On the Periphery of Europe, 1762–1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite

By Andreas Schönle and Andrei Zorin

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Russian elite assimilated the ideas, emotions, and practices of the aristocracy in Western countries to various degrees, while retaining a strong sense of their distinctive identity. In On the Periphery of Europe, 1762–1825, Andreas Schönle and Andrei Zorin examine the principal manifestations of Europeanization for Russian elites in their daily lives, through the import of material culture, the adoption of certain social practices, travel, reading patterns, and artistic consumption. The authors consider five major sites of Europeanization: court culture, religion, education, literature, and provincial life. The Europeanization of the Russian elite paradoxically strengthened its pride in its Russianness, precisely because it participated in networks of interaction and exchange with European elites and shared in their linguistic and cultural capital. In this way, Europeanization generated forms of sociability that helped the elite consolidate its corporate identity as distinct from court society and also from the people. The Europeanization of Russia was uniquely intense, complex, and pervasive, as it aimed not only to emulate forms of behavior, but to forge an elite that was intrinsically European, while remaining Russian. The second of a two-volume project (the first is a multi-authored collection of case studies), this insightful study will appeal to scholars and students of Russian and East European history and culture, as well as those interested in transnational processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781609092412

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On the Periphery of Europe 1762–1825

THE SELF-INVENTION OF THE RUSSIAN ELITE

ANDREAS SCHÖNLE AND ANDREI ZORIN

NIU PRESS

DEKALB, IL

© 2018 by Northern Illinois University Press

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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978-0-87580-785-0 (paper)

978-1-60909-241-2 (e-book)

Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr

The research for this volume and its publication were supported by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust (RPG-357).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

In Memory of Michelle Lamarche Marrese

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note to the Reader

INTRODUCTION

1. HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF RUSSIA’S EUROPEANIZATION TO 1825

2. EXPOSURE TO EUROPE

3. COMMERCE WITH POWER

4. THE QUEST FOR TRUE SPIRITUALITY

5. WRITING ON THE TABULA RASA

6. THE RISE OF LITERATURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF A SECULAR CULT

7. THE EUROPEANIZED SELF COLONIZING THE PROVINCES

CONCLUSION

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This volume owes its existence to a research grant entitled The Creation of a Europeanized Elite in Russia: Public Role and Subjective Self awarded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-357). This grant supported the preparation of two books, of which this is the second. Among other things, the grant enabled the appointment of a research assistant for two years, supported the archival research undertaken by our consultants in Russia, and allowed the principal investigators some precious time off teaching. We are deeply grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for its support, as well as for its flexibility during the three-year tenure of our grant. We also thank the Ludwig Fond at New College, University of Oxford, as well as the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Film at Queen Mary University of London, which supported the translation of some contributions for our first volume from Russian into English.

The research team we assembled consisted of Alexei Evstratov as our research assistant, Stanislav Andriainen, Elena Korchmina, and Mikhail Velizhev as our archival consultants, and several scholars we invited to participate in our debates and to contribute to our collective volume: Igor Fedyukin, Alexander Iosad, Michelle Lamarche Marrese, and John Randolph. This proved to be a wonderful group, and we wish to express our gratitude to our friends and colleagues for the lively discussions they nurtured through their participation. Our collective work led to the publication of The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016).

To our profound distress, Michelle Marrese tragically died just as this volume came out and before she could see it. Her contribution for us will likely be her last publication. Over the last few years, she had been collecting archival sources for a book manuscript on eighteenth-century noblewomen. This would have been, no doubt, yet another hugely influential monograph, just like her work on women’s property rights in imperial Russia. She cared deeply for this book, and it is a huge loss for scholars of eighteenth-century Russia (and beyond) that her indefatigable work in archives will not come to fruition. We dedicate our volume to her, to pay tribute to her inspiring contributions to our field and in gratitude for her friendship.

