By Fables Alone A rs rossicA series editor – dAvid M. B etheA (U niversity of W isconsin – MAdison ) By Fables Alone Literature and State Ideology in Late-Eighteenth — Early-Nineteenth-Century Russia ANDREI ZORIN translations by Marcus C. Levitt with Nicole Monnier and Daniel Schlaffy BOSTON / 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress. The book is supported by Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation (translation program TRANSCRIPT). Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-61811-346-7 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-61811-357-3 (electronic) Book design by Ivan Grave On the cover: “Allegory of Catherine’s Victory over the Turks” (1772), by Stefano Torelli Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th , 201 7 , this book will be subject to a CC - BY - NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by - nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The A ndrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative , which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open Published b y Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com In memory of Genrietta Grigorievna Zorina List of Illustrations ix From the Author / Acknowledgements xi Introduction: Literature and Ideology Translated by Nicole Monnier 1 1. Russians as Greeks: Catherine II’s “Greek Project” and the Russian Ode of the 1760s–70s 24 2. The Image of the Enemy: V. P. Petrov’s “Ode on the Conclusion of Peace with the Ottoman Porte” and the Emergence of the Mythology of a Global Conspiracy against Russia 61 3. Eden in Taurus: The “Crimean Myth” in Russian Culture of the 1780s–90s 92 4. Eden in the Tauride Palace: Potemkin’s Last Project 121 5. The People’s War: The Time of Troubles in Russian Literature, 1806–1807 155 6. Enemy of the People: M. M. Speranskii’s Fall and the Mythology of Treason in Social and Literary Consciousness, 1809–1812 185 7. War and Quasi Peace: The Character and Goal of the War in 1812–1814 in the Interpretation of A. S. Shishkov and Archimandrite Filaret 232 8. Holy Alliances: V. A. Zhukovskii’s Epistle “To Emperor Alexander” and Christian Universalism 258 9. “Star of the East”: The Holy Alliance and European Mysticism Translation by Daniel Schlaffy 288 10. The Cherished Triad: S. S. Uvarov’s Memorandum of 1832 and the Development of the Doctrine “Orthodoxy—Autocracy—Nationality” 325 Works Cited 359 Index 399 Contents List of Illustrations Figure 1 Medal commemorating the birth of Grand Prince Konstantin Pavlovich (1779).....................................................................25 Figure 2 “Allegory of the Victory of Chesme” (1771) by Theodorus de Roode. Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. ......................................................................51 Figure 3 “Portrait of the Grand Princes Alexander Pavlovich and Konstantin Pavlovich” (c. 1781) by Richard Brompton.....................59 Figure 4 “A Critical Map” (1791) – an allegory of the “balance of power.”.................................................................................69 Figure 5 Portrait of V. P. Petrov. ..............................................................................78 Figure 6 An English caricature of the Chevalier d’Éon exposing him “as a Woman- Freemason.” ......................................................................89 Figure 7 “Catherine II on a Journey across Russia in 1787” (1790) by Jean-Jacques Avril the Elder, based on a drawing by Ferdinand de Meys. State Historical Museum, Moscow. .....................106 Figure 8 “View of Tauride” by V. P. Petrov (1791). Saratov State Art Museum, Saratov. ..................................................................................................112 Figure 9 Portrait of G. A. Potemkin-Tavricheskii by Johann-Baptist von Lampi the Elder (c. 1790). Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. ......................123 Figure 10 and 11 Catherine II the Legislatress (1789) by F. I. Shubin. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Below – The winter garden of the Tauride Palace (1792) by F. D. Danilov. .........................132 Figure 12 First proposal for a monument to Minin and Pozharskii (1804-1807) by I. P. Martos. .................................................................158 Figure 13 Minin summons Prince Pozharskii to save the Fatherland (1800’s) by G. I. Ugriumov ................................................................................168 Figure 14 Proposal for a monument to Minin and Pozharskii (1809) by I. P. Martos . .....................................................................................177 x List of Illustrations x Figure 15 Portrait of Count M. M. Speranskii; gravure from the original by I. A. Ivanov. .....................................................................................186 Figure 16 Portrait of F. V. Rostopchin. Gravure of T. Meyer after the original by Ernst Gebauer ......................................................205 Figure 17 Portrait of Grand Princess Ekaterina Pavlovna (1810’s). Gravure by Andre Joseph Mecou after the original by Jean-Henri Benner. .....218 Figure 18 Throwing French