The new turn in Russian diplomacy helped French become the common language of the aristocracy. Although the Russian aristocracy was also to create modern literary Russian, they continued to speak to one another and even to think largely in French. This new language brought Russian noblemen into the main stream of European culture, and also helped isolate them more than before from their own countrymen. Much of the drama of the aristocratic century lies in the struggle of a refined but essentially foreign culture to strike roots in Russian soil.
In its attempt to take hold in this chilly northern climate, the rationalism of the French Enlightenment was opposed not just by the dogged piety and superstition of the masses but also by a fresh surge of pietistic thought within the aristocracy itself. However one divides the aristocratic century, one finds a straggle going on beneath a seemingly tranquil surface: between rationalism and romanticism. French and German influence, universalism and nationalism, St. Petersburg and Moscow.
One can speak impressionistically of an enlightened eighteenth and a romantic nineteenth century; of the cult of Voltaire and Diderot giving way to that of Schelling and Hegel; of an alternation between Francophile reform under Catherine and Alexander I and Prussian discipline under their successors Paul and Nicholas; or of a general attraction toward France that
was weakened first by the revolutionary terror and then by the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 In any case, the struggle throughout this century was essentially between French and German approaches to political, personal, and aesthetic problems.
The contioversies occurred within an uneasy aristocratic minority which also felt piessures from below and harassment from above. Yet, viewed in the broad context of Russian history, there has probably never been a century in which the controlling elite has had the liberty to discuss problems and ideas free from the disruptions of major social and political change. During this period, the aristocratic elite produced a culture that was both national and European, and created poetry, ballet, and architecture equal to the finest of the age.
Yet it was jnst in the realm of ideas that the aristocratic century left its most fateful legacy. The very security and freedom from practical responsibilities of the aristocracy permitted it to become involved in the controversies of a disturbed century in European philosophy. Partly from idle curiosity, partly from deeper concern, the Russian aristocrats generated a sense of philosophic anguish which gradually focused on certain nagging questions about the meaning of history, of culture, and of life itself.
A special kind of fraternity emerged within the aristocracy of those who felt alienated from official Russia and concerned about these 'cursed questions.' Out of debates that began innocuously among bored officers in masonic lodges, fraternal societies, and philosophic 'circles' came a sense of solidarity and spiritual purpose. To be sure, the aristocratic philosophers agreed on almost nothing and generated great confusion in the society around them. In their unreal efforts to bring to life on Russian soil the heroics of Byron's poems and Schiller's plays, they often lost themselves in the indecisive melancholy of their favorite dramatic character, Hamlet, and created the literary type known as 'the superfluous man.' Yet, at the same time, they created an aura of heroism about their own implausible dedication to high ideals. They created an enduring dissatisfaction with compromise, philistinism, and partial answers.
Frustrated in matters of practical political and social reform, thinking aristocrats increasingly poured their passion into artistic creativity and historical prophecy. They harrowed the soil and sowed the seeds for a rich harvest. Their restless pursuit of truth enabled succeeding ages to produce the most profoundly realistic literature and the most profoundly revolutionary political upheaval of modern times.
i. The Troubled Enlightenment
ls distinct from the pattern that developed in the early modern West, secular enlightenment in Russia began late, proceeded fitfully, and was largely the work of monks or foreign technicians-always in response to imperial commands and patronage.
Even Soviet scholars who minimize the importance of religion and generally maximize Great Russian influences now tend to date the beginning of the Russian Enlightenment from the influx of learned White Russian and Ukrainian monks into Moscow at the time of schism in the Russian Church.1 Monks and seminarians indeed continued to play a large role in the Russian Enlightenment down into the twentieth century, and are responsible for some of the religious intensity of much Russian secular thought. At the same time, the Westernized regions of the empire played a key role in opening up the Russian mind to the speculative philosophy and classical art forrns which soon dominated aristocratic culture. While under Polish dominance, Kiev had been transformed into an eastern bastion of scholastic education and baroque architecture. For nearly a century after its return to Russian control, Kiev was the most literate city in the empire. The Kiev-Mogila Academy (which was not made a theological academy until the nineteenth century) was the closest approximation to a Western-style liberal arts university. Between 1721 and 1765, twenty-eight seminaries were founded-all on the Kievan model; and it is probably not too much to say that Kiev taught Russia not only to read and write in the eighteenth century, but also to think in the abstract, metaphysical terms which were to prove so attractive to the aristocratic intellectuals.2
Foreign technicians were also bearers of literary and secular ideas in the early modern period of Russian history. Yet the various military, commercial, and medical specialists that flooded into Russia in increasing numbers from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century were, for the most part, kept in hermetically sealed settlements in the major ports and administrative centers. The price of extensive residence or broad Russian contact
was almost invariably complete assimilation: change of name, religion, and dress. Those willing to pay this price did not generally have very much intellectual or cultural vitality to contribute to their adopted land.
Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education. By making a measure of elementary education obligatory for much of his service aristocracy and by introducing an official civil script, a reformed alphabet, and innumerable Western words and concepts into the language, Peter prepared the way for a more purely secular enlightenment. Shortly after his death, the first institute of secular scientific learning, the Academy of Sciences, was established in St. Petersburg along lines that he had prescribed. By entrusting the organization and staffing of the Academy to the German mathematician and natural philosopher Christian Wolff, Peter recognized the dependence on foreigners that would continue under his successors but willed to them his own bias in favor of secular learning. Whereas the school system set up early in Peter's reign in key Russian cities by Pietist evangelists from Halle soon collapsed, the academy organized by Wolff (who had been forced to leave Halle by fearful Pietists) survived and gradually became the center of a new educational system.3
Only, however, under Elizabeth in the 1750's did the work of the Academy begin to have a broader impact on Russian culture. By then the many-sided effects of Peter's opening to the West had begun to reach a fruition that can properly be called a Russian Enlightenment. Within the space of a few years in the mid-fifties the Academy issued a number of ethnographic and geographic publications that broadly stimulated aristocratic society with fresh information about other cultures; and Russia acquired a university, permanent theater, academy of arts, decorative porcelain factory, and so on.
The early years of Catherine's reign were perhaps thr, most decisive of all, for the new sovereign virtually commanded the literate public to consider a new spectrum of problems-problems ranging from politics to architecture to agriculture. Whereas the number of books printed annually in the Russian empire had risen from a