At different stages of the grant, we benefited greatly from the input of our Advisory Board, which consisted of Wladimir Berelowitch, Simon Dixon, Catriona Kelly, Dominic Lieven, and Derek Offord. Their commitment to our project has been much beyond the call of duty and gave rise to heady and lively discussions, which helped us avoid many pitfalls. Roger Bartlett, Andrew Kahn, and Paul Keenan also participated in some of our internal research meetings and contributed extensive feedback on our work, for which we thank them profusely. We remain, of course, solely responsible for the content of this volume.

We presented individual research papers or intermediary reports of our research at various conferences and in various seminars, notably at the University of Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the annual conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston, the annual meeting of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia in Hoddesdon, and the East European History Seminar at Humboldt University in Berlin. The questions and comments we received from panel chairs, discussants, and participants sharpened our thinking greatly. Particular recognition is due to Gary Marker and Richard Wortman, whose constructive skepticism was crucial. We thank the organizers and participants of these events for the opportunity to present our thoughts and for the feedback we received. We also thank our peer reviewers, Jelena Pogosian and Peter Sterns, for their pertinent suggestions and comments.

The project relied on extensive archival work, and for their assistance in locating materials we wish to thank the staff at the State Archive of Ancient Acts, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Manuscript Collection of the Russian State Library, the Division of Written Sources of the State Historical Museum, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Russian State Archive of the Navy, and the Russian State Military Historical Archive, all in Moscow; the Manuscript Division of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), the Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library, the Russian State Archive of History, and the Archive of the Museum of Artillery, Engineering, and Communication Corps in St. Petersburg; the State Archive of Novgorod Oblast’ in Novgorod; and, finally, the National Archives in Kew. Essential library work was undertaken at the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, as well as the Russian State Library and the State Public Historical Library in Moscow, and we are indebted to these institutions for access to their extensive collections.

Last but not least, we are grateful to Amy Farranto and the other staff at Northern Illinois University Press for their enthusiastic response to our project and their support throughout, as well as to Christine Worobec, the series editor, for her helpful suggestions in the final stages.

Note to the Reader

This volume aims to present an original synthesis intended for a broadly educated reader not necessarily conversant with the many twists and turns of Russian history, while incorporating archival research and the conclusions drawn from an intense collective research project that took place between 2012–2015. We have therefore tried to provide background knowledge, to define critical terms, and to lighten up our bibliographic apparatus. Where called for, we provide parenthetical acknowledgments of sources and references for further reading, but to the extent possible, we have given preference to English-language publications, in keeping with the aims of this book, and refrained from using endnotes. Scholars of Russian history will hopefully find provocative ideas in this volume, despite having to return to some well-trodden fields, especially in the introduction.

As described in greater length in our acknowledgment section, our research is based in part on the findings of a research group we convened with the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust. This project led to the publication by Northern Illinois University Press of The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self, edited by ourselves and Alexei Evstratov, a volume organized as a series of case studies. The present monograph incorporates additional research and proposes an original synthesis of our findings.

Dates are given according to the old Julian calendar, since this is what our protagonists used. For the transliteration of Russian names and terms, we adopted the Library of Congress transliteration system, with a minor simplification consisting of reducing the frequent ending -kii (as in Dostoevskii) to -ky (Dostoevsky), except in bibliographic references. We also adopted the accepted English spelling of well-known figures. Translations from foreign-language sources are ours unless otherwise noted.

INTRODUCTION

A new book discussing the Europeanization of Russia requires some explanation. Not only is the existing literature quite substantial, but one can hardly mention any work dedicated to Russian political, social, or cultural history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that does not in some way deal with this issue. The scholarly attention to this problem has clear reasons—the changes initiated by Emperor Peter the Great (Peter I) in Russia in the early eighteenth century were arguably the most far-reaching attempt at enforced Westernization until the Meiji restoration in Japan in 1868 and the Ataturk reforms in Turkey in the 1920s—and their repercussions continue to resonate in Russian history to the present day. They are also important for understanding the logic of political, institutional, and cultural transformations in peripheral empires—a topic that acquired new relevance in the period of globalization.

