The Icon and the Axe

The new turn in Russian diplomacy helped French become the common language of the aristocracy. Although the Russian aristocracy was also to create modern literary Russian, they continued to speak to one another and even to think largely in French. This new language brought Russian noblemen into the main stream of European culture, and also helped isolate them more than before from their own countrymen. Much of the drama of the aristocratic century lies in the struggle of a refined but essentially foreign culture to strike roots in Russian soil.

In its attempt to take hold in this chilly northern climate, the rationalism of the French Enlightenment was opposed not just by the dogged piety and superstition of the masses but also by a fresh surge of pietistic thought within the aristocracy itself. However one divides the aristocratic century, one finds a straggle going on beneath a seemingly tranquil surface: between rationalism and romanticism. French and German influence, universalism and nationalism, St. Petersburg and Moscow.

One can speak impressionistically of an enlightened eighteenth and a romantic nineteenth century; of the cult of Voltaire and Diderot giving way to that of Schelling and Hegel; of an alternation between Francophile reform under Catherine and Alexander I and Prussian discipline under their successors Paul and Nicholas; or of a general attraction toward France that

was weakened first by the revolutionary terror and then by the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 In any case, the struggle throughout this century was essentially between French and German approaches to political, personal, and aesthetic problems.

The contioversies occurred within an uneasy aristocratic minority which also felt piessures from below and harassment from above. Yet, viewed in the broad context of Russian history, there has probably never been a century in which the controlling elite has had the liberty to discuss problems and ideas free from the disruptions of major social and political change. During this period, the aristocratic elite produced a culture that was both national and European, and created poetry, ballet, and architecture equal to the finest of the age.

Yet it was jnst in the realm of ideas that the aristocratic century left its most fateful legacy. The very security and freedom from practical responsibilities of the aristocracy permitted it to become involved in the controversies of a disturbed century in European philosophy. Partly from idle curiosity, partly from deeper concern, the Russian aristocrats generated a sense of philosophic anguish which gradually focused on certain nagging questions about the meaning of history, of culture, and of life itself.

A special kind of fraternity emerged within the aristocracy of those who felt alienated from official Russia and concerned about these "cursed questions." Out of debates that began innocuously among bored officers in masonic lodges, fraternal societies, and philosophic "circles" came a sense of solidarity and spiritual purpose. To be sure, the aristocratic philosophers agreed on almost nothing and generated great confusion in the society around them. In their unreal efforts to bring to life on Russian soil the heroics of Byron's poems and Schiller's plays, they often lost themselves in the indecisive melancholy of their favorite dramatic character, Hamlet, and created the literary type known as "the superfluous man." Yet, at the same time, they created an aura of heroism about their own implausible dedication to high ideals. They created an enduring dissatisfaction with compromise, philistinism, and partial answers.

Frustrated in matters of practical political and social reform, thinking aristocrats increasingly poured their passion into artistic creativity and historical prophecy. They harrowed the soil and sowed the seeds for a rich harvest. Their restless pursuit of truth enabled succeeding ages to produce the most profoundly realistic literature and the most profoundly revolutionary political upheaval of modern times.

i. The Troubled Enlightenment

l\s distinct from the pattern that developed in the early modern West, secular enlightenment in Russia began late, proceeded fitfully, and was largely the work of monks or foreign technicians-always in response to imperial commands and patronage.