California Slavic Studies, Volume XI

By Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Gleb Struve

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780520312883

Book preview

CALIFORNIA SLAVIC STUDIES

California

Slavic Studies

VOLUME XI

Editors

NICHOLAS V. RIASANOVSKY

GLEB STRUVE

THOMAS EEKMAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

CALIFORNIA SLAVIC STUDIES

Volume 11

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD.

LONDON, ENGLAND

ISBN: 0-520-03584-4

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 61-1041

© 1980 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents 1

Contents 1

TOWARDS A BIOGRAPHY OF PRINCE PETER KOZLOVSKY (1783-1840) Kozlovsky’s Letter to Countess Lieven Gleb Struve

A WORD ON THE POLISH QUESTION BY P. YA. CHAADAEV Julia Brun-Zejmis

FEMININE IMAGES IN OLD RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND ART Joan Delaney Grossman

DREAMS IN PUSHKIN Michael R. Katz

ESCHATOLOGY AND THE APPEAL OF REVOLUTION: Merezhkovsky, Bely, Blok Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal

OSIP MANDELSTAM: The Poetry of Time (1908-1916) Gregory Freidin

EXCERPTS FROM THE DIARIES OF KORNEY CHUKOVSKY RELATING TO BORIS PILNYAK Translated and edited by Vera T. Reck291

THE SINGER’S THEMES IN SERBOCROATIAN HEROIC SONG Mary Putney Coote

ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM AND JEWISH REFORM: Prussia, Austria, and Russia Arnold Springer

Gleb Struve: A Bibliography

TOWARDS A BIOGRAPHY OF

PRINCE PETER KOZLOVSKY (1783-1840)

Kozlovsky’s Letter to Countess Lieven

Gleb Struve

C'est un Russe engraisse par la civilisation.

MME DE STAEL ABOUT KOZLOVSKY

There were in him both a grandee of the Versailles court and an English free thinker.

PRINCE VYAZEMSKY ON KOZLOVSKY

When, in 1950, I was preparing for publication my book about Prince Peter Borisovich Kozlovsky,1 I decided to include in it, among the illustrations, the caricature entitled Longitude and Latitude of St. Petersburgh, which I now reproduce, on page 2, below. This caricature by the well- known English draughtsman George Cruikshank (1792-1878) was published in May 1813, at the height of the post-Napoleonic Anglo-Russian honeymoon. It represented Countess (later Princess) Dorothea (Darya) Khristoforovna Lieven (1785-1857), the wife of the Russian ambassador in London (who had been transferred there, the year before, from Berlin), and Prince Peter Kozlovsky, who had recently arrived in London on the way to his post as Russian envoy to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and who was quite a prominent figure in English society, both in London and in Bath.2 They are shown dancing together. Countess Lieven was said to have introduced and

popularized the waltz at the famous exclusive London club of Almack’s, of which she was one of the patronesses (she and Princess Esterhazy, the wife of the Austrian ambassador, were apparently the only two foreigners who ever attained that exalted position). Countess Lieven’s modern biographer says that

it was not long before Countess Lieven enlivened the proceedings by a bold innovation. She told her colleagues that there was a new dance called the waltz, or valse a la française, and that she had seen it on the Continent where it was becoming popular. She showed them how it was done; she went through the movements in the public rooms. Although dancers who were accustomed to more stately evolutions were at first somewhat diffident about surrendering themselves to the dizzy whirl, and though it met with considerable opposition from anxious mothers who thought it immoral, the waltz was gradually accepted and soon became the rage.3

In his book Dr. Hyde reproduced Cruikshank’s print, without identifying Countess Lieven’s partner. In fact, she herself was not identified, and Kozlovsky was misidentified, much later, in volume 9, covering the years 1811—1819, of Mrs. M. D. George’s valuable descriptive catalogue of personal and

political cartoons and caricatures preserved in the British Museum. This volume was published just before I embarked on my book on Kozlovsky. Here the Cruikshank print was listed under No. 12047, and its description ran:

Longitude and Latitude of St. Petersburgh. G. Cruikshank fect. Pubd May 18th 1813 by H. Humphrey St. James’s Street.

Engraving (coloured and uncoloured impressions). The Duke of Clarence dances with a tall thin girl (r.), holding both her hands; they face each other in profile. He is unrecognizable, a plainly dressed short and obese John Bull. She wears a cross suspended from a long necklace. The room, with boarded floor and small musicians’ gallery suggests an English provincial assembly-room rather than a Russian palace. Two couples stand against the wall (1.); a lady and her partner sit on a bergere (r.); a man stands near them. Two of the men have moustaches, as an indication that they are foreigners. All are much amused at the ill-matched partners.

