The Crimean War (1853-1856), initially called the Eastern War, began as yet another round in the ongoing struggle between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Deploying a rich arsenal of patriotic idioms cultivated over the preceding decades, wartime rhetoric focused not only on Russia’s centuries-old confrontation with the East, but also – since England and France joined forces with Turkey – on her conflicted relationship with the West.^[1] Yet the war proved a losing one, ultimately discrediting the patriotic rhetoric it had elicited. It is widely acknowledged that the disastrous outcome of the Crimean campaign compromised Russia’s geopolitical status, provoked sharp criticism of the government, and paved the way for the Great Reforms. What remains understudied, however, is the defeat’s impact on the vision of the nation. How did Russians contrive to reconcile the stunning failure with their sense of national greatness? Which concepts of an authentic self came to dominate and which were shifted to the margins? The humiliating defeat set the stage for new ways of articulating the nation that superseded and sometimes undermined the patriotic rhetoric of earlier years. What symbol of Russia, for example, could be more persuasive – or more persistent – than her “boundless” expanses? From the eighteenth century onward, various forms of cultural production, working from different ideological perspectives, encoded Russia’s vast, flat, open space as a metaphor for her imperial might and for the boundless potential of her people.^[2] Though during the Crimean War this cultural construct enjoyed wide currency, after the defeat, as we shall see, the most distinguished Russian writers either dramatically transformed those limitless, dreaming fields into sucking swamps and snowy wastes, or else severed the conventional links between their native landscape and national virtues.
Other patriotic symbols underwent a similar evolution. Throughout the reign of Nicholas I, both official propaganda and public opinion commemorated the Patriotic War (1812-1815), cherishing it most in times of crisis. Thus, in response to the November rebellion in the Kingdom of Poland (1830-1831), poets, independent thinkers, and partisans of official ideology all made the 1812 triumph the focus of their historical allusions, seeing in it a confirmation of Russia’s collective capacity for sacrifice, of the brotherhood supposedly prevailing among social strata, and of the country’s messianic role in world history.^[3] While during the Crimean War memories of 1812 constituted one of the central tropes of the “invincible nation,” by war’s end and immediately thereafter nationally-minded intellectuals had not only grown skeptical of such exploitation of the victory over Napoleon, but, as I shall demonstrate below, transformed it from a source of national aggrandizement to an instrument of critique.
It is far from coincidental that both symbols should have been challenged at once. In rhetorical practice the two were often intertwined, illustrating and supporting one another. Indeed, nothing so convincingly cast the native landscape as proof of the people’s might and a repository of their glorious memories as the story of the expulsion of Napoleon’s army – which, as the recurrent patriotic clichй would have it, bogged down in 1812 in Russia’s endless snowy fields. Reinterpretation of one symbol required that of the other since both stemmed from a common national vision that defined the collective self by reference to historical achievements, nature, or Providence. The loss of the Crimean War encouraged attempts to break out of this conceptual framework because, as I argue below, the defeat had brought about fundamental changes to patterns of national self-perception and led to the crystallization of a whole new set of attitudes towards the Russian community. This article seeks to capture what changed in the understanding of the Russian collective self over the 1850s and how national symbolism reflected this shift.
This is not to say that the intelligentsia used only symbolic language to express their new visions of the collective self. Thaw and glasnost’– concepts first introduced into the political lexicon in the late 1850s – and the preparations for the Great Reforms themselves engaged public opinion and made it possible to openly venture new approaches to the nation. Looking to the Western countries that had won the Crimean War, some liberals even urged the Russian government to take steps towards introducing elements of civic nationalism. Although at the outset of the Reform era the regime seemed to have opened the floodgates for wider participation in decision making, it ultimately curtailed any possibility of popular participation in political life. In an autocratic state with a sharply limited public sphere and a lack of institutional space for articulating the nation, symbolic language offered a fruitful – indeed at times the only – avenue for rhetorically constructing an authentic collective self. Moreover, since national symbolism draws upon a shared heritage, metaphoric expressions of collective self can function as the common denominator of disparate constructs, even those inscribed within distinct ideological paradigms. Thus, tracing how intellectuals reinterpreted idioms of nation can help us reveal a general shift across political divides, rather than the differences between individual thinkers. This article explores how national symbolism evolved during the 1850s, beginning with a study of wartime rhetoric, which played a two-fold role in the development of Russian national discourse: it both exerted a measure of influence on intellectuals’ post-war attempts to redefine the self and constituted a point of departure for many of them.

THE CRIMEAN WAR AS A COMMEMORATION OF THE 1812 TRIUMPH

Even before it began, the Crimean War was given a poetic interpretation through the prism of Russia’s struggle with Napoleon. In the first days of September, 1853 – more than a month before the start of military action against the Ottoman Empire and almost half a year before the Western powers’ entry into the war – Fedor Tiutchev composed the poem “Nieman,” in which he covertly predicted that Russia stood on the brink of another triumphant war with the West. Depicting the Grand Army’s triumphal entry into Russian territory in 1812, “Nieman” focuses on the “glorious warrior” (“voitel’ divnyi”) who controls the fates of humanity. Yet, as the poem unfolds, the portrait of a victor gives way to the image of a doomed commander leading his army to defeat. “Nieman” offers a remarkable example of how the romantic cult of Napoleon, enormously popular in Russia, and the vision of the Patriotic War as confirmation of Russia’s greatness could coexist within a single text. The more Tiutchev elevates the “man of genius,” the more the triumph over him becomes proof positive that Russia was fated to play a unique role in the divine plan of salvation.^[4]
Tiutchev’s zealous expectations were fueled by ominous preparations already being made on both sides. By September 1853 Russia had occupied the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Walachia and the combined navy of England and France had entered the Dardanelles.^[5] Military and diplomatic maneuvers leading up to the war were conducted against a backdrop of fundamental political change in France. In 1852, the Second Empire was proclaimed and Louis Napoleon, French president and nephew of the great Emperor Napoleon, declared himself Napoleon III. Despite the Russian court’s opposition, the Napoleonic dynasty sat again on the throne of France, undermining the Holy Alliance’s decisions and symbolically restoring the First Empire.^[6] Events themselves thus offered fertile ground for historical rhymes. When the war started, Tiutchev envisioned it as “the recurrence of 1812,” the victorious resolution of “the thousand-year dispute of East and West,” and a portent of the triumphal fulfillment of Russia’s high destiny.^[7] These expectations proved prophetic only in anticipating the essential pattern that was to govern perceptions of the war through the prism of 1812.
At the outset of the “Eastern campaign,” many intellectuals conflated memories of the Patriotic War with the history of the Crusades, in which Russia had never participated. In his letter to M. P. Pogodin on Christmas of 1853, S. P. Shevyrev, a famous partisan of official ideology, redirected memory of the Patriotic War to solve the Eastern question: “From all of Russia there is sympathy for the war […] It’s a crusade […] Everyone is ready to sacrifice. The movements remind me of 1812.”^[8] Pogodin’s articles and G. Titov’s book The Crusades and the Eastern Question (1854) forged a still more explicit link between the Patriotic War and the centuries-long struggle for the Christian Holy Land: only the country that had bested Napoleon could fulfill the high mission to which “exhausted Western Europe” had proved itself unequal.^[9] The year 1853 marked exactly 400 years since the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and many viewed this “anniversary” as a symbolic threshold auguring the rebirth of an Orthodox East.^[10]The perception of the Crimean War as an extension of the successes of the Patriotic War and thus a further step towards implementing Russia’s messianic role in world history, ridicule of the “nephew” (Napoleon III) as the direct inheritor of his “uncle’s” (Napoleon I) disgrace, interpretation of coincidences in the chronology of the two campaigns as providential signs – all these themes permeated the press, popular verse, and personal correspondence in the early days of the war.
