PART ONE
CUSTINE IN RUSSIA

1
La Russie en 1839

Most travel accounts aspire only to be practical guides to a country or a city the reader may intend to visit. But some address contemporary problems and discuss the dilemmas of their own societies while comparing them to the visited ones. The Russian travels of Marquis de Custine are a classic example of this kind of writing.

La Russie en 1839 described and analyzed Russia but was also an inquiry into the most pressing and painful problems of postrevolutionary French society. It was written in the then popular form of letters sent by the author from Russia to his Parisian friends. Custine stayed in Russia for three months in the summer of 1839; he visited Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Zagorsk, Jaroslav, and Nizhni Novgorod. He had introductions to many illustrious people and spoke to some of the most interesting and important figures of Russian life—among them the tsar and the main "dissident," Petr Chaadayev. In the introduction to the book, he sets forth all its main ideas; then we follow his slow and reluctant journey from Paris to Saint Petersburg. The traveling itself and the description of what is seen are constantly mixed with quotations, reminiscences, comparisons, and elucidations. Before we get inside Russia, we read the hundred-page-long memoir about the history of the de Custine family during the French Revolution; on the boat to Saint Petersburg we witness the narrator's conversations with, among others, a Russian prince (very critical of his country) and a Russian spy. Before setting foot in Russia, we are well prepared for what we are going to see.

One of Custine's reasons for undertaking his journey was his desire to intervene on behalf of his friend, the young Polish aristocrat Ignacy Gurowski, whose family possessions had been taken over by the tsar. Custine's intervention was not successful, and many of his critics attributed the bitterness of his description of Russia to this fact. But the book itself offers sufficient reason for the most biting criticism of Russia and its system of government, and looking for hidden resentments is unnecessary.

Custine described cities, the court, several members of the tsar's family, the Russian landscape, architecture, people, customs, and the unusual means of transportation. Each of these topics was an occasion for him to think about the nature of political power, about social responsibility, and relations between the rulers and those they ruled. Questions of religion and its role in society absorbed him very much. The scenes and people of Russia prompted reflections on art, literature, beauty, culture, and love. Actual travel descriptions probably occupy only about one-third of the book; the rest consists of thoughts and reflections. All these elements are well blended into an organic whole: there is a tension in the book which keeps all the elements together. The reader shares Custine's worries and apprehensions and follows excitedly in his steps. The letters Custine writes need to be hidden; he is being followed; he falls mysteriously sick. His writing is full of dark hints, suspicions of conspiracy and plots; he sees violence everywhere. The book is lively, engagé, and full of passion.

La Russie en 1839 is recognized as the most important travel account of Russia ever written in French. It is a classic and forms part of the canon of conservative books about Russia: no description of Russia is possible today without acknowledging it, even if only implicitly. In the English-speaking world the book is less known. There were some English and American editions in the nineteenth century; later, in 1951, a short "cold-war" edition appeared in the United States. In France, too, several shortened editions were published, the last one by Gallimard in 1975. For this edition, Custine's work was chopped into pieces and arranged for publication by the historian Pierre Nora. These abridged editions omitted everything that the editors considered boring for today's reader: the family memoir (which opened the "voyage") describing terror and death during the French Revolution; digressions on the Catholic Church; quotations from books of Russian history; many descriptions of cities and countryside. The liberties that virtually all the editors take with the book reflect their idea of the genre as a loose

compilation of various fragments rather than an organic whole. What results, usually, is a 250-page volume of aphorisms—portable, affordable, snappy, and succinct. It has but a distant resemblance to the original four volumes. The newest American edition is a beautifully illustrated one-volume reissue of the British anonymous translation that appeared in 1843, soon after La Russie en 1839 was published. The Empire of the Czar, for such is the title of this translation, also is shortened, although only by approximately 15 percent.

For his description of Russia, Custine used several printed sources, as well as his interviews and personal impressions. His general point of view was not a surprise to his readers. Custine viewed Russia as an alien and dangerous country, and most of the French reading public saw the country in this light: his book was in part a forceful and original restatement of opinions they already expected and shared. A strong, coherent, conservative critique of Russia was thus formulated and introduced to the French-speaking part of Europe. Soon it was considered definitive and became widely known. The four-volume book became extremely popular, although the critics were not friendly toward the author. Julien-Frédéric Tarn, in his Le Marquis de Custine ou Les Malheurs de l'exactitude (a title, incidentally, that is intentionally reminiscent of Custine's novels), declares that in the first twelve years of the existence of La Russie en 1839 (between 1843 and 1855) the book had many shortened editions and nineteen complete ones, twelve in French (of which six were pirated—unauthorized—editions in Belgium), three in German, three in English, and one in Danish.^[1] According to Pierre Nora, Custine estimated the number of copies in foreign editions at 200,000 for the first ten years.^[2] For that time, it was a spectacular success.^[3]

[1] Tarn, p. 532.

[2] See Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie: La Russie en 1839, ed. and with Preface by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 405.

[3] The book had six press reviews in the Parisian press from May to September of 1843, and nine more from November to December of the same year after the second edition appeared. They were rather critical. In the next ten years, eight more reviews appeared. None of the reviews recognized the importance of the book. See Tarn, pp. 487–540. As George F. Kennan pointed out, some of the critics were in the pay of the Russians, and some were afraid of Russian protests or just unfriendly toward the author. See George Frost Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and His "Russia in 1839" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).

2
The Romantic Self and Russia

Aloys

When in the early summer of 1839 Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, set off on his travels to Russia, he was, at the age of forty-nine, a mature man. He came from the very center of "civilization," and his tastes and likes—those of aristocratic French culture—were synonymous with "culture" itself. He was ready to judge—to like and to condemn. Yet at the same time he was a divided man, unhappy, unsure of his talents. His uncertainty belonged to a more general malaise: Romantic unhappiness. Probably the most important single influence on Astolphe's life and work, beside his mother's, was that of Chateaubri-and. Later in his life, Custine wrote that the memory of Chatcaubriand was "linked to the first lights of my thought."^[1] A formidable man, and the most influential writer of his era, Chateaubriand's impact on the young marquis was truly formative. Custine remained "Chateaubri-andesque" throughout his life: unhappy, unfulfilled, looking for inspiration, conservatively and profoundly Catholic, Romantic. When writing about Russia he ironically called himself "an aging René," applying to himself the name of the protagonist of Chateaubriand's short novel of that title. Published in 1802, René gave birth to several generations of similar literary heroes. They never aged—they died young, or, if they

[1] Quoted in Tarn, p. 34, who wrote that Custine's political attitudes were incomprehensible "without René (p. 35).

survived their defeat, they remained in an in-between, death-in-life state—les morts-vivants . Chateaubriand, unable to accept his old age, was planning to write a book about René growing old. But he did not do it, perhaps because in René and his brothers their youth was an ideological category, one of the many ways of being an outsider.

René and his literary descendants were products of the event that prevented them from living fully: the Revolution. At the time, Europe was full of morts-vivants . The isolated, destroyed young men first spoke in German (Goethe's Werther); then, after the Revolution, in French (René), in English (Byron's Manfred), and, later, in all European languages. Such a man was estranged from nature, society, and himself. He was a literary character but also a model for life: a ruined life or early death was the fate of Chopin, Novalis, Schubert, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Nerval, Hölderin, Kleist, and Chatterton, to name a few. Deviation in behavior became a norm—at least, a literary norm. Illness, death, and estrangement were the themes used in literature to show alienation, as were incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin.^[2] These young, aristocratic literary protagonists were themselves ruins—remnants of the Ancien Régime, representatives of a class that felt part of the past. In their books they were found dying, most often in exotic surroundings, of an unhappy, impossible love; themselves orphans, they were unable to marry and have children—that is, to become part of society. Custine's first novel, Aloys ou Le Religieux du Mont Saint-Bernard (1827), had just such a character for its protagonist.

Aloys was one of several psychological novels written by various authors at the time on the topic of impossible love. Madame de Duras began the series with her Olivier ou le Secret, written in 1825, as a challenge to other writers to follow her. The second in the series was another Olivier, written a year later, by Hyacinthe Thibaud de Latouche, and this was followed by Stendhal's Armance . All three novels, as well as Aloys ou Le Reliqieux du Mont Saint-Bernard (the title was taken from another novel by Madame de Duras), describe a situation in which a betrothed young man breaks his engagement a few days before the wedding ceremony and then dies or withdraws from public life. In none of the books are the reasons for this unhappy ending spelled out. Philippe Sénart, in his preface to Aloys (entitled melodramatically "Un Martyr du Ro-

[2] See Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Form of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). Especially relevant is the Introduction, in which these "fragmented modalities"—incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin—are proposed as fundamental for Romanticism.

mantisme: Custine"), assumes that all four books, Aloys included, were based on an actual engagement of Custine, which he broke in 1818, to Claire de Duras, daughter of Madame de Duras—author of the first Olivier .^[3] If this is true, then the secret that prevents the happy ending in all of the books is not, as Stendhal explained in a letter about Armance, sexual impotence, but homosexuality. This, as if to continue the secret of the novels, is never stated by Sénart, only suggested.

Sénart points out many similarities between Custine, Aloys, and Octave, the protagonist of Armance . They are brothers, he says. "Strangers to their time, exiled within their country, these young aristocrats without homeland or state are banished forever. They would like to fight, they would like to serve, but their marked birth keeps them away from the world" (p. xv). In fact, the impotence of the protagonists is social as well as personal. Whatever the reason for the impossibility of their love—be it homosexuality (actually rather unlikely as a literary reason), incestuous passion (as in the case of René ), sexual impotence (Stendhal), the death of the beloved (Tocqueville's "Journey to Lake Oneida" and Gustave de Beaumont's Marie ), or love for the mother rather than the daughter (Aloys )—the new protagonist expresses a social predicament common to a generation—or to generations—of postrevolutionary European men of the higher classes. Young noblemen are such important figures in these novels because it was they who traditionally were political actors. Here we see them passive and suicidal, mortally injured by the Revolution.

The French Revolution was of course an enormously disruptive and violent event.^[4] For Custinc, the Revolution and its violence were so shocking because they spelled an end to an epoch of innocence. The Revolution took away his childhood, killed his father and grandfather, and destroyed the world of his ancestors. It was therefore vitally important to understand the Revolution and its reasons. All his life, Custine tried to come to terms with his private horror of revolutionary destruc-

[3] Astolphe de Custine, Aloys ou le Rellgieux du Mont Saint-Bernard, presentation by Philippe Sénart (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1971). This is also Tarn's opinion—Tarn, p. 83.

[4] The cost of the Revolution depends on who does the counting. René Sédillot gives a number of 2 million dead by including the victims of the Napoleonic Wars. See René Sédillot, Le coût de la Révolution française (Paris: Librarie Académique Perrin, 1987), 28. Jean-Françols Fayard arrives at approximately 16,000 "judicially" executed during the Terror (1793–1794). In the preface to Fayard's book, Pierre Chaunu claims the number of victims of the Revolution (including the wars) to be higher than that of the French victims of World War I. See Jean-Francois Fayard, La Justice révolutionnaire: Chronique de la Terreur, Preface by Pierre Chaunu (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), 12–13, 259–270.

tion and violence, and to find a socially useful place for himself and his class. Perhaps his La Russie en 1839 is such a powerful book in part because in it we see an aging René expressing his unhappiness and finally rendering public service. The book is gripping because it is a meeting place of personal grief with the unhappiness of an entire country.

The French Revolution and the Understanding of Russia

The young—and then the aging—René is in a sense the protagonist and hero of all of Custine's writings, and, indeed, of his life. René is the subject of his novels, letters, and of his travel writings. His voice is lyrical. He is not a man of action but of musings, premonitions, fears, and visions. But he is also a thinking man. His travels are his action. In all his books he presents a certain psychological and political situation that characterizes his class and his generation, and this functions as a vantage point in La Russie en 1839 .

The literary protagonist—the defeated young nobleman—is a negative expression of the feudal need to serve: the denial of the present. Such negation, the rejection of the world-as-it-is, took many forms in Romanticism. One of them was an extravagant love of the Middle Ages and of history in general; another was the fondness for the Oriental. Travel in time and travel in space were, like death, forms of exile. The work of Custine, and of many of his contemporaries, is enclosed by and wavers between the two extremes of service or death.

Custine and his contemporaries expressed social isolation through the Romantic biographical model of a defeated hero. Although these heroes appear to die of an unhappy love, they are in a deeper sense crushed by history. And history, in addition to psychology, provided the language in which the radical alienation of the aristocracy was expressed. At the same time the use of history for this purpose was in itself an effort to overcome social estrangement. History was a place to travel to in search of reasons and explanations. When Custine went to Spain or Russia, he moved not only geographically but also in time. Following standard Enlightenment theories he believed that countries, like people, had developmental stages to go through: Spain was for him the medieval past—France's past—while Russia was an unnatural combination of old age in a young and developing giant. If one was to compre-

hend the present, one had to reach into history and see at what stage the country had arrived.

The problem that Custine investigated in his Russian travelogue was that of historical change associated, in his mind, with the Revolution and violent upheavals. The Revolution, he felt, was a new kind of change, and historical and travel writing was a place to assess it. Change, of course, is a natural subject of historical and even of philosophical inquiry. An attempt at reconciliation with death and ruin—with the inevitable end—is a basic underlying motive of much of Custine's writing, and of Tocqueville's political writing as well. Their class had no confidence in change, seeing it as more likely to bring disaster rather than improvement. In their works, a longing for lost unity and wholeness was combined with premonitions of doom. This type of longing, shared by several postrevolutionary generations, was a form of perception. Most Oriental travels, for example, were undertaken in search of the still-living past—for an unchanged biblical landscape, for the "immobile, dreaming Oriental woman" (Flaubert)—as if to reassure oneself that outside of the unrecognizable, fluid Western world some things remained stable. Stability was what Custine looked for in conservative Russia, while the younger Tocqueville tried to spot, in America, the direction of the change accepted as inevitable.

There are certain periods when historical inquiry becomes particularly poignant, and the time in which Custine was writing about Russia was one of them. While in 1811 only 3 million pages of historical works were published in France, in 1825 there were 40 million. Historical language was used to talk about contemporary politics, and the main event around which discussion crystallized was, of course, the Revolution. Liberal historians interpreted this series of events as logical steps in the people's striving for emancipation, while conservatives treated it as a violent disruption of a stable national life.^[5] Custine's starting point was conservative: the Revolution meant disruption of an orderly historical cycle. He traveled to Russia in search of historical continuity: "I went to Russia to seek for arguments against representative government," he said. What he found, however, was only the semblance of order, and he returned "a partisan of constitutions" (Custine, Empire of the Czar, 16; see Bibliography).

The superficial order of Russian life covered up the change that was

[5] Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1958).

due not to the action of its people but to an individual's capricious will. Change came from the tsar, not from the people. Peter the Great single-handedly redirected the course of Russian life, and Custine, although a monarchist, could not accept it. The Revolution had taught him that social life is complex and cannot be reduced to any one element; history is not only about personalities, their will and their actions, but about a complicated interaction of individual will and social forces working as a system. Instead of the continuity and order he expected in Russian autocracy, he found tyranny, which he interpreted as another form of disruption. "In France," he wrote, "revolutionary tyranny is an evil belonging to a state of transition; in Russia, the tyranny of despotism is a permanent revolution" (p. 206). This might have been an echo of Sismondi's saying that "tyranny is a perpetual revolution"^[6] but it was his visit to Russia (where he felt the violence with which the social order was imposed and maintained), not anything he read, that made him understand the reasons for the French Revolution. And, conversely, the revolutionary experience offered itself as a paradigm to which Custine could refer the incomprehensible and unacceptable violence of the Russian regime. The Revolution provided concepts and a vocabulary into which Russia could be translated; the central notion of this vocabulary was that of violence. Russia explained the Revolution to Custine and was herself explained by the Revolution.

