London: The Folio Society, 1965). References in parentheses in this paragraph are also to this edition. On Goncharov’s Frigate Pallas see Milton Ehre, Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 142-153, and Vsevolod Setchkarev, Ivan Goncharov: His Life and His Works (Würzburg: Jal, 1974), pp. 80-110. 10 One suspects that Goncharov’s account of England owes something to Dickens’s Hard Times, which was published in 1854, the year before Goncharov began to write up his account of his voyage, as well as to Karamzin, Herzen and perhaps Grech. 9

202 Chapter 7 and fiction, both in the sense that they mark a transitional point in Dostoevskii’s literary career and in terms of their conception and form. The work was written in the months following Dostoevskii’s first visit to the west in the summer of 1862, in the period after his return from Siberia, where he had spent nine years, first in a penal settlement in Omsk and then in exile in Semipalatinsk, for his participation in the Petrashevskii circles.11 Having long since repudiated the socialist ideas to which he had been attracted in the 1840s, Dostoevskii was now using the journal Time, of which he was the de facto editor, to engage in polemics with the liberal and radical camps of the intelligentsia and to formulate, together with Grigor'ev and Strakhov, a distinct ideological position, termed pochvennichestvo, or Native-Soil Conservatism.12 Based on the concept of pochva, or soil, Native-Soil Conservatism was redolent of the Russian land and the indigenous values of the narod, especially their attachment to Orthodoxy. It thus continued the romantic conservative tradition to which Slavophilism and Official Nationality belonged, although it was not identical with either of those doctrines. Its central purpose was to encourage reconciliation between the narod and the educated class, which had assimilated European civilization since the time of Peter the Great and was thought by NativeSoil Conservatives to have become divorced from the narod as a result. The Winter Notes, on one level, represent a skilful statement of the doctrine of Native-Soil Conservatism. However, the ideas that Dostoevskii had expressed in his polemical articles of 1861-1862 were now invigorated and richly illustrated by the material provided by his first-hand experience of the western countries, especially England and France, from which he had already imbibed so much cultural and intellectual nourishment through voracious reading. From the Winter Notes Dostoevskii would shortly proceed, in Notes from the Underground (1864), to offer through the irrationalist credo of his underground man a glimpse of the blind alley to which he believed the rationalistic western intellectual tradition might lead. He would then embark on the great novels, starting with Crime and Punishment (1865), which explore and test his own and his opponents’ ideologies as they are embodied in vibrant characters who probe the potentialities of ideas through their actions and their interaction with other characters. The Winter Notes purport to describe a two-and-a-half-month journey in the course of which Dostoevskii visited Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Cologne, Paris, London, Lucerne, Geneva, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Venice and Vienna (46).13 Dostoevskii seems to have had little worthwhile social contact with 11

On the literature on the Petrashevskii circles see n. 14 to Chapter 6 above. On Dostoevskii’s polemic of the early 1860s with his radical contemporaries see Offord, “Dostoyevsky and Chernyshevsky,” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (October 1979), pp. 509-530. On Native-Soil Conservatism see Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev, and Native-Soil Conservatism (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1982), and idem, An Unnecessary Man. On Strakhov see Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 13 Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, in Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 5, pp. 46-98. Page references in parentheses in the remaining sections of the text of this chapter are to this edition. There is extended discussion of the Winter Notes in Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (London: Robson Books, 1987), pp. 233-248; Offord, “Beware the Garden of Earthly Delights”; and idem, “Dostoevskii and the intelligentsia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. by W. J. 12

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 203 the native inhabitants of the countries he visited, although he was apparently invited to some Parisian social gathering (85). (While in London he did, on the other hand, visit Herzen.) The brevity of Dostoevskii’s stays in the countries that he visited and the fact that by his own admission he knew not a word of English (71) might also lead one to suppose that his impressions, of England at least, were superficial. Nevertheless he confidently characterizes Parisian mores and culture under the Second Empire and Victorian society at a time when Britain was enjoying scientific, industrial and technological pre-eminence, as reflected in the recently built Crystal Palace and the construction of the first underground railway line.14 Like so many travel writers, he enhances the apparent authenticity of his account of his travels by use of a literary form – notes (zametki) – that seems personal, unpremeditated and uncrafted. He too begins in the informal style of a man writing to friends who are pressing him to tell them about his trip. His opening paragraph of about one-and-a-half thousand words is a seemingly impromptu colloquial stream of consciousness punctuated by rhetorical questions, exclamations, particles, parentheses, unfinished thoughts, darting false trails, voltefaces, banality and bathos, frivolity and absurdity (46-49). He promises that his account will be based on his travel-diary and will convey personal impressions gathered “on the wing” and that he will be as ingenuous as he can (49). In fact, however, the Winter Notes are anything but a spontaneous, artless record of the writer’s observations. For one thing, Dostoevskii’s account of the places he visited is highly selective. On Germany he offers only some scattered and provocatively frivolous introductory remarks (47-49). He fails to mention one of the most momentous recent political events in Europe, namely the unification of most of Italy under the leadership of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, which had begun with the ejection of Austria from its domain in Lombardy in 1859 and ended in 1860-1861 with the entry of Naples, Sicily and the central Italian cities and regions into a new kingdom headed by Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont and Sardinia.15 He also omits to tell his readers anything at all about Switzerland and Austria. This selectivity is dictated by Dostoevskii’s wish, for simplistic polemical purposes, to concentrate readers’ attention on the two nations, France and England, that seem to Dostoevskii most clearly to demonstrate the existence of a “panwestern individual principle” (69). Equally important, what Dostoevskii does choose to describe – or rather, what he allows his narrator to describe – is perceived through the eyes of an artist who seeks some essence which he intuitively takes to be typical, rather than the eyes of, say, a social scientist who is concerned with dry facts and might pretend to a degree of objectivity. The truth that he seeks about Paris is a larger one than any compendium of factual information can supply: he wants to find a definition for the city, to pin an “epithet” to it (68). It is no bad Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 111-130. See also Bruce K. Ward, Dostoyevsky’s Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986). 14 That is the Metropolitan Railway between Farringdon Street and Bishop’s Road, Paddington. Work was begun in 1860 and the line opened on 10 January 1863. 15 The Italian kingdom still excluded Venetia, which remained an Austrian possession until 1866, and the papal city of Rome, which was acquired when the French garrison withdrew from it in 1870.

204 Chapter 7 thing, he thinks, if travel writers strive not so much for “absolute correctness [vernost'],” which they can hardly ever attain, as for sincerity (49). Thus Dostoevskii’s narrator champions what might be called moral veracity as opposed to factual accuracy.16 One should also be aware, though, that any such moral truth as the Winter Notes may convey is shaped as much by the literary and intellectual traditions that resonate in the work as by the phenomena that Dostoevskii has observed in Paris and London. It is clear, for example, that the Notes are conceived as a contribution to a by now well-established literary genre with a lineage corroborated by quite specific inter-textual reference. Thus in the first chapter Dostoevskii invokes the example of Karamzin, whose gesture of falling on his knees before a Rhine waterfall comes to Dostoevskii’s mind when he sees Cologne cathedral for the second time and feels that he should ask its forgiveness for not having appreciated its beauty the first time he had seen it (48).17 The second chapter he begins by quoting – slightly inaccurately – Fonvizin’s aphorism on the French (50), on which he subsequently comments at length (53).18 The Winter Notes would also seem to be based to a greater extent than the accounts of earlier writers who have been examined on other literary impressions of the west. Dostoevskii’s tableau of London bears some resemblance, for example, to Goncharov’s depiction of the soulless English metropolis. It reuses various details and striking images that occur in Goncharov’s text, including reference to London’s trains which run on tracks above the houses, the teeming ant-hill and the obedient human herd, as well as the city’s gas-lights and the crowded Thames on which Karamzin too had long since remarked. As for Dostoevskii’s representation of Paris, it draws on Fonvizin’s and possibly also on Heine’s depiction of that city in his French Affairs (1833).19 Above all Dostoevskii would seem to be indebted to Herzen for his evaluation of the morality of the bourgeoisie, the position of women in bourgeois society, French character, the French political and judicial systems, liberalism, French oratory and the utilitarian view of art. More generally, the world that the Winter Notes describe, although it is apropos of an actual journey to the west that they are written, is refracted through the prism of belles-lettres (which Dostoevskii sees as a reliable indicator of the consciousness of a society). Dostoevskii alludes, for example, to the work of Russian and western thinkers, including Chaadaev, Belinskii, the Slavophiles, Chernyshevskii, Voltaire, Rousseau, Fourier, Cabet, Considérant, Louis Blanc and Proudhon. He lards his text with explicit or implicit literary reference (for instance, in the order in which the references and quotations occur, to Khomiakov, Karamzin, Pushkin, Fonvizin, 16

Dostoevskii’s narrator also repeatedly distances himself from travellers who view foreign places “by the guide-book, to order.” He therefore despises the mechanical curiosity of English tourists who look more in the guide-book than at the sights themselves and constantly check what they see against the account given in the guide-book (Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 5, p. 63). 17 On the influence that Karamzin, and in particular his History of the Russian State, had on Dostoevskii see Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, pp. 55-58. 18 On the relationship and similarities between Fonvizin’s and Dostoevskii’s accounts of France see Offord, “Beware the Garden of Earthly Delights,” passim. 19 Heinrich Heine, Französische Zustände.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 205 George Sand, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Koz'ma Prutkov, Lermontov, Gogol', Griboedov, Turgenev, Polevoi, Oliver Goldsmith, Richardson, Schiller and Victor Hugo) (47-48, 50-51, 53-63, 73, 77). Critique of French society is conducted through parody of its art forms, the vaudeville and melodrama (95-98). The traveller’s first childhood view of the west comes from the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe (46). His outline of the history of the westernization of Russia – with which, in spite of a disingenuous denial (51), he is primarily concerned in the second and third chapters of the Winter Notes – is based on literary rather than historical sources, especially Fonvizin’s satirical comedy The Brigadier (55-59) and Griboedov’s mordant drama on late Alexandrine society Woe from Wit (1825) (61-63). Most importantly, hope that Russia might assert her cultural autonomy in spite of the wave of western influence is nourished by reference to Pushkin (51-52). THE BOURGEOIS WORLD REVISITED Insofar as the Winter Notes constitute a description of western Europe, as opposed to a literary discourse on Russian relations with Europe, the work is a tale of two cities, Paris and London, and – in its representation of the bourgeoisie – a rather Dickensian tale at that. In both France and England the capital stands synecdochically for the nation as a whole. The Frenchman is the Parisian, because in essence all Frenchmen are Parisians (85), and all of Dostoevskii’s generalizations on the English are based on the evidence furnished by his short stay in London. And yet in the final analysis the two capitals will coalesce in Dostoevskii’s text in a unified representation of western civilization, which is now ruled by the bourgeois (81) and in which the “pan-western individual principle” has entered into a struggle to the death with the need of human beings somehow to construct a community where they can live together without devouring one another (69). It is convenient to begin with Dostoevskii’s representation of Paris, since that is the city in which he spends the most time and to which he devotes most space in the Winter Notes. It should be stressed straightaway that Dostoevskii visited the French capital at roughly the mid-point in the massive programme of reconstruction and urban improvement that was being undertaken at the instigation of Napoleon III by Baron Haussmann in his capacity as Prefect of the Seine, a post which Haussmann occupied from 1853 to 1870. In the course of this programme long, wide, straight, shaded boulevards were laid down and many other streets, secondary streets and bridges across the Seine were built.20 The construction required demolition of many old, narrow streets and clearance of overcrowded, insanitary slums which were a locus of both disease and social unrest. It resulted in a healthier, more hygienic environment in which the incidence of cholera would be 20 Including, e.g., the Avenue de l’Alma, the Rue des Ecoles, the Boulevard Haussmann, the Avenue Kléber, the Rue Lafayette, the Boulevard Magenta, the Boulevard de Malesherbes, the Rue de Rennes, the Rue de Rome and the Boulevard de Strasbourg. The Rue de Rivoli, begun by Napoleon I, was also completed.

206 Chapter 7 reduced. It also improved circulation of traffic, especially around that typical midnineteenth-century urban phenomenon, the railway station, and the creation of safer passage for pedestrians. New buildings were erected too, including Opera House, a municipal hospital (the Hôtel Dieu, begun in 1868) and the final portions of the Louvre. A huge new market, Les Halles, was constructed in a central location. The Bois de Boulogne to the west of the city was developed on the model of Hyde Park in London, and the broad Avenue de l’Impératrice (now Avenue Foch) was constructed to provide access to it from the city. To the east a park was created out of the Bois de Vincennes. Other municipal parks and landscaped gardens were created, public places were furnished with fountains and new monuments were provided throughout the city. A system of collector sewers was constructed that ended contamination of the River Seine within the city. Haussmann also eventually succeeded, despite much opposition to his plan, in supplying Paris by means of aqueducts with abundant drinking water from springs in the valleys of the Rivers Marne and Vanne to the east of the city.21 There has been dispute as to whether Haussmann’s programme was driven by a desire on the part of Napoleon III to create a city whose grandeur reflected his imperial pretensions or simply a healthier and more agreeable environment for Parisians. Again, it is possible that the street-building and slum clearance had the purpose, at least in part, of making it more difficult for opponents of the regime to build barricades or to take refuge in constricted areas and correspondingly easier for troops to suppress insurrection. Napoleon may also have intended, by creating a more agreeable environment, to remove some of the unpleasant factors that gave rise to grievance and social disturbance, or even to reduce hardship by providing employment for a large labour force.22 It has been objected, moreover, that Napoleon and Haussmann, having cleared slums, took insufficient steps to ensure that the new dwellings constructed in their place were of a higher standard than the old ones on the inside as well as in external appearance, or that new slums did not appear elsewhere.23 Whatever the motives and shortcomings of the programme of rebuilding undertaken during the Second Empire, though, it is undeniable that Paris became a more attractive, spacious and healthier city than it had been when Herzen arrived in it shortly before the revolutionary year of 1848. It was also, for whatever reason, politically more stable: whereas barricades went up in the streets eight times in the period from 1827 to 1849, in the Second Empire, between 1851 and 1870, they never went up at all. It is perhaps indicative of Dostoevskii’s preconceptions and polemical intent that he is uninterested in this substantial improvement of the urban environment and that he wilfully declines to talk about the city’s sights (68), except insofar as he facetiously remarks upon the city’s fountains from time to time (76, 87, 96, 99). Instead of providing a rounded view of what he must have observed, including 21 For all this information I have used Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). Not all of the projects I mention had been completed at the time of Dostoevskii’s visit in 1862. However, many had, or were in progress. For example, six pavilions of the new central market had been opened in 1858. 22 Ibid., pp. 35-40. 23 Ibid., p. 93.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 207 townscape, Dostoevskii approaches travel writing as a quest – of a sort encouraged by the German idealists who had intoxicated Russians in his youth – for insight into the spirit of the peoples whose countries he was visiting. Thus in his Winter Notes, like Herzen in the Letters from France and Italy, Dostoevskii seeks a key to understanding of French national character. Like Herzen again, he tends to identify French national character with the character of the French bourgeois. That is to say, it is in the bourgeois world that the French character finds its truest expression. The putative flaws that Dostoevskii claims to detect in the French people in general and the French bourgeois in particular are numerous. For example, the French have an extraordinary fondness for spying on people (82-83). Dostoevskii dwells on this alleged trait in the fourth chapter of the Winter Notes, where he claims to have experienced police surveillance on the train taking him into France and to have found his Parisian landlady and landlord compiling a report on him for the police (64-68).24 The French are also servile, fickle and prone to flatter (83). They are preoccupied with fashion and trivial entertainment. They are given to sexual licence. (Like Fonvizin, Dostoevskii is perhaps disconcerted by the sexual mores of Paris, where adulterous lovers are said to be as numerous as grains of sand (75) and where women cultivate what seems to Dostoevskii an unnatural attractiveness that seduces corrupt men “who have lost the taste for fresh, authentic beauty” (93).) At the same time the French greatly prize the appearance of virtue. Indeed so concerned are the Parisians to maintain the pretence that Paris is “the most virtuous city in the world” (68) that one is supposed to believe that adultery is out of the question there (75). Parisian hypocrisy is captured in the melodrama, the sentimental popular art form that now most fully satisfies the bourgeois, reflecting his conception at any given moment of what is noble and exemplary (95). It is with a notional summary of the plot that a melodrama might have – there is a hint of an adulterous liaison and a facetious Flaubertian suggestion that all is comme il faut (98) – that the Winter Notes aptly end. Paramount among the failings that Dostoevskii attributes to the French character in general is the materialism that is attributed by a broad swathe of the midnineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia to the bourgeois in particular. Acquisitiveness has become the “main code of morality, the catechism of the Parisian,” the only key to respect and self-respect (76). So natural is it to want to make a fortune that stealing “out of virtue” is permitted, indeed encouraged, whereas thieving in order to fend off starvation is considered unforgivable (77). The mercenary spirit finds expression in the bourgeois conception of the institution of marriage. In general the Parisian, if he’s got any money at all, when he wants to get married, chooses a bride who’s got a bit of money too. More than that, they do some preliminary calculations, and if it turns out that the francs and chattels are the same on both sides, then they are conjoined. This happens everywhere, but here the law of equality of pockets has become a distinctive custom. If, for 24 It is likely that by dwelling on surveillance Dostoevskii wishes to disarm Russian opponents who would point to the greater freedom enjoyed by the European vis-à-vis the state as one aspect of western superiority over their oppressive autocratic homeland.

208 Chapter 7 example, the bride has just a kopeck more then she will not be given away to a suitor who has less and they’ll look for a somewhat better bribri [i.e. little bird]. Besides, marriages for love are becoming more and more impossible and are considered almost unseemly. This prudent custom of essential equality of pockets and matrimony of capital is very rarely infringed . . . (91) The possibility that in the event of a separation an unfaithful wife might try to reclaim her dowry inclines the bourgeois husband to turn a blind eye to his wife’s extramarital adventures. The mercenary way of life is “on its soil” in France, autochthonous, national (91-92). And yet materialism is not confined to the bourgeoisie; it is merely that the now regnant bourgeoisie most brazenly expresses the materialistic nature of the French people as a whole. For the French workers and farmers are no less acquisitive than the bourgeois; indeed the farmers are “arch-proprietors,” “the best and fullest ideal of the proprietor that one could imagine” (78).25 Like Pogodin and Herzen again, and in the same spirit as Fonvizin in the eighteenth century, Dostoevskii not only reviles the pre-eminent French social class and denounces its alleged materialism but also finds fault with the political system that upholds the interests of the bourgeoisie. Although the principal target of Dostoevskii’s attack in the Winter Notes, as we shall shortly see, is the militant young radical wing of the Russian intelligentsia led by Chernyshevskii, he does adopt an attitude that is similar to Chernyshevskii’s towards the rights valued by western liberals and their Russian counterparts. Dostoevskii too contends that the vaunted liberté of the French, the supposed freedom of all to do whatever they like within the law, is spurious unless it is supported by wealth. “What is liberté?,” he asks. Freedom [svoboda]. What freedom? The equal freedom of all to do whatever they please within the law. When can you do whatever you please? When you have a million. Does freedom give everyone a million? No. What is a person without a million? A person without a million is not a person who does whatever he or she pleases, but a person with whom others do as they please. (78) Nor do the French, in Dostoevskii’s opinion, enjoy equality before the law. Thus another of the principles upheld by revolutionary France, égalité, turns out also to be an empty slogan (78). As for political representation, Dostoevskii too sees little value in it. He reports scornfully on the practice of allowing liberal deputies representation in the French legislative assembly under Napoleon III: their fine speeches are merely ineffectual rhetoric, “an innocent game, a masquerade” (8687). More generally he is unmoved by the eloquence in which the French take such delight, whether it be deployed in a political assembly, where it leads to no practical results, or in the law-courts, or merely as a means of concealing ignorance, as in the commentary of an aged invalid who conducts the traveller on a tour of the Pantheon (85-90). 25 The charge of materialism took root in Dostoevskii’s mind early in his visit to Paris. In a letter from Paris he says of the Frenchman that “money is everything to him”: Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 28 (Part 2), p. 27.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 209 On a superficial level Paris differs greatly from London, to which Dostoevskii made a trip from Paris that took him, he tells us, eight days (68). In Paris the governing principle, as Dostoevskii perceives it, is order, or perhaps we should say orderliness. This principle is manifested in strictly defined and firmly established social relationships and in the fact that everything is guaranteed and neatly ruled (razlinovano). There is in Paris a pervasive spirit of regulation, not so much external regulation but rather a colossal inner, spiritual regulation (68). Dostoevskii’s initial impression of London, on the other hand, is of a chaotic industrial and commercial environment that throws together opulence and squalor. This city which bustles day and night, immense as the sea, the screeching and ululation of engines, the cast-iron tracks above the houses (and soon to be under the houses too), the audacity of enterprise, the apparent disorder, the poisoned Thames, the air steeped in soot, the magnificent squares and parks, the terrible corners of the city like Whitechapel with its half-naked, savage and hungry populace. The City with its millions and its world trade . . . (69) Dostoevskii mingles with the throng in the Haymarket, observing the district’s gaslights and sumptuous cafés and also – following Karamzin – its prostitutes, including child prostitutes (71-72).26 London is the province of Baal, the false god whom the English worship. Baal is not concerned at the poverty and suffering of the London mass. He does not try to conceal the unpleasant side of life in his city, as does the Parisian, who like an ostrich sticks his head in the sand so as not to see the approaching hunters. On the contrary, he contemptuously allows all London’s squalor to exist alongside him (74). And yet in essence Paris and London closely resemble one another, for London too is bourgeois in the highest degree (69). The resemblance is pointed up by the fact that Dostoevskii’s description of London unfolds seamlessly out of his reflections on the character of Paris: the reader, and even the narrator himself, it seems, are confused by the sudden discovery that it is not Paris in which the narrator finds himself but London. Thus Dostoevskii attributes to contemporary western civilization – or rather the most advanced forms of it – various characteristics that have long since become embedded in the Russian intelligentsia’s perception of it. Western societies are materialistic and hypocritical. They prize ineffectual political institutions and empty, ostentatious eloquence. They are riven by inequality. However, Dostoevskii also brings to his critique of the bourgeois world a new, ontological dimension that is absent, or only latent, in the accounts of his predecessors. Developing the perception of western societies that is communicated in the writings of previous conservative nationalists as fragmented, atomized and dehumanizing, he expresses a keen presentiment of the destruction of the personality and the loss of individual identity in the modern city where the materialistic, soulless, uncaring bourgeois rules. As a starting-point for his reflections on Londoners’ loss of a sense of purpose and meaning Dostoevskii dwells memorably on the city’s crowded streets and bars: 26

The scene inspires, or the passage is a first sketch of, the scenes of poverty and prostitution in the tenements of St. Petersburg’s own Haymarket (Sennaia) in Crime and Punishment.

210 Chapter 7 in London one may see the mass in a bulk and atmosphere of a sort in which you will not in waking consciousness see it anywhere else in the world. I was told, for example, that on a Saturday night half a million working men and women and their children come pouring out like the sea over the whole city, concentrating in certain districts, and they celebrate the sabbath all night till five in the morning, that’s to say they stuff themselves with food and drink like cattle, for the whole coming week . . . The people throng in the open taverns and in the streets. This is where they eat and drink. The drinking saloons are done up like palaces. Everyone’s drunk, but without merriment, in fact they’re sombre, serious and strangely taciturn. Except that swearing and bloody brawls occasionally disturb the suspicious silence that so depresses you. The whole lot are hastening to drink themselves to the point where they lose consciousness as quickly as possible… Wives don’t lag behind their husbands and get drunk together with them, while their children run about and crawl between them. (7071) Dostoevskii comes to the conclusion that the desire to lose consciousness that he observes is not a random occurrence but a systematic phenomenon that is brought about by the Victorian social order. The phenomenon manifests itself in the proliferation of religious sects such as the Mormons and the Quakers. We wonder at the folly of joining such sects, he writes, but we do not suspect that this is people detaching themselves from our social formula, persistently, subconsciously detaching themselves; instinctively detaching themselves come what may, for the sake of salvation, detaching themselves from us with revulsion and horror. These millions of people abandoned and banished from the feast of humankind, jostling and pressing one another in the subterranean darkness into which they have been cast by their elder brethren, blindly beat on any gate they can and seek a way out lest they suffocate in the dark underground. This is a last desperate attempt by people to form a huddle, a mass of their own, and to detach themselves from everything, even from the human likeness itself, just in order to be in their own way, just in order not to be with us... (71) Only thus, by means of the self-detachment to which Dostoevskii repeatedly refers, can the alienated reassert their human individuality in the soulless western metropolis and avoid non-being, the nothingness, or néant, of which twentiethcentury existentialists would speak. EUROPE, RUSSIA AND “RUSSIAN EUROPE” The bourgeois world, in which community has broken down and pariahs are threatened with extinction, furnishes an example of a dystopia which Russians will not want to emulate and in opposition to which they may construct their own utopia. However, Russians cannot wholly repudiate western civilization, because their own development since Petrine times has been so greatly affected by it.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 211 Before they can definitively decide what they are and what they will become they must therefore consider the impact that the west has had on them and establish what their future relationship to Europe will be. It is for this reason that in the second and third chapters of the Winter Notes Dostoevskii, from his post-Crimean vantagepoint, reviews the familiar subject of the westernization of the Russian educated class. The material in these chapters, which describe a journey in the narrator’s imagination before he reaches Paris or London (the principal destinations of his actual journey), amounts to a summary of Russia’s literary, intellectual and spiritual journey over the previous hundred years. Although the narrator teasingly calls one of these digressive chapters “completely superfluous” (53), the national journey which they chart is in fact inextricably connected to, and immeasurably more important than, his physical journey. For the traveller’s personal enterprise is but a means of illuminating the path that the nation has followed to date and of helping to steer it on its future course. The narrator’s reflections on the nation’s historical journey begin before he has even left Russia. The prospect of crossing the border and having his first glimpse of foreign land at Eidtkunen prompts him to wonder what sort of people Russians are, whether they are indeed Russian, why Europe has such a magical appeal for them, whether their Russianness has been compromised by foreign influence (51), in what way Europe has affected them at various times, to what extent they have been civilized and how many Russians have been civilized thus far (55). The Europe that Russia embraced in the eighteenth century, a Europe made to order and introduced by command,27 settled surprisingly comfortably in Russia, starting in that fantastic creation of Peter’s, St. Petersburg. And yet this European influence “from above,” the cultural westernization of Russia in the age of Catherine, was superficial. A nobleman pulled on silk stockings, donned a wig, wore a sword and thought he was then a European, but in all other respects (for example, the way he dealt with his serfs and treated his family, fought with his neighbours and fawned before his superiors) remained the same as before. Serf-owners in the age of Catherine did not lose touch with their serfs; on the contrary, they knew them better and despised them less than their more europeanized descendants. Moreover, flog them as they might, they were better loved by their serfs and seemed less alien to them than those descendants, less like “Germans.” (Russia’s nearest non-Slavonic western neighbours stand here for foreigners in general, as the common people perceive them.) Eighteenth-century westernization, then, was a “phantasmagoria,” a “masquerade” (57). The question of the effect of foreign culture on Russia had no less topicality in the mid-nineteenth century, in Dostoevskii’s time, than it had in the late eighteenth century, in Fonvizin’s. Europe continued to bewitch Russians. The west still seemed to Dostoevskii, as it had to Fonvizin, to exercise an influence which it was hard for Russians to withstand (51) and which was manifested in an uncritical adulation, in sections of the intelligentsia, of western fashions and practices and a habitual rejection of native ones as barbaric (61). Still few people questioned 27

That is zakaznaia i prikazannaia; it is hard to convey in translation the force and elegance of the pair of Russian words from the same root.

