4
The (Double) Nature of Russia

The Western View

The history of Europe, too, could have been written as one long list of crimes—hence Karamzin's comparisons of Russian tsars with Nero or Caligula. But the history of Russia as presented by Custine was aimed at expelling Russia from Europe. It was not a simple operation, nor was Custine without ambivalence while performing it. The history of Russia, he felt, could be understood only if one knew where Russia belonged: to be understood historically, Russia must be placed geographically. The writer had to decide if it was an Oriental or a European civilization, and if its violence was unique to the "East." By expelling Russia from Europe, Custine could hope to expel the violence as well.

The first step was to approach Russia as mysterious. Custine expressed this thought in traditional terms: he needed to "unmask the colossus," "unveil his mystery" (Tarn 1985, 492). The mystery of Russia was a constant motif, a cliché in the descriptive literature. For centuries, each travel book opened with a promise that the reader would finally understand the mystery of this strange entity. Of course, such introductions had a function of legitimizing the writer's effort: I am writing, it meant, because I have something new or unusual to tell. But they expressed as well a persistent frustration that the Western public felt when confronted with Russia and Russians. Not only did the Russians "hide" their country

by consistently limiting Westerners' access to it, but the Westerners themselves were unable to "apprehend" the nature of Russia and neatly assign this country to Europe or to Asia. This difficulty in comprehension took the form of an impossibility of classification.

For an example of this predicament we could look at various attempts made by nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers to describe a building that was unlike others: Moscow's Cathedral of Saint Basil, on which Custine lavished considerable attention. The cathedral was built in the years 1553–1560 (or 1555–1561, depending on sources) to commemorate Ivan the Terrible's 1552 victory over the Tartars. It is composed of a central tower surrounded by eight small churches, each with a dome; all nine towers are raised on a podium. Each of the domes is different from the others, their exterior bright with a variety of colors. Originally the structure was white, and the colors were added a century after the church had been completed. Its architecture represents the most successful attempt at translating into masonry the Russian medieval wooden church structures. It is so different from the buildings traditionally used for Christian worship that no simple analogy can describe it. "This boldest departure from classic or Byzantine architecture violates the academic laws of symmetry and proportion as understood by the Western world, and the structure is uniquely medieval Russian in content, form, technique, decoration, and feeling."^[1]

Western travel writers attempted to convey the uniqueness of the building by comparing it to the most unusual objects. August von Haxthausen, author of a treatise on Russia, wrote in 1847 that Saint Basil "reflects all the colors of the rainbow, and from a certain distance or in foggy weather one might think it was a huge dragon ready to pounce on its prey."^[2] Italian writer and painter Carlo Levi compared it to "the back of a gigantic animal . . . a bunch of flowers or strange vegetables . . . a natural object, an elaborate plant."^[3] Nestor Considérant likened the church to "a gigantic plate loaded with flowers and fruit, on top of which a mass of rainbow-colored melons and pineapples

[1] Arthur Voyce, Moscow and the Roots of Russian Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 111.

[2] He thought Saint Basil "one of the most unusual and magnificent buildings." See his Studies on the Interior of Russia (Chicago: University, of Chicago Press, 1972), 20.

[3] "La schiena di un immenso animale . . . un mazzo di fiori o di strani ortaggi . . . un oggetto naturale, un vegetale elaborato." In Il futuro ha un cuore antico (Turin: Einaudi, 1956), 54.

has been mounted."^[4] "I counted seventeen cupolas on the roof of Vassili-Blagennoï," wrote Jacques Angelot, "each is different by its form, color, proportions: one resembles a ball, another a pineapple."^[5] Colin Simpson described the cupolas as "colossal cloves of garlic centrifuged into twirled shapes in various paintpots; and . . . as colored onions that have been incised by pineapples."^[6] And Waldo Frank called it "an intricately petaled giant flower."^[7]

There were writers who compared Saint Basil to human artifacts. The crosses atop the domes of the cathedral reminded Walter Benjamin of "gigantic earrings attached to the sky."^[8] Italian writer Mario Praz called it "a massive paperweight liberty avant la lettre,"^[9] while Jozef Lubomirski thought it was like "an eccentric piece of furniture—heavy, fantastic, bizarre—forgotten in an empty drawing room on the day of moving."^[10] Usually, however, writers found comparable objects in the realm of nature. It was by no means an obvious way of describing a church, and often frustration was expressed at the elusiveness and bizarre character of the object of description. "This building is always holding something back," complained Walter Benjamin (1986, 25). Nestor Considérant feels unable to give "an acceptably precise idea of this architecture that departs from nowhere and arrives at nothing" (1857, 112).^[11] Even the master painter of unusual sights—Théophile Gautier—declared that he "will not seek comparisons in order to give an idea of a thing that has neither prototype nor similarity." He said this, though, after having already compared the building "to a gigantic

[4] "Un immense plat chargé de fleurs et de fruits, et au sommet duquel on a empilé des melons et des ananas de toutes les nuances de l'arc-en-ciel." See Nestor Considérant, La Russie en 1856: Souvenirs de voyage, 2 vols. (Bruxelles and Leipzig: Auguste Schnée, 1857), 1: 112–113.

[5] Jacques Angelot, Six mois en Russie (Bruxelles: Wahlen, 1827), 249–250.

[6] Colin Simpson, This Is Russia (Sydney, Australia: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 222.

[7] Waldo Frank, Dawn in Russia: The Record of a Journey (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1932), 201.

[8] Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 22.

[9] "Un massiccio posacarte liberty avanti lettera." Mario Praz, Il mondo che ho visto (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1982), 442.