At first glance, this vision of the “Eastern campaign” is nothing short of astonishing. One might have expected the interpretation of military events to hinge on Russia’s previous victories in the Crimea and Caucasus – the main theaters of the current war – and to rely on historical memories invoking Russia’s age-old struggle with the “barbaric” East. Or else one might have expected historical symbolism to focus on the Russia’s traditional role as defender of oppressed Slavic peoples, since many intellectuals, above all the Panslavists, viewed the defense of the Orthodox peoples of the Ottoman Empire as one of Russia’s main motivations in the present conflict. Although such memories, to be sure, did play a role in wartime rhetoric, the projection of current events onto the Patriotic War overshadowed and absorbed all other historical parallels. Tiutchev, Shevyrev, and Pogodin, whose formulations generally stayed close to official ideology, in this case exceeded the limits set by the authorities with their ecstatic expectations and Panslavist hopes – and they expressed these hopes through the memory of 1812. But then even the government elevated the Patriotic War over other military accomplishments.
The glories of 1812, still a living memory at the time of the Crimean War, allowed official rhetoric to hearten the Russian army by proclaiming its invincibility, and, as regarded the international context, to repudiate Western powers’ attempts to undermine Russia’s leading status within the concert of European powers. Nicholas I made this function of the Patriotic war explicit in an imperial decree issued on February 9, 1854 and announcing the severing of diplomatic relations with England and France: “…if enemies attack its [Russia’s] borders, we will be ready to meet them with the severity bequeathed us by our ancestors. Are we not now the same Russian people whose valor is attested by the memorable events of 1812!”^[11] Nicholas was well aware, however, of the dangers inherent in 1812 as a symbol of unconstrained popular movements potentially hostile to the regime.^[12] To erase these implications of the 1812 memory, long before the “Eastern campaign,” official ideology presented the Patriotic War as the people’s struggle not so much for their own freedom, as for legitimate order. Throughout Nicholas’ reign, this interpretation of Russia’s triumph over Napoleon was fostered by carefully crafted public ceremonies and a historiography controlled by the tsar himself.^[13]As the official newspaper Russkii invalid shows, during the Crimean campaign parallels with the Patriotic War proved even more adaptable: they encapsulated Nicholas’ vision of the Russian empire and the Russian nation.^[14]
Many contributors to Russkii invalid promoted the memory of 1812 as the apotheosis of the true Russian spirit, emerging visibly across divergent regions of the state to unite them in time of war. Praising the bravery of Odessa’s inhabitants when their town was under bombardment (1854), the author of one account ecstatically observes that “merry souls sang the native legends of the year twelve” and in this fashion “under the thunder of enemy fire” Odessa took on an authentic Russian character.^[15] The sermons of Innokentii, Archbishop of Kherson and Tavrida and the main official wartime prognosticator, clearly demonstrate the power of memories of 1812 both to symbolically unify and Russify the empire. As though following Tiutchev’s poetic logic, Innokentii interpreted the Anglo-French landing on the Crimean coast as an echo of the successful entry of Napoleon’s troops in 1812 – which could only presage the foe’s inevitable downfall: “In time of battle, does the enemy intrude first into the Russian land? …To invade it, with its vast expanses, is always possible; what is hard – as experience shows – is to extricate oneself without falling prey to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth...”^[16] Directly contradicting customary representations of the Crimea as temperate, picturesque and ultimately foreign,^[17] Innokentii extends the fearsome features of Russia’s heartland – the endless expanses, harsh climate, and wild animals – to its exotic southern extremity. The preacher thus endows a relatively recently acquired corner of the empire with the attributes of Russianness, making the diverse state into a single entity bound together by the Russian spirit – which accorded perfectly with Nicholas’ concept of a national empire. Russkii invalid even presented the Patriotic War as a blueprint for martial achievements by the empire’s various ethnic groups. A Nizhnii Novgorod imam serving as army chaplain called on his coreligionists to follow the feats of 1812 and to defend their homeland “in whose depths repose… the bones of our fathers.”^[18] Thus official propaganda utilized the glories of 1812 to incorporate non-Russian ethnic groups, even the Tatars, in the struggle against the Turks – and it was all the more important to do so, since some of the Crimean Tatars had gone over to the enemy’s side.
The Patriotic War symbolized the Russian-centric focus of the entire empire. Popular poetry published in Russkii invalid provides a good example of how literature, reiterating the poetic tradition of memorializing 1812, provided a device for this symbol’s interpretation. Celebrating the Russian victory over the Ottoman fleet in the battle of Sinop (1854), the poem “On the current war” begins with conventional praise of late eighteenth century triumphs on the Black Sea. In the second half of the text, however, the poem’s conceptual center shifts to conflicts with the Western powers, focusing on the victory over Napoleon. Shifting from the naval victories of the expanding empire, won at the periphery of the state, to the Patriotic War, which took place in its historical heartland, the poem underscores the ethno-national dimension of the event:

Ne dvenadtsatogo-l’ goda
Vy khotite, gospoda?
My gotovy. Rus’ rodnaia
I mogucha i sil’na.
[Gentlemen, do you seek
The year twelve?
We are ready. Native Rus’
Is strong and potent.]^[19]

Presenting the 1812 campaign as an achievement of Rus’ and setting it atop the hierarchy of Russia’s victories, the poem symbolically enshrines the ethnic core of the state as the defining spirit and the dominant force of the diverse empire. To produce this effect the unknown author also applies the word Russkoe to the Black Sea, while conventionally the sea was called Rossiiskoe. With a final, hidden echo of “To the Slanderers of Russia” (1831), the poem reiterates Pushkin’s use of 1812 in articulating his vision of the relation between Russian nationality and the imperial polity:

Prikhodite zhe k nam v gosti!
Chestno vstretim my gostei.
I ulozhim vashi kosti,
Sred’ nechuzhdykh vam kostei!...
[Come, then, be our guests!
We know how to treat a guest.
We will lay you to rest
Among familiar bones!...]

Given the markedness of the word “nechuzhdyi” in the Russian poetic lexicon and the poet’s use of parallel syntactic constructions, these final words read as a recognizable reference to Pushkin’s:

Tak vysylaite zh k nam, vitii,
Svoikh ozloblennykh synov:
Est’ mesto im v poliakh Rossii
Sredi nechuzhdykh im grobov
[So, bards, send along to us
Your enraged sons:
There’s room for them in Russian fields
Among familiar graves]

In “To the Slanderers of Russia,” officially sanctioned under Nicholas, Pushkin projects the Polish unrest (1830-1831) onto Russia’s struggle with Napoleon, emphasizing two dimensions of the memory of 1812. On the one hand, the Patriotic War represents a holy war of ethno-national resistance, a feat of Russian nationality. Lines about the ancient “quarrel among the Slavs” revive the longstanding parallel between 1812 and 1612 – the end of the Time of Troubles, when a Russian popular militia led by Minin and Pozharskii liberated Moscow from Polish intruders. Reference to this people’s war, calling the Russian people a Slavic “tribe,” veneration of the Moscow Kremlin, evocations of the national epic hero (bogatyr’), all inscribe the November uprising in Poland and the memory of 1812 into a paradigm of ethnic resistance. Yet on the other hand, Pushkin engages memories of imperial victories (the taking of Izmail) and envisions the diverse imperial realm – “from Perm to Tavrida, from the cold Finnish cliffs to burning Colchis” – joining together in opposition to the enemy. Thus he inserts the destruction of Napoleon’s army into the triumphal imperial narrative. “To the Slanderers of Russia” does not contrast the ethnic and imperial dimensions of the memory of 1812, but rather fuses them into one. At the conclusion of the poem, Pushkin calls the entire imperial space “Russian land,” united by a shared sense of patriotism.^[20] On the pages of Russkii invalid one finds repeated references to this poem by Pushkin, to his vision of 1812 and the empire’s national character.