212 Chapter 7 whether Russia should be guided by Europe’s “leading-strings.” (The arrestingly apt reference is to the strings used to lead toddlers who are beginning to walk.) Indeed the whole “extreme progressive party,” Dostoevskii observes acidly, “is passionately in favour of foreign leading-strings” (55). Moreover, the predominant source of foreign influence – in the 1840s, at least, when Dostoevskii began his literary career – happened again to be French, and now its effect was to radicalize the educated class. After a prolonged period of intoxication with German Romantic culture, Westernizers such as Belinskii and Herzen had consciously turned to the rationalistic, universalistic intellectual world of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment. Dostoevskii recalls with what reverence those Westernizers regarded the west, especially France. It was not just that they worshipped George Sand and Proudon and respected Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin; they had a high opinion of even the most wretched figures, “wizened non-entities,”28 as well (50). This renewed French cultural hegemony was reflected in the fiction of the Natural School of writers, to whose mentor, Belinskii, Dostoevskii was briefly close in the 1840s, and whose “physiological” depictions of urban squalor perhaps still affect Dostoevskii as he constructs his setting in Crime and Punishment in the 1860s. It also found expression in the utopian socialism that Dostoevskii himself had imbibed in the Petrashevskii circles (although now in the Winter Notes he derided it (80-81)). Dostoevskii does not deny that Europe is truly a “‘land of holy miracles,’”29 a “promised land” (47). Indeed it is the source of almost every worthwhile Russian achievement in the realms of “science, art, citizenship and humanity” (51). And yet the assumed superiority of foreign, especially French, culture causes anxiety and offence in the representative of a nation that feels it is coming of age. Dostoevskii is no less perturbed by French self-confidence, indeed conceit, and by the imperial reach of French culture in the Winter Notes than Fonvizin had been in the letters from his first foreign journey. Like Fonvizin he refers facetiously to the myth of Paris as paradise on earth (75) and complains that the Parisian sees himself as the centre of the universe, expects his city to make an overwhelming impression on the visitor and still believes that he can morally crush and destroy. The Parisian will never be persuaded that he is not pre-eminent in the world, although he does not know the world beyond Paris very well at all (85). Moreover, Russian subservience to this culture, the constraint of leading-strings held by foreigners, wounds Dostoevskii’s patriotic feeling. The state of thraldom is exemplified in the Winter Notes by the behaviour of Russian tourists who, once they cross the Russian border, remind Dostoevskii of little dogs running around in search of their masters (63). This thraldom is no less demeaning to him than it had been to Fonvizin; in fact it seemed even more dangerous in the 1860s than it had 28

i.e. smorchki, literally morels, a kind of mushroom. The quotation is from a poem entitled “A Reverie,” written by the Slavophile Khomiakov in 1835, the theme of which is that the west has lost its former greatness. The poem concludes with the lines (rendered here in prose translation): “an age has passed, and the whole west is cloaked in a death shroud. There will be deepest gloom there… Hark the voice of destiny, arise in fresh radiance, awake, O slumbering east!” See A. S. Khomiakov, Stikhotvoreniia i dramy, ed. by B. F. Egorov (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1969), p. 103. 29

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 213 been in the 1770s. For whereas westernization at the stage when Fonvizin responded to it was still relatively superficial, now the process had reached the point where the educated class, so self-assured in its civilizing mission and alienated from the common people, threatened to obliterate national personality. In his polemical articles of 1861-1862 Dostoevskii had frequently expressed concern about the apparent desire of contemporary radical thinkers to erode national distinctiveness, with the result that individual peoples might resemble worn coins whose markings it would be difficult to identify.30 Now in the Winter Notes he inveighs against those who have concluded that there is no soil, there is no people, nationality is just a certain tax system, the soul is tabula rasa, a little piece of wax from which one can straightaway mould a real person, a universal everyman, a homunculus31 – all one has to do is apply the fruits of European civilization and read two or three short books. (59) The urgent need for Russia to liberate herself from dependency on foreign culture and affirm her individuality is pointed up in the Winter Notes by use of the narrator’s position, as a passenger on a train idly passing the time while others bear him along, as a metaphor for the national predicament. Oh, how tedious it is to sit idly in the carriage, well actually it’s just like living at home in Rus' without matters of one’s own to attend to. They do transport you, they do take care of you, they do even lull you so at times, so that it would seem that you could want for nothing more, and yet you have a longing, such a longing, precisely because you are doing nothing yourself, because they are taking too much care of you and you just sit and wait for them to get you there. Really sometimes I would have liked to have leapt out of the carriage and to have run alongside the engine on my own two legs. No matter that things might not have gone so well, or that I’d have got tired because I wasn’t used to it, or that I’d have slipped up! But on the other hand I’d have been going along on my own two feet, I’d have found a job of my own and done it, and if it had happened that the carriage were to crash and fly up head over heels then I wouldn’t have been sitting there locked up and twiddling my thumbs, paying for somebody else’s failings with my own skin . . . (52) Not only does Dostoevskii echo Fonvizin’s offended response to Russian infatuation with western civilization; he also draws material from Fonvizin’s writings in order to illustrate his own historical account of Russian borrowing from the west and to expose the harmfulness of undiscriminating reception of foreign culture. Fonvizin, Dostoevskii notes, sported a velvet French frock-coat (Dostoevskii calls it a kaftan, thus appropriating it for the Russians by use of a word that is not western), wore powder and carried a sword to show his knightly 30 See, e.g., “Ob''iavlenie o podpiske na zhurnal ‘Vremia’ na 1862 god,” in Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 19, p. 149; “Dva lageria teoretikov,” ibid., Vol. 20, pp. 6-7. 31 i.e. a tiny man with magical powers who could be produced artificially, according to the sixteenthcentury alchemist Paracelsus.

214 Chapter 7 origin and defend his honour (53). (Dostoevskii pointedly remarks, though, as the Slavophiles had done, that Russia had had no tradition of knight-errantry.) And yet this representative of the “French frock-coats” wrote The Brigadier, a trenchant satire of Russian Gallomania, indicating that already in the age of Catherine there were people who had tired of doing nothing and being led like children on leadingstrings (55). Fonvizin’s aphorism to the effect that the Frenchman has no judgement and would consider it the greatest misfortune to have judgement (because it would compel him to reflect and thus distract him from his amusements) is construed by Dostoevskii as a delightfully audacious indication of piqued national pride. Indeed the aphorism seems to Dostoevskii to have been emblematic for three or four generations of Russians. For the Russians love sayings that somehow disparage foreigners and are secretly gratified by the retribution for some past slight that is implicit in such sayings (50). Furthermore characters from Fonvizin’s Brigadier embody for Dostoevskii attitudes of which his own contemporaries need to remain aware. Gvozdilov (the Russian word suggests someone who bashes), a character who is mentioned in The Brigadier but does not actually appear in person in the play, is used by Dostoevskii to epitomize the brutal old ways which westernization has superficially mitigated. Gvozdilov is a captain who habitually beats his wife. He represents the senseless brutality of the Russian nobility in its dishonourable form. And yet what was once crude and primitive, like the wife-beating of a Gvozdilov, has not ceased to exist in the superficially westernized Russia of the early 1860s, Dostoevskii is arguing, but has merely become less flagrant: Gvozdilovs do not now beat their wives so often when they are sober. Gvozdilov has become a “bourgeois.” The “progress” associated with westernization, then, is not a panacea. Even the virtuous Sof'ia, one of Fonvizin’s bearers of humanistic culture, seems to Dostoevskii to embody a warning about westernization. For she provides a prototype for the mid-nineteenthcentury “liberals” whom Dostoevskii – in common with Chernyshevskii, but of course from a different cultural and political standpoint – was fond of attacking. Fonvizin’s Sof'ia, as perceived by Dostoevskii, is a type frequently found in Dostoevskii’s own fiction, a person who takes pleasure in her virtuous rhetoric but is loath to confront reality. In asking the brigadier’s wife to stop talking of Gvozdilov’s wife-beating, because she finds it painful to listen to such tales, Sof'ia reveals herself as one of those “hot-house progressives” (oranzhereinye progressisty) who do not want to hear disturbing truths about their protected environment (58-59). The question of the relationship between Europe and Russia is intertwined in the Winter Notes with another question that preoccupied the nineteenth-century intelligentsia almost as much, namely the relationship between themselves (a europeanized educated class) and the Russian common people. For the contrast between Europe and Russia is matched by a domestic chasm that separates the “Russian Europe,” that is to say the “privileged and patented handful” who are just one hundred thousand strong, from the fifty million “simple” Russians whom the intelligentsia takes as “nobody” (51). The former, who know Europe ten times better than Russia (46), are now so “civilized,” so European, that the common

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 215 people do not understand a single word they utter, or book they write, or thought they express, and take them for foreigners (59). It is the mission of the Native-Soil Conservatism that Dostoevskii propounds to reverse this false “progress” (59) by effecting a reconciliation of the superficially westernized educated class, which has absorbed a humane culture, with the narod, the common people untouched by westernization. The coalescence (sliianie) of intelligentsia and common people that Dostoevskii seeks is not, however, a straightforward matter that the intelligentsia can accomplish merely by donning peasant costume (53). Although the Russian thinking class has been divorced from the mass of common people as a result of the invasion of Russia by Europe and the very existence of the Russian personality appears to be imperilled, nevertheless Dostoevskii does find some grounds for optimism in the Winter Notes. Improbable as it seems, given the fact that the life of the educated Russian has borne an attractive European stamp from early childhood, many Russians have withstood European influence, to the pleasure of some, such as Native-Soil Conservatives, and the chagrin of others, such as radical Westernizers. Dostoevskii conjectures that this capacity among the educated class to withstand westernization might have been due to the influence of the simple people, the nursemaids like Pushkin’s Arina Rodionovna. Pushkin, after all, managed to renounce his aristocratic environment, so Dostoevskii claims, and to pronounce judgement on it from the point of view of the popular spirit in the figure of Onegin (51-52). He also interprets Griboedov’s Chatskii as a peculiar embodiment of Russia’s “Russian Europe” who was torn between Europe and the Russian soil and he muses that Chatskii might have been reborn in the younger generation. He has faith in these “young new forces” who, he optimistically expects, will soon manifest themselves (61-62). Perhaps they will serve as a counterforce to the “new people” in Chernyshevskii’s novel What is to be done?, the rational egoists Lopukhov, Kirsanov and Rakhmetov who apply the same supranational, scientific measure to all things. RADICAL WESTERNISM AND NATIVE-SOIL CONSERVATISM Dostoevskii’s attitude towards the bourgeois order which he encounters in Paris and London is not dissimilar to that of his contemporaries at the radical end of the political spectrum. However, the young Russian radical thinkers with whom Dostoevskii was in conflict in the early 1860s also drew inspiration from western philosophy, showed enthusiasm for utopian social and political models devised by western thinkers and attributed little importance to any supposed traits in the Russian personality that distinguished it from a generalized European one. Dostoevskii, on the other hand, voiced profound misgivings about the allegedly rationalistic tenor of western thought in general, with its pretensions to universal applicability, and about western socialist teachings in particular. Dostoevskii’s bilious traveller is therefore dismayed, as the Slavophiles had been, by evidence of the ascendancy of reason and intellect in western life. Such evidence was to be found in inordinate respect for the manifest achievements of

216 Chapter 7 natural science and technology. The first example of such achievement in the Winter Notes is the recently completed suspension bridge at Cologne. Of course, the bridge is superb and the city is rightly proud of it, but just a bit too proud of it, I thought. Needless to say I got cross about this straightaway. Besides, the tollman who collects the coins at the entrance to the wonderful bridge really didn’t have to take this perfectly reasonable charge from me as if he was fining me for some misdemeanour of which I was not aware. I don’t know, but I thought the German was swaggering. “I expect he’s guessed that I’m a foreigner, a Russian in fact,” I thought. “At least his eyes were almost saying: ‘You see our bridge, you pathetic Russian, well you’re just a worm compared to our bridge or compared to any German, because you haven’t got a bridge like it.’” (48) As a piece of evidence in the polemic with Russian radical Westernism the bridge is a well-chosen example of western technological pre-eminence, for Chernyshevskii had cited suspension bridges as proof of the benefits of the Europeans’ scientific approach to knowledge.32 An even more potent symbol of western technological supremacy – and another symbol presented in a positive light by Chernyshevskii – is the Crystal Palace, the exhibition hall of iron and glass built in Hyde Park by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of London of 1851 and subsequently dismantled and re-erected at Sydenham. While acknowledging the scientific achievement that the exhibition celebrated, Dostoevskii was frightened by the terrible power that it exercised and the loss of a dimension of being that worship of such achievement seemed to entail. Yes, the exhibition is staggering. You feel the terrible force which has brought all these innumerable people from all over the world into “one fold” here; you acknowledge the gigantic idea; you sense that something has been attained here, that it is a victory, a triumph. You even start apparently to be afraid of something. However independent you may be, something frightens you. “Is this not indeed the ideal attained,” you think, “is this not where the end is? Is this not indeed the ‘one fold’?33 Is one not going to have to accept this as the whole truth and become speechless once and for all?” It’s all so majestic, triumphant and proud that it starts to constrain the spirit. You look at these hundreds of thousands, these millions of people who obediently flow here from all over the Earth – people who have come with one thought and who quietly, persistently, silently crowd into this colossal palace, and you feel that something definitive has come to pass, come to pass and been completed. It is a sort of Biblical tableau, something about Babylon, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse which has come to pass before your eyes. You feel that you would need a great deal of enduring spiritual resistance and powers of rejection in order not to yield, not to submit to the impression, not to bow down to the fact and not to deify Baal, that is to say not to take what exists for the ideal... (69-70) 32 33

See, e.g., “O prichinakh padeniia Rima,” in Chernyshevskii, PSS, Vol. 4, pp. 662-663. The reference is to John, Chapter x, Verse 16.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 217 Thus modern reason has created a new materialistic religion and the individual has been belittled and depersonalized by it. The rationalistic spirit manifested in western scientific achievement seemed to Dostoevskii also to inform the musings of the French socialist thinkers to whom he himself had been attracted in his youth. As a matter of fact he considered socialist ideals unrealizable in Europe, at least in France, because the western personality, he believed, was characterized by an assertive individualism, the “principle of the detached house:” bent on self-determination and self-preservation, westerners tended to set their own ego against all other egos and insisted on their personal rights (79, 81). (One is reminded again of the Slavophiles’ presentation of the medieval western institution of knight-errantry as an expression of aggressive individual self-assertion and the comfort that the Slavophiles drew from the fact that the institution had not taken root in medieval Russia.) However, Dostoevskii also argued against socialism on the more general grounds that the socialist’s utopia would impose a degree of regimentation and a dull, oppressive conformity that humans would in practice find intolerable. In this respect the Winter Notes offer a presentiment of the notion that is explored in Dostoevskii’s next work, Notes from Underground, and in the great novels, namely that humans place supreme value on the availability of freedom of choice and on the retention of their capacity to exercise free will. It is of course tempting to live on a purely rational basis, Dostoevskii concedes, when one is guaranteed everything and labour and harmony are the only demands that society makes. And yet human beings, perverse as the socialist might consider them, will not consent to this arrangement: they promise to give him food and drink and supply him with work and in return they demand of him just a little drop of his personal freedom for the common good, a tiny little drop. No, man doesn’t want to live on these terms, even a little drop weighs heavily with him. He obtusely keeps thinking this is a prison and that he’s better off by himself because that way he has complete freedom [volia].34 No matter that when he is free he is beaten, he is given no work, he dies of starvation and he has no freedom, but no, all the same the strange fellow thinks that his freedom is better. Of course the socialist is bound to spit and tell him that he’s a fool, that he hasn’t grown up and that he’s immature and doesn’t understand what’s good for him; that the ant, the insignificant, dumb ant is brighter than he is because it’s all so nice in the ant-hill, it’s all so neatly ruled [razlinovano, as in Paris it will be recalled], everybody is full and happy and everyone knows his business, in a word man has a long way to go before he gets to the ant-hill! (81) While thoroughly discrediting the European socialist conception of utopia – or rather dystopia, as Dostoevskii perceives it – Dostoevskii promotes a countervision of his own ideal community. In opposition to Chernyshevskii, who argues that all people are governed by self-interest and that the law of egoism may serve as 34 The Russian word volia denotes a capacious freedom of action, freedom to exercise one’s will, that is quite different from the political freedom, or liberty, denoted by the word svoboda, of which Dostoevskii speaks in the Winter Notes in a passage cited above in the third section of this chapter.

218 Chapter 7 a foundation for socialism, Dostoevskii asserts that in conditions of true brotherhood (bratstvo), as opposed to a more superficial western political fraternity (fraternité), the individual personality does not press a claim to be valued as highly as everyone and everything outside itself. On the contrary, in brotherhood, in real brotherhood, it is not the separate personality, not the ego, that must clamour for the right to be of equal worth and equal weight to all the others, but this other that should itself come to this personality that requires a right, this separate ego, and itself, without having been asked, acknowledge [that ego] as of equal worth and equal weight to itself, that is to say to everything else on Earth. However, this rebellious and demanding personality ought at the outset to sacrifice its entire ego, all of itself, to society and not only not demand its right but, on the contrary, surrender it to society without any conditions.35 (79) That is not to say that one has to become devoid of personality in order to be happy or to find salvation. For to take the path of self-renunciation is to become a personality of a higher sort than that which has been shaped in the west. Conscious and unforced self-sacrifice for others, laying down one’s life for others on the cross, is for Dostoevskii the sign of the highest development of personality and the fullest expression of one’s own will. Indeed self-sacrifice is a “law of nature.” (Dostoevskii is presenting an alternative to the scientific, or in some cases supposedly scientific, “laws of nature” whose apparent infallibility Chernyshevskii prized.) Arguing implicitly against Chernyshevskii’s rational egoism, according to which it is in a person’s own interest to act in socially useful ways, Dostoevskii stresses that the self-sacrifice that he has in mind requires obliteration of the slightest trace of self-interest. Russians are assured, finally, that whereas the nature of the European personality precludes the creation of a socialist society in the west, their own self-abnegating nature equips them to inhabit utopia as Dostoevskii conceives of it. An instinctive propensity to brotherhood, community (obshchina) and harmony persists among the Russian people in spite of all the sufferings they have endured, the barbaric coarseness and ignorance rooted in their society, the age-old institution of serfdom and the invasion of their territory, in the Middle Ages, by people of another tribe, that is to say the Tatars (79-80). Thus the utopian vision that Dostoevskii offers in the Winter Notes is antithetical to Chernyshevskii’s. Dostoevskii substitutes altruism for egoism as the basic law of human nature and in contrast to Chernyshevskii takes an essentialist view of national character. He gives fresh meaning to Chernyshevskian images, such as the “laws of nature,” the ant-hill, suspension bridges and the Crystal Palace. He even quibbles about the terms in which debate is being conducted. What would the brotherhood that he advocates be, he asks, if his ideas were to be transposed to “rational, conscious language,” that is to say described on an intellectual level in the only dimension of reality (rational consciousness) that Chernyshevskii 35 James Scanlan makes the point that Dostoevskii’s “utopia of mutual love” is pitched against the western view of society as governed by a notional social contract: see James P. Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 161 ff.

Dostoevskii: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 219 acknowledges? The question is unanswerable because Dostoevskii’s utopia is based on “feeling and nature rather than reason”; in fact it is a “humiliation for reason” (80). It is not the product of a rational decision based on calculation of interest by an individual but the outcome of a sub-conscious spiritual instinct within a whole people. It is apt in this connection to return finally to a literary aspect of Dostoevskii’s travelogue that supports his polemical thrust, namely the subversion of order, logic and rational expectation in the Winter Notes. Dostoevskii’s traveller records his impressions in a wilfully untidy way and is also on occasion perverse and knowingly unreliable. He warns his readers (that is, supposedly, his circle of friends) that his observations will be disorderly as well as unoriginal because he has not viewed places in a logical sequence and because he has not had enough time to inspect properly what he has seen (46). He is inclined to stray from his subject (e.g. 93). Thus he interrupts his reflections about nationality during his journey to Paris to ask his readers to assume that he has already returned to Russia (60). In his discussion of Paris he reports at length a conversation (83-84) that allegedly took place in Italy, to which no other reference is made in the work, except in his introductory list of places that he has visited. He confuses the reader by interweaving literary-historical and touristic narratives. What seems likely at the end of the first chapter (50) to be a description of his stay in Paris turns out to be his reverie on French influence in Russia. As that reverie ends the narrator himself is temporarily disoriented, thinking he is about to cross the Russian border when in fact he is approaching Erquelinnes on the Belgian border with France (63). The travelogue describes a journey in time as well as space: the cultural journey takes the narrator back “into antiquity,” into the age of Catherine when Fonvizin travelled to France (53). He creates chronological muddle: he has stayed in Paris before visiting London and seems to be embarking on a description of it, but then proceeds to describe London first. His impressions – for example of Cologne Cathedral – are unstable and may depend on the weather. There may be errors in his record. He attributes thoughts to people that they may not have had. He confesses to a tendency to mislead or even to lie. Moreover, as always with Dostoevskii, forms of consciousness other than the normal waking consciousness of the rational adult intrude into the narrative. His first experience of lands beyond the border comes to him through Gothic novels read to him by his parents and redigested in feverish dreams. He hints at the possibility that ill-health will give rise to jaundiced observation: the “sour” impression which he thinks Berlin has made on him may be partly due, he admits on reflection, to his liver complaint and to the fact that he arrived in the city exhausted after two days on the train (46-49). Thus even literary form and devices are deployed in the Winter Notes as a means of challenging the rational secular outlook of radical Westernizers who held that the world was amenable to definitive analysis by the empirical method employed by natural scientists, that is by means of observation, experimentation, deduction and formulation of inflexible laws. The perversely structured and chronologically muddled text with overlapping narrative or description of external reality and inner monologue implicitly affirms Dostoevskii’s principal negative point: Russians

220 Chapter 7 should reject the rationalist utopia – or dystopia, as Dostoevskii sees it – that is rooted in European intellectual sources. *

*

*

In Dostoevskii’s hands, then, the travelogue is a carefully crafted literary text which imparts fresh life to ideas advanced in Dostoevskii’s recent polemical journalism and gives expression to the new form of romantic conservative nationalism that Dostoevskii represents. Directing at what is alien the malice for which Dostoevskii and his characters are renowned and revelling in generalizations about various nationalities, Dostoevskii’s traveller paints a bleak picture of modern bourgeois life as he claims it is lived in the two major centres of western civilization. Materialism and self-interest prevail there, the human spirit has been crushed in the quest for technological progress and prosperity, and a sense of organic community has been lost. These problems have their roots in the western personality, which, while dynamic, is selfish and incapable of fraternity except on a superficial level. Since these flaws are ingrained, the western personality has no prospect of regenerating itself and will remain unfulfilled. The Russian personality, on the other hand, is loving and yielding, in spite of the historical tribulations of the Russian people and the difficult conditions in which they continue to dwell. This personality finds fulfilment in communion with the larger flock. Thus again a negative perception of the west offsets a conception of Russianness that nourishes a writer’s hopes. While westerners were trapped in a dystopia, Russians might find their way to a utopia in which the altruistic impulse would prevail over possessive individualism, albeit a deeply reactionary utopia in which individuals voluntarily surrender their rights to society without seeking any constitutional guarantees or material recompense in return.

CHAPTER 8

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border

SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN AND THE CONTEXTS OF HIS TRAVELOGUE Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov, who wrote under the pseudonym Shchedrin and is commonly known as Saltykov-Shchedrin, is an important and prolific writer, whose literary career spans the whole period from the late 1840s, when he began to publish reviews in The Contemporary and Notes of the Fatherland, until his death in 1889. Born in 1826 in a gentry family, he attended the Moscow Pension for the Nobility and then the Aleksandr Lycée at Tsarskoe selo near St. Petersburg and entered the civil service in 1844. He drew early intellectual nourishment from the literary criticism of Belinskii, whom he observed in the St. Petersburg salons which he began to frequent in the 1840s while still a pupil at the lycée. He associated himself with the Westernist camp of that time, as he himself tells us in the travelogue Across the Border (1880-1881; p. 111), which it is the purpose of this chapter to examine.1 His literary masterpiece is perhaps the intensely sombre 1 References to Across the Border (Za rubezhom) in parentheses in the text of this chapter are to the version in M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. by S. A. Makashin et al. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1965-1967; hereafter Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS), Vol. 14, pp. 7-243. There is an article on this work by Makashin on pp. 527-555 of this volume (hereafter Makashin, “Za rubezhom”). I have also made much use of Makashin’s endnotes in this volume of SS (hereafter Makashin, endnotes). Makashin is also the author of the principal Russian biography of the satirist, of which there are four volumes, all published in Moscow by Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura:” Saltykov-Shchedrin: biografiia (1949); Saltykov-Shchedrin na rubezhe 1850-1860 godov: biografiia (1972); Saltykov-Shchedrin: seredina puti: 1860-e-1870-e gody: biografiia (1984); SaltykovShchedrin: poslednie gody: 1875-1889 (1989; hereafter Makashin, Poslednie gody). On Across the Border see the last of these volumes, pp. 229-238. There are also two large studies which were first published in the late Stalin period: Ia. El'sberg, Saltykov-Shchedrin: zhiznƍ i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1953); and V. Kirpotin, Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin: zhiznƍ i tvorchestvo, revised 2nd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1955); on Across the Border see pp. 437-460 and 431-456 of these works respectively. There is also a biography of Saltykov-Shchedrin in French: Kyra Sanine, Saltykov-Chtchédrine: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Institut d’études slaves de l’université de Paris, 1955); on Across the Border see pp. 252-259. On SaltykovShchedrin’s life and work and for further bibliographical information see also the entries by I. P. Foote in Cornwell, pp. 707-710. Foote translates Za rubezhom as In Foreign Parts. I think this translation is a little free and have preferred the translation used by Joseph Frank in the last volume of his literary

221

222 Chapter 8 psychological novel The Golovliov Family (1876-1880).2 He is Russia’s leading classical satirist, who in his Provincial Sketches (1856-1857), Pompadours and Pompadouresses (1863-1874), The History of a Town (1869-1870), The Haven of Mon Repos (1878-1879)3 and many other works indicted Russian society in a caustic and overwhelmingly gloomy tone, especially its provincial bureaucracy, in which he himself served for long periods.4 His writings are difficult for the modern reader for several reasons: they are saturated with topical allusion; racy colloquialisms, slang, colourful sayings and proverbs abound in them; and bureaucratic terminology and patriotic archaism are widely deployed in them in a facetious way. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satire tends to be of the bitter, even illtempered, Juvenalian variety rather than the gentler Horatian sort. It significantly contributed to the erosion of respect for the authorities in the second half of the nineteenth century. (It is notable that Lenin often referred to Saltykov-Shchedrin in his writings and admired his skill in capturing social types, the aptness of his satirical language and his exposure of liberal caution and hypocrisy.5) SaltykovShchedrin also played an important role in radical journalism in the age of Alexander II. From 1862-1864 he served on the editorial board of The Contemporary, the leading radical journal of the 1860s until its closure by the government in 1866. In 1868, following his retirement from government service, under official pressure, he was among those (Nekrasov and Eliseev were the others) who took control of Notes of the Fatherland and developed it into the leading organ of radical opinion. On Nekrasov’s death in 1877 Saltykov-Shchedrin himself became editor-in-chief of this journal until it too was closed by the government in 1884. Across the Border is loosely based on a foreign trip that Saltykov-Shchedrin made for medical reasons – on the advice of one of his physicians, Sergei Botkin, brother of the writer examined in Chapter 5 above – in the summer of 1880. Saltykov-Shchedrin left St. Petersburg by train at the end of June (OS), having sent his wife and two children and the children’s governess on ahead to Baden-Baden the previous month. He crossed the border into Prussia at Verzhbolovo and travelled via Berlin to the spa towns of Ems and Baden-Baden, where he spent some six weeks, the bulk of his time abroad. From Baden-Baden he made a brief visit to Thun and Interlaken in Switzerland. Towards the end of August he went with his wife to Paris, where he stayed until early October, at which point he biography of Dostoevskii cited above. 2 Gospoda Golovliovy, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 13, pp. 7-262. 3 Gubernskie ocherki, ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 7-468; Pompadury i pompadurshy, ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 7-261; Istoriia odnogo goroda, ibid., pp. 265-433; Ubezhishche Mon Repo, ibid., Vol. 13, pp. 265-404. 4 Saltykov-Shchedrin served in the provincial bureaucracy first during a period of exile in Viatka in 1848-1855, following his expression of sympathy for utopian socialism in an early tale. After a spell in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg from 1856-1858 he served as vice-governor of the province of Riazan' from 1858-1860 and then Tver' from 1860-1862. In the period 1865-1868, he served successively as president of the revenue departments of the provinces of Penza, Tula and Riazan'. 5 See V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 Vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958-1965), Vol. 1, pp. 268, 447; Vol. 3, p. 270; Vol. 5, p. 191; Vol. 6, p. 132; Vol. 14, pp. 237, 278 (the references are to Across the Border); Vol. 15, pp. 213-215; Vol. 16, p. 43; Vol. 22, p. 84; Vol. 31, p. 286; Vol. 48, p. 89.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 223 returned to St. Petersburg via Belgium and Germany.6 It was not the first time that Saltykov-Shchedrin had been abroad, nor was it to be the last: in 1875-1876 he had spent a longer period in Baden-Baden and in France and he made three further trips in the last few years of his life. However, Saltykov-Shchedrin was never a willing traveller: his foreign journeys began relatively late in life and were all made primarily with a view to alleviating the severe rheumatism and serious heart condition from which he suffered from the mid-1870s. Nor did he settle easily abroad: Russia, detestable as life there was in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s representation of it, always remained in his thoughts. It is useful when reading Across the Border to bear in mind the further changes that had taken place in the balance of power in Europe since the time of Dostoevskii’s first visit to the west, especially the rise of Prussia and the decline of France. In the course of the 1860s the competition between Austria and Prussia for leadership of the German world had been decisively won by Prussia under the aggressive leadership of Bismarck, who had become prime minister in 1862. Austrian influence in Germany was brought to an end by Prussia’s defeat of Austria in the short war of 1866, as a result of which all the German states north of the River Main joined a North German Confederation under Prussian leadership. Then in 1870, after France had declared war on Prussia out of concern at the possibility of a Prusso-Spanish alliance, Prussia inflicted a crushing military defeat on France at Sedan, in September, and forced the surrender of another large French army at Metz, in October. The French defeat at Sedan effectively ended the Second Empire. A Government of National Defence, inspired by the eloquent young republican lawyer Léon Gambetta, vainly prolonged resistance to the German forces but in January 1871 Paris surrendered. In February a newly elected French National Assembly dominated by monarchists met at Bordeaux and the old Orleanist Thiers, whom Herzen had ridiculed and demonized some twenty years before, assumed leadership of the Third Republic which replaced the Second Empire. The new French government sued for peace and concluded a settlement, contained in the Treaty of Frankfurt, whose terms were severe. France ceded Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany. She also agreed to pay an indemnity of five thousand million francs and to meet the cost of maintaining a Prussian occupying army until the indemnity was paid. The Prussian victory over France in 1870-1871 completed Bismarck’s German nation-building: the four south German states of Baden, Bavaria, Hesse-Darmstadt and Württemberg were added to the North German Confederation and an empire of forty-one million people came into being. From the Russian point of view the rise of Prussia did not represent an immediate military threat, since good relations with Russia were essential to Bismarck’s conservative system. All the same the formation of a coherent, national German state, untroubled by the separatist aspirations of ethnic groups such as Magyars and Croats that weakened the Austrian state, was an unsettling development and it colours Saltykov-Shchedrin’s account of his journey. For France, on the other hand, the defeat at Sedan and the loss of its north6

See Makashin, Poslednie gody, p. 228.

