The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History 9462982724, 9789462982727

Table of contents :
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Presentation of dates, transliteration, and other editorial practices
Abbreviations used in the notes
The Romanovs
Introduction
Chapter 1: The historical contexts of Russian francophonie
Chapter 2: Teaching and learning French
Chapter 3: French at court
Chapter 4: French in high society
Chapter 5: French in diplomacy and other official domains
Chapter 6: Writing French
Chapter 7: French for cultural propaganda and political polemics
Chapter 8: Language attitudes
Chapter 9: Perceptions of bilingualism in the classical Russian novel
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The French Language in Russia

Languages and Culture in History This series studies the role foreign languages have played in the creation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of Europe, both western and eastern, and at the individual, community, national or transnational level. At the heart of this series is the historical evolution of linguistic and cultural policies, internal as well as external, and their relationship with linguistic and cultural identities. The series takes an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of historical issues: the diffusion, the supply and the demand for foreign languages, the history of pedagogical practices, the historical relationship between languages in a given cultural context, the public and private use of foreign languages – in short, every way foreign languages intersect with local languages in the cultural realm. Series Editors Willem Frijhoff, Erasmus University Rotterdam Karène Sanchez-Summerer, Leiden University Editorial Board Members Gerda Hassler, University of Potsdam Douglas A. Kibbee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Marie-Christine Kok Escalle, Utrecht University Joep Leerssen, University of Amsterdam Nicola McLelland, The University of Nottingham Despina Provata, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Konrad Schröder, University of Augsburg Valérie Spaëth, University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle Javier Suso López, University of Granada Pierre Swiggers, KU Leuven

The French Language in Russia A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History

Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Front page of Gazette de St. Pétersbourg, 5 September 1757 Used with permission from the Russian National Library, St Petersburg Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 272 7 e-isbn 978 90 4853 276 6 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462982727 nur 757 © Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski & Gesine Argent / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents List of illustrations 9 Preface 11 Acknowledgements 23 Presentation of dates, transliteration, and other editorial practices 27 Abbreviations used in the notes 29 The Romanovs 33 Introduction 35 Conventional assumptions about Franco-Russian bilingualism 35 Russia and ‘the West’, and the two Russias 44 Empire, nation, and language 52 Sociolinguistic perspectives 60 Methodological considerations 67 Literature as a primary source 72 Chapter 1: The historical contexts of Russian francophonie 79 The spread of French in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe 79 The westernization of Russia in the eighteenth century 88 The introduction of foreign languages into eighteenth-century Russia 94 The golden age of the nobility 102 The Napoleonic Wars and the Decembrist Revolt 110 The literary community and the intelligentsia in the age of Nicholas I 115 Chapter 2: Teaching and learning French 123 An overview of French teaching in Russia 123 French versus German 135 French versus Latin 146 French (and English) versus Russian 151 Acquiring social and cultural codes by learning French 160 Chapter 3: French at court 173 The discovery of sociability 173 French as a sign of the status of the Russian court 183 French as a court language under Catherine II 188

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French at the nineteenth-century court French as a royal language

195 200

Chapter 4: French in high society 215 The place of French in the noble’s linguistic repertoire 216 French in the sites of noble sociability 222 The spirit of the grand monde and social relations in it 232 Francophonie and social identity 242 French beyond the metropolitan aristocracy 253 Chapter 5: French in diplomacy and other official domains 263 The Chancery of Foreign Affairs and language training for Russian diplomats 265 The gradual rise of French in European and Russian treaties 273 Turning to French for the conduct of Russian diplomatic business 278 The influx of French loanwords into Russian diplomatic parlance 287 Language use in internal communications about foreign affairs 290 The triumph of French in the diplomatic community and the limits to its use 295 French and Russian in other official domains 301 French at the Academy of Sciences 312 Chapter 6: Writing French 327 Types of text and language choice in them 327 Language choice in nobles’ personal correspondence 332 Language use in diaries, travel notes, memoirs, and albums 346 Writing French to join Europe 359 Count Rostopchin’s ‘memoirs’ 372 Women’s place in the literary landscape 376 Early nineteenth-century women’s prose fiction 381 Chapter 7: French for cultural propaganda and political polemics 395 Transforming Russia’s image 395 Cultural propaganda in French in the age of Catherine 409 Russian use of the Francophone press in the age of Catherine and beyond 417 The promotion and translation of Russian literature 424 Chaadaev’s first ‘Philosophical Letter’ 434 Geopolitical polemics around 1848 439 Polemical writings in French after the Crimean War 452

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Chapter 8: Language attitudes 461 Language debate and its place in discourse about national identity 461 The development of Russian language consciousness 465 Linguistic Gallophobia in eighteenth-century comic drama 472 The linguistic debate between Karamzin and Shishkov 484 Rostopchin’s Gallophobia 494 Literary reflection on francophonie in the 1820s and 1830s 501 A Slavophile view of Russian francophonie: Konstantin Aksakov 507 Chapter 9: Perceptions of bilingualism in the classical Russian novel 519 The rise of the novel and the expression of nationhood in it 519 Ivan Turgenev 522 Lev Tolstoi: War and Peace 534 Tolstoi: Anna Karenina 550 Fedor Dostoevskii 558 Conclusion 571 The functions of French in imperial Russia 571 The changing climate in which French was used 575 Cultural borrowing and language use in grand narratives about Russian culture 578 Bibliography 589 Archival sources 589 Published primary sources 611 Secondary sources and reference works 627 Index 661



List of illustrations

Cover Gazette de St. Pétersbourg, 5 September 1757, no. 71 (Russian National Library) Title page of a 1792 edition of Émile by Jean-Jacques 1. 83 Rousseau (Russian National Library) Portrait of Nikolai Karamzin by Vasilii Tropinin, 1818 2. 93 (Russian National Library) 3. Map of Portugal, drawn by Princess Nina Bariatinskaia, 144 1785 (Russian State Library) Draft of a letter addressed by Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn to 4. his mother, Princess Natal’ia Golitsyna, 1778–1781 (Rus163 sian State Library) Exercises in French writing by Stepanida Baranova, 5. 164 1781–1785 (Russian State Library) Viktor Vasnetsov, Diner du 24 mai 1883 (Russian National 6. Library)213 View of the River Neva, including the buildings of the 7. Academy of Sciences (David Rumsey Map Collection, at www.davidrumsey.com)313 Cover page of an unfinished essay by Prince Boris 8. 366 Golitsyn, 1782 (Russian State Library) Title page of Alexandre Golovkin’s treatise Mes idées sur 9. l’éducation du sexe, ou précis du plan d’éducation pour ma 368 fille, 1778 (Russian National Library) Portrait of Fedor Rostopchin by Orest Kiprenskii, 1809 10. 373 (Russian National Library) Title page of Le Tableau slave by Zinaida Volkonskaia, 11. 388 1826 (Russian National Library) Title page of Relation fidelle de ce qui s’est passé au sujet du 12. jugement rendu contre le Prince Alexei et des circonstances 401 de sa mort, 1718 (Russian National Library) Le Furet. Journal de littérature et théâtre, 1830, no. 8 13. (Russian National Library) 425 Title page of a copy of the first volume of the 1868 edition 14. 539 of Tolstoi’s War and Peace (Russian National Library) 15. The first page of the text of the first volume of the 1868 edition of Tolstoi’s War and Peace (Russian National Library)540

Preface The aim of this book is to offer a multi-faceted history of the French language in pre-revolutionary Russia, where French was widely used for many purposes by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elites. (By ‘French language’ we mean the exclusive standardized variety used by the upper classes, which came in the eighteenth century to be seen as the only correct form of expression, a variety synonymous with the French language itself.1) This is a subject that has been rather little explored, at least until very recently, but we believe it has considerable importance. Study of it may afford insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. The subject also has a bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, particularly the prolonged debate about Russia’s relationship with the world beyond its western borders during the ages of empire-building and nation-building. At the same time, we hope that a fuller description of Franco-Russian bilingualism than has yet been provided will enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, the subject has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for it invites us to look beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within it in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated with them have been shared across national boundaries. Two principal threads run through our book; each could be the subject of a discrete enquiry, difficult as it might be to separate them at certain points. The first thread concerns language practice, that is to say, the functions of French in Russia and the settings and media in which it was used over a long period from the early eighteenth century. We analyze, for example, the use of French as a spoken and written language in various social milieus (the court and sites of aristocratic sociability, such as the salon, the ball, and the Masonic lodge) and in some official domains, especially diplomacy. We also examine its use as a literary language, both for amateur and more professionalized forms of writing, and as a propagandistic or polemical language for the promotion of a positive image of Russia beyond the country’s borders and for international debate about politics and grand questions of historical destiny. Language practice is the principal subject-matter of Chapters 3–7, which we arrange in a way that is primarily thematic rather 1

We use here the definition given by Lodge, French, 184.

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than chronological. Although we make occasional reference to language use in the closing years of the imperial regime, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the period with which we are principally concerned in our consideration of language use ends in 1861. This was the year in which the government of Alexander II abolished serfdom, and the nobles’ loss of their exclusive right to own serfs marked the end of an era: after this date the prestige of the noble estate, of which nobles’ use of French among themselves was a symbolic indicator, was on the wane. The second thread of our investigation concerns language attitudes and the ways in which language use is bound up with conceptions of identity of various sorts (especially social and national identity). It takes us into the realm of perceptions, imagined communities, mental landscapes, and notions of worth. We explore, for instance, the penetration of ideas about the qualities of languages and the implications of language choice into Russian cultural consciousness. We consider the degree to which attitudes towards Russians’ adoption of the French language were entangled with conceptions of France and the French people. Equally important, we discuss the narratives that unfolded in Russia about the supposed perils of cosmopolitanism and bilingualism for an awakening nation. In Chapters 8–9, where such matters come to the fore, our account is largely chronological. It begins in earnest slightly later than our account of linguistic practice, around the middle of the eighteenth century. This was the time when French was establishing itself at court and as a prestige language among the Russian nobility and when Russians were beginning to reflect on their use of foreign languages and on the varieties and qualities of their own. It also ends a little later than our account of language use, because the great classical novelists, whose treatment of Franco-Russian bilingualism we examine in our final chapter, continued to regard the subject as highly relevant to their reflections on Russian destiny throughout the reign of Alexander II, who was assassinated in 1881. However, before following the two main threads that we have described, on language use and language attitudes, we shall try to construct a conceptual framework for our investigation and to provide a rich historical context for it. The first of these tasks we address in our introduction. Here we begin by questioning some common assumptions about the Franco-Russian bilingualism and related biculturalism of the elite in imperial Russia (or rather their multilingualism and multiculturalism, for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elite was exposed to a range of European languages and cultures, not just to French language and culture) and about the effects of these phenomena. We then consider two notions which have strongly

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affected discussion of Russian culture: first, that Russia is best defined by comparison with, or even in opposition to, an imagined ‘West’ and second, that Russian cultural development has been exceptional or even unique. Next, we approach the subject of language use and language debate from two different disciplinary angles: as a subject that is germane both to historians, especially historians interested in empire-building and nation-building, and to sociolinguists interested in bilingualism, diglossia, language choice, language loyalty, code-switching, purism, and so forth. The interdisciplinary nature of our investigation also necessitates some reflection on the extent to which the approaches of history and sociolinguistics can be reconciled and on other methodological matters. In the last section of the introduction, we discuss the nature, value, and shortcomings of some of the types of primary source we have used, especially prose fiction and drama. The linguistic phenomena we bring to light and the twists and turns in both the threads of our narrative may be explained to a considerable extent by social and political developments and by external and internal cultural and intellectual stimuli. We therefore aim, in Chapter 1, to establish a broad historical background which can be borne in mind as we examine the functions of language and perceptions of the effects of language use in pre-revolutionary Russian society over some two centuries. After some discussion of the international spread of French from the age of Louis XIV, we briefly describe the empire-building undertaken by eighteenth-century Russian sovereigns, starting with Peter the Great, and the accompanying reforms initiated by Peter with a view to modernizing the state he inherited and westernizing its elite. We then outline the reception of foreign languages in eighteenth-century Russia, focusing on the adoption of French as a prestige language among the elite from around the middle of the century. A key social factor in Russia’s modernization was the development of the nobility into a corporation of a western kind, conscious of its privileged status, and this process we survey in the fourth section of Chapter 1. After mention of historical events (the Napoleonic Wars and the so-called Decembrist Revolt of 1825) to which we shall often refer, we dwell on the emergence of the literary community and intelligentsia in the oppressive age of Nicholas I. These groups began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century to vie with the nobility for cultural and moral authority. They also played a key role in shaping a sense of national identity, fostering the development of the modern Russian literary language and at the same time promoting a predominantly negative attitude towards the Franco-Russian bilingualism of the nobility. If in Chapter 1 we provide more contextual information than might be required by specialists in the field of Russian history and culture,

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it is because we are also aiming our work at readers who are students of other fields and disciplines. Our account of language use and language attitudes is preceded by one further chapter, in which we describe and discuss both the place of French in the curriculum of public educational institutions (especially the Noble Land Cadet Corps) and the investment made by families in the Russian elite in teaching their children French, if they could afford to do so. This chapter (Chapter 2) is structured in such a way as to reveal the panoply of languages to which the upper stratum of the nobility was exposed, as well as the special place of French in their upbringing. We consider the ways in which French was learned, through tuition in private or public educational institutions or through the employment of foreign tutors in aristocratic households. We point out that the learning of it was supported by such means as study abroad, the Grand Tour, use of French as a medium for tuition in other subjects, and personal correspondence between parents and children. We emphasize that the symbolic value attached to command of the French language, and to the assimilation of the refined culture for which French was the primary international vehicle, is indicated by the material cost willingly incurred by nobles in order to ensure that their offspring acquired it. Besides contextualizing the linguistic phenomena we examine, we attempt continually to relate language use, language choice, and language attitudes to such matters as upbringing, pedagogy, social and cultural practice, fashion, manners and morals, views of individual and national character, and the formation of social and national identity. At the same time, we resist casual generalizations about what we believe was a complex multilingual environment, where practice did not always conform to assumed rules of etiquette. We do not seek to explain all Russian cultural and linguistic developments as the outcome, in the final analysis, of autocratic initiative, even in eighteenth-century Russia; rather, we emphasize the initiative of families and individuals, especially in the upper nobility, as well as sovereigns and individuals who were in some sense agents of the state. We call into question the largely negative view of the effects of Franco-Russian bilingualism that tends to emerge from classical Russian literature and thought and that has been perpetuated by some works of scholarship. We also make reference to linguistic practice and debate in other European speech communities. We do this partly in order to give breadth to our account but also for two other reasons. First, we wish to cast doubt on the claims that are often made about the extent to which Russian cultural development has been exceptional or to which Russia’s culture has been

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imitative and its presence in European civilization marginal. Secondly, we wish to underline the transnational nature of the cultural history we are tracing, of which language use and language attitudes are a part. Our approach, as we have said, is interdisciplinary. As our sub-title indicates, our investigation of linguistic matters takes us at various points into the fields of social, political, cultural, and literary history. On one level, we are examining the relationship between language choice and social class: the adoption of the French language for many purposes, especially for social differentiation, is an aspect of the history of the pre-revolutionary Russian nobility. Our work enters the terrain of political history to the extent that the use of French in Russia is also a manifestation of the westernizing and empire-building project of eighteenth-century sovereigns. Examination of the strong reactions to the use of French by the Russian nobility also leads us into the territory of students of national consciousness and nationalism of various kinds, political and cultural. At the same time, we are writing cultural history, since we are concerned with language use as an aspect of cultural behaviour and as subject-matter in debate about Russian culture. We are concerned with literary history too, for the corpus of writings produced by Russians in French, including writings that are ‘literary’ even if we use the term in the relatively narrow sense of belles-lettres, is quite substantial, and this corpus does constitute an element in Russian literature. We are working in the field of historical sociolinguistics as well, making use of categories (bilingualism, diglossia, standardization, code-switching, and so forth) employed by sociolinguists in their study of language as it functions in society and as it is affected by social and cultural factors. We hope that our attempt to integrate the approaches and findings of these various disciplines will make the book of use to readers beyond the community of Slavists and the community of French scholars who have an interest in the reception of French language and culture in lands outside France. It would be prudent also to make clear at the outset what we are not aiming to achieve in this book. We do not attempt, for example, to provide a fully comprehensive account of the history of French in Russia, although we do try to survey the subject over a long time span, from the early eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth, and to view it from many angles. Admittedly, the abundance of pertinent primary sources might enable us to describe certain relevant matters, such as foreign-language teaching in educational institutions and language practice in the family circle, more evenly over the whole period covered by our study. However, constraints of time and space and the limitations of our own expertise preclude quite such thorough treatment. In any case, only a relatively small proportion of

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the primary source material has yet been examined in a way that would allow us to draw copiously on secondary literature in a truly comprehensive survey. The chronological scope of our study is also more restricted than the sources available would no doubt allow it to be. For example, we have not extended the study into the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth (except insofar as we deal with language practice in the royal family in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II). Nor have we attempted to write a systematic account of the influence of the French language on the Russian language, because we are concerned with the functioning of language in society rather than with linguistic processes such as syntactic change. The lexical influence of French on Russian also lies outside the fields of social and cultural history in which we are primarily interested, although it is of tangential interest to us insofar as it indicates the impact of French language and culture on pre-revolutionary Russian elite society, and indeed its enduring impact on Russian culture more broadly. What we have wanted to produce, in spite of these limitations, is a many-sided account of the role of linguistic matters in the social, political, cultural, and literary history of imperial Russia, striking a balance between broad overview and close study of particular cases and bringing together the approaches of both historical scholarship and historical sociolinguistics. Of the many areas on the margins of our investigation that future students of the subject could usefully explore, we are inclined to mention five in particular. First, further research needs to be done on the use of French among the middling and lower provincial nobility and in non-noble classes, such as the merchants (kupechestvo) and the clergy (dukhovenstvo), in order to determine where the social boundaries lie beyond which French was not used or barely used. Secondly, scholars might profitably investigate the use of French in regions of the empire which were remote, peripheral, or inhabited by a majority of people who were not ethnically Russian, such as Siberia, the Caucasus, and the Ukraine.2 The language practice of the Baltic German nobility, who played such an important role in the Russian administration after the absorption of the Baltic provinces in the empire in the eighteenth century, might prove especially illuminating. Thirdly, although we have briefly alluded to theological disputation in French,3 we have not dealt with such subjects as the conversion of Russian men and 2 We shall frequently use the term ‘the Ukraine’, in order to denote the pre-revolutionary region, as opposed to the modern, post-Soviet political entity. 3 See the last section of Chapter 7.

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women to Catholicism, the influence of French abbés who for one reason or another resided in Russia, the presence of Jesuit schools there, or the impact of French writings about spiritual matters and of translations of ecclesiastical literature written in French.4 All of these subjects are potentially of interest from the point of view of linguistic history. Fourthly, official language policy in the Russian Empire deserves a separate study, for which one would need to undertake an exhaustive examination of legislation on linguistic matters in the complete collections of the empire’s laws.5 Fifthly, we are sure that fruitful work could be done on the language practice of the Russian aristocracy in the twilight of its life and on multilingualism among the artistic community during the cultural resurgence of the Silver Age in the early twentieth century. The large corpus of primary sources on which students of the history of French in Russia can draw includes unpublished documents of many kinds that survive in Russian archives in Moscow and St Petersburg, such as AVPRI, GARF, RGADA, RGALI, and RGIA, and in the Manuscript Departments of RGB and RNB (all these and other abbreviations are explained on pp. 29–31 below). We have also used material from GATO, the provincial archive in Tver’, the capital of a province to the north-west of Moscow in which wellknown noble families, including the Bakunins and Glinkas, owned estates. In these repositories, we find the personal archives of Francophone noble families, nobles’ correspondence with friends and family members, personal diaries and notebooks, family albums, children’s educational exercises, library catalogues, official reports and correspondence, and even reports written in French by agents of the Third Section, the secret police force set up by Nicholas I in 1826. Some archival holdings have long since been published, notably the forty-volume collection of correspondence and other documents relating to four generations of the powerful Vorontsov family. The very numerous relevant primary sources that have been published also include the personal correspondence of many other individuals, diaries and memoirs, and the impressions of foreign travellers of various nationalities who visited Russia in the period in which we are interested. Of the types of published primary source that we have used, works of Russian literature, such as plays, short prose fiction, and novels, are perhaps the most familiar to many readers. (This type of source, which often contains comment on language use, will come to the fore when we discuss perceptions, as opposed to usage, in Chapters 8–9.) Examples of each type of source may provide 4 We are grateful to Elena Grechanaia for identification of these lacunae. 5 i.e. PSZ (see list of abbreviations on p. 3o).

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useful insights, but each type may also pose particular problems, of which we take note at appropriate points in our account, especially in the last section of the introduction. We also draw, of course, on the secondary literature in various disciplines in which scholars share an interest in language. In the f ields of social, political, cultural, and literary history, we make use of work on European nobilities in general and the Russian nobility in particular, empires and nationalism, the cultural history of Russia, and classical Russian literature and thought. In the field of sociolinguistics, we have benefited from the extensive literature – which is not specific to any particular national situation – on such matters as multilingualism and bilingualism, diglossia, lingua francas, purism, standardization, and code-switching. We also make use of work on the general history of francophonie and the history of the Russian language. Since the range of fields in the humanities and social sciences into which we enter is quite large, and since we hope that our material will be of use to scholars from different backgrounds who may be familiar only with certain parts of the terrain we explore, we include references to some standard works in several footnotes. We have also made use, of course, of the existing corpus of scholarly literature on the history of French cultural influence in Russia and, in particular, the history of Russians’ use of French. Interest in the use of French in Russia was already apparent in the nineteenth century, as attested by a bibliography published in the 1870s, when French was still highly visible in the Russian linguistic landscape.6 However, it was in the Soviet period that the subject first began to attract serious scholarly attention, not least because the attempts made during that period to deepen knowledge of Russian literature in the age of Pushkin encouraged its investigation.7 The main focus of Soviet studies of the subject was the use of French as a medium of literary activity and a language of sociability among Russian writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Work was also done in the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet periods on Russians’ bilingual correspondence, 6 Ghennady (1874). As a rule, we shall provide in our footnotes the surname of each author whose work we cite together with a short title of the publication in question. We also give the author’s forename if, in the book as a whole, we cite work by different authors who have the same surname (e.g. Smith). In notes of a bibliographical nature (e.g. the notes in this section of our preface), for the sake of economy, we generally provide only the surname of the author and the date of publication of the work in question. Full details of all works cited in the footnotes can be found in the bibliography at the end of the volume. 7 See especially the works in our bibliography by Lozinskij (1925), Vinogradov (1938), Paperno (1975), Paperno and Lotman (1975), Galland (1976), and Zhane (1978).

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especially the correspondence of men of the nineteenth-century literary world.8 In addition, there are several works dating back to the 1970s and 1980s on the circulation of French books in Russia and their presence in Russian libraries and book collections.9 Interest in Russian francophonie continued after the end of the Soviet era10 and has been reinforced by a new curiosity about the culture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian elite. Much of the recent scholarship on these subjects, like the scholarship of the Soviet era that we have cited, has continued to be devoted primarily to the phenomenon of Russian Francophone writings. A particularly notable post-Soviet contribution to this part of the field has been made by Elena Grechanaia, in the form of a monograph and two edited volumes produced in collaboration with other scholars.11 Personal correspondence has continued to receive attention, for example in Michelle Lamarche Marrese’s important reexamination of Iurii Lotman’s conception of noble identity and in Wladimir Berelowitch’s recent discussion of Russian francophonie.12 There have also been important new contributions in this area of the field by Rodolphe Baudin, on Radishchev’s letters from exile, and Jessica Tipton, on the correspondence of several generations of the Vorontsov family.13 Particular aspects of the social and cultural history of Russian francophonie that have attracted relatively recent attention include the development of a Russian Francophone press14 and translation from French into Russian.15 A number of studies have been devoted to ‘French education’ among the Russian nobility as well.16 Finally, there has been new work in the twenty-first century in another field directly related to our study, namely the linguistic influence of French on Russian, particularly lexical borrowings from French.17 8 See Paperno (1975), Maimina (1981), and Ekaterina Dmitrieva (1994). 9 e.g. Luppov (1976 and 1986), Khoteev (1986), Somov (1986), and Kopanev (1988); see also the more recent study by Berelowitch (2006). 10 e.g. Lotman and Rozentsveig (1994). 11 See Grechanaia (2010; translated into French and with an augmented set of texts, 2012), Gretchanaia and Viollet (2008), and Gretchanaia et al. (2012). 12 Lamarche Marrese (2010); Berelowitch (2015). We explain our use of the term ‘francophonie’ in our introduction: see p. 41, n. 25 below. 13 Baudin (2015) and Tipton (2015 and 2017). Tipton was attached as an AHRC-funded postgraduate to the research team described in the following paragraph and in 2017 was awarded a doctorate for her work on the Vorontsovs. 14 e.g. Speranskaia (2005, 2008, and 2013), Rjéoutski (2010 and 2013), Somov (2011), and Rjéoutski and Speranskaia (2014). 15 e.g. Levin (1995–1996), Barenbaum (2006), and Maier (2008). 16 Berelowitch (1993), Rjéoutski (2005), Chudinov (2010), Rjéoutski and Tchoudinov (2013), and a further large volume edited by Rjéoutski (2016). 17 Gabdreeva (2001) and May Smith (2006); see also the earlier study by Hüttl-Worth (1963).

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This book will also build, finally, on all the work already done by its three co-authors and other scholars within the framework of a project generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ over the academic years 2011–2015. Publication of findings arising out of this project began with the appearance on the project website of the first set of documents in a corpus of primary sources that may be used for the study of Franco-Russian bilingualism, together with essays of our own on each text or group of texts.18 The broad purposes of this corpus were, first, to begin to classify the functions of French in imperial Russia and the domains in which French was used and, secondly, to explore possible approaches to and interpretations of Franco-Russian bilingualism. We then edited a cluster of four articles on ‘French Language Acquisition in Imperial Russia’, two of them written by Rjéoutski and one each by Ekaterina Kislova and Sergei Vlasov. This cluster appeared in the opening number of an online American journal, Vivliofika.19 These articles investigate foreign-language education in Russian public and private educational institutions and noble families and examine the values and ambitions that pedagogical policy and practice reflect. Our broader aim here was to illustrate the importance of educational matters in the study of the socio-cultural history of language. Next, we explored the incidence and importance of francophonie as a social and cultural phenomenon in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Europe.20 In collaboration with sixteen other European scholars,21 we surveyed aspects of historical francophonie in a dozen European language communities outside France (Bohemia, medieval England, Holland, Italy, Piedmont, Poland, Prussia, the Romanian Lands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey as well as Russia) and published our f indings in a volume containing twelve single-authored or co-authored chapters. We ourselves contributed an introductory chapter, in which we attempted 18 The website can be found at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/french-in-russia/. Electronic sources on which we have drawn were last accessed by us on 26 October 2017, and references to them were accurate at that date. 19 Vivliofika, no. 1 (2013); available at http://vivliofika.library.duke.edu/issue/view/2231/showToc. 20 Rjéoutski et al. (eds), European Francophonie (2014). 21 Marianne Ailes, Manuela Böhm, Silviano Carrasco, Ivo Cerman, Laurent Mignon, Ileana Mihaila, Nadia Minerva, Katarzyna Napierała, Luis Pablo-Nuñez, Margareta Östman, Ad Putter, Begoña Regueiro-Salgado, Alda Rossebastiano, Amelia Sanz-Cabrerizo, Maciej Serwański, and Madeleine Van Strien-Chardonneau. The chapter on Russia in European Francophonie was written by Derek Offord.

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to provide a framework for the study of the use of French as a European lingua franca and prestige language in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Peter Burke contributed a further preliminary chapter, on diglossia in early modern Europe. We thus used this volume to provide a pan-European context for our study of the language situation in imperial Russia and a background against which to test claims about the exceptional nature of Russian linguistic and cultural development. We used a further cluster of articles, on ‘Foreign Language Use in Russia during the Long Eighteenth Century’, to underline the complexity of the language situation there.22 The cluster contains articles by Kristine Dahmen, Wladimir Berelowitch, and Anthony Cross on the presence of German, French, and English respectively in eighteenth-century Russia. In our co-authored introductory article,23 we pointed to the strong presence of German alongside French and invoked the concept of value in the linguistic market-place to explain the pre-eminence of French in the eyes of the elite. We also explored the link between foreign-language acquisition, on the one hand, and Russia’s westernization and empire-building, on the other – a link to which we return in this book in our introduction and in Chapter 1. Together with Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, we have also edited two volumes on the co-existence of French and Russian in imperial Russia and the interplay between them.24 Volume 1 of this pair concerns language use among the Russian elite and Volume 2 concerns language attitudes and identity. Here, in collaboration with a further 20 scholars25 from France, Russia, and the United States, as well as the UK, and in many chapters of our own, we undertake a more detailed examination of language use and language attitudes among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian elites. Our main aims in these volumes were twofold. First, we sought to determine who spoke or wrote French in pre-revolutionary Russia and in what domains and for what purposes. Second, we wished to consider the effects that the use of French had on Russian society, culture, and thought during the period when Russian

22 See The Russian Review, 74:1 (2015). 23 Available online, on open access, at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/russ.10752/abstract. 24 Offord et al., French and Russian in Imperial Russia (2015). 25 i.e. (as their names appear in these volumes) Rodolphe Baudin, Xénia Borderioux, Stephen Bruce, Carole Chapin, Sara Dickinson, Nina Dmitrieva, Georges Dulac, G.M. Hamburg, D. Brian Kim, Iuliia Klimenko, Sergei Klimenko, Michelle Lamarche Marrese, Emilie Murphy, Liubov Sapchenko, Svetlana Skomorokhova, Vladimir Somov, Natalia Speranskaia, Jessica Tipton, Olga Vassilieva-Codognet, and Victor Zhivov.

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writers were beginning to create a rich secular literature and to construct a distinctive identity for their nation. In the present volume, we synthesize and enlarge upon all this preparatory work in order to provide both an overarching account of an important aspect of Russian social, political, cultural, and literary history and an examination of a striking example of bilingualism and its effects. We hope that in the process we shall also have offered fresh insight into the interaction of languages and cultures across national boundaries and proof of the intricate connections of Europe’s cultures. Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, Gesine Argent October 2017

Acknowledgements Over the years during which we have been collectively engaged in the project that culminates in this volume, we have received support from a large number of institutions, scholars, and other colleagues, and we gratefully acknowledge that support here. First of all, we thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK for a three-year Standard Research Grant which underpinned a project based in the University of Bristol on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’. This AHRC award began in August 2011 and was subsequently extended until the end of June 2015. It funded the employment of Derek Offord as Principal Investigator, on a half-time basis, for the duration of the project and the full-time post-doctoral research fellowships of Vladislav Rjéoutski, from August 2011 to November 2013, and Gesine Argent, from July 2012 to June 2015. Additionally, a postgraduate studentship was attached to the award, and this was held by Jessica Tipton over the period from October 2011 to October 2015. The AHRC grant also enabled us to make three research trips to archives and libraries in Russia and to organize a series of academic events and collaborations that laid extensive and solid foundations for this monograph. The first of these events was a seminar series on European francophonie in 2012, to which scholars from the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, and Sweden, as well as scholars from the UK, contributed. (Fuller details of this seminar series are available on our project website at http:// www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/french-in-russia/seminars/.) The second event was an international conference, attended by some 60 delegates, that was held in Bristol in September 2012 to mark the bicentenary of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the rapid repulsion of the invading force. (Details of this conference too can be found on our website, at http://www.bristol. ac.uk/arts/research/french-in-russia/conference/.) The third event was a colloquium in Bristol, attended by some 35 delegates, at the end of June 2015, which concluded with a three-hour round table which we found highly rewarding. In our preface we describe the various publications that have arisen out of this AHRC project and the ways in which they have prepared the ground for the present volume. We also acknowledge in our preface the contributions made to these publications by many individual scholars (42 in toto) from outside the project team. Secondly, we thank the German Historical Institute in Moscow (DHI Moskau) and its Director, Professor Nikolaus Katzer, for the award of a

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generous subvention which has enabled us to publish such a long book at a price which should not be prohibitive. This subvention has made it possible for us to explore our relatively unploughed terrain widely and without seeming, we hope, only to scrape the surface of it. Next, we warmly thank the members of an advisory board of scholars whose expertise in a range of fields (Russian history and literature, European history, language as a subject of investigation for historians, and sociolinguistics) helped to guide us. This board, for whose meetings the AHRC also made provision, consisted of Robert Evans (University of Oxford), Rosalind Marsh (University of Bath), David Saunders (University of Newcastle), Andreas Schönle (Queen Mary, London), Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije Universiteit, Brussels), and Andrei Zorin (University of Oxford). We have also benefited from the fact that Professors Schönle and Zorin have concurrently been leading another project, ‘The Creation of a Europeanized Elite in Russia: Public Role and Subjective Self’, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, and that they kindly invited Derek Offord to participate in symposia associated with that project in Oxford and London in 2013 and 2014 respectively. There are many other scholars whose knowledge and opinions have informed our work on this book in some way. These include Michael Gorham, of Florida State University, with whom we had valuable discussions during his week-long stay in Bristol as a Visiting Fellow supported by our AHRC grant in May 2015. Wladimir Berelowitch (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), Anthony Cross (University of Cambridge), Sara Dickinson (University of Genoa), and Gary Hamburg (Claremont McKenna, California), together with four members of our advisory board (Robert Evans, Rosalind Marsh, David Saunders, and Andreas Schönle), made substantial contributions to the planning of the book at our colloquium in Bristol in June 2015. We also thank other scholars who helped to make our 2012 conference in Bristol so productive, besides those whose papers evolved into chapters in our volumes on French and Russian in Imperial Russia or one of the clusters of articles arising out of the project, namely: John Dunn, Aleksei Evstratov, Ol’ga Kafanova, Svetlana Maire, Vera Mil’china, Nina Nazarova, Alla Polosina, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, Mikhail Safonov, Alexandre Stroev, Catherine Viollet, and Iurii Vorob’ev. There are many other scholars who have kindly read and commented on the whole manuscript (in the case of Elena Grechanaia) or drafts of some of the chapters, or who have drawn our attention to useful sources or generously shared information with us. These scholars include Grigorii Bibikov, Ol’ga Edel’man, Igor’ Fediukin, Aleksandr Feofanov, Sergei Karp, Ekaterina Kislova, Denis Kondakov, Sergei Korolev, Andrei Kostin, Tat’iana Kostina, Dmitrii Kostyshin, Maiia Lavrinovich, Gary Marker, Sergei

Acknowledgements

25

Pol’skoi, Galina Smagina, Ol’ga Solodiankina, Vladimir Somov, Angelina Vacheva, and Alexa von Winning. We also gratefully acknowledge the help afforded to us by Lisa Poggel, Evgenii Rychalovskii, and Viktoriia Zakirova in the course of our archival research. It goes without saying, though, that we ourselves are solely responsible for whatever flaws the book may have despite the best efforts of all these advisers. Among Bristol colleagues, or former Bristol colleagues, Nils Langer deserves a special mention for his advice on all sociolinguistic matters, for his organization of numerous academic events that were of relevance to us, and for his introductions to other scholars working in the broad field of sociolinguistics. We are grateful also to Mair Parry, for advice on sociolinguistic matters and on the history of Italian in particular. Thanks are due to other Bristol colleagues (Stephen Gray, Gilles Couzin, Markland Starkie, and Chris Bailey) for advice at one time or another about IT matters and construction and maintenance of the website that has helped us to clarify our views and manage the project out of which this book has grown. We are also grateful to the staff of the German Historical Institute in Moscow (DHI Moskau) and particularly to the librarians Larisa Kondrat’eva and Viktoria Silwanowich. We are indebted too to the staff of the many archives and libraries, including their manuscript departments, in which we have carried out the research on which this volume is based. We should like to mention the following in particular: the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg Branch), the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the National Library of France, the Russian National Library, the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents, the Russian State Historical Archive, the Russian State Military History Archive, the Russian State Naval Archive, the Russian State Library, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and the Tver’ Province State Archive. We also thank the Russian National Library, the Russian State Library, and the David Rumsey Map Collection for their permission to use the illustrations listed on p. 9 above. Finally, we thank many individuals working for publishers and editing academic journals whose prompt, efficient, and courteous oversight has enabled us to publish volumes and articles arising out of our project sooner than we might reasonably have expected when we began work on it in 2011. These individuals include Laurel Plapp of Peter Lang, Laura Williamson and Richard Strachan of Edinburgh University Press, Eve Lewin and Kurt

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Schulz, as well as Michael Gorham, at The Russian Review, Ernest Zitser at Vivliofika, and of course Louise Visser and Jaap Wagenaar of Amsterdam University Press, who have overseen the production of this book. Last but by no means least, we thank Willem Frijhoff and Karène Sanchez for affording us the opportunity to publish this volume in the series they are editing on ‘Languages and Culture in History’ and for their advice on its conception and design. The role that foreign languages have played in the creation of the European cultural heritage; the diffusion of foreign languages and the demand for them; the historical relationship between languages in a given cultural context; the relationship of languages to identities of various kinds; the history of pedagogical practices: these topics, on which these scholars in the Netherlands have focused their series, provide a framework within which our present volume, we hope readers will agree, is ideally accommodated.



Presentation of dates, transliteration, and other editorial practices

Old style and new style dates In 1700, Peter the Great adopted the Julian calendar, which was eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century, twelve days behind in the nineteenth, and thirteen days behind in the twentieth. Thus, the Bol’shevik Revolution took place in Russia on 25 October 1917 according to the Julian calendar but on 7 November according to the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar, which western states had begun to adopt in preference to the Julian calendar in 1582, was not adopted in Russia until 1918. In this book, dates are given in the Old Style (OS; i.e. according to the Julian calendar) when the event to which reference is made took place in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the New Style (NS; i.e. according to the Gregorian calendar) when it took place outside Russia. Transliteration We have followed the Library of Congress system of transliteration in our text, footnotes, and bibliography. Thus, Russian surnames ending in -ский have been rendered with -skii (e.g. as in Dostoevskii) rather than with the commonly used English form -sky (as in Dostoevsky). The Russian soft sign has been transliterated with an apostrophe, e.g. Gogol’, and the letter ë as e. Russian words printed in pre-revolutionary orthography (e.g. the titles of pre-revolutionary periodicals) have been transliterated from their modernized form. In the footnotes and bibliography, alongside the transliterated name of an author who has published a cited item in Russian, we have in a few instances added, in square brackets, the form of the surname by which the scholar in question may be known from publications in languages other than Russian (e.g. Chudinov [Tchoudinov]). Forms of forenames We have preferred transliterated Russian forenames (e.g. Aleksandr, Ekaterina, Petr) to translated ones (Alexander, Catherine, Peter), except in the case of monarchs and other members of the Russian royal family (e.g. Alexander I, Catherine II, Peter the Great), who are familiar to the English-speaking reader from the translated form of their names. We also use the form Alexander in the cases of the poet Pushkin and the thinker Herzen.

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Translation of quotations in foreign languages In many cases (for example, when authors are merely quoting an opinion or a statement about a fact), we have not considered it necessary to retain the language of the original and the words we quote have been translated into English. However, in many other cases (for instance, when language usage is being illustrated), it has seemed important to retain the original. In these cases, we have also provided a translation in the text, either within the quotation itself or separately after or beneath it, as seemed most appropriate. Translation of titles In the text of each chapter, titles of novels, plays, poems, articles, chapters, and other works written in a language other than English have been translated, but the original title (in transliterated form, if it was in Russian) is given, with only a few exceptions, in a footnote. In the references, as a rule, only the original foreign-language title is given. Titles of periodicals Titles of periodicals, on the other hand, are presented in the text of a chapter in their original or transliterated form. A translation of the title is also given, in brackets, when the periodical is first mentioned. Dates of works Dates given in parentheses after the titles of works mentioned in the text are, unless otherwise stated, the date of first publication, not the date of composition. Ellipses Where we have omitted material from a quotation or title we have indicated the omission by use of three dots in square brackets (i.e. […]), in order to distinguish this type of ellipsis from suspension points (i.e. …) used by an author who is being quoted. Punctuation We have anglicized the punctuation in quotations and titles in French; for example, we have removed the space that normally precedes a colon or semi-colon in French.



Abbreviations used in the notes

Names of archives, libraries, and research institutions AN AVPRI

BAN (BRAN) BNF GARF GATO IMLI IRLI

RAN RGA VMF RGADA RGB RGIA RGVIA RNB SPbF ARAN SPb II RAN

Akademiia nauk (Academy of Sciences) Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi imperii (Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire), Moscow Biblioteka (Rossiiskoi) Akademii nauk (Library of the (Russian) Academy of Sciences), St Petersburg Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tverskoi oblasti (Tver’ Province State Archive), Tver’ Institut mirovoi literatury im. A.M. Gor’kogo (Gorkii Institute of World Literature), Moscow Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom) Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences), St Petersburg Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk (Russian Academy of Sciences) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota (Russian State Naval Archive), St Petersburg Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents), Moscow Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (Russian State Library), Moscow Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Russian State Historical Archive), St Petersburg Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (Russian State Military History Archive), Moscow Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka (Russian National Library), St Petersburg S.-Peterburgskii filial Arkhiva Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (St Petersburg Branch, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences) Sankt-Peterburgskii institut istorii Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (St Petersburg Institute of History at the Russian Academy of Sciences)

Titles of books and journals AKV IP IS

Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova (Archive of Prince Vorontsov) Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Selected Works) Izbrannye sochineniia (Selected Works)

30  KA LN PSS PSSP PSZ RA RBS RR RS SEER SRC SS SSPAS

The French L anguage in Russia

Krasnyi arkhiv (Red Archive) Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Complete Works and Letters) Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire) Russkii arkhiv (Russian Archive) Russkii biograficheskii slovar’ (Russian Biographical Dictionary) The Russian Review Russkaia starina (Russian Antiquity) The Slavonic and East European Review The Semiotics of Russian Culture, by Lotman and Uspenskij Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works) [Shishkov], Sobranie sochinenii i perevodov admirala Shishkova (Collected Works and Translations of Admiral Shishkov)

Other abbreviations bk Bulg. CS d. Dan. ed. khr. Erm. f. fol. Fr. Ger. It. k. Lat. op. Pol. pt r. Russ. sect. SIRIO Sp.

book Bulgarian Church Slavonic delo (dossier, file) Danish edinitsa khraneniia (individual file) Hermitage (in St Petersburg) fond (collection) folio (list in Russian) French German Italian karton (box) Latin opis’ (inventory) Polish part razriad = fond Russian section Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva (Collected Papers of the Imperial Russian Historical Society) Spanish

Abbreviations used in the notes

Swed. Tat. trans. Turk. v.

Swedish Tatar translated or translation Turkish verso

31



The Romanovs

Michael (1596–1645; reigned 1613–1645) Alexis (son of Tsar Michael, 1629–1676; reigned 1645–1676) Sof’ia (daughter of Tsar Alexis, 1657–1704; regent 1682–1689) Peter I (i.e. Peter the Great; 1672–1725, son of Tsar Alexis; co-ruler with his half-brother Ivan V, 1689–1696, and sole ruler 1696–1725) Catherine I (1684–1727, Lithuanian peasant taken captive by the Russians in 1702; consort of Peter I from 1703 and his wife from 1712; reigned 1725–1727) Peter II (1715–1730, infant son of Prince Alexis (1690–1718), who was the son of Peter I; reigned 1727–1730) Anna (1693–1740, daughter of Ivan V; reigned 1730–1740) Elizabeth (1709–1761, daughter of Peter I and Catherine I; reigned 1741–1761) Peter III (1728–1762, son of a daughter of Peter I and of Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp; reigned December 1761 (OS) or January 1762 (NS)–July 1762) Catherine II (i.e. Catherine the Great; German princess who came to Russia as fiancée of the future Peter III, 1729–1796; reigned 1762–1796) Paul (1754–1801, son of Peter III and Catherine II; reigned 1796–1801) Alexander I (1777–1825, son of Paul; reigned 1801–1825) Nicholas I (1796–1855, son of Paul and younger brother of Alexander I; reigned 1825–1855) Alexander II (1818–1881, son of Nicholas I; reigned 1855–1881) Alexander III (1845–1894, son of Alexander II; reigned 1881–1894) Nicholas II (1868–1918, son of Alexander III; reigned 1894–1917)

Introduction Conventional assumptions about Franco-Russian bilingualism Until recently, the role of the French language in Russia had attracted rather little attention, save for passing remarks in works on Russian social or cultural history.1 No doubt this oversight is due partly to the fact that social and cultural historians and western students of the Russian nobility, on the whole, have not been specialists in linguistic matters and partly also to the fact that historical sociolinguistics is a relatively new academic discipline. In those works of scholarship (especially Anglophone scholarship) in which Franco-Russian bilingualism has been mentioned, moreover, we find a number of generalizations which have tended to reinforce the predominantly negative discourse on the subject in classical Russian thought and literature. Since we shall want to probe the accuracy of these generalizations in the course of our account of language use and language debate in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, we begin by briefly considering three of them. In the process, we shall introduce some of the key questions that our discussion of language use and language attitudes will need to explore and some of the larger narratives about Russian culture within which that discussion needs to be situated. We shall also rehearse some of the arguments against the commonplaces that are encountered. First, the Russian nobility (which was numerically very small as a proportion of the population of the empire2) is commonly treated as a clearly defined and undifferentiated class which uniformly adopted French in preference to Russian.3 The impression may even be given that all nobles, over a long period, spoke French all the time, and in all situations, to any compatriots who could understand that language. Thus it is claimed – to take an extreme example – that ‘for over two hundred years French (and, 1 For a brief outline of the literature on the subject, see our preface above (pp. 18–19). 2 The number of persons of both sexes who were entitled to noble status in the years before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was only just over 600,000 (Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917, 240). The number of landowners at this period was just over 100,000 (Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 233). The population of the Russian Empire was a little over 70 million. 3 See, e.g., Charques, A Short History of Russia, 102, where it is stated that Catherine’s reign ‘confirmed the sway of French fashion at the higher levels of society and the adoption by the Russian nobility of the language of France in place of their own’. Similarly, Evtuhov and Stites assert, with respect to the age of Paul, that ‘the Russian nobility used the French language in preference to Russian’ (A History of Russia, 7).

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to a smaller extent, English) replaced Russian as the principal language spoken by the vast majority of Russian aristocracy, landed gentry, government officials, army officers, and wealthy merchants’. 4 Even a leading sociolinguist, whose authoritative work we frequently cite, is drawn into a large generalization covering a vague time-span: ‘In some countries it is expected that educated persons will have knowledge of another language. This is probably true for most of the European countries, and was even more dramatically so earlier in countries like pre-Revolution Russia, where French was the language of polite, cultured individuals’.5 We shall want to guard in this study against unqualified statements about the replacement of Russian by French throughout the noble estate6 over a long period and to consider instead questions of the following sort. Was the language practice of nobles really uniform or very similar throughout the estate? What effect did educational opportunity have on Russians’ language use? Did nobles invariably use French for communication, oral and written, with other Francophone individuals? Did French predominate among Francophone groups in all linguistic domains? If preference for French was so marked, how could Russia’s magnificent literature in the vernacular have come into being, unless nobles had no part in its creation? (In fact, of course, they played the leading role.) Was language use the same in all parts of the empire? Did it remain constant over the whole period between the adoption of western culture and habits by the nobility in the early eighteenth century and the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the consequent destruction of the nobility, in 1917? What place did language practice have in conceptions of social and national identity, and indeed conceptions of gender differences? How and why did such conceptions change over the long period we examine? We begin to address such questions in Chapter 1 by noting the economic and social differentiation within the noble estate and the consequent variations in opportunity to acquire a command of foreign languages. Secondly, alongside assertions about the universality of competency in French among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nobility we commonly find equally confident assertions about their lack of competency in Russian, at least up until the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812. Their mother tongue (if that is how Russian can be classified in this case) 4 Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 24. 5 Romaine, Bilingualism, 31. It is the implication of the last part of this statement that seems most problematic, as if all such individuals altogether abandoned Russian. 6 We shall generally use the term ‘estate’ (Russ. soslovie) to denote this social stratum, rather than the term ‘class’, which is anachronistic, at least with regard to the eighteenth-century nobility.

Introduc tion

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is frequently described as a language that nobles never learned, or never properly learned, or did learn in infancy but then more or less forgot. ‘By the time of Catherine’s death in 1796’, Catherine Merridale writes, ‘her court conversed and wrote in French’ and Russia, no longer content ‘to be an apprentice to Europe (especially as France dissolved into revolution after 1789)’, would ‘attempt to revert to its roots, reviving a half-forgotten language’.7 ‘The use of the French language by the Russian aristocracy was often pushed to the point of forgetting their own’, Hugh Seton-Watson affirms in his valuable history of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire.8 There are indeed grounds for such assertions in Russian memoirs, such as those of Princess Dashkova who, recalling her childhood in the Vorontsov family in the mid-eighteenth century, claimed not only that members of the younger generation in her family circle spoke French as their first language but also that they spoke Russian very imperfectly.9 The presumption of noble incompetency in Russian is sustained by entertaining anecdotes. For example, when the sixteen-year-old Nikita Murav’ev ran off without his mother’s permission to fight against Napoleon’s invading army in 1812, it is said, he was detained by peasants who suspected him of being a French spy because his Russian was so poor.10 In its extreme form, the presumption of nobles’ ignorance of Russian is hard to maintain, for the evidence will not support it. Thus Orlando Figes, while he speaks at one point in his panoramic cultural history of Russia about a pronounced and persistent prejudice against study of Russian among the nineteenth-century aristocracy, in a subsequent passage points to a fashion after 1812 for the sons of nobles to read and write Russian and a growing trend in the provinces for women as well as men to learn it.11 Common sense, moreover, may lead scholars to admit that noblemen who served in the army, at least in the lower officer ranks, must have needed some minimal competence in Russian in order to command Russian peasant soldiers, and that nobles also needed Russian in order to manage the overwhelmingly monolingual inhabitants on their rural estates.12 This admission about men’s practical linguistic needs may partly account for the belief, which has been convincingly contested by Michelle Lamarche Marrese in an article 7 Merridale, Red Fortress, 197–198. Our italics, to emphasize the scale of the generalization. 8 Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 40. 9 Dashkova, Zapiski, 38, 42. For further examples, see Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 181. 10 Lotman ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 353–354. 11 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 56, 102–103. 12 Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 172–173.

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to which all students of French-speaking in Russia are greatly indebted,13 that noble women found it even more difficult than noble men to express themselves in Russian. This belief is most famously inscribed in Eugene Onegin (1823–1831), in which Alexander Pushkin’s heroine seems to exemplify incompetence in the vernacular. Foreseeing a problem and wishing to save the honour of his native land, the narrator confides to his readers, he will have to translate Tat’iana’s letter to Onegin, for She knew Russian poorly, / Didn’t read our journals / And expressed herself with difficulty / In her native language, / And so, she wrote in French… / What is to be done! I repeat anew, / As yet, a lady’s love / Has not declared itself in Russian, / As yet, our proud language / Has not become attuned to postal prose. / […] Is it not true that those sweet subjects, / To whom, for your sins, / You secretly wrote verses, / To whom you gave up your heart, / Did they not all, weak in Russian / And finding it hard to use, / Mangle it so sweetly, / So that a foreign language / Turned in their mouths into a native one?14

And yet, paradoxically, Tat’iana also illustrates another commonplace that became entrenched in Russian fiction in the age of Nicholas I: in contrast to feckless westernized males, Russian woman had a sound moral compass and was rooted in native soil. Tat’iana herself was ‘Russian in soul, although she herself knew not why’, Pushkin asserted.15 Dostoevskii would agree, exalting Pushkin’s favourite female creation as an authentic embodiment of the national spirit.16 With respect to some aristocrats, assertions about their mastery of French and the low level of their competency in Russian are no doubt entirely true. It is likely that such assertions hold good, for example, in the case of some (but by no means all) nobles who spent much of their childhood abroad. Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, who had been brought up in Paris in the last years of the French ancien régime, initially had to have his speeches translated from French into Russian when he was appointed governor of Moscow in 13 Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’. 14 Evgenii Onegin, Canto 3, Stanzas 26–27, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 6, 63. Of course, a woman’s inability to use Russian for the purpose of writing a letter to a noble suitor does not necessarily indicate that she was unable to use it for any other purpose! 15 Ibidem, 98 (Canto 5, Stanza 4). As Priscilla Roosevelt points out, Tat’iana believes in popular superstitions (Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 277). 16 On the speech in which Dostoevskii expressed this view, see the last section of Chapter 9 below.

Introduc tion

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1820.17 In general, though, there are grounds for treating claims about the extent of noble ignorance of Russian, as well as claims about the universal predominance of French among the nobility, with caution. For one thing, we need to take a sceptical attitude towards our primary sources. There may be reasons, for example, why memoirists wished to create the impression that they had almost no knowledge of their native language in childhood. For instance, Dashkova, who edited the first dictionary produced by the Russian Academy, may have wanted to show what sterling efforts she had made as an adult to master Russian. Most importantly, we should bear in mind the typical language-learning process in a noble household which could afford to employ a resident Francophone tutor or tutors or to send a child to a Francophone pension. As Priscilla Roosevelt explains in her monumental study of life on the Russian country estate, the arrival in the household of the first governess or tutor marked the cultural divide between a Russian infancy and a European adulthood […] In some families social contact with serf servants was prohibited after infancy, lest the young noble’s language and habits be corrupted by peasant speech, prejudices, and superstitions. The inability of most tutors to speak Russian forced young nobles to learn a foreign language in short order. One memoirist notes that as a small child she rarely saw her older sister and even more rarely spoke with her, chiefly because the sister spoke only French or English, while the younger children spoke only Russian.18

However intense the exposure of noble children to foreign languages during their childhood and adolescence, though, the fact remains that the language they mainly heard in infancy, in the years when they were learning to speak, was Russian. Most noblemen and noblewomen, Roosevelt affirms, ‘were raised almost exclusively by wet nurses and nannies, who periodically presented them to their parents’.19 These nannies were domestic serfs, like the Arina Rodionovna whom Alexander Pushkin fondly remembered, and the nobleman’s or noblewoman’s bond with them might be very close: Anna Kern, to whom Pushkin addressed a famous love poem, once cuttingly remarked that she did not think Pushkin ever really loved anyone other than his nanny and, later on, his sister.20 To overlook this fact is to make it 17 Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 216. 18 Ibidem, 181. 19 Ibidem, 180. 20 Kern, ‘Vospominaniia Anny Petrovny Kern’, 233.

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seem miraculous that Pushkin, having been brought up in a Francophone noble household and educated in the elite lycée at Tsarskoe selo, could turn out to be a figure of cardinal importance in the creation of the Russian literary language. Likewise, any account of noble language practice has to accommodate the fact that the perfectly Francophone Fedor Rostopchin, who for some six years was educated in a house separate from the manor house on his parents’ estate so that he would be compelled to communicate exclusively in French with his resident French tutor, was nonetheless able to produce rabble-rousing leaflets in demotic Russian when he served as governor of Moscow in 1812.21 There is no doubt that many noble families attached greater weight to the development of their children’s ability to use French than to having them taught Russian, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Russian francophonie was in full bloom. At the same time, it seems questionable whether so many Russian nobles found it so difficult in adulthood to use Russian as some sources, both primary and secondary, would have us believe, as if command of one language precluded proficiency in another. The impression that nobles were unable to develop and retain functional competence in Russian as well as French may rest on a rigorous notion of competence as perfect command in all domains or on a polarized, black-and-white view of linguistic competence (either one knows a language or one does not) to which few sociolinguists would subscribe. What we seem in fact to be dealing with in the Russian case is a phenomenon common to bilinguals: individuals attain different levels of competence in the languages spoken, or they perform unevenly in the languages in different linguistic domains. Disparagement of nobles’ competence in Russian, moreover, may sometimes be due to disdain for the variety of Russian acquired by the nobleman or noblewoman in infancy through exposure to domestic serfs, peasants, and their children, that is to say, Russian ‘of the careless and ill-educated kind, culled from the servants’.22 However, we should beware of falling into the trap of classifying users of Russian as incompetent on the grounds that they did not master a register deemed appropriate in refined society. Indeed, Nikolai Karamzin – an important man of letters to whom we shall often refer – doubted at the beginning of the nineteenth century whether such 21 On Rostopchin’s bilingualism, see Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 2, 13–14, and Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘French in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Salon’. For his leaflets in Russian, see Kartavov, Rostopchinskie afishi. Some of these leaflets may be viewed online at http://www.museum. ru/1812/Library/Rostopchin/index.html. They are briefly discussed in Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 126–129. 22 Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 24.

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a register had even come into being in Russian, since ‘in the best houses’, where such society was to be found, people tended to use French for polite conversation.23 In general, we are inclined to think that existing discussion of the subject of Franco-Russian bilingualism has been marred by failure to consider linguistic competence as relative rather than absolute, a matter of degree,24 and even by intrusion of the assumption common in monolingual communities that bilingualism, even if we define it as functional competence in more than one language, is an unusual phenomenon. A third common assertion, or set of assertions, about Franco-Russian bilingualism concerns the supposedly detrimental effects of Russian francophonie25 and the cultural westernization of the elite of which francophonie was symptomatic. These effects, it has often been thought, might be felt at national, social, and personal level. The practice of speaking French, Russian writers began to suggest as far back as the mid-eighteenth century, weakened the sense of national identity, or indicated that a sense of national solidarity that should have been experienced was lacking. It even seemed to call into question nobles’ allegiance to their native land or, worse still, to undermine their loyalty. The strong association of language use with nationhood in the minds of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian writers and thinkers will repeatedly be apparent in this volume, especially in our account of language attitudes in the last two chapters. We emphasize here at the outset that this association depends upon a rigid and ethnic view of national identity, according to which peoples have fixed, primordial attributes. (We shall shortly attempt to describe the cultural background against which this view arose.) We also emphasize the highly problematic nature of the assumption that foreign-language use implies acceptance of the cultural values and political beliefs with which a language may be associated at a particular time.26 At the social level too, francophonie could be perceived as a negative phenomenon, on the grounds that it was divisive. By using a foreign language, 23 ‘Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?’, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 2, 185, translated as ‘Why is there so Little Writing Talent in Russia?’, in Karamzin, Selected Prose, 193. 24 We return to this subject in the penultimate section of this introduction, on methodological matters. 25 We use the term ‘francophonie’ in this book to denote the historical phenomenon of the use of French from the seventeenth century onwards in European countries, including Russia, where it was not the mother tongue. On meanings of the term, see Argent et al., ‘European Francophonie and a Framework for its Study’, especially 4–10. 26 We consider the question of allegiance in the section on eighteenth-century comic drama in Chapter 8 below.

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it was supposed, the nobility separated itself from the rest of the ethnically Russian population of the empire, especially the bulk of the peasantry, and allegedly fractured a nation which, in the opinion of Romantic conservatives, had been whole and organic before the elite was westernized in the eighteenth century.27 Now, francophonie was indeed a means of social differentiation, insofar as it served as a marker of nobility, and in our account of Russians’ use of French we shall dwell on this function of it.28 However, the notion that nobles’ habit of using French among themselves was damaging to social cohesion perhaps depends to some extent on the assumption – which, we have already suggested, should be treated with caution – that nobles had little or no competence in Russian and were therefore incapable of communicating with monolingual compatriots from lower social strata. In general, we are inclined to keep an open mind about the extent to which it was nobles’ adoption of a western style of life and their foreign-language use (as opposed to their right to own serfs) that separated them from the common people. Roosevelt usefully draws our attention, moreover, to beliefs and customs that brought lord and peasant together on the rural estate. The Orthodox religion, its rituals, celebration of its festivals, and even popular superstition, she points out, all provided a basis for shared experience and common identity.29 After all, not all late eighteenth-century nobles were Voltaireans, nor were all nineteenthcentury noblemen and noblewomen atheists or agnostics: many promoted church-building, gave hospitality to pilgrims and protection to beggars and holy men, or collected icons.30 In any case, memoirs and belles-lettres, as Mary Cavender points out, ‘testify to the commonsense notion that interaction between serfs and landlords was ongoing and multifaceted’.31 At the personal level, it has been claimed, cultural westernization also had a detrimental psychological effect: Europeanized Russians were divided 27 Such conservatives included the Slavophiles (on whom see the following section of this introduction) and Native-Soil Conservatives, including Dostoevskii (on whom see the last section of Chapter 9). 28 On the use of French as a marker of social identity, see especially the fourth section of Chapter 4. 29 See Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, Chapter 10, especially 271. 30 Ibidem, 273. The view that the Orthodox religion was ‘remote from the consciousness of the Westernized elites’ is expressed in, e.g., Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 57. For an example of a Francophone nobleman who did his best to support Orthodox piety among his serfs through church-building, see the case of the mid-nineteenth-century nobleman Valerii Levashev that is described in Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘Family Correspondence in the Russian Nobility’, n. 9, on the basis of a document in GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 69, fol. 23. The peasants seem to have been disappointingly indifferent to Levashev’s efforts, though! 31 Cavender, ‘Provincial Nobles, Elite History, and the Imagination of Everyday Life’, 47.

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selves with a ‘split identity’,32 and the elite was consequently disoriented and enervated. Isolated by an education based on the study of western languages and culture and on the acquisition of French in particular, the eighteenthcentury Russian nobleman33 – so this argument runs – absorbed ideas that could not be put into practice in Russia and thus became alienated from his own country.34 He turned into a ‘superfluous man’ avant la lettre, that is to say a prototype of those disillusioned, nomadic characters, lacking a moral compass or the ability to form enduring relationships, such as Evgenii Onegin in Pushkin’s novel in verse, Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time, and Ivan Turgenev’s eponymous hero Rudin, who abound in the fiction of the age of Nicholas I and beyond. Attempts have even been made – in American biographies of the mid-nineteenth-century metaphysical poet and nationalist polemicist Fedor Tiutchev, for instance – to explain the personal crisis that biculturalism and bilingualism supposedly induced in the Russian nobleman in psychoanalytic terms, as a morbid ‘psychosocial dislocation’.35 It is worth noting in passing at this point that the argument that Russian francophonie had pernicious effects on nobles’ psychological wellbeing – and indeed the argument that it had pernicious effects at other levels too – rests to a considerable extent on evidence in literary sources. We shall consider at the end of this introduction how we should approach such sources and what weight we should attach to them. It will be seen that at all the levels we have identified – national, social, and personal – the argument about the detrimental effects of biculturalism and bilingualism hinges on anxiety about fracture and loss of imagined wholeness. It is also apparent that the principal cause of the schism perceived in the collective or individual personality is the westernization of the elite, of which foreign-language use was symptomatic. In order fully to understand the perceptions we have outlined about the national, social, and personal problems to which Russian francophonie allegedly contributed we therefore need to see them in the larger discourse about the relationship of Russia 32 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 44–45. 33 We say ‘nobleman’ here because it is men with whom the exponents of this idea are primarily concerned. 34 The main proponent of this thesis in western scholarship is Marc Raeff, in his Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia. The thesis has often been well summarized in subsequent scholarship, e.g. by Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, 129, and, most recently, Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, in The Europeanized Elite in Russia, ed. by Schönle, Zorin, and Evstratov, 10–11. The fullest arguments against it are advanced in Confino, ‘Groupes sociaux et mentalités collectives en Russie’ and idem, ‘Histoire et psychologie’. 35 Conant, The Political Poetry and Ideology of F.I. Tiutchev, 9–10; see also Gregg, Fedor Tiutchev, especially 106, 145–146.

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to Europe in which they were entwined. Was Russia a part of Europe or something sui generis? Should Russia orient itself towards the West or, on the contrary, look within its own history and tradition for principles that would guide its further development? These questions provided the framework within which classical36 Russian thinkers and writers reflected on their national identity, the role and predicament of the Russian elite, the nature of the Russian common people, and the national mission and destiny. We shall need at the same time to refer to the influential corpus of scholarship on Russian cultural history produced in the late Soviet period by Iurii Lotman, in which the relationship of Russian culture to European culture was also a central preoccupation. Lotman had more than most other scholars to say about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian francophonie and his analysis of this subject is often cited as received wisdom by other scholars who touch upon it.37

Russia and ‘the West’, and the two Russias Russian self-definition since the early modern era has depended heavily on the notion of opposition between ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’ (Evropa) or ‘the West’ (Zapad). And yet, the nature of the concepts being compared is very hard to define. Even the unit ‘Russia’ in this opposition is less tangible than it may seem at first sight, for it could refer to a multi-ethnic empire or to the Russophone nation (concepts which we discuss in the following section). The notion ‘the West’, however, is more elusive still. It belongs as much to a mental landscape as to a geographical one. Although it theoretically included everything European beyond Russia’s western border, in truth nineteenth-century Russian writers, when they railed against ‘the West’, were generally thinking of the more advanced European powers (Britain, France, and the German states). Besides, the notion is too capacious to mean anything very precise. It assumes that a group of nations38 divided for many centuries by religious and cultural heterogeneity, political rivalries, 36 We use this term in this work to describe the writers of what is generally considered the golden age of Russian literature, which spans the period from about 1820 to 1880, when a literary canon was created and the question of Russia’s relationship to Europe was explicitly and exhaustively examined. 37 See especially Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’. 38 Or peoples, empires, polities, or other entities, for the term ‘nation’, which for convenience we use loosely here, may be anachronistic before the early modern period. We consider nationhood and language in the following section of this introduction.

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military conflicts, and linguistic diversity in fact had a uniformity, coherence, and solidarity which were not always obvious to the inhabitants of those nations themselves. Its use as a term denoting a conceptual antipode to ‘Russia’ implies, furthermore, that differences among the western nations pale into insignificance by comparison with the collective difference of those nations from Russia. Nonetheless, for all its weaknesses, the idea that Russia can be best defined by contrasting it with an imagined ‘West’ has repeatedly been employed as a tool for examination of Russia’s history, religion, economic development, national character,39 and – in ways we explore in this book – language use. The classic formulation of the contrast between Russia and the West – but by no means its first formulation, let alone its last – is to be found in the mid-nineteenth-century dispute between so-called Westernizers (zapadniki) and Slavophiles (slavianofily), especially in the writings of members of the latter group. It is conventional to say that the Westernizers, who were often known in their time as ‘Europeans’ or ‘cosmopolitans’, 40 believed that Russia needed to adopt European ideas and practices in order to overcome its backwardness. 41 The Westernizers therefore admired Peter the Great as a ruler who had greatly accelerated the modernization of Russia in the early eighteenth century.42 The Slavophiles, on the other hand, believed that native values and traditions could provide the bases for a bright and distinctive Russian future. They extolled Russia’s Orthodox form of Christianity and detested Peter as the ruler who was responsible more than any other for 39 On the use of this device in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian travel-writing, for example, see Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard. 40 Billington, The Icon and the Axe, 379. 41 In fact, the concept of ‘Westernism’ is not nearly so coherent as this conventional description suggests. For one thing, the group of individuals commonly cited as representatives of the Westernist camp is too large and the intellectual and political complexion of the individuals in it too diverse for us to be able to form any precise idea of the Westernizers’ thinking. Moreover, the thinkers often cited as outstanding representatives of Westernism, especially Vissarion Belinskii and Alexander Herzen, in fact expressed views, at one time or another, that were critical of the very bases of the Western economic, social, and political life that they are supposed to have admired. Nor were positions in the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy as polarized as they might appear at first sight. Writers working within the Westernist tradition were in most cases nationalists of a sort themselves, while Slavophiles owed their ideas to a considerable extent to the European counter-current to the Enlightenment, particularly to ideas associated with the pan-European Romantic movement and emanating from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German world. 42 On Peter’s reforms, see the second section of Chapter 1. We shall refer to Peter in this book as Peter the Great rather than as Peter I, as twentieth- and twenty-first century Russian scholars have often preferred to call him.

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the introduction of alien habits and for the consequent disruption of the organic community that had existed, they imagined, in Muscovy before the eighteenth century. Whereas western peoples, the Slavophiles believed, were aggressive, materialistic, and individualistic, the Russian people – or more precisely, the Russian peasantry, who most truly represented Russian character – were peace-loving and uninterested in private property, sharing the land and other resources available to them and abiding by the decisions of their village commune, the obshchina or mir. At bottom, Slavophilism reveals an understandable concern about loss of spirituality and the weakening of a sense of social cohesion in the prosaic age of urbanization, industrialization, and thriving commerce, whose effects Russian nobles could observe when they travelled abroad. At the same time, it shows very well where a strongly contrastive approach to national identity may lead: that is to say, to sweeping generalizations, crude stereotyping about peoples, and chauvinism. 43 The Russia-West paradigm that was used to view relations with the external world was replicated in the notion of two contrasting Russias, which helped to shape views on the internal realm. 44 On the one hand, there was ‘Russian Europe’, consisting of the court and the noble elite which in the eighteenth century adopted western cultural practices, dress, and fashion and learned foreign languages. This Russia was minute as a percentage of the population of the empire and yet omnipotent politically. It was concentrated in St Petersburg and Moscow, at least during the winter months; its outposts were the manor houses on the isolated estates owned by the nobility that were scattered over Russia’s agricultural heartland. On the other hand, there was the much more populous indigenous Russia, including the peasant mass clothed in traditional Russian costume. While this non-noble Russia was present in all towns and cities, it was located mainly in the countryside, in innumerable villages, which a peasant might never leave unless he was recruited for military service. This other Russia provided the labour force (which remained enserfed up until 1861) on the lands owned by nobles, the Church, and the state. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, it remained more or less untouched by western culture and, being untutored and illiterate, 43 There is a large literature on Slavophilism. For general studies, see especially the works by Riasanovsky (1965) and Walicki (1975) that are cited in our bibliography. Useful monographs on individual Slavophiles include Gleason’s study of Ivan Kireevskii (1972), Christoff’s separate volumes on each of Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii, Konstantin Aksakov, and Samarin (1961, 1972, 1982, and 1991 respectively), and Lukashevich’s biography of Ivan Aksakov (1965). Rabow-Edling (2006) places the Slavophiles in the tradition of cultural (as opposed to political) nationalism. 44 For a classic exposition of this notion, see Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh), in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 5, 46–98, especially 50–64.

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had no knowledge of the major Western European languages which served as the vehicles for that culture. The Prussian aristocrat Baron August von Haxthausen, who travelled widely in Russia in 1843–1844, noted the gulf between these two Russias. ‘The cultivated class in Russia’, he wrote, is separated from the people by a much wider chasm than in the rest of Europe, where modes of living, riches and poverty stand far apart, but not the different spheres of ideas, as in Russia; in other parts of Europe the people have the same cultivation as the educated classes, only in a less degree. In Russia the higher classes have assumed that of the West, while the people have an ancient national cultivation, not much developed, and of a lower grade in comparison to the other. 45

The tendency to depict Russia itself as containing two different cultural worlds, like the tendency to characterize Russia by comparison with the West, was strong in classical Russian writing. It has also been sustained in scholarship: the juxtaposition of ‘the European culture of the upper classes and the Russian culture of the peasantry’, for example, is the organizing principle of Natasha’s Dance, the book by Figes to which we have already referred, one of the major studies of Russian cultural history written in recent times. 46 The contrastive approach to the task of defining Russian identity that is encountered in classical Russian writing has been sustained and reinforced in cultural historiography over the last fifty years by the work of Lotman, with regard both to the relationship between Russian culture and European culture and to the inner dynamic of Russian culture itself. The influence of Lotman and his followers on western students of Russian culture no doubt explains the persistence of some of the commonplaces about the detrimental effects of Franco-Russian bilingualism that we have identified. Three notions that run through Lotman’s writings about Russian culture have particular importance from our point of view, and we illustrate them here by reference to some much-cited texts in his corpus. 47 45 Haxthausen, however, did not consider bilingualism a factor that contributed to the gulf he observed. On the contrary, language and religion were the only things, he thought, that nobles and peasants had in common. See Haxthausen, The Russian Empire, vol. 2, 185–186. 46 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, xxvii. 47 Most of these texts are available in English in Lotman and Uspenskij, SRC. Lotman’s writings contain many arresting insights to which we shall refer, but they are also highly schematic and make generalized assertions about culture that are based on slender evidence. For discussion of Lotman’s reliance on evidence of a literary nature, see the last section of this introduction.

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First, Russian culture, according to Lotman, is ‘constructed on a marked dualism’. Before the nineteenth century, for example, life beyond the grave was divided conceptually into heaven and hell: unlike Catholicism, Orthodoxy placed no ‘neutral axiological zone’, no purgatory, between life on Earth and the afterlife. This dualism extended to concepts unconnected with the Church, so that Russia lacked social institutions of the sort found in the medieval West which were ‘neither “holy” nor “sinful”, neither “stateorganized” nor “anti-state”’. The absence of a neutral sphere in Russia led to a conception of the new as total eschatological change, ‘the radical rejection of the preceding stage’, rather than a continuation of the past. Thus, Russian culture, which is seen with hindsight to have an underlying structure and unity over various historical periods, is perceived by its bearers as embodying an ‘opposition’ between what is old (starina) and what is new (novizna). 48 The experience of the alien as revolutionary novelty was acutely felt, Lotman argues, by the noble elite on whom Peter the Great and subsequent sovereigns imposed a western way of life in the eighteenth century, with profoundly unsettling effects. The introduction of foreign-language use in eighteenth-century Russia may easily be seen as a manifestation of the ‘binary opposition’ between tradition and innovation, Russia and the West. Secondly, Lotman argued, the everyday behaviour of the post-Petrine nobleman was a sort of improvised theatrical performance. Underlying this claim is a distinction that Lotman makes between two modes of human behaviour. On the one hand, there is the ordinary, everyday, customary, social behaviour that seems normal and natural to a group. On the other hand, we have all types of ceremonial and non-practical behaviour, which may be connected with the state, worship, or ritual and which is perceived by native speakers of a culture (for culture is in a sense a language) as having an independent meaning. The first type of behaviour is learned by bearers of the culture unconsciously, like a native language, through immersion. The second type is consciously learned like a foreign language, with the aid of rules and grammar books. (The distinction also applies literally to language itself, of course.) The result of the adoption of a foreign style of life by the Russian nobility from the early eighteenth century on was that members of the elite came to resemble foreigners in their own country. Even when fully grown up, the Russian nobleman had to learn artificially what people usually absorb in early childhood by direct experience. The alien and the foreign became the norm. To 48 Lotman, ‘The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (up to the End of the Eighteenth Century)’, in SRC, 4–5.

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conduct oneself correctly was to behave like a foreigner, that is to act in an artificial way according to the norms of an alien life-style. It was as necessary to bear these norms in mind as it was to know the rules of a foreign language in order to be able to use it properly. 49

At the same time, Lotman argues somewhat tortuously, the nobleman was obliged to retain the outsider’s ‘alien’ – that is to say, Russian – attitude to the forms of a European life-style that he was assimilating, ‘for in order to be constantly aware of one’s own behavior as foreign, it was necessary not to be a foreigner’. ‘One did not have to become a foreigner, but to behave like one’. Thus, it became ‘entirely typical of the Russian eighteenth century that the members of the nobility passed their lives as if they were plays, conceiving themselves to be forever on the stage’, while the common people ‘tended to look on the gentry as if they were mummers, whom they watched from the pit.’50 Andreas Schönle and Andrei Zorin, in the important essay with which they introduce their recent volume on the sense of self that developed among the Europeanized elite in Russia from roughly 1762 to 1825, emphasize that Lotman’s theory, while it ‘aptly captures the overall theatrical dimension of courtly culture’, does not accurately characterize noble life or – what is particularly important for our purposes – noble language use. The theory rests on a dichotomy between the public sphere and private life that was not intrinsic to the life of the nobility, in which the public and the private were thoroughly intertwined […] Furthermore, [it] implies the notorious antinomy between authenticity and artificiality, which not only mischaracterizes the nobility’s ambivalent structures of feeling and identity but also fails to account for the syncretic and, with regard to the choice of language, macaronic ways in which the nobility often discharged the codes of behavior and modes of expression fashionable in its times.51

Lotman’s claims that Russian culture is characterized by dualism and that westernized Russian nobles acted out a role as foreigners in their own land support a third notion: the Russian cultural case, and indeed Russian 49 Idem, ‘The Poetics of Everyday Behavior’, in SRC, 232–233. 50 Ibidem, 233–234; Lotman’s italics. Lotman cites no evidence for his claim about what ‘the people’ thought or felt; indeed there may be none that is reliable. 51 Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 12. In general, Schönle, Zorin, and Evstratov resist stark ‘binary mapping’ of the sort ‘which emphasized the ideological, cultural, and behavioral divide between a thoroughly Westernized elite and the uneducated mass of people over which it ruled’ (ibidem, 10).

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history, are exceptional, or in fact unique.52 This notion, which was implicit or explicit in much classical Russian writing about the relationship of Russia and the West and which we shall encounter at several points in this book, has also had wide currency in scholarship.53 Strictly speaking, the assertion that Russia is unique cannot be gainsaid, for it is a statement of the obvious. After all, which state, region, city, or community, cannot be described as unique, especially if – like Russia – it has an ethnically diverse population and is culturally heterogeneous?54 Thus to be unique, in one sense, is not to be exceptional at all. Claims about Russian uniqueness or exceptionality may seem particularly weak, though, if it cannot be convincingly shown that those features that are held to be peculiar to Russian culture really are altogether lacking, or at least are poorly developed, in all the other cultures that are being used as comparators. In fact, many of Lotman’s observations about Russian culture, on close scrutiny, might seem equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to the culture of other societies, in Europe or on other continents, either during the period in which Lotman was interested or at other times. May we not find evidence in other cultures too, for instance, to suggest that what is perceived as ‘new’ in fact has roots in the distant past?55 Surely the most superficial study of the toponymy of other countries would make it impossible to uphold Lotman’s view that the frequency of the word ‘new’ in Russian place names demonstrates some distinctive tendency on the part of Russians to perceive their history ‘as a chain of explosions’.56 What evidence do we have to suggest that the conscious or subconscious ability of Russian nobles to convey meaning in a variety of behavioural registers57 distinguished them from their peers in other lands? Did the Russian nobility really differ from other elites when they theatricalized their behaviour or performed their adopted roles before social groups which 52 Lotman additionally claims, incidentally, that a semiotic study of Russian culture has exceptional value as a means of proving the validity of his theory of culture: see ‘Authors’ Introduction’, in SRC, xiii–xiv, and Lotman, ‘Theses towards a Semiotics of Russian Culture’. 53 ‘For very many Western historians of Russia’, Dominic Lieven has observed, ‘the country’s uniqueness is a matter of faith. For many Russians it is the core of true religion itself’ (Lieven, Empire, x). Among western historians on whose work we draw in this book, Geoffrey Hosking in particular leans towards the exceptionalist viewpoint, both on account of the late and stunted development of civic nationhood in Russia and on account of the comprehensive adoption by the elite of a culture initially alien to it (Hosking, Russia, 156–157). 54 On heterogeneity as a characteristic of Russian culture, see ‘Authors’ Introduction’, in SRC, xiii. 55 Lotman, ‘The Role of Dual Models’, in SRC, 7. 56 Idem, ‘Theses towards a Semiotics of Russian Culture’. 57 Idem, ‘The Poetics of Everyday Behavior’, in SRC, 235.

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were enthralled? Again, Lotman rightly points out that the imported forms of everyday behaviour and the foreign languages which came into use among the Russian nobility ‘altered their function in this process’. That is to say, everyday norms which were native and natural in the West acquired high prestige when they were transferred to Russia, where they increased a person’s social standing, as did knowledge of foreign languages.58 Surely, though, Russia is not the only place in which the function of imported behaviour or language has altered in some way. Might one not expect to find such alteration wherever and whenever an elite group seeks to differentiate itself socially by use of a foreign language? Lotman, then, seems to overlook or understate the possibility that what he regards as the most significant characteristics of Russian culture might also be observed elsewhere.59 In fact, international comparisons of the behaviour of aristocratic elites in multi-ethnic empires and studies of elite bilingualism and of the development of cultural nationalism among oppressed or backward groups in nineteenth-century Europe do yield plentiful evidence of Russia’s affinities with its western neighbours, as well as its differences from them, as we shall hope to show in our account of Russian francophonie and attitudes towards it. We shall therefore not interpret the evidence of Franco-Russian bilingualism that we offer in this book as corroboration of a Lotmanesque grand thesis about the exceptional nature of Russian culture, although we do not deny, of course, that every European example of historical francophonie is bound to have certain local features.60 58 Ibidem, 233. 59 Lotman may even categorically rule out the possibility that such phenomena could occur in the West. He confidently asserts, for example, that the ‘subjective “Europeanization” of [Russian] life had nothing in common with any real convergence with Western life-style, and at the same time definitely influenced the setting-up of anti-Christian forms such as had certainly never been possible in the life of the Christian West’ (‘The Role of Dual Models’, in SRC, 21; our italics). 60 With regard to the argument about the degree to which Russia is an exceptional case, Schönle and Zorin perhaps take a more Lotmanesque approach than we do, albeit with reservations. Comparing Russia with Japan and Turkey, which also undertook rapid military, economic, technological, and cultural modernization (in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century respectively) as a means of saving their countries from ‘annihilation’ by their more advanced rivals, they argue that only in Russia did the state consider the top-down Europeanization of a narrow upper class ‘more effective, and often safer, than fundamental social and political transformation’. The most distinctive feature of Russia’s experience of modernization and westernization, which also separated it from the Japanese and Turkish models, was that whereas ‘Meiji, Ottoman, and later Kemalist elites aspired to become similar to Europeans or sometimes Americans, Russian nobles strove to be Europeans’ (cf., though, Lotman’s contention, which we quoted above, that Russians strove to behave like Europeans). Moreover, the mental outlook and subjective sense of self of the Europeanized elite which emerged in Russia, and

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In sum, our examination of language use and language debate in imperial Russia will take account of the framework within which Russian writers and thinkers have discussed Russian culture and national identity, a framework which sets Russia against an imagined external entity, ‘the West’, and replicates this opposition within Russia itself. We shall also engage with the insistent narrative in Russian literature and in scholarship on it, to which Lotman made a particularly influential contribution, about the degree to which Russian culture is exceptional, not least by virtue of the existence of this tension within it. Our description of foreign-language use in imperial Russia is bound to reveal the intensity of the Russian encounter with foreign cultures. However, we shall not uncritically accept the emphasis on Russia’s alterity which characterizes much discussion of this phenomenon or endorse the view that linguistic and cultural diversity was as damaging on several levels as it has often been thought to be. We shall pay attention to what Russia had in common with other European nations as well as what made it different, to what is transnational as well as what is nationally exclusive. In the broadest perspective, we shall hope to show how francophonie in imperial Russia contributed to the flow of information both from the west of the continent to its east and from east to west, with the result that Russia became more closely integrated into European society and cultural space, despite the emphasis in Russian language debate on difference, division, and disorientation.

Empire, nation, and language We need to locate our investigation of Franco-Russian bilingualism not only in the discourse about the relationship of Russia to the West that runs through Russian literature and thought and in the corpus of scholarship on that discourse but also in the scholarly discussion of empires and nations that has taken place over the last three or four decades. Pre-revolutionary Russia, after all, was both a multi-ethnic empire and a nation. The very existence of more than one Russian term for ‘Russian’ attests to difference between state and nation, between a political entity and a cultural community, as Geoffrey Hosking in particular has pointed out.61 (The adjectives which is the primary focus of the volume assembled by Schönle, Zorin, and Evstratov, ‘was a completely new and distinctive social, cultural, anthropological, and psychological phenomenon’ (Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 2–5; Schönle’s and Zorin’s italics). The problem of proving exceptionality, when one cannot be omniscient, recurs. 61 Hosking, Russia, xix.

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that describe the imperial state and the nation are rossiiskii and russkii respectively.) It will be important for us to bear this distinction in mind and to consider at various points in our work which entity, empire or nation, was the prime focus of the loyalty of the elite and what bearing that loyalty had on linguistic consciousness. An empire, Dominic Lieven contends, is ‘by definition large and diverse’. It is both ‘a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era’ and ‘a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multi-ethnicity is one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire’.62 In the Russian case, the aristocracy was itself multiethnic – a fact that is graphically illustrated in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, in the gallery of portraits of over 300 high-ranking officers who served in the campaigns of 1812–1814 against Napoleon.63 Moreover, in embracing the empire-building project of Russia’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rulers, and therefore accepting the western culture that Russian sovereigns encouraged it to adopt, this aristocracy took on an identity that was to some extent supra-ethnic. The foreign-language use that conspicuously demonstrated this cosmopolitan identity, and command of French in particular, gave Russia sudden international cultural status, to be sure; it also served as a means of unifying the Russian elite, aiding the assimilation of its diverse ethnic and cultural elements, and conferring prestige on them at the same time. There is no clear agreement as to whether, in the Russian case, the process of empire-building, which began in the mid-sixteenth century under Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), preceded or followed the making of the Russian nation. In Hosking’s view, empire-building consumed so many resources and so much effort that it ‘impeded the formation of a nation’, that is to say ‘Rossiia obstructed the flowering of Rus [the old Russian nation]’.64 Lieven, on the other hand, takes the view that while Russia was not a nation in the modern sense in the 1550s, nevertheless it was a great deal nearer to being one than most of the other peoples of Europe at that time, by virtue of the ‘unity of dynasty, church and people which the term “Holy Russia” implied’.65 Gary Hamburg also traces a conception of Russian identity that amounted to ‘a prototype of integral nationhood’ at least as far back as the mid-sixteenth century.66 However, irrespective of the extent to which a sense of nationhood 62 Lieven, Empire, 89, xiv. 63 See Offord et al., ‘Introduction’, in French and Russian in Imperial Russia, vol. 1, 1–2. 64 Hosking, Russia, xix. 65 Lieven, Empire, 253. 66 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 76.

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had developed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy, account had to be taken in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the new relationship that Russia had with her western neighbours after the reforms introduced by Peter the Great. This reconsideration of nationhood was bound to be affected, especially in the nineteenth century, by the rise of the nation as the most effective focus for political loyalty. It was also affected, of course, by the European ideas and currents to which Russia was now being exposed, including the development of nationalism. The sense of solidarity that underlies national consciousness may be derived from many sources, such as a shared religion or attachment to a type of political institution or way of life. Very often it is associated with language.67 The embryonic nationhood of Muscovy already had a linguistic element, as well as religious, territorial, and political elements. The Book of Royal Degrees, Hamburg points out, stressed the mortal threat posed to Rus’ by a godless ‘foreign tribe’, the Tatars, who used a ‘language unknown’ and ‘forced the alien tongues of barbarians’ on the clan or people (rod) who inhabited this land.68 However, it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that language came to be seen in some quarters as an essential and distinctive attribute of an ethnic group that was capable of becoming a nation. Interest grew in the origins and history of languages, and the qualities of one’s own vernacular were extolled and other vernaculars were disparaged.69 A prominent role in the new discussion of the origins and functions of language was played by German representatives of the counter-current to the Enlightenment, especially Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder.70 ‘Has a people, especially an uncultivated people, anything dearer than the speech of its fathers?’ Herder asked rhetorically in his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity. ‘In it reside all the riches of its thought, its tradition, history, religion, and principles of life, all its heart and soul. To take its speech from such a people or to abase it is to take away its only imperishable property.’71 Fichte, in his patriotic Addresses to the 67 This was especially the case with communities that were becoming aware of themselves as nations in the nineteenth century: see Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 9–10. See also Lieven, Empire, 172. 68 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 75–76. 69 For a summary of such developments across early modern Europe, and of the interest in national cultures that accompanied them, see Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Chapter 1. 70 On this discussion and its relevance in the Russian context, see Hamburg, ‘Language and Conservative Politics in Alexandrine Russia’, especially 121–123. 71 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, vol. 1, 146.

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German Nation (1807), goes further. He seems to regard the German language as indicative of the superiority of the Germans themselves over other races: the French, because German has fewer Latinate borrowings, and the other Teutonic races as well, because ‘the German speaks a language which has been alive ever since it first issued from the force of nature, whereas [they] speak a language which has movement on the surface only but is dead at the root’.72 A language, for Fichte, not only expresses national character, inasmuch as its speakers are the mouthpieces of the people’s collective knowledge. It also determines the people themselves: people, Fichte argues, ‘are formed by language far more than language is formed by people’.73 The concurrent development of national consciousness and language consciousness among peoples in early modern Europe was bound up with other processes whose importance in nation-building projects has been emphasized by students of nationalism such as Benedict Anderson.74 One such process is the development of a standardized and polyfunctional literary variety of the language in question. As Stephen Barbour has pointed out, a codified standard variety which is clearly differentiated from others gives a language ‘a kind of focus and identity that it may have not possessed before’. Consequently, ‘the growth of nations and the sharp demarcation of languages are actually related processes’.75 Another process connected to the development of national consciousness and language consciousness is the emergence of a literary community capable of producing an exemplary corpus of writings. Ethnicities turn into nations (although not all do), Adrian Hastings has argued, when the written form of their vernacular is regularly employed for the production of an extensive living literature.76 A further stimulus for the formation of the consciousness we are describing is the growth of a print culture, with publishing houses, periodicals, and critics (as arbiters of taste and good practice), through which the new writings can be disseminated. Russia began to undergo all the processes we have mentioned during the eighteenth century, especially during the second half of the century.77 These processes prepared the ground for the creation, in the nineteenth century, of a native literature, written in Russian, which served

72 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 68. This passage is quoted by Edwards, Multilingualism, 131. See also Hamburg, ‘Language and Conservative Politics’, 122–123. 73 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 55. 74 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 75 Barbour, ‘Language, Nationalism, Europe’, 13. 76 Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 12; see also 19–20. 77 See especially Marker, Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life.

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as a foundation for the imagined nation that was being constructed, or rather reconstructed in the wake of Russia’s eighteenth-century westernization. It is worth pausing here to make two further points about the role of language consciousness in the development of national consciousness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. First, it may be that language assumes particular importance as a basis for national consciousness if other possible sources of a sense of unity, such as religious affiliation or the perceived ideal nature of a polity, are for some reason hard to agree upon. In Russia, the authority of both the Orthodox religion and autocratic government was severely challenged, and opinion in the elite was radically divided as a result, by the sudden influx of western ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nation-building was also complicated to an unusual degree by geographical factors. Nations can have historical existence, Ingrid Kleespies has argued in a stimulating recent monograph on the topos of nomadism in Russian culture, only when they inhabit a clearly defined territorial space or homeland.78 However, in the Russian case the very centre of the state shifted, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from Kiev to more northerly cities, first Vladimir and then Moscow. Subsequently, continuous imperial expansion and the existence of marginal regions in which nomadic enemies or independent Cossacks roamed made it impossible to say precisely where borders lay in the endless Eurasian steppe. As Vera Tolz has also emphasized, territorial vastness was a central feature of Russian national discourse from the eighteenth century on, and a source of pride in that discourse, but it made the issue of national definition problematic.79 In these circumstances, language, as manifested in the national literature that was coming into being in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may have provided a particularly strong centripetal force as the modern conception of nationhood was being formed. Secondly, we shall argue that the presence of French in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, paradoxical as it might seem, actually assisted the development of the Russian language and the formation of Russian nationhood in various ways. It provided lexical and phraseological material and stylistic models for the development of the Russian literary language. It was a vehicle for generic models, subject-matter, plots, and themes that could be used by writers creating the literature through which Russian consciousness would eventually find expression. It may even have nurtured that complexity of vision, receptivity to diverse ways of viewing the world, 78 Kleespies, A Nation Astray. 79 Tolz, Russia, 159, 162–164; Kleespies, A Nation Astray, 195, n. 13.

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which endowed classical Russian literature with the universality that writers who bemoaned Franco-Russian bilingualism admired in their own culture.80 Its presence also wounded national pride and may consequently have stimulated native literary creativity at the time when other European nations were beginning to prize the languages associated with their core ethnic groups, or rather standardized varieties of them. Thus far we have been discussing the sense of nationhood and various ways in which language consciousness and language itself are bound up with it. However, we need also to take account of the frequent evolution of national consciousness into nationalism, which influential historians have associated with modernity and which became a powerful force in European politics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.81 In an important study of eighteenth-century Russian culture written over fifty years ago, Hans Rogger made a distinction that is still useful between national consciousness and nationalism, each of which, he argued, was ‘characteristic of a distinct period of Russian history’. Although they share common features, these phenomena differ in their scope, purpose, and nature: National consciousness is […] a striving for a common identity, character, and culture by the articulate members of a given community. It is the expression of that striving in art and social life, and characteristic, therefore, of a stage of development in which thinking individuals have been able to emerge from anonymity, to seek contact and communication with one another. National consciousness presupposes extensive exposure to alien ways; it presupposes a class or group of men capable of responding to that exposure; it requires, moreover, the existence of a secular cultural community or an attempt at its formation. In Russia, these conditions were met, could only be met, in the eighteenth century. Nationalism goes beyond the search [for] or the creation of a national consciousness. In nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere, it is an inclusive system of thought, an ideology, which on the basis of a specific national experience attempts to provide answers to moral, social, and political questions. It is more than an awareness of national identity, more than a search for the bases of national being; it has found these and 80 We shall develop this point in the last section of Chapter 9. 81 The modernity of the phenomenon is stressed in the classic studies by Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. For a challenge to the ‘modernist’ view of the emergence of ‘nations’, see Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, Chapter 1, especially 8 ff.

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proclaimed their eternal validity. It is a philosophy, a value judgement, a metaphysic. Its basis is belief, not consciousness. However tolerant it may be of other beliefs, it usually values what is Russian more highly than that which is not.82

It will also be useful for us to bear in mind the distinction that has been made, by Anthony Smith among others, between ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ forms of nationalism.83 The proponents of political nationalism may seek to build loyalty around a political system or institutions, legal principles, or a set of values. Statesmen, legislators, and agitators tend to predominate among them. The doctrine of Official Nationality, promulgated by the authorities in the Russia of Nicholas I from 1833 and appealing to autocracy, Orthodoxy, and the vaguer concept of nationality (narodnost’) as the foundations of the Russian state, exemplifies nationalism of this type.84 The proponents of cultural nationalism, on the other hand, aspire to regenerate what they suppose is – in Smith’s words – a ‘community of common descent’ in which birth, family ties, and native culture are of paramount importance.85 In place of ‘the legal and rational concept of citizenship’, writes Suzanna RabowEdling, who has studied the Slavophiles as representatives of this type of nationalism, cultural nationalists substituted ‘the much vaguer concept of “the people”, which could only be understood intuitively’.86 Regarding ‘the people’ as a ‘final rhetorical court of appeal’, they cherish popular vernacular culture. For the most part, they are members of an intelligentsia, thinkers, artists, and scholars rather than politicians. The importance of language to them as a basis for national identity is demonstrated by the presence among their number of lexicographers, philologists, and folklorists.87 This exclusive, cultural or ethnic conception of a nation would become widespread in the nineteenth-century Russian literary community and intelligentsia.88 We should now return, towards the end of this discussion of language and nationhood, to two related points that we broached in the first section of this introduction when we were outlining some of the views that have 82 Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 3–4. 83 See especially Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, Chapter 1. See also Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, Chapter 1. 84 On Official Nationality, see especially Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia. 85 Anthony Smith, National Identity, 11. 86 Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, 64–65. 87 Anthony Smith, National Identity, 12. 88 On the intelligentsia, see the last section of Chapter 1 below.

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been put forward about the supposedly detrimental effects of the use of French by the Russian nobility. The first of these points concerns the ways in which identity can be imagined. Nationalism of the cultural variety tends to generate the so-called ‘primordialist’ conception of collective identity as a fixed phenomenon determined by blood-ties, shared descent, and a particular language and culture. However, as Paul Robert Magocsi has argued, a ‘situational’ or ‘optional’ conception of identity, which allows an individual consciously to emphasize or de-emphasize an identity as circumstances dictate, is as widespread as the primordialist view. In most social settings, Magocsi points out, people operate with a network of multiple social and political loyalties: to family or tribe, occupational group, church, clubs, village or city, region or state, and, in multi-national states, to various national identities at the same time.89 To groups that were deeply affected by the contrastive approach to identity encouraged by the rise of nationalism, such as the nineteenth-century Russian literary community and intelligentsia, the primordialist view was no doubt attractive. To the cosmopolitan nobleman of eighteenth-century Russia, on the other hand, multiple, hybrid, or fluid identities (servant of the Russian Empire, family patriarch, grand seigneur, European aristocrat) might have seemed quite feasible and unproblematic. We therefore do not take it as a given that different identities are mutually exclusive or that it is psychologically difficult or unsettling for an individual simultaneously to accommodate various cultural influences.90 The second point concerns language choice and the signals about loyalty that it might be thought to transmit. The motivation for learning a language that is not the mother tongue may be integrative, that is to say use of a foreign language is a means of indicating solidarity with another community. Eighteenth-century Russian aristocrats may indeed have felt that their command of French established various bonds: with their social peers in France and other European countries, with supporters of the European Enlightenment, or even with France as a nation under the ancien régime. However, when Russian nobles had their children taught French, in the eighteenth century and beyond, their primary concern was no doubt to ensure that their offspring would be well prepared for life within their own Russian class, in which command of French was de rigueur for success in high society and the upper echelons of government service. This motivation 89 Magocsi, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism, 45–46. 90 There is also an emphasis on ‘fluid, shifting, hybrid, and multiple identities’ in Schönle, Zorin, and Evstratov (eds), The Europeanized Elite in Russia (see 13).

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for language-learning might be seen as largely instrumentalist: a choice is made for pragmatic purposes and does not necessarily entail any emotional allegiance to the people mainly associated with the language in question or the polity they inhabit.91 In any case, the aristocratic culture of the ancien régime with which the eighteenth-century Russian noble might have felt an affinity was destroyed by the revolution that began in 1789. Consequently, for nineteenth-century Russian nobles, the living French language had different associations. French could just as easily be associated with Napoleon or with economic, social, and cultural developments that the aristocracy detested, such as the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society under the ‘July Monarchy’ of Louis-Philippe (1830–1848), or with revolutionary disturbances (in 1830 and 1848), or with the development of socialist ideas and realist literature characterized by physiological sketches on life among the lower classes.92 If nineteenth-century Russian nobles continued to place high value on the French language, then, it was not because they loved France as a nation or admired contemporary French civilization. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, we suggest, French had been assimilated by Russian society as an internal language, as it were, to the extent that users of it in society did not necessarily regard it as an alien phenomenon. Once a language is viewed in this way, as the natural property of a group, the question of whether its users are showing allegiance to a foreign people or power and disloyalty to their own may seem meaningless to members of the in-group themselves. Those who observe the practice from outside the in-group, of course, may see things quite differently.

Sociolinguistic perspectives We turn next to questions explored in this book which fall within the purview of sociolinguistics and for discussion of which the writings of sociolinguists provide a useful framework. We are concerned, after all, 91 On the question of whether language choice was conscious, see in particular the second section in Chapter 6 below, which deals with personal correspondence. Metalinguistic comments about language choice are scarce in the eighteenth century in the milieu in which French was most frequently used at that time. 92 The multiplicity of the associations that language use may have is well illustrated by the case of the Francophone nationalist intelligentsia in the Romanian lands in the mid-nineteenth century: see Mihaila, ‘The Beginnings and the Golden Age of Francophonie among the Romanians’, especially 346 ff.

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with the key sociolinguistic question famously formulated long ago by Joshua Fishman: ‘Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When?’93 As we shall show, French – in both spoken and written forms – was used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia in many domains and had many functions. For much of that period, or at certain times within the period, it was a language of diplomacy and a medium for social engagement with foreigners. It was a lingua franca that enabled subjects of the Russian Empire to transmit a certain image of their country to the outside world, to conduct cultural propaganda, or to win support for a political or social point of view, loyalist or oppositional. Knowledge of French facilitated communication with members of the imperial elite who were Russian subjects but were not Russophone or for whom Russian was a second language. French also commonly served numerous purposes among ethnic Russians themselves. It was a court language, a prestige language among the nobility, a society language, a language of education, a language of intimacy in the family or among friends, a language of internal administration for discussion of foreign affairs, and a literary language. Other subjects that have an important place in sociolinguistics, besides language use and language choice, are of central interest to us too. In particular, we dwell on language attitudes and linguistic ideologies, for ‘language, and discussions about language, provide an instructive view of broader issues of power, authority, and national identity’.94 We shall therefore consider sociolinguistic concepts that pertain to instances of language contact and reactions to such contact. As we are engaged in a diachronic study of language use and language attitudes in a distant period, the writings of historical sociolinguists are particularly relevant, and will be introduced at the beginning of the section on methodology below. In this section, we broach some general questions relating to language use, language choice, and language attitudes: bilingualism, ideological issues surrounding language choice, diglossia, and language loyalty. Bilingualism is a staple subject of sociolinguistics and central to this project, which deals with a multilingual section of Russian society. We should therefore consider the term at the outset, referring to the types and degrees of bilingualism that sociolinguists identify. First, we emphasize that we are concerned here with bilingualism as a societal and political question, not with its interest from the neurological, developmental, or psychological angles, from which it can also be studied.95 Secondly, there is 93 This is the title of a ground-breaking article by Fishman in La Linguistique (1965), 67–88. 94 Gorham, ‘Linguistic Ideologies, Economies, and Technologies’, 168–169. 95 Romaine, Bilingualism, 7–8.

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a distinction to be made between ‘societal’ and ‘individual’ bilingualism.96 In the case of imperial Russia, we are dealing mainly with the phenomenon of societal bilingualism, insofar as a substantial stratum of the noble estate aspired to have a command of French, but a bilingual society is of course made up of bilingual individuals. We therefore need to consider, thirdly, what constitutes a bilingual individual. In fact, there is a wide spectrum of bilinguals, including heritage speakers, speakers who acquire their second language after infancy, and speakers who do not have the same level of command of all languages in their repertoire. Defining the competence of these various types of speaker is a thorny issue: how well does a user need to know a language in order to be described as ‘bilingual’? Functional bilingualism, it has been pointed out, may be interpreted in a ‘maximalist’ way (users are able to undertake a wide range of activities and have a wide range of capacities in the two languages) or in a ‘minimalist’ way (they are ‘able to accomplish a restricted set of activities in a second language with perhaps only a small variety of grammatical rules at [their] disposal and a limited lexis appropriate to the task in hand’).97 The distinction between maximalist and minimalist def initions of bilingualism is important for us, because different cultures, as Romaine reminds us, ‘may embody different notions of what it means to be a competent member of a particular language community’.98 It is possible that when we read in our primary sources about the incompetence of members of the elite in Russian the authors of the sources in question are not telling us that members of the elite were completely unable to speak Russian. Rather they mean that individual speakers failed, when using their mother tongue, at least in certain domains, to meet maximalist criteria which by no means all speakers whom sociolinguists might now classify as bilingual are able to satisfy in both the languages they know. We also need to consider what sort of competence is being measured. Can a user sustain the same level of linguistic performance across all the functions of reading, writing, listening, and speaking? Fluency may not be developed equally in all areas, and indeed it may not be needed at all in some of them.99 In fact, identical competence in two languages, or ‘symmetrical bilingualism’, is unlikely to occur at societal level, for, as Romaine explains, any ‘society which produced functionally 96 For in-depth treatment of societal bilingualism, see Hoffmann, Introduction to Bilingualism, 157–174. 97 Beardsmore, Bilingualism, 12–13. 98 Romaine, Bilingualism, 16. 99 Edwards, Multilingualism, 2–3.

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balanced bilinguals who used both languages equally well in all contexts would soon cease to be bilingual because no society needs two languages for the same set of functions’.100 Bearing all these points in mind, we use the term bilingualism in this book to mean functional competence in two languages that does not demand full native-level fluency or symmetrical command.101 It is pertinent also to mention here sociolinguists’ classification of bilingualism as ‘additive’ or ‘subtractive’: that is to say, the learning of another language either represents an expansion of the user’s linguistic repertoire, providing an extra tool without adversely affecting command of the first language acquired, or it pushes the first language into the background. Additive bilingualism, John Edwards observes, ‘occurs principally where both languages continue to be useful and valued; a classic example is found in the bilingualism of aristocracies and social elites in systems in which it was considered natural and proper that every educated person know more than one variety’.102 In many cases, as we shall see, Franco-Russian bilingualism was ‘additive’, although the negative discourse about it, to which we have referred, suggests that it tended to be ‘subtractive’, with knowledge of Russian supposedly fading as a result of the superimposition of knowledge of French. Finally, the second language, which is added to the mother tongue, may be described as ‘untutored’ or ‘tutored’, that is to say it may be acquired through mere contact with users of it or through study, which in turn may either be motivated by personal interest or prescribed as an element in an educational curriculum. The French acquired by members of the Russian nobility was certainly ‘tutored’ (hence the prominence we give in this study to educational matters). It is also important that we take a sceptical view of some of the opinions voiced about the effects of bilingualism, such as the belief that it inevitably has a subtractive effect, whether these opinions be expressed by members of the bilingual society in question or by the authors of subsequent studies of it. After all, different communities are prone to evaluate the effects of bilingualism quite differently on a spectrum ranging from beneficial to pernicious. The positive effects sometimes attributed to bilingualism have included cognitive benefits such as mental flexibility, superiority in concept formation, and more diversified mental abilities, as well as the social or even artistic benefit of enhanced sensitivity to other cultures and points 100 Romaine, Bilingualism, 19. 101 For a short discussion of what constitutes bilingualism, see also Myers-Scotton, Multiple Voices, 38–40. 102 Edwards, Multilingualism, 59.

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of view.103 On the other hand, numerous negative effects have also been attributed to it. Bilinguals learn neither language as well as they might, it has been claimed. The mental effort devoted to learning a second language is supposedly diverted from other important learning tasks. Bilingual children, it has been asserted, are more prone than monolingual children to stutter.104 At the societal level with which we are concerned in this work, bilingualism has come under scrutiny for supposedly orienting speakers unduly towards a foreign culture and obscuring their true, innate nature. Forgetting or neglecting one’s native language skills, it would frequently be alleged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, was tantamount to jeopardizing Russia’s chances of freeing itself from western influence and blazing a unique trail of its own. Equally, bilingualism may seem to pose a threat to a dominant group: it can be perceived not only as weakening identity but also as legitimating ‘an alternative point of view to the mainstream by sanctioning the use of another language and by implication the cultural values it symbolizes’.105 What has had particular resonance in the Russian context and scholarship on it is the common suspicion, to which we referred earlier, that bilingualism produces split personalities. This is a suspicion which Paul Theroux fans when he presents bilingualism as a sort of disease: being bilingual, he claims apropos of Anglo-Welsh bilinguals (albeit frivolously, one hopes), is ‘often a form of schizophrenia, allowing a person to hold two contradictory opinions in his head at once, because his opinions remain untranslated’.106 A more cosmic prejudice against multilingualism, Romaine has pointed out, is embedded in the Christian foundation myth in the story of Babel in Genesis, according to which linguistic diversity is a divine punishment.107 Here, however, we take the view expressed by Edwards that multilingualism, pace those who are wary of it, ‘is not the aberration supposed by many (particularly, perhaps, by people in Europe and North America who speak a “big” language)’; it is, rather, a normal condition and an ‘unremarkable necessity for the majority in the world today’.108 103 Romaine, Bilingualism, 112, 114; see especially Chapter 6 (241–287), on bilingualism as a positive or negative force in cognitive, social, or academic development. See also Valian, ‘Bilingualism and Cognition’. 104 Research over the past 50 years, far from bearing out warnings about the dire consequences of bilingualism for children’s cognitive development, has revealed its positive developmental effects: see Bialystok, ‘The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition’. 105 Romaine, Bilingualism, 251. 106 Paul Theroux in The Kingdom by the Sea, quoted by Edwards, Multilingualism, 225. 107 Romaine, Bilingualism, 321, referring to Genesis, 11:1–9. 108 Edwards, Multilingualism, 1. We see no reason to modify this view some twenty years after Edwards expressed it.