During the Crimean War, official ideology also turned parallels with 1812 into a means of buttressing the dynastic conception of the nation. For Nicholas, the triumph over Napoleon stood as a symbol of the dynasty and the people’s common past, and helped to present the ruler as an embodiment of the nation’s will. In an imperial manifesto issued in December, 1854, the tsar referred to the upheavals of 1812: “When necessary we all, tsar and subjects – to repeat the words of the Emperor Alexander spoken in a time of trial similar to this – stand before the ranks of our enemies with sword in hand and the cross in our hearts to defend the most precious blessings in this world: the safety and honor of the Fatherland” (italics in the original).^[21] Calling his subjects to battle, he missed no opportunity to remind them that love for the tsar was a particularly Russian trait. This manifesto is dated December 14, 1854 – the same day as the Decembrist uprising. Throughout Nicholas’ reign, official ideology presented the suppression of the uprising as a victory of national ideals over Western doctrines and a visible reassertion of the triumphal union of monarch and common people.^[22] In Nicholas’ era an annual prayer service commemorated the imperial family’s deliverance from danger on this date. The day the manifesto was read from the pulpits – December 25, 1854 – was another famous date. From 1812 onward, on the first day of Christmas, all of Russia’s churches held a thanksgiving service to commemorate the expulsion of Napoleon’s army.^[23] The choice of both these dates – the date the manifesto was signed and the date of its promulgation – formed a chain of crucial historical events, each a high-water mark in the union of the monarchy and the people. The manifesto brought the Crimean War into this chain, as well.
Wartime propaganda constantly equated the defenders of Sevastopol’ – site of the most ferocious battles of the Crimean campaign – with the heroes of Borodino, thus emphasizing the unchanging nature of Russians. With this in mind, Innokentii seems not to pass up a single chronological “coincidence” with the Patriotic War: “...have you noticed which day the enemies appeared in your land? On the same day that they once entered Moscow, as if to augur that in the Crimea the same bitter fate awaits them that they suffered after taking our first capital.”^[24] Developing this parallel, the preacher not only ascribes to the Anglo-French troops the same motives that had drawn Napoleon’s army to Russia (“godlessness and passion”, the overthrow of “altars and thrones”), but also attributes to his compatriots the permanent qualities of piety and devotion to the throne.^[25] Appealing to the militia of 1812, the government clearly expressed this idea in the manifesto “On the Summoning of a National Militia” (January 29, 1855): “More than once already, Russia has faced and been overtaken by difficult, sometimes cruel, trials. But it has always been saved by humble faith in Providence and the strong, unshakeable bond of the Tsar with His subjects, His devoted children. Be it so even now.”^[26]
The more tragically military events unfolded, the more ingeniously the authorities exploited the memory of the Patriotic War. Once the Crimean events were projected through the prism of the Patriotic War, any military failure could be interpreted as a sign of Providence’s special design, as a token of inevitable future success, and as testament to the constancy of Russian virtues, since the Russian army of 1812 had also withstood many losses.^[27] This is why Alexander II, upon his ascent to the throne, resorted to the symbol of 1812 even more persistently than his father. On receiving word of Sevastopol’s collapse, the young tsar encouraged Prince M. N. Gorchakov: “Do not lose heart, but remember 1812 and trust in God…. Two years after the burning of Moscow, our triumphant troops entered Paris. We are the same Russians and God is with us!”^[28] Informing the Russian armies and the navy of Sevastopol’s surrender, he compared its defense to the greatest feats of Russian arms, among them the Battle of Borodino.^[29] Even when the government signed the humiliating Paris treaty (1856), in public ceremonies Alexander II visibly entwined the narratives of the two wars.^[30] His coronation (1856), set to coincide with the anniversary of the battle of Borodino (August 26), was intended to symbolically overcome the painful loss of the war and to reassert the deep bond between the monarch and his subjects.
Read through the scenario of the Patriotic War, the Crimean campaign turned into a commemoration of 1812. By merging the events of the two wars, won and lost, into a single narrative, official propaganda found a way to highlight the stability of the Russian people’s nature and thus made it possible to sustain the official vision of the empire and the nation. Yet public opinion, deeply traumatized by the course and outcome of the Crimean War, turned the memory of 1812 in a far different direction.

1812 AS CONTESTED SYMBOL

The Crimean War provoked a complex amalgam of emotions and attitudes in Russian society – from ecstatic expectations of the impending fulfillment of Russia’s historical destiny (as we have seen in case of Tiutchev, Pogodin, and Shevyrev) to a bitter defeatism, which hoped that military loss might bring with it a weakening of the repressive regime.^[31] This is not to say that all critics of the government dreamed of defeat and all enthusiasts of the war blindly supported the government. Alhough Aleksei Khomiakov, like the rest of the Slavophiles, supported the Eastern campaign, his oppositional mindset is evident in his then-popular poem, “Russia” (1854). For Khomiakov, the war had the potential to cleanse the country of its sins – “the yoke of slavery” and “black injustice” in the courts – and for this very reason the war opened the way to the realization of Russia’s high mission: the liberation of the Slavs: “O, unworthy chosen one, you are chosen…”^[32] Another proponent of the war, Mikhail Pogodin – who had contributed to the theory of official nationality – now harshly denounced the government’s unwillingness to introduce some freedom into Russian life and its readiness to sacrifice the interests of the Slavs, which for him was tantamount to betraying Russian national interests.^[33] Thus support for the war and criticism of the regime often went hand in hand. In Nicholas’ Russia, where the regime blocked almost all open advocacy of change, militarist schemes appeared to many the only accessible cure for the country’s ills.
Just like official rhetoric, many critics of the government tended to perceive the Crimean War through the prism of the 1812 triumph. For them, however, the real value of the Patriotic War lay in its potential to symbolize unconstrained popular movement, which Nicholas I prudently avoided rousing, even rhetorically. Hoping that the campaign for the liberation of brother Slavs would turn into a Russian people’s war, Pogodin claimed that Russia had reached a moment of decision such as had not been seen since the days of Poltava and Borodino. He therefore urged the tsar to “sound the call” and raise up “all the land.”^[34] The diary of V. S. Aksakova, sister of two famous Slavophiles, records how the growing oppositional mood among Moscow intellectuals coalesced around the memory of the Patriotic War as a people’s war. She compared the militias of 1812 and 1855 to reveal, on the one hand, the government’s underlying fear of popular participation in military action and, on the other, the people’s boundless potential and capacity for deciding the fate of Russia. After the noble assemblies of several Russian provinces elected the disgraced Ermolov, a hero of the Patriotic War, to head the militia, he took on in the eyes of society the aura of a national leader and even a rival to the tsar. Regularly compared with M. I. Kutuzov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army of 1812 (and who had also been little loved by the court), Ermolov came to represent the nation as distinct from the absolutist state.^[35]
Both major intellectual trends of the time, Slavophilism and Westernism, subscribed to the vision of 1812 as evidence of the people’s viability and strength. In the first volume of My Past and Thoughts, as in many other works of his written during and immediately after the Crimean War, Herzen utilizes the memory of the Russian triumph over Napoleon as a means of revealing the nation, otherwise obscured by Nicholas’ regime. Of course, the mission assigned the Russian people by the famous Westernizer differed substantially from that envisioned by the Slavophiles and Panslavists. The moral superiority of the Russian people over Western civilizations, their immunity to bourgeois “corruption” and their ability to bring socialism to Europe, thus once again liberating the Europeans (this time from the tyranny of bourgeois values, rather than from Napoleon) – all these constructs Herzen demonstrated through references to and comparison with the glory of 1812 that was understood as a military accomplishment of the common folk.^[36] Although, like the Slavophiles, Herzen takes the memory of 1812 as a token of national superiority, unlike them he weaves the victory over Napoleon into a history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, thus even more dramatically contrasting the people and the government. In this way, the memory of the Patriotic War being promoted by the intelligentsia sounded an altogether different note than did government propaganda.
Many years later, Dostoevskii parodied these struggles over 1812 in his novel, The Idiot (1868-1869). The author devotes an entire chapter to the mentally disturbed general Ivolgin’s fantastic tale about how as a boy he stayed behind in French-held Moscow and served as a page to Napoleon. This tale is but a hyperbolic version of the many appropriations of the memory of 1812. A man of ruined reputation, Ivolgin uses the sacred national symbol to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his fellows. The general has his child persona utter fiery patriotic phrases, impressing the great conqueror with the indomitable Russian spirit.^[37] To make clear the parodic function of Ivolgin’s “memoirs,” Dostoevskii introduces a competing wild story on exactly the same subject: the tale of Lebedev’s leg, blown off by a bomb and buried with pomp and circumstance in French-held Moscow. Lebedev concocts this story, despite being in possession of two perfectly healthy legs, and in any case being much too young to have participated in the 1812 events, in order to openly ridicule the disturbed general.
