???§?^???????????*^????? Russians in 1847 eloquently restated the
classical enlightened arguments for constitutional monarchy; but this was
the voice of an old manj amp;rjJmginParj amp;JIis. tonTTs^rela^Ttet"^oTthe
innuln amp;able memoirists of thelate imperial period: semi-fatalistic and
elegiac regret combined with a scholarly desire to set the record straight.
Turgenev's work is a masterpiece of this genre, with his praise of the civiliz
ing effects of pietism and Masonry under Alexander, his criticism of the
"Adonises in uniform" who prevailed over right reason at the court, and his
indictment of "the fatalism which seems to weigh on Russia as much as
despotism."4*
One interesting nevMbjafimui£-24U^^Vs_j2p^ the morTli3vanc^^
SympatrTyTorsubjugated Poland wasto become a mark of the new radical^ so£ial_tnittkers inRussia; ancjinterest in Finland was to become in some / respectseven more impoTEant. F^laSLSasTfirst of~3l^"Protestant state;
t
and Turgenev was not alone in_suggestingJh4tProtestantlSm^rovi3ea ? m^jfefav^We-^frnosrAwe^'far freelRSclaljdjgvelopmentffiatr‹SthoMclsm. yOiteof theTe^arrjg^ewjtraTHab devo!e3to thedisCu^ionof~s6cial ques-I tions in St. Petersburg was entitled The Finnish Herald, and there was a steady increase in Finnish settlement in the St. Petersburg region as well as increased contact through the Helsinki-St. Petersburg steamboat line.
Of particular interest to Russians was the fact that the Finnish diet included not only the sta^3ard~three* estateTb^Tajso--following thejoodgl of the SwedisTTw^ag-rBpre^eTIfaTrves""oF"a"fourth estate: the peasantry. ForJit_y^L_ffienimst6cratic atSSSvEiyoFthe peasantry that was principally
v. UN ? NEW SHORES
1. The Turn to social inougm
responsible for the turn to social reform in the 1840's. Jnterest in the peas"^^^S^mulated_b^tiie gradual increase in peasant disordersjmder Nicholas I and by the attend5ur"actiyifTeTl3f"^e various commissions ap-pomtedjtoj|nid^rejmdjiyJs£^^
the same time, the peasantry appears as a kind of final object of romantic fascination for the alienated intellectuals. Having traveled in vain to foreign lands and studied at the feet of foreign sages, the Russian Faust now heard happy murmurs from JtejjejisjmJ^masjse^^ «"rcpundmes of his voutL
Althoughsynthetic pastoral themes were sounded much earlier in
J ????^^^???????????? fo'becorn^ErmnanTior the first time in the
j›3P840's. HarjbingeroT~tEe new trend '^wSs^ffie^pbs^umous "criticaT~praise
heaped on the poems and folks^m5S__ofAlexis KoPtsov by Belinsky, who
foundTn^mTmaffected and unperfected art oftBerough-hewn Kol'tsov a
"new simplicity" that seemed to satisfy the "loneimjfor normalcy" that was
charact5Sicofhis IaSTjears.5 "Sociality or death" had been BelinsKy's"
vatedictoTy^siogSTcTthe aristocratic intellectuals just before his death in
?/i848. They were to find this "sociality" (or "social life," sotsial'nosf') in the
^real or imagined company of the noble savages in the Russian countryside.
With the appearance in 1846 ol"nmitfy-6fl^fovich7s The Village and of
the first of Ivan Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches the following year, the
i_peasant emerged as a new heroictype for Russian literature. In part, this
new interest was just another Russian reflection ofa Western trend
noticeable in the sudden popularity of Berthold Auerbach's Village Tales of
the Black Forest and George Sand's Francois de Champi. But there was a
peculiar intensity to the E?stemJB?m^?l¦?at^?stj?^^^^?n^_JQl^
resulted from the slirvival theie_Qfthe brutaHzingJnstitution of serfdom, and
is exemplified ? such writers of the fortieTas the PoIe*Easzewski and'lhe
UkrSnTffi" SBivchgnko.6
»«- It is arneasure of_ue Russian aristocrats' alienation from their own
peor^es__uafJhe^35scojvei^jtoe peas^nTsnotofTtheir ownesTates~Hut'in
books-above all in thejfluse=J5Iu5^?1£150????^"BaYon
Haxthjm_sj^jjjej^ajpng trip through Russia in 1.841..