[10] "Un meuble excentrique (lourd, fantastique, bizarre) oublié dans un salon vide le jour d'un déménagement." Jozef Lubomirski, Scènes de la vie militaire en Russie. Le Prince Soldat. Superstitions russes. Impressions de voyage (Paris: Didier, 1873), 296.

[11] "Une idée passablement précise de cette architecture qui ne dérive de nulle part et qui n'aboutit à rien." La Russie en 1856, 112.

madrepore, a colossal crystallization, a grotto of stalactites turned upside down."^[12]

All the descriptions found here share two elements: bewilderment, expressed by the unusual second term of comparison, and a feeling of the grandeur of the object they face. Whatever Saint Basil is compared to, be it "madrcpore," "paperweight," or "a clove of garlic," it is always "gigantic," "massive," and "colossal." It had a groznyi —terrible—look, just like that of its founder—a look at the same time terrifying (in the religious meaning of the word), imposing, and intimidating. But the main element of these descriptions is frustration, inability to "ambush" the building (Walter Benjamin's expression), to describe it in a conventional way. Usually, buildings are compared to buildings, people to people, and landscapes to landscapes. The "incomparable" Saint Basil is compared to the objects outside the pool of things buildings are normally likened to. Not only does it not belong to architecture; it does not belong to the man-made realm of culture. Instead, it reminds writers of fruits, flowers, and vegetables and becomes a part of nature rather than civilization.

The encounter with Saint Basil Cathedral was in fact shocking for the writers. The building is placed at the end of the Red Square—a large, empty space, "entirely enclosed yet . . . infinite and open,"^[13] not truly flat but not raised either. It borders the square together with other unusual buildings; in description, it was traditionally juxtaposed to the architecturally eclectic but more classical Kremlin. For the last several decades it has formed a pair of opposites with the Lenin Mausoleum—an opposition in which Saint Basil consists predominantly of surface, whereas the mausoleum is "sinking into the ground like a root" (Frank 1932, 207). "It is not only unlike any other building anywhere, it isn't even shaped like a building" (Simpson 1965, 222). Saint Basil stands out as an object that defies description.

Although their journeys were undertaken in search of something new, the writers express surprise and shock at finding an object so unlike anything else. The comparisons they reach for seem capricious, outrageous, arbitrary. And yet the pineapple, the onion, the vegetable are repeated from book to book. Each surprise, each description is controlled by previous surprises and descriptions, and by the general framework of culture the writer operates in. The writer is facing an elaborate

[12] Théophile Gautier, Russia, trans. Florence MacIntyre Tyson, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1905), 1: 379.

[13] Waldo Frank, 201.

artwork, a magnificent building. The building does not fulfill the expectations of the writer's canon of beauty. The writer goes back to his first impression—that of surprise and, most often, enchantment—and revises it. I thought it was art, he says, but when I looked more closely I saw it was nature. It has beauty, I agree, but it is the beauty of an artichoke: the unself-conscious beauty of a natural object. It is not a product of civilization: it is, like nature, a result of a caprice. Therefore, it does not need to disturb our ideas about culture.

This reasoning did not need to be made anew by each of the writers: it could be found in books that the writer must have read in order to understand what the cathedral represented. In these books the cathedral's very own history placed it outside civilization. The story has it that Ivan the Terrible had the builder of the cathedral blinded so as to prevent him from creating another, similar masterpiece. Most probably untrue, the story stuck to the building, and it is a rare book that does not mention it. The insistence with which it is repeated, even when doubt is expressed as to its truthfulness, is analogical to the flowering of strange comparisons. To the writer, the cathedral looks like a caprice and is a result of caprice, an accident of history, rather than a product of an orderly development of a civilization. The lack of order in its structure corresponds to lack of order in its origin and, instead of being an example of the truly, uniquely Russian culture the writers were in search of, it becomes a strange growth, an accidental protuberance, or "a dream of a sick mind implemented by a crazy architect."^[14]

To appreciate how the operation of exclusion works, we turn again to Custine's La Russie en 1839 . Custine approaches the subject of Moscow and Saint Basil only in the third volume, when the reader is already quite versed in Russian matters and has been given a tour of Saint Petersburg. Custine recounts his arrival in Moscow and describes a magnificent, distant view of the city, hundreds of whose churches were still in existence.

This first view of the capital of the Slavonians, rising brightly in the cold solitudes of the Christian East, produces an impression that cannot easily be forgotten. Before the eye, spreads a landscape wild and gloomy, but grand as the ocean; and to animate the dreary void, there rises a poetical city, whose architecture is without either a designating name or a known model.^[15]

[14] As Alexandre Dumas (Père) said in his Voyage en Russie (Paris: Hermann, 1960), 482.

[15] The Empire of the Czar, 394. Another part of the description of Moscow is also very convincing: "A fleet, apparently on land—such is the apparition with which my eye has been sometimes surprised in Holland, and once in England. . . . Exactly similar is the effect that has been produced upon me by the first view of Moscow: a multitude of spires gleamed alone above the dust of the road, the undulations of the soil, and the misty line that nearly always clothes the distance, under the summer sun of these parts" (p. 393). The passages describing the Cathedral of Saint Basil and its history are quoted from The Empire of the Czar, 393–397 ; additional passages, cut out in the American edition, have been translated from the original, 3: 251–253.

This wonderful image of the city from the distance is soon juxtaposed to the prosaic character of its streets. The contrast between the splendid exterior and the dull interior—between superficial richness and interior poverty—expresses the very nature of what Custine understands as the "East" or the "Orient."

On entering Moscow we feel as if waking from a brilliant dream to a very dull and prosaic reality—a vast city without any real monuments of art, that is to say, without a single object worthy of a discriminative and thoughtful approbation.