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Opinions about bilingualism, then, express certain linguistic ideologies, by which we mean ‘cultural conceptions of the nature, form and purpose of language, and of communicative behaviour as an enactment of a collective order’.109 Here it is helpful to call to mind Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the linguistic market-place, where different ways of speaking have different values. In a multilingual market-place the choice of language depends on what value a language has in a certain context, and those who lack the legitimate competence are excluded where it is required. This value is ascribed to the different languages available on the basis of notions that have been constructed about what the languages are like and what they are suitable for rather than on the basis of any inherent features in them.110 And yet, language choice does have real social consequences, notional though the perceptions of the worth of a language might be, and speakers must adhere to the rules prescribed by cultural convention if they wish to gain cultural capital through their language use. When two or more languages coexist in a speech community, one language is likely to be considered more adequate or appropriate than others for certain purposes or in certain situations. We must accordingly keep in mind the concept of diglossia, which describes this state of affairs. Charles Ferguson wrote a much-cited article on this subject, with the Arab-speaking world in particular in mind,111 and it has attracted more recent scholarly attention.112 Franco-Russian bilingualism, however, cannot easily be classified as diglossia as Ferguson defines it, that is to say as a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation.113 109 Gal and Woolard, ‘Constructing Languages and Publics’, 130. 110 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 55, 57, 107. 111 Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’. 112 For brief introductions to diglossia, see relevant sections in the works by Edwards (2009) and Coulmas (2013) that are cited in our bibliography. Hudson (1992) provides a bibliographical review of the subject that is still useful. For a fairly up-to-date account of the debate on Ferguson’s work, see Snow (2013). 113 Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’, 336 (the passage quoted is in italics in the original).

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We might more readily describe the Russian situation as diglossic if we accepted the classification of Fishman, who is inclined to regard bilingualism as individual and diglossia as societal and who considers societal normification of bilingualism as ‘the hallmark of diglossia’.114 However, we do not think our findings bear out a view of imperial Russia as a clearly diglossic society even in Fishman’s terms, partly because the conventions determining language choice do not seem to have been as rigid as is often suggested. At least, they were not inflexible in the male sphere: our evidence suggests that breaches of linguistic etiquette by noblewomen – for example, in using Russian to men to whom they were not married – may have been more strongly discouraged.115 We allude, finally, to the notion of language loyalty, which may come into play when more than one language is available in a speech community. Uriel Weinreich, in his classic study of languages in contact, likens the relationship between language and language loyalty to the relationship between nationality and nationalism, which we discussed in the previous section. A language, like a nationality, may be thought of as a set of behavior norms; language loyalty, like nationalism, would designate the state of mind in which the language (like the nationality), as an intact entity, and in contrast to other languages, assumes a high position in a scale of values, a position in need of being ‘defended’.116

The defence of which Weinreich speaks may be conducted with the aid of various mechanisms, which are also much studied by sociolinguists and which we shall find in abundance in the Russian case. These mechanisms include heightened interest in standardization, eulogies to the language being defended (often bolstered by an assumption which sociolinguists generally reject, namely that languages have inherent qualities or defects), linguistic purism (reflected, for example, in complaints about pollution of a language by loanwords or other foreign elements), and ridicule of code-switching (that is to say, alternation between languages or varieties within a single utterance or text). For sociolinguists, these mechanisms ‘are phenomena of major importance requiring systematic treatment’.117 114 Fishman, Sociolinguistics, 81–83, 88. 115 On differences between male and female usage, and also for a survey of the literature on diglossia, see Dmitrieva and Argent, ‘The Coexistence of Russian and French in Russia’. 116 Weinreich, Languages in Contact, 99. 117 Ibidem.

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Furthermore, we must bear in mind that these mechanisms are connected to questions of power, because language choice and attitudes are inseparable from political arrangements, relations of power, language ideologies, and interlocutors’ views of their own and others’ identities. Ongoing social, economic, and political changes affect these constellations, modifying identity options offered to individuals at a given moment in history and ideologies that legitimize and value particular identities more than others.118

In studying such phenomena, mechanisms, and connections, we recognize that language choice and attitudes to languages and their functions are intertwined and that language ideologies themselves are linked to other ideologies which have currency at any given time.119

Methodological considerations As is evident from preceding sections of this introduction, our examination of the history of the French language in Russia is interdisciplinary, falling both in the field of historical scholarship and in the field of sociolinguistics. We need now to consider to what extent the approaches of these two disciplines are compatible and can be combined within a single study. In the process, we shall touch upon a few other methodological questions. It may no longer be true that the history of language is usually kept rigidly apart from conventional political, economic, and social history, as Seton-Watson complained it was in the 1970s.120 Many historians have taken a keen interest in the social or political history of language over the last forty years.121 Indeed, a relatively new discipline, historical sociolinguistics, has emerged, which benefits from an inherently multidisciplinary approach.122 However, it probably remains the case that historians, when they touch upon 118 Pavlenko and Blackledge, ‘Introduction’, 1–2. 119 Ricento, Ideologies, Politics and Language Policies, 4. 120 Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 11. 121 See especially the pioneering works written or edited by Burke and Porter (1987, 1991, and 1995), Corf ield (1991), Robert Evans (1998), and Burke (2004). Language has also necessarily featured in the writings of various students of nationalism, including Seton-Watson (1977), Anderson (first published in 1983), Barbour and Carmichael (2000), and Kamusella (2009). 122 On the problems and opportunities presented by this discipline, see Steffan Davies et al., ‘Language and History, Linguistics and Historiography’.

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linguistic matters, do not routinely draw on sociolinguistic literature which could provide a firm framework for the study of the history of language as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon. They may find themselves in difficulty as a result of this omission, or may for other reasons speak loosely about linguistic matters.123 Historians, admittedly, cannot conduct their research in the same way as sociolinguists who deal with contemporary usage and who take a synchronic approach rather than the diachronic approach that historians tend to prefer. After all, sociolinguists are able to devise their own tools, such as questionnaires and recorded interviews, which by their nature are unavailable to historians (and to historical sociolinguists as well, come to that), in order to elicit answers to the questions they pose. They can collect copious, firm, factual data of the sort prized by social scientists. That is not to say, of course, that statistical information is unavailable to historians and historical sociolinguists, or that it cannot be compiled. We use some information of this sort in this study in order to illuminate certain areas of the history of French in Russia. We draw, for instance, on figures compiled by Vladislav Rjéoutski on the numbers of pupils studying foreign languages in the Noble Land Cadet Corps and on the quantity of articles in different languages in publications of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. It is also possible to gain some idea of the number of books in 123 The sort of weakness in treatment of linguistic subject-matter in historical writing that we have in mind is exemplified in a description by Figes of the undeveloped state of the Russian literary language up until some not very clearly specified moment in the early nineteenth century. According to Figes’s account, eighteenth-century Russian had ‘no set grammar’ (this statement overlooks the work of eighteenth-century grammarians, including Lomonosov) and ‘no clear definition of many abstract words’ (although by 1794 a six-volume dictionary produced under the aegis of the Russian Academy had begun to address the need for lexical codification). Written Russian was ‘a bookish and obscure language’ (students of the poetry of Lomonosov, the drama of Fonvizin, or the prose fiction of Karamzin may disagree!). The ‘spoken idiom of high society’ was ‘basically French’ (our italics; it is not clear what is meant by ‘basically’ here). There were ‘no terms in Russian for the sort of thoughts and feelings that constitute the writer’s lexicon’. (Were there really no such terms? For an explanation of how a part of this lexicon was created in Russian from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, see Zhivov, ‘Love à la mode’.) No basic literary concepts ‘could be expressed without the use of French.’ (What is meant by ‘the use of French’? If Figes means French loanwords were introduced, then it might be pointed out that lexical borrowing is a commonplace linguistic phenomenon, that a loanword itself becomes a part of the language that borrows it, that Russian borrowed words from other languages too, and that the practice of calquing was much used in addition to direct borrowing.) ‘[V]irtually the whole material culture of society had been imported from the West’, and consequently there were ‘no Russian words for basic things’ such as articles of western clothing. (In fact, there were words for these things: many of them were loanwords, like the English words ‘samovar’ and ‘sputnik’, and ‘intelligentsia’ come to that.) See Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 50.

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various languages that were published in Russia over particular periods and of the numbers of readers who subscribed to particular periodicals there. Nonetheless, historians and sociolinguists do not have access to so much reliable quantitative information as sociolinguists who work on present-day practice. As they must make do with ‘imperfect data’,124 they cannot precisely define the number or calculate the proportion of nobles in imperial Russia who used French in the drawing-room or the nursery, or determine what proportion of their utterances were in one language or another. They are bound to fall back on the more impressionistic data provided by such sources as memoirs and travellers’ accounts, making due allowance in each case for the more or less transparent intent or prejudices of the author of the source in question. It is very important also to note that whereas sociolinguists investigating contemporary usage are able to produce an accurate description of spoken language and measure competence in it, historians and historical sociolinguists are at a disadvantage in this regard. Using the limited number of documents that have fortuitously survived, they can evaluate Russians’ written competence in French, provided that they can be sure that a document was produced without the aid of a native speaker of French. For information on oral usage and competence, on the other hand, they are dependent on the opinions of observers of the sort mentioned above, for we cannot take written language as an accurate reflection of spoken language. Those opinions, moreover, may be highly subjective and amount only to hearsay. Nor do we know, as a rule, on what criteria or how much evidence observers based their judgements. In some cases, observers may not have been well qualified to evaluate Russian linguistic achievement in languages that were foreign to both parties. Thus, for reasons which relate to the methodology that can be used and the types of evidence that are available for the study of historical phenomena, some subjects that are commonly examined by sociolinguists who are interested in contemporary usage are distinctly unpromising from the perspective of historians, if not altogether impossible for them to investigate. Such subjects – to give examples only from the particular sociolinguistic field, plurilingualism,125 which is of greatest interest to us in this study – include the cognitive consequences of bilingualism, evaluation of the 124 Joseph, ‘Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics’, 70. 125 Although the term ‘plurilingualism’ is often used as a synonym of ‘multilingualism’, it seems to us to have a use to denote competence in more than one language but not necessarily in as many as the term ‘multilingualism’ might imply.

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positive or negative effects of bilingual education, and measurement of individuals’ relative oral competence in different languages. All the same, historians and sociolinguists do have much in common. Social, political, and cultural historians, when they examine communities where some degree of plurilingualism can be observed, may benefit just as much as sociolinguists if they keep in mind Fishman’s question about the functions of different languages and the circumstances in which choices about language use are made. Staple concepts used by sociolinguists (for instance, bilingualism, diglossia, language consciousness, purism, and code-switching, to list only those we have already mentioned) can help historians to organize their discussion of texts in this or that language or in a mixture of languages. Historians and sociolinguists may find it equally illuminating to study the provision made for foreign-language teaching in a country’s educational system and the timing and nature of a pupil’s exposure to a second language. They share an interest in relations between classes and between men and women. The work of both types of scholar may bear on the real or perceived social, intellectual, and psychological consequences of bilingualism, be they positive or negative, such as individuals’ increased social influence, greater access to wealth and power, and enlarged cultural horizons, on the one hand, and social exclusion, sense of grievance, cultural disorientation, anomie, and conflicting loyalties, on the other. Within their respective disciplines, historians and sociolinguists examine phenomena, such as nationalism and language loyalty, which may turn out to be analogous. In any case, language use and language choice, we emphasize, are inseparable from the social and cultural processes in which historians are interested. Linguistic elements, Viktor Zhivov has argued, exist in the consciousness of speakers and writers ‘not as abstract means of communication but as indicators of social and cultural positions’.126 When we consider the social or cultural implications of language use and language choice, as opposed to the purely practical imperative of finding a medium in which one’s utterances can be understood, it is useful, finally, to bear in mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s reflections on speech genres. In an essay published in the 1970s, before the discipline of sociolinguistics had developed very far, Bakhtin held it against specialists in linguistics that they reduced the active role of the other in speech communication to a minimum.127 In fact, Bakhtin argued in a spirit quite in harmony with the sociolinguist’s concern to relate language use to a social or cultural context, any concrete 126 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 4; see also 7. 127 Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, 70.

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utterance should be seen as ‘a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere’. Utterances, he maintained, are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another […] However monological the utterance may be (for example, a scientific or philosophical treatise), however much it may concentrate on its own object, it cannot but be, in some measure, a response to what has already been said about the given topic […] The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones […] After all, our thought itself – philosophical, scientific, and artistic – is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought […] The speaker is not the biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time […].128

Being part of a dialogue, each utterance possesses a quality which Bakhtin classified as ‘addressivity’. That is to say, it is inevitably directed, if only implicitly, at some actual or imagined reader or listener. Bakhtin was not concerned, in the essay to which we have referred, with language choice, and the principal subject-matter of his writings as a whole was literature rather than social life. Nevertheless, his remarks on the inter-relatedness of utterances, past, present, and future, in a particular sphere and on speakers’ or writers’ conception of their addressee also have a bearing on our discussion of Russian plurilingualism and plurilinguals’ language choice. For one thing, what is said or written in French reverberates in a lasting way both in the cultural and intellectual content of Russian discourse and in linguistic borrowing, especially in lexical and phraseological loans. Bakhtin’s remarks are also of obvious applicability when it comes to the choice of French as the conventional vehicle for certain types of written expression, such as noble correspondence and amateur personal documents, including the diary and the récit de voyage (travel account), or as the vehicle of choice for international debates. What he has to say about the linguistic manifestations of class consciousness and social differentiation is apposite for our discussion of the role of French in the construction of noble social identity, especially since Bakhtin himself underlines the particular applicability of his notion of the ‘concept of the speech addressee’ to a society dominated by an aristocracy. Lastly, we shall come across instances where the use of French quite clearly implies a conception of the addressee on the part of the author of the utterance, or 128 Ibidem, 91–93; italics in the original.

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at least places on the addressee an imagined obligation to respond to the author in a certain way.129 We argue, then, that social, political, and cultural historians and theorists, on the one hand, and sociolinguists, on the other, have many overlapping interests. Sociolinguists, to be sure, are able to use certain tools and methods favoured in the social sciences that are unavailable to historians, or that can be deployed by historians only to a limited extent. Nonetheless, there are enough theories, findings, and insights that are relevant on both sides of the disciplinary boundary for us to be able to integrate subject-matter and themes in a single work that straddles this boundary. The sub-title of our work implies that our findings may be couched primarily in the terms of historical studies rather than sociolinguistics, if indeed such a distinction needs to be made. And yet, any study of language as a dimension of social, political, cultural, or intellectual history must, we believe, pay attention to the categories and debates of sociolinguists, and, if it does, then it may also claim a place within the now developing sub-field of historical sociolinguistics.

Literature as a primary source We have already commented on the need to bear in mind the obvious fact that whenever we examine language use in a speech community that existed in a period beyond living memory we are entirely reliant on written sources. However, we need also to remember that the written language itself – which is not to be taken as a mere record of spoken language, incidentally, but as a medium with its own independent existence130 – has many varieties. One broad variety is used for largely practical purposes (for example, in administrative documents or diplomatic correspondence131). Another has literary purposes. It is shaped by aesthetic considerations and is perpetuated by texts which have become canonical and create collective memory, national narrative, myth, and tradition. Between these two extremes there is a whole intermediate band of types of text which may no longer be felt to belong to the category of belles-lettres but did to some extent fulfil an artistic function in the period, or part of the period, with which we are 129 See, e.g., our discussion of a letter by Andrei Rostopchin in the third section of Chapter 4 below. 130 Romaine, Socio-Historical Linguistics, 14–15. 131 We focus on such texts in Chapter 5 below, on the use of French in the diplomatic world.

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concerned. Private correspondence was a significant element in this band: the common noble habit of writing drafts before sending a letter to its addressee attests to the partly aesthetic function of some texts which were neither of a wholly practical nor an exclusively literary nature. Written sources of these various types may not have equal value as evidence for both threads of our investigation, that is to say, for our account of language use, on the one hand, and language attitudes, on the other. For our account of language use, it may be prudent, on the whole, to attach more weight to documents which exemplify it than to documents which purport to describe it. There is, after all, an enormous corpus of extant sources written by subjects of the Russian Empire in French. The corpus includes a wide range of documents of the more practical kind, such as teaching materials, library catalogues, and police reports, besides diplomatic materials. It also includes literary works and many types of writing that are in the intermediate zone between the non-literary and the literary to which we have referred, especially various forms of ego-writing, such as the personal diary and the récit de voyage.132 It also contains a prodigious quantity of personal correspondence. This is a particularly valuable source for the study of usage, for several reasons. Either French or Russian may be found in individual letters, or some combination of the two languages, depending on who is writing to whom, the nature of the relationship between writer and addressee, the context, and the type of subject discussed. The range of possible topics is very wide, from conventional social situations, the character of acquaintances, and the health of friends or relations to political questions and practical matters such as estate management. So too is the range of relationships between correspondents, who could be members of the same family, friends, colleagues, equals in social rank, or superiors and inferiors, and so forth. Private letters may therefore provide insight into the factors governing language choice and code-switching, differences within individual families and between generations, and differences between the linguistic habits of men and women. As documents that were not written for publication, they also have the merit that their authors were likely to be writing in a relatively spontaneous and unguarded way (although account also needs to be taken of the constraints dictated by epistolary etiquette). When we come to sources which are of a literary or semi-literary nature and which were written in Russian,133 then we shall need to bear in mind 132 We deal with Russian texts of these sorts in Chapter 6. 133 i.e. the sort of sources discussed in Chapters 8 and 9 below in which Russians debated their use of French and its effects.

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that discussion of language use in them is coloured by language attitudes. We do not at all mean by this to say that we shall find no valuable information on Russians’ use of French in documents of this kind, especially in such non-fictional texts as memoirs and diaries. While some such texts make only occasional reference to language use, others (for example, the memoirs of Filipp Vigel’,134 which cover the period from Vigel’’s childhood in the 1790s to his retirement from government service in 1840) contain numerous passages describing and shrewdly commenting on it. Again, the voluminous diary of Petr Valuev, who occupied major ministerial posts in the 1860s and 1870s, continuously exemplifies the practice of code-switching.135 Nevertheless, we do need to remember that such texts, as examples of self-conscious ego-writing produced for posterity, are a form of self-presentation and selfjustification and are therefore likely to reflect personal biases and prejudices. However, it is when we use Russian literature (by which we mean here, for instance, satirical articles, drama, and prose fiction) that we have to consider most carefully how reliable this source can be as evidence of social, cultural, or linguistic practice. Literary products of these kinds are highly crafted forms of writing, in which the narrator is not necessarily to be identified with the author and in which – especially in the nineteenth century – elaborate frames were often constructed around narratives, so that readers may have to decide whose words in the text should be considered most authoritative. Furthermore, we cannot be sure that the words placed by writers in the mouths of f ictional characters approximate to actual linguistic usage: writers might invent or exaggerate certain linguistic habits, such as the use of loanwords and code-switching, if it suits their artistic or polemical purpose. At the very least, we need to explore the context in which a literary text was produced, in order to satisfy ourselves that we have understood its author’s position in a contemporary debate. These qualifications about the value of literary sources as evidence of language use are important, because the critical narrative about Russian francophonie to which we have referred unfolds chiefly in sources of this sort, from plays by Aleksandr Sumarokov and Denis Fonvizin in the mid-eighteenth century to novels by Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii in the late nineteenth.136 134 Vigel’, Zapiski. Vigel’’s memoirs were first published posthumously in the 1860s. 135 Valuev, Dnevnik P.A. Valueva. 136 We should add that literary texts can represent reality only within the limits within which authors are permitted to write for public consumption in a particular state. It was considerably easier under the conditions of censorship that obtained in the Russia of Nicholas I, for example, to explore in depth the cultural tensions and personal foibles to which the westernization of the elite gave rise than it was to analyze the social, economic, and moral effects of serfdom.

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The point we have just made needs to be underlined, moreover, because many commentators, while approaching their subject from quite different theoretical angles, have treated literary sources as if they faithfully reflected reality. Readings of literary texts as social commentary were commonplace in Soviet scholarship. Thus the doyen of Soviet dix-huitiémistes, Georgii Makogonenko, interpreted Fonvizin’s play The Brigadier, an early example of satirical treatment of Russian Gallomania and francophonie, as an ‘unmasking’ of the ‘parasitic life’ of the Russian nobility.137 Likewise, Kirill Pigarev asserted that when Fonvizin denounced ‘gentry cosmopolitanism and servility towards things foreign’ he was stigmatizing an ‘everyday social phenomenon that had become typical of the gentry class’.138 Some western and post-Soviet scholars, for all their differences with Soviet scholars, have used literary texts in a similar way. David Welsh, for instance, sees a straightforward connection between drama and cultural reality when he asserts that Gallomania of the sort Fonvizin was mocking ‘was so widespread in Russia that there is hardly a comedy between 1765 and 1823 which does not contain satirical references to it’.139 Much more recently, Alexander Etkind has relied on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Tolstoi’s War and Peace as the sole basis for sweeping assertions about language use in nineteenth-century Russia: that the Russian of ladies of high society was typically ‘worse than’ their French, that ‘French was the language of women and family life’, and that ‘Russian was the language of men, of the military service and the household economy’.140 Lotman, while approaching the literary text from a point of view different from that adopted by scholars who observed the pieties of Marxism-Leninism, also treated literary characters as illustrations of ‘real norms of behaviour’, facts of Russian life predating the texts in which they are situated and living beyond those texts. The boundary between the text and the ‘extratextual empirical reality’ which the semiotician wishes to reconstruct (and which is itself perceived as a text that must be decoded) may therefore seem blurred in his scholarship too.141 137 Makogonenko, Denis Fonvizin, 142. Quoted by Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 439. 138 Pigarev, Tvorchestvo Fonvizina, 94. 139 Welsh, Russian Comedy, 49. See also May Smith, The Influence of French on Eighteenth-Century Literary Russian, 377. 140 Etkind, Internal Colonization, 16. Some of the shortcomings of comment on linguistic matters that we have already mentioned are again apparent here. It is not clear, for example, whether we are dealing with the spoken or written form of language or what it means to say that someone’s Russian was ‘worse’ than their French. If French was the ‘language of family life’, moreover, then it was presumably the language of men as well as women. 141 ‘Authors’ Introduction’, in SRC, x; Lotman, ‘Gogol’s Chlestakov’, ibidem, 178.

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Our practice in this book will be to take due account of the type of text with which we are dealing in any particular instance, the circumstances in which the text was written, the attitudes that authors probably had towards their material, and the aims they may have had when they wrote the work in question. Awareness of such factors helps us to understand how social reality is refracted in a text. In the case of literary texts, we ought also to take account of their sheer literariness and their relationship with other texts, a relationship in which Russian Formalists such as Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovskii took great interest. We should then be alert to the fact that an abundance of references in a literary text to phenomena such as Gallomania, Gallicized speech, and language-mixing does not necessarily prove that those phenomena were ubiquitous in society. Such references might equally show that ridicule of French-speaking and French fashion was a common topos in European literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.142 We thus concur with the more cautious view of the relationship between art and reality that is taken by Figes at certain points in his history, as when, for example, he counsels against treatment of art as ‘a window on to life’ or ‘a literal record of experience’.143 In sum, we do not dispute that classical Russian literature is an extremely valuable source for our study of the history of French in Russia. The reflections of the literary elite on language use, as our final chapter will show, are woven into this literature and have become part of the larger, authoritative narratives about national culture and destiny that Russian writers of the golden age created. At the same time, we may have to accept that the evidence with which this corpus of literary sources furnishes us is more useful for our account of language attitudes than for our enquiry into linguistic, social, and cultural practice.144 We shall certainly need to contextualize literary sources, viewing them against an ample social and cultural background and historical circumstances at the time when they were written. Broadly speaking, the perceptions about language use that 142 We discuss this subject in more detail in the section on comic drama in Chapter 8. 143 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, xxvi, 104; see also 101, where Figes rightly points out that we cannot take Tolstoi’s observations in War and Peace as ‘an accurate reflection of reality’, however much the novel ‘might approach that realist ideal’. 144 Language use is not the only subject of study in which it is dangerous to attach too much credence to literary evidence. As Priscilla Roosevelt has suggested, social and cultural historians have also been unduly influenced by the powerful negative stereotypes established by literary portrayals of ‘the hedonistic, cruel, or improvident aristocrat, the ignorant, coarse, or helpless smallholder, or the “superfluous man”, as Russian intellectuals dubbed the many eccentric or aimless nobles to be found in the provinces’ (Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, xv).

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found expression in mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature reflected the development of an essentialist view of language as an attribute of ethnic and national identity and the passing of cultural authority in Russia from courtiers and nobles of cosmopolitan outlook to a literary community and intelligentsia affected by the rising cultural nationalism we have mentioned. * We have tried in this introduction to describe some of the features of the negative discourse about the use of French by the Russian nobility that has come down to us through major works of Russian literature and some scholarship on Russian culture. We have associated the predominantly negative treatment of Russian francophonie with a highly influential contrastive conception of Russian national identity. According to this classic paradigm, Russia is defined in opposition to ‘the West’. A corollary of it is the assumption that imperial Russia itself was internally divided into a westernized elite and a mass that cleaved to different, native values. We have also considered the relevance of certain political ideas, notably conceptions of empire and nation, to our enquiry. In particular, we have drawn attention to the effect of the growth of national consciousness and cultural nationalism on language choice and perceptions of language use at certain historical junctures. It has been our aim to set the scene for a nuanced picture of the use of French in imperial Russia that will look beyond received wisdom and generalizations which conform to social and national stereotypes. Our next step will be to outline in more detail the historical background against which we believe this picture should be seen.



Chapter 1 The historical contexts of Russian francophonie

The spread of French in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe In the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian nobility was transformed, as we shall see in later sections of this chapter, from an unrefined service class, whose slavish deference to the autocrat had frequently been scorned by western visitors to Muscovy, into a class whose upper stratum, at least, was a culturally sophisticated, self-respecting corporation with numerous contacts and aff inities with western peers. 1 While this transformation was taking place, it was France that happened to provide the most widely admired models for Europe’s royal courts, aristocratic society, and literary and learned communities. Naturally, the French language was the principal vehicle for these models on foreign soil. The spread of French across Europe and its function in the dissemination of elite French culture (we use the term ‘culture’ in a broad sense) were described long ago by Ferdinand Brunot in his massive History of the French Language.2 More recently, Marc Fumaroli has paid nostalgic tribute to the French language and the cultural achievement associated with it up until the French Revolution of 1789.3 Here, as background to our survey of the historical contexts in which French was adopted in Russia and subsequently used there, we shall draw attention to the factors that signif icantly contributed to the spread of French language and culture across Europe from the grand siècle, the age of Louis XIV, whose personal rule lasted from 1661 to his death in 1715. 4 First, French was associated in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe with a way of life unrivalled on the continent at that time in its 1 We emphasize that we are not speaking here of the whole of the nobility, a considerable proportion of which was still illiterate in the reign of Catherine II. On gradations within the noble estate, see the fourth section of this chapter. 2 Brunot, Histoire de la langue française dès origines à 1900. 3 Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait français. The book has been translated into English with the insensitively Eurocentric title When the World Spoke French. Our quotations from this work below are from the English edition. 4 We draw in this section on work of our own and the work of other scholars that has been published in Rjéoutski et al. (eds), European Francophonie.

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refinement, gaiety, good taste (bon goût), and comfort (douceur de vivre). This way of life was cultivated at the sumptuous court of Louis XIV at Versailles and more generally by the aristocracy of France under the ancien régime. It was associated above all with Paris, the city par excellence in the postRenaissance, pre-industrial age in which francophonie flourished and the place where the knowledge, skills, and resources required to sustain the new refinement were concentrated. Indeed, the art of living well (l’art de vivre) was distinguished by urbanity, in the literal sense of ‘urban life’ as well as in the sense of courtesy or politeness (politesse).5 Fumaroli eloquently lists the numerous threads in the great web of factors which in large measure account for the simultaneous pre-eminence of the French monarchy and Paris and the relative ‘universality’ of the French language in Europe until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789: the authority and intelligence of an excellent diplomatic network, the quality of the translations of every important European book published in French in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, the prestige of the etiquette of the premier court in the known world, the authority of the royal academies and of the Salon of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture; but also, in Paris, the attraction of the great sales of artworks and the quality of their experts, the magnetism exerted throughout the world by an urban aristocracy that had raised the leisures of private life to the rank of a fine art of living, served by artists from the first master of the hunt to the last kennel keeper, from the chef to the gardener, from the dressmaker to the jeweler, from the wigmaker to the perfumer, from the painter to the architect, from the poet of light verse to the philosopher – director of conscience and leader of thought – from the ballerina to the great actor, from the playwright to the novelist, from the tutor to the lady’s companion, not to mention the gaiety of fairs, festivals, and the daily life of the streets of Paris, the charm and good manners of its actresses and grisettes.6

Crucial to the new refinement were eloquence and the art of conversation. Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, a Frenchman descended from a branch of a Neapolitan family, who in the 1770s recorded the enthusiasm of the seventeenth-century European elite for French culture, congratulated himself and his peers on the new-found verbal facility they had acquired 5 We are indebted to Anthony Lodge for this point. 6 Fumaroli, When the World Spoke French, xxvi.

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from the French source, resorting in the process to crude stereotyping of a kind that we shall repeatedly encounter: The world has been seduced by the way people talk in France. It is amenity itself speaking, candor itself that laughs, what is agreeable mingles with what is useful, what is news with what is unspeakable, and conversation moves from one subject to the next as imperceptibly as the most delicate nuances, among the tenderest colors happily blended. […] An Englishman never used to have any subject but that which concerned his government; an Italian talked only about music; a Dutchman only about his commercial interests; a Swiss gentleman only about his country; a Pole about his freedom; an Austrian about his lineage. Now there is a unison of voices for the ways of conversation. We speak of everything, and we speak well.7

The style of life adopted by the French court and nobility and the aura emanating from Versailles and Paris go a long way to explaining why French was spoken at the courts of eighteenth-century rulers such as Frederick II of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786), Joseph II of Austria (Holy Roman Emperor, 1765–1790), Gustav III of Sweden (1771–1792), and the grand dukes of Parma,8 as well as Catherine II of Russia. Meanwhile, Paris provided definitive models of sociability, such as the academy, the salon, and the theatre, for other national hubs of Francophone society and culture, such as Berlin, Stockholm, Turin, Vienna, and – in Russia – St Petersburg. Thus, French elite culture and its lingua franca tended to erase national distinctions while underscoring social division. France’s representatives, of course, were delighted by the ubiquity of French in polite society. ‘I’m in France here’, Voltaire wrote to one of his correspondents in 1750 from Prussia, where Frederick had recently ordered the Berlin Academy of Sciences to start using French in place of Latin. ‘People speak only our language. German is for soldiers and horses; you only need it for the road.’9 However, l’art de vivre and douceur de vivre cannot easily be separated from a second factor which assured the prestige of French in eighteenth-century Europe, namely the originality, range, and importance of the corpus of 7 Ibidem, 360–361, quoted from Caraccioli, L’Europe française. 8 On language use in this Italian duchy, see Minerva, ‘The Two Latin Sisters’, 137–139. 9 Voltaire to the Marquis de Thibouville, 24 October 1750, in Voltaire, Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. by Théodore Besterman, vol. 95, 375. On the development of court and aristocratic social life in Russia and the use of French in it, see especially Chapters 3 and 4 below.

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literature written in that language.10 By the end of the grand siècle, this corpus included Descartes’s Discourse on Method, Pascal’s Thoughts, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, Molière’s comedies, the fables of La Fontaine, the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, the Characters of the moralist La Bruyère, the letters of Mme de Sévigné, Bossuet’s sermons and funeral orations, Boileau’s satires and Poetic Art, and Fénelon’s Telemachus. To this legacy, French writers of the Enlightenment, the siècle des Lumières, added a rich stock of social, political, historical, and moral literature, as well as further plays. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and On the Spirit of the Laws, Voltaire’s Henriad, his History of Charles XII, Letters on the English, and Candide, Rousseau’s New Héloïse, The Social Contract, Émile, and Confessions, the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert: these and many other eighteenth-century works written in French circulated throughout the continent, from Prussia and Sweden to Italy and the Romanian Lands (Illustration 1). Knowledge of the literature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, as well as elegance and refined manners, embellished court life; indeed it was essential if monarchs’ claims to be enlightened were to seem plausible. Thus, Catherine II, who (ostentatiously) played the role of enlightened monarch with accomplishment,11 drew extensively on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in the Instruction (Nakaz) that she wrote for deputies to the Legislative Commission she convoked in 1767. She corresponded with Voltaire and in 1773–1774 conversed in person with Diderot, whom she had invited to St Petersburg. And yet, members of the ‘Republic of Letters’, whose achievements added such lustre to French civilization, were not necessarily supportive of aristocratic privilege, let alone of the ancien régime. Many writers shared an aesthetic sensibility with the social elite and similarly prized taste and refinement, to be sure. At the same time, concepts that came to the fore in eighteenth-century French intellectual life (for example, reason, virtue, public utility, love of the fatherland) helped to undermine the old order. Likewise in Russia, the literary community and intelligentsia that the westernization of Russian elite culture brought into being would eventually, in the nineteenth century, mould a public opinion inimical to the autocratic regime and detrimental to the survival of the social structure on which noble privilege was based.12 10 We use the word ‘literature’ here, and in many other places in this volume, in the broad sense of ‘letters’ or ‘belles-lettres’. 11 See especially the second section of Chapter 7 below. 12 On the intelligentsia and definition of the term itself, see the last section of this chapter and notes 119 ff. below.

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Illustration 1 Title page of a copy of a late eighteenth-century edition of Rousseau’s Émile, first published in 1762, in which Rousseau set out his views on education. There was great interest in this work in Russia in the age of Catherine II.

This copy, kindly reproduced for us by the Russian National Library, belonged to a branch of the Tolstoi family.

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A third factor which assisted the spread of French in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe was the development of a discourse originating in France, and accepted elsewhere, about the qualities of the French language itself.13 Sometimes these qualities were explained by reference to historical, extra-linguistic conditions, but sometimes they were explained in a way that modern sociolinguists by and large reject, by reference to the supposedly intrinsic properties of the language or to the character of the people who spoke it. In fact, this discourse had begun long before the eighteenth century. As early as 1549 Joachim du Bellay had notably claimed that French could serve as the vehicle for a literature at least equal in merit to that written in Italian.14 Further bold claims about the qualities of French and its consequent suitability as a universal language were made in the seventeenth century. For example, Louis Le Laboureur affirmed in his treatise of 1669, The Advantages of the French Language over Latin, that French had clarity because its syntax reflected the ‘order of thought which is that of Nature’. Being the most ‘natural’ language, Le Laboureur maintained, French was also the most ‘accomplished’.15 Two years later, the French Jesuit Dominique Bouhours developed assertions of this sort into an argument about the desirability (and likelihood) of the universal use of French. Only French, one of the characters in his Conversations between Ariste and Eugene (1671) opined, possessed the qualities required in a language fit to play this role. Considering ‘the [state of] perfection in which [French] has existed for some years now’, Bouhours wonders, ‘are we not bound to acknowledge that it has something noble and august about it, which makes it almost the equal of Latin and raises it infinitely above Italian and Spanish, the only living languages that can reasonably [hope to] compete with it?’16 French is superior to all other modern languages, Bouhours believes, because it is guileless, clear, concise, pure, polite, better able to express tender feelings, and more natural.17 This stream of linguistic patriotism took on fresh momentum in the eighteenth century, as the spread of French across Europe gathered pace. Voltaire himself extolled French and its native speakers. ‘Of all the languages 13 On this discourse, see especially Argent et al., ‘European Francophonie and a Framework for its Study’, 10–15. 14 Du Bellay Défense et illustration de la langue française. 15 Le Laboureur, Avantages de la langue française sur la langue latine, 174. 16 Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 40. 17 Ibidem, 47–63. Bouhours tends to present his observations about how people, in his opinion, use French as statements about inherent virtues of the language. On thought about language in the French classical age, see especially Siouffi, Le génie de la langue française.

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of Europe’, he wrote, ‘French is bound to be the most general, because it is the most fitting for conversation: it has taken its character from that of the people who speak it.’18 Thirty years after Voltaire’s visit to Berlin, Frederick II approvingly underlined the pre-eminence of French, providing in the process a striking example of the argument against bilingualism on the grounds that it has detrimental cognitive effects: And now this language has become a master-key which lets you into all houses and towns. Travel from Lisbon to St Petersburg and from Stockholm to Naples speaking French and you will be understood everywhere. Having just this one language you make a saving in the number of languages you would need to know, which would overload your memory with words, in place of which you can fill your memory with [other] things, which is far preferable.19

Perhaps the most important step towards the establishment of a conceptual link between the French language and notions of civilization, though, was taken when the Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts invited participants in a competition of 1783 to explain what had made the French language universal, why it deserved this privileged position, and whether it could maintain it. Of the two authors who shared the prize, Johann Christoph Schwab and Antoine de Rivarol, it was the latter who became the more famous, thanks to his treatise On the Universality of French. Rivarol does adduce extrinsic reasons for the spread of French, such as the central geographical position of France between north and south, the early development of a press there, the high reputation enjoyed by French academies, industry, and fashions, and the support lent by Louis XIV to the arts and sciences. At the same time, Rivarol’s argument in favour of French as a universal language is coloured by linguistic essentialism. There are many qualities that make up the génie (genius) of the language. Like the French people, it has ‘grace’ and ‘politeness’. It is ‘manly’, ‘sure’, ‘honest’, and ‘reasonable’. Its word order (subject, verb, object) is ‘natural’. From this naturalness it derives clarté (clarity), an attribute so characteristic of the language that what is not clear, Rivarol famously declared, is not French. Indeed, so well equipped was the French language to become the tool of civilization that 18 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 19, 566. 19 Frederick, De la littérature allemande, 78–79; the translation is our own. Frederick’s work appeared simultaneously in French and German. On this work by Frederick, see Böhm, ‘The Domains of Francophonie’, 180–182.

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it should be regarded not as the language of the French people alone, but as a universal endowment, ‘the language of the human race’.20 There was one other important factor that helped to carry the French language abroad, but it had nothing to do with the allure of French social life, the authority of French literary culture, or the supposedly inherent qualities of the French language or people. French was transported by émigrés. Many of the émigrés who settled in Northern European countries (especially England, the Netherlands, and Prussia) were French Protestants, the Huguenots, who were fleeing from religious persecution in France after Louis’s revocation, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes, which had previously afforded them freedom of worship in the Sun King’s Catholic realm. Eighteenth-century Russians came across these Francophone Protestants in the course of the foreign travels they themselves were beginning to make. An early beneficiary of such contact was Ivan Shcherbatov, who had been sent to London by Peter the Great, probably in 1716, to study navigation. Denied the opportunity to enroll in the Royal Navy, Shcherbatov applied himself while in London to learning French from a private tutor who was doubtless a Huguenot refugee and to conversing with the émigré Francophone community there.21 Some of the Huguenot refugees (though probably not more than 500 persons in all22) went to Orthodox Russia at the moment when Russia was opening itself up to western influence and found employment there, mainly in the army, the navy, or the medical profession. A larger number of emigrants from eighteenth-century France, though, were Catholic, and they brought with them expertise in such f ields as military matters, engineering, the silk and tapestry industries, and the production of mirrors and luxury products, especially cosmetics. Numerous services began to be associated with French knowledge and skill, ranging from hairdressing to cookery and education, and there was strong demand for them among the European aristocracy. This Catholic wave of emigration helped to spread the French language, as the émigrés used it 20 Rivarol, De l’universalité de la langue française; see especially 10, 28–29, 73, 85. For recent discussion of the ‘universality of French’, see also Böhm, ‘The Domains of Francophonie’, 182–183. 21 See Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Teaching and Learning French in the Early Eighteenth Century’. Extracts from 23 of Shcherbatov’s letters to his tutor are reproduced with kind permission of the Russian National Library (RNB) in St Petersburg on our project website at https://data.bris. ac.uk/datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Ivan%20Shcherbatov%20text.pdf). 22 This is a finding from a recent project on French-speaking émigrés in Russia during the reign of Peter the Great, to be published in Inostrannye spetsialisty v petrovskoi Rossii, ed. by Rzheutskii [Rjéoutski] and Guzevich. Jürgen Kämmerer suggests that the number of Huguenots settling in Russia was even smaller: see Kämmerer, Rußland und die Hugenotten im 18. Jahrhundert (1689–1789).

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for their professional purposes wherever they went. Several thousand such Frenchmen settled in Russia in the course of the eighteenth century, and in welcoming them, as in so many other ways, Russia followed a practice that other European nations had adopted.23 There are, of course, numerous other factors that account for the spread of French in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and help to explain the varying degrees to which French penetrated particular countries or regions or the differences in the purposes it served, the associations it bore, the prestige it enjoyed, and the resistance it provoked. Dynastic links or marriage into French aristocratic families often played a role, as in Piedmont and Poland.24 Sometimes the presence of Jesuits and other religious orders in educational institutions gave francophonie a boost, as in late seventeenth-century Parma and Siena, eighteenth-century Madrid, and eighteenth-century Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin, and Vilnius in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.25 French texts were disseminated through a flourishing international book trade, which had important bases in the Netherlands in particular. Educational ideas, especially the notion of the honnête homme, and the popularity of the Grand Tour as the culmination of a noble’s upbringing, also helped to spread the French language and French culture.26 In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth, the presence of Napoleon’s Grande Armée naturally increased exposure to French and made it necessary for other peoples to know it (for example, in the Netherlands, Piedmont, and other parts of Italy27), although foreign invasion could also generate resistance to the language of the occupier. In the case of the Romanian Lands, the spread of French was assisted by the presence of Francophone Russian officers in Moldavia and Wallachia from the time of the Russo-Turkish wars in the late eighteenth century; later, from the mid-nineteenth century, generations of the emergent Romanian intelligentsia would experience France at first 23 For over 6,000 biographical articles on French and French-speaking Swiss who arrived in Russia in the eighteenth century, see Mézin and Rjéoutski (eds), Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières. However, there were undoubtedly more than this number of French-speaking immigrants in Russia during the eighteenth century. 24 Rossebastiano, ‘Knowledge of French in Piedmont’, 89–90; Serwański and Napierała, ‘The Presence of Francophonie in Poland’, 310–316. On the languages of courts and ‘the geopolitics and sociology of diglossia’, see Burke, ‘Diglossia in Early Modern Europe’. 25 Minerva, ‘The Two Latin Sisters’, 133–134; Sanz-Cabrerizo et al., ‘Francophonies in Spain’, 254; Serwański and Napierała, ‘The Presence of Francophonie in Poland’, 318–319. 26 On educational practices, see especially Chapter 2 below. 27 Van Strien-Chardonneau, ‘The Use of French among the Dutch Elites’, 150–151; Rossebastiano, ‘Knowledge of French in Piedmont’, 87–88; Minerva, ‘The Two Latin Sisters’, 140–143.

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hand as students there.28 All the factors we have mentioned in this section, then, combined to put French in the ascendancy among the living European languages in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since some of those factors, moreover, were operative in many different parts of Europe, the continent’s institutions and elites, including the Russian court and nobility, acquired a certain sense of community, a shared culture, understanding, and experience. In sum, the eighteenth century is of great importance in the history of the spread of the French language, both in Europe generally and in Russia in particular. Francophonie was strongly associated with the courts of eighteenth-century monarchs who wished to be regarded as enlightened and with the cosmopolitan European aristocracies that flourished in that century. It was also in the eighteenth century, of course, that the cultural and linguistic effects of the French contribution to the Enlightenment were most widely and strongly felt and that the discourse about the universality of the French language reached its climax. In many countries outside France, including Russia, aristocracies continued to enjoy the style of life cultivated by the French elite under the ancien régime well into the nineteenth century, and the French language retained its status as a language of courts and high society and as an international lingua franca. However, the Romantic countercurrent to the Enlightenment and the rise of nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century affected language attitudes, sharpened consciousness of vernacular varieties, and generated resistance to the predominance of French. At the same time, the position of the nobility, the social stratum which had most valued French as a prestige language, began to be weakened in many European countries by economic, social, and political change in the industrial age. For these reasons, francophonie started to take on different connotations in the nineteenth century, although French continued to serve as a transnational medium for influential ideas and culture even after its value as cultural capital for the social elite had begun to decline in the eyes of increasingly self-conscious groups lower in the social hierarchy.

The westernization of Russia in the eighteenth century The French language and the culture with which it was associated arrived in Russia as the country was being transformed from an isolated, 28 Mihaila, ‘The Beginnings and the Golden Age of Francophonie among the Romanians’, 343–347.

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inward-looking realm into an expanding great power which defined itself as European and derived strength from its numerous new connections with the western world.29 The accounts left by sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury foreign envoys to Muscovy, such as the Austrian Sigismund von Herberstein, the Englishman Sir Giles Fletcher, and the German Adam Olearius, had described a benighted land on the margin of the European landscape in which an oppressive autocrat ruled over a servile nobility and a dull, unenterprising populace.30 For the Puritan Fletcher in particular, Muscovy, which he visited in 1588–1589, was a barbarous other, the dystopian antipodes of Elizabethan England. Its manner of government was ‘much after the Turkish fashion’ and ‘plain tyrannical’.31 It lacked legal norms and was corrupted by false religion. It was economically backward, because wealth was plundered by the autocrat and his officials, and the people therefore had no incentive to labour. The morals of the people were perverted: the country overflowed with ‘whoredoms, adulteries, and like uncleanness of life’.32 Most importantly from our point of view, Muscovy’s contact with the Western European world (as opposed to the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, the Eastern European Orthodox fold, and, of course, Tatar khanates to the east and south) was slight, at least before the second half of the seventeenth century. Russians, Fletcher remarked, attempted to leave Muscovy on pain of death and foreigners’ entry into it was severely restricted: You shall seldom see a Rus a traveller [sic] except he be with some ambassador or that he make a scape out of his country, which hardly he can do, by reason of the borders that are watched so narrowly and the punishment for any such attempt, which is death if he be taken and all his good confiscate […] Neither do they suffer any stranger willingly to come into their realm out of any civil country for the same cause, farther 29 On the point in this process at which French established itself, see the following section. French was not the foreign language that seemed to be of greatest use and interest in Russia in the reign of Peter the Great. For recent discussion of the degree to which pre-Petrine Muscovy was isolated, see the doctoral thesis by Tat’iana Chernikova, ‘Protsess evropeizatsii v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XV–XVII vv.’ Chernikova thinks it possible to talk of Europeanization as early as the fifteenth century, and certainly in the sixteenth. She shows that a considerable number of foreigners practising various professions and crafts were invited to Russia in that early modern period and argues that the great majority of them were invited by the Russian government. 30 Herberstein, Description of Moscow and Muscovy, 1557; Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth; Olearius, The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia. 31 Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, 30. On Fletcher’s work, see also Offord, ‘Sir Giles Fletcher’s View of Muscovy’. 32 Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, 155–156.

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than necessity of uttering [i.e. exporting] their commodities and taking in of foreign doth enforce them to do.33

Still in the seventeenth century, Muscovy could seem to European travellers a world apart. It is perhaps symptomatic of Muscovite introspection, as western visitors saw it, that the only question about life beyond Russia’s western borders that the then Patriarch of the Russian Church, Nikon, thought to ask a Dutch visitor in the 1660s related to the church bells in Amsterdam.34 Of course, to draw attention to foreigners’ accounts of the difference of Muscovy from Austrian and German lands or England in the early modern period is not to prove that Muscovy remained altogether untouched by western practices and culture before the eighteenth century. During the seventeenth century, a style of church architecture developed that was influenced by the western Baroque manner. Clocks and carriages were imported. The practice of portrait-painting was introduced.35 Men of learning such as the poet and dramatist Simeon Polotskii appeared.36 Statesmen such as Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin learned foreign languages and advocated greater economic and cultural contact with the West.37 Private libraries with books in foreign languages began to be collected. Contacts proliferated in the reign of Tsar Alexis in particular, and Kiev served as a major conduit for the increasing western influence after its acquisition, together with left-bank Ukraine,38 from the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania as a result of the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667. Thus, the eighteenth-century westernization we are about to describe represented a rapid acceleration of a process that had already begun rather than a complete replacement of the old with the new, as Peter and his supporters liked to suggest and as the description of Peter’s reforms as a ‘revolution’ might imply.39 Nevertheless, the changes that Russia underwent from the time when Peter became its sole ruler, in 1696, were indeed very wide-ranging. 33 Ibidem, 68. 34 Billington, The Icon and the Axe, 158. 35 See Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery. 36 For a recent account of Polotskii’s writings, see Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 191–203. 37 For a fine sketch of Ordin-Nashchokin’s ideas and activity, see Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia, vol. 3, 334–351, and for more recent brief discussion of them, see Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 205–206. 38 i.e. Ukrainian territory to the east of the River Dnepr. 39 As argued by Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great.

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The overriding motive for Peter’s modernization of the backward state he inherited was pragmatic: modernization was a pre-requisite for continuation of the empire-building which, like western cultural innovation, had been gathering pace in the seventeenth century. It is therefore useful, as we consider Russia’s eighteenth-century westernization, to bear in mind the territorial expansion that accompanied it, especially under Peter and Catherine II. 40 This expansion took place mainly at the expense of Sweden, Turkey, and the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. First, Russia was victorious in the prolonged Great Northern War that Peter fought against Sweden (1700–1721), in which the Russian defeat of the Swedish army at Poltava in the Ukraine in 1709 was a defining national moment.41 As a result of this war, Russia established itself as a major Northern European power, with egress into the Baltic Sea. In the south, Russian territory was greatly extended by the acquisition of land along the northern shore of the Black Sea and in the North Caucasus, as a result of Catherine’s two Russo-Turkish Wars (1768–1774 and 1787–1791). In 1783, Russia also annexed the Crimea, which – from a formal point of view – had been independent since 1774 and, before that, subject to the Ottoman Empire. To the west, large stretches of Polish territory in White Russia, Livonia, Lithuania, and north-western Ukraine were incorporated into the Russian Empire as a result of three partitions, carried out in 1772, 1793, and 1795 together with Prussia and, in the case of the first and third partitions, with Austria as well. This territorial expansion was clearly conceived as empire-building and proudly celebrated as such. In 1721, at the triumphant conclusion of the war with Sweden, Peter assumed the title imperator (emperor), a borrowing from Latin, invoking perhaps the example of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, whose title enjoyed the greatest prestige in the system of international relations at that time.42 The military prowess and martial valour on which empirebuilding depended were repeatedly lauded by eighteenth-century Russian writers, whatever their intellectual or political complexion. The ode (in the hands of Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin, for instance) and epic poetry (written by Mikhail Kheraskov) served this purpose well. The acme of the tradition of glorification of imperial conquest is the twelve-volume, 40 In our account of empire-building and westernization in this section we draw on some of our previous work, viz. Argent et al., ‘The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages’, 11–16. 41 It is worth pointing out, in order to underline the continuity of Russian expansion since the sixteenth century, that this was the second Northern War: the first had been fought against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Peter’s father, Alexis, from 1654–1667 and it was concluded with the signing of the above-mentioned Treaty of Andrusovo. 42 We are indebted to Sergei Karp for this point.

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though still incomplete, History of the Russian State (1818–1829) to which Karamzin devoted the last twenty-five years of his life (Illustration 2). Here Karamzin argued that the autocrats of late medieval Muscovy, especially Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505), whom he heroized, had steered Russia towards a destiny that would eclipse even that of ancient Rome. 43 Empire-building benef ited most directly from modernization in the military sphere. With the help of numerous foreign mercenaries and advisers, Peter reorganized, re-equipped, and retrained the army. He also created a navy which enabled Russia to become a maritime power in the Baltic and, in due course, the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. 44 At the same time, he founded institutions and introduced practices intended to marshal the human resources, raise the taxes, and develop the technological capacity required to support this military effort and transform Russia into a major European power. At the administrative level, he reorganized the bureaucracy into ‘colleges’ conceived according to models developed in Sweden and other European countries. The colleges began to function in 1719, each with responsibility for a major branch of state activity, such as foreign affairs, trade, or collection of revenue. In 1722, Peter introduced a Table of Ranks, inspired by Danish, Prussian, and Swedish models, which assigned state servants in the armed forces and the civil service and at court to one of fourteen classes. Again, the titles in this table, such as admiral, general, kamerger, and kantsler (admiral, general, chamberlain, chancellor), like new designations of social rank, such as baron and graf (baron, count), pointed to the western provenance of Peter’s reforms. Rapid technological progress, much of it overseen by foreigners, made it possible sharply to increase extraction of coal and iron, to engage in new types of manufacturing, and to undertake monumental building projects, most notably the construction of St Petersburg, the new capital on the Gulf of Finland on which work was begun in 1703. Academic and educational institutions were established to promote and disseminate scientific and cultural advances, including the Academy of Sciences, which was opened in St Petersburg shortly after Peter’s death in 1725, following consultation with the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Underlying Peter’s reforms, Priscilla Roosevelt has argued, was an assumption that technology and culture are inseparable: Peter ‘came to assume that 43 Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo; see especially vol. 6. On this work, see Offford, ‘Nation-Building and Nationalism in N.M. Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State”’. 44 On Peter’s reforms, see Anisimov (1993), Hughes (1998), and Dixon (1999). For a discussion of ‘modernization’ in eighteenth-century Russia, see Dixon, especially 1–26.

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Illustration 2 Portrait of Nikolai Karamzin by Vasilii Tropinin, 1818.

Image reproduced for us by the Russian National Library from Russkie portrety, vol. 1, 58.

to think like a European – that is, to understand western technology, warfare, and statecraft – Russians must learn to act like Europeans’. Hence, he set out to force the Russian nobility to behave and dress in a new way,45 requiring

45 Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 8–10.

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selected subjects, for example, to attend social gatherings.46 Social and cultural westernization continued under the empresses who ruled Russia for all but a few years during the remainder of the century after Peter’s death in 1725. Indeed, under Elizabeth and, in particular, Catherine II, the projection of an image of Russia as a power with a refined society and a culture of a western kind came to play an important part in the imperial project. Gatherings on the French model, such as soirées, salons, and balls, would eventually become commonplace among the social elite. Women, who – as Herberstein had noted47 – had lived a cloistered existence in pre-Petrine Muscovy, became prominent, indeed admired, participants in the new society. Dress changed, from the time when, in 1699, Peter began to issue edicts requiring his noblemen to wear European clothes, so that by the age of Catherine II fashionable costume, coiffure, and vestimentary accessories gave the social elite a thoroughly western outward appearance. The extension of the meaning of the Russian word svet (literally ‘world’) to include the concept of high society (Fr. monde) reflected these social and cultural changes. Belles-lettres developed too. Throughout the century, and particularly during its second half, Russian writers (Antiokh Kantemir, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Derzhavin, Karamzin, Ivan Krylov, and many others) created native examples of classical and modern European literary genres such as satire, the meditation, tragedy, comedy, the elegy, the metaphysical poem, the fable, and, eventually, prose fiction, as well as the ode and the epic to which we have already referred. A periodical press began to appear and to express a rudimentary form of public opinion. Catherine herself encouraged this development, at least until gentle mockery of morals began to give way to what seemed like criticism of the social order or political institutions.

The introduction of foreign languages into eighteenth-century Russia The reception of western culture and practices in Russia required and inevitably entailed increased familiarity with living Western European languages – Dutch, English, French, German, Italian – which had been little known in the seventeenth-century Muscovite realm, where, incidentally,

46 On these gatherings, see the first section of Chapter 3 below. 47 Herberstein, Description of Moscow and Muscovy, 1557, 40–41.

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no university yet existed.48 These languages were the media through which Russians would learn in the eighteenth century about innumerable subjects that were now of interest to them, such as weaponry, military strategy, ship-building, navigation, fortification, civilian architecture, mathematics, medicine, governance, taxation, mining, industrial production, pedagogy, geography, history, literature, the polite society that was coming into being, dress, cuisine, taste, fashion, and leisure pursuits. Translators with knowledge of foreign languages were needed, to be sure, in order to acquaint Russians with the enormous stock of printed information on such practical matters, not to mention the literary, artistic, and musical heritage of the West. The task was infinite, though, and so there was no alternative, if Russians were to draw extensively on this stock, but to learn to read writings in the original or in an intermediary language. In any case, communication with the foreign soldiers, seamen, engineers, architects, diplomats, doctors, scholars, and teachers who flooded into Russia as it remade itself from around 1700 required that Russians develop oral proficiency in other European languages, for few of these foreigners had Russian when they arrived there. Nor could study abroad be undertaken without a good knowledge of the language of the country in which the student was based, or at least a good knowledge of one of the most widely used international languages of the time, that is to say Latin, French, or German. However, the increased communication between Russia and the West in the eighteenth century did not take place in only one direction, and so foreign languages were not merely vehicles for the passive reception of foreign culture, a process which in due course, especially in the nineteenth century, would generate a distinctive Russian culture for the modern age. Russian knowledge of foreign languages also made it possible for Russians now to attempt to transform their country in the western imagination by projecting an image radically different from the image that foreigners had received from Herberstein, Fletcher, Olearius, and other writers who had not visited Russia themselves but willingly reused negative stereotypes. 49 Post-Petrine Russia presented itself as a ‘European power’ – the words are

48 The experience of a Russian embassy to France in 1668 vividly illustrates Russian ignorance of French and the way in which it could weaken the position of diplomats and complicate their mission. See Schaub, ‘Avoir l’oreille du roi’, especially 220–221. On the development of language expertise in the Russian diplomatic community in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, see the first three sections of Chapter 5 below. 49 See, e.g., John Milton’s Brief History of Moscovia, written in the mid-seventeenth century, in Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 8, 474–538. Milton depended heavily on Fletcher’s account.

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Catherine’s, from her Instruction50 – ruled by an enlightened monarch. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Russian court and elite would seek recognition of Russia by other Europeans as a civilized member of their community. Command of the most widely used languages of that community was an important credential for acceptance in it, entitling the Russian Empire to the same degree of respect in the cultural sphere as its military successes brought it in the diplomatic sphere. Such command enabled Russian writers themselves to participate in the European Republic of Letters and to advertise their achievement to a foreign readership, either through translation or in articles and private correspondence written in languages with which that readership was familiar. Thus, Russians’ newly acquired facility in foreign languages and their confident, extensive use of them deeply affected others’ perceptions of them, and their own selfperception too, at both the national and the personal level.51 Various foreign languages entered the Russian linguistic market-place as eighteenth-century rulers sought to bring about rapid modernization of their realm, nobles adopted western practices, Russians projected a new image of their country to the western world, and the flow of human and commercial traffic increased in both directions. Dutch, as the language of a major sea-faring nation whose naval and commercial prowess had impressed Peter, had utility in the domain of maritime engineering, as attested by some linguistic borrowings from this period.52 German had many practical functions, in fields such as metallurgy, mining, and medicine.53 For much of the eighteenth century, it was taught as widely as French, or even more widely, in some public educational institutions.54 It was used in the Academy of Sciences, in which most of the early cohorts of scholars were from German-speaking lands.55 It was learned in the age of Catherine by some of the country’s ablest students, who were sent to study in German universities. Most importantly, German was the mother tongue of a substantial section of the Russian imperial elite, especially families from the Baltic region, which had come under Russian rule as a result of Russia’s eighteenth-century expansion. (Baltic German families would prove particularly loyal to the 50 [Catherine II], Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 43. 51 On the use of foreign languages, and French in particular, to project certain images of Russia to European readers, see Chapter 7 below. 52 Nautical loans from Dutch include gavan’, dreif, matros, shturman, verf’ (harbour, drift, sailor, navigator, shipyard). 53 See Dahmen, ‘The Use, Functions, and Spread of German’. 54 Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘French in Public Education in Eighteenth-Century Russia’. 55 See the last section of Chapter 5 below.

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imperial regime and provide it with a stock of military and civilian personnel out of all proportion to the size of their community in the population of the empire.) Italian too became part of the linguistic repertoire of some Russian nobles, partly because of its importance in the field of fine arts (it was learned, for example, by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg) and its preponderance in the domain of music even after French had prevailed in other spheres of European culture. It was also an important diplomatic language in the Mediterranean world and a lingua franca for European dealings with the Turkish court.56 English would be valued by sections of the Russian nobility, particularly in some circles which, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, were keen to display their social superiority, but it did not attain the position that one might have expected, given the considerable diplomatic and commercial presence of Britain in eighteenth-century Russia and the intermittent Anglomania of Russian nobles, especially in the early nineteenth century.57 Latin too had some currency in eighteenth-century Russia as a language of scholarship in the Academy of Sciences and it also began to appear in mottos and inscriptions (for example, on the statue that Catherine II erected to Peter, the famous ‘bronze horseman’ in St Petersburg).58 Although French was already, perhaps, the principal language of transnational communication in Europe by the time Peter the Great died in 1725, and although knowledge of foreign languages had become an important asset for the Russian elite by that date, it was not until the middle of the century that the elite noticeably leaned more towards French than any of the other foreign languages we have mentioned. From that point on, though, they embraced French and French culture whole-heartedly. There was no nation in Europe, Diderot observed, which was Gallicizing itself more quickly than the Russian nation, both with regard to language and practices.59 No doubt one reason for the ascendancy of French in Russia was the fact that the Empress Elizabeth herself had a fine command of it, having learned it in childhood from a Francophone lady at her father’s court.60 At the beginning of her reign, moreover, Elizabeth’s francophonie may have 56 See, e.g., the following: Cremona, ‘Italian-based Lingua Francas around the Mediterranean’; Varvaro, ‘The Maghreb Papers in Italian Discovered by Joe Cremona’; Bély, L’Art de la paix en Europe, 411. 57 See Cross, ‘English – a Serious Challenge to French in the Reign of Alexander I?’ 58 See Vorob’ev, Latinskii iazyk v russkoi kul’ture XVII–XVIII vekov; Rjéoutski, ‘Latinskii iazyk v dvorianskom obrazovanii v Rossii 18 v.’ 59 Dulac and Karp (eds), Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières, vol. 1, vi. 60 Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth, 10.

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served a political purpose: it helped to distance her from German-speaking claimants to the throne after the death of the Empress Anna in 1740 and subsequently to differentiate her court from that of Anna, whose detested favourites and leading statesmen (Bühren, Münnich, and Ostermann) were Germans.61 However, Elizabeth’s leaning towards French culture was lasting. As empress, she presided over a court where French theatre troupes frequently performed French comedy62 and where, as a visiting Frenchman, La Messelière, observed in 1755, Russian courtiers spoke French ‘comme à Paris’ (as in Paris).63 It is also notable that proficiency in French and the habit of using it developed in the middle decades of the century among certain noble families – the Vorontsovs, the Shuvalovs, and the Razumovskiis – in which there were men who were close to Elizabeth and who flourished during her reign, or at certain times during it.64 Other factors also helped to consolidate the adoption of French among the Russian social elite from around the middle of the century, besides its use at court. Two formative figures in the history of modern Russian literature, Vasilii Trediakovskii, a poet, writer on prosody, and translator, and Kantemir, a satirist and diplomat, had spent long periods in Paris, the former as a student at the Sorbonne from 1727 to 1730 and the latter as head of the Russian diplomatic mission from 1738 until his early death in 1744. Their familiarity with French literature perhaps helped to direct the attention of Russia’s fledgling literary community towards France in the early stages of its development. In any case, French literature provided the aesthetic doctrine, Neoclassicism, and the chief generic models for the Russian writers who in the eighteenth century began to lay the foundations for a national secular literature. At the geopolitical level, a diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and France took place at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the juncture at which Russia began decisively 61 Bühren (Biron in Russian) had demanded that all correspondence with him be conducted in German: see Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 93. At the same time, we should not overstate the difference between the courts of Anna and Elizabeth in terms of linguistic practice. All Anna’s German favourites and statesmen did have French and frequently used it in their official capacities. It was Anna, moreover, who first invited a French theatre troupe (from Germany) to the court. 62 See the second section of Chapter 3 below and the work by Alexeï Evstratov on which we draw in it. 63 Quoted in Cross (ed.), Russia under Western Eyes, 194. 64 On Mikhail Vorontsov and Ivan Shuvalov, Francophile courtiers under Elizabeth, see Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth, 211–230. Shuvalov became Elizabeth’s favourite in the late 1740s. Mikhail Vorontsov was Vice-Chancellor and later Chancellor under Elizabeth. On foreignlanguage use among the Vorontsovs, see Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’.

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to establish itself as a major European power. The fact that Catherine II, who came to the throne after the brief reign of her husband Peter III, which followed the death of Elizabeth in 1761, was herself a foreigner also helped to fix the Russian gaze on the western world where French culture was in the ascendancy.65 However, of all the reasons why French came to be the most highly valued foreign language among the eighteenth-century Russian elite, perhaps the most important was the transformation of nobles from servitors cowed by an all-powerful ruler into members of a self-conscious corporation possessing initiative of its own. As the main agents through whom the imperial state westernized Russia, nobles (or at least, members of the high nobility and, insofar as they could, the middling nobility) emulated their European peers and adopted their means of demonstrating corporate distinctiveness, including their language practice. For social advancement within this stratum, or simply for the maintenance of social status within it, command of French came from the mid-eighteenth century to seem an essential commodity, and nobles were prepared to invest heavily in it. They devoted considerable material resources to their children’s acquisition of this cultural capital, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, which could in turn be translated back into material capital, for mastery of French was a qualification for advancement in lucrative careers in branches of state service, as well as for success at court and in high society. Before closely examining this social transformation and its cultural effects, though, we should make two further points about the adoption of francophonie by the eighteenth-century Russian nobility which it will be worth bearing in mind as our narrative unfolds. First, the range of intermediaries of various nationalities who were involved in the transmission of western practices and products to eighteenthcentury Russia was very wide, as we might expect, given the extent of social and cultural innovation among the elites there. To mention only intermediaries who were French or Francophone, there were diplomats from aristocratic families, such as the Baron de Corberon and the Comte de Ségur, other members of the cosmopolitan high nobility, such as Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, the encyclopédiste Diderot, the German-born journalist and art critic Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the future pre-Romantic writer Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and the future historian Pierre-Charles Levesque. There were also many Francophone visitors or emigrants of other social strata who were attracted by the commercial opportunities presented by the new tastes of the Russian nobility. These included publishers and 65 On Catherine’s French and her use of it, see the second and third sections of Chapter 3 below.

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book-sellers,66 who could meet the demand for works of foreign literature and western periodicals, haberdashers, dress-makers, milliners, hairdressers, perfumers, furniture makers, wine merchants, cooks, pastrycooks, and representatives of numerous other trades. We gain an insight into the diversity of the commerce in which such intermediaries were engaged and of the consequent extent of novelty in Russian material culture from an inventory of goods shipped from Rouen to St Petersburg in 1747 for a French Huguenot, Jean Dubuisson, who was known chiefly as a wine merchant but who clearly saw a market for other products too. His shipment included sets of trimmings for ladies’ dresses, mantillas, costumes for masked balls, hats, armchairs, couches, chests of drawers, mirrors, brushes, walking-sticks, tassels, sword knots, stockings, powder, combs, nails, pins, needles, and ink-wells.67 Some of the entrepreneurs engaged in such commerce must have been among the ‘swarm of French of every complexion’ whom La Messelière was dismayed to find in St Petersburg, ‘the majority of whom, having been in trouble with the police in Paris, [had] come to infest the northern regions’.68 All the Francophone visitors or immigrants, whatever their social origins and personal reasons for being in Russia, were in some sense, indirectly or directly, responsible for the development of Russian francophonie. Many of them, irrespective of their pedagogical qualifications, found employment as teachers in institutions such as the Noble Land Cadet Corps (founded in St Petersburg in 1731) and the various boarding schools that appeared in St Petersburg or Moscow or as tutors and governesses in private noble households.69 The nobility’s apparently willing embrace of foreign cultural practice and products requires us to reflect on a second point, namely the extent to which eighteenth-century westernization, at least in the cultural sphere, was driven by the autocratic state. It is arguable that in Peter’s time westernization in all domains was generated mainly by political will from above rather than by any spirit of enterprise and enquiry from below: ‘progress’ came about ‘through coercion’, to use the sub-title of Evgenii Anisimov’s important biography of Peter.70 In the years following Peter’s death, on the other hand, the nobility developed a greater intellectual and cultural independence. Affected by changes in conceptions of human nature, 66 On whom, see Rjéoutski, ‘Les libraires français en Russie au Siècle des Lumières’. 67 See Zakharov, Zapadnoevropeiskie kuptsy v rossiiskoi torgovle XVIII veka, 193–194. 68 Cross, Russia under Western Eyes, 194. 69 Rjéoutski, ‘Les écoles étrangères dans la société russe’. 70 Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great.

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Igor Fedyukin has argued, nobles came to be viewed by the state (and by themselves) as ‘entitled, by their praiseworthy ambitions and love of honor, to make decisions regarding their own lives and the public good in general’. Motivated by ambition and encouragement rather than coercion, they were transformed from servitors into autonomous subjects.71 Thus, individuals, as well as the state, began to take important initiatives.72 What nobles did was in harmony, to be sure, with the policy of sovereigns oriented towards the West, that is to say with the ‘state project of Europeanization’, as Schönle and Zorin have called it.73 However, nobles needed little or no prompting from higher authority in order to innovate, particularly in such areas as the education of their children, the development of forms of sociability, and language practice. The evidence we shall produce of the receptivity of the high nobility to western ideas and culture and the richness of the cultural life with which it filled its social sites suggest more than mere compliance with the wishes of sovereigns. In particular, the serious-minded and diligent attempt to acquire foreign languages, exemplif ied by the upbringing that nobles gave their children, if they could afford to do so, leads us to believe that the emergence of an elite that was cosmopolitan yet patriotic in outlook was the outcome of noble initiative just as much as the stroke of a royal pen. Indeed, the state itself, it has been argued, fostered ‘individual initiative while also tying the nobility to its political mission to contribute to the governance of the country’,74 in ways that we examine in the following section. 71 Fedyukin, ‘From Passions to Ambitions’, 26, 41–44. 72 See, e.g., the recent volume by Fediukin [i.e. Igor Fedyukin] and Lavrinovich (eds), ‘Reguliarnaia akademiia uchrezhdena budet…’ 73 Schönle and Zorin def ine the nobles’ role in this project thus: ‘promoting the greatness of the Russian empire in the international arena militarily or diplomatically, contributing to running the empire administratively, fostering the spread of European decorum and elegance in society, furthering the advance of knowledge and education, establishing new institutions, experimenting with new technologies, and the like’ (Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 9–10). 74 Ibidem, 7. Schönle and Zorin thus ‘restore a degree of agency to the elite, despite its outward subservience to the monarch’ (ibidem, 15). They also emphasize the ‘crucial importance of education’ in the formation of a nobility that ‘would assimilate the inner compulsion to render service to the monarch’ (ibidem, 6–7). We strongly agree with this view, as implied by the fact that we place our chapter on teaching and learning French near the beginning of this book. Education was a vital tool in the modernization of Russia, which was conceived, as Schönle and Zorin also point out, ‘as a significant step toward enlightenment, interpreted mostly in universalist terms’ (ibidem, 2). We should add that a class whose self-esteem depended on attainment of a high level of culture was bound to respect education, specifically an education which prioritized the acquisition of the foreign languages that gave access to the cultural models the class most admired.

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The golden age of the nobility Peter the Great had required lifelong service of all his nobles, from the age of fifteen, and their advancement, as his Table of Ranks made clear, depended on service rendered to the state rather than on the historical status of their clan.75 Subsequent rulers, though, began to lessen the onerous demands Peter had made on the nobility. In a manifesto of 1736, ‘On Entry of Noble Children into Service and their Retirement from it’, the Empress Anna reduced the term of service to twenty-five years and raised the age at which it began to twenty; she also granted one or more sons in a family the right to remain at home to manage the estate.76 Then, in Elizabeth’s reign, legislation was drafted for the establishment of noble privileges such as economic concessions, monopolies in the metal industry and distilling, and the granting of loans.77 The most far-reaching measure of this type was the edict ‘On the Granting of Freedom and Liberty to the Whole Russian Nobility’, which was issued by Peter III in 1762, less than two months after he had ascended the throne and some four months before he was deposed by Catherine and murdered. In the preamble to this edict, or manifesto as it was known, it was argued that the coercive attitude of Peter the Great towards his nobility, although it had brought much benefit to Russia by introducing enlightenment and inducing diligent service, could now be relaxed. The edict emancipated the nobles from compulsory military or civilian service and granted them the right to travel abroad (although they still required permission to travel, inasmuch as they had to obtain a passport78). Nobles who were off icers could retire, although they would still be obliged to serve in time of war or within three months of the beginning of a military campaign (Article 1). Nobles who had not reached officer rank could retire if they had served for twelve years (Article 8). In a provision that illustrates 75 A useful overview of the duties and rights of the Russian nobility is provided by Madariaga in her essay in a two-volume collection edited by Scott (1995), which is itself a rich comparative source on the pan-European history of the class. Other important studies in English include those by Raeff (1966) and Robert Jones (1973). Lieven (1992) provides valuable information on the Russian aristocracy in his comparative examination of the role and fortunes of the English, German, and Russian nobilities in the age of industrial development and the rise of nationalism. The classic Russian monographs on the subject are by Romanovich-Slavatinskii (a nineteenth-century work reprinted in 1968) and Troitskii (1974). We also refer below to more recent work by Marasinova and Ivanova, as well as Lamarche Marrese. 76 ‘O poriadke priema v sluzhbu shliakhetskikh detei i uvol’neniia ot onoi’ (31 December 1736): PSZ, no. 7142. 77 Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth, 60 ff. 78 We are grateful to Sergei Karp for pointing out this fact.

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the conception of the nobility as an international European corporation, the edict also permitted nobles to serve other European sovereigns and to retain whatever rank they had attained abroad when they came back to Russia (Article 5). Nobles were obliged to return to Russia if summoned, on pain of sequestration of their estates (Article 4), but the only other obligation imposed on them was to ensure that they or their children received an education, in Russian or other European institutions or from well qualified tutors at home (Article 7).79 In 1785, Catherine II issued a ‘Charter’ of her own, confirming the privileges granted by Peter III, such as the right to retire from service, to travel abroad, and to serve foreign powers (Articles 17–19). Indeed, Catherine’s charter went further than Peter’s manifesto in defining noble exemptions and privileges. Noble rank was not only hereditary but also inalienable except in the event of commission of specified crimes that were considered incompatible with noble status (4–6). Nobles could not be deprived of their noble rank or of honour, life, or property except through trial by peers (8–12). They were exempt from corporal punishment (15) and personal taxation (36). They were entitled to dispose of their property however they pleased (22). They could buy villages (26), sell wholesale whatever was grown or produced on their estates (27), set up factories on their property (28), exploit mineral resources discovered on their land (33), and own, buy, or build houses in towns (30).80 The manifesto of Peter III and the charter of Catherine II are generally regarded as important landmarks in the history of the Russian nobility. As such, they need to be borne in mind in this socio-cultural study of language practice, in which language use and language attitudes among that class have a central place. How much difference, though, did these pieces of legislation actually make to the way that nobles led their lives? What effect did they have on the way nobles saw themselves? Was the noble estate uniformly affected by them? And to what extent were these sovereigns’ policies (that is to say, purposeful action from above), as opposed to initiatives undertaken by the nobles themselves (in other words, more or less spontaneous action from below), responsible for the development of the nobility into a corporation of a western sort? 79 ‘O darovanii vol’nosti i svobody vsemu Rossiiskomu Dvorianstvu’ (18 February 1762): PSZ, no. 11,444. This piece of legislation is discussed in Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 5–7. 80 ‘Zhalovannaia gramota dvorianstvu’, more formally known as ‘Gramota na prava, vol’nosti i preimushchestva blagorodnogo rossiiskogo dvorianstva’, available at http://www.hrono.ru/ dokum/1700dok/1785gramota.php. The numbers in brackets in this paragraph refer to articles in the charter.

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It can safely be said, perhaps, that the manifesto and charter helped members of the upper stratum of the nobility to cultivate themselves, as the manifesto of Peter III explicitly encouraged them to do, and that as a result they gained a new sense of self-respect (amour-propre, in French terminology, calqued in Russian as samoliubie).81 Using the leisure they enjoyed and the revenue they received from estates cultivated by serf labour, which they alone among the Russian social classes were entitled to exploit, they travelled widely. If in the age of Peter the Great Russian nobles generally went abroad for professional reasons on the instructions of the sovereign, in the age of Catherine II they travelled most often for personal fulfilment and on their own initiative, in emulation of the westerner undertaking the Grand Tour. They adopted the habits of other nobilities. As Lieven comments, while comparing Russian aristocrats with their Austrian counterparts, they ‘read the same books, dressed in similar clothes, shared common amusements, and conversed easily with each other in the French language in fashionable salons and spas across the continent’.82 Most importantly from our point of view, Russian nobles adopted the manner of speaking, and – quite literally, as Lieven notes in passing – the language of their new peers in other European countries. Mastery of French became an essential accomplishment for the young Russian nobleman or noblewoman, along with refined manners, the art of entertaining conversation, and an ability to draw and dance, and also to fence (in the case of boys) or (in the case of girls) to sing and play musical instruments. It secured entry into the European social elite. Access to this elite, moreover, ensured familiarity with its code of honour as well as its norms of social behaviour. The good name that a sense of self-worth entitled one to expect became a key component in the social identity of the Russian nobleman, as of his European peers. If necessary, he would defend his honour through duelling, calculating that the physical risk of doing so was outweighed by the risk to his reputation, his cultural capital, if he did not. It may be doubted, though, whether very many Russian nobles were able to take full advantage of the opportunities which the new legal rights they were granted in the second half of the eighteenth century afforded them. For most eighteenth-century nobles, Lamarche Marrese has argued, such opportunities were limited, even after 1762, since they were indebted 81 Amour-propre is not to be confused with egoistic self-love (amour de soi, or sebialiubie). Fonvizin is already contrasting the two concepts in his play The Minor, first performed in 1782: see Nedorosl’, Act III, Scene 1, in Fonvizin, SS, vol. 1, 132. 82 Lieven, Empire, 163.

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and depended on patronage.83 Indeed, according to statistics produced by Irina Faizova, the number of nobles who actually availed themselves of the opportunity to retire from service did not increase dramatically after 1762.84 Elena Marasinova too has wondered whether the manifesto of 1762 was really a transformative moment for the nobility, or rather, in what way it was transformative. Instead of seeing it as marking a decisive shift in the balance between noble obligations and privileges, she prefers to interpret it as an attempt to persuade the nobility to develop in ways useful to the absolute monarchy, by raising the prestige of education and bolstering the authority of the system of ranks.85 If after 1762 service changed, strictly speaking, from a legal obligation into a moral one, then there was still a strong incentive to perform it, Marasinova argues, because serving the empress and the ‘fatherland’ came to be considered a privilege which earned royal favour, confirmed worth, and was associated with access to a refined way of life.86 As to whether the manifesto of 1762 was the decisive enabling factor for those nobles who did use leisure to cultivate themselves (by travelling abroad, for instance), it should be pointed out that some aristocrats were already doing this before Peter III issued his manifesto. It is questionable, then, whether the privileges granted by Peter III and only affirmed over two decades later by Catherine II in themselves brought about a major qualitative and quantitative change in the practice of large numbers of nobles after 1762. There is one point in our aforegoing discussion of nobles’ obligations, rights, habits, and self-image which we must develop and re-emphasize before proceeding to aspects of the nineteenth-century historical context that are important to our study. Although Peter’s manifesto of 1762 and Catherine’s charter of 1785 set out privileges that were – theoretically – to be enjoyed by the whole noble estate and although these documents strongly differentiated the noble estate from all other social strata, nevertheless the Russian landed nobility was itself variegated. The motley character of the nobility is evident from a reading of Catherine’s charter, which on one level 83 Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 714. 84 Faizova, ‘Manifest o vol’nosti’ i sluzhba dvorianstva, 107–111; cited by Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 714. 85 Marasinova, ‘Vol’nost’ Rossiiskogo dvorianstva’, 24. 86 Ibidem, 28–31. Schönle and Zorin too argue that the manifesto ‘proposed a kind of moral compact, whereby legal emancipation would in fact strengthen the internalized ethos of dedication and active service on behalf of the monarch and the fatherland’, and that the manifesto was therefore ‘more about internalized duty than about freedom’ (Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 6).

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is concerned with the administrative problem caused by the fact that men had been ennobled over the centuries in many different ways. Article 91 explicitly acknowledges that Catherine’s nobles might have noble status either because they have inherited it or because it has been granted to them by the sovereign. Diversity within the estate is also recognized implicitly in the careful listing, in the last section of the charter, of the numerous types of proof of noble status that would be officially acceptable and indeed in the admission at the end of Article 91 that there may be yet other types of proof that have not been described in the document. We shall identify some of the differences within the noble estate and then explain why they are significant for our discussion of noble language use. First, an enormous gulf separated the high aristocracy from the petty gentry. As Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter has pointed out, the nobility extended from the aristocratic courtier who stood at the foot of the throne to the odnodvorets, a man from the lowest ranks of ennobled servitors who owned a humble farmstead with only a few serfs.87 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, fictional and non-fictional, contains much evidence of the existence of this social range and of consciousness of hierarchy within it. Such consciousness is strikingly exemplified by a memoirist’s recollection that a provincial landowner required neighbours of inferior social rank to use the servants’ entrance to her manor house.88 Inequalities within the noble estate – which were greater, it has been claimed, than the inequalities in the mid-nineteenth-century English or German nobilities89 – can be attributed in part to the socially rigidifying effect of the Table of Ranks introduced by Peter the Great. The Table even prescribed the modes of address to be used when addressing persons of a particular rank. However, inequalities could also be defined in terms of wealth. The most firmly established criterion for measurement of nobles’ wealth up until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was the number of adult male serfs owned by a family. Nobles who owned more than 5,000 such serfs were considered enormously rich; those owning between 800 and 5,000 were thought to be extremely well-off; those with between 200 and 800 were regarded as prosperous; an adult male serf population between 80 and 200 was considered average; an estate with fewer than 80, on the other hand, was not self-sufficient. Most Russian nobles, it should be noted, fell into the 87 Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, 36. The point is made by Nikolai Turgenev in his work La Russie et les russes (see vol. 2, 27), to which we refer in Chapters 4 and 7 below. 88 Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 159. 89 Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 42.

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last two categories.90 Indeed, on 52 percent of the estates of the provincial gentry there were 20 male serfs or fewer in 1766–1767, while on 34.7 percent there were between 21 and 100. At the other end of the spectrum, only a minute proportion of serf-owning nobles (about one percent on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861) could be called grands seigneurs.91 The proportion of nobles who could afford exposure to education, travel, books and periodicals, services provided by foreigners, and Europeanized society on a scale that would have enabled them to master French was therefore very small. Secondly, even among families of comparable rank and wealth, status might vary depending on such matters as the lineage and antiquity of a family, the reasons for its original ennoblement, and whether it had continued to provide meritorious service over many generations. At the pinnacle of the nobility in eighteenth-century Russia stood families such as the Golitsyns, Naryshkins, Sheremetevs, Tolstois, Volkonskiis, and Vorontsovs, which had accumulated wealth and power as a result of prolonged loyalty and service to pre-Petrine autocrats. Other families among the wealthiest and most powerful band of the elite had only begun to prosper much more recently and were vulnerable, at least for a while, to the disdain with which the blue-blooded may treat the nouveaux riches. The Menshikovs, Orlovs, Panins, Potemkins, Razumovskiis, Riumins, Shuvalovs, and Zubovs, for instance, owed their eminence to the grants of land and serfs that munificent eighteenth-century sovereigns were wont to award to their courtiers and favourites. The Demidovs, Goncharovs, Stroganovs, and other families had also acquired their wealth in recent times, but not through royal patronage: they had profited from new commercial opportunities which had presented themselves in such fields as mining, arms manufacture, and cloth and salt production as Russia began to modernize. Such families might raise their social status by marrying into the older aristocracy.92 The degree to which differences of these kinds mattered to Russian nobles in the eighteenth century is illustrated by assertions or discussions in works of literature, such as Kantemir’s second satire and Fonvizin’s plays, and by debates at Catherine’s Legislative Commission about whether lineage or meritorious 90 Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, xiii; see also 158–159 on differences within the nobility. On noble wealth as measured by serf-ownership in the period leading up to the emancipation, see Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 42–43, and Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, 233–234. 91 Ivanova (ed.), Dvorianskaia i kupecheskaia sel’skaia usad’ba, 182, cited by Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 9; see also Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 178. 92 Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 37.

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service was the better criterion for ennoblement and for continuing enjoyment of noble status.93 Thirdly, a family’s style of life varied depending on whether the family had the means to spend much time beyond its rural estate and, indeed, outside Russia. The British traveller Robert Lyall, who lived in Russia in the years immediately after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, perceived a marked difference in conduct and manners between the aristocratic upper stratum of the nobility and the lower stratum, especially those who were ‘untravelled’.94 The horizons of nobles who had a mansion in one of Russia’s two relatively large and cosmopolitan cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, where families in the higher echelons of the nobility commonly spent the winter months, were bound to be broader than those of nobles who for one reason or another spent almost all their lives in the countryside. Then again, the nobility of St Petersburg, where the court resided and the organs of central government were located, could be perceived as quite different even from the Muscovite nobility, for which a marked preference shines through in the writings of such influential literary figures as Alexander Herzen and Tolstoi. There were differences too in the quality of social life enjoyed by nobles in different rural regions of the empire, depending on the distance of the region from a metropolis and the density of its local noble population. In the fertile agricultural provinces of the heartland (for example, Iaroslavl’, Kaluga, Kostroma, Kursk, Orel, Riazan’, Smolensk, Tambov, Tula, Tver’, Vladimir, and Voronezh) the estates of peers were not so few and far between, or the distance to Moscow or St Petersburg so forbidding, as in provinces such as Kazan’, Penza, Samara, Saratov, and Simbirsk in the Volga region, on the periphery of European Russia. We should also bear in mind that the Russian nobility was ethnically heterogeneous, as well as socially diverse. By the mid-eighteenth century it had absorbed not only many Tatars, descendants of the Central Asian nomads who had invaded Russia in the thirteenth century, but also nobles from territory into which it had expanded in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the course of its empire-building, especially Ukrainians and Germans. Many western immigrants who had entered Russian service had also been admitted to the nobility. There was no people in Russia or Asia from whom individuals have not entered Russian 93 ‘Na zavist’ i gordost’ dvorian zlonravnykh’, in Kantemir, Sobranie stikhotvorenii, 68–88; Offord, ‘Denis Fonvizin and the Concept of Nobility’, especially 20–26; Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, 170 ff. 94 Lyall, The Character of the Russians, vi–vii.

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service and consequently been ennobled, the memoirist Vigel’ observed, so that the noble estate in Russia had become a ‘mongrel’ class that differed markedly from other estates, Vigel’ supposed.95 Thus, with respect to the ethnic diversity of its nobility, Russia exemplifies a pre-modern type of empire, as it has sometimes been defined, in which the elite might have little or no sense of solidarity with subordinates of similar ethnic origin but might well ‘accept, assimilate or cooperate with the aristocracies of the initially peripheral regions’ of the empire.96 It should be added that after Peter’s reforms the imperial Russian nobility was diverse from the confessional point of view as well: foreign Catholics and Protestants were assimilated into the cosmopolitan ruling class without being put under pressure to convert to Orthodoxy or to absorb specifically Russian cultural values.97 The existence of such diversity in the noble stratum is important from our point of view, because it tends to invalidate generalized statements about nobles’ opportunities to acquire foreign languages and about their use of them and level of competence in them. The ability of different families to meet the costs of ensuring that their children mastered foreign languages – especially the cost of employing foreign tutors or governesses and, ideally, arranging journeys abroad and further tuition there – varied greatly. It followed that families which could not afford such expenditure, or which lived an isolated existence in the countryside and had infrequent contact with Francophone peers, found themselves at a disadvantage in the struggle for plurilingual competence and the benefits it could bestow. The diversity of opportunity to master French may partly explain some of the grumbling comments made by members of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury literary community about Russian francophonie and about the supposedly idle or incompetent foreign tutor residing in the aspiring noble household. After all, many members of the literary community came from quite modest levels of the estate or from a non-noble background, including the poet Derzhavin (who was brought up in the remote province of Kazan’) and Fonvizin, whose father – Fonvizin is careful to point this out in a short autobiography – could not afford to hire private tutors to teach him foreign languages.98 Again, the translator and dramatist Vladimir Lukin, author of a 95 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 289. 96 Lieven, Empire, xv; see also 249–250. 97 Ibidem, 250. 98 See [Fonvizin], The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin, 33. On the attitude of Fonvizin and other writers to French-speaking among the nobility, see Chapter 8 below.

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particularly scathing attack on Russians’ adoption of the French language,99 was the son of a poor nobleman who was a court servant. We should add, finally, that the embryonic educated class and literary community in eighteenth-century Russia contained not only middling or low-ranking noblemen, as well as aristocrats, but also men who were not of noble origin at all. In the relatively meritocratic age that began with the reforms of Peter the Great, many significant men of letters originated in social strata beneath the nobility: for example, the economist Ivan Pososhkov, the orator, dramatist, and churchman Feofan Prokopovich, the poet and translator Trediakovskii, the scientist and poet Lomonosov, and the dramatist and fabulist Krylov. Thus, already in the eighteenth century, and even before the age of Catherine II, we see signs of a process that would become conspicuous, and would be much commented upon, in the middle of the nineteenth century. So-called raznochintsy (people of various non-noble ranks) would emerge in the intelligentsia that was coming into being, and they would eventually reject the habits and values of the nobility. Language education and practice also differed in the two groups of which the intelligentsia was composed.100 We shall return to the subject of the literary community and the emergence of an intelligentsia of mixed social origin in the last section of this chapter, in order to consider the further development of these groups in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, under Nicholas I. Before that, though, we should pause briefly on Russia’s involvement in the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century and the Decembrist Revolt which followed the death of Alexander I in 1825, since we shall frequently have occasion to mention these matters in our account of Russian francophonie and reactions to it.

The Napoleonic Wars and the Decembrist Revolt The Franco-Russian hostilities of the Napoleonic age began under Paul, in 1799, when Russia participated in the Second Coalition against France, and they resumed under Alexander I in 1805–1807. A combined Russian and Austrian army was defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz in December 1805. A further major battle was fought between Napoleon’s army and a joint Russian and Prussian force at Eylau, in East Prussia, in February 1807. 99 See the third section of Chapter 8 below. 100 On the different priorities in language education, see the following chapter.

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(On this occasion the outcome was inconclusive.) In June of the same year, Napoleon decisively defeated a Russian army at the Battle of Friedland, also in East Prussia. Hostilities temporarily ceased with the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, when Russia and France became allies and Alexander secretly agreed to join Napoleon’s Continental System against Britain. However, in June 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia. In the ensuing struggle for national survival, the Russian army under Kutuzov slowed, but did not halt, the advance of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Borodino, where a bloody battle involving about a quarter of a million troops was fought on 7 September. A week later Napoleon entered Moscow, which in the following days was severely damaged by a fire thought to have been started by the Russians themselves during their mass exodus from the city. The invasion ended in November and December with the retreat of the disjointed remnants of Napoleon’s starving army, harried by guerrilla attacks and ill-equipped for conditions in the Russian winter. It was only to be expected that military conflict with France would accentuate the criticisms that Russian writers had been expressing for some time about their compatriots’ Gallomania. There are indeed indications in early nineteenth-century and later Russian writings of various kinds that the war with France dampened the ardour of the Russian nobility for French civilization, in the broadest sense of the term, and for the language that was the vehicle for it. Gallophobia, expressed partly through criticism of Russians’ francophonie, was much in evidence, for example, in works by Fedor Rostopchin, who would be the governor of Moscow when the Grande Armée occupied it in 1812 and who is thought to have instigated the arson there.101 Vigel’ noted the linguistic effect of the increased patriotism on high society on the eve of renewed war with Napoleon in 1812: aristocratic ladies began in French to extol Russian and to express a desire to learn it or to pretend to show that they knew it. People explained to them and to courtiers that Russian had been distorted, infected, stuffed with words and turns of phrase borrowed from foreign languages and that ‘Beseda’ [The Symposium] had been formed with the sole aim of restoring and preserving its purity and immaculacy; and they all got down to being its main champions.102 101 We deal in more detail with the views of Rostopchin in the fifth section of Chapter 8 below. 102 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 359–360. Vigel’ is referring in this passage to the conservative literary society Symposium of Lovers of the Russian Word, set up in St Petersburg in 1811 (see also Chapter 8 below).

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The French theatre in St Petersburg, which had been a popular venue for high society in the early Alexandrine period, began to empty as French troops approached Moscow and the sovereign, who had never liked this theatre much, took the opportunity to close it.103 Women owning fashion shops in Moscow were forbidden to use French in the signs in their boutiques, when Rostopchin was governor of the city.104 Even in provincial Penza, in the autumn of 1812, ladies showed their patriotism by putting on sarafans and kokoshniki and by refusing to speak French.105 Tolstoi evokes this cultural reaction to the war that Napoleon waged against Russia by having characters in War and Peace resolve to fine people for using French words and to donate the proceeds to a charitable foundation.106 Pushkin, who, unlike Tolstoi, lived through the Napoleonic Wars himself, also reports in an unfinished novel, Roslavlev, that Moscow nobles resolved to stop speaking French.107 And yet, such gestures were plainly superficial and temporary, and it is striking that conservative patriots such as Rostopchin, despite their fulminations against French culture and Russian francophonie, continued to speak French in noble social venues and to correspond in French among themselves.108 Moreover, the persistence of francophonie in high social, military, and official circles long after 1815 and the importance that continued to be attached to French in the education of noble children suggest that the experience of war against France had little lasting effect on the value the nobility attached to French language and culture. There were, however, other historical factors at work which would strain the loyalty of some of the nobility to the regime, weaken the homogeneity of the educated elite, and call into question the value of noble culture and the practices associated with it, including the use of a foreign language for social purposes.109 103 Ibidem, vol. 2, 54. 104 N.I. Turgenev, La Russie et les russes, vol. 1, 14. 105 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 2, 21. A sarafan is a sleeveless dress worn by a peasant woman and a kokoshnik (plural kokoshniki) is a peasant woman’s head-dress. 106 Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 11, 177. 107 Roslavlev, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, pt 1, 153. See also Offord, ‘Treatment of Francophonie in Pushkin’s Prose Fiction’, 209. 108 As Lotman notes, the growth of patriotic feeling that characterized late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian noble culture did not conflict with the similarly dynamic spread of the French language among the nobility. On this paradox (as it seems to us, although it did not seem paradoxical to many nobles at the time), see Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 353. On Rostopchin’s French writings, see the fifth section of Chapter 6 below. On the linguistic views of other conservative nationalists, see Chapter 8, where we discuss the seeming contradiction between linguistic Gallophobia and actual language practice. 109 The threat posed to aristocracies by loss of homogeneity in the elite is discussed by Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 5–6.

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Chronologically speaking, the first of these historical factors to which we should call attention was a parting of the ways between the autocratic polity, on the one hand, and the social and cultural elite, on the other. The eighteenth-century nobility had on the whole been supportive of the imperial project pursued by Russian sovereigns, despite the heterogeneity of the estate, the existence of tensions within it, and occasional manifestations of political opposition, the most notable of which was Aleksandr Radishchev’s attack on the arbitrariness of autocratic power and the inhumanity of serfdom in his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790).110 It was in the years following the victory over Napoleon, though, that the sense of collective noble solidarity with the autocratic state clearly began to break down. After 1815, Alexander I committed himself to a Holy Alliance of conservative powers (Austria and Prussia, as well as Russia) determined to maintain the old monarchic order in Europe. At home, he gave free reign to reactionary advisers such as Aleksei Arakcheev, a parade-ground disciplinarian. When army officers – representatives of the military and social elite, whose education had inculcated in them a sense of civic responsibility – returned from the final campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814–1815 with a favourable impression of life in Western Europe, they were dismayed to find that their homeland was destined to remain backward and oppressive. An acute sense of disillusionment set in amongst them, giving rise, from 1816 on, to the formation of a succession of secret societies (a Union of Salvation, a Union of Welfare, a Northern Society based in St Petersburg, a Southern Society in the Ukraine). Freemasonry, which from the age of Catherine had encouraged Russian nobles both to improve themselves morally and to perform philanthropic deeds (and which also provided a model for secretive organization), underwent a revival.111 Projects for political reform were drafted: Nikita Murav’ev set out a detailed plan for a constitutional monarchy with representative assemblies and a federal structure on the American model, while Pavel Pestel’, in his unfinished Russian Law, envisaged an authoritarian republic on the French Jacobin model.112 This dissatisfaction and the yearning for moral improvement and social and political change – to which Tolstoi alludes in the first part of his epilogue 110 Radishchev, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu. 111 See Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Foreign Languages and Noble Sociability’, on which we draw in Chapter 4 below. On the literature on Freemasonry in Russia, see n. 51 in that chapter. 112 Murav’ev, ‘Konstitutsiia’, and Pestel’, ‘Russkaia Pravda’, in Vosstanie dekabristov, vol. 7. Short extracts from each project are published in English in Leatherbarrow and Offord (eds), A Documentary History of Russian Thought, 42–58.

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to War and Peace 113 – eventually found expression in the disastrously ill-conceived mutiny that became known as the Decembrist Revolt. On 14 December 1825, shortly after the sudden death of Alexander I, officers of the Northern Society leading some 3,000 men refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Nicholas, who had assumed the throne after it had been disclosed that his elder brother, Constantine, had declined it. At the end of the day, loyal troops fired upon and dispersed the rebellious soldiers, who had gathered in Senate Square in St Petersburg. A protracted investigation was conducted, at the conclusion of which five leaders of the St Petersburg insurrection and of a slightly later revolt by the Southern Society were hanged and over a hundred other mutineers were sentenced to various terms of hard labour, exile, or service in disciplinary battalions. Although the social origins of the Decembrist officers were quite varied,114 many of the leaders of the revolt belonged to families that were highly placed in the Russian social and official world. They included, for example, the princes Evgenii Obolenskii, Sergei Trubetskoi, and Sergei Volkonskii (whose mother was a lady-in-waiting at court), the baron Veniamin Solov’ev, and Count Zakhar Chernyshev, as well as the brothers Matvei and Sergei Murav’ev-Apostol, whose father had been a diplomat, and Pestel’, whose father had served from 1806 to 1818 as governor-general of Siberia. The participation of members of such eminent families in the revolt, and the sympathy felt for the mutineers by members of other such families who were not directly implicated, suggested that the monarchy was beginning to suffer a dangerous loss of moral authority.115 The world inhabited by these members of the imperial elite was cosmopolitan and plurilingual. The Murav’ev-Apostol brothers had studied in a Parisian boarding school in their childhood. Members of the Decembrist circles had had frequent social contact with French men and women during the Napoleonic Wars. Trubetskoi was married to the daughter of a French immigrant. Nikita Murav’ev used French as his domestic language, although his wife was Russian. In any case, several Decembrists, it should be noted, 113 See especially Chapter 14, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 12, 281–286. 114 For a discussion of this point, see Grandhaye, Les décembristes, 47–52. 115 There is a large literature on the Decembrist Revolt, which is usually regarded as the opening episode in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. For accessible introductions to the insurrection and its pre-history, see the now quite old works by Mazour (1962) and Raeff (1966). There is a more recent study in French by Grandhaye (2011). There are useful biographies of two of the leading Decembrists, Ryleev and Pestel’, by O’Meara (1994 and 2004 respectively). The def initive works in Russian on the authors of the two main Decembrist projects are by Druzhinin, who focuses on Nikita Murav’ev (1985), and Nechkina, who focuses on Pestel’ (1955 and 1982).

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were not ethnically Russian, and for some of them Russian was not their first language. The Poggio brothers, Aleksandr and Iosif, for instance, were sons of an Italian settler in the polyglot and cosmopolitan city of Odessa, while Andreas von Rosen belonged to a German-speaking Baltic noble family. And yet, as political rebels who drew inspiration from contemporary events such as the uprising of 1820 against the restored monarchy of Ferdinand VII in Spain and the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire that began in 1821, the Decembrists were prone to a cultural nationalism that made some of them (Aleksandr Bestuzhev, Pestel’, and Volkonskii, for example) reflect on language use.116 Thus already towards the end of the reign of Alexander I, a part of the social elite was experiencing an alienation that went further than politics. In the following reign, this alienation would merge with a more general disaffection in the wider educated elite, the social composition of which was changing as a result of the influx of non-nobles, who were increasingly called upon to meet the administrative, professional, and technological needs of the expanding empire and modernizing state.

The literary community and the intelligentsia in the age of Nicholas I Shocked by the Decembrist Revolt, Nicholas I immediately set about ensuring that there would be no recurrence of the political dissidence that had been allowed to develop in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. A staunch believer in the legitimacy of autocratic power, he immediately introduced measures designed to restrict freedom of expression and to discover the earliest signs of dissent. In 1826, he tightened censorship, and by 1848 there were as many as twelve agencies entitled to impose it. In the same year, he established a new police body, the Third Department of the Imperial Chancery, with Count Benckendorff as its first head.117 This institution, which depended on a host of informers as well as its own gendarmerie, was responsible for surveillance of persons considered subversive, or potentially so, including religious sectarians and foreign subjects in addition to political opponents of the regime. The closing years of Nicholas’s reign – the so-called ‘seven dismal years’ (mrachnoe semiletie) from 1848 to 1855 – were particularly repressive, since Nicholas was concerned to ensure that popular insurrections of the sort 116 On Bestuzhev and language consciousness after the Napoleonic Wars, see the fifth section of Chapter 8 below. 117 On language use in the Third Department, see the penultimate section of Chapter 5 below.

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that had taken place in 1848 in France, various parts of the Austrian Empire, Germany, and Italy did not spread to Russia. Many members of circles discussing utopian socialist ideas in St Petersburg in the late 1840s – the socalled Petrashevskii circles, to which the young Dostoevskii belonged – were severely punished. In 1849, Nicholas sent Russian troops into Hungary to crush a revolt that was taking place there against the Habsburg monarchy. And yet, for all his efforts, Nicholas failed to prevent the emergence of an independent public opinion which would help in the long run to undermine both the old noble way of life and the empire itself. There now began a cultural awakening which found expression in the development of a rich and original literary tradition. It was in the age of Nicholas, after all, that Pushkin, whose poetry is of seminal importance in Russian literature, produced most of his œuvre and that the poet and prose-writer Lermontov and the novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist Nikolai Gogol’ produced all of theirs. The novelists Ivan Goncharov, Turgenev, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi all began their literary careers in the 1840s or early 1850s too. Nor did these writers merely establish a literary canon. They are also credited with having brought into being the standard modern Russian language, and their works have continued to furnish examples of good linguistic usage, as attested by the numerous quotations from them in the dictionary of the Russian language published by the Academy of Sciences.118 The classical literary corpus developed together with an equally vigorous tradition of thought on aesthetic, moral, social, theological, and, in the final analysis, political questions. Examples of both types of writing, poetry and fiction, on the one hand, and belles-lettres and sociopolitical journalism, on the other, were published side by side in voluminous periodicals, the ‘thick journals’ (tolstye zhurnaly) which sprang up in the age of Nicholas and proliferated in the freer conditions, Russia’s first age of glasnost’ (openness), after the death of Nicholas in 1855 and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856). The group that generated the tradition of sociopolitical literature would come to be known as the intelligentsia (intelligentsiia; the English word is of Russian origin).119 This group should not be entirely equated 118 See, e.g. Chernyshev et al. (eds), Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 17 vols (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1950–1965). 119 We use the term ‘intelligentsia’ in this book to mean a force that is both intellectually independent and socially and politically engaged. It should be noted, though, that definition of the term is fraught with difficulty. In English, the word has tended to be used in a pejorative sense, as attested in a work of 1916 by H.G. Wells, whose Mr Britling defines it as ‘an irresponsible middle class with ideas’ (the example is given in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 7, 1070). With regard to the Russian intellectual community, on the other hand, the term has

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with the literary community, especially in the age of Nicholas: it would be wrong, for example, to attempt to attribute to Pushkin or Lermontov the sort of moral engagement that came to be regarded as characteristic of the intelligentsia.120 Nevertheless, it often happened that the same individual (for example, Herzen, Dostoevskii, or Tolstoi) was both a creative writer, on the one hand, and a polemical journalist, commentator on current affairs, or pamphleteer, on the other. Both literatory (men and women of letters) and intelligenty (intellectuals), moreover, generally shared a sense of civic duty and high moral purpose and were equally liable to official disapproval or punishment for the expression of views unpalatable to the authorities. As a rule, both types of writer were far removed from the political authorities (although there were exceptions, of course). Indeed, they tended to think, as the Soviet dissident Andrei Siniavskii put it, that they ‘should not become a part of power, rather [they] should observe power from the outside’.121 At the same time, they acquired great cultural and moral authority by seeming to express the conscience of the nation – an authority that official persecution of them tended only to increase. The development of the literary and intellectual community under Nicholas I reveals a fracture among the cultured elite itself, an additional parting of the ways. Alongside those nobles who remained more or less unquestioningly loyal to the autocratic state, a well-read, free-thinking republic of the written word was coming into being, and the citizens of this republic did not necessarily belong to the nobility. Many members of the literary community and intelligentsia (for instance, the leading critic generally had a more positive meaning, as it does in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, who greatly admired most of its mid-nineteenth-century representatives, about whom he wrote in the essays collected in Russian Thinkers (2008). Gary Hamburg, in a wide-ranging reconsideration of the concept, attempts to resolve the problems associated with use of the term by arguing that many different sorts of ‘intelligentsia’ existed: see Hamburg (2010). The problematic nature of the term is compounded by its retrospective application: it seems not to have come into common use until the 1860s (the minor prose writer Boborykin claimed to have coined it in that decade), but thinkers such as Belinskii who flourished much earlier, in the 1830 and 1840s, are now generally considered to have belonged to it. There is a large literature on the concept, besides the works of Berlin and Hamburg. Many essays written as long ago as the 1960s and 1970s, when there was much interest in the subject among western scholars, are still of value: see, e.g., the items in our bibliography by Billington (1960), Malia (1961), Nahirny (1962), Pollard (1964), and Confino (1972), and also Raeff’s book The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia. 120 Nonetheless, we would not attempt to define ‘the great writers’, such as Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and Chekhov, in opposition to the radical intelligentsia, as is done by Morson: see his ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, especially 141–148. 121 Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia, 2. Siniavskii does not make the distinction that we make here between the intelligentsia and the literary community.

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Vissarion Belinskii, the dilettante Vasilii Botkin, the historian Mikhail Pogodin, the historiographer and critic Nikolai Polevoi) were from professional, merchant, or even peasant families.122 Admittedly, the major men of letters of the age of Nicholas (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol’, Goncharov, Turgenev, the young Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, along with Timofei Granovskii, Herzen, and many others) were all noblemen, albeit noblemen born into different strata within the estate. However, even nobles might repudiate, or at least might cease wholly to share, the noble ethos once they felt themselves to be part of the literary and intellectual community. The nobleman’s sense of duty could still be directed towards an imperial fatherland (otechestvo), of which nobles were the pre-eminent metaphorical sons. Members of the new literary and intellectual elite, on the other hand, were more likely to feel that they served the nation of which they had been encouraged to conceive by the thought and literature of the European Counter-Enlightenment and the Romantic period. They were intent above all on discovering Russia’s distinctiveness or originality (samobytnost’) and solving the riddle of its destiny. At its grandest, their mission was to explain the significance of Russia’s role in some universal system of the sort propounded by Hegel in his philosophy of history. Confident that they were better qualified than the noble estate or self-interested statesmen to formulate Russia’s identity and needs, they convinced themselves that they were more entitled than any other group to speak for the nation.123 Although the controversy between so-called Westernizers and Slavophiles may obscure the fact, many writers and thinkers right across the political spectrum thus subscribed to a form of cultural nationalism. As Herzen famously asserted in his autobiographical masterpiece My Past and Thoughts, Westernizers and Slavophiles resembled the imperial two-headed eagle: they looked in different directions, but the heart that beat in its breast was the same.124 The fracture in the educated elite was reflected in differences in values as well as primary allegiance. The forms of cultural capital prized by the literary and intellectual community, we might say, differed from those prized by nobles, even though many members of the community were of noble origin and something of the noble code of values was still apparent 122 In the late 1850s and 1860s, after the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, the proportion of raznochintsy in the intelligentsia would increase, and among the raznochintsy there would be many sons of clergymen, most notably Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov. 123 The point is well made by Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia, 137. 124 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, vol. 2, 511.