In Russia, the ideological debate about the eighteenth-century Europeanization was launched in the 1830s by Petr Chaadaev, and the direction it took afterward was already anticipated by his notorious First Philosophical Letter and the Apology of a Madman: it featured obsessive comparisons with Europe, assertions of Russian exceptionalism, and painstaking deliberations about the moment in history when the country took a wrong turn. In the wake of this cause célèbre, the elites that emerged in the process of Europeanization embarked on a reassessment of their own history and their place in the world. The historiography of the question is until now very much defined by the controversy between proponents of the idea of the Russian Sonderweg (that is, exceptionalism), whether positive or negative, and scholars and thinkers tending to normalize Russian history and to see in it just one national version of European modernization.

The goal of this book is to refocus this debate. We are not so much interested in the eternal question whether there is something special about the Russian case and whether Russia was really Europeanized, but to analyze the world of the actual actors of this process—the Russian educated elite. Thus, the visible parts of this transformation—the introduction of a regular army and professional civil service; the rise of secular print and the periodical press; the development of schools, universities, and the Academy of Science; as well as the emergence and proliferation of new manners and dress codes—will be discussed here primarily from the perspective of the people who experienced these changes, shaped them, and changed themselves in the process. This volume deals not with the history of institutions or the history of ideas, but with the history of practices, emotions, and perceptions. Hence our interest in case studies, that is, in specific examples that give us a glimpse into the actual world of Russians rapidly Europeanizing themselves in order to find, define, or consolidate their identities as Russians. We believe that this approach allows us to see the controversial and dramatic history of the emergence of a great and powerful empire on the fringes of Europe and within the sphere of attraction of European culture in a more nuanced, detailed, and complex way than a traditional set of historiosophical generalities. This change of optics will then also allow us, in our conclusion, to map out what is at stake in this process of self-Europeanization and how the Russian case can help shed light on other countries that at different stages of history have embarked on similar trajectories. Our research will show that the elite did not have its own home, as the various roles it inhabited produced a lack of coherent attachment, resulting in unstable hybridity in its subjective world.

This introduction aims first to describe our methodology, explaining how we defined the object of our inquiry and how we proceeded to trace the elite’s complex subjective response to the state project of Europeanization. In order to demonstrate how fundamentally this issue shapes Russian history, this introduction will then briefly analyze the major historical narratives nineteenth-century historians and thinkers have proposed to assess Russia’s Europeanization. We will also outline the trajectory of Europeanization in the twentieth century and to this date, to illustrate the continuing relevance of this debate and reveal some recurring patterns. Furthermore, in chapter 1, we will provide an overview of the key parameters of Russia’s Europeanization in political, social, economic, legal, and cultural terms. This historiographic background will thus sketch out the charged and polarized field within which our study of practices, attitudes, and emotions inserts itself. Our intervention is intended less to take a stance in this grand political debate than to map out how macrohistorical factors shape subjectivities and produce patterns of behavior among individuals and to delineate how these individuals eventually seek to emancipate themselves from this sort of historical determinism and imagine new forms of living.

Who are the elite? In keeping with the emphasis on subjective identity, we have deliberately refrained from defining in social terms what we mean by elite. And to avoid any confusion with the nomenclature of the period, we have chosen this term despite the fact that it did not exist in Russian at the time, which does not mean that the sense of distinction was absent. What mattered to us was less the social standing of a man or woman than their subjective self-evaluation—that is, whether they considered themselves as part of the cream of the country and acted accordingly. Neither one’s position on the table of ranks nor the number of serfs owned could have worked as an adequate proxy to determine one’s elitist identity. Nevertheless, by virtue of the service ethos of the times, it goes without saying that we have in mind a subsection of the nobility: those subject to an interiorized requirement to act on behalf of the public good and rise above their sole private interest.