Both absurd anecdotes represent Dostoevskii’s covert sarcasm at the uses of the Patriotic War. It is no coincidence – though it seems at first glance strange – that Prince Myshkin, the novel’s protagonist, should compare Ivolgin’s mad inventions to the opening chapter of Herzen’s Past and Thoughts, where the memoirist recounts how, when he was a new-born baby, he and his parents stayed behind in surrendered Moscow. His father chanced to meet Napoleon, and the French emperor sent him to the Russian emperor with an offer of peace.^[38] Despite their utter dissimilarity in tone and content, the thematic echoes between Ivolgin’s and Herzen’s stories – a child as the natural intermediary between warring sides, and Napoleon’s search for a Russian emissary to send to Alexander – justify the odd comparison of the mad general’s baseless fantasies with Herzen’s factually grounded recollection. With his parallel to Ivolgin’s fantasies, Dostoevskii discredits Herzen’s use of memories of the Patriotic War. I would contend that the author’s aim was in fact wider and that The Idiot was parodying the entire polarization of conceptions of the victory over Napoleon which marked relations between society and the regime. In this context it is significant that both of Dostoevskii’s characters, Ivolgin and Lebedev, recount the events of 1812 differently, partly because they gravitate to different social and ideological groups. While the mad general sees himself as an inheritor of the noble tradition and articulates the tenets of official nationalism, Lebedev is a raznochinets (a person of humble origins) and a friend of nihilists, who openly debunked patriotic symbols.
Though, as the novel shows, the Patriotic War persisted into the 1860s as a highly contested symbol and an indicator of ideological divisions, Dostoevskii was moved to caricature the struggle because by the end of the Crimean War 1812 had taken on new connotations within the national discourse. For intellectuals, 1812 became not so much a scenario of popular war and a means of finding the nation apart from the state, as it had become a symbol that could be used to criticize both the government and the people. On learning of the surrender of Sevastopol, Dmitrii Obolenskii disputed the official equation (“we” are the same, “of Borodino and Paris”): “Now, in consolation over the fall of Sevastopol, many say: ‘It’s nothing. The enemy was also in Moscow.’ I don’t know if 1812 can serve as a guarantor of the current war’s being concluded successfully – not only were the character and purpose of that war, undertaken by a single conqueror, completely different, but Russian society was also incomparably more whole, more moral, and the government more reasonable.”^[39] As though challenging both Innokentii’s sermons and the imperial manifestoes, Elena Shtakenshneider likewise opposed the government line, recording in her memoirs the opinion of the Petersburg liberal circle to which she belonged: “Without railroads, without telegraphs, what made Russia so frightening? Surely not just its size and unfamiliarity? Or was it still 1812 and the glory of 1814? We had grown so used to appearing strong that we came to believe in our own strength, although we should have known very well what strength a decaying organism possesses.”^[40] In postwar rhetorical practice two series of metaphors that reflected the need for reforms gained extremely wide currency. The end of the Crimean campaign saw the proliferation of metaphors of spoilage, sickness, injury, decay, torpor, and the sleep of a “great nation.” Meanwhile, with Alexander II’s ascent to the throne and the awakening of hopes for an increase of freedom, metaphors of rebirth, recovery, and refinement joined the metaphors of spoilage in the public domain. Like many others, Shtakenshneider equated the accomplishments of 1812 with the nation’s “strength,” and current events with its “decay.”
As the accounts of many memoirists demonstrate, comparison of the Crimean and Patriotic Wars served as a marker of the generational divide and as a measure of how far the people had deviated from their authentic self. This, of course, undermined the official conception of the nation. If wartime propaganda postulated the might of Russia as the consequence of exclusive, immutable, and eternal national features (piety and devotion to the monarch), then the defeat brought into question not only the protective power of these virtues, but their very existence. Filaret, the metropolitan of Moscow, directly linked the military failures to Russia’s deviation from the path of righteousness and, flatly contradicting official rhetoric, accentuated the rupture between generations: “Sons of Russia! The God of Vladimir, the God of Alexander Nevskii, the God of Peter… from generation to generation down through the centuries has bequeathed and preserved for us the pure, holy Orthodox faith in Christ and through this faith has sowed and propagated in the lives of our ancestors good seeds… Are we using this inheritance wisely? …It would be hard to stop if we set out to name how many of the pious, good, innocent, humble traditions and habits of our fathers are neglected and lost….”^[41] Where Filaret, the most authoritative church leader, considered Orthodoxy compromised and thus questioned the first tenet of Uvarov’s triad, the liberal intellectual elite openly challenged the underlying principle of official nationality, namely, loyalty to the monarch. The young Moscow University Professor, B. N. Chicherin, wrote that “The war had shattered the union of tsar and people, it had decisively disgraced the reign.”^[42] P. A. Valuev, the future Minister of Internal Affairs, claimed in a personal letter to Alexander II that antagonism permeated society’s attitude toward the government.^[43] To be sure, Filaret, Chicherin, and Valuev criticized the regime from differing political viewpoints, but all their observations pointed in the same direction.
Military failure had destabilized the official image of the nation. It similarly undermined the concept of the national empire. Even those critics of the regime who supported the idea of a dominant homogeneous Russian mass within the empire (that is, did not distinguish between Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Great Russians) admitted that Russians did not assimilate subject non-Russian populations, but rather alienated them with forced Russification. “Germans are the same in Alsace and in the towns and castles of Ostsee; why is it that French Germans think of themselves as French, while ours are still German?” asked N. A. Mel’gunov, the author of a pamphlet exposing Nicholas’ Russia (1856). Subscribing to the recurrent patriotic clichй, he claimed that Russian people are distinguished by their “uncommon ability to live alongside other nationalities” and succeed in turning them into Russians only under conditions of “moral union” and “respect for other nationalities.”^[44] In Mikhail Katkov’s article, “Pushkin” (1856), which he placed in the first issues of the newly permitted journal Russkii vestnik, the national empire is also articulated as a thing to be made, not a given: “The multiplicity of various tribes which occupy our homeland must consciously and morally submit to the Russian nationality, just as they now submit to the Russian government.” Not the regime with its mechanisms of compulsion, but “the universal power of the Russian word” and the great potential of the Russian people, Katkov asserted, would be the instrument of consolidation of the empire.^[45]
Defeat in the Crimean war brought about fundamental changes in the national self-image. While explicitly criticizing official nationalism, intellectuals began to search for new strategies for defining the collective self. Attempting as before to locate the nation apart from the state, independent thinkers now, rather than claiming the immutability of the Russian people or defining them by reference to their heroic past or unique natural environment, tended instead to use historical symbols to measure how far the people had deviated, how the state had damaged them, and what might be done to improve national life. The idea of the nation as an evolving entity and an object of care now entered the political discourse. The Patriotic War came to represent both an instrument for measuring degradation and a lost ideal that should have been realized. These changes in approaching the collective self were also clearly reflected in how the conception of national character evolved during the 1850s. The following two sections, in which this evolution is traced, seek to demonstrate a fundamental shift in the language of self brought about through discussions of national character.

