number of literary works.187 This was no longer the Moscow which had appeared on Latin-inscribed medals struck in honor of the founding of Russia's first university, showing the Kremlin towers illumined by the rising sun,138 but a Moscow of mysterious moonlight:
How clear and brilliant is the moon
Contemplating sleeping Moscow. Can it have ever seen in all its journeys through the vault of heaven A city so magnificent? Can it have seen a second Kremlin?139
The remarkable cultural activity of Moscow under Nicholas I was, however, no mere return to the Muscovy of old. Catherine and Alexander I had wrought an irrevocable change in Russian thought. The aristocracy had undergone a stimulating exposure to the West, and to books that were hitherto inaccessible in the vernacular-from the complete New Testament to Diderot's Encyclopedia. They had acquired a taste for the fraternal and intellectual activity of small circles. Secular journalism and art, organized education and philanthropy, had all become part of the life of many Russian aristocrats.
The changes that had already taken place in the intellectual atmosphere are illustrated by the figure who finally set down the official state philosophy of Nicholas I, Sergius Uvarov. From the time he first propounded his sacred trilogy of 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality' as the newly installed minister of education in 1833 until he died just a few months after Nicholas in 1855, Uvarov was an urbane and effective apologist for the anti- Enlightenment. Just as Speransky's new law code of 1833 spelled an end to the hopes of the Russian Enlightenment for political-constitutional reform, so Uvarov's circular of the same year brought to a close hopes for educational reform. But in contrast to the law code, Uvarov's writings helped open up new avenues for Russian thought by keeping alive some of the ideological passion of the preceding era.
Superficially, Uvarov appears as yet another epigon of occult Masonry -arguing that some supra-rational basis must be found for truth and authority and that one must look to the ancient East for surviving reflections of the 'lost light of Adam.' Russia should treasure its links with Asia and conduct extensive 'metaphysical archeology' into its Eastern heritage, Uvarov argued, in his blueprint of 1810 for an Asian Academy.140 Two years later, his Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries idealized the authority of mystery in a primitive Greek civilization still thought to be linked to its Oriental heritage. The implication was that the democracy and critical
philosophy for which Greece had generally been praised in the Age of the Enlightenment were, in fact, corrosive forces that had destroyed the 'intellectual solidarity'141 of an earlier, proto-Oriental society.
This early statement of pro-Asian sentiment attracted increased attention as Napoleon's invasion of Russia fanned anti-European and anti-Enlightenment sentiment. Uvarov's reiteration of this position in the 1830's benefited from a second wave of anti-Western feeling that followed the Polish uprising of 1830. Pletnev, Uvarov's leading lieutenant and popularize^ insisted that Western classicism was incompatible with autocracy; Osip Senkovsky, professor of Oriental languages at St. Petersburg, became a propagandist for Uvarov's views; and Count Rostopchin, the reactionary pamphleteer who had defended Moscow from Napoleon, was posthumously assigned a genealogy from Genghis Khan.
'We must Easternize ourselves [ovostochifsid],' proclaimed one leading critic,142 and, as if in response, Asians suddenly became heroes in a number of new and distinctly second-rate historical plays and novels-such as those of the prolific Raphael Zotov, which ranged from the embellished saga of his Tatar father's battles against Napoleon, The Last Descendant of Genghis Khan, to the picture of enlightened Chinese struggling with corrupt Western intruders in Tsin-Kin-Tong, or the Three Good Deeds of the Spirit of Darkness. A play of 1823, The Youth of Ivan III, or the Attack of Tamerlane on Russia, even goes so far as to have the Mongol invader tutor the Russian tsar. An almanac of 1828 completed the picture by offering an anthology of Mongolian proverbs to a people always responsive to this type of folk wisdom.148
Pan-Asianism did not become part of Uvarov's doctrine of 'official nationality'; but his fascination with the Orient illustrates his own remoteness from any simple doctrine of returning to primitive, purely Russian practices. Instead, he appears as an uncertain seeker for some new form of authoritarianism. He speaks of 'complete societies . . . where the philosophic element triumphs,'144 and where shallow philosophes are confounded by 'complete thought' which integrates intelligence, imagination, and sentiment.145
Uvarov fully shared the general aristocratic contempt for the commercially oriented West and its periodical press which has 'dethroned the word.'146 But he places on his ideological throne not the Word that was in the beginning but slogans that never were before. Orthodoxy comprised only one third of his formula; and his critical writings reveal a general indifference to Christianity-if not actual atheism.147 He is the voice not of faith but of inner uncertainty and romantic longing. He seems to be looking not for a philosopher-king or Christian emperor, but for the grand master
of some occult order. His image of the 'complete society' is not one in which each individual has perfected his rational faculties and remade the social order in accordance with moral law. Rather it is a rigidly hierarchical society ruled by an 'intelligence' that is unintelligible to all but the inner initiates.
Uvarov fought Cartesianism and scepticism not with tradition but with a new ideology that often seems to anticipate modern totalitarianism. In the process, however, he helped create other problems. By introducing narod-nost' ('nationality') as one of the three pillars of official ideology, he gave increased authority to a vague term which radicals later interpreted to mean 'spirit of the people.' By founding in 1834 and presenting his views regularly in a monthly 'thick journal,' The Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, Uvarov moved the government into the risky terrain of ideological journalism. By idealizing the 'effervescence of ideas'148 in the ancient Orient, he helped encourage the new effervescence of exotic thought that became characteristic of the age of Nicholas. By setting forth an all-encompassing state ideology, Uvarov helped turn Russian thinkers to broad questions of personal and national belief, which increasingly interested Russians as the possibility of political and pedagogic reform faded.
New vistas had been opened to the imagination in the Age of Alexander I. Despite Uvarov's efforts to hold them in check, the aristocrats were to enjoy a last period of creative exploration under Nicholas before the stage became filled with the new social classes and material concerns of a more open and industrialized society under Alexander II.
3. The ' Cursed Questions'
nder Nicholas I, the imperial pendulum swung back from French Enlightenment to German discipline far more decisively than it had done during the brief reigns of Peter III and Paul. The various contacts and associations with the German-speaking world that had been growing fitfully but steadily in importance were climaxed during the long and superficially glittering reign of Nicholas by new bonds of princely and aristocratic brotherhood. Russian and German rulers stood together as guardians of the conservative restoration sealed at the Congress of Vienna. Far closer to his Germanophile mother than to his much older and more cosmopolitan brothers, Constantine and Alexander I, Nicholas married a Prussian princess and leaned constantly throughout his own thirty-year reign on his father-in-law and brother-in-law, who successively ruled Prussia as Frederick William III and IV. The addition to the Russian Empire of the Baltic provinces with their German baronial overseers further flooded the Russian aristocracy with Germans, and led to the famous incident whereby an aristocrat given his choice of new rank by the Tsar asked to be redesignated 'a German.'1 Survivors of the Alexandrian era complained in exile that Russia's movement into Central Europe had been its undoing:
