by Will Durant
At the behest of Nicholas I, Ricard de Montferrand crowned Russia’s Alexandrian Age with a tall, monolithic column (perhaps remembering the Vendôme Column in Paris), as a lasting tribute to the Czar who had conquered France, but had never ceased to reverence its art.
Russian sculptors also sat at the feet of French artists who had knelt before Roman artists who had borrowed from conquered Greece. Before the West-oriented Catherine II, the influence of a Byzantine religion largely Oriental and fearful of the human body as an instrument of Satan had led the Russians to shun most sculpture in the round; and only slowly, with the lusty paganism of the Enlightenment entering with Catherine, had this taboo yielded in the eternal war and oscillation between religion and sex. Etienne-Maurice Falconet, lured from France by Catherine in 1766, carved and chiseled in Russia till 1778, and, in his epochal statue of Peter the Great, not only raised a horse and a man of bronze into the air, but struck a blow for the right of art to speak its message uncurbed by anything but its conception of beauty, reality, and power.
Meanwhile Nicolas-François Gillet had come in 1758 to teach sculpture in the Academy of Fine Arts which had been opened in St. Petersburg a year before. One of his pupils, F. F. Shchedrin, was sent to Paris to refine his chisel; he did so well that his Venus rivaled its French model, the Baigneuse of his master, Gabriel d’Allegrain. It was Shchedrin who carved the caryatids for the main portal of Zakharov’s Admiralty. —The last among Gillet’s famous pupils, Ivan Markos, worked for some time with Canova and Thorwaldsen in Rome, and added to their classic idealism something of the Romantic emotion that was replacing the neoclassic age; critics complained that he made the marble weep, and that his work was fit only for a cemetery.32 The cemeteries of Leningrad still display his art.
Russian painting had undergone a basic transformation through French influence in the Academy of Fine Arts. Till 1750 the art had been almost entirely religious, mostly consisting of icons painted in distemper or fresco on wood. The French inclinations of Catherine II, and her importation of French and Italian artists and paintings, soon drew the Russians to emulation; they passed from wood to canvas, from fresco to oil, from religious to secular subjects—”histories,” portraits, landscapes, and, last of all, genre.
Four painters reached excellence under Paul and Alexander. Vladimir Borovikovsky, perhaps taking a hint from Mme. Vigée-Lebrun (who painted in St. Petersburg in 1800), found attractive sitters among the young women of the court, with their gay or meditative eyes, their proud bosoms, and their flowing robes;33 but also he caught the aging Catherine in a moment of simplicity and innocence hardly to be expected of a royal nymphomaniac; and he left, in a ruthless mood, a discouraging portrait of An Unknown Woman with a Headdress,34 which is probably Mme. de Staël circling Europe to escape Napoleon.
Feoder Alekseev, sent to Venice to become a decorator, returned to become one of Russia’s foremost landscape painters. In 1800 he made of Moscow a series of paintings and drawings that remain as our best guide to the appearance of that city before Rostopchin’s patriotic arsons burned a third of it under Napoleon’s nose.
Sylvester Shchedrin, son of the sculptor aforesaid, loved nature more than women as inspirations to his brush. Dispatched to Italy in 1818 to study art, he fell in love with the sun, the bays and shores and woods of Naples and Sorrento, and sent back landscapes that must have made St. Petersburg doubly cold.