The Russian nobility was in itself a highly stratified estate, ranging from select families that owned extensive tracts of land and thousands of serfs to provincial gentry with only a few serfs and very little exposure to the European way of life. In 1766–1767, 52 percent of the estates featured 20 (male) serfs or fewer, 34.7 percent owned between 21 and 100 serfs, 13.3 percent had up to 1,000 serfs, and only 0.6 percent more than 1,000 serfs. This latter group represented 240 families (Ivanova 2001, 182). Nobles with a pronounced sense of elitism were more likely to be found among the latter two categories, and especially in the wealthiest group, although we did not want to exclude individuals who made a speedy career progression—for example, officers who rose quickly in the ranks on account of their talents and assumed commanding positions in the military, yet did not own substantial estates. Furthermore, there were nobles who traced their families back to pre-Petrine boyars and derived particular pride from this, even if their economic circumstances and social rank were not always commensurate with what they saw as their social standing. It goes without saying that in eighteenth-century Russia, when four women wore the crown and ruled for a combined sixty-seven years, and where women could legally hold title to immovable property, one did not need to be a man to belong to the elite.

Implicit in the notion of service, which was morally linked to the privileges enjoyed by the nobility, was a degree of public-spiritedness, which, however, can be understood in a fairly trivial way. For the provincial gentry residing on their estates, this public commitment might mean as little (or as much) as managing their estates in such a way as to be able to collect the poll tax and surrender the required number of recruits during the periodic conscriptions. For other members of the lower gentry, service in the army or civil administration was first and foremost a way to survive economically and escape destitution. But higher up socially, the public good signified participation in the state project of Europeanization on its various levels: promoting the greatness of the Russian empire in the international arena militarily or diplomatically, contributing to running the empire administratively, fostering the spread of European decorum and elegance in society, furthering the advance of knowledge and education, establishing new institutions, experimenting with new technologies, etc. In this way, through this service ethos, the identities of the elite were directly implicated in the processes of Europeanization that were traversing the country.

As he embarked upon his broad-ranging reforms of Russian society, Peter I conceived of Europeanization primarily as a technique to enlist the elite as informal (and sometimes formal) state agents in the furtherance of his aims. Thus he placed the emphasis on inculcating the ethos of service, providing incentive and reward mechanisms that clearly tied the elite to its social role, and sought to prepare it for discharging its new duties competently. These aspirations underscored the importance of education and cultural reform as means to changing the mindset and developing the skills of the elite. To this effect Peter deployed legal and coercive techniques—rule by decree and the occasional use of state violence. By the time of his death in 1725, without security of person or property and subject to a lifelong obligation to serve, the elite was profoundly dependent on the government.

As we describe in greater detail in chapter 1, in the decades following Peter’s death, the elite started, with some success, to mobilize as a social group and lobby for legal and economic reforms that would strengthen its position vis-à-vis the government on one side and its serfs on the other. This process culminated in Peter III’s promulgation of the Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility in 1762. The manifesto formally freed the elite from the obligation to serve, but substituted an internalized moral compunction for the coercive means Peter had used. The elite was thus given a modicum of independence, but on the condition that it developed an emotional bond with the ruler and internalized the duty to serve on behalf of ruler and country. The manifesto was hence more about moral duty than freedom.

The year 1762 marks thus the beginning of the period when the elite found itself in a subjectively ambivalent position. The European ideas about the dignity of the person, which it had started to imbibe, had raised its aspirations and given it some tacit independence, albeit no legal security, and then only to the extent that it willingly embraced the aims of the state and applied itself to their furtherance. Europeanization became a double-edged sword. While it encouraged internalized self-discipline and self-invention, it also tethered the elite to a state project, which was to compete with European countries in terms of civilizational progress. In order to become better Russians, members of the elite were expected to reinvent themselves as Europeans, yet without losing their patriotic loyalty to Russia.