For the Duke and the Grand-duchess Anna see No. 12020. For the title cf. No. 8662. Reid, No. 235. Cohn, No. 1329. 8 9/16x12 7/8 in. With border, 9 13/16x13 7/8 in.4 5

Mrs. George’s misidentification of the male dancing partner was apparently traditional: the reference to Reid and Cohn was to the earlier catalogs of George Cruikshank’s works, by George William Reid and Albert M. Cohn, published respectively in 1877 and 1924. It was quite natural that Mrs. George herself had found no resemblance in the male dancer to the Duke of Clarence, the Prince Regent’s brother and the future King William IV, whom it would have been in any case strange to portray as the latitude of the Russian capital. But it would be interesting to speculate how Prince Kozlovsky himself and his friends would have reacted to the description of him as a plainly dressed short and obese John Bull: Kozlovsky was a descendant of one of the oldest Russian princely families, which is now extinct. Kozlovsky’s Russian friends commented, however, more than once on his slovenliness in dress. For instance, Constantine Bulgakov, a fellow diplomat and later Director of the Moscow Post Office, wrote to his brother Alexander from Vienna, where he was attending the Peace Congress, that another famous personage had joined their company: this was Prince Kozlovsky, whom he then described as follows: queje trouve change un peu a son avantage quant a son moral; pour le phisique il a engraisse, ce qui le rend tout-a-fait rond. Son costume ne s’est pas forme sur les modes anglaises, malgre son sejour en Angleterre. Il est aussi mal torche qu‘auparavant.5

Mrs. George’s wrong identification of Kozlovsky and her failure to identify Countess Lieven prompted me to write to her, and in 1950, prior to the publication of my book, we exchanged several letters. I drew her attention to the fact that both Kozlovsky and Countess Lieven had been identified by Dr. Wilhelm Dorow, Kozlovsky’s first biographer (his German book was published in 1846—that is, six years after Kozlovsky’s death). Dorow wrote:

Kozlovsky’s extraordinary obesity, his original manners and speech, in combination with his dazzling, always well-pointed, wit, attracted general attention, and in a country like England there was no lack of caricatures of him. He himself greatly enjoyed them and laughed heartily. Thus, for instance, the very meager but elegant Princess Lieven once refused to dance with an Englishman who was a poor waltzer, remarking as she did so: "Je ne danse qu'avec mes compatriotes." A cartoon was immediately published: the fat Prince Kozlovsky was shown dancing with the exceptionally thin princess Lieven, and underneath one could read: The Longitude and Latitude of St. Petersburgh.°

Dorow made a mistake in dating this and other English caricatures of Kozlovsky from 1821, the year after his retirement from the diplomatic service. To his Russian friends these caricatures had been known much earlier. The same Constantine Bulgakov wrote to his brother from Vienna on April 15, 1815 that some caricatures had been received from London by one of the Russian diplomats and were being sent to him, since he was known to be collecting caricatures. On two of them, he said, his brother would recognize Kozlovsky and on one Countess Lieven was portrayed as the Longitude. Bulgakov added that Kozlovsky felt quite proud of this and regarded it as a distinction. There was no doubt, wrote Bulgakov, that Kozlovsky had attracted the attention of the public in England where the King himself is not immune from this kind of distinction. He also wrote that he had already seen those caricatures in London but that there were so many of them and they were so funny that it was difficult to make a choice and to buy them all would cost more than £1,000.

6

7 There were also mentions of the Longitude and Latitude caricature in various other contemporary letters and reminiscences. Thus, in responding to Constantine’s letter, Alexander Bulgakov wrote him, asking him to remind Kozlovsky of some cross of his which he had left in Kozlovsky’s care when the latter was Russian Minister in Cagliari and threatening to draw an even more vicious caricature of the latitude of Russia.8 The caricature was said to have been a great success in the diplomatic world, and Count di Front, the Sardinian minister at the Court of St. James’s, even had it forwarded to his government. Joseph de Maistre, Kozlovsky’s opposite

Prince Peter Borisovich Kozlovsky in 1836. From a watercolor portrait by Cesarine de Barante (1794-1877), wife of the French ambassador in St. Petersburg. Property of Professor Gleb Struve.

number in St. Petersburg, who knew him personally quite well, found it delightful.⁹ Prince Metternich, who must have known Kozlovsky at the Congress of Vienna and who certainly met him during the Congress at Aix- la-Chapelle, where he became Countess Lieven’s lover, wrote her soon after that, in 1819, from Vienna:

9. Pingaud, Un diplomate russe, p. 56.

By the way, a propos of the waltz: do you know that I first came to know you through the caricature of you and the fat Kozlovsky, drawn some seven or eight years ago?¹⁰

In replying to my first letter, Mrs. George wrote that Dorow’s explanation sounded plausible to her, and that she regretted very much having accepted, despite her own misgivings, the traditional interpretation of this print as portraying the Duke of Clarence.

