The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  become major centers of initiation into the new Russian Enlightenment. Foundling homes are even now called "educational" (vospitatel'nye) homes in Russia, and these first ones were set up

  … to overcome the superstition of centuries, to give the people their new education and, so to speak, their new birth (porozhdenie).48

  They were to remain totally removed from the outside world in these secular monasteries from age five or six to eighteen or twenty; but, in fact, many entered at two or three, and were neither bastards nor orphans.

  Betskoy was Russia's first de facto minister of education, serving as president of the Academy of Arts, organizing planner for the Smolny Monastery for women (the only one of these "monastic" schools to outlive him), and reorganizer of the curriculum for the infantry corps of cadets-as well as head of the foundling homes and an influential adviser to the Academy of Sciences and many private tutors. He was also a resourceful fund raiser, promoting special theatrical benefits and a lucrative tax for education on another favorite aristocratic recreation: playing cards. He died in 1795, just a year before his sovereign benefactor, and willed his substantial private fortune of 400,000 rubles to his educational projects. As he was lowered into the grave, the most honored poet of the age, Gabriel Derzhavin, read a specially written "On the End of the Philanthropist" to this "ray of goodness." The poem was, as it were, the secular substitute for the "Eternal Memory" of the Orthodox burial service. Now "heaven, truth, saintliness" were made to "cry out above the grave" that their "light" was immortal even if their lives were only "smoke." "Without good deeds," Derzhavin concludes, "there is no blessedness."48

  One can, of course, question what the real number of "good deeds" or extent of civic "blessedness" was under Catherine. Slje never shared her courtiers' fondness for Rousseau, and forbade-long before the Pugachev uprising-the circulation of many of his key works, including Emile. She viewed Rousseau as "a new St. Bernard," who was arming France and all of Europe for "a spiritual crusade against me."50 Nevertheless, the all-important fourth part of Emile, the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," readily slipped through the hands of the censors when it appeared in Russian translation in 1770 under the "Aesopian" title "Meditations on the Majesty of God, on His Providence and on Man."

  The historical importance of the Russian Enlightenment under Catherine cannot be denied. Russians had been introduced to a new world of thought that was neither theological nor technological, but involved the remaking of the whole man in accordance with a new secular ideal of ethical activism. Moreover, the idea was established that this moral educa-

  tion was properly the responsibility of the government. Betskoy was thoroughly devoted to autocracy, and sought to enlist government support for his educational program on the grounds that it would serve to produce a select elite uniquely loyal to the imperial cause.

  Like Montesquieu in politics, Betskoy in education set the tone for much subsequent discussion in Russia, without seeing many of his practical prescriptions adopted. Betskoy's interest in using the Russian language was disregarded by academies and tutors alike, who were expected to familiarize aristocratic youth with Western European rather than Russian or Byzantine tradition. His interest in a measure of practical training in trades was never able to modify the pronounced emphasis on non-technical and broadly philosophical subjects. Time spent in higher educational institutions generally counted as state service for noblemen or for those aspiring to a title. A leisurely and dilettantish education was better preparation for life among the aristocracy than industrious specialization.51 Betskoy's more earnest boarding schools were remembered mainly as the object of humorous barbs, usually aimed at the "child-like Betskoy" {detskoy-Betskoy).

  Betskoy's last important service to Catherine was supervising the embellishment of St. Petersburg. With characteristic thoroughness he organized expeditions to Siberia to bring back rare and decorative stones, arranged for importation of stone from Finland and the manufacture of bricks in St. Petersburg, and helped put in their final place a variety of statues, including Falconet's long-labored equestrian statue of Peter the Great in the Senate Square.52 This imposing memorial to Peter became, through Pushkin's famous poem "The Bronze Horseman," an enduring symbol of both the majestic power and the impersonal coldness of the new capital. Catherine's pretense in placing a monumental facade over widespread suffering seems in some ways anticipatory of the dostoprimechatel'nosti ("imposing sights") in the midst of terror in the Stalin era. Her city below Kiev on the Dnieper (Ekaterinoslav, now Dniepropetrovsk) became the site of the first and most celebrated mammoth construction project of the Soviet era: the hydroelectric dam of the 1920's.

  The most important link between the Russia of Catherine and that of the revolutionary era lies, however, in the creation of a new class of secular intellectuals vaguely inclined toward sweeping reform. Betskoy had spoken of developing through education a "third rank" of citizens along with the aristocracy and the peasantry.53 The educated intellectuals did indeed come to constitute a new rank in society outside the table of ranks created by Peter. They found their solidarity, however, not as a class of enlightened state servitors, as Betskoy had hoped, but as an "intelligentsia" estranged from the state machine. This was the "new race of men" to come out of

  Catherine's cultural upheaval: the unofficial "third rank" between the ruling aristocracy and the servile peasantry.

