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 The humiliating defeat set the stage for new ways of articulating the nation that superseded and sometimes undermined the patriotic rhetoric of earlier years.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.