'Very well, then, let it be as though we had not spoken a word about it. What
is it, Tanya?' she said in French to the little girl who had come in. 'Where's my spade, Mama?'
'I am speaking French, and you must answer in French.' The little girl tried to, but she could not remember the French for spade;
her mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look. All this
made a disagreeable impression on levin.
Everything in Dolly's house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as before.
'Why does she talk French with the children?' he thought. 'It's so affected and unnatural. And the children sense it. Learning French and unlearning sincerity,' he thought to himself, unaware that Dolly had reasoned over and over again in the same fashion and yet had decided that, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, the children must be taught French in that way.126
Such attitudes continued to be found in high-born families throughout the nineteenth century, and they shaped the education of some of Russia's most creative minds. As a boy in the 1820s, Tolstoy was instructed by the kind of German tutor he portrayed so memorably in Childhood (1852). His aunt taught him French. But apart from a few of Pushkin's poems, Tolstoy had no contact with Russian literature before he went to school at the age of nine. Turgenev was taught by French and German tutors, but he only learned to read and write in Russian thanks to the efforts of his father's serf valet. He saw his first Russian book at the age of eight, after breaking into a locked room that contained his father's Russian library. Even at the turn of the twentieth century there were Russian noblemen who barely spoke the language of their fellow countrymen. Vladimir Nabokov described his 'Uncle Ruka', an eccentric diplomat, as talking in a
fastidious combination of French, English and Italian, all of which he spoke with vastly more ease than he did his native tongue. When he resorted to Russian, it was invariably to misuse or garble some extremely idiomatic or even folksy expression, as when he would say at table with a sudden sigh: 'Je suis triste et seul comme une bylinka v pole (as lonesome as a "grass blade in the field").'127
Uncle Ruka died in Paris at the end of 1916, the last of the old-world Russian aristocracy.
The Orthodox religion was equally remote from the consciousness of the Westernized elites. For religion played but a minor role in the upbringing of the aristocracy. Noble families, immersed in the secular culture of the French Enlightenment, thought little of the need to educate their children in the Russian faith, although by force of habit
and conformity they continued to baptize them in the state religion and observed its rituals. The Voltairean attitudes that ruled in many noble households brought a greater sense of religious tolerance - which was just as well since, with all their foreign tutors and their peasant serfs, the palace could be home to several different faiths. Orthodoxy, in so far as it was practised mainly in the servants' quarters, came at the bottom of the social pile - below the Protestantism of the German tutors and the Catholicism of the French. This pecking order was reinforced by the fact that there was no Russian Bible - only a Psalter and a Book of Hours - until the 1870s. Herzen read the New Testament in German and went to church in Moscow with his Lutheran mother. But it was only when he was fifteen (and then only because it was an entry requirement for Moscow University) that his father hired a Russian priest to instruct him in the Orthodox religion. Tolstoy received no formal religious education as a child, while Turgenev's mother was openly contemptuous of Orthodoxy, which she saw as the religion of the common people, and instead of the usual prayers at meals substituted a daily reading from a French translation of Thomas a Kempis. This tendency to patronize Orthodoxy as a 'peasant faith' was commonplace among the aristocracy. Herzen told the story of a dinner-party host who, when asked if he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was 'simply and solely for the sake of the servants'.128
Set against this domination by Europe, satires such as Kniazhnin's and Kheraskov's began to define the Russian character in terms which were distinct from the values of the West. These writers set up the antithesis between foreign artifice and native truth, European reason and the Russian heart or 'soul', that would form the basis of the national narrative in the nineteenth century. At the heart of this discourse was the old romantic ideal of the native soil - of a pure 'organic' Russia uncorrupted by civilization. St Petersburg was all deceit and vanity, a narcissistic dandy constantly observing its own reflection in the Neva river. The real Russia was in the provinces, a place without pretensions or alien conventions, where simple 'Russian' virtues were preserved.