In the same letter Mrs. George promised to be on the lookout for further cartoons of Kozlovsky. A little later, she thanked me for some further information about Kozlovsky and the background of Cruikshank’s print and said that she hoped to be able to squeeze that information into volume 10 of her Catalogue. And, in fact, a very brief rectification was squeezed into that volume, published in 1952, on p. Ivi, under Corrigenda etc. It ran: "The persons are Prince Pierre Kozlovsky, a Russian diplomat, and Mme Lieven. The scene is London. See W. Dorow, FUrst Kosloffsky. Leipzig, p. 12." There was no reference to my book or to our correspondence.

In the meantime, by May 1950, another cartoon (or, in this case, rather a portrait) of Kozlovsky did actually come to light. In a letter dated May 5, 1950, Mrs. George wrote me:

You may possibly be interested to know that in Lord Malmesbury’s collection of caricatures, recently sold here, there was an impression of The Longitude and Latitude of St. Petersburgh, with a note by Lord M[almesbury]: "A Russian called Prince Koslovski or I'aimable roue as he called himself & Countess de Lieven Russian Ambassadress waltzing at Devonshire House May 1813."

This note by Lord Malmesbury made it possible to identify Kozlovsky as the subject of another print in the British Museum, recorded by Mrs. George in the same volume 9 of her Catalogue under No. 12126 and described as follows:

L’AlMABLE ROUE

London Pubd 6 April 1813 by H Humphries [i.e. Humphrey]

St. James Street

Engraving (coloured impression). An unidentified portrait. A very stout man with small neat features rides a well-bred horse in profile to the r.; his obesity forces him to lean backwards. He wears a cylindrical hat, double-breasted coat, frilled shirt, Hessian boots, and holds a hunting-crop.

9 1/4x11 3/4 in. (pl.)¹¹

10. When writing this article I did not have Jean Hanoteau’s original French edition of Metternich’s letters to Countess Lieven (1909) at hand. See the German translation: Geist und Herz verbiindet: Metternich’s Briefe an die Grafin Lieven, Mit einer Einleitung von Dr. Emil Mika (Wien, 1942), p. 137.

11. George, Political and Personal Satires, p. 217.

L* Aimable Roue

This portrait of Kozlovsky has never been mentioned in Russia, though Constantine Bulgakov could have been referring to it as the second cartoon in which one could see Kozlovsky. As far as I know, it has never been reproduced before, except in my Russian book on Kozlovsky, and I reproduce it here: it offers quite a good contrast to the other cartoon.

Mrs. George wrote me that the artist remained unknown, but that the portrait was similar to other portraits published by Humphrey, some of which were by Gillray and Rowlandson. Since James Gillray (1757-1815), who drew many cartoons of the Prince Regent as Farmer John, was known to have gone insane in 1811, the artist was more likely to have been Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827).

Lord Malmesbury’s note to Longitude and Latitude located, as we have seen, the scene at Devonshire House and not at Almack’s, as had been previously thought. In her Corrigenda in volume 10 Mrs. George merely identified Kozlovsky and Mme Lieven and the scene as London, but in her much later, richly illustrated work about English social satire from Hogarth to Cruikshank, in which she reproduced Longitude and Latitude (but not L’Aimable Roue), she seems to have reverted to the earlier and widely accepted identification of the place. She wrote:

In Longitude and Latitude of St. Petersburgh, 1813 [149], by Cruikshank, evidently after an amateur, the tall thin woman and the short fat man are Madame de Lieven and Prince Pierre Kozlovsky, who called himself "Гdimable roue," waltzing at Almack’s. The setting shows the austerity that was a protest against the lavish entertainment of the new rich. It had been no feature of the earlier balls there … The magnificence of rooms, decor and food had much impressed Dr. Campbell in 1773: every thing in the most elegant style.

