The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  For all its tribulations and divisions, Russia had become by the mid-eighteenth century a great European power. Frontier ruggedness and Tatar ruthlessness had been harnessed by Prussian discipline and Swedish administrative technique. The officer class, newly swollen with Northern European mercenaries, had led Russia in conquest abroad and defended its autocrat from unrest within. It was now being rewarded by grants of land and civil authority. The culture of old Russia was rejected by the new aristocracy, but nothing had as yet taken its place except a patina of Latin culture acquired from the newly absorbed Polish territories.

  Under Peter and his immediate successors, the aristocracy stood suspended between many worlds. They generally had to speak at least three languages: German, Russian, and Polish; and their semi-official handbook of instruction advised them to learn three different numerical systems: the Arabic (needed for military and technical purposes), the Roman (used in classical and modern Western culture), and the Church Slavonic lettered numerals still used in Russia itself.1

  The name first assigned to the new service nobility, shliakhetstvo, symbolized the polyglot derivation of the class; for this was the Russified form of the Polish szlachta, which was itself derived from the German word for hereditary lineage Geschlecht. In the course of the century, the nobility came to be known by the term dvorianstvo, "men of the court," which suggested the growing interdependence of the tsar and the aristocracy. In return for the services to the state prescribed in Peter's Table of Ranks (1722), the aristocracy received almost unlimited local power in a series of grants cli-

  maxed in 1785 by the Charter to the Nobility. Just as the new nobility shed its Germano-Polish name, so it soon shed the shell of Latin culture that had been the vehicle for rejecting the traditional Greco-Byzantine heritage. Latin remained the principal language of seminaries and academies; but it did not-and in the eighteenth century could not-provide the common language for the new Russian ruling class.

  Only late in the reign of Peter's youngest daughter, Elizabeth, did this rootless but triumphant class begin to find a sense of identity through the language and culture of France. Elizabeth's reign began a period of creativity that can justly be called the golden age of the JRussian aristocracy, and roughly identified with the century between 1755-6 and 1855-6.

  In 1755-6 Russia witnessed the first performance of a Russian opera by Russians, the founding of the first permanent Russian theater, and the establishment of the first Russian university. A century later, Alexander II ascended the throne to free the serfs, open up Russia to accelerated industrialization, and thus end forever the special position of the aristocracy. In terms of foreign influence this frame of dates is equally significant: 1756 marking the "diplomatic revolution" that aligned Russia with the ancien regime in France; 1856 bringing an end to the Crimean War, which, as the first great setback for the old order in Russia, prepared the way for an influx of liberalizing ideas from the victorious English and French.

  The new turn in Russian diplomacy helped French become the common language of the aristocracy. Although the Russian aristocracy was also to create modern literary Russian, they continued to speak to one another and even to think largely in French. This new language brought Russian noblemen into the main stream of European culture, and also helped isolate them more than before from their own countrymen. Much of the drama of the aristocratic century lies in the struggle of a refined but essentially foreign culture to strike roots in Russian soil.

  In its attempt to take hold in this chilly northern climate, the rationalism of the French Enlightenment was opposed not just by the dogged piety and superstition of the masses but also by a fresh surge of pietistic thought within the aristocracy itself. However one divides the aristocratic century, one finds a straggle going on beneath a seemingly tranquil surface: between rationalism and romanticism. French and German influence, universalism and nationalism, St. Petersburg and Moscow.

  One can speak impressionistically of an enlightened eighteenth and a romantic nineteenth century; of the cult of Voltaire and Diderot giving way to that of Schelling and Hegel; of an alternation between Francophile reform under Catherine and Alexander I and Prussian discipline under their successors Paul and Nicholas; or of a general attraction toward France that

  was weakened first by the revolutionary terror and then by the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 In any case, the struggle throughout this century was essentially between French and German approaches to political, personal, and aesthetic problems.

  The contioversies occurred within an uneasy aristocratic minority which also felt piessures from below and harassment from above. Yet, viewed in the broad context of Russian history, there has probably never been a century in which the controlling elite has had the liberty to discuss problems and ideas free from the disruptions of major social and political change. During this period, the aristocratic elite produced a culture that was both national and European, and created poetry, ballet, and architecture equal to the finest of the age.

  Yet it was jnst in the realm of ideas that the aristocratic century left its most fateful legacy. The very security and freedom from practical responsibilities of the aristocracy permitted it to become involved in the controversies of a disturbed century in European philosophy. Partly from idle curiosity, partly from deeper concern, the Russian aristocrats generated a sense of philosophic anguish which gradually focused on certain nagging questions about the meaning of history, of culture, and of life itself.