It is precisely for this reason that La Russie en 1839 opens with a memoir about the de Custine family during the Revolution. The memoir sets a framework for an interpretation of Russia as a colossus that will soon become victim of its own lack of social justice. Politics, Custine declared, consisted of a mutual sense of obligation between the ruler and the people. That reciprocity was essential.

A fearful and mysterious relativeness of merits and of demerits has been established by Providence between governments and subjects, and . . . moments arrive in the history of communities when the State is judged, condemned, and destroyed, as though it were a single individual. (P. 385)

Having himself witnessed the end of a régime believed to be permanent, Custine knew very well that a political system could be abolished, that it was not divinely guaranteed, and that it continued only as long as it was allowed to continue. He blamed not only the rulers but also the

[6] Quoted in G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959; first published in 1913), 160.

people for complicity in oppression and looked for signs of rebellion. The Russian people—alien as they were to Custine—were subjugated by unprecedented violence, and with equal violence, he thought, they would one day respond. The nobility did not fulfill its duty to defend the oppressed. Such a situation could not be maintained indefinitely. Custine felt in the people the future mob avenging by massacres centuries of meek acquiescence. "To whom will the people one day appeal against the silence of the great? What explosion of vengeance is being prepared against the autocracy by the abdication of such a cowardly aristocracy?" Russian history, as Custine saw it, was already a series of spasmodic interruptions, arbitrary crimes, capricious reversals. It lacked only one final, apocalyptic eruption. "Either the civilized world will, before another fifty years go by, pass anew under the yoke of barbarians, or Russia will undergo a revolution more terrible than the revolution whose effects are still felt in Western Europe" (p. 131). It was because he put together the beneath-the-surface violence of Russian life and his understanding of the Revolution that he was able to predict with such clarity the eruption of the Russian Revolution, only seventy-eight years away.

Violence in Russia

Nineteenth-century writers often accepted that history contained, among other elements, "demonic" social forces, and many delighted in the violent themes of history, showing a special predilection for gruesome detail. Stendhal, Shelley, and Custine himself were among many who wrote on the Italian family of Cencis; Cesare Borgia, Galeazzo Sforza, and Ezzelino da Romano were other popular "monsters" and "fiends" of historical poetry and prose. The depiction of cruelties accompanied another historical theme running through nineteenth-century literature: the struggle for freedom by peoples abused by tyrants (Masaniello, Rienzo, Sicilian Vespers). The literary treatment of these subjects followed the immense popularity of a few historical books about Italy or Rome: Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici (1795) and of Leo X (1805), and Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics (1809–1818).^[7]

[7] See C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

Although Russia was a "literary" place, no Western writer described Romantic Russian heroes struggling against tyranny. It was not for lack of models, however. In the Decembrist uprising of 1825, young, idealistic noblemen—Romantic men of action—rebelled against the tsar. The uprising occurred in the year Madame de Duras was writing her Olivier ou le Secret, but these truly Romantic Russians failed to appeal to the literary imagination of the West weary at the time of even the slightest hint of regicide.^[8] The implacable repression that followed the rebellion, and the sufferings of the defeated young men aroused therefore a limited amount of compassion. The Decembrists, certainly brothers—or at least cousins—of René, were not recognized as belonging to the family at all.

The most memorable character that remained in Western literature after the Decembrist uprising was the Faithful Wife who voluntarily followed her husband into his Siberian exile.^[9] In France, that literary heroic character was modeled after Princess Trubeckoja: she was French, and her sacrifice made an enormous impression on French public opinion. Her behavior was described by such well-known authors as Alexandre Dumas père (in his Le maître d'armes ) and by Alfred de Vigny (in Wanda ). Custine devoted several pages to "so noble a victim of conjugal duty," treating her case as an illustration of the tsar-jailer's lack of magnanimity (p. 354). Princess Trubeckoja was not a new kind of protagonist in literature. In nineteenth-century iconography and literature, Slavic women had been portrayed as beautiful, long-suffering, and passive—as passive as René in his life-in-death state. The writers used this tradition to describe the sacrifice of the princess.^[10]

A figure of a noble, passive beauty fitted well another literary image: love in Siberia. There was a large popular literature about unhappy love in exile—for example, the 1806 best-seller Élisabeth ou les exilés de Sibérie by Madame Cottin, which was later turned into a play by the most

[8] The Decembrists' behavior, by contrast, was very dependent on Romantic literature. See Iurii M. Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category)," in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 95–149.

[9] In his study "The Decembrist in Daily Life," Lotman shows that this behavior came to be perceived as heroic thanks to Russian literary models: before the uprising the wives of exiles followed their husbands as a matter of course, and their behavior was found only natural by their society. Several aristocratic women voluntarily joined their husbands in exile for moral reasons rather than because of love (pp. 119–123).

[10] In Benjamin Constant's novel Adolphe —another in the family of first-name psychological and (auto) biographical novels like Aloys —a René-like protagonist was unable to love a passive Slavic beauty.

popular melodrama-writer of the time, Pixérécourt, and then, in 1853, made into an opera with music by Donizetti; and there was Xavier de Maistrc's Prascovie ou la jeune Sibérienne (1807). These books, which could be grouped under the title of one of them—Les amants exilés en Slbéie —had a family resemblance to two other popular categories: books about unhappy Poland and books about the crimes of the tsars.^[11] The image that the French public received from this literary and theatrical output was only confirmed by the true story of Princess Trubeckoja. Custine himself was strongly influenced by all this "Russian vogue" and produced a short story—"Histoirc de Telenef"—which he included in La Russie en 1839 . In this story he combined, rather predictably but movingly, the themes of unhappy love, of the Russian peasants' servitude, and of Siberian exile.

Custine described with real horror and repulsion the immeasurable violence done to the Russian people. His descriptions are thorough and lavish more detail than perhaps was sane or necessary. (But is there any good, sane way of describing violence?) He feels and sees this violence wherever he goes. Standing in front of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, he recounts the story of its renovation after an accidental fire.

In order to complete the work at the time appointed by the emperor, unheard-of efforts were necessary. The interior works were continued during the great frosts; 6,000 workmen were continually employed; of these a considerable number died daily, but the victims were instantly replaced by other champions brought forward to perish, in their turn, in this inglorious breach. . . . During frosts when the thermometer was at 25 to 30 degrees below 0 of Réaumur, 6,000 obscure martyrs—martyrs without merit, for their obedience was involuntary—were shut up in halls heated to 30 degrees of Réaumur, in order that the walls may dry more quickly. Thus, these miserable beings, on entering and leaving this abode of death—destined to become, thanks to their sacrifice, the home of vanity, magnificence, and pleasure—would have to endure a difference of 50 to 60 degrees.

(P. 93; the difference is of 100 degrees Fahrenheit)

There are many similar passages in La Russie en 1839, quoted from historical sources or from conversation, or perhaps even imagined or

[11] See Charles Corbet, L'opinion française face à l'inconnue russe, 1799–1894 (Paris: Didier, 1967). France felt, for a short period, strong solidarity with Poland in her unsuccessful anti-Russian insurrections of 1830 and 1861; that solidarity, produced many books, pamphlets, songs, and so forth. As for the other category—the "crimes of the tsars"—it probably started with the stories about the scandalous life of Catherine II. See Corbet, p. 27. Today, this tradition continues with an English edition of Alexandre Dumas père's Voyage en Russie, entitled Adventures in Czarist Russia (London: Owen, 1960), which took from the original only the stories of the excesses of the tsars.

transcribed—passages such as the report, offered in an appendix, of the prison stay of an unfortunate Frenchman, Louis Pernet, on whose behalf Custine intervened while in Russia. ("Imagination," Custine wrote, "serves to extend the sphere of pity, and to render it more active" [p. 570].) Pernet was for Custine an occasion to describe Russian prisons and the source of information registered with a very personal emphasis:

The first two days he was left without food . . . . The only sound that he heard was that of the strokes of the rod, which, from five o'clock in the morning until night, were inflicted upon the unhappy slaves who were sent by their masters to this place, to receive correction. Add to that frightful sound, the sobs, the tears, the screams of the victims, mingled with the menaces and imprecations of the tormentors.

"The rod," Custine explained,

is formed of a cane split into three pieces, an instrument which fetches off the skin at every stroke; at the fifth, the victim loses nearly all power to cry, his weakened voice can then only utter a prolonged, sobbing groan . . . [a] horrible rattle. . . . (Pp.577–578)

In these passages, the suffering is described not generically but in concrete and piercing detail.

The personal way in which Custine described the oppression turned his travel book into an act of testimony. Alert to details, he understood the pervasive, banal, everyday character of injustice.

In Russia the desire for travelling fast becomes a passion, and this passion serves as a pretext for every species of inhumanity. . . . Yesterday evening. . . . a child who drove us had been several times threatened with blows by the feldjäger [Custine's courier] for delays, and I participated in the impatience and wrath of this man. Suddenly, a foal, not many days old, and well known to the boy, escaped from an enclosure bordering upon the road, and began neighing and galloping after my carriage, for he took one of the mares that drew us for his mother.

The young coachman was forbidden to stop, and the foal ran all the long stage at the fastest gallop. For three full pages Custine describes the unhappiness of the boy and his efforts to liberate the colt, the suffering of the animal, and his own complicity in "the martyrdom."

At the moment of leaving the broken-down foal and the forlorn young postillion, I felt no remorse; it came only upon reflection, and especially upon recording the circumstances in writing: shame then awoke repentance. Thus easily may those who breathe the air of despotism be corrupted. What do I say?

In Russia, despotism is only upon the throne, but tyranny pervades the country. (Pp.386–389)

This passage conveys in exemplary fashion the minuteness, the everyday character of oppression; it shows the wordless victims—children, animals—suffering because of "petty acts of unnecessary cruelty." Only while writing, white comparing the facts to the standards of his convictions, did the traveler understand his actions. It is his complicity in these petty acts, the temptation to practice them, and the contagion "with the contempt for the weak" that are so revealing.

Custine was one of these rare travelers who were able to see Persecution on the face of every passerby. French historians Michel Cadot and Jacques Brenner attribute this attraction to Russian horrors to what they allege was Custine's sadomasochism.^[12] But his reaction—whatever its psychological reasons—was well justified: he could not accept the senselessness of violence and the total impotence of the individual in Russia. To bear witness was the obligation dictated by his conscience. Custine was creating (and participating in) a then new tradition of testimonial writing about wars and revolutions as meaningless and brutal—writing in anguish but writing nevertheless, as if somehow to come to terms with the horrors. It was "apocalyptic" reporting about history, in which the writer defended his sanity and protested by recording human misery in all its detail. His writings ceased at that point to be Romantic self-expression and became a passage through which the voices of the oppressed could be heard. Hence Custine gave (among other examples) the description of workers dying in the excess of heat or cold rather than merely recounting the emperor's balls he witnessed. Hence the story of the martyred boy and a colt. The reaction of horrified disbelief, far from being abnormal, was perhaps the only healthy reaction to such events. That tradition of testimonial writing continues today with innumerable books about the "univers concentrationnaire" in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, and about the Holocaust and many "minor" apocalypses. Custine should be recognized as a classic of the genre.

The detailed recounting of pain, fear, and dying reclaims the dignity of the victim. The adding-up of degrees of temperature inside and outside the Winter Palace is an effort to redeem the misery of the workers, to show it in its concrete dimension. But at the same time

[12] Michel Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle françalse (1839–1856) (Paris: Fayard, 1967), 186.

Custine understood that the victims could also be blamed for their complicity, for their passivity, for their connivance with the oppressor. "Martyrs without merit" is his bitter phrase for the dying workers. "People and government . . . the Russians great and small . . . they are drunk with slavery" (p. 96). Not one single voice is heard opposing the despotism. "An oppressed people has always deserved the ills under which they suffer; tyranny is the work of the nation" (p. 131).^[13]

The secret of Russia—the reason such an inhuman system survives for so long—lay, he thought, in her plans for the future.

That nation, essentially aggressive, greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other nations: the glory, the riches which it hopes for, consoles it for the disgrace to which it submits. (P. 614)

Only this common goal could, in the eyes of Custine, unite the oppressed people behind their oppressor. Their complicity is turned against weak and enervated Europe, and all the internal Russian violence will spill out onto the conquered West. Both of his predictions—that of the Russian Revolution and of the Russian expansion—turned out to be right. It was only their violence and its capacity to engulf both revolution and expansion that surpassed his expectations.

[13] The responsibility, of a nation for its own independence was one of the reasons for Custine's limited sympathy for Poland. In letter 36, written after his return to France, Custine explained that he did not travel through Poland in order to avoid telling the Poles the truth. And the truth was that "an attentive observer can see, in the fate of individuals as well as of nations, the results of the development of their characters." Besides, since Poles, like Russians, were Slavs, they shared all the characteristics of the race; in the case of Poles, however, the servile, imitative nature of the Slavic race was mitigated by Catholicism.

3
Russian History: The Tangled Tradition

Herberstein

To understand the violence he saw (and felt in Russia), Custine turned to history. He found autocracy unacceptably, inexplicably oppressive. In search of some sort of explanation, he reached for a tradition that was close to him. The choice of this particular tradition, although predetermined, had profound consequences for Custine's vision of Russia. He found in it a confirmation of his rejection of that country and the arguments and vocabulary in which to express this rejection. It is worth taking a brief look at this tradition in order to see how Custine, by relegating Russia outside of Europe, tried to assuage his own fear of perpetual revolutionary violence.

In fact, Russia was for Custine a state of heightened violence. "This empire," he said in one of his most celebrated aphorisms, "immense as it is, is no more than a prison, of which the emperor keeps the key" (p. 237). "Tomorrow," he predicted,

in an insurrection, in the midst of massacre, by the light of a conflagration, the cry of freedom may spread to the frontiers of Siberia; a blind and cruel people may murder their masters, may revolt against obscure tyrants, and dye the waters of the Volga with blood; but they will not be any the more free: barbarism is in itself a yoke. (P. 608)

The question that needed to be posed was, What was the reason for this perpetual violence?

Custine phrased this question by quoting words written in 1549 by another traveler to Russia—or, rather, Muscovy—Sigismund von Herberstein.

"He [the tsar] speaks, and it is done; the life and fortunes of laity and clergy, of nobles and burghers, all depend on his supreme will. He is unacquainted with contradiction, and all he does is deemed as equitable as if it were done by Deity; for the Russians are persuaded that their prince is the executor of Divine decrees. Thus, God and the prince have willed, God and the prince know, are common modes of speech among them. Nothing can equal their zeal for serving him. . . . I cannot say whether it is the character of the Russian nation which has formed such autocrats, or whether it is the autocrats themselves who have given this character to the nation."

"It appears to me," comments Custine,

that the influence is reciprocal; the Russian government could never have been established elsewhere than in Russia; and the Russians would never have become what they are under a government differing from that which exists among them. (Pp. 94–95)

Custine introduced the author of his quotation as a "German diplomatist" (p. 95), "the Baron Herberstein, ambassador from the Emperor Maximilian, father of Charles V, to the Czar Vasili Ivanovich" (p. 94). And he agreed wholeheartedly with the bitter criticism he could discern in that quotation. "This letter, written more than three centuries ago, describes the Russians precisely as I now see them," he declared (p. 95). "This letter," however, was not a letter at all but a book, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii and published in Latin, in Vienna, in 1549. Custine did not read this book: "The following passage I have found in Karamsin [sic ]," he conscientiously indicated (p. 94). Who was Siegmund (or Sigismund or Sigmund, as his name was sometimes written) from Herberstein? And why would Custine quote him?

The question of the responsibility for autocracy is particularly well formulated by Herberstein, but the weight of his quotation is greater than its meaning. By the very act of repeating Herberstein's words, and then commenting on them, Custine made himself part of a very concrete tradition of writing about Russia of which Herberstein's name was a sign. For the reader who did not know the tradition, Custine presented it before he used it. He introduced Herberstein to the readers, and, to indicate his reliability, he quoted him from still another source. To grasp the reason for this double quoting, and Herberstein's importance for Custine, as well as for the whole European tradition of

writing about Russia, it is necessary to talk about the baron, his book, and its influence on later writers.

In Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii Baron von Herberstein reported on his two embassies to the court of the Grand Prince Vasili Ivanovich, undertaken in the years 1517 and 1526. His mission was to bring about the end of the war between Poland and Muscovy, so as to free the two countries to fight the Turks. The second voyage was partially successful, but Herberstein's true success was the book, which had many editions in Latin and in German.^[1] The popularity of the book was due to its comprehensive and serious character, and to the novelty of its subject. It was also very well written.

Herberstein was born in Vipava, near Trieste, in 1486, and died in Vienna, in 1566. In Vipava he learned the local Slavic language, Slovenian, and later learned Russian and Polish as well. (It is quite unusual to find a report on Muscovy, Russia, or the Soviet Union by an author who understands Russian.) The son of an Austrian nobleman, he worked in his native language—German. He graduated from Vienna University, in 1502, having had a very thorough Renaissance education. His Latin and Italian were excellent, and he also knew French and Spanish. He was interested in the sciences and his education prepared him for a life of scholarship, but instead he became a diplomat for the Habsburgs. His missions to Muscovy were only two of several embassies he undertook. Written at the request of the monarch, his book was an act of public service: it was a report, initially addressed to the emperor, in which he rendered account of his actions and the knowledge he acquired as a result of his missions. In writing his book, he followed two traditions. The first was that of the Renaissance reports addressed to the prince, which were meant to form a basis for wise foreign policy, the most famous reports being the description of Germany by Niccolò Machiavelli, of Spain by Francesco Guicciardini, and of the Netherlands by Ludovico Guicclardini. The second tradition was that of reports written by papal and Venetian envoys and by merchants—the most famous of these, of course, being The Travels of Marco Polo.

In preparing for his difficult and perilous missions, as well as in his

[1] Herberstein himself translated his book into German, but there were other more popular translations. See "Editor's Preface" to Sigmund von Herbcrstein, Description of Moscow and Muscovy (1557), ed. Bertold Picard, trans. J. B. C. Grundy (London: J. A. Dent and Sons Limited, 1969). This translation of selected passages was made from Herberstein's 1557 German text considered definitive by the editor.

writing, Herberstein used several books and reports that belonged to that second tradition. He read the report by Joannes de Plano Carpini, an Italian minorite who in 1245 went to the Mongolians on behalf of Pope Innocent IV. Two Latin versions of this report, one short and one long, were easily accessible.^[2] He also used Viaggio in Persia, the report of the Venetian ambassador Ambrogio Contarini on his journey in 1474 through Germany, Poland, Kiev, and the Crimea to Persia. This work was published in 1482, in Venice, where many of the reports of travels to near and distant lands were printed at that time. Herberstein also read and quoted Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis by the Polish prebendary Mathias Miechowski (1517), and the work of the bishop of Vienna, Johann Fabri, whose report, published in 1525, was a survey of the religious situation in Muscovy based on his conversations with Russian ambassadors to Spain. This last book was recommended to Herberstein by the then archduke, Ferdinand. All four of these works (Western sources of Herberstein's information) were written by Catholics, whose perspective on the "wrong" religion played a critical role in their interpretations. Herberstein was himself a Catholic and felt estranged from the exotic rites and religious customs of the Muscovites. Devoutly Catholic Custine was bound to reach for this tradition.

Herberstein also used other sources. He talked with his hosts and with the guides—more with the latter, because of the severe isolation the Muscovites imposed on their visitors. Several of his guides were Polish or Lithuanian Catholics, whose opinions must have influenced his writing. In the many years he spent researching his book, he corresponded with many scholars, several of whom were his "Polish friends."^[3] And—what was unusual—he read and quoted written Muscovite annals of the monasteries, chronicles of the cities, and other reports. In that way, he preserved an enormous amount of information and became an important source for later Russian historians. It was in Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State that Custine found his quotation.

But Herberstein was quoted by everybody, and for good reasons. The seriousness and thoroughness of his work was unique. In fact, he

[2] See the Introduction to Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes Upon Russia: Being a Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, Entitled "Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii," trans. and ed., with Notes and an Introduction by R. H. Major, 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin Publisher, n.d.), xvi–xviii.

[3] See Christine Harrauer, "Die Ziegenössischen Lateinischen Drucke der Moscovia Herbersteins und Ihre Entstehungsgeschichte (Ein Beitrag zur Editionstechnik im 16.JH)," in Humanistica Lovaniensia 31 (1982): 141–163.

became known as the "discoverer of Muscovy." He went to a country that was emerging from a long isolation under the Mongol occupation. It was a faraway country: Herberstein's mental map must have had Vienna as its political and Rome as its religious centers. Muscovy was a relatively unknown entity—it was not only distant but had a harsh climate, no roads, and a very unfriendly attitude toward foreigners. No adequate maps of Muscovy were available, and Herberstein went around collecting data, formulating definitions, and making geographical decisions.^[4] One of the main determinations to be made was the geographic placement of Muscovy.

It is interesting to observe the terms in which Herberstein thought about Russia. He was moving from the center of the known world toward its borders. Certain places were too far away to be visited. "Siberia," he wrote, "is a land which borders upon Perm and Vyatka [now Kirov]. I have been unable to learn whether there are castles and towns within it" (Description, p. 36). He went as far as Tula, "the last place before the desert [wilderness]" (p. 24). Already in Nizhni Novgorod [now, but not for much longer, Gorki] "Christendom comes to an end" (p. 23). He devoted much attention to tracing the trajectory of the Tanais [Don], "that celebrated river which is called a frontier between Europe and Asia . . . if a line were drawn from the estuary to the source of the Tanais and projected northward it might be said that Moscow lies in Asia and not in Europe" (pp. 24–25). But the answer to the question whether Moscow, the capital of Muscovy, was in Europe or in Asia depended on more than geography. Herberstein thoroughly described the political and cultural map of the country and found it distinctly non-European. The state organization—the absolute power of one person, the submission of the Church to state authority, the state ownership of all property, the servile forms of address to the authority, the military customs—were more Mongol and Chinese than European. The calendar and the alphabet were also different. Coats and dresses,

[4] Probably modeled on the Greek genre of the commentary to a map, his book methodically described the country, the people, the government, religious life, the economy, and customs. Herberstein's geographic description provided information for several new maps, which accompanied his book from the very first edition. He devoted much time and attention to finding and checking the geographical names, distances, and particulars of landscape (as well as the names of animals and plants). Given his historical and geographical interests, his knowledge of languages, of the systems of government–given his general culture—the Vienna University graduate was perfectly prepared to write a comprehensive work of discovery.

religious rites, and the seclusion of women reminded Herberstein of what he had read about Asia.

The comparisons of Muscovite customs to Chinese and Mongolian customs were not accidental. Comparison—this basic way of assessing foreign reality—is necessarily founded on difference, similar things being of no interest; but what really matters is how the difference is classified, compartmentalized, grouped. Herberstein, in trying to define Muscovy, had little doubt about its non-European nature. In fact, it was around this time—in the middle of the sixteenth century—that the opinion that Muscovy belonged to Asia became entrenched.^[5] All the early "discoverers of Muscovy," that is, authors of the most widely read books about Muscovy—Herberstcln, Giles Fletcher, Adam Olearius—called Muscovite society Oriental. This was stated, one might say, not as a judgment but as a fact. And yet there was still a certain hesitation in Herberstein's report. Russia was a Christian country and that made it part of the European family. The people there were Slavs, as they were in other parts of Europe. And there was no clear geographical boundary to divide Europe from Asia, certainly not before one got to the city of Moscow. If the customs were to change—for example if the hoped-for conversion to Roman Catholicism took place, the border of Asia could be pushed farther away from the center of Europe. For where Asia began, Europe ended. Herberstein traveled from the center of Europe toward the "desert," and he had to decide where the desert began.

He was not writing on a blank slate—although he was in some sense the first, there were several books and authorities that he had to take into account. As we have seen, he carried with him concepts and loyalties that came from his education, from his readings, and from his role as a diplomat. His book was a continuation of a tradition. But it was still possible to have placed the accents differently from the way he did. There were

[5] In 1559, the Venetian humanist Giovan Battista Ramusio published an anthology of travels with a volume on Asia that contained reports of travels to Muscovy. Herberstein's report was included in this volume, together with works by Ambrogio Contarini, Iosaphat Barbaro, Alberto Campense, Paolo Giovio, and others. In another collection, by Manuzio, travels to Muscovy were printed in a volume devoted to visits to Persia and India. (See Arturo Cronia, La conoscenza del mondo slavo in Italia: Bilancio storico-bibliografico di un millennio [Venezia-Padova: Istituto di Studi Adriatici, 1958], 116.) Many of these travel reports were, in fact, written by people who went to Persia or India and crossed Muscovy on their way. Even today, Herberstein is considered a major contributor to the field of Asiatic geography and cartography. See Helmuth Grössing, Humanistische Naturwissenschaft: Zur Geschichte der Wiener mathematischen Schulen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1983), 186.

Catholic reports in which positive, acceptable sides of the new society were stressed. In 1525, a year before Herberstein's second voyage, the Dutch Jesuit Alberto Campense praised the Muscovites for their moral purity.^[6] Another relatively positive report about Muscovy was Paolo Giovio's Libellus de legatione Basilii magni . . . ad Clementem VII (1525).^[7] Both of these books had political objectives, and, in order to create a propitious atmosphere for anti-Turkish alliance with Russia, they were more generous to the Muscovites than was common. Both books had no actual journey to a distant, unfriendly country as their basis—a journey, one might add, the end of which left most travelers exhausted, bewildered, and hostile. Herberstein, although interested in the anti-Turkish alliance, was bothered by the Greek Orthodox rituals and truly repelled by the political tyranny, by the secrecy, by the fear and submission of individuals, by the isolation of foreign visitors, by the pomp at the court, by the seclusion of women. So when he placed Muscovy on the map, he located it—culturally as well as geographically—in Asia.

We have seen the sources of his book. Once written, it itself became a source, or rather the source for thinking about Muscovy. Indeed, it was because Herberstein firmly placed that country on the mental map of Europe that he was called a "discoverer" of Russia. His description was accepted as authoritative and therefore was quotable. And he was quoted, invoked as an authority, and simply plagiarized. Antonio Possevino, sent as Pope Gregory XIII's personal emissary, in 1581–1582, to arrange a truce (again!) between Ivan the Terrible and the Polish king Stefan Batory, used Herberstein as his source (and Johann Fabri, as well as Paolo Glovio and Alberto Campense). He also used Alessandro Guagnini who "republished Herberstein under his own name without mentioning the real author."^[8] Possevino, then, not only

[6] "The vices against nature are totally unknown to them," he wrote. (See Croma, 136.) Herberstein, however, as well as Fletcher and Olearius, reported widespread sexual license, homosexuality, drunkenness, and thievery. Campense based his relatively positive description of Muscovy on information he received from his father and brother. He thought Muscovy would be useful in a proposed league against Turks (see Hugh E. Graham, "Introduction" to Antonio Possevino, S.J., The Moscovia, trans. with Introduction and Notes by Hugh E Graham, Series in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1 [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977], 142), and his writings were colored by this intention.

[7] This, too, was not the fruit of personal experience but a compendium of information given by the Russian envoy (or translator) Dmitrii Gerasimov. See Possevino, 142, fn.

[8] Walter Leitsch, "Herberstein's Impact on the Reports about Muscovy in the 16th and 17th Centuries: Some Observations on the Technique of Borrowing," in Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, 24 (1978): 163–177; esp. 171. During his lifetime Guagnini was accused of plagiarism by Maciej Strykowski, who claimed the book as his own! (Leitsch, 171–172). That may be a proof of the extent to which Herberstein's book became "common property"—a necessary, though often unacknowledged, component of all writing about Muscovy.

used Herberstein (doubly, if one counts the content of Guagnini's book) but also used Herberstein's sources, as if to knit them all together anew. All of these works belonged to the same tradition—that of the Catholic Europe—and the net of quotations was made wider and stronger by every follower and user.

Walter Leitsch has shown that for a hundred years after his journeys Herberstein remained the most influential authority on Muscovy. Another student of the period, Samuel H. Baron, has stated^[9] that Herberstein's book was the basis for three of the most important early books about Muscovy: On the Rus Commonwealth by Giles Fletcher (1591), The Travels to Muscovy and Persia by Adam Olearius (1647), and Juraj Krizanic's Politika (1666). Giles Fletcher, the "discoverer of Muscovy" for the British,^[10] plagiarized Herberstein with no acknowledgement at all of his enormous debt. S. Baron has counted 131 instances in which Fletcher used, with slight modifications, fragments from Herberstein. Several ideas of Fletcher's treatise were taken from Herberstein, although the strongly Protestant Englishman was more critical of the Greek-Orthodox Christianity and compared it to the papacy.^[11] Fletcher's way of writing his book was typical. He stressed sources he had hardly used—Strabo, Bonfinius, Martin Kromer—and hid the work he had appropriated, that is, the Latin edition of Herberstein. For almost a century after its publication (in 1591), Fletcher's work was considered definitive, therefore it was quoted and used in other works. This was the reason it served as a source for John

[9] During a lecture in the Russian Center of Harvard University, in the spring of 1987.

[10] Or the second "discoverer," after Richard Chancellor; see Giles Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, ed. and with an Introduction by Albert J. Schmidt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966).

[11] Educated at Eton and King's College, he traveled to Russia in 1589. Throughout his journey he was badly treated by his hosts; he, too, was kept from contact with the natives (whose language he ignored). One would suppose that the social isolation in which Fletcher and most foreign visitors to Muscovy were kept might have increased the temptation of plagiarism; however, books about even such an open and well-known country as Italy show an equal degree of unacknowledged borrowings. Herberstein may have been especially tempting to plagiarize because he had more direct experience of Muscovite reality than was common: he knew the language and, while in Muscovy, he was relatively less isolated. Also, his book was comprehensive, intelligent, and well written, which, I am sure, had a lot to do with its attractiveness for other writers.

Milton's A Brief History of Moscovia, a secondhand treatise written in the 1630s.^[12] In this way, Herberstein, although unacknowledged, entered the bloodstream of British culture.

Another Protestant writer to use Herberstein, and to use with him the entire Catholic tradition—Guagnino's rewriting of Herberstein, Giovio, Matthew from Miechow, Posscvino—was Adam Olcarius (1603–1671), who traveled to Russia in the years 1634, 1636, 1639, and 1643 and published the first version of his famous report in 1647. A 1627 graduate of the University of Leipzig, Olearius had a thorough education in philosophy, literature, mathematics, astronomy, an geography. His book was extraordinarily popular and very critical of Muscovy.^[13] It was so critical, in fact, as to be found slanderous by Juraj Krizanic (1618–1683), the author of a strongly pro-Muscovite book called Politika . Born in Croatia, Krizanic went to Russia with the vision of unifying all Slavs. Politika, one of his many books, was written while Krizanic was in Siberian exile. It was a description of Muscovite society, composed in an invented Pan-Slavic language ("Common Slavic"). The objective of the book was to teach the ruler how to govern. The religion Krizanic foresaw as common to all Slavs was Roman Catholicism. He approvingly mentioned Herberstein, Possevino, Giovio, and Pernisteri,^[14] who, since they were

members of the Roman Catholic faith . . . do not curse us [Slavs], do not shame us, and they do not exaggerate our sins. On the contrary, they praise what is good and tell honestly what they have seen. . . . As for Adam Olearius, Petrejus,^[15] Jacob the Dane,^[16] and the rest of the writers, they belonged to the Lutheran heresy, and as a result they have spoken libelously in accordance with their custom and teaching.^[17]

[12] See Albert J. Schmidt, "Introduction," in Fletcher, xxvi. Fletcher's work was known in a censored version, due to the pressure from British merchants afraid of possible limitations in their trade with the severely criticized Muscovites.

