The young officers who came back from Europe were virtually unrecognizable to their parents. The Russia they returned to in 1815 was much the same as the Russia they had left. But they had greatly changed. Society was shocked by their 'rude peasant manners'.17 And no doubt there was something of a pose - the swagger of the veteran - in these army ways. But they differed from their elders in far more than their manners and dress. They also differed from them in their artistic tastes and interests, their politics and general attitudes: they turned their backs on the frivolous diversions of the ballroom (though not their own revelry) and immersed themselves in serious pursuits. As one explained: 'We had taken part in the greatest events of history, and it was unbearable to return to the vacuous existence of St Petersburg, to listen to the idle chatter of old men about the so-called virtues of the past. We had advanced a hundred years.'18 As Pushkin wrote in his verse 'To Chaadaev' in 1821:
The fashionable circle is no longer in fashion.
You know, my dear, we're all free men now.
We keep away from society; don't mingle with the ladies.
We've left them at the mercy of old men,
The dear old boys of the eighteenth century.19
Dancing, in particular, was regarded as a waste of time. The men of 1812 wore their swords at formal balls to signal their refusal to take
part. The salon was rejected as a form of artifice. Young men retreated to their studies and, like Pierre in War and Peace, went in search of the intellectual key to a simpler and more truthful existence. Together, the Decembrists formed a veritable 'university'. Between them they had an encyclopaedic range of expertise, from folklore, history and archaeology to mathematics and the natural sciences, and they published many learned works, as well as poetry and literature, in the leading journals of their day.
The alienation felt by these young men from their parents' generation and society was common to all 'children of 1812', poets and philosophers as well as officers. It left a profound imprint on the cultural life of Russia in the nineteenth century. The 'men of the last century' were defined by the service ethic of the Petrine state. They set great store by rank and hierarchy, order and conformity to rational rules. Alexander Herzen - who was actually born in 1812 - recalled how his father disapproved of all emotional display. 'My father disliked every sort of abandon, every sort of frankness; all this he called familiarity, just as he called every feeling sentimentality.'20 But the children who grew up in Herzen's age were all impulsiveness and familiarity. They rebelled against the old disciplinarianism, blaming it for 'Russia's slave mentality', and they looked instead to advance their principles through literature and art.21 Many withdrew from the military or civil service with the aim of leading a more honest life. As Chatsky put it, in Griboedov's drama Woe from Wit, 'I'd love to serve, but I am sickened by servility.'
It is hard to overstate the extent to which the Russian cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century entailed a revolt against the service ethic of the eighteenth century. In the established view, rank quite literally defined the nobleman: unlike all other languages, the word in Russian for an official (chinovnik) derived from that for rank (chin). To be a nobleman was to take one's place in the service of the state, either as a civil servant or as an officer; and to leave that service, even to become a poet or an artist, was regarded as a fall from grace. 'Service now in Russia is the same as life', wrote one official in the 1810s: 'we leave our offices as if we are going to our graves.'22 It was inconceivable for a nobleman to be an artist or a poet, except in his spare time after office work, or as a gentleman enthusiast on his estate. Even the great eighteenth-century
poet Gavril Derzhavin combined his writing with a military career, followed by appointments as a senator and provincial governor, before ending up as Minister of Justice in 1802-3.
During the early nineteenth century, as the market for books and painting grew, it became possible, if not easy, for the independent writer or artist to survive. Pushkin was one of the first noblemen to shun the service and take up writing as a 'trade'; his decision was seen as derogation or breaking of ranks. The writer N. I. Grech' was accused of bringing shame upon his noble family when he left the civil service to become a literary critic in the 1810s.23 Music too was thought unsuitable as a profession for the nobleman. Rimsky-Korsakov was pushed into the naval service by his parents, who looked upon his music 'as a prank'.24 Musorgsky was sent to the Cadet School in Petersburg and was then enrolled in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Tchaikovsky went to the School of Jurisprudence where his family expected him to graduate to the civil service and not forget but put away his childish passion for music. For the nobleman to become an artist, then, was to reject the traditions of his class. He had, in effect, to reinvent himself as an 'intelligent' - a member of the intelligentsia - whose duty was defined as service to 'the nation' rather than to the state.