actresses out of Moscow (1812). Caricature by A. G. Venetsianov. ..........................................................................227 Figure 19 Variants for a medallion commemorating the home guard by A. N. Olenin....................................................................................234 Figure 20 Portrait of A. S. Shishkov. Lithograph by P. F. Borel’ after the painting by George Dawe. ...................................................243 Figure 21 Portrait of Archimandrite Filaret (Drozdov). Gravure by J. Brian. ...........................................................................................249 Figure 22 Medallion commemorating the expulsion of the enemy from Russia in 1812 by A. N. Olenin. ...........................................................255 Figure 23 Prayer of Thanksgiving in Paris, 1814. Gravure by I. V. Cheskii. ............267 Figure 24 Portrait of V. A. Zhukovskii. Gravure by A. A. Florov from the original by P. F. Sokolov. ......................................................................271 Figure 25 Medallion commemorating the Triple Alliance by A. N. Olenin. .......280 Figure 26 Portrait of Baroness von Krüdener. Gravure by J. Pfenninger. .............290 Figure 27 Mother of God (1814-1815). Icon based on a passage from Revelations by V. L. Borovikovskii. ...............................................305 Figure 28 The manifesto of December 25, 1815. ................................................307 Figure 29 Portrait of S. S. Uvarov. Lithograph by M. Mukhin................................327 Figure 30 Portrait of Karl Freiherr vom Stein. Sketch by S. S. Uvarov. ..................341 Figure 31 Monument to Ivan Susanin by V. I. Demut-Malinovskii (1838). Drawing by V. M. Vasnetsov. ...............................................................349 From the Author / Acknowledgements T his book was begun in 1993 while I was a fellow at the Russian Research Center (now the Davis Center) at Harvard University. During 1996- 1998 this project was underwritten by the Research Support Scheme of the “Open Society” Institute (the Soros Fund), and in 1999 by the “Pushkinist” Program of the Moscow branch of the same Institute. The book was initially published in 2001 and the second edition from which the translation was made appeared in 2004. Last decade witnessed a lot of political changes that suggest new perspectives on the history of Russian Imperial ideology. For example, the English translation is appearing shortly after the annexation of Crimea by Russian Federation and the revival of nearly forgotten concept of Novorossia – the historical background of these developments is discussed in Chapter three. A lot of new works on the history of Russian state Ideology have also appeared. However, I decided not to make changes and additions in the text. Starting to correct it would mean either using the advantages of the hindsight to look cleverer that I really was at the end of the previous century, or writing a new book on the same topic. Neither seem an attractive option. In 1990-s several chapters of the current book were published in the journal Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, some were given as university lectures, public talks, and conference presentations. It is not possible to name the dozens of colleagues who have been of tremendous help with their advice, questions and criticisms, but I would nevertheless like to express gratitude to: xii From the Author / Acknowledgements xii Mikhail Bezrodnii, Laura Engelstein, Konstantin Lappo-Danilevskii, Ekaterina Liamina, Maria Maiofis, Iurii Mann, Oleg Proskurin, Konstantin Rogov, and Andreas Schönle. Andrei Kurilkin who was the editor of the Russian edition made productive suggestions and helped preparing the bibliographical appa- ratus and choice of illustrations. I owe eternal gratitude to late Victor Zhivov. For the possibility to present the book to the English speaking audience I want to thank the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and Irina Prokhorova who in her different roles and functions supports and encourages my research for twenty years already, Kira and Igor Nemirovsky for their help and enthusiasm, Marcus Levitt for his careful and painstaking translation and Melissa Miller for meticu- lous editing of the English version. I would not have been able to complete this work without the support of my family, which supported me with their unfailing support, their patience, and their impatience. For my development both as a man and a professional I am indebted to my mother Genrietta Grigorievna Zorina (1923–1980). I dedicate this book to her memory, in my endless and hopeless desire to be worthy of her expectations. Introduction Literature and Ideology Translated by Nicole Monnier* 1 “H abent sua fata verba [words have their own fate], though some words have a fate more bizarre than others. The word ‘ideology’ sets, however, a record which is difficult to beat. Finding a common denominator to the sharply different historical uses of the term, or a transformative logic productive of its successive avatars, is a notoriously tall order,” wrote the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman in his recent book (1999, 109). Ever since the late eighteenth century, when Antoine Louis Claude Destutt first put forward the idea of ideology as the science concerning the formation of ideas and human knowledge, innumerable philosophers, thinkers, historians and politicians have proposed their own definitions of this category. In his classic Ideology and Utopia of 1929, Karl Mannheim complained that “we do not as yet possess an adequate historical treatment of the development of the concept of ideology, to say nothing of a sociological history of the many variations in its meanings” (Mannheim 1936, 53–54). Since then circumstances have gone to the other extreme, and one is more likely to be troubled by the superabundance of works on the subject * First published in History and Theory 1 (40) (2001): 57-73. 2 Introduction 2 (cf. the works of Larraín 1979; Kendall 1981; Thompson 1984; Ricœur 1986; Eagleton 1994; etc.; for the latest works, see Bauman’s short essay “Ideology in the Postmodern World,” Bauman 1999, 109–130). The author of one of the latest of these surveys, the English Marxist Terry Eagleton, begins his book with a list of sixteen definitions of ideology taken almost at random from studies of recent years: (a) the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life; (b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; (c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; (d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; (e) systematically distorted communications; (f) that which offers a position for a subject; (g) forms of thought motivated by social interests; (h) identity thinking; (i) socially necessary illusion; (j) the conjuncture of discourse and power; (k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of the world; (l) action-oriented sets of beliefs; (m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality; (n) semiotic closure; (o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their rela- tions to a social structure; (p) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality. (Eagleton 1994, 1–2) A significant majority of these formulations are directly or indirectly connected to Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, with its notion of ideology as a camera obscura where “men and their circumstances appear upside-down,” and the “ruling ideas are nothing less than the ideal expression of the prevailing material relations ... and thus an expression of those very relations which make that class the ruling one” (Marx and Engels III, 25, 45–46). This selection of definitions not only reflects Eagleton’s party affiliations, but also the actual state of scholar- ship. The issue of ideology has been developed most actively either within a Marxist framework, or, in the extreme case, in an attempt to get beyond it. 3 Introduction 3 Interpreting ideology as a “camera obscura” left open the question of the theoretical status of Marxism itself. One possible solution was partly noted by Marxists of the start of the twentieth century, including Lenin; it was developed by Lukács in his book History and Class Consciousness (1922), and despite the harsh criticism of this work in the party press, was accepted by official Soviet philosophy. Reviving the Hegelian substratum of Marxism, Lukács saw in the history of class consciousness a kind of materialist analogue for the self-consciousness of the absolute spirit. Insofar as the proletariat’s class interests correspond to the logic of the historical process, the contradiction between science and ideology is removed and proletariat ideology coincides with objective truth (see Lukács 1971). Another, opposite approach sees ideology as compromised, in Engels’s expression, as “false consciousness” (Marx and Engels XXXIX, 82; cf. Mannheim 1994, 66–69), contrasting this to scientific Marxist sociology. Within the Marxist tradition the most radical adherent of this view was the French philos- opher Louis Althusser, who saw ideology as a type of subjectivity that could be eliminated from thought only by means of objective scientific analysis (Althusser 1971; cf. Ricœur 1984, 120–132; Eagleton 1991, 137–154). On the other hand, K. Mannheim applied the critical method worked out by Marxism to his own gnoseological premises: For the Marxist doctrine it is obvious that behind every theory stand aspects of vision that belong to a definite collective. This phenomenon—thought, conditioned by social and life interests—is what Marx called ideology. Here, as often happens during the course of political struggle, a very important discovery was made, which ... should be brought to its logical conclusion . ... First of all, it is easy to be convinced that a thinker of the socialist-communist tendency will only see elements of ideology in his opponent’s thinking, while his own thinking appears to him to be free of any manifestations of ideology. From a sociological perspective there is no basis not to extend to Marxism its own discovery. (Mannheim 1994, 108) Mannheim made a distinction between a “particular” ideology, defined as the actual “content” or programmatic component of the pronouncements made by one’s political opponent, and a “total” ideology embracing the worldview of that opponent, including his categorical apparatus. Accordingly, any reference 4 Introduction 4 to the socially conditioned character of a “particular” ideology would more or less constitute a critical judgment, while similar reference to a “total ideology” would be considered standard scholarly practice: The notion of partial ideology follows from the fact that this or another interest serves to falsify and cover up the truth, [while] the notion of total ideology is based on the opinion that certain points of view, methods and aspects of observation correspond to certain social positions. Here too an analysis of interests is applied, not in order to reveal casual determinants but to characterize the structures of social being. (Ibid., 58) It is precisely in terms of the latter that Mannheim worked out his concept of sociology of knowledge as a historical discipline that examines ideological prac- tices in their social context without reference to contemporary political judgments. Yet no matter how rich and developed the procedure espoused by Mannheim for an “anti-ideological hygiene,” the intellectual procedure itself does not allow one to move beyond the fatal question of the sociologist’s own condi- tionality and the conditionality of his analysis, a question Geertz called “Mannheim’s paradox.” With the inevitable logic of a boomerang, the polemical device developed by post-Marxist sociology for the criticism of its teachers only undermines its own foundations. In postwar years the inescapable question “And who are you then?” more often sounded from their liberal-leaning opponents, from sociolo- gists and political scientists who tended to associate the concept of ideology with communistic or fascist totalitarian doctrines while viewing their own propositions as de-ideologized and grounded either in universal values or in the propositions of a positive science. 1 The American sociologist Geertz analyzed and rejected the entire complex of Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to sociology in his article “Ideology as a Cultural System,” which was included in his collection The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz 1973, 193–233; Geertz 1998). Geertz 1 Mannheim differentiated between ideology that legitimizes the existing social order on the basis of values transcendental to it and a utopia that would destroy this order through similar values while projecting a different social construction. Working from this distinction but from the perspective of a different philosophical tradition, Paul Ricœur suggested that it was precisely the conscious acceptance of utopia that reflectively creates a pure position for the critique of ideology (see Ricœur 1984, 172). We will consider “utopian” thinking as defined by Mannheim and Ricœur as one of many varieties of the ideological. 5 Introduction 5 grouped all of these various wide-ranging approaches to the analysis of ideology under the category of “interest theory”: “The fundamentals of the interest theory are too well known to need review; developed to perfection of a sort by the Marxist tradition, they are now standard intellectual equipment of the man-in-the-street, who is only too aware that in political argumenta- tion it all comes down to whose ox is gored” (Geertz 1998, 13). In the final analysis, it is this commonsensical, man-on-the-street aspect of interest theory that constitutes at once its strength and weakness. According to Geertz: The battlefield image of society as a clash of interests thinly disguised as a clash of principles turns attention away from the role that ideologies play in defining (or obscuring) social categories, stabilizing (or upsetting) social norms, strengthening (or weakening) social consensus, relieving (or exacer- bating) social tensions . ... The intensity of interest theory is ... but the reward of its narrowness. (Ibid., 13–14) The emphasis within interest theory on “post-Marxist common sense” satis- fies him as little as the post-Freudian cliché of “strain theory” (as Geertz calls the hypothesis according to which social conflicts within a destabilized society find their outlet in ideology). 2 In his opinion, “both interest theory and strain theory go directly from source analysis to consequence analysis without ever seriously examining ideologies as systems of interacting symbols, as patterns of inter-working meanings” (ibid., 17). It is precisely this lacuna between source and consequence that is inaccessible to traditional theoretical models of ideology and which Geertz attempts to fill with what he calls “the semiotic approach to culture” (Geertz 1973, 5, 24–30). 2 For the Russian reader this last phrase immediately conjures up very specific associations. Geertz’s most famous works were written in the very same years 2 In the second half of the 1960s, Althusser attempted to introduce the theoretical elabora- tions of Freud and Lacan into the Marxist approach to ideology. According to Althusser, in serving as the basic means for the reproduction of existing industrial relations, ideology is a transhistorical phenomenon that was also located in the sphere of the “social subcon- scious” (see Althusser 1971). On the further development of this tradition, see Jameson 1981; Žižek 1999). 