[13] Adam Olearlus, The Travels to Muscovy and Persia, trans., ed., and with an Introduction by Samuel H. Baron (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967).

[14] Phillipi Pernisteri, author of Relatio de Magno Moscoviae Principe, printed in Frankfurt in 1579.

[15] Peter Petrejus, Historien und Bericht von dem grossfürstenthum Mushkow, 1620.

[16] Jacob von Ulfcldt, Hodeaporicon Ruthenicum; De hello Moscovito (Moscoviticum?) commentariorum libri, 1581. Olearius used Jacob's book and plagiarized Petrejus, see S. H. Baron, Introduction to Olearius, 14.

[17] See Iurii Krizhanich (Juraj Krizanic), Russian Statecraft: The "Politika" of Jurii Krizhanich, an analysis and translation by John M. Letiche and Basil Dmytryshyn (London: Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1985), 122. In fact, it is true that Protestant writers were more critical of Muscovy than Catholic ones because of the religious meaning they saw expressed in manners and everyday behavior.

So Krizanic, by his quotations, introduced the Catholic writings about Russia into Muscovite culture. Although there is no sure proof that his book was read by Russian rulers, an indirect influence is almost certain (Introduction to Krizanic, xiv–xv). This would be, then, still another way in which Herberstein's thought traveled to other countries.

Karamzin

When quoting the famous question by Herberstein—whether it was "the character of the Russian nation which has formed such autocrats or the autocrats themselves have given this character to the nation"—Custine was borrowing from the Catholic tradition of writing about Russia; yet Custine himself pointed to the fact that the quotation was not taken directly from Herberstein. As is typical of the progress of travel opinions, this one meandered to him by an indirect route—the already-mentioned History of the Russian State by Nikolai Karamzin. Herberstein's quotation came to Custine in French, translated from the Russian; but it must have been translated into Russian from the German translation or the Latin original and only then into French.^[18] This multiple remove from the source did not alter the question's meaning: "Incertum est an tanta immanitas gentis tyrannum principem exigat: an tyrannide principis, gens ipsa tam inimanis, tamque dura crudelisque reddatur."^[19]

The ironic twist in this case comes from the fact that the quotation came to Custine via a Russian historian who wrote an apologia for Russian autocracy. In order to produce a respectable, quotable history of Russia, Karamzin had to quote—even if only to rebut—the Catholic tradition of writing about Muscovy. Hence, although Custine had not read Herberstein and had no idea what kind of book the baron's "correspondence" was, he picked up in this one sentence and proposed again

[18] The first French translation (from the Latin) appeared only in 1965. See La Moscovie du XVIe siècle: Vue par un Ambassadeur Occidental Herberstein, Présentation de Robert Delort (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1965).

[19] Sigismundi Liberis Baronis in Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Basilea: Ioannis Oporinus, 1551), 18. The two versions in English: from the Latin—"It is matter of doubt whether the brutality, of the people has made the prince a tyrant, or whether the people themselves have become thus brutal and cruel through the tyranny of their prince" (Notes upon Russia, 1: 32); and from the German—"It is debatable whether such a people must have such oppressive rulers or whether the oppressive rulers have made the people so stupid" (Description, 43).

the question containing all the main elements of Herberstein's critique of Muscovy: the condemnation of the Russian system of government, the feeling of radical estrangement from both the autocratic rulers and the submissive people, and the puzzlement of a rational (that is, Western) man at the mysterious nature of that country. These themes became the main motifs of Custine's critique of Russia.

As can be seen from this example, Karamzin's history served the detractors of Russia. And yet he worked all his life for Russia's glory. His predicament may be taken as symbolic of a problem Russian culture had to face time after time: the tense (and subversive) relationship between the new and old. Acceptance of Western cultural forms—for example, of the Western way of dresing—implied criticism of the native culture. History, as written by Karamzin, was a Western genre: it contained the idea of historical progress and of the irreversibility of the movement of history.^[20] He followed Montesquieu and British and Scottish models—the historians John Gillies, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson. The leading Russian historians of the end of the eighteenth century were editing and commenting on medieval chronicles and not writing narrative, unified stories.^[21] Karamzin, like Herberstein, was "the first." Some Western histories of Russia existed already and also served as models. Karamzin wanted to write a history based on primary, sources, and the reports of foreign travelers were for that purpose priceless. Yet these sources were almost entirely critical of Muscovite society. To use them was to introduce into Russian historiography a constant tension—found also in other modernized or "Westernized" areas of social life—between the modern and the old, the native and the foreign. This tension is one of the central features of post-Petrinc Russian culture.

Karamzin's life and work are good examples of this tension. Born in 1766 and educated in the provinces, he acquired an excellent command of German and French and a working knowledge of English. As a young man he traveled abroad, and in the years 1789–1790, while the French Revolution was changing forever the face of Europe,

[20] Rather than history that was a "return to the past." See Iurii M. Lotman, "Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture," The Sennotics of Russian Cultural History, 30–66; see p. 64.

[21] Richard Pipes, Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 52–53. On Karamzin, see as well A. G. Cross, N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literary Career 1783–1803 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University, Press, 1971); and, especially, Andrzej' Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979).

Karamzin visited Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. His most important literary work, apart from the History of the Russian State, was an account of his foreign travels (in which the Revolution is barely mentioned at all). First published serially in magazines founded by himself—the Moscow Journal and Aglaia —and later enlarged and rewritten, the Letters of a Russian Traveller was completed in 1801. Based on his travel diary but enriched by extensive readings in Western descriptive literature and rewritten through the years, Letters was the first travel memoir published in Russia, and one of the best prose works of Russian eighteenth-century literature. From 1803 until his death in 1826, Karamzin worked on his history of the Russian state in the official capacity of Historiographer of the Russian Empire. Between the years 1818 and 1829, twelve volumes of the history were published in Saint Petersburg, and it was there that the French translation used by Custine was prepared almost simultaneously.^[22]

It has often happened that history has been written at the request of the king. In France, the legitimizing role of history was exploited by François I, the first absolutist monarch. The chronicles and genealogies written in Europe before his time also had the function of reconfirming the God-given nature of royal power. Even if the history was not contemporary, the mere act of establishing a royal genealogy contributed to the seeming legitimacy of the ruler's dynasty or system of government, and thereby to his glory. But the modern state needed more complex narratives. Louis XIV appointed as his historiographers two bourgeois (but excellent) writers, Boileau and Racine, and sent them to the battlefields of his campaigns to create a proper record of his glory. History in which the king—the one who made history —was its object and recipient at the same time was difficult to write. Racine, who classified that kind of history as éoge, was unable to write it, partly because his archives were destroyed by fire. In Custine's time, Napoleon deemed history so important that he made it subject to the Minister of Police. The powerful "owned" history: they granted permissions to consult the archives, they paid for the printing of books or suppressed, censored, and forbade them.^[23]

[22] The translation, entitled L'Histoire de l'empire de Russie ("par M. Karamsin"), was made by two professors from Saint Petersburg—St. Thomas and Jauffret—and published in nine volumes in Paris, by A. Belin, in the years 1819–1826. Vols. 10 and 11 were subsequently translated by D. G. Divov (or Divoff) and published in Paris by Bossange Pare. The history went only to the beginning of the seventeenth century.

[23] See G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957; first published in 1913), 154–155.

The function of the historiographer of the tsar, then, was borrowed from Western tradition. Karamzin, who was the first to occupy this post, was paid an annual pension by the state and was guaranteed that each of his successive volumes would be printed. The state commissioned the translation into French from which Custine quoted. The writing of the History of the Russian State was supervised by Tsar Alexander I, to whom Karamzin read parts of his work. Custine discovered this fact in another Russian source, Wiazemski's Incendie du palais d'hiver à Saint-Pétersbourg . Custine's conclusion was that like "every Russian writer," including Wiazemski (whom he had met in Russia), Karamzin was a courtier. As such, he could not be suspected of calumnies against the absolute Russian monarchy, and therefore his credentials as a believable source whenever he described brutal or horrifying events were established. But even though the function of state historiographer may have been modeled on the French, the role of the courtier was for Custine incompatible with that of a historian.

In Russia, history forms a part of the crown domain: it is the moral estate of the prince, as men and lands are the material; it is placed in cabinets with the other imperial treasures, and only such of it is shown as it is wished should be seen. The emperor modifies at his pleasure the annals of the country, and daily dispenses to his people the historic truths that accord with the fiction of the moment. (P. 617)

Custine called Karamzin "the courtier" and "the flattering historian," not only because of his official function as state historiographer but also because Custine strongly disagreed with Karamzin's apologctics for the Russian autocracy. Custine did not study Karamzin thoroughly and was unable to see the evolution and nuance in Karamzin's opinions. As if in despair, he quoted Karamzin's "blood-soaked pages" without restraint. Yet the more he quoted, the more reconciled he became, it seemed, with the historian himself—feeling for him, at the end, "an admiration mixed with pity."^[24] And indeed, Karamzin was a courageous, incorruptible man. His independence led to his estrangement from the tsar, whose ideas (initially, at least) were less conservative than Karamzin's.^[25] Alexander I did not want his history to prevent his attempts at reform, whereas Karamzin wanted to prove that autocracy was the traditional form of

[24] Vol. 3: 225. The entire letter 26 and its appendix are devoted to quotations from Karamzin (3: 175–238). But he is quoted all throughout the book's four volumes.

[25] See I. M. Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category)," in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, 95–149; see pp. 115–119,

government in Russia, and, as such, not to be tampered with. He understood autocracy as a system in which the political power of the monarch was undivided but limited to matters of high politics. (In despotism, by contrast, the monarch's power reached into every sphere of life.) The governing of the "manor," he believed, belonged to the rights and obligations of the gentry. Autocracy, as the traditional Russian system of government and as the result of long historical development was best suited for Russian society and should not, Karamzin felt, be changed according to legalistic, and therefore abstract, Western ways of dealing with the individual's relationship to the state. Karamzin lauded the specific character of Russian society and saw Peter the Great's reforms as the imposition of Western elements on the native body of an authentic culture. Such was generally also the opinion of Custine, who was respectful of tradition and opposed to the imposition of abstract political ideas on a different civilization but who in the particular case of Russian society felt repugnance toward the native culture and toward its political system—despotism. Karamzin and Custine differed in their attitudes to freedom but less radically than Custine thought. Yes, Karamzin did "defend the power that limited freedom, but he defended it as a free man."^[26]

According to the oft-quoted passage from Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History,

the term History unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the res gestae themselves; on the other hand it comprehends not less what has happened, than the narration of what has happened.

This quotation is used to prove the point that history is in the writing—in the books—and that the facts cannot be apprehended as such before they are organized in verbal form.^[27] For Karamzin, the action of writing history was truly a deed of historic proportions. He opened his "Foreword" to the History of the Russian State with a sentence full of biblical overtones:

In a certain sense, history is the sacred book of a nation, the main, the indispensable book, the mirror of its existence and activity, the table of revelations and

[26] I. M. Lotman, Sotworenije Karamzina (Moscow: Kniga, 1987), 279. For the extraordinary role Karamzin played in Russian culture see pp. 280–320 of Lotman's book and N. Eidelman, Poslednij Letopisec (Moscow: Kniga, 1983).

[27] It can be found, for example, in Hayden White's The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 12.

rules, the ancestors' bequest to posterity, the supplement and explanation of the present, and the example for the future.^[28]

Custine, although critical of Karamzin's apology, was no less convinced of the outstanding role of the historian.

Karamzin, even though a timid historian, is nevertheless instructive, because he has an underlying loyalty which cuts through his habit of prudence, and which fights against his Russian origin and the prejudices of his education. God called him to avenge humanity, perhaps in spite of himself, and in spite of humanity's wish as well. (3: 224)

In fact, Karamzin's history became a source of enormous national pride: he seemed to have given Russia its past.^[29] Also, he may (as one of several factors) have influenced the tsar's retreat from his liberalizing bent. In his "Foreword," Karamzin writes about the necessity for the historian to submit to the factual truth. He describes the glory of strong and undivided power but also the deplorable violence and cruelty perpetrated by some Russian tsars. The pages devoted to the description of the violence were the ones Custine paraphrased, reported, quoted—often in their entirety. Even the "obsequiously partial" Karamzin found it necessary, in Custine's opinion, to write damagingly about Russian history, because Russian history itself was "anti-Russian" in what it revealed about the Russian state. Only "a darkness [is] equally favorable to the repose of the despot and the felicity of his subjects" (p. 94). Thus, the activity of this "most widely read Russian of his time" (Pipes 1959, 89), while strengthening Russian identity, was also malgré lui ("in spite of himself ") critical of Russia.

In La Russie en 1839, Custine made extensive use of Karamzin's history to show not the wisdom but the senseless brutality of the Russian autocracy. He read Russian history as a catalogue of cruelties. "Quoting from a certain author usually provides proof of a specific authority, proof of the aesthetic or conceptual validity of the cited words within a new work of art."^[30] But "the same word changes its meaning depending on the force that takes hold of it," wrote Antoine

[28] In Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff, Introduction by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), 117–124, esp. 117 (in the translation of Jaroslav Pelenski). Karanuin dated his Foreword December 7, 1815.

[29] In Stalinist times Karamzin's History was not published. Only now, with glasnost, is it being printed (in installments!) in a Moscow publication.

[30] Nina Perlina, Varieties of Poetic Utterance: Quotation in "the Brothers Karamazov" (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 10.

Compagnon.^[31] The example of Custine's use of long quotations from Karamzin proves that point. In Custine's version, Karamzin's history is one long criticism of his country. Even the historian's intention to praise his nation's past is turned into an accusation. Is this illegitimate? Is Custine's version of Russian history truthful? Certainly his description of Russia was truthful to the extent of being faithful in his use of the sources. In historical works, quoted material is verified by checking it against its source and other related texts; Custinc found Karamzin's facts true but disputed his opinions. The referentiality of historical quotations is indirect: it cannot simply reside in their relationship to the past (which cannot be visited) but is to be found in written texts and other testimonies. In that sense, travel writing is concerned as much with traveling through books as with traveling through countries.

There is, then, a certain inevitability in a tradition—a necessary course things must run. Karamzin wanted to write a laudatory work, yet he had to adopt the heritage he wanted to become part of. the Western (that is, the only one then available) way of writing history. He used, for example, the French definition of civilization: arts but also laws.^[32] He compared Ivan the Terrible to Caligula, to Nero, and to Louis XI, and Custine scoffed at him for this (Custine, 3: 226). The central problems of his work—the questions of authority and responsibility, of the relationship between the people and their princes, between tradition and political institutions—these are the questions of Western historiography. Karamzin belonged to the same tradition as Custine (and Herberstein and Contarini), and he "appropriated" the same quotations.

Yet the texts he quoted from were overwhelmingly hostile to Russia, so Custine was able to build his case against Russia on the work of the native historian. It was in Russian history—history written in Russian, by a Russian, and about Russia—that Custine found and revived Herberstein's Catholic critique of Russia. Of course, Custine was not a historian, as Karamzin was, hence his frank dependence on quotations.

[31] Antoine Compagnon, De la Seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 38. ("Le même mot change de sens selon la force qui se l'approprie.")

[32] "In the happy respite of peace, the monarch feasted with the lords and the people like the father of a large family. Cities populated with chosen inhabitants began to adorn the deserts; Christianity was softening the fierceness of wild customs; Byzantine arts made their appearance on the shores of the Dnieper and Volkhov. Iaroslav gave the people a scroll of simple and sagacious civil laws, which conformed to the laws of the ancient Germans. In one word, Russia became not only the most spacious of all states, but also, compared to others, the most civilized." Karamzin, "Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia," in Pipes, 104–105.

But his quotations are incomparably longer than is common in travel narratives; there are more of them; and their sources are indicated with more emphasis. The history of Russia, as shown in the quotes from Karamzin, is unacceptably cruel and bloody. Custine does not assimilate the quoted sentences, does not take them out of quotation marks. These quotation marks indicate not authority, as when Custine quotes Herberstein, but distance, rejection, the nonassimilative quality of Russian history, which Custinc seemed to be unable to translate into his own words.

