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

1. A Shifting Vision of the Nation: Constructs of Russianness in the Aftermath of the Crimean War

T he Crimean War (1853 –56) began as yet another round in the protracted struggle between the Romanov and the Ottoman Empire that spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russians initially called the conflict the Eastern War, but it soon took on a European dimension as, driven by strategic interests, England and France joined forces with Turkey. With the escalation of the war, Austria also threatened to attack Russia, while Prussia posed at best a latent hazard.1 Facing enemies on all sides, Russian authorities and public alike drew on two sets of heroic memories—of Russia’s centuries-old antagonism with the East, and of its conflicted relationship with the West—to inflame and channel Russian patriotism .2 How, then, did this rich arsenal of historical narratives come to be understood, once the Russians lost the war? Scholars have thoroughly examined how the Crimean defeat compromised Russia’s geopolitical status and provoked sharp public criticism of the government. What remains understudied is how Russians reconfigured the patriotic language 26 1 A Shifting Vision of the Nation Constructs of Russianness in the Aftermath of the Crimean War the war had elicited. Which visions of nationhood came to dominate and which were marginalized? The evolution of two persistent symbols of Russia is revealing in this respect. Throughout the reign of Nicholas I, both official propaganda and public opinion commemorated the Patriotic War (1812–15), cherishing it particularly in times of crisis. Thus, in response to the November rebellion in the Kingdom of Poland (1830–31), poets, independent thinkers, and partisans of official ideology all alluded to the 1812 triumph as confirmation of Russia’s capacity for collective sacrifice, of the brotherhood supposedly prevalent across social strata, and of the country’s messianic role in world history.3 Although memories of 1812 constituted one of the central tropes of the “invincible nation” during the Crimean campaign, by war’s end and immediately thereafter intellectuals of a nationalist persuasion had not only grown skeptical of such exploitation of the victory over Napoleon but transformed it from a source of national aggrandizement to an instrument of self-critique and redefinition. Another national symbol underwent a similar evolution. From the eighteenth century onward, numerous thinkers, working from different ideological perspectives, encoded Russia’s vast, flat, open space as a metaphor for its greatness, as well as for its people’s inexhaustible potential.4 It was the rhetorical blurring of the line between Russia proper and the empire as a whole that made this image central to imperial discourse before and during the Crimean War. Yet after the defeat, as we shall see, the most distinguished Russian writers either dramatically transformed those “boundless” expanses into sucking swamps and snowy wastes or severed the conventional link between wide-open spaces and national virtues. Rather than invoke Russia’s vastness as a means of articulating imperial vision, postwar representations of the homeland reflected the need to “find” the nation within the empire and symbolically separate the two. That both symbols should have been challenged at once is far from coincidental . In rhetorical practice, the two were often intertwined, illustrating and supporting each other. Indeed, nothing so convincingly cast the native landscape as proof of the people’s might and repository of their glorious memories as the story of Napoleon’s army being expelled and, according to the recurrent cliché, bogged down in Russia’s endless snowy fields.5 Reinterpretation of one symbol required that of the other, since both stemmed from a conventional approach that defined the nation by reference to A Shifting Vision of the Nation 27 historical achievements, nature, or Providence. The loss of the Crimean War precipitated attempts to break out of this conceptual framework and led to fundamental changes in patterns of national self-perception. To grasp the innovative character of the postwar rhetoric, it is important to distinguish between two sets of concepts: “patriotism,”or the “patriotic,” on the one hand, and “nationalism”—the “national” or “nationalist”—on the other. Although various interpretations of the relationship between these two concepts exist in the scholarly literature, in this book “patriotic” denotes imperial patriotism, that is, sentiments and rhetorical clichés focused on loyalty to the tsar, the absolutist regime, and the imperial state, while “national” and its derivatives designate those beliefs and discursive practices that take the Russian people as their...