6 Introduction 6 that saw the formation in the USSR of the so-called Tartu-Moscow school, a period now canonized as the Golden Age of Russian scholarship in the humanities. By 1973, when Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures —a collec- tion of essays which included in the form of an introductory chapter the first publication of “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” a general account of the theoretical bases of his anthropology—was published, six issues of the Tartu-Moscow School’s own Studies in Symbolic Systems [Trudy po znakovym sistemam] had already appeared. One cannot rule out the possibility of Geertz’s familiarity with the work of Lotman and his associates, translations of which had begun to appear in the West in the late 1960s; it is more likely, however, that the scholarship of the noted (although as yet not especially well-known) American anthropolo- gist might have been in the field of vision of the Soviet semioticians. Nonetheless, there is little need to talk of any serious mutual influence. The “Geertzian” and “Lotmanesque” models of the semiotics of culture were created independently of each other and on the bases of different academic traditions—a fact that makes the points of convergence and divergence between them all the more interesting. The anti-structuralist orientation of The Interpretation of Cultures is not simply transparent but clearly stated. Geertz included in Interpretation his 1967 review of Levi-Strauss’s most important works, an essay that is at once both deeply respectful yet sharply polemical. Geertz summarizes Levi- Strauss’s methodology in the following manner: “Binary opposition—that dialectical chasm between plus and minus which computer technology has rendered the lingua franca of modem science—forms the basis of savage thought as it does of language. And indeed it is this that makes them essen- tially variant forms of the same thing: communications systems” (ibid., 354). Steadfastly hostile to the panlinguistic quality of structural ethnography and its striving toward constants and deep structures, Geertz turns the French scholar’s own scientific arsenal against its author, seeing in Levi-Strauss’s anthropology a possible realization of a unitary deep structure, the “universal rationalism of the French Enlightenment.” “Like Rousseau, Levi-Strauss’s search is not after all for men, whom he doesn’t much care for, but for Man, with whom he is enthralled,” comments Geertz (ibid., 356). Geertz himself is categorically opposed to the search for 7 Introduction 7 universality, instead replacing the revelation of deep structures with “thick description.” In his understanding of man as a “cultural artifact” (ibid., 51), Geertz on the whole avoids generalizing uses of the term “culture,” which he prefers to use in its plural form or to set it off with the article “a” or “the.” In this way each of the cultures he investigates will contain within it its own anthro- pological dimension. The very possibility of the construction of a single theory of culture calls forth a certain distrust; according to Geertz, any theoretical sharpening of one’s scholarly instruments should serve for a more subtle and adequate interpretation of individual cases: coherence cannot be the major test of validity for a cultural description. Cultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence, else we would not call them systems; and, by observation, they normally have a great deal more. But there is nothing so coherent as a paranoid’s delusion or a swindler’s story. The force of our interpretations cannot rest, as they are now so often made to do, on the tightness with which they hold together, or the assurance with which they are argued. (Ibid., 17–18) It goes without saying just how distant this approach is from the scientifically minded optimism of the Tartu and Moscow semioticians, for whom Levi- Strauss remained (at least, in terms of methodology) an unshakable authority, and for whom the impulse towards a total scientific synthesis was a symbol of faith of a kind. It should be mentioned that as a whole, the philosophical anthropology of the French Enlightenment and especially that of Rousseau was especially meaningful for Lotman, who spent a lifetime studying the legacy of that epoch. It was not coincidental that at the same time that Geertz was directing his own semiotics against structuralism, the research of the Tartu-Moscow school continued to be referred to as “structural-semiotic.” However, one cannot juxtapose these two semiotic approaches without making certain important reservations. Above all, the intellectual continuum articulated in the conjunction “structural-semiotic” also contains within it, albeit somewhat indistinctly, two different methodological poles. One can (somewhat simplistically) view the evolution of Lotman himself from his Lectures in Structural Poetics to his study of the semiophere and his interest in the philosophical ideas of Ilya Prigogine in terms of his movement from one pole to another. Yet the immense ideological pressure to which the Tartu-Moscow