The complex working of tradition can be seen here within and without Russia. Karamzin's history was built on and against the Western Catholic opinion about Russia; it contained, then, two diametrically opposed evaluations of that country. The negative one, although rejected, is restated in his history, recalled, and therefore reaffirmed for a moment, just before being negated. Custine has no trouble pulling it out, intact, to use it anew. The name of Herberstein led him to a thread that unraveled the work of the Russian historian.

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.

5
Self-Assertion and the Nature of Others

"Any movement along a plane surface which is not dictated by physical necessity is a spatial form of self-assertion, be it empire building or tourism," writes Brodsky in the previously mentioned essay (p. 389). In fact, Custine's La Russie en 1839 is as interesting as it is—and, as a work of art, as successful as it is—because, along with being a tenacious attempt to understand the complex phenomenon of Russia, it is an effort at self-assertion and self-description. And, as was already mentioned, Custine had as many problems with his identity—or rather with his place in postrevolutionary society—as he did with the nature of Russia.

In the introduction to the shortened 1975 edition of La Russie, Pierre Nora called Custine a "man of all exiles, " and he specified:

. . . historical exile of this great decapitated family of the Old Régime, excluded from participation in social life by the Revolution and the new order. Moral exile of the man condemned to practice customs he himself considered as vices. . . . Social exile of this aristocrat rejected by his caste. . . . Literary exile . . . [of a writer of second or third rank]. (Pp. 10–11, emphasis added)

Custine was a man of all exiles, and it is not surprising that he understood Russia first of all as a place of exile—a gigantic Siberia—and then, vaguely, as an exiled place, as an outside. It may be that the need to locate Russia on a map returned obsessively because it accompanied this other, personal need to find a place for himself.

Olivier Gassouin, the author of Le Marquis de Custine. Le courage

d'être soi-même, considers Custine's attachment to the idea of personal freedom—an idea expressed in his acceptance of his homosexuality—as the basis of his understanding of Russia.^[1] The most admiring biographer of Custine, Julien-Frédéric Tarn, explains the outstanding range, depth, and perspicacity of La Russie en 1839 as being due to Custine's character and situation. It is "his long experience of the comedy of salons, of worldly pretenses . . . his schizophrenic hypersensitivity of a homosexual . . . and of a mystic" that allowed his "pitiless clairvoyance." This is the context within which Tarn fits Custine's method "which consists in multiplying points of view [and names!], showing the most different, the most unexpected aspects, choosing the most contrasting lights, so as to create a global vision of the thing he described" (Tarn 1985, 524).

Those who have written about Custine had a clear understanding of the drama of his situation. The titles of books and articles already quoted here talk about "the martyr of Romanticism" (Philippe Sénart) or "les misfortunes of exactitude" (Tarn). Custine was a torn man. He felt acutely the conflictual, fragmentary character of his life. Speaking about his life—always indirectly, as the life of a traveler—he speaks of nothing but contradictions. He declares that there is a difficulty in combining thinking with feeling, and feeling with writing. The very nature of things was contradictory. "As soon as I look into my soul," he confessed in a letter to Rahel Varnhagen, "I find there only doubts, darkness, agitation, scruples. . . ."^[2]

To understand the pain and suffering involved in his contradictions and moral conflicts, we must return to Custine's social situation. We can presume—although we do not have any direct evidence (as far as is known, he never wrote about the subject)—that his homosexuality was a source of acute distress. For a while he did lead a married life, even though he was already linked with Edward de Sainte-Barbe—the Englishman whose family came from France and who remained his companion for life. The tragic premature death of his wife and son freed him to live the way he did. He was ardently and traditionally Catholic, and it is difficult to suppose that he could reconcile his faith with his sexuality. His social milieu did not respect him. The writers and artists—his new companions—did not approve of him, either. Sainte-Beuve, certainly

[1] Custine cohabited with a man and did not hide his male lovers. Olivier Gassouin, Le Marquis de Custine. Le courage d'être soi-même, Preface by Hugo Marsan (Paris: Lumière & Justice, 1987), 62.

[2] Quoted in Gassouin, 27.

the most influential literary critic of the time, wrote frankly and brutally: "Custine's reputation here is so bad, and this is so notoriously well-justified when it comes to morals . . . that although people read him, and take a liking to him, no one admires him. It has been almost necessary for him to flee."^[3] In a letter to an English friend, Stendhal (always in financial trouble) mentioned Custine's homosexuality and then went on to write: "His wealth, more than his behavior, is a stain."^[4] He was "held in contempt by some, pitied by others, a problem for everyone," wrote his biographer Pierre de Lacretelle, in 1956.^[5] Custine, who wished very much to be admired, demanded comments on his books, carefully read the reviews, and felt rejection very keenly. Many of his letters are a testimony to his bitterness and weariness. He was a frustrated poet, an author of a threatrical flop and of unadmired novels. He was reluctantly received by the aristocracy, yet he was unable to join the artistic élite; his birthrights were partially abrogated, yet he was not recognized on the basis of merit. He was not even respected.

Perhaps his estrangement from his class might have been mended with the passage of time after the scandal that revealed his homosexuality. It seems, however, that in some way he courageously welcomed the freedom to live with the men of his choice. As if to increase his estrangement, these men—or at least the two most important ones—were foreigners. The already-mentioned companion of his life, Edward de Sainte-Barbe, was an Englishman, and the great passion of his later years was a young Pole, Ignacy Gurowski. Neither of these men could be integrated into society, as wives could have been. Most of Custine's other lovers probably belonged to the lower classes. Some of his most important friends—the German Wilhelm Hesse and the German-Jewish Rahel Varnhagen—were foreign as well. Most of his correspondents (and he wrote many letters) were women. He traveled a lot and did his best writing about his travels. His masterpiece—La Russie en 1839 —was written, elaborated, and corrected abroad. He said many times about himself that he was dislocated, foreign, exiled from his country and from his times.

The dissociation from a natural context—the outsideness—had an importance for Custine's understanding of Russia. We should repeat here the famous declaration from the beginning of his book: "I went to

[3] In a private letter. Quoted after Tarn, 535.

[4] Quoted in Gassouin, 53.

[5] Quoted in George Frost Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and His "Russia in 1839" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 6.

Russia to seek for arguments against representative government. I returned from Russia a partisan of constitutions" (p. 16). This declaration could be easily understood as a literary device: it would make out of a simple journey a discovery à rebours, a descent into hell, a gigantic disappointment. It would justify the writing of yet another book about Russia, when so many had been produced already. Could Custine, a quintessential Westerner—a Parisian aristocrat, writer, and esthete—truly expect to find a place for himself in this faraway, "Asiatic," and "barbaric" place? In fact, there is one dimension of Custine's life that made such expectation and the following disappointment possible—his social origin.

During his lifetime, Russia was a place of exile for many of Custine's fellow French aristocrats (as was America). Tsar Nicholas I made a point of welcoming Custine—although he must have known about his objectionable "moeurs"—precisely because of this antirevolutionary class solidarity. Custine was keenly interested in a country in which one could still be an aristocrat. But the same class solidarity dictated to him a sense of social obligation that forced him to criticize the tsar. To fulfill his duty as a nobleman, Custine had to keep his independence.

It was not an easy thing to do. In a letter to Madame Hanska, Balzac, terrified that their acquaintance with Custine might cause the confiscation by the tsar of Madame Hanska's Ukrainian possessions warns her and predicts: ". . . he is writing a book . . . this book will be terrible. . . . There will be storms, even more justified because of his having been well received."^[6] He criticized Custine for breaking the code of hospitality, and in this he expressed the opinion of many. Most of his critics dismissed him for his indiscretion and lack of gratitude. In anticipation of such a reaction, the editor's and the author's prefaces to La Russie are devoted to a justification of Custine's decision to write about Russia. Several times in the book, Custine returns to this point. And indeed, his situation was difficult. While in Russia, he was most cordially accepted at the court by the emperor himself, who held long (and "frank," as Custine points out) talks with his French visitor. The very amiable empress, the crown prince, and many aristocrats and dignitaries were unusually welcoming to him. He was enlightened about various interesting subjects, permitted to see things and people, invited to the most interesting events. He was provided—and this is an interesting custom—with a guide-driver, who aided him in all his trips inside Russia. Since it was known that he had

[6] Quoted after Tarn, 508.

already written some voyages, everybody in officialdom went out of his way to impress him as favorably as possible. They were acting as representatives of their culture and state and behaved according to diplomatic protocol. He smiled, talked, listened, observed, and wrote, but his book bitterly disappointed the expectations of his hosts.

The emperor was especially furious. "I am alone to blame; I encouraged and patronized the visit of this scoundrel," he was reported to say. (Later, however, he must have found the book interesting for he read aloud some of its parts to his family.)^[7] In fact, it was a serious breach of etiquette. To make such a decision, Custine must have been truly shocked by what he saw and understood in Russia. There are many ways in which he explains his decision. He had to write the truth, he insisted—his conscience was more important than his manners. He could not submit to the pressures of "their political hospitality," which consisted in (as the Russians themselves say in French) enguirlander ("engarlanding") the guest with ceremonies, favors, and flattery, to make him blind to social injustice so he will report favorably on Russia (p. 239). "They refuse you nothing, but they accompany you everywhere; politeness becomes a pretext for maintaining a watch over you. In this manner, they tyrannize over us while pretending to do us honor" (p. 306). Besides, there is no real hospitality and politeness among people who are not free; "here, politeness is only the art of reciprocally disguising the double fear that each experiences and inspires" (p. 233). Reticence becomes complicity in Russia, and the traveler who has social position, character, and independence has a duty to record what he had seen (pp. 227–237). The pressure to conform made Custine more tender toward Karamzin: he could see that one needed to be circumspect in Russia. What made Custine understand Karamzin (although perhaps mistakenly, for Karamzin did not write out of fear!) was the gilded chain of being himself, at least for a moment, a courtier. "The chain, though gilded, did not appear to me the less heavy" (p. 252). He did not want to be the tsar's courtier.

To write a travel book is a social act. Although Custine declared that his writing expressed only himself, he represented a tradition, a country, a culture, and even a specific class. And he entered into a relationship with his hosts—a complicated relationship of which one of the aspects was its diplomatic side. Custine belonged to the West, but he was also an aristocrat; therefore he belonged to a social layer that crossed the

[7] George F. Kennan, vii.

borders of countries and perhaps even continents. Nicholas I was higher-but-equal in this social dimension, and the relationship between them could take one of two familiar shapes: that of dependency between the ruler and his courtier, or that of an independent nobleman defying the king. Custinc opted for the second role, although the traces of the first one remained throughout the text.^[8]

The dictates of polite behavior must have been difficult to defy. Custine, however, was not only an aristocrat, he was also a former victim of political persecution. He, who so much needed approval, was flattered by the attention, recognition, and respect accorded him by his Russian hosts. And yet he could not turn away from the signs of unhappiness and misery he detected everywhere—especially in cases in which he could observe the all-powerful state acting against its citizens. In chapter 17 he chillingly described a street-fight that the interference of a gendarme changed into the killing of one of the men involved (pp. 275–276). Once he had noticed the animosity of the state against its own people—its total disregard of the individual—he saw Siberia everywhere. The everyday life of Russia was for him one of continuous persecution.

He knew that the French public, although perhaps fascinated by his behavior, would disapprove of it. But his hesitations had to do as well with the role he had set himself to play. He called on Western civilization to judge Russia. He criticized in Russia a lack of the spirit of chivalry and of a code of honor, but he himself was breaking one of its cardinal rules. Good manners—that is, manners accepted by a social group as binding—have the function of regulating the life of that group and of separating that group from others, and therefore of establishing the group's identity. Unexpectedly, Custine found himself in the same social group with people toward whom he felt no loyalty, and the limitations of protocol became too binding for him. He swiftly proceeded to prove that the code did not apply to this people.

Even as aristocrats, he reasoned, Russians were in a separate category. The nobility in Russia consists of slaves who own other slaves; to be truly polite, as we have seen, one has to be free. But a fundamental Russian characteristic was that of being "something else." Placed "on

[8] It was visible even 138 years later to Ronald Hingley, who wrote: ". . . Custine was accusing the whole nation of being intoxicated with servility, and commenting on the general atmosphere of sycophancy; of which, incidentally, one seems to detect not a little in that French Marquis's own attitude to the all-powerful Nicholas I." The Russian Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977), 194.

the confines of Asia . . . upon the limits of two continents . . . submitting to the violence and incoherence attendant upon the contact of two civilizations entirely different in character" (p. 229), Russia consists of two nations, "Russia as she is, and Russia as they would have her to appear in the eyes of Europe" (p. 232). "It is not in the nature of that which is European to amalgamate perfectly with that which is Asiatic" (p. 229). Therefore everything is hidden or distorted. "The manners and the policy of the East are here disguised under European urbanity" (p. 208). It is the country of façades, and the duty of the traveler is to look behind them.

He could not expect to learn the truth from the Russians themselves, as they were governed by an overriding duplicity.

They have a dexterity in lying, a natural proneness to deceit, which is revolting. Things that I admire elsewhere, I hate here, because I find them too dearly paid for; order, patience, calmness, elegance, respectfulness, the natural and moral relations which ought to exist between those who think and those who execute—in short, all that gives a worth and a charm to well-organized societies, all that gives a meaning and an object to political institutions, is lost and confounded here in one single sentiment—that of fear . . . it is not order, it is the evil of chaos; where liberty is wanting, there soul and truth must be wanting also. Russia is a body without life, a colossus which subsists only by its head. (P. 233)

The essential duality leads to a reversal, and the world of Russia is the world à rebours . What is politeness in France in Russia becomes a lie. In such a world, to abide by the code of honor is to become the accomplice of the government.

But if only Russia were truly the world à rebours! Then the situation would have been simple. That would explain everything, it would satisfy the need for clarity and definition. But the world of Russia is far from being simply black by contrast to the white of the West. Custine continuously returns to and insistently reformulates the same points, as if the meaning were always escaping him. Although he had to break the rules of hospitality—to deceive the deceivers—he is nevertheless bothered by it. Although he thinks that a country should preserve its own culture, he believes in the superiority of Western civilization; therefore, its partial adoption could be beneficial for Russians. Although he thought of himself as a Westerner, here he found himself conversing in his native language with Russians of his social milieu; although everything in this country was new, there was always something unnervingly familiar as well.

In fact, the problem of language is indicative of a deeper confusion. Russian nobility spoke two languages, belonged to two distinct cultures—one native and one foreign. Many of Custine's interlocutors spoke French the way he did. For Custine this was very upsetting, and he was unable to attend to the content of their words "unproblematically," the way he would if they were French. The meaning of their words was undermined by the co-presence of the other, "real" language. He felt that their French was only a "façade" hiding their mysterious Russianness. When with Russians, these noblemen most often spoke Russian (not always!) and behaved according to a different set of rules.^[9] This phenomenon defied Custine's idea of the unity of human person expressed by a unified code of behavior and one language. (Although that person would be torn by internal contradictions.) Only a one-language person could be authentic ("le naturel" was the term he used). A French nobleman's life was "coherent," that is, monocultural, while the Russian's life was, in a manner of speaking, swinging like a pendulum between two poles. The more Frenchified the Russian became, the more inauthentic he seemed to Custine. But if the Russian's French was imperfect, Custinc's native ear found it jarring. For him a Slavic accent in French was no less inauthentic than the perfect Parisian spoken by some Russians. Either the purity of language or the purity of culture was offended.