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in the speech or conduct of men such as Pushkin, Herzen, and Tolstoi. Whereas the nobility sought signs of favour from the sovereign and craved approval in the beau monde, both domestic and international, the esteem that mattered to writers and thinkers came from fellow writers, critics, reviewers, readers, and the European literary and intellectual fellowship. Many writers and thinkers professed to dislike the society that the high nobility frequented, perceiving it as artificial, affected, and hypocritical, and to prefer a simpler and supposedly more authentic way of life.125 They abhorred materialism (in the sense of love of worldly goods), deploring both the conspicuous consumption of the upper nobility and, for good measure, the cupidity attributed to the western bourgeoisie. They cultivated instead an unmercenary air.126 Social conscience and altruism stood higher in their code of values than personal honour. Inverting the values of the politically loyal nobleman, they might even regard punishment by the authorities, as Ingrid Kleespies has shrewdly observed with Herzen in mind, as a ‘visible and highly prized mark of tsarist disfavor’.127 What is most important for our purposes, the language that the literary community and the intelligentsia valued most was not French but Russian. There were several reasons for this preference. First, many members of the mid-nineteenth century cultural and intellectual community simply lacked the high level of active oral proficiency in foreign languages, especially French, that nobles were able to display in their exclusive social venues. Take, for instance, Belinskii, who shaped the development of Russian literature in the 1830s and 1840s and who is regarded as the first major example of the morally and socially engaged intellectual. Being the son of a poor military doctor, Belinskii was largely dependent on plurilingual noblemen such as Pavel Annenkov, Mikhail Bakunin, Granovskii, Herzen, and Ivan Turgenev for his information about the French and German philosophical and literary developments that shaped his interpretations of Russian literature. That is not at all to say that plurilingualism had no use in the intelligentsia, for it was a means of direct access to modern European literature and ideas. Belinskii himself tried to improve his knowledge of French in the 1840s so that he would be able to read George Sand and Pierre Leroux, among other authors, in the original.128 It could not, however, be a crucial marker of collective 125 This attitude was not new in the nineteenth century; it was also a common trope in Russian eighteenth-century literature. 126 See Offord, ‘Worshipping the Golden Calf’. 127 Kleespies, A Nation Astray, 160. 128 Panaev, Literaturnye vospominaniia, 242, 243.

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identity or personal status in a meritocratic grouping that welcomed people from social backgrounds where it was difficult or impossible, as a rule, to acquire command of foreign languages at an early age. Secondly, non-noble members of the emergent literary community and intelligentsia did not aspire to achieve the elite social status of which command of French – like refined manners, titles, and coats of arms – was emblematic. On the contrary, they displayed indifference to such status. As for members of the community who did originate in the nobility, some spoke rather apologetically about their social origin129 or even attempted to ‘simplify themselves’ (oprostit’sia) by adopting the dress and habits of the common people.130 The sense of standing outside or being estranged from the pre-eminent social class naturally entailed rejection of the linguistic practice of that class. As representatives of a new social grouping that aspired to speak for the nation as a whole, literatory and intelligenty, as we shall see, mounted a sustained attack on the linguistic habits of the nobility.131 It is no coincidence that the attack reached a crescendo in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the nobility found its pre-eminence in the educated elite more seriously threatened than ever before and after it had lost its exclusive right to own land cultivated by serf labour. Thirdly, nations, as we have pointed out, were beginning in the nineteenth century to be associated with particular ‘peoples’,132 and the language of the core people of the nation was coming to be seen as a fundamental attribute of the nation’s identity. As the principal representatives of the cultural nation, members of the literary community and intelligentsia were therefore keepers and developers of the nation’s linguistic heritage, as well as vessels for Russia’s social and political conscience. It was essential, if they were to play this role, that they create a literary corpus in Russian, and the importance of the contribution made by the corpus that they did create to the formation of the modern Russian sense of nationhood can hardly be exaggerated.133 By contrast, nobles who continued in the mid-nineteenth129 Note, e.g., the negative tone of remarks made by the writer Ivan Panaev in his literary memoirs about his youthful noble self and the circles in which he moved in his youth: Panaev, Literaturnye vospominaniia, 145. 130 Tolstoi, in his later life, exemplifies the yearning for such simplification. 131 See especially Chapters 8 and 9 below. 132 A ‘people’ is understood here as a body of men, women, and children comprising a particular ethnic group and cultural community, rather than the subjects of a particular king or other ruler, or the body of citizens of a particular country. For these and other definitions of ‘people’, see Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 11, 504–506, especially §§ 1a-d, 4a, and 5. 133 The point is emphasized by Hosking, Russia, 286–311.

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century age of nationalism to use French for social and domestic purposes seemed poorly qualified to speak on behalf of the Russian nation, as opposed to the Russian Empire. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the essence of the nation – many mid-nineteenth-century writers and thinkers came to believe – was to be found in its purest form among the common people (narod), especially in the mass of the peasantry, whose life had been untouched by the ways of the refined society of the upper social stratum. This statement would hold good for numerous classical writers and thinkers at various points on the political spectrum, including Herzen, Bakunin, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi, as well as the Slavophiles. The literary community and intelligentsia became intensely interested in this popular mass. The shift of attention away from the drawing-rooms of St Petersburg and towards the izba (peasant hut), the antipodes of the world of the nobility, was reflected in numerous publications of the immediate post-Nicholaevan period, some of which were the outcome of labours dating back many years. These publications included tales about peasant life, historical scholarship about the history of serfdom, the peasant commune, and peasant rebellions, and collections of folk songs, fairy tales, popular legends, myths, and oral epos.134 Popular speech received its share of attention too: in 1862, the lexicographer Vladimir Dal’ published a collection of over 30,000 proverbs and sayings of the Russian people, which might be regarded in some sort as a repository of their collective originality and wisdom.135 We must remember that the popular mass, of course, was not Russophone throughout the Russian Empire: ethnic minorities in many regions (for instance, Estonians, Georgians, Jews, Kalmyks, Maris, or nonRussian Slavs such as Ukrainians) might have little or no Russian or they might function to some degree as bilinguals. Nevertheless, the bulk of the peasant mass within the Russian heartland – and the element of it in which the literary community and intelligentsia were primarily interested – was Russian and monolingual, and this fact too helps to explain the diminishing value of Franco-Russian bilingualism among Russian writers and thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century. * 134 For examples of fiction on the peasantry, see the following: Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism; Glickman, ‘An Alternative View of the Peasantry’; Offord, ‘Literature and Ideas in Russia after the Crimean War’. For examples of the other types of publication mentioned here, see Offord, ‘The People’, 252, 261 (nn. 44–49). 135 Dal’, Poslovitsy russkogo naroda.

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The language use we shall describe and the language attitudes whose development we shall trace in this book need to be seen against the background of social and cultural processes that were taking place in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have therefore briefly described the Europeanization of the Russian nobility in the eighteenth century, which began during the reign of Peter the Great as part of a programme of empire-building accompanied by sweeping modernization of the state Peter inherited. We have drawn attention to the divisions within that class, stressing that command of French was primarily an accomplishment of its upper echelons and that this accomplishment required resources that made French-speaking socially exclusive. We have broached the question of the extent (limited, we believe) to which royal action was the crucial factor in the emergence of a plurilingual, outward-looking nobility in eighteenth-century Russia. Viewed over the whole of the long period we survey, the stock of this nobility as the pre-eminent social estate in the empire declined. On the other hand, the stock of the literary community and the intelligentsia as pre-eminent cultural and moral representatives of the nation rose. Differences in language use and language attitudes mark these developments, and discussion of those differences is woven into the grand narrative about national destiny that so strongly colours the literature and thought that burgeoned in pre-revolutionary Russia.



Chapter 2 Teaching and learning French

Command of French became a necessary attribute in the social and private world of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian nobility, whether it was for use at social gatherings, visiting the theatre, travelling, reading, or simply keeping a private diary. However, other languages – most importantly German, English, Latin, and, of course, Russian – were also widely used and were in some sense in competition with French in Russia in the imperial period. In this chapter, we shall consider which languages various social groups or individuals chose to learn, or chose to have their children taught, and what their choices tell us about conceptions of social and cultural identity. The learning of one language or another will thus be treated as indicative of the way in which groups or individuals inscribed themselves in an ‘imagined community’, to use Benedict Anderson’s expression. Conceived as a form of cultural capital, the languages in question had different values in the minds of those who learned them, and we shall look closely at these differences, exploring the main social and cultural oppositions between them. We shall also seek to show that the way in which French was learned in the noble milieu was affected by certain ideas and values that were dear to the nobility, such as notions about friendship, politeness, and style, and by preoccupation with nobles’ principal activity, engagement in sociability. First, though, we shall provide a chronological survey of the development of the teaching of French in Russia, from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.

An overview of French teaching in Russia There was little teaching of modern languages, properly speaking, in Russia before the eighteenth century.1 This fact can be explained by the cultural isolation of the country: the few merchants who came to trade in Russia had to set about learning Russian in order to conduct business, as was the case, for example, with merchants from the Hanseatic cities. Russians, moreover, were apprehensive about the presence of ‘schismatics’ in Orthodox schools 1 On the beginnings of language teaching in Muscovy in the second half of the seventeenth century, see the first section of Chapter 5 below.

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and therefore excluded foreigners from the staff even though there were virtually no indigenous teachers. The Russian state needed people with knowledge of modern languages, to be sure, especially for negotiations with diplomats from other countries and for translation. However, in the seventeenth century these needs were still limited, and were met chiefly by the Chancery of Foreign Affairs (Posol’skii prikaz), which carried out translation for the purpose of compiling the main Russian journal of the time, Vesti-Kuranty, a source of information on the outside world which was aimed at the tsar and his immediate entourage.2 Even when the policy of rapid modernization pursued by Peter the Great raised the demand for translators to an unprecedented level, the supply of language specialists did not immediately increase. No instruction in French or other living foreign languages was offered in the majority of the state educational establishments in Peter’s time, such as the elementary schools (the so-called tsifirnye [cipher] and arifmeticheskie [arithmetic] schools), the Naval Academy in St Petersburg, or the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in Moscow. Other European countries (for example, Holland, the German lands, Sweden, Poland, and England) were ahead of Russia in the teaching of French at the turn of the century. In certain countries, there was a long tradition of use of French in professional domains, for example in the legal domain in England (although interest in French diminished there at the end of the Middle Ages).3 In the Low Countries, where relations with France were close and French was the main language used to conduct them, French had been learned since the Middle Ages and began to be taught in earnest in the sixteenth century, in the first instance in auxiliary schools which were tolerated by the municipal authorities (whereas in official schools Latin reigned). In the last third of the sixteenth century, after the invasion of part of the Low Countries by the Spaniards, there was an exodus of Protestant Francophone refugees to the Northern Low Countries, which further consolidated the position of French there.4 Then, in the seventeenth century, French gradually became Europe’s lingua franca.5 In Sweden, it was becoming difficult to make a good career in the administration without knowing French, and 2 On the Posol’skii prikaz and Vesti-Kuranty too, see the first section of Chapter 5. 3 See Kibbee, For to Speke Frenche Trewely. 4 Riemens, Esquisse historique de l’enseignement du français en Hollande du XVIe au XIXe siècle; Frijhoff, ‘Le français et son usage dans les Pays-Bas septentrionaux jusqu’au XIXe siècle’; Swiggers, ‘Regards sur l’histoire de l’enseignement du français aux Pays-Bas’. 5 For further details, see Siouffi, ‘De l’“universalité” européenne du français au XVIIIe siècle’; Brunot, Histoire de la langue française dès origines à 1900, vols 5 and 8, pts 1 and 2; Rjéoutski et al. (eds), European Francophonie.

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manuals for the military, in fortification and so forth, were for the most part written in French.6 Again, if one wanted to earn one’s living as a tutor or governess in Sweden, command of French was essential. Besides boarding schools for the nobility, private schools specializing in commercial studies and aimed at the middle class were developing, and French was available in these too.7 In some places groups of religious worshippers contributed to the spread of French teaching, as was the case in Poland, to which French nuns were invited following the matrimonial alliances of kings of Poland with France.8 In Italy too, French was taught in the seventeenth century, for example in nobles’ colleges in Piedmont and in the Duchy of Parma, in Rome, where scholars and ecclesiastics cultivated it from the beginning of the century, and in Florence and other major centres.9 Often it was a royal court that served as a catalyst in stimulating the teaching of French, whether because of dynastic links with France or because of a predilection for a certain court model in which entertainments in French, such as the theatre, played a central role. At the same time, French did meet with some stiff resistance, and in universities and the Jesuit colleges which had spread all over Catholic Europe Latin continued to have pride of place. As far as the teaching and learning of French in Russia is concerned, we should slightly revise the chronology that has hitherto been accepted when scholars have referred to the spread of French there. Small groups of people were already learning French in the reign of Peter the Great, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These were mainly members of families close to the reforming tsar and foreign families in the service of Russia, but French was also taught in at least one school supported by the state, the school of Pastor Johann Ernst Glück,10 who trained individuals for work on foreign affairs. French was not taught, on the other hand, in the Catholic or Protestant schools set up in foreign parishes in Moscow and St Petersburg, which attracted a noble Russian clientèle and and which offered Latin and German instead.11 After Peter’s death, French began to be taught in the School of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg and in the Noble Land Cadet Corps, alongside German and Latin. French was thus recognized in 6 See Chaline, ‘L’art de la fortification en Europe centrale et la francophonie’. 7 Hammar, L’Enseignement du français en Suède, 11–12. 8 Nikliborc, L’enseignement du français dans les écoles polonaises au XVIIIe siècle, 21, etc. 9 Minerva, ‘Les précepteurs français dans les maisons nobiliaires et les collèges en Italie’. 10 For more details on this school and on foreign-language learning in the Petrine age, see the first section of Chapter 5 below. 11 Kovrigina, ‘Inovercheskie shkoly Moskvy XVI–pervoi chetverti XVIII v.’; Florovskii, ‘Latinskie shkoly v Rossii v epokhu Petra I’.

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the immediate post-Petrine period as a language of culture that could not be ignored. It would also be taught at the University of Moscow (founded in 1755) and the Institute for Noble Maidens in St Petersburg (the Smolny Institute, founded in 1764), which was the first public educational institution for girls in Russia. Not that knowledge of foreign languages could be taken for granted before Catherine’s reign, even among the great noble families. The memoirist Vigel’ provides evidence of the scarcity of French-speakers before the 1760s, when he refers to Prince Sergei Fedorovich Golitsyn, who belonged to a very distinguished branch of the Golitsyn clan and who at the end of the reign of Elizabeth studied at the Cadet Corps, where he learned German. It was only after he had left the Cadet Corps that Golitsyn acquired a good knowledge of French, through circulation in society. Knowledge of languages was ‘not a trifling thing at that time’, Vigel’ remarks: ‘it led to advancement’.12 Nor should the spread of French in public education in eighteenth-century Russia obscure the fact that the teaching of the language was still largely confined, in the middle of the century, to the two major cities of the country, St Petersburg and Moscow. Outside these ‘capitals’, there were few centres where living foreign languages were taught. Admittedly, the remote city of Ekaterinburg in the Urals became a centre of foreign-language teaching in the 1730s, thanks to the work of the statesman Vasilii Tatishchev, but this was an unusual case at that time. Moreover, the only languages that Tatishchev introduced were Latin and German, the latter being considered important for the mining industry which was developing in the region and which drew its technology and part of its labour force from Germany.13 Language-learning did spread further into the Russian provinces during the reign of Catherine II, not only through private tuition and private boarding schools but also through the development of public educational institutions for the nobility. However, we may surmise that it was difficult to find local teachers, if we are to judge by an attempt that was made in Moscow in 1784 to recruit a French teacher for a school for the nobility that had been opened in Kursk the previous year.14 The events of the late eighteenth century, starting with the revolution in France, temporarily discredited French, which came to be viewed as a possible vehicle for subversive ideas. Under Paul, all trade in French books was accordingly banned and the teaching of French in public educational institutions was prohibited. Metropolitan Gavriil of Novgorod (Petr 12 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 73. On Vigel’ and his memoirs see the first section of Chapter 4 below. 13 Safronova, ‘V.N. Tatishchev o vazhnosti izucheniia inostrannykh iazykov’. 14 IRLI, f. 265, op. 2, d. 1578.

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Petrov-Shaposhnikov) sent dioceses a letter explaining the reasons for this prohibition: ‘Your seminarists are learning French, but as experience has shown that those of them who are ill-intentioned abuse their knowledge of that language I am instructed to write to your Holinesses that you be so good as to cease to give classes in this subject.’ It is hard to tell whether such ‘abuse’ of French had really been brought to light, but clearly the authorities were attempting to alter the image of the language in order to make it seem a vehicle for the ideas of revolutionary France. These measures did not remain in force for long, though, and from 1797 the teaching of French was gradually reinstated.15 For a long time, the main obstacle to the teaching of French in Russia was the scarcity of language teachers. Russian teachers of foreign languages were very rare in the eighteenth century, and so institutions and individuals had to employ foreigners for this purpose. These foreigners, at least those who worked in state institutions, were of many different origins; they included Germans, Italians, Swedes, and others as well as French and Swiss men and women. Since many of them knew no Russian, they taught French through another foreign language, usually German. The first Russian teachers of languages appeared in state institutions around the middle of the eighteenth century, but they remained in a minority, so that foreign languages continued to be taught almost exclusively by foreigners, in private boarding schools and in the home as well as in public educational institutions. This state of affairs gave cause for concern in the 1780s, when an important reform of public education that was being undertaken by the Commission for the Establishment of Popular Schools touched upon the organization of teaching in the Institute for Noble Maidens. Recognizing that the teaching delivered by foreigners at the institute was not satisfactory, not least because it contributed to ignorance of Russian among the pupils, the commission aimed to replace most of the foreign teachers with Russians. French was also taught mainly by foreigners at the Noble Land Cadet Corps, the Naval Cadet Corps, and the Page Corps. This situation persisted in the nineteenth century. At the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, where Pushkin studied, the French language and French literature were taught by the Swiss David Boudry, a brother of Jean-Paul Marat, the leader of the radical Montagnard faction during the French Revolution. At the University of St Petersburg, which was founded in 1819, it was taught by the Frenchmen Jean Tillot, Antoine Dugourt, Charles de Saint-Julien, Jean 15 Quoted by Kislova, ‘Le français et l’allemand dans l’éducation religieuse en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, 56.

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Fleury, and others. (The first Russian lecturer in French, Fedor Batiushkov, was not appointed until 1895!) At the Law School and the Nicholas Institute for Orphans, the French teacher was the same Fleury.16 At the Institute of the Corps of Communications Engineers, there was Saint-Julien, at the Mary Institute and the Institute for Noble Maidens, Alphonse Jobard, a former professor of the University of Kazan’, and at the Gatchina Orphans’ Institute and the Demidov Lycée, Jules Perrault, who later became a lecturer at the University of St Petersburg. This list of institutions in itself shows how much the provision for teaching of French expanded in the nineteenth century. We can also be sure that teachers’ expertise and experience increased considerably over time, not least because in the nineteenth century there was a larger pool of French-speakers settled in Russia from whom teachers could be selected. Several of these teachers (for example, Boudry, Fleury, and Saint-Julien) authored textbooks on French language or literature.17 The preponderance of foreigners among foreign-language teachers in Russian institutions continued, though: in 1900, the majority of teachers of French in Russian secondary schools were still of French or Swiss origin.18 The employment of numerous foreigners in educational roles gave rise to concerns, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, about the extent to which children’s sense of identity might be affected by the education they provided, particularly when education took place in the family home.19 Opposition to ‘French’ education was pronounced in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy in the Alexandrine age: Admiral Aleksandr Shishkov, Count Rostopchin, Admiral Nikolai Mordvinov, and other Russian statesmen spoke in their writings of the ills that came of education by foreigners. Mordvinov, for example, recommended that attachment to their country and their language be inculcated in young noblemen, and advised Alexander I to make the court a model of love for all good Russian things – language, faith, customs, and rituals. To this end, the use of the French language, 16 On the career of Fleury and his French manuals, see Vlasov, ‘Zhan Fleri’. 17 Boudry was the author of Premiers principes de la langue françoise ou nouvelle grammaire, 2 vols (1812) and Abrégé de la grammaire françoise (1819). Saint-Julien wrote several manuals, including Histoire et littérature des sciences, cours professé à l’Institut des voies de communications (1836) and Cours méthodique et général de composition (1845). Fleury’s Grammaire en action went through many editions in Russia. See Goëtz, ‘De précepteur privé à professeur en titre à Tsarskoïé Selo’; Vlasov, ‘Zhan Fleri’, 56–57; Grigor’ev, Imperatorskii Sankt-Peterburgskii universitet, 140. 18 Piccard, L’enseignement de la langue française, 7. 19 Rjéoutski, ‘Le précepteur français comme ennemi’, 31–39.

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French things, and French rituals should be discontinued at court and in all parts of society, for they greatly weaken national spirit and love of our fatherland and, to the attentive observer of human deeds, they portend doleful consequences.20

Mordvinov proposed that nobles be forbidden to take foreigners into their houses as tutors and that tutors only be allowed to give private lessons on condition that they knew Russian. It was extremely important to him that various disciplines should be taught in Russian. He regarded an education provided by foreigners and education outside Russia as damaging and believed that Russia was already experiencing the harmful effects of these practices: The best foreign educators, unfamiliar with the spirit of the Russian people and having no strong filial feeling for Russia or devotion to it, cannot give the Russian youth a good upbringing or prepare useful sons of the fatherland, even if they have good intentions. What, then, could one expect of the crowd of unskilled, mercenary, and perhaps ill-intentioned vagrant teachers to whom the Russian nobility entrust the formation of the minds and hearts of their children? The pupils of these mentors will be true citizens of the world; that is to say, they will have no fatherland of their own, nor their own language or customs, nor will they know their country’s decrees, or their obligations, or understand their blood ties.21

Mordvinov is particularly critical of the boarding schools run by foreigners because, he says, children come out of them with an imperfect knowledge of French, superficial and sometimes false knowledge of what they have studied, and only a few accomplishments in dancing and music. The children who have been exposed to such an education are alien and quite often flaccid in body and spirit. Mordvinov’s vocabulary (blood ties, body, spirit, flaccidity, and so forth) reflects an assumption that individuals are bound exclusively and naturally to their native country and helps him to imagine an opposition between the sturdiness and sound morality of the Russian nation and the softness and immoral character of the French. We can be sure that Mordvinov is addressing his criticism first and foremost to people of his own social level, because it was mostly in the highest strata of Russian society that families had their children educated at home 20 Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh, vol. 4, 398–399. 21 Ibidem, 400.

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by foreign tutors. According to statistics compiled recently by Aleksandr Feofanov, Russian boys whose fathers were in the army and had reached one of the first three ranks in the Table of Ranks (that is to say, the ranks from field marshal to lieutenant-general) were less and less likely during the second half of the eighteenth century to be sent to one of the state schools for the nobility, such as the Noble Land Cadet Corps. Other educational pathways were increasingly preferred, such as education at home, or abroad (during the Grand Tour), or at the Page Corps, which was a far more elite institution, from the social point of view, than the Cadet Corps.22 The need to have oversight of foreign tutors, of whom a large proportion taught French in family homes, would become an intermittent political preoccupation of the Russian authorities. Compulsory examinations for tutors were introduced and attempts made to turn tutors into virtual state functionaries. Greatly concerned by recurrent disturbances in Europe, the authorities tended to see the French tutor as an agent of revolution who, under the cover of an educational post, sought to inculcate dangerous ideas in Russian nobles, whom the authorities regarded as pillars of the regime. Thus, the ultimate aim of the government was to reduce the community of tutors, if not altogether to destroy it, and to control the ideas that its members spread among the nobility.23 It is symptomatic of these tendencies that French teaching materials produced specially for Russian children began sometimes to include sections on the history of Russia. A textbook entitled The Friend of the Russian Youth, written by a certain L. Thibaut, a teacher of French language at the Larin Gymnasium, provides a good example. In addition to a summary of the history of Russia, Thibaut offers a section on the ‘beautiful features of Russian history’, and his work as a whole represents an apologia for the ‘heroes’ of Russian national history and a glorification of the ruling dynasty.24 However, there was no chance, in the early nineteenth century, of replacing instruction at home by French men and women with instruction delivered by Russians in educational institutions, for there were not enough Russians capable of teaching French. This was one of the reasons why in the 1810s Paul’s widow, the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, set up a class in the Moscow Orphanage to train Russian women to teach in the 22 We refer here to a paper presented by Aleksandr Feofanov at a conference ‘Beyond the Traditional Historiography of Education in Russia’ which was held at the German Historical Institute in Moscow on 27–28 January 2017. 23 Solodiankina, ‘Les précepteurs français parmi les autres éducateurs étrangers en Russie en 1820–1850’. 24 Thibaut, L’Ami de la jeunesse russe; see especially 38–46 (‘Beaux traits de l’histoire de Russie’) and 152–210 (‘Histoire de Russie’).

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houses of the nobility, including the provincial nobility. In spite of the fact that ‘French’ education was stigmatized in public discourse at that time, French was taught much more intensively in this estate than German, 25 having become the nobility’s most important language. From being a language of elites, French gradually became a language of culture as well. There were notable differences, though, between the uses of French among the high nobility, especially before the decline of elite francophonie, and its use by broader strata of the Russian population as teaching of the language spread across a whole network of academic institutions. In the case of the nobility, the French language became a central feature of the educational and aesthetic system of the class, and indeed command of French became a part of a noble’s identity. It also served as a vehicle for all major European cultures, which became accessible to the elites through French much more often than through translation into Russian. For lower social strata, on the other hand, French was a linguistic tool that offered access not to the culture of a cosmopolitan aristocracy but to French culture per se, which in the nineteenth century was increasingly regarded as the property of a single nation whose boundaries, both territorial and imaginary, were more clearly defined in people’s minds than they had been before. Knowledge of French, moreover, could be useful for some professional purpose. This contrast was reflected in the ways in which French was learned, which depended heavily on the learner’s social level. In the families of the high and middling nobility, French was acquired through practice as well as tuition – during walks with tutors, in various forms of sociability, such as salons and the theatre, through reading books, by travelling abroad, for example during a Grand Tour, and so forth. The nobility could therefore practise its French in a variety of settings where the boundaries between formal tuition and sociability were not always clearly demarcated, whereas the lower social strata learned the language mainly in the classroom. In gymnasia (gimnazii, i.e. secondary schools) and real schools (real’nye uchilishcha, i.e. non-classical secondary schools), by the end of the nineteenth century, French was learned mainly through translation and study of grammar. The textbooks used in these schools ‘were completely devoid of interest’, a French-language master recalled; the grammar and vocabulary studied in them were ‘absolutely arbitrary’ and had no connection with the teaching aims.26 Class sizes were very large (often there were 50 pupils in a class). 25 Lavrinovich, ‘Soediniaia “blagosostoianie s obshcheiu pol’zoiu”’. 26 Piccard, L’enseignement de la langue française, 12–13.

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Teachers, to make a living, had to teach for 30 or even 40 hours per week, and the standard of instruction suffered as a result.27 French was studied for two or three hours a week, alongside German and, in the classical gymnasia, Latin, Greek, and sometimes, as an option, English, with the result that pupils made slow progress.28 Teaching was focused on reading and comprehension of a foreign text, whereas in the privileged schools the pupils were already so advanced in French when they entered that, according to an expert in the Ministry of Education, they needed to be taught ‘as if it was the pupils’ mother tongue’, with emphasis on extensive reading of canonical literature and written expression in French, to which the gymnasia and real schools paid less attention.29 Clearly, then, the way in which French was learned in public schools was far removed from the way it was absorbed in ‘good’ society and privileged schools, such as the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, the Page Corps, and the Imperial Law School,30 where the aims of tuition were also quite different. As the number of learners of French increased and the social base from which they originated widened, language study became more theoretical, with emphasis on grammar, even in the Cadet Corps and the Institute for Noble Maidens. One consequence of this development seems to have been loss of fluency in French. A teacher at the Catherine Institute in St Petersburg (founded in 1798) compared the generation of pupils who studied in young ladies’ institutes in the 1860s and 1870s with those who studied there at the end of the nineteenth century and found that the earlier generation spoke French fluently and ‘with an accent with which one could find no fault, and, for the most part, astonishingly correctly’. The later generation, on the other hand, ‘barely mumble a few short replies’, he complained, ‘and, if they want to launch themselves into a sophisticated conversation, then the barbarisms and solecisms with which their language is studded soon show that they have made an imperfect study of French’. However, these latter pupils, having learned French ‘as a dead language’, did have a better theoretical knowledge of it than the former.31 The same observer tried to identify the causes of what he did not hesitate to call the ‘decay of the French language in Russia’. Formerly, ‘one scarcely heard people speaking any language other than French in all the salons’, he declared, but by the end of the nineteenth century French had become the exception. Linguistic 27 Ibidem, 7–9. 28 Ibidem, 10–11. 29 Du Loup, Rapport à son Excellence le ministre de l’Instruction publique, 18. 30 Ibidem, 7. 31 Fondet, L’enseignement de la langue française en Russie, 3.

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patriotism had played a large part in this change. ‘Patriots will tell you’, he continued, writing in 1895, that this is a legitimate return to the national language, which is more harmonious and richer than French, and which did not deserve the disdain that had long been heaped upon it. Such ideas had an impact, there was a sort of reaction, or rather people were borne from one extreme to another, and that is where we still are now.32

The change in the model for the teaching of French and the social background of people learning it may also be illustrated by reference to the network established by the Alliance Française, which began to operate in Russia in the early twentieth century and which, besides having a presence in Moscow and St Petersburg, had by 1913 set up some thirty branches across the country. French was now a language that represented the culture of France and its values. The Alliance offered lectures on literature, science, music, and other aspects of French culture, as well as language courses. The lectures delivered by literary and scientific personalities from France and Belgium, such as Frantz Funck-Brentano, Pierre Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Jean Richepin, and Émile Verhaeren, attracted hundreds of listeners. It was no accident that the Alliance, like the Institut Français (founded in 1912), relied on the French colony that had been established in Russia and on the French authorities (the French ambassador was honorary president of the St Petersburg branch of the Alliance Française). These organizations were the figureheads of ‘francophonie’ (the word had already been coined by Onésime Reclus), instruments of what we should now call ‘soft power’ that France could exercise in the race for hegemony in the world. This policy was grounded in the tradition of Franco-German competition that grew more intense after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871.33 The social base of these organizations in Russia reflected the diversity of the Russian Francophone community by this time. On the one hand, the core public attracted by these bodies, especially the public attending courses mounted by the Alliance Française, was made up of the daughters of families belonging to the petty bourgeoisie and officials of modest rank. The language courses were followed exclusively by women – a fact that reflected both the position of women in the educational system, for universities remained closed to them, and the state of the labour market, in which women who 32 Ibidem, 5. 33 See Medvedkova, ‛‟Scientifique” ou ‟intellectuel”?’

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could teach French were much in demand in schools in the public sector as well as in private education. On the other hand, the people sitting on the boards directing these organizations were, in the main, high Russian officials and persons from the imperial court. Such protection for new institutions was important, to be sure, but we should not forget that the St Petersburg court always remained the nerve-centre of Russian francophonie.34 After the cataclysms of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War and the emigration of a large proportion of the French-speakers in the elite, the teaching of French would decline in the Soviet Union. The French Slavist André Mazon, who was sent by the French minister of education to observe developments in the USSR in the 1920s, concluded that there was ‘not one establishment in ten that had a teacher qualified to teach French on its staff’. If one could choose a language to learn at school (German, English, or French), ‘local needs’ almost always dictated the choice of German or, more infrequently, English. In higher education institutions, students confined themselves to pursuing the language they had begun to learn at school, which was almost always German or English. French studies at universities, Mazon wrote, mainly attracted ‘young women who belonged for the most part to the old society’.35 French fared a little better in evening classes, for which those attending paid a fee, but there too the public was almost entirely female.36 A certain M. Parain, acting as an observer in the Ukraine, reported that in 1926 there was only one institution in Kiev that was teaching French, a college which had about 15 pupils studying the subject, while there were about 30 studying English and 150 studying German. In Odessa, which had been a centre of francophonie in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, French was taught only at the Pedagogical Institute, the Economics Institute, and the Infantry School. The degree course lasted only two years, with two hours of tuition per week, and when the students completed it, Parain claimed, they knew ‘next to nothing’. ‘French influence, or rather French taste’, he wrote, survived ‘in the higher intellectual milieu’, at the Academy of Sciences, among learned Francophiles (especially Orientalists) who had been brought up before the revolution.37 The new generation of Russian scholars, who were 34 Rjéoutski, ‘L’Alliance Française à Saint-Pétersbourg’; idem, ‘L’Institut Français de Saint-Pétersbourg’. 35 Report of 15 June 1927: Institut de France, fonds André Mazon, no. 6780, fol. 417. 36 In Leningrad, the most important courses were directed by the linguist Lev Shcherba, a pupil of Baudoin de Courtenay, and in Moscow by Klavdiia Ganshina. Both of these individuals were eminent French specialists educated before the October Revolution. 37 Institut de France, fonds André Mazon, no. 6780, fols 124–125, report by M. Parain on his visit to the Ukraine, 1 December 1925.

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of humble social origin, had hardly been taught French at all, and this led to a sharp reduction in Russian contact with French men of learning.38 ‘Beyond the previously bourgeois intellectual and learned world’, Parain continued, ‘there can be no question of French influence, other than influence of a practical nature, except in cities such as Leningrad (i.e. the former St Petersburg), Moscow, or Odessa, where there has been a tradition’.39 There were evidently social as well as political reasons for this abandonment of French, which, as a language of elites, seemed suspect to Communists. However, there were also practical considerations: Germany was more open to trade with the USSR, and ‘the Union was concerned above all to produce men who knew those living languages that would make the biggest contribution to its industrial and commercial future’, as Mazon was told by Ian Riappo, a high-ranking official in the Commissariat for Education in the Ukraine. 40 The Bolshevik Revolution, Mazon noted with some bitterness, has swept away knowledge of French at the same time as the society that availed itself of it [French]; it has brought to power a large number of men who, during their [years of political] exile, had acquired a German or Anglo-Saxon culture; it has turned the youth, whose watchword is to be positive and realistic, to the study of other languages which are thought [in the USSR] to be of more immediate use, German and English. 41

We shall now explore in greater depth the social and cultural distribution of languages in education in imperial Russia, focusing principally on the eighteenth century, when French turned from a language of the second order into the main language of the Russian elite. Bearing in mind our emphasis on the plurilingualism of the elite, we shall consider the position of French vis-à-vis that of German, Latin, English, and Russian.

French versus German For a good part of the eighteenth century, French was not the main foreign language studied in Russia, for German was firmly established there. For one thing, German was the first language of the majority of foreigners 38 39 40 41

Rjéoutski, ‘Le français des scientifiques en URSS’. Institut de France, fonds André Mazon, no. 6780, fol. 125. Ibidem, fol. 419. Ibidem, fol. 408.

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The French L anguage in Russia

resident in Russia. Moreover, relations between Russia and Germanophone countries were close. The annexation of the Baltic provinces by Peter the Great following the Great Northern War also brought into the bosom of the empire an important group of Baltic nobles whose mother tongue was German. In these circumstances, it was unsurprising that German attracted such interest in Russia, especially in public education. 42 Thus the history of foreign-language learning in Russia during the Enlightenment may be seen as a narrative about the advance of French in competition with other languages, particularly German. Sometimes French developed at the expense of German and sometimes in parallel with it. It is therefore problematic to speak of ‘French Europe’, 43 as far as Russia is concerned, at least until the mid-eighteenth century. The norm in Russia was plurilingualism rather than bilingual competence in French and the vernacular. However, the same could be said of several other European countries. The percentage of pupils studying different foreign languages in Swedish military schools in the early nineteenth century, for example, shows that French was facing strong competition not only from German but also from English. 44 In eighteenthcentury Bohemia, the nobility used German and French, sometimes Czech, and even Latin, but each language had its special space. 45 We also find plurilingualism in the Low Countries, where French was the language of the elites and the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century but German and English were close behind. 46 Statistical information on the publication of language textbooks suggests that although Russians began to take a serious interest in French as early as the 1750s, the number of such works grew rapidly in the 1780s. 47 Interest in German went back further than this, to the seventeenth century, but with German too the number of textbooks increased in the second half of the eighteenth century, from the 1760s, peaking in the 1780s and 1790s. We may therefore assume that in the last third of the eighteenth century wider sections of the population began to think it worth studying the two main 42 Koch, Deutsch als Fremdsprache im Rußland des 18. Jahrhunderts. 43 This is the title of the famous book by the Marquis Louis-Antoine Caraccioli to which we referred in the first section of Chapter 1 above. 44 Östman, ‘French in Sweden in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, 280–281. 45 Cerman, ‘Le Précepteur français en Bohême au temps des Lumières’. 46 Frijhoff, ‘Amitié, utilité, conquête?’, 30–31. 47 See Vlasov, ‘Les manuels utilisés dans l’enseignement du français en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’; Glück and Pörzgen, Deutschlernen in Russland und in den baltischen Ländern vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1941, xxxix, xl. The number of such publications may have been boosted by the easing of restrictions on printing in 1783.

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foreign languages in Russia, especially, no doubt, the middling and petty nobility and ‘people of various ranks’, the raznochintsy. It was also in the second half of the eighteenth century that French and German began to enter religious education, often on the initiative of a clergyman who had himself mastered these languages. For instance, French was taught in the Nizhnii Novgorod seminary from some time around 1753, in the seminary in Riazan’ from 1765 or 1766, in the Voronezh seminary from the 1770s, and at the St Alexander Nevskii Seminary in St Petersburg from at least as far back as 1772. In the Ukraine, French was taught at the college in Khar’kov in 1736–1741, and then again from 1768. It is possible that the introduction of tuition in these two languages in Russian seminaries was linked to the ‘Instruction to the Commission Established by Us concerning the Domains of the Church’, dated 29 November 1762, in which the sovereign deplored the low educational level of the clergy. Even if languages were not expressly mentioned in this instruction, study of them was undoubtedly seen as a possible means of raising the general cultural level of the priesthood.48 Knowledge of French was a sign of culture that could serve to counter the image that nobles had of an untutored clergy, while Latin was no longer regarded by the nobility as a sign of culture. What Karamzin says about churchmen on the occasion of his visit to the Trinity Monastery of St Sergei near Moscow shows very well how the display of knowledge of foreign languages could favourably affect the impression that the clergy made on a nobleman: Apart from the classical languages, they study French and German here. This is commendable. Those who need to preach ought to know Bossuet and Massillon. Some of the monks spoke French to me, and the important teachers mixed some French phrases into their conversation. They demonstrated that learning is welcoming: they walked around with me and showed me everything with sincere obligingness. Learning imparts an air of nobility to people of any station. 49

The competition between French and German is well illustrated by the case of the Cadet Corps, the main nursery of the Russian nobility. Up until the 48 French and German were not off icially introduced into the seminaries and spiritual academies until the issue of a regulation in 1798, though, and still only as optional subjects. See Kislova, ‘Le français et l’allemand dans l’éducation religieuse en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, 51–56. 49 Karamzin, ‘Istoricheskie vospominaniia i zamechaniia na puti k Troitse i v sem monastyre’, at http://az.lib.ru/k/karamzin_n_m/text_1070oldorfo.shtml. Quoted by Kislova, ‘Le français et l’allemand dans l’éducation religieuse en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, 72.

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reign of Catherine II, German was the first language studied there.50 Over a period of roughly 30 years, from the 1730s to the 1760s, French was learned by between one third and two thirds of the Russophone pupils, whereas practically all of those pupils learned German. To understand the surprising unpopularity of French in the main Russian noble school in the middle of the Enlightenment, we need to take account of the social level of the pupils, who came for the most part from the middling and petty nobility, especially after the reform of the Corps, in the 1760s, when the number of pupils increased considerably. Their families were far removed, socially and culturally, from the centre of the nascent Russian Francophone world, the St Petersburg court. There are other reasons too why French was not more popular at the Cadet Corps, especially the presence of numerous German-speaking teachers in this institution. These teachers did not have a command of Russian and therefore taught French mainly through the medium of German; Russian pupils consequently had to learn German before they could tackle French. On the whole, the Russian authorities supported the teaching of German. It would seem that in 1732 German was compulsory for Russian pupils and that Russian was virtually compulsory for pupils from Baltic families. The insistence that each of the main groups of the nobility in Russia should learn the language of the other shows a desire to bring them together culturally. This rapprochement was regarded as a means of creating stability in the empire. In 1773, the Senate sent an edict to the University of Moscow, the Noble Land Cadet Corps, the Naval Cadet Corps, and the Academy of Sciences, regretting the fact that the Russian nobility had insufficient knowledge of German. The senators regarded acquisition of this language as a priority for the state. The chief reason they gave for this view was the need to integrate the Baltic provinces in the empire. The Senate also ordered that priority be given to German over other languages in these institutions,51 which suggests that in fact German was no longer pre-eminent. In the first half of the eighteenth century, German was also the main language of instruction at the Cadet Corps, whatever the mother tongue of the pupils. In April 1734, there was only one Russian teacher who taught a 50 See the statistics for the period 1731–1764 in Rjéoutski, ‘Native Tongues and Foreign Languages in the Education of the Russian Nobility’. 51 RGA VMF, f. 432, op. 1, d. 70, fols 2–2 v. There is another version of the same edict, dated 9 September 1773, in PSZ, vol. 19, 818–819, no. 14036, and it is this published version, which differed considerably from the version found in RGA VMF, that had the force of law. The edict, in its published form, outlines the potential advantages of knowledge of German for men pursuing a career in the civil service, thus betraying concern that German was widely considered less useful than some other foreign languages (the author(s) no doubt had French in mind) in professional life.

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non-linguistic discipline and one German teacher of mathematics who knew a little Russian.52 In 1737, almost all the books used for teaching subjects other than languages were in German or, less often, Latin. Only in the geometry class did they use a Russian textbook, which had been translated from German by one of the teachers.53 Nor was this situation exceptional, as Kristine Koch (Dahmen) has shown; German was also used for teaching various subjects in the school attached to the Academy of Sciences. Thus, from being a foreign language in Russia, German became one of the main languages of instruction and played a role similar to that played by Latin in Jesuit colleges and European universities. There were considerable misgivings about this state of affairs, for many pupils had a poor understanding of what their teachers were saying.54 In private education, on the other hand, German was already starting to give way to French by the middle of the eighteenth century. From the 1720s and 1730s, French was being introduced in circles whose members were most exposed to western influences and had opportunities to rub shoulders with foreigners.55 According to data (incomplete, admittedly) collected by a commission that was set up in 1757 by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences to scrutinize applications for permission to teach in families and private educational institutions, French was taught more frequently than German in St Petersburg families:56

All families surveyed Families of Russian nobles surveyed

Number of families

Families with children studying both French and German

Families with children studying only French

Families with children studying only German

30 23

7 5

16 14

7 4

This preponderance of French in teaching in the home is explained by the fact that the St Petersburg families who employed tutors at this time were often highly placed and close to the court. In some families the study of 52 RGADA, f. 248, op. 1, d. 396, fol. 29. 53 Sukhomlinov, Materialy dlia istorii Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 3, 464–465. 54 Koch, Deutsch als Fremdsprache im Ruβland des 18. Jahrhunderts, 155–168. 55 On the study of French in families close to Peter the Great, see the first section of Chapter 5 below. 56 SPbF ARAN, f. 3, op. 9, d. 80 (1757–1758).

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German was abandoned or at any rate receded into the background. The historian Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov seems not to have learned German to a high standard, and never used it in his correspondence, even if he did not question the need for a Russian nobleman to know this language.57 On the whole, though, the Russian aristocracy continued to learn German. In the family of the Bariatinskii princes, for example, the sons and daughters learned it alongside French in the 1770s. Both French and German were also studied during Catherine’s reign in numerous boarding schools opened by foreigners in St Petersburg and Moscow. The pupils in these schools were mainly the children of foreign merchants and craftsmen and, if they were Russian, the children of officers and officials of middling or low rank (lieutenant, captain, collegiate assessor, postman) or, very occasionally, the sons of Russian merchants.58 In those families which featured in the documents of the commission set up in 1757, there was only one Russian merchant family whose children were learning German. We may therefore conclude that Russian trades-people rarely learned living languages in the eighteenth century. However, we know little about the languages used by the petty nobility at this time, for there are few documents relating to the private sphere of this milieu. Some members of this group were illiterate throughout Catherine’s reign and we may doubt whether such nobles were in a position to master foreign languages. The instructions (nakazy) submitted by provincial nobles when Catherine convoked her Legislative Commission in 1767 rarely raise questions relating to education, which is in itself revealing. Such questions are broached for the most part in the instructions of nobles from the province of Moscow and provinces in the Ukraine. Foreign languages are not often mentioned, but when they are it is German and French that the nobles have in mind.59 At the Noble Land Cadet Corps, French was the main language studied by the end of Catherine’s reign, if we are to judge by the number of times it was used by cadets to congratulate the director on the occasion of his birthday or the New Year. In 1773, Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc (subsequently known as the historian Le Clerc), who at that time was director of studies at the Corps, described French as ‘the language which, after Russian, it is most important for the pupils to have a thorough knowledge of’.60 For the second age group 57 See Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘French in the Education of the Nobility’. 58 Rjéoutski, ‘Les écoles étrangères dans la société russe au siècle des Lumières’, and additional information kindly provided by Galina Smagina. 59 Kusber, ‘Kakie znaniia nuzhny dvorianinu dlia zhizni?’, 277, 279. 60 Tableaux des Exercices et des Etudes de Messieurs les cadets […]. The title of each table ends with an indication of the age group in question (du Second âge, etc.). These are weekly timetables

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(from nine- to twelve-year olds), there were sixteen hours of French classes in reading and writing per week, as against four and a half hours for Russian. For the youngest age group (six- to nine-year olds), these figures were quite logically reversed, bearing in mind the attention that needed to be given to mastering their national language. For the third age group (twelve- to fifteen-year olds), four hours were allocated to Russian and ten to French, divided between grammar, dictation, and reading. It was only from this age that pupils started learning German, for three hours per week. For the two highest age groups (fifteen- to twenty-one-year olds), French classes (and German classes too) disappeared, as the cadets were expected to have mastered the language by that stage. The only exercise that pupils had in these languages at this level was translation from French and German into Russian, and that was for no more than one hour per week. They did have to continue to study Russian, though, with three hours of grammar. Twenty minutes each week were also devoted to Church Slavonic.61 The speeches delivered to all cadets on occasions such as holidays and celebrations in the late 1780s and early 1790s were invariably in French.62 In general, it became common practice in educational institutions to give speeches in French at special occasions,63 thus symbolically marking the place accorded to French in Russian education, both before and after the Napoleonic invasion. And yet, if German began to give ground to French, trilingualism in Russian, French, and German remained the rule, not RussoFrench bilingualism, as is often assumed when one speaks of this period. At the Naval Cadet Corps, on the other hand, the sailors rarely learned more than one foreign language. Thus in 1771–1772, only 17 out of 45 Russophone pupils were learning French, 14 German, and 10 English. In 1778, the picture was much the same: 22 out of 47 pupils were learning French, 22 German, and only eight English. Nor does the level of command of the languages studied seem to have been very high in this institution, at least in the years to which we refer.64 Nonetheless, here too greater importance was attached to French than to German during Catherine’s reign, as we may included by Betskoi in Les plans et les statuts des différents établissements, vol. 2; see Kouzmina, ‘Les langues vivantes dans les établissements éducatifs russes au siècle des Lumières’, 15. It is not clear whether this plan was put into practice. 61 Kouzmina, ‘Les langues vivantes dans les établissements éducatifs russes au siècle des Lumières’, 15–17. 62 These conclusions are based on analysis of documents in RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 1059 (Cadet Corps). In the early days of the Corps, in the 1730s, speeches were written in three languages, namely German, French, and Latin. 63 Grigor’ev, Imperatorskii Sankt-Peterburgskii universitet, 43. 64 RGA VMF, f. 432, op. 1, d. 23 (1770–1771), fols 154–158; d. 5 (1762–1783), fols 1–26. The list does not contain the names of all the cadets who were studying in the Cadet Corps.

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see from an initiative taken by the director of the Corps, Ivan GolenishchevKutuzov. In February 1774, he ordered that a theatre be set up. He envisaged this as a place that would help pupils ‘to acquire the freedom of manner, spontaneity of action, confidence in conversation, and grace of movement which are not only seemly for noble youths but which they really must have’.65 The director mentioned only two languages in which cadets might stage plays, Russian and French. Productions, he stated, should ‘not be put on in Russian alone, but in French too, as the more widely-used language and the one which has the best theatrical works’.66 This experiment evidently yielded good results, and in 1777 Golenishchev-Kutuzov required all cadets to take part in the theatre, except those who were ‘incompetent, lazy, badly behaved, or scruffy’. It seems that by this time performances were staged not only in Russian and French but in other languages that the cadets were studying as well, for the theatre was regarded as helping to advance ‘knowledge of foreign languages and ability to converse in them’.67 At the Institute for Noble Maidens, according to its ordinances, the number of hours per week devoted to study of the two main languages learned was as follows:68 Language First age group (6–9 years old)

Third age group Fourth age Second age (13–15 years old) group group (16–18 years old) (10–12 years old)

French

7 hours, then 6½ hours, for reading and writing

German

4 hours for reading and writing

3 hours for grammar, reading, and dictation, plus 1 hour for writing 2 hours for grammar, plus 1 hour for reading books, and dictation

1 hour for reading 1 hour for reading books books

2 hours for grammar and writing, 2 hours for grammar and translation

4 hours for grammar, translation, and reading books

It may seem surprising that the number of classes in French should be reduced to almost nil during the last six years of study, whereas the number of classes 65 Ibidem, f. 432, op. 1, d. 103, fol. 42. 66 Ibidem, fols 42–42 v. 67 Ibidem, fol. 44. 68 Cherepnin, Imperatorskoe vospitatel’noe obshchestvo, vol. 3, 136–137. The number of hours for non-noble girls was slightly different (ibidem, 138–139). This schedule was adopted in 1783.

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in German should be increased during the last three years. No doubt it was thought that pupils had effectively finished learning the French language by the time they reached the age of twelve. Classes over the next six years pursued different aims, such as development of the girls’ knowledge of French literature. In any case, the girls could make further progress in French by attending other courses that were taught in it and through conversations in French with members of staff. All in all, French was in a stronger position than German at the Smolny, but we should not forget that this institution was very close to the court where French played a central role. Besides, French was undoubtedly considered more important than German for a young noblewoman who was being prepared for a prominent role in noble society. In aristocratic families, as opposed to educational institutions, the teaching methods used were based on direct communication with the pupil in the foreign language in question, which made for rapid linguistic progress. This helps to explain why there were already Russian aristocrats with an excellent command of French by the mid-eighteenth century.69 Other practices adopted by the high nobility also accelerated language acquisition. French was often the main and sometimes the only language of communication within the family circle. During the reign of Catherine, it also became, in many households, the language of tuition for many non-linguistic subjects, such as geography, mathematics, history (including Russian history), and literature. Examples from numerous noble families, including the Bariatinskiis, the Durnovos, the Golitsyns, the Sablukovs, and the Stroganovs, bear witness to this fact (Illustration no. 3). Evidently, this was also the case in the royal family. The Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine were taught geography and mathematics in French by Charles Masson and history by Frédéric-César de Laharpe. Later, in the nineteenth century, the future Emperor Nicholas I and the Grand Duke Michael studied politics in French with the academician Heinrich Storch, who was German, and read Greek and Roman authors in French with Du Puget. Archives preserve several textbooks that tutors wrote for their pupils on these subjects.70 69 Rjéoutski, ‘Le français et d’autres langues dans l’éducation en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, 32–36. 70 e.g. ‘Tableau Chronologique – historique et géographique avec deux cartes de l’Empire de Russie. A Mr Alexandre Sabloukoff […], 22 octobre 1800’ [by J.-B. de Résimont], RNB, Manuscripts Department, Fr. Q IV, no. 165; ‘Tableau des événements les plus remarquables de l’histoire de Russie suivi d’une description topographique de ce vaste Empire, S. Pétersbourg, année 1800’, RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 95, no. 1457 (167), written for Nikolai Dmitrievich Durnovo (1792–1828), another pupil of Résimont, who was the son of a marshal of the court and would later become a military officer. See also translations of information on Russian history from Russian into French which Durnovo made when he was twelve years old: ibidem, f. 95, nos 1456a

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Illustration 3 Map of Portugal drawn by Princess Nina Bariatinskaia (1785).

Image held in the Russian State Library, Manuscripts Department, f. 19, k. 284, d. 3, fol. 4, and reproduced with their permission.

Nor should we overlook the importance of reading habits in noble families, and in particular the existence of the library in the noble house, for the development of a child’s facility in French and the maintenance of that facility into adulthood. Children in aristocratic families started reading books in French in early childhood, and their acquisition of writing ability in French depended to a considerable extent on this experience. However, reading French was not conceived merely as a tool in the study of subjects in the educational curriculum, such as history or geography, but as part of a broader upbringing.71 (That is not at all to say that a ‘French’ upbringing invariably had the effect of excluding Russian books from the young nobleman’s reading.72) The extent to which the Russian aristocrat became (141) and 1456b (142). Durnovo wrote all his diaries in French: RGB, f. 95, nos M.9535(90)–M.9551 (106) (1811–1828). 71 For examples, see Rjéoutski (ed.), Quand le français gouvernait la Russie, 43, 45, 59, 75 (Golitsyns), 316–317 (Protasovs), 349 (the family of Lev Tolstoi), etc. 72 Thus Jacques Démichel, the governor of Baron Grigorii Stroganov’s son, wrote in his plan for the education of his pupil that there should be books in Russian in the young baron’s library

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immersed in literature in French has yet to be properly studied, but there is reason to suppose that the amount of literature read by members of the upper stratum of the Russian nobility in French from the age of Catherine exceeded the amount they read in other languages, including Russian and German, and that this reading had a deep effect. The many catalogues of private libraries which have survived, either as published books or in collections of the documents of individual noble families, clearly attest to the importance of nobles’ French reading, although the preponderance of books in French in them was no doubt due to the general prestige of the French book in Russian noble culture as well as to the demand for French literature among Russian noble readers. We know from many examples, such as the families of Alexander Pushkin and Lev Tolstoi, that noble children often had access to libraries in which the French book had pride of place.73 As French gained ground and became more widely known, its use as a language of instruction spread to public educational institutions. In Catherine’s reign, Clerc taught history to cadets at the Cadet Corps in French. At the University of St Petersburg, the Orientalists Jean-François Demange and François-Bernard Charmoy delivered their courses in French. From 1810, a whole cohort of French engineers (Pierre Bazaine, Alexandre Fabre, Charles Potier, Maurice Destrem, and others) and the Spanish engineer Agustín de Betancourt taught their courses in French at the St Petersburg Institute of the Corps of Communications Engineers. In fact, the majority of courses so that he could have exercise in his native language: ibidem, 139–140. 73 We can glean the importance of French books in the libraries of Russian aristocrats from the archives of a family such as the Bariatinskiis. Not only were the titles of the books in library catalogues belonging to the Bariatinskiis in French; the titles of the catalogues themselves were in French too, as a rule (see RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 19, op. 5, dd. 31–32, Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque du prince W. Bariatinsky (no date); d. 37, Catalogue des livres de français du prince Wladimir Bariatinsky (no date); d. 38, Catalogue de la Bibliothèque du prince Wladimir Bariatinsky (1863); dd. 259–261, Catalogue général de la bibliothèque du Feld-maréchal Prince Bariatinsky (1873–1876).) Moreover, the family archives contain collections of manuscripts in French, as well as collections of French books: we find dozens of hand-written notes in French, for instance, on a wide range of topics from infantry and military studies to pharmacy, gymnastics, and cheese-making in France (ibidem, dd. 93–98, 110). References to French books or books in French were also to the fore in the readers’ diaries kept by members of the family (ibidem, dd. 131, 132). It is no surprise that aristocrats, nurtured on literary models written in French and having access to such copious quantities of them, should take their first literary steps in that language, as exemplified by extant texts written by Ivan Ivanovich Bariatinskii (ibidem, d. 133, Les aventures tragiques et comiques. Conte de fée. Autographe de Ivan Ivanovitch Bariatinsky (no date)). It is probably symptomatic of the general evolution of reading habits that by the end of the nineteenth century members of this family seem to have read not only French, English, and Italian books, but Russian books as well (ibidem, dd. 27, 30).

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in this institution were delivered in French at least until the early 1830s.74 Furthermore, French books were used in abundance in Russian institutions for the teaching of various disciplines. At the University of St Petersburg, for example, works by Louis Lefébure de Fourcy, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Gaspard Monge, and Sylvestre François Lacroix were used for the teaching of algebra, geometry, and differential calculus; theoretical mechanics was taught from the works of Louis-Benjamin Francœur, the ‘physiology of plants’ from works in French by a Swiss scholar, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, and zoology from the works of Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville.75 This widespread use of French as a teaching medium clearly presupposed a good prior knowledge of French on the part of the students.

French versus Latin If the plurilingualism of the high Russian nobility gave it an affinity with other nobilities in Northern Europe, there is nevertheless at least one feature which made the Russian situation different from that in other countries: there was no tradition of learning Latin in the noble milieu. (Orthodox ecclesiastics, on the other hand, did learn Latin.76) What, then, was the relationship between Latin and French in the Russian social and cultural landscape? According to Max Okenfuss, Latin ceased, in eighteenth-century Russia, to be part of a broad humanist culture and became instead a branch of practical knowledge that was necessary for people serving the state.77 The nobility more or less eschewed the opportunity to learn Latin in such a hub of Latin culture as the university attached to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. (This university was founded in 1724; it had very few students.) There was also a gymnasium attached to the Academy, at which we find quite a few representatives of the Baltic and Russian nobility.78 Latin was one of the basic subjects taught in this school, along with German, French, arithmetic, geometry, and geography, but most of the Russian pupils opted

74 D.Iu. Guzevich and I.D. Guzevich, Karl Ivanovich Pot’e (1785–1855), 57, 96, 226. 75 Grigor’ev, Imperatorskii Sankt-Peterburgskii universitet, 131. 76 Freeze, The Russian Levites, 83–85; Kislova, ‘Latin as the Language of the Orthodox Clergy in Eighteenth-Century Russia’. 77 See Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early Modern Russia, especially 213–214. 78 Materialy dlia istorii imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 1, 217–226, 325–343; D.A. Tolstoi, Akademicheskaia gimnaziia v XVIII stoletii, 32.

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instead for living foreign languages (French or German, and occasionally both of them).79 In the Cadet Corps too, there was little interest in Latin among Russophone pupils. This was in spite of the fact that in the 1730s, when the Corps was founded, contacts between this institution and the Academy of Sciences were very close, a fact that plainly affected both the breadth of the approach to nobles’ education in the Corps and the place accorded to Latin in the Corps as a language needed for acquisition of knowledge in certain fields. The Corps taught civil law, for example, for which books in Latin were used. Latin was also one of the languages in which speeches were delivered at a public examination, at which academicians were present.80 Despite these efforts, the number of Russian pupils in the Cadet Corps who studied Latin was negligible. In 1732, the figure was just one percent, in 1737 4 percent, in 1748 13 percent, and in 1764 (in the cohort of pupils graduating from the Corps) 6.5 percent.81 The situation remained unchanged at the end of the eighteenth century: in several dozen volumes of excerpts from various writings and greetings written by cadets to the director of the Corps in the last years of the reign of Catherine, we have found only one example of the use of Latin.82 Against the background of ubiquitous and numerous records in French, German, and Russian, this single greeting in Latin speaks volumes: Latin was a tribute to the existence of a tradition of broad education, but in reality Latin studies were stagnating in the Corps. As in the gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences, so in the Cadet Corps the indifference of the nobility to Latin correlates with their interest in living languages and, above all, French. The picture in the University of Moscow was broadly similar. A noble gymnasium and another gymnasium for raznochintsy were attached to the university, and both publicly-funded and self-funded (svoekoshtnye) pupils studied in these schools. There were particularly large differences in the percentages of pupils from different backgrounds who studied Latin, Greek, and French.83 An overwhelming majority of the publicly-funded pupils studied Latin and Greek, but only one fifth of them studied French. Among the self-funded noble pupils, these proportions were reversed: less than one fifth of these pupils studied Latin, and still fewer studied Greek, 79 Materialy dlia istorii imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 1, 226–230, 330–343. 80 RGADA, f. 248, op. 1, d. 396, fols 17 v., 71–76, 543. 81 RGVIA, f. 314, op. 1, d. 1654, fols 1–176, 306–384 (a list containing 79 names in all); d. 2178. 82 RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 1059 (‘Compliments du nouvel an. 1790’). 83 RNB, Manuscripts Department, Hermitage Collection, 500, pt 1, M.V. Priklonskii, Director of Moscow University, 1776.

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whereas more than half were studying French. Among the self-funded raznochintsy, considerably less than half the pupils were studying living foreign languages, whereas the figure for Latin was 65 percent. The most likely explanation for this difference is the fact that the publicly-funded pupils in the gymnasia were being prepared for university entry, for which knowledge of Latin was obligatory. Many of the self-funded pupils from the nobility, on the other hand, did not expect to become university students, and these, we may suppose, were the ones not learning Latin. We thus see that a significant social contrast was in play when pupils were deciding which languages to study. Nor was Latin popular at court or, on the whole, among the nobility who had their children educated at home, as we see from the data collected by the commission set up in 1757 in the Academy of Sciences, to which we referred earlier, and by a second commission set up in Moscow University in the same year. Admittedly, Peter Alekseevich, the grandson of Peter the Great and the future Peter II, learned Latin and even used it to help him learn French (by making notes on French grammar in Latin!).84 At the end of the eighteenth century, though, it was not felt necessary for the grandsons of Catherine II – the Grand Dukes Alexander (the future Emperor Alexander I) and Constantine – to study this subject. Indeed, one of their teachers, the famous Laharpe, openly opposed the study of it, and the empress was at one with him on this. All the same, some eighteenth-century aristocrats did learn Latin, not least because ignorance of the language could prove a problem during an educational journey abroad, forcing young nobles to take extra-curricular lessons from university professors, which could be done in French or German. This is precisely what Baron (subsequently Count) Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov did when he arrived in Geneva, having no prior knowledge of the language. In the age of Catherine too, a few aristocrats learned Latin, for instance the young Princes Boris and Dmitrii Golitsyn. For the princes’ mother, Natal’ia Petrovna Golitsyna, knowledge of Latin was a sign of a good education, and Prince Boris himself believed that Latin was ‘necessary for people who want to possess sound knowledge’.85 In the early nineteenth century, Count Aleksandr Stroganov, the grandson of Aleksandr Sergeevich and son of Pavel Aleksandrovich Stroganov and Sof’ia

84 RGADA, f. 2, op. 1, d. 25, fol. 11. We are grateful to Ol’ga Kosheleva for this information. 85 Letter of 19 March 1791 from Boris Golitsyn to Natal’ia Golitsyna: RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, k. 93, ed. khr. 45, fols 1–2. We are grateful to Stefan Lehr for drawing our attention to this source.

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Vladimirovna Stroganova, née Golitsyna, also learned it.86 Indeed, Latin gained some currency among nobles brought up in the Alexandrine age: as Lotman observed, many of the Decembrists (for example, Gavriil Baten’kov, Matvei Dmitriev-Mamonov, Ivan Iakushkin, Aleksandr Kornilovich, Nikita Murav’ev, Mikhail Orlov, Nikolai Turgenev) had a good knowledge of the language.87 Another Decembrist, Mikhail Lunin, was able not only to read Latin but also to write it, as attested by an extant letter that he wrote to Misha, the son of his fellow Decembrist, Sergei Volkonskii, for whom he devised an educational curriculum which included the study of Latin from the age of ten.88 (Lunin’s deep knowledge of Latin may be partly explained by his interest in Catholicism.) Even the future Slavophile Iurii Samarin received excellent instruction in Latin, along with French, from his governor Adolphe Pascault during his boyhood in the 1820s.89 Latin was notably absent from the curriculum in the Smolny Institute, where French and German were studied, as we have said, and where French had pride of place. This fact probably reflected traditional European views of women as beings who were intellectually weaker than men and might struggle to master a language that was considered exceptionally difficult. It was no doubt also a consequence of the relatively limited educational opportunities available to women, since university – one of the centres of Latin culture – was closed to them at that time.90 Having acknowledged the generally low level of interest in Latin among the Russian nobility, though, we do not see any fundamental difference between the treatment of boys and girls as regards the study of languages in noble upbringing. In eighteenth-century Russia, unlike Western and Central Europe, both boys and girls studied modern languages, first and foremost French and German. The situation in the Ukraine and White Russia, however, was not the same as the situation in Russia. In the reigns of Catherine II and Alexander I, Jesuit colleges in White Russia offered a curriculum that was substantially different from that on offer in the main state schools for the nobility in Russia. The major difference concerned the role of Latin, which was central in Jesuit colleges. For many nobles living in White Russia (and in St Petersburg, where Jesuits also taught in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), 86 Rjéoutski and Somov, ‘Language Use among the Russian Aristocracy’, 75. 87 Lotman, Pushkin, 554–555. 88 Lunin, Pis’ma iz Sibiri, 147–149, 265; see also 469. 89 Ivanova, ‘Domashniaia shkola Samarinykh’. We are grateful to Ol’ga Solodiankina for drawing our attention to this source. 90 However, some French pedagogues (e.g. Fénelon and the Marquis de Lambert) believed that noble girls too should study Latin.

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Latin was a pathway to the study of ancient history and literature. Knowledge of these subjects enabled pupils to become acquainted with republican ideas, and it is probably no coincidence that several pupils educated in these schools would subsequently take part in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Orthodox colleges in the Ukraine, which were strongly influenced by the Jesuit model of education, offered a similar curriculum. Unlike Russian church seminaries, which nobles rarely attended, colleges in Ukraine were not closed to certain strata or professions, and the Ukrainian elite regularly sent their children to them.91 In their reluctance to learn Latin, the eighteenth-century Russian nobility found support among the powers that be. In the new ordinances written for the Cadet Corps in 1766, Ivan Betskoi – who was closely associated with Catherine II and served as her de facto minister of education – proposed to rid the Corps of it as of an unnecessary burden on which the ‘best part of life’ might be spent.92 Of course, Betskoi was familiar with the view of Enlightenment thinkers, for whom Latin was a symbol of an old way of thinking characteristic of people who were resistant to change and to a more practical education that could quickly be applied in professional life. Betskoi insisted instead on the study of two living foreign languages, French and German. While they did not study Latin, Russian nobles did, as we have emphasized, study modern foreign languages, especially – and, increasingly – French. For the Russian nobleman, French came in the second half of the eighteenth century to occupy the place that Latin had long occupied in Western European culture. It was the new lingua franca of Europe, and it enabled the nobility to gain access to the broadest spectrum of educational disciplines and professional knowledge, thanks to the quantity of books written in French or translated into it. Nobles’ predilection for French should also be explained by reference to the cultural codes that were linked to Latin and French in Russia at that time. Latin was associated with a social stratum below the nobility. For the intelligentsia of various ranks in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Lotman observed, ‘Latin was the same sort of password-language as French was for the nobility’.93 Nikolai Grech, 91 See Posokhova, Pravoslavnye kollegiumy na peresechenii kul’tur, traditsii, epokh; Rouët de Journel, Un Collège de Jésuites à Saint-Pétersbourg; Blinova, Iezuity v Belarusi; Inglot, Obshchestvo Iisusa v Rossiiskoi Imperii. We are grateful to Denis Kondakov for drawing our attention to the last two of these studies. 92 [Betskoi], Ustav imperatorskogo shliakhetnogo sukhoputnogo kadetskogo korpusa, 2nd pagination, 53. 93 Lotman, Pushkin, 554.

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reminiscing about the Senate’s Junkers’ Institute in the late eighteenth century, reported a more disparaging view: the cadets did not learn Latin because ‘they called Latin a doctor’s language which was unseemly for nobles!’94 It is true that in the eighteenth century Latin could attract nobles who moved away from their social roots and started to mix in a university environment. A similar change would take place in the nineteenth century with the introduction by the government of gymnasia with a bias towards classical languages and the culture of antiquity. The gymnasia would in time become the only possible path to a university education, which was becoming a condition for entry to certain posts in state service. In the reign of Alexander I, though, the gymnasium was open to all estates and had little appeal for the nobility, which continued to be educated in boarding schools,95 where Latin, as a rule, was not taught. All the same, as we have seen, some noble families did have Latin taught to their children in the Alexandrine age and beyond.

French (and English) versus Russian For a long time, Russian did not exist in noble education as a discipline in its own right. Some young nobles entering the Cadet Corps in the 1730s and 1740s were illiterate in their mother tongue, although they could read and sometimes even write in French or German, which tells us much about priorities in noble education before Catherine II came to the throne.96 However, even in the middle of the eighteenth century an image was beginning to take shape of Russian as a European language endowed with many qualities, including qualities of the sort that were ascribed to French. A speech on the subject of the French language which was delivered by an obscure foreign-language teacher in the University of Moscow, a Frenchman named Guillaume Raoult, at a formal gathering attended by many representatives of the Muscovite nobility in 1757 is illuminating in this respect.97 Raoult presented his subject from within the French, indeed European, tradition 94 Grech, Nikolai Grech, 154. We are grateful to Iurii Vorob’ev for drawing our attention to this point. 95 Maksimova, Prepodavanie drevnikh iazykov v russkoi klassicheskoi gimnazii XIX–nachala XX veka, 16–17. Latin, however, was taught in the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée; Pushkin, who studied at the lycée, was able to read Roman authors fluently. 96 We are grateful for information provided by Igor’ Fediukin in this connection. 97 RGADA, f. 199, op. 2, d. 805, fols 1–2 v. We are grateful to Dmitrii Kostyshin for drawing our attention to this document.

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of language discourse that spoke of the ‘genius’ of the French language, a discourse which would find its definitive expression in the essay submitted by Rivarol for the competition of the Berlin Academy in 1783. However, Raoult praised Russian too, according it a status far above that of a language that was suitable merely for speaking to horses, as Frederick II of Prussia famously said of German. Russian, then, began to be seen not only as the official language of the empire but also as one of the major languages of Europe. It became customary for speeches in the university to be delivered in three living languages, Russian, French, and German, as well as Latin.98 The rising status of Russian was also reflected in the proposal made in the 1760s by Betskoi that all teaching other than language tuition should be carried out solely in Russian in the Cadet Corps, where previously it had often been conducted in German. In order to justify this policy, Betskoi invoked contemporary ideas about the way in which knowledge is assimilated. Learning can only be successful, he argued, if it takes place in one’s native language. Furthermore, Betskoi advocated the study of Church Slavonic, the liturgical language, as a means of teaching pupils ‘to write Russian correctly and eloquently and thereby better to understand our holy books’.99 There may therefore have been a religious dimension to decisions about language choice, and language choice was thus being associated with national identity, since religion and national identity had traditionally been closely bound up with one another in Russia. At the same time, Betskoi was bringing to Russia a debate that was taking place in France, where French and Latin were seen as rivals and Latin was increasingly giving way to French as the language of instruction in academic institutions attended by nobles. Supporters of instruction in the mother tongue wanted learning to be rapid and to yield practical results. If Roman literature and history were to continue to be included in the curriculum, they should be studied in the native language, in French in this instance, especially since all the main Greek and Roman authors had been translated into French. The mother tongue facilitated the nobility’s access to the ‘sciences’ (that is to say, knowledge in general), whereas Latin demanded so much effort that young nobles were ‘repelled’ by them.100 Betskoi constructed the same sort of opposition in Russia, except that since Latin played little or no role in the education of the Russian 98 See also the discussion of the topos of pride in the Russian language in the second section of Chapter 8 below. 99 [Betskoi], Ustav imperatorskogo shliakhetnogo sukhoputnogo kadetskogo korpusa, 2nd pagination, 50 (italics in original). 100 See N. le Gras, L’Académie Royale de Richelieu, a son Eminence (1642) in the BNF, Arsenal 4-H-8289, 23–30. We are grateful to Andrea Bruschi for drawing our attention to this source.

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nobility in the age of Catherine its place was taken there by German, in the first instance, and then increasingly by French. Several reforms now brought Russian into the foreground. In the 1780s, a Russian Academy was founded, which began, under the guidance of Princess Dashkova, to compile a dictionary of the Russian language.101 A new reform of public teaching institutions attempted to do what Betskoi had begun, to ensure that all subjects with the exception of languages were taught in Russian. It is not clear whether these initiatives yielded results in the short term. Betskoi himself admitted that it was impossible to find Russophone teachers for all disciplines, and it was a long time before his wish that all subjects be taught in Russian could be realized. Perhaps we should therefore be cautious in our assessment of the impact that the initiatives of the authorities had on the place of Russian in the public education of the nobility. The complaints of some senators in 1773 about the gradual abandonment of German in public educational institutions would also seem to indicate that the wishes of the authorities were sometimes to no avail. Be that as it may, we can say that by the end of Catherine’s reign Russian had been put on an equal footing with the other two main languages, French and German, at the Cadet Corps. The cadets had an excellent command of it, as we see from a book containing hundreds of greetings that they addressed to the director in Russian, as well as in French and German. The widely held belief that nobles were so Gallicized at this period that they were ignorant of their own language surely has no foundation, at least if we judge by pupils’ language competence in public educational institutions for the nobility. While stressing that competence in Russian was widespread in the nobility, we should also acknowledge that Russian may in general have had greater importance in public education than it had in education in the home (which remained the most important form of upbringing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially for the high nobility). We find several instances of almost exclusive preference for French in Russian aristocratic households in the age of Catherine. In the family of Princess Natal’ia Golitsyna, for example, the education of the children and communication between parents and children and between the family and its circle of friends of the same rank almost always took place entirely in French. Again, in the home of the Princes Bariatinskii, even Russian history – which was no doubt perceived, in the 1770s, as a means of consolidating the children’s sense of identity – was taught in French rather than Russian.102 All 101 See the second section of Chapter 8 below. 102 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 19, op. 284, d. 5.

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the subjects learned by the girls in the Bariatinskii household at this time (history, mythology, geography, literature, mathematics) were learned for the most part in French as well, except languages, where Russian appeared alongside French, German, and even Italian.103 Attachment to Russian, on the other hand, became commonplace in Pushkin’s generation among nobles brought up in the Alexandrine age and during the Napoleonic Wars. Aleksandr Stroganov, the son of Pavel, had instruction in Russian language and literature and read Russian works which inspired patriotic feeling in him, such as Matvei Kriukovskii’s play Pozharskii (1807), Kheraskov’s epic poem The Rossiad, and the speech made by Peter the Great to his troops before the Battle of Poltava (1709). He had several Russophone tutors who taught him non-linguistic subjects in Russian, something which would have been almost unthinkable in the mid-eighteenth century when his grandfather was being educated.104 Russian was learned now as a subject in its own right, through reading (of literary texts, in the main) and writing. Furthermore, some Russian nobles, while continuing to prefer French for correspondence, made efforts to perfect their Russian in adult life. This was the case with Boris Golitsyn, one of the so-called ‘Franco-Russian writers’. Elizaveta Mukhanova, who would marry Prince Valentin Shakhovskoi, used Russian in her diary, although it cost her more effort to write in this language than it did to write in French. She wished to improve her Russian: ‘I certainly want to read the whole of the New Testament, once in Russian and then in Church Slavonic’, she declared; ‘I love my native language and want to consolidate my knowledge of it.’105 Boris Golitsyn’s sister Sof’ia, who became Countess Stroganova after her marriage to the above-mentioned Pavel, also commended the study of Church Slavonic as well as Russian. In 1819, for example, she wrote to her daughter (albeit in French!): ‘I am delighted that you are working at Slavonic, it’s the key to Russian, and then again it is so beautiful that this reason alone ought to be enough to [make one] study it.’106 Paradoxically, in many families this new determination to learn their national language and read the literature of their country entailed almost no change in private communication, which always took place in French, 103 Ibidem, dd. 2–8. 104 On linguistic education in this family, see Rjéoutski and Somov, ‘Language Use among the Russian Aristocracy’. 105 Letter of 25 September 1823, quoted from Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 184. 106 RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 669, no. 54, fol. 4.

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so that French remained at the core of noble education. This applies to the Stroganovs during the first half of the nineteenth century. Natal’ia Shakhovskaia (the daughter of the above-mentioned Elizaveta Shakhov­ skaia, née Mukhanova) and Natal’ia’s cousins Sof’ia Murav’eva, Praskov’ia Golynskaia, and Matil’da Golynskaia barely used Russian in their private communication, for which French was used, with some other languages, such as English, German, and Italian, sometimes mixed into it. This practice reflected the balance of their educational curriculum, which continued to diversify linguistically but strangely brushed the native language to one side.107 It would therefore seem that patriotic feelings could coexist with a preference for French in everyday communication. Most subjects continued to be studied in French in the first half of the nineteenth century, as we know from information on the Golitsyns, the Kerns, the Sollogubs, the Stroganovs, and other families. The French Abbé Froment taught history, geography, and botany in French to the Davydovs, Gur’evs, and Kochubeis. In the family of Aleksandr Dmitriev, a brother of Ivan Dmitriev, a well-known poet and statesman, Russian was taught every Saturday, but most time was devoted to French and German and other subjects such as geography, ancient history, and mythology, which were taught in French. Fedor Samarin studied geography and Russian history in French in his youth, in the late eighteenth century, and went on to use French extensively as an adult, writing travel diaries and historical and religious works in that language. His son Iurii did not study Russian in the early stages of his education, in the 1820s, as his French governor, Pascault, noted in a diary of the boy’s lessons that he kept. ‘Although he’s in Russia, he’s learning very little of his own language’, wrote Pascault, regretting what he thought was excessive use of French in the private life of this family. ‘No doubt, the first reason for this is that I am always with him. But if I were the only person, absolutely the only person to speak French to him, perhaps one would see some progress in Russian’.108 Ironic as it might seem, it was partly on the initiative of this French governor that a teacher of Russian was employed for the young Iurii, which enabled this future Slavophile to acquire a sound knowledge of his national language. French was similarly dominant in the household of the Barons von Meyendorff, a noble family from the Baltic region. Excellent command of French enabled the Meyendorffs to integrate themselves quickly in Russian high society, for they still had a poor command 107 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 190. 108 ‘Samarin, Iurii Fedorovich’, in RBS, vol. 18, 134. We are grateful to Ol’ga Solodiankina for bringing this information to our attention.

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of Russian in the early nineteenth century. In the Alexandrine period, the children in this family corresponded with their mother in French and in general still used French as a language of intimacy, thus pushing their mother tongue, German, to one side.109 Russian continued to be neglected in some noble families in the age of Nicholas I. The domestic language in the family of the mother of the memoirist Elena Khvoshchinskaia, the Bakhmetevs, for example, was French, and the teachers employed in it were all foreigners. The children were punished when they spoke Russian (a red cloth tongue would be attached to their chests), and lessons in Russian were ‘consigned to oblivion’.110 Even the children of Lev Tolstoi were educated, in the 1870s, by an army of foreign teachers (English, French, German, and Swiss), and although they did learn Russian French remained the linchpin of their education.111 In another highly placed family, the Kurakins, ample attention was devoted to Russian in the children’s education, despite the fact that French still predominated at home. Although they spent their early childhood in France, during the 1840s, Elizaveta Kurakina and her brother Boris, children of the diplomat Aleksei Kurakin, were taught most subjects (Russian, geography, ancient history, Russian history, mathematics, natural history, physics, and botany) in Russian by a Russian teacher. Elizaveta polished her knowledge of her native language by translating The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece from French into Russian.112 It is also noteworthy that one of the reasons why the family returned to Russia was to enable them to give ‘a Russian education’ to Elizaveta’s brother Boris.113 Nevertheless, the family’s domestic language at this time was still French, as we can see from Elizaveta’s memoirs, for when she quotes what a member of the family said she usually does so in French, even though she wrote the memoirs in Russian. Incidentally, Elizaveta’s attainment in French, for which she attended classes while she was living in France, seems to have been on a par with that of her French peers, if her reminiscences are to be believed: ‘And you say after this that the Russians are Cossacks!’, her teacher exclaimed in admiration.114 109 Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Family Correspondence in the Russian Nobility’. 110 Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Vospominaniia Eleny Iur’evny Khvoshchinskoi’, RS, 1897, no. 3, 518. Khvoshchinskaia’s mother, who was born in 1822, claimed to have had only seven lessons in Russian, and those from a Little Russian priest who could not pronounce the Russian words for ‘five’ and ‘Friday’ properly (ibidem). 111 Polossina, ‘Les précepteurs dans la vie et l’œuvre de Léon Tolstoï’. 112 Naryshkina, Moi vospominaniia, 45–46, 53. Naryshkina is Elizaveta Kurakina’s married name. 113 Ibidem, 67. 114 Ibidem, 57.

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We do, however, find evidence that the use of French as a language of intimacy was not universal in the Russian aristocracy. The late eighteenthcentury prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, for instance, did not generally correspond in French either with members of his own family or with other Russians. The few letters that he did write in French to his son Dmitrii had a pedagogical purpose. In one of these letters, Shcherbatov explicitly broached the question of language choice and the reasons for learning a language. French seems indispensable to him, because it is ‘a present si repandue en Europe et par consequent necessaire tant pour la conversation, que pour l’instruction a cause du grand nombre de bons auteurs qui ont écrit en cette langue […]’ (now so widespread in Europe and consequently necessary as much for conversation as for instruction, owing to the large number of good authors who have written in this language […]).115 ‘C’est pour cella’, Shcherbatov says, ‘que je vous conseille en ami et en père de vous appliquer a lire les bons auteurs français, et a tacher de former votre stile sur ces bons auteurs’ (That is why I advise you as [your] friend and father to apply yourself to reading good French authors and trying to form your style on these good models).116 The reasons that Shcherbatov puts forward for learning French, then, relate to its function as a lingua franca and to the literary qualities of French authors as well as to the demands of style. 117 Shcherbatov declines to see French as a language which could potentially serve the needs of all types of communication and supplant Russian. It is quite possible that this point of view was linked to his criticisms of the practices and forms of sociability introduced into Russia by the westernization forced on its society, although his pessimistic work On the Corruption of Morals in Russia does not seem to contain any direct comments on the excessive use of French in Russia. At any rate, Shcherbatov’s habit of eschewing French in correspondence is not isolated, for even in the reign of Catherine II we find corpora of letters by members of the elite which were written entirely in Russian. Most frequently, perhaps, it was not a question of the exclusive use of one language or the other, French or Russian, but of some form of multilingualism in which different languages fulfilled different functions. For example, a noble might speak in French to another noble but in Russian to a priest or 115 RGADA, f. 1289, op. 1, d. 517, fols 12–13, 33–34, 174–174 v. We have retained Shcherbatov’s orthography. Shcherbatov’s letters to his son have been published, in Russian translation, in Shcherbatov, Izbrannye trudy, 108–116, and they are reprinted in idem, Perepiska kniazia M.M. Shcherbatova, 352–354, 357–361, 366–368. The quotation is taken from 357–358. 116 Ibidem, 357. 117 On style, see the following section of this chapter.

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a merchant. Or again, noble men might speak Russian among themselves but French to a noble woman. At other times, the functions might overlap or might even be interchangeable. In their everyday communication, for instance, nobles might switch from French into Russian without really sensing that the languages were to be used for different purposes.118 The complexity of patterns of language use was compounded by the fact that different generations of the Russian aristocracy attained different levels of command of French. This can be seen in the cases of the Golitsyns and the Stroganovs. Natal’ia Petrovna Golitsyna wrote in French that was fluent but spelt almost phonetically (some examples are given in the following section). This fact no doubt reflected the way in which aristocratic women of Natal’ia’s generation had been educated during the reign of Elizabeth or the early part of the reign of Catherine II: they were already thoroughly acquainted with French but had barely learned to write the language. On the other hand, Golitsyna’s children, boys and girls alike, acquired a more highly tutored form of French during their education in the 1770s and 1780s. They probably emerged as bilinguals, although this assumption is difficult to prove because hardly any documents written by them in Russian can be found, at least from the period when they were being educated. Aleksandr Stroganov’s father, Baron Sergei Stroganov, corresponded with his son in Russian during the 1750s because Sergei, while he could read French, was not able to write it. As for Aleksandr Stroganov himself, he often exchanged letters with his son Pavel in Russian, but in this case for quite a different reason: having been born and brought up in France, Pavel had a much better command of French than of Russian, at least when it came to writing, which obliged the father to take steps to correct the asymmetry of his son’s language competencies. The Grand Tour of Russia that Aleksandr arranged for his son was intended not only to familiarize Pavel with his country but also to perfect his knowledge of his native language. This was an innovation in aristocratic education in Russia. Pavel’s son, also Aleksandr, had an equal command of the two languages and was able to express himself elegantly in French as well as Russian, even if he rarely used written Russian outside classes.119 We should add, finally, that while French still had priority in the early nineteenth century and German generally continued to be studied (though less than previously and usually after French), more and more families were now employing English or Scottish teachers. Already in Catherine’s reign, 118 On code-switching, see especially Chapter 6 below. 119 Rjéoutski and Somov, ‘Language Use among the Russian Aristocracy’.

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English was being learned in the Golitsyn 120 and Stroganov families.121 And yet, even when Anglomania took hold among the Russian nobility, in the Alexandrine age, attraction to English culture did not necessarily imply knowledge of English.122 Admittedly, interest in English does seem to have increased in the early nineteenth century, as the examples of several noble families indicate.123 One sign of the fact that there were now quite numerous Russians who could read English was the foundation, in 1822, of a short-lived review entitled The English Literary Journal of Moscow by the Scotsman James Baxter, who was a tutor in the Kireevskii family. The editor of this periodical explained that it was intended to help those who spoke English and were learning it but could not keep abreast of new publications in English literature. He noticed ‘the marked attention now paid throughout Europe, but particularly in Russia, to the study of the language of England’.124 In order to help Russians who did not feel sufficiently comfortable in English, though, the editor provided a French translation of the texts published in the review, thus recognizing the continuing function of French as an intermediary language.125 At the close of the reign of Catherine II, then, differences in linguistic practice were to be found not only between the nobility, the clergy, and the raznochintsy, but also within the nobility itself. Different strata of the nobility shared the taste for French. However, aristocratic education seems to have placed less emphasis on knowledge and use of the national language (even if the image of a Russian nobleman who did not know his native language 120 i.e. the family of Princess Natal’ia Petrovna and Prince Vladimir Borisovich Golitsyn. 121 Pavel Stroganov studied it, as did his children by his marriage to Sof’ia Vladimirovna, née Golitsyna. 122 Cross, ‘English – a Serious Challenge to French in the Reign of Alexander I?’ 123 e.g. in the families headed by the following nobles: Ivan Petrovich Wul’f, Governor of Orel from 1808 to 1812 (the family was from Tver’ Province); Senator Zakhar Nikolaevich Posnikov; Prince Pavel Alekseevich Golitsyn; General Paissii Sergeevich Kaissarov (the Englishwoman Claire Clairmont taught in all these families in the 1820s); Senator Ivan Matveevich Murav’ev-Apostol, the father of two of the Decembrists; Vera Ivanovna Khliustina, née Tolstaia (a family from Kaluga); Princess Mar’ia Fedorovna Bariatinskaia; Major-General Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov, one of the Decembrists; and General Nikolai Nikolaevich Raevskii junior (the Englishman Thomas Evans, a teacher at the University of Moscow, taught Murav’ev-Apostol, Khliustina, Bariatinskaia, Orlov, and Raevskii). We are grateful to Ol’ga Solodiankina for all this information. On the teaching of English in these families, see also the following: Alekseev, ʻMoskovskie dnevniki i pis’ma Kler Klermont’; Claire Clairmont et al., The Clairmont Correspondence; Pavlov, ‘Evans’. 124 Alekseev, ʻMoskovskie dnevniki i pis’ma Kler Klermont’, 527. 125 This venture was short-lived, though. We are grateful to Ol’ga Solodiankina for information on this subject too. On Baxter and this journal, see Alekseev, ʻMoskovskie dnevniki i pis’ma Kler Klermont’, 527–528.

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is a caricature). English was also being introduced among the aristocracy. In public educational institutions (from which the middling and petty nobility profited most), on the other hand, good provision was made for study of Russian from the age of Catherine. The teaching of English was not universal in these institutions, nor would it be introduced for a long time to come in the main educational institutions for the nobility, such as the Cadet Corps and the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée.126

Acquiring social and cultural codes by learning French As we saw in the case of Mikhail Shcherbatov, it was one of the educational aims of noble parents to equip their children to develop the art of writing letters in French. Practice in this art, and in particular the repeated use of certain rhetorical formulae, also enabled children to absorb notions and values associated with noble society. The extant writings of the Golitsyn family again provide revealing examples. One of the recurrent themes of the correspondence of Natal’ia Golitsyna’s family is friendship and the mutual attachment of the children and their mother. Natal’ia herself is constantly evoking these feelings. However, she never broaches the subject for its own sake, but always in connection with the children’s performance in their studies and behaviour, as in the following passage (which also illustrates her eccentric spelling): mon cher Boris je vous crois trop resonable et trop datacheman a vos parans […] apropos mon cher ami je veux vous prevenir conssernan votre écriture […] pour ce qui est de mon amitiez je vois que vous ne lambissionne pas ainsi je n’en dit rien, je ne puis conssevoir comman vous avez si peu dembition […] si mes prieres peuvent quelque chose sur vous et que vous avez quelque atacheman pour moi, taché de vous conduire de fasson a me faire avoir des nouvelles satisfésante […] continue seuleman a vous conduire de meme, a mon retour je tacherez au tems que je puis vous temoigné ma reconnoissance et vous prouvé mon amitiez […]127 (my dear Boris I think you are too reasonable and too fond of your parents […] apropos of which I want to forewarn you, my dear friend, about your writing […] regarding my friendship, I see that you don’t covet it and 126 At the Naval Cadet Corps, English teaching stagnated during the reign of Catherine II. 127 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, k. 83, no. 2, fols 10–11 v.

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so I don’t say anything about it, I can’t conceive how you have so little ambition […] if my entreaties can have any effect on you and you have any affection for me, try to conduct yourself in a way that will enable me to receive some satisfactory news […] carry on conducting yourself only in the same way, on my return I shall try as much as I can to show you my gratitude and prove my friendship […])

Teachers in turn borrow this vocabulary and speak of their pupils as their friends and well-wishers. Indeed, friendship was held up as the ideal relationship between teachers and children. This use of the language of friendship, for which French is the vehicle, was relatively new in Russia. At roughly the same time, the French nobility was using the same method in the education of its children, linking ‘affection’ and ‘friendship’ to ‘merit’ in its discourse. From their earliest years, children would learn to channel their feelings for their parents by using codified forms which often remained unchanged even when the child became an adult.128 The discourse found expression not only in collections of letters but also in French pedagogical treatises, which, well before Rousseau, were read by the Russian nobility as it borrowed the language of friendship as an element of noble culture and the culture of the honnête homme in general. Thus, in a tract which was written expressly for young nobles and which was well known in Russia, the Abbé Jean Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde commended friendship as a form of sociability that a young noble should adopt.129 Aleksandr Stroganov clearly followed such advice, filling his youthful letters in French with invocations of friendship: C’est un criminel, mon cher Sarasin [i.e. one of Stroganov’s Genevan acquaintances], honteux des fautes qu’il a commise vis-à-vis du meilleur de ses amis qui vien devan vous comme devan son juge entendre sa sentence, oui très cher ami s’est le Baron cet homme que vous avés comblé de votre amitié c’est lui qui vien vous demander Million et Million de pardon pour la faute la plus grossiere qu’il ay pu commetre c’est-à-dire par [pour] avoir été si longtems sens [sans] vous donner de ses nouvelles.130 (This is a criminal, my dear Sarasin, ashamed of the mistakes he has committed in relation to the best of his friends, and he comes before you 128 See Grassi, ‘Un révélateur de l’éducation au XVIIIe siècle’, especially 176. 129 Bellegarde, L’éducation parfaite, e.g. 46–47. On Bellegarde’s treatise, see also the first section of Chapter 3 below. 130 RGADA, f. 1278, op. 1, d. 5, fol. 54.

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as before his judge to hear his sentence, yes, my dearest friend, it is the baron who is this man on whom you have bestowed your friendship, it is he who comes to beg millions of pardons for the grossest mistake he has been able to commit, that is to say for having gone so long without giving you any of his news.)

It was through French and in rhetorical formulae borrowed from people with whom he corresponded, and no doubt from books as well, that Stroganov learned such attitudes towards the other, both concepts and emotions.131 This sort of posture remained important for Stroganov throughout his life, not merely in his dealings with his peers but also in his relations with people who were not on his social level. The vocabulary of friendship is conspicuous, for example, in his exchanges with his son’s teacher, Gilbert Romme.132 Another aim of educational correspondence conducted in French was to inculcate politesse, or politeness, one of the aristocracy’s most cherished accomplishments (Illustrations no. 4 and 5). The letters of the young brothers Boris and Dmitrii Golitsyn to their mother are full of time-honoured formulae which reflect the polite social relations usual in their milieu: J’assure Papa de mes respects et vous prie de me croire avec la plus vive impatience de nous revoir Maman, Votre tres obeissant f ils Pr. Baris Galitzin. (I assure Papa of my respects and ask you to believe me [when I say] that I cannot wait for us to see each other again, mother, Your most obedient son, Prince Boris Golitsyn.) Je vous prierais, maman, de leur passer mes compliments. (I would ask you, mother, to pass my compliments to them.) C’est sans contredit un des hommes que j’estime le plus et si quelque sentiment en moi peut balancer celui de l’amitié que j’ai pour lui, c’est l’estime. (He is unquestionably one of the men for whom I have the greatest esteem, and if some feeling in me may balance the feeling of friendship then it is esteem. [Boris is praising his brother Dmitrii in this passage.])133 131 Rjéoutski and Somov, ‘Language Use among the Russian Aristocracy’, 67. On learning emotions, see Zorin, ‘Import chuvstv’; idem, Poiavlenie geroia. 132 Frede, ‘Friends: Gilbert Romme and the Stroganovs’. 133 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, op. 93, d. 43, fols 1 v., 33 v., 35–35 v.

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Illustration 4 Draft of a letter addressed by Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn to his mother Princess Natal’ia Golitsyna.

Image held in the Russian State Library, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, k. 94, d. 28, fol. 1 (1780, St Petersburg), and reproduced with their permission.

There are numerous examples of this kind, in which high Russian families give expression to politesse through the conduit of French and with an array of linguistic formulae. Take, for instance, the following letter written by Nina Bariatinskaia to her mother in 1782:

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Illustration 5 Exercises in French writing designed to inculcate politesse. The exercises were done by Stepanida Baranova, who was raised in the Bariatinskii family (1781–1785).

Image held in the Russian State Library, Manuscripts Department, f. 19, k. 284, d. 7, fol. 12, and reproduced with their permission.

Ma tres chere Maman, Je vous suis très-sensiblement obligé des nouvelles marques que vous me donnez de votre affection par vos bons et judicieux conseils, je ne manquerai pas d’en prof iter, et d’étudier soigneusement ce que vous estimez que je dois apprendre, je vais apprendre, je vais m’y appliquer avec d’autant plus de soin, que je me ferai toujours un très-grands plaisir de suivre en toutes choses vos sentimens, et de vous marquer par une entiere déférence à tout ce qu’il vous plaira de me prescrire, que je suis avec toute la soumission que je vous dois, ___ et avec un tres proffond respect, Ma très chere Maman, Votre très soumise fille et respectueuse amie.134

134 Ibidem, f. 19, op. 284, d. 2, fol. 130 v.

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(My very dear mother, I am extremely obliged to you for the new tokens you give me of your affection by your good and sensible advice, I shall not fail to profit from it, or to study carefully what you think I should learn, I shall learn, I shall apply myself to this with all the more care as I shall always take very great pleasure in following your feelings in all things and in showing you through complete deference to what it may please you to prescribe for me that I am following them with all the obedience I owe you, and with the deepest respect, my dear mama, Your very obedient daughter and respectful friend.)

In addition to friendship and politeness, nobles took pains to develop an aesthetic sense in their children. This aesthetic dimension to noble education is apparent at an early stage in the exchanges between Natal’ia Golitsyna and her children. Even if the mother herself wrote in French that was far from perfect, nonetheless she aimed in her correspondence to inculcate good style in her children. In general, correspondence, and writing in French more generally, became the centrepiece of the children’s education in this family, revealing in the process the place of the art of letter-writing in the culture of the nobility. It is not surprising that although the exchanges of letters between the children and their mother were quite frequent, the children rarely wrote their letters without producing a rough draft first, for a letter had to make an impression by virtue of its style.135 The French language was not merely a sign of social distinction for the nobility,136 but also a form of cultural capital which put Russian nobles on the same level as their western peers and gave them the right to enter the high society of all European countries. Correspondence in French had a particularly important function in this milieu, going beyond a simple exchange of information: the letter had to provide evidence of an excellent education and knowledge of the codes that were accepted by cultivated people. It is therefore no surprise that Natal’ia Golitsyna was constantly assessing her children’s style. ‘Je suis tres contan mon cher Dmitrie de votre lettre’ (I am very happy with your letter, my dear Dmitrii), she writes. ‘Le stil et lécriture en est tres jolie’ (the style and the writing of it are very nice). And again: ‘ je n’ai rien à dire de votre écriture et de votre stil, jen suis parfaiteman contante’ (I have nothing to say about your writing and your style, I’m perfectly happy with them). And yet again, perhaps with a sting in the tail on this occasion: ‘Je suis contante 135 Ibidem, f. 64, k. 83, no. 2; see also Rjéoutski, ‘L’éducation d’une jeune fille dans une grande famille de la noblesse russe’. 136 See the fourth section of Chapter 4 below.

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de votre lettre mon cher Boris, pour ce qui est du stil je le trouve trop bien pour pouvoir me flaté qu’il soit de vous’ (I am happy with your letter, my dear Boris, as far as the style is concerned I find it too good to be able to flatter myself that it is from you).137 We thus see that language study went together with learning about emotions and forms of sociability and helped to nurture certain values which enabled the aristocracy to mark itself off even within the noble stratum. Among the Golitsyns, as among the Stroganovs, then, French was learned from the start as both their language of intimacy and the main tool of noble sociability. Just how close the link was between the French language and Russian noble sociability we see from the recollections of Vigel’ about the point in his own education at which he was made to enter Mme Forceville’s boarding school in 1798: I very much wanted to study at the University boarding school; but French, which the higher estate at that time spoke in the main, and almost exclusively, was a signboard [vyveska] advertising the perfection of an upbringing; I expressed myself poorly in it and those educated in the University were not famed for their knowledge of it. Mlle Dubois remarked on this and added that young people emerged from the hands of Mme Forceville as real French people. Calculating that I was destined to be a man of society and a military man rather than a scholar and lawyer, my sister [who had married into the Saltykov family and was overseeing Vigel’’s education] felt that it really would be better to hand me over to the French.138

Command of French, finally, was also bound up with the concept of the honnête homme, the sociable man whose character it was the purpose of noble education to form.139 According to the dictionary of the Académie Française (1694), an honnête homme was an agreeable man who embodied various qualities thought to be necessary for life in society. In the Encyclopédie he was similarly defined as ‘a polished man who wishes to please: the honnêtes gens of a city are those persons in it who are above the people, who have property, a reputation as upright, and honourable birth, and who have had an education’.140 There is thus a sense that the honnête homme 137 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, op. 83, d. 2, fols 7, 26, 28. 138 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 61. 139 Rjéoutski (ed.), Quand le français gouvernait la Russie, 124–125, on which we have drawn here. 140 Encyclopédie, vol. 1, 136 (in the entry ‘adjectif’). However, the author of another article in the Encyclopédie expressed reservations about describing someone with polished manners as an

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belongs to a different social milieu from the populace at large and has had an upbringing which inculcates in him the qualities needed to move in ‘good’ society. These qualities usually comprise a tincture of both the arts and sciences, but at the same time it is emphasized that knowledge that is too deep and specialized needs to be avoided, for it smacks of pedantry, which is intolerable in a man of society. In Russia, the notion of the honnête homme had a central place in the educational programmes followed by the governors hired to teach noble children, and it was to be assimilated through study of French literary examples and through instruction that also took place in French. It influenced the curriculum of the main public institution for the education of the nobility, the Noble Land Cadet Corps, where students studied some subjects which may have seemed far removed from the needs of the military but which were nonetheless necessary for the honnête homme. The concept was invoked in recommendations and self-recommendations. When, in 1761, Prince Nikolai Dolgorukii gave Chevalier Jean Desessart a testimonial for his good and loyal services, he wrote that the governor had proved himself an honnête homme.141 Desessart, for his part, made use of this notion to make himself more attractive to subsequent employers, promising, when he signed a new contract in 1765, to give his pupil the knowledge needed by ‘l’honneste homme, l’homme aimable et le bon citoyen’ (the honnête homme, the agreeable man, and the good citizen).142 Laharpe invoked the concept too, when in 1784 he outlined his pedagogical ideas to Catherine II, undertaking to develop it in the Grand Duke Alexander, along with the concept of the ‘citizen’.143 The notion of good citizenship to which Laharpe refers, finally, was often implicit in the concept, together with the ideal of noble sociability. When Pushkin speaks of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State as ‘not only the work of a great writer but also the heroic deed [podvig] of an honnête homme [chestnogo cheloveka]’,144 for example, he is not underlining the pleasing side of Karamzin’s character but Karamzin’s concern for the public good, a concern which is perceived as a moral virtue. Ivan Dolgorukov had had in mind the same quality in a poem he wrote in

honnête homme. This was an abuse of the expression which, the author maintained, indicated ‘the progress of corruption’ in society (see the entry ‘honnête homme’, Encyclopédie, vol. 8, 287). 141 AVPRI, f. 7, op. 3, d. 127, fol. 11. 142 Ibidem, fols 12–12 v. 143 His Mémoire is published in Sukhomlinov, Issledovaniia i stat’i po russkoi literature i pro­ sveshcheniiu, vol. 2, 143–164. 144 ‘Otryvki iz pisem, mysli i zamechaniia’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 11, 57.

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memory of Ivan Shuvalov, the founder of the University of Moscow.145 The concept is difficult to define, to be sure, both because it did not often appear in children’s correspondence or written exercises and because it overlapped with the social and emotional characteristics of a society man, who prized friendship and politeness. And yet, we may be sure that it was absorbed, both as a social practice and as a sort of moral obligation, through the French language and education to which Russian noble children were exposed. The association of francophonie with the social code of the aristocracy, finally, is well illustrated by a passage in Boyhood, the second part of an autobiographical trilogy, in which Lev Tolstoi, who was born in 1828, considers his upbringing in the 1830s and 1840s. The move of a noble family from their provincial estate to Moscow marked the beginning of a new phase in a child’s development. ‘Politeness’ and relations in society would henceforth have a special place and would be bound up with the French language and a ‘French’ education. In the Tolstoi household, a ‘French dandy’, who knew how ‘des enfants de bonne maison [children from a good family] should be brought up’, replaced Karl Ivanych, a kindly German who was quite unversed in the ways of society and who, in the caustic words of the narrator’s grandmother, could only teach the children ‘Tirolean songs’. It is significant that the boy’s grandmother, in Tolstoi’s narrative, refers to this German educator as diad’ka146 rather than guverner (governor) and that the latter role is taken on by a Frenchman who understands society’s cultural and linguistic priorities.147 * The teaching of French in Russia began much earlier than is sometimes supposed, but only in a milieu close to the tsar and in a school established in connection with Russian foreign affairs. French was introduced in a number of public educational institutions immediately after the death of Peter the Great, but it was not until the reign of Catherine II that it really took wing in them, whereas in aristocratic families it was successfully learned from at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. There is thus a certain imbalance between the public and private spheres. 145 Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgorukii, ‘Na konchinu Ivana Ivanovicha Shuvalova’. 146 Literally ‘old uncle’; the word denoted a retired soldier who helped to look after a boy in a noble household. 147 Otrochestvo, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 2, 23–24. On the demands that families in high society made of the governor, who himself needed to be a man of society and to possess society’s manners, see Berelowitch, ‘Les gouverneurs des Golitsyne à l’étranger’.

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In the course of the eighteenth century, French became an integral part of the identity of the Russian nobility, in a way that it was not for other social groups. The Russian bourgeoisie – if the term can be used in relation to eighteenth-century Russia – scarcely learned foreign languages at all during the eighteenth century. The clergy was conversant mainly with Latin and was only just beginning to learn French and German in the second half of the century. From this point of view, the contrast between the linguistic behaviour of different social groups was more marked than in many European countries. (One might cite the example of Sweden, where non-nobles made up more than half of the authors who used French in the second half of the eighteenth century.148) The contrast is also apparent when we consider knowledge of Latin: neglected by the Russian nobility, Latin became an important cultural marker for many raznochintsy and for the clergy. The nobility, for its part, gained access to the classical heritage simply by appropriating French, which had become a medium for that heritage. Thus, the struggle that was waged against Latin by theoreticians of noble education in the West was won in Russia without a battle. The rise of French in Russia occurred at the expense of German, which had had pride of place in the educational system until the beginning of the reign of Catherine II. And yet, if German ceded first position to French, it never disappeared from Russian education and continued to accompany French almost everywhere. In the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth, English and sometimes Italian were added to the list of foreign languages studied, which suggests some cultural reorientation. Thus, the Russian nobility was a multilingual social group rather than a group that was bilingual in French and Russian, as has often been claimed. It is true, though, that Russian and French were the main languages for noble communication and this fact was already reflected in the ways in which French was learned. At the same time, it became normal – and a growing sense of national consciousness helped in this respect – to learn one’s mother tongue, not only in public educational institutions, but also in noble families, which had not been the case in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Russian did not exist as an academic subject. Judging by the history of language learning in Russia, it is difficult seriously to claim that the ‘Gallicized’ Russian nobility was ignorant of Russian in the age of Catherine and beyond. French did prevail over Russian in the education of the high nobility under Alexander I and, as before, it was used as an intermediary language for a variety of subjects, especially literature, geography, and history, but 148 Östman, ‘French in Sweden in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, 283.

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sometimes also mathematics, botany, and so forth.149 So paradoxically, neither the efforts made during Catherine’s reign nor the patriotic upsurge during the Napoleonic Wars, and particularly at the time of the invasion of Russia by the Grande Armée, led to any significant improvement in the position of Russian in this milieu. Not that the Russian authorities abandoned their plan to alter the balance of languages in the education of the Russian nobility, quite the contrary. During the early part of the nineteenth century, they endeavoured to introduce Latin as a possible alternative to French, which increasingly came to be seen as a language capable of inspiring dangerous ideas within a section of the Russian nobility. Already in the reign of Alexander I, though, Russian nobles tried to avoid being educated in public institutions such as gymnasia, where Latin (which nobles did not regard as essential to their cultural identity) had a prominent place in the curriculum but where dancing (which nobles did consider an important ‘noble art’) was not taught. Thus, by the early nineteenth century the Russian nobility had absorbed an ideal of education which was not altogether consistent with imperial language policy and which deterred them from attending institutions where they would be exposed to values the government wished to promote. This was a perverse outcome, since the French style of education favoured by the nobility seemed to be a product of the westernization of Russian society that the monarchy itself had initiated. In the course of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, French would be learned in Russia according to two models. For nobles, the language was always inseparable from ideas associated with the culture of their own class, such as friendship, politeness, and style, whereas for the bourgeoisie it was more of a lingua franca, a professional language, and a language of culture. The broadening of the social base of those learning French led to the decline of Russian francophonie by the end of the nineteenth century even if, in privileged milieus, there was always a good command of it. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 sounded the death-knell of the teaching of French, both for the Russian elites, who left the country or were forced to adapt themselves to the new regime by 149 It is worth adding in this connection that it was often through French that Russians learned about the literatures of other modern countries, especially Britain, whose languages were less well known to Russian aristocrats than French or German in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like many nobles of his generation, Pushkin, for example, acquired knowledge of English literature, but almost entirely through French translations of it. The mediating role of French in helping Russians to become aware of other European cultures inevitably left a mark on the outlook of Russian nobles, on the set of concepts with which they operated, and, in the final analysis, on the language (Russian as well as French) that they used in speech and writing.

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abandoning part of their cultural capital, and for the Russian population as a whole, who turned towards German, which was judged more relevant in the new political situation.