WARTIME REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIONAL CHARACTER

In its catalogue of national virtues, official wartime rhetoric entwined the people’s humility and devotion to the throne with their martial valor, and their physical and spiritual strength. What supposedly distinguished Russians from others was this amalgam of submissiveness and epic heroism – symbolized above all, of course, by Ivan Susanin, whose legendary self-sacrifice in saving Mikhail Romanov, the founder of the ruling dynasty, had placed him during Nicholas’ reign at the center of myth-making about the unbreakable union of dynasty and people.^[46] “His blood has soaked into the heart of every Russian,” thus Russkii invalid explained the mass heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol.^[47] Physical strength and courage were traditionally evoked through the feats of ancient Greek and Roman heroes. This habit, rooted in classicism, of comparing the victors of the Patriotic War with the heroes of classical antiquity played a key role in descriptions of that conflict and persisted into the Crimean War. Though neo-classical style was out of date by the mid-nineteenth century, Russians clung to it for reasons of their own. If at that time they were saddled with an inferiority complex when it came to poetry and literature, and denied themselves the right to compete in this arena with Western European countries,^[48] then military feats, in their eyes, could still elevate them to the heights of Homeric epic. As a result, there emerged in the pages of Russkii invalid a curious cultural hybrid: Susanins with classical traits. The newspaper extolled the Russian warrior, graced equally by Spartan qualities and by a readiness to sacrifice himself “at the tsar’s first word.”^[49]
In 1854 Pogodin even claimed that the heroes of the current war had “surpassed the Iliad.” The source of their superiority over other nations was, of course, Russian Orthodoxy with its spirit of humility and its readiness “to submit to blows, to be wounded” for tsar and fatherland.^[50] This conflation of bellicosity with self-sacrifice and of Homeric heroes with the Russian Christ-figure constituted common ground for both official rhetoric and wartime literary representations of national character, often the product of opposition-minded intellectuals. Although at that time interpretation of 1812 served as an indicator of ideological divisions, visions of Russia’s distinctive spirit functioned similarly at both ends of the political spectrum.
As always in times of crisis, official ideology aggressively solicited support from literature.^[51] The noble literary elite, in turn, eagerly allied itself with the government, arrogating to itself the role of enlightened counselor, capable, as P. A. Viazemskii had foreseen back in the 1830s, of synthesizing European culture and “narodnost.”^[52] In his own literary practice this program engendered a combination of official patriotic rhetoric and a definition of the collective self through folklore, nature, and the customs of the common people. Far from unique, this combination characterizes a wide circle of writers of the Crimean War period, including the provincial poet-autodidact I. S. Nikitin, plucked from obscurity by the intelligentsia to serve as true voice of the people. In 1854, Russkii invalid published his missive “To the Don Cossacks” (“Dontsam”), where the constant motifs of official propaganda all figure: the dominance of the Russian spirit over the entire imperial geography and the concomitant identification of Russia with Rus’; harsh nature and the endless steppe as “our” natural defenses; and military feats as the redeeming sacrifice of the Christ-like Russian warrior.^[53] One cannot, however, consider Nikitin a mouthpiece of official propaganda. Comparison of the author’s version of the poem with its newspaper edition shows that the censor downplayed the theme of the Russian people’s love for freedom and their boundless might, suppressed the motif of liberating brother-Slavs, and foregrounded faithfulness to the dynasty and the defense of thrones, even foreign ones, as a distinctive national trait. However significant these discrepancies, they still left room for using identical patriotic idioms and glorifying the very same national qualities.
Lev Tolstoy’s wartime prose demonstrates that he also drew on the common arsenal of patriotic rhetoric, though he did so ambivalently and searched for new justifications for widespread idioms. At the start of the war, depressed by the military losses, the young artillery officer Count Tolstoy sharply criticized the Russian army, seeing in it the corrupt and repressive regime in miniature. Like the majority of intellectuals, he blames military failures on serfdom, which official propaganda had completely erased from the general picture: “We have not an army, but a rabble of oppressed slaves, taking orders from thieves and mercenaries.”^[54] Tolstoy pronounces this verdict in an unfinished tract that reads like part of the period’s flood of exposй literature. Yet, as Donna Orwin has astutely observed, the article’s dismal classification of Russian soldiers (“oppressed, oppressive, and despairing”) finds its optimistic mirror image in the story “The Woodfelling” (1855), completed after the author, arriving in Sevastopol, experienced a strong attack of patriotism.^[55] Here Tolstoy divides soldiers into “the submissive, the commanding, and the despairing,” endowing the “commanding” with noble traits and declaring the “submissive” to be the most widespread type, embodying the best Christian virtues.^[56] In the sketch, “Sevastopol in December” (1855), written immediately after “The Woodfelling,” Tolstoy more explicitly excludes the theme of oppression from his picture of the army, claiming that neither the hope of reward nor the fear of authority could inspire such feats as the defenders of Sevastopol had accomplished.^[57]
One idealized national trait begets another. The unbreakable union of humility and heroism constitutes the underlying motif of “Sevastopol in December” and fits tidily into official war rhetoric. Moreover, by accentuating the epic strength of the Russian warrior, the writer clothes him in antique dress, and in this way again echoes official propaganda. In the same kind of conventional spirit that he will subsequently deride in War and Peace, Tolstoy calls Kornilov “a hero worthy of ancient Greece.”^[58] If the author of War and Peace makes it his aim to reveal the truth hidden behind the mythical accretions, then in this Sevastopol sketch he, on the contrary, portrays the ongoing military action as the embodiment of a “glorious historical legend.”^[59]
In Tolstoy’s military prose of the 1850s one finds a number of other thematic echoes of official propaganda. As in Innokentii’s sermons, the author symbolically annexes the Crimean peninsula to the Russian spirit. While depicting southern nature as markedly exotic, he at the same time asserts that the fearlessness of Sevastopol’s inhabitants gives the town a thoroughly Russian character.^[60] The motifs of unique Russian bravery (in details developed in “The Raid” and “Sevastopol in December”)^[61] and unity across social barriers (“Sevastopol in December”), the optimistic tone of the story about the surrender of Sevastopol (“Sevastopol in August”) – all these constitute points of commonality between Tolstoy and official propaganda. It comes as no surprise that Russkii invalid excerpted the sketch “Sevastopol in December” from Sovremennik, and Alexander II ordered that the sketch be translated into French.^[62]
This is not to overlook the serious limitations in Tolstoy’s willingness to subscribe to the official vision of the nation, or to downplay his iconoclastic attitude towards conventional literary representations of the war. As Eikhenbaum observed, Tolstoy’s instinct to contradict made him “incapable of writing anything primitive or tendentious.”^[63] Like Nikitin and many others, Tolstoy interwove elements of official rhetoric with a definition of the Russian self through folklore and authentic national traditions.^[64] Like no one else, he enriched his battle prose with fine psychological portraits that were arresting to his contemporaries. The censor’s numerous changes to the journal version of the Sevastopol stories testify to their innovative character and Tolstoy’s unusual use of existing idioms. The dialectic of fear and courage, pacifism combined with delight at military feats, the portrayal of blood and mud as a background for heroism and, finally, the absence of jingoistic slogans – all of these the censor’s pen and scissors corrected.^[65] Even though during the Crimean campaign Tolstoy overturned many conventional assumptions about the war, this should not prevent us from seeing that he exploited extant patriotic idioms and praised the same national traits that were idealized in Russkii invalid. He praised them, however, on new rhetorical and mimetic grounds. Here Tolstoy’s famous defamiliarization – making the ordinary extraordinary and thus refreshing or changing our vision of familiar things – comes into play.