The concept of purity—of a language, of a nation, of a race—is fundamental to the way Custine and his contemporaries thought about their identity. The aspiration toward purity dates in the history of the French language from the sixteenth century and runs parallel to the centralization and strengthening of the French state. The pure language was the language of the political and cultural center—the language continuously defined as pure in opposition to its margins. Purity, then, was a political concept, and as such it was used by Custine. It is interesting to note that he shared that understanding of the purity of language with some moments of the Revolution, when an attempt was made to establish firm control over the language. The decree of the Brumaire 15 of the Second Year opposed regional "vulgar dialects" for maintaining "the infancy of the mind and the old age of the prejudices."^[10] This

[9] See I. Lotman, "Everyday Behavior," 70–76.

[10] Jacques Chaurand, Histoire de la langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 92.

prescriptive tendency toward language was shared by pro- and antirevolutionary Frenchmen.^[11]

The question of language was always central to French thinking about culture. If the authenticity of a culture was not recognized, its language could be demoted to a status of a dialect. During a discussion in 1840 in the Chambre des Députés regarding a project to found a chair of Slavic languages at the Collège de France, a député called Auguis objected: "The Slavic language is not a language proper. . . . Whatever is original among Slavs is a translation from works that belong to France or Germany."^[12] In matters of language, Custine shared the attitudes of his contemporaries. He accepted as a matter of course the superiority of French and strived for purity and clarity, in his sentences as well as in his entire work. As a topic, Russia defied this purity and clarity at all levels. It spoke too many languages,^[13] literally and figuratively. All of Custine's sources, critical and laudatory alike, declared that the Russians were a racial, cultural, and spiritual mixture. Russian geography was unclearly delineated, its role in history was not yet truly determined, its future was mysterious. Moreover, it eluded the traveler's powers of observation. Superficially, there were no obstacles: the nobility spoke French, and that, for Custine,

[11] There was a difference between the French and Russian attitudes toward language. French was compared to its origin—Latin, the language used for intellectual discourse and exercise of power. The relationship of the French language to Latin was very unlike that between Russian and French. French was just one of the Western languages used by the Russians, and it came late in the development of written Russian. Byzantine Christianity had its own language—Old Church Slavonic. It was based on a language formulated in the ninth century by Cyril and Methodius for (Slavic) Moravian converts and, unlike Latin of Europe in the Middle Ages, Old Church Slavonic cut Russia off from the outside (which in this case meant Greek) tradition. Russia did not have the experience of pervasive bilingualism that France and Western Europe had undergone: all West-European languages were in steady contact with Latin. Although many foreign words have been incorporated into Russian, the contact Russian language had with other languages was external. Neither did the concept of purity, of the Russian establish itself as dominant. Many Russian writers wrote in French, Pushkin included. One of the best Russian novels—War and Peace —has entire pages of conversations in French.

[12] Corbet, 168.

[13] "How could the national genius develop in a society where people speak four languages without knowing any one well? Originality of thought has a nearer connection than is imagined with the purity of idiom. This fact has been forgotten in Russia for a century, and in France for some years now. Our children will feel the effects of the rage for English nurses which possessed all 'fashionable' [in English in the original] mothers" (p. 289). This is not the only time Custine alerts his readers to the dangers the excessive use of English brings to the French language. He fears the vulnerability of French, its purity constantly assaulted by foreign influences.

made it a French-speaking country. (There was no question of learning Russian: people "worth" talking to knew French.) Even though talking was easy, the entire "continent" was left linguistically obscure. The same duality of light-and-shadow dwelled inside each of his interlocutors. They were not passive objects of his inquiry. They asserted themselves, as if their relationship with him was one of reciprocity; but when they were showing themselves similar to the foreigners, they were hiding their gigantic other self. If they denied this difference they made him angry and confused.

This situation made Custine suspect deceit and duplicity everywhere. He recognized a spy when he met one—Nikolai Ivanovich Grech, who was a fellow-passenger on the boat on which Custine went to Russia, was a spy for the Russian government, and Custine identified him as such. His distrust of certain of his noble interlocutors—especially of Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev—turned out to be justified; the archives show that while in the West Turgenev did report to the Russian government on his compatriots. But to find people who were spying on him, Custine did not, in fact, have to look so far afield. He, like most privileged travelers, was given a guide—a driver he called "feldjäger"—who arranged for all his needs and controlled his every step. Custine was very afraid of him, but he was helpless to do anything about it in a country where a foreigner could not pass unnoticed. When he arrived, driven by his feldjäger, at a destination—be it a museum, a palace, a park, a fortress—there he always found another guide waiting for him, to lead him around and explain everything. In this way—Custine bitterly complained—everything, while shown, is concealed and obscured. "Nothing can be seen here alone. A native of the country is always with you to do the honors of the public establishments. . . . Russia [is] scarcely better seen in Petersburg than in France" (p. 187).

The spy-guide played in Custine's visit a role similar to that of the French language: he made everything accessible while at the same time falsifying it hopelessly. Everything seemed clearer but was in reality skewed. Virtually all visitors to Russia, starting with Hcrberstein (or even earlier), were forbidden to travel by themselves. The problem of language was specific to French visitors and limited to certain periods; the spying guide is present in all Russian travelogues. A constant companion, a guide (in recent times an Intourist agent) is present sometimes as a character in the book; sometimes only his shadow remains. Nevertheless it has to be kept in mind that almost all the visits we have read about have been made in the company of a state-appointed control-

ler. In tsarist Russia, the guides limited the visitor's access to places deemed unrepresentative of Russian reality or too important militarily. (All the public buildings were in any case guarded—the suspiciousness being directed toward natives and foreigners equally.) In the Soviet Union, particularly at the height of Stalinism, two other ways of controlling visitors were practiced: one obligatory itinerary for all was provided (always the same steel mill, maternity ward, day-care center, kolkhoz, or model prison), and group visits were required. Whatever the variation, the guests became (pampered) children for the time of the visit. Some guests rejected the game (Gide); some accepted it, especially since a lot of flattery was added (G. B. Shaw). In every case, the country was difficult to see. As Custine wrote, "Most assuredly it is not sufficient to visit this country in order to know it" (p. 187).

Like most modern travelers, he left home because he was looking for something new.

We travel to escape the world in which we have passed our lives, [but] we find it is impossible to leave it behind.

It is the new uniformity of customs, the lack of difference that he mourns in "modern Europe," where

one is at a loss where to go to find original manners, and habits which may be taken as the true expression of characters. The customs recently adopted by each people are the results of a crowd of borrowed notions. There arises from this digest of all characters in the crucible of universal civilization, a monotony that is any thing but conductive to the enjoyment of the traveller. (P. 417)

This complaint, so common (and only partially true) as to become one of the most frequent travel clichés, has a certain built-in ambiguity: the familiar may be reassuring in an alien environment. Moreover, this yearning for difference was in conflict with Custine's dream, expressed in his preface and repeated in the book itself, of unity of all nations in spiritual Catholicism—unity that could be realized only by overcoming differences. Today, he said,

the human race is reuniting, languages are being lost, nations are disappearing, philosophy is reducing creeds to a matter of private belief. . . . The malediction of Babel approaches its prescribed term, and the nations are going to be one, notwithstanding all that has tended to disunite them. (P. 418)

But in Russia he disliked the similarities he could see. Equally, he disliked the differences.

The problem of language was one of the reasons for his ambivalence. It was good that French, the language of civilization, was spreading. But its use brought along imitation of things French. Russian literature was not national; all its writers, including the best, were imitators.^[14] As was well known, the Slavic race was imitative by nature. (Custine read this in many of his sources, including the most laudatory. It was usually thought to be a result of the mixing of races.)^[15] The visit to Russia, where many of his interlocutors spoke French, confirmed this opinion. The question of language must have been crucial in this matter.

Similar accusations have been leveled against another "new" nation using an "old" language: the United States. The derivative character of America was felt most keenly by the British. Many elements of the American political system, customs, and language were modeled after and similar to the English: similar but different. The difference implied an imperfection, a failing; English language was a standard and its American version a distortion. In fact, the entire country—as described in books by Captain Basil Hall, Mrs. Frances Trollope, or Charles Dickens, for example—seemed a distortion. And since Americans were imitators by nature, no national literature was expected to arise.

The imitative nature of the Slavic race was a cliché in the literature of the period. Custine's attraction to this notion might have come from his own struggle with imitation: the derivative character of his writings. But—what was very important—the concepts of distortion and imitation provided a powerful interpretative and organizing tool. Double in their nature, they implied a model and an imperfect copy. In Custine's descriptive practice, this duality was expressed by a pair, of which the second term contradicted the very essence of the first. The Russians had "a natural dexterity in lying" ("natural" is a positive word for Custine) and a natural talent for imitation; their order was in reality disguised chaos, their hospitality Oriental (therefore false), their politeness superficial (pp. 233, 239). They did not have the death penalty in their legal code—it was abolished—and yet they executed people by sentencing them to beating with the knout (the rod), not naming what they were doing. Truly, a confessed tyranny would have been better than this

[14] Custine's most famous mistake was to dismiss Pushkin (and Mickiewicz) as able imitators of foreign literary fashions. See pp. 288–289; in the original this discussion of the relationship between national language and foreign models is much longer.

[15] See J.-H. Schnitzler, La Russie, la Pologne et la Finlande: Tableau statistique, géographique et historique (Saint Petersburg and Paris: Jules Renouard, 1835), 13, 524. Schnitzlcr was one of the sources quoted by Custine.

masked one. The entire country, although it seemed to be nothing but a huge, open expanse, was in reality a prison, with the Tsar Nicholas as its warden. The description has always two opposite terms—expanse versus prison—but the second term does not dispose of the first one, and the description does not arrive at the opposite of the first term. Order in Russian society may hide a profound chaos, but it is also an evident military order—a rigid organization of life—which Custine complained about several times. Emerging in description, the new, third term is elusive, incomplete. Tension is not resolved. Russia falls between categories. The blond Arabs, the Romans of the North, the chaotic order evade again the attempts at definition. The essence of the country is still mysterious. The search has to continue.

In the detailed summaries that precede each of his chapters, Custine gives us an idea of what problems and mysteries he attempts to solve; ". . . What truth there is in the popularity of the tsar . . . Russia as it is shown to foreigners and Russia as it is . . . The essence of things . . . Dissimulation as a point of order."^[16] But he also has an entire system of titles which dissect his narrative into mini-genres and show his models. There are, for example, anecdotes and longer histoires; a quotation from an author is indicated in the summary as un mot de . . . (Madame de Staël about Russians being like Tartars, for example). There are also tableaux, both of moeurs and of nature; there are portraits and caractères, the first stressing the physical presence of the persons described, the second their moral characteristics. There are long réflexions and définitions, souvenirs and paysages . All of these genres are repeatedly named in the summaries and abundantly used in the text. Custine's narration is composed of well-structured, closed units, which by themselves are independent genres learned by Custine in his French lessons.^[17] These genres were used because Custine was writing a work of literature: just as "poetic" words were essential to a poetic style, so were literary mini-units essential for a literary work. It was an important point, because les

[16] From the summary preceding letter 15 (2: 107). Edited out of the American edition.

[17] A manual for French composition, published when Custine was learning how to write, combined in its title the idea of the beauty of language with morality. Written by a Monsieur Noel, Leçons françaises de littéature et de morale (Paris, 1812) offered various models for different types of compositions: Madame de Sévigné's letter on the death of Vatel was to be imitated when writing narrations, Chateaubriand's description of the Niagara Falls when attempting a tableau; "L'Amour propre" by La Rochefoucauld was to be followed when writing a définition, and so forth. Besides the models, the manuals offer mostly interdictions, and the students were constantly warned of mistakes against the purity of the language. See Chaurand, 96.

voyages were not literature. Each single traveler had to decide whether he would try to follow in Chateaubriand's footsteps (to Jerusalem) and aspire to high literature, even to poetry, or whether he would be content to be prosaic, informative, and useful. La Russie en 1839 could not but follow Chatcaubriand.

But what is more important, by using classical literary genres Custinc expressed a certain attitude toward the reality he tried to describe. All of these forms speak of a belief in essence that can be apprehended in description. A well-taken portrait or a convincing tableau were to reflect a person one had encountered, or a thing. The travel memoir—a loose structure—could then accommodate these assimilable segments of reality. Unfortunately, Russia's reality (and perhaps any reality) was unmasterable with this method. Russia proved elusive, incompatible with beautiful style. It was best suited for endless, inelegantly long quotations from her historian. Though described in many volumes, and summarized with many an aphorism, it remained mysterious.

The mystery of Russia is the key concept in this entire effort of definition. It explains, or at least in a way unifies, an entire set of phenomena that otherwise would have remained random. The duality of Russian culture, the lying to foreigners, the sentimentality combined with brutality, all of this is "hidden [and revealed] in the mist of the Slavonic soul."^[18] Combined with other notions—of race, linguistic purity, and social behavior—it creates a system for the description of Russian civilization.

In the opposition culture-versus-nature, Russia, although covered by a "European veneer" of culture, finds herself on the side of nature. The notion of the mystery of Russia is also inherent in the relation the West had to Russia. It is related to the "impurity"—the mixed character—of Russian culture and to the ensuing resistance of this culture to the categories applied to it. The West, complicated as it was, was referred to only as the West, whereas Russia was Rome, and Greece, Byzantium, the Orient, the North. None of these names were accepted as final, none exhausted her nature. The West did not and could not understand Russia, therefore Russia was in its essence mysterious. What Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the "eternal mystery of femininity" describes the West's relationship to Russia as well: "The categories in which men think of the world are established from their point of view as absolute:

[18] As Eric Newby wrote in 1978 (!) in his Big Train Ride: Ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway (Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1978), 55.

they misconceive reciprocity, here as elsewhere. A mystery for man, woman is considered to be mysterious in essence."^[19] The mystery of Russia contained all that was incomprehensible and created a contrast with the clarity and transparence of the West. This is one of the meanings of Custine's feeling of discovery. A traveler is a "speaking mirror" (L'Espagne, 1: 86); his own face could be clear and understandable only if reflected in the mysteriousness of Russia.

[19] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953), 257.

6
Mental Geography

Siberia

"How many reasons for not going to Siberia!" wrote Custine at the beginning of his journey. He did not plan to go literally to Siberia: for him Russia and Siberia were synonymous. "And yet I go there."^[1] From a country that for Herberstein was too distant even to know if it had cities, Siberia was now a place that was everywhere. Siberia was, in fact, not only a place but also a state of mind.

As we have already said, geography may become a way of thinking about identity. The division between "our" world and the world where "lions dwell" may "help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away." This is how Edward Said describes the function of what he calls "imaginative geography and history."^[2] The way Custine used the name of Siberia is an example of imaginative geography at work.

Custine's opinions were based on what he saw, what he read, and what he imagined. Certainly, the place he knew best was the center of Russian political life—the court—as far away from Siberia as one could get in Russia. At court he saw unmatched splendors, but also a servility

[1] Custine, 1: 127.

[2] As opposed to "positive" geography and history; see Edward Said, Orientalism, 55.

and submission he did not see anywhere else. He accused Russians of using civilization to increase their importance and power and not to improve the life of their society: it was only their image they were worrying about (La Russie en 1839, vol. 1: 97). The enslavement of the peasants and of the nobility; the brutality of persecution; the forced uniformity of behavior, dress, and thinking; the military organization of everyday life accompanied by extreme poverty and dirt all made him call Russia "a desert." A desert was a place of solitude, where no civilization could be found. Romantic writers applied that term to many countries, including the United States. For Custine, the Russia of Nicholas I was such a desert, and there was even a name for it—Siberia.

Siberia commenced on the Vistula,^[3] that is, in the partitioned Poland, wrote Custine in one of his attempts to delineate Siberia's borders. Wherever fear governed, there he saw Siberia. The many beginnings of his voyage, the very slowness of his approach to Russia (we have to wait for at least two hundred pages before he crosses the border) are an expression of this geographical indeterminacy.^[4] Once he was in Russia, Siberia was what he saw behind every façade.

