Aleksandr Griboyedov (1795–1829), author of Russia’s finest neoclassical verse comedy
Although the era of patronage was over, what remained, as a fact of life and a theme of literature, was Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks. In 1722, Peter replaced promotion based on birth by a merit system with fourteen ranks, which provided the infrastructure to his decree on obligatory state service.3 Mandatory service had never been popular and in 1762 it was rescinded by Catherine the Great’s spouse, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762). But the basic
structure of promotion, reward, and formal titles - which determined how a gentleman was addressed in public and what salaried positions he was allowed to pursue - remained in place, with small modifications, until the Bolsheviks abolished the Table of Ranks in 1917. Without a sense of this stratification it is difficult to grasp the dynamics of prestige, ambition, and humiliation in tsarist Russia. Its mechanisms of flattery and shame - the distinctive psychological fuel of much Russian Romantic prose - could function with grotesque precision, especially in the imperial capital. One’s sense of honor and sensitivity to insult was conditioned by one’s birth in conjunction with one’s rank.
The fourteen ranks had three parallel branches: military, civil, and court (that is, “attached to the imperial court,” “courtier”). Rank Fourteen was where one began. Any rank above Eight (after 1856, any rank above Four) bestowed hereditary nobility. Many benefited from this system; sons of the gentry and even of low-born scribes and secretaries could now work their way into the nobility. Some professions, however, had no rank assigned to them at all - such as musicians before the founding of a degree-granting conservatory in St. Petersburg in 1862 - and thus officially did not exist. One’s rank guaranteed rights (such as existed in the Russian Empire): the right to own human property, the right to be exempt from public flogging. In official documents, a person’s rank came first. When addressing a person formally it was procedurally obligatory to use titles, which were multi-syllabic, bulky, and intrusive (ranks One and Two were addressed as “Your High Excellency”
Pushkin and honor (its reciprocity, roundedness, and balance)
Pushkin was acutely aware of the rewards and constraints of official rank. They often conflicted with two other values precious to him: professionalism as a
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writer, and noble birth. The poet possessed a distinguished genealogy of which he was very proud. On his father’s side the Pushkins were an ancient, although impoverished and marginalized, boyar family. His exotic mother, known as “the beautiful Creole,” was a granddaughter of Abram Gannibal, a black African who had been captured as a boy and educated as a favorite of Peter the Great (rising to rank Four, major general). Scarcely out of his teens, Pushkin was already celebrated as Russia’s supreme poet. But he never “served the state” with distinction on
Pushkin was to rise only one notch above the miserably low rank assigned him upon graduation from his boarding school, St. Petersburg’s imperial Lycee: the Tenth (civilian collegiate secretary). Many of his best friends were dashing officers. Pushkin felt his unglamorous official status keenly; but when the politically suspect and financially strapped poet volunteered for the army in 1829, he was turned down. In 1831 he was promoted to titular councilor (rank Nine), with access to imperial archives. He did receive one further dubious honor, however. On New Year’s Eve, 1834, Tsar Nicholas, desiring to gaze on Pushkin’s breathtakingly beautiful wife at imperial balls, named the poet a “kammerjunker” or Gentleman of the Bedchamber (court rank Eleven; the courtier ranks had no equivalent to civilian Ten). Pushkin considered this rank humiliating for someone of his years and stature, and furthermore it obliged him to escort his wife to palace events. Outraged, he avoided wearing the hated green uniform and (so it was said) even sabotaged it, ripping off a button and refusing to repair it.4 After Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel defending his wife’s honor in January 1837, his widow bravely respected his wish to be buried in his frock coat, not in uniform - a gesture that greatly irritated the tsar. When his opponent, the young and well-connected French officer Georges d’Anthes, was eventually deported from Russia, the reason given was “for killing the kammerjunker Pushkin.”
Birth, service rank, and social status came together for Pushkin in the concept of
promotion while heroes like himself were passed over. Precisely such corrupting “advancement by genealogy alone” was eliminated, one century later, by Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks.
One’s official title was tied to self-respect on more mundane planes. How promptly need one pay gambling debts – or any debts at all – to a person of lower rank? Is it a fresh insult to a dueling opponent to bring, as one’s official second, a man of low birth or of lesser (or no) rank? Quite possibly the tragic subplot of Pushkin’s novel in verse
The duel of honor, initially devised to confirm aristocratic courtiers as a military-social class, was codified in the Italian Renaissance as a secular (and usually illegal) ritual response to perceived insults in which “extreme violence was meted out with extreme politeness.”6 As an institution it came late to Russian culture, which did not experience an Age of Chivalry and continued to preferfistfights toformalduelsup until theend of the eighteenth century.7 Once arrived, however, the duel came to occupy an ambiguous place in nineteenth-century literature, not unlike gambling. In a society so stratified and closely watched, where every button was mandated, the right of a gentleman to duel became his right to define the limits of his own dignity and patience, to decide for himself how he