Orest Adamovich Kiprensky (1782–1836) came closest to greatness among the Russian painters of his time. The illegitimate son of a woman serf, he was adopted by her husband, was freed, and found his way, helped by accidents, into the Academy of Fine Arts. One of his first and best portraits was of his adoptive father, painted in 1804, when the artist was only twenty-two; it seems incredible that one so young should have reached both the understanding and the mastery to see and convey in one portrait the strength of body and character that made Suvorov and Kutuzov, and that led the victorious Russians from Moscow to Paris in 1812–13. Entirely different is Kiprensky’s portrait (1827) of the poet Pushkin—handsome, sensitive, questioning, with a dozen masterpieces in his head. Again unique is the full-length picture (1809) of the cavalry officer Evgraf Davidov—gorgeous uniform, proud mien, one hand on his sword as the supreme court. And in 1813, in a quite different world, the portrait of young Aleksandr Pavlovich Bakunin—no known relation to the Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin who, a generation later, harried Karl Marx with different absolutes, and founded the Nihilist movement in Russia. Kiprensky himself was something of a rebel, sympathized with the “Decembrist” rising in 1825, was marked as a social rebel, and sought safety in Florence, where the Uffizi Gallery had asked him for a self-portrait. He died in Italy in 1836, leaving it to later generations of Russians to recognize him as the greatest Russian painter of his time.
VII. RUSSIAN LITERATURE
Russian literature had both blossomed and decayed under Catherine the Great. Seldom had a ruler shown so enthusiastic a surrender to a foreign culture, or made so visible a conquest of its living leaders, as in her love affair with the Enlightenment, and her adroit conscription of Voltaire, Diderot and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm as eloquent defenders of Russia in France and Germany. But then the Revolution came, all thrones trembled, and the gods of the Illumination were discarded as godfathers of the guillotine. The Russian court still spoke eighteenth-century French, but Russian writers proclaimed the beauty of the Russian language, and some, according to Mme. de Staël, “applied the epithets deaf and dumb to persons ignorant of the Russian tongue.”35 A mighty quarrel arose, and became a national duel, between the admirers of foreign models in literature and life and the upholders of native morals, manners, subjects, speech, and styles. This “Slavophil” spirit was an understandable and necessary self-assertion of the national mind and character; it opened the way for the flood of Russian literary genius in the nineteenth century. It derived considerable stimulus from the wars of Alexander and Napoleon.
Alexander himself symbolized the conflict through his own spirit and history. He was highly sensitive to beauty in nature and art, in woman and himself. He recognized in art the double miracle of duration given to passing loveliness or character, and of illuminating significance elicited from indiscriminate reality. The influence of La Harpe and a Francophile court made the grandson of German Catherine a gentleman rivaling any Gaul in manners and education. He naturally supported the efforts of Karamzin and others to import French graces and subtleties into Russian speech and ways. His friendship with Napoleon (1807–10) supported this Westward inclination; his conflict with Napoleon (1811–15) touched his Russian roots, and turned him to sympathy with Aleksandr Shiskov and the Slavophils. In each of these moods the Czar encouraged authors by pensions, sinecures, decorations, or gifts. He ordered governmental printing of important contributions to literature, science, or history. He subsidized translations of Adam Smith, Bentham, Beccaria, and Montesquieu. When he learned that Karamzin wished to write a history of Russia but feared that he would starve in the process, Alexander gave him an annuity of two thousand rubles, and ordered the Treasury to finance the publication of his volumes.36
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826) was the son of a Tatar landowner in the province of Simbirsk on the lower Volga. He received a good education, learned German and French, and went well equipped for his eighteen months of travel in Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. Returning to Russia, he founded a monthly review, the Moskovsky zhurnal, whose most attractive contents were his own Letters of a Russian Traveler. His light and graceful style, describing not only objects seen but the feelings aroused in him, revealed the influence of Rousseau and the Russian tendency to sentiment. Karamzin went further on the Romantic line in his novel Poor Lisa (1792): a peasant girl, seduced and deserted, commits suicide. Though the tale made no pretense to be more than fiction, the spot where Lisa drowned herself became a pond of pilgrimage for Russian youths.37
Karamzin made his mark in almost every litera
ry field. His poems, unabashedly Romantic, found a large audience. As a critic he shocked the Slavophils by importing French or English terms to replace what seemed, to his traveled ear, clumsy, inaccurate, or cacophonous in Russian terms or phrases. Shishkov denounced him as a traitor to his country. Karamzin stood his ground, and won: he purified and expanded the Russian language, reconciled it with music, and transmitted a cleansed and sharpened instrument to Pushkin and Lermontov.
