The Imperial Russian Noble Elite and Westernization: the Family Eizen-Fon- Shvartsenberg
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The Imperial Russian Noble Elite and Westernization: The Family Eizen-fon- Shvartsenberg Roger Bartlett (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) mong Gary Marker’s writings on Russia is a thoughtful essay on A“The Westernization of the Elite, 1725-1800.”1 He provides a vivid and wide-ranging picture of Russia’s higher social strata, primarily the nobility but also the higher clergy and literati, surveying their social, cultural, and political development and their relationships with rulers and the system. He concludes persuasively that the educated Russian elites “reacted favorably and optimistically to the changes that went on around them” in the eighteenth century: some had discontents, and some felt a disconnection between their “Europeanization” and “that which they considered to be native” that could amount to a crisis of identity. But “all of them, even the doubters, fundamentally embraced almost matter-of-factly the westward-looking orientation” introduced by Peter I, until the shock of the Decembrist revolt called this stance into question.2 Roger Bartlett 337 To this skillfully portrayed “abbreviated synopsis of Russia’s eighteenth-century elite”3 some additional brush-strokes may be added. One feature of the westernization process described so well by Professor Marker that deserves further consideration is the exposure of the elite to direct foreign influences. Successive eighteenth-century governments’ cultural policies compelled close attention to imported foreign forms, but equally important was direct contact with things foreign in travel, work, or study abroad. The impact of foreign expe- riences on Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in Poland, and still more on his son Peter I during the Grand Embassy, is very well known. The new education of eighteenth-century nobles, with whom we are primarily concerned here, was also calculated to confront them with the outside world and its ways of thinking and seeing. Many of the iconic figures of Russian eighteenth-century culture received formative education abroad, from Feofan Prokopovich (Krakow and Rome) and V. N. Tatishchev (Berlin and Dresden) to A. N. Radishchev (Leipzig). The protagonists of the first debates on new Russian literary forms brought to their arguments a formative personal exposure to foreign cultures, V. K. Trediakovskii his experience of France (Paris), M. V. Lomonosov his of Germany (Marburg and Freiburg) – not to mention the foreigner and international diplomat A. D. Kantemir. Direct foreign sources of education could also be found inside the Russian Empire: Petr Rychkov, a merchant’s son, historian of Orenburg, subsequently ennobled, learned his foreign languages and mental discipline in manufactures owned by foreigners, an education which gave him a good start in state service; while Andrei Bolotov’s formative educa- tional experiences came in the house of a Baltic German nobleman and in occupied Koenigsberg.4 And by the end of the century, more prosperous young nobles who did not attend one of the new educa- tional establishments that Professor Marker discusses5 received the domestic education celebrated—caricatured—by Pushkin in Evgenii Onegin, which also commonly involved face-to-face westernization: Sperva Madame za nim khodila, Potom Monsieur ee smenil. Rebenok byl rezov, no mil. 338 The Imperial Russian Noble Elite and Westernization Monsieur l’Abbé, frantsuz ubogii, Chtob ne izmuchilos’ ditia, Uchil ego vsemu shutia, Ne dokuchal moral’iu strogoi, Slegka za shalosti branil I v Letnii sad guliat’ vodil. At first Madame looked after him, Then she was replaced by Monsieur. The child was lively but charming. Monsieur l’Abbé, a decrepit Frenchman, So as not to exhaust the infant, Taught him everything with a joke, Didn’t exasperate him with strict morality, Ticked off his pranks mildly And took him walking in the Summer Garden.6 Onegin’s turn-of-the-century education, conducted by foreigners, produced a fashion-conscious “London dandy,” full of self-confidence and savoir vivre, especially in matters of the heart; able to discourse superficially but widely on topical matters; fluent in French and lightly acquainted with Latin literature. This was an elite education, proper to a member of the beau monde: “Society decided that he was clever and very sweet” (Svet reshil / Chto on umen i ochen’ mil).7 Fluency in French, a marker of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Russian elite culture, itself sharpened the interaction with European culture. Research is only now uncovering the extent to which Russian nobles of the period both spoke and wrote in French.8 Wealthy young Onegins also increasingly gained immediate experience of the Euro- pean world through variants of the Grand Tour. A second facet of direct interaction with things foreign was the rise in immigration. With the growth of the Moscow German Quarter after its relocation in 1652, the physical presence of foreigners had already made itself increasingly felt in the seventeenth century; but with