And she then quotes a description of Almack’s by Prince Piickler-Muskau, a Prussian and an acutely malicious observer who made a fortune-hunting visit to England in 1826-28:

A large bare room with a bad floor … with two or three naked rooms at the side, in which were served the most wretched refreshments, and a company into which, in spite of the immense difficulty of getting tickets, a great many Nobodies had wriggled … And yet Almack’s is the culminating point of the world of fashion.¹²

Strange though this may seem, we know tantalizingly little about the actual relations between Prince Kozlovsky and Mme Lieven. What could they have had in common—at least before 1835, when the Princess (the princely title was conferred on her husband in 1826, upon the coronation of Nicholas I) left Russia, never to go back there because she had incurred the disfavor of the Emperor, and became, to all intents and purposes, a distinguished migre in Paris under the July monarchy and under Louis Napoleon? Prince Kozlovsky, a great friend of George Canning, and Countess Lieven, who once described him as a Jacobin minister (it is true that towards the very end of his life she changed her opinion of him and also became his admirer)? Countess Lieven, the lover of Metternich, and Kozlovsky, who certainly came very close to regarding the Austrian Chancellor as the evil genius of Europe, as some of posterity was to do,¹³ and had, moreover, good reasons to ascribe to Metternich’s influence his own dismissal from the Russian diplomatic service? Countess Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador in London, the admirer of Nicholas I and upholder of his regime, and, what is more, the sister of Count Alexander Benckendorff, the head of the notorious Third Division, that is, the Political Police;¹⁴ and

12. M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London, 1967), p. 163. The quotation is from E. M. Butler, ed., A Regency Visitor. The English Tour of Prince Piickler-Muskau, Described in his Letters (London, 1957).

13. See, for example, Viktor Bibi, Metternich the Evil Genius, in Metternich, the Coachman of Europe: Statesman or Evil Genius¹! ed. Henry F. Schwarz (Boston, 1962), pp. 19-28. This is an extract from Bibi’s book: Metternich, der Damon Oesterreichs (Wien, 1936), pp. 378 ff.

14. Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benckendorff (1788-1844). The Countess’s letters to him before 1835 were published in Lionel G. Robinson, ed., Letters of Dorothea, Princess Lieven, during her Residence in

Prince Kozlovsky, a Liberal, an avowed constitutionalist, a friend of the Decembrists and, later, the interlocutor of Marquis de Custine, to whom he developed, on the latter’s famous journey to Russia, the heretical Chaadaye- vian ideas about Russia and Europe?

9

Curiously enough, Cruikshank’s caricature is the only contemporary piece of evidence known to me that links Countess Lieven and Prince Kozlovsky between 1813 and 1825. Whether they had known each other before 1813, in Russia, we do not know. This is by no means impossible, for both, in a way, belonged to the same high society. It is not, however, very likely, inasmuch as Kozlovsky lived abroad on diplomatic service most of the time between 1803 and 1810, while the Lievens were in Berlin between 1810 and 1812, that is, just during Kozlovsky’s short spell in St. Petersburg.

There is no doubt, on the other hand, that they must have met in London in 1813, be that at the receptions in the Russian Embassy, at Almack’s (though the purely symbolic meaning of Cruikshank’s print is not out of the question), or in society at large, in which both of them scored immediately a great success. They met again five years later at the Aix-la-Chapelle Congress, at which Kozlovsky was one of the Russian representatives, though he played no important part in it. But we know that at that Congress Countess Lieven spent very much time in the company of Metternich (it was there that they became lovers), and that Metternich felt an intense dislike for Kozlovsky, whom he must have first known during the Congress of Vienna and of whose diplomatic activities in Turin he was certainly well informed. In politics and in diplomacy of those days the two men stood for sharply opposed principles. In one of his official despatches to the Austrian ambassador in St. Petersburg, Baron Lebzeltern, Metternich included the name of Kozlovsky among the Russians with whom, he said, he never did or could come to terms (s entendre); while in another he complained of the language of people like von Anstett, Pahlen, and Kozlovsky, singling out the latter’s as entierement liberal and opposing to it that of some other Russian diplomats who were more to his taste (among them he included Count Lieven).

10

In one of his early love letters to Countess Lieven, written during the Aix- la-Chapelle Congress, Metternich wrote at some length about a personal conversation he had with Kozlovsky in the couloirs of the Congress. That conversation shocked him profoundly. Its subject was women, about whom Kozlov-

London, 1812-1834 (London & New York, 1902). Some interesting further letters will be found in Daudet, Vie d’ambassadrice. It is curious that such an authoritative and otherwise reliable reference work as the Russian Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Brokgauz/(Brockhaus)-Efron gives Dorothea Lieven’s maiden name as Countess Buxhoevden.

sky allegedly spoke with frank cynicism, saying that he liked them with round cheeks, plump arms, and a good appetite. When Metternich told him that all he cared for in women was their spirit, their mind, and their soul, and it did not matter to him whether their cheeks were thin or plump, Kozlovsky said that he was sentimental, to which Metternich retorted: No, but I either love or not. In his letter to Countess Lieven he went on to say that the whole conversation was so unpleasant to him that he got up under the pretext of greeting some royalty just entering the room. And he added: There are so many Kozlovskys in this world: Heaven has created plump arms specially for them.¹⁷

It is more than likely that on this occasion Kozlovsky spoke to Metternich with tongue in cheek, or was even making fun of him: there is enough evidence to show Kozlovsky’s entirely different, nay very chivalrous, attitude to women, though there were also others who spoke of his dissoluteness, and Comtesse de Boigne, the daughter of Kozlovsky’s French colleague in Turin, described him in her memoirs as plein de connaissances et d’esprit, mais tellement leger et si mauvais sujet qu’il n’y avait nulle ressource de socit de ce cote.¹⁸

Kozlovsky himself contracted (apparently around 1809) a secret marriage (just as he had, a few years earlier, secretly embraced the Roman Catholic faith) with a simple Italian woman, with whom he lived more or less openly during his diplomatic service in Turin and with whom he had two children, a son and a daughter (the latter, who bore his name, was afterwards a friend of Balzac and figures in his correspondence as Sofka; she married a young Frenchman who became a civil servant under Napoleon III). We know of no portrait of Kozlovsky’s wife, and none of his Russian friends seem to have described her: it looks as though he had never brought her to Russia; she apparently lived in Paris, and we do not know when she died. But we have a playful picture of her in the reminiscences of Pictet de Rochemont, the Swiss diplomat with whom Kozlovsky negotiated the demarcation of frontiers between Piedmont, Switzerland, and France (this successful negotiation was his most signal diplomatic achievement in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna). On one occasion Kozlovsky invited Pictet and his colleagues to his house in Turin and took them to his bedroom to show them something. There they saw, as Pictet put it, a very pretty and quite tame night bird of a female sex whom he had recently brought from Genoa. Pictet said that during the long diplomatic conversation she would now and then glance from her needlework and smile at a young colleague of his. Since Kozlovsky invited them to dine en famille two days later, Pictet added: We’ll be able to tell you then how the little bird sings. And in a despatch written a couple of

17. Hanoteau, Geist und Herz verbiindet, pp. 37-38.

18. Comtesse de Boigne, Recits d’une tante: Memoires de la Comtesse de Boigne, nee d’Osmond (Paris, 1924), p. 21.

days later he wrote: Nothing unusual happened at our family dinner. The twittering of the little female parakeet made this dinner more delightful.¹⁹

Except for the already mentioned brief recall of Cruikshank’s print, on which Kozlovsky and Mme Lieven were so sharply contrasted, Metternich’s account of his conversation with Kozlovsky about women is the only mention of Kozlovsky in his known letters to the Countess. Since no letters of the Countess to him before 1820 are available, we do not know whether what Metternich wrote to her provoked any reaction on her part. Kozlovsky’s name is not mentioned in her published letters to him after 1820, and no letters of Metternich to her after 1819 have ever been published. It is possible that during his affair with her Metternich did implant in her some of his antipathy towards Kozlovsky.

We also do not know, strangely enough, whether Countess Lieven ever wrote to Kozlovsky, His papers were not systematically preserved, and only a few have survived by pure chance. Most of his life after his retirement was spent in constant peregrinations, in crossing and recrossing Europe: we hear of him in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Belgium, in England. It was only in 1835 that he went back to Russia. He stopped first in Warsaw where his stay was unexpectedly prolonged by an accident: he fell out of a carriage and was for a time disabled (later he always had to use a crutch). When he finally arrived in St. Petersburg, Princess Lieven, who had been there since the previous year, had already left. Kozlovsky’s last years were spent again in Warsaw: somewhat surprisingly, in view of his liberal opinions and his proPolish sympathies, which he had evinced at a very early stage, already in the previous reign, he was now appointed, apparently on the recommendation of Lord Durham, the then British ambassador in St. Petersburg, to the Viceroy’s council in Warsaw. The Viceroy was none other than Fieldmarshal Paske- vich, the conqueror of Poland, with whom Kozlovsky had established a satisfying relationship during his previous stay in Warsaw. From Warsaw Kozlovsky paid occasional visits to St. Petersburg and to Western Europe, and during one of the latter he died, in 1840, in Baden-Baden, where he was buried. There is nothing to show that he and Princess Lieven met during this last period of his life, though we know that she was in Baden-Baden in the summer of 1839 and wrote from there to Guizot. But there is no mention of Kozlovsky in her letters to him.

