The Germans have conquered Russia in the very process of letting themselves be conquered. This is what happened in China with the Mongols, in Italy with the Barbarians, in Greece with the Romans.2
Extending the Prussian ideal of military discipline to all corners of society, Nicholas became the bete noire of liberals and nationalists throughout Europe. Leaning for civil order on the investigative activities of his newly created 'Third Section,' Nicholas was said to have meant by the phrase le bien-etre general en Russie, 'it is well to be a general in Russia.'3
Nicholas' reign occupies in some respects a place in Russian history similar to that of Peter the Great, of whom Nicholas' official apologists were
such great admirers.4 Like Peter, Nicholas came to power at the end of a period of religious and political ferment in which allegiances and institutions all seemed subject to change. Like Peter, Nicholas was primarily a soldier, fascinated from boyhood with military weapons and technology; and sought to re-establish order on military lines with the aid of a Lutheran-style church clearly subordinate to the state. Just as Peter came into power by curbing rebellion within the palace guard in Moscow, so Nicholas ascended to the throne while crushing the Decembrist uprising within the new elite regiments in St. Petersburg.
Peter, of course, was opening, while Nicholas was shutting, windows to the West. But the century between the end of Peter's reign and the beginning of Nicholas' had brought too much cultural exposure to the West ever to be blocked off; ideas from the West could not be stopped as Mag-nitsky would have wished. Like a swollen river suddenly confronted with a major obstacle, the flow was merely diverted into channels that had hitherto carried only a small trickle of ideas. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism replaced politics and religion in the mainstreams of Russian culture. For awhile it seemed that Russian intellectual life was to be diverted from practical concerns altogether. Many leading figures went abroad for visits that slowly lengthened into semi-exile. Many of Russia's finest minds moved into the realm of the distant or theoretical. In Kazan in the aftermath of the Magnitsky era, a young mathematician, Nicholas Lobachevsky, sought to supplant Euclid with a new 'pan-geometry.' His modern geometry, perhaps the greatest Russian contribution to scientific thought during the reign of Nicholas, earned him an unprecedented six terms as rector of Russia's easternmost university.5 Another area of scientific accomplishment lay in astronomy, which had been since the days of Kepler an area of active inquiry in the navigation-minded Baltic world. The long nights and northern lights stimulated interest, and as early as 1725 there was an observatory in St. Petersburg. Russia later fell heir to a larger observatory at Tartu, and in the i83o's Russia turned to the building of an observatory at Pulkovo, outside St. Petersburg, which became the largest in the world upon its completion in 1839. J-ts director, F. G. W. Struve, had turned from literary to astronomical studies during the late years of Alexander's reign, and his life's work at Pulkovo was a long study of a relatively nebulous astronomical subject: the Milky Way. Another fascination of the age was comets, which were a lively topic of speculative discussion, particularly before and after the rare appearance of Halley's comet in 1835.0 The most important philosophic journal of the Nicholaevan period called itself The Telescope.
There was also a romantic interest in exotic portions of the Russian Empire itself. One scientific explorer, who was forced to make a long dis-
claimer of any association with Masonic or secret societies upon returning from abroad in 1830, even idealized the frozen northern region of Novaia Zemlia (New Land).
Novaia Zemlia is a real land of freedom, where each man may act and live as he wishes. It is the only land where there is no police force or other ruling force besides hospitality. … In Novaia Zemlia each man who arrives is greeted as an honest man.7
The most important flight from harsh realities was, however, the flight to German romantic philosophy. On soil that was thoroughly prepared by the occult theosophic pursuits of higher order Masonry, the seeds of Schell- ing's and Hegel's great philosophic systems were now sown. The harvest was to be rich indeed, for these cosmic systems provided the thinking aristocracy not only with consolation from the frustrations of the Nicholaevan age but also with a vocabulary to discuss certain deep philosophical questions that troubled them.
Thus, far from turning to new problems, the aristocratic intellectuals resolved to make one last heroic effort to answer the old ones. The material world, which was increasingly preoccupying a Western world in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, was simply not yet on the agenda of Russian thought. Occult spiritual forces were still thought to rale the world; and small circles of dedicated truth seekers were believed capable of understanding and serving these forces. As the optimism and reformist enthusiasm of the Alexandrian era waned, Russian thinkers turned from the outer to the inner world: from practical affairs to problematic philosophy. Beneath the tranquil surface of Nicholaevan Russia, disturbing questions were asked as never before about the meaning of history, art, and life itself. In their increasingly desperate effort to answer these so-called 'cursed questions,' they turned to Germany no less enthusiastically than Nicholas himself-but to its universities rather than its drill fields. The answers they found in the philosophy taught at these outwardly conservative institutions were new, and in many cases potentially revolutionary.
The Flight to Philosophy
Old Russia had repeatedly and consistently rejected the need for any systematic secular philosophy. 'The Russians are philosophers not in words, but in deeds,'8 Krizhanich wrote sadly after his unsuccessful efforts to introduce Western philosophic ideas into seventeenth-century Russia. Philos-
ophy was rejected not only because it was irrelevant to salvation but because it can lead men-in the words of an early nineteenth-century Old Believer- 'to contemplate the overthrow of kingdoms.'8
Thus, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, philosophy held for the Russian mind some of the exotic fascination of soaring comets and distant lands. Almost from the first introduction of philosophy into the curriculum of Moscow University, it acquired the subversive reputation of being a rival and potential substitute for revealed religion. Even during the early years of Catherine's reign, a follower of Hume was forced to resign from the university and a dissertation on natural religion publicly burned. With the founding of new universities early in Alexander's reign and the influx of German-trained professors, German philosophic idealism gained such a foothold that Magnitsky could with some justice speak of 'substituting Kant for John the Baptist and Schelling for Christ.' So heavily censored were lectures on philosophy by the end of Alexander's reign that the most serious discussion of broad philosophic issues often took place in faculties like medicine and jurisprudence. In the wake of the revolution of 1848, Nicholas I abolished philosophy altogether as a legitimate subject of study. This extraordinary ban was lifted in 1863, but other crippling restrictions on academic philosophy remained in effect until 1889.10
The effect of such harassment was not to prevent the study of philosophy but rather to force it out of the classroom into the secret society: away from an atmosphere of critical discipline into one of uncritical enthusiasm. The philosophy that was popularized by Schwarz was similar to that with which the ancient Gnostics had opposed the worldliness of late Hellenistic culture. Schwarz believed in a supra-rational knowledge (gnosis or mudrost', premudrost') which could harmonize reason with revelation. To the clinical study of the natural world, they opposed the mystical 'light of Adam,' which man could recapture only through inner purification and illumination. The most important single influence on the formation of a Russian philosophical tradition was Jacob Boehme, of whom Schwarz, Saint-Martin, and the other heroes of higher order masonry were little more than popularizes. In Boehme's richly metaphorical writings, all of the universe-even evil-became expressions of the wisdom of God. It was this 'wisdom of God' (theosophy) rather than any 'love of wisdom' (philosophy) that Boehme held out to his followers as an attainable ideal. Boehme's God was not the finite clockmaker and repairman of the deists, but an infinitely
