The last and the first

The discourse of Romantic nationalism dealing with essentialist categories like national character, soul or mission looks today shockingly outdated. The contemporary academic community largely regards these notions as historical manifestations of culturally constructed identities. However, the ideologies based on the intellectual heritage of Romantic nationalism are vibrant and resurgent in contemporary Russia that is once again rethinking its imperial legacy and trying to build the new nation state on the foundations still unclear to the majority of the population as well as to the intellectual and political elite. The debates about Russia’s ‘place in the world’ its ‘historical destiny’, ‘unique spirituality’ and relative merits and drawbacks of its ‘backwardness’ vis-à-vis the West initiated in 1830-s during the notorious split between Westernisers and Slavophiles are not only continuing in the XXI century, but have actually intensified.

One of the most powerful mechanisms for the perpetuation of this discourse can be found in Russian literature. After Alexander Hertzen it became commonplace to argue that in the country lacking any form of political representation, independent court or free press, literature and literary criticism become the main forum for public debates and the focus of national hopes and aspirations. To add to this, in the country where all political, religious and ideological continuities were regularly broken, literature remained the only national institution that retained its status and, with the partial exception of early 1920-s, was always regarded with reverence and esteem.

For nearly two centuries the Great Tradition of Russian literature was inscribed in the minds of the generations of Russians through school curriculum. This tradition emerged in 1830-s simultaneously with the birth of Romantic nationalism in Russia and within a framework of Romantic glorification of literature as an embodiment of national spirit and the main vehicle of national self-expression and self-preservation. While Romantic nationalism brought the literary canon to the centre of national culture, this canon perpetuated the message and the appeal of Romantic nationalism for decades to come. This double effect resonates until the present day.

Romantic nationalism originated in late XVIII century Germany as the ideology of national reunification, first formulated on a cultural level and then transferred into the political sphere. The concept of the nation as a collective person brought forward by Herder emphasized the role of folklore, language and literature as the expressions of national soul and the unifying force that in spite of the political fragmentation of Germany could, first and foremost, serve as a proof of existence of German nation. This ideology institutionalised the role of national poet as the embodiment of national spirit. In Germany Goethe gradually became such a universally recognised institution notwithstanding the fact that he himself always refused to embrace nationalist aspirations and ‘Schprachpatriotismus’. The perception of the nation as an organic unity was specifically geared to confront French cultural hegemony that was implicit in the culture of Enlightenment.

Needless to say, political and cultural situation in Russia could not be more different. Unlike fragmented Germany, it was a centralized multi-ethnic empire which during the first decades of the XIXth century achieved unprecedented political stature and military power. However, many political, social and cultural factors made Russia and its intellectuals especially receptive to the new and fashionable ideology that appeared in Germany and was rapidly sweeping all over Europe.

Since early XVIII century when after the reforms of Peter the Great Russia for the first time emerged as a major European power and a member of European concert, Russia’s position vis-à-vis the West was a worrying question for its elite. The initial perception of this problem was relatively benign. It was generally assumed that Russia is backwards compared with its Western counterparts, but being a ‘young country’ it had time on its side and was rapidly closing the gap. Slavish imitations of Western ways were generally mocked and condemned, but the necessity to take lessons from the more advanced countries remained unchallenged in Russia at least until the time of French revolution and, with the exception of rabid patriotism of Shishkov and his followers, beyond that. Only after the Napoleonic wars and the Decembrist revolt of 1825, when, using the expression coined by Nicholas Ryazanovskii, the ways of Russian state and Russian society started to part, this optimistic and more or less universal outlook gave way to a set of different and conflicting ideologies.

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It is widely known that the debate about Russia’s historical fate was generated by the publication of the so called First Philosophical Letter by Petr Chaadaev (1836). The scholars still argue how this extravagant and self contradictory document originally written in French could have skipped through the rigid censorship of tsarist Russia. Chaadaev blamed all evils of Russian history upon the fatal choice of religion. According to him, Eastern Christianity separated Russia both from the West and the Islamic East and left it in the civilization void:

We are not a part of any of the great families of the human race; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we have not the traditions of either. We stand, as it were, outside of time; the universal education of mankind has not touched us.