"On the basis of his study, Russja??istocra^s^ddenlyJ?›fessed Jo_jmdki the"p^asant_commune (oBsftCfunal^^^bas oOro"ettersoTletyT Although"^ the peasant ??????? had ???? idealizedDefore^-as an organic religious community by the Slavophiles and as a force for revolution by Polish extremists-Haxtihausen's praise was based on a detailed study of its social, functions of regulating land ?????????????? dispensing local jusjjcjl He saw ???*??????? a~modelfor "free productive associations like those of 1 lie Saint-Simonians"; and the idea was born among Russians that a renova-
tion of society on the model of the commune might be possible even if a political revolution were not.7
The belief in a coming transformation of social relationships wasSwd
propaga^lKff^TyT›yTwo"lnT^¦*
aristocrat (and one of three well-known brothers). Each was a teacher of law Mid apopularizer of Auguste Comte's pleafor a new non-metaphysical science of society; each enjoyed 8???* ?????? '?, ?* jjav, ??^ djg^ ?" ???]? and unnatural death.
" Maikov was the son of a famous painter, the grandson of a director of the imperial theater, and a descendant of the most famous masonic poet ol the eighteenth century. Had he not died in a mysterious drowningJn_£847, it is likely that this extraordThafyiMd'pfo^igyivo^ra^'ve beenthe most f???????!*^1????~???1???8, Includ^ig~ffis^stogjushed^*brotiier, the poet ????????? received ? ??????^?^??????? age of nineteen, founded a journaTfor the study of society, The Finnish Herald, at twenty-two, was the principal author of the first volume of the Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words Used in Russian, and wrote two thick volumes of essays (and many others that remained unpublished) on every subject from chemistry to agriculture. He was hjule^byjnany as the leading literary critic in Russia before dying shortly after his twenty-fourth birffiday]
Maikov's~most important_essay was his long and never complgisd. "Social Sciences in Russia" 011845, inwhich hecalled for a new "Philosophy oj_gociety"_to provide the basis for a regeneration of Russian life. This "plulosoplry_ofjoaety'' was to be a compTrmtionjjLthe historical ideas of Auguste Comte and the moralistic socialism of Blanc andF^rojidbaa. Only such a philosophy can provide the basis for an "organic" culture that will avoid the "disembodied" metaphysical speculations of German culture ("the Hindus of today") and the "one-sided" and "soulless" English preoccupation with economic production. The preoccupation of Adam Smith and English liberal economists with wealth as something separable from the quality of social development he finds "false in theory and disastrous in practice."8
Miliutin picked up where Maikov left offwith his long study, "The
???1?1??????~?^???1????«?^whlcTHvlSTenaTjzeffjiir
the~firsFfour issues ot The Annals of the Fatherland (the journal on which
MaikoT]5d^ustli^^1847.
Miliutin contrasts the vigor of French social thought with the degeneracy of bourgeois sociel^r^oWiiis~aftTcles~and his "1??????*?? Moscow "Unrvgtaly reflect a Comtian optirffisnTaBouf the ??^?????????????? ^the struggle of interests" characteristic onTgfowing economy luce that of France" and
J r* JtlUKM
England through the "future development of science." Miliutin was a friend of many Decembrists and a leading court advocate of reform in the institution of serfdom; and his two brothers were to become important court figures under Alexander II. But Miliutin succumbed to the melancholia of late Nicholaevan..R?aa^nd_s^othirnself in 1855.
The translation of the new interestmsocialauestions into socialist.
?? Eeycircles of ueHfflchoiaevanj|ra^
activity was the_worlc of thelast of 1
that of Michael Petrashevsky. In conscious imitation of the French Encyclopedists, Petrashevsky sought to gather a groupthat would lead the intellectual development of the ftu^slanpeopTe! Tbe~~P~ockeT~Dictionari was drawn up by Petrashevsky a
nd Maikov to serve as its Encyclopedia and also as a kind of ideological guidebook for combating German idealism. Young ___
writers and civil servants largely ^??^????????? gathered to discuss
the l^oyatjon^Q?j|gg^thinkers.
