not something that you can see, or touch with your hands. A court chamberlain doesn’t have a third eye in the middle of his forehead.’ Similarly, in Chekhov’s story ‘Abolished!’ (1891) we are meant to laugh at the retired major (Izhits) who is thrown into confusion by the abolition of his former rank: ‘God knows who I am,’ the old major says. ‘They abolished all the majors a year ago!’25
Unwilling to conform to their fathers’ rules and bored by the
routines of the civil service, the young men of Pushkin’s generation sought release in poetry, philosophy and drunken revelry. As Silvio remarks in Pushkin’s
The young men of the Decembrist circles spent much time in revelry. Some, like the serious Volkonsky, disapproved. But others, like Pushkin and his friends of the Green Lamp, a loose symposium of libertines and poets, saw the fight for freedom as a carnival. They found liberty in a mode of life and art that dispensed with the stifling conventions of society.29 When they were playing cards or drinking and debating with their friends, they were able to relax and express themselves, ‘as Russians’, in the easy language of the street. This was the idiom of much of Pushkin’s verse - a style that fused the language of politics and philosophical thought with the vocabulary of intimate emotion and the crude colloquialisms of the whorehouse and the inn.
Friendship was the saving grace of these wild orgies, according to Pushkin:
For one can live in friendship
With verses and with cards, with Plato and with wine, And hide beneath the gentle cover of our playful pranks A noble heart and mind.30
Volkonsky said the same of his fellow officers. They happily transgressed the public code of decency, but in their dealings with each other they kept themselves in moral check through the ‘bonds of comradeship’.31 There was a cult of brotherhood in the Decembrist camp. It evolved into the cult of the collective which would become so important to the political life of the Russian intelligentsia. The spirit was first forged in the regiment - a natural ‘family’ of patriots. Nikolai Rostov in
felt for the first time how close was the bond that united him to Denisov and the whole regiment. On approaching [the camp] Rostov felt as he had done when approaching his home in Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and saw the picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his master, ‘The Count has come!’ and Denisov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all dishevelled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents’ house.32
Through such bonds young officers began to break away from the rigid hierarchies of the service state. They felt themselves to belong to a new community - a ‘nation’, if you will - of patriotic virtue and fraternity where the noble and the peasant lived in harmony. The nineteenth-century quest for Russian nationhood began in the ranks of 1812.
This outlook was shared by all the cultural figures in the orbit of the Decembrists: not just by those in its leading ranks, but by those, more numerous, who sympathized with the Decembrists without actively engaging in plans for a rebellion (‘Decembrists without December’). Most of the poets among them (Gnedich, Vostokov, Merzliakov, Odoevsky and Ryleev, though less so Pushkin) were preoccupied with civic themes. Renouncing the aesthetics and the frivolous concerns of Karamzin’s salon style, they wrote epic verses in a suitably spartan style. Many of them compared the soldiers’ bravery in the recent wars to the heroic deeds of ancient Greece and Rome.
Some monumentalized the peasants’ daily toil; they raised it to the status of patriotic sacrifice. The duty of the poet, as they saw it, was to be a citizen, to dedicate himself to the national cause. Like all the men of 1812, they saw their work as part of a democratic mission to learn about and educate the common people so as to unite society on Russian principles. They rejected the Enlightenment idea that ‘all the nations should become the same’ and, in the words of one critic, called on ‘all our writers to reflect the character of the Russian folk’.33
Pushkin holds a special place in that enterprise. He was too young - just thirteen in 1812 - to fight against the French, but as a schoolboy at the
You’ll recollect: the wars soon swept us by, We bade farewell to all our elder brothers, And went back to our desks with all the others, In envy of all those who had gone to die Without us…34
Though Pushkin, unlike them, had never been to Europe, he breathed the European air. As a boy he had immersed himself in the French books of his father’s library. His first verse (written at the age of eight) was composed in French. Later he discovered Byron’s poetry. This European heritage was strengthened by the years he spent between 1812 and 1817 at the
My friends, our union is wondrous! Like a soul, it will last for eternity -Undivided, spontaneous and joyous, Blessed by the muse of fraternity. Whatever partings destiny may bring, Whatever fortunes fate may have in hand,
We are still the same: the world to us an alien thing, And Tsarskoe Selo our Fatherland.35
Yet, for all his Western inclinations, Pushkin was a poet with a Russian voice. Neglected by his parents, he was practically brought up by his peasant nurse, whose tales and songs became a lifelong inspiration for his verse. He loved folk tales and he often went to country fairs to pick up peasant stories and turns of phrase which he then incorporated in his poetry. Like the officers of 1812, he felt that the landowner’s obligation as the guardian of his serfs was more important than his duty to the state.36
He felt this obligation as a writer, too, and looked to shape a written language that could speak to everyone. The Decembrists made this a central part of their philosophy. They called for laws to be written in a language ‘that every citizen can understand’.37 They attempted to create a Russian lexicon of politics to replace imported words. Glinka called for a history of the war of 1812 to be written in a language that was ‘plain and clear and comprehensible by people of all classes, because people of all classes took part in the liberation of our motherland’.38 The creation of a national language seemed to the veterans of 1812 a means of fostering the spirit of the battlefield and of forging a new nation with the common man. ‘To know our people’, wrote the Decembrist poet Alexander Bestuzhev, ‘one has to live with them and talk with them in their language, one has to eat with them and celebrate with them on their feast days, go bear-hunting with them in the woods, or travel to the market on a peasant cart.’39 Pushkin’s verse was the first to make this link. It spoke to the widest readership, to the literate peasant and the prince, in a common Russian tongue. It was Pushkin’s towering achievement to create this national language through his verse.
Volkonsky returned to Russia in 1815 and took up the command of the Azov regiment in the Ukraine. Like all the Decembrists, he was deeply disillusioned by the reactionary turn taken by the Emperor
Alexander, on whom he had pinned his liberal hopes. In the first years of his reign (1801-12) Alexander had passed a series of political reforms: censorship was immediately relaxed; the Senate was promoted to the supreme judicial and administrative institution in the Empire -an important counterbalance to the personal power of the sovereign; a more modern system of government began to take shape with the establishment of eight new ministries and an upper legislative chamber (the State Council) modelled on Napoleon’s Conseil d’Etat. There were even some preliminary measures to encourage noblemen to emancipate their
