culminate in another lengthy and obscure philosophic dialogue of the 1840's: Prince Odoevsky's Russian Nights. As the work of a Western emigre in Russia, de Maistre's Evenings also stands as a kind of eastward extension of the romantic revolt against optimistic rationalism which had
begun with Young's Night Thoughts and culminated in Novalis' Hymns to the Night.
De Maistre's first contact with Russia came in 1797. As the dispossessed son of the former president of the senate of Savoy, he was fleeing the advancing legions of the French Revolution when he accidentally met and was taken aboard a boat on the Po River by the Russian ambassador.2 After many subsequent wanderings, De Maistre joined his brother Xavier and many other Savoyards and Piedmontese who had already taken refuge in St. Petersburg. He brought with him a passionate opposition to the French Revolution and the entire philosophy of the Enlightenment: 'the destructive fanaticism of the eighteenth century.'3 Unlike most other emigres, he did not formally enter the Russian service but came rather in the capacity of ambassador of Sardinia. As such he moved into a position of independent authority and began fifteen years of influential activity in and around the imperial court. De Maistre arrived during a high period of Catholic favor in Russia. Paul had obtained from Pius VII permission to restore the disbanded Society of Jesus in Russia. The Jesuits' educational zeal endeared them to Alexander as it had earlier to Catherine. The head of the Society lived in Russia, and it continued to flourish throughout the early years of Alexander's reign independently of the Catholic hierarchy.4
De Maistre argued that the Revolution of 1789 and the Terror of 1793 followed inevitably from the real revolution that had taken place in the European mind some years before, 'the insurrection against God.'5 In his denunciation of 'theophobia'6 and contemporary nihilism (rienisme),'' he became a favorite figure in the drawing rooms of St. Petersburg and by 1805 was already a confidant of the young emperor, advocating Roman Catholicism as the only antidote to revolution.
Yet De Maistre was no ordinary Catholic. His ideological background lay not in Thomist philosophy and Roman Catholic academies but in occult mysticism and secret societies. In the seventies and eighties he had been a leading theorist and organizer of higher order Masonry-a background which prepared him well for the disturbed atmosphere of aristocratic Russia. Like the Russian intellectuals, De Maistre had a kind of unstable ideological convertibility. 'I owe to the Jesuits,' he wrote, 'not having become an orator of the constituent assembly.'8 He often seems more fascinated than outraged by the mystical and destructive side of the Revolution. Morbid themes weave in and out of his provocative writings, creating an impression that terrifying forces are loose in the world and that only total surrender to the Roman priesthood can stave off disaster. He picks up essentially where Schwarz and Novikov had left off in their attacks on 'the pale light of reason.' While still a Mason he had written an ambitious
project for the congress of higher orders at Wilhelmsbad in 1782. His Mnousal of the Roman priesthood came not on rational or traditional grounds but as an answer to the need which he felt for a new society dedicated to combating scepticism and recapturing the 'true divine magic' of (lie early Christian Church.9
Essential to De Maistre's war on the Enlightenment was his convic-lion that man was incurably and irrevocably corrupt. He is harshly critical of
Ihe banal hypothesis that man has lifted himself gradually from barbarism to science and civilization. It is the favorite dream, the mother-error . . . of our century.10
'Wc must not let ourselves be seduced by what we perceive of order in the universe,'11 he warns in an italicized passage. The ecclesiastical optimism of Bishop Berkeley is no less wrong than the scientific optimism of Bacon. Man has triumphed in the natural world not because he is more reasonable, us the eighteenth century contended, but because he is more barbaric. Man is a 'terrible and superb king,' the supreme killer who takes perfume 'from the heads of sharks and whales,' tramples triumphantly on the skins of ligcrs and bears, 'kills for the sake of killing.'
Man demands everything at once: the entrails of the lamb to play on his harp, the bones of the whale to stiffen the virgin's corset, the most murderous tooth of the wolf to polish light works of art, the defences of the elephant to fashion a child's toy: his tables are covered with corpses.12
Man will finish by destroying himself in accordance with an 'occult and terrible law' which permeates nature. It was far harder for Peter the Great to abolish beards than to get his people to go to war-even when they were losing. There is an irresistible fascination with bloody violence, which is attested to even in man's highest religions. Lofty prophetic monotheisms, such as Islam and Judaism, require bloodletting in circumcision, and the loftiest of all, Christianity, required crucifixion. Salvation is a mysterious gift gained only through bloody sacrifice and requiring a special priestly caste to keep the secrets and disperse authority.13 Political authority likewise is based on fear of the hangman and requires the right of summary execution by the sovereign to be effective.14 He hails the Jesuits as 'the Janissaries of St. Peter,' who 'alone could have prevented the Revolution.'15 But he feels that Europe is disintegrating and will give way to some savage tribe, such as the natives of New Holland, who have a word lor forced abortion but not for God.1(i His last words were: 'the earth is trembling, yet you want to build.'17
A hint of premonition is introduced at the beginning of his most famous work dealing with Russia. The setting for the Evenings is the 'fleeting twilight' of the northern summer, where the sun 'rolls like a flaming chariot over the somber forests which crown the horizon, and its rays reflected by the windows of the palaces give the spectator the impression of an immense conflagration.'18 De Maistre believed that the flames were already reaching St. Petersburg; but, like the Old Believers, he considered fire a purifying rather than a destructive force. He saw the flame of poetry mixed in with the flame of revolution, and he betrays the same mixture of horror and fascination with which many Russian intellectuals were to look on their country. De Maistre was appalled in 1799 at the arrival in Italy of Suvorov's army, 'Scyths and Tatars from the north pole coming to slit the throats of the French,'10 yet he soon became convinced that Russia was an instrument chosen by Providence for the salvation of Europe. He spoke contemptuously about Russia's tendency toward violence and assassination, yet was fascinated with the potentialities for sudden political and ideological change with which this 'Asiatic remedy' provided Russia.20 He loved to visit the supposedly haunted regions of Gatchina and the room in the Mikhailovsky Palace in which Paul was killed.
Almost immediately upon arrival he wrote of the danger to Russia of 'minds fashioned by La Harpe'21 in the Tsar's entourage and soon gathered about himself a constellation of older noblemen who also had reason to be apprehensive of the Tsar's new advisers and liberal inclinations: the Stroganovs, Tolstoys, Kochubeis, and the Viazemskies. The leader of the latter family, Catherine's former procurator general, provided the salons which, along with the new Jesuit headquarters in St. Petersburg, became the centers for De Maistre's activities.
Like Possevino in the sixteenth century and Krizhanich in the seventeenth, De Maistre became fascinated by the possibility of converting this vast land to Catholicism. He launched a program for the conversion of 'one dozen women of quality' and helped gain for the Jesuits increasing authority within the empire.22 As the euphoria of the summit meeting of 1807 between Napoleon and Alexander receded and the possibility of war with France grew, De Maistre's influence increased proportionately. He became a leader in the ideological mobilization of the Russian aristocracy, portraying their struggle as that of Christian civilization against the new Caesar.
He began his public attack on the liberalism of Alexander's earlier years in 1810 with Five Letters on Public Education in Russia, an indictment of Speransky's proposed educational reforms.23 The following year he began his correspondence with Count Uvarov, the future minister of education and theoretician of reaction. He also delivered a long memorandum to