TOLSTOY’S “THE COSSACKS” AND THE POSTWAR SHIFT IN THE VISION OF THE NATION

In the years immediately following his return from Sevastopol, Tolstoy’s attitude toward wartime rhetoric took a sharply skeptical turn, due in part to the influence of the liberal intelligentsia and the opposition-minded circle around the journal Sovremennik, where all his first writings appeared. By the beginning of the 1860s, however, he developed a no less critical view of the liberal movement, with its Westernism, progressivism, propagandizing for women’s emancipation, advocacy of modernization of Russian institutions, and reliance on the bureaucratic state as a major agency of the impending reforms. In The Decembrists (1860-1861) – an unfinished novel that laid the groundwork for War and Peace, but was set in the 1850s – he finds a way to target both wartime patriotic language and the intelligentsia’s post-war exaltation at the prospect of fundamental change. Tolstoy here retells his own Sevastopol sketches in parodic fashion, while at the same time highlighting the absurdity of the triumphal spirit that prevailed in educated society as the defeat was being absorbed: “...the victorious Russian troops returned from surrendering Sevastopol to the enemy... Russia celebrated the destruction of the Black Sea fleet, and Moscow of the White Stones met and congratulated the remainder of the fleet’s crews on these happy events.”^[66]
If The Decembrists reveals the writer’s tendency to debunk the ideological trends of the 1850s, then the novella The Cossacks (1853-1863) represents his attempt to provide new communal definitions and goals. Like the literature of the preceding decades, The Cossacks approached the question of the authentic Russian self by juxtaposing the Europeanized cultural elite with the simple folk, taken as the incarnation of the national spirit. The aristocrat Olenin, the author’s alter ego, finds his ideal in a Cossack village, but his desire to fit into it proves unsuccessful. There is nothing new in the conflict itself, except, perhaps, the piercing sense of personal tragedy Olenin experiences over his estrangement from the Cossacks. What is new is that the novella signaled a move away from simple worship of the common people as the repository of true Russian virtues. Though Tolstoy elevates the Cossack community to epic heights,^[67] through this celebration he addresses key issues which had come into sharp focus as a result of the defeat: How should the national community develop? Who and what embodied its true spirit? Where were the resources for its consolidation to come from? Expressive of Tolstoy’s personal views, which differed substantially from any of the ideological movements of the late 1850s and early 1860s, The Cossacks at the same time fits within the broad current of attempts to discursively redefine the Russian collective self.
The novella undermines the notion of Russians’ distinctive quality as an amalgam of strength and submissiveness. Among the Cossack traits foregrounded in the story, there is no mention of either humility or obedience, while independence, initiative, adventurousness, and daring appear in abundance, often to excess. Although Olenin condemns the theft, debauchery and sexual license of the village, the self-reliance, creative potential, and primordial energy of the Cossacks captivate him, overshadowing problematic ethical areas in the life of the community. What attracts both protagonist and author to the Cossacks is their spirit of independence, inherent not only in the men but also the women of the community. Descendants of refugees from Russia, living “from time immemorial” in the Caucasus on the Greben (the Ridge) – “the first crest of forested mountains” in Chechnia, – this Old Believer community escaped from both church control and state pressure, above all from serfdom, and thus symbolizes a double freedom, religious and personal. The independent spirit of these inhabitants of the empire’s dangerous frontier holds deep political implications.
While Tolstoy was still in the Caucasus (1851-1854), the “wild country” attracted him with its combination of “two utterly contradictory things – war and freedom.”^[68] These “contradictory things” coalesce in the underlying thematic motif of the novella, making it possible for Tolstoy to explicitly position the Greben Cossacks apart from the state. Drawn into war with the Chechens, they do not enter the regular standing army, with its subjection of every soldier to the brutality of the commanders and equally rampant indulgence in violence toward civilians. Moreover, Tolstoy stresses the spirit of enmity that separates the army and the Cossacks. The Greben settlers look with hatred on the infantry regiment quartered in their village. Cossack women curse the soldiers and call them the “horde.” The author emphasizes that the Cossack “disdains… the oppressor-soldier,” and in a draft of the novella even compares the infantry regiment in the Cossack village to an enemy army “in captured territory.”^[69] Indeed, the Greben Cossacks often react to the Russian troops as enemies. Tolstoy places at the center of the story a symbolic scene where the daring Lukashka, one of the central characters and the embodiment of the Cossack spirit, intentionally refuses to give way to soldiers marching towards him, thereby seeking an altercation.^[70] The Greben community becomes neither the object of systematic oppression on the part of the regime (like the mass of Russian peasants) nor the subject of state coercion (like the regular army).
Tolstoy not only plucks the Greben community from the shadow of the state, but also highlights how different its members are from the rest of Russian ethnicity, thus calling into question Russians’ homogeneity as an ethnic group. While the soldiers ridicule the Cossacks’ language and customs and do not recognize them as Russians, for the Greben community “the Russian muzhik is something strange, a wild and contemptible creature.”^[71] Mutual alienation, according to Tolstoy, divides not only the army and civilians, not only the cultural elite and the simple folk, but also the Russian common people among themselves. At the same time that Tolstoy raises high cultural and linguistic barriers between different groups of the empire’s ethnic core, he blurs the lines between the Cossacks and their Muslim counterparts. Due to their centuries-long contacts and intermarriages, the exiles of the Greben show some similarities to the Chechens: a common ethos with respect to war; the cult of the horse, bravery, highwaymen, weapons, friendship (kunaki), and freedom;^[72] and the dominant position of women in domestic life.^[73] If in “The Woodfelling” (1855) Tolstoy tends to attribute true courage only to Russians, contrasting them with peoples of the East,^[74] he is now inclined to liken the Greben community to the Chechens, with their martial spirit constituting the point of commonality. It is possible to identify two converging, though seemingly contradictory, tendencies in this work’s depiction of the Cossacks. On the one hand, Tolstoy emphasizes their otherness and educates his readers, explaining in detail the ethnographic and linguistic differences of the Greben’s inhabitants from the peasants of Russia’s heartland. On the other hand, Tolstoy claims that the Cossacks “held onto… the Russian language and old belief in all its purity,”^[75] ascribes to them elements of central Russian dialects, and makes them the bearers of a common Russian folk tradition.^[76] As a result, the Greben community simultaneously represents both the Russian self and its other.^[77] In these militant Old Believers pushed to the frontier, Tolstoy finds a free Russian community unconstrained by the state, close to the “barbaric” Eastern world and thus embodying Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage.
With this interpretation of the Greben settlers, Tolstoy addresses at least three sets of issues that were much discussed in the wake of the defeat. First, he calls the unity of Russian nationhood into question, emphasizing the fragmented nature of the “ruling nationality” and the elusiveness of its body, stifled and divided by the state. Second, he overthrows the myth of a national empire, portraying the Greben Old Believers as Chechenized, whereas in traditional interpretations the Cossacks were considered indomitable propagators of the Russian spirit and the prime movers of the imperial mission on the frontiers. Finally, Tolstoy raises the issue of national character, demonstrating that initiative and energy do constitute distinctive Russian traits, but are preserved intact only in a marginalized segment of the population.
Several generations of thinkers, poets, and writers “found” an active and vibrant nation in folklore, language, religious traditions, and historical memories. The lost war showed, however, just how difficult it was to separate the people from the state, and how easy it was to stifle their creative potential. Who lost the war: the government or the people? Although the heroism of the rank and file defenders of Sevastopol seemed to give a clear answer to that question, doubts inevitably arose: Were only the authorities guilty? Did they alone bring about the defeat? N. A. Mel’gunov, the author of a pamphlet exposing Nicholas’ Russia, concisely expressed these doubts: “Courage and composure in military affairs are the defining traits of the Russian; but are these qualities sufficient… when it comes not to obeying an order, but using one’s head!”^[78] The sentence ends not with a question mark but an exclamation point. For many thinkers, the defeat had provided a dismal answer.
The passivity of the common people came to occupy the central place in political tracts circulated in manuscript or published abroad at the end of the war and immediately thereafter. The Westernizers B. N. Chicherin and K. D. Kavelin saw the Russian muzhik as “a miserable sufferer” not yet awakened “to independent and rational action.”^[79] Even the Slavophile Iu. F. Samarin included in his list of blatant Russian maladies the nation’s “mental somnolence” and the “stagnation of its creative forces.”^[80] N. A. Mel’gunov, who occupied an intermediate position between the Slavophiles and Westernizers, surpassed them all, calling the lack of “inventiveness” and “capacity for initiative” “Russia’s original sin.”^[81] Criticism of the national character seeped into literature. I. S. Turgenev focused on passivity among the educated segments of society. Elena, the main character of his novel On the Eve (1859), falls in love with the energetic Bulgarian Insarov, rejecting the attentions of her compatriots because of their lack of convictions and purpose. For Turgenev, the erotic, matrimonial, and ultimately creative debacle of Insarov’s Russian rivals resulted not so much from their own personal weaknesses as from the suffocating political system which had deprived them of initiative. Lingering oppression damaged all levels of society, submerging it in lethargy- – on this point intellectuals from across the political spectrum could agree.^[82]
Although, unlike the liberals, Tolstoy saw the Crimean war and the defense of Sevastopol as confirmations of the might of the Russian people, for him the bureaucracy in general and Nicholas’ regime in particular had weakened and suppressed the nation. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, however, he expressed this thought not by negative means – that is, by pointing out what was lacking; but positively – by celebrating the spirit of independence and creativity that still survived, if only in a community driven into the hinterlands. Tolstoy was not alone in seeking an epitome of the nation’s true and best self in a community of Old Believers. Mel’gunov also elevated the schismatics exiled to the Caucasus as “the distillation of everything independent that lies hidden in the simple Russian.”^[83] During the promulgation of the Great Reforms, Old Believers attracted considerable attention as an active, independent, economically successful, and purposeful part of the population, although representatives of various ideological trends tended to construct them differently. Since schismatics were persecuted (and during Nicholas’ reign, especially severely), revolutionary intellectuals placed great hope in the supposed power of their discontent and considered them the bulwark of the coming revolution.^[84] Liberal and conservative publications, on the other hand, often treated them as potential allies of the regime (if only the government would show them tolerance) and looked to their reunion with the official church as a source of national consolidation.^[85] Both ends of the political spectrum identified the Old Believers as a powerful political force; in the former instance – destructive, in the latter – formative.