Only two of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers (Gonch-arov and Saltykov-Shchedrin) ever held high rank in the government service, although nearly all of them were noblemen. Goncharov was a censor. But Saltykov-Shchedrin was a tireless critic of the government, and as a vice-governor and a writer he always took the side of the 'little man'. It was axiomatic to this literary tradition that the writer should stand up for human values against the service ethic based on rank. Thus in Gogol's 'The Diary of a Madman' (1835), the literary lunatic, a humble councillor, ridicules a senior official: 'And what if he is a gentleman of the court? It's only a kind of distinction conferred on you, not something that you can see, or touch with your hands. A court chamberlain doesn't have a third eye in the middle of his forehead.' Similarly, in Chekhov's story 'Abolished!' (1891) we are meant to laugh at the retired major (Izhits) who is thrown into confusion by the abolition of his former rank: 'God knows who I am,' the old major says. 'They abolished all the majors a year ago!'25
Unwilling to conform to their fathers' rules and bored by the
routines of the civil service, the young men of Pushkin's generation sought release in poetry, philosophy and drunken revelry. As Silvio remarks in Pushkin's Tales of Belkin (1831), wild behaviour 'was the fashion in our day'.26 Carousing was perceived as a sign of freedom, an assertion of the individual spirit against the regimentation of the army and bureaucracy. Volkonsky and his fellow officers demonstrated their independence from the deferential customs of high society by mocking those who followed the Emperor and his family on their Sunday promenades around St Petersburg.27 Another officer, the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, was well known for his displays of the free will. On one occasion he turned his brilliant wit against a general who had forbidden his officers to 'offend propriety' by bathing in the sea at Peterhof, a fashionable resort on the Gulf of Finland near St Petersburg where there was a garrison. One hot afternoon Lunin waited for the general to approach. He leapt into the water fully clothed, and stood at attention and saluted him. The bewildered general asked what this was all about. 'I am swimming,' Lunin said, 'and so as not to disobey Your Excellency's order, I am swimming in a manner not to offend propriety.'28
The young men of the Decembrist circles spent much time in revelry. Some, like the serious Volkonsky, disapproved. But others, like Pushkin and his friends of the Green Lamp, a loose symposium of libertines and poets, saw the fight for freedom as a carnival. They found liberty in a mode of life and art that dispensed with the stifling conventions of society.29 When they were playing cards or drinking and debating with their friends, they were able to relax and express themselves, 'as Russians', in the easy language of the street. This was the idiom of much of Pushkin's verse - a style that fused the language of politics and philosophical thought with the vocabulary of intimate emotion and the crude colloquialisms of the whorehouse and the inn.
Friendship was the saving grace of these wild orgies, according to Pushkin:
For one can live in friendship
With verses and with cards, with Plato and with wine, And hide beneath the gentle cover of our play
ful pranks A noble heart and mind.30
Volkonsky said the same of his fellow officers. They happily transgressed the public code of decency, but in their dealings with each other they kept themselves in moral check through the 'bonds of comradeship'.31 There was a cult of brotherhood in the Decembrist camp. It evolved into the cult of the collective which would become so important to the political life of the Russian intelligentsia. The spirit was first forged in the regiment - a natural 'family' of patriots. Nikolai Rostov in War and Peace discovers this community on his return from leave. Suddenly he
felt for the first time how close was the bond that united him to Denisov and the whole regiment. On approaching [the camp] Rostov felt as he had done when approaching his home in Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and saw the picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his master, 'The Count has come!' and Denisov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all dishevelled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents' house.32
Through such bonds young officers began to break away from the rigid hierarchies of the service state. They felt themselves to belong to a new community - a 'nation', if you will - of patriotic virtue and fraternity where the noble and the peasant lived in harmony. The nineteenth-century quest for Russian nationhood began in the ranks of 1812.
This outlook was shared by all the cultural figures in the orbit of the Decembrists: not just by those in its leading ranks, but by those, more numerous, who sympathized with the Decembrists without actively engaging in plans for a rebellion ('Decembrists without December'). Most of the poets among them (Gnedich, Vostokov, Merzliakov, Odoevsky and Ryleev, though less so Pushkin) were preoccupied with civic themes. Renouncing the aesthetics and the frivolous concerns of Karamzin's salon style, they wrote epic verses in a suitably spartan style. Many of them compared the soldiers' bravery in the recent wars to the heroic deeds of ancient Greece and Rome.