Lamennais' Words of a Believer was read in a Church Slavonic translation at one meeting, and friends of the group scheduled a dinner to honor the birthday of Fourier on April 7, 1849.9
Though the various programs discussed by the Petrashevsky group came to notiWngJTtTlIeTeTmT decidedliijgra^^
of affiliated provincial circlestoappliarlmce the time of the Decembrists-
stretc?ln^?nI^^m^^^Sra"Estnorfla, to KaZaTTTmTIfenmldle VoIgaTA
recenTfefurnee from the revolutionaiyTworld of Western Europe, Speshnev,
cafiedlumselfa Cominunistrafter than a socialist and urged the crgation of
a "central committee" or^neJtSeleven^rrh^wo4^to be
as^ociatgdJwI|E eacK affiliated^ group_ A military officer from the East,
Chernosvitov, suggested that eastern Siberia be separate from Russia and
joined through revolution to a great Pacific empire that was to include
Mexico, California, and Alaska.10 Others ^?^?^^???^?^??^??-^?^^.
Lsignedjtojttunsform the peasant communTmto the nucleus of a new socialist Jp3 amp;
society^" "
Some of the most imaginative minds of the late nineteenth century servedjheir intellgfijiiji^
biologist and ideologist of militant Pan-Slavism, Nicholas Danilevsky, the satirist, Michael Saltykov-Shchedrin. Above all, in future importance, stands^ejier4rJojto£j^^jajwrng writer lnterSte^TfrthTTSeTBfpropa? gan3aamong the Old Belkyersand^ciaMfrtmllt onTES*lffllage~-commurie ahjnjrtejibrrns of nrgani7^tion~n~He~was jhe one wlro*i'ead3nlie*Petrashev-sky group Belinsky's famous letter ^buking"'tjDg6TTfor his reconciliation^ wi??ffiap^x?s?r^dinsk^s-^e?tfasti?g-gf Christ's^xample with that of official Christendom was to ????? echo not only in Dostoevski's Brothers
Although the Petrashevtsy were not explicitly Christian (unlike the contemporaneous Ukrainian circle, the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius), they didclaim to be rediscovering "the teaching of Christ in its original purity.," which "had as its basic doctrine "charity ana its ?? the realization of freedom and the destruction of private ownership."1* Following Saint-Simon and Comte, they spokeof a "new'Qvristianityj4a new "nor mal" and "natural" society ofso£ialharrhwty"That was evolving peaceftrHy
frdfh history.
Essential to the idea of a "new Christianity" among Russian social thinkers was theneed to avoid the pattern of social and political life that was developing in thebourgroirWestrTtrosTflie /,efras/iev£ry"^eresceptical (as the Decembrists had never been) of both the institution of private property and the value of constitutions.
Defenders of constitutions forget that the human character is contained not in personal property but in personality, and that in recognizing the political power of the rich over the poor, they are defending the most terrible despotism.13
TJie early social thinkers followed Belinsky in regarding socialism as "the.ideaj)nagas" which "has absorbed history,je%ion, and pMosophv^14 Maikov used "so^fl*SIr^_a^a_2™^^1 f°r his^nhilnspphy of W™gJ3^_^g£p!( specifically^d^o^ateTme shMTngofprofits wrthafi workers. The Pocket Dictionary guardedly uses the synonym L'Owe1usirP; and Petrashevsky described Fourier as "my only God," attempting rather pitifully to set up a communal house for seven peasant families on his estate near Novgorod. The peasants burned down his model phalanstery; but the detailed Fourier-ist blueprint for harmonizing passions and solving all the conflicts of man with nature, himself, and his fellow men had a profound impact on the formation of Russian social thought. Fourier's plan was the most sensually appealing of all images of the coming golden age with its ideal of a free "play of passions." The phalansteries were, moreover, to be built around agricultural and craft manufacturing activities and thus seemed peculiarly
*
suited to Russian conditions. However passing the infatuation with Fourier, the belief in a kind jpXXlu^tianize4_socialism remained JLJSflnslant.-fif -Russian socijl_ft£ueht:Those like Speshnev who advocated more violent VTrand conspirajorjajjmethods in the forties were careful to call themselves '^''Commimkts^^and^Herzen went to some pains to distin^uishethical and aristoc^atic_sacial.ism ?????!?????4??11?"???1 metaphysical communism, "the_socialism of revenge."15
Along with "socialism,'Ulje__social thinkers of the forties tended to
????^?_|?]2^???????.'' The Pocket Dictionary defined it as the form of
government where "each citizen takes part in the review and decisions of the
affairs of the whole hafxon." It was destined to prevail everywhere, alsTmilng"
different forms "in accordance with the stage of development of the moral
forces in a people and the consciousness of true, rational freedom."16 J[he_
political goal for Russia is never spelled outJbut_the Pocket Dictionary also
incrtidj^je^erTn^"national gat|Srmg??r"andr"some
forcesjva^jdfiaa^Zassjmied.