Chapter 3 French at court

The discovery of sociability Russia, Isaiah Berlin once observed, ‘was a latecomer to Hegel’s feast of the spirit’. Whether ‘humane culture’, as Berlin contended, therefore ‘meant more to the Russians [than] to the blasé natives of the West’ is a moot point. We may safely say, though, that it is a distinctive feature of Russian cultural, literary, and intellectual history that the lateness of Russians’ arrival at the feast had at least one important chain of consequences.1 The achievements of many phases of European cultural and intellectual development became known in Russia in rapid succession, or more or less simultaneously, with the result that ideas could flourish there in conditions different from those in which they had originated and that they could bloom in unexpected configurations.2 This outcome is apparent in the history of the reception of ideas and literary movements and genres in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Russia. It may also be evident in the history of the reception of cultural models such as courtly behaviour and gallantry, the introduction of types of social gathering such as the salon and the literary circle, and the development of notions about sociability, manners, conduct, and taste. It is particularly worth bearing in mind that the conceptions of correct social behaviour adopted by the Francophone aristocracy, on the one hand, and pre-Romantic and Romantic notions about sensibility, the corruption of morals by modern civilization, and the importance of vernaculars to an ethnos, on the other, all arrived in Russia within a relatively short time-span. Belief in the importance of a certain type of sociability and a certain manner of conducting relations with one’s peers, we have already suggested, was a distinguishing trait of members of the Russian nobility, whose eighteenthcentury evolution as a westernized corporation we described in our survey of the historical contexts of Russian francophonie. This belief informed the upbringing that noble families provided for their children as they prepared 1 Something similar may no doubt be said of the history of other nations that lay outside the mainstream of European civilization at the time of the Renaissance and in the early modern period. 2 On Isaiah Berlin’s œuvre on Russian thought, see Offord, ‘Isaiah Berlin and the Russian Intelligentsia’, at the beginning of which this point is made.

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them, in ways discussed in our chapter on teaching and learning French, to play a role worthy of their station. It will help us to structure our discussion of the function of French in Russian high society, in our following chapter, if we continue to bear in mind the notions of sociability and social relations we have outlined. Here, though, in the first of two closely related chapters, we should dwell on language practice at court, for it was the court that furnished the principal model for aristocratic sociability and conduct. The generic model of aristocratic behaviour with which Russians belatedly became familiar in the eighteenth century was the man whose accomplishments and pleasing demeanour enabled him to win praise and favour in the refined society at or near a royal court. Baldassare Castiglione had already described this exemplar in the late Renaissance in his Book of the Courtier (1528), in which knowledge of many languages, especially French and Spanish, was highly recommended.3 Another sixteenth-century Italian gentleman, Stefano Guazzo, gave those who aspired to enter polite society copious advice on the art of conversation between nobles and non-nobles, young and old, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and children, and so forth. 4 Castiglione’s and Guazzo’s books were both translated from Italian into French soon after they had first been published,5 and in the course of the seventeenth century it was in France that the art of civilized sociability was most assiduously cultivated. The savoir vivre for which the French elite became renowned, particularly during the long reign of Louis XIV, entailed not only enjoyment of the comforts of life (les douceurs de la vie) but also gentleness in relations with one’s peers (la douceur envers le prochain). French authors themselves – notably Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Méré – held forth on the art of making oneself agreeable to others.6 The man frequenting polite society would require the ability to make conversation characterized by grace, refinement, gaiety, and wit. He would have to be able to engage his interlocutor and to improvise. He would need originality and an indefinable quality, a je ne sais quoi.7 This distinctive way of behaving, conversing, and mixing with 3 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 147. 4 Guazzo, La civil conversazione (1574), translated as The Civile Conversation. 5 For a list of the very numerous translations of The Courtier into other languages in the century after its first publication, see Burke, The Fortunes of the ‘Courtier’, Appendix 1. 6 Gombaud was the author of works on the ‘honnête homme’: see Gombaud, Œuvres posthumes de M. le chevalier de Méré. For a useful list of French works on civility, manners, conversation, gallantry, and the conduct of the honnête homme, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 32, n. 34. 7 We have drawn in this paragraph on Grechanaia’s characterization of the French social world in Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski; see especially 8–10, 34–35.

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one’s peers, being exclusive and difficult to acquire, represented a form of cultural capital that marked those who mastered it as socially superior. It also accorded considerable status to men in the civilian world, loosening the link between aristocratic prestige and military valour, and to women.8 The central role of women in the social world surrounding the early modern court is strikingly apparent in Castiglione’s Courtier, the third book of which is largely devoted to the grace that women bring to gentle society and the courteous attentiveness, or galanterie (gallantry), with which gentlemen should treat them. From the seventeenth century, moreover, women also began, in France, to play a prominent part as hostesses in the salon, an institution which functioned, Antoine Lilti has argued, as ‘a kind of interface between court society, elite networks, and the literary sphere’ and which was strongly shaped by the court’s values and practices.9 A typical salon would meet regularly at a private house, which became a semi-public arena where social boundaries were relatively porous, with members from various backgrounds. Its exclusive purpose was sociability, and conversation would be its main pastime, although other activities, such as recitals, lectures, and theatrical and musical performances, were common, depending on the interests of the hostess, or salonnière. Both men and women would attend, but it was the salonnière who brought participants together and set a distinctive tone.10 Over a long period from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, leading salonnières – the Marquise de Rambouillet, Mme de la Fayette, Mlle de Scudéry, the Marquise de Lambert, Mme de Tencin, Mme Geoffrin, Mme du Deffand, Mlle de Lespinasse, Mme Necker, Mme d’Épinay, and others – achieved renown by presiding over circles, above all in Paris, that were distinguished by their individual social mix and intellectual or artistic interests but united in their allegiance to aristocratic culture.11 We are not concerned here with the scholarly debate that has taken place about the part played by women in shaping the Enlightenment through their role as salon hostesses.12 Lilti’s distinction between the society of 8 Berelowitch shows that the great families looked for ease in society and knowledge of the world in candidates for the post of tutor to their children, because these were qualities they thought it necessary to instil in young aristocrats: see Berelowitch, ‘Les gouverneurs des Golitsyne à l’étranger’. 9 Lilti, ‘The Kingdom of Politesse’, 5, 11. 10 Seibert, ‘Der literarische Salon: ein Forschungsüberblick’. 11 For sketches of some of these salonnières, see Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 74–84. 12 Dena Goodman has claimed, for example, that a ‘cultural history of the French Enlightenment must also be a feminist history, because it challenges the conceptualization of intellectual activity as the product of masculine reason and male genius’ (ibidem, 2–3).

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aristocrats and the society of writers and intellectuals, though, contains insights that seem pertinent, mutatis mutandis, in the nineteenth-century Russian context.13 The fact that men of letters frequented the salons of eighteenth-century Paris, Lilti contends, does not prove that the salon was a central institution in the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’.14 It is more accurate, he argues, to look upon the salons as ‘aristocratic bastions’ that provided a social space for le monde or the beau monde. They were regions of a ‘kingdom of politesse’, rather than literary and intellectual venues. The philosophes were attracted to them because they wished to reach an audience beyond the world of learning, especially in elite society, and they were welcomed there provided that they conformed to aristocratic norms.15 Turning to the development of sociability in Russia, we find evidence of the induction of Russian noblemen into western social networks, and the usefulness of knowledge of French for that purpose, from as far back as the early eighteenth century. The diplomat Andrei Matveev, who represented Russia in Holland, for example, left some notes on a visit that he made to France in 1705–1706. Besides some remarks on France’s political structure, the French court, and so forth, Matveev commented on social life among the French aristocracy. He noticed that women played a major part in this social milieu and enjoyed equality with men in it. Plays were staged in aristocratic households and aristocrats themselves took part in them, not least in order to help them to improve their diction in the French language. People could circulate freely at social gatherings and could play cards or converse at them without attracting suspicion. 16 Another early Russian visitor to the West, Ivan Shcherbatov, revelled in the new opportunities for social intercourse which abounded in London, if only one had English or French. In the letters that he wrote in French as a pedagogical exercise to the teacher whom he found for himself, Shcherbatov described his entry into the public sphere of theatres, public houses, and coffee-houses, of which there were many around Charing Cross, where he had his lodgings, and several of which catered for London’s French community.17 13 See especially the last paragraph of this section. 14 Lilti is taking issue here with Dena Goodman. On his differences with Goodman, see especially his book Le monde des salons, 55–57. 15 Lilti, ‘The Kingdom of Politesse’, 1–3. 16 Matveev, Russkii diplomat vo Frantsii, 198. On Matveev’s discovery of social life in the West, see Haumant, La Culture française en Russie, 19. 17 RNB, Manuscripts Department, Hermitage Collection, French Manuscripts, no. 105, partially reproduced at https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Ivan%20

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The initial impulse for the development of European forms of sociability in Russia came from the sovereign himself. The interest of Peter the Great in promoting sociability among his nobles is indicated by an edict of 1718 laying down rules for the conduct of assamblei. These were gatherings that could take place for business and pleasure at private houses. People attending them (including women as well as men) were at liberty to talk about whatever they wanted and to come and go as they pleased. The edict explained the origin of the word assamblei and thus, implicitly, the origin – or at least, one of the origins – of this social innovation: ‘Assamblei is a French word, which cannot be expressed in Russian with a single word’.18 The edict on assamblei had nothing to say about foreign-language use, but since the participants in such gatherings included associates of Peter who did show an interest in learning French the introduction of the new social practices could not have been altogether unconnected with the development of new linguistic skills.19 In any case, the subject of foreign-language acquisition and use did receive considerable attention in a longer contemporaneous document, the so-called Honest Mirror of Youth, or Guide to Worldly Manners, a manual on polite behaviour which was printed on Peter’s orders in 1717, the year before the promulgation of the edict on ‘assemblies’.20 Designed for use in the upbringing of the young nobleman and noblewoman, The Honest Mirror contained injunctions about respecting and obeying parents, keeping promises, and behaving with modesty and restraint, exhortations not to belch or cough in people’s faces, tell lies, or speak ill of the dead, and advice on how to converse, sit at table, eat, blow one’s nose, and comport oneself in the street.21 The young nobleman was urged to become proficient in languages, Shcherbatov%20text.pdf. See also Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Teaching and Learning French in the Early Eighteenth Century’. 18 ‘O poriadke sobranii v chastnykh domakh, i o litsakh, kotorye v onykh uchastvovat’ mogut’ (26 November 1718): PSZ, no. 3246. In fact, such gatherings had been introduced in St Petersburg before this edict was issued (Komissarenko, Kul’turnye traditsii russkogo obshchestva, 128). On these social gatherings, see also Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 28–29. 19 On this development, see the first and third sections of Chapter 5 below. 20 Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo ili pokazanie k zhiteiskomu obkhozhdeniiu. See the description of this book in Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, vol. 2, 381–383. On possible sources for this book and its position vis-à-vis pre-Petrine edif icatory literature, see Bragon, ‘Traditsionnoe vospitanie i novyi etiket dlia molodezhi Petrovskoi epokhi’. The emergence of new forms of sociability in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was accompanied in Europe more generally by the appearance of such treatises on polite conduct: see Montandon (ed.), Bibliographie des traités de savoirs-vivre en Europe, and Carré, ‘Les traductions anglaises d’ouvrages français sur le comportement et l’éducation des femmes au XVIIIe siècle’. 21 See, e.g., Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo, §§ 1, 5, 7, 11, 47, 49 ff., 57, 58.

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as well as in horse-riding, dancing, and fencing.22 To this end, adolescents were instructed always to speak foreign languages among themselves. One practical advantage of knowing foreign languages was that nobles would be able to conceal their thoughts from servants. Another was that they would be able to differentiate themselves from ‘ignorant blockheads’.23 However, the manual also introduced the notion of the blagochestnyi kavaler, a Russian prototype of the honnête homme, who should be humble, polite, and capable of making good conversation.24 Ability to speak foreign languages was part of this set of skills, mastery of which in turn equipped the young nobleman to become a courtier.25 A further article in the manual indicated the high value attached to linguistic attainment: Adolescents who have come from foreign regions and have learnt languages at great expense, they should imitate and try not to forget them but to become more prof icient in them by reading useful books and mixing with others and sometimes writing and composing [komponovat’] something in them, so as not to forget the languages.26

It was only with the ascendancy of the French cultural model in the postPetrine era, though, that Russians became fully acquainted with the notion of gallantry. ‘Love’, Zhivov wittily observed, ‘appeared in Russia quite late, somewhere around the end of the seventeenth century, and at first it had virtually no voice or words with which to express itself’. That did not mean, Zhivov hastened to add, that ‘up until then Russians had lived like wild animals and that there had been no love among them’, but that ‘there was no cultural tradition of amorous relationships or the words to go with them: the Russians had no troubadours, no Petrarch, not even a Boccaccio’. When love did ‘invade public space’, in the Petrine age, ‘the art of courtship and gallant dialogue was almost entirely lacking’ and it needed to be quickly learnt, for love, it now turned out, was a skill as well as a feeling.27 The main teachers of this skill, as of so many other skills in Europe at this time, were the French, and translations from French therefore became the main teaching aids. The most important of these were Paul Tallemant’s allegorical novel Journey to the Island of Love (1663), which was published in Trediakovskii’s translation 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ibidem, § 18. Ibidem, § 27. On formation of the honnête homme in Russia, see the last section of Chapter 2 above. Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo, § 18. Ibidem, § 30. Zhivov, ‘Love à la mode’, 214.

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in 1730, and Jean-François Dreux du Radier’s Dictionary of Love (1741), which was revised by Aleksandr Khrapovitskii and published in a Russian version in 1768.28 By painstakingly comparing Trediakovskii’s and Khrapovitskii’s texts, which record different stages in the development of gallant language in Russia, Zhivov has illustrated the effect of Europeanization in the sphere of social relations there.29 Post-Petrine Russia also embraced French salon culture, though not for a long while after Peter’s death, despite Peter’s encouragement of western sociability. Extended circles of friends did begin to meet in the second half of the century for the sake of being sociable.30 Already in the early part of the reign of Catherine II, for example, Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov held social gatherings in his palatial house on Nevskii Prospekt, where Russian and foreign guests, including men of letters, discussed and heard addresses in French on learned topics and enjoyed lavish hospitality.31 However, such gatherings were not salons in the proper sense, for women did not take part in them, it seems, or at least women were certainly not the centre of attention at them.32 It is only from the beginning of the nineteenth century that the salon as a social and cultural venue of the sort long known in France truly established itself in Russia. Notable salonnières abounded: Sof’ia Bobrinskaia, Avdot’ia Elagina née Iushkova (Kireevskaia during her first marriage), Aleksandra Khvostova (a niece of 28 Tallemant [also known as Tallement], Voyage de l’isle d’amour, translated by Trediakovskii as Ezda v ostrov liubvi; Dreux du Radier, Dictionnaire d’amour, translated by Khrapovitskii as Liubovnyi leksikon. 29 Zhivov, ‘Love à la mode’. On Khrapovitskii’s language in his translation of du Radier, see also Kochetkova, ‘Kniga Dre diu Rad’e Dictionnaire d’Amour v russkom perevode’. Kochetkova stresses that Khrapovitskii’s written Russian was close to spoken Russian and that in this respect Khrapovitskii was ahead of his time (825). Although Kochetkova does not make the point explicitly, we may suppose that Khrapovitskii was influenced by the French original he was translating, since the written language in France was closer to the spoken language than written Russian was to spoken Russian in Khrapovitskii’s time and since du Radier’s work was indeed written in a language close to spoken French. However, in the spirit of the Catherinian age, Khrapovitskii inserted some rather Gallophobic passages in his translation, criticizing the overwhelming cultural influence of France in Russia (827–828). Kochetkova draws attention to the seeming paradox that criticism of Russians’ submission to French cultural influence was expressed through a translation of a French book (829). 30 Bernstein, ‘Women on the Verge of a New Language’, 209. See also Rosslyn, ‘Making their Way into Print’, 412. 31 See Rjéoutski and Somov, ‘Language Use among the Russian Aristocracy’, 69–70. 32 It may be that the gatherings at Stroganov’s house in Paris during the second of his long sojourns in the French-speaking world were nearer to what we normally understand as a salon, but we have little information on them.

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the poet Kheraskov, who hosted a St Petersburg salon attended by Joseph de Maistre, the Piedmontese ambassador to Russia from 1803 to 1817), Evdokiia Rostopchina (wife of one of the sons of Fedor Rostopchin), and Zinaida Volkonskaia.33 Aleksandra Rosset, on whose memoirs we draw in the following section, was hostess of a salon frequented by Pushkin, Viazemskii, Gogol’, and Lermontov.34 There may have been some linguistic difference between ‘aristocratic’ salons and ‘literary’ salons (for example, those hosted by the poets Anton Del’vig and Vasilii Zhukovskii and the prose writer Vladimir Odoevskii). (Not that it is easy to establish a clear borderline between the two types; after all, some literary salons were organized by noblemen and noblewomen who were close to the court and the aristocracy.) At any rate, the primary language of conversation in many salons, especially salons with literary leanings (such as those hosted by Del’vig, Ekaterina Karamzina (Karamzin’s second wife), and Smirnova-Rosset) was not French but Russian.35 Adoption of the French language in the salon, as well as the practices of the French model of the institution, was encouraged by the international nature of society in St Petersburg, the seat of the empire’s court and its diplomatic and cultural centre, and also by the increased presence of French nobles in Russia as they fled from France after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789. In fact, some Russian salonnières were the wives of French émigrés. Agrafena Bibikova, for instance, whose late eighteenthcentury salon was frequented by diplomats, including the Comte de Ségur and the Comte de Coblenz, was married to Jean-François de Ribeaupierre, who had come to Russia in the 1770s and served as adjutant to Catherine’s favourite, Grigorii Potemkin. Aleksandra Kozitskaia, who hosted an influential literary salon in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, was the wife of Count Jean-François-Charles de Laval de La Loubrerie.36 Russian salonnières, according to contemporary accounts, tried to carry on the tradition of politesse which the revolution had supposedly destroyed in France, while 33 On Volkonskaia’s salon, see Saikina, Moskovskii literaturnyi salon kniagini Zinaidy Volkonskoi. On Volkonskaia’s prose fiction, see the last section of Chapter 6 below. 34 Mézin and Rjéoutski (eds), Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières, vol. 2, 725. Not all Russian salons, it should be noted, were presided over by aristocratic women: Pushkin’s father, for example, hosted a literary salon that was visited by Joseph de Maistre. 35 Bunturi, ‘Peterburgskii literaturnyi salon v russkoi kul’ture pervoi treti XIX veka’. The question of language use in Russian salons has not been much investigated to date; see, though, the doctoral thesis by Elena Palii, ‘Salon kak fenomen kul’tury Rossii XIX veka’, and idem, ‘Russkaia salonnaia kul’tura XIX veka’, as well as the contribution by Bunturi that we have just cited. 36 Mézin and Rjéoutski (eds), Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières, vol. 2, 482–483.

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French émigrés, for their part, found that the salon offered an opportunity to continue the noble way of life to which they had been accustomed.37 Two further points need to be made to complete our sketch of the context in which French became the primary language of the court and aristocratic society in Russia. First, together with the models of court life and sociability that Russia adopted in the eighteenth century there also came a powerful tradition of opposition to those models. As Peter Burke points out, a critique of Castiglione, in which Northern European unease about the culture of performance was pronounced, can be traced back to the sixteenth century.38 This critical tradition became well established in France, where the court’s vices were particularly associated with Italy and where some writers complained about the Italianization of the French language. It was probably introduced into Russia through French polemical or pedagogical writings such as Bellegarde’s Perfect Education (1710), which appeared in a Russian translation that was published in 1747 and republished in 1759 and again in 1775. Bellegarde does not reject the court as an institution, but he does warn his young readers against vices thought to be characteristic of courts, such as intriguing and insincerity.39 We do not know whether the dramatist Fonvizin was aware of Bellegarde’s work, but he too expressed loathing of the flattering courtier through Starodum, his main mouthpiece in his play The Minor (1782). 40 A similar distaste for court life is implicit in the selection of texts in a miscellany of French writings assembled some time before 1783 by a Russian whose identity we do not know. Here the court is depicted, through excerpts from La Bruyere’s Characters, a letter addressed to Comte de Bussy, and a sonnet by an anonymous author, as a wretched world of flattery, falsehood, and deception, ‘a country where joys are visible but false, and sorrows hidden but real’. 41 As for the salon, its manners – as a form of stylized behaviour practised by a privileged group – became a target both for more self-critical members of elites themselves and for outsiders who resented this exclusive set or who simply made cultural or literary capital of their own out of scorning it. Molière, for instance, is already ridiculing cultural pretentiousness (préciosité) in several of his comedies in the second half of the seventeenth 37 Chistova, ‘Pushkin v salone Avdot’i Golitsynoi’, 190. 38 Burke, The Fortunes of the ‘Courtier’, 99–116, especially 113–115. 39 Bellegarde, L’éducation parfaite, 43–44. 40 See especially Act V, Scene 1 of the play, in Fonvizin, SS, vol. 1, 167–169. On the influence of Fénelon, Stoicism, and Confucianism on Fonvizin, see Offord, ‘Denis Fonvizin and the Concept of Nobility’, 26–30. 41 RGB, f. 183, op. 1, d. 1482. The quotation from La Bruyère is on fol. 46 v.

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century. 42 However, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who gave the greatest impetus to criticism of salon society in the middle of the eighteenth century through his discourses on the corruption of morals and on inequality. 43 We shall repeatedly encounter this tradition of censure of polite society in works of classical Russian literature up to two centuries after Molière. Krylov, for example, adapted one of Moliere’s plays for this purpose in his one-act comedy A Lesson for Daughters (1807), as D. Brian Kim has shown. By boldly rewriting Molière’s Affected Young Ladies, Krylov exhorts Russians of the Napoleonic period not to succumb to the sort of Gallomania that has induced the two young sisters whom he portrays to fall in love with a servant because of his Gallicized appearance and his (unsuccessful) attempts to express himself in French.44 The high value attached to feeling and naturalness by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian writers who were inspired by the Sentimentalist and Romantic movements also encouraged the representation of the beau monde, with its formality and etiquette, as hypocritical and shallow. These writers would have readily agreed with the moral with which Molière’s Affected Young Ladies ends: ‘On n’aime ici que la vaine apparence’ (Vain appearances are all that people love here). 45 Secondly, bearing in mind Lilti’s distinction between the aristocratic social arena of the Parisian salon and the literary and intellectual arena of the ‘Republic of Letters’, we should beware of equating the social life of the aristocratic drawing-room, in which women were centres of attention, with the entirely male literary societies or political circles that sprang up in the Alexandrine age. Still less should we confuse the noble salon or soirée with the circles frequented by writers, critics, and the embryonic intelligentsia that emerged during the reign of Nicholas I, especially in the 1840s. The latter gatherings were venues not for polite, uncontroversial conversation but for impassioned debate about philosophy, literature, and the so-called ‘accursed questions’ (prokliatye voprosy), such as the existence of God and national identity and destiny. Discussions at them, 42 Les précieuses ridicules (first performed in Paris in 1659), L’école des femmes (1662), and Les femmes savantes (1672). 43 J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) and Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755); see Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 35–36, 39, 54–56. 44 Molière, Les précieuses ridicules, adapted by Krylov as Urok dochkam: see Kim, ‘Seduction, Subterfuge, Subversion’. 45 On the Russian literary critique of high society, see especially Chapters 8 and 9 below, although the subject is also broached in our discussion of women’s prose fiction in French in the last section of Chapter 6 below.

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which could go on long into the night, were increasingly conducted in Russian, because the literary and intellectual communities – although they did contain many nobles – were losing the stamp of aristocratic culture or, to put it another way, the connection between belles-lettres and mondanité was weakening. In any case, influential actors who entered the intelligentsia in the age of Nicholas, as we have pointed out, 46 were of non-noble origin, had not been educated by foreign tutors and governesses, and either were not Francophone or had a limited command of French. Women, incidentally, played a much more peripheral role in these circles than they did in the aristocratic drawing-room, or were altogether absent from them.

French as a sign of the status of the Russian court For the Romanovs, as for the Habsburgs, Lieven has pointed out, the establishment and maintenance of their empire as a European great power was ‘the single overriding priority’: their ‘sense of pride, self-image and legitimacy was linked absolutely and inescapably to the great power status of their dynastic empires’.47 For a power situated on Europe’s periphery and perceived in a negative way by those representatives of the continent’s cultural centres who occasionally visited it, knowledge of foreign languages and possession of a lingua franca were pre-requisites for success in this political competition and in the cultural diplomacy which played an important part in such competition. As a matter of fact, Russia’s connections with foreign courts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were predominantly with the German world rather than with France. 48 (The influence of this world is reflected in the fact that the Russian terminology for court roles was of German origin. 49) However, from around the middle of the eighteenth century, it was the then prevailing French cultural model of polite society that was embraced by the Russian court (as it had been by German courts). The example set by the court was followed by the metropolitan aristocracy,

46 See the last section of Chapter 1 above. 47 Lieven, Empire, 159. 48 We provide some examples in the penultimate section of this chapter. 49 Within the second level of the Table of Ranks, for example, ober-kamerger, ober-gofmarshal, ober-shtal’meister, ober-egermeister, ober-gofmeister, ober-shenk, ober-tseremoniimeister, oberforshneider, and, at lower levels, kamerger, kamer-iunker, kamer-fur’er, kamerdiner, mundshenk, tafel’deker, konditer, and so forth.

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and gradually French culture spread from St Petersburg and Moscow through the nobility more generally.50 It was in the reign of Peter’s daughter Elizabeth, it will be recalled, that French cultural influence began to prevail at the Russian court and French visitors to St Petersburg started to take note of Russian prowess in the French language.51 One important instrument in the cultural and linguistic Gallicization of Elizabeth’s court was the French theatre troupe that took up residence in St Petersburg in the 1740s. French actors had started to appear in Russia as early as the 1720s, at the court and elsewhere, but there was no permanent troupe in the country at that stage. In the 1730s, a troupe of Italian comedians and actors appeared, and there was also a German troupe, but it was dismissed after the death of the Empress Anna. Since the repertoire of the German troupe had consisted largely of French plays, we may assume that when an invitation was extended to the French troupe from Kassel, at the beginning of the 1740s, it was because the court wished to see French plays performed in French. The invitation to the Kassel troupe was formally issued in the reign of Elizabeth, who, besides being Francophile herself, had benefited from the support of French diplomats at the time of the coup d’état that brought her to power in 1741, but the decision to issue it had already been taken by Löwenwolde, the Grand Marshal of the Russian court, before the coup. Löwenwolde’s personal tastes probably played a part in this decision. However, as Alexeï Evstratov has recently argued in his authoritative study of the Francophone court theatre in Russia, the desire to have a French troupe in residence in St Petersburg no doubt reflected a broad political aim as well.52 French theatre troupes, Evstratov points out, had begun to tour in foreign countries from as early as the 1670s, and the number of them permanently abroad increased around the beginning of the eighteenth century. By the end of the 1730s, five European courts – those at Brussels, Hanover, The Hague, Mannheim, and Munich – had a French troupe in residence.53 The Russian court, then, was resolving to follow a developing trend in cultural politics at quite an early stage, before other major European courts had begun to host French troupes. The Saxon ambassador, who had previously acted as 50 The pioneering work on the spread of French culture in Russia, La Culture française en Russie by Émile Haumant, still deserves attention, even though it was written over a hundred years ago. 51 See the third section of Chapter 1 above. 52 In this discussion of French theatre at the Russian court, we have drawn heavily on Evstratov’s monograph, Les Spectacles francophones à la cour de Russie. 53 Ibidem, 30, 34.

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an intermediary in the recruitment of Italian actors for the Russian court, thought that the Russian initiative sprang from the empress’s wish ‘to make her court and her state shine’.54 In his dedicatory epistle to his play The Orphan of China (1753), Voltaire clearly expressed his view of the significance of the spread of the French theatre in Europe: So we see that no sooner had Peter the Great brought orderly government to Russia and built St Petersburg than theatres were set up there. The better Germany has become, the more we have seen it adopt our plays. The few countries in which they have not been received during the past century have not joined the ranks of civilized countries.55

The last phrase speaks volumes about the relationship that became fixed in the public consciousness between theatre, especially French theatre, and a monarch’s stature. The éclat of a court and its ‘civilized’ character, to which the presence of French theatre contributed, were trump cards when a monarch’s prestige was being considered and a country’s image was being constructed. Louis XIV recognized the value of such cultural diplomacy: expenditure on such things ‘might seem unnecessary’, he observed, but in fact it made ‘a very advantageous impression of magnificence, power, wealth, and grandeur’ on foreigners.56 That courts should compete with one another, moreover, seemed in eighteenth-century Europe a perfectly logical thing. Travellers and diplomats compared courts, and monarchs and courtiers cared about the pre-eminence of their own. The Empress Anna was voicing a hope, or an anxiety, typical of rulers of her time when, in the 1730s, she asked a French officer who was a prisoner of war whether he found her court splendid and whether the court of France was more so.57 Thus the Russian court, by the mid-eighteenth century, was seeking to surpass the model of the premier court in Europe, the court at Versailles. It was not enough, though, to dazzle foreigners with the material magnificence of the court; it was also necessary for the court to show refinement, and the staging of French theatre, which was accessible to all distinguished foreigners, was at that time the best means of doing so. When, in 1763, Voltaire’s Zaire was performed at the Russian court theatre by courtiers themselves, and, what is more, in French, the British ambassador, 54 55 56 57

Quoted by Evstratov, ibidem, 34–35. Quoted by Evstratov, ibidem, 57. Quoted by Evstratov, ibidem, 58. Ibidem, 59.

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the Earl of Buckinghamshire, provided a long description of the occasion in a dispatch and ended with the following passage: The elegance and magnificence of the whole was such that what may appear a laboured description is but barely doing justice to it. When we consider how very few years have elapsed since the politer arts were first introduced into this country, and how considerable a part of that time they have been but little cultivated, it will appear very extraordinary that a performance of the kind can have been planned and executed in a few weeks.58

Even if the aim of these words was to flatter Catherine II, who, as the ambassador well knew, read the correspondence of foreign diplomats, nonetheless they clearly expressed the connection in contemporary minds between the presence of a theatre and the ‘civilized’ character of a court. Not that foreigners were the only people at whom performances were aimed. Russians themselves, both the court and ‘the city’, were also part of the theatre-going public. They too were supposed to associate the court and monarch with magnificence and refinement, and to assimilate the models of behaviour that the theatre furnished, for the theatre, according to the ideas of Baron Jakob Bielfeld, one of Catherine’s favourite authors, was a civilizing entertainment. The Francophone court theatre, then, played an important part in the projection of royal power, to which Richard Wortman has devoted a classic study. That is not to say that this particular cultural importation derived its symbolic potency from its alien character and that it therefore exemplified the practice that Wortman describes of associating ‘the ruler and the elite with foreign images of political power’.59 In this instance, we believe, the potency of the innovation lay primarily in its symbolic alignment of the Russian court with European courts and in a desire to measure Russia against European competitors – an aspiration to which we shall return when we come to consider early Russian writing in French and the concurrent development of a literature in Russian. In 1756, some fifteen years after the arrival of a resident French troupe at the Russian court, a Russian troupe appeared there. This development reflected the growing belief that Russian too was a language capable of bearing a literature of quality and it raised the vernacular to the status of a language that could also be considered among the most ‘civilized’. In 58 Quoted by Evstratov, ibidem, 79–80. 59 See Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1–2.

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fact, though, the Russian troupe was much less generously funded than the French troupe and the Russian court theatre lacked the prestige enjoyed by its French counterpart. The theatre management even went so far as to withhold information about the order of the performances when a Russian comedy and a French comic opera were being staged on the same evening, so that the auditorium would not empty at times when the Russian troupe was performing. Not that the French troupe was exempt from criticism by foreign visitors to St Petersburg. Russians apparently took such criticism badly, for the understandable reason that any comments which seemed to put the leading troupe of the Russian court on a par with a provincial French troupe could be construed as demeaning to the court itself.60 French cultural and linguistic influence was consolidated at court during the age of Catherine, although Catherine herself was by no means Francophile. As the daughter of a German prince, she learned French as a child from her Huguenot governess, Mlle Cardel, before coming to Russia in 1744, at the age of fourteen. Her knowledge of French, as Georges Dulac has demonstrated in a detailed examination of her correspondence with Friedrich Melchior Grimm, to whom she was very close, was profound. She had read widely in French literature (including the writings of authors who wrote before the classical age) and was well-versed in the language of the theatre. She could deploy arcane and archaic vocabulary, colourful proverbs, and idiomatic expressions, had a sensitivity to register that enabled her to use the language playfully, and was able to coin words herself for expressive or humorous effect.61 Catherine’s mastery of French was an important asset in her campaign to establish Russia as a European power whose credentials for respect were cultural as well as military. The capacity of the court to attract distinguished visitors (Grimm, the Prince de Ligne, Gustav III of Sweden, Francophone diplomats, and so forth) depended on the status of St Petersburg as a European cultural centre,62 and that status in turn depended on the ability 60 Evstratov, Les Spectacles francophones à la cour de Russie, 49–55. 61 Dulac, ‘The Use of French by Catherine II in her Letters to Friedrich Melchior Grimm’, 51–56. Grechanaia points out that Catherine’s written French, formed by Huguenot governesses who may have preserved late seventeenth-century usage, had a slightly archaic flavour and that her style, according to de Ligne, had ‘more clarity than lightness’ (Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 114). 62 Even the staging of plays by pupils at the Smolny Institute could be used to underline this status. The empress often took high-ranking guests, such as Gustav III, to the institute when plays were performed in French there, thus showing foreigners the best side of the Russian educational system and displaying Catherine’s personal pedagogical mission. On the function of French as a vehicle for cultural propaganda, see Chapter 7.

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of those who inhabited it to speak excellent French. Catherine herself set an example, corresponding in French with other sovereigns (Frederick II, Gustav III, and Maria Theresa of Austria), men of letters (d’Alembert, Buffon, Diderot, Marmontel, and Voltaire), and well-known social figures, such as de Ligne and Mme Geoffrin, whom Catherine admired.63 Indeed, Catherine liked to see herself as a salonnière. (She herself, incidentally, served as a model for Mme Necker, who praised Catherine for having no taste for pleasure!)64 Catherine was also well aware of what we might call the propagandistic value of her French correspondence, especially her correspondence with Voltaire.65 Both she and Voltaire realized that their letters soon became widely known among European intellectuals and took this fact into account when framing their communications. In this respect, there is a sharp contrast between this correspondence and Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm, which was much less public and much more intimate.66 It is no coincidence, for instance, that Catherine’s letters to Voltaire are better written and contain fewer mistakes than her letters to Grimm: her aim in them was to present herself as an exemplar of the enlightened sovereign.67

French as a court language under Catherine II We can gain a good insight into the use of French as a spoken language at the Russian court, from the age of Catherine onwards, from the memoirs of courtiers, who often quoted what they heard there. Of course, we need to treat this information with caution, like any evidence that comes to us from memoir literature. However, it is hardly likely that the memoirists wrote down utterances in French if in fact they were produced in Russian, even if we may question the accuracy of some of the utterances that are quoted. One such source which sheds light on the use of French at court is the diary of the aforementioned Khrapovitskii, who served as Catherine’s

63 The drafts of many of Catherine’s letters to such personalities are kept in Russian archives, e.g. RGADA, f. 5, op. 1, dd. 145, 152–154, 156, 157, 158, etc. Our references here are drawn from Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières, ed. by Dulac and Karp, vol. 1, 27, and the RGADA catalogue. 64 Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 82. 65 See [Catherine and Voltaire], Voltaire – Catherine II. 66 [Catherine and Grimm], Catherine II de Russie – Friedrich Melchior Grimm. 67 For fuller discussion of Catherine’s aptitude as a propagandist, see the second section of Chapter 7 below.

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secretary of state.68 Judging by this diary, Catherine quite often addressed her courtiers of Russian origin in French. In June 1785, for example, she responded with the following witticism to a remark by Lev Naryshkin, who had opined that the language of parrots was just as complex as human language: ‘Je ne savois pas cela; je donnerais à la Perruche la survivance de votre charge!’ (I didn’t know that; I’ll give the parrot this post when you die).69 Indeed, one has the impression that conversations in the presence of courtiers quite often took place entirely in French. With reference to September 1789, for example, Khrapovitskii writes: while the Empress was dressing, Lev Naryshkin spoke about the books Vie privée d’Antoinette de France [the private life of Marie Antoinette of France] and l’histoire de la Bastille [the history of the Bastille] which had just come out [and Catherine said]: ‘Ce sont des libelles et je ne les souffre jamais [They are libels and I can’t abide them]’.70

Catherine frequently addressed Khrapovitskii himself in French as well. Thus, in September 1786, she said as she walked past him: ‘Bonjour, Monsieur. Il fait bien froid’ (Good day, Sir. It really is cold)71 and, on another occasion, ‘Je vous fatigue trop, je ne vous ménage guère’ (I tire you out too much, I don’t take good enough care of you).72 There are a great many such instances, and we see from them that French was an everyday means of communication between the empress and her secretary of state.73 Khrapovitskii commonly spoke to Catherine in French too: ‘I said’, he writes for instance, ‘C’est un dessein prémédité’ (It’s a deliberate plan),74 or again, ‘I said que les circonstances s’eclairciront et la diète de Stockholm fera voir ce, qu’il faut faire’ (that circumstances will become clearer and the diet in Stockholm will make it 68 Khrapovitskii, Pamiatnye zapiski A.V. Khrapovitskogo. We give priority to this work in this section because it appears to serve as a relatively full and illuminating source of information on Catherine’s spoken usage. It should be borne in mind, though, that the period to which Khrapovitskii’s diary relates is the latter part of Catherine’s reign, and we cannot rule out the possibility that language practice at court and Catherine’s own linguistic habits changed over the decades during which she was on the throne. A thorough study of Catherine’s language use and linguistic competencies would need to consider this possibility, as well as drawing on a much wider range of sources than we use here. 69 Ibidem, 6. 70 Ibidem, 207. 71 Ibidem, 14. 72 Ibidem, 93. 73 Ibidem, 29, 46, 53, 77, etc. 74 Ibidem, 120.

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obvious what must be done).75 Or take the following exchange about events in Paris in 1789: ‘I [said]: “c’est une véritable Anarchie” [it’s absolute anarchy]. “Yes! ils sont capables de pendre leur Roi à la lanterne, c’est affreux” [they are capable of hanging their King from a lamppost, it’s shocking].’76 At the same, it seems clear from Khrapovitskii’s diary that Catherine often had recourse to Russian and that code-switching was a common phenomenon in her speech. Reacting to news of murders in Little Russia in April 1787, the empress said: ‘Cela est affreux [That’s shocking]. A lot has to do with bad government.’77 There are instances of even more complicated language-mixing, although it is difficult, we repeat, to be sure how reliable Khrapovitskii’s records are. Take, for example, the following note of November 1788 about Catherine’s comments on the madness of the British king: ‘I think on peut être étouffé [one may find it suffocating], because it’s intolerable to be with mad people; I experienced that with Prince Orlov; it’s excruciating for a sensitive person: on pourra devenir fou [one could go mad oneself]’.78 The question therefore arises whether Catherine’s language choice was determined by subject-matter or context. We may suspect the operation of certain factors, conscious or sub-conscious, which can often be seen also to affect language choice and code-switching in the speech and writing of other Franco-Russian bilinguals.79 At the same time, we come across instances where no hard-and-fast rules seem to apply or where we can adduce no very clear reason for the choice made other than personal preference, mood, or whim, or the ultimate status of one language or another in the individual’s linguistic repertoire. French tends to be used by Catherine, it seems, when affairs of state are being discussed, especially foreign affairs.80 This is the domain in which French most commonly occurs in Khrapovitskii’s diary (and after all, dealing with affairs of state was Khrapovitskii’s principal responsibility). French occurs too in discussion of court affairs and of other people, for example 75 Ibidem, 156; see also 157, 167. 76 Ibidem, 206. 77 Ibidem, 27. 78 Ibidem, 141. It is possible that Khrapovitskii was ‘translating’ parts of Catherine’s utterances into Russian without indicating the fact. 79 See especially the second section of Chapter 6 below for examples in letters of members of the Golitsyn and Vorontsov clans. 80 Khrapovitskii, Pamiatnye zapiski, 80, 82, 84, 90–92, 133, 134, 150, 154, 176, 194, 200, 202, etc. In some cases, Khrapovitskii even provides in their entirety Catherine’s replies in French to officials’ reports (e.g. 132). He also quite often gives the replies in French that Catherine sent to her Western European correspondents (e.g. 160) and notes and letters to diplomatic representatives of the Russian Empire (e.g. 164, 173, 174, etc.).

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the poet Derzhavin: ‘It is difficult for Her Majesty to hold it against the author of the ode for writing “Felitsa”, cela le consolera [that will console him]. I reported Derzhavin’s gratitude – on peut lui trouver une place [a place can be found for him]’.81 (The phrases in French evidently convey the words spoken by the empress herself here.) French is also used, as one might expect,82 in discussion of works of literature or scholarship, for example a dictionary compiled by Theodor Janković de Mirijevo: ‘“Cela montrera la filiation des mots [This will show the filiation of words]”. I [said]: “de cette filiation des langues s’ensuivra la derivation des peuples, engloutis par les temps fabuleux [when this filiation of languages is established we shall also understand the derivation of peoples who have been swallowed up by the times of which fables tell]”.’83 French is the vehicle for medical subject-matter as well (as we repeatedly find in records of the language use of Franco-Russian bilinguals in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia).84 Thus Catherine comments, speaking about her health: ‘on n’a plus de barre sur la poitrine’ (the tightness in my chest has gone now) and ‘je suis plus ramassée’ (I’ve picked up a bit).85 Judging by the evidence in Khrapovitskii’s diary, Catherine is also particularly inclined to resort to French when it offers some set locution that enables her to express an idea in a striking way.86 Take the following cases (bearing in mind, though, that it is always possible that Khrapovitskii himself is choosing which expressions to record in French): ‘je mettrais la main au feu’ (I would swear [to it]; literally ‘I would put my hand in the fire’), ‘qui s’excuse s’accuse’ (he who apologizes accuses himself), and ‘payer les pots cassés’ (pay the piper; literally ‘pay for the broken pots’).87 French is the medium, moreover, for witty or derogatory remarks about 81 Ibidem, 198. ‘Felitsa’ was a daringly light-hearted ode that Derzhavin wrote in praise of Catherine. 82 It is possible, as Angelina Vacheva has suggested to us, that the use of terminology that was available in French but not yet established in Russian was a factor, or even the decisive factor, in choice of language in this sort of instance. 83 Khrapovitskii, Pamiatnye zapiski, 210. 84 See the second section of Chapter 6 for a further example, from the correspondence of Semen Vorontsov in the 1760s. 85 Khrapovitskii, Pamiatnye zapiski, 77, 92. Medicine is another f ield (like literary and intellectual life) in which French provided terminology and phraseology in a field of foreign knowledge that Russia was beginning to receive in the eighteenth century. In any case, most medical practitioners in Russia at this time were foreign. 86 We are grateful to Angelina Vacheva for pointing out to us that Catherine uses German phrases in the same way in letters written to Grimm in French, and that these letters were often constructed as if they were part of a conversation. 87 Khrapovitskii, Pamiatnye zapiski, 47, 61, 133.

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other people. In December 1789, for example, we find the following entry in Khrapovitskii’s diary: ‘Her Majesty didn’t speak well of Alekseev, the governor of Astrakhan’: ‘Il va se casser le nez’ (He’s going to come a cropper; literally ‘He’s going to get his nose broken’).88 Again, apropos of the war of 1788–1790 with Sweden, Catherine quips: ‘Le roi de S. est enfuit comme un chien qu’on chasse de la cuisine, les oreilles pendantes et la queue entre les jambes’ (The king of Sweden ran away like a dog being chased out of the kitchen, ears down and tail between his legs).89 Speaking around the same time about the King of Prussia, she says: ‘Il est fait pour être mené’ (He was made to be led).90 However, it is not always a desire to express herself vividly that prompts Catherine to opt for French. When she remarks of Novikov that ‘C’est un fanatique’ (He’s a fanatic),91 for instance, she may be using French simply because she feels that the loanword fanatik had not yet taken root in Russian.92 Khrapovitskii’s diary, then, leads us to believe that Catherine used French every day and in many different situations, especially when certain types of subject-matter were being discussed or for certain types of remark. That said, it is not always easy to find an explanation for Catherine’s preference for French over Russian other than that at some level French seemed to her more like her native language than Russian, or even German, or simply that French was for some reason uppermost in her mind at a particular moment.93 No doubt Catherine could in most cases have expressed an idea in Russian just as well as in French, and her recourse to French in straightforward utterances cannot plausibly be linked to linguistic competence. Nor does context invariably help us to explain the choice. Often the phrases that Khrapovitskii records in French were spoken when only he was present, and so there was no need for Catherine or for him to use French as a society language, the language of a court displaying itself, or a lingua franca which foreign guests could understand. Thus, when the death of Admiral Greig prompts her to lament in October 1788 that ‘C’est une grande perte, c’est 88 Ibidem, 45. 89 Ibidem, 203. 90 Ibidem, 122. 91 Ibidem, 121. 92 It was not until the early nineteenth century that this word began to appear in dictionaries of the Russian language: see Etimologicheskii slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo iazyka, compiled by Shaposhnikov, vol. 2, 474. 93 That is to say, for example, if she had just been reading a French book or reading or writing a letter in French. Here, perhaps, we are merely describing linguistic behaviour that is typical of people with great facility in more than one language.

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une perte pour l’état’ (It’s a great loss, it’s a loss for the state),94 the most compelling explanation for her choice of French might be the simplest: French is the language that comes most readily to her at that moment, for it was effectively her mother tongue. Indeed, there is evidence that Catherine herself viewed it as such. She was proud of the fact that she spoke and wrote French fluently at a very young age (the age of three, she claimed!) and constantly flaunted her knowledge of it. Even when she wrote to her father as she was preparing for her religious conversion, she composed two letters in French and only one in German.95 She wrote many works in French, besides her famous Instruction, her autobiography,96 and the correspondence that she conducted in French with the numerous individuals we have mentioned above. These works included notes on a broad range of subjects, such as law, finance, and administration.97 French was a family language for her too, and a significant part of her correspondence with her son, the future Emperor Paul I, and her daughter-in-law was conducted in it.98 It is tempting, finally, to suggest that the pre-eminence of French in the linguistic repertoire of a sovereign who ruled Russia for over 34 years consolidated the position of this language there, both as a ‘society’ language and a language of intimacy among the aristocracy who were affected by court culture. In addition to Khrapovitskii’s diary, we may draw on the equally wellknown notes of Semen Poroshin, who was one of the tutors of Catherine’s son, the Grand Duke Paul. Poroshin’s notes are even more detailed than Khrapovitskii’s, but Poroshin had a much less sure command of French, and so we cannot rule out the possibility that his records of conversations in French are less complete than Khrapovitskii’s. Poroshin himself sometimes used French, as we see from an entry from October 1764 when the Grand Duke was about ten,99 and so did Paul, although one has the impression that he used it less than his mother (admittedly, he was still very young at this time). Evidently, French was used in certain conversations at the ‘junior’ court. On 16 October 1764, for instance, Count Nikita Panin, who 94 Khrapovitskii, Pamiatnye zapiski, 122. 95 We are grateful to Angelina Vacheva for the point about the status of French in Catherine’s repertoire and the evidence that supports it. See also her book Potomstvu Ekaterina II, especially 386, 399. 96 RGADA, f. 1, op. 1, dd. 20–24, 26; these and the references in the following two footnotes are drawn from Dulac and Karp (eds), Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières, vol. 1, 25–26, 30, as well as from RGADA catalogues. On Catherine’s autobiographical notes, see the third section of Chapter 6 below. 97 e.g. RGADA, f. 1, op. 1, d. 24; f. 10, op. 2, dd. 226, 227, 229–239, 245, 246, etc. 98 RGADA, f. 4, op. 1, dd. 114, 115. 99 Poroshin, Semena Poroshina zapiski, 39.

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had just received the Turkish ambassador, told the heir to the throne about the Ottoman Empire over dinner, and in French, it would seem: ‘Speaking of the Turks, His Excellency said: “c’est un empire formé par le brigandage et soutenu uniquement par la jalousie de ses voisins [it’s an empire formed through brigandage and kept going only because its neighbours are at loggerheads with one another]”.’100 French also occurs quite often in paraphrases of what had been said by others, many of them foreigners.101 Sometimes Poroshin introduces so much French text that we may assume that the whole conversation, not just the passages quoted, was in French.102 However, French is also present as part of the background of life at the ‘junior’ court, in reading, and in the society entertainments that were available to the Grand Duke, above all the theatre. Paul went to the court theatre almost every day, and most of the plays performed in it were in French. If French was used less by the Grand Duke than it was at the ‘senior’ court, then that may have been because Paul’s tutors were trying to instil patriotic ideas in him, successfully it seems. Poroshin records the content of a conversation of September 1764 which provides an insight into the young heir’s attitude to the mixing of French and Russian and to the excessive use of French by Russians: Over tea we struck up a conversation about the blending of foreign words into our language. His Royal Highness very wittily said that some Russians stir so many French words into their conversations that it seems as if it is Frenchmen who are speaking and that they use some Russian words among the French ones. They [i.e. the Grand Duke] also said that some [Russians] are so weak in their native language that they are translating everything, word by word, from a foreign language, both when they speak and when they write.103

Paul seems to have firmly believed that Russians allowed too much interference from French in their speech. When conversing at table, Poroshin remarks, Paul ‘deigned to mix French words with Russian ones, taking off people who really speak like that’.104

100 Ibidem, 77. 101 e.g., ibidem, 68, 69, 71. 102 e.g., ibidem, 71. 103 Ibidem, 14. 104 Ibidem, 69–70.

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French at the nineteenth-century court In the nineteenth century, the tradition of using French at court, far from disappearing, took on new life. On one level, the persistence of French at court can be explained by the fact that French served as the principal diplomatic language of the early nineteenth-century European world105 and the simplest means of communication with the numerous distinguished foreigners resident in St Petersburg. It was not surprising, for example, that the correspondence that Alexander I conducted with the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski106 should have been entirely in French, a language they shared. And yet, we should perhaps see this language choice as something more than a simple solution de facilité. After all, French must have seemed a natural medium for social and intimate communication between these two people, for it was closely bound up with social codes to which they both subscribed, such as the notion of friendship, which was vividly expressed in their letters.107 It was also natural that French should have been used in the ‘Unofficial Committee’ which gathered at the court for several years after Alexander I came to the throne in 1801. The committee included, besides Alexander himself and Czartoryski, Count Pavel Stroganov, Nikolai Novosil’tsev, and Count Viktor Kochubei. These four confrères of Alexander were all aristocrats who had received a ‘French’ education and travelled in Europe in the 1780s and 1790s. They had spent a good deal of time in France (in the case of Czartoryski, Kochubei, and Stroganov) or in England (in the case of Novosil’tsev and Stroganov). Moreover, French was the most appropriate language for discussion of the sort of questions that interested the Unofficial Committee, such as the use of a constitution as a means of avoiding arbitrariness in the management of affairs of state and as a means of firmly basing the whole state apparatus on infrangible laws. Alexander and his companions derived their knowledge of such matters, first and foremost, from French literary sources. French therefore not only provided them with a common language (in the presence of the Pole Czartoryski) but also enabled them to avoid any vexing terminological confusion, since the Russian political lexicon was 105 On language use in the diplomatic domain, see Chapter 5 below. 106 [Alexander I], Alexandre I-er et le prince Czartoryski. Correspondance particulière et conversations. 1801–1823. For a biography of Czartoryski, see Zawadski, A Man of Honour. 107 On this notion, see also the last section of Chapter 2 above and Chapter 4 below. The point is confirmed by the fact that Alexander’s correspondence with several Russians was also conducted in French. We may suppose, moreover, that French was a more natural written language for Alexander, who had several Francophone teachers, including Laharpe. Certainly his written French was distinguished by its naturalness and elegance.

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relatively poorly developed at that time. The point is borne out by discussion of a ‘Charter to the Russian People’ that was written by Aleksandr Vorontsov in 1801. Vorontsov produced a first draft in Russian, and this was translated into French. Novosil’tsev then composed a detailed French draft, which was discussed in the committee. Next, the definitive French text was translated into Russian. Finally, stylistic revisions were made – chiefly by Vorontsov and Alexander’s close adviser Speranskii – to this new Russian version.108 Irrespective of the social composition of the court (and we are dealing here with men and women from the upper nobility, for whom French for long remained in a sense a professional language), one is bound to say that the court of the Russian Empire was extremely cosmopolitan in its make-up. As a rule, the Russian emperors and members of their families married representatives of foreign monarchies, chiefly German monarchies, in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alexander I, for example, was wedded to Louise-Marie-Auguste (known after her conversion by the Orthodox name Elizabeth Alekseevna), who was the daughter of Charles Louis, the Hereditary Prince of Baden. Nicholas I married Princess Charlotte of Prussia (Alexandra Fedorovna after her conversion). The Grand Duke Michael, also a son of Paul, was married to Princess Charlotte of Württemberg (who after her conversion was known as the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna). Alexander II married Maximiliane Wilhelmine Auguste Sophie Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt (subsequently Empress Maria Aleksandrovna). The list could be extended, for it was not only emperors and their brothers and sisters who married representatives of European royal families, but their children as well. For these cross-bred families, French was one of the preferred means of communication, if not the only means. Nor should it be forgotten that there were an enormous number of foreigners at the court, and not merely diplomats. French was the main language for communicating with these foreigners too. It was used even when neither interlocutor was a native French-speaker. Further memoirs attest to the persistence of French as the main language of communication at the Russian court during the reign of Nicholas I – despite the policy of cultural Russianization encouraged from the early 1830s by the doctrine of Official Nationality – and also during the reign of Alexander II after Russia’s defeat by French and British forces in the Crimea in the mid-1850s. For example, both Aleksandra Smirnova-Rosset, who was a ladyin-waiting at court in the reign of Nicholas I, and Elizaveta Naryshkina, née Princess Kurakina, who was a lady-in-waiting at the courts of three emperors 108 See Safonov, ‘A.N. Radishchev i “Gramota Rossiiskomu narodu”’. We are grateful to Sergei Pol’skoi for this information.

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from the mid-nineteenth century, quite often report the utterances of people from their aristocratic milieu, and a considerable number of their quotations in French relate to life at court. Thus Smirnova-Rosset records an exchange at a ball at the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg in 1845, where the Emperor Nicholas had begun by flirting with Baroness Krüdener but then began to court Elizaveta Buturlina. Smirnova-Rosset – somewhat mischievously, one assumes – addressed Baroness Krüdener in the following way: ‘Vous avez soupé, mais aujourd’hui les derniers honneurs sont pour elle.’ ‘C’est un homme étrange,’ dit-elle, ‘il faut pourtant que ces choses ayent un résultat, et avec lui il n’y a point de fin, il n’en a pas le courage, il attache une singulière idée à la fidélité. Tous ces manèges avec elle ne prouvent rien.’109 (‘You have supped, but the final honours go to her today.’ ‘He’s a strange man’, she said, ‘but these things must have an outcome, and with him there is no end, he does not have the heart for it, he has a peculiar idea of fidelity. All these stratagems with her prove nothing.’)

As a rule, conversations between courtiers and the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (who, as we have said, was of German origin) were conducted in French. Reminiscing about the Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna, the wife of Alexander I, Smirnova-Rosset says: it was rather strange that E[lizaveta] A[lekseevna] became more affectionate towards her [i.e. the future Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna] when an heir was born. ‘Ce devait être un moment affreux pour elle,110 et cependant depuis ce moment elle [est] devenu [sic] plus affectueuse pour moi [said Alexandra Fedorovna]. Quand mon fils est né, après un moment de bonheur, j’ai pensé au sort qui l’attendait: il était destiné à régner. [That must have been a terrible moment for her, and yet from that moment she became fonder of me. When my son was born, after a moment of bliss, I thought of the fate that awaited him: he was destined to rule.]’111

Other members of the imperial family use French too, as we see when Smirnova-Rosset asks the Grand Duchess Maria, the daughter of Nicholas I, to 109 Smirnova-Rosset, Dnevnik, 9. 110 Alexander I and his wife did not have any sons, and both the daughters of this marriage died in childhood. 111 Smirnova-Rosset, Dnevnik, 10.

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intercede with the emperor on behalf of Gogol’. Having given birth prematurely, Maria forgot Smirnova-Rosset’s request and said, as the memoirist reports it: ‘Parlez vous-même à l’Empereur [Speak to the Emperor yourself]’. At a soirée, I told Her Majesty [i.e. the wife of Nicholas I] that I was planning to petition the sovereign, but she said to me: ‘Il vient ici pour se reposer, et vous savez qu’il n’aime qu’on lui parle affaires; s’il est de bonne humeur, je vous ferai signe et vous pourrez laisser votre demande [He comes here to relax, and you know that he does not like people talking business to him; if he is in a good mood, I’ll make a signal to you and you’ll be able to make your request]’. He arrived in a good mood and said: ‘Journal des Débats is printing des sottises [silly things]. C’est une preuve que j’ai bien agi [That shows I’ve done the right thing].’112

French was all the more important during the foreign trips made by court society. Sof’ia Kiseleva, to whom the Grand Duke Michael introduced Smirnova-Rosset in Marienbad, said to her: ‘J’ai connu votre mère. Nous étions à Odessa, toute notre famille et Isabelle Valevsky, la femme de Serge Gagarin, que vous connaissez’ (I knew your mother. We were in Odessa, our whole family and Isabelle Valevsky, the wife of Serge Gagarin, whom you know).113 Of course, other languages were used too: there is evidence that Nicholas I spoke at court receptions in French, Russian, German, and even English, depending on whom he was talking to.114 (He was said by a competent judge to speak French and German, as well as Russian, with a very pure accent and elegant pronunciation.115) The Empress Alexandra Fedorovna also sometimes used other languages, apart from French and Russian. In the 1830s, for example, she had occasion to speak English with the American envoy George M. Dallas.116 Another of Nicholas’s daughters, Olga, confirms that for the most part they spoke French in the family, although the elder children spoke French more, while the three younger brothers spoke Russian,117 perhaps in order to display patriotic feeling.118 It was rulers themselves who quite often set the tone, although they could not entirely change linguistic practice single-handed. As Smirnova-Rosset 112 Ibidem, 60–61. 113 Ibidem, 76. 114 Zimin, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ imperatorskogo dvora. 115 Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov, vol. 1, 102. 116 Zimin, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ imperatorskogo dvora. 117 Ibidem. 118 As suggested to us by Ol’ga Edel’man.

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noticed, French was spoken at the court under Alexander I, but Nicholas started to speak Russian more frequently.119 Priding herself on the quality of her Russian and finding it strange that people in St Petersburg were surprised that Russian ladies might be proficient in their native language, SmirnovaRosset noted that Nicholas always spoke to her in Russian.120 Pushkin also wrote that in 1834, when Nicholas conversed with him at a ball, the emperor did not mix languages and that he spoke Russian well, ‘not making the usual mistakes and using authentic expressions’.121 Under Nicholas’s successor Alexander II, on the other hand, French again became fashionable at court, whereas under Alexander III, Russian came into its own once more.122 As Smirnova-Rosset shows, not all courtiers or, more precisely, not all individuals appearing at court, had the same high level of proficiency in French, although even those who did not know the language very well clearly felt a need to say something in it, for it was perceived as an indispensable sign of entitlement to move in high society. She describes a revealing episode that took place on 12 March 1845 at a court supper at which she was seated beside Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich. For the most part, they spoke in Russian, because, Smirnova-Rosset observes, ‘the Field Marshal is not conspicuous by his eloquence in French, and in fact he is not eloquent in Russian either’. Nonetheless, Paskevich too turned to French at one point: ‘He started speaking French apropos of Bohemia: “Vous avez lu, comment cela?” [You’ve read, what’s it called?].’123 The persistence of French at court at the end of the Nicholaevan period and beyond is confirmed by Naryshkina, who was close to Elena Pavlovna and who generally conveys the words of the Grand Duchess in French. When Naryshkina’s aunt expressed surprise that Elena Pavlovna had invited Naryshkina’s mother to become the chief lady-in-waiting (gofmeisterina) at her daughter’s court, for example, the Grand Duchess replied: ‘Il y a longtemps que je l’espionne’ (I’ve been spying on her for a long time).124 Again, 119 Baron Fircks reports that Nicholas tried to raise the status of Russian by requiring that it be used for discussion of public affairs, by using it himself more often than Alexander I, and by expecting people to reply to him in the language in which he had asked them a question. This ensured that Nicholas’s courtiers knew Russian better than Alexander’s but it did not stop society continuing to use French almost exclusively and speaking Russian only to people who did not know French, that is the servants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the common people (Fircks, Le nihilisme en Russie, 74; see Chapter 7 below on Fircks and this work of his). 120 Smirnova-Rosset, Dnevnik, 480. 121 Pushkin, PSS, vol. 12, 320, quoted from Smirnova-Rosset, Dnevnik, 702. 122 Zimin, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ imperatorskogo dvora. 123 Smirnova-Rosset, Dnevnik, 12. 124 Naryshkina, Moi vospominaniia, 67.

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when the young Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael (sons of Nicholas I) were sent to the Crimea, their mother, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna said sadly, as they were taking leave of her: ‘Toutes les familles ont là tout ce qu’il y a de plus cher. Nous devons aussi y envoyer les nôtres’ (All families send what is dearest to them there [i.e to the front]. We must send our own too.).125 It is clear from other sources as well that conversations between members of the royal family and Francophone Russians were still conducted in French in the age of Alexander II. Another memoirist, Khvoshchinskaia, recalls Alexander addressing her grandmother Tat’iana Potemkina thus, when the aged woman tried to get up to greet him: ‘Je vous supplie, chère M-me Potemkine, ne vous dérangez pas!’ (I beg you not to put yourself out, my dear Mme Potemkin).126 Not that everyone at court spoke perfect French, it seems. In fact, the Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Altenberg and wife of Nicholas’s son Constantine, spoke it poorly, according to the perfectly Francophone diarist Anna Tiutcheva.127 Nor, evidently, was the court immune to the normal practice of language-mixing that purists detested: an eighteen-yearold woman who was taken into the Winter Palace in the 1850s while Tiutcheva was a lady-in-waiting there spoke a strange mixture of French and Russian which was apparently quite acceptable in Muscovite society at that time.128

French as a royal language There are several other ways, finally, in which French was associated with the imperial family, besides the fact that it was spoken at court. One sign of its cachet as a royal language was its use when members of the family were received at public institutions. Thus, when the Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine visited the Artillery Cadet Corps in St Petersburg late in Catherine’s reign, a theatrical performance arranged by the cadets in their honour was presented entirely in French. An extant manuscript of the programme for this play prepares the audience thus: le grand prètre dans son costume parait occupé du culte, mais lorsqu’il voit les grands Ducs il s’avance, et leur dit: 125 Ibidem, 79. 126 Khvoshchinskaia, 1898, no. 5, 418. See also many instances in Valuev’s diaries: Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 136, 149, 198–199, 213–214, 217, 240, 241; vol. 2, 274, etc. 127 Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov, vol. 1, 108. 128 Ibidem, 86.

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Venez; Princes chéris, espoir de cet empire; Entrez au temple d’Apollon; De vos brillants destins vous pourrez vous instruire, Comme Alexandre a fait dans le temple d’Ammon. Ces parvis, où les Dieux veulent que je les serve, Ne s’ouvrent, il est vrai, qu’a des héros fameux; Mais vous enfants de Paul, élèves de Minerve Un jour vous serez grands comme eux. J’en lis sur votre front des présages heureux; C’et [sic] pour vous qu’Apollon dans ce séjour réserve Ses Oracles sacrés et ses dons précieux.129 (the high priest in his robes seems busy with the rites of worship, but when he sees the Grand Dukes he steps forward and says to them: ‘Come, dear Princes, the hope of this empire, enter into the Temple of Apollo; you will be able to discover your brilliant destinies, as ALEXANDER [the Great] discovered his in the Temple of Ammon. These parvises before the church, where the Gods wish me to serve them, are open only to famous heroes, it is true; but you, children of PAUL and pupils of MINERVA, will one day be great like them. I read happy omens on your brows; it is for you that Apollo keeps his sacred oracles and precious gifts.’)

Of course, the decision to have the cadets stage a play in French may have had a didactic purpose for the cadets themselves, but it is unlikely that this was the only reason for the choice of language on this occasion, since the cadets were also learning German. The status of French as a royal language is also indicated by the fact that numerous writings were composed in French for the court or contained dedications in French to emperors and members of the imperial family.130 There are in addition many instances where works which were performed on the court stage 129 RNB, Manuscripts Department, Hermitage Collection, French Manuscripts, f. 999, op. 2, no. 46 (Fête donnée à Leurs Altesses Impériales Messeigneurs Alexandre Paulovitche et Constantin Paulovitche, Grands-Ducs de Russie), fol. 2. 130 e.g. [Estat], Lali et Sainval (1784, with a French dedication to the Grand Duchess); l’abbé Comte de Lubersac, ‘Discours sur l’utilité et les avantages des monuments publics et tous les genres etc. […]’ (RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 2, Fr. 116); Luzier, Les noces de Mars (1796, with a French dedication to Platon Zubov, one of the major figures at the court of Paul); Bertin de Antilly, ‘Ode à Pierre le Grand […]’ (RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 2, Fr. 32); Loëillot, ‘Annales de l’empire de Russie, dédiées à S.M. l’Impératrice Elisabeth’ (St Petersburg, 1801, RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 2, Fr. 115); Gay, Vers adressés à l’Empereur des Russies […] (1808).

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in other foreign languages – for example, a cantata in Italian, which was sung at court in 1802 – were translated into French rather than Russian for members of the audience who did not have a command of the other foreign language.131 French was also a private language for oral and written communication within the royal family, although here too it was used alongside other languages, namely Russian, German (it will be recalled that many members of the family were themselves of German origin), and increasingly, towards the end of the imperial period, English. French was frequently used, for example, in personal correspondence and even in private reflection in diaries and notebooks. We shall try to shed light on the incidence of French and other languages among the Romanovs in the nineteenth century by considering some of the many extant texts written by members of the family, both male and female, Russian and foreign.132 First of all, we should highlight common features found among all generations and in the writings of almost all members of the imperial family in the nineteenth century. All of the Romanovs, including the women among them, carried out duties of state which entailed a considerable volume of official correspondence. The overwhelming majority of such letters were written in Russian. The exception is sovereigns’ diplomatic correspondence, which was usually conducted in French.133 Another common factor was that the various generations of the Romanovs all corresponded with other European monarchs. This correspondence too was usually conducted in French, except insofar as German members of the Russian royal house quite often (though not always) wrote to their relations in German. This pattern, as we shall see, would not change until the reign of Nicholas II, at the end of the nineteenth century, when English was used more and more in such correspondence. Turning to the letters of individual members of the imperial house, we find that a significant part of the correspondence of Alexander I with other 131 Ariane et Bacchus (1802). 132 The documents we have used are kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Our survey is partly based on examination of inventories (opisi) of collections ( fondy), in which the language of a document is almost always indicated (when there is no such indication, the language of the file is Russian), as well as on scrutiny of many files in these collections. Our conclusions need, of course, to be treated with caution inasmuch as our experience has shown that the contents of files have not invariably been described with complete accuracy by the archivists who have compiled the inventories. 133 We deal in more detail with letters of these types, and with the differentiation of official from private correspondence by means of language choice, in Chapter 5, on the role of French in the official domain.

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members of the family was in French.134 In general, Ol’ga Edel’man has observed, a distinction was drawn between Alexander’s official correspondence, which was expected to be conducted in Russian, and more private, unofficial letters, in which French was used. Thus in 1820, the emperor’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, wrote to Alexander in French about the mutiny that had occurred in October that year in the Semenovskii Life Guards Regiment in St Petersburg, probably signalling by his choice of language that he was expressing a personal opinion.135 French was also the base language in the correspondence and diaries of Alexander’s sister, Maria Pavlovna, the Grand Duchess of Saxe-WeimarEisenach, who left Russia as a young woman and lived out her life in Weimar.136 Maria made her children keep diaries in French as well, and her own and their governess’s constant inspection of these diaries helped the children to perfect their French style. Maria’s correspondence with the Swiss governess who had brought her up, Jeanne Mazelet, served the same purpose: Mazelet often corrected the style of her pupil even after Maria had grown up and married. Maria’s own diary was a vehicle for self-analysis, but at the same time the ready-made formulae of the French language which were expected to be used in accordance with societal conventions allowed her to hide her true feelings in it.137 French also aided Maria’s integration into European culture, offering an elaborate lexicon with which to describe learning and the arts.138 Familiarity with epistolary novels such as JeanJacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Héloïse and with the letters of writers such as Mme de Sévigné enabled members of the royal family, and of course Russian nobles, to describe recurrent and very similar situations with a large variety of expressive resources.139 Russian, incidentally, is virtually absent 134 RGADA, f. 1, op. 1, dd. 3 (1798), 10 (1812–1813), 11 (1807–1813), 13 (1797), 14 (1786–1789), 15 (1788), 16 (1790) (letters to Alexander from his father, mother, or sister, either before or after he became emperor); GARF, f. 679, op. 1, d. 76, Empress Maria Fedorovna to Alexander I (1808–1810, Fr.); d. 115, Alexander I to the Empress Maria Fedorovna, his mother (1810, Fr.). For the sake of economy, we hereafter omit ‘op. 1’ in most references to holdings in GARF in this section, since there is only one opis’ in each collection to which we refer, with the exceptions of ff. 601 and 678. 135 e.g. GARF, f. 679, d. 42. We are grateful to Ol’ga Edel’man for sharing her thoughts on this letter with us. 136 Her diaries have been published in part: see Maria Pavlovna. Die frühen Tagebücher der Erbherzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. 137 The point is made by Katja Dmitrieva and Viola Klein in their introduction to the source cited in the previous note. 138 Ibidem, 7. Maria Pavlovna’s diaries, like a considerable portion of her correspondence, are kept in the Thüringisches Hauptarchiv Weimar, Grossherzogliches Hausarchiv A XXV. 139 This point too is made by Dmitrieva and Klein: see Maria Pavlovna, 8.

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from Maria Pavlovna’s diaries and very rare in her correspondence. She corresponded in French both with her mother and her brothers, Alexander I and the Grand Duke Constantine. On the whole, she switches to Russian only in two sorts of situation: first, when she gives way to reminiscences about her childhood and, secondly, when she conveys political news. In the latter case, she no doubt uses Russian in the interests of secrecy, as a language known to relatively few foreigners, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars.140 Maria’s brother, Nicholas, the future Emperor Nicholas I, also kept a personal diary in French while he was Grand Duke,141 in which he recorded much information about his everyday life, his ‘junior’ court, the trips on which he was sent for education and pleasure, his impressions of theatrical performances, and much else besides. However, Russian words abound in this French diary. As a rule, these were personal names and words for things which Nicholas probably found it difficult to denote in French, such as drozhki, iunker, oboz, panikhida, sherengi (a droshky, or low open carriage; a cadet; a string of carts or sledges; a funeral service; files or columns), or which he may otherwise have associated with a Russian environment, such as nesposobnyi (incapable, incompetent).142 Nicholas’s personal correspondence, when he was grand duke and later when he was emperor, was also in French as a rule, and not just when he was corresponding with other members of the royal family 143 but also when he was exchanging letters with certain courtiers and other people such as the historian and writer Karamzin.144 However, there were letters in Russian too. That was the language, for instance, in which he corresponded with the heir to the throne, perhaps because inculcation of an awareness of his son’s momentous future role was in a sense a formal matter that transcended the domain of personal relations in the family.145 On the whole, the division of correspondence into 140 Ibidem, 34. 141 GARF, f. 672, dd. 42–49 (1822–1825). This diary (or rather, set of notebooks) has been published in Russian translation as [Nicholas I], Zapisnye knizhki velikogo kniazia Nikolaia Pavlovicha, 1822–1825. 142 Ol’ga Edel’man has pointed out to us the military connotation of this word, as a formal description of unsuitability for military service. 143 GARF, f. 672, d. 339 (to his mother, the Empress Maria Fedorovna, 1818); d. 345 (to his brother Michael, 1847); and d. 354 (from his wife, the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, 1833). Alexandra Fedorovna kept her diary in her native German (GARF, f. 672, dd. 409–423 (1822–1860)). Nicholas had an excellent command of German but his language of written communication with Alexandra was French. 144 GARF, f. 672, d. 341 (1826). 145 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, dd. 819–822 (1838–1853); letters from the heir to Nicholas I are partly in Russian and partly in French: f. 672, d. 352 (1825–1828). For correspondence between Nicholas I

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different spheres, personal and official, and the use of French and Russian respectively in those spheres, is more clear-cut in the reign of Nicholas I than it had been under Alexander I. Nicholas’s children, for their part, generally corresponded with one another in French.146 As for Nicholas’s wife, the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, who was the daughter of the Prussian King Frederick William III, she too often corresponded in French, with members of the royal family among other people.147 However, she kept her diary, notebooks, and album in her native German (although she did sometimes use French and Russian in her notebooks)148 and she conducted her correspondence with her German relations in that language too.149 The importance of French and German in the life of Nicholas’s family is revealed even by such minutiae as the choice of language in poetry composed for the birthdays of the emperor’s children.150 It is also worth noting that an exercise-book belonging to Nicholas’s daughter, the Grand Duchess Maria, which contained religious texts, was in German.151 It is equally instructive to examine the linguistic repertoire of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg, as we have said, Elena Pavlovna had been brought up in Paris and was an eminent member of the royal family during the reigns of both Nicholas I and Alexander II. She wrote notes in French on the Decembrist Revolt,152 the education of women,153 and the French Revolution of 1789.154 She also kept a diary in French155 and wrote a French draft of memoirs on her life.156 She corresponded in French with many members of different generations of the royal family, including the Grand Dukes Constantine Pavlovich and her husband Michael, the above-mentioned Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich, and the Grand Duchess Olga and Grand Duchess Aleksandra Iosifovna (the wife of the Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich), in Russian as well as French, see f. 672, d. 353 (1847–1852). 146 GARF, f. 672, dd. 502, 503, 509; f. 678, op. 1, d. 823а. 147 e.g. GARF, f. 672, dd. 460–462. However, Russian too sometimes appears in this correspondence. 148 See, e.g., GARF, f. 672, dd. 409, 410, 412–423, 426, 428, 431, 432, 572–574. 149 e.g. GARF, f. 672, dd. 434–441. 150 GARF, f. 672, d. 486 (1832). 151 GARF, f. 672, d. 489 (1860). 152 GARF, f. 647, d. 20 (1825). 153 GARF, f. 647, d. 21 (no date). See also her notebook written mainly in French: ibidem, d. 28 (1865). 154 GARF, f. 647, d. 22 (no date). 155 GARF, f. 647, dd. 23 (1838), 24 (1839), 25 (1849), 26 (1849–1850). 156 GARF, f. 647, d. 27 (no earlier than 1839).

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Nikolaevna.157 The overwhelming majority of the letters written by members of the Russian aristocracy to Elena Pavlovna were also composed in French: these came, for example, from princes of the Bariatinskii, Bibikov, Bludov, Buturlin, Dolgorukii, Gagarin, Golitsyn, Gorchakov, Kozlovskii, Kurakin, Lovich, Odoevskii, and Vasil’chikov clans, barons and princes from the von Lieven family, counts of the Apraksin, Golovkin, Orlov, Pahlen, Rostopchin, Sumarokov, Tolstoi, Uvarov, and Vorontsov families, and various Demidovs, Kiselevs, Lanskois, and Miliutins.158 German occurs in Elena Pavlovna’s correspondence too, albeit less frequently than French, as we see from letters that she addressed to or received from Prince Augustus of Württemberg, other members of the House of Württemberg, and the Grand Duchess Sophie of Baden.159 However, Elena Pavlovna also learned Russian and read a great deal in it, as we can see from numerous extant notes written in that language on affairs of state and from copies of works by Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, Karamzin, and other writers which are to be found in her personal archives.160 The son of Nicholas I, the future Emperor Alexander II, learned English as well as French and German, and even used it as the medium for the study of certain subjects, such as British history.161 He also learned Polish, not only because the Russian emperor was formally the sovereign of Poland too but because the Polish question was becoming increasingly important in Russian politics.162 Alexander kept his diary in Russian 163 but used French in his correspondence with many members of his family, for example, his German wife, the Empress Maria Aleksandrovna,164 and his aunts Anna Pavlovna (the Queen of the Netherlands, who was the daughter of the Emperor Paul)165 and the aforementioned Elena Pavlovna.166 However, there were some 157 GARF, f. 647, dd. 652, 659, 661, etc. With the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, who was also of German origin, she corresponded mainly in German, sometimes switching to French: ibidem, d. 645. 158 See GARF, f. 647. We do not give more precise references on these sources because the number of files in question is very large. 159 GARF, f. 647, dd. 647–649. 160 GARF, f. 647, dd. 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, etc. We cannot be sure that Elena Pavlovna read the writings in question, but their presence would seem to indicate an interest in them on her part. On Elena Pavlovna’s plurilingualism, see also the discussion of her involvement in affairs of state and public life in the penultimate section of Chapter 5. 161 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, d. 246 (1834). 162 Murov et al. (eds), Dvor rossiiskikh imperatorov, vol. 1, 407–408. 163 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, dd. 268–290 (1826–1840). 164 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, dd. 711 (1867–1877), 781–795 (1851–1879). 165 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, d. 742 (1838–1865). 166 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, d. 761 (1834–1880).

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members of the royal family to whom he wrote in Russian, most notably the heir to the throne.167 One has the impression that Alexander II used French much more in correspondence with female members of the family than with male members of it. The son of Alexander II, the future Alexander III, on the other hand, was exposed to more Russian influences in his upbringing. His teachers and mentors (among whom the presence of the arch-conservative thinker Konstantin Pobedonostsev was strongly felt) placed emphasis on things that they believed would distance him from the westernized court and that they defined as national.168 Alexander therefore studied the Russian language and Russian literature intensively in his youth 169 and, unlike his father, he used Russian a great deal with the other grand dukes. Some courtiers recalled that he started to speak Russian at court before he became emperor, and his example no doubt influenced language use there.170 The foreign languages he learned were French, German, and English.171 He seems to have studied most subjects through the medium of Russian, except for history, which he studied through German. 172 He also kept his notebooks, for the most part, in Russian.173 Letters to relations he tended to write in either Russian or French, but he did use Russian quite frequently in letters to members of his family, or they wrote to him in Russian, as attested by correspondence with his sons, the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael, his brother the Grand Duke Nicholas Aleksandrovich, his f irst cousins the Grand Dukes Michael Mikhailovich and Nicholas Konstantinovich, and his uncle the Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich.174 Interestingly, we detect more instances of correspondence with female members of the family in Russian in the generation of Alexander III than we did in the generation of his father, 167 e.g. GARF, f. 678, op. 1, dd. 700 (to Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich, 1878), 701 (to his mother, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, 1830–1857), 710 (to Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich, 1862), 729, 731, 732 (from Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich to his father, Alexander II, various years). See also dd. 771–774 (Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich to Alexander II, 1835–1861), 805–808 (Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich to Alexander II, 1863–1880), and 816 (Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to Alexander II, 1855–1879). 168 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 253. 169 GARF, f. 677, dd. 198–207 (1855–1864). 170 Murov et al. (eds), Dvor rossiiskikh imperatorov, vol. 1, 413. 171 GARF, f. 677, dd. 208–220 (1855–1864). 172 GARF, f. 677, dd. 221–227 (1858–1862). 173 GARF, f. 677, dd. 253–308 (various years). 174 See, in order of correspondents, GARF, f. 677, dd. 900 (1884–1892); 919 (1876–1894) and 920 (1876–1894, 1894); 918 (1859–1865); 901 (1890–1891); 921 (1894); and 902 (1865–1888).

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Alexander II.175 There are also many letters that were written to Alexander III by Russian aristocrats in Russian, perhaps because of the resurgence of nationalistic patriotism during his reign after the assassination of his father in 1881, although we do often come across French too in aristocrats’ letters to him. The son of Alexander III, the Crown Prince Nicholas, as we have already noted, corresponded with his father almost exclusively in Russian. However his early letters in Russian, from the middle of the 1870s when he was about seven or eight years old, are full of grammatical errors which make it clear that Russian was not his first language.176 He kept his diary in Russian as well, both before and after his accession to the throne,177 although we also find a sprinkling of other languages (mainly French and English) in it.178 The correspondence of Nicholas with other members of the royal family, like that of his father Alexander III, contained many letters in Russian, and not only when the letter-writers were men.179 From his mother, Empress Maria Fedorovna, the widow of Alexander III, Nicholas received letters in both French and Russian.180 His wife, the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, wrote to him mainly in English, which is explained by the fact that she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, at whose court she had been brought up.181 More surprising is the fact that letters received by Nicholas from the Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna, the wife of the Grand Duke Paul Aleksandrovich, were also in English.182 (Alexandra Georgievna was the daughter of the Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna Romanova, the Queen of Greece, and her husband the King of Greece, George I.) Likewise, English was the language used in letters sent to Nicholas by the Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna, the daughter of the Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich 175 e.g. with his daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna (GARF, f. 677, d. 935 (1891, 1894)); with his first cousin, Olga Konstantinovna, the Queen of Greece (f. 677, dd. 936 (1866–1894) and 937 (1882–1894)); and with the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, his aunt, Queen of Württemberg (f. 677, d. 938 (1866–1892)). 176 GARF, f. 677, d. 919. For example, Nicholas often forgets to decline nouns and uses Russian syntactic calques from French. His Russian correspondence from the 1890s, on the other hand, is almost flawless (ibidem). 177 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, dd. 217–266 (1882–1918). 178 See his published diaries: [Nicholas II], Dnevniki imperatora Nikolaia II, 1894–1918. See also http://www.rus-sky.com/history/library/diaris/1894.htm. 179 See, e.g., letters from the Grand Duchess Militsa Nikolaevna, Princess of Montenegro and wife of Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich (GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1300 (1914–1915)), and his sister Olga Aleksandrovna (f. 601, op. 1, d. 1316 (1890–1918)). 180 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, dd. 1294–1297 (1879–1917). 181 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, dd. 1147а–1150 (various years). 182 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1145 (1883–1891).

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(that is to say the granddaughter of Alexander II), who was married to the son of King George of Greece and Olga Konstantinovna.183 Nicholas II also received letters in English from Prince Maximilian of Baden, who was a relation of his,184 and Victoria of Baden, who was Queen of Sweden,185 and he corresponded in that language with the King of Romania.186 Although French too was often used in Nicholas’s correspondence with crowned monarchs, English thus occupied an important place in his correspondence with other royal families, which probably reflected changes in education in high society and, more generally, the balance of power in Europe at the turn of the century. The signs of change that we have detected in language choice in the imperial family, and in particular the emergence of English as one of the languages of the family by the turn of the century, can also be found in the correspondence of Nicholas’s sister, the Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna.187 Olga was brought up by an English governess, and, unlike members of previous generations of the Romanov family, she kept her diary in English, or at any rate she did so when she was a child.188 She also received letters in English from a considerable number of people outside her family circle,189 among them members of the Russian aristocracy such as Count Iurii Aleksandrovich Olsuf’ev and Sof’ia Sheremeteva,190 although some aristocrats wrote to her in Russian too.191 Other members of the royal family also corresponded in English at this period. Thus, the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna, who was Danish by birth but was closely connected with the British royal house (her sister was the wife of King Edward VII), wrote to her daughter in English.192 Similarly, the Grand Duchess Xenia Aleksandrovna used English in correspondence with her sister.193 This analysis of correspondence in the royal family during the long nineteenth century conf irms the impression created by memoirs that the Russian court was a truly multilingual environment. French, as the 183 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1256 (1906–1913). 184 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1161 (1886–1914). 185 GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1196 (1908). 186 See GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1123 (no date). More examples of royal correspondence in English could be given. 187 See, e.g., the letters Olga received from Nicholas in GARF, f. 643, d. 45 (1891–1917). 188 GARF, f. 643, dd. 2–19 (the diaries cover the period from 1894 to 1904). 189 GARF, f. 643, dd. 61, 63–70, 72–74, 79, 83, 91, 93, 99, etc. 190 GARF, f. 643, dd. 101 (1893–1900) and 121 (1898–1900) respectively. 191 GARF, f. 643, d. 119 (Irina Sheremeteva and Sergei Sheremetev, 1901–1903). 192 e.g. GARF, f. 643, dd. 34 (1886–1905), 35 (1906–1914), 36 (1915). 193 GARF, f. 643, dd. 38 (1886–1889), 39 (1900–1903), 40 (1909–1914), etc.

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language of high society and as a language associated with the royal family had an important place there, but Russian, German, and, increasingly, English were also widely used. The major linguistic distinction that we can observe is between the official and private correspondence of members of the royal family: on the whole, the former was conducted in Russian and the latter in French. However, as time went by, members of the imperial family used Russian more and more, even in their private correspondence and particularly when the correspondence was between male members of the family. This trend certainly reflected the growing status of the Russian language in the period in question. As for differences between male and female usage, they did not remain constant over the whole period we have surveyed, nor do they tend to reveal a relative lack of proficiency in Russian among women. The corpus of documents we have used attests, moreover, to the centrality and vigour of the Russian language in life at the highest level of the Russian state. This finding – together with ample evidence of the keen interest of many members of the royal family in numerous aspects of Russian national life194 – makes it difficult to argue, pace some representatives of the nationalistic and radical traditions of Russian thought, that the court was an altogether alien institution on Russian soil. There is one further aspect of language use in the domain of the court and the royal family which deserves comment. At the opposite end of the spectrum which runs from the personal domain revealed in private correspondence and diaries to the public domain in which the royal family displayed its power and charisma, we find ample documentation on royal ceremonial events. In this documentation too, French became highly visible, partly, of course, because its use enabled the royal family to project an image of itself beyond Russia’s borders but also, no doubt, because it was important in the domestic realm to associate the royal family with this prestige language. Already in the eighteenth century, for example, French was used in accounts of the coronations of Russian monarchs, although the versions of a description of the coronation of the Empress Elizabeth issued by the Academy of Sciences in different languages in 1745 would seem to suggest that French was not at that time considered the most important medium for such matters.195 In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, 194 See also the penultimate section of Chapter 5, on language use for official purposes. 195 Fifteen hundred copies were made of the Russian version of this description, 300 of the German, and 200 of the Latin, but none was issued in French. It was indicated, though, that a French copy was being prepared. See Buck, ‘The Russian Language Question in the Imperial Academy of Sciences’, 198, and Sukhomlinov, Materialy dlia istorii Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 6, 548.

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such descriptions were invariably produced in French, as well as Russian, and were accompanied by a stream of other publications, many of which were also in French.196 We have, for instance, descriptions or celebrations of the coronation of Alexander I, the arrival of Nicholas I in Moscow for his coronation and the event itself, the coronations of Alexander II and Alexander III, and so forth. Similar documents describe the funeral of the wife of Alexander I, the Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna, in 1826197 and the wedding ceremony of the future Alexander II in 1841.198 Nor was it only coronations, funerals, and weddings that could be lavishly publicized in such ways. There were also spectacles that celebrated these and other events and that were themselves worthy of description. Particularly notable were firework displays, which became popular in the middle of the eighteenth century at precisely the time when Elizabeth’s court seems to have been considering how best to present itself. It is no coincidence that one of the major European firework-makers, Giuseppe Sarti, was engaged by the Russian court in 1755. These striking spectacles were akin in their function to court theatre, projecting royal power urbi et orbi. Accounts of them were translated into German and French (and published in bilingual Russo-German and Russo-French versions), as was done in 1759,199 and sent to other European courts. After all, such events and accounts could draw attention to the achievements of the Russian sovereign, as they were manifested in the Seven Years’ War, for instance, and to the shortcomings of Russia’s enemies. Petr Shuvalov specifically demanded that the descriptions be translated into German and French, although the Academy of Sciences, which compiled them, was not always able, at this period, to provide a translation into French, since there were times when the Academy did not have an experienced Russian-French translator at its disposal.200 By the 196 e.g. Platon, Discours adressé à l’Empereur Alexandre I-er le 15. Sept. 1801 […] (1801); P***, Les Manes de Pierre le Grand au couronnement d’Alexandre […] (1801); Couronnement de S.M. l’Empereur Nicolas I-er (1826); Programme du cérémonial confirmé par S.M. l’Empereur Nicolas I, pour son entrée solennelle […] (1826); Programme du feu d’artifice […] (1826); Ancelot, ‘Ode sur le couronnement de l’Empereur Nicolas I’ (1826); Description du sacre et du couronnement de Leurs Majestés Impériales […] (1856); Murat, Le couronnement de l’Empereur Alexandre II (1857); Marque, Le couronnement du Tzar Alexandre III (1883); Description du sacre et du couronnement de L.M.I. l’Empereur Alexandre III […] (1887). 197 Programme du cérémonial confirmé par Sa Majesté l’Empereur pour la réception du corps de feu Sa Majesté l’Impératrice Elisabeth Alexeiewna […]. 198 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, d. 5 (1841). 199 The French title was Description des représentations allégoriques du feu d’artifice […]. 200 Kostin, ‘Stikhotvornye nadpisi v opisanii feierverkov 1758 i 1759 godov’. We are grateful to Andrei Kostin for his additional advice on this subject.

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age of Nicholas I, of course, the Russian authorities had no such difficulty in producing a French version of the description of a f irework display like that which marked the end of the festivities surrounding Nicholas’s coronation.201 Even menus for grand ceremonial banquets could fulfil a propagandistic function. Designed by well-known artists and written in French, they attested to the refinement of the court, as well as its wealth. Take, for example, the menu for a banquet of 24 May 1883 on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander III (Illustration 6). It is perhaps indicative of the resurgent nationalism in government circles in the late nineteenth century, though, that the dishes served at another dinner, which was held in the Great Kremlin Palace three days later, were characteristic of Russian cuisine and that the menu for this dinner was presented in Russian.202 * During the reign of Peter the Great, Russians discovered a new model of sociability, just as they were discovering – as we saw in our preceding chapter – a new way of educating members of the nobility. This model was primarily of French origin. In the first instance, the importation of new forms of sociability evidently took place without the French language being adopted. However, it is perhaps no coincidence that it was in the circle of people who, at the tsar’s behest, were probing new forms of sociability that we first notice a desire among the elite, as far back as the Petrine period, to learn French. The French language became an important component of court culture during the reign of Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth, and the introduction of drama at that time underlined the court’s ‘civilized’, European character. During the reign of Catherine II, the French theatre became one of the chief venues at which the monarch’s majesty and power could be demonstrated, as Alexeï Evstratov has shown. More broadly, French served, in the second half of the eighteenth century, as more than an item of décor at court. It became an indispensable attribute of the court’s everyday life. It was a vehicle not 201 Programme du feu d’artifice […] (1826). 202 The menus for these two banquets are to be found in the Russian National Library (RNB, Cartography Department, Il’in Collection: V.M. Vasnetsov, Diner du 24 mai 1883). The nationalistic mood of the reign of Alexander III was reflected in the conspicuously native architectural style of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood which was erected on the spot where terrorists of The People’s Will mortally wounded Alexander’s father, Alexander II, in St Petersburg on 1 March 1881. It is also significant that Alexander III was the first Russian tsar since the seventeenth century to wear a full beard.

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Illustration 6 Printed menu for the coronation dinner of 1883, with a painting by Viktor Vasnetsov.

Reproduced with permission of the Russian National Library.

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just for social interaction with foreigners of high social origin but for social communication among members of the Russian royal family themselves, as the examples of Catherine and her son Paul show. From this point on, French would also be associated with the court in the public mind, a fact corroborated by the theatrical performances staged in honour of members of the royal family and by numerous tributes to them. This function of French is apparent in descriptions of ceremonial at events connected with the life of the Romanovs. In the nineteenth century, French was perhaps the main vehicle for sociability among members of the multi-national Romanov family, with its many branches. Its role as a lingua franca, though, was less important than its role as a royal language and a language of society. Many members of the family had a perfect command of German too but nonetheless chose French for communication among themselves and with those who were close to them. Thus, the choice of French should be seen not primarily as a pragmatic decision forced upon a family whose members spoke various mother tongues, but rather as a badge of identity and a means of imagining and presenting themselves as members both of a European royal family and of the outward-looking, cosmopolitan elite of the Russian Empire. This choice may well have helped to affirm the political and cultural superiority of the Russian ruler, who belonged to a monarchic tradition which, from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, was bolstered, as Richard Wortman has argued, by an association with foreign images of political power. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century do we see the French language regress somewhat as a language of intimacy in the Russian royal family, both because Russian was gaining ground and because English was being introduced. For all the importance of foreign languages at the Russian court, though, we should not underestimate the place of Russian there. It never vanished from the linguistic landscape. It was present as a medium for social intercourse for many members of the family, especially its male members, for whom it served as their clearest means of identification with Russia. Above all, it served as their main bureaucratic language, and all the Romanovs devoted themselves to affairs of state. In a later chapter we shall examine the function of both French and Russian in the Russian official realm, and shall look more closely at their use by monarchs in that realm.203 Before that, though, we should consider the use of French in noble society, or rather in the aristocratic stratum of the nobility, whose members needed little prompting to follow the example of sociability set by the court. 203 See Chapter 5 below.



Chapter 4 French in high society

Cultural and linguistic practice at the Russian court set an example which men and women in the higher ranks of the nobility, as it turned out, followed with zest and without being compelled to do so. They embraced a European cultural identity, cultivating politesse and refinement. They adopted other European languages of their own accord and ensured – insofar as their financial resources permitted – that their children had the access to foreign tutors, governesses, books, and opportunities for foreign travel which would enable them to acquire a high level of competence in those languages, and in French in particular. In showing this independent interest in the field of education, and in insisting that language learning should be central in their children’s curriculum, the great aristocratic families were acting in parallel with the court. (It was the lower-ranking nobility on whom the monarchy needed to exert pressure, if it was to ensure that they too would adopt the western cultural model.) Nobles’ adult reading habits then deepened the knowledge of western culture that their upbringing had instilled in them and kept them abreast of European developments in everything from philosophy, belles-lettres, politics, economics, and agriculture to social life, fashion, and coiffure.1 To be sure, their education and reading equipped noblemen for various types of service – especially in diplomacy, the upper ranks of the civil administration, and the officer corps – and, in a more general sense, prepared them to be worthy representatives of their empire. At the same time, this upbringing disposed them (both men and women) to a certain kind of sociability that was emblematic of their social class and exclusive to it. It is the function of French in nobles’ performance of their social role to which this chapter is devoted. For the most part, we are dealing here with linguistic usage, rather than language attitudes, insofar as usage can be accurately established at this remove. We therefore rely as far as possible on sources – especially memoirs and materials from family archives – which yield what seems to be factual information.2 When we come to consider 1 On Russian fashion journals, the use of French and French linguistic influence in them, and the importance of French fashion to the Russian aristocracy, see Vassilieva-Codognet, ‘The French Language of Fashion’. On the French language and the world of fashion in Russia, see also Borderioux, ‘Instruction in Eighteenth-Century Coquetry’. 2 Memoirs are a better source for this purpose than literary fiction not because they are less imbued with preconceptions but because for the writer of fiction language preference may serve

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the use of French as a marker of the social identity of the nobility, on the other hand, we stray into the more subjective domain of perceptions and need to take account of the conscious or possibly sub-conscious biases that our sources may contain.

The place of French in the noble’s linguistic repertoire While it is true that French had a special place among the foreign languages that Russians acquired, the upper reaches of the post-Petrine nobility might be best characterized, we have argued, as plurilingual rather than merely bilingual, especially if we accept a less strict definition of plurilingualism or bilingualism than symmetrical competence in all forms of all or both the languages in question.3 We find much written evidence of plurilingualism in noble correspondence, diaries, accounts of journeys, and other sorts of text. 4 In the diary of Count Valuev, who occupied high ministerial posts under Alexander II, for example, we come across numerous expressions in English (‘desultory conversation’, ‘distinguished guests’, ‘criket-match’ [sic], ‘humbug’, and ‘meddling’5) and Italian (‘sotto voce’ [in an undertone], ‘e tutti quanti’ [and everyone], and ‘in fiocchi’ [in [my] best clothes]6), besides myriad words, phrases, and reported remarks in French and occasional reported utterances in German.7 Of course, not all nobles went so far as Field Marshal Petr Saltykov and his wife, who, in the mid-eighteenth century, seem to have expected their daughters to compose letters of identical content in Russian, French, German, Italian, and English.8 Again, few members of high society, in all probability, could emulate Aleksandra Dolgorukaia, a as a means of characterization, as we shall see in Chapter 9, which deals with the classical novel, novella, and short story. See also our discussion of sources in the last section of our Introduction. 3 For a more detailed treatment of the role of different foreign languages in Russia in the long eighteenth century, see Argent et al., ‘The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages in Eighteenth-Century Russia’ and the cluster of articles on language-use in the same issue of RR. 4 On texts of these kinds, see the second and third sections of Chapter 6 below. 5 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 97, 210, 246, and vol. 2, 375. See also vol. 1, 58, 69, 78, 95, 110, 205, 252. 6 Ibidem, vol. 1, 207, 245, 70. 7 e.g. ibidem, vol. 1, 290, vol. 2, 330. Valuev is also particularly fond of locutions in Latin, such as ‘[p]rincipium finis’ (the beginning of the end), ‘[s]ignum temporis’ (a sign of the time), ‘in toto’ (in total), ‘semper idem’ (always the same), and ‘conditio sine qua non’ (an essential condition), some of which may have become common currency in the discourse of the educated European elite, particularly in the bureaucracy (ibidem, 71, 112, 199, 215, 237; see also vol. 1, 58, 72, 73, 232; vol. 2, 268, 376). 8 Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 723.

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young lady-in-waiting at the court of Alexander II, who is said to have had an exceptionally fine knowledge of five or six languages.9 However, the recollections of both foreigners and Russians do confirm the impression of a society in whose upper echelons plurilingualism, over a long period, was unexceptional. English was described by Martha Wilmot, who stayed on Dashkova’s estate in the early 1800s, as Dashkova’s fifth language.10 Russian society appeared to Wilmot as ‘a Tower of Babel […], and it seems as if Russians had the talent born with them of speaking all fluently, for t’is [sic] quite common to hear four or five at one dinner Table’.11 Some forty years later, an Englishwoman named Charlotte, who worked for about three years as a governess for an aristocratic family which had an estate in the province of Orel, noted in a similar vein that ‘four languages are nothing for one person here’.12 The princess in the household in which she lived, Charlotte observed, has great powers of conversation; will talk English with the greatest fluency to one, then rise, and seating herself by a German, converse in that language with the same ease, next with a Russian, (and from her it comes soft and flowing,) at the same time using French to another of the party […]13

This facility in foreign languages (which evidently did not preclude fluency in Russian, it will be noted) was achieved through provision of the sort of education we have discussed: Charlotte’s charge, the English governess remarks, ‘speaks four languages with ease, and knows something of Italian; she naturally mixes idioms and locutions; but I have noticed that even little children always address a person in the right language where they can, and more correctly than one would imagine’. Languages, then, were ‘acquired so intuitively from foreigners resident in the country, that but little study [was] required to bring the practice to perfection in every way’.14 9 Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov, vol. 1, 92. 10 Martha and Catherine Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, 117, cited by Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 115. 11 Martha and Catherine Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, 26, quoted by Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 174. 12 Anon., Russian Chit Chat, 12. This rather clumsily compiled work, consisting of letters written to various people in Britain, diary entries or notes from a notebook, and concluding addenda, all punctuated by translated excerpts from Russian literary works and sermons, would have been of particular interest for a British readership a few years after the governess’s stay in Russia, at the time of the Crimean War. The family who employed her appear to belong to the Davydov clan, some of whose estates were in Orel Province. 13 Ibidem, 33–34. We have retained the author’s punctuation in this quotation. 14 Ibidem, 51, 178.

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For all their plurilingualism, the Russian nobility accorded special status to French for both verbal and written communication in society and in the family, as well as for the purpose of communicating with foreigners.15 We shall shortly dwell on the main social settings in which the use of French was widespread or, at times, de rigueur and on some of the connotations that its use had in those settings. By way of introduction to the use of French in aristocratic society, though, we shall briefly consider the broad insight into this subject that can be gained from the valuable memoirs of Vigel’, on whose linguistic education we have already commented.16 Vigel’ was socially active during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I. He held various government posts and was well connected in society and literary circles as well as officialdom. His voluminous, candid, and often trenchant reminiscences are an exceptionally rich source of information on the importance of French as a social language in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century, because they have a broad sweep, as regards both time-span and subject-matter, and because they contain much comment on linguistic practice among the elite. Their value is enhanced, for our purposes, by the ambivalence of Vigel’ towards the phenomenon of Russian francophonie, which he views from different vantage-points. While he took pride in his own command of French and demonstrated the wit that won admiration in Francophone society, his references to French-speaking members of that society are often barbed, placing those individuals in an unflattering light. Vigel’ frequently mentions the linguistic attainment of individuals who inhabited the grand monde and asserts that prowess in foreign languages, especially French, was the prime qualification for entry into it in St Petersburg in the early Alexandrine age. A ‘perfect knowledge of French’, along with ‘the manners of high society’ and ‘great ignorance of everything else’, he caustically remarks, is the distinguishing trait of a Russian aristocrat.17 Unfortunately, the value attached to French as an indicator of merit also made society ‘accessible to people who should not have been seen in it, such as foreigners of all sorts, speculators and tricksters [aferisty], and even actors [!]’.18 No one better exemplified what was simultaneously pleasing and deserving of censure in the grand monde, its charm and its superficiality, than the Francophone aristocrat Prince Fedor Sergeevich Golitsyn, in whose 15 On the use of French for certain types of writing as well as for certain types of verbal interaction, see Chapter 6. 16 See the last section of Chapter 2 above. 17 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 227. 18 Ibidem, 164.

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family Vigel’ himself spent some of his formative years. Golitsyn had not been well educated, Vigel’ writes: he had, however, acquired in high society that good tone which gives a person endowed with wit so many means of displaying it and a person who does not have it the means to conceal his deficiencies. Most of all, it enables one to circumvent awkward questions which could reveal one’s ignorance; if one has the most superficial knowledge one might pass as someone almost learned. In France, where [Golitsyn] was born, it [bon ton] could cover up vices and even wrongdoing until the revolution destroyed it as a useless mantle. Our young aristocratic travellers, the Shuvalovs, the Belosel’skiis, the Chernyshevs, brought it to us long ago, but it was above all émigrés who spread it in the best society. Prince Fedor Golitsyn was educated in it; and since the French language was the only vehicle of bon ton, without which, even to this day, it has not been able to exist among us, he expressed himself in that language as freely and pleasantly as I had ever heard before.19

Indeed the clan to which Golitsyn belonged had collectively played a leading role in establishing a Francophone aristocratic culture in which birth and connections were more highly prized than service and position in the Table of Ranks. This culture had been brought to Russia straight from the Parisian district of St Germain by Natal’ia Petrovna, the famous ‘Princess Moustache’ on whom Pushkin is assumed to have modelled his anonymous countess, the aged relic of another epoch, in his tale ‘The Queen of Spades’.20 Taking up the torch that was being extinguished in France as the ancien régime ended there, Natal’ia Golitsyna rekindled it in the North, with the help of hundreds of refugees from French society and the French clergy. Vigel’ describes this transfer across national boundaries in terms consonant with the notion of cultural capital. Metaphorically speaking, he writes, a joint stock company was formed in which titles, wealth, and credit at court, knowledge of the French language, and, even more than that, ignorance of Russian were invested. Having appropriated important privileges, this company named itself high society and started to adapt the rules of the French aristocracy to Russian mores just as successfully as the marchionesses of Senneval and 19 Ibidem, 77–78. 20 See the last section of Chapter 2 above on Natal’ia Petrovna’s inculcation of French aristocratic taste and values in her children.

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the viscountesses of Jussac in today’s French vaudevilles are reborn on our stage as Avdot’ia Dmitrievnas and Mar’ia Semenovnas. Catherine [II] welcomed this society, seeing it as one of the bulwarks that protected the throne from free-thinking, and Paul I even acted as its patron, while reserving the right to pummel its members mercilessly, which the French kings had not been able to permit themselves to do.21

The use of French, then, was an important element of the strict code which regulated the conduct of the social, official, and cultural worlds in which Vigel’ was well connected, as his numerous vignettes of notable functionaries, social figures, and writers demonstrate. At the same time, Vigel’ took a jaundiced view of these worlds. This ambivalence tempts us to consider him as a prime example of the sort of split personality that the cultural westernization of the Russian elite, it is supposed, typically created. Certainly, we glimpse in his memoirs some of the dilemmas that beset the elite in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia whenever they had to reflect on social or national identity and allegiance. However, these dilemmas may be largely explained in Vigel’’s case by his status as an outsider in several of the domains in which he found himself. Although he had close connections with the aristocracy, having been educated for much of his childhood alongside the children of families in the eminent Golitsyn and Saltykov clans, he clearly disliked this social stratum, perhaps nursing a grievance as a result of his early dependency on them. The aristocracy, he remarked, as if he was not part of it himself, was ‘a fairly faithful copy of a French original: it concealed its pride under politeness and its lax morality under decorum’.22 Not that Vigel’ had any obvious respect for, interest in, or affinity with the non-noble social classes.23 Nor did he have any truck with liberal ideas, let alone with the Decembrists, despite his proximity to free-thinking men in the Alexandrine and Nicholaevan ages.24 As far as his sense of nationality was concerned, he clearly felt himself to be Russian, although ethnically he had foreign roots (his father was a Swedish Estonian). His sense of exclusion was no doubt accentuated by other personal factors. He seems not to have been a popular man, partly because contemporaries found him difficult and arrogant but probably also because of their prejudice against his homosexuality. It is clear from his memoirs that he was acutely 21 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 90. 22 Ibidem, vol. 2, 5. 23 See the first page of Allen McConnell’s introduction to the reprint of Vigel’s memoirs by Oriental Research Partners (1974), ibidem, vol. 1 (unpaginated). 24 Vigel, Zapiski, vol. 2, 269.

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ashamed that he had been seduced in his teenage years by a French governor in the Golitsyn family, the Chevalier Romain de Belleville.25 The memoirs of the above-mentioned Khvoshchinskaia, which are also of value to us for several reasons, bear witness to the persistence of French in the beau monde of St Petersburg in the post-Crimean period, long after the literary community and intelligentsia, as we shall see,26 had come to deplore the practice of French-speaking as a social and domestic practice among the Russian nobility.27 When, in the mid-1860s, Khvoshchinskaia comes to the capital as a girl to visit her grandmother, Potemkina, she is introduced to Potemkina’s guests thus: ‘C’est la fille de Iurka.’ [This is Iurka’s daughter.] ‘On le voit bien par la ressemblance’ [One can certainly see the likeness], the old women replied, politely nodding at me. ‘Et a-t-elle du talent comme son père?’ [And is she talented like her father?], one of them asked. ‘Elle a une très belle voix et va la travailler ici; après le thé elle nous chantera.’ [She has a very beautiful voice and is going to work on it here; after tea, she’ll sing for us.]28

By tacitly resorting in her memoirs to the common practice of code-switching for the purpose of reporting speech in the language originally used by the speaker in question, Khvoshchinskaia reliably indicates that French-speaking remained normal practice in the high metropolitan society that the Potemkins frequented.29 Further evidence of the persistence of francophonie in this society in the 1860s and 1870s is supplied by Valuev’s voluminous diaries,30 not to mention the literary evidence furnished by Tolstoi in Anna Karenina.31 25 Ibidem, vol. 1, 81–82, 134. 26 See Chapter 8 below. 27 Published in nine instalments at the very end of the nineteenth century, Khvoshchinskaia’s memoirs, like those of Vigel’, ranged over a long period from the age of Nicholas and reflected the author’s experience of life in different strata of the nobility, as her family circumstances changed. (Her abrasive and prodigal father, the composer and choirmaster Iurii Nikolaevich Golitsyn, squandered the wealth of his branch of the family.) 28 Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Vospominaniia Eleny Iur’evny Khvoshchinskoi’, RS, 1898, no. 5, 415; see also 420. 29 For further examples of code-switching, see the second section, on noble correspondence, in Chapter 6 below. 30 See e.g. Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 71, 92. See also the third section of Chapter 6, where we examine this diary as an example of multi-lingual ego-writing, for numerous further examples. 31 See the fourth section of Chapter 9 below.