  A special kind of fraternity emerged within the aristocracy of those who felt alienated from official Russia and concerned about these "cursed questions." Out of debates that began innocuously among bored officers in masonic lodges, fraternal societies, and philosophic "circles" came a sense of solidarity and spiritual purpose. To be sure, the aristocratic philosophers agreed on almost nothing and generated great confusion in the society around them. In their unreal efforts to bring to life on Russian soil the heroics of Byron's poems and Schiller's plays, they often lost themselves in the indecisive melancholy of their favorite dramatic character, Hamlet, and created the literary type known as "the superfluous man." Yet, at the same time, they created an aura of heroism about their own implausible dedication to high ideals. They created an enduring dissatisfaction with compromise, philistinism, and partial answers.

  Frustrated in matters of practical political and social reform, thinking aristocrats increasingly poured their passion into artistic creativity and historical prophecy. They harrowed the soil and sowed the seeds for a rich harvest. Their restless pursuit of truth enabled succeeding ages to produce the most profoundly realistic literature and the most profoundly revolutionary political upheaval of modern times.

  i. The Troubled Enlightenment

  ls distinct from the pattern that developed in the early modern West, secular enlightenment in Russia began late, proceeded fitfully, and was largely the work of monks or foreign technicians-always in response to imperial commands and patronage.

  Even Soviet scholars who minimize the importance of religion and generally maximize Great Russian influences now tend to date the beginning of the Russian Enlightenment from the influx of learned White Russian and Ukrainian monks into Moscow at the time of schism in the Russian Church.1 Monks and seminarians indeed continued to play a large role in the Russian Enlightenment down into the twentieth century, and are responsible for some of the religious intensity of much Russian secular thought. At the same time, the Westernized regions of the empire played a key role in opening up the Russian mind to the speculative philosophy and classical art forrns which soon dominated aristocratic culture. While under Polish dominance, Kiev had been transformed into an eastern bastion of scholastic education and baroque architecture. For nearly a century after its return to Russian control, Kiev was the most literate city in the empire. The Kiev-Mogila Academy (which was not made a theological academy until the nineteenth century) was the closest approximation to a Western-style liberal arts university. Between 1721 and 17
65, twenty-eight seminaries were founded-all on the Kievan model; and it is probably not too much to say that Kiev taught Russia not only to read and write in the eighteenth century, but also to think in the abstract, metaphysical terms which were to prove so attractive to the aristocratic intellectuals.2

  Foreign technicians were also bearers of literary and secular ideas in the early modern period of Russian history. Yet the various military, commercial, and medical specialists that flooded into Russia in increasing numbers from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century were, for the most part, kept in hermetically sealed settlements in the major ports and administrative centers. The price of extensive residence or broad Russian contact

  was almost invariably complete assimilation: change of name, religion, and dress. Those willing to pay this price did not generally have very much intellectual or cultural vitality to contribute to their adopted land.

  Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education. By making a measure of elementary education obligatory for much of his service aristocracy and by introducing an official civil script, a reformed alphabet, and innumerable Western words and concepts into the language, Peter prepared the way for a more purely secular enlightenment. Shortly after his death, the first institute of secular scientific learning, the Academy of Sciences, was established in St. Petersburg along lines that he had prescribed. By entrusting the organization and staffing of the Academy to the German mathematician and natural philosopher Christian Wolff, Peter recognized the dependence on foreigners that would continue under his successors but willed to them his own bias in favor of secular learning. Whereas the school system set up early in Peter's reign in key Russian cities by Pietist evangelists from Halle soon collapsed, the academy organized by Wolff (who had been forced to leave Halle by fearful Pietists) survived and gradually became the center of a new educational system.3

  Only, however, under Elizabeth in the 1750's did the work of the Academy begin to have a broader impact on Russian culture. By then the many-sided effects of Peter's opening to the West had begun to reach a fruition that can properly be called a Russian Enlightenment. Within the space of a few years in the mid-fifties the Academy issued a number of ethnographic and geographic publications that broadly stimulated aristocratic society with fresh information about other cultures; and Russia acquired a university, permanent theater, academy of arts, decorative porcelain factory, and so on.

  The early years of Catherine's reign were perhaps thr, most decisive of all, for the new sovereign virtually commanded the literate public to consider a new spectrum of problems-problems ranging from politics to architecture to agriculture. Whereas the number of books printed annually in the Russian empire had risen from a low of seven in the ) ear after Peter the Great's death to twenty-three by the end of the fifties, the average in the 1760's leaped to 105 a year: the first in a series of geometric increases. Whereas almost all of the few books printed in the first half of the eighteenth century were religious, 40 per cent of the eight thousand books printed in the second half of the century (almost all of them during Catherine's reign) were purely secular.4 The number of new books put in circulation in Russia in the 1760's and 1770's was more than seven times the number for the 1740's and 1750's.5

  Accompanying this sudden growth in the number of books printed (and also imported) went an extraordinary spread of secular learning to the provinces. Outlying regions that had been bastions of religious conservatism and xenophobia began to make important contributions to secular enlightenment. The poet Tretfiakoysky came from Astrakhan; Lomonosov from Kholmogory; and the personnel for the first permanent Russian theater from Yaroslavl. The director and principal playwright of the theater, Sumarokov, came from Finland-as did most of the granite used for rebuilding St. Petersburg. The first provincial journals in Russian history appeared late in the eighties in Yaroslavl and in Tobol'sk in distant Siberia.6 Voltaire's best translator (and most eloquent defender even after Catherine had become disillusioned with the Russian Enlightenment) came from the Siberian city of Orenburg.7