The same contrast functions on other levels of the description: Saint Basil's external beauty contrasts with its internal ugliness; the church's Oriental vivaciousness contrasts with the almost-classical restraint of the Kremlin; its happy, life-affirming colorfulness with the terrible fate of its architect. Saint Basil's form stands in opposition to its content.

Although he had declared a moment before that Moscow has not a single object of art worthy of approbation, the Church of Saint Basil is for Custine "the most singular, if not the most beautiful edifice in Russia." The description that follows displays brilliantly, in a crescendo, all the vegetables and mythical animals of other comparisons quoted here.

It appears as an immense cluster of little turrets forming a bush, or rather giving the idea of some kind of tropical fruit all bristling with excrescences,

he says at the beginning, only to move from the realm of nature to that of strange artifacts:

or a crystallization of a thousand rays, the enamelled skin of a serpent, the most highly polished enamel of China.

Then the comparison moves to the sphere of mythical animals:

It is like gilded scales of fish, the skins of serpents stretched on piles of misshapen stones, heads of dragons, shells of chameleons,

and continues into a purely visual series of associations:

altar ornaments, priests' robes, and the whole is topped by spires painted so that they resemble rich materials of reddish brown silk.

The nouns "cluster," "brush," "bouquet," "excrescences" indicate a chaotic, unorganized, organic character of the church, so chaotic as to defy any orderly description. This "masterpiece of caprice" can hardly be imagined as a place of worship and "the men who go to worship God in this box of glazed fruits are not Christians." Soon the splendid outside is sadly contrasted with the inside of the church which is "narrow, mean, without character." The richness of colors and shapes slowly becomes incomprehensible, the traveler's attention wanes for lack of form. It is not art, because it is not harmonious. So, although the church is beautiful, it is not worthy of "thoughtful approbation."

Custine complained bitterly about the unoriginality of architecture in Saint Petersburg. His initial reaction to Moscow and Saint Basil is one of relief—finally something real and original! But the closer look revealed a truly different city and a truly different church; his enthusiasm weakened. Another closer look and he had nothing more than waning patience for this "box of glazed fruits"; the patience disappeared when he remembered the fate of the architect. The church's history is recalled: "this enervating work caused the misfortune of the man who accomplished it." Hence a description that started with the highest praise (the most beautiful building in Russia) deteriorated into a hostile rejection: the cathedral is judged and condemned.

It is, in fact, the history of Saint Basil Cathedral that allows the writer to move one step away from the breathtaking image of the church into the security of cultural certitudes. From the cultural perspective the building can be handled as just one in a series of artifacts, reflecting the nature of Russia. The comments on the story about the architect, then, reflect an overall attitude of the writer toward Russia. Doubtful as to the truthfulness of the anecdote, Custine nevertheless insists on it because he finds it characteristic of the "Oriental" nature of Russian society. Lucky artist, he says; since the work was so successful he was not impaled but only blinded. His irony points to the reversal of the ways in which the success of an artist is treated in the "Oriental" society and serves as the "final word" on the cathedral's beauty.

Other writers interpreted the church's story in different ways. "A master with rather strange and unpleasant moods!" wrote strongly

protsarist Haxthausen about Ivan the Terrible blinding the artist; but soon he rushes to redeem the tsar anyhow:

Curiously enough, in the memory and opinion of the Russian people and in extant popular legends he was a pious and good-natured man who could easily be duped and who was occasionally inclined to play practical jokes. . . . Legend always tells a version different from the one history tells, and yet is nevertheless just as true. What we call history presents the truth from one point of view only. (Haxthausen 1972, 20)

In that way Haxthausen is not confronted with the story as an illustration of Russian history but approaches it from the methodological point of view: without denying its truthfulness, he decides it is only half-true.

Théophile Gautier presented still another attitude. When he visited Russia twenty years after Custine, many changes, most of all the reforms of the new tsar, Alexander II, improved the Russian situation. Also, in the years 1839–1845, Saint Basil's interior was partially frescoed (Voyce 1964, 115). When Custine saw it, its walls were simply white, which explains the shock he felt at comparing the church's interior to its exterior. Gautier's interests and situation were also different: he went to Russia to write a book about Russian art, and the project depended heavily on the Russian government's financial backing. His description of Russia was phrased in a "pittoresque," a-political style similar to the style of his celebrated description of Spain. He very much liked—and described with gusto—both the exterior and the interior of the church. "It would be difficult to imagine," runs his comment on the story of the blinding of its architect, "a cruelty more flattering in its jealousy, and this Ivan the Terrible must have been at bottom a true artist, an impassioned dilettante . This ferocity in matters of art displeases us less than indifference" (Gautier 1866, 1: 379). It is, of course, Gautier's own indifference—indifference to the sufferings of this faraway tribe—that made him describe the barbaric act as an expression of jealousy and love of art.

Custine was not indifferent. But both he, an anti-Russian writer if there ever was one, and the pro-Russian Haxthausen compare Saint Basil to a dragon. Why, in spite of ideological differences, were there so many similarities in description? Was the building really similar to a dragon? One answer to this question is that Haxthausen took the comparison from Custine, whom he read and commented upon. Moreover, Gautier read and plagiarized Custine. It is, therefore, an indirectly

quoted comparison—quotation being a way in which tradition controls description. But what we see here as well is the binary mind at work. The unexpectedness of the way Saint Basil looks is expressed by the unexpectedness of comparison controlled by the ideological and conceptual dimensions of writer's culture. Saint Basil is fitted into a proliferation of binary oppositions: removed from culture, it is placed in nature; included in the Orient, it is excluded from the West; seen as a caprice, it is denied the status of a sustained work of art; acknowledged as a work of art, it is rejected as a building. The Kremlin, although the work of Italian architects, is seen as Russian and therefore contrasted to the French Louvre; but inside the Red Square, the Kremlin becomes Western, a kind of Louvre, and is opposed to Saint Basil's nativeness. There are here two systems, two "languages"; the reader knows only one of them, the traveler both. Comparison, or more generally, parallelism, is a translation and an interpretation—an effort to find synonyms, correspondences, similar meanings. That effort is performed before our eyes by the narrator-traveler. He is attracted by the unusual, which he is unable to render without using known and accepted notions, the "déjà vu." The dragon of Haxthausen's description and the bouquets and crystallizations of Gautier's are related to Custine's description, which in turn is indebted to many prior descriptions. Hence the comparisons, as original as they seem, are an outgrowth of a collaborative effort modified by the talent each writer brings to the task.