Over the following decades, the elite sought more and more to assert its independence psychologically, morally, culturally, and symbolically, in a continuous dialogue and negotiation with the state in all spheres of its existence. It gained greater legal protections in 1785 when Catherine II promulgated the Charter of the Nobility. But the internalized bond between the elite and the monarch started to fray in the wake of the French Revolution, when the government took fright and began to implement repressive measures. In the wake of Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1815, expectations were ripe that Tsar Alexander I would embark on domestic reforms. When this failed to materialize, a psychological conflict or contradiction opened up between the ideological commitment of a segment of the elite toward political and social reforms on the one side and identification with the monarch on the other. For officers of the guard who had seen the liberties and amenities of life in Paris, to be a good patriot now increasingly implied turning against the ruler, who was perceived as an obstacle to reforms. This rift prepared the ground for the Decembrist uprising of 1825, when members of the guards tried to take advantage of a brief interregnum to demand constitutional reforms and install their preferred ruler. For the elite, the crushing of this uprising meant the end of the period of internalized identification with the monarch. Thus the years of 1762 and 1825 represent the thresholds of our inquiry, as they mark the limits of the period when subjective emotional identification, with all its tensions and ambivalence, was the main mechanism that tied the elite to the court.

What did Europeanization mean for the elite? As we will discuss in the following chapters, Europeanization meant first of all exposure to many facets of the way of life of European countries. From material culture to reading practices to the arts, the elite keenly observed, absorbed, consumed, and purchased whatever it could find on its journeys through Europe or obtain from intermediaries who imported goods to Russia. Europeanization also meant developing forms of sociability inspired by European models—from clubs to balls to theaters—leading notably to the incorporation of elite women into polite society. Furthermore, Europeanization encouraged the development of social networks across state boundaries, fostering the interaction with foreign elites by various means. It also became an educational project, requiring foreign tutors and often study at one of the main European universities. Through the widening influence of Freemasonry, along with pietist and mystical literature, it gained a spiritual dimension. And in practical term, it inspired costly attempts to redesign Petersburg mansions and country estates. Thus Europeanization gave rise to a whole series of practices that were socially significant as they signaled one’s belonging to the circles of the elite. In the following chapters we have tried to render justice to the pervasive and multifaceted repercussions of Europeanization for the elite by analyzing, in as extensive a fashion possible, the multiple and variegated forms it assumed in its lives.

With these practices also came distinct emotions. Through its readings, the elite learned to identify sentimentally with the author behind the text and to shape and evaluate its existence in analogy with literary narratives. Through its consumption of the visual arts and its involvement with interior and estate design, it discovered the pleasures of vicarious travel to foreign places. At court, it learned to control and feign emotions, and to adapt its behavior to the setting and circumstances, including letting emotions loose to express its devotion to the monarch. In balls, assemblies, and salons, the elite started to enjoy socializing with members of the other sex. Some men discovered libertinism, interpreting the enlightenment as a license for sexual experimentation. More typically, men and women began to feel romantic attachment for one another, sometimes in defiance of marital bonds. At the highest echelons of society, romantic dalliances were pursued in full view of polite society.

Men acquired the habits of protecting their honor scrupulously, taking the risks inherent in dueling on the chin. Women learned not only to dance, but also to manage their or their husbands’ estates and to represent the interests of their families at court. Through Masonic practices, the elite internalized methods to reach higher degrees of spiritual perfection. It also fleshed out what patriotic devotion to the country might mean beyond dutiful subjection to the monarch, perhaps identifying with the military regiment over and above anything else, or imagining a moral affinity with its serfs, for whose welfare it was responsible. But it also suffered from the instability of court life and developed a longing for islands of stability such as the country estate, seeking to invent lasting markers of identity independent of its position at court. Most importantly, through exposure to this manifold emotional palette, the elite acquired the techniques of self-fashioning, reflecting on its positions, inventing or reinventing itself as it saw fit, performing its identities in public, and articulating thereby its vision of its social roles.