Karamzin prevailed for another reason: he practiced what he preached, in twelve volumes constituting the first real History of Russia. Financial help from the government enabled him to give almost all his waking time to the task. He borrowed judiciously from early chroniclers, warmed their cold facts with emotion, and graced the long story with a clear and flowing style. When the first eight volumes appeared (1816–18), in an edition of three thousand copies, they were sold out in twenty-five days. It could not rival the histories of Voltaire, Hume, or Gibbon; it was frankly patriotic, and saw absolute monarchy as the proper government of a people fighting for its life against a merciless climate and barbarian invaders, and forced to create law as it spread. But it proved to be a precious mine of material for poets and novelists of the succeeding generations; here, for example, Pushkin found the story of Boris Godunov. It shared modestly with the repulse of Napoleon from Moscow in raising the Russian spirit to play its brilliant and unique part in the literature and music of the nineteenth century.
Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769–1844) was the Aesop, as Karamzin was the Herodotus, of this Alexandrian spring. Son of a poor army officer, he may have taken from military camps some of the racy speech and satirical verve that sharpened his comedies till they drew blood from the status quo. When it silenced him he withdrew from literature into more practical pursuits—tutor, secretary, professional card player, gambler… Then, in 1809, he issued a book of fables which set all literate Russia laughing at all mankind except the reader. Some of these stories, as fables often do, echoed earlier fabulists, notably La Fontaine. Most of them—through the mouths of lions, elephants, crows, and other philosophers—expounded popular wisdom in popular language cut into ambling iambic verses of any convenient length. Krylov had rediscovered the secret of the great fabulist—that the only intelligible wisdom is that of the peasant, and its art is to find the ego behind the sham. Krylov exposed the vices, stupidity, wiles, and venality of men, and reckoned satire to be as good a tutor as a month in jail. Since only an exceptional reader thought that the story was about himself, the public bought the little volume eagerly—forty thousand copies in ten years—in a land where the ability to read was a proud distinction. Krylov tapped the vein periodically by publishing nine more volumes of fables between 1809 and 1843. The government, grateful for the general conservatism of Krylov, gave him a supporting post in the public library. He held it, lazy and content, till, one day in his seventy-fifth year, he ate too many partridges and died.38
VIII. ALEXANDER AND NAPOLEON: 1805-I2
They came to power almost at the same time, and both by violence: Napoleon on November 9, 1799, Alexander on March 24, 1801. Their nearness in time overcame their separation in space: like two opposed forces in a cell, they expanded in power till they tore Europe apart, first at Austerlitz with war, then at Tilsit with peace. They were rivals for Turkey, because each thought of mastering the Continent, with Constantinople as its key; each took turns in courting Poland because it was a strategic bridge between East and West; the war of 1812–13 was fought to decide which of the two was to master Europe and perhaps conquer India.
Alexander, a youth of twenty-four, facing in 1801 a bedlam of Powers old in chicanery, wavered in his foreign policy but repeatedly extended his rule. He alternated between war and peace with Turkey, annexed Georgia in 1801 and Alaska in 1803, allied Russia with Prussia in 1802, with Austria in 1804, with England in 1805. In 1804 his Minister for Foreign Affairs drew up for him a plan for partitioning the Ottoman Empire.39 He admired Napoleon’s work as consul, denounced him for the summary execution of the Due d’Enghien, joined Austria and Prussia in a disastrous war against the usurper (1805–06), met and kissed him at Tilsit (1807), and agreed with him that half of Europe was enough for each of them until further notice.