But the uses the image is put to vary a great deal. All three examples, taken as they are from representative nineteenth-century descriptions of Russia, show the ideological use of the image of Saint Basil, or, to phrase it differently, the role of the image in the integrated vision of Russia. An unusual building, it is treated by Custine as typical, capriciousness being the characteristic of Russian culture; by Haxthausen as not so unusual after all; and by Gautier as one work of art in the long series of other works of art he has described, thus turning it into a matter of taste only. In all cases, however, it is strange and therefore typical of Russia.

The Russian View

But what was Russia? Was Russia part of Europe or of Asia? The continuous reemergence of these questions lay at the basis of

the West's attitude toward Russia. The answer was never final, and the effort of definition had to be repeated with every description. There were many reasons for that state of affairs. First of all, "Asia" and "Europe" were by no means stable terms. Whatever they meant, however, it was never possible either to entirely include Russia in or entirely expel Russia from either of them. Russia was never simply "Europe" or "Asia" but was always defined in terms of both. Moreover, Russia herself used these two concepts as the limits against which to measure herself. The uncertainty and confusion were shared by the describer and the described.

When Karamzin described the origin of Russia, he presented her as a blend of many traditions.

Situated in the depths of the north, rearing her head between Asiatic and European kingdoms, Russian society contained elements derived from both these parts of the world. It was a compound of ancient customs of the east, carried to Europe by the Slavs and reactivated, so to speak, by our long connection with the Mongols; of Byzantine customs which we had adopted together with Christianity; and of certain German customs, imparted to us by the Normans. . . . The Russians considered such an amalgam of customs brought about by accidents and circumstances as indigenous, and they loved it as their own national heritage.^[16]

This balance, however, was upset by Peter the Great. According to Karamzin, the monarch, great as he was, committed unpardonable violence toward his people by tampering with long-established customs. He wrote:

Peter was unable to realize that the national spirit constitutes the moral strength of states, which is as indispensable to their stability as is physical might. . . . It is nothing else than respect for our national dignity. By uprooting ancient customs, by exposing them to ridicule, by causing them to appear stupid, by praising and introducing foreign elements, the sovereign of the Russians humbled Russian hearts. . . . The Russian dress, food, and beards did not interfere with the founding of schools. Two states may stand on the same level of civil enlightenment although their customs differ. One state may borrow from another useful knowledge without borrowing its manners. These manners may change naturally, but to prescribe statutes for them is an act of violence, which is illegal also for an autocratic monarch. The people, in their original covenant with the kings, had told them: "Guard our safety abroad and at home, punish criminals, sacrifice a part to save the whole." They had not said: "Fight the innocent inclinations and tastes of our domestic life." In this realm, the sovereign may equitably act only by example, not by decree. . . . Imitation became for Russians a matter of honor and pride. (Karamzin in Pipes, 1959, 121–123)

[16] See Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, 110–111.

This long quotation contains all the basic elements of Karamzin's thought. In trying to prevent the Tsar Alexander's westernizing reforms, he criticized Peter the Great more severely than he did the cruel rages of Ivan the Terrible. The terms in which this criticism is expressed were a summary of Russian anti-Western conservatism. And yet they were an elaboration of a passage from Montesquieu, whom Karamzin emulated and admired!

Thus, when a prince wants to make great changes in his nation, [wrote Montesquieu,] he must reform by laws what is established by laws, and change by manners what is established by manners and it is a very bad policy to change by laws what should be changed by manners. The law that obliged the Muscovites to cut off their beards, and to shorten their clothes, and the violence of Peter I in trimming up to the knees the long robes of those who entered the towns were instances of tyranny. The means for preventing crimes are penalties; the means for changing manners are examples.^[17]

Western arguments were used by the anti-Western writer to criticize the Russian monarch for his Westernizing efforts.

In his Foreword to the History of the Russian State (a title reminiscent of Montesquieu's vision of history as a history of institutions) Karamzin frequently used the pronoun us . But the meaning of us is not always the same. "Contrary to the opinion of Abbé Mably, we cannot wax oratorical in history. New achievements of reason have given us a clear notion about history's characteristics . . ." ("Foreword," p. 121), he wrote in clear agreement with the West-European intellectuals. A few pages before he had declared, "Besides the special value which Russia's chronicles have for us, her sons, they have also a general value" (p. 118; all italics are mine). It is interesting to note that although the text was written in Russian Karamzin felt obliged to specify the Russianness of "us" ("her sons") but not "our" Western character. This was because for him the category of Europeans was larger than that of Russians and included them.