Some monumentalized the peasants' daily toil; they raised it to the status of patriotic sacrifice. The duty of the poet, as they saw it, was to be a citizen, to dedicate himself to the national cause. Like all the men of 1812, they saw their work as part of a democratic mission to learn about and educate the common people so as to unite society on Russian principles. They rejected the Enlightenment idea that 'all the nations should become the same' and, in the words of one critic, called on 'all our writers to reflect the character of the Russian folk'.33
Pushkin holds a special place in that enterprise. He was too young - just thirteen in 1812 - to fight against the French, but as a schoolboy at the lycee he watched the Guards from the garrison at Tsarskoe Selo march off to war. The memory remained with him throughout his life:
You'll recollect: the wars soon swept us by, We bade farewell to all our elder brothers, And went back to our desks with all the others, In envy of all those who had gone to die Without us…34
Though Pushkin, unlike them, had never been to Europe, he breathed the European air. As a boy he had immersed himself in the French books of his father's library. His first verse (written at the age of eight) was composed in French. Later he discovered Byron's poetry. This European heritage was strengthened by the years he spent between 1812 and 1817 at the lycee at Tsarskoe Selo - a school modelled on the Napoleonic lycees that drew heavily on the curriculum of the English public schools, stressing the humanities: classical and modern languages, literature, philosophy and history. The cult of friendship was strong at the lycee. The friendships he formed there strengthened Pushkin's sense of European Russia as a spiritual sphere:
My friends, our union is wondrous! Like a soul, it will last for eternity -Undivided, spontaneous and joyous, Blessed by the muse of fraternity. Whatever partings destiny may bring, Whatever fortunes fate may have in hand,
We are still the same: the world to us an alien thing, And Tsarskoe Selo our Fatherland.35
Yet, for all his Western inclinations, Pushkin was a poet with a Russian voice. Neglected by his parents, he was practically brought up by his peasant nurse, whose tales and songs became a lifelong inspiration for his verse. He loved folk tales and he often went to country fairs to pick up peasant stories and turns of phrase which he then incorporated in his poetry. Like the officers of 1812, he felt that the landowner's obligation as the guardian of his serfs was more important than his duty to the state.36
He felt this obligation as a writer, too, and looked to shape a written language that could speak to everyone. The Decembrists made this a central part of their philosophy. They called for laws to be written in a language 'that every citizen can understand'.37 They attempted to create a Russian lexicon of politics to replace imported words. Glinka called for a history of the war of 1812 to be written in a language that was 'plain and clear and comprehensible by people of all classes, because people of all classes took part in the liberation of our motherland'.38 The creation of a national language seemed to the veterans of 1812 a means of fostering the spirit of the battlefield and of forging a new nation with the common man. 'To know our people', wrote the Decembrist poet Alexander Bestuzhev, 'one has to live with them and talk with them in their language, one has to eat with them and celebrate with them on their feast days, go bear-hunting with them in the woods, or travel to the market on a peasant cart.'39 Pushkin's verse was the first to make this link. It spoke to the widest readership, to the literate peasant and the prince, in a common Russian tongue. It was Pushkin's towering achievement to create this national language through his verse.
Volkonsky returned to Russia in 1815 and took up the command of the Azov regiment in the Ukraine. Like all the Decembrists, he was deeply disillusioned by the reactionary turn taken by the Emperor
Alexander, on whom he had pinned his liberal hopes. In the first years of his reign (1801-12) Alexander had passed a series of political reforms: censorship was immediately relaxed; the Senate was promoted to the supreme judicial and administrative institution in the Empire -an important counterbalance to the personal power of the sovereign; a more modern system of government began to take shape with the establishment of eight new ministries and an upper legislative chamber (the State Council) modelled on Napoleon's Conseil d'Etat. There were even some preliminary measures to encourage noblemen to emancipate their serfs. To the liberal officers, Alexander seemed like one of them: a man of progressive and enlightened views.
The Emperor appointed his adviser Mikhail Speransky to draw up plans for a constitution that was largely based on the Code Napoleon. Had Speransky got his way, Russia would have moved toward becoming a constitutional monarchy governed by a law-based bureaucratic state. But Alexander hesitated to implement his minister's proposals and, once Russia went to war with France, they were condemned by the conservative nobility, which mistrusted them because they were 'French'. Speransky fell from power - to be replaced by General Arakcheev, the Minister of War, as the outstanding influence on Alexander's reign in its second half, from 1812 to 1825. The harsh regime of Arakcheev's military settlements, where serf soldiers were dragooned into farming and other labour duties for the state, enraged the men of 1812, whose liberal sympathies had been born of respect for the soldiers in the ranks. When the Emperor, against their opposition, persevered with the military camps and put down the peasants' resistance with a brutal massacre, the Decembrists were enraged. 'The forcible imposition of the so-called military colonies was received with amazement and hostility', recalled Baron Vladimir Steigel. 'Does history show anything similar to this sudden seizure of entire villages, this taking over of the houses of peaceful cultivators, this expropriation of everything which they and their forefathers earned and their involuntary transformation into soldiers?'40 These o
fficers had marched to Paris in the hope that Russia would become a modern European state. They had dreamed of a constitution where every Russian peasant would enjoy the rights of a citizen. But they came back disappointed men - to a Russia where the peasant was still treated as a slave. As
Volkonsky wrote, to return to Russia after Paris and London 'felt like going back to a prehistoric past'.41
The prince fell into the circle of Mikhail Orlov, an old school friend and fellow officer from 1812, who was well connected to the main Decembrist leaders in the south. At this stage the Decembrist movement was a small and secret circle of conspirators. It began in 1816, when six young Guards officers formed what they initially called the Union of Salvation, a clandestine organization committed to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and a national parliament. From the start the officers were divided over how to bring this end about: some wanted to wait for the Tsar to die, whereupon they would refuse to swear their oath of allegiance to the next Tsar unless he put his name to their reforms (they would not break the oath they had already sworn to the present Tsar); but Alexander was not even forty years of age and some hotheads like Mikhail Lunin favoured the idea of regicide. In 1818 the society broke up - its more moderate members immediately regrouping as the Union of Welfare, with a rather vague programme of educational and philanthropic activities but no clear plan of action for revolt, although Count Orlov, a leading member of the Union, organized a brave petition to the Tsar calling for the abolition of serfdom. Pushkin, who had friends in the Decembrist camp, characterized their conspiracy as no more than a game in these immortal (but, in Tsarist times, unpublishable) lines intended for his novel Eugene Onegin, whose action was set in 1819:
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