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Mid-century guidebooks for foreigners intending to visit St Petersburg affirm the point: ‘French is the language of society’, John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland informed prospective tourists in 1865, although English too was by this time ‘generally understood’.32

French in the sites of noble sociability The domains in which French was most widely used as a social language, and to which we now turn, were of course those very venues or sites of noble sociability that were imported as a result of cultural westernization. The sites are familiar to readers of classical Russian literature, especially prose fiction, which of all literary forms had the greatest claim to social realism.33 They are also amply described in letters, diaries, albums, and other documents preserved in family archives, and it is on these non-fictional sources that we shall mainly draw here. One such site was the ball. It was at a ball given by Countess Sof’ia Tolstaia (wife of the poet Aleksei Tolstoi) that the seventeen-year-old Khvoshchinskaia made her entry into St Petersburg society in the late 1860s, and the hostess took the débutante under her wing with the reassuring words ‘C’est votre premier bal, il faut que vous vous y amusiez’ (It’s your first ball, you must enjoy yourself).34 Another venue was the salon or the soirée, where the host (or more probably the hostess) might arrange various imported entertainments, such as the performance of French romances, in which Natal’ia Kurakina, née Golovina, excelled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.35 Games of wit ( jeux d’esprit) might also be played at such occasions. Valuev gives us a glimpse of this sort of entertainment, and the use of French at it, in a diary entry about an event he attended in 1874: Then I went to a soirée, for the sovereign at Madam Moira’s. Incidentally, there was a game of secrétaire in which various ladies and gentlemen took part and which produced some good witticisms. For example. Quel est le 32 Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland, 46, quoted by Lieven, The Aristocracy, 138. 33 For treatment of these sites by Ivan Turgenev and Tolstoi, see Chapter 9 below. Other examples are to be found in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, and the works of many other classical writers. 34 Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Vospominaniia Eleny Iur’evny Khvoshchinskoi’, RS, 1898, no. 6, 642. 35 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 183, op. 1, d. 1549. See also Argent, ‘Noble Sociability in French’. Kurakina herself hosted a salon in Paris in 1812 and wrote a travel diary in French: see N.I. Kurakina and F.A. Kurakin, Souvenirs des voyages de la princesse Natalie de Kourakine, 1810–1830.

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plus grand bonheur? – Celui que nos envieux nous supposent. Qu’est ce qu’une femme incomprise? – Celle qui comprend la vie autrement que son mari. Quand un crocodile veut être aimable, que fait-il? – Il mord, mais sans tuer. Qu’est ce qu’une grande symphonie? – L’éléphant de la musique. Pourquoi la terre tourne-t-elle autour du soleil? – Par curiosité.36 (What’s the greatest happiness? That which those who are envious of us suspect we have. What is a woman who is misunderstood? One who understands life in a different way from her husband. What does a crocodile do when it wants to be liked? It bites without killing. What is a great symphony? The elephant of music. Why does the Earth go round the sun? Out of curiosity.)

The theatre was another social site in which French came to the fore. The staging of plays in French was a traditional social entertainment in aristocratic circles from at least as far back as the reign of Catherine II. (In this respect, among others, there was no clear dividing line between life at court and the life of major aristocratic families which followed the model laid down by the court.) For example, a governess employed in the 1780s in the Chernyshev family, into which Natal’ia Golitsyna was born, mentions performances in French which were put on by members of the family in their palatial residences.37 A play written by the family’s French governor, Duvignau, on the model of works by the eighteenth-century dramatists Arnaud Berquin and Louis Carmontelle, was staged in 1811, to celebrate Natal’ia Petrovna’s nameday, and members of the family themselves acted in it, along with relations and close acquaintances from the Apraksin, Saltykov, and Stroganov families.38 This domestic theatrical tradition persisted in the Russian aristocracy for many years. Naryshkina recalled that in her childhood, in the middle of the nineteenth century, they performed Scribe’s plays The Young Lady to be Married and The Truthful Liar.39 As late as the reign of Alexander II, the continuing popularity of the French theatrical repertoire conspicuously prompts switches from Russian into French in Valuev’s diary: Evening at the theatre Le fils de Giboyer [Giboyer’s Boy40], a lot of talk about this play […] It makes an impression, although there are a lot of incongruities 36 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 2, 305–306. 37 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, op. 106, d. 3, fol. 29 v. 38 Ibidem, op. 79, d. 13. 39 Naryshkina, Moi vospominaniia, 86. The French titles of Scribe’s plays are La demoiselle à marier and Le Menteur véridique.  40 This is a comedy by Émile Augier.

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both in the character of Giboyer, détestable auteur et рèrе sublime [a detestable author and sublime father] and in the character of Fernande dont l’esprit a changé de sexe et qui ignore ce que c’est que les sexes [whose spirit has changed sex and who doesn’t know what the sexes are].41

At the opera, the restaurant, and the horse-races too members of the high nobility mingled and demonstrated their right to be present by using French. All these settings, incidentally, serve as locations for scenes which Tolstoi sprinkles with utterances in French in either War and Peace or Anna Karenina, or in both these novels. 42 A further venue where French flourished was the spa, to which Russian aristocrats flocked in the nineteenth century. Indeed, they developed their own versions of this venue in recently colonized territories in the Caucasus, for instance at Piatigorsk, where Lermontov’s ‘Princess Mary’, one of the components of his Hero of Our Time, is set. Equally, the spa was an international European venue where the Russian aristocracy could rub shoulders with European peers. Again Tolstoi, in Anna Karenina, provides a literary example of the behaviour of Francophone society at it. We may reasonably suppose that when in the middle of the century Nadezhda Barteneva wrote in French to her sister Praskov’ia from Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, where she was taking the waters, she was using the lingua franca of the international elite with whom she was consorting each day, including the ethnically diverse elite of the Russian Empire who were well represented there. Among those she had recently met, Barteneva named les Adlerberg, les Wiazemsky, dont je t’enverrai les vers en souvenir de Kissingen, les Ramzay, les Cancrine, Marachette, accompagnement obligé, Marenhiem, Stackelberg de Turin, qui arrive aujourd’hui etc. etc. Je ne te parle pas de nouvelles connaissances dont une grande pianiste Mme Delphine Knight. (the Adlerbergs, the Viazemskiis, whose verses in memory of Kissingen I’ll send you, the Ramsays, the Kankrins, Marachette, her inevitable accompaniment Marenhiem, Stackelberg from Turin, who is arriving today, etc. etc. This is not to mention new acquaintances, including a great pianist, Mme Delphine Knight.) 41 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 202. For further examples, see 191, 199, 249. 42 On treatment of francophonie in these novels, see the third and fourth sections of Chapter 9 below.

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Not that the treatment Nadezhda was undergoing at the spa, let alone the strain of observing the niceties of this society, was restorative! She was suffering, Nadezhda complained, from ‘une humeur massacrante, une fatigue horrible et une lourdeur insurmontable sans compter les frais d’amabilité et de politesse, les tribulations mondaines de visites reçues et rendues pour éviter lesquelles ont [on] fuit la capitale’ (a very bad temper, horrible tiredness, and an unconquerable sluggishness, without counting the cost of amiability and politeness, the social tribulations of visits received and rendered, which one flees from the capital to escape). 43 As we have observed in our discussion of language use at court, so too in the aristocracy at large French functioned not only as a language of society but also as a language of intimacy, a medium of communication in the private sphere. This function is attested by playful texts that have survived in family archives. In papers belonging to the Miatlev family and dating from the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, we find a humorous family ‘newspaper’ entitled ‘Le Barbet Scrutateur’ (The Beady-Eyed Spaniel), which contains family news, anecdotes, and a hand-drawn title page. 44 A mid-nineteenth-century collection of letters and notes belonging to Vladimir Shcherbatov and his wife, who lived in Stuttgart, where Vladimir was attached to the Russian diplomatic mission, appears to offer another example of playful use of French among people who were evidently close to one another. A member of the Gagarin family sent the Prince a message in French written out in Cyrillic script. 45 Similarly, Aleksandr Bobrinskii left notes from a game in which participants would write plays and stories, one person beginning the work and another continuing it after a few lines, with wordplay and puns, as in the following example: ‘Lui aussi avait aimé Julienne; il l’avait aimé, comme une julienne, toute pleine d’herbes du printemps et de carottes amoureuses’ (He too had loved Julienne; he had loved her like a julienne [soup], full of spring herbs and amorous carrots). 46 French was also commonly used for witty verses, impromptu remarks 43 N.A. Barteneva, ‘Pis’ma k Praskov’e Arsen’evne Bartenevoi’, GARF, f. 632, op. 1, d. 54, fols 50 v., 51, 51 v. The Adlerbergs, Ramsays, Kankrins, and Stackelbergs, as well as the Viazemskiis, were all subjects of the Russian Empire. 44 IRLI, f. 196, no. 18. It is worth noting an example of a provincial news book that was passed between two neighbouring families, the Chikhachevs and Chernavins, in the Province of Vladimir in the 1830s. Although it was written mostly in Russian, it also featured some French (Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage, 236). 45 RGB, f. 347, k. 3, d. 1, fol. 441. 46 RGIA, f. 899, op. 1, d. 37, fol. 21 v. This material dates from the second half of the nineteenth century.

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or aphorisms in the albums which families or individuals kept in their drawing-rooms and the compilation of which was a favourite pastime. 47 Take, for example, the following lines written in the album of a Moscow family of the late 1830s or early 1840s: L’amant différent chez chaque nation. Quand un objet fait résistance, L’Anglais fier et vain s’en offense, L’Italien est désolé, L’Espagnol est inconsolable, L’Allemand se console à table Et le Français est tout consolé. P. 9 octobre 1841. 48 (Each nation has a different sort of lover. When an object offers resistance, the vain and haughty Englishman takes offence, the Italian is disconsolate, the Spaniard is inconsolable, the German finds solace at the table, and the Frenchman is completely consoled.)

Nor should we overlook the Masonic lodge as a cosmopolitan venue to which plurilingualism gave nobles access, both outside Russia and within the empire. Freemasonry had been introduced into Russia in the mid-eighteenth century, mainly from British and German sources in the first instance, and for most of the age of Catherine II it was allowed to flourish. For idealistic Russians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a source of spiritual comfort, enlightened ideas, and humanistic values. It attracted men who were close to or trusted by Catherine, including Khrapovitskii, Aleksandr Bibikov, who commanded the forces that put down the Pugachev Revolt, and Ivan Elagin, who was director of the imperial theatres from 1766–1779. Among men of letters, it was associated in particular with Nikolai Novikov, who through his satirical journalism and activity as publisher, editor, and philanthropist played a major role in the creation of a reading public in Russia.49 Catherine herself did not approve of Freemasonry, which she considered at best eccentric, and following the outbreak of the French 47 On albums, see also the end of the third section of Chapter 6 below. 48 ‘Souvenir’, RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 183, op. 1, d. 1679, fol. 16. 49 On Novikov, see especially W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov.

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Revolution she ceased to tolerate it. However, it underwent a strong revival in the age of Alexander I, despite the resistance of some conservative nationalists, including Fedor Rostopchin, who harboured a suspicion of Masons as carriers of seditious alien ideas.50 Numerous lodges sprang up, or were invigorated, in the early 1800s, for instance The Lodge of United Friends, The Palestine Lodge, The Three Virtues, The Elizabeth and Virtue, The Alexander and Beneficence, and two Grand Lodges into which the Russian directorial body split in 1814, namely the Grand Provincial Lodge and the Grand Lodge of Astraea. Among the men who frequented these lodges there were prominent aristocrats, such as the Princes Il’ia Dolgorukov, Sergei Trubetskoi and Sergei Volkonskii, and notable future men of letters, such as Petr Chaadaev and Aleksandr Griboedov. Despite the prevailing reactionary climate in Russia after the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander I continued to allow Masonic activity up until 1822, when finally an edict was passed banning the lodges and secret societies in general.51 Membership of Masonic lodges, both in Russia and abroad, enabled Russian noblemen to socialize with foreigners of various origins and to build international cultural networks.52 Already in the eighteenth century numerous Russians, including individuals who subsequently became eminent, are known to have belonged to or visited lodges across Europe, from Stockholm, Warsaw, and Berlin, to Naples and Oxford.53 Many joined or visited lodges in France, where they found themselves on diplomatic postings or as students in educational institutions or simply as tourists on the Grand Tour, and some became prominent in French Freemasonry. For example, the Francophile Aleksandr Stroganov, a future president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts and Director of the Imperial Libraries, represented a lodge based in Besançon and all the lodges of the Franche-Comté region at the founding 50 Rostopchin wrote a tract in French against the Freemasons (1811), published later as ‘Zapiska o martinistakh’. 51 There is a large literature on the history of Russian Freemasonry. The first major study of the subject was made by the pre-revolutionary scholar Pypin (1916). Other important studies include Vernadskii (1917) and Bakounine (1967). Recent scholarship includes the following book-length studies: D. Smith (1999), Serkov (2001), Faggionato (2005), and Breuillard and Ivanova (eds) (2007). For the claim that Masonic motifs strongly affected aspects of nineteenth-century Russian culture, from religious revival in the post-Napoleonic period to Decembrism and Herzen’s thought, see Billington, The Icon and the Axe, 242–252. 52 On Masonic sociability, see, e.g., Beaurepaire, L’Autre et le Frère, and idem, L’Espace des francs-maçons. 53 For a list of Russians who were members of foreign Masonic lodges in the eighteenth century, and also foreign members of Russian Masonic lodges, see Serkov, Russkoe masonstvo, 990–995. See also Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Foreign Languages and Noble Sociability’.

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meeting of The Grand Orient of France (Grand Orient de France) in 1773 and he subsequently occupied leading positions in that organization. He was also one of the founders of The Lodge of United Friends (Les Amis Réunis) in Paris and a member of another well-known Parisian lodge, The Nine Sisters (Les Neuf Sœurs), whose other members included Voltaire, the Comte de Mirabeau, Benjamin Franklin, several prominent scientists and artists,54 and Gilbert Romme, a future tutor to Stroganov’s son Pavel and a participant in and eventual victim of the French Revolution.55 In the lodges established in Russia (in which Russians returning from abroad often participated), Russian members also mingled freely with non-Russian members (‘non-Russian’ either in the sense that they were subjects of foreign states, including many Frenchmen, or in the sense that they were subjects of the Russian Empire who were not of Russian ethnic origin).56 For Russians participating in or communicating with Masonic lodges outside Russia, French, as the European lingua franca, may have been the most frequently used language. It was the language, for example, in which Elagin and Kurakin conducted or drafted correspondence with the Swedish Grand Lodge when in the late 1770s they were discussing the possibility of Russian Freemasons joining the Swedish system. It was also the language used in a Swedish licence authorizing the establishment of a directory in St Petersburg in 1780.57 Within Russian lodges too bilingualism and plurilingualism were important assets for Russian Freemasons. The increasing prominence of Germans in Russian official and social circles in the eighteenth century, the presence of a German community inside Russia, the status of German lodges in the international Masonic movement, and the relative geographical proximity of the German world to Russia – all these factors ensured that German was much used in Russia in the Masonic domain, as in other social domains. The Moscow Rosicrucians (whose order had been founded in Prussia) naturally used German, especially for conduct of relations with their German brethren, and translated Masonic 54 For further details, see Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Foreign Languages and Noble Sociability’, unpaginated text and n. 14. 55 Stroev, ‘Gilbert Romme et la loge des Neuf Sœurs (juillet 1779)’. On this lodge, see also Amiable, Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789, la loge des Neuf Sœurs. 56 On the composition of the membership of lodges in St Petersburg and Moscow during Catherine’s reign, see Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Foreign Languages and Noble Sociability’, Serkov, Russkoe masonstvo, 943–995, and Rjéoutski, ‘Les Français dans la franc-maçonnerie russe au siècle des Lumières’. Serkov’s lists cover the whole of the eighteenth century but relate mainly to the reign of Catherine II. 57 Pypin, Russkoe masonstvo, 154–155, 158.

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documents from German.58 However, from an early stage in the history of Russian Freemasonry, French was a working language in which members of Russian lodges or visitors to them might make speeches, write documents such as rules and regulations, charters, constitutions, and descriptions of rituals, draw up minutes of meetings, conduct correspondence, compile membership lists, and sing hymns. In 1760, for example, Ivan Shuvalov’s secretary, Baron de Tschudy, who was himself a prominent French Mason, made a speech in French at one of the St Petersburg lodges.59 French was used even among the Russian Rosicrucians. Nikolai Kraevich, for instance, wrote his main mystical works in that language.60 Later, in the Alexandrine age, French was the working language in the Lodge of United Friends, which had been founded in St Petersburg in 1802 in accordance with the French system of Freemasonry, and at the Friends of the North, into which Vigel’ was inducted, even though the Grand Master, Aleksandr Zherebtsov, was Russian.61 In the Palestine Lodge, founded in St Petersburg in 1809, proceedings were also conducted in French, and not until 1813 was Russian adopted as a second working language, under pressure from its Russian members. Although the war against Napoleon had the effect of stimulating an increase in the number of translations of Masonic ceremonials into Russian, French continued to be much used in lodges in the years immediately after the end of the wars. The Orpheus Lodge, founded late in 1818, for example, used French for speeches, rules, minutes, and books of ritual, and The Three Virtues Lodge produced minutes in French as well as Russian. When in 1818 a Freemason from Berlin was instructed to collect information on Russian lodges the answers to the questions that had been formulated for him in German were provided in French.62 Even in a lodge in which there were many German members, The Alexander and the Triple Salvation, which was founded some time before the middle of 1817 and survived until 1822, 58 Kondakov, Orden zolotogo i rozovogo kresta v Rossii, 61–62, 64, 72–76, 78–80, 82, 212, 221–222, etc. 59 ‘Discours prononcé à la Loge S. T. à Pétersbourg, le premier mars 1760, vieux style, à un travail d’apprenti’, in [Baron de Tschudy], L’Étoile flamboyante (1766), vol. 2, 35–40. 60 A mystical novel written by Kraevich in French was published in a Russian translation by Lopukhin under the title Luch blagodati, ili Pisaniia N.A.K. (no date or place of publication). Some of Kraevich’s writings were first published by N.V. Repnin and Kraevich in a book that appeared under two different titles, Les fruits de la Grâce, ou les Opuscules spirituels des deux F. M. du vrai Systeme (1790) and Les fruits de la Grace ou Opuscules spirituels des deux amateurs de la Sagesse (also 1790). See Pliukhanova, ‘Kraevich Nikolai Aleksandrovich’. 61 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 2, 115 ff. 62 For information on language use in these and other lodges, see, e.g., Pypin, Russkoe masonstvo, 384 ff., 413–414, 420, 429, 531, and Brachev, Мasony v Rossii, Chapter 9.

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French was used both for formal documents describing rites and rituals and as the language in which to conduct them.63 Francophonie, then, was a useful tool for Russians when they entered the Masonic world, whether it was in a foreign setting or in the Russian Empire and whether they were mixing with foreigners or other Russians, just as it was when they attended balls, soirées, the theatre, the opera, and the spa, or when they conversed more informally and playfully in the aristocratic drawing-room. Finally, it is worth pausing briefly to consider the linguistic competencies of the Decembrists and their wives, both because the Decembrist movement, if it can be called that, grew out of the activity of Masonic lodges in the post-Napoleonic part of the reign of Alexander I and because the higher ranks of the imperial army were closely connected with high society. It has been said that certain Decembrists were much more competent in French than in Russian; indeed, they found it excruciatingly difficult, it has been claimed, to testify to the investigating commission in the vernacular.64 Up to a point this claim is no doubt true, but we need in this connection to take account of the fact that the collection of officers indicted for their part in the revolt reflected the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Empire. It would not be surprising if men of non-Russian origin, such as the Baltic Baron Andreas von Rosen or the Poggio brothers from the cosmopolitan city of Odessa, who were of Italian extraction, had imperfect or halting Russian. More important still, it is evident from testimonies written in their own hand that many of the Decembrists – for example, Pavel Avramov, Nikolai Basargin, Nikolai and Pavel Bobrishchev-Pushkin, Andrei Ental’tsev, Vasilii Ivashev, Aleksandr Kornilovich, Semen Krasnokutskii, Aleksandr Kriukov, Vladimir Likharev, Nikolai Lorer, Vasilii Norov, Sergei Trubetskoi, and Ferdinand Vol’f – had a good knowledge of Russian. Indeed, Kondratii Ryleev, one of the five men hanged for their role in the revolt, had achieved 63 See the extracts from the charter of this lodge published at https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets /3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Free_masonry%20text.pdf (Free_masonry_text). The original charter is at RGB, f. 183, op. 1, d. 808. See also Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Foreign Languages and Noble Sociability’. 64 See, e.g., Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 361. The claim is bolstered by stories of the difficulties caused by leading conspirators’ ignorance of Russian when they found themselves in Siberia. Non-Francophone guards, for instance, apparently became suspicious when Sergei Volkonkii’s wife Mariia, who joined him there, spoke to him in French in order to speed up their communication. Again, the wife of Nikita Murav’ev, Aleksandra (Alexandrine), incurred the wrath of a drunken Cossack by interjecting some French, in which she was more fluent than in Russian, into a conversation with her husband. See Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 172–173, 240–241; Sutherland does not precisely indicate her sources for these pieces of information, though.

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prominence in the Russian literary community as a journalist and civic poet. Only a small number of the Decembrists wished to write their testimonies or letters to the investigating commission in French. Those who did came for the most part from the wealthier stratum of the nobility.65 Thus Mikhail Bestuzhev-Riumin requested that the investigating committee ‘me permettre de faire les réponses en français; car je dois avouer à ma honte que j’ai plus d’habitude de cette langue que du Russe’ (allow me to make my replies in French, for I must admit, to my shame, that I am more accustomed to using that language than Russian).66 And indeed, Bestuzhev-Riumin did initially write his testimonies and letters in French.67 Nevertheless, he was well able to respond in Russian when ordered to do so, and his Russian was lucid and contained few mistakes.68 His friend Matvei Murav’ev-Apostol, who was the son of a man who had served as a diplomat and senator, also testified in Russian as well as in French.69 Admittedly, his Russian testimonies contained some spelling mistakes, occasional grammatical errors,70 and uncertainties (for instance, he inserted some words in brackets because he was evidently not sure that the Russian expression he had used was correct 71), but in general his Russian too was fluent and correct. No neat or comprehensive pattern of language use, then, can be obtained from studying the huge corpus of extant papers relating to the Decembrists. All we can safely say is that language competencies among them, as members of the officer corps of the imperial army, confirm our impression of the complexity and heterogeneity of language practice among the cosmopolitan elite of the multi-ethnic empire at the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Nearly all the Decembrists who belonged to the higher social echelons were plurilingual, having a command of both French and Russian, and, in many cases, German too. (Few knew English or Italian, though.) We may add that the authors of both the main political projects associated with Decembrism, Nikita Murav’ev and Pestel’, although they themselves may have been at least as comfortable in French as in Russian, 65 There were exceptions, such as Basargin, whose family possessed only about 50 serfs (Vosstanie dekabristov, vol. 12, 285–286). Basargin’s French is not without mistakes, though. 66 Ibidem, vol. 9, 69. 67 Ibidem, 41–46, 69–72, 95–96, 139. 68 Ibidem, 74–78, 81–92, 98–100, etc. 69 Ibidem, 183–192, 224–244, etc. (in Russian); 192–197, etc. (in French). 70 e.g. ‘v pervykh chisel dekabria’, ‘vylezaet iz okoshko’ (ibidem, 231, 237; our underlining to indicate errors). 71 e.g. ‘nichego ne bylo pridumannogo (pas de préméditation)’, ‘bol’shaia sobstvennost’ (la grande propriété)’ (ibidem, 186, 228).

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regarded Russian as a unifying force and a source of national identity in their imagined future polities, and envisaged possession of Russian as a qualification for Russian citizenship.72

The spirit of the grand monde and social relations in it The prevalence of French at the social venues we have mentioned is not explained merely by linguistic competencies, for we should not imagine that a majority of the Russian nobility were unable to converse in Russian. Rather, it was due to the fact that French was inextricably bound up with the culture of the noble social sphere. Use of French conveyed a sense or claim of entitlement to belong to that sphere, and it was prudent constantly to remind one’s superiors, peers, and inferiors of that entitlement. Francophonie, then, was a marker of social identity, and we shall discuss this function of it in the following section. First, though, we shall briefly consider the tone and nature of the conversation for which French seemed the natural vehicle and to which many Russian nobles, as we have seen in our earlier chapter on teaching and learning French, were habituated from their early years. The skilled speaker of French in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European society was endowed with a stock of phrases with which to interact with others in a polite way, that is to say, to introduce people to one another, pay compliments, offer congratulations, issue invitations and accept or decline them, express gratitude, make promises and requests, apologize, take leave, offer condolences, and so forth. More or less formulaic expressions serving these purposes abound in recollections of social conversations among ‘Europeanized’ Russians, as in the following examples: ‘mon frère d’armes’ (my brother in arms); ‘Elle est charmante, charmante votre nièce’ (She is charming, charming, your niece); ‘je ferai pour vous tout ce qui sera en mon pouvoir’ (I’ll do everything in my power for you).73 Of course, such locutions occurred in the written as well as the spoken language; in 72 Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 178, 180. It is of interest in this connection that Pestel’ moved from a Masonic lodge which conducted its business in French to a Russian-speaking one, although it is possible that language preference may not have been the sole cause of this switch, inasmuch as Pestel’ may have wanted to mix with people who were more likely to share his political views: see Grandhaye, Les décembristes, 54, and O’Meara, The Decembrist Pavel Pestel, 41–42. 73 All these examples are taken from the memoirs of Anna Kern: see Kern, ‘Vospominaniia Anny Petrovny Kern’, 231, 236. For discussion of French in the letter of condolence, see Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 53.

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particular, they pervaded noble letter-writing, a written form of the language of society, alongside other formulae that were peculiar to the epistolary genre, such as those with which letters might begin or end. Take, for example, the following formulae that are used by Natal’ia Golitsyna in letters to her children: ‘je suis charmé d’apprendre que…’ (I am delighted to learn that), ‘j’espère que vous me donnerez de la satisfaction’ (I hope you will give me the satisfaction), ‘tâchez de donner de la consolation à la mère qui vous adore’ (try to give some comfort to the mother who adores you), ‘je désirerai pouvoir vous témoigner le plaisir […]’ (I shall want to be able to indicate to you the pleasure […]), and so forth.74 Beyond such ready-made locutions, French might simply provide le mot juste, as Valuev observed: ‘It is with incredible légèreté [lightness of touch], the precise word is lacking in Russian, with which he [Aleksandr Gorchakov, the minister of foreign affairs] plays his role in today’s circumstances.’75 Indeed, Valuev (like Catherine II a century earlier76) frequently resorted to French when he needed an aphorism or an expression to sum up a feeling or situation: ‘Chacun son métier’ (Each to his trade), ‘Gouverner c’est prevoir’ (To govern is to foresee), ‘Je n’aime pas le gros rire’ (I don’t like loud laughter), ‘folle journée’ (a mad day), or ‘tâter le terrain’ (to put out a feeler).77 Nimble use of the phraseological stock available to those adept in high society helped to structure conversation there, but communication in this milieu also had a distinctive tone and style. Although serious topics might well be touched upon at the sort of noble social gatherings we have mentioned, the type of conversation conducted at them, as Lilti has written, with regard to the salon in eighteenth-century Paris, was very different from the model of scholarly discussion. One had to be seductive and witty, and one was not allowed to contradict others. The goal of the conversation was not to join in a cooperative exercise aimed at advancing the progress of learning, as in the Republic of Letters, but rather to participate in a collective entertainment.78

Consequently, the most sought-after participants, irrespective of their learning or literary achievements, were accomplished performers and 74 Rjéoutski, ‘L’éducation d’une jeune fille dans une grande famille de la noblesse russe’. See also the section on French in Russian letter-writing (i.e. the second section) in Chapter 6 below. 75 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 2, 375. 76 See the third section of Chapter 3 above. 77 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 63, 75, 79, 207, 242. 78 Lilti, ‘The Kingdom of Politesse’, 4.

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raconteurs, like the Neapolitan Abbé Ferdinando Galiani, whose exuberant conversation, as Lilti characterizes it, might be accompanied ‘by gestures, jokes, and imitations’ and who might be able ‘to defend paradoxical ideas with compelling and witty arguments’.79 Fedor Rostopchin, by all accounts, was an acknowledged Russian master of this histrionic art.80 Successful conversationalists could find bons mots with which to characterize other members of society, such as somebody whom Chicherin described as ‘le roi du rire’ (the king of laughter).81 The most daring among them might sail close to the wind, as did Khvoshchinskaia’s overfamiliar father, Iurii Golitsyn, when he was asked by a superior to kiss his shoulder rather than his face. ‘Oh! Je suis enchanté de le faire’, Golitsyn replied, ‘car je n’aurai pas le désagrément d’être piqué par votre menton, qui n’est pas toujours bien rasé’ (Oh, I’d be delighted to do that, because then I won’t have to suffer the unpleasant experience of being pricked by your chin, which isn’t always cleanly shaven).82 The function of French as a language of cynical wit, like so many other aspects of foreign-language use in imperial Russia, is well illustrated in Valuev’s diary. In numerous instances, Valuev switches from Russian into French because French seems the most appropriate vehicle for observations which exemplify the wit on which society prides itself, or because French was the society language in which the bons mots in question were uttered. Consider, for instance, the following quip about the rebellious Poles in 1861: they ‘have long been looking for an opportunity pour se faire mitrailler [to have themselves gunned down]. The aim is obvious. People in Europe will start talking about the Polish question again.’83 Or take the following small selection of more or less caustic comments about other people, all of them recorded in entries in Valuev’s diary for 1861: I met Count Murav’ev-Amurskii at Lanskoi’s. Il n’a plus allures d’un astre ascendant [He no longer looks like a rising star].84 Prince Gorchakov, as always, dans le vague et dans un monde de phrases [in a haze and in the world of words].85 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibidem. On his ‘memoirs’, see the fifth section of Chapter 6 below. Chicherin, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 509. Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Vospominaniia Eleny Iur’evny Khvoshchinskoi’, RS, 1897, no. 3, 531. Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 69. Ibidem, 82. Ibidem, 119.

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The thought that I can escape from him [the Archbishop of Vilnius] here m’а mis de bonne humeur pour toute la durée de notre entretien [put me in a good mood for the whole of our conversation].86 Under the influence, perhaps, d’un verre de vin généreux sur un estomac un peu faible [of a generous glass of wine on a rather weak stomach], Prince [Aleksandr] Gorchakov was so vain that it was comic.87 He [Fedor Paskevich] thinks the Poles have fond memories of his father. Il serait désobligeant de tâcher de le désabuser [It would be unkind to try to disabuse him].88

A brief and unflattering character sketch of the sort that a French moralist might once have enjoyed producing calls for the French language too: ‘Finance Committee in the morning. I drove over to Golovnin’s. He came to my place in the evening to let me know what he was undertaking. Intélligent, insinuant, méthodique, froid, égoïste, peu agréable’ (intelligent, ingratiating, methodical, cold, egoistic, not very likeable).89 A switch into French seems equally appropriate for a generalized remark that Valuev conceives almost as a maxim, after the manner of La Rochefoucauld: ‘There are people who are repelled by any fervour. Toute vivacité les effarouche, toute véhémence leur suscite un malaise’ (Any vivacity frightens them, any vehemence makes them uneasy).90 Since match-making was an important function of the social gatherings of the imported grand monde, French was also perceived as a language of courtship, and the tradition of galanterie to which we have referred, supplemented by French romantic fiction, furnished a lexicon and tone for flirtation. We gain an impression of this conversational genre from a letter of 1791 in which the Polish Countess Théophilie Lubomirska describes an encounter that she says she had during an evening walk in the gardens of the Peterhof Palace in the environs of St Petersburg. A man she names Cléon, whose advances she had been trying to avoid, managed to corner her and declare his love. She describes Cléon as ‘Jeune beau enjoué spirituel mais malin vain et fourbe’ (a sprightly and witty young beau but a vain and 86 87 88 89 90

Ibidem, 125. Ibidem, 126. Ibidem, 129. Ibidem, 137. Ibidem, 255.

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cunning rascal) who had no genuine feeling for her but was merely hoping to make a gratifying conquest. In the dialogue that she claims took place, she confounds her stumbling admirer with her witty responses: ‘Je vous avois cru un instant plus dangereux, Monsieur; j’ai lu dans les romans, que les femmes se fachaient dans la circonstance ou je me trouve. Je ne comprends pas pourquoi. Votre air embarasse [embarassé] me fait de la peine mais c’est [ce] n’est pas celle qui n’ait de l’interet.’ (I had thought for a moment that you were more dangerous, Sir; I have read in novels that women lose their temper in situations like the one in which I find myself. I don’t understand why. Your embarrassed look pains me, but that’s not what is uninteresting.)

Having rejected the ever more desperate entreaties of Cléon, who is eventually driven to ask what he has done to make himself so detested, Lubomirska administers the following coup de grâce: ‘Vous ètes comme votre sexe petri d’amour propre. Ne vous flates [flattez] donc pas qu’on vous abhore. On ne vous aime pas voila tout le mystere’ (Like all of your sex you are eaten up with self-conceit. Don’t flatter yourself that you are loathed. You are not loved; that’s all the mystery there is to it).91 Lubomirska plainly theatricalizes her description of this encounter. No doubt there is much poetic licence in this letter, whose author shows how she responds adroitly to male attention that is both wanted and unwanted. Cléon is evidently not the real name of her pursuer but a conventional literary name for a galant, as attested in the Dictionary of Love by Dreux du Radier that Khrapovitskii had translated.92 Whatever the accuracy of Lubomirska’s record of the conversation, though, her letter does seem to exemplify aristocratic acceptance of French as a language of flirtation in which men and women might flatter, entreat, succumb, rebuff, or reproach. The use of Russian for flirtation in the beau monde, we might add, was to be avoided as a practice that was likely to seem disrespectful to a woman. French tended also to be associated with certain aristocratic practices or behaviour, such as ballroom dancing, card-playing, and gambling,93 as 91 Théophilie Lubomirska, ‘Zapisnye tetradi’, RGB, f. 183, op. 1, d. 1486 (a, b), fols 42, 43, 43 v. 92 See Zhivov, ‘Love à la mode’, 230. 93 For an interesting discussion of the attitude of the future Decembrists towards such aristocratic entertainments after the Napoleonic Wars, see Lotman, ‘The Decembrist in Everyday Life’, in SRC, 106–108.

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well as with certain social formulae, a style of conversation, and types of interaction, such as courtship. The association is well illustrated in a letter on the practice of duelling, which Mikhail Vorontsov thought it necessary to broach with his son Semen in 1842. In his letter, Mikhail grapples with the fact that there are reckless nobles (bretteurs; the French word gave rise to the now obsolete Russian breter) who will fight duels on trivial pretexts and he tries to persuade his son only ever to resort to this practice if there is no other way of defending his honour: il restait à toucher un point délicat, et n’ayant pu le faire alors, je remplis ce devoir dans ce moment. Nous n’avons jamais eu de conversation avec vs […] sur des duels, quelque [quelle que] soit l’horreur d’une [qu’une] société civilisée devrait ressentir pour une coutume aussi barbare et aussi antichrétienne […]; je ne puis songer à l’idée de vs demander votre parole d’honneur de ne jamais vous battre; dans la societé telle quelle est faite dans notre tems il peut arriver des cas où un homme bien né est obligé de se battre parce que, s’il ne se battait pas, la societé dans laquelle nous vivons le regarderoit comme déshonore [déshonoré] l’usage et les préjugés lui mettraient sur le front une tâche d’infamie qui l’empecherait de se montrer […]94 (it remains for me to touch on a delicate matter, and having been unable to do it before, I fulfil this duty now. We have never had a conversation about […] duels, whatever the horror that a civilized society ought to feel for such a barbarous and anti-Christian custom […]; I cannot contemplate the idea of asking you to [give me] your word of honour that you will never fight; in society such as it is in our time, cases may arise where a well-born man is bound to fight because if he did not then the society in which we live would regard him as disgraced and custom and prejudices would stamp on his brow a stain of infamy that would prevent him from showing himself […])

Now, it is true that Mikhail writes to his son in French on other subjects too; it is not that he has switched into French on this occasion for the purpose of discussing duelling. In any case, the type of letter Mikhail is writing in this instance (a letter containing advice which a father considers it his duty to give his son) tended to be composed in French, as many other examples attest.95 94 Quoted by Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 195. 95 See, e.g., our comments on Mikhail Shcherbatov’s letters to his son in the fourth section of Chapter 2 above.

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Nonetheless, the subject-matter (a set of ideas which concern the standing of the nobleman among his peers, his sense of honour, and a noble practice designed to uphold it) seems particularly to require this linguistic choice, the more so since the ideas in question are of western provenance. Indeed, it is likely that the subject-matter was familiar to the nobility primarily through exposition and discussion of it in French. The use of French is also apt when an aristocrat wishes implicitly to underline a sense of social solidarity with an interlocutor or correspondent or to appeal to someone by whom he or she hopes to be considered an equal.96 Such use of language choice as a means of implicitly defining a certain social relationship may be observed among Decembrists who found themselves under arrest after the failure of their mutiny in 1825. When they appealed in Russian to members of the investigating commission in the hope of alleviating their lot then they were in effect making a formal request, but if they appealed in French they were attempting to open a dialogue with a social peer.97 We find yet another striking example of the use of French for this sort of solidarizing purpose, as we might describe it, in a letter of 1888 in which Count Andrei Rostopchin, the son of Fedor, begs a fellow nobleman, Count Anatolii Davydov, to lend him some money. Monsieur le Comte, Le 25 du mois passé j’ai eu l’honneur de vous adreser, à votre résidence d’Otrada, une lettre que je dois croire perdue, puisque jusqu’à présent vous n’y avez pas répondu d’aucune façon. Je vous y décrivai l’horrible position dans laquelle je me trouve, harcelé par des créanciers et ayant une femme, que j’adore, grièvement malade et dont je ne puis adoucir les souffrances, n’ayant pas la possibilité de payer ni médecins, ni médecine. La veille de sa mort, monsieur le Comte votre père, a rempli un acte de charité chrétienne en me prêtant six cent roubles […] Aujourd’hui je me vois dans une situation encore plus atroce, car à mes propres chagrins se joint l’état de ma femme, qui me déchire l’âme. Si ce n’est pour moi, du moins pour elle, venez à mon secours et envoyez-moi cette somme […] Excusez mon insistance et expliquez-vous la par le dicton: нужда 96 See, e.g., Baudin, ‘Bilingualism in Aleksandr Radishchev’s Letters’, 127, for an illuminating discussion of language choice in Radishchev’s letters to his patron, Aleksandr Vorontsov. 97 We are indebted to Ol’ga Edel’man for this point. For examples of supplicatory letters in French, see the two by Iosif Poggio that are published in Vosstanie dekabristov. Dokumenty, vol. 12, 156–159.

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пляшет, нужда скачет… Elle est bien forte cette нужда, puisqu’elle me fait sauter par-dessus toutes les convenances sociales et la rougeur au f[r]ont me force à importuner une personne qui ne me connait pas, sur la simple certitude que j’ai affaire à un gentilhomme accompli. Recevez avec bienveillance l’expression de ma haute et parfaite considération. Comte Rostoptchine.98  

(Your Lordship the Count, On the 25th of last month I had the honour to send you a letter at your residence in Otrada. I am bound to think the letter has been lost, because you have not as yet replied to it in any way. In it I described to you the horrible position in which I find myself, harried by creditors and having a wife, whom I adore, who is gravely ill and whose sufferings I cannot mitigate because I am unable to pay either for doctors or medicines. On the eve of his death, His Lordship the Count, your father, performed an act of Christian charity by lending me 600 roubles […] Today I see myself in an even more appalling situation, for in addition to my own woes there is the state of my wife, which I find heart-rending. If not for me, then at least for her come to my assistance and send me this sum […] Excuse my insistence and explain it by the saying: need makes one do things one would not have wanted… It is very acute, this need, because it makes me skip all the social conventions and the blush on my face forces me to importune a person who does not know me, [which I do] simply because I am sure I am dealing with an accomplished gentleman. Be so kind as to accept my greatest respect, Count Rostopchin.)99

The use of French here enables Rostopchin, who has fallen on hard times, to maintain his dignity in an embarrassing situation and to underline the shared status and values of writer and addressee. After all, Rostopchin too is a count and he speaks the same language as Davydov. Both men are members of the same European corporation. Indeed, they both belong to the Russian branch of it, and Rostopchin may even feel that his interpolation of a short Russian saying in his otherwise French text strengthens their bond still further. And how, finally, could another ‘accomplished gentleman’ who was conscious of his worth refuse a request on which the wellbeing of a sick noble lady might depend? 98 RGB, f. 219 (Orlov-Davydov), k. 60, d. 81, fols 3–3 v. 99 Italics in this translation indicate the parts of Rostopchin’s text that were written in Russian.

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Opponents of the imported culture would seize upon the association of the French language with aspects of social interaction in the grand monde, such as flirtation, of which they did not approve and with the disingenuousness or spitefulness of society conversation. They would link French, for example, with a love of sexual display and immodesty that seemed improper and shocking in the Russian context. The formality embedded in the French speech habits that Russians adopted in the eighteenth century could also create unease, as Russian literary representations of the grand monde will reveal.100 Strange as it might seem, given the fact that social relationships were already highly stratified in Russia by the Table of Ranks, the respectful distance that French politesse established between society’s individual members could seem to Russians cold and inauthentic. On the linguistic level, an enduring sense that the foreign social model imposed an unnatural formality on Russians is manifested by the perceived differences between French second-person personal pronouns and their Russian equivalents. The French aristocratic practice of addressing and being addressed by most interlocutors with the plural second-person pronoun vous was maintained in Russian Francophone circles, in both speech and writing.101 Indeed, the habit of addressing a single person in the plural number became established in Russian too in the eighteenth century and rapidly took hold in educated circles. However, the habit was not universally pleasing to patriots; Fonvizin, for example, rails against it through his mouthpiece Starodum, in his play The Minor, and praises plain-speaking Petrine courtiers who, he supposes, still used ty to address a single interlocutor.102 Russians evidently continued throughout the nineteenth century to feel that the second-person pronouns available in the two languages (tu and vous in French, ty and vy in Russian) were not entirely congruent.103 Individuals whom etiquette required a speaker or writer to address as vous in French might therefore be addressed as ty in Russian in order to avoid intolerable formality or to indicate real intimacy.104 Pushkin muses on the nuances 100 On negative representations of Francophone high society, see Chapters 8 and 9 below. 101 As we see from all the examples we have already provided and from the epistolary practice of the nobility, of which we give examples in the second section of Chapter 6 below. 102 Nedorosl’, Act III, Scene 1, in Fonvizin, SS, vol. 1, 130. In fact, the use of vy, Zhivov contends, was already widespread in Peter’s time, as attested by many examples in Peter’s letters and those of his contemporaries (Zhivov, Language and Culture, 169 n.). 103 On this incongruence, see especially Friedrich, ‘Structural Implications of Russian Pronominal Usage’. 104 For a good example of the incongruence, see a letter written by a young woman who treats the poet Zhukovskii as a trusted father-figure. In Russian she addresses him only with singular pronominal forms (ty, tvoe, tebia, tebe) but when she switches into French (presumably the

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of the Russian pronouns in a short poem of 1828, contrasting the empty formality imposed by social politesse, as it seemed to the Russian ear, and the passion felt by the poet in love: Пустое вы сердечным ты Она, обмолвясь, заменила И все счастливые мечты В душе влюбленной возбудила. Пред ней задумчиво стою, Свести очей с нее нет силы; И говорю ей: как вы милы! И мыслю: как тебя люблю!105 (With a slip of the tongue, she replaced an empty vy with a heartfelt ty, and awakened all the happy dreams in an enamoured soul. I stand before her pensively, unable to take my eyes off her; and I say to her, how sweet you (vy) are, but thinking how I love you [tebia, i.e. the accusative form of ty].)

The use of French in Russian society, then, did not indicate personal warmth so much as recognition that interlocutors shared a small, privileged social space in the vast empire. This recognition and the mutual respect implied by the use of French and its vocabulary of politesse were quite compatible with an undertone of personal malice, reflected in the waspish remarks that revealed a speaker’s wit, the mischievous insinuation that fed the gossip on which the beau monde feasted, and the condescension that reminded an addressee of fine social gradations. A switch from French into Russian, we might finally add, could in certain circumstances indicate the withdrawal language in which they had conducted the conversation to which she refers) she uses the plural pronoun (‘Vous dites que voulez me servir lieu de père!’): see Zeidlits, ‘Iz knigi “Zhizn’ i poeziia V.A. Zhukovskogo”’, 58. For further examples of pronominal usage in letter-writing, see the second section of Chapter 6 below. For literary examples of incongruence in French and Russian pronominal usage, see the section on Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina (i.e. the fourth section) in Chapter 9 below. 105 ‘Ty i vy’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 3, 103. On Pushkin’s pronominal usage in French, see Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 187. On the subject of Russian pronominal usage, Khvoshchinskaia rues changes which indicated the declining social standing of the nobility in the post-reform period. After the emancipation of the serfs, noble children were instructed to use ty forms to their parents and vy forms to peasants. These changes reversed the previous norms and, in Khvoshchinskaia’s opinion, introduced over-familiarity into relations between noble parents and their children and undue deference into nobles’ attitudes towards peasants (Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Vospominaniia Eleny Iur’evny Khvoshchinskoi’, RS, 1897, no. 5, 370).

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of respect from a person who had fallen outside the charmed circle. Mariia Volkonskaia, née Raevskaia, the daughter of one of the heroes of the Napoleonic Wars and a member of one of the most respected noble families of the first Alexandrine age, reports a striking example of such a switch in her account of her journey into voluntary exile in Siberia, where she went to join her husband Sergei Volkonskii after he had been sentenced to 20 years of penal servitude for his part in the Decembrist Revolt. When Volkonskaia arrived in Irkutsk, the local governor, Johann Gottfried Zeidler, addressed her in French (with a strong German accent, for he was a native of East Prussia). However, when she insisted, against Zeidler’s wishes, on continuing her journey further east to her husband’s place of exile, he switched to Russian, thus emphasizing how far, as the wife of a criminal, she had fallen.106

Francophonie and social identity We return now to the subject of the role of language in identity formation, which we broached in our discussion of the education of the Russian nobility. An individual’s identity is a potentially complex amalgam of more or less conscious notions and allegiances in which linguistic competence and loyalty may play a part, alongside numerous other factors such as nationality, social class, professional network, gender, sexuality, religion, cultural affiliation, and age. These possible components of a person’s self-conception cannot be arranged in any definitive hierarchy, for their weight and relative importance vary from one individual to another, from group to group, and from one place and time to another. We can say, though, that the significance of language in the amalgam tended to increase, at least in the minds of European literary and intellectual elites in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as national consciousness grew stronger, ethno-nationalism became a powerful cultural and political force, and the nature of aristocracies changed and their political dominance was threatened by the rise of bourgeoisies and intelligentsias.107 106 See Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 150, 153, who gives a fuller account of this encounter (presumably on the basis of a manuscript version of Volkonskaia’s memoir) than that contained in [Mariia Volkonskaia], Zapiski kniagini Marii Nikolaevny Volkonskoi, edited by her son and published in 1904, 35. 107 There is a large body of work on the relationship of language and identity. Joseph (2004) provides a clear and comprehensive introduction. Silverstein (1979) first studied the link between the perception of a person’s language use and perception of their personality, as language is a signif icant part of the construction of their identity. Anderson’s seminal work Imagined

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Besides serving as a medium of communication, language also functions, it has been observed, as ‘a common marker of ethnic identity, and an integrating symbol for group unity and distinctiveness’.108 Both of these semiotic functions of language use are of interest in our study of the history of French in Russia. The first of them, which bears on the formation of the nation as a cultural entity, is best discussed when we turn to the language attitudes of the nineteenth-century Russian writers who constructed the modern Russian cultural nation, because the treatment of languages – in Benedict Anderson’s words – ‘as emblems of nation-ness, like flags, costumes, folkdances, and the rest’,109 was rife in their discourse.110 The second function, the use of French as a ‘badge’ of social identity, on the other hand, properly belongs here, in our consideration of the social and cultural practice of the nobility.111 Of course, the use of French, like styles of dress and the adoption of family coats of arms, gave the nobility a European social identity, for French was the predominant language of European civilization and the Republic of Letters.112 At the same time, as Lotman observed, French functioned as a sign of corporate exclusivity,113 hence its inculcation in the noble child from an early age and hence also the fact that use of it was repeatedly deplored by critics of noble culture, from whichever angle – conservative, liberal, or radical – they made their criticisms. For the purpose of discussing the role of French-speaking as a means of establishing social identity and affirming entitlement to belong to the Communities connects language specifically to national identity. The interplay between language, identity, and the use of and attitude towards foreign words has been studied by Duszak (2002). Gasparov (2004) examines the history of thought on language and identity in Russia. Most general handbooks of sociolinguistics include introductions on language and identity: see, e.g., Mesthrie’s Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics (2011) and Meyerhoff’s updated edition of Introducing Sociolinguistics (2015). The comprehensive reference guide to the field of historical sociolinguistics, the Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics edited by Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre (2012), also includes a section on the subject. 108 Törnquist-Plewa, ‘Contrasting Ethnic Nationalisms’, 220. 109 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 133. Anderson’s italics. 110 On language attitudes and conceptions of national identity, see the conclusion of Chapter 8 below. 111 The term ‘badge’ belongs to James Billington, who, in his grand cultural history of Russia, observed long ago that the Russian aristocracy ‘used French culture to establish a common identity. The French tongue set them off from both the Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking peasantry and the German-, Swedish-, or Yiddish-speaking mercantile elements of the empire’: see Billington, The Icon and the Axe, 219. 112 On the function of French as a means of joining Europe, see also the fourth section of Chapter 6. 113 Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 352.

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nobility, the evidence from belles-lettres seems less problematic than we believe it is for the description of linguistic practice. This is because, as we have said, we are dealing now with perceptions about the nature of the community to which individuals thought they belonged, or to which they would have liked to belong, or against which they wished to measure themselves. (These perceptions are of course shot through with received stereotypes, images, myths, prejudices, and patterns of thought.) That is to say, we are examining the more or less conscious self-fashioning of a social group and individuals within it. Nonetheless, we draw here only on comments made by writers in non-fictional or semi-fictional works as we illustrate perceptions, at different points in the period in which we are interested, about the degree to which the use of French helped to differentiate the Russian nobility from other classes or – and this is also important – to differentiate groups within the multi-layered nobility itself. By avoiding evidence from fiction at this stage, we have more direct access to the authors’ own opinions, although we shall still need to take account of factors that might have made authors accentuate the negative effects of the noble practice of French-speaking. Fonvizin, one of the major men of letters in the age of Catherine II, offers us an insight into the importance of a command of French as an indicator of social worth at an early date in the history of Russian francophonie. In a brief autobiography that he wrote towards the end of his life, he describes an encounter that he had in his youth in a theatre in St Petersburg ‘with the son of a certain personage’. (Judging by the context provided in Fonvizin’s narrative, this episode must have occurred around 1760.) The ‘very manner’ of this personage, Fonvizin wrote, impressed me by his evident sense of self-worth. He asked me if I could speak French. When I responded that I could not, his interest in me seemed to pass rather quickly. Apparently he considered me ignorant and improperly schooled. So he began taunting me […] This whole episode taught me how necessary it was for a young man to know French. I immediately undertook the study of the language.114

Some 65 years later, the young Aleksandr Nikitenko, who would become a government official, censor, writer, professor, and notable diarist, observed the zenith of this linguistic development in Muscovite high society. With misgivings similar to those of Fonvizin, he remarks in a diary entry for 1826 114 We have taken this translation from [Fonvizin], ‘Sincere Confessions of My Thoughts and Deeds’, in The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin, 41.

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on behaviour at a typical soirée, where participants in the grand monde ‘conform slavishly to fashion in [their] speech, opinions and conduct’. Mastery of French is mandatory for those who would display the ‘adroitness’ and ‘amiable manner’ prized in this social milieu, where women, in Nikitenko’s opinion, were the most accomplished performers: here is the guiding rule for this ‘adroitness’ and ‘amiability’: ‘dress and position your feet, hands and eyes as Madame French Governess has instructed you. Don’t give your tongue a moment’s rest while keeping in mind that French words should be the only sounds released by this human clavichord, a clavichord which is set in motion only by a frivolous mind.’ Indeed knowledge of French serves as an entrée into the most ‘refined’ salons. It frequently determines your status in the eyes of an entire community and frees you, if not forever, then at least for a while, from the necessity of displaying other very serious claims to the public’s attention and good will.115

Nikitenko, who came from a family of serfs belonging to the Sheremetevs and was discomfited by society’s brittle decorum, clearly felt the exclusivity of the Francophone monde as keenly as his slightly older contemporary Vigel’, another outsider, and remarked in a similar manner on the degree to which proficiency in French could mask personal shortcomings. A French tutor could guarantee success in high society for the children of the most prominent families, he mused, but only chance determined their morality.116 The subject was also addressed, and at greater length, at various points in a three-volume work, Russia and the Russians, which was written, in French, by Nikolai Turgenev while he was an émigré in France during the reign of Nicholas I. As if they felt their prerogatives, personal appearance, and clothes were not enough to indicate their superior social position, Turgenev explained, nobles (or at least members of the high nobility) ended up ‘repudiating the national language and adopting the use of a foreign language, even in private life, the life of the family’. This language practice, Turgenev argued, had detrimental effects. For one thing, the social elite thus took on the air of a race of conquerors who had imposed themselves on the nation by force, bringing with them instincts, tendencies, and interests that were different from those of the majority. (One is reminded of the distinction 115 We have used here the translation of the diary done by Helen Jacobson: see Nikitenko, The Diary of a Russian Censor, 4. The original can be found in Nikitenko, Dnevnik, vol. 1, 11. 116 Nikitenko, The Diary of a Russian Censor, 2.

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made by French champions of the nobility under the ancien régime between conquering Franks and native Gauls.117) For another, repudiation of the Russian language accentuated the ‘isolation’ of the Russian nobility and thereby made the march of civilization in Russia more diff icult, since the nobility was the engine of progress there. (Turgenev seems to follow Montesquieu in his conception of the role of the nobility, but uses an image that was apt in the industrial age.) Admittedly, Russian was the vehicle for ‘high literature’, as vernaculars were for such literature elsewhere, but ‘the national language’, Turgenev contended, did not percolate into other regions where literature ordinarily softens mores, making for polite manners and more agreeable social relations. In particular, private and intimate literature, which is the ‘echo’ of social and family life, could not be written in Russian, Turgenev asserted, nor could those who had adopted a foreign language and foreign formulae and ways of speaking invariably conduct elegant private conversation in Russian. There was no way of saying ‘Madame’, ‘Monsieur’ in Russian, for instance, Turgenev claimed.118 What makes Nikolai Turgenev’s negative interpretation of the consequences of noble francophonie in Russia particularly interesting is the fact that Turgenev is by no means a nationalistic patriot. On the contrary, he deplores jingoism and xenophobia.119 He is outward-looking and has no desire to deflect Russia from the path it has been following since the time of Peter the Great with a view to modernization.120 Nor does he wish to dissuade Russians from learning foreign languages. He does believe, though, that their main purpose in doing so should be to facilitate relationships with other countries, to enable them to acquaint themselves with the literatures of other civilized peoples, and to assist their own progress in the arts and sciences. Russians’ ill-judged and insensitive use of French for conversation and correspondence among themselves, on the other hand, has the adverse effects of reducing the number of domains in which the native language is used and of promoting a ‘factitious and deceitful civilization which is the scourge of true civilization’. Up to a point, then, Turgenev objects to the use of French by the Russian nobility in public and private social interaction on the grounds that it impedes the development of the Russian language (which he regards, in an essentialist way, as rich and beautiful), preventing 117 Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France, 33–36. 118 Turgenev, La Russie et les russes, vol. 2, 31–33. On private literature in French, see the third section of Chapter 6 below. 119 Ibidem, vol. 2, 204–205. Turgenev conceded, though, that the tendency of the Russian government to appoint foreigners who had little merit encouraged xenophobia. 120 Ibidem, vol. 3, 10.

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it from becoming polyfunctional. Those who advocate the advantages of a ‘national education’ should practise what they preach, Turgenev believes, placing Russian at the core of the curriculum, although he doubts whether the need to cultivate the national language will actually be felt until either a judiciary or a pluralist political arena has truly emerged in Russia.121 A passage in Lev Tolstoi’s pseudo-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, written in the 1850s at the beginning of his literary career, brutally underlines the continuing significance of francophonie as what Bourdieu would see as a form of the cultural capital that the nobleman needed in the social market-place. Drawing attention to the status that the French language still enjoyed in Russian high society while he was growing up, in the 1840s, a now repentant Tolstoi confessed that his ‘favourite and principal system of division’ of the human race at that time ‘was into people comme il faut [who behave properly] and comme il ne faut pas [who do not behave properly].’ The latter I subdivided into those inherently not comme il faut and the lower orders. The comme il faut people I respected and looked upon as worthy to consort with me as my equals; the comme il ne faut pas I pretended to despise but in reality detested, nourishing a sort of injured personal feeling where they were concerned […] My [Tolstoi’s italics] comme il faut consisted first and foremost in having an excellent knowledge of the French tongue, especially pronunciation. Anyone who spoke French with a bad accent at once aroused my dislike. ‘Why do you try to talk like us when you don’t know how?’ I mentally inquired with biting irony.122

Seen through the lens of cultural theorists such as Lotman who are interested in norms of social behaviour, francophonie was thus a tool used by the nobleman for the purpose of self-fashioning, a ‘social sign’, or part of the performance required to maintain social standing. Together with other attributes of noble identity, appearance, and forms of behaviour, such as long, well-kept, clean fingernails and an ability to bow, dance, converse, and cultivate an air of refined, supercilious ennui, facility in French furnished evidence, for the young Tolstoi, of membership of a corporation that was closed to the profane.123 121 Ibidem, vol. 2, 33–34. 122 For this quotation, we have used the translation by Rosemary Edmonds in Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 268. 123 Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 351.

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Substantially the same point was made in the late 1860s, and in a way that was equally critical of Francophone nobles, by a Baltic German baron, Theodor Fircks. In an anti-nihilist tract written in French, Fircks described the French language as a sort of Masonic sign by means of which people who belonged to a certain world and aspired to be comme il faut could recognize one another. People who knew French, Fircks argued, could regard themselves as part of a civilized and elegant minority, a distinct nation which lay within the Russian nation but was isolated from it by its habits, material interests, political aspirations, and language use. The two nationalities, representing society, on the one hand, and the people, on the other, could have no mutual sympathy. Monolingual Russians, especially if they had a little education, detested ‘la classe dénationalisée, la société devenue française’ (the denationalized class, society that had become French). Society, for its part, despised everything that was Russian and valued only what came from abroad, especially from France, whose fashions, ways, customs, and language it aped.124 There is a passage in his diary where Valuev too, like Nikolai Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Fircks, reflects on the habit of French-speaking among the Russian elite. For a period in the early months of 1868, Valuev suffered from a serious eye infection, and on days when he was unable to read or write he dictated entries for his diary to his second wife, Anna Ivanovna Vakul’skaia, who was the daughter of a man from Riga,125 in what was evidently Valuev’s 124 Fircks, Le nihilisme en Russie, 74. Fircks makes it clear that French was not the only foreign language that was used on Russian soil and argues that knowledge of other foreign languages also conferred advantages on users of them. He identifies four categories of inhabitants according to language use: first, the aristocracy, courtiers, people with a ‘brilliant’ education, in short ‘society’, who spoke French to the virtual exclusion of Russian (so Fircks maintains); second, industrialists, pharmacists, factory managers, and subaltern employees, who spoke German but did not know Russian or have any desire to learn it; third, other ‘privileged’ races, including some with a superior civilization who had been incorporated in the empire as it expanded to what Fircks thinks were its natural limits, and who spoke Finnish, Polish, Tatar, Greek, Armenian, or Bulgarian; and fourth, the unprivileged race of people who spoke Russian, the national language, use of which indicated various types of inferiority, that is to say, inferiority in level of civilization, social position, and civil rights (ibidem, 78). This is another very schematic account of language use that needs to be treated with caution. Did the elite really only speak French, for example, and were all of the first three groups to which Fircks refers altogether ignorant of Russian? However, the point to note here is that Fircks affirms a hierarchy in which command of French confers the highest status (in the eyes of the social and bureaucratic elite, including himself) and Russian monolingualism ensures the lowest (except in the eyes of the increasingly populist intelligentsia, which Fircks despised). We return to Fircks in the last section of Chapter 7 below. 125 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 2, 234 n. and 250 n.

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main domestic language, French. ‘It has occurred to me more than once’, Valuev mused, that it is not natural that French should have come to be the language of the world which has the greatest influence among us. Chinese would suit us much better. I am sorry that I don’t know it. It would be wonderfully fitting, judging by what I know about China and what I see here, with our needs, our ideas, and even our passions.126

Although Valuev thus affects to be puzzled by the sway of French in his milieu, there is in truth no mystery about it: French is emblematic of the international aristocratic culture that Russia imported in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is a culture, moreover, with which Valuev clearly identified himself, by repeatedly switching from Russian into French in order to reflect on the manners of high society and the accomplishments or faults of those who inhabited it. His own mastery of society’s linguistic code bolstered his sense of self-worth, to which his diary was a continuous testimony. An entry of 1874 is telling in this respect. ‘He speaks freely and well’, Valuev comments after he has met the Hungarian statesman Count Gyula Andrássy, who ‘expresses himself accurately and touches on ticklish questions, avec une aisance de bonne compagnie qui n’appartient qu’à ceux qui ont l’habitude de s’y trouver en première ligne’ (with that easy manner of people of high society which belongs only to those who are used to finding themselves in its first rank).127 By shifting into French at this point, Valuev explicitly acknowledges the worthiness of his urbane new acquaintance, to be sure, but he also implicitly underscores his own sense of belonging in the same international society. We should bear in mind that the writers whose remarks on the significance of Russians’ use of French we have quoted had their reasons – even in the non-fictional works from which these remarks are drawn – for underlining or exaggerating the social division that Russian cultural borrowing and foreign-language use caused. Turgenev’s statements about Russian francophonie, for instance, are situated for the most part in a volume in which Turgenev is advocating the emancipation of the serfs, long before this measure began to be discussed in earnest by the government. It therefore serves his purpose to highlight noble detachment from the nation as a whole. As a political exile, he is in any case alienated from the loyalist aristocracy 126 Ibidem, 241. 127 Ibidem, 297.

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(and possibly somewhat out of touch with the development of Russian society and cultural circles in the 1830s and 1840s). His comments on the absence of Russian in private writing of various sorts, it might be added, are not borne out by the extant archives of noble families. Tolstoi, when he writes Youth, is looking back on his past at a period in his life when he was turning against the values of the aristocracy to which he belonged. (He may nevertheless have continued to harbour the prejudice he deplores in Youth: in War and Peace, Lotman believes, he ascribed to Speranskii, the son of a priest, a poorer command of French than Speranskii actually had.128) As for Fircks, he uses his tract on ‘nihilism’ in Russia to present a schematic account of language use which chimes with the partisan two-nation account of Russia in the 1860s that was also being propounded at that time by the so-called Native-Soil Conservatives.129 There is no doubt that the ability to use a foreign language was a source of pride to the Russian social elite and helped symbolically to differentiate the nobility from other social groups and to differentiate strata within the nobility itself. At the same time, the degree to which cultural borrowing, including language use, actually separated the elite from the mass of the population may be overstated in the narrative offered by nineteenth-century Russian cultural nationalists and in the Lotmanesque interpretation of Russian culture. We have already referred to some factors that did help to bind the nation together.130 Moreover, linguistic differentiation between elite and mass was only one of many aspects, albeit a highly visible one, of what seems an overwhelming assertion of the supremacy of the upper class. After all, the Table of Ranks imposed a highly stratified structure on Russian society and deeply affected social consciousness. Most important of all, nobles were separated from the majority of the population by their exclusive and jealously protected right to own serfs and by their de facto ability to treat their peasants and servants as chattels. The extent of their power over these fellow human beings is well illustrated by their effective right to maintain harems of serf girls, as did Herzen’s father. Nor does noble French-speaking appear so socially divisive if we accept that nobles did have sufficient competence in Russian to communicate effectively with their non-Francophone social inferiors. Evidently, it did not seem to the anonymous English governess whom we cited earlier that the multilingualism of the Russian aristocracy at which she marvelled in the 128 Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 352. 129 See the last section of Chapter 9. 130 See the first section of our Introduction above.

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1840s precluded ‘intercourse between the proprietors and the cultivators of the soil’; Russian landowners, she believed, were generally ‘more accessible’ than the English.131 Indeed, there is abundant evidence to deter us from concluding that the dominance of French in certain social venues and within the private family circle made for widespread and profound ignorance of their mother tongue among the Russian nobility, despite Vigel’’s waspish remark about the pains that aristocrats took to be ignorant of Russian. The man of letters Petr Viazemskii, born in 1792, tells us that his father, Andrei, spoke French more than Russian, like almost all educated people of his time, but nevertheless was perfectly capable of speaking Russian to people of a generation born before the middle of the eighteenth century and brought up without knowledge of French. Andrei would fluently and accurately translate into Russian all the thoughts and turns of phrase that took shape in his mind in French.132 Even some Russians who were brought up abroad, such as Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov, the son of the Russian ambassador in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were well able to use their mother tongue, thanks in Mikhail’s case to his exposure to a devoted Russian nanny for most of his childhood.133 Most importantly, we should bear in mind the fact that it was from this very caste of perfectly Francophone noblemen that there emerged the major poets and men of letters – Karamzin, Zhukovskii, Viazemskii, Pushkin, Tiutchev, Ivan Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoi are outstanding examples – who in the nineteenth century created the modern Russian literary language and the classical literary canon. It is difficult, we therefore contend, to sustain the view that by inculcating French in their children the nobility suppressed knowledge of Russian, either by design or through indifference towards the vernacular. It might just as well be argued that the Russian noble upbringing had the positive effect of stimulating cognitive abilities and broadening horizons and that it thus contributed to Russia’s extraordinary cultural flowering in the late imperial period. We also question whether nobles were as conflicted by their adoption of a foreign language as one might suppose from the language debate that took place in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature. Perhaps we need in the first instance to challenge the assumption that bilingualism 131 Anon., Russian Chit Chat, 68. 132 Viazemskii, ‘Ocherki i vospominaniia’, 307. 133 Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 184, where it is argued that Mikhail’s proficiency in colloquial Russian may have contributed to the loyalty that Mikhail is known to have inspired as an officer in the Russian army.

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necessarily fractures identity. Bilinguals, Judith Oster has observed, ‘do not automatically belong to two cultures; one can speak a second language in specific contexts or places, quite unrelated to one’s cultural identity’.134 In any case, how simple and monolithic is identity? Can identity not be hybrid and multifaceted? Only if we believe that some sort of binary choice has to be made (in this instance between Russian and non-Russian identity) do concerns about conflicted personalities and anomie really make sense. Last but not least, how stable and durable is identity? Under certain pressures people may be forced to arrange the factors that determine their sense of themselves in some sort of hierarchy and to give precedence to one or some of them, but in normal circumstances they may not have to choose between different facets of a complex identity. If bilingualism did give rise to the sort of inner conflict that classical Russian writers and thinkers divined and students of them love to analyze, then that conflict seems rarely to have caused nobles much angst when they expressed their thoughts in their informal private writings. Nobles code-switch repeatedly in their correspondence, often conforming silently to certain rules,135 but rarely think it worth commenting on the fact. Admittedly, a noblewoman of the 1820s, Mariia Mukhanova, did wonder why she was writing in French,136 but such cases seem rather exceptional. Few reflections on language choice are to be found in the hundreds of letters written by various members of the Vorontsov clan that have been studied by Jessica Tipton.137 Emilie Murphy, likewise, notes in her examination of Russian noblewomen’s travel diaries that whilst the women commented on their use of English, German, Italian, and Russian, they did not comment on their use of French.138 We are inclined, then, to agree with Michelle Lamarche Marrese that on the whole noblemen and noblewomen experienced little tension between a European identity and a Russian identity: ‘even nobles who were immersed in European culture’, Lamarche Marrese wrote, ‘perceived no opposition between their assimilation of foreign customs, manifested in their frequent recourse to foreign languages, and their allegiance to traditional forms of Russian culture’.139 No doubt this relaxed attitude towards bilingualism and language-mixing was due to the fact that ‘the 134 Oster, Crossing Cultures, 60. One can also identify with a second culture and still be monolingual, Oster adds. 135 On these rules, see especially the second section of Chapter 6 below. 136 Quoted by Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 701. 137 Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 254. 138 Murphy, ‘Russian Noblewomen’s Francophone Travel Narratives (1777–1848)’, 104. 139 Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 737.

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use of French was associated with gentility and proper noble behavior, rather than rejection of national culture’.140 The identity that was being expressed by the adoption of a foreign culture, including a foreign language, we therefore maintain, was predominantly social rather than national, pace the cultural nationalists and detractors of the nobility who deplored Russian francophonie.

French beyond the metropolitan aristocracy We should briefly consider, finally, how far the francophonie we have been describing spread. We have in mind both the geographical and the social extent of French-speaking in imperial Russia, although to some extent the distinction between these two types of measurement is blurred, since French travelled with its bearer. We are hampered in this task by the nature of the sources available to us at this distance in time from our subject. We cannot confidently infer that a phenomenon was negligible on the grounds that the surviving documentation that might attest to its existence is exiguous by comparison with the volume of texts (such as memoirs and papers in the archives of prominent and long-lasting noble families) which have enabled us to describe the use of French at court and among the metropolitan elite. We are also obliged for practical reasons to place some limits on the scope of this study. Nonetheless, questions need to be asked about the boundaries of Russian francophonie, even if we do not have the means to provide full, satisfying answers to all of them. As far as the geographical reach of French in Russia is concerned, the main hubs of Russian French-speakers were St Petersburg, the seat of the court and the new political capital, and Moscow, the ancient capital and historical centre of the powerful autocratic state that had emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.141 However, the most prominent families generally retired to their rural estates for the spring and summer months. Provincial noble families who wished to maintain their social status or aspired to improve it, for their part, needed to acquire and display this mark of prestige, if they could afford to do so. Consequently, the noble manor house, or usad’ba, whose culture has been so thoroughly and memorably described by Priscilla Roosevelt, became an island of European civilization 140 Ibidem, 729. 141 It was during that period that an empire began to be built, even though it was not yet designated by that name.

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in the vastness of rural Russia.142 We know from memoirs and other sources of information how rich the social, artistic, and intellectual life of these nests of gentry could be in places distant from St Petersburg and Moscow, such as the homes of the Glinkas in the province of Tver’, the Griboedovs in Smolensk, or the Tolstois at Iasnaia Poliana in Tula Province, let alone the Golitsyns and the exceptionally wealthy Sheremetevs in many different locations. French remained the domestic language of Francophone aristocratic families, of course, when they left metropolitan society, temporarily or even permanently. Potemkina continued to address her granddaughter in French, as she had in St Petersburg, when the girl stayed on her estate in Khar’kov Province.143 Family members corresponded with one another in French when they were in different places, as did Natal’ia Petrovna Golitsyna, for instance, when she visited one of the family estates while her children remained in St Petersburg. French was also used by many nobles who retired to the countryside and then rarely left it. Extant letters written in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by Aleksandr Bakunin (the father of the future anarchist Mikhail), for example, attest to this nobleman’s continuing preference for French in domestic correspondence. Although his estate at Priamukhino was in the province of Tver’, the capital of which was regarded in Russian literature as a typical provincial town,144 European languages and ideas flourished there. Aleksandr was well able to write in Russian and did not avoid it, especially when he mentioned distinctively Russian subject-matter, such as a document certifying that a payment had been made to exempt a serf from military conscription.145 However, he routinely used French to express himself on a wide variety of everyday domestic topics, ranging from the choice of a children’s nanny, the sale of oats, and employment of workers for a factory to advice to his brother-in-law about financial matters.146 Something similar may be said of Valerii Levashev, a 142 The point is made by Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, xii, who speaks of the rural estate as ‘the crucible of Russian high culture’ (318). Whether this development was due to a flow of nobles to their country estates which was itself caused by the emancipation of the nobility from compulsory service in 1762 is a moot point (see the fourth section of Chapter 1 above). 143 Khvoshchinskaia, ‘Vospominaniia Eleny Iur’evny Khvoshchinskoi’, RS, 1898, no. 7, 161. 144 Frazier, Romantic Encounters, 181. Tver’ is the supposed setting for Dostoevskii’s novel The Devils (on which, see the final section of Chapter 9 below). 145 GATO, f. 103, op. 1, d. 1395, fols 25, 32. 146 Ibidem, fol. 23 v. On the multilingual nature of the environment in which Bakunin brought up his children, see his (Russian) poem ‘Osuga’: see http://www.booksite.ru/usadba_new/world/ fulltext/stihi/97.htm.

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somewhat conscience-stricken nobleman of the mid-nineteenth century who came from a highly educated family with literary connections and who retired to the estate he had inherited in the province of Nizhnii Novgorod.147 Although we have not been able to study the incidence of French in the Russian provinces in any systematic way, we do have sources that provide snapshots of the probable interest in acquiring French across large swathes of European Russia at certain times. One such source relates to the period when the fashion for French-speaking among the aristocracy was near its peak. In 1793, after the execution of Louis XVI in France, all French people in Russia were made by the Russian authorities to swear an oath of allegiance to the French monarch. In this connection, the authorities drew up a register of all immigrants from France, of whom there were no fewer than two and a half thousand. The majority of these were living in St Petersburg or Moscow. Many of them were teaching French in private households, which supports the belief that the capital cities were the chief centres of Russian francophonie. Several hundred French people, though, were living in the provinces. We do not have full data for all provinces, but the lists that are available do clearly show that a considerable number of French people residing in the provinces were working as governors or governesses in families.148 We are also able to see in what sorts of family they were employed. In the province of Nizhnii Novgorod, for instance, we find French men and women (whose names we give in brackets) in the families of the governor himself, Ivan Savinovich Belavin (Antoine Devot, who by this time had been working as a teacher in Russia for fourteen years), Nikolai Cherkasskii149 (Jean Baptiste Belliard and his wife), and a court councillor 150 by the name of 147 For an example of Levashev’s use of French, see the letter published at https://data.bris.ac.uk/ datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Levashov%20text.pdf (the original is at GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 69). On the possible reasons for this nobleman’s use of French (which could not have had to do with maintaining a position in society, since Levashev was reclusive), see Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘Family Correspondence in the Russian Nobility’. It is possible that French was more readily used by Russian nobles in the mid-nineteenth century for conventional epistolary purposes than for conversational purposes, although in the absence of a large volume of reliable records of oral linguistic practice in distant epochs we cannot be sure that this was the case. 148 Namen der in Gouvernement von Nijni-Novgorod sich aufhaltenden Franzosen; Verzeichniss der im Gouvernement von Iziaslaw sich befindlichen Franzosen; Verzeichniss der in Gouvernement von Saratow befindlichen Franzosen; Namen derjenigen Franzosen und Französinnen, die sich im Gouvernement von Wologda aufhalten. These lists survive as booklets in the Russian National Library (RNB). They were probably published separately. As a rule, it is indicated in a list that the person named is a teacher, but in other cases the profession is not given. 149 Presumably Bekovich-Cherkasskii. 150 This is a civilian rank of the seventh class, equivalent to the army rank of lieutenant-colonel.

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Proskudin in the village of Bogorodskoe (Pierre Deran and his wife). On the estate of a certain Major Kozlovskii there was Jeanne Marie de Bonnegarde. In the province of Saratov, a Frenchman (François Demoiselle) was teaching children in the household of Court Councillor Ivan Il’ich Ogarev, who was the economic director of the region,151 while Marie Muller was employed in the Abalduev family in the village of Ulreika. In the province of Vologda, there were French teachers in the families of Prince Ukhtomskii (Jean-Baptiste de Résimont152), Colonel V. Beresnikov (Jean-Pierre Dubert), M. Klement’ev, who was a naval captain of the third rank 153 (Elisabeth Montard), Lieutenant Briancheninov (Julie Radiace), and the wife of one Colonel Menshekov (Annette Marque). In Iziaslav Province, in the western part of the Ukraine, French teachers were to be found in considerable numbers in Polish families, including families of lower social rank as well as those of the titled nobility, such as the Princes Sanguszko (Anne Servante), the Counts Proto-Potocki (Jean Berger), and the Princes Lubomirski (Joseph Ainesquin). There were also a few Russophone households in which French teachers worked in the province of Iziaslav, such as that of a certain Colonel Vlasov (Anne Busquet). While these scraps of information do not allow us to make broad generalizations with much confidence, they do seem to support our impression that the study of French in the Russian provinces was still the exception rather than the rule around the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, we see that French teachers were appearing not only in families belonging to the high nobility but also in the households of military men of relatively modest rank, from lieutenant upwards. It is also of note that the number of teachers seems to have been greater in Russia’s Polish lands.154 151 One of Ogarev’s sons, Nikolai Ivanovich, would become a privy councillor and senator. According to Senator Aleksandr Kochubei, Nikolai Ogarev was an enlightened and efficient man and a true philosophe, brought up to follow the ideas of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He married a niece of Novosil’tsev, one of the circle of men close to Alexander I in the early years of his reign. See http://tatiskray.ru/index.html?4/065.htm. 152 Résimont would subsequently become a teacher in the families of the Sablukovs and the Durnovos. He compiled handwritten textbooks for his pupils and would later become an outstanding engineer. 153 Also known as lieutenant-captain, this is a naval rank of the eighth class, equivalent to the rank of major in the army. 154 A similar picture emerges from an analysis carried out by Maiia Lavrinovich of the posts available in provincial noble households, around 1820, for young women who had studied at a school for prospective teachers set up in St Petersburg by the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna. The greatest number (six) of requests for teachers, who would be expected to teach French among other subjects, came from families in the western province of Smolensk. Four requests came from Simbirsk and three each from the provinces of Kaluga, Kursk, Tver’, and Voronezh. Most of the posts were in families of the middling or lower gentry (at the sixth, eighth, ninth,

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It is tempting also to suggest that French had relatively wide currency among the nobility in the Baltic region, although the subject requires further investigation. As early as the 1730s, immediately after the Noble Land Cadet Corps had been founded in St Petersburg, we see that the Baltic nobility seemed more interested than the Russian nobility in the study of French.155 As far as language practice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is concerned, we find noble families from the Baltic region, as well as aristocratic families in the metropolises, in which French was not only studied but actually became the chief language of communication within the family. One such family was that of the Barons von Lieven, which was elevated to princely rank at the beginning of the reign of Nicholas I in recognition of the services of Charlotte von Lieven, who had been governess to the children of the Emperor Paul. Another was the clan of the Barons von Meyendorff, members of which made good at the Russian court not least, perhaps, because of their excellent French.156 French also functioned in the Baltic region, during the Alexandrine age, as a vehicle for the collective discussion of the interests of the nobility, as attested by a memorandum submitted to the Diet of Courland in 1817 by Georg Friedrich von Fircks, the Marshal of the Nobility in Goldingen (Kuldiga), one of the capitals of the Duchy of Courland. Reporting the intention of Alexander I to grant personal liberty to the serfs in the Baltic provinces, Fircks seized the opportunity to seek benefits for the region more generally. He urged the diet to press for fundamental laws and inviolable rights for all social groups, the establishment of a supreme court empowered to try cases in the light of local laws and customs and in the local language (which was Latvian), and a commission to make proposals about the future relationship between the different classes in the region and between the region and the imperial state. Firck’s memorandum reveals a strong sense of the religious, cultural, and linguistic difference of Courland – and by implication the other Baltic provinces (Estland and Livonia) – from Russia. One therefore suspects not and twelfth ranks in the Table of Ranks). The applicants were evenly divided between the civilian and military spheres. These were families whose access to the best teachers of French was limited by their place of residence and their relatively modest f inancial resources. See Lavrinovich, ‘Soediniaia “blagosostoianie s obshcheiu pol’zoiu”’. 155 See the data on the numbers of Baltic and Russian pupils studying French at the Cadet Corps in 1732 and 1737 in Rjéoutski, ‘Le français et d’autres langues’, 29. 156 See Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘Family Correspondence in the Russian Nobility’, together with examples of the Meyendorffs’ family correspondence in French from the middle of the age of Alexander I. These documents are reproduced on our project website at https://data.bris.ac.uk/ datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5f3bjp/Meyendorff%20letters%20text.pdf with the kind permission of GARF, where they are housed in f. 573, op. 1, d. 437.

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only that French was a language in which the traditionally German-speaking nobility of the region were competent but also that it functioned as a cohesive imperial language which was more palatable than Russian to a loyal and valuable minority who had a sense of partial autonomy.157 We should bear in mind too just how exceptional the Europeanized society of the noble manor house must have seemed in provincial Russia. The point might be illustrated with reference to the province of Tambov, situated in the fertile black-earth region some three hundred miles south-east of Moscow. Scattered around the province were sites of great cultural sophistication: the estate at Mara belonging to the family of Evgenii Baratynskii, a close friend of Pushkin and himself a poet in the so-called Pushkin Pleiad; the Chicherins’ estate at Umet; the Krivtsovs’ estate at Liubichi. Used to receiving the latest works of Pushkin and Balzac, Krivtsov’s wife apparently found St Petersburg society relatively shallow when she repaired to the capital for the winter of 1834–1835.158 Boris Chicherin, who would become a major liberal thinker, describes in his memoirs the sparkling cultural and intellectual life of these estates. Here, deep in the Russian countryside, Chicherin’s mother carried on an affectionate correspondence in French with Krivtsova, her ‘sœur de choix et d’affection’ (sister of choice and affection).159 Such estates, though, must have stood out as glaringly untypical. Pushkin, in Eugene Onegin, Lermontov, in A Hero of Our Time, and Turgenev, in Rudin, all imply that Tambov is the epitome of a tedious provincial backwater.160 In one sense, the rural estates of Europeanized nobles (distant as many estates were from St Petersburg and Moscow) cannot be accurately described as provincial environments at all, since their owners, in many cases, moved between the provinces and the capitals, and indeed between Russia and Western Europe, bearing Europe’s cultures and languages with them.161 The lives of nobles of this order were insulated from the humdrum existence at which writers enjoyed poking fun, as Gogol’ did when he had his narrator in Dead Souls (1842) exclaim, as he described the attire of a group of ladies at a provincial ball, ‘No, this is not the provinces, this is a capital city, it’s Paris itself!’162 It may even be – although we do not have sufficient 157 RGB, f. 183, op. 1, d. 286, especially fols 2 v.‒3, 23 v.‒26 v. 158 Chicherin, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, 517–518. 159 Ibidem, 507; see also 515, 517–518, 520. 160 Evgenii Onegin, Canto 5, Stanza 27, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 6, 109; ‘Bela’, in Lermontov, IP (1963), vol. 2, 382; Rudin, in Turgenev, PSSP, vol. 6, 353. 161 Lounsbery, ‘“No, this is not the Provinces!”’, 262. 162 Mertvye dushi, in Gogol, PSS, vol. 6, 163; quoted by Lounsbery, ‘“No, this is not the Provinces!”’, 273.

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evidence to say so with confidence – that provincialdom was defined as much by social station as by place of residence and that ignorance or poor knowledge of French was felt to be a marker of provincial status.163 It is therefore important to ask not merely how far French spread geographically in Russia but also how far it spread socially, within the noble stratum and beyond it. We cannot say, in answer to this question, that French was the language only of the high aristocracy. The Francophone Bakunins and the Levashevs, whom we mentioned above, or the families of Herzen, Karamzin, and Pushkin, were not in the same grand social rank as the Chernyshevs, Gagarins, Golitsyns, Kurakins, Naryshkins, Potemkins, Sheremetevs, Stroganovs, Tolstois, Volkonskiis, Vorontsovs, and other great clans whose members make frequent entrances in our history. Nor can we say, though, that French was a language that was widely used by the whole noble estate over the century and a half on which our study is focused. It is difficult to ascertain how far French percolated into the families of the middling or lesser nobility, who made up perhaps 80 percent of the class and many of whom did not own enough serfs to do more than subsist on their estates, to which they were confined by their economic circumstances.164 We have much less information about the unglamorous lives of these families than about those of the great nobility. Some knowledge of French must have spread among this stratum as schools, both public and private, appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century in such provincial centres as Belgorod, Bogoroditsk, Kursk, Orel, and Tula.165 We also know that those sons of the lower nobility who studied at institutions such as the Noble Land Cadet Corps (where a majority of students, from the mid-1760s on, came from the petty gentry) learned French, and German too, to a high standard.166 Something similar might be said of the girls who studied at the Smolny Institute. By mastering French, as well as acquiring good manners, they could rise socially above their gentry background and might, on graduating from the institute, end up at court or marry advantageously, as did Evgeniia Sergeevna Smirnova, a captain’s daughter who in 1787 married the poet Prince Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgorukov. However, the total number of such students was hardly sufficient to bring about a significant change in the proportion of French-speakers in this social stratum as a whole. The fact 163 We are grateful to Sara Dickinson for raising this question. 164 Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate, xiii. 165 Glagoleva, ‘“Gramote i pisat’ obuchen”’, forthcoming. Glagoleva examines the educational level (of which the standard reached in French was considered indicative) attained by nobles in certain Russian provinces. 166 See Chapter 2 on language study at this institution.

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that French did not quickly spread throughout the nobility is amusingly illustrated by the case of Anna Labzina, née Iakovleva, who was born in 1758 and who may not have been altogether exceptional. The daughter of a middling nobleman who was an official in the mining service, Labzina (as she became known after her second marriage) was brought up on a country estate in the Urals region, east of the River Volga. That is to say, she came from a place and a social level where there was little or no access in the first half of Catherine’s reign to the Gallicized education that the great clans and the nobility resident in the metropolises of St Petersburg and Moscow were beginning to favour. When, in the 1770s, she arrived in Moscow, Anna thought that the roman everybody was talking about in the capital was a person, rather than a genre of French literature with which young ladies were becoming infatuated.167 Of one thing we can be sure, though, when we consider the social distribution of French-speakers in imperial Russia: formidable obstacles stood in the way of nobles who were not well-to-do when they tried to ensure that their children would have a command of French. Accumulation of this cultural capital required a supply of economic capital which members of the middling and lower nobility either did not have or must have struggled to obtain. Families in this stratum may not have been able to afford to employ language teachers. As Ol’ga Glagoleva observes, the provincial nobleman Andrei Bolotov was dismayed not to be able to hire a French governess for his daughter Elizaveta, who was born in 1767.168 Some noblemen of this station might teach their children themselves, as did Andrei Chikhachev, who apparently had imperfect French but tried hard to learn any new words he encountered and was his son’s first tutor in that language.169 Even if tutors were available to such families, their quality may have decreased the further away from the capital cities a family lived and the more meagre the funds at its disposal.170 Nor was it really sufficient merely to employ a 167 Labzina, Vospominaniia Anny Evdokimovny Labzinoi, 48. For translated extracts from her ego-writing, see Russian Women, 1698–1917, ed. by Bisha et al., 119–122, 243–248; biographical information is on 118–119. Together with her second husband, Labzina played a prominent role in the Masonic movement in Alexandrine Russia. It is not obvious, incidentally, that any of the metropolitan Russians with whom she came into contact after her arrival from the provinces found it difficult to communicate with Labzina as a result of her monolingualism. 168 Glagoleva, ‘Dream and Reality of Russian Provincial Young Ladies’, 37, 26. 169 Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage, 165. Nonetheless, the provincial gentry were consuming and contributing to an active and independent print culture, as Antonova’s detailed study of the life of this modest nineteenth-century family in the province of Vladimir indicates (ibidem, 35). 170 Kusber, ‘Kakie znaniia nuzhny dvorianinu dlia zhizni?’, 286.

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Francophone tutor or governess. Teachers of accomplishments associated with the style of life of the European nobility, such as singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments, were required as well, and even drama teachers, for performance in theatrical productions schooled a pupil in polite and elegant behaviour.171 Nor, finally, did expenditure end with payment for tuition of all sorts. The very way of life of the charmed Francophone circle required participation in the types of sociability we have described, with all the expense (on fashionable clothes, servants, and means of transport) that that entailed.172 * The high Russian nobility, we have argued, might be better described as plurilingual rather than merely bilingual. Nevertheless, French had a special place in the noble’s linguistic repertoire. It was a pre-requisite for success in high society, where it was conspicuously deployed at all the main sites of noble sociability, from the ball and the drawing-room to the theatre, the opera, the spa, and – in the ages of Catherine II and Alexander I – the Masonic lodge. It was associated, in society, not only with politesse and the values and sensibility which an aristocratic upbringing sought to inculcate but also with light-heartedness, a desire to amuse rather than to enlighten, and a wit that could be used to cutting effect. As many reminiscences attest, the ability to speak it with ease in society helped to define an aristocrat, at least until wider educational opportunities spread knowledge of it across a broader social spectrum and reduced the exclusivity of this accomplishment.

171 As the director of the Naval Cadet Corps was aware: see the second section of Chapter 2 above. 172 We have little information on the study of languages in the merchant class. On the introduction of the teaching of modern languages in ecclesiastical educational institutions in the eighteenth century, see the second section of Chapter 2 above.



Chapter 5 French in diplomacy and other official domains

In the two preceding chapters, we have examined the use of French at the Russian court and in Russian high society, the principal domains in which francophonie served as a marker of social prestige and an expression of an outward-looking, pan-European identity. However, that same aristocracy which emulated the habits of the court, frequented the social venues we have identified, and circulated among European peers also occupied most of the high offices in the civilian administration of the Russian Empire and the high ranks in its armed forces. Nor was the boundary between the social life of the aristocracy and its life in imperial service rigid. Members of the same charmed circle met in different settings, social and professional, and they corresponded in different capacities, as both friends and colleagues. It was only to be expected, therefore, that they should to some extent function bilingually in the official or military realm as well as in the social realm – or rather, that male members of the elite should function in this way, for women, whose conspicuous introduction into the social sphere can be associated with the rise of francophonie in Russia, were entirely absent from the professional sphere. We therefore aim in this chapter to form an impression of the extent to which French was part of Russia’s official life, as well as its social life, to discern the limits of its penetration in the official sphere, and to sense the pace of its progress there. We shall go about this task mainly by studying language practice in the field of diplomacy, using a small part of the enormous extant archival holdings of documents that relate to the conduct of Russian foreign affairs. By focusing on this field, through which Russia’s formal relations with the European world expanded and developed and were maintained in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we thus complement our investigation of the role of foreign languages in the Europeanization of the Russian elite in the social and cultural spheres. After some introductory remarks on the ascendancy of French as Europe’s principal diplomatic language in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we consider foreign-language use in Russia before the age of Peter the Great and the development of language instruction, during Peter’s reign, for men serving in offices dealing with foreign affairs. Although French is not usually associated with the Petrine period, we suggest that it was in fact at that time that the foundations for knowledge of French in the Russian diplomatic community were laid. In the second section of the

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chapter, we examine language choice in the treaties that Russia concluded during the eighteenth century, placing this subject in a broad European context in which French was supplanting Latin as a diplomatic language. In the third section, we dwell on the increasing familiarity with French in the Russian diplomatic community and its use for the conduct of relations with other powers, looking briefly at its occurrence in the correspondence of certain multilingual Russian diplomats of the first half of the eighteenth century, in diplomatic ceremonial, and in diplomatic documents. Not that the adoption of French for diplomatic purposes precluded the use of other foreign languages in the diplomatic domain. In fact, various languages were employed in exchanges (both oral and written) with foreign diplomats in Russia during the first half of the eighteenth century. In our fourth section, we note the influx of loanwords of French origin which accompanied the rise of French as the pre-eminent language of Russian diplomacy in the mid-eighteenth century. In the fifth section, we turn to the use of French as a language of internal communication for the management of foreign affairs in the reign of Catherine II. Continuing to explore this extension of the use of French for internal purposes, we devote the sixth section to comparison of the way in which nineteenth-century Russian diplomats and officials who dealt with foreign affairs communicated with one another, on the one hand, and the way in which they communicated with officials serving in other branches of the administration and institutions of the Russian Empire, on the other. The correspondence on which this comparison is based helps us both to define the parameters within which French was used in the official domain and to gain further insight into the role of language choice in marking the boundary between the official and private spheres. Next, we briefly consider a few examples of the use of French – in royal correspondence, in the Third Department which was established in 1826 after the Decembrist Revolt, and in verbal discussion of government business in the 1860s – for official purposes outside the diplomatic community and the realm of foreign policy. Finally, we explore the use of French as a working language in the Academy of Sciences which, although it was of course a scholarly body, was also an imperial and bureaucratic institution and therefore, in some sense, an official domain. Our sketch of the use of French for official purposes outside the diplomatic domain will be somewhat impressionistic, for at least two reasons. First, the volume of relevant primary source material that survives (thanks to the fact that it is official and consequently has been carefully preserved) is far larger than we can tap in a single chapter of this general investigation of the history of French in Russia. Secondly, the area we are entering is perhaps

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even less well surveyed in secondary literature than some other areas of the territory we are exploring. There are therefore pertinent questions which we do not properly address here but which future studies may be able to answer. Just how widely was French used in the upper reaches of the administration outside the department that dealt with foreign affairs? Was the ethnic composition of the imperial bureaucracy, in which non-Russian personnel, particularly members of the Baltic German nobility, played a prominent role, an important determinant of language choice? To what extent was French known among the legal profession and the clergy, and for what purposes was it ever used in those milieus? Incomplete as our survey of French in the official domain of imperial Russia might be, nonetheless it does support one of the overarching conclusions of our monograph. The adoption of French by post-Petrine Russian noblemen for various purposes by no means turned them into an estranged caste of alien monolingual beings who struggled to express themselves in a half-forgotten vernacular.

The Chancery of Foreign Affairs and language training for Russian diplomats Across the continent with which Russia became more closely connected during the eighteenth century, French had already become one of the major languages of diplomacy, together with German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. Indeed, in the course of the eighteenth century, it became Europe’s pre-eminent diplomatic language, and it continued to occupy that position at least up until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Various political and cultural factors help to explain its growing currency and status in European diplomacy over the period with which we are concerned. These factors include the declining power of the Vatican and of Spain under Charles II, who reigned from 1665 to 1700, and the differences between German dialects, which complicated communication between diplomats within the Holy Roman Empire and encouraged the use of a lingua franca there. The prestige of France, meanwhile, was increasing, and Paris was in the ascendant as a diplomatic centre during the reign of Louis XIV. Moreover, the relatively relaxed French manner of conducting diplomatic business, which contrasted with the formal and circumspect style associated with Spanish diplomacy, was becoming popular across the continent and soon came to be accepted as standard.1 The popularity of the French model of noble education 1 Black, A History of Diplomacy, 75.

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also contributed to the emergence of French as the international language of diplomacy, since in many European countries the most distinguished diplomatic positions were traditionally reserved for the representatives of social elites. By the late seventeenth century, these elites often had a very good command of French and, at the same time, had become reluctant to undergo formal tuition in Latin. Of course, in some European countries, such as Russia, exposure to the French educational model had not yet taken place. In any case, Russia was only just beginning to reshape its diplomatic system on the European model. This it achieved by establishing permanent diplomatic representation in the main European countries (it had had hardly any missions there until the eighteenth century), creating new diplomatic ceremonial practice on European lines (it followed practice at the French court in particular), and providing training, including the teaching of foreign languages, for those serving in the diplomatic corps.2 From the age of Peter the Great, Russia too, like other European countries, would increasingly use French for diplomatic purposes both as a language in which Russian representatives could communicate with foreign diplomats and as a language of internal communication within the department of the administration that dealt with foreign affairs.3 By the reign of Alexander I, a century later, French was indisputably the dominant means of both external and internal communication in that department.4 For much of the seventeenth century, though, Russians had scarcely had any knowledge of or recourse to French, even in direct negotiations with France. Muscovy’s need for people with knowledge of foreign languages had largely been met by foreigners. Expatriates from Polish lands often taught Latin and Polish, though we do not know much about their activity.5 Moreover, most of the translators and interpreters who worked in the Russian Chancery of Foreign Affairs in the first half of the seventeenth century were of foreign origin. Under Michael 2 On the reconstruction of the diplomatic system in Russia, see Ageeva, Diplomaticheskii tseremonial imperatorskoi Rossii XVIII v., 32–38. 3 The name and functions of the department of the administration that dealt with relations with foreign countries changed over the period we are examining. In the seventeenth century it was known as the Chancery of Foreign Affairs (Posol’skii prikaz, literally ‘ambassadors’ chancery’). Following the administrative reorganization undertaken by Peter the Great and his establishment of ‘colleges’, or ministries, in 1718, the department in question was the College of Foreign Affairs (Kollegiia inostrannykh del). In 1802, this college was subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del) set up by Alexander I, and in 1832, under Nicholas I, the college was formally abolished and absorbed into the Ministry. 4 Judging by the documents published in the series Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka. Dokumenty rossiiskogo ministerstva inostrannykh del. 5 Voevoda, ‘Iazykovaia podgotovka diplomatov i perevodchikov’, 20–21.

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Romanov, for example, only seventeen out of 69 translators and interpreters in this department were Russians, and few of these learned Western European languages or received any financial support from the department while they were training.6 From around the middle of the century, languages did begin to be taught in several institutions (from or at the dates given in brackets), namely: the Andreevskii Monastery (1646?), the Chudov Monastery (1650s– 1660s), the Spasskii Monastery (1665), the Printing School (1681), the school run by the two Greek Leichoudes brothers (1685–1694) in Moscow, and the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy that arose out of that school.7 Several former pupils of these institutions became translators at the Chancery of Foreign Affairs. However, the only languages taught in these institutions were Latin and Classical Greek, and – in the second Leichoudes’ school (1697–1700) – Italian. Although no detailed study has been made of the languages used in the chancery during the second half of the seventeenth century, we do have some indirect information on that score. Ingrid Maier, who has examined extant issues of Vesti-Kuranty, the handwritten digest of articles from European newspapers that was prepared for the tsar and his entourage from the 1620s, came to the conclusion that the foreign languages used most frequently during the reign of Tsar Alexis were German, Dutch, and Polish. Searching in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (RGADA), she found 466 newspapers in German, 123 in Dutch, 28 in Polish, and one in Latin for the period 1660–1670. She notes the surprising disappearance of Swedish, which had commonly been used in the preceding period. Newspapers in French did not appear until 1693, with one exception in 1676.8 There were certainly some individuals at the chancery in the second half of the seventeenth century9 who could translate from French, but it seems that there was 6 Kunenkov, ‘Perevodchiki i tolmachi’. Kunеnkov speaks of two translators who had knowledge of Western European languages in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Beliakov finds only two translators and four interpreters who had knowledge of English in the whole of the reign of Tsar Alexis, and most of these were of English or Scottish origin: Beliakov, ‘Spetsialisty po angliiskomu iazyku v Posol’skom prikaze’, 15–16. 7 Voevoda, ‘Iazykovaia podgotovka diplomatov i perevodchikov’, 20–21. On the school of the Leichoudes brothers, see Ramazanova, ‘Bogoiavlenskaia shkola Likhudov’, idem, ‘Brat’ia Likhudy i nachal’nyi etap istorii Slaviano-greko-latinskoi Akademii’, and the recent book by Chrissidis, An Academy at the Court of the Tsars. 8 See Vesti-Kuranty, ed. by Maier, 74–76. Beliakov thinks that translators from English were the second or third most important group in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs in the second half of the seventeenth century, if we are to judge by their salaries: see Beliakov, ‘Spetsialisty po angliiskomu iazyku v Posol’skom prikaze’, 16. On Vesti-Kuranty, see also the first section of Chapter 2 above. 9 A collection designated ‘Arrival of Foreigners in Russia’ contains occasional documents in French that were translated into Russian from the 1680s: RGADA, f. 150.

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no more than one such translator there at any one time. As for Russian diplomats, not only did they themselves often lack French; sometimes, when they visited France, the interpreters who accompanied them did not know that language either.10 More generally, seventeenth-century Muscovites had scant knowledge of the world beyond Muscovy’s borders. Some, it is true, had been abroad even before the age of Peter the Great, particularly to Poland, the Germanspeaking lands, and even Italy, but only in small numbers. In Peter’s reign, though, signif icant numbers of young men began to be sent to foreign countries to learn new skills, trades, and professions. For example, a cohort of courtiers was dispatched in 1697–1699, 45 of them to Italy and 22 to England and Holland. In 1702, an even larger number were sent from Arkhangel-Gorod to Holland to study nautical matters. In the years 1712–1715, a large group of young noblemen from the highest Russian families (the Golovins, Naryshkins, the Princes Cherkasskii, Golitsyn, Dolgorukii, Urusov, and so forth) studied navigation in Rotterdam and Zaandam (where Peter himself had briefly observed shipbuilding technique during his Grand Embassy to the West in 1697). Then in 1716, a group of Russian artists went to Venice, Florence, and other European cities. Naturally, many of the Russians who studied abroad in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries acquired a command of foreign languages and adapted themselves to foreign ways of life. Some of them went on to become diplomats, although the original purpose of sending them abroad had not been to prepare them for a diplomatic career. One notable example, to whom we shall have occasion to return, was Prince Vasilii Dolgorukov, who spent several years in France, having arrived there in 1687 with an embassy that included his uncle Prince Iakov Dolgorukov and Prince Iakov Myshetskii.11 Another was the above-mentioned Prince Ivan Shcherbatov, who studied French in London with a French-speaking personal tutor to whom we referred earlier.12 Shcherbatov seems to have 10 This was the case with the Russian embassy that went to France in 1654: Konstantin Machekh­ in, the leader of this embassy, had no French, nor did his translator Boldvinov. Machekhin’s speech to the king was translated into Flemish (i.e. Dutch) and then into French: see Martens, Recueil des traités et conventions conclus par la Russie avec les puissances étrangères (hereafter Martens), vol. 13, xxiii. Similar difficulties arose during another Russian embassy to France, in 1668: see Schaub, ‘Avoir l’oreille du roi’. 11 RBS, vol. Dabelov–Diad’kovskii, 511–522 (article by V. Korsakova). We shall continue to use the form ‘Dolgorukov’, a common version of the family name Dolgorukii, in the text of this chapter. However, in references to archival documents in our footnotes and in the first section of our bibliography, we shall retain the form Dolgorukii if that was the form used in the description of the document in question. 12 On Shcherbatov’s study of French, see the first section of Chapter 1 above.

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applied himself to the study of French very diligently, for in quite a short time he wrote about 120 letters in that language and made several translations from French into Russian, including one of a work by John Law.13 Another notable statesman – although in this case not a diplomat – who benefited from lengthy sojourns abroad while he was a child and young man was Ivan Betskoi. A son of Prince Ivan Trubetskoi, Betskoi was born out of wedlock while his father was a prisoner of war in Sweden, where he was educated up to the age of twelve, after which he was sent to Denmark to continue his education.14 In 1721, he served as secretary to Russia’s ambassador in Paris, the above-mentioned Vasilii Dolgorukov, and he remained in the French capital as a student from 1722 until 1726. He then entered service under his father, who was governor of Kiev, with instructions to conduct correspondence ‘in the German and French languages, because he [was] skilled at that’.15 Of course, French was not the only foreign language that engaged the attention of Russian students abroad and of Russia’s budding diplomats. Some studied Italian, which, as we have already noted, was an important diplomatic language in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in the Mediterranean region. Prince Petr Golitsyn, who would serve as the Russian minister in Vienna from 1701 to 1706 and later as a senator and president of the College of Commerce, learned Italian while he was a student of navigation in Venice. Count Petr Tolstoi, who would become one of Peter’s most trusted diplomats, was also sent to Venice, in 1697, in order to study navigation and he too learned Italian there. Prince Boris Kurakin spent some time in Venice as well, studying various sciences and languages. He would subsequently serve as a Russian representative at the Holy See and the court of the Elector of Hanover, minister plenipotentiary in London, minister to the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and, finally, Russian ambassador in Paris. Nor was it only the sons of the elite who went abroad to study and who eventually found themselves in a diplomatic career because, or partly because, they had acquired proficiency in foreign languages. One of the best-known non-nobles who followed this career path was Petr Postnikov, the son of an official in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs. Postnikov (who, 13 See Troitskii, ‘“Sistema” Dzhona Lo i ee russkie posledovateli’. 14 On Betskoi, see the third section of Chapter 2 above. It was common practice in the Russian nobility to give illegitimate children a truncated form of the family surname, as in this case. Other examples include Pnin (Repnin) and Rontsov (Vorontsov). 15 Quoted from RBS, vol. Betankur–Biakster (article by P. Maikov), 5.

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incidentally, would become the first doctor of medicine in Russia) had been educated at the Leichoudes’ school, where he studied Greek and Latin. He went on to defend a thesis at the University of Padua, where he learned Italian and French. In 1697–1698, he accompanied Peter’s Grand Embassy, serving as an interpreter and arranging accommodation. During this stay in the West, he was sent to Versailles, no doubt because he knew French, even though Peter himself did not visit France during this foreign trip. When Peter urgently returned to Russia in August 1698 to put down the revolt of the strel’tsy, or royal musketeers, Postnikov was ordered to go to Vienna with another official, Prokofii Voznitsyn, to hold talks with the Turks. At first, he absented himself in Naples but he was required to return at once to Vienna, where it was impossible to do without him, as Voznitsyn explained: Otherwise you should fear the sovereign’s anger, because you have been instructed to be with me on the Turkish committee, and it can’t take place without you, and there will be no-one to do the business, and there is a new Turkish ambassador, the Greek Mavrocordatos: you’ve been assigned to this business because on top of everything else you can speak to him in Greek, Italian, French, and Latin, and he knows all those languages.16

When he went back to Russia, Postnikov continued to work for the Chancery of Foreign Affairs, while also practising medicine. His role was to translate and write ‘the necessary letters in Latin, French, and Italian in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs as the need arises’.17 He also produced the first translation of the Koran into Russian, from a French translation of the original.18 In 1701, he was ordered to go abroad again, this time to France, to the court of Louis XIV, where he busied himself with the recruitment of skilled people for employment in Russia and the procurement of instruments, French clothing, and so forth. He continued to serve as a Russian diplomatic representative in Western European countries until 1710. Nor was his knowledge of foreign languages, especially French, Postnikov’s only ‘cultural capital’. Another Petrine diplomat, Andrei Matveev, who met him in Paris, noted that he also had a good knowledge of ‘European affairs’, which he had acquired while studying abroad and travelling round the continent.19 16 Quoted from Krylov, ‘Petr Postnikov’. On Postnikov, see also Zapol’skaia and Strakhova, ‘Zabytoe imia: Petr Postnikov’. 17 Ibidem. 18 Postnikov’s translation was done from the French translation by André Du Rieu. 19 Quoted from Krylov, ‘Petr Postnikov’. A brother of Postnikov’s (who was also called Petr, it seems!) attached similar importance to the study of foreign languages, especially French, which

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Postnikov, then, would seem to bear out the impression of Peter’s reign as a relatively meritocratic time when men from different social strata could make good and occupy responsible positions. What the men who flourished under Peter had in common was commitment to Peter’s reforms and sympathy with his outward-looking mentality. It is striking how many of them, irrespective of their social background, were involved at one time or another in the conduct of foreign affairs, acquired a good command of foreign languages, and took part in missions abroad.20 It was also in the Petrine age that language training designed specifically to prepare future diplomats and translators in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs began to develop. There is evidence of official interest in such training as early as 1701, when one of the translators in the chancery, Nicolaus Schwimmer, was asked to open a school whose pupils would be obliged to serve at the chancery after they had completed their studies.21 From 1703, moreover, the chancery ran another school with a particular focus on languages. This was the school founded by a prisoner of war, the German pastor Johann Ernst Glück, who reported directly to the chancery’s highest official. French was introduced in Glück’s school on the orders of the tsar, which suggests that it was felt in the chancery that knowledge of this language was becoming a priority.22 he had studied in France for seven years, starting in 1702. Given the social success of the first Postnikov, the second Postnikov’s wager on foreign languages, and French in particular, seems to be no coincidence. 20 We should add that among those who were close to Peter, there were quite a few people who knew French, some of whom served as diplomats, such as the following: the naval officer Konon Zotov (1690–1742), who carried out diplomatic assignments in France from 1715; Vasilii Suvorov (1705–1775), who was a translator in Peter’s time and who at the age of nineteen translated a book about Vauban from French (Vasilii Suvorov was the father of the famous military commander); and Sergei Volchkov (1707–1772), who was a translator in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs and who would go on to translate a number of books by the Dutch jurist Grotius, the above-mentioned Bellegarde, and others, as well as compiling a French-German-Latin and Russian dictionary. Mention should also be made of three Volkov brothers (Grigorii, Petr, and Boris), who were sons of a high-ranking official in the department of foreign affairs. These brothers studied foreign languages, both in Russia and abroad, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, and became involved in foreign affairs in some way: both Grigorii and Petr carried out diplomatic missions in Europe and both Petr and Boris translated from various languages for the Chancery of Foreign Affairs, compiling political news from foreign newspapers and providing material for the first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti. See O nemetskikh shkolakh v Moskve v pervoi chetverti XVIII v., 237–241. 21 RGADA, f. 150, op. 1 (1703), d. 1, fol. 54. Young men were sent to this school by the chancery to learn German, Latin, and French (but it is not certain that French was actually taught there!). 22 Ibidem, fol. 9 v.