For some this was a question of the contrast between Moscow and St Petersburg. The roots of the Slavophile movement go back to the
late eighteenth century and the defence of the old gentry culture of Moscow and its provinces against the Europeanizing Petrine state. The landed gentry, it was said, were closer to the customs and religion of the people than Peter's courtiers and career bureaucrats. The writer Mikhail Shcherbatov was the most vocal spokesman of the old nobility. In his Journey to the Land of Ophir (1784) he portrays a northern country ruled by the king Perega from his newly founded city of Peregrab. Like St Petersburg, the intended object of Shcherbatov's satire, Peregrab is cosmopolitan and sophisticated but it is alien to the national traditions of Ophir, whose people still adhere to the moral virtues of Kvamo (read: Moscow), their former capital. At last the people of Peregrab rise up, the city falls and Ophir is returned to Kvamo's simple way of life. Such idyllic views of the unspoilt past were commonplace in Rousseau's age. Even Karamzin, a Westernist who was certainly not nostalgic for the old nobility, idealized the 'virtuous and simple life of our ancestors', when 'the Russians were real Russians', in his story Natalia (1792).
For others, Russia's virtues were preserved in the traditions of the countryside. Fonvizin found them in the Christian principles of the 'old thinker' Starodum, the homespun village mystic in his satire The Minor (1782). 'Have a heart, have a soul, and you'll always be a man,' advises Starodum. 'Everything else is fashion.'129 The idea of a truly Russian self that had been concealed and suppressed by the alien conventions of Petersburg society became commonplace. It had its origins in the sentimental cult of rural innocence - a cult epitomized by Karamzin's tearful tale of Poor Liza (1792). Karamzin tells the story of a simple flower girl who is deceived in love by a dandy from St Petersburg and kills herself by drowning in a lake. The tale contained all the elements of this vision of a new community: the myth of the wholesome Russian village from which Liza is ejected by her poverty; the corruption of the city with its foreign ways; the tragic and true-hearted Russian heroine; and the universal ideal of marriage based on love.
Poets like Pyotr Viazemsky idealized the village as a haven of natural simplicity:
Here there are no chains,
Here there is no tyranny of vanity.130
Writers like Nikolai Novikov pointed to the village as the place where native customs had survived. The Russian was at home, he behaved more like himself, when he lived close to the land.131 For Nikolai Lvov, poet, engineer, architect, folklorist, the main Russian trait was spontaneity.
In foreign lands all goes to a plan, Words are weighed, steps measured. But among us Russians there is fiery life, Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.132
Lvov contrasted the convention-ridden life of the European Russians with the spontaneous behaviour and creativity of the Russian peasantry. He called on Russia's poets to liberate themselves from the constraints of the classical canon and find inspiration from the free rhythms of folk song and verse.
Central to this cult of simple peasant life was the notion of its moral purity. The radical satirist Alexander Radishchev was the first to argue that the nation's highest virtues were contained in the culture of its humblest folk. His proof for this was teeth. In his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790) Radishchev recalls an encounter with a group of village women
dressed up in their traditional costumes for a holiday - their broad smiles 'revealing rows of teeth whiter than the purest ivory'. The ladies of the aristocracy, who all had rotten teeth, would 'be driven mad by teeth like these':
Come hither, my dear Moscow and Petersburg ladies, look at their teeth and learn from them how they keep them white. They have no dentists. They do not scrape their teeth with brushes and powders every day. Stand mouth to mouth with any one of them you choose: not one of them will infect your lungs with her breath. While yours, yes yours may infect them with the germ - of a disease… I am afraid to say what disease.133
6
In eighteenth-century panoramas of St Petersburg the open sky and space connect the city with a broader universe. Straight lines stretch to the distant horizon, beyond which, we are asked to imagine, lies the rest of Europe within easy reach. The projection of Russia into Europe had always been the raison d'etre of St Petersburg. It was not simply Peter's 'window on to Europe' - as Pushkin once described the capital - but an open doorway through which Europe entered Russia and the Russians made their entry to the world.