Chaadaev insisted that Russia as a nation and a state had no history whatsoever and even more outrageously he claimed that Western Europe even after Reformation and French Revolution (in his Letter he never mentioned either of those historic events) showed an example of spiritual unity based on Catholicism. However, the public as well as the authorities took his arguments very seriously as he was the first person to openly challenge the doctrine of Orthodoxy – Autocracy – Nationality. This doctrine forged by the minister of education Sergei Uvarov was by that time established as the official ideology of Russian empire. It defined Russian nationhood as belief in the dogmas of the ruling church and the existing political order, the institutions that, according to the ideologues of Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationality, saved Russia from the degradation already experienced by the West. The magazine that published Chaadaev’s Letter was closed, its editor exiled and Chaadaev was officially declared insane and forever banned from publishing. Nevertheless, the publication triggered the outburst of national self-examination.

The responses to Chaadaev’s Letter helped to define the main trends that dominate Russian political thought until the present day – the so called Westernisers and Slavophiles. The former regarded Peter’s reforms as an unfinished project. Assimilation of Western manners and cultural norms by the educated elite was to be followed by the adoption of Western political institutions, most importantly, parliamentary democracy, equality before the law, legal system and free press. Only by completing the Westernisation process Russia would be able to finally compete with her European neighbours not only militarily, but also economically, politically and culturally. On the contrary, Slavophiles believed in Russia’s ‘sonderweg’ based on its pre-Petrine historical legacy: unique spirituality and communal religiosity (‘sobornost’). According to Slavophiles, Russia had to reject misplaced Westernisation and return to its real peasant and Orthodox roots.

Thus, the general spectrum of ideological positions towards Russia’s mission and its relation’s with the West can be systematised on the basis of the answers the adherents of each ideology gave to two basic questions: 1) whether Russia is comparable with the West or has its own unique way of development; 2) whether Russia’s traditions and customs are superior to Western ones or inferior to them.

 

Superiority ?Comparability Vs. ? Vs. Inferiority/ ?‘Sonderweg’	Russia is comparable to the West	Russia has its unique way of development and mission in the world
Russia is superior to the West	Official Ideology (Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationality)	Slavophiles
Russia is inferior to the West	Westernisers.	Chaadaev

 

This choice of ideological options is still shaping the political debate in Russia. The most important thing that changed since the time of Romantic nationalism is the definition of ‘the West’ – while in 1830-s this notion was used more less as a synonym to ‘Europe’, now it means mostly US that had replaced France as an embodiment of Western values and attitudes. (The other significant change is the emergence of Eurasianism – the ideological movement that regards Russia neither as a part of Europe, nor as a separate civilisation, but includes it into the larger community of Eastern nations, but this ideological trend has never resonated with popular imagination and anyway is beyond the topic of the current essay).

Naturally, the regime of the public debate was at best ‘asymmetrical’. The proponents of official ideology not only had at their disposal all the channels of dissemination of their ideas, but could control the expressions of contradictory views through censorship and outright police repression. On the contrary, their opponents had to rely on oral discussions in closed salons and circles, manuscripts and hints and equivocations in the published texts. The main role here inevitably belonged to literature and its interpretations.

Literary critics served as pivotal figures in the first open polemics about Russia’s mission as a nation which was centred on the interpretation of the work of fiction, namely Nicholas Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). In his book Gogol aspired to solve the Westernisers – Slavophiles debate. Unsurprisingly, both groups claimed him as the supporter of their position and argued whether the novel should be read as the apotheosis or the scathing condemnation of Russia. Like most great works of art, Dead Souls allowed contradictory readings especially as Gogol gave birth to an original and peculiar version of Russian exceptionalism that has not lost its appeal till the present day and for more than a century and a half remains popular across ideological borders.

Gogol portrayed Russia as a deeply flawed country, but he was also convinced that this nation of dead souls is entitled to some sort of mystical regeneration not in spite of its misery and hopeless sinfulness, but exactly because of it. The religious origins of this idea are self – evident. Jesus in Gospels many times repeated that the last will be the first. Still Gogol seems to be the first writer and thinker who read these teachings within the framework of Romantic nationalism and applied them not to individual persons, but to the nation as an organic whole. In the end of the first part of Dead Souls the ‘troika’, (three horses that draw the carriage in which the swindler Chichikov and his drunken coach Selifan escape from the town) is transformed into the image of the nation that gloriously surpasses all others:

Is it not thus, like the bold troïka which cannot be overtaken, that thou art dashing along, O Russia, my country? The roads smoke beneath thee, the bridges thunder; all is left, all will be left, behind thee. The spectator stops short astounded, as at a marvel of God. Is this the lightning which has descended from heaven? <…> Yes, on the troïka flies, inspired by God! O Russia, whither art thou dashing? Reply! But she replies not; the horses’ bells break into a wondrous sound; the shattered air becomes a tempest, and the thunder growls; Russia flies past everything else upon earth; and other peoples, kingdoms, and empires gaze askance as they stand aside to make way for her!