224 Chapter 8 eastern territory in the Rhineland destroyed the myth of la grande nation, in which it had still been possible to believe during the Second Empire, when Dostoevskii had made the journey out of which his Winter Notes arose. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie remained the dominant force in France and quickly reasserted itself after the fall of Napoleon III. In the spring of 1871 a workers’ insurrection, fuelled by hostility to the National Assembly that had concluded the humiliating peace with Prussia and led by socialists elected to a council that took the name the Commune of Paris, was brutally crushed by forces marshalled by Thiers. Having survived this challenge Thiers, as provisional president of the Third Republic, floated two bond issues that enabled the indemnity to Prussia to be paid off ahead of schedule in 1873, and the Prussian occupation thus ended.7 French democratic institutions were also reinvigorated during this period and republicans began to gain the upper hand in them. The constitution adopted by the Third Republic provided for a bicameral legislature, consisting of a Chamber of Deputies and an indirectly elected Senate which could serve as a check on the Chamber, as well as a Council of Ministers responsible to the Chamber, and a president with powers resembling those of a constitutional monarch who was elected for seven years by the two houses. Although there was a republican majority in the Chamber of Deputies elected in 1876, in the Senate conservative rural France continued to be strongly represented and Mac-Mahon, the commander of the army who had succeeded Thiers as president, was a staunch monarchist. In 1879, though, republicans won control of the Senate as well as the Chamber, whereupon MacMahon resigned and was replaced as president by an insipid republican, Jules Grévy. Not that this republic, in which parliamentary institutions held the conservative forces of French society in check, was any more palatable to Saltykov-Shchedrin than the assertive, authoritarian state that had been fashioned by Bismarck. We should also take account, when reading Across the Border, of political developments inside Russia during the 1870s. By the middle of the 1860s the appetite of Alexander II for reform had diminished and a revolutionary movement, generated in part by the radical ideas that Dostoevskii had opposed, had begun to develop. In 1874 some two thousand idealistic young men and women, fired by the writings of Lavrov, Bakunin and Bervi-Flerovskii, had gone to the countryside in order to try to persuade the peasants and workers to carry out what socialists of that generation designated an “economic” and “social” revolution from below. In 1876, following the abject failure of this “going to the people” (the majority of the propagandists and agitators were arrested or took refuge in the towns), revolutionaries established a disciplined organization, Land and Liberty. Under this banner they produced a voluminous literature printed on clandestine presses inside Russia and began to mount demonstrations and support workers’ strikes. They also turned increasingly to violence. Various forms of terrorist act were now carried out, ranging from armed resistance to arrest and murder of police agents to attempts to 7 Despite this success Thiers was shortly forced by monarchists, the most numerous bloc in the assembly, to resign when he forsook his long-standing support for the principle of an Orleanist constitutional monarchy and declared himself a republican.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 225 assassinate representatives of the regime responsible for the persecution of revolutionaries, such as police chiefs, public prosecutors and prison governors. By the summer of 1879 the concentration of revolutionary forces on terrorism and the determination of some revolutionaries to attempt to assassinate the tsar, thus engaging in “political” struggle with the regime, had precipitated a split in Land and Liberty. While one faction, which now formed itself into a party named The Black Partition, continued to hope that a popular uprising could be incited through agitation among the peasantry, the more energetic faction, The People’s Will, devoted itself principally, though not exclusively, to attempts to assassinate the tsar himself. The People’s Will quickly achieved international publicity by blowing up part of a train in which the tsar was thought to be travelling and then, in February 1880, by causing an explosion, which resulted in fatalities but did not harm the tsar himself, in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.8 The response of the government to this intensification of revolutionary activity was at first seemingly conciliatory. There began a so-called “dictatorship of the heart” under Loris-Melikov, who was appointed president of a supreme governmental commission in February 1880 and then Minister of Internal Affairs in August of that year. Loris-Melikov eased censorship, promised liberal reforms and dismissed some of the more unpopular ministers, notably Count Dmitrii Tolstoi who had served as Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod since 1865 and Minister of Education from the following year.9 The object of this change of governmental policy was to appease public opinion by promising freedoms (of press and assembly) that were widely desired and thereby to isolate revolutionaries. It was in this fevered, expectant atmosphere that Saltykov-Shchedrin made the journey on which Across the Border is based. The atmosphere inside Russia is evoked in the travelogue by reference to the fact that everybody is now clamouring for a constitution (or “constintuntion,” as the emergent rural capitalists call it), though each person has her or his own interests in mind and understands a constitution only dimly and in her or his own way (19, 23-24, 26). It should also be noted that intellectual life in the second half of Alexander’s reign was coloured by the emergence, or evolution, of two new forms of Russian nationalism, one revolutionary and the other conservative. It was the revolutionary form of Russian nationalism, which came to be known as Populism, that inspired the “going to the people” and continued to underpin the activity of Land and Liberty, The Black Partition and the People’s Will. Populism owed much to the 8 The fullest account of the revolutionary movement up until 1 March 1881 is still Venturi, cited in n. 14 to Chapter 6 above. 9 On this “crisis in the upper spheres,” as it was known to contemporaries, or the “second revolutionary situation” as it was termed in Leninist historiography (the first “revolutionary situation” was in the period 1859-1861), see Peter A. Zaionchkovsky, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 18781882, ed., tr., and with a new introduction by Gary Hamburg (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1979). On Dmitrii Tolstoi as Minister of Education see Patrick L. Alston, Education and State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), especially pp. 77-114. Saltykov-Shchedrin does not impute any benevolent motive to the government: his account of the supposed official conversion to somewhat more liberal views in 1880 is laden with sarcasm: Za rubezhom, in SaltykovShchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, p. 190.

226 Chapter 8 radical thought of the 1860s (against which Dostoevskii was arguing in his Winter Notes) but diverged from it in at least three important respects. Firstly, the thinkers chiefly responsible for shaping Populism – Lavrov in his Historical Letters (18681869), Mikhailovskii in his essay What is Progress? (1869) and Bervi-Flerovskii in his Condition of the Working Class in Russia – drew a sharp distinction between the natural scientist, on the one hand, and the social scientist or historian, on the other. They accepted that the former ought to employ an objective method, but the latter, they felt, was obliged to make moral judgements and instil his own ideals into his writings, since his subject-matter was not the natural world but suffering human beings and their society, with all its problems. Secondly, in appealing to the “critically thinking minority,” as Lavrov called the intelligentsia, to discharge a debt to the suffering masses by attempting to effect a social and economic revolution, these thinkers implicitly discarded the rational egoism preached by Chernyshevskii and Pisarev and advocated instead a messianic altruism. Thirdly, this idealistic altruism required the rejection of the rigid determinism that followed from Chernyshevskii’s belief – although Chernyshevskii did not express the belief consistently – that human conduct was governed by immutable scientific laws. To these fresh attitudes the Populists added a number of assertions that were already familiar from Herzen’s writings about Russia’s national distinctiveness. They contended that the Russian peasant was instinctively socialistic and suited to harmonious life in a collective. They took it as axiomatic that nations were not inevitably destined to follow invariable laws of historical development. They therefore convinced themselves that Russia might quickly proceed from its protocapitalist condition to a form of socialism based on the existing peasant commune, which Herzen and others had admired as an embryonic socialist institution. Russia would thus bypass the capitalist stage of development, during which the hated bourgeoisie was the dominant social class, and all the evils of capitalist society that the Russian travel writers examined here had claimed to observe at first hand. The fresh conservative form of nationalism that developed in the age of Alexander II was Pan-Slavism, a broad church whose members ranged from those who merely felt an emotional bond with all fellow Slavs to those who aspired to the creation of some form of union of all the Slav peoples. Pan-Slavism had its roots in the attempts made in the first half of the nineteenth century by west and south Slav scholars and men of letters (with some of whom Pogodin had been in contact, it will be recalled) to establish the national identities of their peoples. The first PanSlav congress, attended by representatives of all the Slav ethnic groups living under Austrian rule, had been organized by the Czech historian Palacký in Prague in 1848. However, it was not until the 1860s, when Russia was recovering from defeat in the Crimea, that a Russian form of Pan-Slavism began to flourish. The most important theoretical basis for this variant of Russian nationalism was furnished by Danilevskii in his magnum opus, Russia and Europe (1869). Drawing on the method of the natural sciences (he himself was a naturalist), Danilevskii attempted to classify civilizations as distinct cultural-historical types10 and to identify laws 10

Danilevskii identifies ten cultural-historical types: Egyptian, Chinese, ancient Semitic, Indian, Iranian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Arabic and Germano-Romance or European.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 227 which governed their development. Like organisms in the natural world, Danilevskii argued, drawing like so many other Russian thinkers on the German idealist tradition, civilizations pass through the stages of childhood, youth, maturity and senescence. The Germano-Romance, or European, type of civilization was still strong,11 but its creative power was declining. It was therefore timely for the Slavs, whose civilization was approaching maturity, to challenge European hegemony.12 It is ironic, though, that Danilevskii should have expected the Slavs, who are traditionally presented by Russian romantic conservatives as peace-loving, to resort to military means against the European type, to which such conservatives consistently attribute a propensity to violence, in order to fulfil their historic mission. Unlike Slavophilism and Native-Soil Conservatism, which were relatively benign visions of a Christian brotherhood, Pan-Slavism was a more or less naked apologia for Russian imperialism. It belonged, after all, to the period that followed the brutal suppression of the Polish revolt of 1863, when the subjugation of the Caucasus was being completed and Turkestan in Central Asia was being conquered. As such it appealed to pragmatic men of action as much as, or even more than, to idealistic members of the conservative wing of the intelligentsia. One of its leading exponents, for example, was Fadeev, a man who spent most of his adult life in the military and who rose to high rank in the army, having served for many years in the Caucasus. Fadeev unashamedly advocated use of military force for the promotion of Russian imperial interests and in his Opinion on the Eastern Question (1869) put forward the view that military conflict with the western powers in the contest for supremacy in eastern Europe was inevitable.13 Other prominent and vocal supporters of Pan-Slav ideas included Skobelev, a military officer who played a leading role in the conquest of Central Asia, and Ignat'ev, a diplomat who from 1864 until 1877 served as Russia’s ambassador at Constantinople and who sedulously cultivated Slav rebellions in the Balkans. The Slav confederation of which such men dreamed would be not a brotherhood of equals but a union dominated by Russia.14 The views of the Pan-Slavists were not shared by Alexander II himself or by his long-serving Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Gorchakov, but they did enjoy support at court and gained a strong hold on public opinion. Pan-Slavism helped to create a climate in which the regime, being perceived as the protector of the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans, was compelled to intervene when, in the course of 1875-1877, Slav peasants rose against Turkish rule in Herzegovina and Bosnia and the Bulgarians also revolted and when the Turks suppressed these uprisings with great cruelty. Alexander duly declared war on Turkey in 1877 and in 1878 11 Danilevskii did not contend that the west was at such an advanced stage of decay as Herzen believed it was. 12 On Danilevskii see Thaden, Conservative Nationalism, pp. 102-115, and Robert E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 13 On Fadeev see Thaden, Conservative Nationalism, pp. 146-163. 14 On Pan-Slavism see also M. B. Petrovich, The Emergence of Russian Panslavism 1856-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956) and Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).

228 Chapter 8 Russian forces prevailed, although victory was delayed by stubborn Turkish resistance at the strategically important town of Plevna. Military success enabled Russia to impose terms on Turkey in the Treaty of San Stefano, signed in March 1878, which included the creation of a Great Bulgaria under Russian protection. However, the Russian triumph was shortlived. There was alarm at the Russian success among the European powers, especially in Austria-Hungary, which feared that the settlement of San Stefano might stimulate Slav nationalism within Austrian domains, and in Britain, which was concerned at the prospect that Russia would establish herself as a power in the eastern Mediterranean if Turkey were weakened. A congress was therefore convoked in Berlin to revise the Treaty of San Stefano and Russian diplomatic gains were eroded. The resulting Treaty of Berlin, signed in July 1878, provided for the establishment of a smaller Bulgaria and put Bosnia and Herzegovina, which under the Treaty of San Stefano would have become autonomous, under Austrian occupation and administration. Although she retained southern Bessarabia, Russia was humiliated by the Treaty of Berlin. This humiliation, combined with the development of the revolutionary movement and the alienation of the moderate public as a result of the government’s return to reactionary policies from the middle of the 1860s, helped to precipitate the crisis with which the reign of Alexander ended. It was in this domestic climate that Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote Across the Border, a work clouded by a sense of dejection that stems not only from the author’s curmudgeonly personality but also from a national loss of self-esteem in the postreform period and a sense of impending crisis. FACT, FICTION AND TOPICAL COMMENT IN ACROSS THE BORDER Across the Border contains seven parts, or “articles” or “studies” (eskizy, etiudy), as Saltykov-Shchedrin classified them. The first two parts Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote while he was abroad, the remaining five after his return to Russia. The work was first published in serial form in Notes of the Fatherland. The first five parts appeared consecutively from the ninth number for 1880. The last two parts did not come out until the middle of 1881, following a two-month break in publication that was due to the eventual assassination of Alexander II by The People’s Will on 1 March 1881. Like previous exponents of the genre, Saltykov-Shchedrin found the loose form of the travelogue convenient for his broad purpose of discussing the relationship between Russia and the west and reflecting on Russia’s condition and destiny. The genre allows him to deal with various locations and periods (for example, contemporary Berlin, Paris and Russia, Paris at the time of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s earlier visit in 1875-1876 and the Moscow of his school days). It also gives him freedom to deploy devices such as the dream, polemical and historical digressions, autobiographical reminiscence, philosophical reflection and satirical dialogue and to view his material from different perspectives and to present it in various tones. In

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 229 short Saltykov-Shchedrin is able to offer a complex attitude to the broad and shifting panorama of European and Russian events that he is surveying.15 Some coherence is lent to this mélange by the periodic appearance of a number of imaginary characters and by the recurrence of certain striking images and phrases, as well as by the continuous presence of the narrator himself. The narrator of Across the Border may be identified with Saltykov-Shchedrin in several respects. He is a man of letters who goes abroad on the advice of his physicians and he follows Saltykov-Shchedrin’s itinerary. At times he clearly expresses Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own views, for instance on the Westernism of the 1840s and its French sources of inspiration. All the same Across the Border perhaps bears a looser relation to the journey on which it is apparently based, and certainly gives freer play to the artist’s fantasy, than any of the other works examined here. Much of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s supposed account of his journey does not deal directly with what he sees and experiences abroad in 1880. For example, he continues after he has crossed the border on his way out of Russia to report conversations that he has supposedly had in St. Petersburg before his departure. Approximately half of the fourth sketch, which deals with Paris, is based on impressions arising out of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s first visit there. Considerable portions of the text – notably two episodes that will be discussed in later sections of this chapter, namely the narrator’s dream about a debate between a German boy and a Russian boy (the boy with trousers and the boy without trousers), and a morality play entitled “The Pig Triumphant, or a Conversation between a Pig and Truth” – germinate in the narrator’s fantasy. Numerous episodes are obviously fabricated. Reminiscing about his first trip to France in 1875-1876 the narrator describes how he has offered to buy lunch in Versailles for a French politician, Laboulaye, and how when they have drunk two bottles of champagne Laboulaye falls asleep and is left by the narrator to settle the bill (123-128). In a footnote the narrator admits that the entire episode is a fiction but in the next sketch, in a conversation with other Russians in Paris which is no doubt equally fictitious, he continues to refer to the episode with Laboulaye as if it had indeed taken place (178). It is a further indication of the fictionality of Across the Border that characters of various degrees of authenticity mingle freely in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s text. Firstly, there are living people such as the French politicians Clemenceau, Grévy, Laboulaye and Gambetta. Secondly, there are fictitious characters based on living models. Thus Dyba and Udav (the names denote “rack” (the instrument of torture) and “boa-constrictor” respectively), two passengers whom the narrator encounters on the train out of Russia (12-13), constitute satirical portraits of high-ranking tsarist officials, specifically Murav'iov, who had brutally suppressed the Polish Revolt of 1863, and Shuvalov, head of the Third Section in the period 1866-1874. Likewise Count Tverdoonto (the name suggests “hard being,” that is to say “hard man”), an out-of-office minister with whom the narrator importunes an interview in Interlaken, is a satirical embodiment of Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, who himself did 15

Makashin, “Za rubezhom,” p. 551.

230 Chapter 8 travel abroad in the summer of 1880 and who, as Saltykov-Shchedrin feared he might, was to make a political comeback after the fall of Loris-Melikov.16 The reporter Podkhalimov (the name denotes a “toady,” podkhalim), as whom the narrator masquerades in order to gain access to Tverdoonto, is based on Sharapov, the Paris correspondent of Suvorin’s reactionary daily newspaper New Time. Thirdly, there are characters who represent some recognizable social type, such as Blokhin (the name is derived from the word blokha, “flea”), an egg-trader of the first guild, with whom the narrator spends some time in Paris and who is intended to typify the merchants, a conservative class with monarchist sympathies. Similarly Starosmyslov (literally “old sense” or “old thinker”), whom the narrator also encounters in Paris, where Starosmyslov is taking refuge from the Russian authorities, represents the gimnaziia teacher with radical political sympathies and possibly a record of revolutionary activity. Finally, there are characters who have stepped into this text from other works of fiction, such as Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own creations Kolupaev and Razuvaev (personifications of the capitalist in The Haven of Mon Repos) and Khlestakov and Liapkin-Tiapkin from Gogol'’s play The Inspector General. Although Across the Border is thus a work in which there are substantial elements of fabrication and fantasy, it is intensely germane to debate on Russia and its relationship to Europe at the end of the reign of Alexander II and the beginning of his son’s reign, when it had become evident that the great reforms, lacking a political dimension, had failed to satisfy public opinion. Against the international background of the rise of Prussian militarism and the continuing ascendancy of the western bourgeoisie Saltykov-Shchedrin reflects on Russia’s economic, social, political, civil and legal backwardness.17 Like so many examples of Russian travel writing, Across the Border is therefore a book, in the words of SaltykovShchedrin’s Soviet editor Makashin, that is “not only about the west but about Russia and the west and, essentially, more about Russia than about the west.”18 It is accordingly packed with Russian topical reference (and on one level is as much a satire about Russian life as any of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s other work). For example, Saltykov-Shchedrin mentions a recent scandal concerning misappropriation of valuable timber-bearing state land by high officials (20-22). He begins the second sketch with a discussion of the issue of the radical intelligentsia’s habit of “going to the people” (44-47). He makes cryptic reference, by means of such phrases as “to begin struggle” and “heroism,” to the terrorist campaign being waged in 1880 by The People’s Will (81). He also alludes to discussion in the Russian and foreign press of the impending relaxation of restrictions on the Russian press, of which he learns while he is in Interlaken (102). 16 Tolstoi was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in May 1882. Curiously enough, Tolstoi had been a fellow pupil of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s at the lycée at Tsarskoe selo in the 1840s. He was also related to Piotr Tolstoi, the first writer examined in this book: he was the great-great-grandson of Piotr Tolstoi’s son Ivan, who had been sent to prison in the Arctic region with Piotr after the death of Peter the Great and had died there in 1728. The novelist Lev Tolstoi, incidentally, was also the great-greatgrandson of Ivan, but from the line of a different son of Ivan’s. 17 Makashin, “Za rubezhom,” p. 541. 18 Ibid., p. 529; idem, Poslednie gody, p. 230.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 231 Most importantly, it is in Russia that the narrator’s heart remains even while he is travelling. It is not just that he gravitates as strongly towards his homeland as most of the other travellers examined here (Piotr Tolstoi and Botkin are the exceptions), and regards “abroad” as a “desert packed with people” who are not Russian (191). It is also that his civic concern never diminishes. One has a homeland (rodina), he reminds his readers at the outset, in which one has an enduring interest as a member of a family, a citizen and a human being (8). He writes with the distress caused by drought and pests in the southern and black-earth provinces in 1879-1880 in his mind, and assures his compatriots that even in his spa he has not for a moment forgotten the problems afflicting the blessed pastures of Chembar, that is to say rural Russia (10-11). His frequent reference to minor rivers of the Russian heartland reminds the reader of this continuing preoccupation with Russia and especially its rural population. It will therefore be as a contribution to discussion of Russia’s relationship to the west and as commentary on Russia’s deteriorating predicament after the assassination of Alexander II that Across the Border will be read here, albeit a contribution that is again informed by evaluation of the contemporary western sources of Russian civilization. PRUSSIA, AND FRANCE AGAIN Saltykov-Shchedrin does of course relish the freer atmosphere of the west. Early in his first sketch he acknowledges the achievement of Europeans, who have created a humanistic culture and civil society. The great advantage of civilization in Eidtkunen – that is to say, on the western side of the Russian border – is that it has long been recognized there that it is characteristic of humans to talk and write about and reflect on all questions that concern them. This truth may still be only timidly or partially recognized in the west and Mr Hecht, or “pike,” the German capitalist, may do all he can to limit its dissemination. Nevertheless the truth undoubtedly does flicker beyond the Russian border and every Knecht, or labourer, is a little heartened by it. This humanism is the basis, Saltykov-Shchedrin believes, of everything good and rational on which a civil society may be built, the precondition for the softening of morals, the flowering of the arts and sciences and even the cultivation of abundant crops. It must therefore be the first aim of any society – Saltykov-Shchedrin’s point, of course, has the greatest pertinence for Russia – to enable its members freely to express their views and govern their own affairs (1819). Educated Russians seem to respond positively to the freer civilization of the west: as soon as they cross the border they become unusually active, enterprising and inquisitive, the opposite of what they are in their own country, as if trying to prove that they are not by nature dullards, dolts or simpletons but that it is just the Russian environment that has made them seem as if they were (42). Moreover, the westerner’s capacity to create material prosperity is soon in evidence. From the train window the Russian passengers, who have liked to think that Germans would starve and have no fuel with which to heat their homes if Russian grain and wood were not exported to them, observe the inescapable and

232 Chapter 8 thought-provoking fact of superior Prussian husbandry. The terrain on the Prussian side of the border is the same as that on the Russian side, a sandy plain interspersed with peat lowlands. However, the hummocks, moss, willow-bushes and little birchtrees have been cleared away and crops have been sown which are yielding grain more luxuriant than that in the most fertile Russian heartland. Whereas in Chembar people had complacently counted on the infinite productivity of the land and had not noticed that the soil was being exhausted, here people preoccupied themselves day and night with how to subsist in sand and marsh, cleared meadows for their cattle, removed obstructions from their ditches and stacked peat for use as fuel and manure. The blackened frame of the Russian izba, or peasant hut, thatched with tousled straw gave way to a gayer whitewashed dwelling with a tiled roof (13-16). And yet Saltykov-Shchedrin’s attitude towards what he sees abroad is from the beginning deeply ambivalent. He makes it clear as he describes the East Prussian landscape, for example, that he is talking about the westerner’s superior productive capacity, not about a more just system of economic distribution. For he knows very well that amid these excellently cultivated fields people talk only about the accumulation of wealth and not about its distribution at all; that these fields, meadows and whitewashed dwellings belong to the same bourgeois money-bags to whom the houses and shops in the towns belong, and that behind each of these money-bags there stand dozens of Knechte to whom only a very limited part of this beautiful prosperity comes. (17) That is not to say that Russians, knowing that wealth is unjustly distributed in their country, should pay no attention to the need to create wealth. They do need to note that in Eidtkunen wealth has at least been created, even if it is not fairly distributed, whereas in Verzhbolovo, on the Russian side of the border, wealth has not been created in the first place. All the same the politico-economic basis of life in East Prussia is no different from that in post-reform Russia and the local Prussian money-bags is hardly less greedy than Kolupaev (16-17). Saltykov-Shchedrin’s reservations about Prussian society multiply when he reaches Berlin. His depiction of the city has a rather Dostoevskian, splenetic character. Everybody had understood the old Berlin, capital of the Prussian state, and nobody was afraid, envious or suspicious of it. However, with the unification of the German states everything has changed. Political malleability has given way to pretensions to world domination, bashfulness to self-regard, modesty to boastfulness. Prussian universities have forsaken their role as torch-bearers and heralds and have become instead essentially reactive institutions which merely comment on officially accepted formulae and devise theoretical justifications for what has come to be. Berlin’s gaiety has a gloomy, false quality: it is as if there is an onus on the city to show that after its conquests it is not so miserable as it was before. In spite of the incessant movement of the city’s streets Berlin is lifeless: it seems to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s narrator that all these people have come out of their houses only in order furtively to buy cheap sausages without their acquaintances seeing them and trying to cadge a share of their purchase. Most importantly,

