The readings for this week brought me three distinct (but maybe vaguely connected) thoughts that I wanted to post about. Hence, the various, perhaps odd, pictures above of Dostoevsky, the Tver Historical Museum established in 1866, and Adam Olearius (1603 -1671) a German scholar, mathematician, geographer and librarian, who traveled in Muscovy and consequently wrote very unflattering things about Russian people, and state.
First, lets start with the ever lovely Fyodor Dostoevsky. A lover of writing and gambling and hater of Germans and jewish people, his Brothers Karamazov was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Why bring this up? Wortman in the selections we read for class today goes at lengths to explore the “scenario” of domesticity. (For discussion of this see 166-167.). He describes the importance for the public display of affection for this son, with the family idyll being distributed for a broad audience outside the court. Additionally, Wortman writes, “To violate the principle of autocracy became tantamount to a biblical sin against the father, while violation of family morality would throw into doubt the moral foundations of autocratic rule.” (166). Wortman’s book for all its pluses focuses on the distribution of this image and scenario but not its reception in the broader arena of ideas and by the wider public. This is not his goal after all, and it would be unfair to fault him for this. However, it is interesting to note how this scenario, and the validity (worth?) of this father son relationship was questioned by Dostoevsky, who can be seen as ultimately reaffirming it. Typically, identified as a “conservative” thinker for his support of the existing gov’t / monarchy, Dos’s book puts forth the question: is it ever moral / just for a son to kill his father, especially if that father is an evil man? The father in the book rapes a “holy fool” (a figure of innocence and spirituality among other things) in russian culture / literature. He is murdered by one of his sons (for a different reason). Interestingly, the intellectual Ivan who is must troubled by the moral questions of murder, who wavers between what is correct and permissible and what is not, is the most interesting character in the book, with the goody two shoes Alyosha rather boring in contrast.
2nd, I have a picture of the Tver historical museum because the readings for this week rightly stressed the more authoritarian aspects of Nicholas I’s gov’t and his pretensions to absolute power and so one. However, neglected in broader historiography at large is the importance of the 1830s provincial reforms that he enacted! It was these provincial reforms that allowed for the creation of statistical committees and newspapers in European Russia, and it is from these knowledge gathering projects that provincial museums ultimately came from. Catherine Evtuhov describes the neglect of these reforms in her Portrait of a Russian Province.
3rd, Will noted the continuity of the Russophobic writings from the Marquis to today. I want to point that Marquis de Custine’s writings also have a continuity with the already established tradition of othering Russia in Western European writings. Iurri Krizhanich, a Croatian pan-Slavist Catholic missionary who lived in the 17th century, noted a derogatory trend occurring in writings by Western Europeans concerning Russians in his Politika published in 1666:
In short, when these authors write anything about Russia or any other Slavic people they write not history, but biting satire. They exaggerate our vices, inadequacies, and natural shortcomings, and wherever there is no sin to be found, they invent one. They also write false histories.
One writer specifically mentioned and condemned is Adam Olearius, who, in a 1647 publication, declared that Russians were “cruel and fit only for slavery.” This is a statement not so different from the Marquis saying that the Muscovites have a “military habit of submission” (98). It is interesting to note how widespread this tradition of was as well. In the Victor Hugo’s Life of a Condemned Man (published 1829), a work ostensibly about attacking the practice of capital punishment, he also takes time to briefly refer to, and attack, Russia by declaring that the state occupies the lowest rungs of the “ladder of civilization.”