The "wandering" we implicitly expressed itself in the use of Western arguments and Western genres and was very characteristic of Russian culture. The mapping of the borders within which the we was enclosed could prove a very difficult operation. Until the twentieth century, the Russian we never included Asia. Russia's identity was first created in a constant fight for survival against nomadic tribes of Asia. "For perhaps

[17] Charles Louis Sécondat de la Brède, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), bk. 19, ch. 3, p. 309.

a thousand years, if one is to include speculation about prehistory, the basic Russian attitude toward the peoples of the steppe, toward Asia, was that of total apartness and extreme hostility."^[18] The Westernization introduced by Peter the Great was, from that point of view, a process of modernization whose aim was to secure final superiority of Russia over her Asiatic neighbors. At the same time the Russian intellectual outlook became part of the Western-centered world-view, in which Asia was relegated to the category of the inferior and incompetent (Riasanovsky 1972, 9). On the eastern front, then, Russian self-identity was created against Asia. But what about Europe?

In a fascinating study, ^[19] Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii constructed a model of Russian culture built on binary opposition. Whereas in Western culture there is a three-way division of life into the sacred, the profane, and a neutral sphere in-between, in medieval Russia "the basic cultural values (ideological, political, and religious) . . . were distributed in a bipolar field and divided by a sharp boundary without an axio-logically neutral zone." Secular power, for example, could be perceived either as diabolical or divine but never as neutral. This accentuated duality was not removed by the reforms of Peter the Great: in fact, in Russian culture "change occurs as a radical negation of the preceding state," not as a creation of neutral zones; the new state incorporates the previous one with a changed, negative sign. Because of this internal mechanism, culture in Russia has always been organized by oppositions in which terms were defined and existed in relation to each other—Christianity versus paganism, knowledge versus ignorance, lower classes versus nobility. The duality of the sacred/profane language changed from Church Slavonic versus Russian to Western (Dutch, then German, then French) versus Russian (Lotman and Uspenskii, 32–33).^[20] The very model proposed by Lotman and Uspenskii continues that duality (Russian versus

[18] See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, "Asia Through Russian Eyes," in Wayne S. Vucinich, ed., Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), 3–29; the quoted sentence can be found on pp. 6–7.

[19] Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, "Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century)" in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Press, 1985), 30–66.

[20] West European culture also knows the phenomenon of bilingualism, and the entire Catholic tradition of writing about Russia was possible precisely because of the unifying role Latin played in its imposition. (Russia, it is worth remembering, was outside of the Latin family.) Latin was not only the language of power but also the language of religion. No such community was offered by French and German, and these languages played an ambiguous role, perhaps best called colonizing.

Western culture) and "spontaneously reflects the deep structure of Russian consciousness."^[21]

One of the main axes of that culture is the opposition between Russia and the West. Whatever the attitude of the Russians, the West was always seen as an inversion, as a bearer of qualities that might be good or bad but that were always diametrically opposed to those to which the Russians either had to aspire or to defend themselves against (p. 65). Starting with the reforms of Peter the Great, this opposition was, so to speak, "internalized," translated into the coexistence of two different groups of people: the Russian people and the Westernized nobility. In other articles in his book, Lotman shows persuasively that this division became an internal one not only in the society but also within each nobleman.^[22] It was a very unstable situation, in which the we of the Russian nobility was in constant need of definition.

This duality may be accepted as a constant in the Russian culture after Peter the Great—as a source of continuous conflict but also as a dynamic, creative force, and an inspiration for many social phenomena. This duality, however, can also help explain the problems the West had in describing and classifying Russia. The object of description did not fit the categories applied to it. And since the passion for describing and classifying became Russian as well, the problems with description became problems of self-identity. This may be an explanation for Karamzin's wandering we .

Grattez le Russe . . .

This is not to say that it was Russia's nature—however it may be conceived—that was responsible for the difficulties the West had in describing her. It was the very concept that countries had "natures" that led to difficulties. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature claimed that the concept of national character was purely descriptive.

[21] Boris Gasparov, Introduction, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, 28.

[22] "The Russian nobleman was like a foreigner in his own country. As an adult he had to learn through unnatural methods what is usually acquired through direct experience in early childhood . . . [this Europeanization] accentuated rather than obliterated the non-European aspects of daily life. In order to perceive one's behavior as consistently foreign it is essential not to be a foreigner. . . . A Russian was not supposed to become a foreigner; he was merely supposed to act like one" (p. 70 in "The Poetics of Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture," in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, 67–94).

Montesquieu, who was credited with the creation of that notion, employed it in a complicated way: the character, or rather a general spirit of a nation, was composed of and influenced by the climate, religion, laws, "the maxims of government," history ("examples of past things"), "mores" and "manners." Some of these factors were more important in one society than in others. "Nature and climate almost alone dominate savages; manners govern the Chinese; laws tyrannize Japan; in former times mores set the tone in Lacedaemonia; in Rome it was set by the maxims of government and the ancient mores."^[23] All of these factors were interrelated and had to be analyzed carefully.

Travel writers, however, treated the notion of national character as a descriptive, self-evident category not unlike the landscape or the mineral composition of the soil. Every observation could become a permanent feature of a nation's psychological portrait. Some passing scenes and glimpses of social and religious life—a cheating shopkeeper or vetturino —were promptly generalized into statements such as "Americans lack probity," "Italians cheat," "Russians are imitators." The cultural facts were assumed to be meaningful in the same way that character traits were, and the movement between the two domains—of facts and of psychological generalizations—was free and unproblematic. Writers often personalized the national character so as to present it more easily. Dealing with a character, with one type, a traveler felt able to find and represent the essence of the visited nation. Once the general idea of a national character, racial type, or climate-related behavior is accepted, each cheating shopkeeper is a particularization of that idea, a source of generalization and its proof. But in reality it was a normative term formulated in a generalized psychological vocabulary. Nations were thought of as people or, rather, as men (though visually they were depicted as women). Further, they were implicitly compared to the standard of a white, mature man, in full possession of his mental and physical capacities, which were seen as active, resourceful, and expanding. The man was either French or English. Of necessity, all other nations had to be found wanting. They were either too young (Americans), or too old (Italians), too feminine (Egyptians), too childish even when old (Chinese). (Not one nation was pro-

[23] Montesquieu, De l'esprit des loix, ed. Jean Brethe de la Gressaye (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, 1958), 3: 7–8. English version: The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 308–310. The documentation for this monumental work, written in 1749, was largely based on travelers's reports.

nounced to be too masculine.) Russians belonged to the strange in-between category of being too young but already decadent.