Like the radicals, Tolstoy celebrates the Old Believer community as proof positive that Russian people do exist and flourish apart from the state. He values them particularly for their isolation from the bulk of the population and for their relative independence from the coercive apparatus of the regime. Tolstoy does not, however, see them as a destructive force. Like the liberals and conservatives, he rather portrays the Old Believers as an embodiment of communal cohesion, a vessel of Russian identity, and a resource for national rebirth, if only their spirit could be diffused to the wider population. To reinforce the potency of this construct, Tolstoy singles out the Greben community in two distinctive ways. First, he extends the history of these settlers’ opposition to the state. Without a hint of skepticism, the author recounts the Greben Cossacks’ legend of how at the time of Ivan the Terrible they were already recognized as an Old Believer community and the tsar guaranteed them religious tolerance.^[86] Although Greben folklore does in fact include a legend about negotiating rights with Ivan the Terrible, in the sixteenth century the Caucasian exiles could not have been considered Old Believers, since the church schism occurred some one hundred years after Ivan’s death. As a second distinctive feature, Tolstoy infuses the story about the Old Believers with the literary topoi of the Cossack myth.
In Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, as in Tolstoy’s novella, Cossacks also live at the border of alien worlds – temporal, spatial, and cultural – at times belonging simultaneously to all, at times to neither. Within the literary tradition Cossacks also embody a primordial freedom bordering on amorality, and symbolize, though less explicitly than in Tolstoy’s story, Russia’s ambivalent relation to the East.^[87] Utilizing these topoi of the Cossack myth, Tolstoy imbued the Cossacks’ dual nature with a sharper political meaning than had his predecessors. If the Greben community represents Russia’s self, it is not foreign enemies or alien cultures that serve as Russia’s other, but the coercive bureaucratic state. Tolstoy’s anarchistic views made it possible for him to introduce this innovation into the Cossack myth and thus radically pluck the Russian people from the shadow of the state.
What also drew a sharp line between Tolstoy and literary tradition is that he chose not to locate the Greben community in the historical past (as does Pushkin) or the mythic past (as in Gogol). The Cossacks’ subtitle, “A Caucasian story of 1852,” localizes the action to a point in time on the eve of the Crimean War. To understand Tolstoy’s decision one should take into consideration that the Russian army’s victory in the Caucasus, the only truly successful theater of the Crimean campaign, led to the region’s final subjection to the Russian empire. While The Cossacks appeared in 1863, by which time the Caucasus had been declared “finally subdued,” the subtitle indicates that its characters live in a pre-war as-yet-undefeated Caucasus. This means that the Greben community still sits on a dangerous frontier, has not yet been absorbed into the body of the Russian Empire, and can symbolize a sense of independence. This is not to say that Tolstoy subscribed to anti-imperialistic ideas at that time. His primary concern was to re-define the Russian nation, and the pre-war period made it possible for him to construct the Greben community – an embodiment of Russia’s true self – by juxtaposing it with the Chechen one.
The narrative sharply distinguishes between two types of violence, depicting them in very different ways. At the outset of the story, Lukashka, without a moment’s hesitation, kills a Chechen abrek who intrudes into Russian territory. Tolstoy describes this killing twice: initially in third person, in an objective manner; and then in first person, in the words of Lukashka himself, who is excited and proud of the killing. In both versions Tolstoy surprisingly downplays the moral aspects of the act and the psychology of courage, both of which are central themes in his martial prose. Moreover, the author surrounds the event with hunting scenes and comparisons with the life of animals, evoking in the reader associations with instinctual struggle and thus justifying the shooting. Olenin’s reflections on the moral aspect of the killing serve only to deepen the divide between him and the Greben settlers, without shedding any light on the event. Among the Cossacks, it is the old man Eroshka – an intermediary between the aristocratic protagonist and the Greben community – who broaches the ethical side of the killing. But Eroshka sharply limits his discussion of the subject. Yet when soldiers of the regular army do violence to the Chechens, the author both directly and indirectly condemns their actions. Now Eroshka does not hold back, but speaks repeatedly (once he even breaks into song) about the senselessness of the violence inflicted on the mountain-folk by the Russian soldiers.^[88] The difference in these assessments is explained by the differing nature of the violence in question. When Lukashka kills the Chechen, he is defending his land and the Greben community. When the regular army destroys a mountain village, it is obeying an order. Unlike the soldiers, Lukashka not only commits violence, but voluntarily exposes himself to danger. In the final clash with the Chechens no one orders him forward, but he rushes into the fray of his own accord and receives a potentially fatal wound (the reader is left in doubt as to the hero’s fate).
The Cossacks’ relation to violence constitutes their principal similarity with the Chechens – both sides are defending their land and their community. It is important that Lukashka is wounded by the brother of the abrek he had killed. The two are not anonymous combatants, but mortal enemies. This lends the entire conflict the quality of a skirmish between two nationalities, which are equals in battle. Tolstoy is thorough in establishing parallels between Lukashka and the abrek he kills at the beginning of the story. Although we see Lukashka’s victim only after his death, the author constantly reiterates that both men were the most successful warriors of their communities, that both voluntarily rushed forward in clashes with the enemy, and both possessed the qualities of leadership. Tolstoy also emphasizes each man’s physical beauty and uses their racial differences (the Chechen’s brown body and Lukashka’s white one) as a backdrop against which to reveal their similarities (strong, muscular, beautiful bodies).^[89] By setting the narrative in 1852, Tolstoy puts the Cossacks in the same position of fighting for their independence and their communities as the Chechens. Since the Greben settlers epitomize the nation’s true self, their equation with the Chechens symbolically resolved one of the central conundrums of Russian national consciousness.
In On the Eve Turgenev argues that Russians do not know the meaning of love of country and have lost all sense of national identity. Resurgent Bulgaria and still-uniting Italy represent two different scenarios of struggle for national rebirth, equally attractive to the author and equally inapplicable to his own country, since the struggle for the Russian nation inevitably entailed struggle on behalf of the regime that had enslaved and oppressed the nation. The action of the novel begins in the summer of 1853. The work shows how movements for the independence of the Balkan nations began to emerge with the Russian army’s successes on the Danube at the very beginning of the Crimean War. The war brought the Bulgarians hope of emancipation from the Ottoman yoke, but demands by the Russian people only increased humility.^[90] This vicious circle tormented Turgenev – and, to be sure, not only him.^[91] The Cossacks symbolically breaks the circle, dramatizing an ideal scenario where Russians fight for their own community.
