were often read in an intoned, semi-liturgical manner. Yet behind all these mystical activities of the 'circle' stood the supreme Enlightenment belief in an 'inner reason,' an 'ultimate harmony' behind all the seeming incongruity and misfortune in the world. Thus there was a logical connection between the 'rational' and the 'mystical' side of the Enlightenment, as well as a psychological connection through the personality of Novikov.
Of course, the flight into occult methods of exegesis was partly the • result of virginal enthusiasm. Holy chants of the Church were replaced by new declaratory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Icons were replaced by statues-above all busts of great philosophers. The pseudo-science of physiognomy was flourishing in Russia thanks to the extraordinary influence of the Swiss mystic Johann Caspar Lavater; and the belief was widespread that one could divine the inner characteristics of a man (and by extension the essence of his ideas) from a careful study of his facial contour and features. Gardens and rooms full of realistic busts or portraits were increasingly common; and Catherine's famous smashing of her bust of Voltaire as a result of the French Revolution was almost a totemistic act.
But what did the 'lovers of truth' expect to find inside their circles and behind the sculptured masks of philosophers? The answer may be
partly revealed by the Russian word for 'truth,' pravda. As one nineteenth-century aristocratic intellectual said:
Every time that the word pravda comes into my head I cannot help but be enraptured by its wonderful inner beauty. Such a word does not, it seems, exist in any other European language. It seems that only in Russia verity (istind) and justice (spravedlivost') are designated by one and the same word and are fused, as it were, into one great whole. . . . Truth in this wide meaning of the word has been the aim of my searching.117
Truth thus meant both knowledge of the nature of things and a higher form of justice. Some indication that it had both meanings for the aristocrats of the Russian Enlightenment can be found by looking at the classical divinities they substituted for the saints of old as revered intermediaries between ultimate truth and the world of men. Two goddesses stand out in the pseudo-classical pantheon of the Russian enlightenment: Astrea and Athena, the goddesses of justice and of wisdom; of pravda-spravedlivosf and pravda-istina. Elizabeth had a large statue of Astrea built for her coronation and a temple to Minerva (the Latin form of Athena) placed in front of the Winter Palace shortly thereafter. Catherine had a masquerade, 'Minerva Triumphant,' performed for her coronation and had herself depicted as Astrea when she drew up her legislative proposal. The first higher order Masonic lodge to establish a chain of dependencies in Russia was the Berlin lodge Minerva; and the last and most influential chain of higher order lodges was that of the Russian lodge Astrea.
The influence of higher order Masonry on the development of Russian intellectual life can hardly be exaggerated. The concept of small circles meeting regularly, the idea of a corporate search for true knowledge and higher justice, the love of esoteric ritual and readings, the tendency to see moral, spiritual, and aesthetic concerns as part of one higher concern-all this became characteristic of Russian aristocratic thought and was to leave a permanent if ambiguous legacy of chaos and intensity. These circles- rather than the government chanceries or the new universities-were the main channels for creative thought in early-nineteenth-century Russia. Mar-tinism had charged the air with expectation and created a sense of solidarity among those searching for truth, even if they differed as to what it was. Most important, ideas were creating a thirst for action. As one speaker put it at a 'creative gathering' of a new 'fraternal literary society' at the turn of the century:
. . . The good lies in the order which we bring into our meetings; the beautiful in the union of friendship. . . . What is to be done? . . . how and
who will open this rich treasury which sometimes lies too deeply hidden in the invisible future? Activity. Activity is the guardian and mother of all success. It gives us the key and shows us the path to the sanctuary of nature. Labor, unhappiness, and the crown of victory unite us closer than all our speeches.118
The Frustration of Political Reform
The last decade of the eighteenth century was a bleak period for Russian culture. Catherine was frustrated physically by the increasing difference in age between herself and her courtiers and ideologically by the increasing difference between her old ideals of enlightenment and the reality of revolution. Only a few days after the fall of the Bastille she received prophetic warnings from her ambassador in Paris about the new 'political enthusiasms' of the revolutionaries. Slowly she turned her back on France. By 1791 she had recalled all Russian students from Paris and Strasbourg and declared ideological war on the revolutionary 'constitution of Antichrist.' The assassination of Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball in 1792, followed closely by the execution of Louis XVI and of Catherine's close friend Marie Antoinette in 1793, deepened Catherine's gloom and precipitated an almost farcical witch hunt in St. Petersburg. A French royal ist general wearing a red hat was mistakenly arrested by an official anxious to find a Jacobin; illiterate police officials ordered to destroy suspect books ended up destroying books adjacent to them in the library for fear they had been contaminated.
Poetic transcriptions of psalms were censored, and all copies burned of an innocuous melodrama, Vadmi_oi_Movgorod, by one of Catherine's former favorites. The play depicted the love of Vadim for the daughter of Riurik, who had come to rule over them. Realizing that his attachment to the old ways in Novgorod makes him bad building material for the new order, Vadim commits suicide together with his beloved. Everything is done with stoic dignity in the interest of good government and to the glory of Russian rule; but Vadim's occasional nostalgic soliloquies in praise of the lost liberties of Novgorod sounded too much like revolutionary oratory to Catherine.119
Catherine had, however, let out the leash too far to be an effective dictator. She was unable to gain the cooperation of university professors and other educated groups for tightening the censorship; and only her son and successor Paul was willing to institute a real purge and establish a blanket censorship. Under his brief rule it became a crime to use the word
'citizen' or to possess a copy of his mother's legislative proposal In 1797, his first complete year of rule, the number of regular periodicals published in Russia declined to 5 (from 16 in 1789), the number of books printed during the year to 240 (from 572 in 1788) .12°'But Paul lacked the authority to stake out a new course for Russia. His reign made the need for reform more urgent than ever and affected the course of Russian thought under Alexander I in two important ways. First of all, Paul's overt admiration of Prussian ideas had the negative effect of driving much of the nobility back I to the French Enlightenment. Whereas there had been a strong wave of reaction against all things French in the early stages of the Revolution, Russian aristocrats now tended to look again to France for political guidance in preventing a recurrence of Paul's arbitrary rule. Thus Paul unintentionally stimulated the renewed discussion of political reform during the first half of Alexander's reign.
At the same time, however, Paul's methods for combating revolutionary thought anticipated in many respects the pattern which prevailed in the second half of Alexander's reign. For Paul sought to enlist mystical religion in the counter-revolutionary cause. He formally assumed the title 'Head of the Church' at his coronation (administering communion to himself) and became an enthusiastic patron of both higher order Masonry and the Roman Catholic Church. Shortly after his coronation be released NpV-ikovand promoted Repnin, head of the 'New Israel' sect, to the post of field marshal and special adviser. In 1798 he made himself the new commander of the Maltese Order of the Knights of Jerusalem (who had been evicted from Malta by the advancing tide of the French Revolution), and appointed the higher Masonic leader Labzin as its official historian. He also offered shelter to the Pope from the Revolution and approved the establishment of a Catholic parish in St. Petersburg and of a Catholic academy in