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 233 Saltykov-Shchedrin, unlike any of the earlier Russian travel writers examined here, has to confront the military power of a united Germany. His narrator is disconcerted by the conspicuous presence of soldiers, to whom he responds in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of Dostoevskii’s resentful response to the man collecting tolls at the bridge in Cologne. Compared to St. Petersburg the military garrison in Berlin is not all that large, but whether it is that the bodies of Prussian officers are stouter or their chests are more voluminous, whatever the reason it becomes positively crowded when a Prussian officer walks down the street. He is dressed rather oddly, in a uniform that reminds you of our military jackets and caps of the forties; his chest is puffed out like a wheel, the ends of his moustache are curled up into little rings... He walks along red-faced, fine-grained, pleased with himself, as if he’s just received his salary, which doesn’t prevent him, by the way, from treating his neighbour sternly and brusquely. (52) The military victory that has given rise to this conceit cannot bring about “sociability,” though; it breeds not a sense of community but naked chauvinism (49-56). Paris, on the other hand, does make a favourable impression on SaltykovShchedrin, partly, no doubt, because of the improvements brought about by Haussmann in the period of the Second Empire and the buoyancy of the city as a result of subsequent economic growth under the Third Republic. At any rate Saltykov-Shchedrin finds the city quite different from misanthropic Berlin. With its boulevards, restaurants, squares, gardens, museums and galleries and the abundance of goods attractively displayed in its shops, Paris is spacious, elegant and invigorating. There is a pleasing interaction between performer and audience in the city’s numerous theatres. Saltykov-Shchedrin marvels at the speed and stamina of the French at work (117-122). Most importantly, though, he is predisposed to view Paris in a positive manner because it was primarily French culture, rather than German idealism, that had inspired him in his youth. (In this respect he differs somewhat from all the other nineteenth-century writers examined here.) The passages in Across the Border that describe the aspects of French culture that he admires are notable for their nostalgia and their relative transparency, stylistic simplicity and lack of irony. “My recollection of my youth, that is to say of the forties,” he writes, is inextricably bound up with the notion of France and Paris. And not just for me personally but for all of us, people of the same age, there was in those two words something resplendent, light-bearing, which warmed our lives and in a certain sense even determined their content. . . . at that time I had only just left the school desk and, nurtured on Belinskii’s articles, I naturally joined the Westernizers. But not the majority of the Westernizers (the only ones who were authoritative in literature at that time) who were concerned with popularizing the premisses of German philosophy, but that unknown circle which instinctively adhered to France. Not to the France of Louis-Philippe and Guizot, of course, but to the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet,

234 Chapter 8 Fourier, Louis Blanc and in particular George Sand. It was from there that faith in humanity flowed to us, from there that a certainty radiated that the “Golden Age” lay ahead of us, not in the past... In a word everything that was good, desirable and full of love – it all came from there. (111-112) Thus while Saltykov-Shchedrin’s generation lived physically in Russia, spiritually they dwelt in France, the “land of miracles.” (Dostoevskii, it will be recalled, had used the same phrase from a poem by Khomiakov in his own acknowledgement of the civilizing impact of French culture on the Russian intelligentsia in the 1840s, but with a certain irony.) They had been delighted by the revolution of 1848 and the flight of Louis-Philippe and the fall of his ministers such as Guizot and Thiers, whom they perceived as personal enemies (111-113). Even French participation in the Crimean War had not tarnished France in their eyes, for they no more confused Napoleon III, to whom Saltykov-Shchedrin repeatedly refers as a “bandit” (e.g. 152, 160), with France as a whole than they had Louis-Philippe (115). In spite of his acknowledgement of a spiritual debt to French culture, SaltykovShchedrin, like Herzen and Dostoevskii, is implacably hostile to the French bourgeoisie. It is true that France has enjoyed an enviable prosperity since the Franco-Prussian War. Saltykov-Shchedrin describes the country’s surging industrial productivity, its favourable balance of trade, its budget without deficit and its expanding rail network. He acknowledges that strikes are not prolonged and are settled to mutual satisfaction. The bourgeois is so sated, he suggests, that he feels a need to share his prosperity with the workers and yields to demands after having held out for a while merely for the sake of form (146). However, none of the apparent economic achievements of the Third Republic lessens SaltykovShchedrin’s loathing of the bourgeoisie, whom he depicts with the aid of the familiar topoi of avarice and hypocrisy. For the class has ceased to be the liberating force of the French Revolution. Where there once seemed to stand a beacon there now sat “corpulent money-changers” (131). The bourgeois likes to blaspheme a little, because Voltaire has told him he cannot have faith but he has not entirely expunged the word “God” from his lexicon and apparently remains devout, crossing himself and thanking God whenever he eats. He also likes to enjoy himself and even to carouse, but he wants to do so on the cheap (123, 149-150). He is no longer heroic or idealistic. Satiety has made him somnolent and sluggish in his republic without “adventures” or “horizons” (148, 152-153). In the fields of science and learning he has come to value only applied knowledge, in polemical journalism trivia, in fiction light reading about adulterous affairs and in his amorous liaisons speedy gratification without emotional entanglement (149). Saltykov-Shchedrin’s aversion to bourgeois prosperity and mores is particularly pronounced in his description of the abundance of food with which Paris is supplied. He sees on display the finest fruits and vegetables from the environs of Paris, fruit, dairy produce and poultry from Normandy and Touraine, stuffed pies from Perigord, fragrant truffles from Gascony, wine and poultry from Burgundy, charcuterie from Lyon, olive-oil from Provence, candied fruits from Nice, red partridges from the Pyrenees, quail and ortolans from Landes, and oysters and every sort of fish and shell-fish from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Saltykov-

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 235 Shchedrin’s description of these gastronomic riches is punctuated with and followed by gibes at the bourgeois consumer. When the bourgeois starts to list these riches he chokes on his saliva and there is a sort of politically unreliable glint in his eyes: he seems to be on the point of tearing out his interlocutor’s throat. Even the loss of Strasbourg [as a result of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War] the present-day bourgeois regrets not so much on account of its belfry as from the point of view of Strasbourg pâté . . . (146) The bourgeois magnanimously allows any unpalatable leftovers that he cannot consume himself to be sold off at a reduced price and served up in indigestible stews in restaurants frequented by the lesser brethren (146-147). Perhaps there is some deep-seated psychological explanation for SaltykovShchedrin’s apparent disapproval of the Frenchman’s enjoyment of abundant good food. After all, Saltykov-Shchedrin is a man who came from a well-to-do noble family but whose parents withheld food from the children to the extent that the children had to rely on the family’s serfs to satisfy their hunger. His mercenary mother would not let the children eat the plentiful cream from the milk of the family’s herd, preferring to store it in the cellar (where it would eventually turn sour) so that any guests who might chance to call could be treated to it and impressed by the family’s wealth.19 Whatever the explanation for the response which the sight of French food provokes in him, Saltykov-Shchedrin seems not merely to feel that if the working man cannot partake of the feast then nobody else should be allowed to partake of it but also to regard the worldly pleasures in which the bourgeois is able to indulge as intrinsically sinful. Saltykov-Shchedrin is also shocked, as Fonvizin, Pogodin and Dostoevskii had been, by the sexual mores of Paris. In Saltykov-Shchedrin’s case one suspects that behind this shock there lies some personal combination of prudery, misogyny and fear of women as well as cultural difference. Saltykov-Shchedrin seems to view woman as a being with no interests other than in dressing and comporting herself in ways that show off her figure to best advantage. One cannot imagine anything more pitiful than a human being engrossed from head to foot in the display of her attributes [atury, from French atours, literally “finery”]. But the cultivated woman of our time is almost entirely concerned with just that. And not just the young tête de linotte [feather-brain], but the old woman as well. Nothing interests her, not a book (except for pornographic literature), not a picture (except for pornographic photographs), not a landscape (except for pornographic cabinets particuliers [i.e. private rooms, e.g. in restaurants]). Nothing except a concern that her clothing should hide her curves as little as possible. She even eats as much as she can not in order to stay alive and satisfy her gluttony but because, she has been told, good and ample food helps to put on good and ample attributes. (68-69; see also 7-8)

19

See Sanine, p. 16.

236 Chapter 8 It may be that this view is coloured by experience of marital incompatibility and domestic acrimony: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s wife, an attractive woman who was thirteen years his junior, did not share his intellectual and cultural interests and took pleasure in cosmetics, shopping and light-hearted society. Perceived by her husband as empty-headed, she apparently bore his irritability and waspish tongue with composure but was given to saying in his later years: “The sooner you die the better.”20 Whatever the deep springs of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s attitude towards the other sex, the impression that emerges from Across the Border is that women as a whole are no less alien to Saltykov-Shchedrin than the Germans, the French or the working man of any nationality, and considerably more intimidating than any of these. The women who flit in and out of his narrative are not significant actors, with the sole exception of George Sand, whose literary status perhaps detaches her from other members of her sex. Rather they are mistresses, temptresses, adulteresses, protagonists in the trivial fiction of the Third Republic and sources of sexually transmitted disease. Every day brings some new nakedness, the narrator complains; some further part of a woman’s bust is revealed, or a woman’s clothes increasingly take on the form of sculpture, clinging to her body. It is not surprising that among a people whose impulse is to cast off women’s clothes the art of conversation in the salon is dying. Indeed the salon has been replaced by the club with the cabinet particulier, where gluttony and adultery reign (158-159). The city that had once been a torch-bearer for the rest of the world had become, since the Crimean War, a “treasure-house of female nakedness and comestible allurements” (116). The pervasive sense of satiety among the French bourgeoisie, its lack of horizons, its gourmandizing and licentiousness are all manifested, SaltykovShchedrin believes, in French literature. Following Herzen and Dostoevskii in analyzing art forms in vogue at the time of his visit, he holds the bourgeois responsible for this impoverishment. Mythologizing the youth of his own generation, he draws a contrast between the literature of the 1840s, which he believes is “heroic,” and the contemporary “Realism,” as he insists on calling the movement led by Zola. The former, represented by George Sand, Victor Hugo, the less talented Eugène Sue and even Balzac (despite his “socio-political indifferentism”), stirred hearts and minds and devoted themselves to dissemination of the “ideals of the future in the most accessible form.” Russian literature and criticism in the 1840s had been inspired by this literature. Zola and his followers, on the other hand, are interested above all in the human body and dwell on people’s physical capacity and amorous exploits (151-153). In particular Saltykov-Shchedrin deplores Zola’s novel Nana (1880). “Imagine a novel,” he inveighs, in which the principal character is a potent female torso not covered even by a fig-leaf, as accessible as a highroad and presenting no definitions other than the “distinguishing characteristics” which signify its sex. Then put in place as a pendant to this potent torso a corresponding number of male torsos which also present nothing other than the distinguishing characteristics that signify their 20

Makashin, Poslednie gody, pp. 405-406.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 237 sex. And then when all these torsos have been put in place in the proper manner, and when, at the author’s command, a setting has been created around them with props in the latest fashion, the distinguishing characteristics gradually start to move and a bestial drama unfolds before the reader’s eyes... (154) The novel is perceived by Saltykov-Shchedrin as satisfying bourgeois demands and as indicative of bourgeois tastes and leanings. There will come a time when the bourgeois is even more sated than he is now and Zola will be able to describe more explicitly lesbian scenes of the sort that in Nana are still muted.21 Some of Zola’s slavish imitators go even further in naturalistic description (154-155). Thus French “Realism” is degenerating into pornography. Admittedly the government does pursue the authors of such works and the bourgeois praises the government for its severity, but on the quiet the French bourgeois, Saltykov-Shchedrin alleges, is a “pornographer to the marrow of his bones” (158). Like Herzen and Dostoevskii again, and like Pogodin too, Saltykov-Shchedrin is also hostile to the political order that the bourgeoisie supports. The latest variant of this order is the well-fed, solid “république sans républicains” (135) moulded by Thiers in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Saltykov-Shchedrin despises Thiers, who did everything to reconcile the timorous bourgeois to the word “republic.” He effortlessly paid off the reparation to the Prussians ahead of schedule, then he suppressed the Commune and, to conclude with, he disbanded the National Guard. But most importantly he pointed to a new channel for French chauvinism by making it clear that in addition to military glory there was the glory of economic and financial superiority of which one could boast just as reasonably as one could boast of military victories, and with less risk too. (140-141) Nor is Saltykov-Shchedrin’s narrator any more impressed by the democratic institutions of the Third Republic than Dostoevskii had been by the Corps Législatif at the time of the Second Empire, even though the franchise has been extended. The representatives elected by universal manhood suffrage who now sit in the two chambers seem hardly any different to the narrator from the representatives elected by limited suffrage who sat in the assemblies that existed in the time of Charles X and Louis-Philippe (160). The narrator attends a sitting of the Chamber of Deputies at Versailles, or claims to have done so, and hears Clemenceau speak for three hours, “in a very ordinary, colourless, limp way,” in favour of an amnesty for former communards which it had already been decided not to grant (128-129). The oratory here is weak, Saltykov-Shchedrin believes, because the deputies speak not out of any impassioned conviction but because they have a duty, as members of political parties, to contribute to debate from time to time. Orators have lost the ability to kindle and audiences the ability to be kindled, at least in the realm of ideas as opposed to the realm of prosaic material matters such as duties, taxes and 21 Zola was already known to Russian readers. His monthly “Paris Letters,” in which he for the first time set out his theory of Naturalism and the “experimental novel,” were published in The Messenger of Europe between 1875 and 1880: see Makashin, endnotes, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, pp. 587590.

238 Chapter 8 the laying of new railway lines (130). As for liberals, they continue to be characterized as prone to equivocation (122).22 Saltykov-Shchedrin finds himself in a difficult position when he comes to assess the value of the political institutions of the Third Republic. For all the shortcomings of the Chamber of Deputies, he is bound to wish that there were something similar in Russia, where there was still no legal means of expressing political views except in a more or less oblique form through writings in the “thick journals” such as Notes of the Fatherland, which he himself now edited. He admits that it could be objected to his critique of the Third Republic that France, unlike Russia, does have universal manhood suffrage (160). And yet he also finds it hard to accept the form that French political institutions have taken almost a century after the French Revolution and continues to display an idealism that makes him baulk at the “money-changing character” that French existence seems to be assuming (132). Anticipating the suggestion from liberal quarters that it is now necessary to come down to earth and arrange things so that people will live as well as possible here and now, Saltykov-Shchedrin pleads that their ultimate goal will only be achieved when there is a firm enough foundation in “spheres beyond the stars,” in other words when practical activity is inspired by ideals. In the absence of ideals some military dictator like Mac-Mahon, who had been President at the time of SaltykovShchedrin’s first visit to France, in 1875-1876, will shoo off those who aspire to change (131). Saltykov-Shchedrin’s dilemma – whether imperfect democratic institutions and limited practical achievement in the economic realm were worthwhile goals for idealists who had harboured grander, utopian dreams in their youth – illustrates the problem facing the Russian intelligentsia at a juncture when its messianic expectations were collapsing. Alongside his ritual disparagement of the French bourgeoisie, it should be added, Saltykov-Shchedrin indulges an equally stereotypical romanticization of the French working man. If the bourgeois is unmitigatedly bad, the working man is spoken of with at least cautious respect. His favoured status is indicated by the fact that when Saltykov-Shchedrin discusses him, as when he discusses Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and its French humanist sources, his tone becomes untypically serious. At the same time the working man is enigmatic, for he is an alien being to Saltykov-Shchedrin, like the Russian peasant to the intelligentsia as a whole. Disconcerted by the range of guises in which the worker is presented in the press – as Bonapartist, Legitimist, opportunist, socialist, cleric, free-thinker and drinker (143) – Saltykov-Shchedrin undertakes his own unwittingly patronizing attempt to study and characterize him by visiting (or so he claims) his suburban haunts. The task proves impossible, though, because the working man’s private life is lived in out-of-the-way places which the foreigner neither can nor wants to penetrate (and also because demonstration of an interest in the workers’ question might attract unfavourable attention from the Russian authorities) (144-145). Saltykov-Shchedrin assumes that the French working man cannot be grateful for the few scraps he receives from the bourgeois table and imagines that his enmity must be secretly 22

Ibid., p. 580.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 239 building up. However, the working man cannot express his anger while troops loyal to the bourgeoisie surround the city (148). Nor does the state of the workers’ movement in 1880 give grounds for optimism that the bourgeois regime will soon collapse (160-161). The French workers, then, offer no hope that might alleviate the gloomy impression that Paris under the Third Republic makes on the narrator. Thus Across the Border reflects the profound disillusionment of a radical Westernizer with what has become of the civilization that once inspired him. European life in general seems by 1880 to have lost a trait that Saltykov-Shchedrin had previously thought was characteristic of it, namely a capacity for steady historical progress.23 More particularly the new German state headed by Prussia displays a threatening militarism, while the economically successful French bourgeois model is devoid of higher, moral qualities of the sort that the idealistic Russian intelligentsia prized. This bourgeois model is decisively rejected as a possible solution to Russian problems, in a symbolical way, in a post scriptum to the fourth sketch. By now back in St. Petersburg, Saltykov-Shchedrin reports that as he writes he hears the sound of the cannon in the Peter and Paul Fortress, commemorating the anniversary of the expulsion of Napoleon’s grande armée from Russia on 25 December 1812 (161). There was therefore no longer any reason to go to Paris other than to have one’s trousers cut in a modish way. Food for thought now had to be sought not in distant places, but at home (116). RUSSIA AND HER RELATIONSHIP TO THE WEST Discovery, or confirmation, of the defects of foreign countries does not enhance his homeland in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s eyes, as it had in some or many respects enhanced the Russia of Karamzin, Pogodin, Herzen and Dostoevskii. The canvas of Russia that is painted in Across the Border is, like all Saltykov-Shchedrin’s depictions of it, as unremittingly gloomy as his depiction of Prussia and France. Anything in Russia that is seen as in any way out of the ordinary, SaltykovShchedrin complains, is felt to require suppression. Theft, misappropriation, squandering property that has been entrusted to one or ruining other people through one’s actions are felt to be private matters into which other citizens or the state should not intrude. Those who try to expose corruption because they have the wellbeing of their nation at heart are perceived as out of order, even subversive (80-82). Everybody in Russia is discontented now, or at any rate all civilized (kulƍturnye) people are, for those who are not civilized do not have time to be discontented (19). Saltykov-Shchedrin is even sceptical that the position of editors of journals will be eased by the proposed introduction of control of the press through the law-courts (rather than by means of administrative repression), a measure for which there was widespread public support (102-104).24 23

Makashin, “Za rubezhom,” ibid., pp. 542-543. See Makashin, endnotes, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, p. 573. Saltykov-Shchedrin has concerns about committal procedure, the nature of the court to be used for dealing with offences relating to publishing, the use of imprisonment in connection with such offences and the fact that men of letters 24

240 Chapter 8 Official Russia is typically represented in Across the Border by Count Tverdoonto, one of the fictitious characters based on living persons to whom reference was made in the second section of this chapter. Tverdoonto believes that Russia needs efficient district police chiefs more than it needs material prosperity and that the poverty of the masses need not cause difficulty for the authorities. “Our whole problem,” he confides to Podkhalimov in his inelegant bureaucratic register, is that we too readily arouse questions about lack of affluence. If we remind a hungry man about food then in so doing we, as it were, artificially cause him to think about a need of that sort. And about affluence as well, without fail. Whereas if we hadn’t done it then probably in nine cases out of ten the most unaffluent people would have considered themselves affluent enough, in the event of appropriate reminders, to fulfil on time the obligations incumbent upon them. (91-92) He exploits the alleged national partiality to alcohol, which he believes will prevent the Russian people from becoming truly virtuous. Podkhalimov. But you are forgetting, Your Highness, that the excise-duty from spirits makes up a good part of our budget, and consequently... The Count. Not only do I not forget it, I think about it all the time. And in fact on one occasion, when I was questioned on this subject, I replied like this: if the Russian peasant were to give up the consumption of spirits of his own free will then one would have to compel him again, by gentle means, to return to them. (92-93) He accepts that in trying to realize his grand idea of tearing up the weeds and giving the corn room to ripen he may have been too severe and indeed has torn up good crops along with the weeds (90-94). Nor does the fact that Tolstoi is currently out of office provide much comfort to Saltykov-Shchedrin, for he is sure that the former minister will in due course return to some important position, perhaps with a brief to make empty promises that will placate liberal opinion (101). Oppressive as life in Russia is, nevertheless Russia is where the narrator of Across the Border would rather be. He experiences anguish (toska) there, to be sure, but at least he has the illusion when he is in his homeland of being able to do something, to call for help and seize a robber by the arm, whereas when abroad he is forced to yield to a stultifying despondency (unynie) (79). In any case the enigmatic future of “poor, run-down” Russia makes the country far more interesting to Saltykov-Shchedrin than other countries such as Germany, in whose capital, for example, the very stones cry out that tomorrow is bound to be the same as yesterday (57-59). Russia may yet have a futurity that differs from that of the sterile bourgeois world that the narrator is studying. Debate about the relative destinies, strengths and weaknesses of Russia and the west is conducted in Across the Border in the light of the dialogue mentioned above between two peasant boys, one German and one Russian, which takes place in a could not afford to pay heavy fines: Za rubezhom, ibid., pp. 102-104.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 241 dream that the narrator has in the train on his outward journey to Berlin and which is related in the opening sketch. The narrator dreams that in a German village he meets a neat seven- or eight-year-old boy in trousers and that he introduces this boy to a scruffy Russian peasant boy of the same age who is wearing a long shirt without trousers. The two boys fall into a conversation which the narrator presents as a play in one scene and which develops in allegorical form Saltykov-Shchedrin’s earlier considerations about the relative economic productivity of Prussia and Russia and their differing politico-economic circumstances. The boy in trousers represents the German working man in a society of developed capitalism which has Grossbauerin (that is to say, large-scale farmers) personified by Mr Hecht. He is well fed and clothed and his parents receive a fixed wage. He sees advantage in a contract that establishes a clear relationship between employer and employee and contrasts this situation with the situation that obtains in Russia, where the peasant grumbles at his lot. The German boy with trousers represents an ancient culture with a solid stock of knowledge, a brilliant literature and free institutions. He looks on Russians as lower organisms who for twenty years have been boasting that they have made gigantic strides. They even speak about some ‘‘new word” that they claim to have uttered – Saltykov-Shchedrin is referring here to a claim made recently by Dostoevskii25 – but in truth, the German boy believes, they are poorer than ever and their souls are enslaved by the emergent capitalist Kolupaev. The boy’s trousers are therefore a symbol of the maturity of a nation where people are allowed to use their abilities to promote their own and the general good and are not intimidated or obliged to do things that are useless. The boy without trousers, on the other hand, is unimpressed by the apparent security of the German working man. As the following passage from their conversation makes clear, he prefers the arbitrary, Asiatic rapacity of Russia’s immature capitalist society, on the grounds that the Russian working man has entered into no binding agreement and therefore has greater freedom than his German counterpart to rebel in the near future. Boy in trousers. Do you know what I think, Russian boy? You ought to come and stay with us! Mr. Hecht would gladly have you as a Knecht. Just think about it: how do you sleep when you’re at home, what do you eat? But here they’ll give you a good strip of felt to sleep on and as for food, even on working days there’s pork fat and peas! Boy without trousers. That’s good food... And is it true, German, that you’ve sold your soul to the devil for a farthing? Boy in trousers. You’re talking about Mr Hecht, I suppose?... Because my parents get a certain wage from him... Boy without trousers. Well yes, that’s just what I’m talking about: you’ve sold your soul for a farthing! Boy in trousers. Just a minute! They say even worse things about you, that you’ve given away your soul for nothing at all. 25

See Dostoevskii, PSS, Vol. 26, pp. 136-149, especially p. 148. Saltykov-Shchedrin ridicules Dostoevskii’s claim: see Za rubezhom, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, pp. 79-82.

242 Chapter 8 Boy without trousers. You’re talking about Kolupaev, are you? Well, brother... we’ll talk about that again.. We’ve had enough of him, Mi-ster Ko-lupa-ev! (39) The Russian boy thus anticipates a “holiday in [his] street too.”26 However, it is not just the capitalists who are appearing in post-reform Russia from whom the Russians will shortly liberate themselves. They will also free themselves from the grip of the German state, which is alleged to have taken Russia captive, and from the Germans as a people, whom the boy without trousers regards as heartless oppressors of the Russian working man, merciless pedagogues and dull-witted administrators. (Saltykov-Shchedrin is echoing the widespread belief in the intelligentsia that the undesirable elements of Russian statehood are Germanic. The German blood in the royal house and the prominence of Germans in the nineteenthcentury tsarist administration provided the grounds for such dubious claims.) For it was the German, the boy without trousers believes, who inspired proizvol (that is to say, the arbitrariness that the Russian intelligentsia identified as the fundamental attribute of autocracy) and who was autocracy’s most implacable and willing instrument (32-42). In his travelogue as a whole and in the dialogue between the boy with trousers and the boy without trousers in particular Saltykov-Shchedrin makes a contribution both to the debate that had been going on since the 1840s about the function and importance of the peasant commune in Russian life and about the broader question that was beginning to preoccupy the radical intelligentsia concerning the fate of capitalism in Russia.27 More specifically, he engages with current Populist views on these matters. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own position in this debate about the possible benefits to Russia of the development of capitalism and further innovation on the western model is somewhat equivocal, as his initial response to the wellhusbanded Prussian landscape had been. Although in the years following the death of Nekrasov he worked closely with the Populist journalist Mikhailovskii on the editorial board of Notes of the Fatherland, he was sceptical about the possibility of erecting the utopia of which Populists dreamed on the foundation of the peasant commune. He takes the long-established Westernist view of the commune as an institution serving the fiscal interests of the state, a convenient and economical means of gathering taxes under a system of collective guarantee. It is also clear in Across the Border that Saltykov-Shchedrin believes, pace the Populists, that Russia is destined to pass through the same stages of historical development as the west. The Russians will not abolish political economy (Russians tended in the nineteenth 26 Saltykov-Shchedrin is hinting here at the possibility of peasant revolution and also taking issue with Dostoevskii’s admiring view of the Russian people as passive. However, in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s sympathy for the Russian boy there may also be a trace of Dostoevskii’s belief that people will jib at the conformity of the ant-hill. On the degree to which the “conversation” is a polemic with Dostoevskii see S. Borshchevskii, Shchedrin i Dostoevskii; istoriia ikh ideinoi borƍby (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelƍstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956), pp. 339-341, and Makashin, endnotes, in SaltykovShchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, pp. 563-564. 27 On the debate about the degree to which capitalism had established itself in Russia at this juncture, see especially Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 243 century to use the term “political economy” as a synonym for “capitalism,” as we have already seen). Saltykov-Shchedrin also challenges the Populist belief that every poor peasant, as a member of a commune, has at his disposal a plot of land and that Russia therefore cannot have a “proletariat.”28 The Populist claim that Russia may escape the “ulcer of proletarianism,” he argues, overlooks two facts. Firstly, there is a huge mass of petit-bourgeois town-dwellers who have long since had no means of support other than their own labour, and whose numbers have been swollen since the emancipation by an influx of former household serfs. Secondly, Kolupaevs have already appeared and are eager to exploit the peasant’s labour. It is the interests of these parasitic rural capitalists, not the interests of its own members, that the commune now protects (17-18).29 It is also an underlying assumption of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s analysis of the Russian countryside that Kolupaev is assisted by the government, in other words that the development of capitalism is supported by the state: quibus auxiliis, “with whose help,” he asks as he observes the rise of Kolupaev (18, 46). Thus Saltykov-Shchedrin does not endorse the Populist shibboleths concerning the development of capitalism in Russia and the Russian peasant commune. On the other hand he does tend to agree with the Populists that the benefits of capitalism to which the boy in trousers draws attention – material prosperity, thriving agriculture and respect for property among the people – are not so valuable that it is worth mortgaging one’s soul for them by entering into a contract (58). Furthermore, he is broadly in sympathy with the classic Populist strategy of “going to the people,” to which the members of The Black Partition (including Plekhanov) still subscribed while The People’s Will was mounting its terrorist campaign. He defends this strategy in the second sketch of Across the Border, which begins with a discussion of contact between the intelligentsia and the rural masses, although it seems to be for an educative rather than a revolutionary purpose and in order to ensure social cohesion that he wants the “going to the people” to continue to take place. It should not be thought reprehensible, he insists, for the educated man to wish to go to the countryside to see how the peasants live or perverse for him to share with the peasant information that might raise the peasant’s intellectual and moral level. In fact the country cannot prosper, he contends, unless the peasant does have knowledge and aspires to improve his position. If members of the intelligentsia had to explain themselves to the police whenever they showed a natural concern for their less privileged neighbours and tried to raise them to their own level, then the Russian countryside was bound to continue to suffer from “cultural absenteeism.” In that event rural Russia would remain coarse and the peasant wild. Indeed such absenteeism posed a potential threat to the nation’s political stability (44-47). 28 Saltykov-Shchedrin, in common with most of his Russian contemporaries, does not use the term “proletariat” in the strictly Marxian sense of an urban industrial working class but in the broad sense of wage-labourers. 29 In this respect Saltykov-Shchedrin anticipates the challenge to Populism mounted by Plekhanov in his writings of the 1880s, notably Our Differences, following his emigration and conversion to Marxism. Here Plekhanov argued that capitalism was ineluctably developing in Russia, in the countryside as well as the towns, and that under its impact the village community was being divided into a class of exploiters and a class of wage-labourers: see Nashi raznoglasiia, in Plekhanov, SS, Vol. 2, pp. 91-356.