At each step I here take, I see rising before me the phantom of Siberia, and I think of all that is implied in the name of that political desert, that abyss of misery, this tomb of living men,—a world of fabulous griefs, a land peopled with infamous criminals and sublime heroes, a colony without which this Empire would be as incomplete as a palace without cellars. (P. 239)

Custine was not an explorer, and he never ventured very far toward the northeast. Interested mainly in the political system and in high society, he stayed mostly in the salons. Once, though, he traveled on a road that turned out to be the great exile route to Siberia. The psychological proximity (he was not any closer to Siberia) did not make his description any more concrete.

Siberia! This word made my blood run cold . . . that Russian hell is incessantly before me with all its phantoms. It has upon me the effect that the eye of the basilisk has upon the fascinated bird. (P. 504)

[3] Warsaw was then one of Russia's provincial cities. See The Empire of the Czar, 155.

[4] There is a special topic that should be addressed here: transportation. Every travel book starts with a boat or train. Going to Russia at that time was truly an adventure. Custine's list of means of transportation is awesome: droshka, taranta, telega, kibitka. And the distances seemed endless. His description of travel reminds one of readings about kinds of torture, torture by transportation. With the introduction of railroad, traveling in Russia became easier and travelers' moods improved.

These exclamations, interpolated by the author, written as if he were fighting for his breath, are followed by a description of the plain the great exile route crosses. The description is totally negative:

[It is] a plain without limit, without colors, without lines, but for the line, always the same, traced by the leaden circle of the sky on the iron surface of the land!^[5]

Too much space makes him feel claustrophobic:

Winter and death are felt to be hovering over these scenes: the Northern light and climate give to all objects a funereal hue; at the end of a few weeks, the terrified traveller feels himself buried alive; he would like to destroy his funeral shroud and escape this cemetery, which has no closure and no limits but for those of how far he can see; and, stifling, he struggles to burst his coffin-lid, that leaden veil that separates him from the living. (P. 504)

Custine describes Siberia by using two powerful images that had been imposed by Chateaubriand: the desert and the tomb. Chateaubriand's America is presented in his famous short novels René, Atala, and Les Natchez (1902) as a social desert that in the end becomes a tomb. Like America, Russia, and especially Siberia, have no historical ruins, no visible tombs of their past. It was therefore the boundless spaces that became their tomb. Like everything in Russia—indeed, like Russia herself—Siberia is not what is seems to be. Space serves to enclose, to enslave, to kill, not to set free.

The population of this desert are "the colonists of Siberia"; because of that, "there is, in that distant exile, a vague poetry which adds to the severity of the sentence all the influence of the imagination" (p. 505). Custine looked at Siberia through the eyes of the political convict and saw it in all its horror. While traveling on the grand exile route, he saw a group of convicts and convinced himself that they were Poles, "heroes of unhappiness and devotion." The fear of his feldjäger makes him pass the convoy without speaking to the unfortunates, and he feels profoundly humilitated. "I would wish to be far away from a country where the miserable creature who acts as my courier can become formidable enough to compel me by his presence to dissimulate the most natural feelings of my heart" (p. 505).

This entire episode of the great exile route to Siberia is added almost as an afterthought toward the end of the last volume. It is of particular interest because it shows Custine's style: Chateaubriandesque imagery,

[5] ". . . with immense, colorless rivers, dull as the heavens they reflect!" (p. 504).

extreme sensitivity, very strong involvement, and frank confession of fear. A passing convoy—if indeed it was a passing convoy and not a shadow—evokes in him a psychological chain-reaction in which all his thoughts and images of Siberia are combined and reiterated. He shows, with himself as example, the working of the Russian "despotism." He does not tell a story of attempts at heroism: in silence the prisoners pass, and he remains confused, ashamed, humiliated—that is, touched and stained by fear. It is an antiheroic description and, as such, extremely modern.

One needs to have an iron body (de fer) and an infernal imagination (d'enfer) to travel in Russia, he said. His imagination certainly is infernal. He is truly hypnotized by fear, like a bird by the glance of a basilisk. This obsession reflected the reality. The atmosphere of paranoia was not in the head of the traveler but all around him, although a privileged traveler like himself had to make an effort to see it. His critics accused him of inventing the meeting with the prisoners and, in general, of having too much imagination. It is not clear whether he did actually see the prisoners, but, as Isaiah Berlin has said, "Victims make acute observers."^[6] Custine made a political convict a presence in his travels because it was his way of talking about the most important phenomenon of Russian everyday reality—fear.

There were many travel descriptions of Russia in which no mention was made of political deportees. Théophile Gautier, in his Voyage dans Russie, treats Siberia as "pittoresque,"^[7] while George Kennan, the American nineteenth-century writer (and no relation of George Frost Kennan) wrote a book about The Tent Life in Siberia which did not mention the penal colonies. Only later did he "discover" the archipelago of prisons and camps, to which he devoted a separate book. Siberia was like a continent—spacious enough to accommodate many descriptions. But hers was not a dry, regular geographic name. "The very mention of Siberia conjures up a foreboding image," wrote August von Haxt-

[6] Quoted in George F. Kennan, 26.

[7] See the already quoted Russia . The original edition was intitled Voyage en Russie, 2 vols. (Paris: Chapentier, 1866, 1867). This was a collection of essays, some of them published in magazines. Gautier concentrated on Russian art and the beauty of the landscape. He plagiarized heavily Custine's La Russie, mentioning its author only once, in passing. Tarn made an amusing comparison of various plagiarized fragments. When Voyage was published, Custine was already dead. In his famous Spanish travels, Tra los Montes (1843), Gautier also plagiarized Custine's book on Spain, although Custine was still alive. Tarn considered this fact a victory, for Custine, whose unjustly forgotten Spanish book reappeared, in a "digested" form, in Gautier's bestseller (Tarn, 465–468).

hausen, a great admirer of Russia.^[8] There were other untranslatable Russian words that were incorporated into Western culture in quotation marks. These were words like knout, a lash used to kill; or bunt, a violent revolt of peasants; muzhik, a peasant slave (later metamorphosed into kulak ); ukaz, the tsar's "fiat"; and, by the end of the nineteenth century, the word pogrom . In this little dictionary, Siberia meant the place, a punishment, and the political system that stood behind it. For Custine, it replaced the very word Russia.

The Russians themselves talked about Siberia in similarly vague and terrified terms. Lotman quotes a letter written in 1821 by a Russian nobleman called Katenin who said that he was in exile "not far from Siberia."

This is a geographical absurdity: Kostromskii province, where Katenin was exiled, is closer not only to Moscow but also to St. Petersburg than it is to Siberia, and both men knew this. But by the time of their correspondence, Siberia had already become the place of exile in literary plots and the oral mythology of Russian culture . . . real space was interpreted through literary space.^[9]

Literary but also real. Siberia stood for punishment, cruel and merciless, because such was her history. It is difficult to think of an equivalent place in all of geography. None of the other places that were used for prisons and confinement—Australia, various islands—became so firmly associated with this function as did Siberia.

According to George Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System, Russian convicts and exiles began to be sent to Siberia as soon as it was conquered. The first mention of exile in Russian law was in 1648.^[10] The horror surrounding the name of Siberia was due to the harshness of its climate and to the extreme cruelty with which the entire prison and exile system was organized. Throughout the centuries, the Russian state used not only force but also climate, distance, and neglect as means of punishment. The prisoners' own bodies were turned into instruments of torture. In heat or cold, people were marched for months, with fetters on their feet, disfigured by mutilation or head-shaving, with insufficient food or water. Those who survived found themselves in mines or prisons, or settlements in places not fit for human habitation. This punishment was meted out arbitrarily and irrevocably. At least half of the

[8] August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, 185.

[9] I. Lotman, "The Decembrist in Daily Life," 110–111.

[10] George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 74. This is an abridged version of the first edition of 1891.

convicts were sent there through extralegal measures—for example, because of a landlord's dislike or a rural commune's decision. In order to colonize the land and provide labor for the mines, the slightest offense was punished by exile.^[11] In the nineteenth century, the loss of a document was often enough to dispatch a peasant to Siberia. And only a few ever came back. While passing the boundary post of Siberia, George Kennan, not at all given to exclamations or exaggerations, declared that "no other boundary post in the world has witnessed so much human suffering, or been passed by such multitudes of heart-broken people" (Siberia, 52). Many have offered a similar opinion.

Yet there was another attitude to Siberia, exemplified, among others, by Haxthausen. He saw a great future awaiting Siberia. "It is one part of the globe whose destiny is boundless and wholly uncertain," he wrote with admiration, comparing the promise of Siberia to that of North America (p. 186). Many people, including Chateaubriand,^[12] defended exile as a form of social control superior to prison. France made ample use of her colonies for that purpose. Custine often quotes Coup d'oeil sur la législation russe, written in 1839 by Anatol N. Demidov, an ardent defender of the exile system in Russia. The idea of populating Siberia could certainly be convincing. There were even people—though few believed them—who thought Siberia beautiful and its climate healthy.^[13] Throughout Russian history, many religious dissenters and fleeing serfs had gone to Siberia, which meant for them escape from central authority and, therefore, freedom. Several proponents of Russian uniqueness saw in Siberia a place where an authentic peasant communal life could thrive and develop. For Haxthausen, Siberia was the land of the future but one in which old traditions could survive. His undoubtedly very influential book^[14] was written at the instigation of (and with the finan-

[11] "This is called in Petersburg peopling Asia," ironized Custine who was always attentive to the insincere use of language (p. 126).

[12] In his Voyage en Amérique, published by C. A. Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, n.d.), 268.

[13] In her memoir from Soviet camps, Erica Wallach wrote that the prisoners were often struck by the beauty of the landscape around them. But they "did not dare admit it openly to each other—how could we possibly enjoy anything in the inferno?" They thought, however, that they would admire the place if they had come as tourists (Erica Wallach, Light at Midnight [New York: Doubleday, 1967], 285). That enjoyment would have been impossible, the image of prisoners being by then an integral part of the landscape.

[14] Especially inside Russia; see Introduction to his Studies, xxii–xlii. He formulated the problem of the peasant commune in a way that made it appealing for both the Westernized Russians like Alexandr Herzen, and the conservative Slavophiles.

cial support of) the Russian government, eager for a rebuttal to Custine's book. Haxthausen enthusiastically endorsed a Russian autocracy as based on unity and obedience, which were precisely what Custine abhorred.

For Custine, Siberia was a symbol (and reality) of everything that was wrong in Russia. The arbitrariness of the Russian system of justice made nonsense of any discussion of the social usefulness of the exile system. It was a place where the individual was crushed, thrown away by the arbitrary will of the state. And nobody objected! If he compared Siberia to a desert and tomb, it was because no public, no testimony remained to watch the endless sacrifice. The arbitrariness and irrevocability of the sentence made Siberia a true inferno. To be sent there was to be buried alive.

Custine was very afraid in Russia. Fear, usually, clouds vision, but in this case, with so many obstacles in the way of clear vision, only the acuity that comes from fear could pierce them. He saw very clearly that the Russian state was serving only itself—concerned with its own glory and expansion at the expense of everything else. He saw that obedience to the state was thought to be the people's most sacred duty, and he considered this a sacrilege. He thought each individual unhappy and saw no possibility of happiness in Russia. He understood what was later called "the critical attitude" that those in power had toward the people—always trying to change them, always violently unhappy with the way they were. Custine rose to the defense of the people by writing his book. To interpret the silence, to unmask the tyranny, was to punish it (Empire of the Czar, 234–235; La Russie en 1839, vol. 2: 122). It was the only means of punishment he had.

Siberia symbolized Russia for Custine because of its greatness—the greatness of its possible future, the greatness of its space, but, most of all, the greatness of its inexpressible suffering—suffering as limitless as its space. He found no justification for its existence in culture: no true, human law was observed or realized there, and the social function of punishment was simply reduced to cruelty. Nor was history on Siberia's side: there was none, since the names of the victims went unrecorded. From the point of view of the individual, it was the most horrible, lonely place to die. Neither faith nor freedom could be found there, neither salvation nor glory. In this way of dying Custine saw the denial of individuality—the pulverization of the victim. He rebelled against it with all his might.

Siberia—this "political desert"—was a huge, silent presence in Cus-

tine's book, a place on which everything converged. In this geographic name we can observe three realities intersecting: the traveler, the place, and a tradition. The traveler's sensibilities and experiences are, to use Hippolyte Taine's metaphor, a filter, a lens coloring what is being perceived.^[15] In Custine's case, his experience as a victim of political violence and as a social outcast—an experience not only undergone but remembered and understood—provided the dark glass through which he looked at everything. But, we can ask, what had he looked at? Would his opinion be different had he actually seen a Siberian city or prison? Most probably he would have been even more horrified. In his mind the place was a political phenomenon, and it is doubtful that any amount of physical experience could change it. And why should it? Although there were other aspects to Siberian reality, the suffering of the exiles and the prisoners could not have been overshadowed in Custine's mind by a nice city, a pleasant landscape, or evidence of happiness—had there been any. It was a land populated by "the phantoms," which no amount of physical experience could dispel.

The "phantoms" came from the knowledge of Siberia that Custine brought with him to Russia. This knowledge was contained in books he read, theatrical performances he saw, stories he heard from his Polish friends. It filled the very name of Siberia with dread. Although it was a tradition that could be ignored (as Gautier proved), it was also one that had a long history and a receptive public. In his one look at Siberia—a look from far away—Custine found proof of all he had read and heard about it.

One could object that "the place" does not participate in this transaction, that Custine spins out of his tradition a vision of Siberia not only without having seen it but also without the necessity of coming to Russia at all. But the way we know and see things is very complex indeed. Our description and our understanding of a place is never totally dependent on our physical experience of it. Siberia was not some neutral, geographical entity that Custine wanted to describe. It had earned its name in history and, even unseen, felt oppressive to the increasingly anxious Europeans. The history of the place—in this case the historyless, nameless continuity of suffering—is more important than its physical characteristics. The past defines the place. In itself the landscape is incomprehensible, inchoate: it needs words to be explained. Siberia was

[15] Hippolyte Taine, Italy, Rome and Naples, trans. J. Durand (New York: Henry Holt, 1889), p. v.

understood by Custine as an expression of the entire system of government: it represented Russia politically, geographically, and symbolically. The road leading to Siberia was enough of a geographical experience. The rest was on the map in the traveler's head.

The Cities

In addition to describing what he did not see—Siberia—Custine presented the reader with places he did visit. His descriptions were vivid, dramatic, and often unusually imaginative. Almost all of them reproduced in miniature the author's point of view and the drama of his discovery of the real nature of Russia. The description of the city of Moscow is an example. The first, positive impression of the city from afar turns, at closer scrutiny, into profound rejection. Every sentence, every detail of the description fits into a larger, ideological category. Everything is infused with judgment.

Through his descriptions, however, one could see the shape of Moscow's churches and feel its dust. His descriptions are lively and convincing and have been pirated by the master-describer himself. Théophile Gautier. Gautier was perhaps the most accomplished of an entire tradition of writers called "tourists" by Michel Cadot—writers who set aside political problems, deliberately untreated, and concentrated on "the purely picturesque."^[16] As was already mentioned, Théophile Gautier wrote his account when the tsar, Alexander II, was introducing some of the most important reforms in Russian history (i.e., the abolition, in 1861, of serfdom). Despite such programs, there was still much that might have been criticized. The "tourist" writers Cadot mentions—Xavier Marmier, Louis Viardot, Henri Merimée, Charles de Saint-Julien, and Horace Vernet—traveled to Russia in the years 1839–1848, that is, at the height of the rigid and uncompromising régime of Nicholas I. Nevertheless, they were favorably impressed by what they saw. Indeed, one's opinion of a country seems to depend to an astonishingly high degree on matters outside the political reality of that country. Nowhere can this be observed more clearly than in the case of Russia, both in tsarist and in Soviet times. The attitude expressed by the writers depended directly on their feeling about their own country rather than about the one

[16] Michel Cadot, 103.

visited. The most favorable accounts of visits to the Soviet Union, clothed as they were in the all-obscuring language of statistics, were produced when the Stalinist terror and purges were at their highest intensity. But the writers wanted to strike out against the corruption, unemployment, and hypocrisy of their homelands; they therefore accepted the proffered image not only unquestioningly but with enthusiasm.