Lp*
"Democracy'' in Russian__sjjgial thought was, however, juxtaposed
??? the" beginning to constitutionalism or liberalism as understood in the
West. Democrats and liberals were in fact often contrasted, the formeF be
ing portrayetfasi^lifariarr*^English rJuiinessmefi
interested in pT5:eryTormirTibbr^s~Ior~the imdllle~^ss715ne article" of the
fifties insisted that SiBeria^wasamore congenial land for true democrats
than liberal England. A dictionary of foreign terms prepared in the early
sixties in imitation of the Petrashevsky dictionary defines a liberal as
a man loving freedom, usually a boyar [who enjoys] freedom to look through a window without doing anything, then to go for a walk, to the theatre, or a ball-that is what is known as a liberal man.17
1840 to 1845. In the foUowin^ihreejjearj^ publications were imported into Russia.18
At ?????????^^moved back
from Moscow to St. P^grs6urg_in trJeTfepSi's. StPetersburgnadaornmated^ RussiarT^tundlife under Catherine until the movement of Novikov and Schwarz to Moscow and the final disillusioned years of her reign. Peter's city had also dominated the optimistic early years of Alexander's reign until the burning and reconstruction of Moscow made that city the focus of the nationalist revival. But the gradual triumph of the Westernizers (or the "Europeans" and "Cosmopolitans" asthey were "more often* called during the ''remarkable decade") was to a lafge extent a victory of St. Petersburg over Moscow, Chaadaev's~"eity ? tile dead."
rrjrn" Moscow to St i'etersDurginib^ojsvas accompanied by the ostentatio^s~q^claratioh: "To .Petersburg, to Petersburg, therein lies my salvation."19 St. Petersburg was the laijestjmd most commercially active of Russian cities. The journals to which Belinsky contributed there, Thelinnals of the Fatherland and The Contemporary, attained by 1847 an unprecedented number of subscriptions (4,000 and 3,000, respectively)20 and were to become the leading vehicles for the populism of the seventies ano^Tra amp;caTTcbnoclasm of the sixties, resibettlWlvrBy ? 1,'????
Sail half of the privately operated journals in
private journals
"PoffiififfTMuscovite was the last effort of the romantic nationalists to found
a major "thick journal" (that is, a journal with ideological pretensions sup
ported by comprehensive bibliographical and critical sections) in Moscow.
Despite (or perhaps because of) official support, it enjoye^ripihingUketiie
successoTlhTirnewji^^When it
collapsed m_i856, most of its personnel moved to St. Petersburg, where the
most important newnmtT-WBsTerrflz^:
rarjgjng ????? amp;????^????'?^?? b^A^M^fTpiayr""
??? nntTmistic hone that a new sociaTorder migbLcpme into being in
The optimistic hope that a new sociaTorder the WesForUrte-bSsis of advanced French sociaf theories wa
s deajj^a fourttH9tow"~b"y~tne failure of the
W0i1abwiar5jrprmn^*of 1848-9 in J WSftern and Centra Europe. Russia did not participate in" thiswave~5f revolutions and thus did notfe^bdjscredite5~bytEeir faim7e7Tn3eed, the Russians~werr7Tifm^eliced by the impassioned writings of Herzen, who witnessed these events, and Bakunin, who participated in them, to conclude that the torch of leadership in the coming transformation of society had simply been passed from Jthe^jiefeated workers of the West to the slumbering peasants of the East.
The Icon and the Axe Page 56