Schönle, Andreas Zorin, Andrei Evstratov, Alexei The Europeanized Elite in Russia 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 571 otherwise the volume is well produced, and it represents a useful and welcome addition to the literature on the Enlightenment in Europe and on social and cultural relations in early-modern Livonia. Ludlow Roger Bartlett Schönle, Andreas; Zorin, Andrei and Evstratov, Alexei (eds). The Europeanized Elite in Russia 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2016. xi + 371 pp. Illustrations. Archival sources. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 (paperback). Both an anthology of scholarly articles and an elaborately planned collective monograph, the book focuses on what happened in eighteenth-century Russia ‘when the values and attitudes imposed by [government] decree became interiorized and began to affect the mental world of the elite’ (p. 5). The authors posit that the process of Russian elite self-fashioning was ‘tortuous’ (p. 13), complex because not entirely scripted, and therefore to some degree improvisational and free. The book’s body consists of seven two-part ‘chapters’, with each of the parts constituting a self-standing monographic article on an individual or groups whose attitudes pointed to the range of choices visualized by the Europeanized elite. The first chapter treats two ideal psychological traits of the Europeanized elite — zeal and curiosity. Igor Fedyukin’s article on ‘zealous servicemen’ in the Russian army shows that, whereas Peter I assumed that good government must restrain the passions of ‘vile’ officials, his successors preferred to encourage ambitious nobles to serve zealously. Alexander Iosad’s article shows how Peter I’s emphasis on curiosity as a prerequisite for understanding nature influenced Russian nobles such as Vasilii Nashchokin; but Iosad also suggests that, after 1725, natural philosophers laid more importance on rational classification as the key to scientific knowledge. The second chapter analyses gender roles in marriage. Alexei Evstratov’s article looks at the scandalous divorce of Alexander Stroganov from his wife Anna (née Vorontsova) in 1764. Evstratov identifies theatrical elements in the public behaviour of Stroganov, who presented himself to friends as cuckolded husband (probably on the model of Boccacio’s ‘happy bourgeois’ from the Decameron) and ennobled commoner (after Molière’s George Dandin). Michelle Lamarche Marrese’s article treats the letters of Ekaterina Rumiantseva and Dar´ia Saltykova as ‘self-conscious performances of marriage and motherhood’ (p. 93). According to Marrese, Rumiantseva was SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 572 a traditionalist, who in her husband’s absence managed his estate and raised her children; Saltykova, who managed an estate, raised children and pursued life in the Petersburg court, was more overtly Europeanized; yet both women ‘closely resembled’ elite women elsewhere in Europe in the way they expressed themselves in correspondence (p. 108). In chapter three, which analyses aspects of Russia’s domestic economy, Elena Korchmina proposes that adoption of rational accounting practices was a method of self-fashioning by which wealthy nobles struggled to control their financial situations but also ‘to make sense of the very concept of personal income’ (p. 127). Meanwhile, Andreas Schönle explores the contradictions of rational estate design as practised by Ivan Bariatinskii. Schönle sees the psychology of the landowning nobility as a ‘negotiation between various value systems’ — moral, economic and aesthetic — rather than as a fixed mentality, as Michel Confino once supposed. In Schönle’s telling, Europeanization meant to Bariatinskii ‘a lifestyle, not a political program’ (p. 152). Chapter four focuses on military officers off the battlefield. Stanislav Andriainen’s article on the peacetime-officer corps describes the traditional system for procuring food, purchasing horses and staging parades, but also mentions the ‘Europeanizing ideology’ of soldierly professionalism (p. 175), about which officers learned in military journals. Mikhail Velizhev treats the unpublished diary and letters of Vasilii Viazemskii from 1803 to 1812 as ‘a laboratory of Europeanization’, in which Viazemskii presented himself as a member of the enlightened European elite but distanced himself from that very self-description in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Velizhev’s point is that Viazemskii’s worldview was full of ‘contradictions, aporias, and tensions among the many meanings of concepts used in Russian and European languages’ (p. 194), and therefore that the ‘Europe’ interiorized by Russian officers lacked coherence. Chapter five discusses the emotional culture...