  The sudden influx of private foreign tutors, and the efforts to transform provincial cities into imperial cultural and administrative centers, increased provincial involvement in the new secular culture. Also important were the sudden rash of scientific expeditions to the north and east in the sixties and seventies led by the great biologist, mineralogist, and linguist Peter Simon Pallas. Sponsored by the Academy of Sciences, these large-scale attempts to gather and collate scientific information of all sorts necessarily drew into their activities many provincial figures with first-hand knowledge of local conditions and problems.

  The arrival of the Academy of Sciences as a serious institution for the higher scientific education of native Russians can be dated from the beginnings of group research by the Russian apprentices of Pallas and of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Despite blindness which overtook Euler shortly after he returned permanently to Russia in 1766, Euler wrote almost half of the eight hundred papers in his completed works during the years that remained in his life, which were eminently productive ones. His very infirmity forced him to rely on young Russian apprentices; and his previous experience as head of the Berlin academy fortified him with an ability to organize as well as inspire his fellow scientists. When he died in 1783, he left Russia with a significant number of Russian-speaking scientists capable of introducing advanced mathematics into the curricula of other educational institutions.8

  Having taken away from Catherine the Great her personal cook, who provided his aging physique with richer food than it could digest, Euler repaid her by providing Russia with more food for thought than its youthful intellect could yet assimilate. But after his death three of his sons remained in Russia, at least for a time, to help begin the process; and Nicholas Fuss, the man who pronounced the eulogy at Euler's burial in St. Petersburg,

  married his granddaughter and helped found an indigenous tradition of higher mathematical study in early-nineteenth-century Russia.

  Even more important than this development of a native scientific tradition was the prior emergence of scientific self-confidence in the person of Michael Lomonosov, the best-known figure of the Russian Enlightenment. He was a scientist in both the Renaissance and the modern sense of the word: a universal man, symbolizing the arrival of Russia as a contributor to, rather than a mere dependency of, the secular scientific culture of Europe.9 The decisive moment in Lomonosov's life came in the mid-thirties, when a new director of the Academy of Sciences requested that a number of well-trained Russian students be transferred from theological academies for scientific training at the gymnasium of the academy. As one of the small group chosen, Lomonosov arrived in St. Petersburg on New Year's Day of 1736-a milestone in the cultural rise of the new capital, no less important than the arrival of Empress Anna for permanent residence just four years before.

  From St. Petersburg, Lomonosov went to study with Christian Wolff, who had left the domain of Prussian pietism at Halle for the University of Marburg. There Lomonosov acquired not only the scientific training which enabled him to become a pioneer in the field of physical chemistry, but also a fascination with the institution of a university hitherto nonexistent in Russia. Upon his return, he immersed himself in the scientific activities of the St. Petersburg Academy, and also helped found Moscow University and give it an initial Germanic bias in favor of developing a library and research institutes.

  Lomonosov was not only a scientist and educator but a poet, essayist, orator, and historian. He gathered the material which was sent to Voltaire for his biography of Peter the Great; questioned the then dominant "Norman" emphasis on the Germanic elements in early Russian civilization; and wrote a Russian grammar which served as the basic text on this subject from its appearance in 1755 until the 1830's. By praising vernacular Russian and providing guidance for its use, Lomonosov helped clear the way for truly
national forms of expression-even though he wrote most of his literary production in a more bombastic language replete with Church Slavonic forms.

  Lomonosov was in no sense a revolutionary. He rejected sloth and superstition wherever he found it. But he admired royalty no less than most other leaders of the European Enlightenment, and his religious beliefs were considerably more fervent. His new methods of rhetoric and panegyric were invoked for the commemoration of coronations and Christian holidays; his

  new chemical techniques for glass manufacture were used for church mosaics. His curiosity extended up into the sky (where he and a colleague duplicated Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity and fascinated St. Petersburg society by producing "thunder machines" that brought electrical charges into bottles during thunderstorms), and far out to sea (where he proposed the founding of an international academy to develop more scientific methods of navigation and championed an expedition to find a northern passage to the Orient).

  Lomonosov is, together with Pushkin, one of those rare figures admired by almost all factions in subsequent Russian thought. Those who came after him have looked back longingly, not only at the breadth of his accomplishment, but at his practical-minded attitude toward life. The passion of their nostalgia no less than the uniqueness of Lomonosov himself serves as a reminder that the Enlightenment in Russia was a relatively frail and insecure phenomenon compared to that of the West. Indeed, much of Lomonosov's scientific work was not fully uncovered and understood by his countrymen until the early twentieth century.