In our previous edited volume, The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self, we specifically defined this period in the life of the elite as the time when subjectivity was experienced as deeply internal and intimate, yet at the same time in need of being constantly performed, tested, and refined in the public eye. In order to feel themselves European, nobles needed to demonstrate a mastery of their roles at court, in the company of peers, on the country estate, and not the least in the theater, which members of the elite were required to attend. The theatrical character of the Europeanization of the elite did not contradict the existential seriousness of this endeavor or its pragmatic importance. Performance could not be separated from the interiorization of new values and practices; in fact, it constituted an integral and arguably most important part in the transformations of the inner world of the nobility.

These fluid relations between subjective selves and public roles could be reconstructed only through case studies. In our book, we provided a detailed and nuanced analysis of specific cases in various spheres of life. We discussed how members of the elite dealt with their social roles and tried to negotiate and reconcile different practical and existential challenges facing them, when interiorized loyalty to the state, deeply imbibed European ideas, fashions, and emotional patterns, as well as personal aspirations and fears pulled them in various directions. We were interested mostly in a thick description of exceptional personalities, biographies, and conflictual situations, where the interplay of contradictory cultural and social pulls and pushes is particularly revealing. These case studies demonstrated the conflicts between different trends and normative systems that make it necessary for specific individuals and sometimes groups to navigate and negotiate between them.

In the current volume, we retain our interest in cases studies, but cast our gaze more widely and place them in a broader institutional and social context. By considering a more extensive array of cases, we can better demonstrate the range of options available to the elite and thus highlight the choices individual members made in fashioning their existences. As Clifford Geertz put it, in showing the pertinence of case studies, Contextualization is the name of the game (Geertz 2000, xi). For us, this contextualization means primarily embedding our case studies within a continuous negotiation between public roles and subjective emotions and, in particular, within a dialogue between the elite and the ruler (or the state). By necessity, as the number of these cases grew, our descriptions became less detailed, although they also gained greater representativeness as symptoms of the rapid macrohistorical political, social, intellectual, and cultural changes Russia was undergoing at the time. Furthermore, we outline the historical evolution, over six decades, in the manner in which this negotiation unfolds, tracing its increasing complexities and fluidities. One can say that while the first book described the meaning of Europeanization to individual members of the elite, here we deal with this social group as an aggregate whole and in a more stringent historical perspective.

Our focus is on the ways educated Russian nobles perceived their private lives, including their individual practices and emotional reactions, as manifestations of the political aspirations of the state to become a legitimate member of European civilization, hoping to contribute to this process both on individual and national levels. The private and the public were thus thoroughly entangled. From a retrospective point of view, one can probably say that the Russian elite failed to accomplish its historical mission, but in the process it managed to create what is now known as the Golden Age of Russian culture, not only in terms of artistic production, but also in the complexities of its inner world and polite manners.

This volume demonstrates that the emotional and intellectual life of the Russian elite was characterized by a specific type of hybridity, produced by the various competing systems of allegiance and emotional patterns it interiorized. As influences, borrowings, and identifications added to one another, they created intricate, unstable, even volatile combinations, but combinations that at least had potential for some syncretic fusing, rather than leading to an irreconcilable rift. Hence the elite’s sometime extraordinary ability to navigate contradictory pulls and to experience the bricolage of cultures as a natural condition. It is only toward the end of our period, as identifications hardened into fixed ideologies, that the harnessing of different behavioral and emotional patterns became more difficult and unbridgeable contradictions opened up, which spelled an end to the period of conscious and unconscious compromises that enabled the extraordinarily intensive self-fashioning, self-reflection, and self-refining performed by the elite.

The Nineteenth-Century Historiography of Russian Europeanization

What were the main historical narratives advanced in the nineteenth century to assess the results of Russia’s Europeanization? The publication of the First Philosophical Letter by Petr Chaadaev in 1836 can be seen as the first salvo in a historiographic battle over Russia’s identity that continues to this day. It showed that this period could already be seen as belonging to the historical past. Chaadaev blamed the evils of Russian history on the fatal choice of religion. According to him, Eastern Christianity separated Russia both from the West and the East and left it in a civilizational void:

We do not belong to any of the great families of the human race; we are neither of the West