In fact, while it was difficult to fit neatly these nations into a single category, Russia seemed to fall directly in between. Diderot was perhaps right, said Madame de Staël, when he remarked that "The Russians rotted before they grew ripe." This remark is sometimes attributed to somebody else, commented her editor.^[24] In fact, it was a popular cliché, used with only slight variations and almost mechanically not only about Russia. People kept wondering about the age of the United States. Baudelaire thought America old and young at once, while D. H. Lawrence said it had rotted before it was ripe.^[25]

Young but old; civilized but barbaric. "Scratch the Russian and you will find a Tartar," Napoleon was said to be fond of saying; "Open the vest, you will feet the fur," wrote Ségur.^[26] In 1872, while advocating the French-Russian anti-German alliance, a writer by the name of Luis exclaimed: "Finally, dear Sirs, you journalists could stop repeating that when one scratches a Russian one discovers a Cossack or a bear" (Corbet 1967, 354). Corbet finds the source of this saying in the words of an Englishman quoted by Count Rostopchin. But the origin of such pieces of wisdom, like that of proverbs, is hard to discover. They were just one way of expressing the in-between nature of Russia. Historians and writers (Michelet, Cyprien Robert, Schnitzler) generalized the idea into the theory of métissage: Russians were not pure Slavs, for there is an addition of Mongol blood in them.^[27]

Custine's treatment of the problem is very typical. He complains about the double nature of Russia using the current stereotypes.

The alliance of the East and the West, the results of which are discoverable at every step, is the grand characteristic of the Russian empire. . . . The Russians

[24] Morroe Berger, in the Preface to Madame de Staël, Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character, trans., ed., and with an Introduction by Morroe Berger (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1964), 365.

[25] See Harry Levin, "France-Amérique: The Transatlantic Refraction," in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 212–220, esp. 215.

[26] In La Vie de Rostoptchine . See Corbet, 83.

[27] "Semblables à leurs édifices de brique que le moindre accident dépouille du mastic blanc et poli que les couvre, les Russes laissent bientôt apercevoir le Tartare sous cette enveloppe luisante dont une civilisation précoce les a revêtus," wrote Ancelot in 1827 (Corbet, 141). And Balzac saw children behind the adult façade: "Il y a chez les Slaves un côté enfant, comme chez tous les peuples primitivement sauvages, et qui ont plutôt fait irruption chez les nations civilisées, qu'ils ne sont réellment civilisés" (Balzac, Cousine Bette [Paris: Garnier, 1962], 211). These are only two of many examples. In fact, these opinions were totally commonplace.

have not yet become polished men, but they are already spoiled savages. (P. 307)

He elaborated the point in another passage:

The customs of the people are the product of the slow and reciprocal action of the laws upon practice, and of practice upon the laws; they do not change as by the stroke of a wand. [A point made by Montesquieu and Karamzin.] The customs of the Russians, notwithstanding all the pretensions of these semi-savages, are and will long remain cruel. Hardly a century passed since they were actual Tartars: it was Peter the Great who first compelled the men to admit women into their social meetings; and underneath their modern elegance, many of these parvenus of civilization retain the hide of the bear; they just turned it inside out, but if one scratches a little, the bristly fur reappears.

An explanatory footnote follows:

These words were spoken by the archbishop of Tarente, of whom Mr. Valéry has just completed a very interesting and thorough portrait in his book Anecdotes et Curiosités italiennes . The same thought, I believe, has been expressed even more forcefully by the Emperor Napoleon.

Having quoted these authorities, Custine added as a witness:

Besides, it comes to mind to anyone who has an occasion to observe the Russians.^[28]

The predicament Custine finds himself in, and the reason he had to quote others to show that he is not alone, is that none of the definitions turns out to be sufficient. The action of "scratching the Russians" does not produce satisfactory results. One of the most important endeavors of his book is his continuous effort at pinpointing what he thinks is the nature of the Russians, but he never feels satisfied that he has done so. He calls them "semi-savages, Tartars, outwardly elegant parvenus, civilized bears." "According to their notions, discipline is civilization . . . the Russians are not yet civilized. They are enrolled and drilled Tartars, nothing more" (p. 139). "[They] are the Romans of the North. Both people have drawn their arts and sciences from foreign lands" (p. 223). "[They] are disguised Chinese. . . . If they dared to brave the reproach of barbarism as the true Chinese do, access to Petersburg would be as difficult to us as is the access to Peking" (pp. 307–308). "[They] are blond Arabs" (vol. 1: 10), "Oriental people" (p. 18), people, but with

[28] These passages, again, had to be translated from the original. See vol. 2, pp. 207–208.

"the hide of bear." "There is between France and Russia a Chinese wall—the Slavonic language and character" (p. 155). It is not Asia, neither is it Europe; it is a "Muscovite civilization" in the land of Siberia, for "Siberia commences on the Vistula" (pp. 346, 155). The difficulty in classifying creates new continents.