  For Catherine's reign saw a profound and permanent change in the source of internal opposition to imperial authority. Whereas the first half was plagued by violent protest movements among the lower classes, climaxing in the Pugachev uprising, the latter half of her reign saw the first appearance of "Pugachevs from the academies": a new kind of opposition from within the educated aristocracy. The estrangement of these intellectuals from their aristocratic background resulted not so much from any changes in the sovereign's attitude toward reform as from an inner ripening of ideas within the thinking community itself. Since this intellectual ferment was to play a vital role in subsequent Russian history, it is important to consider the first steps on the path of critical questioning that was to lead Russia to form an intelligentsia, a "new Soviet intelligentsia," and perhaps something even beyond that in the post-Stalin era.

  The Alienation of the Intellectuals

  The alienation of the intellectuals in modern Russia was, from the beginning, not so much a matter of conflict between different classes and factions as of conflicting feelings and impulses at work within the same groups and even the same individuals. The conflicts inside these disturbed groups.and individuals were, in a sense, minor compared with the great sense of distance that was felt between those who participated in the conflicts and those who did not; between what came to be called intelligentsiia and meshchanstvo, "intelligence" and "philistinism."

  The inner conflict that first created the modern Russian intelligentsia was a personal and moral one within the ruling aristocracy. This fact created a peculiar psychological compulsion for passionate personal engagement in ethical questions, which was to become a key characteristic of the alienated intellectuals.

  The personal moral crisis for the ruling aristocrat of Catherine's era was not, in the first instance, created by economic and political privilege but rather by the new style of life within the aristocracy itself: by the vulgar hedonism and imitative Gallomania of their own increasingly profligate lives. Much of this self-hate was sublimated into biting denunciations of foreign forms and customs, which led in turn to an increased, if hyper-sensitive national self-consciousness by the late years of Catherine's reign.

  But there was also much introspection and self-criticism. Russians ex-

  pressed distress that "the wworship of Minerva was so often followed by the feasts of Bacchus," and soought to discover how the wisdom of Minerva might be applied to problersms of practical conduct. Still, however, the need was felt for some external 1 source of their perversion; and one was soon found in the symbolic figure» of Voltaire, w
ho was said to have "made animal life the sole aim of man."a'54 Voltairianism came to be viewed as a force leading into self-indulgent ii immorality.

  As was so often to I be the case subsequently, thoughtful Russians tended to unite around whaat they rejected rather than what they accepted. A convenient object for thliis collective hatred was provided by Theodore Henri Chudi, the principal ft foreign agent of the Francophile Shuvalov family and a major vehicle for the s importation of French culture into Russia.

  Chudi was one of the : more odious sycophants in the Russian imperial entourage. He was a Swiss 5 actor who had first come to Russia as a minor figure in the new imperial t‹ theater. After adopting a more impressive name (Chevalier de Lussy) and ; a synthetic French noble ancestry, he made a successful career at court asis a gigolo and glorified gossip columnist-editing the first French-language jcjournal on Russian soil, he ??????? litteraire. On its pages, he frankly adimitted that he would be "lost without frivolity."

  I am French, one wouuld expect it, the frivolity of my work announces a man of my nation. To this first quality, I could add the title of Cosmopolitan.65

  Under such unfortunate auaspices was introduced the term "cosmopolitan," which became a classic tersrm of invective in Imperial and Soviet Russia alike. Sensuality, superficialklity, and cosmopolitanism were interrelated sins -all equated with the viruus of Voltaire and with bearers of the infection like Chudi.

  The first dim outlines ? of a deeper moral reaction to Voltairianism was evidenced in the theater: tithe central ideological arena of Catherine's era. The importance of the emerrging Russian theater derived not solely from the sheer numbers of the playys, operas, ballets, and pantomimes that were written and performed-inncluding those of the imperial playwright and patron herself. Its importanace lay in the fact that in a world where the court life of the aristocracy had b become stylized and theatrical, the impersonal, formal theater tended to boecome by ironic transposition the only public arena in which the deeper ? concerns of the aristocracy could be dealt with in poUte society.

  The alienation of the «intellectuals in many ways begins with the growing antagonism of serious playwrights toward the increasingly frivolous, largely musical theater of CCatherine's later years. A typical comic opera of

  the 1780's, hove Is Cleverer than Eloquence, made fun of professors, philosophers, and enlightenment generally, ending with the chorus:

  However people deceive, However reason jokes,

  Truth proclaims to everyone:

  Love will out-deceive you all.

  Catherine forced the entire Holy Synod to sit through another, Le Philosophe ridicule; and her own profligacy was extolled in The New Family Group, which ended with a chorus to happiness at last freed from "either longing or monotony":

  As you wish, so shall you live We will never interfere .. .Be

  One sees the beginning of the reaction in Alexander Sumarokov, the director of the St. Petersburg theater, whose tragedies, comedies, and opera libretti provided the mainstay of the repertoire throughout the eighteenth century. Though always operating within the framework of secular enlightenment, Sumarokov tried to lead Russian taste back from hedonistic Voltairianism to Fenelon, Racine, and the Stoic philosophers of antiquity.

