origin. Back in Russia, the 1830s and 1840s saw the end of traditional Lithuanian institutions, such as the university and the Statutes. The Uniate Church was merged with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1839. For the Polish emigration as a whole, the old commonwealth remained the touchstone of political thought. But in time a new generation arose that had no actual memory of the old order and reimagined it in ways that reflected various ideas of nationality.
The nationalist politics of Poles in the Parisian emigration can be divided into two main currents: republican and monarchist. Joachim Lelewel, once a professor at Wilno, propounded a democratic republicanism that drew its optimism from a belief in the pacifism of Slavic peoples. Unlike Russians with similar ideas, Lelewel believed that this pacifism could be destroyed by autocratic rule. The Polish Democratic Society, founded in 1832 on French models, soon fell under Lelewel’s influence. The
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leader of the monarchists was Adam Czartoryski, a great Lithuanian magnate and onetime minister to Alexander I. Czartoryski was a liberal constitutionalist who advocated monarchy on pragmatic grounds. One of his disciples, J?zef Bem, led the Hungarian insurrection in Transylvania in 1848. Other Poles justified monarchy in terms of national development. Karel Hoffman argued that a monarch was needed to create cities and middle classes. Janusz Woronicz theorized that a true monarchy mediated between a self-aware nation and the exercise of power. In his view, the partitioning powers were not true monarchies, because they did not represent nations. By the end of the 1830s, the monarchical Party of May 3 had fifteen-hundred members.
The 1830s and 1840s also witnessed intense philosophical discussion of the nation by Russian subjects. The Polish nationalist philosophers of the day generally came from the Polish Kingdom and wrote dissertations at German universities. German philosophy was fashionable in Russia, but the Poles actually completed philosophy doctorates in Germany. Their work was more systematic than that of their Russian contemporaries, and influenced philosophical discussion (especially within Left Hegelianism) rather than simply refracting it through local conditions. Polish philosophy was more open to French ideas than German philosophy, and more open to German ideas than French philosophy. Polish philosophers tended to replace the state with the nation in Hegelian dialectic and supported philosophies in which action was constitutive of the nation. Most of them combined academic philosophy with practical work. The best-known were August Cieszkowski and Karol Libelt.
Polish Romantic poets of the epoch were also concerned with the nation. It should be stressed, however, that many of their preoccupations were unintelligible to later generations of modern nationalists. Adam Mickiewicz’s interest in mysticism or Juliusz S-lowacki’s fascination with spirit are difficult to reconcile with secular ideologies of any kind, even if a simplified form of Mickiewicz’s mes-sianism did become a common trope. Pan Tadeusz, the most beautiful and most prosaic of Mick-iewicz’s major works, became a national poem two generations or so after its completion in 1834. Mickiewicz and S-lowacki were regarded as national figures of the first rank during their lives, but their career as national bards was mainly posthumous. As nationalism came to be associated with the language of the folk, poetry came to matter less for its content than for its form. At the time, the poets (like the philosophers and the politicians) saw the national mission as part of a European or universal regeneration. Polish emigr?s were the only group in Europe to remember the Russian Decembrists and recall the predicament of other peoples under imperial rule.
The Decembrists, of course, had opposed the ascendance of Nicholas I in 1825. Nicholas was a man of imposing prejudices against Poles and Jews, and was capable of great hatred against whole nations from time to time, but he was no modern nationalist. His reign (1825-1855) is generally seen in the early twenty-first century as reactionary, as it was by Polish rebels in 1830. Insofar as there was a philosophy of rule during Nicholas’s reign, it might be sought in the Official Nationality of his education minister, Sergei Uvarov. Nationality was the third term in Uvarov’s famous trio: Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality. Uvarov meant nationality to be subordinate to the first two principles of rule. The Russian nation was the group meant to submit to the tsar according to the teachings of the church. Uvarov’s educational program was thus a kind of reverse Enlightenment. Education was not meant to create individuals capable of independent judgment, but rather a collective understanding that the ruled are to be judged by the ruler.
