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To the reader in the modern world - where self-lacerating national declarations are made in the media almost every month - the cataclysmic shock of the First Letter may be hard to understand. It took away the ground from under the feet of every person who had been brought up to believe in ‘European Russia’ as their native land. The outcry was immense. Patriots demanded the public prosecution of the ‘lunatic’ for ‘the cruellest insult to our national honour’, and, on the orders of the Tsar, Chaadaev was declared insane, placed under house arrest and visited by doctors every day.158 Yet what he wrote had been felt by every thinking Russian for many years: the overwhelming sense of living in a wasteland or ‘phantom country’, as Belinsky put it, a country which they feared they might never really know; and the acute fear that, contrary to the raison d’etre of their civilization, they might never in fact catch up with the West. There were many similar expressions of this cultural pessimism after 1825. The triumph of reaction had engendered a deep loathing of the ‘Russian way’. ‘Real patriotism’, wrote Prince Viazemsky in 1828, ‘should consist of hatred for Russia
as she manifests herself at the present time.’159 The literary critic Nadezhdin (who published the First Letter in his journal Telescope) himself wrote in 1834: ‘We [the Russians] have created nothing. There is no branch of learning in which we can show something of our own. There is not a single person who could stand for Russia in the civilization of the world.’160
The Slavophiles had an opposite response to the crisis posed by Chaadaev. They first emerged as a distinct grouping in the 1830s, when they launched their public disputes with the Westernists, but they too had their roots in 1812. The horrors of the French Revolution had led the Slavophiles to reject the universal culture of the Enlightenment and to emphasize instead those indigenous traditions that distinguished Russia from the West. This search for a more ‘Russian’ way of life was a common response to the debacle of 1825. Once it became clear that Russia would diverge from the Western path, European Russians, like Lavretsky in Turgenev’s Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), began to explore - and find virtue in - those parts of Russian culture that were different from the West:
The free-thinker began to go to church and to order prayers to be said for him; the European began to steam himself in the Russian bath, to dine at two o’clock, to go to bed at nine, and to be talked to sleep by the gossip of an old butler…161
The Slavophiles looked first to the virtues they discerned in the patriarchal customs of the countryside - hardly surprising, given that they were born, for the most, to landed families that had lived in the same region for several hundred years. Konstantin Aksakov, the most famous and the most extremist of the Slavophiles, spent practically his entire life in one house, clinging to it, in the words of one contemporary, ‘like an oyster to his shell’.162 They idealized the common folk (narod) as the true bearer of the national character (narodnost’). Slavophile folklorists such as Pyotr Kireevsky went out to the villages to transcribe the peasant songs, which they thought could be interpreted as historical expressions of the ‘Russian soul’. As devout upholders of the Orthodox ideal, they maintained that the Russian was defined by Christian sacrifice and humility. This was the foundation of the spiritual
community (sobornost’) in which, they imagined, the squire and his serfs were bound together by their patriarchal customs and Orthodox beliefs. Aksakov argued that this ‘Russian type’ was incarnated in the legendary folk hero Ilia Muromets, who appears in epic tales as protector of the Russian land against invaders and infidels, brigands and monsters, with his ‘gentle strength and lack of aggression, yet his readiness to fight in a just defensive war for the people’s cause’.* The peasant soldiers of 1812 had shown these very qualities. Myth entering history.
Karamzin’s History was the opening statement in a long debate on Russia’s past and future that would run right through its culture in the nineteenth century. Karamzin’s own work was squarely situated in the monarchist tradition, which portrayed the Tsarist state and its noble servitors as a force for progress and enlightenment. The overarching theme of the History was Russia’s steady advance towards the ideal of a unitary Imperial state whose greatness lay in the inherited wisdom of its Tsar and the innate obedience of its citizens. The Tsar and his nobles initiated change, while ‘the people remain silent’ (‘narod bezmolvstvuet’), as Pushkin put it in the final stage direction of Boris Godunov. Pushkin shared Karamzin’s statist view of Russian history -at least in his later years, after the collapse of his republican convictions (which were in any case extremely dubious) in 1825. In The History of Pugachev (1833) Pushkin emphasized the need for enlightened monarchy to protect the nation from the elemental violence (‘cruel and merciless’) of the Cossack rebel leader Pugachev and his peasant followers. By highlighting the role of paternal noblemen such as General Bibikov and Count Panin, who put down Pugachev yet pleaded with the Empress to soften her regime, Pushkin underscored the national leadership of the old landed gentry from which he was so proud to descend.
