The Russians were uncertain about their place in Europe (they still are), and that ambivalence is a vital key to their cultural history and identity. Living on the margins of the continent, they have never been quite sure if their destiny is there. Are they of the West or of the East? Peter made his people face the West and imitate its ways. From that moment on the nation's progress was meant to be measured by a foreign principle; all its moral and aesthetic norms, its tastes and social manners, were defined by it. The educated classes looked at Russia through European eyes, denouncing their own history as 'barbarous' and 'dark'. They sought Europe's approval and wanted to be recognized as equals by it. For this reason they took a certain pride in Peter's achievements. His Imperial state, greater and more mighty than any other European empire, promised to lead Russia to modernity. But at the same time they were painfully aware that Russia was not 'Europe' - it constantly fell short of that mythical ideal - and perhaps could never become part of it. Within Europe, the Russians lived with an inferiority complex. 'Our attitude to Europe and the Europeans,' Herzen wrote in the 1850s, 'is still that of provincials towards the dwellers in a capitaclass="underline" we are servile and apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our peculiarities and try to hide them.'147 Yet rejection by the West could equally engender feelings of resentment and superiority to it. If Russia could not become a part of 'Europe', it should take more pride in being 'different'. In this nationalist mythology the 'Russian soul' was awarded a higher moral value than the material achievements of the West. It had a Christian mission to save the world.
7
Russia's idealization of Europe was profoundly shaken by the French Revolution of 1789. The Jacobin reign of terror undermined Russia's belief in Europe as a force of progress and enlightenment. 'The "Age of Enlightenment"! I do not recognize you in blood and flames,' Karamzin wrote with bitterness in 1795.148 It seemed to him, as to many of his outlook, that a wave of murder and destruction would 'lay waste to Europe', destroying the 'centre of all art and science and the precious treasures of the human mind'.149 Perhaps history was a futile cycle, not a path of progress after all, in which 'truth and error, virtue and vice, are constantly repeated'? Was it possible that 'the human species had advanced so far, only to be compelled to fall back again into the depths of barbarism, like Sisyphus' stone'?150
Karamzin's anguish was widely shared by the European Russians of his age. Brought up to believe that only good things came from France, his compatriots could now see only bad. Their worst fears appeared to be confirmed by the horror stories which they heard from the emigres who had fled Paris for St Petersburg. The Russian government broke off relations with revolutionary France. Politically the once Francophile nobility became Francophobes, as 'the French' became a byword for inconstancy and godlessness, especially in Moscow and the provinces, where Russian political customs and attitudes had always mixed with foreign convention. In Petersburg, where the aristocracy was totally immersed in French culture, the reaction against France was more gradual and complicated - there were many liberal noblemen and patriots (like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace) who retained their pro-French and Napoleonic views even after Russia went to war with France in 1805. But even in the capital there was a conscious effort by the aristocracy to liberate themselves from the intellectual empire of the French. The use of Gallicisms became frowned upon in the salons of St Petersburg. Russian noblemen gave up Cliquot and Lafite for kvas and vodka, haute cuisine for cabbage soup.
In this search for a new life on 'Russian principles' the Enlightenment ideal of a universal culture was finally abandoned for the national way. 'Let us Russians be Russians, not copies of the French', wrote Princess
Dashkova; 'let us remain patriots and retain the character of our ancestors'.151 Karamzin, too, renounced 'humanity' for 'nationality'. Before the French Revolution he had held the view that 'the main thing is to be, not Slavs, but men. What is good for Man, cannot be bad for the Russians; all that Englishmen or Germans have invented for the benefit of mankind belongs to me as well, because I am a man'.152 But by 1802 Karamzin was calling on his fellow writers to embrace the Russian language and 'become themselves':
Our language is capable not only of lofty eloquence, of sonorous descriptive poetry, but also of tender simplicity, of sounds of feeling and sensibility. It is richer in harmonies than French; it lends itself better to effusions of the soul… Man and nation may begin with imitation but in time they must become themselves to have the right to say: 'I exist morally'.'153
Here was the rallying cry of a new nationalism that flourished in the era of 1812.
overleaf: Adolphe Ladurnier: View of the White Hall in the Winter Palace,
St Petersburg, 1838
At the height of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, in August 1812, Prince Sergei Volkonsky was delivering a report to the Emperor Alexander in St Petersburg. Alexander asked the young aide-de-camp about the morale of the troops. 'Your Majesty!' the prince replied. 'From the Supreme Commander to the ordinary soldier, every man is prepared to lay down his life in the patriotic cause.' The Emperor asked the same about the common people's mood, and again Volkonsky was full of confidence. 'You should be proud of them. For every single peasant is a patriot.' But when that question turned to the aristocracy, the prince remained silent. Prompted by the Emperor, Volkonsky at last said: 'Your Majesty! I am ashamed to belong to that class. There have been only words." It was the defining moment of Volkonsky's life - a life that tells the story of his country and his class in an era of national self-discovery.
There were many officers who lost their pride in class but found their countrymen in the ranks of 1812. For princes like Volkonsky it must have been a shock to discover that the peasants were the nation's patriots: as noblemen they had been brought up to revere the aristocracy as the 'true sons of the fatherland'. Yet for some, like Volkonsky, this revelation was a sign of hope as well - the hope that in its serfs the nation had its future citizens. These liberal noblemen would stand up for 'the nation' and the 'people's cause', in what would become known as the Decembrist uprising on 14 December 1825.* Their alliance with the peasant soldiers on the battlefields of 1812 had shaped their democratic attitudes. As one Decembrist later wrote, 'we were the children of 1812'.2
Sergei Volkonsky was born in 1788 into one of Russia's oldest noble families. The Volkonskys were descended from a fourteenth-century prince, Mikhail Chernigovsky, who had attained glory (and was later made a saint) for his part in Moscow's war of liberation against the Mongol hordes, and had been rewarded with a chunk of land on the
* They shall be referred to here as the Decembrists, even though they did not gain that name until after 1825.
Volkona river, to the south of Moscow, from which the dynasty derived its name.3 As Moscow's empire grew, the Volkonskys rose in status as military commanders and governors in the service of its Grand Dukes and Tsars. By the 1800s the Volkonskys had become, if not the richest of the ancient noble clans, then certainly the closest to the Emperor Alexander and his family. Sergei's mother, Princess Alexandra, was the Mistress of the Robes to the Dowager Empress, the widow of the murdered Emperor Paul, and as such the first non-royal lady of the Empire. She lived for the most part in the private apartments of the Imperial family at the Winter Palace and, in the summer, at Tsarskoe Selo (where the schoolboy poet Pushkin once caused a scandal by jumping on this cold and forbidding woman whom he had mistaken for her pretty French companion Josephine). Sergei's uncle, General Paul Volkonsky, was a close companion of the Emperor Alexander and, under his successor Nicholas I, was appointed Minister of the Court, in effect the head of the royal household, a post he held for over twenty years. His brother Nikita was married to a woman, Zinaida Volkonsky, who became a maid of honour at Alexander's court and (perhaps less honourably) the Emperor's mistress. His sister Sophia was on first name terms with all the major European sovereigns. At the Volkonsky house in Petersburg - a handsome mansion on the Moika river where Pushkin rented rooms on the lower floor - there was a china service that had been presented to her by the King of England, George IV. 'That was not the present of a king,' Sophia liked to say, 'but the gift of a man to a woman.'4 She was married to the Emperor's closest friend, Prince Pyotr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who rose to become his general chief-of-staff.