State Power, Social Life, and Russian Nobles in the 18th Century

Abstract

State Power, Social Life, and Russian Nobles in the 18th Century Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter (bio) Ol´ga Glagoleva and Ingrid Shirle (Schierle), eds., Kul´tura i byt dvorianstva v provintsial´noi Rossii XVIII veka (The Culture and Everyday Life of 18th-Century Provincial Gentry), vols. 1–3. 556 + 567 + 598 pp., illus. Moscow: Politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2021. ISBN-13 978-5824324204. Andreas Schönle and Andrei Zorin, On the Periphery of Europe, 1762–1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite. xii + 242 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-0875807850. $39.00. The Europeanized elite, the Russian nobility, the provincial nobility, the court nobility, elite and lesser nobles, hereditary and service nobles, landowning and landless nobles, educated society (obshchestvo or publika), and "people of various ranks" (raznochintsy)—these familiar terms illustrate the multiplicity of social realities that defined Russia's educated and service classes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians and literary scholars long have understood that the Russian elite cannot be equated solely with the service and/or landowning nobilities. Merchants and educated non-noble servicemen, though bounded by institutions such as serfdom and the Petrine Table of Ranks, also aspired to the legal and cultural status of hereditary noble. Whatever the economic circumstances and cultural accretions attained by upwardly mobile individuals, hereditary nobility writ large remained the primary embodiment of the state-initiated project of Europeanization. The significant number of unrequited claimants to noble status illustrates the dynamics of aspiration: 560 out of 1,000 petitioners seeking to enter military service with noble rights in 1820; 3,215 petitioners seeking confirmation of noble status by the Ministry of Justice in 1845 (compared to 3,332 who were [End Page 381] confirmed); and 3,320 in 1846 (compared to 3,013 confirmed).1 Seasoned readers of Russian history readily associate these sociocultural ambiguities with the formation of the all-class (or above-class) Russian intelligentsia. But how can specialists convey the significance of such details to a broader reading public? ________ How best to describe the process of Europeanization for "a broadly educated reader" is precisely the task embraced by Andreas Schönle and Andrei Zorin in their elegant work of synthesis, On the Periphery of Europe, the second volume in a project devoted to the creation of a Europeanized Russian elite.2 Although in the introduction the authors define the elite with reference to the "elitist identity" of individuals—whether or not an individual defined himself or herself "as part of the 'cream' of the country and acted accordingly" (5)—the book is really about a subsection of nobles who consciously sought to become European, pursued moral transformation and autonomy through literary activities, and interiorized the "requirement to act on behalf of the public good and rise above their sole private interest" (5). In post-Petrine Russia, the authors argue, and continuing until the Decembrist Rebellion of 1825, service to the monarch for the common good could not be disentangled from moral self-development or intentional Europeanization. Over time, and especially after the 1762 emancipation from obligatory service, the top-down cultural revolution of Peter the Great gave way to an internalized emotional identification with the monarch, the court, and the empire's greatness in war, diplomacy, education, and culture. As the process of Europeanization unfolded, the elite—defined in cultural terms rather than with reference to socioeconomic or political structures—had to navigate a complicated emotional space defined by a strong service ethos, attachment to the monarch and court, the association of progress with integration into Europe, pride in Russianness and in Russia's cultural achievements, and a sense of individuality and moral autonomy that increasingly produced conflict between personal aspirations and the demands of state service. By 1825, the cultivated elite's [End Page 382] internalized identification with the monarch, court, and state power had come to an end. Based on synthesis of scholarly studies and the letters, travel diaries, memoirs, poetry, and literature of recognized authors and public figures, Schönle and Zorin explore the emergence of an educated noble elite that from the mid-18th century became socially and culturally differentiated from the court, the broader urban population...