In contrast to these views was the democratic trend of Russian history advanced by the Decembrists and their followers. They stressed
* Dostoevsky shared this view. The Russians, he wrote in 1876, were ‘a people devoted to sacrifice, seeking truth and knowing where truth can be found, as honest and pure in heart as one of their high ideals, the epic hero Ilia Muromets, whom they cherish as a saint’ (F. Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. K. Lantz, 2 vols. (London, 1993), vol. 1, p. 660).
the rebellious and freedom-loving spirit of the Russian people and idealized the medieval republics of Novgorod and Pskov, and the Cossack revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Pugachev’s. They believed that the common people had always been the (hidden) moving force of history - a theory largely shaped by their observation of the peasant soldiers in the war of 1812. In response to Karamzin’s famous motto ‘The history of the nation belongs to the Tsar’, the Decembrist historian Nikita Muraviev began his study with the fighting words: ‘History belongs to the people.’163
The origins of Russia was a major battlefield in this war between historians. Monarchists subscribed to the so-called Norman theory, originally devised by German historians in the eighteenth century, which maintained that the first ruling princes had arrived in Russia from Scandinavia (in the ninth century) by invitation from the warring Slavic tribes. The only real evidence for this argument was the Primary Chronicle - an eleventh-century account of the founding of the Kievan state in 862 - which had probably been written to justify what actually amounted to the Scandinavian conquest of Russia. The theory became increasingly untenable as nineteenth-century archaeologists drew attention to the advanced culture of the Slavic tribes in southern Russia. A picture emerged of a civilization stretching back to the ancient Scythians, the Goths, the Romans and the Greeks. Yet the Norman theory was a good foundation myth for the defenders of autocracy - supposing, as it did, that without a monarchy the Russians were incapable of governance. In Karamzin’s words, before the establishment of princely rule, Russia had been nothing but an ‘empty space’ with ‘wild and warring tribes, living on a level with the beasts and birds’.164 Against that the democrats maintained that the Russian state had evolved spontaneously from the native customs of the Slavic tribes. According to this view, long before the Varangians arrived the Slavs had set up their own government, whose republican liberties were gradually destroyed by the imposition of princely rule. Versions of the argument were made by all those groups who believed in the natural predilection of the Slavic people for democracy: not just the Decembrists but left-wing Slavophiles, Polish historians (who used it to denounce the Tsarist system in Poland), and Populist historians in the Ukraine and (later on) in Russia, too.
Another battlefield was medieval Novgorod - the greatest monument to Russian liberty and, in the Decembrist view, historic proof of the people’s right to rule themselves. Along with nearby Pskov, Novgorod was a flourishing civilization connected to the Hanseatic League of German trading towns prior to its conquest by Tsar Ivan III and its subjugation to Muscovy during the late fifteenth century. The Decembrists made a cult of the city republic. As a symbol of the people’s long-lost freedoms, they saw its veche, or assembly, as a sacred legacy connecting Russia to the democratic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. The teenage members of the ‘holy artel’ (1814-17) - among them several of the future Decembrists - opened all their meetings with the ceremonial ringing of the veche bell. In their manifestos the Decembrists used the terminology of medieval Novgorod, calling the future parliament the ‘national veche‘.165 The myth of Novgorod took on a new meaning and subversive power after the suppression of their uprising. In 1830 Lermontov wrote a poem entitled Novgorod (‘Brave sons of the Slavs, for what did you die?’), in which it was left deliberately unclear whether it was the fallen heroes of medieval Novgorod or the freedom fighters of 1825 whose loss was to be mourned. The same nostalgic note was struck by