244 Chapter 8

AFTER 1 MARCH 1881 The last two sketches of Across the Border, written in Russia after the assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881, reflect the different conditions and mood that obtained after the tsaricide and anticipate the harsh governmental reaction to that event. The new sovereign, Alexander III, refused to accede to the demands for a general amnesty for political prisoners and for the convocation of a political assembly that were put to him by the Executive Committee of The People’s Will in a letter written with the help of Mikhailovskii in the days following the assassination.30 He quickly and indefinitely shelved Loris-Melikov’s proposals – which his father had been discussing on the morning of his assassination – for the establishment of commissions, consisting of local representatives, who would discuss legislation before its was submitted to the State Council.31 A devout Orthodox, Alexander III was strongly attached to traditional values, narrowly interpreted. He was easily manipulated by his mentor Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod throughout Alexander’s reign, a firm opponent of constitutionalism and himself the author of the manifesto of 29 April in which Alexander vowed to defend his absolute power.32 Loris-Melikov resigned from his post in May 1881 and the reactionary Pan-Slavist Count Ignat'ev was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in his place.33 The failure of the revolutionary movement to bring about social improvement or political reform, the reactionary policies pursued under Alexander III and the death or senescence of prominent writers and thinkers combined to produce a mood of unprecedented despondency in the intelligentsia during the 1880s. It was an “age of social philistinism,” as the intellectual historian Ivanov-Razumnik designated it.34 The desire to serve the people yielded to a concern to pursue selfish interests and insulate oneself from the misfortunes which harsh reality could inflict. Students began to think not of abandoning their studies in order to go to the people in a spirit of self-sacrifice but to complete their courses and then live their lives within the law. The great expectations of the previous decade gave way to a preoccupation with “small deeds,” that is to say legally permissible attempts to bring about minor temporary or local amelioration rather than sudden and universal regeneration. The onset of this period of official reaction and of despondency and pragmatism 30 Literatura Partii Narodnoi Voli, ed. by B. Bazilevskii [V. Iakovlev] (Paris: Société Nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1905), pp. 903-908. 31 On these proposals see e.g. Zaionchkovsky, pp. 179-187. The proposals, if implemented, would not have resulted in any great diminution of autocratic power, for the commissions were intended to have only a consultative function. 32 On Pobedonostsev see especially Robert F. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). 33 Ignatƍev was to be replaced in that position in 1882 by Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, i.e. Tverdoonto in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s travelogue. 34 See the chapter under this heading in Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli, 2nd ed., 2 Vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1908), Vol. 2, pp. 290-335.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 245 among the intelligentsia is recorded in the closing sketches of Across the Border. Russia, Saltykov-Shchedrin complains in the sixth sketch, is a world where private correspondence is read, people’s homes are searched and “knowers of the heart” (serdtsevedtsy), that is to say secret police, are ubiquitous (195-197). Conservatives, for whom the assassination has provided a pretext for introduction of policies that they favour, are exultant. They shed crocodile tears and plan measures – Saltykov-Shchedrin observes with wry absurdity – to abolish the human race. Even the impotent liberals live in danger now: Saltykov-Shchedrin pictures them sitting alone in their homes in St. Petersburg waiting for the police to come and arrest them. People have no real business or confidence in the morrow and therefore resort to aimless loafing and fatalistically submit to a life in which they are occupied by stultifying trivia (191-194). The narrator reprises the theme of selfpreservation, the instinct to save one’s skin, which he had broached on the opening pages of the work as he set off for a spa on his doctors’ advice (222, 230). This pessimistic mood is reflected in the allegorical playlet “The Pig Triumphant, or a Conversation between a Pig and Truth” that is interpolated in the sixth sketch of the cycle. The pig in the playlet assumes that the sun, which it has never seen from its sty, is a false doctrine and that it has no need of freedom in order to keep its nose in the trough and wallow in the dung. It challenges Truth’s assumptions that there is some general human truth that is superior to the truth of the police station and that laws should give equal protection to all. Eventually, egged on by the raucous public, it attacks and begins to devour Truth (200-201). The seventh letter, which ostensibly deals with the narrator’s train journey home (although Saltykov-Shchedrin himself has long since returned by the time he writes it), is a vehicle for further reflection on the governmental reaction in Russia in the wake of the assassination. During his journey the narrator is questioned in a rather intrusive and intimidating way by a Russian fellow-passenger, who turns out to be a member of a provincial zemstvo (that is to say, of one of the district councils set up in the 1860s in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs). The councillor claims to know the common people well and believes from his close observation of them that they are unlikely to be lured from the right path. At the same time he has apprehensions about the future, because the intelligentsia, he thinks, has nothing in common with the narod, lives apart from it, draws its sustenance from foreign sources and seeks to put into practice ideas which are alien to the people, thus injecting poison into a healthy organism. He questions the pretensions of this intelligentsia, which has no “soil,” to national leadership. Men such as the councillor see opportunities for advancement in the new conditions. They are quick to cast doubt on the “patriotism” of people like the narrator and want them to “say a sober little word.” The councillor is thus used by Saltykov-Shchedrin as a mouthpiece for conservative views that were in the ascendant after 1 March. More specifically, Saltykov-Shchedrin is conducting a polemic with Katkov, editor of the reactionary daily newspaper The Moscow Gazette (for which people like the narrator’s interlocutor are said to have a fondness) and the former Slavophile and now virulently Pan-Slavist Ivan Aksakov, who in 1880 had begun to edit a new

246 Chapter 8 weekly publication, Rusƍ (231-236).35 In this ominous climate Saltykov-Shchedrin begins to grapple with a question which he believes he could have answered without hesitation forty years before, in his optimistic, idealistic youth, namely whether history offers hope (198-199). He now teeters on the brink between historical optimism and pessimism. In a manuscript with a version of the beginning of the sixth sketch that is somewhat different from the published version Saltykov-Shchedrin argued – weakly and unconvincingly – that history does indeed provide solace. Like Granovskii (who was at the height of his fame and influence in the 1840s, when Saltykov-Shchedrin was a young man), he expresses an optimistic belief in a law of progress in history. He advances two lame reasons for taking this optimistic view. Firstly, if one did not take such a view one would have to accept that life was the plaything of contingency. Secondly, the forms of society do improve, “the facts of human activity” – whatever Saltykov-Shchedrin may mean by this phrase – are broadened, hitherto unknown social depths are constantly being illuminated and new historical forces emerge.36 It is difficult to know what status to accord the jejune, vague and poorly expressed remarks in this unpublished draft. At any rate a darker impression of the fate of modern mankind is conveyed in the published version of the closing sections of Across the Border. History, Saltykov-Shchedrin points out here, nurtures lies and ignorance as well as a “progressive increase in truth and light.” It offers no comfort to generations whose whole life passes in the slow and difficult endeavour to promote truth and justice. While modern man is obliged to seek “unity with the people” (real unity, that is, not the false unity advocated by Ivan Aksakov) by bringing light to people flailing in darkness, it must be admitted that at the present time the sullen peasant mistrusts the intelligentsia and resists such approaches. Only by sharing its plight, by suffering its leprosy with it, as SaltykovShchedrin puts it, can the intelligentsia reach the mass. Meanwhile the unfortunate intelligentsia is locked in a struggle to the death with “triumphant modernity.” Its members are stuck in life’s “vice” and will not be released until all their blood has been squeezed out, whereupon they will be thrown into a pit with more and more corpses from whose mass history will in time produce its “consolations” (226-228). This gloomy, if banal, prognosis seems to be confirmed in the conclusion of Across the Border by the reappearance of the Russian boy without trousers from the narrator’s dream on his outward journey. Now the boy is a well-dressed young man working as a porter. He is wearing trousers and has entered into a contract with Razuvaev. Russia seems to be destined after all to enter a period of mature capitalist development on the western model (241-243). Saltykov-Shchedrin’s leaning towards historical pessimism in the final two sketches of Across the Border indicates that horizons are narrowing in Russia after 35 See Makashin, endnotes, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, p. 601. On Katkov see Martin Katz, Michael N. Katkov: A Political Biography, 1818-1887 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1966). On Ivan Aksakov see Stephen Lukashevich, Ivan Aksakov, 1823-1886: A Study in Russian Thought and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 36 See Makashin, endnotes, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, p. 594.

Saltykov-Shchedrin: Across the Border 247 the assassination of Alexander II, as they had been in France, in SaltykovShchedrin’s view, under the Third Republic. Saltykov-Shchedrin underlines the point in the last sketch of his work by drawing a distinction between rare, radiant individuals who have unshakable faith in their ideals (he has in mind a Petrashevskii or a Chernyshevskii, both of whom he greatly admired) and more ordinary natures. The former, he claims, possess such faith that the fulfilment of ideals is not even a question of time for them. They have already come into being, these ideals, they are there before their eyes, they can be touched, and there is no way that an implacable reality can puncture this beautiful certainty of theirs. (224) Saltykov-Shchedrin acknowledges that he personally had been unable to create this type, the “positive hero” driven by intense conviction whom Turgenev, Chernyshevskii himself and Dostoevskii had portrayed in their fiction with varying degrees of success,37 although he had attempted on more than one occasion, he says, to do so. Indeed he doubts whether any Russian artist would in present circumstances possess the faith and all-encompassing vision necessary for this task. For the hero of the hour, after 1 March 1881, is a mediocrity, a man of relative truth, relative goodness, and relative happiness. He lives because he is caught in life’s vice; but live though he does, he is troubled by no clever conundrums. He carefully scrutinizes the way things now are and does his utmost to adapt to them; he seeks a truth which is possible rather than absolute truth and comes to terms with it; and finally he willingly accepts “convenience” as a synonym for happiness and submits to this definition. On the whole this is a man whose needs are uncomplicated and whose ideas are not lofty and who will make compromises when need be . . . (225) For this pragmatic “average person” the “consolations of history” will lie in the distant future (as they do, we might add, for some of the characters created by Chekhov, who was embarking on his literary career at this time). SaltykovShchedrin’s discussion of the transformation of the ambitious idealist into a soberminded pragmatist anticipates the preparedness of the intelligentsia to satisfy itself with “small deeds” in the age of reaction. The spirit of the new decade is grotesquely and cruelly evoked in the narrator’s story of two old privy counsellors whom he encounters in Paris: for five months they have been engaged on a project to compile statistics on the use of the city’s pissoirs, thus focusing their attention on one limited objective that will satisfy some small public need (217-219). *

*

*

Once again the travelogue, in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s hands, has been exploited for the polemical ends of an author exploring the question of the relationship between 37

In the characters of Insarov in On the Eve, Rakhmetov in What is to be done? and Myshkin in The Idiot respectively.

248 Chapter 8 Russia and Europe. In his representation of western European society SaltykovShchedrin retouches the portrait of the bourgeois and the liberal that had become stereotypical not only among Russian radical writers but also in the conservative nationalist camp. In sum the French bourgeois is avaricious, hypocritical, sated and idle and has limited horizons. He is also gluttonous and has a taste for pornography. No political representative of the class is spoken of as having anything to commend him. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s criticisms of the French Chamber of Deputies illuminate again the attitude of the Russian intelligentsia, which is ambivalent at best, towards representative political institutions and its scepticism about the value of eloquence. Like the criticisms of the bourgeoisie expressed by Herzen and Pogodin (with whose writing on Paris Saltykov-Shchedrin is familiar (122)), and like Botkin’s partial defence of the bourgeoisie too, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s observations on French political life also have pertinence to debate in Russia in their time. Indeed his explicit comparison of the French liberals whom he observes to his liberal compatriot Korsh (131)38 points up their Russian topicality. More broadly Saltykov-Shchedrin’s account of his journey to the west serves as a vehicle for his reflections on domestic matters of crucial contemporary importance to the Russian intelligentsia, such as the development of capitalism in Russia, the advantages and shortcomings of representative political institutions, the relationship between the Russian intelligentsia and the narod and the role of the intelligentsia in the reactionary climate after the assassination of Alexander II. The question of Russia’s relationship to the west that Across the Border explores is hardly less pressing or enigmatic towards the end of the nineteenth century than it had been when Fonvizin had set out on his journey to the German states and France just over a century before. Still the Russian observer struggles to come to terms with the relative prosperity of the west, its more efficient economic and administrative organization, its ancient and mature traditions of thought and literature and even its material comforts, culinary sophistication and sexual mores. At the same time Saltykov-Shchedrin, writing in an age of Russian military decline, diplomatic reverses and frustration among the educated class, was prey to a despondency that had not affected Fonvizin in an age of imperial expansion and burgeoning national self-confidence. He also had to wonder to what extent, if any, the great expectations harboured by the Russian intelligentsia in the middle of the nineteenth century, when he had nailed his own colours to the Westernist mast, should be sacrificed in the pursuit of those undoubted benefits, such as relative wealth and political freedom, that the western model of civilization seemed to promise. His conclusions are understandably anxious, characteristically gloomy, tentative and equivocal.

38

See Makashin, endnotes, in Saltykov-Shchedrin, SS, Vol. 14, pp. 582-583.

Conclusion

As Chaadaev was acutely aware when he wrote his first “Philosophical Letter” in 1829, peoples need to feel that their existence has continuity and is informed by certain values if they are not to drift without a compass in a sea of contingency. The writers whose accounts of travels in western Europe have been examined here, with the exception of the ingenuous early-modern traveller Piotr Tolstoi, address – each in his own way – the problem that Chaadaev famously articulated. They seek to lend shape, meaning and direction to the life of a people who were now emerging into the European world, conscious of their backwardness but also aware of their power and sensing a futurity of their own. They pursued the task of national selffashioning by exploiting a malleable literary genre that enabled them implicitly to define Russianness by contrast with what was not Russian. The alien other that they observed could be sub-divided into various forms (notably English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swiss), but it often also had a unity that transcended local differences. The accounts that they produced might be felt to have illustrated the power of the written word to affect reality, inasmuch as the conventionalized representations of western peoples that they offered established themselves as objective data for future writers and had a lasting impact on Russian attitudes. Their accounts also reflected the fact, to which previous scholars have often drawn attention, that an image of Europe or the west has had central importance for Russians in their quest for self-definition. Most of the Russians who came into contact with the western European world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Russians who were most critical of that world, did admire western civilization and drink deeply of it, as Herzen and Dostoevskii, for example, both acknowledged in their travel writing. Moreover, Russian differences from the European other tended to be forgotten as soon as differences from an African or Asiatic other came to be considered. As Nicholas Riasanovsky has pointed out, even those Russian thinkers (Official Nationalists, Slavophiles and Native-Soil Conservatives) who “rose against ‘Europe,’ in the name of a distinct and different Russian identity, retained a completely and

249

250 Conclusion explicitly ‘European’ attitude towards Asia.”1 It would therefore be an exaggeration to say that the writers examined here were altogether dissociating themselves from European civilization in their travel accounts. Their own consciousness had been profoundly affected by the westernization of Russia that had been taking place since Petrine times and in the final analysis they identified Russia, if its position had to be defined in terms of membership or non-membership of Europe, as a European nation rather than an Asiatic one. In any case their writings (or at least the writings of several of them) do furnish examples of western individuals and types, albeit stylized examples, who seem exemplary: various German and Swiss men of letters, Rousseau, the Alpine shepherd, the burgher of Zürich and the English family at their hearth, for Karamzin; the Spanish caballero for Botkin; the French working man, the Italian peasant and socialists such as Blanqui for Herzen; and French writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, especially George Sand, and the French working man for Saltykov-Shchedrin. Nevertheless the travel writers who have been examined – and who, it is claimed, represent a cross-section of Russian political opinion over a long period – seem on balance to have viewed the western world, in which the bourgeoisie was in the ascendant or dominant throughout the period in question, with strikingly uniform distaste. On the whole they disliked the vibrant city with its contrasts of wealth and poverty and they were disoriented by the city’s rapid tempo of life or its mechanical rhythms. (Even Karamzin, who was more adaptable and apparently more sympathetic to western civilization than most, is not altogether exempt from this generalization.) They tended to view western political assemblies as cockpits of futile conflict. The rights and freedoms that westerners enjoyed they regarded as mere forms that provided opportunities for empty oratory and self-promotion. They were perturbed by the high value that westerners placed on private property. The western personality they perceived as materialistic, individualistic and selfish. At some deep level, they felt, idealism had ebbed away from the western world by the mid-nineteenth century and a warming poetry had disappeared from people’s lives. Like Martha in the biblical parable that Pogodin cites, westerners (or at least the dominant bourgeois) had become distracted by mundane cares and bustle from a larger, life-giving truth. This essential vacuity and the loss of poetry and meaning seemed to lend western civilization, strong as it appeared on the surface, a fundamental fragility on which Russian writers often reflected with a certain Schadenfreude. Indeed Europe brought to the Russian mind the image of a graveyard well before Dostoevskii’s Ivan Karamazov planned his pilgrimage to the now dead source of all that was precious in post-Petrine Russian culture. Pogodin, as if in response to Chaadaev’s image of Moscow as Necropolis, presents the derelict mansions of the Venetian nobility as “just a vast graveyard.”2 Herzen, in a similar vein, views Rome as “the greatest cemetery in the world” and reuses the image in the final letter of his cycle as he tries to pick his way through the 1 Riasanovsky, “Asia through Russian Eyes,” in Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples, ed. by Wayne S. Vucinich (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), p. 9; see also pp. 14-16 on Pogodin. 2 Barsukov, Vol. 5, p. 232.

Conclusion 251 wreckage of the failed revolutions of 1848.3 The emergence of the Russian state, from Petrine times, as a major European power; the steady influx into Russia of western objects, institutions, practices, habits and ideas; Russians’ observation of the west in an age of burgeoning nationalism; and Russians’ own interest in the elusive concept of narodnostƍ, which was itself a western borrowing: these factors impelled the Russian educated elite to try to define what it meant to be Russian. However, if Russian thinkers considered only those aspects of a people’s culture that began in the late eighteenth century to seem crucial criteria for the determination of national identity (for example, religion, institutions, way of life), then it was hard for Russians to find defining attributes of Russianness on which most of them could agree. For Pogodin and Dostoevskii such attributes included attachment to the Orthodox religion and the passive, yielding nature of the Russian people that was manifested, these writers believed, in the people’s devotion to Orthodoxy. For Herzen, on the other hand, Russianness lay in an instinctive allegiance to community that supposedly found expression in the peasant commune (although in presenting this view Herzen drew on the patriarchal image of rural Russia formed by the Prussian Baron von Haxthausen). Again, for Saltykov-Shchedrin, as a jaundiced member of the intelligentsia in an age of reaction, being Russian perhaps implied above all a sense of shared experience of repression and suffering under an institution, autocracy, that others, such as Karamzin and Pogodin cherished. And yet it was not impossible to arrive at a more widely shared notion of Russianness, if one considered Russia not in isolation but in comparison or opposition to a conception of Europe and if a proud sense of the difference of the Russian people from the most advanced western peoples could be articulated. The exposure of western vices, it has been argued in this book, implied the existence of countervailing Russian virtues. By presenting westerners in the guise of Caliban, a homo monstruosus, Russian writers could portray their own people to best advantage. Thus Russians, as they are implicitly characterized in the travel writings that have been examined (including even those of Karamzin and Botkin, despite the seemingly “Westernist” orientation of those writers), are free, or relatively free, of the defects that were felt to be rooted in the nature of those western peoples who furnished the dominant models for the newly europeanized Russian civilization. For example, Russians are not materialistic or acquisitive. They do not have a strongly developed sense of private property. Commerce does not regulate their existence. They have not succumbed to mechanical routine. For these reasons they are not at home in the cold bourgeois world of France and England. (They tend by contrast to feel comfortable in the more primitive and supposedly more natural and spontaneous societies of Spain and Italy.) They live relatively simple and authentic lives (or at least the common people do). Their morals are not irremediably corrupted (although innocence is imperilled among the westernized, urbanized elite, the beau monde of Karamzin and Lev Tolstoi or Griboedov’s “damaged class of semi-Europeans”). The French or English liberal economic and political model 3

Herzen, SS, Vol. 5, pp. 81, 212.

252 Conclusion is inappropriate for them, since they are perceived by romantic conservatives as suited to some paternalistic, essentially classless, apolitical community or by Herzen as capable of inhabiting a true socialist republic bound together by consanguinity. Even the status of the Russian language as an essential attribute of Russianness, it might be added, was enhanced by the fact that another European tongue posed a challenge to it, French being the principal medium of social intercourse at court and among the aristocracy during the period of Russia’s most intense cultural westernization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus Russia, benighted as it might have seemed under tsarist despotism, could represent innocence, authenticity, youth, life and the renewal of civilization when juxtaposed with the knowing, mannered, senescent, moribund west. In this way Russians staked a claim to be a fresh force, a people who could now take up the torch that the west was no longer able or worthy to bear. The responses of the travel writers who have been examined in this book to western civilization in their respective times might be seen as an expression of nostalgia for a patriarchal, pre-industrial age. In that golden age the fading gentry in which most of these writers originated had an attachment to the Russian land that was evoked in classical Russian literature by the image of the seigneurial house approached by an avenue lined with lime trees. Equally these responses to western civilization might be seen as a manifestation of an understandable resistance on the part of a nation that was undergoing cultural colonization to the cosmopolitan universalism characteristic of the stream of European thought that flowed from the Enlightenment. (It is significant in this connection that the European countercurrent that finds expression in Romanticism and German idealism, whose representatives set such store by national distinctiveness and take such interest in its manifestations, so strongly colours much of the writing examined here.) In mounting this resistance to cultural colonization and attempting to assert – or invent and construct – an independent national identity Russian travel writers perhaps provide a useful corrective to overweening western self-confidence. They seem to issue a warning that remains valid in the early twenty-first century against imperial ambition of one sort or another (cultural and economic as well as political and military) and against the aggressive pursuit of material wealth and power at the expense of social and spiritual wholeness. Observing the bourgeois west of their time they express reservations that continue to be widely shared in wealthy industrial societies about materialism (in both the philosophical sense of denial of a spiritual dimension to human life and the everyday sense of excessive devotion to material possessions and financial success). Their reflections on the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, the shortcomings of democratic institutions, social atomization, the breakdown of commitment to community and loss of a sense of personal identity may still seem fresh and topical. Their anxieties about erasure of ethnic identity have renewed resonance in a world that is conscious of globalization. At the same time it is arguable that these Russian writers, and more generally the intelligentsia that they represented, impeded their country’s political, social and economic development by their denigration of or coolness towards democracy, their lukewarm attitude towards western law and judicial systems, and

Conclusion 253 the impression they give that it is reproachable to aspire to prosperity or even to enjoy material things. For the reader of Fonvizin, Pogodin, Herzen, Dostoevskii and Saltykov-Shchedrin (and Goncharov, and even Karamzin) could at times altogether lose sight of the benefits that may flow from parliamentary institutions, a legal system practising advocacy, private property ownership and the bourgeois virtue of assiduity. The Russians, as represented by the travel writers examined here, would be altogether more ambitious, at least until the late nineteenth century, than the inhabitants of the bourgeois world as they defined it. They would chafe at the restrictions – temporal laws, rules, conventions, proprieties – imposed by the wellordered, economically effective western societies in which industrious and thrifty citizens aspired to enjoy the fruits of their labour and sought legal protection for their persons and property. They would aspire not to the mundane liberties prized by western liberals but to a broader, less easily definable freedom, volia, which straddles the English concepts of “freedom” and “will” and emerges as a slogan of the revolutionary parties of the second half of the nineteenth century. They were not much interested in political reforms in small increments, the “small deeds” eventually advocated by Saltykov-Shchedrin’s liberal contemporaries. They thirsted instead for some podvig, the great spiritual exploit or feat to which certain characters in Dostoevskii’s fiction aspire. Their restless expansiveness is consistent with the immensity of the Russian landscape. They yearn to be free of constraint like the Cossacks who from the sixteenth century had roamed at the limits of the Muscovite state and to whom Karamzin and Herzen referred with a certain awe. However, such a voyage beyond the confines of the western world, figuratively speaking, was fraught with danger, like the post-Homeric voyage of Odysseus that Dante imagines in Canto xxvi of his Inferno. Driven by a restless urge to explore, Dante’s Odysseus persuades his crew to venture westward to “the uncharted distances” beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where they might taste the “new experience/ Of the uninhabited world behind the sun.”4 The Russians too, once western civilization had provided them with the means to become self-aware, aspired to leave behind the orderly European universe, where peoples had diligently set about the practical, humdrum tasks of organizing their physical landscape, tapping natural resources, improving their material well-being and refining their social life. With exceptions such as Botkin who enjoyed relatively little influence, they therefore set forth into the open sea which Herzen evoked, in search of one of the various utopias of their imaginings. And yet in so doing they risked discovery of only a dystopia more terrible than the flawed, limited civilization that they were leaving behind, or even, like Dante’s Odysseus, self-destruction.

4

The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, Cantica 1, tr. by Dorothy L. Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949), pp. 235-237.