The first part of Dead Souls was to be followed by two others that had to show the very process of this visionary transformation of Russia into the ideal community and its inhabitants into the harmonious society. The dead souls of the first part were to experience the moral rebirth. Gogol wrote the second part of Dead Souls twice and both times he burned the manuscript because of his own dissatisfaction and mixed responses of the first listeners. After his second failure he stopped taking food and died without ever having started his work on Part three.

Russian scholars have long ago showed that the general plan of the novel, or of the ‘poem’ as Gogol himself preferred to call it, was modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The published Part one corresponded to Inferno, the burnt Part two was to play the role of Purgatory and the imagined Part three – of Paradise. The parallels between the plans of these two chef d’oeuvres of European literature are clear and consistent, still, the difference between them is no less striking. Dante sent his poetical alter ego to travel through transcendental spheres from Hell to Heaven; however, unlike Gogol, he never envisaged the immediate transformation of Hell into Paradise.

Gogol’s trilogy was left unfinished and in any case the general plan of his ‘poem’ was probably too bold to be grasped by contemporary critics whose approach was influenced by party feuds and prejudices. Still Gogol was not alone in his vision of Russia’s past, present and future. Interestingly enough, Chaadaev himself was thinking along similar lines.

In 1837, a year after the fatal publication of the first Letter, he wrote The Apology of a Madman where he completely restated his position. We’ll never know the exact motives that were behind this change of direction. Chaadaev may have been willing to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the authorities; he may have sincerely modified his worldview or, indeed, regarded his new position as the logical outcome of an old one. We know only that The Apology did not lead to any improvement in his situation, it remained unpublished and the ban on the name of an author was not lifted.

In any case, Chaadaev in the Apology chose not to renounce his earlier anti-Russian diatribe. Instead he argued that his further deliberations on the same topic inevitably led him to the conclusions that Russia has the most glorious future one can imagine:

Since we have come after others, it is our duty to be better than others <…>. I have the intimate conviction that we are called upon to resolve most of the problems of the social order, to realize most of the ideas of the older societies, to pronounce on most of the grave questions that preoccupy mankind.

It is worth noting, that in the end of the Apology of a Madman Chaadaev has actually denounced Gogol by contrasting the condemnation of his Letter with the success of The Government Inspector Gogol’s comedy where the author has shown his country in an equally unsparing manner. One may feel that Chaadaev saw in Gogol his main rival in the discussion of the historical fate and visionary mission of Russia.

Thus, in late 1830-s – early 1840-s Chaadaev and Gogol independently of each other originated the logical or rather supra-logical pattern according to which Russia’s main advantages lay in its backwardness and envisaged for their country the dramatic transformational leap that will one day enable it to lead the concert of nations. This ideas had many followers among writers and thinkers who were otherwise completely different from each other. Most of them were expecting this transformation to happen rather sooner than later and aspired to become not only the prophets, but also the witnesses of such a miraculous change.

In 1854 during the Crimean war that was extremely unfortunate to Russia leading Slavophile thinker and poet Alexei Khomyakov wrote the passionate condemnation of his country that at the first glance does not seem to bode well with his nationalistic credentials:

In courts black by black untruth, / Marked by the yoke of slavery, / Full of godless flattery, rotten lie / And deadly and shameful laziness / And all sorts of filth.

However, this outburst of indignation ended with seemingly unexpected, but entirely predictable exclamation: ”Oh unworthy of an election / You are elected!”.

Khomyakov’s opponents from the other side of the political spectrum were less keen on biblical allusions, but fully ready to embrace the same logic. The militant Westerniser Nicholai Chernyshevskii believed that the revolutionary spirit of Russian peasants will bring imminent liberation and ended his famous novel What is to be done? (1863) by the description of the ideal harmony brought by the victorious revolution that was to happen within two years from the time when he was writing his novel in the prison cell. Another radical Alexander Hertzen, paradoxically glorified by sir Isaiah Berlin as one of the greatest European liberals, became deeply disappointed by the bourgeois West and cherished the idea that the traditions of the peasant commune make Russia the ideal place for the future socialist society. In late XIX – early XX century this way of thinking defined the teachings of the so called ‘populists’, but such an avowed opponent of populists as Lenin also insisted that socialist revolution will triumph not in the most developed capitalist countries, but in the least developed one. As a dogmatic Marxist Lenin could not fail to see that this idea contradicts the spirit and the letter of economic determinism he claimed to profess, but the magic of the transformational leap was more attractive for him than the logic of orthodox Marxism.

