The Icon and the Axe

The great expectations during the reign of Alexander I (1801-25); the national revival in resisting the Napoleonic invasion (1812-14); the frustration of political reform and the suppression of the aristocratic Decembrist uprising of 1825. Russia as the focal point of the European-wide reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Catholic, pietistic, Orthodox, and occult, Eastward-looking elements in the wave of reactionary thinking that culminated in the pronouncement in 1833 of "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality" as the official ideology of the Russian Empire.

The immersion of aristocratic thinkers in German romantic philosophy during the authoritarian, Prussophile rule of Nicholas I (1825-55). The intense desire to discover within the fraternity of small discussion groups and to set forth on the pages of "thick journals" the answers to certain "cursed questions" about the meaning of history, art, and life itself. The transition from the aristocratic poetry of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) to the anguished prose of Nicholas Gogol (1809-52); from neo-classical architecture to the ideological paintings of Alexander Ivanov (1806-58); from the visionary romanticism of Schelling and the Slavophiles of the 1830's to the revolutionary rationalism of the young Hegelians and "West-ernizers" of the 1840's. The legacy of metaphysical anguish left by the aristocratic search for Truth; the symbolic importance of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" in the unresolved search for cultural identity.

For all its tribulations and divisions, Russia had become by the mid-eighteenth century a great European power. Frontier ruggedness and Tatar ruthlessness had been harnessed by Prussian discipline and Swedish administrative technique. The officer class, newly swollen with Northern European mercenaries, had led Russia in conquest abroad and defended its autocrat from unrest within. It was now being rewarded by grants of land and civil authority. The culture of old Russia was rejected by the new aristocracy, but nothing had as yet taken its place except a patina of Latin culture acquired from the newly absorbed Polish territories.

Under Peter and his immediate successors, the aristocracy stood suspended between many worlds. They generally had to speak at least three languages: German, Russian, and Polish; and their semi-official handbook of instruction advised them to learn three different numerical systems: the Arabic (needed for military and technical purposes), the Roman (used in classical and modern Western culture), and the Church Slavonic lettered numerals still used in Russia itself.1

The name first assigned to the new service nobility, shliakhetstvo, symbolized the polyglot derivation of the class; for this was the Russified form of the Polish szlachta, which was itself derived from the German word for hereditary lineage Geschlecht. In the course of the century, the nobility came to be known by the term dvorianstvo, "men of the court," which suggested the growing interdependence of the tsar and the aristocracy. In return for the services to the state prescribed in Peter's Table of Ranks (1722), the aristocracy received almost unlimited local power in a series of grants cli-

maxed in 1785 by the Charter to the Nobility. Just as the new nobility shed its Germano-Polish name, so it soon shed the shell of Latin culture that had been the vehicle for rejecting the traditional Greco-Byzantine heritage. Latin remained the principal language of seminaries and academies; but it did not-and in the eighteenth century could not-provide the common language for the new Russian ruling class.

Only late in the reign of Peter's youngest daughter, Elizabeth, did this rootless but triumphant class begin to find a sense of identity through the language and culture of France. Elizabeth's reign began a period of creativity that can justly be called the golden age of the JRussian aristocracy, and roughly identified with the century between 1755-6 and 1855-6.

In 1755-6 Russia witnessed the first performance of a Russian opera by Russians, the founding of the first permanent Russian theater, and the establishment of the first Russian university. A century later, Alexander II ascended the throne to free the serfs, open up Russia to accelerated industrialization, and thus end forever the special position of the aristocracy. In terms of foreign influence this frame of dates is equally significant: 1756 marking the "diplomatic revolution" that aligned Russia with the ancien regime in France; 1856 bringing an end to the Crimean War, which, as the first great setback for the old order in Russia, prepared the way for an influx of liberalizing ideas from the victorious English and French.