From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870

Introduction: Cultural Myth and National Self-Perception in the Turbulent Reform Era

A preoccupation with national uniqueness pervaded the intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century Russia, as it did in many European countries during the age of rising nationalism fanned by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Russia’s victory over the Grande Armée (1812–15) galvanized its cultural elite, heightening their sense of national identity and sending them in search of their native roots. Although this process engaged intellectuals throughout the century, certain pivotal historical periods infused the discussions with particular passion and creativity. This book focuses on one of Russia’s most turbulent and exuberant epochs—the time of social, institutional, and legal transformations known as the Great Reforms (1860s through 1870s)—and examines its contribution to national self-understanding. Precipitated by Russia’s crushing defeat in the Crimean War (1853 –56), the reform era produced a broad range of cultural expressions of the nation meant to salve its wounded pride and reconstitute the national community. As we shall see, new visions 3 Introduction Cultural Myth and National Self-Perception in the Turbulent Reform Era of the nation emerged to alter national self-perception and (re)address one of the central problems of Russian national discourse: how to “find” and define the nation within an empire that overshadowed it. Two Faces of Russianness A telling image, reiterated in intellectual discourse throughout the century, illustrates the degree to which Russia’s imperial character threatened its sense of itself as a nation. Recalling the jubilant public reception of Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (1818 –29), Alexander Pushkin praised the author, a celebrated fiction writer, for his vivid evocation of the past and explained the book’s unprecedented success with a most flattering simile: “Karamzin, it seemed, discovered ancient Rus’, as Columbus discovered America.”1 Oddly, as the century progressed and memories of Rus’— the conventional name for Russia’s historical heartland—came to occupy a growing place in public discourse, comparisons with pre-Columbian America persisted. In 1863 the Slavophile Ivan Aksakov described the cultural elite’s emerging interest in the “obscure” parts of Rus’ as “something like Columbus’s discovery of the New World.”2 And in 1877 Dostoevsky used the same comparison when he exhorted educated society to overcome its selfimposed alienation from the authentic values preserved in the common people: by returning to its native roots, the Westernized Russian upper class would discover the real Russia, as Europe once had discovered America.3 Karamzin’s canonical narrative traced Russia’s triumphant expansion and growing power back to the emergence of the absolutist state and thus identified Rus’ with the monarchy. Yet subsequent generations of Russian writers, including Aksakov and Dostoevsky, took the notion of Rus’beyond the state, associating it with the achievements of the people and increasingly transforming it into the ultimate metaphor for the essence of the Russian nation. Oft-repeated descriptions of Rus’ as terra incognita helped them emphasize the “neglected” or unknown nature of the Russian native heritage and of the people as a whole. It was this relationship between empire and nation—or, more bluntly, it was the fact that the Russian Empire overshadowed the Russian nation—that made the quest for Russianness so problematic. As many studies of Russian history have convincingly demonstrated, the supranational policies of the monarchical Russian Empire hindered the 4 Introduction formation of a Russian nation. The regime, whose authority was premised on the exercise of absolute power, stifled and suppressed Russia’s ethnic core, as it did all subject nationalities. But for Russians, unlike other ethnic groups within the empire, it proved difficult to distinguish themselves from the imperial state, even symbolically. The empire, after all, bore the name “Russian” and its contiguous domains, not separated from the metropole by “salt water”—in contrast to Great Britain or France—made it possible to construe it as an “organic”outgrowth of Rus’.4 The question thus inevitably arose: who are the Russians—an empire, a nation, both, or neither? It may seem that the two names for the country—Russia and Rus’— offered a solution. They reflected the Janus-like nature of Russianness, imperial and national, and yielded two distinct terms for the Russian people (narod): rossiiskii when speaking of the multiethnic empire and russkii to designate its ethnic “core.”5 But these two words, and hence the two concepts of Russianness they implied, overlapped and could even...