Karamzin, 1812 was a tragic year. While his Moscow neighbours moved to their estates, he refused to 'believe that the ancient holy city could be lost' and, as he wrote on 20 August, he chose instead to 'die on Moscow's walls'.153 Karamzin's house burned down in the fires and, since he had not thought to evacuate his library, he lost his precious books to the flames as well. But Karamzin saved one book - a bulging notebook that contained the draft of his celebrated History of the Russian State (1818-26). Karamzin's masterpiece was the first truly national history - not just in the sense that it was the first by a Russian, but also in the sense that it rendered Russia's past as a national narrative. Previous histories of Russia had
been arcane chronicles of monasteries and saints, patriotic propaganda, or heavy tomes of documents compiled by German scholars, unread and unreadable. But Karamzin's History had a literary quality that made its twelve large volumes a nationwide success. It combined careful scholarship with the narrative techniques of a novelist. Karamzin stressed the psychological motivations of his historical protagonists - even to the point of inventing them - so that his account became more compelling to a readership brought up on the literary conventions of Romantic texts. Medieval Tsars like Ivan the Terrible or Boris Godunov became tragic figures in Karamzin's History - subjects for a modern psychological drama; and from its pages they walked on to the stage in operas by Musorgsky and Rimsky Korsakov.
The first eight volumes of Karamzin's History were published in 1818. 'Three thousand copies were sold within a month - something unprecedented in our country. Everyone, even high-born ladies, began to read the history of their country,' wrote Pushkin. 'It was a revelation. You could say that Karamzin discovered ancient Russia as Columbus discovered America.'154 The victory of 1812 had encouraged a new interest and pride in Russia's past. People who had been raised on the old conviction that there was no history before the reign of Peter the Great began to look back to the distant past for the sources of their country's unexpected strengths. After 1812 history books appeared at a furious pace. Chairs were established in the universities (Gogol applied unsuccessfully for one at St Petersburg). Historical associations were set up, many in the provinces, and huge efforts were suddenly devoted to the rescuing of Russia's past. History became the arena for all those troubling questions about Russia's nature and its destiny. As Belinsky wrote in 1846, 'we interrogate our past for an explanation of our present and a hint of our future.'155 This historical obsession was reinforced by the failure of the Decembrists. If Russia was no longer to pursue the Western path of history toward a modern constitutional stare, as the Decembrists and their supporters had hoped, what then was its proper destiny?
This was the question posed by Pyotr Chaadaev, the Guards officer and foppish friend of Pushkin, in his sensational First Philosophical Letter (1856). Chaadaev was another 'child of 1812'. He had fought
at Borodino, before resigning from the army, at the height of his career in 1821, to spend the next five years in Europe. An extreme Westernist - to the extent that he converted to the Roman Church - he was thrown into despair by Russia's failure to take the Western path in 1825. This was the context in which he wrote his Letter - 'at a time of madness' (by his own admission) when he tried to take his life. 'What have we Russians ever invented or created?' Chaadaev wrote in 1826. 'The time has come to stop running after others; we must take a fresh and frank look at ourselves; we must understand ourselves as we really are; we must stop lying and find the truth.'156 The First Letter was an attempt to reveal this bleak and unpalatable truth. It was more a work of history than of philosophy. Russia, it concluded, stood 'outside of time, without a past or a future', having played no part in the history of the world. The Roman legacy, the civilization of the Western Church and the Renaissance - these had all passed Russia by - and now, after 1825, the country was reduced to a 'cultural void', an 'orphan cut off from the human family' which could imitate the nations of the West but never become one of them. The Russians were like nomads in their land, strangers to themselves, without a sense of their own national heritage or identity.157
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