  He gave Russian tragedy a disciplined fidelity to the classical unities of time and place and at the same time a bias for instructive moralistic themes. The aim of tragedy was "to lead men to good deeds," "to cleanse passion through reason."57 His short sketches and fables also sought to edify, and his writings did more than those of any other single figure of the age to provide Russian aristocratic thinkers with a new lexicon of abstract moral terminology. Far less religious than a natural scientist like Lomonosov, this natural philosopher attached the supreme value to reason, duty, and the common good. Even when writing "spiritual odes," he was calling for a new secular morality of aristocratic self-discipline.

  To some extent, Sumarokov's ideal was that of "the immortal Fenelon" in Telemaque: vaincre les passions. This pseudo-classical poem was the first French work to become a smash literary hit in Russia. It was translated several times, and inspired a Russian continuation: the Tilemakhida of Tred'iakovsky-just as the Telemaque had been offered by Fenelon as a kind of continuation of Homer's Odyssey.

  The search for links with the classical world led Sumarokov and other philosophically inclined Russian aristocrats to Stoic philosophy. The play that had been staged in Kiev in 1744 on the occasion of Elizabeth's pilgrimage to the Monastery of the Caves was The Piety of Marcus

  Aurelius.68 The vanquished villain in the play was Anger, just as it was invariably passions like self-seeking and carnal love in the plays of Sumarokov. Falconet's statue of Peter was originally modeled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and was popularly referred to as Marcus Aurelius; Fonvizin's translation of the contemporary Elegy of Marcus Aurelius appeared in 1771; and La Harpe cited Marcus Aurelius as a model for all kings in his memorandum to Catherine on the education of Alexander I.59 The Stoic calm of the Roman emperor was seen as a model for the Russian aristocrat's efforts to master passion with reason. As Sumarokov put it:

  The man of reason

  Moves on through time with tolerance,

  The happiness of true wisdom is not moved to rapture

  And does not groan with sorrows.60

  The stoicism of Seneca also gained a following through such books as The Moral Cures of the Christianized Seneca, which promised to "correct human morals and instill true health" with the "true wisdom" of Stoic philosophy.61 This concept of "true wisdom" (premudrosf) was at variance with the ethos of Catherine's court even when advanced by scrupulously loyal monarchists like Sumarokov. Like the concept of natural law that was simultaneously being introduced into the philosophy curriculum of Moscow University, "true wisdom" seemed to propose a standard of truth above that of the monarch's will. Unsystematic Voltairianism, with its ideal of a cultivated earthly life and urbane scepticism, was more to Catherine's liking. Rather than Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, she wanted her courtiers to read Tatishchev's Honorable Mirror of Youth. By 1767 this manual had undergone five editions, with its homely reminders (often reinforced with proverbs) not to repeat the same story incessantly, pick teeth with a knife, or keep spurs on while dancing. In such a world, morality tended to be Epicurean rather than Stoic. The starting point was self-interest rather than higher reality:

  Rational egoism necessarily includes in itself love toward God and one's neighbor. Man will love independently because one needs the love of others for one's own happiness.62

  Earthy satire was even more important than Stoic uplift in giving dramatic expression to aristocratic discontent with Voltairianism. Catherine wrote a number of plays satirizing the aristocracy, and helped give birth to a new and potentially subversive genre which was first mastered by Denis

  Fonvizin. If Catherine's pretensions as a writer far exceeded her accomplishments, exactly the opposite is true of Fonvizin. He was a diffident, self-effacing aristocrat who became incurably ill in his late thirties, yet lived to complete in The Adolescent one of Russia's first original masterpieces of secular literature and "first drama of social satire."

  The Adolescent challenged the prevailing pseudo-classical literary style and gave an altogether new direction to Russian writing. It anticipates in some ways the distinctively Russian theatrical tradition of "laughter through tears" which was to lead through Gogol to Chekhov. Nearly twenty years in the making, it also stands as the first of those life projects which were to drain away the talents of so many sensitive artists of the late imperial period.

  The Adolescent is a short, deceptively simple prose comedy on a contemporary theme-exactly the opposite of the ponderous rhymed tragedies in mythological settings then in favor. It is one of the ironies of Catherine's reign that Fonvizin, who developed to perfection the satirical form which Catherine introduced, was the secretary to Count Panin, the man who had originally led the fight to limit her autocratic power.
Frustrated in their efforts to curb imperial absolutism, her opponents now turned to satire. It was an indication of things to come; for Catherine's successors were to be limited more by ideological disaffection than political restraint. Dramatic satire became in the nineteenth-and indeed in the post-Stalin twentieth century--the vehicle for a distinctively Russian form of passionate, if seemingly passive, communal protest against tyranny. As an acute German observer of the 1860's noted: "Political opposition in Russia takes the form of satire."63 The Adolescent was the first Russian drama to be translated and performed in the West; and it has remained the only eighteenth-century Russian drama still regularly performed in the USSR.