Battalions’, in which he proposed a series of progressive measures (such as loans from the state bank, communal stores of grain and the establishment of public schools) to improve the lot of the poorer Cossacks and lessen their dependence on the richer ones.12
After the war these democratic officers returned to their estates with a new sense of commitment to their serfs. Many, like Volkonsky, paid for the upkeep of the soldiers’ orphaned sons on their estates, or, like him, gave money for the education of those serfs who had shown their potential in the ranks of 1812.13 Between 1818 and 1821 Count Mikhail Orlov and Vladimir Raevsky, both members of the Union of Welfare out of which the Decembrist conspiracy would evolve, established schools for soldiers in which they disseminated radical
ideas of political reform. The benevolence of some of these former officers was extraordinary. Pavel Semenov dedicated himself to the welfare of his serfs with the fervour of a man who owed his life to them. At the battle of Borodino, a bullet hit the icon which he had been given by his soldiers and had worn around his neck. Semenov organized a clinic for his serfs, and turned his palace into a sanctuary for war widows and their families. He died from cholera in 1830 - an illness he contracted from the peasants in his house.14
For some officers it was not enough to identify themselves with the common people’s cause: they wanted to take on the identity of common men themselves. They Russified their dress and behaviour in an effort to move closer to the soldiers in the ranks. They used Russian words in their military speech. They smoked the same tobacco as their men; and in contravention of the Petrine ban, they grew beards. To some extent such democratization was necessary. Denis Davydov, the celebrated leader of the Cossack partisans, had found it very hard to raise recruits in the villages: the peasants saw his glittering Hussar uniform as alien and ‘French’. Davydov was forced, as he noted in his diary, to ‘conclude a peace with the villagers’ before he could even speak to them. ‘I learned that in a people’s war it is not enough to speak the common tongue: one must also step down to the people’s level in one’s manners and one’s dress. I began to wear a peasant’s
Volkonsky took command of a partisan brigade and pursued Napoleon’s troops as far as Paris during 1813-14. The next year, with 20,000 roubles in his chest, a carriage and three servants provided by his mother, he travelled to Vienna for the Peace Congress. He then returned to Paris, where he moved in the circles of the political reformers Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant, and went on to London, where he saw the principles of constitutional monarchy in operation as he watched the House of Commons discuss the lunacy of George III. Volkonsky had planned to go to the United States - ‘a country that had captured the imagination of all Russian youth because of its independence and democracy’ - but the resumption of the war
with Napoleon’s escape from Elba obliged him to return to Petersburg.16 None the less, like those of many Decembrists, Volkonsky’s views had been deeply influenced by his brief encounter with the West. It confirmed his conviction in the personal dignity of every human being - an essential credo of the Decembrists which lay at the foundation of their opposition to the autocratic system and serfdom. It formed his belief in meritocracy - a view strengthened by his conversations with Napoleon’s officers, who impressed him with their free thought and confidence. How many Neys and Davouts had been stifled by the rigid caste system of the Russian army? Europe made him think of Russia’s backwardness, of its lack of basic rights or public life, and helped him focus his attention on the need to follow Europe’s liberal principles.
The young officers who came back from Europe were virtually unrecognizable to their parents. The Russia they returned to in 1815 was much the same as the Russia they had left. But they had greatly changed. Society was shocked by their ‘rude peasant manners’.17 And no doubt there was something of a pose - the swagger of the veteran - in these army ways. But they differed from their elders in far more than their manners and dress. They also differed from them in their artistic tastes and interests, their politics and general attitudes: they turned their backs on the frivolous diversions of the ballroom (though not their own revelry) and immersed themselves in serious pursuits. As one explained: ‘We had taken part in the greatest events of history, and it was unbearable to return to the vacuous existence of St Petersburg, to listen to the idle chatter of old men about the so-called virtues of the past. We had advanced a hundred years.’18 As Pushkin wrote in his verse ‘To Chaadaev’ in 1821:
The fashionable circle is no longer in fashion.
You know, my dear, we’re all free men now.
We keep away from society; don’t mingle with the ladies.
We’ve left them at the mercy of old men,
The dear old boys of the eighteenth century.19
Dancing, in particular, was regarded as a waste of time. The men of 1812 wore their swords at formal balls to signal their refusal to take
part. The salon was rejected as a form of artifice. Young men retreated to their studies and, like Pierre in
The alienation felt by these young men from their parents’ generation and society was common to all ‘children of 1812’, poets and philosophers as well as officers. It left a profound imprint on the cultural life of Russia in the nineteenth century. The ‘men of the last century’ were defined by the service ethic of the Petrine state. They set great store by rank and hierarchy, order and conformity to rational rules. Alexander Herzen - who was actually born in 1812 - recalled how his father disapproved of all emotional display. ‘My father disliked every sort of
It is hard to overstate the extent to which the Russian cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century entailed a revolt against the service ethic of the eighteenth century. In the established view, rank quite literally defined the nobleman: unlike all other languages, the word in Russian for an official
poet Gavril Derzhavin combined his writing with a military career, followed by appointments as a senator and provincial governor, before ending up as Minister of Justice in 1802-3.
During the early nineteenth century, as the market for books and painting grew, it became possible, if not easy, for the independent writer or artist to survive. Pushkin was one of the first noblemen to shun the service and take up writing as a ‘trade’; his decision was seen as derogation or breaking of ranks. The writer N. I. Grech’ was accused of bringing shame upon his noble family when he left the civil service to become a literary critic in the 1810s.23 Music too was thought unsuitable as a profession for the nobleman. Rimsky-Korsakov was pushed into the naval service by his parents, who looked upon his music ‘as a prank’.24 Musorgsky was sent to the Cadet School in Petersburg and was then enrolled in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Tchaikovsky went to the School of Jurisprudence where his family expected him to graduate to the civil service and not forget but put away his childish passion for music. For the nobleman to become an artist, then, was to reject the traditions of his class. He had, in effect, to reinvent himself as an
Only two of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers (Gonch-arov and Saltykov-Shchedrin) ever held high rank in the government service, although nearly all of them were noblemen. Goncharov was a censor. But Saltykov-Shchedrin was a tireless critic of the government, and as a vice-governor and a writer he always took the side of the ‘little man’. It was axiomatic to this literary tradition that the writer should stand up for human values against the service ethic based on rank. Thus in Gogol’s ‘The Diary of a Madman’ (1835), the literary lunatic, a humble councillor, ridicules a senior official: ‘And what if he is a gentleman of the court? It’s only a kind of distinction conferred on you,