Each left Tilsit confident that he had won a great diplomatic victory. Napoleon had persuaded the Czar to drop England and take France as his ally, and to enforce the Continental Blockade against British goods. Alexander, left defenseless by the shattering of his main army at Friedland, had saved his realm from a ruinous invasion by abandoning one ally for a stronger one, and securing a free hand with Sweden and Turkey. Napoleon’s army and capital applauded his military and diplomatic triumphs. Alexander, on returning to St. Petersburg, found nearly everyone—family, court, nobility, clergy, merchants, and populace—shocked that he had signed a humiliating peace with an upstart bandit atheist. Some writers—like F. N. Glinka and Count Feodor Rostopchin (the future governor of Moscow)—published articles explaining that the Peace of Tilsit was only a truce, and promising that the war against Napoleon would be resumed at a suitable opportunity, and would be carried on to his final destruction.40
The business class joined in condemning the peace, since it meant, for them, Russia’s enforcement of the Continental Blockade. The sale of Russian products to Britain, and the import of British goods into Russia, had been vital elements in their prosperity; the prohibition of such trade would ruin many of them, and would disrupt the national economy. And indeed the Russian government neared bankruptcy in 1810.
Alexander lost confidence, and hardened his rule. He restored censorship of speech and press, and abandoned his plans of reform. His liberal ministers —Kochubey, Czartoryski, Novosiltsov—resigned, and two of them left Russia. Then, in 1809, in a final attempt to free himself from the currents of conservatism that were rising around him, he took as his favorite adviser an almost reckless reformer who proposed that the Czar submit to a constitutional government.
Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky had begun life in 1772 as the son of a village priest. He developed a fondness for science, and had risen to be professor of mathematics and physics in a St. Petersburg seminary when his work drew the attention of Czarevich Alexander. In 1802 he was assigned to the Ministry of the Interior, then under the reformer Kochubey. There he showed such capacity for hard work and intelligible reports that the Czar assigned him to direct the codification of Russian laws. When Alexander set out for his second meeting with Napoleon in 1808 he took Speranksy with him as “the only clear head in Russia.”41 An uncertain story relates that when Alexander asked him what he thought of the states then under Napoleon’s control, Speranksy made the perceptive reply “We have better men, but they have better institutions.”42 Returning to St. Petersburg, the Czar gave his new favorite more and more power, until they found themselves contemplating a general reconstruction of the Russian government.
Speranksy wanted to end serfdom, but confessed that it could not be done in 1809. However, perhaps remembering a similar move by Stein in Prussia, he proposed a preparatory decree permitting all classes to buy land. The next step, he suggested, would be the election, by all property owners in each volost (township), of a local duma (council), which would control town finances, appoint local officials, and elect delegates—and submit recommendations—to a district duma; this would appoint district officials, propose district policies, and send delegates and recommendations to a provincial duma, which would send delegates and recommendations to a national duma in St. Petersburg. Only the czar would have the authority to determine laws, but the national duma would have the right to suggest laws for his consideration. Between the duma and the ruler an advisory council appointed by him would aid him in administration and legislation.
Alexander gave the plan a general approval, but he was hampered by other powers in the state. The nobility felt itself endangered; it distrusted Speranksy as a commoner, accused him of partiality for the Jews43 and admiration for Napol
eon, and insinuated to Alexander that his ambitious Minister was aiming to be the power behind the throne. The bureaucracy joined in the attack, largely because Speranksy had persuaded the Czar to issue a decree (August 6, 1809) requiring a university degree, or the passing of a strict examination, for eligibility to the higher administrative offices. Alexander was sufficiently influenced to allow that the international situation did not allow of substantial experiments in the government.
His relations with France had been soured by Napoleon’s marriage with an Austrian Archduchess, and his seizure (January 22, 1811) of the duchy of Oldenburg, whose Duke was father-in-law to the Czar’s sister. Napoleon explained that the Duke had refused to close his ports to British goods, and that compensation had been offered him.44 Alexander did not like Napoleon’s establishment of a grand duchy of Warsaw so close to formerly Polish territory appropriated by Russia; he feared that at any time Napoleon would revive a kingdom of Poland hostile to Russia. He decided that to secure the unity of his country behind him he must make concessions to the nobility and the merchants.