heroes of Turgenev, and even the
search for family happiness and social adjustment from Eugene Onegin to Anna Karenina. At the same time, there is in Radishchev a heroic Pro-metheanism that anticipates the ecstatic, secular belief in the future of Lunacharsky and Trotsky. In his last book, On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev rejects the prosaic materialism of the French Encyclopedists and sees man attaining perfection-even immortality- through heroic effort and a creative evolution that includes a regeneration (palingenesis) of the dead. His conviction was that 'if people feared death less they would never become slaves of superstition. Truth would find for itself more zealous defenders.'74
Radishchev and Skovoroda were precursors rather than decisive influences in their own right; and it is dangerous to lift their ideas out of the complex context of their own life and times. Nevertheless, they stand as pioneers if not prophets: they were the first to set out on the argosy of alienation that would lead to revolution. Almost all Russian revolutionaries have seen in Radishchev the founding father of their tradition; and it has now been revealed that Skovoroda was one of the very few religious thinkers who was read and admired by Lenin himself. There are many memorials to Radishchev in the USSR, and Lenin planned also to erect a monument to Skovoroda.75
Novikov and Masonry
Far more influential than either Radishchev or Skovoroda in Catherine's time was Nicholas Novikov, who shared both the philanthropic reformism of the former and the religious anguish of the latter. Novikov was a serious thinker and, at the same time, a prodigious organizer who opened up new paths of practical activity for the aristocracy. A member of the exclusive Izmailovsky regiment and of Catherine's legislative commission, Novikov imitated Catherine in the sixties by founding his own weekly satirical journal, The Drone, named after the dull pedant in a play then popular at court. In this journal-and even more in its successors of the early seventies, The Painter and The Purse-Novikov voiced the increasing dissatisfaction of the native Russian nobility with Catherine's imitation of French ways and toleration of social injustice. Novikov's journals became the first organs of independent social criticism in Russian history. Like later 'thick journals,' each of these was shut down by imperial authority. Novikov then linked his publishing energies to two other institutions which
were to play a key role in the cultural development of the alienated intellectuals: the university and the small discussion group, or 'circle.'
The university was, of course, Moscow University, which, prior to the arrival of Novikov and his circle in the late seventies, had been a moribund institution with a total enrollment of some one hundred students listening to uninspired lectures in Latin and German. When, however, the poet Kher-askov became curator of the university in 1778, it was rapidly transformed into a center of intellectual ferment. Novikov took over the Moscow University Press in 1779 and organized a public library connected with the university. From 1781 to 1784 he printed more books at the university press than had appeared in the entire previous twenty-four years of its existence, and within a decade the number of readers of the official University Gazette increased from six hundred to four thousand.76
In 1783 he set up Russia's first two private printing presses, capitalizing one of them the following year as Russia's first joint-stock printing company. He also took the lead in organizing Russia's first private insurance company and, in 1787, a remarkable nationwide system for famine relief. His Morning Light, begun in the late seventies, was the first journal in Russian history to seek to impart a systematic knowledge of the great philosophers of classical antiquity, beginning with translations of Plato and Seneca. He edited a series of journals and collections in the eighties, ranging from children's books to voluminous documents on early Russian history. His 'Library of Russian Antiquity' underwent two large editions during the eighties. Together with the History of Russia and Decline of Ancient Morals by his friend, Prince Shcherbatov, Novikov's works tended to glorify the moral fiber of old Muscovy, and implicitly challenged Catherine's cavalier dismissal of traditional elements in Russian life. The publication in the seventies and eighties of Chulkov's encyclopedic collections of Russian folk tales, songs, and popular legends pointed to a wealth of neglected native material for literary development: sources of popular wisdom neglected by the Voltairians of St. Petersburg. Even Ivan Boltin, an admirer of Voltaire and translator of Diderot, rose up to extol Russian tradition in his Notes on the History of Ancient and Modern Russia by Le Clerc in 1789: a vigorous refutation of the unflattering six-volume history of Russia published in 1782 by a Russophobic French surgeon.77
The return of Moscow to intellectual prominence in the second half of Catherine's reign was closely connected with the upsurge of Great Russian nationalist feeling that followed the first partition of Poland, the first Turkish war, the final crushing of Pugachev, and the subordination of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the mid- seventies. Kheraskov was totally educated
in Moscow and had always been a partisan of using Russian rather than foreign languages in Moscow University. Novikov was also less traveled and less versed in foreign languages than most other aristocrats. Aided by the presence of these two figures, Moscow became a center for the glorification of Russian antiquity and a cultural Mecca for those opposed to the Gallic cosmopolitanism of the capital. The intellectuals opposed to Catherine's Enlightenment had found a spiritual home.
Moscow alone was powerful enough to resist the neo-classical culture that was being superimposed on Russian cities by Catherine. Catherine made many efforts to transform the city-even placing the European style of government buildings and reception rooms inside the Kremlin. But the former capital retained its exotic and chaotic character. Wooden buildings were still clustered around bulbous and tent-rooved churches; and the city still centered on its ancient Kremlin rather than its newer municipal buildings and open squares. A city of more than 400,000, Moscow was more than twice the size of St. Petersburg, and was perhaps the only city large enough to cherish the illusion of centralized control and a uniform national culture for the entire disparate empire. Foreigners generally found Moscow an uncongenial city. Falconet in the course of his long stay in Russia visited almost every city in Russia (including those in Siberia), but never Moscow. Only late in Catherine's reign did Moscow come to possess a theater comparable to that of St. Petersburg; but many performers preferred not to play before its spitting, belching, nut-cracking audiences. Sumarokov was not alone in his complaint:
Moscow trusts the petty clerk more than Monsieur Voltaire and me; and the taste of inhabitants of Moscow is rather like that of the petty clerk!78
Absorbed in its narrow ways and self-contained suburbs, closer both historically and geographically to the heart of Russia, and forever suspicious of new ideas, Moscow was the natural center for opposition to the ideals of the European Enlightenment. The features of Catherine's court which most deeply infected Moscow were the venal and self-indulgent ones. Moscow, not St. Petersburg society was to be the butt of Griboedov's celebrated satirical comedy Woe from Wit, in which the hero, Chatsky, is at war with Moscow society and all its vulgarity and monotony. This world, in which forty to fifty aristocratic dances were held each night of the winter season,70 was held up to iambic scorn by Chatsky:
What novelty can Moscow show to me? Today a ball, tomorrow two or three.80
The venality and ennui of Moscow society added an element of vindictiveness to attacks on the Voltairianism and cosmopolitanism of St. Petersburg.
The struggle between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment went on within both cities-and in others as well. However, St. Petersburg remained the symbol and center of the former, and Moscow of the latter, trend.