As for Kozlovsky’s letters to her, we know so far of one only, which is now preserved among the Lieven papers in the British Museum and remains unpublished. Although Kozlovsky shone primarily as a brilliant talker— there are enough testimonies in his contemporaries’ letters and reminiscences to his sharp salon wit and to his great gift of telling tales—he was also very

19. Edmond Pictet, Biographic, travaux et correspondance diplomatique de C. Pictet de Rochemont, depute de Geneve aupres du Congres de Vienne, 1814, envoye extraordinaire et ministre plenipotentiaire de la Suisse d Paris et a Turin, 1815 et 1816 (1755-18241 (Geneve, 1892).

much given to writing letters, and among those that have been preserved there are several very interesting ones (to Chateaubriand, to Mme de Stal, to Marchese Cavour, to Rachel Varnhagen von Ense, to Miss Berry, to Pictet de Rochemont, and others), some of them quite long. There may be others, still to be found among the papers of his Russian friends, such as Prince Vyazemsky and the brothers Turgenev, in whose own correspondence he occupies a prominent place. The possibility of some of his letters to Mme Lieven still coming to light in Russian archives is not excluded.²⁰ Besides private letters, he also wrote and published open letters on subjects that engaged his interest and attention. One of them, addressed to Dr. Blomfield, the Bishop of Chester, dealt with the emancipation of Catholics in England, and was written as though emanating from a German Protestant; while another, addressed to the Duc de Broglie, was, curiously enough, written in defence of the ministers of Charles X.²¹

Kozlovsky also left behind some interesting unfinished memoirs, which contain an unusually objective characterization of the future Emperor Nicholas I, whom he met before his accession.²² He was also the author of two articles on scientific subjects which were published in Sovremennik, the journal which Pushkin launched in 1836. One of them, published during Pushkin’s lifetime, was a review of the Parisian Annuaire du bureau des longitudes. Kozlovsky’s encyclopedic interests were hinted at, when he was still quite young and lived in Rome, by one of his fellow diplomats, who said that sa tete est une bibliotheque en desordre.²³ Pushkin, whom he met after his return to Russia, had a very high opinion of his literary abilities and said once that Kozlovsky would be his Providence if one day he made up his mind to become a writer.

The letter of Kozlovsky to Countess Lieven, which is printed below, is a rather characteristic example of his epistolary art and manner and is therefore given here in its original French. It reflects also some of the characteristic traits of his personality and some of his most cherished views.

20. Prior to the publication of his biography of the Countess, Dr. Hyde published, in 1935, a description, followed by a handlist, of the Lieven archives to which he had had access and which were much later deposited in the British Museum Library. Here, under No. 172, we find listed Letters from Koslowsky to Princess Lieven. It appears that the letter that is printed below is the only letter of Kozlovsky’s among those papers. For Dr. Hyde’s description of the archives see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Lieven Archives, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 12, No. 36 (1935): 152-163.

21. Lettre d’un Protestant dAllemagne a Monseigneur leveque de Chester (Paris, 1825) and Lettre au due de Broglie sur les prisonniers de Vincennes (Gand, 1830). Both these open letters, or pamphlets, were reprinted in Dorow’s book. Some interesting diplomatic despatches of Kozlovsky’s, in connection with Joseph de Maistre and with Mme de Stael, will be found in volumes 29-30 and 33-34 of Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (Moscow, 1937 and 1939).

22. This memoir, written in French, was also reprinted by Dorow.

23. Iz pisem Konstantina Jakovlevica Bulgakova … , Russkij Arkhiv, 1899, No. 2, p. 21. Much later, in 1814, C. Bulgakov wrote to his brother from Vienna: "Kozlovsky is, in fact, much cleaner since he has become Minister, and has gained very much. When he finishes sowing his wild oats |sovsem perebesitsja] he will be quite a decent man [porjadoenyj celovek], for he certainly has the wherewithal, if only he had a little more order in his head. Iz pisem …," Russkij Arkhiv, 1904, No. 3, p. 199. Except for the sentence about sowing the wild oats, the letter is written in French.

