The Icon and the Axe

The university was, of course, Moscow University, which, prior to the arrival of Novikov and his circle in the late seventies, had been a moribund institution with a total enrollment of some one hundred students listening to uninspired lectures in Latin and German. When, however, the poet Kher-askov became curator of the university in 1778, it was rapidly transformed into a center of intellectual ferment. Novikov took over the Moscow University Press in 1779 and organized a public library connected with the university. From 1781 to 1784 he printed more books at the university press than had appeared in the entire previous twenty-four years of its existence, and within a decade the number of readers of the official University Gazette increased from six hundred to four thousand.76

In 1783 he set up Russia's first two private printing presses, capitalizing one of them the following year as Russia's first joint-stock printing company. He also took the lead in organizing Russia's first private insurance company and, in 1787, a remarkable nationwide system for famine relief. His Morning Light, begun in the late seventies, was the first journal in Russian history to seek to impart a systematic knowledge of the great philosophers of classical antiquity, beginning with translations of Plato and Seneca. He edited a series of journals and collections in the eighties, ranging from children's books to voluminous documents on early Russian history. His "Library of Russian Antiquity" underwent two large editions during the eighties. Together with the History of Russia and Decline of Ancient Morals by his friend, Prince Shcherbatov, Novikov's works tended to glorify the moral fiber of old Muscovy, and implicitly challenged Catherine's cavalier dismissal of traditional elements in Russian life. The publication in the seventies and eighties of Chulkov's encyclopedic collections of Russian folk tales, songs, and popular legends pointed to a wealth of neglected native material for literary development: sources of popular wisdom neglected by the Voltairians of St. Petersburg. Even Ivan Boltin, an admirer of Voltaire and translator of Diderot, rose up to extol Russian tradition in his Notes on the History of Ancient and Modern Russia by Le Clerc in 1789: a vigorous refutation of the unflattering six-volume history of Russia published in 1782 by a Russophobic French surgeon.77

The return of Moscow to intellectual prominence in the second half of Catherine's reign was closely connected with the upsurge of Great Russian nationalist feeling that followed the first partition of Poland, the first Turkish war, the final crushing of Pugachev, and the subordination of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the mid-seventies. Kheraskov was totally educated

in Moscow and had always been a partisan of using Russian rather than foreign languages in Moscow University. Novikov was also less traveled and less versed in foreign languages than most other aristocrats. Aided by the presence of these two figures, Moscow became a center for the glorification of Russian antiquity and a cultural Mecca for those opposed to the Gallic cosmopolitanism of the capital. The intellectuals opposed to Catherine's Enlightenment had found a spiritual home.

Moscow alone was powerful enough to resist the neo-classical culture that was being superimposed on Russian cities by Catherine. Catherine made many efforts to transform the city-even placing the European style of government buildings and reception rooms inside the Kremlin. But the former capital retained its exotic and chaotic character. Wooden buildings were still clustered around bulbous and tent-rooved churches; and the city still centered on its ancient Kremlin rather than its newer municipal buildings and open squares. A city of more than 400,000, Moscow was more than twice the size of St. Petersburg, and was perhaps the only city large enough to cherish the illusion of centralized control and a uniform national culture for the entire disparate empire. Foreigners generally found Moscow an uncongenial city. Falconet in the course of his long stay in Russia visited almost every city in Russia (including those in Siberia), but never Moscow. Only late in Catherine's reign did Moscow come to possess a theater comparable to that of St. Petersburg; but many performers preferred not to play before its spitting, belching, nut-cracking audiences. Sumarokov was not alone in his complaint:

Moscow trusts the petty clerk more than Monsieur Voltaire and me; and the taste of inhabitants of Moscow is rather like that of the petty clerk!78