Dimtry Venevitanov in his pro-Decembrist poem
Answer great city:
Where are your glorious days of liberty,
When your voice, the scourge of kings,
Rang true like the bells at your noisy assembly?
Say, where are those times?
They are so far away, oh, so far away!166
The monarchist perception of medieval Novgorod formed a stark contrast. According to Karamzin, Moscow’s conquest of the city was a necessary step towards the creation of a unitary state, and was recognized as such by its citizens. This submission was a sign of the Russian people’s wisdom, in Karamzin’s view: they recognized that freedom was worth nothing without order and security. The Novgoro-dians were thus the original consenting members in the leviathan of autocracy. They chose the protection of the Tsar in order to save
themselves from their own internal squabbles, which had played into the hands of the city’s
The war of 1812 was itself a battlefield for these competing myths of Russian history. This was shown by its commemoration in the nineteenth century. For the Decembrists, 1812 was a people’s war. It was the point at which the Russians came of age, the moment when they passed from childhood into adult citizens, and with their triumphant entry into Europe, they should have joined the family of European states. But for the defenders of the status quo, the war symbolized the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon. It was a time when the Tsarist state emerged as God’s chosen agent in a new historical dispensation.
The regime’s image of itself was set in stone with the Alexandrine Column, built, ironically, by the French architect Auguste de Montfer-rand on Palace Square in Petersburg, and opened on the twentieth anniversary of the battle of Borodino. The angel on the top of the column was given the Tsar Alexander’s face.167 Five years later, work began in Moscow on a larger monument to the divine mission of the Russian monarchy - the grandiose Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on a site overlooking the Kremlin walls. Half war museum and half church, it was intended to commemorate the miraculous salvation of Moscow in 1812. Constantin Ton’s design echoed the architectural language of the ancient Russian Church, but enlarged its proportions to an imperial scale. This colossal cathedral was the tallest building in Moscow when it was completed, after fifty years, in 1883, and even today, reconstructed after Stalin had it blown up in 1931 (one death sentence that might be justified on artistic grounds), it still dominates the cityscape.
Throughout the nineteenth century these two images of 1812 - as
8.
a national liberation or imperial salvation - continued to compete for the public meaning of the war. On the one side was Tolstoy’s
when there were high hopes for national unity in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs, these two visions were at loggerheads. The fiftieth anniversary of 1812 coincided with the millennium of the Russian state in 1862. The millennium was due to be commemorated in the spring in (of all symbolic places) Novgorod. But the Emperor Alexander II ordered its postponement to 26 August - the anniversary of the battle of Borodino and the sacred date of his own coronation in 1856. By merging these three anniversaries, the Romanov dynasty was attempting to reinvent itself as a national institution, consecrated by the holy victory of 1812, and one as old as the Russian state itself. The granite monument unveiled in Novgorod was a symbol of this claim. Shaped like the bell of the Novgorod assembly, it was encircled by a band of bas-reliefs with the sculptures of those figures - saints and princes, generals and warriors, scientists and artists - who had shaped a thousand years of Russian history. The great bell was crowned by Mother Russia, bearing in one hand the Orthodox cross and in the other a shield emblazoned with the Romanov insignia. The Decembrists were irate. Volkonsky, who had by now returned from his thirty years of exile, told Tolstoy that the monument had ‘trampled on the sacred memory of Novgorod as well as on the graves of all those heroes who fought for our freedom in 1812’.168
’He is an enthusiast, a mystic and a Christian, with high ideals for the new Russia,’ Tolstoy wrote to Herzen after meeting Volkonsky in 1859.169 A distant cousin of the Decembrist, Tolstoy was extremely proud of his Volkonsky heritage. Having lost his mother at the age of three, he had more than just an academic interest in researching the background of her family: for him, it was an emotional necessity. Sergei Volkonsky was a childhood hero of Tolstoy’s (all the Decembrists were idolized by the progressive youths of Tolstoy’s age) and in time he became the inspiration for Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in
In 1859 Tolstoy started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, the old Volkonsky estate that had passed down to him on his mother’s side. The estate had a special meaning for Tolstoy. He had been born in the manor house - on a dark green leather sofa which he kept throughout his life in the study where he wrote his great novels. He spent his childhood on the estate, until the age of nine, when he moved to Moscow with his father. More than an estate, Yasnaya Polyana was his ancestral nest, the place where his childhood memories were kept, and the little patch of Russia where he felt he most belonged. ‘I wouldn’t sell the house for anything,’ Tolstoy told his brother in 1852. ‘It’s the last thing I’d be prepared to part with.’171 Yasnaya Polyana had been purchased by Tolstoy’s great-grandmother, Maria Volkonsky, in 1763. His grandfather, Nikolai Volkonsky, had developed it as a cultural space, building the splendid manor house, with its large collection of European books, the landscaped park and lakes, the spinning factory, and the famous white stone entrance gates that served as a post station on the road from Tula to Moscow. As a boy, Tolstoy idolized his grandfather. He fantasized that he was just like him.172 This ancestor cult, which was at the emotional core of Tolstoy’s conservatism, was expressed in Eugene, the hero of his story ‘The Devil’ (1889):
It is generally supposed that Conservatives are old people, and that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen. Thus it was with Eugene. Having settled in the village, his aim and ideal was to restore the form of life that had existed, not in his father’s time… but in his grandfather’s.173
Nikolai Volkonsky was brought back to life as Andrei’s father Nikolai Bolkonsky in
writer researched into the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812. In the novel’s early form
Falsehood. This is the sickness of the Russian state. Falsehood and its sisters, hypocrisy and cynicism. Russia could not exist without them. Yet surely the point is not just to exist but to exist with dignity. And if we want to be honest with ourselves, then we must recognize that if Russia cannot exist otherwise than she existed in the past, then she does not deserve to exist.174
To live in truth, or, more importantly, to live in truth in Russia - these were the questions of Tolstoy’s life and work, and the main concerns of
Volkonsky’s