Custine is not alone in using comparative labeling to describe Russia. Haxthausen, for example, also compared Russia to Rome—not to emphasize her imitative character but to say that, like Rome, Russia was a young empire with a future. For Napoleon, the Russians were like Teutons—the barbarians from the North who destroyed Rome (Corbet 1967, 44). Such historical comparisons formed the essence of historical and political analysis of the times. Why, one could ask, was there such an insistence on finding the proper comparison? Why not say "the Russians are hiding," "the Russians are lying," without calling them Romans or Tartars? What's in a name? All is in it, or at least may be. In his little travelogue A Journey to Arzarum, Alexandr Pushkin described the importance of a name in the following way:

I went out of the tent into the fresh morning air. The sun was rising. Against the clear sky one could see a white-snowcapped, twin-peaked mountain. "What mountain is that?" I asked, stretching myself, and heard the answer: "That's Ararat." What a powerful effect a few syllables can have! Avidly I looked at the Biblical mountain, saw the ark moored to its peak with the hope of regeneration and life, saw both the raven and dove, flying forth, the symbols of punishment and reconciliation. . . .^[29]

A translator's note (pitiless little note!) specifies, however, that the mountain Pushkin could see from the place he was in was not Ararat but Aragats! (p. 105.) Similar, and yet what a difference!

Custine himself was well aware of the power of names: ". . . the steppes! this Oriental word makes me foresee by itself the unknown and marvelous nature; it wakes up in me a desire that revives my youthfulness, my courage, and reminds me that I was born to travel: such is my fate" (1: 106). How different it would have been if the same flatness were called the prairie. Naming and classifying are serious matters. Traveling—facing a new, incomprehensible reality—is very unsettling. In order to comprehend that new reality, the traveler has to define it, categorize it. The new reality can be, so to speak, pinned down, subdued, domesticated. In this way, even if the traveler's categories are not

[29] Alexandr Pushkin, A Journey to Arzrum, trans. Birgitta Ingemanson (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974), 50.

totally applicable, he at least maintains his own identity: in the face of chaos, he says who he is.

The doubts about the nature of Russia have one certain effect: they show to Custine how European he was. Wasn't it obvious? Wasn't Custine as European as could be? There must have been a nagging doubt in his mind, and in the mind of all Europeans. While facing an in-between place such as Russia, one had to ask oneself what it meant to be European. Europe and the West were, after all, composed of many countries, many diverse phenomena. To be European was an ideal state, a forma mentis; ³⁰ it meant being rational, logical, controlled, well-educated, profound, chivalrous. But wasn't that Europe a thing of the past, destroyed by the Revolution, democracy, and mercantilism? Didn't Custinc look for the real Europe in Spain, where time has stopped? The borders between Europe and non-Europe were extended in time as well as in space, they passed within each of the Europeans. Hence, in looking at the others, they had to constantly reassess their own positions.

Custine was propelled to Russia by an anxiety that came to him from the French Revolution, which undermined the self-assurance of Europeans such as himself. The boundaries between "us" and "barbarians" became problematic, and one went abroad to reassure oneself that the West was superior to the "others." The questions of identity, although unacknowledged, were at the basis of Custine's effort of comprehending Russia. He wanted to see the difference between himself and those who were not quite civilized, not quite cultured, not quite men. To capture this difference, he planned to use logic. Yet the logical categories, although presented as scientific, were vague and imprecise. Proud of being a dilettante, he strived nevertheless for a description that would be systematic, that would explain the Russians once and for all. And yet he had to take each of their characteristics separately and compare each of them to a different civilization. He believed that a fragment, a segment of the whole, explained that whole in its entirety. Thus his effort was to catch a feature of the national character of the Russians and then on the basis of it to build an adequate, exhaustive description. The difficulty that he—and many others—had in defining the nature of Russia was due to the fact that the terms of the definition, although

[30] As said by Federico Chabod; quoted in Reinhard Wittram, Russia and Europe, trans. Patrick and Hanneluise Doran (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 8.

vague, were nevertheless rigid. There was a mental map of the world with a deep East-West cleavage in its center, and each side governed a definite set of characteristics. What was understood as the nature of Russia did not fit neatly into that division. This is why it was so difficult, and so exhilarating, to write about her. And so irritating. Russia both was and was not Asiatic, was and was not European; "Arab but blond"; young but already old; civilized but primitive; similar to the Romans, the Chinese, the Tartars, yet different from all of them. In the end, after all the specifications and fine points, it still remained unfathomable. This was the moment in which the exhausted writers regularly collapsed into the clichés about the mystery of Russia.

To think means to establish relations. These relations can be of identity, similarity, or dissimilarity. Custine explained the mystery of Russia by establishing for her a set of similarities to other civilizations. The establishment of parallels expressed a belief in an order, in a repeatability of relations, in a continuity of history, in an unchangeable, timeless nature of things. Just as the Romans borrowed from the Greeks, the Russians were borrowing from the French; always, there were, and always there would be, civilizations that were creative and civilizations that were merely imitative. The greatest eighteenth-century French treatise about the nature of history—Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws —was an expression of this belief in continuity. It was the main source of political ideas for both Custine and Tocqueville. But both of them wrote after the great divide of the Revolution, when things had become uncertain. Although Karamzin is reported to have said that "the Revolution clarified our ideas"^[31] it may have done just the opposite. The categories that for Montesquieu meant order, for Custine and, differently, for Tocqueville, were a constant source of tension. Historical continuity became problematic, and therefore the very nature of the most basic human institutions—the state, the family, war—was liable to change. The categories Montesquieu used did not encapsulate anymore (if they ever did) the things they described in an elegant structure; they just pointed to some of their characteristics. The analogies were partial; a further analogy was needed, and then still another one. For Custine, Tocqueville, and for the Russians themselves, this indeterminacy—the need for another description—was a source of creative energy but also a reason for great anxiety.

[31] Quoted in Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 54.

