humble themselves. Tikhon requested that he be buried under the entrance stone of a simple church so that he could be literally trampled underfoot by the humblest believer. When hit by a freethinker in the course of an argument, Tikhon replied by throwing himself at the feet of his astonished assailant to ask forgiveness for driving him to such a loss of self-control.95 It is perhaps fitting that Tikhon was canonized and his works studied anew in the 1860's, when Russian thinkers were turning again to the problem of moral purification and humbling themselves before the simple people. The principal ideological movement of that age, the famous 'movement (literally 'procession' or 'pilgrimage': khozhdenie) to the people,' was in many ways only an extension and secularization of the effort to take the monastic ideal out to a bonded but still believing peasantry. Indeed, the complex populist movement-the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history-appears in many ways as a continuation of all three post-Petrine forms of conservative protest to the Westernization and secularization of the Russian empire. Like all of them, populism was a loose tradition rather than an organized movement. Like most Old Believers, the populists believed in preserving the old communal forms of economic life and in the imminent possibility of sudden historical change. Like the peasant insurrectionaries, the populists believed in violent action against police and bureaucrats and in the ultimate benevolence of the 'true tsar.' Even after killing Alexander II in 1881, the populists could conceive of no other program than to address Utopian appeals to his successor.96 Like the monastic revivalists, the populists believed in ascetic self-denial and in humbling oneself before the innocently suffering Russian people.
But before considering this and other movements of the late imperial period one must turn to the new and distinctive culture that took shape under Elizabeth and Catherine and lasted for a century. During this period the schisms and tensions that had been opened in Russian society by the reforms of Alexis and Peter were plastered over with the decorative effects of aristocratic culture. It is to the brilliant and self-confident culture of the aristocratic century-and to its lingering inner concerns-that attention must now be turned.
The Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
The unchallenged reign of a distinctive, if disturbed aristocratic culture during the century from 1755-6 (the date of the Russian alliance with the France of Louis XIV and the founding of the first Russian university and permanent theater) to 1855-6 (the year of decisive military defeat in the Crimea and the advent of the reforming tsar, Alexander II). The constant struggle between French and German influences, between rationalistic and romantic impulses; the adoption of the French language and the importation of French ideas as an aristocratic badge of class beginning in the reign of Elizabeth (1741-62); the emphasis on Prussian discipline under Peter III (1762) and Paul I (1796-1801) immediately before and after the long Francophile reign of Catherine the Great. The Russian Enlightenment: the breadth and scientific achievement of Michael Lomonosov (1711-65), the neo-classical art forms and the new cities that accompanied Catherine's age of conquest.
The recurrent dilemma, first met by Catherine, between the desire for rational rule based on natural laws and the concurrent determination to maintain an unlimited autocracy based on rigid class distinctions. The crucial change in the character of opposition to tsarist rule under Catherine, from the last of the great peasant revolts under Pugachev (1773-5) to the first manifesto of the 'Pugachevs from the universities': The Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790) by the alienated aristocratic intellectual Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802). The struggle against frivolous 'Voltairianism,' the journalistic activities of Nicholas Novikov (1744-1818), and the seminal importance of Russian Freemasonry in the deepening communal life of the reforming aristocracy.
The great expectations during the reign of Alexander I (1801-25); the national revival in resisting the Napoleonic invasion (1812-14); the frustration of political reform and the suppression of the aristocratic Decembrist uprising of 1825. Russia as the focal point of the European-wide reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Catholic, pietistic, Orthodox, and occult, Eastward-looking elements in the wave of reactionary thinking that culminated in the pronouncement in 1833 of 'Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality' as the official ideology of the Russian Empire.
The immersion of aristocratic thinkers in German romantic philosophy during the authoritarian, Prussophile rule of Nicholas I (1825-55). The intense desire to discover within the fraternity of small discussion groups and to set forth on the pages of 'thick journals' the answers to certain 'cursed questions' about the meaning of history, art, and life itself. The transition from the aristocratic poetry of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) to the anguished prose of Nicholas Gogol (1809-52); from neo-classical architecture to the ideological paintings of Alexander Ivanov (1806 -58); from the visionary romanticism of Schelling and the Slavophiles of the 1830's to the revolutionary rationalism of the young Hegelians and 'West-ernizers' of the 1840's. The legacy of metaphysical anguish left by the aristocratic search for Truth; the symbolic importance of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Raphael's 'Sistine Madonna' in the unresolved search for cultural identity.
For all its tribulations and divisions, Russia had become by the mid-eighteenth century a great European power. Frontier ruggedness and Tatar ruthlessness had been harnessed by Prussian discipline and Swedish administrative technique. The officer class, newly swollen with Northern European mercenaries, had led Russia in conquest abroad and defended its autocrat from unrest within. It was now being rewarded by grants of land and civil authority. The culture of old Russia was rejected by the new aristocracy, but nothing had as yet taken its place except a patina of Latin culture acquired from the newly absorbed Polish territories.
Under Peter and his immediate successors, the aristocracy stood suspended between many worlds. They generally had to speak at least three languages: German, Russian, and Polish; and their semi-official handbook of instruction advised them to learn three different numerical systems: the Arabic (needed for military and technical purposes), the Roman (used in classical and modern Western culture), and the Church Slavonic lettered numerals still used in Russia itself.1
The name first assigned to the new service nobility, shliakhetstvo, symbolized the polyglot derivation of the class; for this was the Russified form of the Polish szlachta, which was itself derived from the German word for hereditary lineage Geschlecht. In the course of the century, the nobility came to be known by the term dvorianstvo, 'men of the court,' which suggested the growing interdependence of the tsar and the aristocracy. In return for the services to the state prescribed in Peter's Table of Ranks (1722), the aristocracy received almost unlimited local power in a series of grants cli-
maxed in 1785 by the Charter to the Nobility. Just as the new nobility shed its Germano-Polish name, so it soon shed the shell of Latin culture that had been the vehicle for rejecting the traditional Greco-Byzantine heritage. Latin remained the principal language of seminaries and academies; but it did not-and in the eighteenth century could not-provide the common language for the new Russian ruling class.
Only late in the reign of Peter's youngest daughter, Elizabeth, did this rootless but triumphant class begin to find a sense of identity through the language and culture of France. Elizabeth's reign began a period of creativity that can justly be called the golden age of the JRussian aristocracy, and roughly identified with the century between 1755-6 and 1855-6.
In 1755-6 Russia witnessed the first performance of a Russian opera by Russians, the founding of the first permanent Russian theater, and the establishment of the first Russian university. A century later, Alexander II ascended the throne to free the serfs, open up Russia to accelerated industrialization, and thus end forever the special position of the aristocracy. In terms of foreign influence this frame of dates is equally significant: 1756 marking the 'diplomatic revolution' that aligned Russia with the ancien regime in France; 1856 bringing an end to the Crimean War, which, as the first great setback for the old order in Russia, prepared the way for an influx of liberalizing ideas from the victorious English and French.