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It is possible that the increased interest in foreign-language learning in the early years of Peter’s reign was to some extent encouraged by western educational practice in the training of diplomats. After all, many European diplomats had a good command of the main languages in which international negotiations were conducted. It has been emphasized, for example, that almost all the diplomats who took part in the discussions that resulted in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had Latin,23 which – as we shall see shortly – was perhaps the most important diplomatic language in seventeenth-century Europe as a whole and which educational institutions for future diplomats in France insisted their pupils should know.24 Manuals for aspiring ambassadors, of which there were many in Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, laid considerable emphasis on the need for a diplomat to know foreign languages (German, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as Latin, were identified as the most important).25 The existence of Russian translations of such books tells us that they were known in Russia too.26 It is also apparent, finally, that foreign languages were beginning in the Petrine period to occupy an important place in the lives of certain Russian families who showed a particular interest in foreign affairs and inclined towards career paths, a cultural outlook, and an education for their children that reflected that leaning. The Francophone Golovin clan illustrates the point. Fedor Golovin was chancellor and effectively directed Russia’s foreign policy from 1699 until his death in 1706. He helped to further the career of Petr Shafirov, who had a very good command of French and who served first as a translator at the Chancery of Foreign Affairs and then as vice-chancellor or deputy minister of foreign affairs. Fedor Golovin’s son Aleksandr married Shafirov’s daughter, Natal’ia. It is likely that family connections and interests influenced Aleksandr Golovin, who did not 23 Braun, La connaissance du Saint-Empire, 209. On language choice in the set of treaties which make up the Peace of Westphalia, see the following section of this chapter. 24 e.g. the Political Academy founded in France in 1712: see Waquet, Le Latin ou l’empire du signe, 123. 25 e.g. Callières, De la manière de negocier avec les souverains: see Braun, La connaissance du Saint-Empire, 209. 26 A work of 1703 on ambassadorial ceremonial practice at the French court (Philipp Ludwig von Zinzendorf’s Eines hohen Ministri Curieuse Relation Von Dem gegenwärtigen Zustand deß Königreich Franckreichs Ort) was translated into Russian in 1714 by Andrei Matveev, one of Peter’s most prominent diplomats: RGADA, f. 93, op. 1, d. 5 (1704). This work was the basis for Matveev’s minute on this subject. Postnikov translated a work of 1680 by Abraham de Wicquefort, L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions: RGADA, f. 93, op. 1, d. 3 (1713). For information on these translations, see Ageeva, Diplomaticheskii tseremonial imperatorskoi Rossii XVIII v., 30–31.

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become a diplomat himself, when in the late 1720s he invited a French tutor named Pirard to teach his children French. The Kurakins provide a further example. In 1712, the distinguished diplomat Boris Kurakin, to whom we referred above, sought a French governor for his son, Aleksandr. The Frenchman who was found for this post, M. d’Ormanson, proposed to teach his pupil Latin, French, German, and Italian. Aleksandr would go on to become a diplomat and statesman.27 Not that we should exaggerate the role of professional considerations in shaping the language education that was emerging: no doubt some families were learning French because it was already coming to be regarded as a prestige language among European elites. This was the case in the royal family and in the families of some of Peter’s close associates who were not directly involved in diplomacy themselves, such as the families of the Princes Aleksandr Menshikov, Boris Golitsyn, and Nikita Repnin. We might add that the ‘French’ model of education had been adopted even earlier by Ukrainian elites, as we see from the case of Petr Apostol, the son of the Hetman of the Ukraine: Apostol left a diary that was written entirely in French, in which he recorded his impressions of his stay in St Petersburg in 1725–1727.28

The gradual rise of French in European and Russian treaties The Peace of Westphalia, which brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end, showed what a major part Latin still played, and how modest the role of French was, in European diplomacy in the mid-seventeenth century. It was in Latin that the treaties that made up the Peace were for the most part composed. Nor did French play a particularly important part in the negotiations that led up to the Peace. For one reason or another, diplomats from the Holy Roman Empire, other German political entities such as Hanseatic cities, Poland, and Sweden eschewed the use of French even with French diplomats, often preferring Latin.29 Nor was the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678–1679 a turning point in the use of French as Europe’s diplomatic language, as Ferdinand Brunot showed. French was indeed employed at times (for example, by the English and Dutch representatives) during these 27 Arkhiv kn[iazia] F.A. Kurakina, vol. 4, 441–445. 28 ‘Apostol P.D. Dnevnik’. 29 On the language of the treaties that made up the Peace of Westphalia and the languages used in the negotiations that preceded them, and also on the scholarly literature on language use at this congress, see Braun, La connaissance du Saint-Empire, 204–237. See also Brunot, ‘Les Débuts du français dans la diplomatie’.

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negotiations, but no more than was normal for the period, and although the treaty between France and Holland was drawn up in French other documents produced at the end of the negotiations were still written in Latin. Nor again did the negotiations in Ryswick in 1697 bring about a material change of practice: the resulting treaty between France and Holland was once more in French, but that between France and the Holy Roman Empire was, as usual, in Latin.30 The most significant change occurred in 1714 at Rastatt, where the treaty was concluded that brought an end to the hostilities between France and the Holy Roman Empire during the War of the Spanish Succession. Marshal de Villars, who prepared the ground for these negotiations on the French side, was not an experienced Latinist. The Viennese diplomats headed by Prince Eugene of Savoy, for their part, had no interest in protracted and tiresome discussions about the meaning of terms and they quickly signed a treaty in French. Admittedly, a separate article stipulated that the use of French should not be thought to set a precedent for subsequent negotiations, and indeed further treaties concluded by France after 1714 were drawn up in Latin (for example, the Treaty of Versailles with Poland in 1735). Other countries too continued to use Latin in treaties (for instance, Sweden and Britain in 1737 and Sweden and the Ottoman Empire in 1756). However, the use of French in treaties, especially when they were multilateral, was already becoming the norm, as exemplified by those between France and the Holy Roman Empire which were signed in Vienna in 1735 and 1736 and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle between Britain and Holland, on one side, and France, on the other, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748.31 The frequent use of French during diplomatic ceremonies had helped to pave the way for this change in the language of diplomatic documents: as French travellers in Poland in the 1680s had noted, the ministers of the main European countries used that language when they paid their compliments to the king.32 Thus, several traditions may be observed in language practice in early eighteenth-century European diplomacy. The Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, and Poland adhered to the use of Latin in diplomatic documents (which did not preclude the use of French in audiences). For Britain and Holland, it was 30 Some other treaties at this time were already being drawn up in French, such as a trade treaty of 1647, the Concert of The Hague in 1659, and a navigation treaty of 1666. 31 Waquet, Le Latin ou l’empire du signe, 121–122; Brunot, ‘Les Débuts du français dans la diplomatie’. 32 Brunot, ‘Les Débuts du français dans la diplomatie’.

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customary to use French. Spain used its national language. Lastly, Italian was widely used in the Mediterranean region, especially by diplomats of the Ottoman Empire. However, Latin by now had drawbacks as an international diplomatic language. Differences in the way that it was pronounced in different parts of Europe had become so great, for example, that а Latinspeaking Frenchman and a Latin-speaking Pole might well be unable to understand one another.33 A widely-known living language was urgently needed as a means of international diplomatic communication. The hour of French had arrived, and the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714 portended its triumph. The ascendancy of French in European diplomacy coincided with the emergence of Russia as a major European power and soon affected Russian linguistic practice in this domain. Up until the eighteenth century, foreign powers had tended to use either their national language or Latin to communicate with Muscovy. This was the case with England, Spain, several German states, and Poland.34 Latin had also been used in the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), by which Russia and China established their border in the Amur region, as Voltaire reports in his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great on the basis of the primary sources with which he had been furnished. This treaty followed negotiations conducted by two Jesuits (a Portuguese and a Frenchman) who accompanied the Chinese embassy and a German in the Russian embassy who spoke Latin.35 Bilateral treaties between Russia and Austria were concluded as a rule either in Latin or German.36 Various other German-speaking states, including some that belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, naturally used German. During the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, Brunswick, Holstein, and Prussia usually drew up their treaties with Russia in that language,37 as did some states outside the empire, such as Danzig.38 Of course, lingua francas 33 Ibidem, 701. 34 See RGADA, f. 44 (relations with Hamburg), 79 (Poland), 84 (Saxony), 97 (Switzerland). 35 Histoire de l’empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 46, 568, 570. On Voltaire’s History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, see also the first section of Chapter 7 below. 36 e.g. Martens, vol. 1, 34–48, 112–127 (1726, 1727, 1739, Lat.), and 71–110 (1737, 1738, 1739, etc., Ger.). 37 For the sake of economy, we do not give the names of treaties here, just the country with which Russia concluded the treaty, its date, and a reference to the relevant file in the archive. Nor, in most cases, do we give the titles of documents as they appear in archival inventories: these are provided in the first section of our bibliography at the end of the book. See AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 686 (Brunswick, 1711), 696 (Holstein, 1727), 745 (Prussia, 1741). For the numerous treaties that were concluded by Russia with Brandenburg, Prussia, Danzig, the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and so forth in German, see Martens, vol. 5. 38 AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 687 (Danzig, 1736), 688 (Danzig, 1764), 733 (Poland, 1733).

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were used too. For a long time, Italian was an important medium for Russia’s dealings with the Ottoman Empire and other Mediterranean countries, and it was sometimes used in dealings with England as well.39 From the late seventeenth century, Polish and Swedish diplomats increasingly resorted to German as a lingua franca. 40 However, in the course of the eighteenth century, European powers gradually turned to French as their preferred language for diplomatic agreements with Russia, although national traditions of language use in diplomacy continued to be felt while this process was going on. We shall provide a few examples. The treaty concluded at Greifswald in 1715 between Peter the Great and George I, who became King of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714 but was acting in this instance as the Elector of Hanover, was written in French. 41 (George I had grown up in Hanover and had a perfect command of French as well as German. He resorted to French more than to English at the British court42 and used it in his correspondence and in the conduct of relations with other countries.) So too was a treaty of 1715 between Russia and Prussia, 43 although this case was exceptional at this period, for treaties with Prussia continued to be written in German after that date. 44 French began to be used in agreements between Russia and Austria as well, starting with a document of 1743 which included Russia in a peace treaty signed by Prussia and Austria in 1742. This was a de facto trilateral agreement, and it was unexceptional for such documents to be written in French. 45 Russia was a signatory to further such trilateral agreements in the 1750s, namely a treaty of 1750 that included Britain in a defensive alliance between Russia and Austria, for which provision had been made (in German) in 1746, 46 and a treaty of 1756 that bound Russia into a defensive alliance concluded 39 RGADA, f. 35. 40 RGADA, f. 79 (relations between Russia and Poland); AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, d. 783 (Sweden, 1743). 41 Martens, vol. 9 (10), 31–35 (1715). From this time on, the Russian court dealt with the English court in French: see ibidem, 41–43 and 44–45 (1720). This tradition was maintained under Catherine I (ibidem, 57–59 and 60–62 (1726)), Anna (ibidem, 72–90 (1734)), and subsequent Russian monarchs. 42 The use of French by British diplomats of that time, one of the biographers of George I suggests, should not be attributed, or solely attributed, to the monarch’s personal linguistic competencies and preferences: see Hatton, George I, 131. 43 Martens, vol. 5, 120–129 (1715). 44 See Martens, vol. 5, 161–168 (1717). 45 Martens, vol. 1, 130–133 (1743). For other multilateral treaties written in French, see AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 797 (Russia, Britain, and Holland, 1747), 807 (Russia, Prussia, and Austria, 1772), etc. 46 Martens, vol. 1, 145–178 (1746), 178–183 (1750).

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in May that year between France and Austria. 47 The first purely bilateral treaty between Russia and Austria dates from January 1757, 48 and almost all subsequent treaties between these two powers were in French,49 as were diplomatic documents addressed by Russia to the Viennese court.50 The first bilateral treaty in French between Russia and Prussia was concluded around the same time, in 1762; this was the peace treaty that came of Russia’s exit from the Seven Years’ War after the accession of Peter III to the throne.51 Thereafter, virtually all treaties with Prussia were drawn up in French.52 An agreement of 1766 on Russian friendship and trade with Britain was composed in French too.53 As late as the 1750s, there were clearly still some reservations about the use of French in treaties, at least when France was one of the acceding parties, even though the use of French was convenient and more or less unavoidable if the agreement was multilateral. It was stipulated in a declaration of 1757, for example, that the use of French in a document which included Russia in a convention signed in March that year between Austria, France, and Sweden54 should not serve as a precedent.55 Nonetheless, by the beginning 47 Ibidem, 188–201 (1756). 48 Ibidem, 201–212 (1757). 49 Ibidem, 224–251 (1760; this, admittedly, is another trilateral treaty between Russia, Austria, and France); AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 647 (Austria, 1760, a bilateral treaty). German reappears only very rarely, as in a treaty of alliance concluded in 1760: AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, d. 652 (Austria, 1760, Russ., Ger., Fr.). 50 e.g. Déclaration de l’Empereur Pierre III communiquée à la cour de Vienne, sur la cessation des opérations militaires contre la Prusse: see Martens, vol. 1, 304–308 (1762). Subsequent treaties between the two countries relate to the time of Catherine II and were written in French: see Martens, vol. 2. 51 Martens, vol. 5, 368–378 (1762). 52 See Martens, vol. 6. There are occasional exceptions, though, all of them in German, e.g. ‘Act of Guarantee provided by Russia for the treaty concluded between Prussia and the city of Danzig in Warsaw on 22 February 1785’ (Martens, vol. 6, 124–131 (1785)) and ‘Convention regarding boundaries and shipping along the River Memel concluded in Vilna between Russia and Prussia’ (ibidem, 300–307 (1802); see also 396–405 (1806)). There were similar exceptions in the case of dealings with some other German states, for example the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (ibidem, 346–350 (1805)). Some such examples date from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and we may wonder whether the return to German in these instances was due to political factors. Practice was not consistent, though. 53 AVPRI, f. 161, op. 28, d. 72. 54 ‘Act of accession by Russia to the convention concluded on 21 March (NS) 1757 in Stockholm between the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire and the Kings of France and Sweden’: see Martens, vol. 1, 212–213 (1757). 55 AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, d. 800 (1757). The text is in Martens, vol. 1, 223–224 (1757); our reference is to 224.

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of the age of Catherine II, the use of French had become the norm in Russia’s treaties with other European powers, bilateral as well as multilateral, as it had over roughly the same period in treaties between many other European powers. There were exceptions, of course,56 but almost all of the treaties that Russia concluded with Austria, Britain, Prussia, the United States of America, and other states in the nineteenth century were written in French.57 It was not until the early twentieth century that a new era began: although Russia continued to sign bilateral treaties in French,58 English now started to appear, especially in multilateral treaties,59 for which French had previously been the normal medium since the eighteenth century.

Turning to French for the conduct of Russian diplomatic business Although it is clear with hindsight that French progressed at the expense of other languages in the domain of diplomacy in early modern Europe, as we see from the history of language choice in treaties during the first half of the eighteenth century, for many years it coexisted alongside other languages. It is equally apparent from the preceding section that language choice in this domain was not always a straightforward matter, inasmuch as diplomats did not invariably use the same language to representatives of a particular power for all purposes. Treaties, for example, were not necessarily drawn up in the language used in the verbal negotiations that preceded them. This complexity of usage – which language a diplomat used, with whom, and in what circumstances or documents – is well illustrated in the surviving correspondence of several senior Russian diplomats active in the first half of the eighteenth century, as is the importance that French already had in the Russian diplomat’s linguistic repertoire. Let us take, first of all, the case of the above-mentioned Vasilii Dolgorukov, who served as Russian representative at the Danish court in the age of Peter the Great. For a long time, treaties between these two powers were drawn up in Danish or German.60 German was regularly employed in official 56 See, e.g., AVPRI, f. 161, op. 28, dd. 150 (1872, Russ., Ger.), 312 (1831, Russ., Pol.), 347 (1852, Russ., Ger.). 57 See, e.g., dozens of files relating to the nineteenth century in AVPRI, f. 161, op. 28. 58 e.g. AVPRI, f. 161, op. 28, d. 98 (Russ., Fr.). 59 AVPRI, f. 161, op. 28, d. 635 (Minutes of an international conference about seal-hunting, 1911, Eng.); this conference took place in Washington, which was bound to affect language choice. 60 e.g. AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 701 (Denmark, 1730; Ger.), 702 (Denmark, 1730; Dan. with translation in Ger.), etc.

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documents (gramoty) that the King of Denmark sent to Peter the Great, although, on the whole, these were written in Danish.61 It was also the language that Danish diplomats in Russia generally used when they corresponded with the Russian department of foreign affairs.62 It was not until 1800, as far as we can see, that any treaty between Russia and Denmark was composed in French.63 And yet, it is clear that in the early eighteenth century French was already one of the major vehicles for communication between the Russian diplomatic mission in Denmark and the Danish court and its ministers. Documents written in French for the attention of Dolgorukov included letters from Danish ministers (particularly Christian Sehested, the grand chancellor of Denmark64) and papers relating to discussions between Russia and Denmark about a possible alliance against Sweden and a joint campaign against the Swedish army.65 (We also find a letter in French on a personal financial matter that the Danish envoy in Russia sent to Dolgorukov.66) Admittedly, French was not the only language used in exchanges between Danish officials and Russian diplomats, for German sometimes crops up in documents as well,67 but it was the main one.68 Discussions between Russian diplomats and representatives of the countries with which they were dealing, then, might take place in one language (in this instance French), while agreements between the countries might still be drawn up in another.69 The case of Prince Antiokh Kantemir, to whom we also refer at several other points in this book,70 is equally instructive for our present purposes, especially because he was among the first to use French not merely as a professional language but also as a social lingua franca. Such individuals served 61 RGADA, f. 53, op. 4, dd. 2 (1707, Dan.), 3 (1711, Dan.); op. 5, d. 174 (1712, Ger.). 62 e.g. RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, dd. 1 (1700), 35 (1704), 84 (1708), 153 (1711), etc. 63 This is judging by files in the section on ‘Denmark’ in AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, d. 718 (1800, Russ., Fr.). 64 RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, dd. 65 (1707, Fr.), 85 (1708, Fr.). 65 RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, dd. 99 (1709, Fr., Russ. trans.), 122 (1710, Fr.), 146 (1711, Fr., Russ. trans.). 66 RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, d. 157 (1711, Fr.). 67 RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, d. 121 (1710, Fr., Ger.). 68 We can also see from extant correspondence, incidentally, that French was the language, or at least one of the languages, of internal communication between the Danish court and Danish diplomats: see RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, d. 133 (1710, Fr.). This example of the use of French in some European countries for internal discussion of foreign affairs is of interest here because it foreshadows the adoption of this practice in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century (see the fifth section of this chapter). 69 RGADA, f. 53, op. 5, d. 164 (1711, Fr.). 70 See the third section of Chapter 1 above and the fourth section of Chapter 6 and the fourth section of Chapter 7 below.

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as intermediaries between cultures, as well as polities, and contributed to the development of francophonie as an internal phenomenon in Russian culture. Kantemir, as we said earlier, was the Russian envoy in London from 1732 to 1738 and then the ambassador in Paris, from 1738 until his early death in 1744. One of the first texts that he sent from London to Moscow is a record of the address he delivered to King George II when he presented his credentials to the king in 1732. This address was in French. ‘Le Grand Cas et la Haute Estime, que l’Imperatrice ma souveraine fait de la sacrée Persone de V.M.’, Kantemir begins with panache, ‘lui ont rendues tres-agreables les assurances de Votre amitié, faites de la part de Votre Majesté par M:r Rondau son Ministre’ (The high opinion and great esteem that the empress my sovereign has for the holy person of Your Majesty have made the assurances of Your friendship that have been given on Your Majesty’s behalf by his minister Mr. Rondau highly pleasing to her).71 Kantemir made a copy of his speech and commented on it, in Russian, in letters he sent home at the time, explaining how the king listened and responded to him (presumably also in French, although Kantemir does not state this).72 French was probably also the language in which Kantemir conducted his correspondence with British officials, if we are to judge by a surviving letter that he wrote to an English ‘lord’, whom we assume to be William Stanhope, 1st Earl of Harrington and the secretary of state for the Northern Department in the cabinet of Sir Robert Walpole.73 Kantemir’s correspondence with compatriots, of course, followed different rules, but it was not monolingual. When he was writing to imperial officials of foreign origin, he invariably wrote in French. These officials included Baron Johann Albrecht von Korff, president of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg from 1734 to 1740, Korff’s successor Carl Hermann von Brevern, and Johann Daniel Schumacher, a councillor in the Academy’s administration and the Academy’s librarian.74 All these high-ranking officials were of German origin (Korff was born in Courland, Brevern in Riga, 71 RGADA, f. 1261, op. 1, d. 69, fol. 3. Kantemir’s address is reproduced with the kind permission of RGADA on our project website at https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/3nmuogz0xzmpx21l2u1m5 f3bjp/Kantemir%20texts.pdf. The diplomat to whom Kantemir refers is Claudius Rondeau, the British minister resident in St Petersburg from 1730 until his death. It seems that Kantemir’s credentials, incidentally, were in English. ‘I dispatched someone to announce my arrival to the master of ceremonies’, Kantemir writes, ‘and having received my announcement he was with me in the afternoon and, in accordance with the practice here, took from me a copy of my credentials in English to be passed to Lord Hamilton, the secretary of state’ (RGADA, f. 1261, op. 1, d. 69, fol. 2). 72 RGADA, f. 1261, op. 1, d. 69, fol. 3 v. 73 Ibidem, fol. 5 v. This letter too was written in 1732. 74 Kantemir, Sochineniia, pis’ma i izbrannye perevody, vol. 2, 322–336.

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and Schumacher in Alsace). Kantemir corresponded in Russian, on the other hand, with Andrei Nartov, a compatriot of Russian origin who directed the Academy’s office.75 He also used Russian for internal correspondence with his superiors in the diplomatic service, as we see from the large extant volume of dispatches that he sent to Russia from London and Paris over the years he spent in those capitals.76 Russian was the language, moreover, that Kantemir generally employed in correspondence with other Russian aristocrats, such as Ivan Shcherbatov, who succeeded him as the Russian diplomatic representative in London in 1740–1741.77 In other words, French had not yet supplanted Russian as a language of social intercourse between Russian nobles who would have been capable of using it for that purpose. Kantemir did use French, though, as a language of social intercourse outside Russia, even when it might not have been the most natural lingua franca for him, as his correspondence with various Italian men makes clear. His Italian was of a very high standard, and certainly stronger than his French, at least at the beginning of the long period he spent abroad, just after he had arrived in London. And yet, he preferred to communicate with his Italian friends in French, judging by extant letters to Giambattista Gastaldi, the Genoese chargé d’affaires in London, Cavaliere Giuseppe Osorio-Alarcón, the Sardinian ambassador, Vincenzo Pucci, who represented Tuscany, and Giovanni Zamboni, the resident in London for the Landgrave of the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt. Kantemir thus adapted his own language practice to that of the cosmopolitan milieu in which he moved in London, where French was the language of sociability among Italians, who served various European courts, and no doubt diplomats of other nationalities as well. In the 1730s, this practice was still at variance with that in Russia, where the habit of using French instead of the vernacular as a language of polite sociability among the elite had not yet been adopted. Looking at the diplomatic and other official correspondence of the abovementioned Prince Ivan Shcherbatov from the time of his postings in Cádiz and Madrid in 1725–1726, we find further evidence of the spread of French among Russian diplomats. A large number of Shcherbatov’s letters were written in French. Such letters were addressed not only to Frenchmen, but also to Germans and probably (in the case of those sent to Amsterdam) to Dutchmen. Their recipients included merchants and bankers as well as diplomats. Thus, Shcherbatov was already using French as a lingua franca 75 Ibidem, 336. 76 Ibidem, 97–314. 77 Ibidem, 315–321.

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for communicating with diplomats representing other countries and with other foreigners. However, his correspondence with Russian diplomats, like Kantemir’s, was conducted exclusively in Russian. He too, incidentally, was able to use other languages, besides French and his native Russian: from time to time, he wrote letters in English or Spanish (the latter are evidently addressed to Spaniards who were fellow noblemen).78 Another diplomat who was active in the 1720s and 1730s, Aleksei Veshniakov (who also served as Russian consul in Cádiz in the 1720s and who was subsequently posted to Constantinople), followed the same informal rule as Kantemir and Shcherbatov, writing to his compatriot Shcherbatov in their native language. Veshniakov’s letters, though, offer evidence not only of command of French among Russian diplomats in the second quarter of the eighteenth century but also of the percolation of French into their social sphere.79 In professional correspondence with Shcherbatov, Veshniakov frequently switched into French. Sometimes only the date on the letter was written in French, while the text was in Russian,80 but often the passage in French was more substantial than that. In a letter written to Shcherbatov from Constantinople in the 1730s, for example, Veshniakov switched into French in the middle and then apologized for having done so when he reached the end: ‘Pardonnez Monseigneur, si je finis en une langue étrangere, je sçais qu’elle ne lui est pas et d’ailleurs plait’ (My apologies, Sir, for ending in a foreign language, I know that it is not a foreign language for you and besides you like it).81 Nor is this the only such apology.82 Veshniakov thus shows that by writing to a fellow-Russian in French he felt that he was transgressing a rule of a sort. It is hard in this case, as in some other cases in Veshniakov’s letters, to explain the shift to French as a result of a change in subject-matter.83 It is worth adding that neither Veshniakov nor Shcherbatov was in France at the time when the letters in question were written, for sometimes choice of language could be determined by 78 RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 1, no. 123-2. 79 On Veshniakov, see the site at http://www.rusdiplomats.narod.ru/turkey.html, which provides a list of Russian diplomats in the Ottoman Empire. 80 RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 1, no. 123-2, fols 401–402 v. (14 April 1732, from Pera (a district of Istanbul, now Beyoğlu)). 81 RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 1, no. 76, fols 397–398 v. (here fol. 398 v.; 18 March 1732, from Pera). 82 For another example, see ibidem, fols 408–409 (29 June 1732, from Pera). Veshniakov also used French in his correspondence with Kantemir: see his letter to Kantemir published in French in Grasshoff, Antioch Dmitrievič Kantemir und Westeuropa, 280. 83 On possible drivers of language shift in slightly later noble correspondence, see the second section of Chapter 6 below.

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where the writer or recipient of a letter happened to be when the letter was written. In other words, Veshniakov probably resorted to French because, for an outward-looking diplomat, it was becoming the language of polite sociability. We may also conjecture that Veshniakov’s sense of beleaguerment in Constantinople, the capital of an empire which Russian representatives perceived as oriental, hostile, and barbaric, encouraged him to practise the language of the European polite society for which he must have yearned.84 It is interesting also to compare Veshniakov’s Russian usage to that of another diplomat, Ivan Nepliuev, who served in Constantinople before Veshniakov, from 1721 to 1734, and who would subsequently become a senator and a minister. In his own letters to Shcherbatov, Nepliuev never used French or any other foreign language, although he too may well have learned foreign languages, since he had studied abroad, in Venice and Cádiz. Nepliuev’s Russian orthography, by comparison with Veshniakov’s, seems rather archaic: some letters are omitted, as indicated by a superscript suspension mark, and others are detached from a word and written in above the line.85 It seems indicative of wider and divergent views of the world that Veshniakov always referred to the city to which he had been posted as ‘Constantinople’, whereas Nepliuev used the Old Russian name of the city, Tsar’grad. There is perhaps a connection between Veshniakov’s more ‘modern’ Russian usage and his francophonie, both of which suggest that he was at ease with innovation and cultural borrowing. Veshniakov, it is tempting to suggest, was one of the new men on whom the implementation of Peter’s reforms would depend. If French thus became a language in which some Russian diplomats serving in European countries could already function comfortably by the 1720s and 1730s, its ascendancy as a language for the conduct and discussion of foreign affairs inside Russia was perhaps less clear-cut in the first half of the eighteenth century, although it did make progress there too. We have little information on language use in the ceremonial surrounding the reception of foreign diplomats in Russia, to take that aspect of diplomatic life first, but isolated pieces of evidence suggest that French rarely featured in such ceremonial in Peter’s reign. When in 1710, for example, the British envoy Charles Whitworth, 1st Baron Whitworth, was elevated to the status 84 It is significant that, apart from Russian and French, Veshniakov used no other languages in his correspondence with Shcherbatov, although both of the correspondents knew Italian and seem to have had a good knowledge of Spanish (they exchanged documents in both those languages). In other words, it was only French that had potential for them as a social language. 85 RNB, Manuscripts Department, f. 999, op. 1, no. 76, fol. 482.

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of ambassador, he presented the text of his speech in English. In the course of his audience with the tsar, after Whitworth had delivered his speech (also in English), the secretary to the embassy read a translation of it into Dutch (according to other sources it was German!), and then a Russian read a translation of it into Russian. The tsar responded in Russian and his reply was translated (possibly into German) by the vice-chancellor, Shafirov. In a printed description of the ceremony composed by the Russian side (in German), it was explained that Whitworth’s speech had been translated into German during the audience ‘so that the foreign ministers [present] could understand’ (radi vyrazumleniia).86 Finally, the speech was read in Russian for the benefit of the Russians present.87 Similarly, at the farewell audience of the Danish ambassador Grundt in 1710, the ambassador delivered his speech in German.88 Even at an audience granted by the Empress Catherine (the wife of Peter the Great and the future Catherine I) to the French envoy Campredon in 1721, the latter gave his speech in German, explaining that this language had been chosen because the French side thought they could best express the feelings of His French Royal Highness for the empress in that language, which Catherine herself understood.89 Nonetheless, French did soon begin to feature in diplomatic ceremonies in Russia too. An audience granted in 1728 to the Spanish ambassador in St Petersburg, the Duke of Liria, is of particular interest in this respect. The duke made his speech in Spanish – as Spanish ambassadors traditionally did – and the text of the speech was handed to the Russian side in Latin translation. The vice-chancellor, Ostermann, replied to the duke in Russian. However, once the most important formal part of the ceremony, at which the national languages of the two sides had to be used, had ended, the duke paid a compliment to the Emperor Peter II in French, whereupon Ostermann replied, also in French. All the other speeches made by the Duke of Liria on that day (for example, his speech in the presence of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Petrovna, the future empress) were also delivered in French.90 It would seem, then, that French was becoming a convenient means of communication among the diplomatic community in Russia too in situations in which diplomats were not obliged to use the language of their monarch. 86 Ageeva, Diplomaticheskii tseremonial imperatorskoi Rossii XVIII v., 153, 156, 158, 159. 87 Ibidem, 159. 88 Ibidem, 166. 89 Ibidem, 175. 90 RGADA, f. 1261, op. 1, d. 68, fols 2 v.–6 v.

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We also have reason to believe that by the early years of the reign of the Francophone Empress Elizabeth the circulation of diplomatic documents written in French was commonplace. From references to documents in minutes of Russian ministerial meetings with foreign diplomats in the mid-1740s, for instance, we find that where the language used is indicated it is always a language other than French, from which we may deduce that if a document was written in French it was not considered worth remarking upon this fact. Nevertheless, a whole variety of languages besides French were still used in Russian dealings with the foreign diplomatic community in Russia. Thus on 21 August 1744, the Swedish ambassador, ‘with the full authority given him by his master the King to discuss the defensive alliance, presented a Swedish copy and a German translation […]’. Or again: ‘Taking out something written in Italian’, the ambassador complained to the chancellor about the Russian resident in Constantinople, Veshniakov, who had ‘made representations’ to the Porte.91 On 25 September 1744, ‘the Hungarian ambassador Count Rosenberg presented a Latin copy and German translation of his new credentials as ambassador extraordinary’.92 In 1745, at a meeting with the Russian chancellor, the Bavarian minister ‘presented a copy of a declaratory note from his sovereign the elector about the presentation of a document by his father the emperor [of the Holy Roman Empire] in the Latin language’.93 Clearly, the Russian side still quite often used German, or hoped to use German, when dealing both with German diplomats and diplomats from other countries, even though this practice did not always suit the other party. The Bavarian Elector, for example, was asked to write to the Empress Elizabeth in that language, to which the elector objected ‘that the deceased Emperor, while he was Elector, always conducted his correspondence with other courts in Latin’.94 The need for a more widely used diplomatic language was underlined by another episode in 1745, when the Russian court unwisely drew up a collective response to several European envoys in German. On 30 May, the British, Hungarian, and Dutch ambassadors, together with the Saxon resident, were brought together in the chancellor’s house to hear the response of Empress Elizabeth to a request they had submitted that Russia join the Quadruple Alliance their countries had formed earlier that year in support of their favoured candidate, Maria Theresa, in the War of 91 92 93 94

AVPRI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1457, fol. 26. Ibidem, fol. 45. Ibidem, fol. 160. Ibidem, fol. 182 v.

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the Austrian Succession. This response was to be read to the envoys and then handed to them in writing. Unfortunately, only the Saxon envoy had sufficient German to understand it properly, so that the English and Dutch ambassadors, having listened to [it], said that they had so little knowledge of the German language that they were unable to reply to it at the present time but that they would apprise [us] of their opinion in due course.95

It is notable, finally, that diplomatic documents written in French in the mid-eighteenth century (few of which are actually attached to records in the archival files we have consulted) were still translated into Russian for the College of Foreign Affairs at this period. Examples include a memorandum about the possible conquest of Saxony that was sent to the British and Dutch ambassadors96 and an account of 1744 by Francesco Santi, the master of ceremonies at the Russian court, of the duty that was incumbent upon him to notify the ministers of foreign courts that they should not approach the empress directly.97 We might construe the practice of translating French documents into Russian as evidence that not all of Russia’s high-ranking diplomats knew French well in the mid-eighteenth century. The chancellor, Count Aleksei Bestuzhev, and the vice-chancellor, Count Mikhail Illarionovich Vorontsov, did both have a command of French, to be sure, but Bestuzhev’s predecessor, Prince Aleksei Cherkasskii, who had died in 1742, was known not to be well acquainted with foreign languages. It is therefore possible that the requirement that documents be translated from French into Russian was Cherkasskii’s legacy. It seems more likely, though, that the practice of translating French documents stemmed from a general rule that Russian should be used in the internal correspondence and documentation of the department that oversaw foreign-policy matters.98 Still in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth, documents in foreign languages, including French, were translated into Russian for the chancellor, even though the person who held that post from 1758, Mikhail Vorontsov, as we have said, was Francophone.99

95 Ibidem, fols 206–206 v. 96 Ibidem, fols 257–258. 97 Ibidem, fols 4–7 v. 98 Ibidem, fols 259–260 v. (memorandum) and 4–7 v. (report). 99 See AKV, bk 6, 392–416.

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The influx of French loanwords into Russian diplomatic parlance The use of Russian in the internal correspondence of the department of foreign affairs in the first half of the eighteenth century helped to contribute to the flow of foreign vocabulary into Russian, to which a number of scholars have already paid attention.100 Since our investigation is concerned with the history of social and cultural practice rather than with lexicology, we shall not examine this subject in detail or attempt to describe such matters as the dating of borrowings or the ways in which they entered Russian, but a few observations on loanwords in the diplomatic domain may nonetheless be of some use here. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the seventeenth-century Russian lexicon lacked equivalents for some of the concepts that were by then current in European diplomacy than that the Russian diplomatic lexicon as such was undeveloped. However, as contacts with diplomats in Europe became more extensive and closer, it was inevitable that new concepts and terms would be assimilated from the main languages of international diplomacy. The general style of diplomatic correspondence would change as well. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the language of official correspondence used by men working in the Muscovite Chancery of Foreign Affairs had elements of various registers, low and colloquial as well as high. Linguists have detected numerous examples of everyday speech that had become fixed in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury diplomatic correspondence, which makes one suppose that there were no strict rules governing the writing of reports or any standard form for the keeping of records.101 We have only to compare diplomatic reports from the second half of the seventeenth century with diplomatic correspondence from, say, the mid-eighteenth century to see striking differences. In the later period, there are no longer any traces of demotic speech and the language follows a set format and contains a large amount of diplomatic terminology. Terms are standardized and their variability is limited (and consequently the chances of misreading are slight). This outcome may have been due (albeit not exclusively) to reliance on the model of European diplomatic correspondence, and on the French diplomatic register in particular, as the number of direct and indirect loans from French leads us to believe. 100 Works on this subject include those by Christiani (1906), Smirnov (1910), Fogarasi (1958), Hüttl-Worth (1963), and Voloskova (1968) that are cited in our bibliography. 101 See Nikitin, ‘Delovoi iazyk russkoi diplomatii XVI–XVII vv.’

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Loanwords from Western European languages, including diplomatic terms such as audientsiia, konditsiia, konferentsiia, and negotsiatsiia, began to enter Russian and become established in documents before the age of Peter the Great,102 but this process accelerated in the Petrine period, when Peter himself and his close collaborators used a large number of loanwords in their own writings.103 These loanwords were often accompanied by glosses that indicated the cultural position of the author or gave guidance to readers about how they should behave and think.104 This process was assisted by translations, especially from French and German, some of which were done by diplomats.105 In many cases the new words in the diplomatic lexicon did not fill a lacuna, for Russian already had words which expressed the concepts in question.106 The process of replacing Russian diplomatic terms with loans from Western European languages therefore reflected an ambition to bring Russian terminology into line with an international standard. It is probable, though, that the old word often had no association with the new reality that Russian diplomats were discovering in Europe.107 Although the process of borrowing seems to have slowed down after Peter’s time, it did not stop altogether. The word diplomat, after all, was not borrowed from French until the reign of Catherine II.108 A whole set of terms which had entered the Russian diplomatic lexicon by the mid-eighteenth century came from French, although some of them had arrived much earlier than this and possibly via Polish or German. The following 102 See Voloskova, ‘Inoiazychnye slova v diplomaticheskoi terminologii’, 35. The terms we give as examples mean ‘audience’, ‘condition’, ‘conference’, and ‘negotiation’ respectively. 103 Smirnov, Zapadnoe vliianie na russkii iazyk v Petrovskuiu epokhu; Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 276–283. The memoirs of Prince Boris Kurakin, an eminent diplomat of Peter’s time, serve as a good example of a text in which there are numerous loanwords: see Kurakin, ‘Zhizn’ kniazia Borisa Ivanovicha Kurakina im samim opisannaia’, and idem, ‘Zapiski kniazia Borisa Ivanovicha Kurakina o prebyvanii v Anglii’. On foreign loanwords in Kurakin’s memoirs, see Iasinskaia, ‘Iazykovaia lichnost’ kniazia B.I. Kurakina’. 104 Zhivov, Istoriia iazyka russkoi pis’mennosti, 984–990. 105 In addition to the translations done by Matveev and Postnikov to which we have already referred, we should mention a treatise on international law written by another eminent Russian diplomat of this time, Petr Shaf irov’s Rassuzhdenie, kakie zakonnye prichiny […]. Shaf irov’s treatise was based on western sources. 106 The borrowing of terminology sometimes led to the appearance of doublets even for common referents. For example, the word ambassador, in several variants, had currency from Peter’s time alongside the term posol, and we also find ministr (minister) alongside poslannik. See Sergeeva, ‘Funktsionirovanie i razvitie russkoi diplomaticheskoi terminologii v XVIII veke’, 23–24, 27–28. 107 The loanword kur’er (courier), for instance, ousted gonets which, one might think, denoted the same thing: ibidem, 37–38. 108 Ibidem, 42.

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examples are taken from the volume of summaries of meetings with foreign diplomats for the years 1744–1745, which we used in the preceding section. Some of these terms, of course, relate directly to the field of diplomacy.109 Russian loan

French source

English equivalent

аллиация карактер кредитив медиация негоциация нота нотификация сондировать шарже дезафер штафета

alliance caractère lettres de créances médiation négociation note notification sonder chargé des affaires estafette

alliance quality letters of credence mediation negotiation note notification to sound out chargé d’affaires courier

Other borrowings had a wider meaning but were commonly used by diplomats: авертировать акордовать атенция ауторизовать инвитация комиссия конфиденция куверт сукцессор

avertir accorder attention autoriser invitation commission confidence couvert successeur

фрапировать

frapper

эвентуальный

éventuel

to warn, notify, advise to grant attention to authorize invitation commission, i.e. assignment confidence, i.e. secret envelope successor, e.g. the next ambassador to strike, i.e. to impress, surprise eventual

We find calques too, such as полная мочь (pleins pouvoirs, ‘full powers’).110 The examples we have cited occur in the documents we have consulted in combinations of the following sorts: акордовать помощь (to grant help); заключить аллиацию (to conclude an alliance); учинить инвитацию в 109 AVPRI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1457, fols 13 v., 23–25, 32, 41, 41 v., 46, 48, 52, 53 v., 54, 62, 77, 95, 98, 114, 119, 128, 132, 133, 150 v., 151 v. 110 Ibidem, fols 22, 169 v.

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принятии на себя медиации (to offer to mediate); иметь комиссию (to have an assignment); сообщить в крайней конфиденции (to inform in strict confidence); представить свою медиацию (to offer one’s mediation); принять на себя медиацию (to take it upon oneself to mediate); and учинить формальную нотификацию (formally to notify). It is worth noting that loanwords are rarely accompanied by any gloss in these documents, which would seem to indicate that by the middle of the century they had firmly established themselves in the vocabulary of the Russian diplomat.

Language use in internal communications about foreign affairs Many types of diplomatic document – for example, circulars, rescripts, letters of recall, and replies to communications from foreign powers – demonstrate that a variety of foreign languages continued to be used in the Russian diplomatic sphere during the reign of Catherine II. Numerous circular letters sent to Russian diplomats during the first half of Catherine’s reign were written in French,111 which, as we have seen, was by this time becoming the main language of international diplomacy. Sometimes, however, a German version of the document was sent too, as in the case of a letter notifying Russian diplomats of a meeting between Catherine and Joseph II of Austria.112 Right up until the end of Catherine’s reign, German was quite often used in correspondence with the Swedish court as well.113 For circular letters concerning the Ottoman Porte, as well as for the conduct of business with Italian states, Italian was frequently the medium.114 In dealings with the Crimea (which was not annexed by Russia until 1783), Tatar was sometimes used.115 It will be noticed, though, that many of the documents to which we have referred are communications that are directed not at representatives of foreign powers but at members of the Russian community responsible for the conduct of foreign policy and relations with other states. Whereas during the reign of Elizabeth the correspondence of the College of Foreign Affairs with Russian diplomats was generally conducted in Russian,116 in 111 To give just three examples: AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 363 (1769), 367 (1770), 412 (1779). 112 Ibidem, d. 418 (1780). 113 Ibidem, dd. 601 (1796), 602 (1796), 603 (1795). 114 Ibidem, dd. 477 (1772), 597 (1784). 115 Ibidem, d. 580 (1765). 116 See, e.g., the following reports: to Russia’s representative in Paris, Bekhteev; from the resident in Danzig, Musin-Pushkin (1757); and from the minister in Poland, Prince Mikhail Nikitich Volkonskii (AKV, bk 34, 63–70, 71–72, 83–86).

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the age of Catherine the administration routinely communicated with its own diplomats in French, and sometimes in other languages that we have just mentioned. In other words, Russian diplomats more often resorted to French as a language in which to communicate among themselves. Surveying the collections of letters, including circulars, which were sent to Russian diplomats in Catherine’s reign and the correspondence of diplomats themselves, we can both trace the development of the habit of using French as a language of internal communication in the diplomatic domain and also, in many instances, come to understand the reasons for the choice of language. Admittedly, many of the circulars sent to Russian diplomats were still written in Russian. As a rule, these were documents that contained information about domestic matters, such as the movements of the empress and the heir to the throne (for example, Catherine’s visits to Tver’, Kazan’, and Moscow), periods of mourning at court, appointments to various posts, and the opening of the Legislative Commission.117 At the same time, more and more circular letters were written in French (and very occasionally German) during Catherine’s reign.118 Thus in 1767, a number of Russian diplomats were sent a pamphlet in French (and Latin), explaining Russian policy with regard to Polish ‘dissidents’. This material was accompanied by a circular letter in French in which it was explained how diplomats should disseminate it. The circular was probably intended to help the diplomat formulate the arguments he was supposed to deploy: Je vous envoye des exemplaires tant latins que françois de cette piece dont vous ferez usage pour la publicité soit en la faisant lire chez vous soit en en donnant des exemplaires à vos connoissances et vous en remettrez surtout un exemplaire au ministre de la cour ou vous êtes […] Vous l’accompagnerez de cette reflexion que comme l’Imperatrice ne veut point qu’il y ait rien de misterieux dans les motifs de sa conduite elle a permis à son ministère d’exposer les principes d’après lesquels elle a agis jusqu’ici dans l’affaire des dissidents. En consequent de quoi Votre Cour vous a enjoint de faire remarquer à celle où vous etes, que faisant un cas particulier de son amitié et de sa confiance, il ne nous sera pas indifferent de connoitre, qu’on rend public ces principes d’équité et de desinteressement qui reglent toutes les demarches de Sa Majesté Impériale.119 117 AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, dd. 348, fols 3–5, 9–37, and 361, fols 5, 23, etc. 118 In two or three cases, German may have been chosen because it was the first language of the official who wrote the document, as in missives of 1769 that were signed by ‘Stehlin’. 119 AVPRI, f. 2, op. 6, d. 348, fols 1–1 v.

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(I am sending you copies, in Latin as well as French, of this piece of which you will make use for publicity, either by giving copies of it to people to read when they visit you or by giving copies of it to your acquaintances, and you will in particular hand a copy of it to the minister of the court at which you are based […] You will accompany [these initiatives] with the thought that since the empress wants there to be no mystery about the motives for her conduct she has allowed her minister to reveal the principles which have hitherto guided her actions in the matter of dissidents. In pursuance of which, Your Court has enjoined you to make it known to the court where you f ind yourself that we particularly value its friendship and trust, and that we shall be interested to know that these principles of equity and impartiality which govern all the steps taken by Her Imperial Majesty are being made public.)

Another circular in French was devoted to the same subject in March 1767.120 A letter was also written in French to Russian diplomats in Europe about the scandalous scene created in London by the French ambassador, the Comte de Châtelet, on the King’s birthday, when, by surprise and by means of an outrageous act of violence, he grabbed the place of the Empress’s ambassador at the public court ball right under the eyes of His Britannic Majesty.

Once again, the intention was plainly to provide diplomats not only with the arguments they should deploy but also with formulations of them in the language in which they were likely to have to express them, that is to say French. As in the case of the Polish ‘dissidents’, diplomats were being given instructions in French as to how they should act: ‘This is not a formal written declaration but a simple verbal communication, which has to do solely with propriety and precaution’.121 French was evidently chosen for the same purpose in a circular ministerial letter of December 1776 about the failure of the Ottoman Porte to fulfil the conditions of a peace treaty: ‘In making this statement, it is not my intention to have it used in a formal way; it is merely for your own information so that you should be in a better position to demolish false explanations which different interests may give 120 Ibidem, fols 6–8. 121 Ibidem, f. 2, op. 6, d. 364, fol. 2 v.

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for this turn of events’.122 In a letter of June 1783 that was written in French and sent to Russia’s ministers in Berlin and Copenhagen, there is a postscript in Russian which makes the reason for the choice of French explicit: I have written this letter in French on purpose so that Your Illustrious Highness, in order best to explain its contents and to remove any possibility of misunderstanding on this matter, may read it to the ministry of his Prussian [Danish] Majesty. On the one hand, there is no need for you to hand over a copy of it, and, on the other hand, no objection need be made if the person in the ministry of His Majesty with whom you will deal on this matter wishes in your presence to make a note of it for his own record; in due course, I shall expect from you, my M.G., a thorough account of how the things you say have been received.123

It might be supposed that in some cases the choice of French can be explained by the fact that there were foreigners among the diplomats serving the Russian Empire in Europe, but this explanation seems unlikely, since such letters were not infrequently written in Russian too, no matter to whom they were addressed. Of course, even in the 1770s and 1780s we still find letters on matters of foreign policy that were written in Russian. These are evidently cases in which it was not necessary to show the document to foreign ministers.124 On the whole, though, we see a division of diplomats’ correspondence into letters in French, which concern foreign policy, and letters in Russian, which do not. However, this separation of official from unofficial usage was not strictly observed for long. Letters in French begin to appear, for example, in which the chancellor or vice-chancellor recommends Russian travellers to diplomats, although such matters were not really official.125 We may assume that Russian diplomats, who were at ease both in international diplomatic circles and in European high society, were losing sight of the distinction between the function of French as a professional diplomatic language and as a language of society. They might even, in some cases, have been losing sight of firm reasons for choosing one language or the other, if we are to judge by late eighteenth-century documents in which the choice that was made 122 Ibidem, fols 23–23 v. 123 Ibidem, fols 60–60 v. (a letter in French), 65 (postscript). 124 e.g., a letter to diplomats in Munich and Frankfurt am Main about rumours of an intention to recall Count Ségur and to appoint the Marquis de la Côte [?] in his place: ibidem, fol. 100. 125 There are many such letters: ibidem, fols 21, 26, 27, 29, 34, 37, 78, 80, 81, 82, 99–99 v. (1770s and 1780s).

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The French L anguage in Russia

is hard to explain. Take, for example, the correspondence about diplomatic matters between the eminent Catherinian diplomat Prince Nikolai Repnin and the head of the foreign-policy department, Nikita Panin, which was conducted now in Russian, now in French.126 The number of memoranda on diplomatic subjects that were written for the foreign-policy department in French also increased during Catherine’s reign.127 The language used in these memoranda was usually correct and often elegant, as we see from an undated ‘Political History of Europe (1740–1748)’ by Count (later His Serene Highness) Aleksandr Bezborodko, who had de facto oversight of Russian foreign policy at the end of Catherine’s reign: La Russie triomphante de tous côtés, accède à la paix de Westphalie et la détruit par son accession. Ce chef d’œuvre de la diplomatie, qui jusqu’alors avoit lutté contre les efforts du temps, et tenu contre les plus grands bouleversemens, qui avoit vu, sans se détruire, une puissance maritime accéder au système, l’Espagne changer de maître, la Hollande de parti, ce chef d’œuvre chancela entièrement à ce dernier coup.128 (Triumphant on all sides, Russia acceded to the Peace of Westphalia and by its accession destroyed it. This masterpiece of diplomacy, which up until then had battled against the strains of time and withstood the greatest upheavals, which had survived the accession of a maritime power to the system, a change of master in Spain, and Holland changing sides, this masterpiece was completely brought down by this final blow.)

On 22 December 1787, Catherine II signed a rescript requiring that reports (reliatsii) from Russian diplomats that went directly to the sovereign be written in Russian, ‘excluding only those cases in which the essence of the matter that is to be reported to them [i.e. the sovereign] demands precise retention of the words of the language in which it was discussed’. This circular was addressed to ministers, chargés d’affaires, and consuls who 126 AVPRI, f. 167, op. 509/1, d. 8, fols 3, 16–18, 23, 34–37. Sometimes the choice may be explained by the need for secrecy: an uncoded part of a message might be written in Russian and a coded part in French (no doubt because it was more accessible to the prying eyes of foreigners), as prescribed by Catherine’s rescript of 1787 (see below). See the letter of 1798 (ibidem, fols 38–39 v.) for an example. 127 There are quite a few such documents in the collection held in the section ‘Political Writings’ in AVPRI: f. 2, op. 6, dd. 5588–5679. 128 ‘Histoire politique de l’Europe (1740–1748)’, in AVPRI, f. 133, op. 469, d. 7714, fol. 6.

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were ‘natural Russians’ (prirodnye rossiane).129 Catherine’s instruction was plainly in keeping with the mood of the time.130 After all, it was in the 1780s that reform of educational institutions was being carried out with the aim of strengthening the teaching of Russian. The Russian Academy had been founded and a dictionary (in which, somewhat paradoxically, the influence of the French model was felt) was being compiled under its aegis.131 The rescript, then, was one more manifestation of institutional support for the Russian language at a time when francophonie was firmly establishing itself in the upper stratum of Russian society. It is difficult to say what effect this instruction actually had, but clearly a considerable proportion of diplomatic correspondence continued to be written in French after it had been issued. We see a similar reaction to the use of French, incidentally, at another moment when Russian policy was taking a nationalistic turn, precisely a century after Catherine’s rescript: in 1887, the minister of foreign affairs, Nikolai Girs (who was of Swedish origin), ordered that French be replaced by Russian, except when diplomats were notifying colleagues of discussions with foreign ministers that had taken place in French.132

The triumph of French in the diplomatic community and the limits to its use By the early years of the reign of Alexander I, French had become the dominant language in the conduct of Russian diplomacy, despite the national turn in official language use towards the end of the reign of Catherine II. It prevailed in the internal correspondence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as in dealings with foreign states. Ministers of foreign affairs and heads of departments in the ministry used it almost exclusively in their correspondence with Russian diplomats in Europe.133 Of course, to state 129 AVPRI, f. 32, d. 702, fol. 10; Gosudarstvennost’ Rossii. Slovar’-spravochnik, bk 6, pt 2, 241. We are grateful to Mariia Petrova for supplying us with this information. 130 It is notable, for example, that a neighbouring monarch, Joseph II of Austria, attempted from 1784 to introduce German as the language of administration in Habsburg lands where it was not yet commonly used, such as Hungary and Galicia. For a useful summary (by Martin Votruba) of Joseph’s plans and measures, see http://www.pitt.edu/~votruba/sstopics/slovaklawsonlanguage/ Austrian_Law_on_the_German_Langauge_in_Hungary_1784.pdf . 131 See the second section of Chapter 8 below. 132 AVPRI, f. 133, op. 470, d. 23 (1887), fol. 2. See Ocherki istorii Ministerstva inostrannykh del Rossii: 860–1917 gg., vol. 3, 154–155. 133 Hundreds of documents attesting to this fact are published in Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka. It should be noted, though, that it remained entirely possible to use

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The French L anguage in Russia

that French was the pre-eminent language in Russian diplomacy in the nineteenth century is hardly original, but it may be worth considering what limits officials knowingly or unwittingly placed on its use, as these may not previously have been recognized. There is a great deal of material in the archive of the Russian embassy in Constantinople which helps us to understand the rules governing language choice in the correspondence of Russian officials during the nineteenth century.134 Russian diplomats in Constantinople naturally used French in their correspondence with the diplomats of other countries, such as Persia, Prussia, Spain, and Sweden, who were also serving in the Ottoman capital.135 Around the turn of the century, Russian monarchs, for their part, were still sending instructions to Russian envoys at the Porte in Russian, if we are to judge by rescripts from Paul in 1801 and Alexander I in 1803, although a rescript of 1816 from Alexander was in French. Similarly, the embassy’s correspondence with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still conducted in Russian as well as French in the early years of Alexander’s reign. From the 1830s and throughout the reign of Nicholas I, on the other hand, it was almost always conducted in French. Russian diplomats in Constantinople also used French, in the main, to correspond with Russia’s consulates general in many cities in the Mediterranean region, such as Aleppo, Athens, Beirut, Belgrade, Bucharest, Cairo, Damascus, and the Dardanelles (although Italian, as the traditional diplomatic language of this region, sometimes appears too in this correspondence). In this connection, Russian within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the nineteenth century. In January 1813, for example, the envoy in Washington, A.Ia. Dashkov, wrote a dispatch in Russian to the minister of foreign affairs, N.P. Rumiantsev, while in 1814 the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I.A. Veidemeir (Weidemeier), sent a memorandum to Secretary of State Nesselrode, also in Russian: see Vneshniaia politika Rossii, first series, 1801–1815, vol. 7 (covering the years 1813–1814), 28–30, 113–114. Again, in the 1830s, we find a report in Russian from the consul in the Crimea to the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: see Vneshniaia politika Rossii, vol. 17 (August 1830–January 1832), 301–302. Other languages too could still be used in Russian diplomats’ internal correspondence in the nineteenth century. The Russian mission in Hamburg, for instance, used German in its correspondence with Russian consuls elsewhere in Germany in the 1820s and 1830s, probably because those consuls were for the most part ethnic Germans (Hagendorff, Koenke, and A.D. Schepeler in Bremen, Jäger (?) in Cuxhaven, Johann Andreas Sandmann in Wismar, and Schlözer in Lübeck). However, the mission in Hamburg always used French when writing to diplomatic representatives of the Russian Empire in cities in other countries (Amsterdam, Livorno, London, Philadelphia, and so on), even when those individuals were Germans (as was Jacob Georg Benckhausen, the Russian consul general in London; the Russian consul in Rio de Janeiro, Petr Petrovich Kielchen, may also have been a German): see AVPRI, f. 174, op. 545, d. 15. 134 AVPRI, f. 180, op. 1 (517), covering the years 1798–1853. 135 Ibidem, dd. 2302–2441.

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we should take account of the fact that many of Russia’s consular employees were of foreign origin, as their surnames make plain.136 Moreover, the senior management of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was itself highly international in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, the German Count Karl Robert von Nesselrode, and the Greek Count Capo d’Istria all served at one time or another as minister of foreign affairs of the Russian Empire. In this multinational milieu, French was a convenient lingua franca and no doubt a more acceptable means of communication than Russian. When diplomats in the Constantinople embassy corresponded with Russian officials outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or with military officers, on the other hand, their correspondence tended to be conducted in Russian. The off icials to whom the diplomats wrote included civil servants in other ministries and in provincial administrations. Many of these correspondents, such as the provincial governors of Ekaterinoslav, Kamenets-Podol’sk, Kazan’, Kiev, Poltava, and Saratov, occupied high service ranks.137 We stress this point because it is very likely that all these officials had a command of French. And yet, the diplomats did not use French when they wrote to these colleagues outside the domain of foreign affairs. We find similar practice in published documents that relate to other diplomatic missions and officials in other bodies which had dealings with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To cite just a few examples from 1815, Russian was used in the following instances: by Russia’s envoy in Vienna, Gustav Stackelberg, when he wrote to the minister of finance, Dmitrii Gur’ev; by Prince Grigorii Volkonskii, the governor-general, when he sent the Ministry of Foreign Affairs some remarks on a memorandum from the Bokharan envoy Azimzhan Muminzhanov; by the envoy in Madrid, Dmitrii Tatishchev, when he wrote to Prince Petr Volkonskii, the head of the military headquarters under Alexander I; and by a consul general in Iaşi, when he wrote to the military commander and civilian governor of Bessarabia, Ivan Garting.138 The same practice was still in evidence in the 1830s. In 1831, for example, the vice-chancellor, Nesselrode, wrote in Russian to the governor-general of Western Siberia, Ivan Vel’iaminov, and the chief of naval headquarters, Aleksandr Menshikov. The governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Aleksandr Lavinskii, also wrote in Russian to Nesselrode. The Russian ambassador in Paris, Prince Aleksandr Kurakin, corresponded in Russian with Field 136 Ibidem, dd. 557 (1800)–593 (1842). 137 Ibidem, dd. 2697 (1853), 2704 (1821), 2710 (1801–1802), 2925 (1827), 2928 (1831), etc. 138 Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka, vol. 17, 201, 203–204, 290.

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Marshal General Prince Aleksandr Prozorovskii.139 Thus in the official world outside the part of the administration that dealt with foreign affairs, linguistic practice still resembled that in the mid-eighteenth century, when Petr Saltykov, the commander-in-chief of the army during the Seven Years’ War, his successor Aleksandr Buturlin, and Zakhar Chernyshev, another renowned general of that time, all corresponded with the then chancellor, Mikhail Vorontsov, in Russian, even though they were capable of writing in French.140 That is not to say that French was never used in diplomats’ correspondence with officials in other ministries or with military officers. For one thing, correspondence with imperial officials who were foreigners, such as the governor of the city of Odessa, Duke Armand-Emmanuel Richelieu, naturally tended to be conducted in French rather than Russian.141 When in 1805 the Polish Prince Czartoryski, who was at that time Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, addressed himself to General Count Petr Tolstoi, he too wrote in French, no doubt choosing the language that he found it easiest to use.142 Sometimes French does also occur in the correspondence of Russo­phone diplomats with Russophone officials in other departments or Russophone military officers. One has the impression that this happens chiefly in correspondence between men of the highest social origin. Thus in 1812, Admiral Pavel Chichagov wrote to the minister of foreign affairs, Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, in French as well as Russian, without explaining his choice and never mixing the two languages in a single letter.143 To diplomats representing Russia in Vienna and Constantinople – Stackelberg and Andrei Italinskii respectively – Chichagov also wrote in French. His French is accurate, clear, and even colourful, as an extract from a letter to Italinskii shows: Par l’expédition d’aujourd’hui je vais vous fournir, Monsieur, de nouveaux moyens qui faciliteront, au moins pour les formes et l’étiquette, vos premières démarches, auxquelles cependant j’attache une grande importance. Car ce sont leurs résultats qui vous éclaireront au point de vous faire apercevoir au juste ce qu’on peut se flatter d’obtenir, et ce que l’on doit attendre.144 139 Ibidem, 279–280, 360, 361, 483–484; AVPRI, f. 133, op. 468, d. 1943. 140 АKV, bk 6, 356–391, 444–451. 141 AVPRI, f. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2900 (1811). 142 AVPRI, f. 133, op. 468, d. 1197, fol. 59. 143 Ibidem, d. 2014, fols 2 v., 7–8 v., 11, 39–41. 144 Ibidem, fol. 28 v.

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(With today’s dispatch I am going to furnish you, Sir, with new means which will facilitate, at least as far as forms and etiquette are concerned, your first steps, to which, however, I attach great importance. For it is their outcomes that will enlighten you to the extent that you will see exactly what one may feel sure of obtaining and what one should expect.)

It is possible that by writing to these diplomats in French Chichagov was tacitly acknowledging that French was a diplomat’s professional language, a hypothesis that seems to be confirmed by the fact that letters he addressed in that same year to military men, including high-ranking officers, were written in Russian.145 What determined the language choice of officials who switched between French and Russian? The correspondence of Apollinarii Butenev and Vladimir Titov, who represented Russia at the Porte for many years, and Count (subsequently Prince) Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov (the son of the former Russian ambassador in London and the governor of Novorossiisk in the age of Nicholas I) helps us to answer this question.146 Official papers sent to Butenev by Vorontsov from the governor’s office were always in Russian. Butenev and Titov, for their part, also used Russian to provide Vorontsov with information which one might describe as purely official, such as letters about the loss of a merchant vessel in the Black Sea or the financial accounts of the diplomatic mission. Similarly, a draft letter of 1841 conveyed news that had come from the Turkish quarantine authorities that a fisherman who had died on the Black Sea had been found to have the plague. The note ‘sur pap de Dep’ (on departmental paper) indicated that this was a formal communication.147 Letters in French, on the other hand, tended to be unofficial. Thus, in a letter of 1840, Vorontsov thanked Butenev for giving him news from Turkey and explained how pleased he was to receive first-hand information.148 Similarly, a letter of 1841 that Butenev wrote to Vorontsov in French seems more reminiscent of a salon conversation about politics than an official report.149 Perhaps, then, the significance of a shift into French was that it imparted a less formal, more intimate tone to correspondence. And indeed, official news alternates in the correspondence of these men with personal 145 Ibidem, fols 23, 64, 66 (to Lieutenant-Colonel Polev, Vice-Admiral Nikolai Iazykov, who was also the military governor of Nikolaev and Sebastopol, and Major-General Grigorii Engel’gardt). 146 AVPRI, f. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2886 (1839–1841, Russ., Fr.). 147 Ibidem, fol. 11. 148 Ibidem, fol. 4. 149 Ibidem, fol. 8.

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news and requests. For example, in an undated letter, Vorontsov asked Butenev, in French, to take under his protection a certain Miss Hunt, the daughter of an English architect who lived in Vorontsov’s house, while she was visiting Constantinople.150 Likewise, Vorontsov asked Titov and his wife to entrust him with some personal errands which needed to be carried out in St Petersburg, for which Voronstov was about to depart.151 The boundary between the official and unofficial realms might be blurred, as in this passage from Vorontsov’s letter: Ma femme qui s’est toujours souvenu avec reconnaissance de l’obligeance que lui a témoigné pendant son sejour à Consple Monsieur Bogdanoff, a été enchantée hier d’apprendre son arrivée […] J’ai lu avec beaucoup d’interet le paragraphe de votre lettre sur la proposition que pourraient faire quelques negocians de Constple d’établir une communication réguliere avec nous même toutes les semaines pour une subvention aussi minime selon moi que de 50/m Rbls.152 (My wife, who has always remembered with gratitude the helpfulness that Mr Bogdanov showed her during her visit to Constantinople, was delighted to learn yesterday of his arrival […] I read with great interest the paragraph in your letter about the proposal that some businessmen of Constantinople may make to establish regular communication with us, even every week, I think, for a subvention of as little as 50 roubles a month.)

Vorontsov followed the same pattern in later correspondence with Titov: there are letters of a purely official nature in Russian on official notepaper and letters which, although they do discuss professional matters, are relatively informal and written in French. In a letter of 1845, for example, Vorontsov tells Titov in French how he feels about the emperor’s decision to add a new post in the Caucasus to his responsibilities, how difficult it is going to be for him to carry out all these responsibilities, and why he cannot refuse to do what the emperor demands.153 Clearly, we are dealing with a shift from the language of professional correspondence between diplomats and Russian officials outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the language in which it was appropriate to conduct personal relations 150 Ibidem, fol. 20. 151 Ibidem, fol. 58. 152 Ibidem, fols 59 v.–60. 153 Ibidem, fol. 30.

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with a fellow member of high society. In Butenev’s correspondence with the governor of the city of Odessa, Aleksandr Levshin, on the other hand, French was not used (although Levshin, who had previously served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had visited France, had a fine command of that language), because this correspondence was of a purely official nature.154

French and Russian in other official domains The distinction we have observed in mid-nineteenth-century Russian official practice between the use of French for the conduct of diplomatic business and the use of Russian for business that did not concern foreign affairs seems to hold good when sovereigns are involved. Diplomatic documents and correspondence in the archive of Nicholas I, for example, are for the most part in French, including Nicholas’s correspondence with his minister of foreign affairs, Nesselrode.155 The same may be said of the reign of Alexander II, who on the day of his accession to the throne made a speech to the diplomatic corps in French,156 although in Alexander’s correspondence German occasionally featured as well.157 On the whole, this state of affairs persisted during the reigns of the last two Romanovs, Alexander III and Nicholas II, although the latter, as we have seen, conducted some of his correspondence with other European monarchs in English.158 Letters by monarchs and other members of the royal family which did not concern diplomatic matters, on the other hand, tended to be written in Russian. This was already the case under Alexander I, although the linguistic division into different spheres – private and official – was perhaps not yet as clear-cut as it would become under later emperors. For instance, Russian was the language used, in the reign of Alexander I, for minutes of meetings in the Legislative Department and the State Economy Department of the State Council and in the Committee of Ministers. The chairman of the Committee of Ministers, the minister of finance, military commanders – all presented their reports to Alexander and wrote their official memoranda in Russian. Alexander himself used Russian in his orders and rescripts to the chairman of the State Council, the chairman of the Committee of 154 Ibidem, d. 2940 (1837–1839). On Levshin, see http://odesskiy.com/l/levshin-aleksandriraklievich.html. 155 GARF, f. 672, op. 1, d. 202 (1850–1853, Fr.). 156 GARF, f. 678, op. 1, d. 571 (1855). 157 Ibidem, dd. 499 (1863, Fr., Ger.), 500 (1867, Fr.), 502 (1867–1872, Fr.), etc. 158 See the last section of Chapter 3 above.

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Ministers, the president of the Provisional Government of the Kingdom of Poland, the minister of finance, military commanders, and governors. Military men of various ranks generally wrote to one another in Russian, including those who themselves belonged to the aristocracy and had an excellent command of French.159 To an even greater extent, civil servants of the highest rank used Russian when they addressed inferior officials.160 The official correspondence of Nicholas I, his manifestos, and the numerous reports, memoranda, and summaries that he was constantly receiving were also in Russian, in the main.161 Nicholas delivered a speech to the Preobrazhenskii Life-Guard Regiment in Russian, although the life-guard officers were bound to have had a command of French.162 The same can be said of the situation in the reigns of Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II: official documents – reports of one sort or another, memoranda from ministers and high-ranking army officers, and other correspondence of this sort – almost always came to the emperor in Russian.163 It is worth comparing the official correspondence of the emperors with that of a prominent female member of the royal family who also often concerned herself with affairs of state and charitable works, namely the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, whose plurilingualism we have already mentioned.164 The numerous memoranda that Elena Pavlovna received reveal the range of languages, above all Russian, in which she conducted this business.165 As for the many notes in foreign languages in her archive that were written in German or French,166 nearly all of these were from foreigners, although some were from Russians. The latter, when they wrote in a foreign language, always used French.167 The content of the documents 159 Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka, vol. 7, 22–23, 54–55, 257–258, 273, 280, 321–322, 360–361, 374–375, 391–407, 539; AVPRI, f. 133, op. 468, d. 1943 (1808). 160 For example, the dealings of the minister of internal affairs, O.P. Kozodavlev, with the head of the Odessan colonies, Loshkarev, were in Russian: Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka, vol. 7, 523–525 (17 (29) September 1815). We shall confine ourselves to these examples, but a survey of other volumes in this series confirms this trend in later periods, e.g. the 1830s (ibidem, vol. 17). 161 e.g., numerous memoranda written by Nicholas: GARF, f. 672, op. 1, dd. 69 (1831–1834), 82 (1841–1844), etc. 162 Ibidem, d. 87 (1845). 163 There were rare exceptions: see, e.g., GARF, f. 677, op. 1, dd. 370, 463. 164 See the last section of Chapter 3 above. 165 GARF, f. 647, op. 1, dd. 49, 53, 59. Some memoranda addressed to her were written in French: see, e.g. ibidem, d. 126. In this case, the author, Sergei Lanskoi, who was the Russian minister of internal affairs, was very close to Elena Pavlovna, which might explain his choice of French. 166 GARF, f. 647, op. 1; there are dozens of documents in each of these two languages. 167 See, e.g., ibidem, dd. 238 and 239 (no date), 251 (1853), 367 (1862).

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in French in Elena Pavlovna’s archive does not differ from that of documents in other languages: the documents concern such matters as the state of the Russian army, the difficulty of reorganizing the Naval Ministry, Russia’s financial condition, the setting-up of a national bank, tax reform, and, most commonly, education, Polish affairs, and the peasant reform.168 It is clear, therefore, that German and French retained some place in affairs of state in the mid-nineteenth century. No doubt this was mainly due to the fact, in the case of the former language, that a large number of Germans were resident in Russia and, in the case of the latter, that French was still a lingua franca for many foreigners and the language of high society in the Russian Empire. The reports of bodies that were connected in some way to the imperial court and the requests of learned and musical societies were often made in French,169 reflecting the perception in Russian society that French was the principal language of the court and the royal family (and perhaps also the perception of it as the language of women in high society). No doubt we should also bear in mind, when considering the choice of language by those who wrote to this grand duchess, that she was of German origin. In sum, though, the case of Elena Pavlovna would seem to suggest that women’s language use in the royal family was not substantially different from men’s practice. Our impression that Russian was the predominant language of internal administration in the Russian Empire is also borne out by documents relating to the activity of the Third Department and the Corps of Gendarmes, the new secret police organs that were set up in 1826, following the Decembrist Revolt.170 (The de jure head of the Third Department from its inception until 1844 was Aleksandr Benckendorff; its de facto director, though, was Maksim von Fock, who oversaw the Department’s investigations and supervised its agents up until his death in 1831.) As an institution concerned with internal matters rather than foreign affairs, the Third Department invariably used 168 Minutes concerning German educational institutions in Russia or educational institutions in the Baltic lands, though, were written in German. 169 e.g., GARF, f. 647, op. 1, dd. 274, 285, 312. However, such reports might be written in Russian too (see, e.g., d. 295), while draft rules and regulations might be presented in German (e.g., d. 314). Language choice may have been connected with the specific character of this or that society or institution. 170 The pioneering Russian studies of the Third Department, produced in brief periods in the first half of the twentieth century when Russian scholars had good access to archival sources on the subject, are by Lemke (1908) and Isaak Trotskii (1930). The main history of the Third Department in English is the study by Squire (1968), who did not have access to archival sources. Whereas Squire writes an administrative history of the institution, Monas (1961) focuses on the effect of the Third Department on the evolution of literature and journalism.

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Russian for its own clerical documentation and for communications with other government departments. Its decisions or instructions on the papers it received were generally recorded in Russian as well, as were the bulk of the reports it received from provincial gendarmes, most of whom had an army background.171 Nonetheless, there were instances in the history of this government department too when French was used or knowledge of it was needed. The personal memorandum that Benckendorff sent to Nicholas I in January 1826 proposing the establishment of a ‘Higher Police’ under the command of a special minister and inspector of a Corps of Gendarmes was written in French.172 (Benckendorff had previously sent a memorandum, also written in French, to Alexander I, on the need to create a gendarmerie on the French model, but Alexander had not acted upon it.173) Most strikingly, French was the language chosen for the first four annual surveys of the state of public opinion, for the years 1827–1830, which were written by von Fock and passed on by Benckendorff to the emperor.174 Odd as it may now seem, Benckendorff and von Fock had an idealistic and even chivalric view of their role as champions of upright subjects and expressed animosity towards corrupt officials who masqueraded as Russian patriots. This attitude came across in von Fock’s elegant ‘tableaux’.175 For example, the gendarmerie was perceived, von Fock opined in his survey for 1829, as ‘the people’s moral physician’.176 We find a further report, also written in French, and by the same author, in response to a request from Nicholas for clarification of certain points made in one of the surveys on the state of public opinion to which we have just referred.177 Here von Fock provided a list of names of members of the various ‘parties’ in Moscow and St Petersburg who caused him concern. These included young men of letters, among whom there were such unlikely bedfellows as Pushkin, Vladimir Odoevskii, and Viazemskii, 171 We are grateful to Grigorii Bibikov for this information, which is based on his knowledge of the archival material on the Third Department in GARF. 172 The French original of this proposal is reproduced in an appendix in Squire, The Third Department, 239–240. 173 Ibidem, 50. 174 The reports were entitled ‘Tableaux de l’Opinion publique’. They were published in Russian in KA, vol. 37 (1929), 141–156 (report for 1827) and 156–169 (report for 1828), and vol. 38 (1930), 109–133 (report for 1829) and 133–145 (report for 1830). After von Fock’s death in 1831, the annual reports were written in Russian. For a summary and discussion of these surveys, see Squire, The Third Department, 201–205. 175 Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 207–208. 176 KA, 38 (1930), 132. 177 GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 8, fols 30–32.

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the future Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii, and the future Official Nationalists Pogodin and Stepan Shevyrev. More worryingly, from the point of view of the Third Department, they also included certain young diplomats and officers from illustrious backgrounds who, while they were not seeking to overthrow the government, were known to think that Russia would benefit from constitutional government. It is not surprising, perhaps, that French was used at the highest level of the Third Department in the early years of its existence, for both the officials who were responsible for its formation and the early management of it were members of the Baltic German nobility, not ethnic Russians. Benckendorff belonged to a family that traced its origins to knights of the Teutonic Order and whose members became Russian subjects in 1710, during the reign of Peter the Great. He was educated at a Jesuit boarding school. He preferred to use French rather than Russian in his personal correspondence,178 as attested in some surviving notes of 1830–1831 to von Fock.179 He also chose French for his memoirs.180 Maksim von Fock came from the same region of the empire. His mother-tongue was German, but he too had a command of French, as well as Russian (and Polish). French was the vehicle for a stream of reports that he sent to Benckendorff immediately after the Third Department had been set up, during Benckendorff’s absence from St Petersburg in the summer of 1826.181 At the same time, knowledge of French was a matter of practical necessity for those gathering intelligence on Russian subjects from agents abroad

178 We are indebted to Grigorii Bibikov for this point too. 179 GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 35. 180 The first part of these memoirs, covering the years up to 1825, is housed in GARF (f. 728, op. 1, d. 1353) and the second part (the continuation up to 1837) in SPbF ARAN (f. 764, op. 4, d. 5). The memoirs have recently been published in a single volume in Russian translation: see Benkendorff, Vospominaniia. They had previously been published in Russian in instalments in RA, RS, and Istoricheskii vestnik (see the entries under ‘Benkendorf’ in the section of our bibliography on published primary sources). Marina Sidorova has pointed out that although Benckendorff was of German origin he rarely used German in everyday life except when as a child he spoke to his mother and in correspondence about property matters with relations in the Baltic provinces. Schooling at a French pension where classes were conducted in French, military service in the elite Semenovskii Guards Regiment whose officers were French-speaking members of the high aristocracy, and contact at court with the Francophone Empress Maria Fedorovna made French indispensable for Benckendorff. At the same, time his written French, as can be seen from his diaries, was fallible, containing frequent orthographic and stylistic errors and some semantic mistakes. See Sidorova, ‘Novootkrytye memuary grafa Benkendorfa kak istoricheskii istochnik’. 181 Squire, The Third Department, 63–74. A Russian version of these letters was printed in RS, vol. 32 (1881), 168–194, 303–336, 519–560.

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(with whom the Third Department corresponded in French 182) and also from agents reporting on many Russian subjects in Russia itself. Since a major function of the Third Department was to keep members of the Francophone aristocratic elite under surveillance (for members of that elite had been ringleaders in the recent mutiny and were susceptible to political and social ideas that posed a threat to the regime), knowledge of French was required both for eavesdropping and for reading perlustrated noble correspondence. As a woman named Annette who lived in Moscow warned a friend in St Petersburg a week after the Decembrist Revolt, in a letter written in French, there were many spies abroad. It would therefore be unwise of her friend to leave letters such as the one in which Annette expressed this concern lying around on her table for others to see – but evidently Annette’s letter, which is preserved in the archive of the Third Department, never reached its addressee!183 Then again, some of the most useful informants of the Third Department were themselves Francophone nobles who had access to and were trusted by those members of the elite whose views disturbed the authorities. Such people might naturally submit the intelligence they gathered in French. There are documents in both languages, and in various hands, for example, that relate to the investigation into the Decembrists and its aftermath in 1826–1827.184 A particularly detailed and malicious denunciation came, in 1832, from a source who was obviously well-known to the unsuspecting Turgenev brothers. Although the brothers had not all adopted ‘la livrée des vautours jacobins’ (the plumage of Jacobin vultures), the informant was convinced that Nikolai Turgenev, to whom we refer at other points in this book (and who in truth held quite moderate political views),185 was ‘un enragé, une harpie qui infecte par le toucher’ (an out-and-out radical, a harpy who infects you if you touch him). Drawing on knowledge of what Nikolai was doing in France, where he was by now a refugee, the informer recommended closer surveillance of Nikolai’s brother Aleksandr, who, the author conjectured, might be acting as Nikolai’s treasurer in Russia.186 Perhaps the use of French as a vehicle for sharing confidential information between noble peers made the act of denunciation seem less undignified, more like the fulfilment of a civic duty. Not that all informants felt as comfortable about 182 As we are also informed by Grigorii Bibikov. 183 GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 3, fol. 2. 184 See the large collection of documents relating to the revolt: Vosstanie dekabristov (23 vols to date). 185 See the fourth section of Chapter 4 above and the sixth section of Chapter 7 below. 186 GARF, f. 109, op. 1a, d. 37, fols 1–2 v.

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their collaboration with the Third Department as this enemy of Nikolai Turgenev seems to have done. Someone who had been providing the Third Department with intelligence about letters sent by exiled Decembrists from Siberia to Moscow justified his own conduct. Writing ‘[e]n homme d’honneur’ (as a man of honour), he reminded his addressee in the Third Department that the gendarmes had promised to leave in peace a certain Mlle Anastasie whom he had mentioned in his report and who of course had no idea of his involvement in the investigation.187 Finally, we turn again to one of the most productive autobiographical sources for our study, the diaries of Count Petr Valuev, a well-educated and well connected nobleman who became a civil servant in the 1830s and went on to serve as minister of internal affairs, from 1861 to 1868, and minister of state property, from 1872 to 1879.188 Valuev’s adherence to the common practice of switching codes for the purpose of reporting speech in the language in which an observation was originally made provides us with an insight into the persistence of the use of French at the highest level of the official domain in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also attests to the continuing predominance of French in discussion of foreign affairs. At the same time, we may surmise on the basis of Valuev’s diary that French had somewhat greater currency in oral discussion of official business than it did in formal written records and correspondence. It is evident, for example, that conversations Valuev had with the sovereign in his ministerial capacity took place in French, irrespective of the fact that his portfolio was domestic policy. ‘I was in the palace and saw the sovereign at two o’clock’, he writes in an entry in April 1861 as his star was in the ascendant. Graciously received. An announcement about my appointment, expression of confidence, an indication that the sovereign wants ‘de l’ordre et des 187 Ibidem, d. 39, fols 1–2. 188 The first volume of Valuev’s two-volume diary covers the years 1861–1864, and the second the years 1865–1876. The value of this source for our linguistic history, as well as for political historians, is enhanced by the fact that Zaionchkovskii’s edition of it is based on a text written before Valuev reworked it for publication. It is therefore reasonable to view the multilingualism that is on display in the diary, like the opinions expressed in it by Valuev, as a record of fairly spontaneous language use, rather than merely an example of public performance, although Valuev no doubt did also have readers of later generations in mind as he wrote. On Valuev’s reworking and editing of the diary over a long period and on the history of the publication of various parts of the diary, see Zaionchkovskii’s introduction in vol. 1, 8–13. We also use this source in the first three sections of Chapter 4 above (on usage in high society) and the third section of Chapter 6 below (on code-switching).

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améliorations qui ne changent point les bases du gouvernement’ [order and improvements which do not change the bases of the government], an instruction to report on Friday with Lanskoi. I asked the sovereign to support me in the difficult position in which current circumstances and the position of the Ministry would place me and I requested permission to express my thoughts frankly and plainly. His answer: ‘Je vous l’ordonne’ [I command you to do so].189

That is not to say that there was any breach in this case of what we have found to be normal linguistic practice in the written language, according to which Russian was used in correspondence between the sovereign and his subjects about official matters outside the realm of foreign affairs. Indeed, we may infer that it was usual for Valuev to correspond with Alexander II in Russian, since in an entry in his diary for January 1876 (by which time he had an economic portfolio) he specifically mentioned his preference for French in a particular letter and the reason for it: ‘After dinner I wrote a note which I intend to send to the sovereign on the fall in the exchange rate. The note is in French, so that the source of it should remain unknown to Reutern.’190 However, in oral discourse, it would appear from Valuev’s diary, French was widely used for discussion of matters of state at the highest level, and not only when the subject was foreign affairs or when one of the participants was not ethnically Russian. Valuev switched into French in his diary, for instance, to report what had been said to him by colleagues on 21 February 1861, as a crisis was developing in Poland: Prince Dolgorukov told me he was apprehensive about Polish affairs. ‘On prend la chose trop légèrement chez nous’ [We are taking this too lightly]. ‘Je suis heureux de vous l’entendre dire, mon prince. Jе tiens pour certain que la chose est très grave’ [I’m glad to hear you say that, my prince. I have no doubt that the situation is very serious]. ‘Chut! il n’en faut pas parler’ [Shush! We mustn’t speak about it]. Why ever not? I.M. Tolstoi, who attended the committee in place of Prince Gorchakov today, on the other hand, expressed himself as follows: ‘On n’a pas laissé à [Mikhail] Gortschakoff [i.e. the Russian viceroy in Poland] le temps de faire la bêtise de recevoir sa petition. Tout va bien. Il faudra seulement faire aller ailleurs M.M. Fialkovski et c’ie’ [Gorchakov wasn’t given the time to be 189 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 104. For further examples, see vol. 1, 157, 181, 192, 205, 224, 291, and vol. 2, 259–260, 330. 190 Ibidem, vol. 2, 331. Reutern was minister of finance from 1862–1878.

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so foolish as to accept its [presumably Poland’s] petition. All goes well. All that needs to be done is to make Messrs Fijałkowski and Co. go away].191

Indeed, French appears to be Valuev’s prime – perhaps his exclusive – language of communication with such Russian colleagues as Vasilii Dolgorukov, the head of the Third Department in the period 1856–1866, as well as Gorchakov, the minister of foreign affairs from 1856 to 1882. At any rate, it is the language in which remarks of theirs that Valuev records are always couched in his diary.192 In many instances, this usage is consistent with our finding that French was the preferred medium for discussion of foreign affairs and diplomatic matters, but this explanation for the persistence of French in high government circles will not always suffice, and we shall shortly suggest other possible reasons for it. First, though, it is worth pausing on an entry in Valuev’s diary for 13 March 1861, apropos of the worsening crisis in Poland, not only because it throws light both on Valuev’s own apparently symmetrical bilingualism and on some of the factors that generally drive code-switching but also because it seems to show the use of French for deliberations in the government’s highest consultative assembly, which was chaired by the sovereign. In an account of a formal meeting of the Council of Ministers, which Valuev found deplorably incoherent and inconclusive, there is a long passage in which he reports the contributions of a succession of ministers, switching repeatedly between French and Russian as he does so.193 The primary language of this account is Russian, which Valuev uses to frame his personal minute of the debate. When he records the contributions made by individuals, on the other hand, he often shifts to what seems to be the language of the original utterance, especially when he is quoting more or less verbatim what an individual has said. Sometimes, once he has switched to French, he continues in that language even for a highly condensed summary of a speaker’s words. Late in the entry, he again switches to French intra-sententially to record his personal impression of the meeting as a whole: ‘They did not want to make any concessions’, he comments, ‘and did not notice that they were making them, they forgot que des concessions faites de mauvaise grâce sont les pires que l’on puisse faire’ (that concessions made with bad grace are the worst

191 Ibidem, vol. 1, 73. 192 See, e.g., ibidem, vol. 1, 86, 214, 232, 241, 251, 253, 275, 291, 292; vol. 2, 316, 347, 380. 193 Ibidem, vol. 1, 84–85.

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sort that one can make).194 This final shift to French may be explained by the aphoristic nature of Valuev’s personal conclusion.195 There were several factors that no doubt encouraged continuing use of French as a spoken language in the upper echelons of the government of the Russian Empire. First, French remained the lingua franca of the world of international diplomacy inhabited by foreign ministers who were Valuev’s peers, such as Nesselrode (Gorchakov’s predecessor as minister of foreign affairs) and Aleksandr Gorchakov himself. This was a world into which the emperor was continually drawn. In any case, as a government minister resident in St Petersburg, Valuev was constantly coming into contact with foreign envoys, such as the British ambassador Lord Napier, and French was the language in which he generally communicated with them.196 Secondly, Valuev’s duties as minister of the interior – and Valuev would not have been an untypical minister in this respect – brought him into contact with subjects of the empire who may not have used Russian as their preferred language, such as marshals of the nobility of the Baltic provinces.197 Indeed, for some of his peers, such as Nesselrode, Russian was not a mother tongue. It is always in French that this minister speaks to Valuev: Count Nesselrode drove over to me. ‘Je vous avoue’, he said, ‘que si Dolgorouki et Mouravieff passent dans le camp Gagarine, j’y passe aussi.’ [I confess to you that if Dolgorukii and Murav’ev go over to the side of Gagarin, so will I.] There are our convictions and statesmen for you!198

The abundance of men of German or Swedish origin – for instance, Berg, Budberg, Gerngross, Kleinmichel, Krabbe, Krusenstern, Lambert, Reutern, and various Adlerbergs, Korfs, Lievens, Meyendorffs, Oldenbergs, and Pahlens – among the courtiers, diplomats, governors, ministers, officers, and officials mentioned by Valuev in his diary underlines the prominence of non-Russians in the high official and military milieus of the Russian Empire and makes the preference for French in those milieus the more understandable.199 194 Ibidem, 87. 195 For further examples of reported speech, conversations, or statements in French in Valuev’s diary, see, e.g., ibidem, 75, 76, 77, 82, 89, 94, 97, 101, 102, 105, 111, 119, 122, 123, 141, 142, 145, 170, 179, 244, 296. 196 Ibidem, e.g. 236, 242, 243. 197 Ibidem, 88. 198 Ibidem, 62. 199 A similar impression is created by the diary and memoirs of Anna Tiutcheva, where we find mention of Essens, Radens, Tiesenhausens, and Totlebens as well as some of those German

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However, there is no doubt one further reason for the persistence of French in the upper sphere of Russian government. This sphere overlapped with the high social world, where French – whatever misgivings the literary community and intelligentsia might have had about francophonie, as we shall see200 – was still considered a prestige language as well as an international lingua franca. It is often difficult to say, as we read Valuev’s diary, whether an encounter that he describes is official or social: in the charmed circle in which such men moved, the boundary between a discussion in a committee and a conversation in a drawing-room was not clear-cut. Consider, for example, the following conversation with Mikhail Murav’ev, which took place on 28 February 1861 and which we may assume to have been conducted in French, since that is the language in which Valuev quotes Murav’ev’s words: We talked, among other things, about the possibility of his leaving the Ministry because of his explanations [ob’’iasnenii, i.e. self-justifications or clearing-up of matters] with the sovereign. When I told him that I thought he ought to wait until the new committee of people living in the countryside started functioning he replied: mais vous concevez qu’il m’est plus avantageux de m’en aller plutôt. Les choses n’iront pas. Il vaut mieux être dehors avant la bagarre’ [but you see, it’s to my advantage to go sooner. Things won’t work out. It would be better to get out before the scrap begins].201

Or again, take Valuev’s entry on what appears to be a social meeting with Dolgorukov: Prince Dolgorukov, whom I saw at Prince Suvorov’s, spoke about Panin and Stroganov, shrugging his shoulders, and tried to explain his own neutrality or flaccidity by the fact ‘que c’était un parti pris chez l’empereur et que par conséquent on aurait pu seulement faire une démonstration de principes sans obtenir d’autre résultat que de rendre la position de s. m. plus embarrassante’ [that this was a preconception of the emperor’s and consequently he would only have been able to make a show of principle, the sole outcome of which would have been to make His Majesty’s position more embarrassing].202 families mentioned by Valuev: see Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov. 200 In Chapters 8 and 9 below. 201 Dnevnik P.A. Valueva, vol. 1, 76. 202 Ibidem, 88. Valuev’s social use of French extended, of course, beyond the sphere of colleagues in government. Conversations could still be conducted in French by men of letters from high

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In the spoken language, we therefore suggest, the unwritten rules of language choice that obtained in official written usage may have been relaxed at this high official and social level, and in any case the blurring of the boundary between the professional and the social spheres could throw them into doubt.

French at the Academy of Sciences As we pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences may be treated, on one level, as an official institution, like government departments, in which various languages were used at one time or another for the conduct of its business (Illustration 7). However, the Academy was of course also a scholarly body whose members produced learned publications. Moreover, it was de facto a European institution, conceived on the basis of European models and staffed, especially in the eighteenth century, almost entirely by scholars and scientists from Western and Central Europe. Even in the nineteenth century, there was a strong non-Russian element among those members of its staff who were subjects of the empire. Language use in the Academy was therefore affected by the European scholarly tradition, in which Latin had long played a vital role, and by recent or contemporary changes in European linguistic practice in the scholarly and scientific domain. Thus, the progress of French in the learned publications of the Academy during the period we examine in this book can be explained only in part by the development of a Francophone readership in Russia. Just as the preference for French as the language of communication in the field of foreign affairs in Russia was due mainly to the international standing of that language in eighteenth-century diplomacy, so the principal reason for the advance of French for certain purposes in the Academy of Sciences was the rising status of French as a language of scholarly communication in Europe as a whole.203 The variety of languages used by European academies was felt in the eighteenth century to hinder the unity of the Republic of Letters.204 In this situation, French had a role to play in the world of learning and science, as noble backgrounds who belonged roughly to Valuev’s generation, such as the poet Tiutchev, with whom Valuev converses at the Viazemskiis one evening in 1861: ibidem, 79. 203 We are grateful to Tat’iana Kostina for her help with our work on this section and for drawing our attention to a number of useful publications, and also to Galina Smagina for her valuable suggestions. 204 See McClellan, ‘L’Europe des académies’.

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Illustration 7 View of the River Neva, including the buildings of the Academy of Sciences.

Image available in David Rumsey Map Collection at www.davidrumsey.com and reproduced with the permission of this collection. The illustration is from Plan de la ville de St. Pétersbourg avec ses principales vües dessiné et gravé sous la direction de l’Académie Impériale des sciences et des arts, by Mikhail Makhaev and Joseph Valeriani (St Petersburg, 1753).

Latin had previously done. For example, the reform of the Berlin Academy carried out by Frederick II in 1744, which increased the role of French in the activity and running of the Academy, raised the prestige of the institution and facilitated the communication of its scholarly findings throughout Europe. Two Francophone men were put in charge of this company of the learned: Maupertuis, who became its president, and Formey, who was its permanent secretary. Formey’s correspondence reflects the growing role of French in academic exchanges during the eighteenth century: over 90 percent of his letters were written in French, the remainder being in Latin, German, Italian, English, or Dutch. The works of German academicians were translated into French and included in the annual volume of the History and Proceedings of the Berlin Academy.205 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences too, while publishing its proceedings in Swedish in 205 Bandelier, Des Suisses dans la République des Lettres, 18–19, 23.

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the first instance, regularly translated these proceedings into French (and German) in order that its findings should be more widely disseminated.206 As Christopher Buck has shown in a study of language use in the St Petersburg Academy during the f irst half-century of that institution’s existence,207 choice of language in the various branches of the Academy’s activity was a complicated matter. The language chosen varied, depending on the type of activity, which ranged from the keeping of minutes, the production of other internal documents, and correspondence with Russian institutions and European learned societies to the Academy’s publishing enterprise and its teaching. The internal documentation of the Academy on its current activity and managerial matters was written in Russian, although some other documents (relating to its printing press, for example) might be produced in German, for German-speakers made up the majority of the Academy’s employees throughout the eighteenth century. The correspondence of the Academy with other Russian institutions was also generally conducted in Russian. Minutes of its ‘Conference’ (the body in which the Academy discussed its affairs and assessed the outcomes of its research) were kept in Latin, although German and French might be used in appendices. Departures from this rule depended on the language competence and preferences of the president and the director of the Academy who was in off ice at a particular time. Thus, after the appointment of Baron Johann Albrecht von Korff as president in 1734, the minutes started to be kept in German because Korff did not know Latin. After the appointment of Count Kirill Razumovskii to this post in 1746, Latin was reinstated, because Razumovskii had learnt it in German universities in which he had studied. In 1766, when Vladimir Orlov was director, though, German was reintroduced, because Orlov did not have Latin. It was not until 1773 that French began to be used for minutes, and again the change was due to the preferences of the director: during the absence of Orlov, management of the Academy was entrusted to the deputy-director, Aleksei Rzhevskii, who was not strong in either German or Latin. However, when Orlov returned to his post, no further change of language ensued, probably because French henceforth played a major role in the domain of learning, as in others.208 At public meetings of the Academy, which were not infrequently attended by Russian monarchs and courtiers, language choice was dictated 206 Sten, A Comet of the Enlightenment, 9. 207 Buck, ‘The Russian Language Question in the Imperial Academy of Sciences’. 208 SPb II RAN, f. 36, оp. 1, d. 792, fols 22–22 v.

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by convenience, that is to say it depended on the linguistic competencies of the speaker and the audience. Often German was used, sometimes French and Russian. When Razumovskii first attended the Conference in 1746, he addressed the members of the Academy in Russian, while Schumacher, who was de facto director of the Academy at that time, replied to him in French, although Razumovskii understood German too. French was evidently perceived as the language of polite intercourse in which it was most seemly to address a highly-placed courtier. In accordance with the Academy’s new statute of 1747, one paper was supposed to be read at public meetings in Latin and another in Russian. This represented a new step in the direction of recognition of Russian as a language of learned discourse. However, there were few Russian members of the Academy, and so it was decided in 1756 that French could be used when Russian academicians were not present as it would be the language known to the largest number of people. In 1764, Lomonosov proposed that when Catherine II or the heir to the throne was in attendance at a meeting of the Academy the paper in Latin be replaced with one in French or German. As Buck has observed, French emerged as the main alternative to Russian because it was the principal language of the court.209 It is worth pausing on the new regulations introduced in 1747, insofar as the ideas they contain about the Academy’s language policy are of interest to us. The regulations outline a clear policy with respect to language use in the various areas of the Academy’s activity. The thrust of the innovations was not merely to bring greater order to the Academy’s somewhat anarchic language practice but also to reinforce the commanding position of just two languages: Latin, as the traditional language of learning, and Russian, which was drawing level with Latin as a language of academic communication. German and French, which, as we have seen, had played a not insignificant role in the Academy, were now to yield ground to either Latin or Russian. Thus, in accordance with Regulation § 19, ‘the journal, as well as all inventions, and everything that is recorded in the Assembly of academicians should be written in Latin or Russian, and French and German should never be used there’.210 The teaching of subjects other than languages in the Academy was henceforth to be carried out in Russian, whilst professors’ teaching was to be done in Latin, and it was proposed that Russian be used for instructing Russian pupils in other languages.

209 Buck, ‘The Russian Language Question in the Imperial Academy of Sciences’, 192. 210 Ustavy Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 63.

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It may be that we should associate the progress of Russian as a language of learning with the conception of it, from as early as the 1740s, as a language possessing positive qualities which could put it on a par with the main European languages, including French, even though it was as yet imperfect inasmuch as it lacked specialized terminology. We see here an early manifestation of linguistic patriotism, some time before the Russian reaction to the extravagant use of French in high noble society that we examine in later chapters. The French model of defending and extolling a language was acknowledged by scholars of the Academy as an important point of reference. Thus in 1735, Trediakovskii organized a ‘Russian Assembly’ in the Academy. This assembly was the first translators’ organization in Russia. Its members not only produced translations but also discussed and reviewed the work of their fellow-translators. They were to attend meetings of the assembly, submit their own translations for scrutiny, and offer criticisms of the translations done by others. This was a modest enterprise, but Trediakovskii’s aims in a number of ways replicated those of the French Academy, in particular the ambition to compile a grammar, a guide to rhetoric, and a dictionary of Russian.211 As Zhivov has pointed out, Trediakovskii, Vasilii Adodurov, and Tatishchev subscribed, in many respects, to the programme of French purism. The triumphant march of French through Europe set an example which Russian academicians were prepared to follow as they laboured to create a Russian literary language.212 As Lomonosov wrote in 1756: Let us look at France alone, about which it is indeed possible to wonder whether she has acquired the respect of nations through her power or through the sciences, especially philology, refining and beautifying her language by the industry of skilful writers. Her military power affects largely neighbouring nations, while the use of her language not only extends and reigns throughout Europe, but even serves in large part the various European peoples in distant parts of the world for communication as if they were one people.213

The lectures given by professors of the Academy of Sciences were open to the public free of charge. They were intended to broaden the very narrow 211 Zhivov, Istoriia russkoi pis’mennosti, vol. 2, 1018. 212 Ibidem, 1017–1025. 213 This passage is from Lomonosov’s unfinished essay O nyneshnem sostoianii slovesnykh nauk v Rossii (1756?); it is quoted by Buck, ‘The Russian Language Question in the Imperial Academy of Sciences’, 218, whose translation we have used.

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audience that the Academy reached. In 1735, for example, on the initiative of Korff when he was president, groups of pupils from the Cadet Corps began to attend them. As a rule, though, these lectures were delivered in Latin, which was known to very few Russians.214 However, attempts were already being made in the 1740s to use Russian for lecturing at the Academy. Lomonosov proposed that lecture courses be offered in Russian on experimental physics, astronomy, and ancient and modern history in order to attract a wider public, including students at the Noble Land Cadet Corps and the Naval Cadet Corps.215 His proposal was taken up, if not for very long, so that in 1746, the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (St Petersburg Gazette) could report that by decision of the President of the Academy of Sciences, His Lordship Count Kirill Grigor’evich Razumovskii, a Full Chamberlain to Her Imperial Majesty and a Knight of the Order of St Anne, Mr Lomonosov, who is also a professor of the said Academy, has begun to deliver public lectures in the Russian language on Experimental Physics, which have been attended by a very numerous gathering of military men and civilians of various ranks, together with the President of the Academy himself and several Knights of the court and other distinguished persons. 216

By the 1770s, professors of the Academy were giving public lectures in German and French (Wolfgang Ludwig Krafft, on physics) as well as Russian (Petr Inokhodtsev, on mathematics).217 Around the same time, Anders Johan Lexell, a Russian astronomer and mathematician of Swedish-Finnish origin, delivered lectures in French which attracted members of the Russian nobility.218 One of the first steps taken by Princess Dashkova when she became director of the Academy of Sciences in 1783, moreover, was to regularize a programme of public lectures, and these lectures, Dashkova ordained, would be exclusively in Russian, so that they would serve the national interest: 214 On lectures in the Academy during the first decades of its existence, see Kopelevich, ‘Pervye akademicheskie studenty’. 215 Buck, ‘The Russian Language Question in the Imperial Academy of Sciences’, 203. On the languages used for teaching in nineteenth-century Russia, see Chapter 2 above. 216 Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, 24 June 1746, no. 50, 6. 217 Smagina, ‘Publichnye lektsii Sankt-Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk’, 17–19. 218 Some of these lectures were published in St Petersburg in French: Lexell, Réflexions sur le temps périodique des comètes en général, et principalement sur celui de la comète observée en 1770; idem, Recherches sur la nouvelle planète, découverte par monsieur Herschel et nommée Georgium Sidus. The latter work was translated into Russian, as Leksel’, Issledovaniia o novoi planete.

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‘the sciences will be transferred into our own language, and enlightenment will spread’.219 Dashkova’s initiative was part of the wider programme for the advancement of Russian that also included the establishment, in 1783, of the Russian Academy, which occupied itself with translation of works from Western European languages into Russian and the production of a dictionary of Russian. By insisting that professors of the Academy of Sciences lecture in public only in Russian, Dashkova stimulated the development of scientific vocabulary in the vernacular, the dearth of which troubled Russian scientists such as the academician Nikolai Ozeretskovskii, who refused to lecture on botany in his native language on the grounds that Russian had insufficient terminology of its own in this field.220 As for the Academy’s publications, in the main they were in Latin in the early stages of the institution’s existence, as exemplified by its Commentarii (Transactions) and Novi Commentarii Academiae scientiarum imperiali (New Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences; abstracts were also printed in Russian). Lomonosov advocated the use of Russian, as a language more accessible to the Russian public, for publication of academicians’ reports on their findings, but his proposal did not gain support. However, a sort of popular science journal entitled Mesiachnye istoricheskie, genealogicheskie i geograficheskie primechaniia v Vedomostiakh (Monthly Historical, Genealogical, and Geographical Notes in Gazettes) did appear in Russian from 1728 to 1742 and in 1755 the Academy founded a popular science and literary journal in Russian under the title Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia, k pol’ze i uveseleniiu sluzhashchie (Monthly Works that are of Use and Entertain). It was not until the late 1770s that French appeared in a journal that continued the tradition of the Commentarii, namely Acta Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae (Transactions of the Imperial St Petersburg Academy of Sciences), which was subsequently renamed Nova Acta Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae. (Latin, it will be noted, was still used for the title of the journal.) We know that reports in French which were published in 219 Initiatives such as the organization of public lectures were undertaken elsewhere too, for example in Moscow University, where it was not felt necessary to confine oneself to Russian for this purpose, so that lectures were delivered in German and Latin as well: see Smagina, ‘Publichnye lektsii Sankt-Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk’, 19, 25. 220 A number of works appeared in Russian translation as a result of the organization of these lectures in Russian, increasing the stock of Russian terminology on the subjects in question. Some of these works were translated from French, such as J.A.J. Cousin’s Traité de calcul différentiel et de calcul intégral, translated into Russian by S.E. Gur’ev as Zh.A.Zh. Kuzen, Differentsial’noe i integral’noe ischislenie (1801): see Smagina, ‘Publichnye lektsii Sankt-Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk’, 20–22.

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these transactions had by no means always been written in French in the first instance, for it was often indicated that they had been ‘translated from the Russian’, ‘translated from the German’, and so forth, which tells us that French had been deliberately chosen as the language of scientific communication. Each number of the transactions began with papers in French, while the second part of the number was devoted to papers in Latin. Writings relating to the history of the Academy, meanwhile, were published in French, probably because they might be of interest to a wider public. The two-part structure of the journal reflected the fact that this publication was aimed at different sets of readers: first, an enlightened public which knew French but may not have had Latin, in other words the ‘honnête homme’, and secondly, a scholarly readership properly speaking. The increase in the number of contributions in French and the consequently greater accessibility of the journal induced the editors to change the language of its title, which in the early nineteenth century became Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg.221 Attempts were also made at this time – the time when the French language was flourishing in Russia – to emphasize the importance of using Russian in scholarship and science. Thus in 1803, thanks to Academician Ozeretskovskii, the Regulations of the Academy incorporated the following paragraph, in which particular emphasis was placed on the role of Russian: Following the example of other learned societies, the Academy continues to publish annually a single volume of its speculations in Latin or another of the best known European languages as well as Russian; equally, it should publish annually a single volume of Notes worthy of attention by virtue of their practical utility, under the title of Technological Journal.222

In the Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale, articles or papers were to be published in any languages other than Russian (contributions in Russian were to be published in a separate series). Some statistics on the quantity of articles and papers in specific numbers of these transactions during the nineteenth century reveal changing trends in the Academy’s choice of language for scientific communication in its publications. (The samples are chosen at random from periods roughly fifteen to twenty years apart.)

221 The first volume of the new series did not come out until 1809, after a break of several years. 222 Ustavy Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 83, 320.

320  Articles and papers on particular subjects in specific volumes of the Academy’s transactions Vol. 1 (1803–1806), mathematics Vol. 1 (1803–1806), political sciences Vol. 2 (1807–1808), mathematics Vol. 2 (1807–1808), physics Vol. 2 (1807–1808), political sciences Vol. 10 (1821–1822), mathematics Vol. 10 (1821–1822), physics Vol. 10 (1821–1822), political sciences Vol. 10 (1821–1822), history and philology Vol. 7 (1845, new series), series 6, vol. 5, natural sciences Vol. 8 (1849), series 6, vol. 6223 Vol. 9 (1855), series 6, vol. 7 Vol. 17 (1872, new series) Vol. 18 (1872) Vol. 40 (1892–1893) Vol. 41 (1892–1893)

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No. of No. of Total no. No. of of articles articles in articles in articles in German French Latin 29 5 29 13 6 15 8 3 4 9

20 0 19 10 0 5 4 0 2 0

6 8 12 10 2 9

1 0 0 0 0 0

9 5 10 3 6 10 4 3 2 7 2 0 2225 3227 0 2

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 8224 10226 7228 2229 6230

Even this superficial glance at the numbers of publications in the various languages used by the Academy reveals some general trends. French flourishes as a language of scholarship and science in Russia in the first third of the nineteenth century. Around the middle of the century, Latin almost completely disappears. At the same time, German comes into play as a language of academic communication, putting great pressure on French. The growing role of German in the Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century was due in large measure to the part played in it by scholars from the Baltic region. The University of Dorpat (now Tartu, in Estonia) was a major channel through which German-speaking scientists and scholars entered the Academy, especially those working in the natural and exact sciences. 223 There is no separation of subject-matter in the journal from this point on. 224 All these articles are by the German-speaking naturalist Johann Friedrich von Brandt, who was director of the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 225 One of these articles is by a Russophone scholar. 226 All these articles are by German-speaking scholars. 227 Two of these articles are by Russophone scholars. 228 All these articles are by German-speaking scholars. 229 One of these articles was by a Russophone scholar and had been translated from Russian. 230 Two of these articles were by Russophone scholars. There is also an article in Russian in this volume.

