A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia. The Masonic Circle of N. I. Novikov by Raffaella Faggionato (review)

Having reviewed this book in the United States, I cannot help but be reminded of contemporary American debates questioning the separation of church and state as outlined in the U.S. Constitution. This document and the secular public sphere it created are a direct result of Western European Enlightenment idealism. As Raffaella Faggionato states, men of the Enlightenment were “committed to the causes of making mankind independent of historical tradition and replacing religious creeds with a faith in progress” (5). Yet there are those who find that this faith in progress is lacking in spiritual meaning. Certainly, there are conservatives who have revised Texas school-books to downplay the importance of religious freedom. Yet one can also point to certain learned astrophysicists who investigate string theory or the Big Bang and still believe that only some higher power could have created such sublime order.

In fact Enlightenment scholars have recently been reassessing the interpretation of the era as dominated by “rationalism, individualism, and materialism.” They have been searching for focal points that open up gaps and fissures in the hegemonic narrative. Faggionato’s book does just this via its study of the Russian Masonic circle of Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. This circle is particularly interesting as it presents us with an Enlightenment tradition that sought to join reason with ethical-religious values. Faggionato’s book painstakingly outlines the utopia building, political maneuvering, and ultimate censorship that characterized the rise and fall of the Masonic tradition in Russia during Catherine II’s reign.

Russia has long been characterized as caught between East and West, terms often coded to mean conservative and progressive, respectively. This approach also informs Faggionato’s methodology as it seeks to provide an alternate interpretation of the Novikov circle. In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great’s attempt to forcibly modernize Russia led to cultural fragmentation, most noticeable in the newly founded capital. The old Eastern feudal traditions existed alongside the new and enticing ideas coming out of Western Europe. For intellectuals, whose reality was defined by a highly ignorant populace, political autocracy, a xenophobic Orthodox Church, and a society that was still teetering from Petrine reform, the Age of Enlightenment brought new hope. In general, Russian scholars have characterized the Novikov Masonic circle’s reaction to this idealism as “reactionary and obscurantist.” Using newly available material from private libraries and archives, Faggionato argues that the Masonic lodges provided a way for Russians to develop within traditional Christian spirituality a modern sense of self, of individuality, which was lacking in a nonindustrialized, feudal society. They were to do so by adapting German Rosicrucian hermeticism and esoterism with the goal of creating a new ethical man for the coming scientific age.

The study also proceeds from the assumption that Freemasonry represented a protodemocratic tradition within enlightened absolutism. In numerous places, Faggionato emphasizes the general equality and freedom of opinion present within the various Russian Masonic lodge constitutions. In addition, members did not just come from the aristocracy but also included intellectuals, artists, students, and businessmen, though, ironically, not scientists. Thus, members experienced a social leveling within the order, which was directly at odds with the narrow reality of absolutism. Particularly the Novikov circle was dedicated to education and the free dissemination of information in the public sphere. Its location in the sleepier periphery of Moscow allowed it such freedom for a time.

The book begins with a foreword written by the late Marc Raeff, a Russian émigré and well-known scholar of Russian history. After a brief introduction, chapter 1 outlines the contradictions of St. Petersburg and the challenges of establishing Freemasonry there. This chapter provides the reader with exhaustive documentation of the political acumen of influential figures, as exemplified in Ivan Perfil’evich...