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.