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According to the calculations of Ekaterina Basargina, 69 members of the St Petersburg Academy were linked to Dorpat over the period 1801–1850. In the 1860s, this perceived domination of German-speaking scholars in the Academy began to cause resentment both in the press and the Russian university world. The University of Dorpat acquired a reputation as a ‘hotbed of Germanism’ in the Russian academic domain. Journalists claimed that ‘Russian scholars’ were not admitted to the Academy, forgetting – in a period when a nationalistic mood was taking hold and an ethno-linguistic criterion was coming to override the notion of citizenship – that scholars from the Baltic region were subjects of the Russian Empire too. This atmosphere had an effect on the development of government policy towards the Baltic provinces of the empire. Thus, from 1867, the teaching of Russian was bolstered there and it became mandatory for officials in these provinces to use Russian for the conduct of their business.231 Representatives of the universities increasingly demanded that the Academy publish its works in Russian. Some suggested that the Academy should return to Latin, which, in their opinion, had no offensive connotations, whereas German – according to the historian Vladimir Lamanskii, who was a professor at St Petersburg University – was ‘the language of another tribe’ as far as Russian subjects were concerned and ‘extremely dislikeable to the Slavo-Russian tribe that predominated in the Russian state’ (sic).232 However, no substantive changes would take place in this respect until the late nineteenth century, when a significant proportion of academicians’ works, including their scientific treatises, came to be published in Russian and the Academy’s main periodical began to appear with a Russian version of its title, Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, in addition to its French title, Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg. French, as we see from the statistics adduced above, had not entirely lost its status as a medium for dissemination of research outcomes, especially for Russian-speaking scholars. Although the shift to French in the main journal of the Academy of Sciences took place at a fairly late stage, members of the Academy had already been using it quite often in the eighteenth century in correspondence with European scholars and when they had wanted to publicize the Academy’s achievements.233 The aforementioned astronomer Lexell wrote most of his scientific works in Latin (although he sometimes had recourse to French 231 Basargina, ‘Proekty akademicheskoi reformy’, 46–47. 232 Lamanskii, ‘Evreiskaia kollektsiia i nepremennyi sekretar’ Akademii nauk’, quoted from Basargina, ‘Proekty akademicheskoi reformy’, 48. Lamanskii’s remarks were made in 1866. 233 We go into more detail on this latter subject in the first section of Chapter 7 below.

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as well),234 but his correspondence with scientists in other countries and with some Russian scientists was for the most part conducted in French.235 When he undertook a major European journey in 1780 at the behest of the Academy in order to familiarize himself with Europe’s observatories, he also used French for the description of his journey that he published in the Academy’s transactions.236 Nor was Lexell unique in this respect. Another eminent academician, the German Peter Simon Pallas, also spoke in French at public gatherings of the Academy and published several of his findings in that language.237 Finally, the voluminous correspondence of the Swiss mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Leonhard Euler enables us to appreciate the range of languages at the disposal of a distinguished foreign member of the St Petersburg Academy (and we should remember that foreign scientists and scholars were in the majority at the Academy in the eighteenth century). Although most of Euler’s scientific works were written and published in Latin, his best known work of popular science, his Letters to a German Princess on Diverse Subjects of Physics and Philosophy, which were first published in St Petersburg, appeared in French.238 With some European scientists (for example, Johann Bernoulli I, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach, Lomonosov, and Mikhail Sofronov, who occupied a junior post in the Academy), Euler corresponded in Latin. With the abovementioned Krafft, Gerhard Friedrich Müller, and Jakob Stählin (all of whom were professors at the Academy), and with the Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli and the Academy’s librarian, Schumacher, he corresponded in German. With Martin Knutzen, who occupied a chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg, he corresponded sometimes in Latin and sometimes in German. However, French too is often used in Euler’s correspondence, both on scientific and practical matters. He exchanged letters in this language, for example, with French and Swiss scholars such as d’Alembert, the Genevan naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet, the mathematicians Johann 234 e.g. Lexell, Recherches et calculs sur la vraie orbite elliptique de la Comète de l’an 1769. 235 Sten, A Comet of the Enlightenment, xi, xii, 8, 114. 236 ‘Voyage Académique’, Acta Academiæ Scientarum Imperialis Petropolitanae, 1780, no. 2, 109–110. 237 Pallas, Observations sur la formation des montagnes et les changemens arrivés au globe; idem, Tableau physique et topographique de la Tauride. 238 Euler, Lettres à une princesse d’Allemagne sur divers sujets de physique et de philosophie. These letters went through several editions and were translated into a number of European languages. On the basis of Euler’s works, another St Petersburg scholar subsequently produced an algebra textbook for the cadets in French: see Euler, Leçons d’algèbre à l’usage du Corps Imperial des Cadets nobles.

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Bernoulli II of Basel and Jean-Baptiste Clairaut, the mathematician and philosopher Marie Jean Nicolas Marquis de Condorcet, the astronomer and cartographer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, the physicist Jean Jacques d’Ourtous de Mairan, the mathematician and physicist Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande, and the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Euler also used French in his correspondence with scientists and other people of other nationalities, such as Germans (for instance, King Frederick II, Albrecht von Haller, an anatomist and physicist from Göttingen, and a Frankfurt book-dealer named König), António Ribeiro Sanches, a Portuguese doctor in Russian service, and the Russian academician Stepan Rumovskii. He wrote in French to other Russians too, such as Kantemir, office-holders or officials at the Academy, such as Razumovskii and Count Orlov, and the secretary of the Academy’s office, Grigorii Teplov, although he was capable of corresponding in Russian, as we see from his correspondence with the monolingual Nartov, who directed the Academy for a short period.239 Euler’s case clearly shows that even in matters that related purely to the world of science and scholarship a man of learning did not invariably communicate in Latin in the mid-eighteenth century but equally might use major modern European languages, and that French had an important place in his repertoire, and not merely for dealings with Frenchmen and Francophone Swiss. * In the reign of Peter the Great, Russian diplomacy started to adapt to the changing diplomatic landscape in Europe as a whole, in which French was supplanting Latin. A system of professional training, including language training, began to be introduced for men working in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs, although for a long time to come the study of languages would be carried out in a way that was quite haphazard, often in the course of a spell of tuition or work abroad. A generation of Russian diplomats with excellent language skills soon appeared, and French occupied a prominent place in their linguistic repertoire. Their number included Postnikov, Shafirov, Ostermann, the Princes Dolgorukov, Boris Kurakin, Ivan Shcherbatov, and Kantemir. Many of them quickly adjusted to the habit of using French in society as well as in diplomatic service, and adoption of this habit may have 239 See the analytical catalogue of Euler’s correspondence, Leonhard Euler Briefwechsel. Beschreibung, Zusammenfassung der Briefe und Verzeichnisse. See also Die Berliner und die Petersburger Akademie der Wissenschaften im Briefwechsel Leonhard Eulers.

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contributed to the development of the practice of using French as a language of communication with compatriots inside Russia. The rise of French as the language of Russian diplomacy took place over a period of almost a hundred years. French began to be used in the drafting of Russia’s treaties with other European powers in the mid-eighteenth century, but other languages – especially German and Italian – would continue to be used in other diplomatic documents until the end of the century and even beyond. Meanwhile, French was increasingly used in correspondence within the College of Foreign Affairs itself, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as it became. Catherine’s rescript of 1787 was a reaction to the shift that was taking place – a shift which even imperial edicts could not check and which would lead at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the almost complete triumph of French in Russian diplomacy. Documents dating from the nineteenth century enable us to make out the line that separates the use of French as a professional language and a marker of diplomats’ service identity, on the one hand, from the use of Russian as a language of official correspondence among civil servants outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the other. However, this line of demarcation was quite often breached by civil servants in the higher ranks of the bureaucracy, for whom the unwritten law of language use in official correspondence, where Russian was generally de rigueur, ran counter to their habit of using French in society. In the correspondence of diplomats themselves, or at any rate high-ranking diplomats, two registers – the professional register and that of society – became confused.240 In the Russian world of science and scholarship French was also deployed in several situations, as it emerged from the shadow of Latin. It was used when the Academy came into close contact with the court (on the occasion of public ceremonies, for instance), in correspondence with a number of European scientists and scholars, and for promotion of the Academy’s achievements (in European learned journals that were produced in French, for example241). In the learned publications of the Academy itself it played an increasingly prominent role, and by the early nineteenth century it had thoroughly marginalized Latin. This development reflected the position 240 This is evident from the use of French by diplomats when they wrote memoirs about their professional activity. See, for example, the memoirs of Petr Saburov, Russia’s ambassador in Berlin, which were written in fluent, correct, and authentic French: AVPRI, f. 339, op. 81, dd. 1–3. These memoirs have been published in English translation as [Saburov], The Saburov Memoirs: or, Bismarck and Russia. 241 On the use of European journals in French to advertise Russian achievement, see the third section of Chapter 7 below.

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of French as a language of academic communication in Europe as a whole. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, German had gained a status in the European academic domain that was similar to that which French had acquired in the eighteenth century at the expense of Latin. The Russification which took place in the reign of Alexander III (indeed it began earlier, in the reign of Alexander II) touched the academic world too, but scientists and scholars continued to use French and German as languages of science and learning right up until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. After 1917, French survived, for the most part, only in those old academic circles which managed to accommodate themselves to the new regime, particularly circles of Orientalists.242 In completing this outline of the linguistic behaviour of off icials in various government departments of the Russian Empire and of language use in the academic domain, we should perhaps consider what factors impeded the spread of French beyond certain boundaries. In the first place, a complete shift to French in the bureaucracy was of course impossible, if for no other reason than that a large number of officials at the lower level of the administration, and possibly some officials at the middling and even higher levels as well, lacked the necessary linguistic capabilities.243 Even at the highest level of government service people were to be found who had a limited command of French, as Smirnova-Rosset attests when she refers to Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich.244 Secondly, and more importantly, from the eighteenth century on, regular attempts were made to elevate Russian to the level of French and German, which were perceived as the most popular and important European languages from the cultural point of view. There were many such attempts: in the Academy of Sciences as early as the 1730s, when the Russian Assembly was set up there by Trediakovskii; in the 1740s, when the Academy adopted new regulations; in the 1750s, when Moscow University was founded; in the 1760s, when attempts were made to Russify teaching in Moscow University and the Noble Land Cadet Corps; and, in particular, in the 1780s, when Dashkova pursued a policy of Russification which prevented French from becoming an important language for public lectures in the Academy of Sciences and when she began to preside over the Russian Academy and started to oversee the compilation of its Russian 242 Rjéoutski, ‘Le français des scientifiques en URSS’. There is much material on this subject in the André Mazon archive in the Institut de France. 243 On the standard of literacy among provincial off icials, see Glagoleva, ‘“Gramote i pisat’ obuchen”’. 244 As noted in the fourth section of Chapter 3 above.

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dictionary. It was also in the 1780s that reforms were carried out which had a substantive effect on the place of Russian in the system of public education and when, finally, Catherine signed her rescript requiring the use of Russian by diplomats who could speak and write it. Nor did the institutional advancement of Russian cease in the early nineteenth century, despite the fact that it was then that francophonie reached its peak in Russian society. Indeed, the promotion of Russian was encouraged by debates that took place at that time about the role of the native language in the upbringing of the empire’s children.245 In this climate, a more decisive shift towards French as an administrative language was out of the question. Perhaps it is also appropriate, finally, to ask how French came to reign in the internal correspondence of Russian diplomats in spite of the linguistic patriotism that affected even the upper spheres of the Russian state. From the practical point of view of a professional diplomat, the switch to French removed the burden of constant translation from one language to another. We doubt, though, whether the switch to French was necessary as a means of avoiding divergent interpretations of terms, for Russian diplomatic language was already well geared, by the mid-eighteenth century, to the transmission of shades of meaning in diplomatic texts, not least because it had at its disposal a large number of borrowed terms. More important, we think, was the combined effect of two other factors. First, in the course of the eighteenth century French acquired the status of Europe’s foremost diplomatic language. Secondly, the use of French in Russian high society, in which diplomats moved, was reaching its peak in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Which of these two functions of French played the more important role in its progress as an ‘internal’ language in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though, is difficult to say for sure.

245 See the overview of French teaching in Russia in the opening section of Chapter 2 above.



Chapter 6 Writing French

Types of text and language choice in them Cultural production in languages other than the writer’s mother tongue, Peter Barta and Phil Powrie have pointed out, has become increasingly widespread in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the ‘fall of the Iron Curtain and ever-greater mobility across borders during the postcolonial period have brought cultures into contact and languages into productive frictions’.1 The phenomenon of bicultural writing, though, is by no means new in western civilization, as Barta and Powrie emphasize, and in this and the following chapter we examine a major historical manifestation of it, namely Russians’ use of French as a written language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The corpus of extant texts on which we may draw for this purpose is very extensive, so that we cannot do more in this book than classify the types of text found within the corpus and discuss some characteristic or particularly well-known examples. The corpus has many elements. It contains a mass of informal correspondence about personal and practical matters. It includes what might be called ‘literature’ in the broad sense of the term, that is to say elegant writing, or belles-lettres, and this capacious element itself consists of many different sorts of text: ego-writing, poems, drama, fiction, and discourse on moral, aesthetic, philosophical, and other matters. It also comprises texts in which the writer’s purpose is persuasion, that is to say texts that are in some way propagandistic, polemical, or political, including texts that speculate on national destiny. It will be useful, as we approach texts produced by Russians in French, or partly in French, to frame a question of the sort famously asked by Joshua Fishman about language use in a multilingual setting:2 who uses which language in what type of text, for what purpose, and at what stage in the historical period we examine? It will help us, moreover, to address this question and to understand the reasons why writers chose one language or another for particular texts, if we bear in mind the ways in which various kinds of ‘literature’ were conceived at one time or another. In particular, we 1 2

Barta and Powrie, ‘Introduction: Being In-Between’, 1. Fishman, ‘Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When?’

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may identify three types of literature in which the language choice made by bilingual Russians was determined by quite different considerations. First, there are texts which are indeed of a literary nature but which were produced for consumption by a restricted readership, ranging from the author alone to the family, the close social circle, or a gathering such as the salon. Texts of this sort (on which we focus in the present chapter) include private diaries, travel notes, albums, occasional verse, maxims, dialogues, humorous essays, and other short literary forms. Being in many instances examples of ego-writing, such texts function partly as means of self-cultivation and self-reflection. They also, in most cases, serve a social purpose, as material to be read aloud and as the starting-point for polite conversation. (Even personal letters to an individual addressee could be treated as documents that circulated within a select social or literary group, and so our survey of different types of literature begins with personal correspondence.) The production of texts of this nature is warranted by a belief that writing – at least, in certain relatively light-hearted genres – is an elegant accomplishment. As pieces aimed at a restricted sphere and not intended for publication, such writings – like salon conversation – do not often engage deeply with serious social, political, or even moral issues. The vehicle of choice for them tended to be French, because it was among the Francophone aristocracy that they were created and in the Francophone monde that they circulated.3 However, even when French served as the base language for such texts it was often not the only language used, and we shall repeatedly come across instances of alternation and code-switching, which are important phenomena in the picture of language use that we offer. The amateur, social, and relatively private nature of this aristocratic literature ensured that it was acceptable for women, who were discouraged from taking part in public literary activity, to contribute to it; indeed literary creation of this sort was to be encouraged as a feminine accomplishment. (It was probably the nature of the literature that women were permitted to produce, rather than – or at least, just as much as – any lack of female proficiency in Russian, that accounts for the fact that French was the language of so much women’s writing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia.) Literature of this private or semi-private type, it should be added, was by no means exclusive to Russia; on the contrary, it was commonly produced by members of cosmopolitan aristocracies in other parts of Europe, 3 The ground-breaking works on this type of literature are Gretchanaia [Grechanaia] and Viollet, ‘Si tu lis jamais ce journal…’ (2008) and Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski (2010).

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sometimes for what Ivo Cerman has described as a perfomative purpose in the drawing-room, salon, or coterie. 4 Examples include a diary and a tale by the eighteenth-century Swedish nobleman Carl Gustaf Tessin (governor of the future Gustav III), the letters of aristocratic women such as Marie Sidonie Countess Chotek, Marie Josephine Windischgraetz, and Marie Augusta Sternberg in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bohemian Lands, and the diary and correspondence of the nineteenth-century Prussian Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.5 We might also note, though, that the practice of writing in French was not everywhere confined to such an extent to the nobility, or more particularly the high nobility, as it was in Russia. In Sweden, for example, as Margareta Östman has shown, about one third of all authors using French for literary purposes were of non-noble origin by the mid-seventeenth century. This proportion grew and exceeded half of all authors in the period 1772–1809.6 Already in the age of Elizabeth, however, we observe the development of a second, more dedicated and professional type of literary activity in Russia, alongside the amateur, aristocratic, and often light-hearted mode of production we have just described. The author begins to conceive of writing as a vocation rather than an avocation and is engaged in a more serious intellectual or moral enterprise. This type of author may have a didactic purpose, namely to improve society’s mores, as the dramatist Fonvizin, and indeed Catherine II herself, wished to do. He – for in the overwhelming majority of cases the author engaged in this type of writing is a man – may wish to spread enlightenment (as did Novikov), or to celebrate imperial success (as did Lomonosov in odes and Kheraskov in the epos), or to speak truth to power (as Derzhavin dared to do in his verse). He may become involved in activities that promote the development of a literary culture aimed at an expanding readership, such as translating, editing, and the production of almanacs and journals – activities in which Karamzin took a keen interest from the late 1780s to the early 1800s. Literary activity of this second sort is not the domain of high society, although members of high society may indeed engage in it; rather, it is the preserve of the nascent literary community (and later, in the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia), in which the aristocracy is not necessarily pre-eminent. The tension between 4 Cerman, ‘Aristocratic Francophone Literature in Bohemia’, 219–220. 5 Östman, ‘French in Sweden in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, especially 290–291, 299–300; Cerman, ‘Aristocratic Francophone Literature in Bohemia’, 221–223; Böhm, ‘The Domains of Francophonie and Language Ideology in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Prussia’, 194–196. 6 Östman, ‘French in Sweden in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, 283.

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the amateur and increasingly professional attitudes towards literary production can be glimpsed, as Andreas Schönle has noted, in the disapproving reaction of some of Karamzin’s aristocratic contemporaries to that author’s exploitation of the Grand Tour (which had traditionally been considered a means of completing the upbringing of the gentleman) as material for a literary text through which Karamzin might establish himself as an author.7 Although writers who produced this more professionalized type of literature might resort to French in particular instances or for particular purposes, as we shall see, the language of choice for such literature was predominantly Russian, not least because of its authors’ desire to reach a relatively wide readership. The case for using Russian was strengthened, in the early nineteenth century, by the influence of Romanticism, which privileged national distinctiveness and investigation of the medieval and early modern roots of the cultures of European peoples, particularly peoples who were becoming aware of themselves as ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities. Above all, the choice of Russian was necessitated by the development of a conception of literature as an expression of the distinctive consciousness of the nation. Belinskii outlined this conception in his first substantial essay in literary criticism, ‘Literary Reveries’ (1834). Here, under the influence of Schelling, he argued that although Russia did have its literary masterpieces it did not yet have ‘a literature’ as such, in the sense of a coherent body of letters representing the nation’s inner life. 8 Since a literature of the sort prized by Belinskii was closely identified with national autonomy (samobytnost’, a word commonly used by the literary community in the 1820s and 1830s) and the Geist of an ethnic group (narodnost’), only the mother tongue of that people, or narod, could be the vehicle for it. It is the urge to create a literature understood in this new way that made the use of a foreign language particularly problematic in the eyes of the cultural community (creative writers, literary critics, readers, the emergent intelligentsia) that was burgeoning in Russia in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.9 Moreover, many of the individuals entering that community in 7 Schönle, Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 230–231, n. 57. The text in question was Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller. 8 ‘Literaturnye mechtaniia’, in Belinskii, PSS, vol. 1, 20–104, especially 22. The changing conception of ‘literature’ is indicated by Belinskii’s use of the word literatura, incidentally, rather than the term slovesnost’, which eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century writers had tended to use to describe the national literary corpus. 9 The shift from an amateur, aristocratic interest in literary creativity, predominantly in private ego-writing, to professionalized, public literary activity is a sequential development only up to a point. Noble families and individuals continued to produce writings of the amateur

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the 1830s, including Belinskii himself, lacked a command of French and for this and other reasons they felt out of place in the salon, where French was spoken.10 It follows from what we have said about the more professionalized literature that came into being in the nineteenth century that few, if any, of the French texts discussed in this book are representative of this sort of writing. On the other hand, many published literary texts written in Russian do contain extensive reflections on Russians’ use of French, and these texts we analyze in our closing chapters on language attitudes and classical Russian prose fiction. The third type of text that we identify in Russian literature, broadly defined, is the text that is designed, in the last analysis, to persuade the reader to accept a point of view. This type of text – an essay (perhaps presented as a ‘letter’), a journalistic article, or a pamphlet – might be in some way propagandistic or polemical.11 In writings of this sort (to which our following chapter is partly devoted), language choice was determined to a considerable extent by the nature of the readership the author hoped to address. If the goal of such writing was presentation of Russia to the world beyond Russia’s borders, as it often was, then French had the merit that it enabled the Russian writer to reach the largest number of international readers. Besides, the status of the French language and the authority of the literature written in it could lend weight to the writer’s case. At the same time, whatever was written in French was accessible to an elite Russian readership as well as to a more general European one. There are also many examples of speculation by Russians on broad historical matters for which French was no doubt chosen partly because it was commonly used as an international language for reflection of this sort. If, on the other hand, a writer wished to reach a broader social section of the Russian population (including, for instance, raznochintsy, who may have had no French or only limited competence in it), then it was necessary to write in Russian. In any case, polemical work directed at an internal readership, like poetry, drama, and prose fiction, came in the nineteenth century to be conceived as a contribution to national cultural life, and for this reason too Russian was the most appropriate vehicle for it. variety in spite of the fact that it was only literature of the more professionalized variety that interested the bulk of the mid-nineteenth-century literary community and intelligentsia. 10 The tension in salon culture caused by the factionalization of the literary community in the age of Nicholas I is noted by Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 366–367. 11 Writing of this sort in French is a very substantial part of the Russian corpus in French, particularly after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, which falls outside the scope of Grechanaia’s Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski.

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Before examining French texts that are representative of the types of ‘literature’ in the more conventional sense that we have described, though, we should look closely at personal letters, for they too are a form of writing about the self. Language choice in them was more complicated than is sometimes supposed.

Language choice in nobles’ personal correspondence Over a long period, from around the middle of the eighteenth century up until the demise of the nobility with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, letter-writing served both as a means of practical communication among members of that class and as a means of expressing aristocratic values and sensibility. Like other ego-documents, letters also helped nobles to fashion themselves. They might even serve, up to a point, as props for aristocratic social activity, inasmuch as they could be aimed, as we have said, not just at a nominal recipient but at a larger audience to whom they could be read out. Since letter-writing, like the art of polite conversation, was for all these reasons an accomplishment that distinguished a well-educated noble, it was essential that such a person be able to write in French, the principal medium for display of noble conduct. The importance attached to cultivation of the epistolary art in noble upbringing is indicated by the parental practice of writing to children in French, to which we have already drawn attention.12 Mastery of epistolary technique involved the learning of formulaic openings and endings (Mon cher ami [my dear friend], Votre humble serviteur [your humble servant], Que Dieu vous garde [may God watch over you], and so forth) and polite locutions, as well as appreciation of the uses of the postscript and the importance of separation of topics by paragraphs.13 Such knowledge and skill could be acquired from numerous French sources, such as the well-known collection of Bussy-Rabutin’s correspondence with his friends and family, in which Mme de Sévigné’s letters appeared for the first time.14 12 See the last section of Chapter 2 above. 13 Letters composed in French (or translated from German into French) as educational exercises by pupils at the Noble Land Cadet Corps furnish further good examples of epistolary formulae: ‘J’ai l’honneur de vous presenter cette marque de ma soumission’, ‘je vous supplie très humblement de m’honorer de…’, ‘C’est avec cette confiance, Monsieur que je vous prie d’agréer…’, ‘Puisque mon malheur me prive des occasions de vous servir…’, and so forth (RGADA, f. 177 (1739), d. 70, fols 17, 27). 14 Rabutin, Les Lettres de messire Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy. There was a copy of this book in the library of Prince Ivan Shcherbatov (now in RNB: 6.58.11.10). We also find a reference

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Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) offered useful models of letter-writing in the sentimental manner.15 There were also many copious Russian manuals on the subject.16 Or again, Russian nobles might simply acquire their skills from contact with tutors, governesses, and other correspondents, rather than from manuals.17 Being highly codified, the language of the letter in French could easily be regarded as hackneyed and the sentiments it expressed as shallow. This association of the French language with the style and content of communication in high society, as well as the very fact that the grand monde used a foreign language to set itself apart, would in due course help to strengthen the case of society’s literary detractors.18 Since French was formulaic, the language of a ‘mature culture which had developed a comprehensive code of conduct’, it could be used in a more automatic way than Russian, and writing in it required less forethought and creative effort. It supplied a ‘set of clichés ready for mechanical reproduction’.19 Pushkin, complaining of to its use in French classes at the Academy of Sciences in 1736: Materialy dlia istorii imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, vol. 2, 736. 15 Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, or, to use the title of the first edition, Lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes […]. 16 Pis’movnik, soderzhashchii raznye pis’ma, prosheniia, zapiski […] (1788, 1789, 1793); Polnyi pis’movnik ili vseobshchii sekretar’ […] (1812–1813, 1827–1828); Noveishii, samyi polnyi i podrobnyi pis’movnik, ili vseobshchii sekretar’ […] (1812–1813, 1815, 1822). 17 In any case, Russian letter-writing manuals do not appear to be much in evidence in the libraries of Russian nobles: see Joukovskaïa, ‘La naissance de l’épistolographie normative en Russie’, 679–680, cited by Tipton, ‘Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family’, 135. 18 On the detractors, see Chapters 8 and 9 below. 19 Paperno, ‘O dvuiazychnoi perepiski pushkinskoi epokhi’, 150. Paperno’s article exhibits several of the features that are common in the Lotman school of scholarship on classical Russian culture. Thus, on the basis of a limited stock of cited sources, she makes some sweeping assertions, contending, for example, that for men ‘French and Russian were two codes in a binary system’, whereas for women they were ‘different elements in a single language’, and that women mixed languages in their letters in a more disorderly way than men. She also focuses particularly on evidence relating to the literary community. At the same time, her article, despite its brevity, may be seen as programmatic for the study of bilingual correspondence in tsarist Russia. It contains many thought-provoking propositions or insights, some of which are borne out by the further evidence that we have adduced. She observes, for instance, that subjects’ letters to the sovereign needed to be written in Russian if they concerned official matters; that the use of French between people who were not social equals indicated that the communication lay outside the domain in which the Table of Ranks held sway; that Russian, when used between people of the same rank, might be the more intimate language, because it was not the language required by etiquette (see, though, our discussion, in the sixth section of Chapter 5 above, of the correspondence between the Russian diplomats Butenev and Titov); that French was a language of ritualized communication; and that French was also the language of bons mots and elegant aphorisms.

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the as yet undeveloped nature of Russian prose (a defect that he himself began to address in his fiction in the 1830s), observed that ‘even in simple correspondence [in Russian] we are forced to create turns of phrase to clarify the most ordinary concepts, since our lethargy expresses itself more willingly in a foreign language whose mechanical forms have long been available and are known to everyone’.20 Personal letters are one of our most valuable sources of information on Russian nobles’ emotional and spiritual life,21 of which they may provide a more reliable picture than prose fiction. They are also a rich source for the study of nobles’ language use. Given the widespread plurilingualism of the Russian aristocracy, the preference for French over other foreign languages in aristocratic correspondence reflects the exceptional worth of that language as cultural capital.22 It by no means follows, though, that Russian noble men and women were unable or reluctant to write letters in Russian as well. As Lamarche Marrese concluded on the basis of her close examination of no fewer than 30 archival collections of the papers of noble families, the huge corpus of nobles’ personal correspondence shows that the ‘omnipresence of French in polite society […] neither put an end to the use of Russian among the elite nor transformed nobles into foreigners in their native land’. Many nobles alternated between the two languages, and in the personal papers of many others only letters in Russian survive.23 Nor is it true, as has been claimed, that noble women in particular had lost or never acquired the ability to write in their native language, as Pushkin seemed to suggest when he had his Tat’iana Larina write her letter to Onegin in French, or that ‘the great majority of women’s letters [in the ages of Alexander I and Nicholas I] were written in French’.24 On the contrary, women too were prolific writers of 20 ‘O predislovii g-na Lemonte k perevodu basen I.A. Krylova’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol 11, 34. The effect of the habit of writing letters in French can be seen, incidentally, in the Russian correspondence of certain eminent men of letters. For instance, in letters written in Russian by the poet Zhukovskii, especially letters on everyday topics, there are numerous calques, turns of phrase, and syntactic constructions that are modelled on canonical French usage. It has been suggested by Irina Viatkina that Zhukovskii’s Russian letters often seem to be a translation that he has made from a French text he himself has composed mentally. For the formulation of more abstract concepts, on the other hand, Zhukovskii often switches to French. See Viatkina, ‘Diglossiia russkikh marginal’nykh zhanrov’ (unpaginated abstract). 21 Marasinova, Psikhologiia elity rossiiskogo dvorianstva poslednei treti XVIII veka, 98–99. 22 As noted by Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 729–730 (although she does not use the term ‘cultural capital’). 23 Ibidem, 724. 24 As claimed by Bernstein, ‘Avdot’ia Petrovna Elagina and Her Contribution to Russian Letters’, 216−217; Lamarche Marrese challenges the claim in ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’,

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letters in Russian to estate managers and to officials, to whom they addressed petitions and legal claims in respect of legacies and land disputes.25 Such competence in letter-writing in both languages is well illustrated in the voluminous surviving correspondence of Catherine’s vice-chancellor, Aleksandr Golitsyn, which has been studied by Wladimir Berelowitch. Up until 1762, when he served in diplomatic posts in Holland, France, and England, Golitsyn wrote many letters in French, including letters to members of his family, brothers, and cousins as well as more formal letters. In the 1760s and 1770s, on the other hand, he wrote more and more letters in Russian, although he continued to write in French to his nephews, for the pedagogical purpose we have mentioned. This shift from French to Russian can be seen not just in Golitsyn’s letters in the official domain, in which it was in line with Catherine’s policy of strengthening the position of Russian as a language of administration, but also in his letters in the private domain, such as those to members of his family, including his first cousin Dmitrii Mikhailovich Golitsyn, who was Russia’s ambassador in Vienna.26 Aleksandr provided a rare comment on language choice in a letter written in Russian in 1785 to one of his nephews, Mikhail Andreevich Golitsyn, in which he enjoined Mikhail to switch to Russian now that he was entering the world of service to the Russian state: I approve of your efforts to attain an excellent knowledge of French, and even more when it comes to Russian, especially as they [these languages] are indispensable for the office for which you are preparing yourself and you do well to correspond in Russian with all those who understand this language. […] As for translation from French into Russian, that too is very useful for you as a way of becoming stronger in both those languages. […] But as for your travel journal and the description of everything you may see and hear which is worthy of attention, I would ask you to write them down in French, for if you were to write them in Russian you would come up against great, insurmountable difficulties.27

Aleksandr Golitsyn drives home his point about the importance of Russian in the nobles’ repertoire in a further letter to Mikhail some two years later: 731. For Pushkin’s remarks on Tat’iana’s language use, see the first section of our Introduction above. 25 Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 736, n. 159. 26 Quoted by Berelowitch, ‘Francophonie in Russia under Catherine II’, 51. 27 Ibidem, 51–52.

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‘In truth, it is a ridiculous and unbelievable thing that all your friends speak and write French well when they return from foreign states but feel no shame in not being able to speak or write their own language’.28 Given the availability of two languages for the conduct of correspondence, what sort of factors influenced a writer’s decision to use one language rather than the other in a letter? Sometimes, of course, the choice was determined simply by the linguistic proficiency of the sender or addressee. As Jessica Tipton shows in her study of language choice in the correspondence of three generations of the Vorontsov clan, members of the family born in the reign of Peter the Great – Mikhail Illarionovich and Roman Illarionovich – were less likely than their descendants to use French, although Mikhail, as a diplomat, needed it to communicate with foreigners and did write letters in it (he may, however, have had help in composing them). On the other hand, the children of Roman, who were born in the 1740s (Aleksandr, who served for many years as president of the College of Commerce, Ekaterina Dashkova, and Semen, who served for several decades as the Russian ambassador in London), were comfortable in either language. Brought up in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth, cosmopolitan in outlook, and closely involved in affairs of state in the age of Catherine, they clearly perceived the use of both languages as natural and switched between them without constraint or self-consciousness.29 A further good example of changes in language use over the generations, in this instance during the second half of the nineteenth century, is furnished by the Mansurov family, as Alexa von Winning has discovered. The head of the first of the generations of this family on which we have information was Pavel Borisovich, a landowner from the province of Penza who served in the finance department of the imperial administration and who was married to Ekaterina Khovanskaia. His son Boris Pavlovich was a high-ranking official and member of the State Council who was married to Princess Mariia Nikolaevna Dolgorukova. Another son, Nikolai Pavlovich, was a full privy councillor and chamberlain. Among the third generation, the son of Boris Pavlovich, Pavel Borisovich, was a diplomat (there were also daughters), and the fourth generation included Pavel’s sons Boris and Sergei. Now, members of the first two generations corresponded with one other in French. Boris Pavlovich and Nikolai Pavlovich corresponded with their father in French, as did their wives with their father-in-law. Boris Pavlovich and his wife Mariia also wrote to each other in French during 28 Ibidem, 52. 29 Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’.

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most of their married life, in other words, up until the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Mariia conducted all her correspondence in French as a rule. In correspondence with their children, on the other hand, Boris and Nikolai switched to Russian, and from the 1860s this was the language in which male members of the second generation and all members of the third generation normally corresponded. The children of the third generation always used Russian in their correspondence among themselves and wrote in French only to their grandparents and their mother.30 We f ind another example of the use of French as a family language late in the period we are examining in the correspondence of the famous pianist, composer, and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Anton Rubinstein, and his wife, Vera Aleksandrovna, whom Rubinstein married in 1865.31 The couple corresponded in French and all of Vera Rubinstein’s correspondence with her relations was in French as well. Vladimir Somov, who has examined this correspondence, has noted that Vera had a complete command of both French and Russian, and a better knowledge of French than Anton, who came from a well-to-do Jewish family of German origin living in the Ukraine. Vera tried her hand at literary translation from Russian into French (Ivan Turgenev rated her translations as ‘Moscow French’). As for Anton, who had spent some years in Europe in his youth and who was constantly on tour abroad during his adult life, he used French and German in his correspondence with his relations (he wrote only in German to his mother) as well as with foreign composers and musicians. As in the Mansurov family, so too in the Rubinstein family we see a change of usage in the next generation, for Anton and Vera corresponded with their children in Russian.32 When such bilingual writers, composing letters to equally bilingual addressees, made a linguistic choice, numerous factors could come into play. Their choice, moreover, was rarely random, for two languages never fulfil exactly the same functions for a speaker. As Rodolphe Baudin has 30 GARF, f. 990, op. 1, dd. 31–36, 66–68, 70–72; op. 2, dd. 368, 409. We are indebted to Alexa von Winning of the University of Tübingen for this account of practice in the Mansurov family. 31 Vera Aleksandrovna belonged on her father’s side to the Russified Georgian clan of the Princes Chekuanov and on her mother’s side to the Razumovskii clan (her maternal grandmother was an illegitimate daughter of Count Petr Kirillovich Razumovskii). 32 Somov, ‘Vera Aleksandrovna Rubinshtein’, especially 173–177; several original letters in French are published in the appendix to Somov’s chapter (see 194–245). For yet another example of correspondence between Russian subjects in French in the second Alexandrine age, see Niqueux (ed.), Correspondance en français entre Alexis Konstantinovitch Tolstoï et Boleslav Markévitch (1858–1875).

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noted in a useful summary of the views of scholars who have studied Russians’ bilingual correspondence, the choice a letter-writer made between French and Russian depended, most obviously, on such matters as the social relationship between the writer and addressee and their respective genders, the content of the letter, and the reaction the writer hoped to prompt in the recipient.33 French, it is generally agreed, was the proper language to use when writing to one’s parents, other older addressees, and addressees who were not very well known to the writer. It was also appropriate for a man to write in French to ladies other than his wife, including his fiancée. On the other hand, French, as ‘the language of social relations expressed in codified forms in salons, at the court and so forth, where open-heartedness and intimacy were not really allowed’, could seem inappropriate in letters to one’s spouse, other family members, and close friends.34 Russian was therefore often preferred in letters to such addressees35 and also – since it was the principal language of administration – in letters to civil servants, especially to men of higher rank than the writer. As far as the role of content in determining language choice was concerned, French was frequently deemed most suitable for discussion of intellectual matters, for introspective reflection, for flirtation and (in men’s letters) for joking with or about women. 33 We have drawn extensively on Baudin’s summary in this paragraph: see Baudin, ‘Russian or French?’, 121–122. The subject of Russians’ bilingual correspondence has received more attention than many other aspects of Russian francophonie. In the works by Paperno (1975, on which we have already commented in n. 19 above), Maimina (1981), and Ekaterina Dmitrieva (1994), this attention has been concentrated on the correspondence of men of the nineteenth-century literary world. The subject has an important place in Marrese’s reexamination of Lotman’s conception of noble identity (2010) and in Berelowitch’s discussion of Russian francophonie (2015). There are also recent contributions by Tipton on the correspondence of several generations of the Vorontsov family (2015 and 2017). 34 Baudin, ‘Russian or French?’, 121. 35 Take, for example, the case of Nikolai Raevskii, a renowned Russian general, who corresponded only in Russian with his uncle, Count Aleksandr Samoilov, a high-ranking official under Catherine II, even though both Raevskii and Samoilov had a command of French. Raevskii was very close to his uncle and French might have seemed inappropriate for the conduct of a warm relationship. With his youngest son Nikolai, to whom he was also very close, Raevskii corresponded in Russian as well. However, when he wished to reprove his son, he switched to French. Nikolai Raevskii junior and his brother, on the other hand, both wrote to their uncle and parents in French, not because their relations with their them were poor but out of respect for them. See Arkhiv Raevskikh, vol. 1, 1–8, 11–21, etc. (letters from Nikolai Raevskii to his uncle Samoilov), 229–231, 273, 280–281, 287 (Nikolai Raevskii junior to his father), 243 (father’s admonishment in French), 246–247, 263, 274–276, 283–286 (Raevskii père to his son Nikolai), 269–272 (Aleksandr Raevskii to his father), etc. On the use of French in the correspondence of this family, see Kseniia Klimenko, ‘Problema frantsuzsko-russkogo bilingvizma v Rossii v pushkinskuiu epokhu’.

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Lotman plausibly claims that French was also the preferred language when one was performing rituals associated with the noble code of honour, such as challenges to a duel.36 Russian, on the other hand, would of necessity be used in correspondence with monolingual estate managers about agricultural and domestic subjects and might be preferred even between bilinguals for discussion of such practical matters. A recent study of Pushkin’s correspondence by Nina Dmitrieva bears out many of these assumptions about epistolary etiquette. Pushkin corresponded in French with his parents (with whom his relations were cool) and with his sister. French was also the language he used, as convention required, in his courtship of Natal’ia Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, and in his correspondence with Natal’ia’s mother, which was laced with carefully rehearsed clichés.37 On the other hand, he usually wrote to his brother, Lev, in Russian, when he was on good terms with him, although he pointedly switched to French in the 1830s when relations between them deteriorated owing to Lev’s negligent handling of Aleksandr’s financial affairs while the poet was in exile in the south of Russia and to the fact that Lev had run up debts which Aleksandr had to settle.38 Pushkin’s letters to his literary friends and kindred spirits (mainly men, but including some women), with whom he felt unconstrained, were generally written in Russian too, although personal preferences with some correspondents could also come into play. With Nikolai Raevskii junior, for example, he usually corresponded in French, although the two were close friends.39 Another exception was Pushkin’s correspondence with Chaadaev, which was conducted in French, as Pushkin himself noted in a letter of 1831: ‘Mon ami, je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe’ (My friend, I’ll speak the language of Europe to you)40 – an exception explained by the fact that their letters touched upon grand questions of historical destiny, for discussion of which French was deemed appropriate. In his supplicatory correspondence with Nicholas I, which was conducted either directly or through Count Benckendorff, Pushkin also used Russian, as convention 36 Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 365. Lotman bases his opinion on Pushkin’s correspondence. 37 Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 179–183. 38 Ibidem, 175–176. 39 See, e.g., Arkhiv Raevskikh, vol. 1, 254–257 (Raevskii to Pushkin) and 258–261 (Pushkin to Raevskii). 40 Pushkin, PSS, vol. 14, 187; Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 176. Pushkin’s statement ‘je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe’ serves as the title of the revised French version of Grechanaia’s monograph on Russian francophonie (2012). On Chaadaev and the use of French for historiosophical speculation, see the fifth section of Chapter 7 below.

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required, but he tended to resort to French when dealing with ticklish subjects or at particularly difficult moments in his relationship with the emperor. 41 However, we should not assume that the web of factors we have already described provides us with a key to the reasons for language choice in all circumstances. Even the location of the writer when he or she composes a letter and the location of the addressee at that time, Tipton suggests on the basis of her study of the Vorontsovs’ correspondence, may have a bearing. 42 The point is well illustrated by a letter written in French in 1850 by Nikolai Bartenev to his sister Praskov’ia. Bartenev’s choice of language in this instance is probably explained by the fact that Praskov’ia was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. Nikolai is writing from the provinces, and to the court at that, and evidently feels a need to write in French, as a nobleman’s career might depend on it. However, the letter shows that French was not a language he was altogether accustomed to using, for it obviously cost him much effort to write it. His language is very simple, primitive even, and he makes a number of mistakes. He writes, for example, ‘il a monté à cheval’ (he got on his horse) rather than ‘il est monté à cheval’, and ‘voila un homme tous a fais provincial’ (there’s a completely provincial man for you) instead of ‘voilà un homme tout à fait provincial’. He admits that he does not usually write in French: ‘Vous devez être tres étonnez de ma lettre française. Je m’occupe ici et j’ai voulu vous fair voir mes progrés’ (You must be amazed at my letter in French. I’m studying [it] here and I wanted to show you what progress I’ve made).43 There are plainly many instances, moreover, when no clear criterion for a bilingual writer’s choice is detectable. We should also be cautious about accepting the received wisdom and generalizations we have described. The factors influencing language choice could be even more complicated than 41 Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 183–186. It had been normal to address Alexander I, on the other hand, in French, because – it is suggested by Lotman – Alexander acknowledged by this means the equality of people of good society: Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 361. Zhukovskii, like Pushkin, we might add, corresponded in both French and Russian with a member of the royal family, in this case the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, the wife of Alexander I. He used French both for subject-matter which required no particular emotional engagement and when writing about moving episodes in his life, evidently employing French as a sort of emotional filter which placed no onus on the empress to express strong feelings. However, in situations in which some compassion on Zhukovskii’s part was required (for example, on the death of the daughter of the emperor and empress), he switched to Russian, which, by virtue of the fact that it bore fewer clichés, seemed better able to convey genuine emotion. Extant rough drafts of Zhukovskii’s letters to the empress show that he sometimes wavered over his choice of language. See Viatkina, ‘Diglossiia russkikh marginal’nykh zhanrov’ (unpaginated). 42 Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 49, 99, 129, 152–153, 252. 43 GARF, f. 632, op. 1, d. 55, fols 2–2 v.

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the rules thought to be prescribed by etiquette, and the implications of the preference could be even more nuanced than our examples from Pushkin’s letters seem to show.44 For one thing, as various scholars have pointed out, conventions might be breached in order to achieve certain purposes or to affect the recipient in some way. Use of French where Russian might have been appropriate could conceal a writer’s true feelings behind French clichés or conceal real intimacy behind trite expressions of affection. 45 Or again, writers might adapt themselves to the sensibility of the person they were addressing, as did Aleksandr Golitsyn in a letter of 1791 to Praskov’ia Golitsyna, née Shuvalova, who was herself a Francophone writer. Although by the 1780s Golitsyn was writing mainly in Russian, as we have seen, it still seemed appropriate to him, Berelowitch surmises, to choose French for letters to this avowedly Francophone lady: the use of French allowed him to employ a light, gallant style suffused with ‘Franco-femininity’ and to pose as a courtier. 46 Yet more complex factors come into play in letters written by Radishchev to his powerful patron Aleksandr Vorontsov from Siberia, to which Catherine II had exiled him for publishing his subversive Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. In a penetrating analysis of the factors determining language choice in some seventy extant letters between these two correspondents, Baudin finds that Radishchev’s language choice cannot be explained in a wholly satisfactory way by characterizing French as a language suitable for the conduct of a semi-official relationship between a protégé and his patron and Russian as a language to be used between relatives and close friends. Language choice in this corpus of letters was not determined purely by the identity of the addressee, since some of Radishchev’s letters to Vorontsov, his superior, were written in Russian and some of his letters to family members, his intimates, were written in French. Nor was choice determined entirely by the content of a letter, for Radishchev sometimes resorted indiscriminately to one language or the other to discuss a whole range of subjects. In the last analysis, Baudin argues, more subjective factors which relate to the writer’s current anxieties and state of mind sometimes 44 It should also be noted that the epistolary practice of men of letters (who feature prominently in existing studies of Russians’ bilingual correspondence, such as those by Paperno (1975) and Lotman (1994)) is not necessarily typical of noble practice as a whole. Littérateurs had aesthetic preoccupations, of course, and often crafted their letters carefully. Pushkin treated some of his letters as literary experiments and produced several versions of them before sending them (Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 172–173). 45 Baudin, ‘Russian or French?’, 122, summarizing points made by Lotman (‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 365–366) et al. 46 Berelowitch, ‘Francophonie in Russia under Catherine II’, 53.

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prevailed. First, when Radishchev feels a sense of guilt towards Vorontsov for not complying with his instructions he uses Russian (and a subservient mode of address: ‘My dear Sire, Count Aleksandr Romanovich’) as an implicit means of subordinating himself once more to his patron in the Russophone imperial administration. When, on the other hand, Radishchev is liberated from this burden, reversion to French helps him to restore a certain ‘utopian equality’ to their relationship, as implied also by the simpler form of address, ‘Monsieur’.47 Secondly, the use of French, once he reaches his final Siberian destination, may serve for Radishchev as a means of retaining his identity as a civilized European in a wilderness where he is surrounded by wild beasts and people who seem barely to differ from beasts, except insofar as they have language (whose value, however, they do not understand). 48 Bilingual writers needed not only to make a language choice for each individual letter (or, more generally, each individual text) that they produced but also to decide whether they would mix languages, or switch codes, within a single document. Such language-mixing may have been frowned upon in formal texts, because it was considered a sign of familiarity. 49 Thus the fact that code-switching in Radishchev’s letters to Aleksandr Vorontsov is very limited, as Baudin points out, is an indication of their unequal relationship.50 Pushkin, as Lotman reminds us, even rebuked his brother, Lev, for mixing languages in a letter: ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself my dear’, he wrote to him in 1822, when he was close to him, ‘for writing a letter half in Russian and half in French’, as if he were a female cousin from Moscow (moskovskaia kuzina).51 (Pushkin’s gibe makes code-switching sound provincial and unworthy of a metropolitan aristocrat.) However, Pushkin himself, pace Lotman, was quite often guilty of the same sin.52 Indeed, the practice of code-switching – on which many Russian writers poured scorn for a hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century53 – was extremely common in letters between people who were close to one another. 47 On the use of French to imply friendship and a semblance of social equality, even between people who were plainly not social peers, see the reference to relations between Aleksandr Stroganov and his son’s tutor in the fifth section of Chapter 2 above. 48 Baudin, ‘Russian or French?’, 125–129. 49 Maimina, ‘Stilisticheskie funktsii frantsuzskogo iazyka v perepiske Pushkina i v ego poezii’, 61–63. 50 Baudin, ‘Russian or French?’, 124. 51 Pushkin, PSS, vol. 13, 35; Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 365; Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 186. 52 Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 186–187. 53 On attitudes expressed by the literary community towards code-switching, see Chapters 8 and 9 below.

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Just as there were many factors that helped to determine language choice for a letter as a whole, so too certain clearly identifiable factors tended to precipitate code-switching within a letter, as Tipton’s investigation of language choice in the correspondence of the Vorontsov family strongly suggests. Correspondents switch, for example, in order to report speech in the language that was evidently used by the speaker in question. Dashkova follows this practice when she tells her elder brother Aleksandr about a conversation she has had with the Russian ambassador in Paris, Count Morkov, about their younger brother Semen, who seems to have been slandered. ‘Je lui ai demandé’ (I asked him), she writes, si l’on était content encore de Сенюша; il m’a dit oui, mais dis-je, je crois qu’il a eu des réprimandes, mais c’est qu’il est aussi trop entier et trop chaud; et puis il me dit en Russe: ‘давно здесь не были, так не знают или забыли здешний образ мыслей’. (whether he was still happy with Seniusha; he replied yes, but I said I thought he had had some scoldings, but that the problem is that he’s also too headstrong and hot-headed; and then he said to me in Russian: ‘he hasn’t been here for long, so he doesn’t know the way we think round here, or he’s forgotten’.)54

There was also a tendency to switch from French into Cyrillic in order to render Russian patronymics, diminutive forms of personal names (Seniusha, diminutive of Semen, in the quotation above), place-names, weights and measurements, and other culture-specific things, such as edicts, official posts or positions, foodstuffs, or ubiquitous insects! The following examples from letters written by Dashkova illustrate the point: Avant hier j’ai prêté serment en présence du capitaine-исправник (The day before yesterday I took an oath before the head of police) […] avant de me coucher avec des тараканы (before going to bed with cockroaches) 54 AKV, bk 5, 200, quoted by Tipton, ‘Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family’, 136 and 148, n. 5. The italics in the French passage are in the original. The underlining in the translation is our own, to indicate the matter that was written in Cyrillic in the original passage. For an example of code-switching in the other direction but for the same purpose, see Tipton, ibidem, 137. For examples of code-switching for reported speech in Pushkin’s letters, see Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 186–187.

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Si mon éxil doit durer, envoyez moi, je vous prie, des semences, огурцов, моркови, гороху, капусты, кресс-саладу et quelques autres. (If my exile must continue, please send me some seeds, cucumbers, carrots, peas, cabbages, cress, and a few other things.)55

Similarly, Semen Vorontsov, despite his cosmopolitanism, switches into Russian when referring to the Orthodox faith, to which he remained intensely loyal. Thus in a letter of 1826 which is written in French, and in which he vilifies the Decembrists as ‘jeunes Étourdis Élevés par des outchitels Français’ (thoughtless youths raised by French teachers56), he suddenly resorts to Russian to praise the great ‘Russian God’ (Bog Ruskoi) who, he supposes, will protect his country from its enemies.57 Correspondents might also switch from Russian into French in order to close a letter with an appropriate epistolary formula, although we should not assume that they did this because Russian was unsuited to the expression of the sentiments the formula expressed, for Russian versions of such formulae were clearly in evidence early in the age of Catherine and were taken up by Russians who were not bilingual.58 Sometimes the need to switch, or anticipation of it, would make for an extended passage in Russian in a text in which French otherwise predominated. In the following passage in a letter written by Semen Vorontsov in 1764, for example, the word shlafrok (a recent Russian borrowing from German) seems to trigger the switch out of French, which, as we have already noted, was the language customarily used by the Russian elite for discussion of medical matters: Il m’a saigné donc du bras droit et très-heureusement, et au bout de deux jours je fus quitte du mal de tête; mais j’en ai été quatre sans pouvoir mettre l’habit et rien faire avec la main droite: car, comme c’était la première fois de ma vie que cela m’arrivait, je ne savais après comment m’y prendre, и 55 AKV, bk 5, 238, 244, 248. For an example from a letter written by Dashkova’s elder sister Elisaveta Polianskaia, see ibidem, bk 21, 460. These illustrations are all used by Tipton, ‘CodeSwitching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family’, 139–141, where further examples are to be found, and 148, nn. 12–14. Underlining in the translations is again our own, to indicate the matter that is in Cyrillic in the original. For similar examples in Radishchev’s letters, see Baudin, ‘Russian or French?’, 123. 56 Semen uses the Russian word ‘ouchitel’, in transliterated form, in a disparaging way. 57 Quoted by Tipton, ‘Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family’, 142 and 149, n. 17. 58 Ibidem, 137–138. For some examples of code-switching in letters written by Aleksandr Golitsyn’s brother Mikhail, and explanations of them, see Berelowitch, ‘Francophonie in Russia under Catherine II’, 53–56.

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на другой день, заснувши, я так ее разбередил, что два дни после того правою рукою я действовать был не в состоянии и другого надевать как шлафрок. Pardonnez moi, mon cher, tous ces détails ennuyeux, mais je ne les ai faits qu’en connaissant votre amitié pour moi. (So he bled my right arm and very successfully too, and after two days my headache went away; but I had four [days] when I couldn’t put on my clothes or do anything with my right hand: because, as it was the first time in my life that this had happened to me, I didn’t know how to cope afterwards, and the next day, after falling asleep, I aggravated it so much that for the next two days I couldn’t move my right arm and put on anything other than a dressing-gown. Excuse me, my dear fellow, for all these trying details, but I only include them because I know your friendship for me.)59

The prevalence of code-switching in the informal correspondence of Dashkova and her siblings would seem to suggest that the members of this generation of Vorontsovs were fully bilingual in French and Russian.60 In this respect they differed from their uncle Mikhail, whose language use implies a diglossic situation, in which French was preferred to Russian for certain clearly definable purposes.61 We should of course beware of generalizing on the basis of evidence, however detailed, on the practice of one family. However, similar patterns to those that we have described can be found in the letters of other bilingual nobles; indeed Tipton’s research reveals these patterns in the letters of outsiders corresponding with the Vorontsov family. Members of the Bakunin family, whose estate was located in Tver’ Province, are another case in point. Although they too, like the Vorontsovs, write many letters exclusively in one language or the other, they also sometimes switch from French into Russian when they use place names, patronymics, or diminutives of forenames, mention units of measurement (of temperature, for instance), deal with such practical matters as estate management, and cite Russian proverbs or convey name-day greetings.62 It is also worth commenting, finally, on pronominal usage in letter-writing, because Russian correspondents might often sense non-equivalence between 59 AKV, bk 32, 81; quoted by Tipton, ‘Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family’, 142–143 and 149, n. 18. Underlining in the translation is our own, as is bold font in the French and Russian original to highlight the word shlafrok. 60 Tipton, ‘Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family’, 135. 61 Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 49. 62 GATO, f. 103, op. 1, d. 1395.

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the French second-person personal pronouns tu and vous and related forms (ton, votre, and so forth), on the one hand, and the grammatically equivalent Russian forms (ty and vy, tvoi and vash), on the other.63 Use of the formal second-person Russian pronoun vy to an addressee with whom the writer was on intimate terms could feel intolerably frigid.64 Thus in a letter to Anna Kern, for whom Pushkin famously had a passion at one time, the poet could not help slipping from one pronoun to the other: ‘Votre conseil d’écrire à S[a] M[ajesté] m’a touché comme une preuve de ce que vous avez songé à moi – je t’en remercie à genoux’ (Your advice that I write to H[is] M[ajesty] touched me as a proof of what you thought of me and I thank you on my knees).65 Pushkin’s friend Viazemskii also preferred to break the normal epistolary rule by addressing his fiancée as tu in a letter that he wrote to her, as custom dictated, in French, and she too thereafter addressed Viazemskii with the more familiar pronoun, while continuing to write to him in French.66 Anticipation of the awkwardness of vous as a means of addressing someone close might even sometimes explain the use of Russian in preference to French. In an affectionate Russian postscript to a letter of 1824, for example, Pushkin was able to address his sister Ol’ga as ty, whereas vous had seemed appropriate in an addendum that he addressed to her in French which accompanied a letter he wrote to her husband in Russian in 1822.67 Language choice in letters, then, could be a purely practical matter, reflecting the competence of writer and recipient, but there were numerous other factors that often came into play. Something similar may be said of the various forms of ego-writing that also served as props for noble sociability and tools of noble self-fashioning, to which we now turn.

Language use in diaries, travel notes, memoirs, and albums The corpus of documents written by Russians in French during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that might be described as examples 63 On the social implications of pronominal choice, see also the third section of Chapter 4 above. 64 On this implication of pronominal usage, see also the fourth section of Chapter 9 below, for examples of allusions to the problem in Tolstoi’s fiction. 65 Pushkin, PSS, vol. 13, 229, quoted by Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 187; our use of bold. 66 Nina Dmitrieva, ‘Pushkin’s Letters in French’, 187. 67 Ibidem, 176. In the French addendum we have mentioned, Pushkin may simply have been following convention or he may have been mockingly imitating the empty chatter of society.

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of ego-writing is so large that it has been claimed that the bulk of Russian writing in French is autobiographical.68 It is possible that this claim underestimates the volume of other types of text produced in French or that it excludes from consideration certain types of document (diplomatic texts and correspondence, articles in the periodical press, propagandistic and polemical writings) of the sort we deal with in other chapters of this book.69 In any case, the claim is unverifiable. However, it is not altogether implausible, if we treat personal letters as in some sense autobiographical texts, as well we might, for it is certainly true that the boundaries between private correspondence and ego-writing are blurred. The types of ego-writing most abundantly exemplified by extant texts written by Russians in French are the personal diary, the récit de voyage, the memoir, and the album, all of which provided satisfying and socially acceptable means of self-realization for noble women as well as noble men. We shall pause briefly on the characteristics of each of these types of ego-writing. However, it is worth prefacing our remarks by saying that we are not dealing here with a set of strictly defined genres but with texts which may share common features and may individually contain disparate elements, ranging from records of everyday activities, recollections of things the author has heard, and copies of passages he or she has read to the author’s own reflections. The diary, to begin with that type of text, may be regarded variously as historical testimony, an autobiographical document, or a literary genre.70 It comes in various forms: besides the diary with consecutive entries chronologically arranged, for example, there are epistolary diaries which are addressed to a specific recipient, to be sent either in instalments or as a complete work once finished.71 It may be aimed, moreover, at different spheres, the private or the public. Of course, some diaries really were intended to be read only by their author.72 Usually, though, Russian noblewomen’s diaries of the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth had a specific addressee, such as a sister, friend, lover, or husband, and often they were intended to be read aloud to a circle of family and friends. The récit de voyage, like the personal diary, might be written for the more or less exclusive pleasure or interest of the author, or even as an educational exercise supervised by a foreign tutor,73 or again, it might be intended to be read at 68 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 20. 69 See especially Chapters 5 above and 7 below. 70 Paperno, ‘What Can Be Done with Diaries?’, Russian Review, 63 (2004), 561. 71 Viollet, ‘Aux frontières de la correspondance’, 73–76. 72 Viollet, ‘À la rencontre des journaux personnels’, 12. 73 Gretchanaia [Grechanaia] and Viollet, ‘Si tu lis jamais ce journal…’, 28.

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some social gathering. It often attested to the completion of a nobleman’s or noblewoman’s education, the development of their character, and the expansion of their cultural horizons. Like many diaries and récits de voyage, memoirs too might vary in the degree to which they were conceived as private or public texts. Containing detailed accounts of the author’s personal life, including comments on feelings and health, they were often addressed to the writer’s children. At the same time, many memoirs were aimed at posterity and not meant to be read during the author’s lifetime. Such texts conveyed what were supposed to be the author’s honest, unbiased views directly to future generations, thus serving as an educative resource or as a potentially important source for historiography. The album, on the other hand, was usually more unambiguously public in character than the diary or travel account, or even the private memoir, for the keeping of an album presupposed that many individuals would contribute to it and that it would be shown off in the drawing-room or salon. In ego-documents in general, the degree of artifice varied, depending to some extent on the number of readers they were expected to reach. As for language choice in them, their semi-public character tended to dictate the use of French, at least when they were written by women, because that was the predominant language of the refined aristocratic society for which they were produced. However, since such documents could range over so many different subjects, Russian might sometimes seem more appropriate, and much ego-writing produced by Russians does contain some combination of these two languages. It should be noted, finally, that there is a near-complete absence of metadiscourse in the ego-writing we examine. Language use and choice are rarely mentioned, which again suggests to us that the authors of these texts were bilingual (or plurilingual), made instinctive choices based on common linguistic practice, and experienced little or no sense of conflicted cultural identity.74 The most thorough study of Russian noblewomen’s diaries has been carried out by Elena Grechanaia and Catherine Viollet, who have published excerpts from numerous texts which illustrate subject-matter and linguistic practice that were typical in the genre.75 The habit of keeping an autobiographical diary, which was borrowed from French culture, emerged in Russia in the mid-eighteenth century and spread rapidly towards the century’s end. Whereas in France, though, the majority of diary writers belonged to the tiers état, that is to say the commons or middle class, in 74 The last of these points is made in relation to memoirists by Herold, ‘Russian Autobiographical Literature in French’, 3. 75 Gretchanaia [Grechanaia] and Viollet, ‘Si tu lis jamais ce journal…’

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Russia it was nobles who kept diaries.76 Grechanaia and Viollet detect a clear gender divide in language use in this type of text in Russia in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth: men’s diaries, they find, are predominantly written in Russian, whereas women’s diaries are usually written in French.77 However, it is important to note that women too sometimes used Russian for this form of writing, as did Natal’ia Stroganova, for example, in a family chronicle she continued for over fifty years after her mother’s death in 1760.78 In any case, Russian was nearly always present to some degree in women’s diaries (increasingly so in the nineteenth century), as in the diary of Smirnova-Rosset, which we used as a source on language practice at court, and in the bilingual epistolary diary of Anna Kern (née Poltoratskaia).79 This language-mixing confirms the impression that women were able to express themselves in Russian;80 the prevalence of the French language in this and other literary genres and in certain social settings cannot usually be explained as merely an illustration of women’s linguistic competence in French and relative incompetence in Russian. Some of the typical features of Russian women’s diaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and illustrations of points we have made about such matters as language competence and language use in different domains can be found, to take one example for close examination, in the diary of Anastasiia Iakushkina. This text was written in 1827 and is almost entirely in French.81 It is a private, epistolary diary, which Anastasiia sent to her exiled Decembrist husband, Ivan Iakushkin, whom she was hoping eventually to join in Siberia. It serves two particular purposes for the young author (Iakushkina was around 20 years of age when she wrote it). First, Iakushkina used her diary to express her innermost private feelings, ‘les plus petits replis de mon triste coeur’ (all the tiniest recesses of my sad heart), including her love for her husband. (She says that she conceals the existence of the diary even from her mother, who was living in the same household.) French is an appropriate medium for this purpose because, besides serving as a social and domestic language for the Russian nobility, 76 V’olle [Viollet] and Grechanaia, ‘Dnevnik v Rossii’, 19. 77 Ibidem, 24. 78 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 148–149. 79 Ibidem, 176–177. For further examples of women’s bilingual or multilingual diaries, see 177–192. 80 Gretchanaia [Grechanaia], ‘Mémoires et journaux intimes féminins rédigés en français’, 163. 81 The diary is in GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 119. It was published in Russian translation as Iakushkina, ‘Dnevnik Anastasii Vasil’evny Iakushkinoi’ in Novyi mir, no. 12 (1964), 138–152.

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it was also a language in which romantic sentiment and devotion were commonly expressed. After all, French texts such as the epistolary novel and the literary style used in them provided models for Russian women wishing to write in this vein while keeping within appropriate bounds of feminine expression. For Iakushkina, the status of French as a language of love is enhanced by the fact that she evidently does not speak French in her daily life with those closest to her: Russian is the domestic language she uses with her children, servants, and mother. She says she has told her young son Viacheslav about her love for his father in French (‘comme j’aime papa’ [how I love papa]), but she then has to translate her remarks into Russian (kak ia papu liubliu) to make Viacheslav comprehend them fully.82 At the same time, the Francophone diarist may abandon French, the sanctioned language of love, when expressing heightened emotion.83 Thus Iakushkina sometimes switches into Russian to incorporate in her diary affectionate terms such as dushka (darling) and milushka (dearest) which she may have used in face-to-face conversations with her husband.84 Secondly, Iakushkina’s diary enabled her to define herself and her roles, as diarists commonly do.85 She uses it to demonstrate that she can fulfil the roles expected of her by society, that is to say that she will be obedient to her husband, whom she portrays as a strict male figure who has clear views about how she should behave publicly as a woman, wife, and mother. She provides reports of her sons’ wellbeing and behaviour, showing that she is carrying out her duty and obeying Ivan’s wishes: ‘le soir comme je te l’avais promis je dessinais a [sic, i.e. pour] Wecheslas’ (in the evening I have done drawings for Viacheslav as I promised you I would), she writes. Furthermore, she recounts how she upbraided her sons’ nanny, but remained perfectly ladylike throughout the incident. She can run a household with authority and grace, we may infer. Thus, the diary is a place where Iakushkina can offer proof of appropriate feminine conduct and portray herself in an ideal way.86 Language use in Iakushkina’s diary resembles that in other examples of this genre. Like other women diarists, Iakushkina is poor at distinguishing homophonous forms and is consequently prone to grammatical error in French word endings. She writes, for example: ‘j’était [étais]’ (I was) and ‘Dieu m’avait inspirait [inspiré]’ (God had inspired me).87 Her diary also 82 Iakushkina, ‘Dnevnik Anastasii Vasil’evny Iakushkinoi’, 147–148. 83 Gretchanaia, ‘Mémoires et journaux intimes féminins rédigés en français’, 163. 84 Iakushkina, ‘Dnevnik Anastasii Vasil’evny Iakushkinoi’, 143. 85 Savkina, ‘Pishu sebia…’, 98–103. 86 Gretchanaia and Viollet, ‘Si tu lis jamais ce journal…’, 49–51. 87 GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 119, fol. 1.

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contains frequent instances of code-switching, which was common in diaries as well as private letters, especially from the 1820s onwards, it seems, when use of Russian was becoming more common in nobles’ texts. The shift from one language to the other is driven by the same factors that we have observed in personal correspondence, such as reference to toponyms, personal names, and distinctively Russian objects or phenomena.88 Thus, like Semen Vorontsov, Iakushkina retains the Russian word for ‘dressing-gown’ within her predominantly French text, albeit in a slightly different form (shlaforok), because she is referring to a distinctively Russian everyday garment. Code-switching into Russian also occurs as Iakushkina describes life with her children. ‘Les enfants qui ont beaucoup d’esprit’, she writes, ‘ne sont pas dolgoveshni’ (children who are too clever don’t live long). Although she starts the sentence in French, Iakushkina no doubt has in her mind the Russian saying zateilivye rebiata nedolgovechny, which may have been used in conversation with the children.89 She also switches codes, as writers were liable to do, when she quotes either her children or herself as she interacts with the children or their nanny, using what was no doubt the original language of the utterance quoted. Noble men – for example, the Baltic German diplomat Petr Meyendorff in the f irst half of the nineteenth century90 and Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov91 and, as we have seen, Petr Valuev in the second – also wrote diaries that have survived, although not so commonly as women. (The diaries of Meyendorff and Vorontsov were written in French, Valuev’s, for the most part, in Russian.) These men too conceived of their diaries both as private record and reflection, on the one hand, and as a possible means of communication with posterity, on the other, as Meyendorff intimates in a (perhaps slightly disingenuous) prefatory note (Avis au Lecteur) written in Göttingen in May 1816: I take such pleasure in busying myself with memories of time that I have spent pleasantly, thinking of what I have seen that is beautiful and good, 88 V’olle [Viollet] and Grechanaia, ‘Dnevnik v Rossii’, 25; Gretchanaia [Grechanaia] and Viollet, ‘Si tu lis jamais ce journal…’, 41; Grečanaja [Grechanaia], ‘L’usage du français et du russe dans les journaux féminins’, 22. 89 See the entry in the dictionary of Russian sayings compiled by Vladimir Dal’, which is available at http://www.gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/Culture/dal/06.php. Iakushkina spells the Russian word dolgovechnyi incorrectly, as our transliteration shows; one of the mistakes (‘sh’ for ‘ch’) reflects the pronunciation of the word. 90 GARF, f. 573, op. 1, d. 467 (1816? Fr.). 91 RGADA, f. 1261, op. 1, d. 45 (1854 and no date, Fr., Russ.).

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that I believe I shall not be wasting my time if I make a collection of memories that are already so dear to me and will be all the more so later on. This is enough to make those into whose hands this book might fall see that it would be indiscreet to read a journal that is written only for me.92

Like women’s diaries again, men’s diaries exhibited plurilingualism, manifested in code-switching. Take, for example, the following trilingual entry from 1856 in a diary kept by a member of the Prussian Bünting family, which lived and served in the Russian Empire.93 In this instance, the base language of the diary is German, but French and Russian also occur: Mittwoch Okt 17. Spät morgens ist M. Кузнецов wieder abgegangen, wie es schien, sehr erfreut von unserer Bekanntschaft et nous invitent instamment de regarder sa maison à Каширское comme la nôtre.94 (Wednesday 17 October. Mr Kuznetsov left again late in the morning, very happy to have made our acquaintance, it seemed, and urges us to look on his house at Kashirskoe as our own.)

Thus, Russian names (the surname ‘Kuznetsov’ and the toponym ‘Kashirskoe’) are given in Cyrillic, according to the common practice we have already observed. There is also an intra-sentential switch from German into French. One assumes that the diarist makes this switch in order to replicate precisely the speech he is reporting, and no doubt French was the language spoken by Kuznetsov on this occasion, either because convention favoured the use of that language for an invitation extended to a social peer or because French served as a lingua franca between German and Russian nobles in the empire. Bilingualism – indeed plurilingualism – and code-switching are also in evidence in the accounts of travels, the récits de voyage that so many Russian noblemen and noblewomen wrote in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. French was commonly used 92 Translated from the French original at GARF, f. 573, op. 1, d. 467, fol. 2. 93 One of the diarist’s descendants, Nikolai Georgievich Bünting, became governor of Tver’, where he was murdered in 1917. 94 GATO, f. 103, op. 1, d. 3135a, fol. 121 v. The diary deals mainly with military life and campaigns but also includes long passages on emotions, particularly grief and love, as well as on day-to-day activities.

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in this genre too, irrespective of which country the traveller was visiting (Germany and Italy were destinations just as popular as France). The predominance of French in this sort of text can be explained both by the fact that the Grand Tour was an aristocratic rite of passage and by the existence, by the late eighteenth century, of influential models of travel-writing in French, especially Charles Dupaty’s Letters on Italy (1788).95 Early examples of travel accounts written by Russians in French include notes made by Baron Aleksandr Stroganov on his journeying in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy in 1752–1753, Prince Aleksandr Kurakin’s Recollections of a Journey to Holland and England in 1770–1772, some meticulous, drily factual observations by the teenage Prince Aleksei Golitsyn, who studied at the University of Leiden in the 1780s, and Prince Boris Golitsyn’s notes on a journey in Italy and France in 1791–1792.96 Many of the numerous accounts of travels in the West that were written by Russians in French in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, like so many other forms of private journal, were produced by young aristocratic women. Some of these women – for instance, Dashkova, Natal’ia Golitsyna, and Natal’ia Kurakina – became well-known public figures, but a larger number of them – Ekaterina Liubomirskaia, Sof’ia Murav’eva, Varvara Turkestanova, Elizaveta Vasil’eva, and many others – remained little-known. To point to the plethora of récits de voyage that were written in French, especially by women, is by no means to say that no such accounts were written in Russian. Fonvizin, as a major man of letters who was already expressing wounded national pride and ridiculing Francophone fops in the middle of the reign of Catherine, pointedly used Russian for a cycle of ‘letters’ written in 1777–1778, during a long stay in France, and addressed to Count Petr Panin, the brother of Fonvizin’s highly-placed patron Nikita.97 95 Charles Mercier-Dupaty, Lettres sur l’Italie. 96 RGADA, f. 1278, op. 4, d. 77 (Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov’s diary of his journey); Aleksei [but the author is in fact Aleksandr] Kurakin, Souvenirs d’un voyage en Hollande et en Angleterre par le P. A.K. durant les années 1770, 1771 et 1772; RGB, f. 64, k. 113, d. 3 (Boris Golitsyn’s notes on his journey round Italy, 1791–1792, Fr., It.). See also Pavel Stroganov’s diary of a journey abroad in 1785 (RGADA, f. 1278, op. 1, d. 345), the beginning of a French diary on a journey by Petr Miatlev in Russia (IRLI, Manuscripts Department, f. 196, op. 1, d. 19 (1819)), and the undated diary of a member of the Samarin family (possibly Fedor Vasil’evich Samarin (1784–1853), the father of the Slavophile Iurii) about a tour of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy (RGADA, f. 1277, op. 1, d. 144). On the first three of these writers, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 140–146. 97 Pis’ma iz vtorogo zagranichnogo puteshestviia (1777–1778), in Fonvizin, SS, vol. 2, 412–495. Although these ‘letters’ were not published in their author’s lifetime, Fonvizin no doubt had a wider contemporary readership in mind, not just Petr Panin.

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Dashkova, despite her multilingual competence and love of displaying it, also resorted to Russian to describe a journey she made round the south of England in 1770.98 Russian featured in bilingual or plurilingual récits de voyage as well, just as it did in other forms of ego-writing. Aleksei Bobrinskii, Catherine’s illegitimate son by Grigorii Orlov, deployed three languages, French, Russian, and German, in a diary that he kept while he was travelling in Europe in 1783–1786, using French, Grechanaia observes, for more or less dispassionate notes about his journey but resorting to Russian for spontaneous emotional outbursts.99 Again, Russian was frequently used in women’s travel narratives in which the predominant language was French. As Emilie Murphy has shown, women repeatedly followed the normal practice of switching into Russian to render proper nouns, cite proverbs or sayings, or refer to Russian institutions, units of currency, cuisine, and the Orthodox religion or its practice.100 They also indicated in their texts that they were willing to use Russian when speaking to their compatriots during their travels, sometimes as an exclusive language that any foreigners who were present would not be able to understand, sometimes to express deep emotion, and sometimes because this was a pleasant way of reminding themselves of their native land during a long stay abroad.101 Nor did the women who recorded their impressions of the places they had visited confine themselves to use of French and Russian. In many of their accounts, which display similar patterns of language use, Murphy finds examples of code-switching into, or other evidence of knowledge of, other European languages, especially – in ascending order of the number of cases – German, English, and Italian.102 The women make references to their knowledge of these languages, or insert words and phrases in them into their texts, not only in order to quote things people have said but also, no doubt, to lend an air of authenticity or exoticism to their narratives and to demonstrate their familiarity with local customs and their ability to communicate with natives in the countries they visit.103 Different languages are thus chosen to construct an image of the diarist, as a well-read person, a capable traveller, a witty commentator, and, above all, a multilingual cosmopolitan. 98 ‘Puteshestvie odnoi rossiiskoi znatnoi gospozhi po nekotorym aglinskim provintsiiam’. 99 Bobrinskii, ‘A.G. Bobrinskii, Dnevnik. 1779–1786’. See Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 163–164. 100 Murphy, ‘Russian Noblewomen’s Francophone Travel Narratives (1777–1848)’, 111–112. 101 Ibidem, 110, 115, 116. 102 Ibidem, 104. 103 Ibidem, 107–110.

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Russians also began to write memoirs in French in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued often to use French for this purpose up until the 1830s, from which point Russian took precedence.104 Catherine II herself produced an example of the genre.105 She seems to have been well read in literature of this kind: she knew the memoirs of Queen Christina of Sweden and d’Alembert, for example, and also – judging by similarities of style and content detected by Grechanaia – those of Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier.106 Claiming to report what she has seen and heard, Catherine supplied detailed descriptions of her daily life, travels, and illnesses, and the people around her. As to why she chose to write her memoirs in French, it may have been partly because she had a better command of it than of Russian, Grechanaia surmises.107 However, the use of French did have many advantages in a text of this kind, besides Catherine’s facility in it and the fact that it was a language habitually used by the Russian elite for reading and social intercourse. It enabled Catherine, for example, to present herself as an androgynous honnête homme, who exhibited traits associated with both genders and aspired to live by the values of courteous sociability.108 By using what was perceived as the language of ladies of good society, Angelina Vacheva suggests, Catherine was also able to merge with an enlightened norm, to present her exceptional personality within the bounds of convention, thereby averting the possible rebuke that she was driven by ambition. Again, French was a repository of terms, expressive resources, and subject-matter that were familiar to all enlightened people of that age and a medium through which all human knowledge from classical antiquity onwards, it seemed, was accessible to them. Most importantly, it was a vehicle through which Catherine could reach the largest possible readership and it therefore served as a ‘key to the immortality that the empress sought’.109 In particular, as Monika Greenleaf has pointed out, Catherine needed to engage with the European public in order to rebut 104 Herold, ‘Russian Autobiographical Literature in French’, 7. 105 Catherine produced four different versions of her memoirs; they date from 1756, the early 1760s, 1771, and 1791. The memoirs were f irst published by Herzen on his Free Russian Press in London, as Zapiski imperatritsy Ekateriny II. All four versions of the text were published in Sochineniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II, vol. 12. On the literary context of this work and on Catherine’s sources, allusions, and ‘narrative strategies’, see Vacheva, Potomstvu Ekaterina II. 106 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 193, 194. 107 Ibidem, 199. 108 Ibidem, 197. 109 These words belong to Vacheva, to whom we are indebted for the points made in the three sentences preceding the indicator to this note, which Vacheva has generously outlined to us in a personal communication.

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negative accounts of her rise to power and ensure that her own version of history did not go unheard.110 After Paul acceded to the throne in 1796, French-language memoirists largely concerned themselves with depicting their disappearing social world and defending their reputations.111 For example, Dashkova recorded her version of Catherine’s reign and her own role in it for posterity and described the Russian way of life for readers who may not have been familiar with it.112 Other memoirists too, particularly participants in the events of 1812 such as Pavel Chichagov, Fedor Rostopchin, and Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov, resorted to French as a means of reaching a foreign readership.113 Topoi used by earlier memoirists, such as the notions of propriété, simplicité, honnêteté, and politesse (propriety, simplicity, integrity, politeness), remained important for nineteenth-century memoirists, Kelly Herold has argued, but now authors sometimes invoked these qualities to distance themselves from the state and to establish their status as outsiders.114 Thus Aleksandr Vorontsov, writing a memoir a few months before his death in 1805, vented his indignation at the ‘gouvernement absolu et assez immoral’ (absolute and quite immoral government) and deplored the state of ‘un pays ou il n’y a presqu’aucune opinion publique’ (a country where there is almost no public opinion).115 We see here the beginnings of a tradition of using French as a means of 110 Greenleaf, ‘Performing Autobiography’, 409. It should be added that Catherine also tried her hand at writing playlets in French, as well as plays in Russian. Styled as ‘proverbes’ (proverbs), these playlets were composed in the late 1780s, with topical comment, for performance in select Francophone society, which included eminent foreigners such as the French ambassador, Louis-Philippe, Comte de Ségur, at the Hermitage or in private apartments. Among them we find Un Tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras (1787), Les Flatteurs et les flattés (1788), Le Voyage de Monsieur Bontemps (1788), and Il n’y a pas de mal sans bien (also 1788). See Sočinenija imperatricy Ekateriny II, vol. 4. See also O’Malley, The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great, and Evstratov, Les Spectacles francophones à la cour de Russie, 235–238. 111 Herold, ‘Russian Autobiographical Literature in French’, 118. 112 Ibidem, 139. Dashkova’s work was f irst published in English as Memoirs of the Princess Daschkaw (1840). The original French version of her memoirs was first published, under the title Mon Histoire, in AKV, bk 21 (1881), 3–365. For a useful discussion of Dashkova’s presentation of her public and private selves, see Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 69–76; this discussion is located within a broader examination of Russian women’s autobiographical writing (64–102). 113 Chichagov, Memoires de l’amiral Tchitchagoff; Fedor Rostopchin, La vérité sur l’incendie de Moscou; Mikhail Vorontsov, ‘Avtobiografiia’. Discussed by Herold, ‘Russian Autobiographical Literature in French’, 129, 144–145. 114 Herold, ‘Russian Autobiographical Literature in French’, 152. 115 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 204. These memoirs, however, were not intended for public consumption, although Vorontsov does imagine some sort of reader when he criticizes his own ‘négligence de style’, a cliché intended to demonstrate the author’s sincerity: ibidem, 203.

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inscribing an author in a public sphere outside the official realm, a sphere whose development the government would try – especially in the age of Nicholas I – to inhibit through rigorous censorship. This oppositional tradition would live on in the mid-nineteenth century in polemical writings in French, including some work of an autobiographical nature, and in Russian-language memoirs, most notably Herzen’s masterpiece My Past and Thoughts.116 Although it is different from the diary, the récit de voyage, and the memoir in certain respects which we mentioned above, the album can equally be considered a vehicle for self-display, a means of identity formation, and a refuge for female creativity.117 Grechanaia has identified three types of album that were to be found in the extant collections of the personal papers of Russian nobles. One type uses literary quotations and hand-written entries by many individuals to create a specific world inside the album and sustain the self-image of the owner. Next, there are albums written by a single individual. Lastly, some albums are authored by an individual but combine quotations and reflection.118 The women who kept albums clearly saw nothing unusual in a mélange of native and imported styles. Most importantly from our point of view, it was commonplace to use a mixture of languages, as we see from Vadim Vatsuro’s study of examples of this type of text that date from the first half of the nineteenth century. French is used frequently for verse and quotations, but other languages feature as well, including Russian.119 Thus an early nineteenth-century album belonging to a member of the Naryshkin family which contains fables, verses, passages on history, and even drawings of parks and flowers, has entries in French, Russian, Italian, and English and translations of English quotations into French.120 Another album, dating from 1812–1814 and belonging to Evdokiia Lizogubova, has a mixture of French and Russian entries.121 It contains French linguistic play, both in crossed-out draft form and in completed

116 Herold, ‘Russian Autobiographical Literature in French’, 208. On the continuing use of French to express oppositional views (as well as loyalist views) to a European readership in the mid-nineteenth century, see especially the last two sections of Chapter 7 below. 117 Gretchanaia [Grechanaia], ‘Fonctions des citations littéraires dans les albums féminins russes rédigés en français’. 118 Ibidem, 438. There were also musical compilations, like an album of 1834 belonging to Praskov’ia Barteneva, which contains pieces in various genres and languages (for example, Russian prayers and folksongs and French and Italian romances after the current fashion): see RNB, f. 48, d. 2. 119 Vatsuro, ‘Literaturnye al’bomy v sobranii Pushkinskogo doma (1750–1840-e gody)’, 8. 120 IRLI, Manuscripts Department, r. 1, op. 42, d. 76. 121 Ibidem, d. 36. Vatsuro, ‘Literaturnye al’bomy v sobranii Pushkinskogo doma (1750–1840-e gody)’, 7.

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entries, such as the following, where the question ‘avez-vous aimé’ (have you loved) is abbreviated thus, using the names of letters of the French alphabet: AV vous M E?122

The relatively public nature of the album did not preclude the insertion of highly personal material. An album dating from the 1820s and belonging to Evdokiia Golenishcheva-Kutuzova, a noblewoman who moved to Tver’ Province in the late 1820s and married the poet Fedor Glinka, illustrates the point.123 It is full of entries of a conventional kind in different hands and languages: there are verses, prayers, and drawings, some in French, others in Russian, Italian, English, Greek, and Church Slavonic. Suddenly, though, the reader finds entries that seem to be of a very private nature: Golenishcheva-Kutuzova writes in French about her birthday presents and worries about her mother’s illness.124 These entries are followed by a few pages of Russian poems, before we come to another diary entry, in French, about a dream125 and then Italian verses which continue until the end of the album. As a genre, then, the album seems to have served as a space in which women could cultivate and present themselves in the best possible light publicly, within the small aristocratic domain. It could also incorporate private reflection – or rather, such reflection might be felt to enhance the attractiveness of the public persona of the album’s owner. The French language had an important function in the genre, serving its playful and flirtatious purposes, indeed contributing to its eroticization. And yet, it was not so much francophonie as ‘polyphony’, as Gitta Hammarberg has observed, that was the hallmark of the album, from the linguistic point of view.126 In sum, the large corpus of texts that may be classified as ego-writing of some kind reflects the bilingualism, indeed the plurilingualism, of the Russian social elite. As in the case of letter-writing, so too in ego-writing the decision to use or not to use French depended on numerous factors, which no doubt included knowledge of models for a given type of writing, the preferences of the private circle to which the author belonged, and 122 IRLI, Manuscripts Department, r. 1, op. 42, d. 76. 123 GATO, f. 103, op. 1, d. 1115. 124 Ibidem, fols 66 and 66 v. 125 Ibidem, fol. 73. 126 Hammarberg, ‘Flirting with Words’, 300. Hammarberg’s essay is a rich source on this genre.

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calculations about the appropriateness of one language or the other for a specific purpose. The fact that French was widely used for amateur writing of this sort, at least in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was due in particular to the association of such writing with the Francophone aristocratic milieu and to acceptance in that milieu that women were entitled to express their feelings in this way, indeed that their reputations were enhanced by display of this accomplishment. Ego-writing, like nobles’ personal correspondence, straddled a boundary between the private and the public spheres that was often blurred. Personal as the reflections recorded in diaries and récits de voyage might seem, they too, like letters, memoirs, and albums, were often aimed at a coterie of social peers. However, it was not only a close circle of relations and friends with whom Russian nobles wished to communicate. Some also strove to engage with social peers and intellectual and cultural figures across the continent. Such distinguished individuals might be reached through somewhat more public forms of written communication in which the language-mixing we have observed was not appropriate, and it is to these forms that we turn in the following section.

Writing French to join Europe Literary endeavour, besides being a popular private or semi-private activity among the nobility, served as a mode of participation in European aristocratic life and literary and intellectual culture. It could function as an expression of that same sociability that was manifested in attendance at certain types of gathering, such as the salon and the Masonic lodge, to which we have already drawn attention.127 It was thus one of the means by which Russia, through its eighteenth-century social elite, began belatedly to join the European community.128 Salons, in France, Russia, and elsewhere, were connected with the literary world in various ways. For one thing, the honnête homme, who frequented this sort of social gathering could distinguish himself as such by displaying some literary as well as conversational accomplishment.129 Salons also attracted men of letters, since the reading and discussion of belles-lettres was a common 127 See the third section of Chapter 4 above. 128 The function of writing in French as a means of bringing Russia into Europe and creating a shared past is noted by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 23. 129 Ibidem, 10.

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activity in them. The attendance of a notable representative of the Republic of Letters, moreover, graced a salon and enhanced its reputation, especially if he dedicated a work to the salonnière or sang her praises in it.130 Various short literary genres were associated with this social venue. They ranged from the light-hearted to the serious, but not too serious, for the primary aim of this society, as we have emphasized, was always to entertain. Epigrams, fables, eclogues, maxims, epistles, sonnets, elegies, and odes might be heard with pleasure in the salon, and much occasional poetry (vers de circonstance) was produced for recital in it. Musical culture flourished alongside literary culture, and so texts in genres such as the ballad, the madrigal, the rondeau, and the chanson or the chansonnette circulated here too. It is not surprising, given the cosmopolitan and multilingual nature of the social environment with which such literature was associated, that texts in languages other than French might also be read there. This was the case both in France, where poems are found in Italian, Spanish, and Latin as well as French, and in Russia, where texts in French and texts in Russian might both be read and where languages were sometimes mixed in the same text.131 Linguistic purity, it should be added, was valued in the salon, sometimes to such an extent that usage could be mocked as precious, as it had been by Molière. The spoken usage of this site of refined secular society therefore set a standard for written usage in correspondence, memoirs, and poetry.132 Literature of the sort associated with social gatherings – a varied collection of works which tended to be short, entertaining, and elegant, and in which the subject of erotic love was prominent – became familiar to Russians as soon as they encountered contemporary Western European culture in the early eighteenth century. The appeal of such a literature to them is illustrated by Trediakovskii’s choice of Paul Tallemant’s Journey to the Island of Love (1663), a renowned exemplar of gallant writing, as a work to translate for the emergent Russian readership when he returned from a period of study in Paris in the late 1720s.133 Trediakovskii also appended 33 occasional poems he himself had 130 Lilti, Le monde des salons, 178–181. 131 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 46–47. 132 Ibidem, 11. 133 Voyage de l’île d’Amour, translated by Trediakovskii as Ezda v ostrov liubvi (1730), available at http://az.lib.ru/t/talxman_p/text_1663_le_voyage_a_lile_damour-oldorfo.shtml. On the vocabulary of gallantry that was introduced into eighteenth-century Russia through this work, and also through Khrapovitskii’s revised version (1768) of Dreux du Radier’s Dictionnaire d’amour (1741), see Zhivov, ‘Love à la mode’. See also Grechanaia’s extended commentary on Trediakovskii’s translation of Tallemant’s work and related issues in Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 36–58. Grechanaia even suggests that the success of Trediakovskii’s book contributed to the spread of French in Russia (ibidem, 58, n. 95).

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composed to his translation of Tallemant’s work. The majority of these poems dealt in some way with love, and 17 of them were in French, replete with the clichés of gallant language, such as douceurs, feux, flammes, ravissements, and tendresses (sweet things, fires, flames, raptures, acts or words of tenderness).134 However, it was not until the middle of the reign of Catherine that a generation of Russian nobles matured who had not only learned foreign languages but had studied in western universities and undertaken a Grand Tour. Their upbringing, which had equipped them with all the talents an aristocrat was supposed to possess, including the ability to maintain a witty conversation in French, enabled them to shine in high society in Paris and Europe’s other cosmopolitan social centres. Some went further still, mingling with prominent figures in Francophone literary circles and engaging in activity that was uncommon for aristocrats of that era: they not only composed poems but also wrote critical articles, and translated works of literature, in the broad sense in which we have used the term. For some Russian aristocrats, entry into European high society and entry into the Republic of Letters during the Enlightenment were thus concurrent, overlapping experiences. Literary writing in French, for such men, was a means of consolidating their association with both the social and cultural worlds of Western Europe and of maintaining these connections from afar. Thus, for the eighteenth-century Russian aristocrat, Wladimir Berelowitch has pointed out, French in its written form was not merely a language of communication intended to reach distant readerships, because these Russian aristocrats, for the most part, did not dream of truly winning over a French public, any more than they aimed at a public of Russian readers: rather, their writings fit into networks of sociability and aimed at recognition within an order of distinction.135

The yearning of Russian aristocrats for inclusion in the western social and cultural universe is apparent from the essentially dialogic nature of some Russian literary writing in French, such as the admiring verses that Andrei Shuvalov addressed to Voltaire (1765) and to the French playwright and critic Jean-François de La Harpe (1773). Likening Voltaire to both Plato and Virgil, Shuvalov eulogized the sage of Ferney for cultivating reason and the arts in the tranquillity of his retreat, far from ‘la cabale et sa haine / L’éclat des 134 There was also one poem in Latin in Trediakovskii’s collection; the remainder were in Russian. See also Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 58–77. 135 Berelowitch, ‘Francophonie in Russia under Catherine II’, 50.

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cours, les caprices des Rois’ (the cabal and its hatred, the clamour of courts, the whims of kings).136 The flattering tone of such texts invites the attention and approval of their recipients, and the high quality of the French in which they were written greatly improved the chances that such petitioning would achieve these ends. We might regard such literary experimentation in French, on one level, as a form of self-promotion, but on another level Shuvalov and some of his compatriots were attempting, by initiating a conversation with French writers, to bring Russia, a new power on Europe’s ‘northern’ periphery, into the mainstream of European culture. (Russians had in effect been instructed to do this by Peter the Great, who was recognized in both France and Russia as the initial driving force of the process of cultural westernization.) In acting in this way, they were making a contribution to the task of improving Russia’s image in the European world.137 Shuvalov himself celebrated salon culture in an ‘Epistle to Ninon Lenclos’ (1774), a poem in alexandrines with rhyming couplets written in French that was so polished that it was attributed to Voltaire before the true identity of its author became known. Published, with some lacunae, in the prestigious Journal Encyclopédique (Encycloaedic Journal), which had been founded in 1756 by Pierre Rousseau in Liège, Shuvalov’s epistle was addressed to a renowned seventeenth-century salonnière: […] tu sçus réunir les plaisirs et la paix, Les arts, la volupté, le goût, la politesse, L’élégance des mœurs et la délicatesse, Où la sainte amitié, compagne de tes pas, D’un amour enjoué relevoit les appas. Le héros, le sçavant, le grand seigneur frivole, La beauté, tout couroit à ta charmante école. (You knew how to combine pleasures and peace, The arts, delight, taste, politeness, Elegance of manners and delicacy, Where holy friendship, companion of your steps, Heightened the appeal of playful love. 136 A. Shuvalov, ‘Épître de Mr le comte Schowalow à Mr de Voltaire’, 121, and ‘Vers d’un russe à M. de la Harpe’, 49–50. On these poems and Voltaire’s and La Harpe’s responses to them, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 87–90. 137 For fuller treatment of the various ways in which Russians strove to promote their national interest through miscellaneous writings in French, see Chapter 7 below.

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The hero, the man of learning, the flighty lord, Beauty, all came running to your charming school.)

Having both characterized the spirit of salon society and referred to some of its luminaries, such as Mme de Maintenon, La Rochefoucauld, and SaintÉvremont, Shuvalov claimed that this cultural model had been embraced on the banks of the Neva, where, thanks to Peter the Great, morals had been reformed and minds polished. Indifferent to court intrigue, the poet avouches, he devotes his leisure to reflection and amusement, enjoying the felicitous combination of philosophy and ‘douce gaîté’ (sweet gaiety) to which Parisian culture has introduced him.138 In the spirit of the cultural world with which he was thus identifying himself, Shuvalov also penned occasional verse, such as a tribute that was published in La Harpe’s Journal de politique et de littérature (Journal of Politics and Literature) to the first wife of the Grand Duke Paul, Princess Natal’ia Alekseevna, née Wilhelmina Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, who had died in 1776 at the age of only 21.139 Like Shuvalov, Prince Aleksandr Belosel’skii associated himself with the French literary world by addressing a flattering epistle to the ‘sublime’ Voltaire, who was a ‘phare à la Postérité’ (a beacon to posterity). As ‘un enfant du Nord’ (a child of the North), Belosel’skii thanked Voltaire for so many works which had warmed him ‘dans le pays des frimats’ (in the land of wintry weather).140 Brought up by a French governor, whose beneficent influence he acknowledged, Belosel’skii was another important cultural intermediary, who was described by his grandson as a representative ‘of the flower of eighteenth-century French culture which easily became acclimatized in the social hothouses of the North’.141 In an ‘Epistle to the French’ (1784), Belosel’skii enthusiastically embraced the French cultural model: Je veux vivre avec vous en bonne intelligence, Prendre part à vos jeux, à votre urbanité, A cette fleur d’esprit attachante et frivole, 138 A. Shuvalov, ‘Épître à Ninon Lenclos’. On this work, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 90–93. On Shuvalov’s writings in French that are conceived as what we might now call cultural propaganda on behalf of Russia, see the second section of Chapter 7 below. 139 ‘Vers sur la mort de S.A.I. Mad. La Grande Duchesse de Russie’. The poem is printed in the appendix to Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po frantsuzski, 321; see also 95–96 for Grechanaia’s comments on it. 140 Belosel’skii, ‘Épître du Prince de Beloselsky, Russe, à M. de Voltaire’, 176–177. 141 Alexandre Volkonskii, ‘Introduction’, in Volkonskaia, Œuvres choisies de la Princesse Zénéide Volkonsky, viii.

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A cette effervescence un peu légère et folle, A tous ces traits charmants de votre humanité142 (I want to live with you on good terms, Join in your games, your urbanity, That winning and light-hearted charm and wit, That slightly frivolous and mad effervescence, All those charming features of your humanity)

Even in the new climate of the early years of the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution and when the rise of Napoleon began to threaten the old European order, Belosel’skii could not cast off the spell of French culture. ‘Je sens que je suis né pour causer avec vous’ (I feel that I was born to talk to you), he wrote in a second ‘Epistle to the French’ (1802).143 Like other Europeanized Russians of his time, though, Belosel’skii had cosmopolitan tastes, and he did not feast exclusively on French culture. He was a lover of Italian music, whose pre-eminence he acknowledged and on which he produced a knowledgeable and elegant short book, also written in French. The French language, he asserted here, did not allow the French to emulate the grace and delicacy of their Italian singing masters, and they managed to emit only gargling noises! Nor is Belosel’skii ashamed of Russian achievement; indeed, he sounds a patriotic note when he refers to the ‘molle douceur’ (soft sweetness) and ‘simplicité majestueuse’ (majestic simplicity) of the singing of the Greek Orthodox Church which Vladimir had brought to Russia in the tenth century.144 For Russians like Andrei Shuvalov and Belosel’skii, whose motives for writing were the establishment and strengthening of ties with peers in the aristocratic society of Europe and the improvement of Russia’s image in western eyes, French was an essential lingua franca as they felt their way in the world of letters. Equally, a late eighteenth-century Russian writer was bound to prefer French to any other language if he was interested above all in winning a reputation for himself as a European man of letters, as seems to have been the case, Grechanaia has argued, with Boris 142 ‘Épître aux francais’, in Belosel’skii, Poésies françoises d’un Prince étranger […], 11. On the French poems by Belosel’skii that we have mentioned, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 103–106. 143 ‘Épitre aux François’ (no place of publication, 1802), 22–24; see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 112. 144 Belosel’skii, De la Musique en Italie, 12 n., 16 n.

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Golitsyn.145 It was through the medium of French, as used by his Swiss governor, Michel Olivier, that Golitsyn’s mind was formed when he was a child. His knowledge of Cato, on whom he began to write some reflections in his early adolescence, evidently comes from French works rather than from Roman literature itself (although Golitsyn did learn a little Latin).146 More generally, French texts, together with inspirational lessons from Olivier about republican conceptions of virtue and the defects of absolute government and courts plagued by flatterers, shaped Golitsyn’s precocious criticism of pre-revolutionary French society and Russian society. He expressed this criticism in a ‘Dedicatory Epistle to the Young Nobility’ (1782), which he conceived as an introduction to his work on Cato (Illustration 8).147 French ideas, and of course the linguistic formulae with which to express them, were reinforced during the long period, from 1782 to 1790, that Golitsyn spent in France, where his parents sent him, together with his brother Dmitrii, to complete his education, and where he became quite well-known in French literary circles. His literary ambitions are demonstrated by the fact that he tried his hand at various short genres, writing – in French in each case – an eclogue in imitation of Virgil,148 a prose fable, and an imitation of the German poet Christoph Wieland, all of which were published in France during his stay there.149 Golitsyn also attempted translation from English into French, publishing excerpts from Oliver Goldsmith’s Essays (1765), and in an essay of his own on this Irish author he ventured into literary criticism as well.150 Boris Golitsyn also experimented with another genre that was widely used in eighteenth-century belles-lettres, the treatise, drafting some reflections ‘On the Influence of Events on the Formation of a Constitution’.151 145 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 263–264. 146 ‘La Vie de Marcus Porcius Caton surnommé d’Utique’, RGB, f. 64, k. 79, d. 11. See Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 250. 147 ‘Épitre Dédicatoire à la Jeune Noblesse Russe’, RGB, f. 64, k. 79, d. 11. The work on Cato, however, has not survived, and may never have been written. 148 Mercure de France, 20 February 1790, 85–89. 149 Boris Golitsyn, Almanach littéraire ou Etrennes d’Apollon, contenant l’Aurore, Diogène et Glycère, par M. le Prince Baris de Galitsin […]. See Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila pofrantsuzski, 259–260. 150 Mercure de France, 8 November 1788, 78–84, followed by translations (84–88), and 15 November 1788, 132–137. Golitsyn’s expertise was not limited to French and English literature; he also wrote on the German writer Johann Kaspar Risbeck, also known as Gaspard Risbeck (ibidem, 12 July 1788, 97–102). 151 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, k. 113, d. 2; published in Rzheutskii [Rjéoutski] and Chudinov, ‘Russkie “uchastniki” Frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, 192–236 (original French version and Russian translation). For discussion of this work, see ibidem, 39–42.

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Illustration 8 Cover page of Prince Boris Golitsyn’s unfinished essay (1782).

Image held in the Russian State Library, Manuscripts Department, f. 64, k. 79, d. 11, fol. 1, and reproduced with their permission.

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Here he criticized the severity of the revolutionary changes that were taking place in France, holding up Britain as a commendable example of a country which experienced gradual social change. He also contended that peoples had a right to determine their own future and was sharply critical of monarchic despotism, in a way that was quite unusual for a Russian aristocrat. We may suppose that Golitsyn felt able to express his ideas with such freedom, and without worrying about the fact that they were politically impermissible in Russia at that time, both because he was abroad, probably in France, when he wrote this treatise and because he wrote it in French. Nor was Golitsyn alone in resorting to this genre for exposition of serious intellectual or scientific matters. Belosel’skii, for example, produced an epistemological treatise entitled Dianyology, or Philosophical Picture of Understanding (1790).152 Another member of the large Golitsyn clan, the diplomat Dmitrii Alekseevich, wrote substantial, wide-ranging, and learned treatises in French on mineralogy and political economy.153 Russians also used French for the composition of pedagogical treatises, of which Alexandre Golovkin produced a particularly fine example, entitled My Ideas on the Education of the [Fair] Sex, or a Summary of a Plan for the Education of My Daughter (1778; Illustration 9).154 Golovkin is perhaps an unusual case, for although he was of Russian origin, he grew up abroad and lived in Switzerland. Nevertheless, he kept in touch with Russians and Russian was one of the languages he used. (He also knew German.) His choice of French therefore places his work in a broad European tradition of pedagogical literature, especially literature written to aid the upbringing of the late eighteenth-century European nobility. Other Russians writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – including Vasilii Kapnist, Ivan Khemnitser, Iurii NeledinskiiMeletskii, Vasilii Khanykov, and Vasilii Pushkin (an uncle of the great poet) – produced what amounts in toto to a substantial corpus of verse in French, thus continuing a tradition begun by Trediakovskii and his contemporary 152 Dianyologie, ou Tableau philosophique de l’entendement. 153 Dmitrii Golitsyn [Gallitzin], Traité ou description abrégée et méthodique des minéraux (1794) and De l’esprit des économistes […] (1796). Both of these works are over 200 pages long. Some idea of their range can be gathered from the chapter headings of the latter work, which covers, for example, property, taxation, finances, commerce, monopolies, population, mendicancy, noble privilege, the third estate, legislation, crime and punishment, religion, education, despotism, and national character. On Dmitrii Golitsyn’s extensive links with France’s literary and intellectual elite, especially with Diderot, see Dulac, ‘La France de 1768 vue par un diplomate russe’. 154 Alexandre Golovkine, Mes idées sur l’éducation du sexe.

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Illustration 9 Title page of Alexandre Golovkin’s treatise Mes idées sur l’éducation du sexe, ou précis du plan d’éducation pour ma fille (1778). (The treatise has been wrongly attributed to Fedor Golovkin.)

The Russian National Library have kindly reproduced this image for us.

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Kantemir.155 Alexander Pushkin himself made a small contribution to this corpus.156 Serious subject-matter was not altogether lacking in this poetry. Kapnist, for example, was celebrating Russia’s success in the first of Catherine’s two wars with Turkey when he wrote an ‘Ode on the Occasion of the Peace Concluded between Russia and the Ottoman Porte’ (1775).157 Poetry occasioned by events in the life of the royal family, of which Khanykov produced several examples, was also to be taken seriously, of course.158 However, the Russian corpus of verse in French, on the whole, was not written for the public domain, and much of it was light-hearted as well as personal. Khanykov and Vasilii Pushkin, for instance, wrote poems intended to be inscribed in the private albums kept by noble families or set to music.159 The fabulist Khemnitser (who was of German parentage and wrote more verse in German than in French) penned two epigrams in an even lighter vein, as well as a couplet which he called his ‘epitaph’: ‘II est vrai que toujours je me suis vu sans bien; / Mais aussi je vécus ne craignant jamais rien’ (It is true that I have always been without wealth; / But I also lived without being afraid of anything).160 This corpus of verse written by Russian subjects in French represents only a slight literary achievement, but the multilingual proficiency of Francophone Russian poetasters could itself become a source of national pride, evidence with which to rebut the charge of Russian imitativeness. Thus, in the preface to a collection of French verse produced by Pavel Golenishchev-Kutuzov and published in Moscow 155 Kantemir is known to have written two short poems in French; one was a quatrain on ‘censure’ (‘Vers sur la critique’) and the other an eight-line ‘Madrigal à Madame duchesse d’Aiguillon’. (Mme d’Aiguillon was an aristocratic woman of letters and patron of the arts who comforted Kantemir during his terminal illness in Paris. Kantemir also dedicated the French edition of his satires to her.) These poems are reproduced in Lozinskij, ‘Le Prince Antioche Cantemir’, 241, 242. On Kantemir as a diplomat, see the third section of Chapter 5 above. 156 See his ‘Stances’ (1814), ‘Mon portrait’ (1814), ‘Couplets’ (1816–1817), ‘Tien et mien, – dit Lafontaine’ (1819), ‘A son amant Eglé sans résistance’ (1821), ‘J’ai possédé maîtresse honnête’ (1821), and ‘Quand au front du convive, au beau sein de Délie’ (1825), in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 1, 89, 90–91, 285–286, and vol. 2, pt 1, 205, 207, 376. Most of these poems in French were juvenilia, and they may therefore be considered experimental. 157 ‘Ode à l’occasion de la paix conclu entre la Russie et la Porte Ottomane […]’, in Kapnist, SS, vol. 1, 683–686. 158 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 235–236. 159 On Khanykov and Vasilii Pushkin as contributors to ‘album culture’, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 16, 235–244. Some examples of Khanykov’s verse of this sort are reproduced by Grechanaia, ibidem, 349–354; see also 354–358 for a few examples of Vasilii Pushkin’s verse. 160 ‘Epigramme sur Mr. N.A. Lwoff’, ‘Epigramme assez pour faire le portrait de N.A. Lwoff par la rime “-age ”’, and ‘Mon épitaphe’, in Khemnitser, PSS, 257–258.

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in 1811, the publisher boasted that the nation’s geniuses could write in a foreign language, and, what is more, in verse, a feat which writers of other nations, he imagined, were unable to match.161 Such patriots as Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s publisher would have been encouraged by the complimentary remarks that were made about the accuracy and naturalness of Russians’ written French by Émile Dupré de Saint-Maure, the compiler of the first French anthology of Russian writing in French, which appeared in Paris in 1823. Dupré specifically mentioned several Russian poets, including Khanykov, whom he congratulated on the ‘grace and sensibility’ of his verse, and Vasilii Pushkin, whose verse, Dupré thought, had ‘the charm of elegance’.162 Mme de Staël, on the other hand, was much less flattering in her work On Germany (1810–1813). In a broader critique of foreign imitation of the French spirit, she likened the tiresome verse of those Russian (and Polish) poets of whom she was aware to medieval Latin poetry, insisting that a language that was foreign (which she evidently considered the French used by the Russian nobility to be) was always in many respects a dead language.163 Perhaps, though, we should not overlook the educative function of Russian creativity in light genres, including occasional and private poetry. After all, some eminent men of letters among the noble elite resorted to jocular forms of writing that were employed in the salon, including ‘domestic’ poetry and other kinds of work written for the intimate family circle which it is customary to treat as belonging to literary genres that are considered marginal. Such genres are exemplified by writings produced in French by the major poet Zhukovskii and his friend and rural neighbour Aleksandr Pleshcheev. In the mid-Alexandrine period, around the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this pair set up a light-hearted Académie des curieux impertinents (Academy of Inquisitive and Impertinent Fellows) on Pleshcheev’s estate in the province of Orel. The ‘academy’ cultivated domestic forms of poetry and conducted its proceedings in French. However, this was not done entirely in jest, as Irina Viatkina has shown, for Zhukovskii’s and Pleshcheev’s initiative made it possible for them to indulge in some linguistic experimentation. Marginal writing of this sort, in which French was actively used, played a part in the elaboration of many a Russian author’s personal style. It also affected the formation of the Russian literary language more generally. As 161 [Golenishchev-Kutuzov], Poésies d’un Russe; quoted by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 16. 162 Saint-Maure, Anthologie russe, suivie de poésies originales, xxix, cited by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 21. 163 Mme de Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol. 1, 147.