For Russia's educated elites Europe was more than a tourist destination. It was a cultural ideal, the spiritual source of their civilization, and to travel to it was to make a pilgrimage. Peter the Great was the model of the Russian traveller to the West in search of self-improvement and enlightenment. For the next two hundred years Russians followed Peter's journey to the West. The sons of the Petersburg nobility went to universities in Paris, Gottingen and Leipzig. The 'Gottingen soul' assigned by Pushkin to Lensky, the fashionable student in Eugene Onegin, became a sort of emblem of the European outlook shared by generations of Russian noblemen:
Vladimir Lensky, just returning From Gottingen with soulful yearning, Was in his prime - a handsome youth And poet filled with Kantian truth. From misty Germany our squire Had carried back the fruits of art: A freedom-loving, noble heart, A spirit strange but full of fire, An always bold, impassioned speech, And raven locks of shoulder reach.134
All the pioneers of Russia's arts learned their crafts abroad: Tred-iakovsky, the country's first real poet, was sent by Peter to study at the University of Paris; Andrei Matveev and Mikhail Avramov, its first secular painters, were sent to France and Holland; and, as we have
seen, Berezovsky, Fomin and Bortnyansky learned their music in Italy. Mikhail Lomonosov, the nation's first outstanding scholar and scientist, studied chemistry at Marburg, before returning to help found Moscow University, which today bears his name. Pushkin once quipped that the polymath 'was our first university'.135
The Grand Tour was a vital rite of passage for the aristocracy. The emancipation of the nobles from obligatory state service in 1762 had unleashed Russia's more ambitious and curious gentry on the world. Gaggles of Golitsyns and Gagarins went to Paris; Dashkovs and Demi-dovs arrived in droves in Vienna. But England was their favourite destination. It was the homeland of a prosperous and independent landed gentry, which the Russian nobles aspired to become. Their Anglomania was sometimes so extreme that it bordered on the denial of their own identity. 'Why was I not born an Englishwoman?' lamented Princess Dashkova, a frequent visitor to and admirer of England, who had sung its praises in her celebrated Journey of a Russian Noblewoman (177 5).136 Russians flocked to the sceptred isle to educate themselves in the latest fashions and the designs of its fine houses, to acquire new techniques of estate management and landscape gardening, and to buy objets d'art, carriages and wigs and all the other necessary accoutrements of a civilized lifestyle.
The travel literature that accompanied this traffic played a vital role in shaping Russia's self-perception vis-a-vis the West. Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791-1801), the most influential of this genre, educated a whole generation in the values and ideas of European life. Karamzin left St Petersburg in May 1789. Then, travelling first through Poland, Germany and Switzerland, he entered revolutionary France in the following spring before returning via London to the Russian capital. Karamzin provided his readers with a panorama of the ideal European world. He described its monuments, its theatres and museums, celebrated writers and philosophers. His 'Europe' was a mythic realm which later travellers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find. The historian Mikhail Pogodin took the Letters with him when he went to Paris in 1839. Even the poet Mayakovsky responded to that city, in 1925, through the sentimental prism of Karamzin's work.137 The Letters taught the Russians how to act and feel as culti-
vated Europeans. In his letters Karamzin portrayed himself as perfectly at ease, and accepted as an equal, in Europe's intellectual circles. He described relaxed conversations with Kant and Herder. He showed himself approaching Europe's cultural monuments, not as some barbaric Scythian, but as an urbane and cultivated man who was already familiar with them from books and paintings. The overall effect was to present Europe as something close to Russia, a civilization of which it was a part.
Yet Karamzin also managed to express the insecurity which all the Russians felt in their European self-identity. Everywhere he went he was constantly reminded of Russia's backward image in the European mind. On the road to Konigsberg two Germans were 'amazed to learn that a Russian could speak foreign languages'. In Leipzig the professors talked about the Russians as 'barbarians' and could not believe that they had any writers of their own. The French were even worse, combining a condescension towards the Russians as students of their culture with contempt for them as 'monkeys who know only how to imitate'.138 At times such remarks provoked Karamzin to exaggerated claims for Russia's achievements. As he travelled around Europe, however, he came to the conclusion that its people had a way of thinking that was different from his own. Even after a century of reform, it seemed to him that perhaps the Russians had been Euro-peanized in no more than a superficial way. They had adopted Western manners and conventions. But European values and sensibilities had yet to penetrate their mental world.139
Karamzin's doubts were shared by many educated Russians as they struggled to define their 'Europeanness'. In 1836 the philosopher Chaadaev was declared a lunatic for writing in despair that, while the Russians might be able to imitate the West, they were unable to internalize its essential moral values and ideas. Yet, as Herzen pointed out, Chaadaev had only said what every thinking Russian had felt for many years. These complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment, towards Europe, still define the Russian national consciousness.
