As readers of War and Peace will know, the war of 1812 was a vital watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. It was a war of national liberation from the intellectual empire of the French - a moment when noblemen like the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys struggled to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and began new lives on Russian principles. This was no straightforward metamorphosis (and it happened much more slowly than in Tolstoy's novel, where the nobles rediscover their forgotten national ways almost overnight). Though anti-French voices had grown to quite a chorus in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the aristocracy was still immersed in the culture of the country against which they were at war. The salons of St Petersburg were filled with young admirers of Bonaparte, such as Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. The most fashionable set was that of Counts Rumiantsev and Caulaincourt, the French ambassador in Petersburg, the circle in which Tolstoy's Helene moved. 'How can we fight the French?' asks Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow, in War and Peace. 'Can we arm ourselves
against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths! Look at our ladies! The French are our Gods. Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.'91 Yet even in these circles there was horror at Napoleon's invasion, and their reaction against all things French formed the basis of a Russian renaissance in life and art.
In the patriotic climate of 1812 the use of French was frowned upon in the salons of St Petersburg - and in the streets it was even dangerous. Tolstoy's novel captures perfectly the spirit of that time when nobles, who had been brought up to speak and think in French, struggled to converse in their native tongue. In one set it was agreed to ban the use of French and impose a forfeit on those who made a slip. The only trouble was that no one knew the Russian word for 'forfeit' - there was none - so people had to call out 'forfaiture'. This linguistic nationalism was by no means new. Admiral Shishkov, sometime Minister of Public Education, had placed the defence of the Russian language at the heart of his campaign against the French as early as 1803. He was involved in a long dispute with the Karamzinians, in which he attacked the French expressions of their salon style and wanted literary Russian to return to its archaic Church Slavonic roots.* For Shishkov the influence of French was to blame for the decline of the Orthodox religion and the old patriarchal moral code: the Russian way of life was being undermined by a cultural invasion from the West.
Shishkov's stock began to rocket after 1812. Renowned as a card player, he was a frequent guest in the fashionable houses of St Petersburg, and between rounds of vingt-et-un he would preach the virtues of the Russian tongue. Among his hosts, he took on the status of a 'national sage' and (perhaps in part because they owed him gambling debts) they paid him to tutor their sons.92 It became a fashion
* These disputes over language involved a broader conflict about 'Russia' and what it should be - a follower of Europe or a unique culture of its own. They looked forward to the arguments between the Slavophiles and the Westerners. The Slavophiles did not emerge as a distinct grouping for another thirty years, but the term 'Slavophile' was first used in the 1800s to describe those, like Shishkov, who favoured Church Slavonic as the 'national' idiom (see Iu. Lotman and B. Uspenskii, 'Spory o iazyke v nachale XIX v. kak fakt russkoi kul'tury', in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, 24, Uchenye zapiski tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, vyp. 39 (Tartu, 1975), pp. 210-1 1).
for the sons of noblemen to learn to read and write their native tongue. Dmitry Sheremetev, the orphaned son of Nikolai Petrovich and Praskovya, spent three years on Russian grammar and even rhetoric as a teenager in the 1810s - as much time as he spent on learning French.93 For lack of Russian texts, children learned to read from the Scriptures - indeed, like Pushkin, they were often taught to read by the church clerk or a local priest.94 Girls were less likely to be taught the Russian script than boys. Unlike their brothers, who were destined to become army officers or landowners, they would not have much business with the merchants or the serfs and hence little need to read or write their native tongue. But in the provinces there was a growing trend for women as well as men to learn Russian. Tolstoy's mother, Maria Volkonsky, had a fine command of literary Russian, even writing poems in her native tongue.95 Without this growing Russian readership the literary renaissance of the nineteenth century would have been inconceivable. Previously the educated classes in Russia had read mainly foreign literature.
In the eighteenth century the use of French and Russian had demarcated two entirely separate spheres: French the sphere of thought and sentiment, Russian the sphere of daily life. There was one form of language (French or Gallicized 'salon' Russian) for literature and another (the plain speech of the peasantry, which was not that far apart from the spoken idiom of the merchants and the clergy) for daily life. There were strict conventions on the use of languages. For example, a nobleman was supposed to write to the Tsar in Russian, and it would have seemed audacious if he wrote to him in French; but he always spoke to the Tsar in French, as he spoke to other noblemen. On the other hand, a woman was supposed to write in French, not just in her correspondence with the sovereign but with all officials, because this was the language of polite society; it would have been deemed a gross indecency if she had used Russian expressions.96 In private correspondence, however, there were few set rules, and by the end of the eighteenth century the aristocracy had become so bilingual that they slipped quite easily and imperceptibly from Russian into French and back again. Letters of a page or so could switch a dozen times, sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, without prompting by a theme.
Tolstoy played on these differences in War and Peace to highlight the social and cultural nuances involved in Russian French. For example, the fact that Andrei Bolkonsky speaks Russian with a French accent places him in the elite pro-French section of the Petersburg aristocracy. Or that Andrei's friend, the diplomat Bilibin, speaks by preference in French and says 'only those words in Russian on which he wished to put a contemptuous emphasis' indicates that Bilibin was a well-known cultural stereotype that readers would easily recognize: the Russian who would rather he were French. But perhaps the best example is Helene - the princess who prefers to speak in French about her extramarital affairs because 'in Russian she always felt that her case did not sound clear, and French suited it better'.97 In this passage Tolstoy is deliberately echoing the old distinction between French as the language of deceit and Russian as the language of sincerity. His use of dialogue has a similarly nationalist dimension. It is no coincidence that the novel's most idealized characters speak exclusively in Russian (Princess Maria and the peasant Karataev) or (like Natasha) speak French only with mistakes.
Of course, no novel is a direct window on to life and, however much it might approach that realist ideal in War and Peace, we cannot take these observations as an accurate reflection of reality. To read the correspondence of the Volkonskys - of course not forgetting that they became the Bolkonskys of War and Peace - is to find a far more complex situation than that presented by Tolstoy. Sergei Volkonsky wrote in French but inserted Russian phrases when he mentioned daily life on the estate; or he wrote in Russian when he aimed to underline a vital point and emphasize his own sincerity. By inclination, particularly after 1812, he wrote mostly in Russian; and he was obliged to in his letters from Siberia after 1825 (for his censors only read Russian). But there were occasions when he wrote in French (even after 1825): for example, when he wrote in the subjunctive mode or used formal phrases and politesses; or in passages where, in contravention of the rules, he wanted to express his views on politics in a language the censors would not understand. Sometimes he used French to explain a concept for which there was no Russian word - 'diligence', 'duplicite' and 'discretion'.98
In its customs and its daily habits the aristocracy was struggling to
become more 'Russian', too. The men of 1812 gave up feasts of haute cuisine for spartan Russian lunches, as they strived to simplify and Russianize their opulent lifestyle. Noblemen took peasant 'wives' with growing frequency and openness (what was good for a Sheremetev was also good for them) and there were even cases of noblewomen living with or marrying serfs.' Even Arakcheev, the Minister of War who became so detested for his brutal regime in the army, kept an unofficial peasant wife by whom he had two sons who were educated in the Corps des Pages.100 Native crafts were suddenly in vogue. Russian china with scenes from rural life was increasingly preferred to the classical designs of imported eighteenth-century porcelain. Karelian birch and other Russian woods, especially in the more rustic stylings of serf craftsmen, began to compete with the fine imported furniture of the classical palace, and even to displace it in those private living spaces where the nobleman relaxed. Count Alexander Osterman-Tolstoy, a military hero of 1812, was the owner of a magnificent