The views of ideological opponents about the nature and character of the transformation that Russia had to undergo could be completely different, but most of them agreed that such a transformation was both possible and desirable and were fascinated by its sheer dimension and magnitude. If Gogol believed that Russian bird-troika would carry Chichikov from Hell to Paradise, but failed to find artistic means to describe this journey in details, Dostoevsky made the description of the movement of human soul between absolute Good and absolute Evil his trademark. In his first major novel Crime and Punishment the murderer finally becomes the martyr and in his spiritual quest he is guided by a holy prostitute. The character of his last novel Borthers Karamazov confesses:

that man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is that man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with the ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad. I’d have him narrower. <…> God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Dmitry Karamazov speaks here about ‘man’ in general, but most often (one can easily find dozens of examples in Russian Google) his words are quoted wrongly as ”Russian man is broad”. Dostoevsky’s analysis of human nature was reinterpreted as the analysis of the ‘Russian soul’. However, this interpretation does not seem to be completely contradictory to the intentions of the author who regarded ‘Russian soul’ as the ideal embodiment of human nature. Dostoevsky insisted that Russian man was broad enough to understand and include in his world all other national psyches

This idea was fully expressed in the last essay by Dostoevsky that may be regarded as his testament: the famous Pushkin speech he made at the celebrations of the inauguration of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow in June 1880, half a year before his death. By that time Pushkin’s status as a national poet was already established and, according to the traditions of Romantic nationalism, Dostoevsky had to deduct the conclusions about the mission of the nation from the works of its greatest author. Presenting the single most cosmopolitan Russian poet as a symbol of ‘Russian individuality’ was a challenging task, but Dostoevsky found an elegant and powerful solution. He saw Pushkin’s and therefore Russian uniqueness in their exceptional ability to understand other nations better than those nations are able to understand themselves:

There had been in the literatures of Europe men of colossal artistic genius — a Shakespeare, a Cervantes, a Schiller. But show me one of these great geniuses who possessed such a capacity for universal sympathy as our Pushkin. This capacity, the pre-eminent capacity of our nation, he shares with our nation, and by that above all he is our national poet. The greatest of European poets could never so powerfully embody in themselves the genius of a foreign, even a neighboring, people, its spirit in all its hidden depth, and all its yearning after its appointed end, as Pushkin could.

This analysis has a clear political dimension as well – the nation that can understand every other nation is a natural leader of the international order. The glorification of Pushkin’s universal genius becomes the thinly veiled legitimisation of Russia’s imperialistic goals:

Surely we then turned at once to the most vital reunion, to the unity of all mankind! Not in a spirit of enmity (as one might have thought it would have been) but in friendliness and perfect love, we received into our soul the geniuses of foreign nations, all alike without preference of race, able by instinct from almost the very first step to discern, to discount distinctions, to excuse and reconcile them <…> Our destiny is universality, won not by the sword, but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind. What is the power of the spirit of Russian nationality if not its aspiration after the final goal of universality and omni-humanity?

Dostoevsky was aware that Russia is poor and backward and he did not anticipate it becoming prosperous and developed in the foreseeable future. Instead he chose to quote another great Russian poet and militant imperialist Fyodor Tiutchev: ”This poor land Christ traversed with blessing, in the garb of a serf. Why then should we not contain His final word?” – concluded Dostoevsky. The last once more were to become the first.

 

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Russian literature played a major if not a decisive role in the formation of the discourse of Russian exceptionalism either negative or positive. However, Russian literature itself was a predominantly European cultural institution which in its current shape was adopted in Russia during the process of Europeanising reforms of the XVIII century. Russian literature was based on European patterns, but played in national life the role it never had in Western countries. Thus, it became both completely accessible and inherently exotic for European audience and was instrumental in creating both within Russia and abroad the image of the country that is at the same time inside Europe and outside it. For more than a century both Russian and Western readers following the precepts of Romantic nationalism were exploring the ”murky depths” (as Milan Kundera has put it) of Dostoevsky and his peers in order to find answers about Russia, its soul, its national character and its mission. The results of this search may have not been completely reliable, but the process was nevertheless always exciting and rewarding.