Five years before Karamzin set off on his travels, the writer and civil servant Denis Fonvizin had travelled with his wife through Germany and Italy. It was not their first trip to Europe. In 1777-8 they had
toured the spas of Germany and France looking for a cure for Fonvi-zin's migraines. On this occasion it was a stroke, which paralysed his arm and made him slur his speech, that compelled the writer to go abroad. Fonvizin took notes and wrote letters home with his observations on foreign life and the character of various nationalities. These Travel Letters were the first attempt by a Russian writer to define Russia's spiritual traditions as different from, and indeed superior to, those of the West.
Fonvizin did not set out as a nationalist. Fluent in several languages, he cut the figure of a St Petersburg cosmopolitan, with his fashionable dress and powdered wig. He was renowned for the sharpness of his tongue and his clever wit, which he put to good effect in his many satires against Gallomania. But if he was repelled by the trivialities and false conventions of high society, this had less to do with xenophobia than with his own feelings of social alienation and superiority. The truth was that Fonvizin was a bit of a misanthrope. Whether in Paris or St Petersburg, he nursed a contempt for the whole beau monde - a world in which he moved as a senior bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry. In his early letters from abroad Fonvizin depicted all the nations as the same. 'I have seen,' he wrote from France in 1778, 'that in any land there is much more bad than good, that people are people everywhere, that
intelligence is rare and idiots abound in every country, and that, in a word, our country is no worse than any other.' This stance of cultural relativism rested on the idea of enlightenment as the basis of an international community. 'Worthwhile people,' Fonvizin concluded, 'form a single nation among themselves, regardless of the country they come from.'140 In the course of his second trip, however, Fonvizin developed a more jaundiced view of Europe. He denounced its achievements in no uncertain terms. France, the symbol of 'the West', was Fonvizin's main target, perhaps in part because he was not received in the salons of its capital.141 Paris was 'a city of moral decadence', of 'lies and hypocrisy', which could only corrupt the young Russian who came to it in search of that crucial 'comme il faut'. It was a city of material greed, where 'money is the God'; a city of vanity and external appearances, where 'superficial manners and conventions count for everything' and 'friendship, honesty and spiritual values have no significance'. The French made a great deal of their 'liberty'
but the actual condition of the ordinary Frenchman was one of slavery - for 'a poor man cannot feed himself except by slave labour, so that "liberty" is just an empty name'. The French philosophers were fraudulent because they did not practise what they preached. In sum, he concluded, Europe was a long way from the ideal the Russians imagined it to be, and it was time to acknowledge that 'life with us is better':
If any of my youthful countrymen with good sense should become indignant over the abuses and confusions prevalent in Russia and in his heart begin to feel estranged from her, then there is no better method of converting him to the love he should feel for his Fatherland than to send him to France as quickly as possible.142
The terms Fonvizin used to characterize Europe appeared with extraordinary regularity in subsequent Russian travel writing. 'Corrupt' and 'decadent', 'false' and 'superficial', 'materialist' and 'egotistical' - such was the Russian lexicon for Europe right up to the time of Herzen's Letters from France and Italy (1847-52) and Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1862), a travel sketch which echoed Fonvizin's. In this tradition the journey was merely an excuse for a philosophical discourse on the cultural relationship between Europe and Russia. The constant repetition of these epithets signalled the emergence of an ideology - a distinctive view of Russia in the mirror of the West. The idea that the West was morally corrupt was echoed by virtually every Russian writer from Pushkin to the Slavophiles. Herzen and Dostoevsky placed it at the heart of their messianic visions of Russia's destiny to save the fallen West. The idea that the French were false and shallow became commonplace. For Karamzin, Paris was a capital of 'superficial splendour and enchantment'; for Gogol it had 'only a surface glitter that concealed an abyss of fraud and greed'.143 Viazemsky portrayed France as a 'land of deception and falsity'. The censor and litterateur Alexander Nikitenko wrote of the French: 'They seem to have been born with a love of theatre and a bent to create it - they were created for showmanship. Emotions, principles, honour, revolution are all treated as play, as games.'144 Dostoevsky agreed that the French had a unique talent for
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