Though it bears no indication of the year in which it was written, it can be assigned beyond all doubt to 1825, the year when Countess Lieven set out on the first of her two visits to Russia before her husband’s final recall in 1834 (the second time she went in 1830 when her husband was called upon to replace temporarily Count Nesselrode as Chancellor; but on that occasion she went only as far as Warsaw). In a letter to her brother, dated 2/14 March 1825, she wrote that her departure was fixed for June 1, adding: in any case I shall travel by way of Warsaw, as I have a holy horror of that Prussia.11 Kozlovsky must have either seen her or heard from her not long before (in the 1820s he visited London quite often) and thus known of her plan to stop in Frankfurt, as may be seen from the initial sentence of his letter. The Countess did, in fact, stop in Frankfurt, but nearly a month later than originally intended, and Kozlovsky must have missed her. The explanation for this delay was the sudden illness of her son George, who was then six years old. On June 29, the Countess wrote from Frankfurt to Metternich:

I left England after a month of terrible anxiety about my little George. He had the infantile fever, a horrible and never-ending complaint which is common in England. I myself was ill, from exhaustion and the anxiety caused by his illness. I was on the verge of a bilious fever; but, eventually, my sound constitution got the upper hand; I was ill and set out, all within the space of four days.

I am spending tomorrow here, to see my brother [Constantine Benckendorff]; and then I resume my wretched studious journey … I did not write to you during my son’s illness, because I found it impossible to collect my thoughts. I was not myself. You have never known me in sorrow. You do not know how badly I stand up to it.12

The main ostensible subject of Kozlovsky’s letter was the Countess’s second son Paul, then about twenty years old, who had just started his service in the Imperial Chancellery (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) under Count Nesselrode. In the letter to her brother Alexander, in which she announced to him her forthcoming departure for St. Petersburg and which she began by telling him of her recovery after giving birth to another boy (her fifth), she went on to speak at some length about Paul:

The news that Paul tells me of himself gives me great pleasure, and I cannot express myself too gratefully to dear Count Nesselrode for his goodness in allowing my boy to commence his career in a way most likely to give him a taste for his profession. As for Paul, he is delighted with his start in life, and speaks in high praise of the Foreign Office. I gather also from his letters that his doings at Court and in society are such as I should have wished. I am surprised, however, dear Alexander, that you should think him too young to be independent. At twenty years old he should know how to behave himself; I am convinced that he can do so, and if he cannot I should still be disposed to say that he ought to be independent, for at that age experience is the best master, and, moreover, at that age not one of your contemporaries (yourself included) had not been for some time independent.

Our reason for wishing him to make his debut in Russia was to awake in him a love for his own country; we have endeavoured to make him understand his duties towards it. In what concerns his tastes and affections he will need freedom of choice—that is the outcome of his stay in this country—but the fruits of his learning will not be limited to this. If your ideas on this subject do not agree with mine, wait until we meet; do not let us fall to disputing, especially on paper.²"

As I have said before, it is possible that the Countess had seen Kozlovsky some time before her departure from London, and in that case she may have discussed Paul’s case with him. But before Kozlovsky himself comes to deal with it in more or less concrete terms, he indulges in a long disquisition on moral philosophy, developing views that he held very dear. In the contrast which he draws between the position of the individual in Russia and in the West we can see a foretaste of the ideas which he was to develop to Custine fifteen years later.

When he comes to discuss the case of Paul he tries to persuade the mother not to allow her boy to be ruled or dominated by those who are concerned with nothing but his career. It is important that he should retain his independence and not be an echo of other people’s wishes and views, including those of his superiors, no matter how great those people may be. In what he says he voices his own aversion to bureaucracy in all its forms and invokes his own experience, no doubt having in mind his short spell between 1810 and 1812 in the same Chancellery, but under Count Rumyantsev. The passage in which he fulminates against those who fawn upon their superiors to the point of caressing their favorite dogs is a curious echo of the famous monologue of Chatsky in Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit (also rendered into English as The Mischief of Being Clever) which, written a little earlier, was circulating in innumerable copies and, as D. S. Mirsky says in his History of Russian Literature, was as good as published in 1825. We may assume that Kozlovsky, even though he lived abroad, was familiar with it through his friends.

Kozlovsky suggests that it would be better for Paul to go into diplomatic service where he would have more opportunity to develop freely his personality, especially if he did as little routine work as possible and, instead of that, devoted as much time as he could to improving his mind by reading and

26. Robinson, Letters of Dorothea, Princess Lieven, p. 75. In the same letter the Countess enjoined her husband to use his influence (if you have any, she wrote) to get Paul’s brothers, Alexander and Constantine, made officers, adding: I confess that it will be a shock to me to find them in the garb of corporals, and it seems to me that their apprenticeship has been long enough. And then she asked: In what branch of the service are they serving, cavalry or infantry? The cavalry of the Guards is too expensive. They must be in the army, but where and under whom? Ibid., p. 76. It may seem strange that the mother did not know this. At one time all three brothers seem to have attended the University of Dorpat, one of the best in the Russian Empire in those days.

studying on his own. Here, again, Kozlovsky is probably recalling his own experience.

