Practice and Performance in the History of the Russian Nobility

Though reluctantly prepared to admit that his history of the Russian nobility, published in 1870, might be marred by shortcomings of execution—it was, after all, a product of imperfect human nature—Aleksandr Romanovich-Slavatinskii found it hard to imagine that he could be charged with errors of conception: "We permit ourselves to think that in a formal sense, we have more or less correctly embraced the subject, bringing out all its essential aspects."¹ Few in a postmodernist age would risk such an obvious hostage to fortune. Yet it is a tribute to the longevity of Romanovich-Slavatinskii's self-confident positivism that so many of his fundamental preoccupations should have been reflected, as much amplified as amended, in the most recent synoptic survey of the subject, published in 1995.² Like him, its author, Isabel de Madariaga, was concerned mainly to explore changes in the relationship between state and nobility and to trace their implications: for the security of noble property, for the pattern of noble service obligations, and for the social status of the noble estate. Her essentially legal inquiry, based on the fruits of more than a century of research carried out in the wake of the pioneering Romanovich-Slavatinskii, served to consolidate the now familiar image of a heterogeneous social group whose members varied significantly not only in the degree of their political influence but also in wealth, status, and educational attainments.³ Seven years later, Michelle Marrese added a further dimension to the complexity by revealing in unprecedented detail the social and economic role of Russian noblewomen, in particular the unusually extensive property rights that stemmed, in part, from the nobility's attempts to assert its corporate rights vis-à-vis the monarchy.⁴

What, then, held this potentially fissiparous estate together? According to Marc Raeff, the answer was essentially psychological: if anything united the nobility it was a sense of alienation from the importunate demands of a modernizing service state. As Marrese points out in her contribution to the current issue of Kritika (702 n. 2), parts of this argument had been anticipated by Romanovich-Slavatinskii. But no one had hitherto claimed quite so provocatively as Raeff that Peter the Great's servicemen were linked to the revolutionaries of the 19th century by "a straight line of spiritual and psychological filiation."⁵ The idea found little sustained support. Even supposing that it might be possible to psychoanalyze a group rather than an individual, such an interpretation could account only for those nobles who, in Raeff's own words, "participated actively in the cultural and institutional life of the country."⁶ As critics objected, it did little to explain the mindset of provincial backwoodsmen, preoccupied with making ends meet. While Raeff condescended to such men for opting for "a life of vegetation" over one of civic commitment, others were more sensitive, if not to their patriarchal values, then at least to the struggle for economic survival in a hostile climate.⁷

More seductive than Raeff's psychological interpretation of noble identity was the essentially cultural line of thought inspired by Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman. Historians have long been familiar with the sort of provincial patriarch who insisted that his children learn French and flogged them à la russe until they learned to pronounce it accurately. The question is how to interpret such apparently conflicted behavior. As Marrese suggests here, Lotman's depiction of the Russian noble as a foreigner in his own country, adopting European manners while retaining an "alien" Russian attitude towards them, "was not, strictly speaking, a novel insight" (707), since elements of it can be traced back to Alexander Herzen and beyond. Nevertheless, no one did as much as Lotman to construct the sharply focused and widely influential notion of noble identity that depends on a disjunction between theatrically "Europeanized" public behavior and "Russian" interior conviction.⁸

So far, there has been only a limited meeting of minds between proponents of these very different approaches to the history of nobility, the one (following Lotman) overtly conceptually driven, the other (stemming from the positivist Romanovich-Slavatinskii...