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Index of names and subjects

Academies 29, 37, 38, 86, 98, 156 Academy of Arts 49 Academy of Letters 49 Academy of Sciences 33, 49 Acton, Edward xxv Adam 68 Adams, Percy 5 Addison, Joseph (1672-1719) 4; Remarks on Several Parts of Italy 4 Adultery 70, 93-94, 207, 208, 234, 236 Aglaia (almanac) 74 Aksakov, Ivan Sergeevich (1823-1886) 117, 245, 246 Aksakov, Konstantin Sergeevich (1817-1860) 113, 117 Alcázar (in Seville) 149 Aleksandr Lycée 221 Aleksei, Prince: see Alexis, Prince Alexander I (Aleksandr Pavlovich, 1777-1825; Emperor of Russia 1801-1825) 52, 73, 74, 114 Alexander II (Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 1818-1881; Emperor of Russia 1855-1881) xxiv, 21, 28, 160, 198, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 244, 246, 248 Alexander III (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 18451894; Emperor of Russia 1881-1894) xxii, 244 Alexander III, the Great (356-323 BC) 54 Alexis, Prince (Aleksei Petrovich, son of Peter I; 1690-1718) 27-28, 46 Alexis, Tsar (Aleksei Mikhailovich, 1629-1676; Tsar of Russia 1645-1676) 25, 33, 39 Alhambra (in Granada) 149 All Sorts (Vsiakaia vsiachina) Almanacs 74 American Civil War xvii American War of Independence (1775-1783) xvii, 57 Anarchism 145 Anatomy 126 Anglo-Saxons 120

Anne, Empress (Anna Ioannovna, 1693-1740; Empress of Russia 1730-1740) 50, 52 Annenkov, Pavel Vasil'evich (1812 or 1813-1887) xvii, xxi, 21, 77, 110, 116, 144, 145, 148, 162, 178; Parisian Letters xxi Ant-hill, image of 201, 204, 217, 218, 242 n. Anti-Semitism 44-45, 59, 141, 162 Aonides (Aonidy) 74 Apocalypse 216 Apraksin, Fiodor Matveevich (1661-1728) 25 Aqueducts 206 Arabs 149, 152-153, 159 n., 163. See also Moors Arbitrariness ( proizvol ) 156, 242 Arcadia 83-84 Argamakova, Feodosiia Ivanovna (née Fonvizina; 1744-?) 56, 57, 58, 65, 66 Arina Rodionovna (Pushkin’s peasant nurse) 215 Aristocracy 93, 94, 105, 106, 200, 252. See also aristocrats, nobility, noblemen Aristocrats 52, 60, 69, 70, 89, 127, 136. See also aristocracy, nobility, nobleman Artel' (Russian workers’ co-operative) 168, 177, 193 Assiduity 162, 164, 253 Astronomy 153 Augustus II, the Strong (1670-1733; King of Poland 1697-1733) 41 Aulnoy, Marie Catherine La Mothe, comtesse d’ (1650 or 1651-1705) 150 Austrian Empire 121 n., 138, 172-173 Austrians 42 Autobiography xxii, 6, 179 Autocracy xxiii, 16, 49, 87 n., 108, 115, 116, 117, 118, 136-137, 140, 156, 193, 241, 251 Avvakum, Archpriest Petrovich (1620 or 16211682) 43 Baal 209, 216 Backwardness, advantages of 65, 175, 194 Baedeker, Karl (1801-1859) 3

265

266 Index of names and subjects Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814-1876) 113, 115, 143, 144, 145, 161, 165, 190 Ballad 107 Ballet 49 Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850) 236 Bandits 163. See also brigandage, crime Bank of England 127 Baratynskii, Evgenii Abramovich (1800-1844) 17 Barbès, Armand (1809-1870) 189 Baroque 33, 37 Barrot, Camille-Hyacinthe-Odilon (1791-1873) 186 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques (1716-1795) 80, 100; Journey of the Young Anacharsis in Greece 80 Bastille, storming of (in 1789) 88 Baths of Caracalla (in Rome) 136 Batiushkov, Konstantin Nikolaevich (1787-1855) 17, 21 Battle of Borodino 115 n. Battle of Custoza (1848) 174 Battle of Novara (1849) 174 Battle of Temesvár (1849) 173 Battle of Waterloo 103 Bayard, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de (c. 1473-1524) 159 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de (17321799) 182 Beccaria, Cesare, Marchese di Bonesana (17381794) 49 Bedlam 90 Beggars 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 78, 159 Belgians 108, 139 Belinskii, Vissarion Grigor'evich (1811-1848) xviii, 72, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 130, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 161, 162, 165, 168, 169, 204, 212, 221, 233 Bell, The (Kolokol ) 168 Benckendorff, Count Aleksandr Khristoforovich (1783-1844) 119 n. Berelowitch, Wladimir 71 Berkov, N. xxv Berlin, Sir Isaiah xxv, 111, 169, 170, 188 Berry, Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, Duchesse de (1798-1870) 171 Bervi, Vasilii Vasil'evich (pseudonym N. Flerovskii; 1829-1918) xvii, 15-16, 17, 224, 226; Condition of the Working Class in Russia 226 Bestuzhev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (pseudonym Marlinskii; 1797-1837) 18, 19 Bismarck, Otto von (1815-1898) 198, 223, 224 Black Partition (Chornyi peredel; revolutionary organization founded in 1879) 225, 243 Blanc, Jean-Joseph-Charles-Louis (1811-1882) 171, 172, 204, 212, 233 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste (1805-1881) 189, 250 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-1375) 38

Bolero 157 Bolshevik Revolution (1917) 198 n. Bonapartists 133, 171, 172, 238 Bonnet, Charles (1720-1793) 77, 80 Boswell, James (1740-1795) 2, 107 Botany 126, 153 Botkin, Sergei Petrovich (1832-1889) 144, 222 Botkin, Vasilii Petrovich (1811-1869) xvi, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 11, 12, 21, 103, 105, 110, 116, 143-165, 181 n., 183, 184, 193, 194, 199, 200, 231, 248, 250, 251, 253; “Letter from Italy” 145; “Russian in Paris” 145; essays on England in 1859 145, 200; “Fragments of Travel Notes about Italy” 145; Letters on Spain xix, xxii, 145, 148, 183, 184 Bourbon, Louis Henri Joseph, duc de (1756-1830) 57 Bourbons 103, 156 Bourgeois ethos 12, 163, 164, 183 Bourgeois morals 194, 234 Bourgeois order xviii, 182, 186, 215 Bourgeois society 125, 127, 131, 189, 200-201 Bourgeois values 129, 184 Bourgeois world xxiii, 12, 128, 131, 170, 181, 195, 205-210, 240, 251, 252, 253 Bourgeoisie 12, 13, 23, 104, 106, 144, 158, 161164, 165, 174, 178, 182-183, 184-185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 195, 199, 204, 205-208, 224, 226, 230, 234, 235, 236-237, 238-239, 248, 250 Brambeus, Baron: see Senkovskii Bratstvo (i.e. brotherhood) 218 Bridges 29, 32, 126, 205, 216, 218 Brigandage 151-152 British Museum 90, 93 Bronevskii, Semion Bogdanovich (1786-1858) 18 Brosses, Charles de (1709-1777) History of Voyages to the Lands of the Southern Hemisphere 2 Brotherhood: see bratstvo, fraternité Brunel, Isambard Kingdom (1806-1859) 126 Brunetti, Angelo, known as Ciceruacchio (18001849) 189 Bruun, Geoffrey 105 Bulgakov, Iakov Ivanovich (1743-1809) 56, 57, 65 Bulgarian language 139 Bulgarians 139, 176, 227 Bulgarin, Faddei Venediktovich (1789-1859) 119, 121 Bull-fighting 149-150 Burke, Edmund (1729-1797) 83 Burke, Peter 106, 107, 108 Buzard, James 66 Byron, Lord George Gordon (1788-1824) 111, 125, 146, 159 n.; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 146

Index of names and subjects 267 Caballero (Spanish gentleman) 159, 165, 250 Cabet, Étienne (1788-1856) 171, 204, 233 Cafés 81, 126, 209. See also coffee-houses Callisthenes, of Olynthus (c. 360-328 BC) 54 Cantabrians 157 Capitalism 9, 12, 13, 115, 176, 226, 241, 242-243, 246, 248 Card-playing 82, 84 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881): On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History 145 Carnivals 35, 36, 46 n. Carr, E. H. 91 n., 167 Cathedrals 29, 34, 61, 67, 77, 86, 88, 149, 181, 190. See also Cologne Cathedral, Duomo, Kazan' Cathedral, St. Paul’s, St. Peter’s Catherine I (née Marta Skowronska; second wife of Peter I; 1684-1727; Empress of Russia 1725-1727) 28 Catherine II, the Great (Sophie-FriederikeAuguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, 1729-1796; Empress of Russia 1762-1796) xv, xxiv, 6, 7, 11, 16, 17, 18, 20, 47, 49-50, 51 n., 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 64, 74, 75, 98, 118, 156, 197, 211, 214, 219 Catholic Church 44, 67, 68-69, 130, 131, 191 Catholic churches 39, 40, 44 Catholic clergy 46, 130 Catholicism 130-131, 136 Catholics 44, 45, 130, 136 Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène (1801-1857) 172, 182, 196 Cavour, Count Camillo Benso (1810-1861) 203 Celts 138 Censorship xxiii, 109; in Austria 173; in France 104 Chaadaev, Piotr Iakovlevich (1794-1856) 116, 124-125, 135, 175, 204, 249, 250; “Apology of a Madman” 175; first “Philosophical Letter” 14, 116, 125, 249 Chamber of Deputies, in France: in Restoration period 104; under Louis-Philippe 132, 133, 171, 185; in Third Republic 224, 237, 238, 247 Chamber of Peers (in France under LouisPhilippe) 132, 133, 134 Chardin, Jean (also Sir John Chardin; 1643-1713) 2, 33, 53, 80 Charity 36-37, 44, 58, 67, 93, 134 Charlemagne (742-814, King of Franks from 768, Emperor 800-814) 97 Charles II, the Bold (1433-1477; Duke of Burgundy 1467-1477) 78 Charles III (1716-1788; King of Spain 17591788) 156 Charles IV (1316-1378; Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 1355-1378) 59

Charles X (1757-1836; King of France 18241830) 104, 170, 171, 185, 237 Charles XII (1682-1718; King of Sweden 16971718) 27 Charles Albert (1798-1849; King of PiedmontSardinia 1831-1849) 173, 174 Chartists 105 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René (17681848) xvii, 111, 125; Genius of Christianity 125; “Last Abencerraje” 151 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860-1904) 247; Island of Sakhalin 16 Chemistry 106 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828-1889) xvii, 60, 133, 145, 151 n., 158 n., 169, 184, 185 n., 199, 204, 208, 214, 216, 217, 218, 226, 247; What is to be done? xvii, 215, 247 n. Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind (Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma) 73 Chinese, the 45, 141 Chivalry 165. See also knight-errantry Chocolate 34 Choirs 35 Christ 81 n., 131 Christianity xxiii, 10, 39, 43-45, 70, 97, 120, 125, 130-131, 136, 139, 147, 185 Chulkov, Mikhail Dmitrievich (1743-1792) 50 Church services 39, 43-44, 61, 69, 131, 136 Churches 29, 31, 32, 39, 44, 58, 59, 68, 86, 148. See also Catholic churches, Orthodox churches Cicero (Marcus Tullius; 106-43 BC) 59 Ciceruacchio: see Brunetti Cicisbei (Italian lovers) 70, 94. See also adultery Cid, El (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar; c. 1043-1099) 159 Circassians 19 City, attitudes towards xviii, 34, 59-60, 67, 86, 128, 209-210, 250. See also urban world Classicism 76, 107 Clemenceau, Georges (1841-1929) 229, 237 Clergy: see Catholic clergy, Orthodox clergy, Russian clergy Clocks 29, 37 Coffee 34, 35 Coffee-houses 92, 127. See also cafés Cologne Cathedral 204, 219 Colosseum (in Rome) 147 Colosseum (in Verona) 66 Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506) 138 Commerce 61, 92, 127-128, 137, 163-164, 182, 251. See also trade Commercial ethos 128, 201 Common people 17, 88, 106, 107, 129, 138, 160161, 175, 181, 187, 188-189, 194, 195, 211, 214-215, 245, 251. See also narod, peasantry,

268 Index of names and subjects peasants, proletariat, Russian peasant(s), workers, working class, working man Communal landholding 194. See also peasant commune Commune: see peasant commune Commune of Paris (1871) 224, 237 Concert of Europe 104 Confucianism 54, 55 Congress of Berlin (1878) 228 Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) 103, 198 Conquest 1, 51, 100 Conservative nationalism xxiii, 12, 125, 130, 160, 202, 209, 220, 225, 226-227. See also nationalism, Native-Soil Conservatism, Official Nationality, Pan-Slavism, Slavophilism Considérant, Victor-Prosper (1808-1893) 204 Constantine the Great (late 280s-337; sole Roman Emperor 324-337) 147 Constituent Assembly (in Paris in 1848) 172, 178, 185, 186, 187 Constitution(s) 93, 103, 104, 155, 157, 172, 173, 185, 224 Contemporary, The (Sovremennik) 109, 143, 149, 178, 221, 222, 225 Continental System 182 Convents 29 Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851) xvii Corps Législatif (in France during Second Empire) 237 Cosmopolitanism 99, 140 Cossacks 19, 43, 96, 192 n., 253 Council of Ministers (in France in Third Republic) 224 Court, the 25, 26, 33, 39, 41, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 61, 66, 71, 175, 227, 252 Cousin, Victor (1792-1867) 186 Coxe, William (1747-1828) 3, 80 Craftsmanship 37, 38, 44 Craftsmen xvi, 34-35, 41, 163 Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot sieur de (Crébillon père, 1674-1762) 58 Crime 106, 151-152. See also bandits, brigandage, smuggling Crimean War (1853-1856) xxiv, 12, 21, 145, 168, 197, 198, 199-200, 201, 234 “Critically thinking minority” 110, 226 Croats 42, 173, 223 Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658) 94, 97 Cross, Anthony xxv Crystal Palace 203, 216, 218 Cupidity: see mercenariness Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1790-1857) 175, 177, 179; Russia in 1839 175, 179 Cyril, St. (c. 827-869) 138 Dagestanis 19

Dampier, William (c. 1652-1715): New Voyage round the World 5 Dancing 149, 152, 157 Daniil, Abbot (flourished early 12th century) 13 Danilevskii, Nikolai Iakovlevich (1822-1885) 226-227; Russia and Europe 226-227 Dante (Alighieri; 1265-1321) 38, 253 Davydov, Denis Vasil'evich (1784-1839) 17 Decembrist Revolt (1825) 52, 108-109, 112, 114, 156 Decembrists xvii, 112 Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731) 2 Democracy 94, 105-106, 132-133, 140-141, 174, 186, 187, 190, 252 Derzhavin, Gavrila Romanovich (1743-1816) 7, 50, 51, 74 Destouches, Philippe Néricault (1680-1754) 58 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (1492-1581?) 1 Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870) 111, 179; Hard Times 201 n. Diderot, Denis (1713-1784) 50 Diplomatic reports (stateinye spiski) 30 Doge (of Venice) 41 Doge’s Palace (in Venice) 148 Dostoevskii, Fiodor Mikhailovich (1821-1881) xviii, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 9, 12, 13, 22, 23, 58, 81 n., 109, 114, 129, 133, 141, 143, 175 n., 184, 201-220, 224, 225, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 241, 242 n., 247, 249, 251, 253; Brothers Karamazov 15, 250; Crime and Punishment xviii, 202, 212; Devils xviii, 14; Idiot 81 n., 247 n.; Notes from Underground 129, 202, 217; Winter Notes on Summer Impressions xix, xxii, 21, 201-220, 224, 225-226 Dress xv, 8, 33, 36, 42, 98, 138, 139, 149, 156, 157, 158, 162, 215 Drunkenness 36, 41-42, 106, 240 Druzhinin, Aleksandr Vasil'evich (1824-1864) 136 n., 200 Duchess of Orléans: see Hélène Duclos, Charles Pinot (1704-1772) 58 Duomo (cathedral in Milan) 34, 125, 147 Dupaty: see Mercier-Dupaty Dutch language 139 Duty 29, 30, 41, 55, 61, 74, 108, 137 n. Dystopian literature 6, 55 Education xv, 37, 51, 126, 146 Égalité 208 Egoism 95, 101, 199, 217-218. See also rational egoism, self-interest Egorov, B. F. xxv Egyptians 9 Elagin, Ivan Perfil'evich (1725-1796) 54 Eliseev, Grigorii Zakharovich (1821-1891) 222

Index of names and subjects 269 Elizabeth, Empress (Elizaveta Petrovna; 17091761 (OS)/1762 (NS); Empress of Russia 1741-1761 (OS)/1762 (NS)) 20, 49, 50 Eloquence 61, 87, 133, 208, 209, 247 El'sberg, Ia. xxv Emancipation of serfs (1861) xxiv, 13, 160-161, 198, 243, 245. See also serfdom Emin, Fiodor Aleksandrovich (c. 1735-1770) 50 Encyclopédistes 156 Engineering 106, 126 English language 77, 91, 203 English nobility 3 English, the xvii, 2, 23, 91, 94-95, 99, 101, 111, 127-128, 135, 137, 141, 146, 164, 165, 200, 201 Enlightenment xxiv, 8, 11, 16, 46 n., 75, 87 n., 101, 107, 112, 113, 115, 125, 156, 174, 212, 252 Erasmus, Desiderius (c. 1466-1536) 81 Eriksen, Thomas 10, 23 Esenin, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1895-1925) xviii; Iron Mirgorod xviii États du Languedoc 57, 60-61 European personality 218. See also national personality, western personality Existentialists 210 Exoticism 106, 111, 147, 152-153, 165 Exploration xxi, 1, 16, 81 Fadeev, General Rostislav Andreevich (18241883) 227; Opinion on the Eastern Question 227 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice (1716-1791) 98 Faliero, Marino (1274-1355; Doge of Venice 1354-1355) 146 Family, the xxiii, 55, 80, 83-84, 93-94, 101, 137, 250 Fandango 157 Fauriel, Claude (1772-1844) 159 n. Ferdinand I (1751-1825; Ferdinand IV of Naples 1759-1806 and King of the Two Sicilies 18161825) 103 Ferdinand I (1793-1875; Emperor of Austria 1835-1848) 173 Ferdinand II (1810-1859; King of the Two Sicilies 1830-1859) 173, 174, 178, 179, 181 n. Ferdinand IV: see Ferdinand I (1751-1825) Ferdinand VII (1784-1833; King of Spain MarchMay 1808 and 1814-1833) 103 Fet, Afanasii Afanas'evich (1820-1892) 143 Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) 2, 80, 93 Filioque (addition by western Church to Christian creed) 44 Finns 108 Fiodor, Tsar (Fiodor Alekseevich; 1661-1682; Tsar of Russia 1676-1682) 25 Fireworks 35

First World War (1914-1918) 197-198 n. Flattery 55, 61, 207 Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880) 32 Flemish language 139 Flerovskii: see Bervi Fletcher, Giles, the Elder (1548-1611) 1, 23 n. “Foggy Albion” 91 n., 95 Folk-song(s) 42, 107, 117, 138, 148 Fonvizin, Denis Ivanovich (1744 or 1745-1792) xix, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 7, 11, 22, 33, 45 n., 49-72, 74, 76, 77, 79, 82, 86, 90, 94, 98, 110, 126, 131, 133, 138, 141, 179, 185, 188, 192, 204, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213-214, 219, 235, 248, 253; Brigadier 53, 55, 58, 63, 65, 205, 214; “Callisthenes” 54, 62; Letters from France xix, 20, 56-65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 212; letters on German states and Italy xix, 66-71, 72; Minor 53, 61-62, 94; Selection of a Tutor 53 Fonvizina, Ekaterina Ivanovna (née Rogovikova; 1746-1796) 56, 59, 62, 65 Food 31, 34, 35, 45, 46, 66, 149, 234-235 Foote, I. P. 221 n. Forum (in Rome) 140, 147 Fountains 29, 31, 35, 37, 206 Fourier, François-Marie-Charles (1772-1837) 171, 174, 189, 204, 233 Fox, Charles James (1749-1806) 90 Franchise 104, 105-106, 171, 172, 182, 185, 188, 237. See also suffrage, universal manhood suffrage Francomania: see Gallomania Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) 223, 234, 235, 237 Frank, Joseph xxv, 22 n. Franks 120 Fraternité 218 Frederick William IV (1795-1861; King of Prussia 1840-1861) 173 Free Russian Press 168 Freedom(s) xxiii, 6, 19, 36, 52, 60, 64, 79, 82, 84, 88, 95, 101, 120, 131-132, 140, 141, 172, 185, 188, 190, 200, 207 n., 208, 217, 225, 245, 248, 250, 253. See also liberté Freemasonry 52, 113 Freemasons 73, 76 French language 55, 63, 71, 77, 91, 96, 139, 156, 157, 252 French nobility 57, 63, 104, 182-183 French Revolution (from 1789) 57, 73, 87-90, 103, 117, 171, 234, 238 French, the 2, 23, 56, 60, 61, 64, 72, 86-87, 88, 89, 101, 105, 133, 135, 136, 146, 188, 190, 204, 205, 207-208, 236 Fussell, Paul 111 Galleries 29, 67, 77, 149, 233 Gallomania 7, 55, 63, 214

270 Index of names and subjects Gambetta, Léon (1838-1882) 223, 229 Gambling 35 Gardens 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 67, 86, 87, 137138, 206, 233 Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882) 174, 203 Gas-lighting 201, 204, 209. See also streetlighting Gauls 120 Gellner, Ernest 8 Generalife (in Granada) 149 Geology 106 George III (1738-1820; King of Great Britain and Ireland 1760-1820) 90 German idealism 12, 111-116, 117, 125, 174, 182, 227, 233, 252 German language 77, 91 Germans 2, 71, 99, 119, 138, 141, 146, 147 n., 190, 211, 216, 230, 236, 242 Gertsen, Aleksandr Ivanovich: see Herzen, Alexander Gertsen, Natal'ia Aleksandrovna: see Herzen, Natalie Gertsen, Nikolai Aleksandrovich: see Herzen, Kolia Gessner, Salomon (1730-1788) 80, 83, 84 Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794) 93 Gilpin, William (1724-1804) 4 Girondins 117 Glinka, Fiodor Nikolaevich (1786-1880) 179 Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich (1804-1857) 149 Globes 38 Godunov, Boris Fiodorovich (c. 1551-1605; Tsar of Muscovy 1598-1605) 97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832) 3, 72; From My Life, Poetry and Truth 168-169 Gogol', Nikolai Vasil'evich (1809-1805) xxi, 14, 109, 119, 120, 121, 151, 156, 205; Dead Souls 14; Inspector General 230 “Going to the people” (1874) 14, 224, 225, 230, 243, 244 Goitres 82, 129 Golden age 83, 85, 89, 101, 234, 252 Goldsmith, Oliver (1730-1774) 205 Golitsyn, Prince Vasilii Vasil'evich (1643?-1714) 33 Golovnin, Vasilii Mikhailovich (1776-1831) 20 Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1812-1891) xxi, 109, 140, 201, 204; Frigate Pallas xxi, 21, 201; Oblomov 198, 253 Gondolas 35, 67 Gorchakov, Prince Aleksandr (1798-1883) 227 Gor'kii, Maksim (pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868-1936) xviii; “In America” xviii, 22 Gothic novels 205, 219 Goths 157 Grand Tour 3, 26, 52-53, 66, 79, 110

Granovskii, Timofei Nikolaevich (1813-1855) 109, 110, 113, 116, 133, 136 n., 143, 145, 158, 159, 181 n., 246 Graveyards 78, 135, 250-251. See also PèreLachaise Cemetery Great Embassy (of Peter the Great) 26, 29 n., 33, 137 Great Exhibition 216 Great Northern War (1700-1721) 10, 27, 49, 198 Grech, Nikolai Ivanovich (1787-1867) xx, xxi, 21, 119, 121, 179, 201 Greek Revolt (from 1821) 104 Greeks 43, 104, 107, 108, 138, 148 Greenfeld, Liah 7, 8, 9, 22, 117 Greenwich Hospital: see Royal Hospital Grévy, François-Paul-Jules (1807-1891) 224, 229 Grey, Earl Charles (1764-1845) 104 Griboedov, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1795-1829) 17, 205, 251; Woe from Wit 205, 215 Grigor'ev, Apollon Aleksandrovich (1822-1864) 202; To Friends from afar 21 Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl (1785-1863) 107 Grimm, Wilhelm Carl (1786-1859) 107 Grossdeutsch movement 173 Guide-books xxi, 3, 4, 16, 29 n., 30, 58, 86, 204 n. Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume (1787-1874) 139, 163, 171, 178, 181, 186, 233, 234 Gypsies 148, 152 Habsburgs 156 Haller, Albrecht von (1708-1777) 82, 83; “Alps” 82, 83 Hammarberg, Gitta xxv Hampton Court Palace 90, 121, 137 Handel, George Frideric (1685-1759) 90 Hanka, Vaclav (1791-1861) 139 Hanway, Jonas (1712-1786) 3 Harpsichord 62 Harvey, William (1578-1657) 1 Hastings, Warren (1732-1818) 90 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène (1809-1891) 205-206, 233 Haxthausen, Baron Auguste von (1792-1866) 175, 251 Hazard, Paul 2 Hebrews 107 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831) xviii, 111, 113-116, 117, 130, 147, 191; Logic 113; Phenomenology of Spirit 113; Philosophy of History 113 Hegelianism 113-116, 117, 143 Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856) 179, 204; French Affairs 204 Hélène, Duchess of Orléans (1814-1858) 186 Heraldry 36 Herberstein, Siegmund, Freiherr von (1486-1566) 1, 23 n., 38, 41

Index of names and subjects 271 Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744-1803) 8, 77, 107 Herodotus (484 BC?-between 430 and 420 BC) 1, 9 Herwegh, Georg (1817-1875) 168, 180 Herzen, Alexander (Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen; 1812-1870) xvii, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 11-13, 21, 22, 87, 91 n., 100, 101, 103, 105, 110, 115, 116, 123 n., 133, 141, 143, 144, 148, 158, 162, 165, 167-196, 197, 199, 200-201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212, 223, 226, 227 n., 234, 236, 237, 239, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253; “Again in Paris” 178; Dilettantism in Science 167; Ends and Beginnings 194, 200; From the Other Shore 168, 169, 178, 196; Letters from France and Italy xix, xxii, xxv, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 177, 178-196, 207; “Letters from the Avenue Marigny” 178, 179, 180, 182, 184, 192 n.; “Letters from the via del Corso” 178; Letters on the Study of Nature 167; “Letter to Ribeyrolles” 178; My Past and Thoughts 168, 179, 180; Who is to blame? 167, 180. See also Russian Socialism Herzen, Kolia (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Herzen; 1843-1851) 168 Herzen, Natalie (i.e. Natal'ia Aleksandrovna Gertsen, née Zakhar'ina; 1817-1852) 167, 168, 180 Hidalgo (Spanish gentleman) 163 Historical fiction 6, 97 Historiography xxii, 6, 74, 75, 96-97, 109, 120121, 139 Hobsbawm, Eric 7, 8 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1776-1822) 111, 146 Holbein, Hans the Younger (1497 or 1498-1543) 81 n. Holy Roman Empire 26 Homer (9th or 8th century BC) 100, 196; Odyssey 23, 196 Honour 36, 62, 69, 70, 71, 163, 183 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus; 65 BC-8 BC) 50 Horatian satire 222 Hospitals 29, 36, 58, 67, 206 House of Commons: see Houses of Parliament House of Lords: see Houses of Parliament Houses of Parliament 90, 94, 104, 132 Hughes, Lindsey 30 Hugo, Victor (1802-1885) 111, 148, 152, 205, 236 Humanism 39, 51 n., 59, 78 Hume, David (1711-1776) 93 Hungarian Diet (of 1848) 173 Hypocrisy 62, 188, 201, 207, 209, 222, 234, 248 Iakovlev, Ivan Alekseevich (1767-1846) 167

Icons 29, 40 Idealism: see German idealism Idyll 80, 83-85, 93, 129. See also pastoral Ignat'ev, Count Nikolai Pavlovich (1832-1908) 227, 244 Indians (North American) 107 Individual (lichnostƍ) 30, 47, 105, 111, 125, 128, 141, 146, 159, 169, 188, 190, 209, 210, 217, 220. See also personality Individuality: see national individuality Industrial age 8, 9 Industrial development 150, 154, 156, 162, 163, 164, 200 Industrial revolution 12, 15, 85, 106 Industry 49, 157, 162, 163 Inequality 135, 160, 209 Inns 32, 59, 66, 67, 77 Inquisition, Spanish 149 Instruction (Nakaz, written by Catherine II) xv, 49-50 Intelligentsia xxiv, 14, 16, 17, 46 n., 52, 54, 108, 110, 114, 120, 133, 136 n., 141, 143, 144, 151, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164, 165, 174, 185, 199, 202, 209, 211, 214-215, 226, 227, 234, 238, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252. See also radical intelligentsia Irving, Washington (1783-1859) 151, 152-153; Alhambra 151 Islam 153, 160 Italian nobility 70 Italian unification (1859-1861) 203 Italians 2, 42, 67, 69, 108, 131, 146, 147 n., 190, 191 Ivan III, the Great (1440-1505; Grand Prince of Muscovy 1462-1505) 135 Ivan IV, the Terrible (1530-1584; crowned Tsar of Russia 1547) 97, 131 Ivan V (1666-1696; nominal Tsar of Russia 16821696) 25 Ivanov-Razumnik (pseudonym of Razumnik Vasil'evich Ivanov) 244 Ivashina, E. S. xxv Izmailov, Vladimir Vasil'evich (1773-1830) 17 Jacobins 87 n., 89, 117, 187 Japanese, the 141 Jardin des Plantes (zoo in Paris) 126, 191 Jesuits 45, 130, 156 Jews 39, 44-45, 59, 78-79, 149 John (1167-1216; King of England 1199-1216) 93 John III Sobieski (1629-1696; King of Poland and Lithuania 1674-1696) 41 n. Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784) 107 Jones, W. Gareth 30 Joseph II (1741-1790; Emperor of Austria 17651790) 66