The stress which Kozlovsky laid on reading, on books, in the formation of human character was very characteristic of him. He was himself widely read in world literature, though largely an auto-didact. Very fond of Latin poets, much of whose work he knew by heart (according to his friend Vyazemsky, he possessed a prodigious memory), he once urged Pushkin to translate the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, and Pushkin began doing so. But he was also at home in Shakespeare and loved the French classics, and in an unfinished verse epistle to him Pushkin apostrophized him as a connoisseur of giant works of mind, a friend of English bards, a lover of Latin Muses. As a young man, Kozlovsky himself wrote poetry, so we can see perhaps that the honorary doctorate conferred on him by Oxford in 1813, though probably due to diplomatic reasons, was not quite undeserved.

In his letter to the Countess, Kozlovsky, in denouncing flattery and insincerity, supported his argument by quotations from Coriolanus and from Racine’s Britannicus²¹ and opposed to them what he regarded as a typically Russian proverb: My tongue is my enemy. Referring again to the differences in fundamental attitudes in Russia and the West, he brought in the names of Charles Rollin, a French seventeenth-century historian and humanist, and the great Roman historian Tacitus, as well as those of Voltaire and Corneille. To prop up some of his points, he brought in some more literary quotations. Nor could he help mentioning his friend Canning and his praise of Pitt’s disinterestedness, though he probably knew that at that time Countess Lieven still felt hostile towards Canning.

One may wonder: how much of this display of erudition was lost on the Countess? It is interesting to note that some of those who knew Mme Lieven primarily as a skillful diplomatic and political wirepuller,²⁸ as well as those who have written about her in modern times, have spoken somewhat contemptuously of her indifference to literature and her would-be aversion to reading. For example, Jean Hanoteau, the editor of Metternich’s surviving letters to her, has written that she had little taste for literature and rarely found a book that held her attention. That this was by no means so was rightly noted by Peter Quennell, who edited her letters to Metternich.²⁹ From them we can indeed see that she admired Shakespeare, was an enthusiastic reader of Walter Scott’s novels, which she recommended to Metternich’s

27. The quotation from Coriolanus is from the speech of Menenius Agrippa in act III, scene I. There is a minor inexactitude in the second line; it should read: Or Jove for’s power to thunder. The quotation from Britannicus is from act II, verses 639-642. Kozlovsky has, however, reversed the lines, perhaps deliberately: he underlined verse 640 with which his quotation concludes. There is also, in the letter, a mention of Banquo.

28. Une intrigante au dela de toute idee, wrote of her Count Rodolphe Apponyi, who was married to her niece Annette Benckendorff and was attached to the Austrian Embassy in Paris. See Ernest Daudet, Vingt- cinq ans a Paris (1826-1852): Journal du comte Rodolphe Apponyi …, vol. 4 (Paris, 1926), p. 448.

29. See Biographical foreword in Quennell, Private Letters, p. xvii.

attention, and was so much moved by the Third Canto of Byron’s Childe Harold that she once contemplated suicide off Brighton beach! This last confession should perhaps be taken with a big grain of salt: it could have been made for the benefit of the sentimentally and romantically inclined Austrian Chancellor. But what she wrote Metternich about Scott, in a letter dated September 16, 1820, sounded even like a little piece of literary criticism:

Do you like reading English, mon Prince, and have you ever had time to read the novels, or a novel, of Walter Scott? French books are not worth reading after him—there is such truth in the characters and the situations. I think I have found out the chief quality of Walter Scott’s novels; his principal characters are never idealised as in all other novels. On the contrary, it is they who have the most weaknesses, so that in them weak people can see themselves. And, as there are more weak people than strong, there results a delightful impression of truth and fidelity of portraiture which makes the reader identify himself with his Maclvors and his Roland Grahams. Love, usually the essence of the novel, always takes second place; the dominant interest of all his works is something greater. With him, one finds oneself far readier to enter low company than with any other novelist (especially foreign novelists). English rustic society is the most picturesque and quaint of all, and I like his tavern talk as well as his palace conversation. When you have finished your Carbonari novel, and given it a happy ending, promise to read Ivanhoe or The Abbot—Ithat is Scott’s last book.

In a later letter (December 16, 1821) she gave proof of the constancy of her interest in Scott as a writer:

Walter Scott has just published a new novel, The Pirate. As before, the book is in three volumes, neither more nor less, and contains the same number of pages; but, what is more important, it reveals the same talent, the same power of imagination, and a subtlety of observation, a