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.^[1] “His blood has soaked into the heart of every Russian,” thus Russkii invalid explained the mass heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol.^[2] 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 Though neo-classical style was out of date by the mid-nineteenth century, Russians clung to it for reasons of their own.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,^[3] 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.”^[4]
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.^[5] 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.^[6] 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.”^[7] 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.^[8] 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.”^[9] 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.^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[12]
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.”^[13] 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.”^[14]
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.^[15] The motifs of unique Russian bravery (in details developed in “The Raid” and “Sevastopol in December”)^[16] 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.^[17]
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.”^[18] Like Nikitin and many others, Tolstoy interwove elements of official rhetoric with a definition of the Russian self through folklore and authentic national traditions.^[19] 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.^[20] 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.”^[21]
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,^[22] 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.”^[23] 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.”^[24] 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.^[25] 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.”^[26] 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;^[27] and the dominant position of women in domestic life.^[28] If in “The Woodfelling” (1855) Tolstoy tends to attribute true courage only to Russians, contrasting them with peoples of the East,^[29] 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,”^[30] ascribes to them elements of central Russian dialects, and makes them the bearers of a common Russian folk tradition.^[31] As a result, the Greben community simultaneously represents both the Russian self and its other.^[32] 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!”^[33] 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.”^[34] 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.”^[35] 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.”^[36] 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.^[37]
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.”^[38] 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.^[39] 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.^[40] 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.^[41] 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.^[42] 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.^[43] 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).^[44] 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.^[45] This vicious circle tormented Turgenev – and, to be sure, not only him.^[46] 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.”^[47] 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.”^[48] 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.”^[49] 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.”^[50] 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.^[51] 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.”^[52] 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.”^[53] Recasting the celebration of conventional Russian nature as a funeral for its inhabitants, Saltykov-Shchedrin pointed to the path many writers would later take.^[54] 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.^[55]
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.