A Postscript: The East-West Divide

The discussion is not over yet. Quite the opposite—it is as alive today as ever. The Russians themselves made an attempt at overcoming the duality by creating, in the intellectually fertile period around the time of the Revolution of 1917, the concept of Eurasia.^[32] But the East-West divide was not healed. In 1985, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera penned a strong indictment of Russian culture:

In his celebrated Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn places the starting point of the current crisis of the West squarely in the Renaissance. It is Russia—Russia as a separate civilization—that is explained and revealed by his assessment . . . the Russian mentality maintains a different balance [from the European] between rationality and sentiment; in this other balance (or imbalance) we find the famous mystery of the Russian soul (its profundity as well as its brutality). . . . When feelings supplant rational thought, they become the basis for an absence of understanding, for intolerance. . . . The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love.

Although the supremacy of feeling is a phenomenon that, in Kundera's view, came about with the birth of Christianity, the Renaissance introduced into Europe this other, rational tradition, which Kundera claims as his own. This leads him to be repelled by Dostoevsky but attracted to Diderot, and it underlies his combination of rationality and irony. The supremacy of feeling is not considered by Kundera to be an alien, non-European tradition, and therefore he does not "expel" Russia to Asia. He nevertheless summons the tradition of anti-Russian writings ("the famous mystery of Russian soul") and asks, to use Lotman's terms, that Europe be left in peace, in the neutral sphere of ironic rationality, neither sacred nor profane.^[33]

Kundera's entire novelistic work has as its main protagonist a man who tries, against the pressures of the extreme politicization of everyday life, to live according to the principles of an ironic (and hedonistic), rational, secular mind. This man even claims a territory for himself—the land of Central Europe—a mythical Middle Europe that denotes "a culture or a fate" rather than geography and, therefore, is

[32] See Riasanovsky, 19–29.

[33] Milan Kundera, "An Introduction to a Variation," The New York Times Book Review, January 6, 1985.

above traditional divisions. In an article about this spiritual entity, Barbara Torunczyk includes as its citizens intellectuals and writers Milan Kundera, Tomas Venclova, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajewski, Mircea Eliade, and Witold Gombrowicz. All but Brodsky, who was born in Leningrad and grew up there, are or were exiles in the Western world from what is called Eastern Europe. Brodsky, too, tries to liberate art from the tyranny of politics. However, in an answer to Kundera's article, he emphatically rejects the East-West divide and a concept of culture in which there was no place for Dostoevsky.^[34] And he eloquently attacks Kundera on his own territory, that is, Europe.

Mr. Kundera is a Continental, a European man. These people are seldom capable of seeing themselves from the outside. It they do, it's invariably within the context of Europe, for Europe offers them a scale against which their importance is detectable. The advantage of stratified society lies precisely in the ease with which the individual may appreciate his advancement. The reverse side of the coin, however, is that one senses limits, and beyond them, expanses where this individual's life appears irrelevant. That's why a sedentary people always resents nomads: apart from the physical threat, a nomad compromises the concept of border. The people of the Continent are very much a people whose existence is defined by borders, be it that of a nation, community, class, tradition, hierarchy—or of reason. Add to this the mesmerizing bureaucratic structure of the state, and you get a man with no sense of contingencies, either for himself or for his race. Never having heard of multiple options, he can at best only contemplate a wholesale special alternative, one like what he already has—East or West.

Brodsky refers back to Diderot when he points to the Western origin of Marxist ideology, and he reproaches Kundera's "sense of geography . . . conditioned by his sense of history." But Brodsky's sense of geography is mystifying: he writes that Kundera is from "Eastern Europe (Western Asia to some)" but also calls him "Continental" and calls Europe "The Continent," as if Brodsky were an Englishman, or an islander of some sort, or perhaps American. And he himself operates within the binary oppositions, the terms of which define each other. Although he refuses to accept Kundera's divisions as binding—if he did he would find himself in Asia—he uses these divisions nevertheless. As much as a nomad compromises the idea of border, he is necessary for the existence of the very concept of sedentary people. So is the East for the existence

[34] Joseph Brodsky, "Why Milan Kundera Is Wrong About Dostoyevsky," The New York Times Book Review, February 17, 1985. Barbara Torunczyk's article is entitled "Kings and Spirits in the Eastern European Tales," in Cross Currents 7 (1988): 183–206.

of the West. Brodsky attempts to transcend this division by proposing a community of free people to which both "the laughter of Diderot" and "the sorrows of Dostoevsky" belong.

But it turns out that for Brodsky too the West of free people exists in opposition to the East of enslaved masses. In a complicated travel essay, Flight from Byzantium, Brodsky establishes the border between these two communities.

Dreading a repetition, [he writes self-consciously and with irony] I will nevertheless state again that if Byzantine soil turned out to be so favorable for Islam it was most likely because of its ethnic texture—a mixture of races and nationalities that had neither local nor, moreover, over-all memory of any kind of coherent tradition of individualism. Dreading generalizations, I will add that the East means, first of all, a tradition of obedience, of hierarchy, of profit, of trade, of adaptability: a tradition, that is drastically alien to the principles of a moral absolute, whose role—I mean the intensity of the sentiment—is fulfilled here by the idea of kinship, of family. I foresee objections, and am even willing to accept them, in whole or in part. But no matter what extreme of idealization of the East we may entertain we'll never be able to ascribe to it the least semblance of democracy.

A historical illustration follows, of a castration, somewhere around the year 1000, of an emperor's uncle so as "to eliminate any possible claim to the throne."^[35]

Isn't Brodsky's flight from Byzantium a flight into the old categories? Certainly, he does point out where we are, and ubi leones . Although geographic divisions became fuzzy, the need to know who we are, it seems, makes us search out the others. And, it seems, there are always plenty of them.

[35] Joseph Brodsky, "Flight from Byzantium," Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), 393–446; the quotation is on p. 417.