The Alienated Russian Nobility?

Much writing about the pre-reform nobility is a search for solid ground. Russian nobles, it seems, somehow lacked substance. As Petr Chaadaev put it in 1829–30, they were "nomads" in their own country.¹ To generations of Russians and Westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were lackeys of despotism and imitators of foreign cultures.² This conception shaped much of the scholarship of the second half of the 20th century. Marc Raeff wrote of the Westernized nobility's "rootlessness" and "lack of contact with both the Russian tradition and the Russian people."³ Iurii Lotman argued that "the Russian nobleman was like a foreigner in his own country": "To behave properly," he explained, "was to behave like a foreigner," hence "playacting at everyday life, the feeling of being forever on the stage, is extremely characteristic of Russian gentry life."⁴

The past three decades have seen a reaction against this gloomy assessment. Microhistorical studies have concluded that nobles were not culturally rootless or psychologically alienated.⁵ Historians have found, somewhat like the revisionists in Soviet historiography, that the autocratic regime did not unilaterally dictate its will but instead sought consensus with wider elite strata.⁶ Cultural approaches have relativized the nobility's lack of a formal political role by highlighting culture and sociability as arenas where power was negotiated.⁷

The four books under review here make significant contributions to this debate. Written by specialists in history, literature, and sociolinguistics, they also convey its disciplinary breadth.

Rulers and Subjects

Elena Marasinova's "Zakon" i "grazhdanin" v Rossii is a study of the 18thcentury elite's ideas of rulership and subjecthood. This is basically a Begriff-sgeschichte, a history of political concepts (law, citizen, subject, and others) that were new in the 18th century and whose meaning was in flux, but it is Begriffsgeschichte bolstered by political and social history. In almost Annales School fashion, Marasinova shows how the evolution of concepts was governed at once by their own logic, by the choices of concrete historical actors, and by the longue durée of a vast, poor agrarian country where serfdom and autocracy were immutable facts of life.

In keeping with the complexity of her subject matter, her sources and topics are eclectic. She draws on legal texts, political treatises, private letters, memoirs, dictionaries, and belles-lettres. She gives us intellectual portraits of monarchs, etymologies of words, and histories of church rituals, criminal cases, and penal colonies. The book is a wide-ranging exploration of Russian life under Elizabeth and Catherine II. By its end, we see the emergence of the familiar constellation of Russia in the early 19th century: an autocratic state; a population excluded from political life; and an elite that desired legal rights and the ability to participate in government, but mostly sought autonomy and fulfillment in nonpolitical spaces beyond the state's reach.

The book is constructed as an exploration of three themes. The first is the relationship between God and the state as sources of law. Marasinova opens with Empress Elizabeth's moratorium on the death penalty. Elizabeth was pious...