A note made while Tolstoy was at work on the novella concisely encapsulates the author’s intent: “The future of Russia lies in Cossackdom (kazachestvo): freedom, equality, and compulsory military service for all.”^[92] Lukashka at war with the Chechens is the prototype of the citizen-volunteer defending his community, the antithesis both of the standing army which lost the Crimean war and of the slave-recruit who fulfills a punitive function with respect to his own people. Still, while Tolstoy believes the Greben community holds the key to a renascent Russian nation, his vision of Russia’s future was not a fully-developed political blueprint. Complete plans for constructing the nation did not appear until after the Polish uprising the 1860s. Moreover, the note cited above is contradicted by Tolstoy’s views in subsequent decades. When the regime introduced universal military service (1874) and thus started down the path towards nationalizing the army (a path taken by many Western governments long before), Tolstoy underwent an evolution of worldview that placed him at the forefront of protests against compulsory military service on the grounds that the policy contradicted his teaching of nonresistance to violence. But for the time being, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, he accepted this idea and thus concurred with the general tendency of national-minded intellectuals to understand the collective self not as a repository of fixed traits, but as an object of care and transformations. Depicting the Cossack community as the bearer of qualities central to the nation’s sense of self, Tolstoy not only worships it, but uses Cossackdom to suggest the path for the nation’s possible reconstruction.
In the aftermath of the Crimean war, the idea of improving, correcting, and perfecting the national character and the community as a whole gained ascendancy. A. V. Nikitenko wrote in his diary: “Up to now we have shown ourselves to Europe only as a huge fist, threatening its civic life, rather than a great power intent on its own perfection and development.”^[93] Recalling the post-war epoch, S. M. Solov’ev insisted that almost all his contemporaries saw transformation as the only means of “recovering the nation’s energies.”^[94] Even some Slavophiles subscribed to this idea of recreating the nation, though, in keeping with romantic nationalism, they considered the Russian nation long since formed. In 1856, enumerating parallels with the Russia of his day, Iu. F. Samarin wrote enthusiastically about how in 1807, destroyed by Napoleon’s army, Prussia “awoke from drunken slumber.” The abolition of serfdom that followed, enacted by the “strong will” and “free mind” of the reforms’ initiators, allowed the Prussians to “unite as a nation.”^[95] This invocation of an intellectual force capable of transforming the national community is very characteristic of post-war rhetoric. All these quotations signal a major change in approaches to the nation: it is no longer taken for granted, but often understood as a thing to be made or (re)built.
David Bell identifies the awareness of a need to recreate the nation as the distinctive feature of nationalist ideologies, and traces how, propelled by institutional crisis, this idea emerged with particular strength in late eighteenth century France.^[96] Though, unlike in France, the political concept of nation remained underdeveloped in Russia, the post-Crimean War era witnessed a similar tendency to subject the national character to fundamental criticism and thus to foster a vision of the nation as a damaged entity in need of reconstruction. The weakening of censorship made it possible to publicly articulate plans for improvement. The fortunate coincidence of these two fundamental shifts – reappraisal of the national character and the beginning of a thaw – allowed the idea of the nation as a thing to be made to enter public discourse.
Tolstoy’s note cited above (“freedom, equality, and compulsory military service for all”) brings together the motto of the French revolution with a plan for universal military service. A spiritual heir of the Enlightenment well acquainted with Western instruments of national consolidation, Tolstoy never applied them directly to Russian soil. As an opponent of Westernization, modernization, and political efforts to change social life, he looked to Russia’s rich ethnic history for authentic ways to address urgent national issues. Like many European intellectuals, he saw in the extension of military duties to the entire populace a means of forging the nation. Like many Russian intellectuals, he inscribed his vision of the nation’s transformations – even those developed under the obvious influence of West European blueprints – within the authentic historical patrimony (in this case, the Cossack institution). This approach to vernacular symbolism marked a major innovation in the national discourse after the war. Intellectuals rediscovered or manufactured historical distinctiveness not only to celebrate the nation or to foster a belief in its uniqueness, but also to suggest authentic ways of transforming it. National self-image expressed through cultural myths served as a means for reviving a true national identity.
Although various ideological groups envisioned the development of the nation in different ways, after the humiliating defeat even right-wing intellectuals conceded the necessity of modernizing Russia; which meant that they, too, appealed to Western models, albeit cautiously. The necessity of freeing the serfs, expanding the educational system, developing technologies and means of communication, consolidating the “ruling nationality,” finding new bases for imperial unity, and reforming the army, inevitably turned Russians towards Western practices. But no matter what ideas came to them from the West, almost all conceptions sought to sustain a sense of national continuity by rhetorically linking borrowed ideas to ethnic symbols and historical myths. In articulating their program of change, even such Westernizers as Chicherin and Kavelin asserted: “we are a nation overwhelmingly attached to our traditions and customs.”^[97] Recovering a virtuous national past came to be understood as a means of introducing changes that would not destroy the nation’s authentic self.
The new approach to the nation as a political construct sharply changed the functions of pre-existing patriotic clichйs. We have seen that after the Crimean War critics of the regime utilized the memory of the Patriotic War to measure how the national community had deviated from its true self. Although the image of wide-open spaces never disappeared from the arsenal of Russian rhetoric, it did undergo significant transformation. During the Crimean War, Innokentii’s sermons, Nikitin’s verse, and Russkii invalid’s articles all reinvented the flat landscape of Russia, with its lack of natural barriers to enemy incursion, as its most reliable defense. Russia’s very boundlessness promised death to any invader and was presented as a repository of the country’s heroic past. Directly disputing this clichй, The Cossacks breaks the link between native landscape and Russia’s true self. Tolstoy turns the exotic Caucasian landscape into the home environment of the Greben Old Believers, evoking in them a sharp sense of belonging. Unlike most of the works that contribute to the Cossack literary myth, his Cossacks are cut off from Russia’s historical homeland and, therefore, from the main repository of the nation’s glorious past. But despite this fact they preserve the nation’s essence in its pure form, while it has been lost by other segments of the population. Tolstoy’s narrative thus not only contradicts the equation of Russianness with unbounded space, but, much more important, it undermines definitions of the collective self through reference to landscape, nature and history.
M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin called the metaphor into question from a different direction. If Tolstoy distances ideal Russianness from its conventional physical environment, for Shchedrin the traditional national landscape is treacherous and full of peril not for the invading enemy, but for Russians themselves. In Provincial Sketches (1856-1857), he first paints a magnificent image of “fields as far as the eye can see” which represents the antithesis of the empty life of bureaucrats – the author’s main target. But then the peaceful village idyll morphs into endless sleep, the poetic peasant becomes an obtuse slave, and the boundless expanse turns bloodthirsty: you “drown in the swamp of provincial life, which on the surface is so green that from a distance you could, perhaps, imagine it to be a lush meadow.”^[98] Recasting the celebration of conventional Russian nature as a funeral for its inhabitants, Saltykov-Shchedrin pointed to the path many writers would later take.^[99] Mel’gunov proposed the most radical reinterpretation of the metaphor by refusing to acknowledge Russia’s expansive territory at all. Without proper means of communication, he wrote, the Russian expanses are a fiction, because a person cannot comprehend them. As this last example shows, attempts to undermine the traditional understanding of national space stemmed from the sense that the nation needed to be reconstructed, not praised. An advocate of the development of railroads, Mel’gunov compared them to the blood vessels of an organism, asserting that Russia would remain fragmented until she was united by modern means of communication.^[100]
This shift in the function of a stable national symbol reflected a new approach to the collective self. Before the Crimean War, intellectuals defined the nation by reference to something pre-existing – something “eternal” or long since established, be it the physical environment, divine ordinance, historical achievement, or folk heritage. Within this conceptual framework, the nation was given and the agent of its fate was understood to be something independent of human will. After the war Russians looked at themselves through a new lens. They came to see the national community as an evolving entity that might deviate or be resurrected as a result of the people’s activity, and that therefore should be treated as an object of care and construction. Where the former approach fell entirely within the paradigm of romantic nationalism, with its tendency to extrapolate a country’s fate from its presumed national character, the latter cautiously adopted a vision of the nation as political construct, with its premise that nations are not given, but made. When a nation is to be (re)created, the agent of its fate is man – be it the state, the intelligentsia, or a particular class. This shift brought with it a new way of using inherited patriotic idioms. The physical environment, historical achievements, or Providence now became grist for discussions of social transformation, tools for rhetorical redefinition of the nation.