272 Index of names and subjects Journalism 73, 75, 119, 198, 222. See also polemical journalism Journals 50, 74, 143, 239. See also “thick journals” Judicial system xvii, xxiii, 16, 93, 126, 132, 155, 183, 187, 204, 252. See also jurisprudence, law(s), legal system July Monarchy (in France 1830-1848) 104, 162, 163, 170-171, 178, 181, 185, 186 June Days (in Paris in 1848) 172, 182, 187 Jurisprudence 39, 46. See also judicial system, law(s), legal system Juste milieu (i.e. golden mean, slogan of July Monarchy) 171, 185 Juvenalian satire 222

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-1803) 84 Klostermann, German Ivanovich (1756-1838) 65 Kneller, Sir Godfrey (Gottfried Kniller; 16461723) 97 Kniazhnin, Iakov Borisovich (1742-1791) 50 Knight-errantry 153, 158-159, 164, 181 n., 214, 217 Korolenko, Vladimir Galaktionovich (1853-1921) xviii; Speechless xviii, 21 Korsh, Valentin Fiodorovich (1828-1883) 248 Kosheliov, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1806-1883) 112 Kossuth, Lajos (1802-1894) 173 Kremlin 135 Kukol'nik, Nestor Vasil'evich (1809-1868) 119 Kupechestvo: see merchants

Kaempfer, Engelbrecht (1651-1716) 2 Kang-xi (K’ang Hsi) (1654-1722; Emperor of China 1661-1722) 45 Kankrin, Count Egor Frantsevich (1774-1845) 119 n. Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) 77 Kantemir, Antiokh Dmitrievich (1708-1744) 50, 51, 97 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766-1826) xxii, xxiv, xxv, 4, 9, 11, 20, 45 n., 50, 57, 73101, 103, 107, 109, 110, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 136, 140, 145, 154, 179, 193, 201, 204, 209, 239, 250, 251, 253; History of the Russian State 74, 90, 122, 204 n.; “Island of Bornholm” 74, 83 n.; Letters of a Russian Traveller xix, xxii, xxv, 4, 15, 20, 33, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76-101, 123, 146; Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia 74, 90; “Natal'ia the Boyar’s Daughter” 74, 78, 99; “Poor Liza” 74, 78, 84, 86; “What an Author needs” 75 Katkov, Mikhail Nikiforovich (1818-1887) 245 Kazan' Cathedral (in St. Petersburg) 148 Kelly, Aileen xxv, 169, 170 Kheraskov, Mikhail Matveevich (1733-1807) 50, 87 n., 96 Khodasevich, Vladislav Felitsianovich (18861939) 51 Khomiakov, Aleksei Stepanovich (1804-1860) 117, 204, 212 n., 234; “Reverie” 212 n. Kireevskii, Ivan Vasil'evich (1806-1856) 112, 117, 127 n., 158-159 Kireevskii, Piotr Vasil'evich (1808-1856) 117 Kirpotin, V. xxv Kiseliov, Count Pavel Dmitrievich (1788-1872) 137 Kiukhel'beker, Vil'gel'm Karlovich (1797-1846) 21 Kleindeutsch movement 173 Kleinmikhel', Count Piotr Andreevich (17931869) 119 n. Kleist, Ewald Christian von (1715-1759) 80

La Fontaine, Jean de (1621-1695) 122 Laborde, Alexandre Louis Joseph, comte de (1773-1842) 151 Laboulaye, Edouard René Lefebvre de (18111883) 229 Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869) 13, 171, 172, 186-187 Lampert, E. xxv Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia; revolutionary organization 1876-1879) 224-225 Landholding 160, 161. See also communal landholding, peasant commune Landscape 18, 38, 77, 82, 83, 84, 99, 101, 126, 129, 149, 154, 158, 179, 253. See also mountains, Nature, townscape Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741-1801) 77 Lavrov, Piotr Lavrovich (pseudonym Mirtov; 1823-1900) 110, 224, 226; Historical Letters 226 Law(s) xxiii, 60-61, 64, 68, 82, 92-93, 101, 132, 135, 141, 148, 155, 160, 164, 187, 195, 208, 226, 245, 252, 253. See also judicial system, jurisprudence, laws of nature, legal system, scientific laws Laws of nature 218 Layton, Susan 19 Lazzaroni (unemployed, scrounging common people in Naples) 123, 129-130, 138, 179 Le Vaillant, François (1753-1824) 2, 53, 80 “Learned guard” (uchonaia druzhina) 50 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre-Auguste (1807-1874) 186, 212 Left Hegelians: see Young Hegelians Legal system 132, 184-185, 187, 188, 253. See also judicial system, jurisprudence, law(s) Legitimists 170-171, 172, 238 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716) 2 Lemonade 34, 35 Lenin (pseudonym of Vladimir Il'ich Ul'ianov; 1870-1924) 222 Leopold II (1797-1870; Grand Duke of Tuscany

Index of names and subjects 273 1824-1859) 173, 174 Lermontov, Mikhail Iur'evich (1814-1841) 19, 125, 205; Hero of Our Time 19, 109 Liberal Westernism xxiii, 158-164 Liberal Westernizers 136 n., 200 Liberalism xxiii, 9, 116, 132, 133, 145, 158-164, 184, 185, 186-187, 199, 204, 251-252. See also liberals Liberals 60, 104, 156, 158-164, 173, 181, 185, 186-187, 189, 194, 197, 202, 208, 214, 216, 237, 238, 240, 245, 247, 248, 253. See also liberalism Liberté 208. See also freedom(s) Libraries 29, 31, 38, 86, 153 Lichnostƍ: see personality Literary criticism 109, 145, 221, 236 Lithuanians 41, 42 Liubomudry (Wisdom-lovers) 112-113, 125 Loanwords 50, 98. See also neologisms Locke, John (1632-1704) 2 Locks (on waterways) 29, 37 Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasil'evich (1711-1765) 7, 49, 50, 51, 52, 96, 97 London Protocol (of 1830) 104 Loris-Melikov (Count Mikhail Tarielovich, 18251888) 225, 230, 244 Lotman, Iu. M. xxv, 76, 87 n. Louis XI (1423-1483; King of France 1461-1483) 97 Louis XIV (1638-1715; King of France 16431715 (subject to regency 1643-1661)) 97-98 Louis XVI (1754-1793; King of France 17741793) 87 n., 89, 134 Louis XVIII (1755-1824; King of France by title from 1795, in fact 1814-1824) 103, 104, 185 Louis-Napoleon: see Napoleon III Louis-Philippe (1773-1850; King of the French 1830-1848) 104, 117, 133, 171, 178, 186, 233, 234, 237 Louvre 86, 206 Lubomirski, Hieronim Augustus (1647-1706) 35 Lucas, Paul (1664-1737) 2, 80 Luxembourg Commission (in France in 1848) 171, 172 Luxury 36, 45, 71, 86, 127, 134 Machtet, Grigorii Aleksandrovich (1852-1901) xviii Mac-Mahon, Marie-Edme-Patrice-Maurice, comte de, duc de Magenta (1808-1893) 224, 238 Magna Carta 93 Magyars 173, 223 Maiakovskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich (18931930): My Discovery of America xviii Makarov, Piotr Ivanovich (1765-1804) 20, 91 n. Makashin, S. A. xxv, 230 Makogonenko, G. xxv, 87 n.

Malia, Martin xxv Manners xv, xxii, xxiii, 2, 3, 4, 7, 55, 57, 63, 77, 149, 154, 162, 201 Marco Polo: see Polo Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180) 54 Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793) 87, 89 Markets 32, 181, 206 Marlinskii: see Bestuzhev Marmontel, Jean-François (1723-1799) 58 Marx, Karl Heinrich (1818-1883) 115, 177 n. Marxism 243 n. Masquerades 35, 84, 211 Mass(es) (i.e. church service(s)) 29, 44, 69, 191 Masson, Charles François Philibert (1762-1807) 3 Materialism (love of worldly goods) 127, 135, 137, 140, 162, 184, 192, 194, 207-208, 209, 220, 251, 252 Materialism (philosophical doctrine) 168, 199, 252 Mathematics 38, 153 Matveev, Andrei Artamonovich (1666-1728) 20 Maupassant, Henry-René-Albert-Guy de (18501893) 32 Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-1872) 174, 203 Medicine 153 Medievalism 106, 147 Melodrama 207 “Men of the 40s” 199 “Men of the 60s” 199 Menshikov, Prince Aleksandr Denilovich (c. 1670-1729) 28 Mercantilism 163 Mercenariness 62, 95, 100, 101, 127-128, 137, 146, 165, 182, 184, 207, 235. See also materialism Merchants xv, 36, 128, 143, 163, 164, 199, 230 Mercier-Dupaty, Charles Marguerite Jean Baptiste (1746-1788) 53, 80; Letters on Italy 2, 80 Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) 57, 74 Methodius, St. (825-884) 138 Metropolitan Railway (in London) 203 n. See also railways, trains Metternich, Klemens Fürst von (1773-1859) 104, 173 Michelet, Jules (1798-1874) 171 Mickiewicz, Adam Bernard (1798-1855) 139-140 Middle Ages 1, 44, 120, 125, 147-148, 155, 157, 218. See also medievalism Middle class 3, 94, 104, 105, 133, 163, 171 Mikhailov, Mikhail Larionovich (also M. I. Mikhailov; 1826-1865) 21 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich (18421904) 226, 242, 244; What is Progress? 226 Mikhel'son, V. A. xxv, 158 n. Mills 29, 33, 37 Miloslavskiis 25, 26, 27 Milton, John (1608-1674) 93

274 Index of names and subjects Mir: see peasant commune Miracles 40 Mirrors 33, 35 Modernization xxii, 49, 158, 165, 184, 199 Mohammed 45, 153 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622-1673) 58, 122 Monarchism 12, 90, 103, 105, 108, 113, 134, 190, 230 Monarchists 89, 104, 172, 224 Monasteries 29, 31, 38, 40, 44, 49, 58, 88, 161 n. Mongols 155. See also Tatars Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592) 78 Montenegrins 176 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de (1689-1755) 49, 58, 71 Monument (in London) 91 Moors 150, 151, 152-153, 155, 159, 160, 163 Moribundity (of western civilization) 47, 165, 181-182, 195, 196, 200, 252 Moritz, Karl Philipp (1757-1793) 53, 80; Journey of a German in England in the Year 1782 2, 80, 100 Mormons 210 Moscow Gazette (Moskovskie vedomosti) 245 Moscow Journal (Moskovskii zhurnal) 74 Moscow Messenger (Moskovskii vestnik) 119 Moscow Observer (Moskovskii nabliudatel') 109, 143 Moscow Pension for the Nobility 221 Moscow the Third Rome 10 Moscow University 49, 113, 118, 167 Moser, Charles 25 Moses 40 Mountains 18, 82-83, 84, 129 Murav'iov, Count Mikhail Nikolaevich (17961866) 229 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban (baptized 1618-1682) 149 Murray’s Handbooks 3 Muscovite, The (Moskvitianin) 119, 122 Museo burbonico (in Naples) 124, 125 Museums 29, 233 Music xxii, 3, 8, 42, 52, 59, 153 Musical instruments 35 Muslims 19 Muzhik: see peasantry, peasants Nakaz: see Instruction Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) 7, 11, 19, 103, 156, 171, 182 n., 186, 193, 197, 205 n., 239 Napoleon III (also Louis-Napoleon; CharlesLouis-Napoléon Bonaparte; 1808-1873; Emperor of the French 1852-1870) 171, 172, 174, 196, 197, 198, 200, 205-206, 208, 224, 234 Napoleonic Wars 15, 103, 108, 110, 110, 116, 156

Narod 15, 21, 202, 215, 245, 248. See also common people, peasantry, peasants, proletariat, Russian peasant(s), Russian people, workers, working class, working man Narodnichestvo: see Populism Narodnost' 8, 9 n., 11, 118, 157, 251 Narrator(s) xxv, 3, 5, 15, 16, 17, 57, 75, 76-77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 100, 122, 123, 180, 195, 203, 204 n., 209, 211, 213, 219, 229, 230-231, 236, 237, 239, 240-241, 245, 246, 247 Naryshkina: see Natal'ia, Tsarina Naryshkins 25 Natal'ia, Tsarina (Natal'ia Kirillovna, née Naryshkina, first wife of Tsar Alexis; 16511694) 25 National Assembly (in France in 1848): see Constituent Assembly National Assembly (in Third Republic in France) 223, 224 National character 41, 43, 61-62, 69, 76, 86, 87, 94-95, 97, 101, 137, 140, 141, 146, 151, 154, 159, 177, 187-188, 190, 195, 200, 204, 207, 218. See also national personality National Constituent Assembly (in Paris in 1790) 88 National distinctiveness 8, 9, 63, 65, 115, 117, 194, 213, 226, 252 National Guard (in nineteenth-century France) 134, 171, 182, 237 National identity xix, xx, 6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 21, 47, 97, 101, 111, 117, 135, 226, 251, 252 National individuality 7, 63 National personality xviii, xxi, 6, 116, 201, 213, 215, 220. See also European personality, national character, Slav personality, western personality National workshops (in France in 1848) 171, 172 Nationalism xx, xxiii, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 22, 99, 107, 116, 117, 135, 225-228, 251. See also conservative nationalism, Native-Soil Conservatism, Official Nationality, PanSlavism, Slavophilism Native-Soil Conservatism (pochvennichestvo) xxiv, 13, 69, 202, 215, 227, 249. See also conservative nationalism, Official Nationality, Pan-Slavism, Slavophilism Natural School (of Russian writers) 212 Natural sciences 199, 226 Naturalism 237 n. Nature 38, 67, 75, 78, 79, 82-85, 87, 129, 137-138 Neapolitan nobility 36 Nechaev, Stepan Dmitrievich (1792-1860) 18 Nekrasov, Nikolai Alekseevich (1821-1877 (OS)/1878 (NS)) 109, 143, 205, 222, 242; Who is Happy in Russia? 16 Neo-Classicism 4, 71, 75-76, 87, 93

Index of names and subjects 275 Neologisms 46, 57, 77 Nessel'rode, Count Karl Vasil'evich (1780-1862) 119 n. Nevzorov, Maksim Ivanovich (1763-1827) 15 New Time (Novoe vremia) 230 Newgate Prison 90 Newspaper(s) 29, 33, 71, 81, 127, 150 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642 (OS)/1643 (NS)-1727) 2 Nicholas I (Nikolai Pavlovich, 1796-1855; Emperor of Russia 1825-1855) xx, xxiv, 12, 18 n., 19, 21, 108-109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 137, 143, 167, 173, 177, 178, 196, 198, 199 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 82 Nikitin, Afanasii (early 15th century-1472) 13 Nikon (i.e. Nikita Minov, 1605-1681; Patriarch of Russian Church 1652-1667) 43 Nobility 34, 35, 36, 41, 51, 63, 71, 121, 154. See also aristocracy, English nobility, French nobility, Italian nobility, Neapolitan nobility, noblemen, Polish nobility, Russian nobility, Russian noblemen, Scandinavian nobility, Spanish nobility, Venetian nobility Noblemen 37, 47, 55, 62, 113. See also nobility, Russian nobility, Russian noblemen Normans 120 North, the 9 n., 17, 67, 100, 122, 146, 152, 153 Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela) 119 Nostalgia 96, 147, 233, 252 Nostoi (Greek poems) 23 Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski) 13, 18, 109, 143, 221, 222, 228, 238, 242 Notre-Dame de Paris 86, 128 Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenberg; 1772-1801) 112 n. Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1744-1818) 73 Obshchina: see peasant commune Odoevskii, Prince Vladimir Fiodorovich (18041869) 112 Official Nationalists 118, 136, 140, 162, 165, 195 Official Nationality xxiii, xxiv, 112, 118-119, 121, 123, 125, 130, 138 n., 202, 249 Ogariov, Nikolai Platonovich (1813-1877) 167, 180 n. Oken, Lorenz (1779-1851) 125 Okenfuss, Max xxv, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 47 n., 51 n. Olavide, Pablo Antonio José de Olavide y Jáuregui (1725-1802) 149, 156 Old Believers 43 Olearius, Adam (1599-1671) 1, 33 Oligarchy 41 Ol'shevskaia, L. A. xxv, 46 n. Omnibuses 126, 184 Opera 49, 50, 86, 88 Opera-houses 77, 206

“Oppositional” identity 10 Oratory 61, 62, 133, 186, 187, 204, 237, 250 Orchestras 35 Ordyn-Nashchokin, Afanasii Lavrentƍevich (?1680 or 1681) 33 Organs (musical instrument) 37, 67 Orient, the 14, 19, 23, 113, 148, 152-153, 191 Orientalism xvi, 106 Orientalists 23 Orleanists 133, 172 Orléans, Duchess of: see Hélène Orthodox believers 39, 43, 44, 51 n., 69, 117, 118, 130, 197, 227, 244 Orthodox Church 44, 114, 118 Orthodox churches 37 n., 39, 43, 44 Orthodox clergy 46 Orthodox culture 141 Orthodox monasteries 40 Orthodox practice 39 n., 43, 44, 136 Orthodox tradition 47 Orthodoxy 39, 43, 108, 114, 117, 118, 136, 137, 191, 202, 251 Orthographic reform 33 Ossian (Oisín) 107, 100; Fingal 100 Ostrovskii, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1823-1886): Thunderstorm 198 Ottoman Empire 27, 118, 138, 197 Ozerov, Vladislav Aleksandrovich (1769-1816) 50 Pacifism 100 Painting(s) xxii, 33, 38, 49, 58, 65, 67, 69, 79, 81 n., 110, 136, 138, 143, 149, 179, 189, 190 n. Palacký, František (1798-1876) 226 Palais du Luxembourg 86 Palais-Royal 86, 122, 127 Palazzo Pitti (in Florence) 67 Panin, Count Nikita Ivanovich (1718-1783) 20, 54, 55 n. Panin, Count Piotr Ivanovich (1721-1789) 56, 57, 65 Pan-Slavism xxiv, 13, 177, 226-227. See also conservative nationalism, Native-Soil Conservatism, Official Nationality, Slavophilism Pantheon (in Paris) 208 Pantheon of Foreign Literature (Panteon inostrannoi literatury) 74 Papacy 130, 193 Papal states 42, 104 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim; 1493-1541) 213 n. Paris Commune: see Commune of Paris Parliaments 41, 104 Partitions (of Poland in eighteenth century) 11 Paskevich, Count Ivan Fiodorovich (1782-1856) 18

276 Index of names and subjects Pastoral 22, 85, 87. See also idyll Paul the Apostle, St. (died between AD 62? and AD 68?) 40 Paul (Pavel Petrovich, 1754-1801; Emperor of Russia 1796-1801) 55 n. Pausanius (flourished AD 143-176) 1 Pavlenko, N. I. xxv Paxton, Sir Joseph (1801-1865) 216 Peasant commune (mir or obshchina) 120, 168, 170, 175-177, 193, 194, 199, 226, 242-243, 251 Peasant identity 17 Peasantry xv, 17, 51, 64, 188, 225. See also common people, peasants, Russian peasant(s), Spanish peasant Peasants 15, 17, 84, 120, 129, 134, 137, 138, 161, 189, 190, 224, 242, 243, 246, 250. See also common people, peasantry, peasants, Russian peasant(s), Spanish peasant People’s Will (Narodnaia volia; revolutionary organization founded in 1879) 225, 228, 230, 243, 244 Père-Lachaise Cemetery 122, 133 Pérez de Hita, Ginés (1544?-1619?) 150 Perry, John (1670-1732) 3 Persians 9 Personality (lichnostƍ) 30, 47, 114, 174, 209, 218. See also European personality, individual, national character, national personality, Slav personality, western personality Peter I, the Great (Piotr Alekseevich, 1672-1725; Tsar of Russia from 1682, sole ruler from 1696, Emperor 1721-1725) 2, 7, 10, 11, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 41, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 96, 97-99, 101, 117, 118, 120, 126 n., 136137, 157, 175, 202, 211, 230 n. Peter II (Piotr Alekseevich, son of Prince Alexis, 1715-1730; Emperor of Russia 1727-1730) 28 Peter III (Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of HolsteinGottorp, 1728-1762); Emperor of Russia 1761 (OS)/1762 (NS)-1762) 13, 52 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) 38 Petrashevskii, Mikhail Vasil'evich (1821-1866) 174, 202, 212, 247 Petrashevtsy (i.e. members of Petrashevskii’s circles) 174, 175 Petrov, Aleksandr Andreevich (early 1760s-1793) 73 Phalanstery 174 Pharmacies 29, 36 Philanthropy: see charity Philip II (1527-1598; King of Spain 1556-1598) 163 Philip V (1683-1746; King of Spain 1700-1746, except for January-August 1724) 156 Philosophes 62, 125

Philosophy 35, 37, 39, 46, 54, 111, 112-116, 130, 215. See also German idealism Physics 106 Physiological sketch 178, 212 Pilgrimage literature 13, 14 Pisarev, Dmitrii Ivanovich (1840-1868) 226 Pitt, William, the Younger (1759-1806) 90 Pius IX, Pope (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, also known as Pio Nono, 1792-1878; Pope 1846-1878) 173, 178, 181 n., 185, 187 Place de la Concorde 134, 135 Plato (c. 428-348 or 347 BC) 100 Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich (1856-1918) 243 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich (1827-1907) 244 Pochvennichestvo: see Native-Soil Conservatism Pogodin, Mikhail Petrovich (1800-1876) xvii, xxixxv, 11-13, 21, 22, 77, 87, 103, 105, 109, 112, 118, 119-141, 158, 160, 162, 178, 179, 185, 191, 195, 208, 226, 237, 239, 248, 250, 251, 253. Year in Foreign Lands xix, 122-141 Polemical journalism xxii, xxiii, 13, 54, 179, 201, 202, 213, 220, 234 Poles 40, 41-42, 108, 119, 138 Polevoi, Nikolai Alekseevich (1796-1846) 205 Polish language 59 Polish nobility 41, 138 Polish uprising (of 1830-1831) 11, 104, 139, 177 Polish uprising (of 1863) 145, 227, 229 Political economy 127 n., 163-164, 183, 184, 194, 242 Polo, Marco (c. 1254-1324) 1 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) 90 Pope, the 68, 69-70, 103, 131, 173, 189 Popovichi (sons of Russian clergy) 199 Popular culture 35, 107, 108, 115, 117, 148 Populism (narodnichestvo) xxiv, 13, 168, 194, 225-226, 243 n.. See also Russian Socialism, socialism, utopian socialism Populists xvii, 65, 226, 242-243 “Positive hero” (in Russian literature) 247 Possevino, Antonio (1533 or 1534-1611) 1 Poverty 60, 68, 82, 106, 126, 127, 135, 140, 184, 209, 240, 250 Prado (gallery in Madrid) 149 Pratt, Mary-Louise 5 n. Pre-Romanticism xxiv, 17, 42, 75, 82, 85, 87 Prikazy (departments of Muscovite bureaucracy) 39, 43 Progress, conception of 129, 214, 239, 246 Prokopovich, Feofan (1681-1736) 50, 97 Proletariat 172, 175, 186, 242. See also workers, working class, working man Promenading 35, 154 Prostitution 35, 36, 60, 95, 106, 209

Index of names and subjects 277 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865) 171, 189, 204, 212 Proust, Jacques 58 Provençale poetry 159 n. Prussians 237 Prutkov, Koz'ma (fictitious poet invented by group of mid-nineteenth-century Russian poets) 205 Publicism (publitsistika): see polemical journalism Pugachov revolt (1773-1774) 56 Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1799-1837) 18, 19, 156, 204, 205, 215; “Bronze Horseman” 109, 156; Eugene Onegin 14, 109, 215; “Journey to Erzurum” 18; “Prisoner of the Caucasus” 18-19 Pypin, A. N. 143 Quakers 90, 210 Rachel, i.e. Elisabeth Rachel Félix (1821-1858) 141 Racism 133, 191, 195. See also anti-Semitism Radcliffe, Ann (née Ward; 1764-1823) 205 Radetzky, Field Marshall Joseph (1766-1858) 174 Radical intelligentsia 15, 21, 145, 208, 230, 242 Radical Westernism xxiii, 12, 216 Radical Westernizers 168, 215, 219, 239 Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1749-1802) xvii, 16, 50, 51; Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow 16, 52 Radozhitskii, Il'ia Timofeevich (1784-1861) 18, 19 Radziwiáá, Karol Stanislaw (1669-1719) 35 Raeff, Marc 52 Railways 106, 183-184, 200, 201, 203, 209, 234, 237. See also Metropolitan Railway, trains Rational egoism 218, 226 Raznochintsy 199 Razumovskii, Count Piotr Kirillovich (17511823) 63 Reading Library (Biblioteka dlia chteniia) 119 Reform Bill (of 1832, in Britain) 104, 105 Reformation 9 n., 39 Relics 29, 40 Renaissance 1, 9 n., 38, 39, 66, 110, 155 Representative institutions 82, 104, 132-133, 140141, 184-185, 187, 200, 208, 224, 237, 238, 247, 248, 252, 253. See also Chamber of Deputies, democracy, Houses of Parliament, parliaments Republican government 41, 90 n., 252 Republicanism 12, 171 Republican(s) 89, 172, 224, 237 Restaurants 127, 233, 235 Revolutions: of 1830-1831 104-105, 185; disturbances of 1839 in France 134; of 1848-

1849 13, 109, 149 n., 161, 168, 170-174, 181, 182, 184 n., 196, 206, 251. See also French Revolution Revolutionary movement (in Russia) xxiv, 21, 168, 224-225, 228, 244 Riasanovsky, Nicholas xxv, 119, 249 Ribeyrolles, Charles (1812-1861) 178 Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761) 80, 93, 205 Richardson, William (1743-1814) 3 Risorgimento (national revival in mid-nineteenthcentury Italy) 190, 193 Robert, Hubert (1733-1808) 189 Robertson, William (1721-1793) 93 Roboli, T. xxv, 80 Rogger, Hans 7 Roman Empire 9-10, 160. See also Holy Roman Empire Romanians 173 Romantic manner 18, 140 Romantic metaphysicians 111 Romantic movement 12 Romantic period 82, 159 n., 182, 183 Romantic poets 80, 195 Romantic protest 125, 174 Romantic sensibility 167-168 Romantic tradition 125 Romantic writers 42, 112 Romanticism xxiv, 106, 116, 147, 148, 164, 252 Rothe, Hans xxv Rothschild family 127, 180 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778) 58, 80, 85, 87, 89, 90 n., 125, 141, 204, 250 Royal Hospital (at Greenwich) 90, 93, 97 Royal Society 90 Rtishchev, Fiodor Mikhailovich (1626-1673) 33 Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640) 79 Ruins 78, 131 Rus' (Old Russia) 213 Rus' (Pan-Slav journal) 246 Russian clergy 199 Russian language 7, 63, 96, 118, 252 Russian nobility xv, xvi, 7, 13, 20, 21, 36, 47, 51 n., 52, 53, 55, 64, 71, 74, 76, 175, 199, 214. See also nobility, noblemen, Russian noblemen Russian noblemen 3, 7, 33, 52, 55, 60, 63, 71, 90, 111, 211. See also nobility, noblemen, Russian nobility Russian peasant(s) 64, 117, 137, 138 n., 170, 174, 176-177, 181, 193, 194, 195, 226, 238, 240 Russian people 12, 97, 117, 118, 137, 138, 140, 175, 176, 218, 220, 242 n., 251. See also common people, narod, peasantry, peasants, Russian peasant(s) Russian Socialism xxiv, 170, 174-177,190, 193, 194. See also socialism, utopian socialism Russophobia 177