Peter the trickle of immigrants became a flood, and foreigners (including such as Onegin’s later tutors) embedded themselves in many aspects of Russian life. In particular, foreigners made up 26 percent of the Petrine officer corps, 40 percent in the infantry.9 In the early years, Roger Bartlett 339 many incomers came from Kiev and what is now Ukraine—something which Professor Marker has also investigated. But the greatest impact over time came from other parts of Europe. Erich Amburger provided an approximate analysis of natives and foreigners among the some twenty-nine hundred individual officials named in his monumental study of the imperial state apparatus of administration (ca. 1700-1917).10 After certain exclusions, his data gave 1758 “natives” (Great, White, Little Russians/Ukrainians) and 1079 “non-Russians,” of whom 914 had West European names. Excluding 355 (354?) Baltic Germans, the remaining 560 “West-Europeans” consisted of 122 born Orthodox, suggesting assimilation despite foreign ancestry, 225 officials born abroad, and 213 born in Russia to parents of non-Orthodox confes- sions. Thus a significant proportion of Imperial Russia’s higher officials were immigrants or their offspring. In due course most of these incomers merged into the Russian nobility, which (like many others) was extremely mixed in its ethnic origins and composition.11 Recent decades have seen great interest among both Russian and European scholars in foreign elements in Imperial—especially eighteenth-century—Russian society: research in this area has become a well-resourced international industry.12 A particular feature of this work is its determinedly national orientation: Britons have primarily studied Britons, Germans have studied Germans, and French have studied French. The adventures and achievements of the different national groups are all valid in their own right, but this approach isolates and ghettoizes its subjects; a fresh examination of the place of foreign elements as a whole in Imperial Russia is overdue. A third factor often understated in accounts of the westernization of Russia’s elites is the formative significance of state service. Russia had long been a service state, but Peter I greatly increased the service burden on all estates, in particular requiring the nobility to become educated and, ideally, to administer the country in a rational way conforming to foreign models of law.13 The new Petrine system of sena- torial government, and the continually rising level of education demanded of its servitors, increased the “systematization of Russian government,” in George Yaney’s phrase; it compelled the elite to adopt 340 The Imperial Russian Noble Elite and Westernization more systematic ways of thought and standards of knowledge that approximated those of modern society elsewhere in Europe. These in turn led on both to the nineteenth-century bureaucratization of government and to the independence of mind that increasingly charac- terized significant parts of the elite.14 This was the case not only in civil service, but also in the military, generally more prestigious and attrac- tive to men of talent—as one recent author puts it, “officers’ epaulettes attracted the most capably active and gifted part of the Imperial Russian nobility like a magnet.”15 Military service encouraged both specialist knowledge and systematic behavior. In its structure and social relations the imperial army reflected the existing features of Russian society, but it was also a sphere of technical modernization (and especially in such branches as artillery and engineering). The processes that culminated on December 14, 1825, took place primarily among military men: here the crisis of identity was most acute, and foreign experiences during the Napoleonic period played a significant role in the radicalization of many Decembrists.16 Professor Marker ends his investigation in 1800. By then the funda- mental processes of change involved in westernization were indeed largely complete. The imperial noble elite (especially the wealthy and high-ranking nobility most exposed to these processes) had by now completely adopted European forms of material and personal culture, standards of knowledge and education, and arts and sciences, to the point where they were becoming contributors as well as consumers. At the same time, Russian national consciousness had been developing rapidly, although still intertwined with western influences: as internal- ization of western norms grew, so did critical distance from them. Karamzin for example, the well-educated and linguistically competent “Russian Traveler,” was able in 1789-90 to hold his own as a Russian on visits to the great and good of Western Europe. On his return he wrote up his experiences in a bestseller whose sentimental mode was influ- enced by Laurence Sterne,17 but his later literary performances increasingly stressed the dignity and worth of things Russian. The Napoleonic Wars, and especially 1812, hastened this process. By 1825 it was still more advanced, while the growing sense of difference between Roger Bartlett 341 Russia and Europe could express itself in both liberal and conservative terms.