The printing press allowed an emerging group of literate Russians to interpret national ideas according to their own lights. The generation of the 1830s and 1840s, like those that followed, read Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (published 1816-1826). Two renegade Poles led the way in these years in spreading simple national ideas through the press: Faddei Bulgarin, editor of the Northern Bee, and Osip Senkovsky, editor of the Reader’s Library. The mere existence of such periodicals guaranteed that discussions of the nation, even if not at all revolutionary, were unacceptable in Uvarov’s limited vision. The press mediated between the dynastic interpretation of official nationality prevalent in St. Petersburg and the rival Romantic conceptions emerging around Moscow University. Slavophiles interpreted Uvarov’s trio in their own way: Autocracy left room for the autonomous commune, Orthodoxy was a shield against Catholicism and Protestantism, and Nationality mandated attention to the peasant. This Romantic patriotism, although not meant to undermine Official Nationality, differed on one essential point. Whereas Official Nationality gave priority to the state and sought to consolidate
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Peter’s achievement, the Slavophiles began to emphasize the people and to critique Peter’s cosmopolitan project. Nonetheless, they had little in common with the Polish Romantics of the same generation. Both made reference to the past in the hope of overcoming a crisis of the present. But where the Slavophiles spoke of the unspoiled commune, the Poles imagined a restored commonwealth. The Polish dilemma was statelessness; the Russian dilemma was backwardness.
This fact was brought home by the humiliation of the Crimean War. The new tsar, Alexander II, accepted that military defeat justified state reform, and that state reform required the emancipation of the serfs. The twenty years after the emancipation proclamation of 1861 saw the emergence of a new group of prosperous peasants in many parts of the empire, and this group recast the national question, especially on the borderlands. Yet the immediate reaction to reform was rebellion. Reforms initiated in Warsaw led to a revolution of rising expectations, the failure of which accelerated the development of modern ideas of nationality in Poland, Russia, and the lands between. Although there were a few lonely exceptions, such as Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, literate Russian society as a whole reacted to the Polish Uprising of 1863 with disgust and antipathy. In this atmosphere, Mikhail Katkov became quite influential. His new journal, Moscow News, publicized the idea that the rebellion was a war of nations and compromise would be deadly for Russia. Katkov endorsed the policies of Mikhail N. Muraviev in Lithuania, because Mu-raviev also cast the struggle in nationalist terms: Russians against Poles and their Jewish allies. Katkov’s exposition of the 1863 uprising marked a transition from the Romanticism of his youth to the pessimism of his later years. His writings expressed to his twelve thousand readers the painful disappointment of the Slavophile on learning that others might reject Russia, and the emerging conviction that state power might yet put matters right.
Similar views found a scholarly articulation in the pan-Slavism of Nikolai Danilevsky. He resolved certain apparent tensions in the earlier Slavophile scheme by arguing that the state embodied the ideals of Christianity and the peasant tradition, and peace-loving Slavs needed to use force to unite them. A new civilization founded on these principles would emerge, Danilevsky contended in Russia and Europe (1869), when Constantinople fell to Russia. Danilevsky also applied his argument about force to the problem of Slavs who rejected Russian rule. Poland, which he compared to a hideous tarantula, could perhaps be coerced into seeing reason. Pan-Slavism was put to the test by international politics during the second half of the 1870s, when Russia made war against the Ottoman Empire in the name of the Serbs and Bulgarians. The disappointing terms of the Treaty of Berlin brought home the objective limits of Pan-Slavism as an international mission.
Populism was another initiative that failed to pass the test of political reality. Fired by a faith in the essential goodness of the peasant, the narodniki went “to the people” in the early 1870s. Had their message been heeded, Russian populism might have followed the path of similar movements toward the ethnic nationalism that many enlighteners embraced farther west. In the event, most of the young people who remained in politics after this failure moved to the hard left, imagining (as in Vera Za-sulich’s famous correspondence with Karl Marx) that the