Russia's autocratic system of government presented an irresistible temptation to various kinds of reformers. The friendship between Catherine the Great and "les philosophes"—especially Denis Diderot—is an illustration of this. The philosophes were enthusiastically pro-Russian because they believed in the possibility of convincing the monarch to improve social conditions; once the monarch was enlightened, nothing stood in the way of social experiments. For the same reason Leibnitz wanted to offer his advice to Peter the Great, and innumerable other writers and intellectuals planned to implement their ideas in that distant place, which was always in need of improvement. And Leibnitz, Voltaire, and Diderot were only the early ones in a long list of "fellow travellers."^[17]

It did help that the advice was rewarded by income and that the Russian government was always very attentive to the needs of its apologists—and very eager in punishing those who criticized it. Russians were always intensely, painfully interested in the opinion of foreigners. The intensity of this interest was perhaps the reason the foreigners felt free to give their advice abundantly. But it was also the country's duality, the oscillation between its Western and non-Western character, that liberated in the visitors the energies of classification, comparison, and judgment. In no other place did the French philosophes, the German landowners, and the English merchants feel so compelled to give advice and express their opinions. And, although there were many "tourist" descriptions of Russia, the typical reactions were extreme: strong approval or disapproval. To the Westerners, the country was a challenge, an irritation to be classified away. In that sense, Custine's approach was not unique, it was just unusually thorough.

Indeed, to him, everything in Russia spoke of sadness and suffering. Every detail expressed a lack of harmony of the whole. The description of another city he visited in Russia—Saint Petersburg—may serve as an illustration of this. While approaching the city, Custine presented the

[17] See Albert Lortholary, Le Mirage russe en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: B. Boivin, 1951).

view-from-afar, a traditional way of introducing a city in the travel narrative. Such view is usually organized in terms identical to those of travel lithographs and, later, photographs: the city is reduced in size, miniaturized, but with an effort to show it in its completeness. There is a traditional spot from which the city is presented. The next step is "the telling detail." Custine approached Saint Petersburg from the sea, anxious at the thought of entering a city whose existence was due to one man's—Peter the Great's—single-handed decision:

I have never seen, in the approaches to any other great city, a landscape so melancholy as the banks of the Neva. The campagna of Rome is a desert, but what picturesque objects, what past associations, what light, what fire, what poetry, if I might be allowed the expression, I would say, what passion animates this biblical land! To reach St. Petersburg, you must pass a desert of water framed in a desert of peat earth: sea, shore, and sky, everything mingles; it is like a mirror, but so muddy, so dull you would say that the glass has been tarnished, for it reflects nothing. (P. 78)

This description is reminiscent of the description of Siberia. In both cases, there is endless space that is not a symbol of freedom. The desert, there called "political," here could be called "historical": the essence of the space around Saint Petersburg is that it has no memory. The "muddy mirror" of the waters of the Neva is juxtaposed to the other desert, made famous by Chateaubriand (and before him, by Goethe), of the Roman countryside. Called here, in the imaginative geography of Custine's creation, "the biblical land" (perhaps in association with Chateaubriand's pilgrimages?), the countryside outside of Rome evoked Chateaubriand's melancholy musings on the passing of time and on the decline of civilizations. This pose became obligatory in the literature about Italy—so obligatory that even such a sober and witty traveler as Dickens felt compelled forty years later to strike a similarly romantic note. The ruins of aqueducts—signs of human industry defeated by time—were what arrested Chateaubriand's attention. Indeed, it is a most common sight in travel photography: the segment of the Roman aqueduct in a desolate, austere landscape. It says: tempus fugit, memento mori . In Custine's description the Roman countryside is evoked to show the double, triple desert of Russia—a desert not only physical but historical and psychological as well.

Russia did not have history—that is, Russia did not have a history that Custine (and his contemporaries) knew from school or casual readings. Roman, Greek, or medieval Italian history belonged to the vocabulary of an educated Frenchman at the time; Russian history was not a

part of the common European heritage. Custine learned Russian history later, and learned it not as his own history. While approaching cities in the West of Europe, Custine felt a gradual awakening of memory. Arriving in Saint Petersburg, he was reminded of nothing: it was his memory that was the muddy, dull mirror, and nothing was awakened in it. Here everything was not only new but also unsettling. Like the Tuilleries, Saint Petersburg was a city-court, but it had no Paris in the vicinity; it was a capital of the Empire but built in a place that was unfit for human habitation.

There is here no harmony between the inventions of man and the gifts of nature. . . . Contradiction seems to me the outstanding characteristic in the architecture of this huge city. (P. 89)

The city is so confusing that Custine ends one of his attempts at description with a self-justifying exclamation:

Let me not be reproached for my contradictions . . . they lie in the things which I contemplate . . . in physical as in moral order, truth is only an assemblage of crying contrasts—contrasts so glaring, that it might be said nature and society have been created only in order to hold together elements which would otherwise oppose and repel each other. (P. 220)

Custine's contradictions were caused by a feeling of displacement coming from something more than just his traveling. The things he came in contact with had the unsettling quality of being somewhat unlike what they were supposed to be. Saint Petersburg—so different from other Russian cities—shared with them the strange characteristic of being very countrylike. The West-European city Custine knew was sharply divided from the countryside by walls and gates or other fortifications, and its internal space was organized in a dense way that was recognized as urban. That division was not clearly visible in Russia. The contrast between city and country was muted or even absent. Unlike Paris, Saint Petersburg was very empty and spacious. Inside Russian cities, spaces were very large and used for agriculture. The roads were unpaved, the houses built of wood with no fortifications around them. Such cities burned easily and often, and therefore contained no antiquities. With a few exceptions, they were founded by a governmental decree of the Building Commission established by Catherine the Great in an effort to produce a Russian middle class. The places chosen for them were at a distance of three or four days on horseback from each other, in order to be convenient for state communication. The local population or conditions were not a

major concern.^[18] Because of the distances, the cities had to be self-sufficient and therefore identically unspecific in their crafts and crops. Also, the wooden houses were identical in most of the places, and some of them were even prefabricated. The feeling of monotony was reinforced by the fact that the decree that founded the cities also prescribed their design, of which only four possible configurations, or some combination of them, were allowed.

All these factors [, wrote Patricia Herlihy,] dampened the contrasts between city and countryside, and diluted the nature of urbanism itself. The Russian town, aesthetically and . . . socially, was more an extension of the countryside than an exit from it; it was not really an entrance into a radically different society and culture.^[19]

And Custine complains:

At every twenty or thirty leagues on all the roads a single town greets your eyes; this is everywhere the same. (P. 597)

For Western travelers, such cities were very confusing. Like many other things in Russia, the actual city did not neatly correspond to the image evoked by the word "city" in Western experience. The cities in Russia were an extension of the countryside, not its opposite. As a consequence, Russia had neither burghers nor a Western-type urban culture. High culture was limited to the court and had no roots in urban society. Peasant life was also different: in Russia peasants were serfs, organized in rural communes and not bound by local patriotism.^[20] Some visitors found this difference—the communal life of the peasants—worth emulating (Haxthausen). Although Custine approved of traditions, he believed freedom to be the most important characteristic of social life, and this opinion precluded any appreciation of mir or obshchina —the institutions of peasant life based on compulsory cooperation. Serfdom made Russian peasant life a nightmare.

The profound unease felt by Custine in Russia was due in part to this inapplicability of his vocabulary to what he saw before his eyes. "The word 'prison' signifies something more here than it does elsewhere"

[18] See J. Michael Hittle, "The Service City in the Eighteenth Century," in Michael F. Hamm, ed., The City in Russian History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 53–68.

[19] Patricia Herlihy, "Visitors' Perceptions of Urbanization: Travel Literature in Tsarist Russia," in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London: Edward Arnold Pub., 1983), 125–137, esp. 137.

[20] Herlihy, 127.

(Empire of the Czar, 238). "In appearances everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things" (La Russie en 1839, vol. 1: 288). For him, culture and civilization in Russia were just images of Western culture and civilization, not things themselves; the Russians themselves oscillated between nature and culture. For Custine, the very basis of the Russian political system made slaves of everybody, including the aristocrats. This lack of freedom, by preventing any spontaneous expression of national needs and talents, disfigured everything and made Russia a social, political, historical, and moral desert.

Conclusions: In-between

Custine's critique of Russia, although very much his own, was, as I have mentioned, based on many sources. His Russian interlocutors were Westernized noblemen torn between love of their country and disrespect for its autocratic ruler. Custine was indebted mostly to (or, one may say, found most in common with) two of them: Prince Pyotr Borisovich Kozlovski and Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev. Both men were Catholics and believed in the superiority of the universal Catholic Church over the national Greek-Orthodox Church of their country. Fragments of Chaadayev's famous Philosophic Letter, written in French and published in 1836, three years before Custine's journey, sound extremely familiar to the reader of Custine.^[21] He described Russia as a land of wasted opportunity, its people as immature, neither European nor Asiatic—belonging, as he put it, to geography rather than to history. This binary negative framework of Chaadayev's Letter is identical to Custine's way of thinking. It is difficult to say if these were the Russian sources of Custine's opinions or opinions that originated in the West and then filtered back to Custine through Russia. Perhaps in this case, the distinction loses its meaning.

Custine did read the Philosophic Letter and probably met with its author. In the book, he summarized it as a plea for the introduction of Catholicism into Russia (La Russie en 1839, vol. 4: app.). Second only to liberty, Catholicism was the other prism through which Custine looked at Russia. Both were intermingled, the religion being for Cus-

[21] This striking similarity has been noticed, among others, by G. F. Kennan (p. 40) and Pierre Nora (p. 403).

tine the warranty and highest expression of individual freedom. Not only Chaadayev's words but his very life served to convince Custine of the unacceptability of Russian despotism. Chaadayev was a thinker who wrote a critique of his country—and this was considered the gravest of crimes. To punish him, the tsar declared him mentally sick and confined him to his house and to the care of doctors. This use of psychiatric treatment for political dissent profoundly horrified Custine.

Today, at the end of three years [Custine's emphasis], of a treatment rigorously observed, a treatment as degrading as it was cruel, the unfortunate theologian of broad horizons . . . doubts his own sanity and, on the faith of the imperial word, he declares himself insane.^[22]

The attempt of the regime to get inside the minds of its victims, to alter their thinking and perceptions, evoked Custine's strongest protest.

This case of human rights abuse (as we would say today) prompted him to pose a question: "Has the traveller, fortunate or unfortunate enough to have collected such data, the right to allow it to remain unknown?" And he answered this question himself. "In this kind of thing what you know positively throws light on what you suppose; and out of all this comes a conviction which you are obligated to share with the world if you can" (p. 373). In defense of the victims of political persecution or arbitrary power, he wrote a book that was an effort to build the memory he found lacking in Russia. That memory would record, expose, and ultimately limit injustice.

He spoke as a witness and reported, in an autobiographical account, on an encounter with social evil. Bearing testimony was only one of his ambitions. He tried to explain and analyze the foundations of the unjust system and to write a treatise about Russian politics. He succeeded admirably. His image of Russia became part of the West-European and American political landscape. In quoting him, various writers have emphasized different aspects of his description, but its astonishing vitality has remained intact. His book was deeply appreciated by some of his contemporaries, including such important Russian thinkers as Aleksandr Herzen. As late as the 1950s, Moscow's American Embassy personnel read and translated Custine, marveling at the correspondence between tsarist and Stalinist Russia. George F. Kennan admired Custine, and it is legitimate to suppose that his influential theory of containment, based, as it was, on a special understanding of the workings of

[22] The appendix from the last volume of La Russie en 1839 is cut from the American edition. Here I use the translation from the Journey for Our Time, 372–373.

Russian and Soviet systems, was related to this reading. Although he found La Russie en 1839 to be an imperfect critique of the Russia of Nicholas I (too partial!), he was struck by its clairvoyant understanding of the country as it existed in the 1950s. The aspect of Custine's critique that impressed Kennan most was the stress on Russia's plans for the future. Unable to explain the grandiose scale of the government's undertakings by reference either to past tradition or to contemporary needs, Custine saw in them a secret preparation for future world conquest. Without this "arrière-pensée," he wrote, "the history of Russia would appear to me an inexplicable enigma" (2: 313). Kennan found this explanation fully justified. Moreover, in Custine, he discovered a comprehensive political program of peace and disarmament: "he rejected materialism, imperialism, and war, in all their forms. How it was possible," Kennan continued, "for a man to arrive at ideas so wholly contrary to the entire developing atmosphere of his own century and culture remains one of the mysteries with which Custine's person and cast of mind seem always to have been surrounded" (Kennan 1971, 93).

The explanation of this mystery may lie in the tendency of Kennan's to think anachronistically: no program of peace and disarmament is to be found in Custine. What is interesting here is that both Custine and Kennan, in the face of an incomprehensible phenomenon, resort to the already-described method of "explanation by mystery." Custine did indeed hide some particulars of his visit to Russia; it was a reasonable precaution to protect people with whom he came in contact. He also had to conceal what Kennan called his "lurid behavior." Otherwise, rather than mysterious, he was a complex man who defied our categories.

Astolphe de Custine is perhaps best characterized as a man in-between. The most successful—for us—of his writings are his travel books. They belong to neither the low nor the high culture; they combine reportage with fiction; their ambitions are literary but also journalistic and political; they are devoted to the description of a foreign country, but they are strongly personal and autobiographical; they are contemporary yet strongly historical; they are about "them," but most of all they are about "us." His politics were also in flux. He left for Russia a professed monarchist and conservative; he returned accepting "the representative system [as] the most moral form of government" (p. 499), because it was able to defend the individual against the abuses of both autocracy and excessive democracy. He felt distaste for the imperial expansion of Russia or of any other country—he thought that each nation had enough territory to be happy—yet he had an unshakable

certainty of the superiority of French civilization, which, therefore, should influence the world. He disliked religious proselytizing but believed strongly in, and incessantly proclaimed, the superiority of the Catholic Church; the universal Catholic Church was for him the only hope of escaping the ills of the modern world. He did not fit into a conservative or monarchist tradition, nor did he look for a place in the democratic camp. His dominant concern—a concern for personal freedom—was joined with an American kind of requirement that the people be happy; yet these coexisted with a conservative nostalgia, respect for tradition, and abhorrence of change. But he found change inevitable and linked happiness to freedom rather than to tradition. Attached as he was to his class, he found aristocracy, in France as well as elsewhere, unable to perform its social functions and therefore superfluous. He held very strong political ideas but did not make of them a coherent system: he felt compelled to measure them against each new experience. All of this made him very difficult to classify.

And yet, as a writer, he felt a strong need to systematize and simplify. He could have said, with Auden, that "the Truth is one and incapable of self-contradiction; / All knowledge that conflicts with itself is Poetic Fiction" (Shorts ). All of his efforts at clear, intellectual definition were, however, undermined by his poetic sensitivity to detail, to reality. Never happy with his verbal definition, he returns again and again to the same point, building an anthill of facts, definitions, reformulations. His topics are marginal, his chosen genre is in-between, his method of writing combines different styles and modes. He looks for complexities and, when they do not fall into a system, he follows them along their many uneven paths.

In La Russie en 1839, a complex writer used an intricate tradition to describe a tremendously complicated country. The result is puzzling and compelling and full of life today, a century and a half later. Custine's appeal for modern readers resides not only in his amazing perspicacity about Russia but also in his guarded, ambivalent attitude toward the world around him. His analysis (and rejection) of an all-powerful state is modern, as are his complaints against modernity. He does not find easy solutions, and the only example of action he gives us to follow is that of his own (imperfect) personal engagement . Today, we share his fears—of violence, of revolutions; and we share his in-between state. We see in him a man who fulfilled his obligation to warn us against evils that still live. He is our contemporary.