278 Index of names and subjects Russo-Turkish wars 11, 57, 96 Ruthenes 139 Rycaut, Sir Paul (1628?-1700) 2 ŠafaĜík, Pavel Josef (1795-1861) 139 Said, Edward xvi, 23 St. Nicholas 40 St. Paul: see Paul the Apostle St. Paul’s (cathedral in London) 90 St. Peter’s (cathedral in Rome) 67, 69, 131, 140 Saint-Petersburg Journal (Sankt-Peterburgskii zhurnal) 57 St. Petersburg University 119 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, comte de Rouvroy (1760-1825) 189, 233 Salons 109, 116, 154, 221, 236 Saltykov-Shchedrin (Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov, pseudonym Shchedrin; 1826-1889) xxiii-xxv, 12, 13, 28, 109, 205, 221-248, 250, 251, 253; Across the Border xix, xxiii, 21, 221, 222-223, 224, 225, 228-248; Golovliov Family 222; Haven of Mon Repos 222; History of a Town 222; Pompadours and Pomadouresses 222; Provincial Sketches 198, 222 Samarin, Iurii Fiodorovich (1819-1876) 117 Sand, George, pseudonym of Amandine-AuroreLucile Dudevant, née Dupin (1804-1876) 111, 205, 212, 233, 236, 250 Sandwich-boards 128 Sanine, Kyra xxv Scandinavian nobility 20 Scanlan, James 218 n. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (17751854) 111-112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 125, 191 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (17591805) 111, 205 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1767-1845) 112 n. Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772-1829) 112 n. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768-1834) 112 n. Schönle, Andreas xxv, 51, 53, 79, 81 Schools 33, 38 Schubert, Franz Peter (1797-1828) 144 Science(s) 37, 39, 40, 51, 62, 89, 111, 126, 127 n., 163, 212, 231, 234. See also natural sciences, scientific method Scientific method 199, 216, 219. See also natural sciences, science(s) Scots 108 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832) xvii, 111 Scythians 9 Second Empire (in France, 1852-1870) 172, 200, 203, 206, 223, 224, 233, 237 Second Republic (in France 1848-1852) 171-172, 174

Sejm (Polish parliament) 41 Self-interest 62, 95, 162, 217-218, 220. See also egoism, rational egoism Senate (in France in Third Republic) 224 Seneca, the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca; c. 4 BC-AD 65) 54 Senkovskii, Osip (Iulian) Ivanovich (1800-1858) 119, 121 Sentimentalism xxiv, 16, 75-76 Serbs 35, 43, 108, 173, 176 Serfdom xv, 16, 17, 133, 160-161, 192, 198, 218. See also emancipation of serfs Service 7, 13, 49, 51, 52, 55, 111 Seton-Watson, Hugh 197 “Seven dismal years” (mrachnoe semiletie; 18481855) 109, 161, 178, 198, 199 Seven Years War (1756-1763) 96 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) 93, 107; Julius Caesar 73 Shalikov, Prince Piotr Ivanovich (1767 or 17681852) 17 Sharapov, Sergei Fiodorovich (1855-1911) 230 Sharp, Samuel (1700?-1778) 4; Letters from Italy 4 Shaving of beards 33, 98 Shchepkin, Mikhail Semionovich (1788-1863) 188 Sherbet 35 Sheremetev, Boris Petrovich (1652-1719) 20 Shevyriov, Stepan Petrovich (1806-1864) 112, 118-119, 121 Shrines 29, 40 Shuvalov, Count Piotr Andreevich (1827-1889) 229 Shuvalovs 63 Skobelev, Mikhail Dmitrievich (1843-1882) 227 Slav personality 170 Slavery 133 Slavonicisms 128 Slavophiles 12, 44, 69, 112, 117, 118, 127 n., 157158, 162, 164, 165, 181 n., 184, 193, 194, 204, 212 n., 214, 215, 217, 245, 249 Slavophilism xxiv, 112, 125, 144, 198, 202, 227 Slavs 42, 45, 99, 118, 121, 129, 138-140, 176. See also Croats, Montenegrins, Poles, Ruthenes, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians Sleptsov, Vasilii Alekseevich (1836-1878) 15; Vladimirka and Kliaz'ma 15 Slovaks 130, 173 Slovesnost' 51, 57, 75, 76 “Small deeds” 244, 247, 253 Smollett, Tobias George (1721-1771) 2, 3, 57; Expedition of Humphry Clinker 5; Travels through France and Italy 3 Smuggling 152, 163 Snuff-taking 35 Sobieski: see John III Sobieski

Index of names and subjects 279 Social contract 218 n. Socialism xxiii, 21, 117, 143, 144-145, 196, 217218, 226. See also Marxism, Populism, Russian Socialism, utopian socialism Socialist ideas 117, 215 Socialists 126, 172, 189, 217, 224, 250 Society tale (Russian genre) 154 Solomon 140 Solovetskii monastery (in Arctic region) 28 Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva) 119 Sophia (Sof'ia Alekseevna, 1657-1704; Regent of Russia 1682-1689) 25 Sorbonne 122, 133 Spaniards 146, 150-165 Spanish language 150 Spanish nobility 159-161 Spanish peasant 154 Stankevich, Nikolai Vladimirovich (1813-1840) 113, 114 Stateinye spiski: see diplomatic reports Steamships xviii, 126, 184 Stein, Johann Andreas (1728-1792) 67 Stein, Maria Anna (Nanette; 1769-1833) 67 Stereotyping xxiv, 22, 23, 41, 42, 71, 80, 94, 95, 101, 141, 146, 165, 169, 188, 195, 238, 247 Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768) 4, 53, 80, 86, 88; Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 4; Tristram Shandy 88 Stock Exchange 90, 128 Stoicism 54, 55, 60, 62, 69, 71 Strabo (64 or 63 BC-after AD 23) 1 Strakhov, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1828-1896) 202 Street-lighting 35, 92, 183. See also gas-lighting Strelƍtsy (Moscow musketeers) 25, 26, 27, 29 Strikes 224, 234 Stroganov, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1734-1811) 63 Sue, Eugène (1804-1857) 111, 236 Suffrage 185. See also franchise, universal manhood suffrage Sumarokov, Aleksandr Petrovich (1717-1777) 50, 51, 75 Sumarokov, Pavel Ivanovich (d. 1846) 17 “Superfluous man” 14, 52, 167 Superstition 33, 39 Suvorin, Aleksei Sergeevich (1834-1912) 230 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745): Gulliver’s Travels 5 Swiss, the 78, 101 Symson, William 5 Szlachta (Polish nobility) 138 Tacitus, Cornelius (AD c. 56- c. 120) 9, 97, 136 n., 196; Germania 196 Tatar yoke 155 Tatars 176, 218 Tatishchev, Vasilii Nikitich (1686-1750) 50 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste (1605-1689) 2, 33, 53, 80

Taylor, A. J. P. 197 Technology xv, xviii, xxiii, 3, 10, 22, 38, 41, 126, 177, 216 Tell, William (legendary figure) 81 Terrorism 224-225, 230, 243 Theatre(s) 33, 35, 49, 58, 59, 66, 70, 84, 86, 88, 127, 133, 179, 181 n., 233 Theocracy 41 Theocritus (c. 310-250 BC) 83, 87 Theology 35, 37, 39, 46 “Thick journals” 109, 238 Thierry, Jacques-Nicolas-Augustin (1795-1856) 120121, 160 Thiers, Louis-Adolphe (1797-1877) 104, 181 n., 187, 223, 224, 234, 237 Third estate 189. See also bourgeoisie Third Republic (in France 1871-1940) 223, 224, 233, 234, 237, 238-239, 246 Third Rome: see Moscow the Third Rome Third Section (secret police under Nicholas I) 109, 229 Thomas, Antoine Léonard (1732-1785) 54, 58 Thomson, James (1700-1748) 80, 84, 87, 93 Thousand and One Nights 153 Tieck, Johann Ludwig (1773-1853) 112 n. Time (Vremia) 202 Time of Troubles (1605-1613) 42 Timkovskii, Egor Fiodorovich (1790-1875) 20 Tiutchev, Fiodor Ivanovich (1803-1873) 112, 116, 119 Tocqueville, Alexis Charles-Henri Clérel de (18051859): Democracy in America xvii Tolstoi, Count Dmitrii Andreevich (1823-1889) 25, 28, 225, 229-230, 240, 244 n. Tolstoi, Ivan Andreevich (1644-1713) 25 Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich (1828-1910) 19, 25, 143, 230 n., 250; “Cossacks” 19; “Lucerne” 21; “Prisoner of the Caucasus” 19; Sebastopol Stories 198 Tolstoi, Piotr Andreevich (1645-1729) xix, xxii, xxv, 2, 10, 11, 20, 24, 25-47, 57, 66, 67, 76, 79, 82, 94, 110-111, 123, 230 n., 231, 249 Tolstoy, Nikolai xxv Tolz, Vera xvi, 9 Tönnies, Ferdinand Julius (1855-1936) 194 Tooke, John Horne (1736-1812) 90 Topiary 31-32 Tower of London 90 Townscape 4, 77, 86, 106, 207. See also city, urban world Trade 92, 100, 137, 162, 163, 182, 200, 209, 234. See also commerce Trains 126, 201, 204, 213. See also Metropolitan Railway, railways Translation(s) xvi, 51, 53, 73, 75, 145, 153 Travnikov, S. N. xxv, 46 n. Treaty of Berlin (1878) 228

280 Index of names and subjects Treaty of Frankfurt (am Main; 1871) 223 Treaty of Paris (1856) 198 Treaty of Peking (1860) 198 Treaty of San Stefano (1878) 228 Trediakovskii, Vasilii Kirillovich (1703-1769) 50 Trianon (at Versailles) 87 Troubadours 159 Tuchkov, Aleksei Alekseevich (1799-1878) 180 Tuileries Palace 86, 89 Tur, Evgeniia (pseudonym of Elizaveta Vasil'evna Salias-de-Turnemir (1815-1892) 21 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich (1818-1883) 17, 109, 110, 114, 116, 143, 198, 200, 205, 247; Fathers and Children 143; On the Eve 247 n.; Rudin 14, 114; Sportsman’s Sketches 16, 17, 161 Turks 10, 18, 25, 26, 27, 29 n., 45, 96, 197, 227

Virgin Mary 40 Vladimir Sviatoslavich, St. (c. 956-1015; Vladimir I, Grand Prince of Kiev c. 980-1015) 97 Volk, the 22 Volkstum 8 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) 50, 54, 58, 87, 122, 125, 204, 234 Vorontsov, Count Aleksandr Romanovich (17411805) 91

Waegemans, E. 53 Walicki, Andrzej 194 Wallachians 63 Waterfalls 83, 129, 204 Wealth 46, 51, 60, 68, 71, 82, 92, 95, 127-128, 140, 141, 157, 160, 163, 183, 188, 208, 230, 235, 248, 250, 252 Weisse, Christian Felix (1726-1804) 77 Uchonaia druzhina: see “learned guard” Western personality 69, 159, 217, 220, 250 Ukrainians 39 Westernism xxiv, 12, 99, 117, 144-145, 198, 229. Uniate Church 44 See also liberal Westernism, radical Universal manhood suffrage 105, 172, 174, 185, Westernism 237, 238. See also franchise, suffrage Westernization xv, xvi, xxiv, 7, 11, 17, 23, 30, 33, Universities 68, 232. See also Moscow 49-53, 71, 98-99, 101, 116, 117, 140, 158-164, University, St. Petersburg University 165, 193, 205, 211, 213, 214, 215, 249, 252. Urban improvement (in Paris under Second Empire) See also modernization 205-206, 233 Westernizers 11, 12, 116-117, 130, 136, 137, 141, Urban world xviii, 12, 36, 38, 59-60, 85, 106, 126 144-145, 157-164, 165, 168, 174, 184, 185, Uspenskii, B. A. xxv, 87 n. 193, 195, 212, 233. See also liberal Ustrialov, Nikolai Gerasimovich (1805-1870) Westernizers, radical Westernizers 119, 121 Westminster Abbey 90, 135 Utilitarian ethos 12, 106 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733-1813) 77, 79 Utilitarianism 199, 201, 204 William I (also William VI, Prince of Orange; Utopian literature 6, 55 1772-1843; King of The Netherlands 1815Utopian socialism 167, 168, 171, 174-175, 212, 1840) 103 222 n., 233. See also Marxism, Populism, Wilson, Reuel K. xxv Russian socialism, socialism Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717-1768) 72 Uvarov, Count Sergei Semionovich (1786-1855) Windsor Castle 90-91, 97 118 Windsor Park 91 Wine(s) 34, 35, 45, 68, 84, 88, 122 n., 126, 234 Vaillant: see Le Vaillant Winter Palace (in St. Petersburg) 135, 225 Varangians 121 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling 51 Vaudeville 141, 182, 205 Wisdom-lovers, Society of: see liubomudry Veche (democratic assembly in medieval Russian Women, attitudes towards 35-36, 87, 154, 159 n., towns) 176 204, 235-236 Vel'tman, Aleksandr Fomich (1800-1870): Workers 15, 17, 104, 129, 130, 171, 181, 185, Wanderer xxii 190, 224, 234, 239. See also proletariat, Venetian nobility 36, 250 working class, working man Venetian state 41, 68-69 Workers’ cooperative: see artel' Venevitinov, Dmitrii Vladimirovich (1805-1827) Working class 106, 162, 174, 188, 243 n. See also 112 proletariat, workers, working man Vespucci, Amerigo (1454-1512) 138 Working man 170, 192 n., 235, 236, 238-239, Viazemskii, Piotr Andreevich (1792-1878) 8 n. 241, 242, 250. See also proletariat, workers, Victor Emmanuel II (1820-1878; King of working class Piedmont-Sardinia 1849-1861, King of Italy 1861-1878) 174, 203 Xenophobia 59, 95, 141, 195 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC-19 BC) 87

Index of names and subjects 281 Xenophon (431 BC- shortly before 350 BC) 1 Young, Edward (1683-1765) 80 Young Hegelians 115, 117, 125 n. Zagoskin, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1789-1852) 119 Zakhar'ina: see Herzen, Natalie

Zemstva (organs of local government) 245 Zhukovskii, Vasilii Andreevich (1783-1852) 21, 119 Zola, Émile-Édouard-Charles-Antoine (18401902) 236-237; Nana 236-237 Zoos 29, 86, 191. See also Jardin des Plantes

Index of place-names

Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) 56 Aarau 81 Adriatic Sea 26, 27, 29, 31, 39, 40 Africa 152-153, 191 Aix-en-Provence 56, 57, 58 Aix-la-Chapelle: see Aachen Alexandria 153 Algeciras 149 Alps 67, 68, 82-83 Alsace 88, 223 America xvii-xix, 22, 56, 152 n., 155, 183 Amsterdam 27, 121, 126, 141 Andalucia 149, 152-153, 156 Antwerp 121 Aranjuez 149 Archangel 25 Arctic region 16, 28, 230 n. Armenia 18 Arzrum: see Erzurum Asia 153, 191, 195 Athens 89 Atlantic Ocean 153, 234 Augsburg 65 Austria 66, 103, 130, 173, 174, 203, 223, 228 Austrian Tyrol 82 Avano Terme 38 Avignon 56, 178 Azov 25, 26, 27 Babylon 128, 216 Baden 65, 81, 223 Baden-Baden 202, 222, 223 Balkans 227 Baltic region 194 Baltic Sea 10, 201 Barcelona 162 Bari 27, 29 n., 40 Barnet 90 Basel 81, 88 Bavaria 223

Belgium 104, 124, 223 Belorussia 56, 59 Bergamo 31 Berlin 27, 76, 96, 113, 115, 121 n., 173, 183, 202, 219, 222, 228, 232, 240 Bern 81, 122 Bernese Oberland 81, 83, 122 Besançon 56 Bessarabia 198, 228 Birmingham 121, 130 Black Sea 198 Bohemia 122 Bois de Boulogne 86, 206 Bois de Vincennes 206 Bologna 27, 31, 32, 37, 38, 65, 70, 123 Bonn 121 n., 122 Bordeaux 63 Borysów (now Borisov) 26, 40, 44 Bosnia 227, 228 Boulogne 121, 122 n. Bourg-en-Bresse 56 Bozen (also Bolzano) 65, 69, 71 Brenner Pass 65 Brenta Canal 37 Brienz, Lake 81 Britain 12, 57, 103, 104, 105, 106, 200-201, 203, 228 Brno 122 Brugg 81 Brussels 121, 183 Bulgaria 228 Burgos 149, 159 Burgundy 56, 63, 85, 99, 234 Cádiz 149, 158, 162 Calais 80 Campagna 189 Campo vaccino (in Rome) 140 Capitoline Hill (in Rome) 89 Carinthia 26, 33, 82

283

284 Index of place names Castile 154 Catalonia 162 Caucasus, The xxi, 11, 14, 18-20, 22, 83, 154, 227 Central Asia 11, 227 Chalon-sur-Saône 56 Chamonix 129 Champagne 56 Channel, The English 90 Chembar 231, 232 China xxi, 1, 20, 198 City of London 134, 209 Civitavecchia 121 Cologne 122, 183, 190, 202, 204, 216, 233 Constantinople 10, 177, 227. See also Istanbul Córdoba 149, 153 Cracow (Polish Kraków) 122, 141 Crimea 14, 17, 198, 226 Dalmatia 27, 36, 42, 45 Danube, River 37 Danubian principalities 198 Danzig (now GdaĔsk) 96 Dauphiné 56 Dijon 56 Dnepr, River 17 Dover 91, 92, 95 Dresden 56, 110 n., 115, 121 n., 139, 202 Dubrovnik 40 Écija 149 Eglisau 81 Egypt 2, 99 Eidtkunen (now Krasnoznamensk) 211, 231, 232 Eiger, The 83 Eisenach 56 Elba 103 Elbe, River 79, 83 Ems 222 England xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 52, 73, 76, 80, 85, 90-95, 110 n., 120, 124, 127, 130, 131, 140, 141, 144, 157, 161, 164, 187 n., 200-201, 202, 203, 251. See also Britain Ermenonville 85, 87 Erquelinnes 219 Erzurum 18 Far East 201 Ferney (now Ferney-Voltaire) 122 Ferrara 27, 41 Finland xvi, 17, 18 n. Florence 27, 32, 36, 37, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 122, 123, 202 Fontainebleau 78, 85, 121 France xvi, xix, xx, 2, 11, 12, 13, 22, 52, 55-65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, 85-90, 91, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110 n., 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 129, 130, 131-134, 135, 141, 144, 146,

148, 149, 151, 155, 157, 161, 162, 173, 174, 177, 178, 181-188, 189, 190, 191, 196, 199200, 202, 203, 204 n., 205-208, 212, 217, 219, 223, 224, 229, 233-239, 246, 248, 251 Frankfurt am Main 56, 59, 78, 84, 88, 122, 127, 173 Frankfurt an der Oder 65, 67 Freiberg 52 Fulda 56 Galicia 139 Ganges, River 153 Gascony 234 Geneva 81, 82, 88, 122, 123, 168, 180, 202 Geneva, Lake 82 Genoa 121, 202 Georgia 18 German Confederation 104, 105, 173 German states xvi, xix, xx, 2, 59, 65-70, 76, 91, 124, 173, 232, 248 Germany xix, 52, 62, 107, 108, 129, 138, 161, 173, 203, 223, 233, 240 Ghent 181 Gibraltar 149, 152, 165 Granada 149, 152, 165 Greece 99, 100 Greenwich 90, 93, 97, 121 Grenoble 121 Grindelwald 81 Haarlem 121 Hague, The 121 Hamburg 73, 178 Hanau 56 Haslital 81 Haymarket (in London) 209 Heidelberg 121 n. Herculaneum 121 Herzegovina 227, 228 Hesse-Darmstadt 223 Highlands (of Scotland) 107 Holland 52, 124, 126, 137 Holy Land 13 Hungary 173, 177 Hyde Park 206, 216 India 2, 191 Innsbruck 65, 66, 122, 173 Interlaken 123, 141, 222, 229, 230 Ireland xvii Irún 149, 152 Istanbul 27 Italy xvi, xix, xx, 2,3, 10, 12, 26, 28, 32, 52, 54, 6571, 82, 94, 103, 104, 121, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 151, 173, 177, 178, 180, 184, 185, 187, 189190, 192, 203, 219, 251

Index of place names 285 Japan 2, 20 Jeréz (de la frontera) 149 Jerusalem 181, 197 Jungfrau, The 83 Karlsbad 116 Kars 18 Kent 90 Kew Gardens 90 Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia 103, 193, 203 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 42, 103 Königsberg 65, 67, 183 Korþula 40 La Mancha 149, 152 Landes 234 Languedoc 56 Lausanne 81, 82, 122 Lauterbrunnen 81, 83 Le Havre 184 Leiden 121 Leipzig 52, 56, 59, 65, 66, 67, 70, 77, 80, 96, 121 n. Linz 122 Lithuania 39 Livorno 65, 121, 174 Lombardy 173, 174, 203 London 80, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 121, 124, 127, 128, 137, 168, 178, 200, 202, 203, 204, 206, 209210, 211, 215-216, 219 Lorraine 223 Low Countries xvii Lucca 65 Lucerne 202 Lyon 56, 57, 58, 60, 85, 88, 97, 121, 134, 171, 178, 185, 187, 234 Mâcon 56, 85 Madrid 149, 156, 157, 159 Maggiore, Lake 123 Main, River 223 Mainz 56, 122 Málaga 149, 152, 153 Malta 27, 29 n., 31, 35, 37, 40, 45 Manchester 121, 130 Mannheim 56 Mantua (Mantova) 65, 122 Marburg 52 Marienbad (now Mariánské LáznƟ) 122 Marne, River 206 Marseilles 56, 121, 126, 133, 180 Mediterranean Sea 29, 234 Meiringen 81, 85, 139 Memel (Russian Memel'; now Klaipơda) 65, 66, 96 Messina 27

Metz 223 Mexico xviii n. Milan 27, 29 n., 34, 37, 38, 40, 65, 122, 123, 125, 173, 178, 202 Minsk 26, 39 Mir 59 Modena 65, 105, 122 Mohylew (now Mogiliov) 26, 44 Moldavia 198 Mongolia 20 Mont Blanc 122, 123 Montpellier 56, 57, 59, 60, 62 Moravia 26 Morocco 149 Moscow 10, 27, 34, 40, 43, 73, 92, 109, 113, 116, 117, 119, 122, 123, 135, 136, 139, 154, 167, 168, 228, 250 Mozhaisk 26, 40 Murten (French Morat) 78 Muscovy 1, 33, 39, 42, 47, 253 Naples 3, 27, 29 n., 31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 103, 121, 124, 125, 127 n., 129, 168, 174, 179, 181 n., 189, 193, 203 Naples, Kingdom of 45 Narva 65, 96 Neva, River 98 Nevskii Prospekt (in St. Petersburg) 148 New York 184 Nice 168, 178, 180, 234 Normandy 234 North German Confederation 223 Novgorod 167, 176 Nuremberg 65, 67, 70 Olomouc 26, 37 Omsk 202 Opava 26 Orange 56 Orsha 59 Ostsee (i.e. Baltic Sea, Baltic region) 194 Pacific islands 129 Pacific Ocean 198 Paddington 203 n. Padua 27, 29 n., 37, 38 Palermo 173, 178 Paris 3, 13, 27, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66, 71, 73, 76, 80 n., 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 100, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133, 134, 139, 141, 146, 147, 148, 153, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 202, 203, 204, 205-209, 211, 212, 215, 217, 219, 222, 223, 228, 229, 230, 233-235, 239, 247, 248 Parma 65, 105, 122 Penza 222 n.

286 Index of place names Perigord 234 Persia 2, 28, 49 Perugia 65 Piazetta di San Marco (in Venice) 36, 46 n. Piedmont: see Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia Pisa 65, 66, 68, 121 Plevna 228 Po, River 37 Poland 11, 39, 42, 43, 56, 59, 62, 103, 104, 105, 139-140 Pompeii 121 Portsmouth 201 Portugal xvii, 3 Prague xxi n., 121, 226 Provence 56, 159, 192, 234 Prussia xvi, 83, 103, 173, 222, 223, 224, 231-233, 239, 241 Prut, River 197 Pskov 176 Pyrenees 154, 234 Racibórz 26 Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) 41, 42 Reggio 65, 126 Rheinfelden 81 Rhine, River 10, 84-85, 103, 122, 204 Rhineland 85, 224 Riazan' 222 Richmond 90, 121 Riga 65, 66 Rimini 65 Rochester 91 Romania 198 Romanian principalities 197 Rome 3, 10, 27, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72, 89, 105, 121, 126, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 147, 168, 173, 174, 178, 181, 189, 191, 193, 203 n., 250 Rotterdam 121 Saandam 137 Saint-Antoine (suburb of Paris) 86 St. Helena 103 St. Peter’s Square (in Rome) 69 St. Petersburg 28, 34, 47, 63, 65, 70, 73, 109, 117, 119, 126 n., 135, 136, 148, 154, 156, 174, 211, 221, 222, 223, 225, 229, 233, 239, 245 Saône, River 85, 99 Sardinia: see Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia Savoy 82 Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 56 Saxony 70, 77, 83 Scandinavia xvi, 20 Schaffhausen 81, 83 Scotland xvii, 107 Sedan 223

Seine, River 124, 206 Semipalatinsk 202 Serbia 107 Seville 149, 154, 156 Siam 2 Siberia 11, 16, 198, 202 Sicily 27, 35, 45, 174, 178, 203. See also Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Siena 65 Sierra Morena 149, 156 Silesia 26 Simbirsk 73 Simbirsk Province 73 Simplon 123 Smolensk 26 South Africa xxi Spain xvi, 2, 3, 12, 52, 108, 148-165, 193, 251 Staubbach 83 Strasbourg 56, 59, 60, 76, 77, 88, 235 Stuttgart 173 Styria 26, 33, 82 Sweden xvi, 3, 10, 27, 49, 107, 108 Switzerland xvi, xix, xx, 76, 80, 81-85, 86, 87, 88, 90 n., 91, 93, 94, 104, 110 n.122, 129, 134, 139, 180, 203, 222 Sydenham 216 Syria 99 Tangier 149 Tarifa 149 Tarpeian Rock (in Rome) 89 Thames, River 92, 121, 126, 127, 204, 209 Thun 81, 222 Touraine 234 Trient (Trento) 65, 67, 68 Troy 196 Tsarskoe selo (now Pushkin) 221 Tula 222 n. Turkestan 227 Turkey 2, 11, 18, 49, 227-228 Tuscany 174 Tver' 13, 222 n. Twickenham 90 Tyrrhenian Sea 29 Ukraine 17 United States xvii. See also America Valence 56 Valenciennes 183 Vanne, River 206 Vatican 37, 38 Vauxhall Gardens (in London) 90 Velikii Ustiug 25 Vendée, The 138 Venetia 68, 173, 174, 203 n.

Index of place names 287 Venice 3, 26, 27, 29 n., 30-31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 65, 66, 67, 82, 121, 146, 147, 148, 173, 174, 178, 202 Verona 27, 32, 65, 66, 122 Versailles 85, 86, 87, 89, 122, 136, 193, 229, 237 Verzhbolovo (now Virbalis) 222, 232 Vesuvius, Mt. 121, 134 Vevey 81 Viatka 167, 222 n. Vienna 26, 27, 35, 37, 44, 45, 65, 104, 121, 122, 127 n., 173, 198, 202 Vienne 56 Vistula, River 34, 42, 198 Vitoria 149 Vladimir 167

Vladivostok 198 Wales xvii Warsaw 26, 27, 34, 35, 41, 42, 56, 59, 121, 122 Wengenalp 83 Western Isles (of Scotland) 107 Westminster 90 White Sea 28 Whitechapel 209 Wiesbaden 202 Windsor 91, 121 Wisáa: see Vistula Württemberg 223 Zürich 77, 81, 83, 84, 122, 132 n., 250