Her ‘Great Instruction’ was not, of course, the only product of the Russian Enlightenment. Indeed, such sentiments and values came to pervade the service élite—newly educated, mostly noble in origin, who imagined themselves to be European gentlemen (and women), moral, fashionable, and literary. Their new cultural world conferred great privilege and honour on the printed word, reading, and writing. It identified France’s ‘Republic of Letters’ as the model of choice, the philosophe as the preferred (if postured) identity.
The first secular men of letters—Vasilii Trediakovskii, Antiokh Kantemir, Alexander Sumarokov, and Mikhail Lomonosov—received their education before mid-century either at the newly established academies for military cadets or at seminaries for prospective priests. Each proved to be a prolific essayist, poet, and translator; each endeavoured to preside over the emergent secular print culture housed at the Academy of Sciences. During the 1750s, however, élite secondary education underwent a significant transformation; it now placed far greater emphasis on modern languages, belles-lettres, and gentlemanly pursuits (fencing, dancing, parade-ground assembly)—all at the expense of narrowly technical subjects. Equally important was the establishment of Moscow University in 1755 (Russia’s first), with its affiliated secondary boarding-schools (pansiony) in Moscow and Kazan.
For the next two generations Moscow University and, especially, its two boarding-schools, would train cohorts of literati who would subsequently establish the main translation societies, journals, and printing presses. Although they received little or no income for their literary endeavours, these first intellectuals devoted at least as much time to their cultural activities as to service and, indeed, saw these activities as a proper extension of their official duties. Their cultural engagement was facilitated by the reduced demands of state service: commissioned officers had few daily responsibilities in peacetime, those in administration rarely had to work more than three or four mornings a week. Favoured with such leisure, the young literati embraced the world of letters, expanding the annual number of publications from under 100 in the 1740s to about 500 in the late 1780s. They created a new genre of literary and polemical journalism, an enterprise that, by the 1770s, was producing two or three new periodicals a year. Most literary journals had tiny press runs (rarely more than a few hundred copies per issue) and often failed after just a few issues. Nevertheless, others quickly took their place, keeping the spirit of creation and engagement alive.
Indeed, journals and publishing circles were the principal foci of secular intellectual activity. As such, they were decidedly noble (dominated by service nobles) and cosmopolitan, housed either in Moscow or St Petersburg. Their audiences, predictably, were also urban and noble; for example, over three-quarters of all subscribers to journals were members of the hereditary nobility. Book readers were less likely to subscribe (hence register their status), but here too the vast majority came from the nobility.
Significantly, the new cultural activity gradually moved intellectual life towards autonomy from state and monarch. Court patronage did remain as an essential feature of literary and cultural life; until 1783, for instance, nearly all secular publications came from institutional presses, mainly the typographies at the Academy of Sciences and Moscow University. Increasingly, however, these presses left editorial decisions to the literati themselves, for they printed most manuscripts with few changes, especially if the author or translator helped pay the bill. Even this modicum of control vanished in 1783, when Catherine gave private individuals the right to own presses without prior approval.
That decree effectively neutralized the monarch’s ability to direct and control literature, not because of any ideological conflict, but because writers could now pursue literature independently of the government. In large measure the literati gained this autonomy precisely because they had not posed a threat to the existing structures of authority, whether formal or informal. In fact, the vast majority of writers shared Catherine’s enlightenment vision of the state as the principal agent of improvement and moral direction; few raised basic questions about the existing social order. All concurred with the empress that Russia was part of Europe, that reinforcing this affinity served the best interests of the fatherland and individual. Some dissented, it is true. Most notably, the great journalist and publisher Nikolai Novikov railed against mindless slavishness towards French fashion (‘Voltairianism’) and launched major publication ventures, such as the Drevniaia rossiiskaia vivliofika (‘Ancient Russian Library’) in twenty volumes, to celebrate Russia’s own antiquity and traditional culture. But even he devoted immense attention to translations and adaptations from contemporary French and English letters. For example, the so-called satirical journals of 1769–74 (The Painter, The Drone, Bits of This and That, and others) included pieces purloined directly from Joseph Addison’s Spectator.
During the 1770s and 1780s, however, the initial concord between writers and empress gradually deteriorated, largely over such issues as French influence and political virtue. Some traditionalist voices, such as M. M. Shcherbatov’s On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, castigated a purported decline of public virtue and respect for fatherland. Others, as in Denis Fonvizin’s play The Minor, raised subtle questions about the erosion of virtue in political leadership. This critical strain reached its most radical expression in the—legal—printing of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey From St Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a scathing attack on Catherine and the Russian social order, serfdom included. The tome outraged the empress, who penned furious rebukes in the margins of her copy, ordered all available copies destroyed, and subjected the author to trial and banishment into Siberian exile.
Radishchev’s views were quite exceptional, however. Far more common were the moral and spiritualist misgivings that pulsated in the Masonic lodges, especially those of the Moscow Rosicrucians around Novikov and his spiritual overseer, Johann Schwartz, a Rosicrucian from Berlin. During the 1780s the Moscow Rosicrucians grew increasingly distressed over the spiritual and religious decline of cosmopolitan Russia, the soulless fashionability and the frivolity that (in their view) permeated élite society. Novikov himself was a major purveyor of the Encyclopaedist Enlightenment and entertaining literature, but his lodge steadily moved away from the celebration of amusement. Even signs of political engagement can be discerned; in 1785, for example, some Rosicrucians developed connections to the court ‘party’ around the Tsarevich Paul; some even entertained the idea of making him emperor before his mother’s death—apparently on the basis of (false) rumours that Paul was more sympathetic to their moral agenda. Whatever the case, the affinity between Rosicrucianism, Paul, free publishing, and geographic distance aroused growing distrust among Catherine’s officials, with a steady chilling in the relations between ruler and writers.
The chill had consequences. In 1785, because of the flirtation with Paul and the publication of religious materials (still a monopoly of the Orthodox Church), the state launched a formal investigation of Novikov’s publications that ended in a mild reprimand. Two years later Catherine ordered an empire-wide raid of book stores to impound dangerous, seditious titles. By the early 1790s, once the violent anti-monarchism of the French Revolution had become a disturbing reality, Catherine (and later her successor, Paul) erected a harsh and repressive censorship, greatly restricting the import of foreign books (banned entirely for a few months in 1800), imprisoning eminent figures such as Novikov, and ultimately closing most private presses. By 1800 publishing had declined to a trickle; literary journalism had all but disappeared; and the international book trade was virtually nil. Although recovery came quickly after the new Emperor Alexander I (1801–25) eased restrictions, state and letters now constituted two separate spheres, with only coercive censorship—not common values—providing the old link between them.