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Zhukovskii’s case attests, writers used spoken French as a model for literary work, at least for work in a playful vein, and this practice helped them, when they adapted it for use in Russian, to bring the written form of their own language closer to its spoken form, from which literary Russian was still relatively distant in the early nineteenth century.164 Nor did the habit of writing verse in French fall into desuetude at the end of the age of Alexander I. Prince Aleksandr Bariatinskii, a Guards officer soon to be implicated in the Decembrist Revolt, published a short volume of French poems (epistles to individuals about love or friendship, occasional poetry, verses for albums, and translations of Horace and of fragments of Ozerov’s tragedies, including Fingal), in a collection entitled Some Hours of Leisure at Tul’chin in 1824.165 Of the major classical poets, Lermontov wrote a few French poems addressed to women, one in a woman’s album and another in a personal letter, and Tiutchev a more substantial number of French poems of various sorts.166 Among the minor poets, Xavier Labenskii, a Polish-born Russian diplomat, published elegiac verse exclusively in French, under the pseudonym Jean Polonius.167 Prince Elim Meshcherskii, another Russian diplomat, also published two volumes of his own French verse168 and a collection of his translations of verse by Russian poets, including Pushkin.169 Neither Labenskii nor Meshcherskii can be considered a typical representative of the noble estate, not least because they spent long periods abroad and because of their attraction to Catholicism, which, however, by no means precluded Russian patriotism: indeed, Meshcherskii subscribed to the values of Official Nationality and served as an aide to the man who formulated that doctrine, 164 Viatkina, Diglossiia russkikh marginal’nykh zhanrov. 165 Bariatinskii, Quelques heures de loisir à Toulchin. 166 e.g. Lermontov, ‘Non, si j’en crois mon espérance’ (1832?), ‘Quand je te vois sourire’ (date of composition unknown; not published in Lermontov’s lifetime), and ‘L’attente’ (1841?), in Lermontov, IP (1964), vol. 1, 269, and vol. 2, 99, 82; Tiutchev, ‘Nous avons pu tous deux, fatigués du voyage’ (1838), ‘Que l’homme est peu réel, qu’aisément il s’efface!’ (1842), ‘“Quel don lui faire au déclin de l’année?”’ (1847), ‘Un ciel lourd que la nuit bien avant l’heure assiège’ (1848), ‘Comme en aimant le cœur devient pusillanime’ (early 1850s), ‘Vous, dont on voit briller, dans les nuits azurées’ (1850), and ‘Des premiers ans de votre vie’ (1851), in Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 1, 182, 192, 195–196, 202, 217, and vol. 2, 23, 28. On Tiutchev, see also the sixth section of Chapter 7 below. 167 Labensky [i.e. Labenskii], Poésies (1827), Empédocle (1829), and Érostrate (1840). 168 Mestshcherski [i.e. Meshcherskii], Les Boréales (1839) and, posthumously, Les Roses noires (1845). On Meshcherskii’s French verse, see Mazon, ‘Kniaz’ Elim’, 406–421. Unlike Labenskii, Meshcherskii also wrote verse in Russian. On Meshcherskii’s formulation of a positive role for Russia in Europe in the 1830s, see the article by Mazon cited above; see also Mazon, Deux russes écrivains français, and Mil’china, Rossiia i Frantsiia, 352–355. 169 Meshcherskii, Les poètes russes traduits en vers français.

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Count Sergei Uvarov, in the mid-1830s.170 The list of mid-nineteenth-century poets who produced French verse includes women as well as men. In an anthology entitled Preludes (1839), Karolina Pavlova (née Jänisch; her father was of German extraction) published five French poems of her own, as well as verse translations into French from poetry in English, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian.171 Elizaveta Ulybysheva produced collections of her verse which contained both Russian and French poems, and these collections were quite well known in their time.172 By the middle of the age of Nicholas I, though, writing in French, in both poetry and prose, had ceased to have the importance it may have had for Russians in the late eighteenth century as a means of entering European social and cultural networks or in the early nineteenth as a vehicle for linguistic, stylistic, and literary experimentation.

Count Rostopchin’s ‘memoirs’ In the corpus of amateur literature that was produced by Russian aristocrats in French and often read in private gatherings such as the salon there was one particularly accomplished work of the late Alexandrine age on which we should dwell. We have in mind the seemingly impromptu work entitled ‘My Memoirs or Me as I Am, Written in Ten Minutes’,173 which was composed by Count Fedor Rostopchin, who had been the military governor and commander-in-chief of forces in Moscow when Napoleon’s army entered the city on 2 September 1812 (Illustration 10). These ‘memoirs’ were written late in 1823 or in 1824 in response to a suggestion made by the society hostess Countess Anna Bobrinskaia.174 As a man who had once played important 170 Mazon characterizes Meshcherskii’s poetry as a curious expression of Russian mysticism in the mood of the French Romantic poetry of the 1830s: Mazon, ‘Kniaz’ Elim’, 409. 171 Pavlova, Les Préludes; for Pavlova’s own poems, see 87–98. Pushkin and Zhukovskii were among the Russian poets whom Pavlova translated for this anthology. On Pavlova, see Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 93–107. 172 Ulybysheva, Épines et lauriers suivis du Juif errant (1845) and Journal d’une solitaire (1853). These works are cited by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 17. 173 Mes mémoires ou moi au naturel, écrits en dix minutes, available at http://www.miscellanees. com/r/rostop01.htm. For details of the many printed sources in which this work has been published, see n. 28 in Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘French in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Salon’, on which we draw in this section. 174 Bobrinskaia was the widow of Aleksei Bobrinskii, the illegitimate son of Catherine II and Grigorii Orlov, who was mentioned in the previous section of this chapter. The story about the way in which the ‘memoirs’ came to be written is told by Viazemskii in his article ‘Kharakteristicheskie zametki i vospominaniia o grafe Rostopchine’, 75.

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Illustration 10 Portait of Fedor Rostopchin by Orest Kiprenskii, 1809.

Kindly reproduced for us by the Russian National Library from Russkie portrety, vol. 1, 20.

roles in the Russian administration and a talented writer and raconteur who had been well connected in Russian high society over a long period, Rostopchin might have been expected to produce memoirs of historical and anecdotal interest. The document with which he shortly returned to Bobrinskaia’s salon may therefore have disappointed in one respect, but as a verbal offering to this social venue and later as a minor printed work of

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art it was highly successful. On 16 April 1839, long after Rostopchin’s death, the document appeared in print for the first time, in the Parisian daily Le Temps (The Time).175 It was subsequently translated from French into other languages, though often inaccurately. An English version, for example, appeared in The Athenæum, a London literary magazine, on 24 August 1839, preceded by a brief introduction which invited readers to speculate on whether ‘the climate of Russia […] might, could, would, or ought to produce such a compound of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, such a mixture of the Cynic and the Epicurean, as the author of this bluette [short playful piece] must be’.176 The ‘memoirs’ perfectly reflect the spirit of salon society in which Rostopchin himself was an accomplished, if overbearing, participant. For one thing, they are too brief for it to be possible that they will bore listeners who wish not so much to be informed as to be entertained. They consist of f ifteen so-called ‘chapters’, on such subjects as Rostopchin’s ‘education’, ‘sufferings’, ‘privations’, ‘respectable principles’, ‘tastes’, and ‘aversions’, but many of these chapters comprise only a single sentence, and none of them contains more than four. Rostopchin writes elegantly, in carefully crafted, well-balanced sentences. He takes pains to demonstrate that he has insight into character: ‘je suis devenu un vrai sage ou égoïste, ce qui est synonyme’ (I have become a true sage or [an] egoist, which is synonymous). As a keen student of the social world, he cannot but make jaundiced remarks on the human condition: ‘J’ai été privé de trois grandes jouissances de l’espèce humaine: du vol, de la gourmandise et de l’orgueil’ (I have been deprived of three great enjoyments of the human kind: theft, gluttony and pride). And again: ‘A force d’être impudent et charlatan je passai quelquefois pour un savant’ (By dint of being impudent and a charlatan I sometimes passed for a savant). He is capable of self-analysis, although he is self-deprecating only in ways likely to raise his own stock in the monde, where the criterion for esteem is not virtue but wit: ‘Je fus entêté comme une mule, capricieux comme une coquette, gai comme un enfant, paresseux comme une marmotte, actif comme Bonaparte’ (I was stubborn as a mule, capricious as a coquette, cheerful as a child, lazy as a sloth [literally a marmot in French] and as active as Bonaparte). It is part of Rostopchin’s appeal to this readership (or rather, to this audience, for what 175 The memoirs were reprinted in other papers (including papers in Brussels, Lyon, Orléans, and Strasbourg) within days of their publication in Le Temps. 176 ‘Memoirs of the Count Rostoptchine, written in Ten Minutes’, in The Athenæum, no. 617 (1839), 630.

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he writes is intended first and foremost to be read aloud in public) that he courts mild controversy. Thus, writing of his tastes, he declares that ‘Les bossus des deux sexes avaient pour moi un charme que je n’ai jamais pu définir’ (Hunchbacks of both sexes have a charm for me that I have never been able to define). At the same time, he has lightness of touch. When he confides that his favourite theatrical genres are comedy and farce, his listeners can be confident that he takes nothing so seriously that he will risk social unpleasantness by asserting his point of view insistently and at length. Above all, he displays wit and wishes to amuse: ‘Je n’ai jamais été impliqué dans aucun mariage ni aucun commérage’, he claims. ‘Je n’ai jamais recommandé ni cuisinier, ni médecin, par conséquent je n’ai attenté à la vie de personne’ (I have never been implicated in any marriage or any tittle-tattle. I have never recommended a cook or a doctor, so have never made an attempt on anyone’s life). In short, Rostopchin’s memoirs are a brisk, acute, self-conscious little literary work which borders on cynicism but is rescued from it by their author’s light-heartedness. It can be taken for granted that the author of such a work is familiar with the literature associated with the seventeenth-century French salon, including, for example, the pithy maxims of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and the perceptive sketches of character offered by Jean de La Bruyère. It is equally obvious that they are the product of, and were written for, the Russian salon society of the 1820s, which Pushkin wearily observed in the first canto of his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, whose eponymous hero ‘could express himself and write perfectly in French, danced the mazurka with ease, and bowed without stiffness’.177 Literature designed for consumption in this social domain might best be seen as material for accomplished performance of the sort expected of a nobleman playing a western role. Indeed, the notion of performance, to which Lotman drew attention, seems never to be far from Rostopchin’s mind as he succinctly reviews his life. It is clearly central, for example, in his valedictory ‘analysis’. His life, Rostopchin concludes, has been ‘un mauvais mélodrame à grand spectacle, où j’ai joué les héros, les tyrans, les amoureux, les pères nobles, mais jamais les valets’ (a bad melodrama in full public view in which I have played heroes, tyrants, lovers, and noble fathers but never servants). Petr Viazemskii, a poet and man of letters who had been close to Pushkin, gave grounds for this view of Rostopchin as performer in a thoughtful essay in which he compared him to an actor

177 Evgenii Onegin, Canto 1, Stanza 4, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 6, 6.

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who needs ‘stalls and boxes occupied by select and brilliant spectators’.178 Rostopchin himself boasted that he was a talented pantomime who in his youth had excelled in the art of acting.179 Thus, Rostopchin craved attention, and in Alexandrine Russia – or Restoration France, where he flourished from 1816 to 1823 – brilliance in the salon was one means of achieving it. Another means was populist demagoguery of the sort in which Rostopchin was engaged in the early years of the reign of Alexander I, when he was out of favour and not frequenting salons, and in 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia.180 The two roles in which Rostopchin shone, salon luminary and xenophobic agitator, required different languages, elegant French and racy Russian respectively, and he had a fine command of both.

Women’s place in the literary landscape We have seen that women were prolific contributors to the amateur literature that was produced for private purposes or for limited circulation within families or coteries in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aristocratic social sphere. We have also seen that French was the basic medium for such women’s writing, although other languages, including Russian, often featured in it too. In most of the more public domains of literature, on the other hand, men predominated, in spite of the attention that was devoted to educating the daughters of the nobility. This preponderance was due partly to the fact that educated women were not expected to have prominent roles outside the domestic and social spheres, especially in activity that was becoming professionalized.181 178 Viazemskii, ‘Kharakteristicheskie zametki i vospominaniia’, 74. 179 Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 126. 180 See our discussion of his Gallophobic texts in the penultimate section of Chapter 8 below, where we also consider the apparent paradox of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian nobleman who deplored Gallomania and yet persisted in using the French language for many purposes. 181 There is now a large literature on women’s writing in Russia, in which women’s predicament in the literary world is of course discussed. Major contributions to this field, on which we draw in this and the following section, include the history by Catriona Kelly (1994), the dictionary edited by Ledkovsky, Rosenthal, and Zirin (1994), and volumes edited by Marsh (1996) and by Rosslyn and Tosi (2007). On the period from c. 1760 to c. 1820, see also Kelly, ‘Sappho, Corinna, and Niobe’. There is an anthology of women’s autobiographical writing, Russia through Women’s Eyes, ed. by Clyman and Vowles, which begins with the autobiography written by Natal’ia Sokhanskaia in 1847–1848 and which therefore does not encompass the amateur ego-writings in French that we dealt with earlier in this chapter. (The editors do, however, discuss women’s autobiography in the period 1700–1855 in a section of their introduction: see 12–22.) The women’s

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Even men of letters frowned upon the participation of women in public creative writing, as we learn from the mid-eighteenth-century dramatist Sumarokov. Speaking of his daughter, Ekaterina, who was married to the dramatist, poet, and translator Iakov Kniazhnin, Sumarokov expressed the opinion that it was unseemly for a young woman to publish poetry, and love poetry at that. It is not surprising, then, that Ekaterina Kniazhnina’s verse was written as if it came from a man and that it was published anonymously.182 Indeed, women who produced original works of literature in Russian for publication in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to conceal their identity. Mar’ia Zubova, for example, published several Russian poems, so Novikov tells us, but she did not put her name to any of them.183 Women’s poetry, it is true, seemed more acceptable to high society than their prose, doubtless because it was more suitable for recital in the salon, which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, became one of the main social sites where noblewomen could play a role.184 Aleksandra Khvostova and Aleksandra Murzina are unusual in that they published Russian prose (although poetry also featured in their œuvre) under their own names. It is of interest, incidentally, that Khvostova’s two most notable works, her prose tales ‘The Hearth’ and ‘The Brook’,185 were circulated in manuscript before they were published, which leads us to wonder whether it was in this form that literary works written by Russian women in Russian most commonly became known. It is also worth noting that these two tales were translated into French and German around the turn of the century.186 Of course, other Russian writers who hoped to become known outside Russia, including Sumarokov and Karamzin, shared Khvostova’s wish to be read in major foreign languages. However, it is also possible that by passing from Russian into French (and German) Khvostova’s works gained greater legitimacy in autobiographical writing of the second half of the nineteenth century that is represented in this anthology belongs in the literary tradition in the vernacular. For reference to a late example of women’s autobiographical writing in French, the diaries of the expatriate Mariia Bashkirtseva (1860–1884), which were published in the 1880s, see 41–42. 182 Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 2, available at  http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=1105. 183 Ibidem, vol. 1, at. http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=931. 184 Take, e.g., the cases of Aleksandra Leont’evna Magnitskaia and her sister Natal’ia Leont’evna Magnitskaia, both of whom published their verse: ibidem, vol. 2, at http://lib.pushkinskijdom. ru/Default.aspx?tabid=965 and http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=998. 185 Khvostova, ‘Kamin’ and ‘Rucheek’. See the article by Andrei Kostin in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 3, at http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=10381. 186 Ibidem, vol. 3, at http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=10381 and http://lib. pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=1065.

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society’s eyes – legitimacy that women’s literature in Russian was only just beginning to acquire.187 Given the existence of a prejudice against female authorship in the public sphere, it is understandable that educated women who had an interest in writing turned to other types of literary activity. One such type of activity which it seems to have been more socially acceptable for Russian women to undertake than literary composition properly speaking was translation of belles-lettres and of writings on popular science, education, and other subjects. At least, this was work that women were more likely publicly to acknowledge as their own.188 There were many women who produced translations into Russian in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mainly from French, and who published their translations, but they made few, if any, of their own literary works public, at least in Russian. Examples include Evdokiia Boltina, who translated Voltaire’s play Socrates (1759), Elizaveta Demidova, Princess Varvara Golitsyna, Varvara Karaulova, Elizaveta Likhareva, Pelageia Veliasheva-Volyntseva, who translated Louis de Boissy’s comedy The Frenchman in London, Ekaterina Voeikova, and Princess Anna Volkonskaia, who, with her sister Ekaterina, translated a work of popular science from French and was praised on this account by Catherine II.189 If male critics began to take a more positive view of women’s writing in the early nineteenth century, then it was partly out of politeness of a sort. Some men patronizingly regarded engagement in literary activity as an educational experience from which women might benefit, for even in the noble milieu women received less tuition than men in their youth. In fact, the compliments that men addressed to the first women writers served to suggest that they considered what women wrote to be of secondary importance by comparison with men’s literary output.190 One might also have expected the development of women’s writing to have been hampered by the masculinization of the culture of literary and intellectual groups that 187 On Khvostova, see especially Andrei Kostin’s article in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 3, at http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=10381. 188 As in the case of Ekaterina Golitsyna, for instance: see Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 1, at http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=714. 189 Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 1. See the biographical entries on these women in the electronic edition of this dictionary http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=460. The original title of the work cited by Boissy is Le françois à Londres. Demidova seems to have written a novel in French, Zelmire, ou La Prisonnière turque, but the text has not been found. 190 See Rosslyn, ‘Conflicts over Gender and Status in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature’, 58–59.

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has been detected in the age of Alexander I. Whereas women were often the principal hosts and the centre of attention at social gatherings such as the salon and the ball, they were excluded from the meetings of Masonic lodges, which again began to flourish in the first half of Alexander’s reign, and of the new literary societies and secret political circles that proliferated in the second half of it.191 There may be several reasons for the change in male attitudes towards women that seems to have taken place in the Alexandrine period, as Catriona Kelly explains in her history of Russian women’s writing. Men of that period tended to be hostile, for example, to the harridans of the age of Catherine whose power was associated with the perceived reversal of normal sexual and power relations under a female autocrat presiding over a venal court. At the same time, the Romantic outlook, with its cult of male friendship and its strongly gendered concept of genius, diminished the importance of female company.192 The prospects for women aspiring to write poetry were particularly poor in the Romantic age, when ‘the “masculine” phenomenon of inspiration’ came to seem crucial to poetry’s production.193 It is as if male authors felt a need to return women, who had been drawn into the social limelight in the process of westernization that took place in eighteenth-century Russia, to a cultural margin. What is particularly striking, from our point of view, is the degree to which a number of male observers seem to have regarded women as disproportionately responsible for a supposedly undesirable linguistic situation. Wondering why the state of the Russian that was spoken in polite society still left so much to be desired around the turn of the century, Karamzin grumbled in his Letters of a Russian Traveller that Russian was not inferior to other languages as a medium for conversation but that ‘we just need our intelligent society people, especially beautiful women [?!], to seek out [Russian] expressions for their thoughts’.194 The writer and critic Petr Makarov, a supporter of Karamzin, was similarly reproachful: the language of society, he thought, had ‘not yet formed in our country because the people who could form it, 191 On Masonic lodges, see the second section of Chapter 4 above. 192 Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 36–38. This male preponderancy would persist in the philosophical and literary circles out of which the intelligentsia was born in the 1840s: such key sources for the study of this milieu as Herzen’s autobiographical My Past and Thoughts, Annenkov’s Remarkable Decade, and the personal correspondence of Belinskii and Botkin leave one with the impression of a gentleman’s club in which all the ardent expressions of love, affection, and comradeship were addressed to male companions. 193 Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 33. 194 Karamzin, Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 531; [Karamzin], Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 391.

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especially women, prefer to occupy themselves with foreign languages’.195 Vigel’, with greater venom, also blamed women for favouring French (an attitude which seemed treasonable in the Napoleonic period). ‘Who among our ladies did not scorn the Russian language then?’ he asked rhetorically, reflecting on the period in which the Battle of Austerlitz was fought. ‘Which of them read anything in it?’196 High society, more than ever, was ruled by women at that time: legislation and retribution were in their hands. Only the French language, in their eyes, was capable of expressing noble feelings, elevated thoughts, and all the mind’s subtleties, and it was their exclusive property. And the wives of officials, women who lived in the suburbs of St Petersburg, the gentry girls of Moscow and the provinces comically thought to enjoy the same rights as them. What fools these women were!197

Again, in a speech ‘On Russian Literature’ delivered at the Athenæum in Marseilles in 1830, Prince Elim Meshcherskii (that same Francophone poet to whom we referred above!) still held women responsible for the fact, as he saw it, that French had usurped the place of Russian in fashionable drawing-rooms, with the result that conversation in Russian was stunted. Taking pride in their ability to write French more correctly than Mme de Sévigné, all the ladies of St Petersburg and Moscow society, according to Meshcherskii, were so attached to that language that no suitor would have dared to express his feelings in Russian. Only recently had Russian begun to reassert itself, so that even ladies no longer thought it beneath them to cultivate the literature of their own country. This happy change in the spirit of the fair sex, Meshcherskii believed, was due to the surge of patriotic feeling generated by the French invasion of Russia in 1812.198 There would seem to be traces of such assumptions and feelings about women’s linguistic practice in Pushkin’s remarks, to which we have already referred, about Tat’iana in Eugene Onegin and about female cousins in a letter to his brother.199 Having emerged from the obscurity in which they dwelt in Muscovy to become 195 Makarov, ‘Novye knigi. Materi sopernitsy, ili kleveta’, 122. 196 Vigel’, Zapiski, 275. 197 Ibidem, 329. 198 ‘De la littérature russe’, in Mestscherski, Les poètes russes traduits en vers français par le prince, li–liii. This discourse was also published separately in 1830 (see bibliography entry on Mestschersky). The Athenæum in Marseilles was a kind of academy where courses and lectures on various subjects were open to the public. 199 See the first section of the Introduction above and the second section of this chapter.

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objects of admiration in the new polite society where command of French was de rigueur, women thus bore a heavy responsibility, in male judgements, for the supposed deficiencies of both the Russian spoken in society and the Russian literary language.

Early nineteenth-century women’s prose fiction It was not altogether inconsistent with male predominance in the world of politics and letters, or with the belief in that world that women should confine themselves to the polite social sphere, that women’s prose fiction should have flourished in Russia in the early nineteenth century as much as at any other time during the imperial period. Paradoxical as it may seem, Kelly observes, ‘the emergence of women’s writing in Russia was linked to a decline in women’s real political and economic powers’: that is to say, ‘social marginalization’ went together with a move towards ‘symbolic centrality’.200 Furthermore, the prevalence of the Sentimentalist outlook at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth helped to create a climate in which ‘female authorship could now be not only countenanced, but positively welcomed’: women were perceived ‘as the vessels of emotion, and emotion as the prerequisite of writing’.201 The legitimacy of female authorship may also have been borne in upon high Russian society by the writings of Mme de Staël, who visited Russia in 1812 when she was at the height of her fame, as well as by the earlier writings of other women, such as Mme de La Fayette and Mme de Genlis, who had long since been highly regarded there.202 200 Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 8; Kelly’s italics. See also 21–22. 201 Ibidem, 53. For a further useful discussion of attitudes towards women’s participation in literary activity and the status of women’s writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Rosslyn, ‘Conflicts over Gender and Status in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature’, especially 55–59, which introduce a chapter on Anna Bunina. 202 That is not to say that the prejudice against female authorship disappeared, even in the 1820s and 1830s, when Russian literary activity and journalism began to become more professionalized and women writers ceased to be curiosities and more unashamedly offered their work to publishers and literary journals. Some male writers continued to be critical of female authorship. In a tale entitled ‘The Woman Writer’ (1837), for example, Nikolai Verevkin, who wrote under the pseudonym Rakhmannyi, represented woman as an intellectually inferior being and assigned her a limited social role. Only men, according to Verevkin, had sufficient talent to contribute to belles-lettres. Moreover, literary activity supposedly changed women’s physiology and turned them into monsters (sic). The desire to be published, finally, was unnatural for women, since their main function was to bring up children (Rakhmannyi, ‘Zhenshchina-pisatel’nitsa’, Biblioteka dlia chteniia, vol. 23, pt 1 (1837), 15–134). See the analysis of this story in Savkina, Provintsialki russkoi literatury, Chapter 1. Belinskii too made airy generalizations, in 1840, about

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As women began in the reign of Alexander I to express themselves freely in prose, responding to the appetite for emotional sensitivity and psychological insight that had been whetted by Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s popular sentimental tale ‘Paul and Virginie’ (1787), three writers stand out, namely Natal’ia Golovkina (née Izmailova), Baroness Juliane von Krüdener (née von Vietinghoff), and Zinaida Volkonskaia (née Belosel’skaia). All three used the epistolary novel, a genre which Samuel Richardson had made popular from the mid-eighteenth century through Pamela (1740–1741) and Clarissa Harlowe (1747–1748) and which, as we noted above, had an effect on women’s ego-writing. Being from the upper echelons of the aristocracy, they were all highly proficient in French, and no doubt their choice of language for their fiction is explained in large part by their greater competence in French than in Russian, at least in the cases of Krüdener and Volkonskaia.203 Golovkina wrote two novels, Elizabeth, or the History of a Russian Woman Written by one of her Compatriots, which came out in three volumes in 1802, and Alphonse de Lodève, which was published in two volumes in 1807.204 The plurilingual eponymous heroine of Elizabeth is a young girl who falls in love with a nobleman called Antoine, whom a certain Mlle de M.***, the daughter of Russia’s ambassador in Vienna, tries – unsuccessfully, in the end – to entrap. Golovkina’s hero and heroine are Russian but they move in a cosmopolitan world where Russians, Germans, and English men and women communicate with one another in French. Not that Elizabeth and Antoine are typical creatures of the society drawing-room, for they value naturalness of feeling, as Grechanaia points out, while also resisting the fashionable cult of sensibility, which the anti-heroine cynically tries to exploit.205 Krüdener was born in Riga in 1764 into a Baltic German aristocratic family. She is remembered for the religious mysticism with which she affected the outlook of Alexander I, whom she met in June 1815, and for the part she the differences between men’s and women’s natures and declared that a woman could not be a great poet (‘Povesti Mar’i Zhukovoi’, in Belinskii, PSS, vol. 4, 115). 203 We return to this subject at the end of this section. 204 Golovkina, Elisabeth de S and Alphonse de Lodève. The second of these two novels is of little interest from the Russian viewpoint, since it is set entirely abroad and contains no Russian characters. Golovkina’s husband, Count Fedor Golovkin, would also publish a short epistolary novel in French, La Princesse d’Amalfi (1821), which dealt with an eleventh-century Italian subject; on this work, see Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 280–281. 205 Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 274-275. Grechanaia disagrees with Kelly’s assumption that the novel betrays ‘unconscious antagonism to the cult of sensibility’ (see Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 54), arguing that the author’s antagonism is in fact deliberate.

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may consequently have played in the formation of the ‘Holy Alliance’, the collective security pact between Russia, Austria, and Prussia after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.206 However, by that time she was already a wellknown figure in European literary circles. She had been greatly impressed by Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, whom she had met in Paris in 1789, and with whose encouragement she herself became a woman of letters. In 1802, she had some thoughts and maxims published in Le Mercure de France (The Mercury of France) and other periodicals. These met with the approval of Chateaubriand, who commended Krüdener’s choice of the language of Mme de Sévigné and Mme de La Fayette as the vehicle for the reflections of someone who thought ‘with so much delicacy’.207 Krüdener’s best-known work, though, was the novel Valerie or Letters by Gustav de Linar to Ernest de G… (1803).208 Often considered an autobiographical story about an impossible love affair, Valerie consists of 48 letters and some extracts from Gustav’s diary. Most of these are written by a Swedish man in his early twenties who confides to a friend, Ernest, that he has an all-consuming love for the eponymous teenage heroine. The remainder are written by Valerie, her husband (an anonymous count, who is in his late thirties and who was a close friend of Gustav’s deceased father), and Ernest. The action of the novel spans the period while Gustav is travelling with Valerie and her husband through the German lands, Austria, and Northern Italy, and a further year and a half after they have reached their destination, Venice, where the count has a diplomatic post. Convinced of the impossibility of pursuing his relationship with the wife of a man who is a second father to him, Gustav eventually resolves to part with Valerie forever. He seeks solitude in other parts of Italy but is unable to forget Valerie and in his distress falls ill and dies. Each member of the love triangle is morally irreproachable. Gustav is consumed with remorse for his ‘passion criminelle’ (criminal passion) and selflessly gives up his ‘amour insensé’ (senseless love).209 The count experiences no jealousy and comforts Gustav as he is dying. Valerie – unlike her creator, perhaps, for Krüdener was notorious for her amitiés amoureuses – is an ‘âme douce et modeste’ (sweet and modest soul) who has not knowingly encouraged Gustav’s attraction 206 There is a large literature on Krüdener: see especially Ley (1962), Mercier (1974), and Ley, Mercier, and Gretchanaia (2005). 207 ‘Pensées et maximes’, in Mercure de France, 2 October 1802, 80–84. Grechanaia quotes from this source in Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 288. 208 Krüdener, Valérie ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G… 209 The quotations are from letters 18 and 43, which are to be found on pp. 58 and 178 respectively in the online edition we have used (see bibliography).

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to her.210 The passionate but virtuous Gustav would subsequently merge into the synthesized image of ideal suitors that takes shape in the mind of Pushkin’s love-sick Tat’iana in Eugene Onegin.211 Valerie contained neither any Russian character nor any reference to anything that pertains specifically to Russia, but it does deserve consideration here on account of its importance both as an influential example of writing in French by a female subject of the Russian Empire and as a work that is sensitive to cultural currents which were beginning to affect Russia as well as other European countries. Punctuated by dramatic expressions of feeling, the novel reflected the vogue for writing in which sentiment was prized, heroes were prone to melancholy, and Christianity was poeticized.212 Krüdener’s Gustav is an impressionable, lachrymose dreamer, one of those ‘âmes ardentes et rares’ (rare and ardent souls) who have ‘la funeste puissance d’aimer’ (the fatal power to love).213 There is, he thinks, a ‘fonds intarissable de bonheur qui se trouve dans l’homme dont le cœur est resté près de la nature’ (inexhaustible stock of bliss in the man whose heart has remained close to Nature).214 He prefers to commune with Nature than to participate in the empty amusements of the Viennese grand monde: J’ai vu des bals, des dîners, des spectacles, des promenades, et j’ai dit cent fois que j’admirais la magnificence de cette ville tant vantée par les étrangers. Cependant je n’ai pas obtenu un seul moment de plaisir. La solitude des fêtes est si aride: celle de la nature nous aide toujours à tirer quelque chose de satisfaisant de notre âme; celle du monde nous fait voir une foule d’objets qui nous empêchent d’être à nous et ne nous donnent rien.215 (I have seen balls, dinners, plays, and walks, and I have said a hundred times how much I admire the magnificence of this city that foreigners speak so highly of. And yet, I have not gained a single moment of pleasure [in it]. The solitude of festivities is so arid; that of nature always helps us 210 Ibidem, letter 47 (p. 209). 211 Evgenii Onegin, Canto 3, Stanza 9, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 6, 55. In his notes to his novel in verse Pushkin explained that de Linar was ‘the hero of Baroness Krüdener’s charming novella’ (ibidem, n. 18 on p. 193). 212 The most notable example of the Romantic attitude towards Christianity was Chateaubriand’s chef d’œuvre, Le Génie du Christianisme (1802). 213 Krüdener, Valérie, letter 2 (p. 14). 214 Ibidem, Gustav’s journal (p. 194). 215 Ibidem, letter 11 (pp. 36–37).

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to draw something satisfying from our soul; that of society causes us to see a crowd of objects which prevent us from being ourselves and give us nothing.)

This weariness with the monde returns to Gustav in Venice, where he is prompted to send Ernest a letter devoted almost entirely to society’s ills. He experiences disgust whenever he is obliged to appear in this vain and immoral milieu, where petty passions efface the ‘traits primitifs de candeur et de bonté’ (primitive traits of candour and goodness) that one would want to see in one’s children. Full of mistrust, egoism, and conceit, the people who make up high society have sealed themselves off from the joys of which those humans who retain their natural goodness are capable: it is a ‘classe que l’ambition, les grandeurs et la richesse séparent tant du reste de l’humanité’ (class that ambition, splendour, and wealth separate so much from the rest of humanity).216 This representation of the beau monde would seem to foreshadow the criticism directed at it by cultural nationalists who deplored Russians’ use of the foreign language with which the monde was associated. And yet, for all the heightened sensibility of Krüdener’s characters, her hero’s preference for naturalness over artifice, and her presentation of high society as a corrupted world apart, Krüdener was an unabashed representative of aristocratic society and an admirer of its French model.217 In some unpublished notes, for example, she defended the spirit of French society against Rousseauesque attacks on it, drawing a distinction between légèreté of tone in conversation (light-heartedness, we might say) and légèreté of character (superficiality or frivolity): Les mœurs en France ont gagné par la politesse même, par l’élégance et la délicatesse; ainsi on contesterait cet ancien principe que les mœurs se corrompent […] en se polissant. Les mœurs se détruisent par le luxe, par la mollesse, par […] l’abandon du travail et le besoin de faux plaisirs, […] mais ce n’est pas à la politesse, à l’élégance que cela tient […]218 (Morals in France have benefited from politeness, elegance, and delicacy; so one would challenge the old principle that morals are corrupted […] as 216 Ibidem, letter 22 (p. 82). 217 The point is emphasized by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 289. 218 Quoted by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 286, from an archival source (GARF, f. 967, op. 1, d. 4, fol. 23).

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they are polished. Morals are ruined by luxury, softness […] the abandonment of work and the need for false pleasures, […] but it is not politeness or elegance that is to blame for this […] )

Krüdener herself, we might add, was for a time a salonnière in Paris.219 Volkonskaia, the last of the three principal women writers who wrote French fiction in the Alexandrine age, was the daughter of Prince Belosel’skii.220 Born in Dresden in 1790 (or according to other sources in Turin in 1792), Volkonskaia spent her early years abroad, her father being a diplomat. Educated by French and Italian tutors, she was another multilingual cosmopolitan who led a peripatetic life. In 1811, she married the aide-de-camp of Alexander I, Prince Nikita Volkonskii.221 She was also a close friend (and probably a lover) of Alexander himself. An accomplished singer and actress, she became well known in Parisian society when the Russian army was stationed in France in 1814, and she travelled with the Russian court to London and subsequently to the Congress of Vienna. From 1824 to 1829 she lived in Moscow, where she hosted a notable salon which was frequented by such outstanding men of letters as the poets Baratynskii, Pushkin, Dmitrii Venevitinov, and Viazemskii.222 However, after 1825 she fell out of favour with the authorities, owing to her ties with Decembrists and her leanings towards Catholicism, to which she formally converted in 1833. In 1829, she settled in Rome and after that returned to Russia only twice, in 1836 and 1840, for brief visits. Living in what became known as the Villa Wolkonsky (nowadays the official residence of the British ambassador to Italy), she received Russian writers and painters such as Gogol’ and Karl Briullov and devoted herself to charitable works.223 219 See Gretchanaïa, ‘Le salon de Madame de Krüdener à Paris en 1802–1803’. 220 See the fourth section of this chapter above. 221 Nikita was the elder brother of Sergei, the Decembrist exiled to Siberia; Sergei’s wife, Mariia Volkonskaia, née Raevskaia, whom we mentioned in the third section of Chapter 4, was therefore Zinaida’s sister-in-law. 222 See the introductory article in Murav’ev (ed.), V tsarstve muz, 5–23, and Saikina, Moskovskii literaturnyi salon kniagini Zinaidy Volkonskoi. 223 On Volkonskaia, see her son’s introduction in Volkonskaia, Œuvres choisies de la Princesse Zénéide Volkonsky, vii–xv. On her life and work, see also Gorodetzky (1960 and 1969) and the entry in Ledkovsky et al. (eds), Dictionary of Russian Women’s Writing, 725–726. On her prose fiction, see especially Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 55–58, Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin, 131–149, and Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzksi, 131–138. On her correspondence, see Aroutunova, Lives in Letters. See also a stimulating recent essay in which Grechanaia views both Krüdener and Volkonskaia in the context of the debate that was already beginning in the late eighteenth century between nobles of cosmopolitan outlook (for example, Andrei Shuvalov and Belosel’skii), who felt that Russians could be at ease in the European world, and those who

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Volkonskaia’s theatrical, musical, and social achievements may have surpassed her achievements as a writer, but her Four Tales (1819) and the romanticized novel Tableau of the Slavs in the Fifth Century (1824; Illustration 11) are substantial and well-known examples of women’s prose writing in French.224 Of the Four Tales, the most important from our point of view is ‘Laura’. The eponymous protagonist of this story, which is set in France, is an orphan brought up by a strict aunt. After marrying at the age of fifteen, Laura is taken to live with her mother-in-law in Montpellier while her husband, Hippolyte, attends to business elsewhere. Having looked forward to entering society, the beautiful Laura finds social gatherings tedious, until she visits the lively, entertaining salon of Madame de C***, where other women quickly become jealous of the attention she attracts. Here the ingenuous girl falls under the influence of an unscrupulous baroness who is adept at social intrigue. Having captivated Laura, the baroness too becomes jealous of her protégée and vengefully humiliates her by making her behave in such a way that she seems a foolish coquette. ‘Laura’ is a tale with weak characterization, poor emplotment, and some jejune remarks about the effect of the North and the South on character.225 The reader’s interest is bound to wane as Volkonskaia’s narrative loses focus in its last third: Laura leaves salon society, begins to study under the direction of the insipid Hippolyte, by extraordinary coincidence re-encounters former acquaintances, and eventually finds fulfilment of a sort in motherhood. All the same, the tale is of interest here both as an example of elegant French prose written by a Russian woman and as an expression, early in the nineteenth century, of Russian unease – which would soon become much more pronounced – about the French social model that had been adopted by eighteenth-century aristocrats such as Andrei Shuvalov and Zinaida’s own father, Prince Belosel’skii. This unease manifests itself in ‘Laura’ in two main ways. emphasized Russia’s distinctiveness and urged compatriots to distance themselves from the West. Grechanaia concludes that Russian women writers, writing only in French (as far as we know) and defending the Russian nation without arguing for an exclusivist view of it, tended to take a more universalist position than their male counterparts and presented themselves more consistently as ‘Russian Europeans’. Indeed, women writers prefigured the Westernizers of the 1840s and 1850s, Grechanaia contends. See Grechanaia, ‘Between National Myth and Trans-National Ideal’, especially 395. 224 See Volkonskaia, Quatre nouvelles, in Œuvres choisies de la Princesse Zénéide Volkonsky, 3–142; idem, Tableau slave du cinquième siècle, ibidem, 155–218. An earlier experiment by Volkonskaia in French prose, ‘Histoire de Lycoris’, which featured in an aristocratic album, is reproduced in Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 362–365. 225 ‘Laure’, in Volkonskaia, Œuvres choisies de la Princesse Zénéide Volkonsky, 3–66. For the remarks on the North and the South, see p. 40.

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Illustration 11 Title page of Le Tableau slave. Par Mme de la P*** Zénéide Volkonsky (2nd edn, Moscow 1826).

The book is held in the Russian National Library, who have kindly produced this image for us.

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First, the tale confronts the question of the identity of the nation, which is perceived by other Europeans, and by some Russians themselves, as imitative. By the expedient of suddenly introducing a Parisian, an Englishman, and a Russian into the provincial society in which Laura finds herself, Volkonskaia is able to allude derisively to European perceptions of Russia and Russians. She implicitly mocks the view of Russia, which she claims is still widespread in Southern Europe, as a land covered in ice for twelve months a year, where words themselves ‘gêlent dans la rue’ (freeze in the street).226 As for the Russians, they are expected by southern Europeans to have about them ‘quelque chose de singulier et d’un peu barbare’ (something odd and a little barbarous).227 Her representative of the Russian elite in the tale, Count Vladimir, helps to undermine this stereotype, for he behaves in the eyes of Laura like ‘un vrai chevalier, un Bayard’ (a true knight, a Bayard).228 He also provides an intimation of cultural independence. He has mastered the French language and cultural idiom, to be sure, for he is described as ‘plus Parisien que les Parisiens mêmes pour l’urbanité du langage’ (more Parisian than the Parisians themselves in the urbanity of his language). Nonetheless, he believes that ‘l’imitation servile est au-dessous de la dignité de l’homme’ (servile imitation is beneath man’s dignity) and is offended by the tendency of some of his compatriots to mimic foreigners. Il avait été frappé du ridicule que quelques-uns de ses compatriotes s’étaient donné en quittant la tournure guerrière et simple, qui leur est naturelle, pour copier strictement les manières de telle ou telle autre nation. Il souffrait de voir en eux cette affectation qui contrastait si fort avec le caractère national russe, et leur disait hautement qu’ils étaient devenus la charge de ceux qu’ils voulaient imiter.229 (He had been struck by the ridicule that certain of his compatriots had brought upon themselves by abandoning the warlike and simple bearing that was natural to them in order strictly to copy the manners of this or that other nation. It pained him to see in them this affectation, which contrasted so strongly with the Russian national character, and he would tell them openly that they had become a caricature of those whom they wished to imitate.) 226 Ibidem, 35. 227 Ibidem. 228 Ibidem, 50. Pierre Terrail de Bayard (1473–1524) was a famed French knight. 229 Ibidem, 32.

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European readers, then, should not be deceived by the impression that some Russians might make on them as culturally subservient: on the contrary, they should be aware of the national pride and military prowess that had recently enabled Russia to withstand Napoleon’s invasion. Secondly, Volkonskaia consistently presents salon society – or at least, provincial attempts to replicate the metropolitan exemplar of it – in a negative light. Regulated by cold etiquette, the salon is a site of petty rivalries, jealousies, and malice, a ‘tribunal capricieux qui s’empare d’une réputation, et qui la forme et la brise avec la même facilité’ (capricious tribunal which takes possession of a reputation and makes and breaks it with equal ease).230 Its habitués are obsessed with mode, seeming to regard changes in fashion as no less important than the overthrow of empires.231 Its ‘dialect’ has ‘niaiseries fines’ (subtle sillinesses) which no textbook can teach a foreigner.232 A girl of fifteen, the narrator reflects, may easily be carried away by this world without seeing its defects, for it is synonyme de douceur de la vie; c’est l’idole de la jeunesse, qui en ignore les illusions; c’est le tyran des êtres faibles, qui adorent cette figure creuse, tout en la connaissant et qui déposent à ses pieds leurs goûts, leurs inclinations, et même leurs sentiments.233 (synonymous with sweetness of life; it is the idol of youth, which is unaware of the illusoriness of it; it is the tyrant of weak beings, who adore this sunken face while knowing it well, and who lay their tastes, inclinations, and even their feelings at its feet.)

Each of the remaining stories in Volkonskaia’s Four Tales – ‘Two Tribes of Brazil, or Nabuya and Zioié’, ‘Mandingo Husbands’, and ‘The Child of Kashmir’ – is set on a different continent. Saturated with references to local flora, food, artefacts, beliefs, and customs, these tales reflect the taste of early nineteenth-century Romantic writers for exoticism.234 The first of them enables Volkonskaia to imply a contrast between the mores of apparently primitive but pure indigenous tribes in South America and the polished European society in 230 Ibidem, 10, 15. 231 Ibidem, 27. 232 Ibidem, 41. 233 Ibidem, 7. 234 ‘Deux tribus du Brésil, ou Nabuya et Zioié, nouvelle américaine’, ‘Les maris mandingues’, and ‘L’enfant de Kachemyr, nouvelle asiatique’, in Volkonskaia, Œuvres choisies de la Princesse Zénéide Volkonsky, 67–87, 89–121, and 123–142 respectively.

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which she moved. At the end of the second, which is set in Saharan Africa, she points up lessons about male despotism and the need for young girls not to be gullible.235 In the third, she hints that ‘la société de la nature’ (natural society) is purer and more delightful than that of the refined classes, to which the man who is wont to ‘déguiser son âme’ (conceal his soul) belongs.236 In the Tableau of the Slavs of the Fifth Century, finally, this exoticism and the yearning for unaffected simplicity are applied to Russia itself. In her preface to the Tableau, Volkonskaia presents the work as an examination of the occupations, practices, manners, and cult of the ancient Slavs who lived in the region of the River Dnieper.237 In the course of the Tableau she also repeatedly invokes the authority of various scholars in order to validate her description of the life of the early Slav tribes, making use in particular of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, of which eleven volumes had appeared by the end of 1824, the year in which the Tableau was published. Up to a point, then, this work is indeed a pastiche of the available historical data on pre-literate Slavic culture, as has been claimed.238 In the last analysis, though, it resembles Karamzin’s own historical tales, in that it is not so much an ethnographical sketch as a pleasing fiction which helps to establish a new national myth. (It was mockingly reviewed as such by Stendhal.239) The Slavs of the forest (Drevliane), among whom Volkonskaia’s hero Ladovid finds his bride, Miliada, are naked savages who are badly in need of civilization, it is true; but the Slavs of the plain (Poliane), to whom Ladovid belongs, are distinguished by a natural virtue to which Miliada eventually succumbs and have a great futurity. In literary-historical terms, it has been claimed, the French-language texts produced by these Russian writers of the early nineteenth-century ‘are of considerable importance in the development of women’s prose writing in Russian’. 240 The portrayal of the heroines in Four Tales, it is argued, foreshadows the psychological prose of Romantic writers, and in ‘Laura’ Volkonskaia ‘develops themes and styles of the society tale’ some time before the genre established itself in Russia, broaching ‘the theme of a woman trapped in social constraints’.241 The path that Laura follows 235 ‘Les maris mandingues’, 121. 236 ‘L’enfant de Kachemyr’, 134. 237 Tableau slave, 155. 238 Ledkovsky et al. (eds), Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, 726. 239 See Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 136–137. 240 Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 54. 241 Tosi, ‘Women and Literature, Women in Literature’, 55. On the society tale, see the fifth section of Chapter 8 below.

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‘from the seclusion of her aunt’s castle to the retreat in the bosom of her family via the false steps of salon life and the failure of intellectual pursuits’, Alessandra Tosi concludes, ‘reflects the limits to women’s freedom in early nineteenth-century and European polite society, limits tested by Volkonskaia herself’.242 From the point of view of the social and cultural history of language, Volkonskaia’s Four Tales and the epistolary novels by Golovkina and Krüdener are of interest because they illustrate the mastery of French achieved by members of the Russian aristocracy and the opportunity that command of French gave women to blossom in the literary world. At the same time, these prose writings may represent a high-water mark in the use of French as a language of fiction in imperial Russia. It would also be dangerous to use them as a basis for generalizations about the linguistic competencies of Russian noblewomen, or rather about their lack of competence in Russian. It is no doubt true that Krüdener and Volkonskaia, at least, were much better able to express themselves in French than in Russian, but neither should be considered a typical Russian aristocrat of the Alexandrine age, if there was such a thing. Krüdener, although a subject of the Russian Empire, was of Baltic German parentage. It is not known what level of competence she had in Russian, but the languages that she had learned in earliest childhood were French and German.243 She was married for twenty years of her adult life, until she was widowed in 1802, to a diplomat from another German family of the Russian Empire. Almost all her life, moreover, was spent abroad, in Denmark, Italy, Germany, France, and Switzerland. As for Volkonskaia, she was brought up abroad and did not embark on a serious study of the Russian language until the 1820s, when she was in her thirties, after she had written her Four Tales. It was only at that point in her adulthood that she began to write works in Russian, notably an ambitious prose tale on Olga, the woman who ruled the Kievan state from 945 to 960. However, she failed to complete this work after she had settled in Italy for good, and only a few ‘cantos’ were published in her lifetime.244 * 242 Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin, 148. 243 Gretchanaia, ‘Varvara-Juliana de Vietinghoff’ (2004); idem, Kogda Rossiia govorila pofrantsuzski, 170–171. 244 In Moskovskii nabliudatel’ in 1836. See the fragments in ‘Skazanie ob Ol’ge’, available at http://az.lib.ru/w/wolkonskaja_z_a/text_0060.shtml, which are also reproduced in Murav’ev (ed.), V tsarstve muz, 36 ff.

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The Russian corpus of writing in French (both the women’s prose fiction that we have just examined and the ego-writing and miscellaneous examples of nobles’ poetry and prose that we examined in preceding sections of this chapter) can of course be considered a contribution to French literature. In this respect, Russians’ texts in French may be compared to texts produced by Francophone writers of many other nationalities, such as certain plays by the Swede August Strindberg, the Italian Vittorio Alfieri, and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco, and some of the plays, novels, and shorter prose works of the Irishman Samuel Beckett. And yet, out of the Russian corpus of work we have described, only Krüdener’s Valerie merits much attention as a French literary phenomenon. It therefore seems that although French had many functions as a written language in Russia it was never really a serious competitor to Russian in the realm of belles-lettres. Indeed, with a few exceptions (most notably, perhaps, Rostopchin’s ‘Memoirs’ and Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letters’, which we shall examine in the following chapter, as well as Krüdener’s Valerie) Russian writings in French do not reach the artistic or intellectual level that distinguishes some of the works by bilingual authors of other nationalities that we have mentioned. They appear, as Lotman observed, to be of marginal significance.245 The most likely explanation for the relative poverty of the corpus of Russian belles-lettres in French is that from the late eighteenth century onwards Russian writers began to conceive of themselves not as amateurs indulging in an aristocratic activity but as patriotic representatives of an ethnos striving to express itself independently in its own vernacular, as Volkonskaia herself was clearly coming to recognize in the 1820s. For this higher vocation, writers needed to write in Russian. The focus of this chapter has been on the private and public writings produced by Russians in French for social and cultural purposes during what we might call the golden age of Russian francophonie, from the mideighteenth century up until the end of the age of Alexander I in 1825. During that age, Russia was being transformed into a European cultural power, as well as a major military power, and the Russian nobility was aspiring to join the European social elite and cultural community. We turn now to another important function of French as a written language in Russia, namely its use for communication with the outside world in the realms of cultural diplomacy, cultural politics, and broader historiosophical or geopolitical speculation. For these purposes, French began to be used early in the eighteenth century and flourished well beyond the first Alexandrine age. 245 Lotman, ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, 355.



Chapter 7 French for cultural propaganda and political polemics

Transforming Russia’s image One important function of French in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, besides those functions we have examined in preceding chapters, was to project a certain image of the expanding Russian Empire and the emergent Russian nation to other European peoples who, lacking knowledge of Russian, had access to little or no unmediated information about the country. This essentially propagandistic function of Russian francophonie had both a cultural and a political dimension.1 The French language was a medium through which to publicize abroad the achievements of Russia’s new secular cultural elite. It also served as a vehicle through which sovereigns and patriots could defend Russia’s polity and society against their detractors. However, French could just as well be used by opponents of the Russian regime as by supporters of it, in order to broadcast grievances, enhance solidarity among equally discontented compatriots, and more generally contribute to debate about Russia’s relationship with Europe. Thus, from the age of Nicholas I, French eventually served as a tool for Russian writers at different points on the political spectrum, loyalists and opponents alike, as they tried to win over to their point of view both a European public and members of Russia’s own political, social, and intellectual elites. Russian attempts to influence European public opinion began as early as the first half of the eighteenth century, even before French had established itself as the most prestigious foreign language at the Russian court and among the aristocracy. As Russia emerged – in the conception of Enlightenment thinkers – from the ‘darkness’ of pre-Petrine Muscovy and came to occupy 1 To describe some of the French writing produced in eighteenth-century Russia as a species of ‘propaganda’ may seem anachronistic, even though the term propaganda, in the phrase de propaganda fide (concerning the faith to be propagated), dates from the early seventeenth century. In fact, though, the term was already beginning to be used outside the religious domain by the late eighteenth century, and in any case the phenomenon it now denotes (spreading information or undertaking activity designed to promote a certain way of thinking) was, of course, not new. The term is now accepted by scholars working on the eighteenth century: see, e.g., Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda and Politics in 18th-Century England, and Dziembowski, Ecrits sur le patriotisme, l’esprit public et la propagande au milieu du XVIIIe siècle. By the second half of the nineteenth century it had gained wide currency among socialists in particular.

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one of the foremost places among the European nations, its image became a crucial issue for Europeans concerned about the empire’s growing power and, above all, for Russians themselves. Russians understood that their admittance to the concert of European nations depended not only on the actual state of Russia’s society, economy, armed forces, sciences, belles-lettres, and arts but also – perhaps even more – on public perceptions of them in Europe. Public opinion in the West, in the eighteenth century, was already being formed to a large extent by the press, especially the Francophone press.2 Periodical publications in French – newspapers, journals, gazettes – were spreading in almost all European countries: in the German-speaking lands and Britain, for example, and above all in the Dutch Republic, or the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.3 By 1765, as many as a dozen periodicals in French had been published at one time or another in the city of Hamburg alone.4 From the time of Peter the Great on, the Russians began to make use of this press for propagandistic purposes. Sometimes financial inducements might be required to buy journalists’ favours, as a French expatriate living in mid-eighteenth century Russia acknowledged in a polemical text that he wrote in order to ‘defend and illustrate’ the country, when he put the following words into the mouth of a Russian: ‘you have to pay a lot for the history of your nation if you want it to do you credit’.5 However, money was not everything. A country seeking, as Russia was, to create a positive image of itself needed also to build networks of sympathizers, arousing the curiosity of journalists and the interest of the European public in this ‘new’ society, which was so unfamiliar to them. In many respects, the programme of self-promotion through Francophone publications that we shall describe in this and the following sections seems remarkably familiar to a twenty-first-century observer, involving what we should now call networking, literary agents, opinion-formers, publicity, public relations, press coverage, and image-creation. Even before the reign of Peter the Great, Russians had occasionally taken note of what was written about their country in European newspapers. It concerned them, for example, that the title of Tsar Alexis, Peter’s father, was not properly rendered in Dutch papers, which simply referred to Alexis as the ‘Prince of Muscovy’.6 It was with the accession of Peter himself, though, 2 We draw in this section on the findings published in Rjéoutski, ‘La presse sous influence’. 3 We have drawn some of the information on the periodicals mentioned below from the Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789 at http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/. 4 See, e.g., Böning, Deutsche Presse, vol. 1.1, Hamburg. 5 [Chevalier Desessart], ‘Voyageur moscovite ou Lettres russes’, RNB, Manuscripts Department, Fr. Q XV 38, fol. 15. 6 See Kopanev, ‘Les Nouvelles sur la Russie dans les périodiques francophones’.

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that the Russian authorities began to pay serious attention to what was said about Russia and its sovereigns in the western press. The translators of the above-mentioned Vesti-Kuranty7 played an important role in this task, but by the 1720s they were monitoring a greater volume of western newspapers than their seventeenth-century predecessors had done, including leading Dutch newspapers that were published in French. Another important difference concerned the news chosen for inclusion in the digests: under Peter, particular attention began to be paid to news about Russia. 8 Thus, in copies of the Francophone Gazette de Leyde (Leiden Gazette) that have been preserved in Russian archives we see translators’ comments such as ‘has been read and has nothing objectionable in it’ or ‘something damaging written here’.9 If something ‘objectionable’ was found, then Russian officials would promptly take steps. Thus repeated requests were made to the authorities in Hamburg on Peter’s behalf to muzzle that city’s journalists.10 What made the task of building a positive image of Russia in the West so difficult was the persistence of clichés constructed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travellers who had described Russia as a realm of tyranny, superstition, and barbaric mores and practices.11 Such prejudice helped to explain why the French people, as Grigorii Volkov, the secretary of the Russian embassy in Paris, complained in 1711, were ‘all hostile to Russia’. However good the news from Russia might be, the French did not want to listen to it and would not let the newspapers publish it. Perhaps it would be more beneficial, Volkov wondered, ‘to win over the editors of the newspapers, so that they might print news which is more favourable to us’.12 In order to counter such hostility, Russian literary agents (the term is anachronistic, but that is really what they were) started in the early part of Peter’s reign to approach western periodicals and to use foreign publishers more generally to rebut negative European representations of Russia and 7 On the Vesti-Kuranty, see also the first section of Chapter 2 and the first section of Chapter 5 above. 8 Maier and Shamin, ‘Obzory inostrannoi pressy v Kollegii inostrannykh del’, 105–106. 9 Ibidem, 102. 10 It was demanded, for example, that ‘no libels be printed about the Russian state’ (RGADA, f. 44, 1705, d. 1). Tracking publications in the local press that gave offence to Russia, incidentally, became one of the basic duties of the Russian resident in Lower Saxony, Johann Friedrich Böttiger. On Böttiger’s propagandistic activity on Russia’s behalf, see Fundaminski, ‘Resident Johann Friedrich Böttiger und die russische Propaganda’. 11 For the opinions of French travellers, see Mervaud and Roberti, Une infinie brutalité. The views of the French are largely in accord with what Englishmen and Germans wrote about Russia in the same period. 12 Quoted from Recueil des instructions aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France, vol. 8, 129.

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promote a positive image of the country. An early challenge to which they rose was a book entitled A Strange and New Account of Muscovy, which had been written by an agent of the King of France, Foy de la Neuville, who had portrayed the young Russian monarch as an oriental despot, a Nero of the North.13 Peter’s companion in arms, François Lefort, who headed the tsar’s Grand Embassy to western countries in 1697–1698, was directly involved in a campaign to discredit Neuville’s book.14 The German diplomat Heinrich von Huyssen, who entered Russian service in 1702, also proved a willing and energetic agent, agreeing to translate Peter’s decrees, to have them printed and disseminated abroad, and to ask men of learning in Holland, Germany, and other countries to dedicate works to the tsar, members of his family, or his ministers. In 1705, Huyssen was sent to Germany, where he tried to persuade Justus Gotthard Rabener, the editor of a well-known Leipzig review, Die Europäische Fama (European Fame [i.e. gossip, rumour]), to publish items favourable to Russia.15 The review accordingly entered into polemics with other periodicals – for instance, Le Mercure historique et politique (The Historical and Political Mercury, 1686–1782, published in The Hague), Lettres historiques (Historical Letters, published in Amsterdam), and L’Esprit des cours de l’Europe (The Spirit of the Courts of Europe, published initially in The Hague, then in Amsterdam) – in order to defend the honour of the Russian army.16 Additionally, Die Europäische Fama published portraits of Russian statesmen, accompanied by texts that advertised their merits,17 along with verses in honour of the tsar in French, German, and Latin and descriptions of the ceremonial entries of the tsar and his army into Moscow and St Petersburg. In another periodical, the influential Acta Eruditorum (The Journal of the Learned, 1682–1782, which came out in Leipzig in Latin), Huyssen placed contributions designed to show how education and learning were developing in Russia.18 In 1706, he published some articles of his own in the ‘Literary News’ section of Mémoires 13 Foy de la Neuville, Relation curieuse et nouvelle de Moscovie (1698). 14 Kopanev, ʻFrants Lefort, Vol’ter, A.P. Veselovskii’, 441. 15 The full title of the periodical was Die europäische Fama, welche den gegenwärtigen Zustand der vornehmsten Höfe entdecket. On Huyssen’s approach to this periodical, see Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 1, 94–96. 16 See, e.g., Europäische Fama, 1706, no. 43, 495–505, mentioned in Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 1, 94–96. 17 Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 1, 95. 18 e.g. Acta Eruditorum, May 1705, 240, August 1705, 382–384. Acta Eruditorum was the first German scientific journal. Its name was changed to Nova Acta Eruditorum in 1732. Nova Acta Eruditorum would publish a number of scientif ic articles written by men of learning in St Petersburg, which no doubt helped to raise the prestige of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

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pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts (Transactions on the History of the Sciences and Fine Arts), better known as Le Journal de Trévoux (Trévoux Journal), which came out in France.19 Nor did Huyssen confine himself to placing publications in the press; he was also behind the appearance of various pamphlets that sought to present Russian affairs in the best light.20 In a pamphlet dated 1706, for example, alongside information on the geography and history of Muscovy, we find a description of a plan of study that Huyssen had written for the heir to the Russian throne.21 This plan was notable for its humanistic outlook and began with a reminder of the importance of French in the education of a prince. It was evidently intended to show that Russian sovereigns were no strangers to European culture and that the tsar’s heir was being prepared to become an enlightened monarch.22 In the same period, the Russian ambassador to Holland, Andrei Matveev, took the opportunity provided by the Russian victory over the Swedish army at Poltava in 1709 to publicize Russian achievement of a different sort. An account of this military triumph, written by Peter the Great himself, was translated into French and published in Holland as a pamphlet. A map of the battle soon appeared too; it was printed in The Hague by the publisher Pierre Husson, in a large format and with explanations in French.23 Matveev also arranged the publication, in French again, of a description of the celebrations and fireworks that he had organized in The Hague, on Peter’s orders, to celebrate this victory.24 A further intense propagandistic effort in foreign languages was directed at European readerships in 1718, when Peter issued a manifesto depriving his son Alexis, who had been convicted of treason, of the right to inherit the Russian crown. The manifesto was published in Russian and German in St Petersburg and in German in Riga and Leipzig. There were also several German editions in which the place of publication was not indicated, two 19 Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts ou le Journal de Trévoux, Paris, June 1706, 1066–1068, cited by Kopanev, ‘Les Nouvelles sur la Russie dans les périodiques francophones’, 35. 20 On Huyssen and his propagandistic activity, see Korzun, Heinrich von Huyssen (1666–1739). See also Graskhoff [Grasshoff], ‘Iz istorii sviazei berlinskogo obshchestva nauk s Rossiei’. Huyssen probably wrote some of these pamphlets himself, although it is impossible to be sure, since many were published anonymously. 21 Stieff, Relation von dem gegenwärtigen Zustande des Moscowitischen Reichs. 22 On Huyssen’s rebuttal of a work written by a former tutor of the crown prince, Neugebauer, which was very critical of Russia, see Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 1, 98–99. 23 Plan de la fameuse bataille, donnée aux environs de Poltava en Ucraine […]. 24 Relation des festins que S. E. André de Matveof […]. For further details, see Kopanev, ‘Les Nouvelles sur la Russie dans les périodiques francophones’.

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editions in French (one published in Paris and one in The Hague), one in Dutch, published in Amsterdam, and yet another in Polish. Some editions carried extracts from Alexis’s correspondence.25 An ‘Announcement of the investigation and trial’ of the tsarevich was also published in foreign languages: there are at least two different editions of this document in German, a French edition (published in Nancy), one in Dutch (published in Amsterdam), one in English (published in London), and another in Latin. The French edition, running to over 380 pages, was preceded by a publisher’s foreword, which condemned Alexis’s ‘innately bad character’ and praised the ‘moderation’ of Peter, who was said not to have wanted to pass a death sentence on his son, although the laws permitted it.26 Nor did the campaign end there: Peter’s point of view on Alexis was also set out in Le Mercure historique et politique in Holland and in another pamphlet (Illustration 12).27 The aim of all these publications was to convince public opinion in Europe that the tsar had the right to disinherit the guilty tsarevich and above all that Alexis had died a natural death. The Russian ambassador at Versailles, Baron von Schleinitz, was ordered to ‘destroy and robustly refute unjust and ill-founded talk’ on the subject.28 The Russian government was obviously also behind the publication, in 1718, of a German book which, without referring to Russia directly, contended that a sovereign was fully entitled to remove the right of his direct heir to inherit his crown.29 These examples show that German and French were the chief languages that served Russian propaganda in Europe in the early eighteenth century and that the Francophone press was already beginning to be used for propagandistic purposes in Peter’s reign.30 Another periodical published in French in Amsterdam from 1720 to 1740, La Bibliothèque germanique (Germanic Library),31 was also exploited for propagandistic purposes, from an early stage in its existence, by scholars 25 Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 2, 410–413. 26 Mémoires en forme de manifeste sur le procez criminel jugé et publié à S. Pétersbourg en Moscovie le 25 Juin 1718 […]. The pages in this document are not numbered. 27 Relation fidelle de ce qui s’est passé au sujet du jugement rendu contre le prince Alexei […]; Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 2, 426–427. 28 Quoted from Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 2, 427. 29 Untersuchung nach dem Recht der Natur […]. 30 The Russian authorities were already employing other means of self-advertisement in the early eighteenth century, such as acts of patronage. In 1712, for instance, Peter bestowed the title of privy councillor on Leibniz in recognition of his distinction as a scholar: Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 1, 26. 31 The journal was f irst known as La Bibliothèque Germanique ou Histoire Littéraire de l’Allemagne et des Pays du Nord.

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Illustration 12 Title page of Relation fidelle de ce qui s’est passé au sujet du jugement rendu contre le Prince Alexei et des circonstances de sa mort (1718), i.e. the official account of Peter’s case against his son, Tsarevich Alexis, and the circumstances of his death.

The book is held in the Russian National Library, who have kindly produced this image for us to use.

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and literary agents serving Russia. News about Russia appeared in this periodical on a regular basis. Information about books published there could be particularly helpful as a means of improving Russia’s image: unlike barbarous Muscovy, readers were bound to infer, eighteenth-century Russia was a place where intellectual life had begun to flourish. Evidently, Russians now took an interest in European political ideas: we come across reference in La Bibliothèque germanique, for example, to the German jurist and political philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf.32 Accounts of books that had appeared in Russia on the life of Peter the Great were particularly appreciated, and Peter came to be presented as a ‘hero’ in the pages of Europe’s Francophone periodicals. Looking on Orthodoxy as a collection of customs which would be improved by the intervention of an enlightened monarch, foreign journalists commended the measures Peter had taken against the Orthodox Church. They needed no persuasion that Russia had made progress under Peter, for the foundations of the Petrine ‘myth’, to which we shall turn shortly, had already been laid. At the same time, they accepted the negative view of pre-Petrine Russia held by most authoritative contemporary writers and agreed with those writers that the Russian people had shown an ‘extreme attachment’ to ignorance and to their ancient customs, ‘however absurd they might be’.33 Le Journal littéraire d’Allemagne, de Suisse et du Nort (sic; The Literary Journal of Germany, Switzerland, and the North) and La Nouvelle Bibliothèque germanique (The New Germanic Library, 1746–1759) continued this tradition of favourable treatment of Russia in the European Francophone press, taking both a sympathetic tone and devoting long articles to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and its works. An analysis of the sixth volume of the Transactions of the Academy, which was published in 1738, for example, ran to 25 pages. Le Journal littéraire reproduced the list of contents of the 32 The translation of Pufendorf to which reference is made here is [Pufendorf], Vvedenie, v gistoriiu evropeiskuiu chrez Samuila Pufendorfiia […]. The translation, which was done by Gavriil Buzhinksii, was presented to Peter after his return from his foreign journey in 1716–1717. The translator extolled Peter for his love of the muses and for reading even in time of war, but, interestingly, did not omit from his translation passages in which Russian mores were severely criticized. The book was republished in 1723 and there were later editions too. For further details, see Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii, vol. 1, 325–327, and vol. 2, 437–439. We have used here Margarita Voïtenko’s bachelor’s dissertation La République des Lettres et l’Empire Russe. We do not indicate page numbers in this dissertation because we have used an electronic version in which the pages are unnumbered. See also Voïtenko’s master’s dissertation, La Présentation de la Russie dans la presse francophone. 33 La Bibliothèque germanique, vol. 8, 188, quoted from Voïtenko, La Présentation de la Russie dans la presse francophone, 44.

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Academy’s journal and provided a detailed account, in French, of reports that members of the Academy wrote on their findings. There were summaries, for instance, of reports by the historian and Orientalist Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer, Leonhard Euler,34 and the German Professor of Medicine and Anatomy Josias Weitbrecht.35 Bayer’s report is of particular interest as an example of the attempts being made to establish a new image for Russia. Bayer asserted that the Russian nation was very ancient and that it already posed a threat to Constantinople in the ninth century.36 He therefore gives the impression that even in the Kievan stage of its history Russia was having an influence well beyond its frontiers. In the same volume of Le Journal littéraire, there was an article on the ‘Astronomical Observations of Mr. De l’Isle’ for the year 1738 and another on the ‘Description and Exact Representation of the Ice Palace’ by yet another German academician, the physicist Krafft.37 If elements of the Francophone press during the Enlightenment put forward a positive image of Russia, then this was due not only to curiosity about this new country which was undergoing such dramatic change but also to the close contacts that Russian scholars and agents had established with these European periodicals. These multiple links were maintained continuously from the moment when the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences was founded, or indeed from the time when it was being planned. Scholars in St Petersburg and Russian agents kept up a correspondence, for example, with Daniel Ernst Jablonski, a preacher at the Prussian court who was long-time secretary and vice-president of the Brandenburg Society of Sciences and president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences from 1733 to 1741 and who was close to the staff of La Bibliothèque germanique. They also corresponded with Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey, the permanent secretary of the Berlin Academy and editor of La Bibliothèque. Huyssen, Euler, and Schumacher played particularly active roles in this academic diplomacy. Huyssen, who was an honorary member of the Berlin Society of Sciences, corresponded frequently with Jablonski.38 Schumacher visited several European countries in 1721 at the request of Peter the Great, hoping 34 On Euler’s multilingual correspondence, see the last section of Chapter 5 above. 35 Journal littéraire d’Allemagne, de Suisse et du Nort, 1743, vol. 2, pt 1, 36–61. 36 Ibidem, 52–61. 37 i.e. ‘Observations Astronomiques de Mr. De l’Isle’; ‘Description et représentation exacte de la Maison de Glace construite à St. Petersbourg […]’ (ibidem, 62–67). The reference is to a palace that the Empress Anna had constructed to celebrate the bizarre wedding that she arranged between Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, whom she designated her court jester, and a Kalmyk maidservant. The ice palace is presented in this article as an unparalleled work of architecture and civil genius. 38 SPbF ARAN, f. 119, op. 1, no. 4.

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to recruit scholars for the future Academy, to establish contacts, and to set up cooperation and exchanges of letters. Jablonski and Maturin Veyssière La Croze, a Protestant convert who became the Prussian royal librarian and a professor at the University of Berlin, were among those with whom Schumacher had discussions.39 Some of the St Petersburg academicians – Bayer, Delisle, Daniel Bernoulli, Christian Goldbach, and the German philosopher and mathematician Georg Bernhard Bilfinger – were in direct contact with the editors of La Bibliothèque germanique. Certain members of the Société Anonyme (Anonymous Society), a society of men of letters who had founded La Bibliothèque germanique, even had direct links with Russia through their families. Louis L’Enfant, the son of Jacques L’Enfant, one of the journal’s editors, had been a preacher in a Protestant parish of Moscow between 1698 and 1701. Léopold de Beausobre, the son of Isaac de Beausobre, another editor of the same journal, had been a soldier in Russian service from 1720 (he rose to the rank of major-general) and had put down roots in Russia.40 (The fact that news on Russian science spread so widely in the French language through a German network is explained by the preponderance of Huguenots in the scholarly milieu in Berlin.) Russian contacts with La Bibliothèque germanique, then, were particularly numerous and close, but scholars based in Russia had access to other journals too, for instance, through the French Huguenot writer Jean Rousset de Missy, the author of a history of the reign of Peter the Great. 41 Rousset was a prominent journalist in the first half of the eighteenth century, contributing to Le Mercure historique et politique and another Amsterdam journal, La Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe (The Descriptive Library of the Works of Learned Men of Europe). He kept in touch with the St Petersburg Academy, especially with Schumacher, and looked out for authors to review works published by the Academy or indeed provided reviews of them himself, for example in La Bibliothèque raisonnée.42

39 Voïtenko, La Présentation de la Russie dans la presse francophone, 34–35. 40 Mézin and Rjéoutski (eds), Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières, vol. 2, 58–59, 514. 41 See Nestesuranoi [i.e. Rousset de Missy], Memoires du règne de Pierre-le-Grand (1725–1726). Rousset was also the author of a work on Catherine I, Mémoires du règne de Catherine […] (1728). On Rousset de Missy, see Berckvens-Steverlynck and Vercruysse (eds), Le métier de journaliste au dix-huitième siècle; Shatokhina, ‘Gollandskii publitsist Zhan Russe de Missi’; Mezin, ‘Gollandskii publitsist Zhan Russe de Missi kak biograf Petra I’. In recognition of his services, Rousset de Missy was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences in 1737, and in 1748 he received the title chancery councillor with the rank of colonel. 42 Voïtenko, La Présentation de la Russie dans la presse francophone, 34, 39.

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The influence that Russia was able to exert on western periodical publications through the intervention of literary agents like Huyssen and through contacts between European learned journals and the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences seems to have declined in the middle of the eighteenth century. At the same time, Ivan Shuvalov, the new favourite of the Empress Elizabeth from the late 1740s, diversified the means of cultural propaganda, commissioning literary and polemical works from various Francophone authors in his entourage and making use of French expatriates who were resident in Russia. The rise of a ‘French party’, in which Shuvalovs and Vorontsovs who were fluent in French were prominent, was reflected in the establishment of the first Russian periodical in French (and indeed Russia’s first literary journal, properly speaking), Baron Théodore-Henri de Tschudy’s Caméléon littéraire (The Literary Chameleon). 43 Founded in St Petersburg in 1755 under Ivan Shuvalov’s effective control, the Caméléon published articles on a range of subjects, from history and literature to pedagogy, and also literary anecdotes. In an ‘Abstract of the third volume of satirical writings printed in Leipzig in German’, Tschudy addressed the subject of the education of noble youth, discussing such matters as choosing a tutor, parents who did not understand the extent of their duties, and the care with which children of quality needed to be educated. His remarks were aimed at the Russian nobility in particular. 44 In fact, education was a central preoccupation of the Caméléon. This was no coincidence, given Shuvalov’s interest in the subject. After all, Shuvalov was the founder of the University of Moscow and looked on this institution as a means of guaranteeing the quality of nobles’ education, which seemed to him to be threatened by the inexperience of private educators (especially the foreigners among them) and by the poor judgement of ignorant nobles when they came to select teachers. Tschudy paid tribute in the Caméléon to Shuvalov’s policies and, praising Elizabeth for carrying on her father’s work, commended ‘the new Establishment that Her Clemency has just created for the good of her people, this famous University with which Moscow is going to see its respectable old age adorned’. 45 He also underlined the utility of the fine arts and approved the attempts by 43 Le Caméléon littéraire. Ouvrage périodique (49 numbers – each in 312 copies – were published between 5 January and 14 December 1755). On the spread of the Francophone press to Russia, see Volmer, Presse und Frankophonie im 18. Jahrhundert. 44 ‘Extrait du troisième tome des écrits satiriques imprimés en allemand à Leipzig’ [sic] (no. 5), 105–114. 45 ‘Réflexion sur un trait d’histoire’, Le Caméléon littéraire, no. 1. See also an article in no. 19 on the opening of the nobles’ boarding school under the aegis of the University of Moscow and the festivities that marked this occasion. For further details on Tschudy’s support for Shuvalov’s

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Russian monarchs to transplant western arts to Russia. ‘The August founder of this magnificent Empire and faithful imitator of Alexander the Great’, he wrote effusively with Peter the Great in mind, ‘encouraged the arts with all the power at his disposal. 46 Already in the age of Elizabeth, then, a Francophone periodical appeared in Russia itself and began to play a part in forming a positive image of Russian society, supplementing the material that had been appearing since Peter’s time in the European Francophone press and other publications at the instigation of scholars and agents serving the Russian authorities. This propagandistic effort answered to the needs of the Winter Palace, although it is often difficult to say whether publications favourable to Russia and its sovereigns were written at the behest of the Russian patrons of the journalists in question or produced on the initiative of the journalists themselves. It was also clear – as we can see from the pages of La Bibliothèque germanique and the remarks by Tschudy that we have just quoted – that the image of Peter the Great, the Tsar who had decisively oriented Russia towards the West, was central to attempts to persuade Europeans to take a positive view of Russia. In Russia, Peter’s supporters, notably Prokopovich and Kantemir, had begun to extol the great reformer immediately after his death. (Their praises would be reproduced by Lomonosov and later eighteenth-century writers and would pass through Karamzin into the broad ‘Westernist’ tradition of Russian thought.) In the West too, various writers – including Rousset, Bernard de Fontenelle, Aubry de la Mottraye, and Eléazar de Mauvillon 47 – had already helped to construct a Petrine ‘myth’ in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Then, late in Elizabeth’s reign, the myth was reiterated by Lacombe,48 and, most importantly, by Voltaire, who, at the bidding of the Russian court, gave it unprecedented authority in his two-volume History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great (1759–1763). 49

educational ideas, see Rjéoutski, ‘Un journaliste français héraut de l’éducation publique en Russie’. 46 Le Caméléon littéraire, no. 1 (5 January 1755). 47 See the following: Nestesuranoi [Rousset de Missy], Mémoires du règne de Pierre le Grand; Fontenelle, Éloge du Czar Pierre I (1727); Mottraye, Voyages en Anglois et en François (1732); Mauvillon, Histoire de Pierre I, surnommé le Grand (1742). 48 Lacombe, Histoire des révolutions de l’empire de Russie (1760). 49 Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand. References to the work here are to Michel Mervaud’s edition of it in vols 46 and 47 of [Voltaire], Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire. For a detailed study of the History, see especially Mervaud’s introduction to the text of it in vol. 46, 88–380. Mervaud discusses the genesis of the History, the sources Voltaire used, the type of historiography in which he was engaged, and the reception of the work, as well as Voltaire’s interpretation of Peter’s reign and its place in Russian history.

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The commissioning of Voltaire’s History illustrates the role of the Russian government in encouraging and assisting literary undertakings, if they seemed likely to bring benefit to the Russian Empire, for it was on the basis of an invitation made by the court of the Empress Elizabeth in 1757 that Voltaire embarked upon this work.50 In order to facilitate Voltaire’s task, Ivan Shuvalov oversaw the preparation of relevant documents which had not been available to previous historians and made sure that Voltaire was provided with them. In his account of Peter’s reign, Voltaire duly flattered Elizabeth, who was still on the throne when his first volume was published. He refers, for example, to the gentleness (douceur) of Elizabeth’s rule and in particular praises her abolition of capital punishment.51 More generally, he compliments all four of the female sovereigns who followed Peter on the throne: between them, he declared at the end of his second volume (published after Elizabeth’s death), they had perfected what Peter had introduced.52 Peter, Voltaire stressed, was the founder and father of his empire.53 ‘Peter was born’, Voltaire declared, ‘and Russia was formed’.54 The great influence that Russia had acquired in European affairs by the time Voltaire was writing was due solely to Peter’s labours.55 He had created everything ab ovo. And how many obstacles placed in his way by forces resistant to change had Peter had to overcome in order to ensure that posterity would enjoy the benefits he had wanted to bestow upon his subjects!56 (It did Peter no harm, in Voltaire’s eyes, that he had brought the Church firmly under the control of the state.) Russia’s laws, ‘police’ (by which Voltaire meant good civil governance), politics, and military discipline, its marine, its commerce, manufactures, sciences, and fine arts had all been fashioned in accordance with Peter’s views.57 Voltaire admired Peter’s will, energy, persistence, and curiosity, his interest in the civilizations beyond the borders of his domain, and his consistent application of the principle of utility. He approved of 50 Before extending this invitation to Voltaire the Russian court had tended to look askance at him, on account of critical remarks he had previously made about Russia and Peter. On the way in which he came to be regarded as a potential ally rather than an intellectual foe, see Rjéoutski, ‘Voltaire, Pierre le Grand, la cour de Russie et la presse francophone’. On Russian hopes that Voltaire would produce a work that would show Peter and Russia in a favourable light, see Mervaud’s introduction to Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, vol. 46, 117–119. 51 Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, vol. 47, 891; vol. 46, 574–575. 52 Ibidem, vol. 47, 940–941. The four empresses are Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II. 53 Ibidem, 941. 54 Ibidem, vol. 46, 510. 55 Ibidem, 507. 56 Ibidem, vol. 47, 865–866. 57 Ibidem, 940.

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Peter’s preference for simplicity rather than ostentation and his respect for merit rather than lineage as a criterion for rewarding his subjects. Peter also benefited, in Voltaire’s estimation, from comparison to his chief adversary, Charles XII of Sweden, about whom Voltaire had already written another history before he turned his attention to the Russian ruler.58 In sum, founders of states which had long since been governed in a civilized way, Voltaire proclaimed in a concluding eulogy, should say: ‘If in the icy climes of ancient Scythia a man assisted by nothing more than his own genius has done such great things, what must we do in kingdoms where works accumulated over centuries have made everything so easy for us?’59

Voltaire thus countered the long-held western perception of Russia as a country of ‘infinite brutality’, a ‘rude and barbarous kingdom’.60 What, then, was there for Russians not to like in Voltaire’s History? Voltaire – like Prokopovich in his oration at Peter’s funeral61 – treated Peter as having wrought a complete transformation. By arguing in his preface that ‘laws, manners, and arts’ were novelties in Russia,62 he was implicitly disparaging the pre-Petrine past. Before Peter, Voltaire asserts, there was more of Asia than of Christian Europe about Russian customs, clothes, and mores.63 Furthermore, great as Peter was (as Voltaire’s title suggests), he was prone to barbarity. Indeed, it was perhaps because he was so far removed from the more ‘effeminate’ mores of contemporary France, Voltaire mused, that Peter excited western curiosity.64 Thus the History, despite the intentions of those who had commissioned it, did not entirely dispel the negative western stereotype of Russia, even though Voltaire found mitigating circumstances for some of Peter’s cruelties, as when he argued, for example, that exemplary harshness may seem necessary in certain times and places if the law is to be upheld.65 To Russian writers of the age of Catherine, who knew the History 58 Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII. 59 Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, vol. 47, 942. 60 See Mervaud and Roberti, Une infinie brutalité; Berry and Crummey (eds), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom. 61 ‘Slovo na pogrebenie vsepresvetleishego derzhavneishego Petra Velikogo, imperatora i samoderzhtsa vserossiiskogo […]’, in Prokopovich, Sochinenia, 126–129. 62 Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, vol. 46, 414. 63 Ibidem, 489. 64 Ibidem, vol. 47, 792. 65 Ibidem, 934–935.

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and other foreign writings that were more critical of Russia, Voltaire’s book could therefore be construed as a confirmation of Russia’s fundamental inferiority. The mental reconfiguration of the European landscape during the Enlightenment, as space divided into East and West rather than North and South, tended to aggravate such impressions by enhancing the status of the West, especially France, and confirming the definitive quality of the ‘occidental’ world.66 Russians, therefore, could not afford to slacken their efforts to persuade the European reading public of the merits of the emergent power on the continent’s eastern periphery. On the contrary, they needed to intensify those efforts, and this they proved well able to do during the reign of Catherine II, using the international language of the Republic of Letters, in which many more of them were now becoming proficient.

Cultural propaganda in French in the age of Catherine The decision taken at the end of the reign of Elizabeth to turn to Voltaire may indicate that the Russian court realized that the Francophone writers who were close to Ivan Shuvalov, being little known in the Republic of Letters, would not be capable of broadcasting St Petersburg’s views throughout Europe.67 Nor could the Caméléon littéraire, the only Francophone journal in St Petersburg, reach a large potential readership outside Russia, even though it was supported by Shuvalov. A more ambitious propagandistic strategy would be needed. An early sign of the use of such a strategy, perhaps, was the appearance, in 1760, of an article entitled ‘The Letter of a Young Russian Lord’ in L’Année littéraire (The Year in Literature), a Parisian literary periodical founded by Abbé Élie Fréron. This article, which was probably written by Andrei Shuvalov, the son of Ivan’s cousin Petr Shuvalov, dealt with the progress of Russian literature and spoke of Lomonosov and Sumarokov, the two most prominent Russian men of letters at that time.68 The publication of this ‘letter’ also attested to the existence of new networks that had been 66 On the views of French writers on Russia and its history, see Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, and Mezin, Vzgliad iz Evropy. 67 The writers in question included the Chevalier Jean Desessart (the author of a polemical manuscript ‘Voyageur moscovite’ cited in n. 5 above) and the Chevalier Charles-Louis-Philippe Mainvillier (author of the Pétréade, ou Pierre le créateur (1762, 1763)), as well as Tschudy (who was probably the author of three short polemical works eventually published in 1964, beginning with ‘l’Apothéose de Pierre le Grand’, as well as the editor of the Caméléon littéraire). 68 ‘Lettre d’un jeune Seigneur russe’, in Année littéraire, vol. 5 (1760), 194–203 (vol. 7, 415–417 in the Slatkine reprint we have cited in our bibliography).

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established as relations between St Petersburg and Paris became closer during the Seven Years’ War, when France, having concluded an alliance with Austria in 1756, was seeking Russia’s support as well. The Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont, who travelled to St Petersburg in 1757 as secretary to the French diplomat Chevalier Douglas, was an associate of Fréron. D’Éon approached several Russian aristocrats, members of families whom we have identified as constituting a ‘French party’ in Russia. (In his letters, he mentions Ivan Shuvalov, Count Mikhail Vorontsov (the vice-chancellor of the empire), Vorontsov’s niece Ekaterina (the future Princess Dashkova), and others.) Douglas initiated a literary correspondence with Paris to amuse the Russian court, which was bored, so d’Éon said. No doubt it was through d’Éon that Fréron received much of his material on Russia. Publication of this material helped Fréron, who was loyal to the French government, to flatter Russian vanity at the moment when France was urging Russia to become an ally.69 The Russian attempt begun under Peter the Great and continued under Elizabeth to develop a network of sympathetic foreign contacts and to influence European opinion in Russia’s favour was intensified by Catherine II. The new empress was adept at developing relationships with men who were eminent in the western cultural and intellectual world, such as Grimm, Voltaire, and Diderot. Like Elizabeth’s courtiers, she was also alive to ways in which the press could be used and she often exploited it to promote her achievements and outlook. News of the coup that she carried out when she deposed her husband, Peter III, for example, soon reached the Journal encyclopédique, probably through François-Pierre Pictet, who had become close to Catherine and served as a link to Voltaire, who may in turn have informed the Journal. The news quickly spread in the western press, appearing in the Gazette d’Utrecht (Utrecht Gazette), among other papers.70 From the opening days of her reign, such connections helped to win Catherine glowing tributes: ‘the Russian throne’, we read in the Journal encyclopédique in 1762, for instance, ‘is today occupied by a Sovereign whom Kings should take as their model’.71 In the following section of this chapter, we shall explore the continuing use of the Francophone press as a medium for Russian propaganda during Catherine’s reign and beyond. We shall then discuss 69 Stroev, ‘Zashchita i proslavlenie Rossii’. Material on Russia also helped Fréron to compete with a rival publication, the Journal encyclopédique ou universel, which inclined towards the philosophes. 70 On this story, see Hans, ‘François Pierre Pictet’. 71 Journal encyclopédique, 1762, vol. 7, pt 3, November, 130.

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the use of translation of Russian texts into French (including texts written by Catherine or representing her views) as a further means of burnishing Russia’s image. First, though, we should dwell on Catherine’s ability to stage spectacular propaganda coups and to publicize and win plaudits for her achievements. Mention should also be made of her own contribution, in French, to the polemical literature written in defence of Russia against the nation’s foreign critics.72 The history of what we should now call the ‘media coverage’ of Catherine’s purchase of Diderot’s library in 1765 shows the extent of the networks that could be used to transmit information about the actions of the new Russian empress.73 In March that year, Betskoi sent a positive response to a suggestion that had been made by Grimm on the advice of the Russian ambassador in France: the Russian court would buy the library from Diderot, who at that time was in financial difficulty. On 15 April, Betskoi’s letter was already being reproduced in Grimm’s cultural newsletter Correspondance littéraire (Literary Correspondence). On 20 April, the news was announced in Nouvelles à la main (News by Hand), a news-sheet produced by the art critic and anecdotist Louis Petit de Bachaumont. By the end of the month, the Journal des dames (Ladies’ Journal, published in Paris) and the Courrier d’Avignon (Avignon Courier) were talking about it too. In the latter periodical, the news was preceded by the following eulogy: ‘The Empress of Russia is fostering and cultivating in her States the taste for literature that Peter the Great introduced there together with all the other tastes of polite nations’.74 This publicity redounded to the credit of the empress, of course. Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, the poet and dramatist Claude-Joseph Dorat, and others quickly learned the news about Catherine’s purchase of Diderot’s library and hastened also to praise Catherine. Thus, Baron d’Holbach wrote to one of his correspondents: ‘By this act, as delicate as it is generous, you see that there is a nobler way of thinking in Tartary than there is in France’.75 Dorat wrote an epistle to Catherine, probably at Grimm’s suggestion,76 and this epistle was published in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, reproduced in the Année littéraire, 72 On the various ways in which Russia’s merits were presented, see Lortholary, Le mirage russe au XVIIIe siècle (1951). See also the reconsideration of Lortholary’s views by Sergueï Karp and Larry Wolff in their critically revised edition of Le mirage russe au XVIIIe siècle. 73 Desné, ‘Quand Catherine II achetait la bibliothèque de Diderot’. 74 Le Courrier d’Avignon, no. 35, 142; quoted from Desné, ‘Quand Catherine II achetait la bibliothèque de Diderot’, 76. 75 Desné, ‘Quand Catherine II achetait la bibliothèque de Diderot’, 75. 76 Ibidem, 82–83.

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and then partially reproduced and commented upon in L’Avant-coureur (The Harbinger, published in Paris) at the end of July and Le Journal des Dames in August. An epistle by Pierre Légier to Diderot, which also sang Catherine’s praises, appeared in Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire in May, was partially reproduced in Le Mercure historique et politique in July, came out in a separate edition that was reviewed in Le Journal des dames in August, was reproduced yet again in August by La Gazette littéraire de l’Europe (The Literary Gazette of Europe, published in Amsterdam), and was reissued in L’Avant-coureur in September. Bachaumont also lauded Catherine: This modern Semiramis does not confine her views to the wisest administration […] she also busies herself every day with what may make her famous and dear to people of letters; [she] holds out to foreign powers the beneficent hand which makes her adored in our time.77

Thus an episode in a private life, as Roland Desné has observed, was transformed into a national and a European event.78 It is almost as if news of Catherine’s purchase spread by itself through the intellectual and journalistic networks of the Enlightenment, and up to a point it did, for the event was an out-of-the ordinary act of patronage which caused astonishment and admiration, but we should not forget the central role of Catherine’s confidant Grimm and his Correspondance littéraire in this media coup. Over many years, Diderot, Jean-François de La Harpe, Jean-François Marmontel, and Voltaire, as well as Grimm, maintained the interest of the Francophone European public in Russia, working with Russian diplomats to provide Catherine with what Georges Dulac has called an effective ‘press service’.79 And yet, foreign public opinion could not always be relied upon to take a sympathetic view of Russia. Alongside admiration of the policies conducted by the Russian empress, prejudices persisted that had originated in the accounts of western travellers who had observed sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Muscovy. A controversy over an entry entitled ‘Knout or Knut’ in the Encyclopédie is illuminating in this respect, as Michel Mervaud has shown. Relying on outdated information drawn from Adam Olearius or John Perry, the author of the entry stated that whipping with the knout was ‘by no means considered dishonourable’ in Russia. A Russian deputy who served on Catherine’s Legislative Commission reacted angrily to this entry 77 Quoted by Desné, ibidem, 76–77. 78 Ibidem, 93. 79 Dulac, ‘L’image de la Russie dans les gazettes’, 86.

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by publishing in the Journal encyclopédique a refutation of the Frenchman’s remark that this punishment was not ignominious.80 Nonetheless, the same Journal encyclopédique, despite its association with Diderot and the philosophes and despite the fact that it was not normally hostile to Russia, soon repeated outdated stereotypes in a review of A Journey to Siberia, a highly unflattering depiction of Russia by the French astronomer Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche.81 Chappe’s three-volume work was published in 1768, six years after the completion of a journey Chappe had made to Tobol’sk, in Siberia, on behalf of the French Academy of Sciences, in order to observe the transit of Venus on 6 June 1761.82 Catherine herself entered the polemical fray in an Antidote to Chappe’s Journey written in French and published anonymously in 1770. Described on its title-page as ‘an enquiry into the merits of a book, entitled A Journey to Siberia, made in 1761 in obedience to an order of the French King’, the Antidote was an indigestible running commentary on Chappe’s impressions of Russian manners and customs and the state of the Russian Empire.83 Quoting from Chappe’s book at length and appealing to the judgement of the impartial reader, Catherine makes observations on Chappe’s remarks on numerous subjects from Russia’s history, geography, religion, education, 80 This ‘Lettre d’un Russe’ was published in the Journal encyclopédique on 15 September 1773: see Mervaud, ‘Le knout et l’honneur des Russes’, 115. 81 Journal encyclopédique, October 1770, vol. 7, 41–54. 82 Chappe, Voyage en Sibérie fait par ordre du roi en 1761. For the text of this work, see Mervaud’s edition (2004), vol. 2; for a discussion of Chappe’s critical account of Russia, see Mervaud’s introduction to vol. 1 of this edition, 49–79. Chappe’s Journey is another landmark in the tradition, which stretches back at least as far as Herberstein and Fletcher, of negative accounts of Russia written by foreign visitors to the country. The tradition did not cease with the reforms of Peter the Great. Notable post-Petrine examples that precede Chappe’s Journey include Locatelli’s Muscovite Letters (Lettres moscovites, 1736) and Gmelin’s Journey through Siberia (Reise durch Sibirien, 1752–1753). 83 Antidote, ou examen du mauvais livre superbement imprimé intitulé: Voyage en Sibérie, fait par ordre du Roi en 1761 […]. The work was first published in two parts, of 230 pages each, with no indication of the place of publication. It was republished in Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1771–1772. A free English translation done by ‘a lady’ appeared in London in 1772. For substantial discussions of the work, see especially Levitt, ‘An Antidote to Nervous Juice’, and Mervaud’s introductory essay in vol. 1 of his edition of Chappe d’Auteroche, Voyage en Sibèrie, 86–99. The Antidote is anonymous but has commonly been attributed to Catherine, for example by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian scholar Aleksandr Pypin, who edited Catherine’s writings, and very recently by Grechanaia (Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 117), though often with the qualification that Catherine no doubt had one or more collaborators (Dashkova and various members of the Shuvalov clan, especially Andrei, are sometimes mentioned in this connection). On Catherine’s probable contribution to the Antidote, see Mervaud’s introduction, 87–92.

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arts, sciences, laws, penal system, and customs to its wedding ceremonies, dining habits, foodstuffs, vodka distilleries, bath-houses, cattle, game, fish, and other wild life. In her often sarcastic and acrimonious rebuttal, she attempts to portray Chappe as an observer who is both malicious and ignorant of Russian history, religious practice, and custom, not to mention the Russian language, and who therefore should not be believed on any score. His account, Catherine argues, is riddled with inaccuracies, contradictions, examples of faulty reasoning, and downright lies. It is also flawed by Chappe’s fondness for generalization on the basis of individual cases.84 So offended is Catherine at Chappe’s perception of her realm that she stoops to personal vilification, declaring – even though Chappe had died by the time the Antidote was ready for publication – that he is either a ne’er-do-well or a liar.85 ‘Since, Mr Deceased, you treat us as outright animals’, she fulminates at one point, ‘I think I am entitled to tell you that during your lifetime you yourself were in truth a beast’.86 Catherine was incensed, to be sure, by the ingratitude of a visitor who had vilified an entire nation in spite of the fact that he had been afforded the assistance he needed in order to travel to the remote site where he was able to make his astronomical observations.87 No doubt what particularly provoked Catherine, though, was the threat that Chappe’s account posed to the image of Russia as a now civilized European power and to Catherine’s own attempt to present herself on the European stage as an exemplar of the modern enlightened monarch. She is exercised by Chappe’s argument (which is reminiscent of Fletcher’s almost two centuries earlier) that despotism makes a people servile and deprives them of initiative and creativity. The oppressive nature of the Russian government, Chappe alleges, has slowed the introduction of European mores: the nobleman now has contact with foreigners and access to European comforts, but his journeys to the West have made him unhappier because they have enabled him to compare his own condition with that of a free man.88 Catherine’s main line of defence 84 Catherine, Antidote, pt 2, 33. 85 Ibidem, 40. 86 Ibidem, 134. 87 Ibidem, 135, 149. Chappe’s criticisms of the political and social order of the Russian Empire are concentrated in his chapters ‘Du gouvernement de Russie, depuis 861 jusqu’en 1767’ and ‘Des lois, des supplices et de l’exil’ (see Chappe d’Auteroche, Voyage en Sibérie, vol. 2, 336–353 and 443–457 respectively). For discussion of Chappe’s critique of the perceived despotism of the regime, the harshness of the penal system, and the servility of the population and possible explanations for it, see Mervaud’s introduction, ibidem, vol. 1, 70–77. 88 Catherine, Antidote, pt 2, 82.

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against this charge is to point proudly to her own attempts to improve the nation’s laws and morals. No matter what Chappe might say, she argues in an injured tone, we are not, and shall not be, cruel or barbarous. Our actions every day are and will be the best way of contradicting him. […] We are far from being crushed by an iron sceptre; which modern nation may boast of having been summoned as a body to compose its laws? Our mores are not steadily growing worse, public and private education is improving day by day.89

She holds up her own Instruction as the strongest evidence that her government encourages intelligence, talent, feeling, and the development of society, the existence of which is demonstrated, even in the provinces, by the merry amusements to which her nobles give themselves up.90 References to warfare in the Antidote may betray a feeling that Russia’s military power, as well as the development of its social life, entitled the Russian Empire to more respectful attention. For example, Catherine invoked martial prowess – as it was being displayed in the first of her RussoTurkish wars, which was in progress when the Antidote was published – to rebut Chappe’s charge that the oppressed Russian peasant was timid and pusillanimous.91 Most importantly, she takes pains to answer Chappe’s disparaging comments about Russians’ supposed want of originality (though her argument is not elegantly made): He absolutely wants to make imitators of us, and he is not the only one; a great deal of trouble has already been taken before him to make an imitative people out of a people who are more original than many others who claim to teach all the others whilst they haven’t ever invented anything themselves.92

Russians must indeed study the moral virtues, Catherine continues, but once they have absorbed them they will be free to adopt the tone that suits them and go beyond what they have borrowed.93 A patriotic movement will unfold, 89 Ibidem, 135–136. Catherine is alluding in this passage to her convocation of a Legislative Commission in 1767. 90 Ibidem, 206–207, 88–89; see also 120. 91 Ibidem, 123; see also 83–84. 92 Ibidem, 203. On Russian sensitivity to the charge of imitativeness, see especially the section on comic drama in Chapter 8 below. 93 Ibidem.

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she predicts, ‘a competition to equal and surpass other nations’, which, given their diligence, love of labour, and disposition, will take the Russians far, for few other nations can boast such a quick understanding.94 Thus Catherine, resentful at Chappe’s air of cultural superiority, defends her empire in a way which transforms a European discourse about Russian imitativeness into the beginnings of a Russian discourse about catching up and overtaking powers that have previously been perceived as more advanced. She accordingly sounds a prophetic note: having made such great strides in seventy years (that is to say from the beginning of the reign of Peter the Great), Russia may expect to fulfil a great destiny by the time another seventy have passed.95 At one level, Catherine’s Antidote is a highly personal document, in which she abuses her opponent and implicitly defends her own reputation. At the same time, her exchange with Chappe in the language of international diplomacy is an example of the conduct of cultural politics at the highest level. Chappe’s Journey to Siberia, Marcus Levitt has argued, should be seen in the context of France’s covert anti-Russian foreign policy in the 1760s, and may even have been officially commissioned to support this policy. More generally, the Journey exemplifies the treatment of Russia as in some way problematic in the mental landscape of the Enlightenment. It amounted to a repudiation of the Voltairean view of post-Petrine Russia, which was broadly supported by Voltaire’s fellow encyclopaedists d’Alembert, Diderot, and Grimm, and others such as the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet, La Harpe, the historian Pierre-Charles Levesque, de Ligne, and Marmontel. It seemed instead to be an endorsement of the view of Peter as a despot and imitator that derived from the treatment of Russia in Montesquieu’s magnum opus On the Spirit of the Laws and Rousseau’s recently published Social Contract (1762), a view to which other men of letters, including the Abbés Condillac, Mably, and Raynal, also inclined.96 We should add, finally, that Chappe’s work was anachronistic: although Catherine had been on the throne for nearly six years when it was published, it was based on observation of Russia in the preceding reigns of Elizabeth and Peter III.97 The Journey to Siberia therefore required a substantial and authoritative riposte, and that is what Catherine set out to provide, although the Antidote’s chances of success were limited by the fact that royal decorum required anonymity. 94 Ibidem, 214. 95 Ibidem, 218–219. 96 Levitt, ‘An Antidote to Nervous Juice’, 49–52; see also 59, n. 7, for a useful summary of the literature (up until 1998) on Enlightenment debate about Russia. 97 Ibidem, 55.

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Russian use of the Francophone press in the age of Catherine and beyond Some European states were understandably discomfited by the weight that Russia carried in European affairs under Catherine II, which made it a power to be reckoned with, feared even. It is therefore unsurprising that polemical combat with Russia became particularly intense, as Georges Dulac has shown, in the 1770s, when the first of Catherine’s Russo-Turkish Wars, the Pugachev revolt, and the first partition of Poland all took place. The fact that sovereigns and politicians, including Catherine herself, actually read such polemics made these texts all the more important. Indeed, what was written about a country in the press might even have financial consequences: it was not by chance that Dutch bankers regarded Russia as unstable, which made it difficult for the country to borrow the capital it so badly needed during its war with Turkey.98 Consequently, the Russian court and its supporters needed to continue to make – or indeed, to intensify – efforts of the sort made in the first half of the eighteenth century to influence the foreign press and mould European opinion. While anti-Russian propaganda supported by the French government was at its height, the Russian envoy at The Hague, Prince Dmitrii Alekseevich Golitsyn, approached Jean Manzon’s Courrier du Bas-Rhin (The Courier of the Lower Rhine, published in Cleves), which had been founded in 1767, and succeeded in persuading it to take a favourable – sometimes extremely favourable – view of Russia. The pages of this periodical came to be filled with accounts of sumptuous occasions at the court in St Petersburg, Catherine’s educational institutions, such as the Noble Land Cadet Corps and the Smolny Institute, and the statue to Peter the Great that Catherine had had Falconet erect on the bank of the River Neva in St Petersburg. The cumulative effect of such articles, Georges Dulac has observed, was to produce ‘a seductive image which seemed designed to correct or offset the very dark representation of the country proffered by hostile papers, whose palette was usually very close to that cherished by French diplomats in St Petersburg’.99 Golitsyn also approached contacts on two French-language newspapers produced in Zweibrücken, and spoke in his diplomatic correspondence of the pleasure it would have afforded him ‘to see their political paper give nothing but reliable news on current events and the works of our august empress; and [to see] the literary [paper] make known the extent to which 98 Dulac, ‘L’image de la Russie dans les gazettes’, 73. 99 Ibidem, 76.

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letters have been cultivated under her protection’.100 In this respect, though, he was unsuccessful, for the Gazette des Deux-Ponts (Zweibrücken Gazette) was subject to French influence. Thus, a few months before the victorious peace of Kuchuk-Kainarji that Russia concluded with Turkey in 1774, the Gazette belittled the achievements of the Russian army, taking a position very similar to that adopted at this time by Durand de Distroff, France’s diplomatic representative in St Petersburg. Meanwhile, the Gazette de France (French Gazette) was persuaded by the Duc Étienne-François de Choiseul to publish news of the same tenor, which incurred the displeasure of the Russian chargé d’affaires in France, Nikolai Khotinskii, who accused the French press of using every means it could to support the Turks against Russia.101 Other subjects covered in the Gazette des Deux-Ponts included the successes of Pugachev, censorship in Russia, Polish affairs, the colonies of German settlers on the Volga, and Catherine’s legislative endeavours.102 If the general tone of reporting about Russia in the Gazette des Deux-Ponts was negative, nevertheless it did sometimes contain perceptive analyses of Catherine’s initiatives which went beyond the clichés of propaganda.103 In any case, as Georges Dulac has noted, the successes of the Russian armies, the expeditions organized by the Academy of Sciences, Catherine’s legislation – none of this subject-matter lent itself to negative interpretation. Journalists had to satisfy the curiosity of a public which was increasingly eager for news about Russia, and the most striking information [the public] could be offered generally concerned facts which ‘dazzled’ the foreigner, as diplomats noted resentfully, because those facts offered, besides the attraction of novelty, a breadth of perspective that was not to be found in much other news in the West.104

It is worth adding that Russian academic affairs continued to attract the attention of European journalists. The mathematician and astronomer Johann Albrecht Euler, the son of Leonhard, corresponded regularly with Formey, his uncle, keeping open a channel for academic information from St Petersburg, and numerous publications about the Imperial Academy still appeared in Francophone periodicals published in the German lands, including the Gazette universelle de littérature at Zweibrücken.105 100 Quoted from Dulac, ibidem, 74. 101 Mitrofanov et al., ‘Russkaia ugroza vo frantsuzskoi presse’, 346. 102 Dulac, ‘L’image de la Russie dans les gazettes’, 75–76; see also idem, ‘Gazettes sous influence’. 103 Quoted from Dulac, ‘L’image de la Russie dans les gazettes’, 81. 104 Ibidem, 85. 105 Ibidem, 86.

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Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the stock of journalistic contacts sympathetic to Russia was replenished by refugees from revolutionary France, some of whom founded periodicals of their own in the German states. The Marquis Henri Joseph de Lambert, an agent of Catherine, considered the possibility of setting up an émigré newspaper in Brunswick with Jacques Mallet du Pan and Jean-Joseph Mounier as its editors. Eventually, in 1797, Le Spectateur du Nord (The Spectator of the North) was founded in Hamburg. The Francophone periodicals of Brunswick and Hamburg, including Le Spectateur, published information on Russian monarchs (Peter the Great, Peter III, Catherine II, and Paul), life at the imperial court, the success of Russian arms under the leadership of Aleksandr Suvorov, and Russian literature (Karamzin was emerging as a promising man of letters in the 1790s106). They also contained reviews of works devoted to Russia. The people behind the Spectateur du Nord (the royalist Louis Dubois-Descours, Marquis de la Maisonfort, Amable de Baudus, Pierre-François Fauche) all had connections with Russian officials, especially the Russian minister in Hamburg, Ivan Murav’ev-Apostol. The same Murav’ev-Apostol intervened when the Hamburg Senate banned another émigré periodical Le Censeur, journal politique et littéraire (The Censor, a Political and Literary Journal, founded in Hamburg in 1800) and imprisoned its editor Bertin d’Antilly, who was released thanks to this Russian support. It is not surprising that several contributors to these émigré periodicals, such as de La Maisonfort and Germain-Hyacinthe de Romance, Marquis de Mesmon, were subsequently welcomed in Russia. The latter, who was himself freed from prison in Hamburg by his Russian protectors, duly became a state councillor and Commander of the Order of St Anne in Russia, was employed by the Ministry of Public Education, and served as editor of the Journal du Nord (Journal of the North, founded in 1807 and published in St Petersburg), the periodical of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.107 As for the Russian subjects who entered into contact with journalists on European periodicals, not all of them could be described as officials and not all initiatives of this kind can be explained as the result of pressure coming from the authorities in St Petersburg. Scholars pursued the interests of their corporation, men of letters tried to promote their works, and noble travellers their ideas. Nonetheless, the initiatives we have described had a certain similarity: all of them took place against the background of a 106 On Karamzin’s own contribution to this periodical, see the following section of this chapter. 107 On these and other émigré journals and their links to Russia, see Somov, ‘La Russie dans la presse des émigrés’.

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concerted attempt to win recognition across Europe for Russian merits, and not just the merits of individual authors but of Russian society and culture more generally. The European Francophone press may have been the most effective journalistic channel through which to defend Russian points of view and improve the empire’s image beyond its borders, but Russia’s own Francophone press developed too after the end of the reign of Elizabeth. New periodicals in French sprang up after the closure of Tschudy’s Caméléon littéraire in December 1755: the Journal des sciences et des arts (Journal of Sciences and Fine Arts, 1761–1762), edited by Philippe Hernandez in Moscow; the Boussole de Terre (The Compass, 1770), set up in St Petersburg by Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc, whom we have already encountered in his capacity as director of studies at the Noble Land Cadet Corps; Le Mercure de Russie (The Russian Mercury, published in St Petersburg in 1786), edited by Timoléon-Alphonse Gallien, known as Gallien de Salmorenc, a former secretary to Voltaire and a professor at the Cadet Corps; Le Journal littéraire de Saint-Pétersbourg (The St Petersburg Literary Journal, 1798–1800), edited by Marie Joseph Hyacinthe, Chevalier de Gaston; and other periodicals of less importance. The Mercure de Russie in particular followed the example of the Caméléon littéraire, showing how an apparently independent periodical could be enlisted to support the cultural and ideological programme of the Russian court. The Mercure immediately announced its intention to enable people to see how much progress education has made in Russia over the last thirty years and how much better it is than the education of several peoples who, although they are very enlightened, have not been able, or have not dared, to banish old methods, which in their lands will always be opposed to the progress of the human Spirit.108

In the same vein, the editor praised the religious tolerance that prevailed in Russia, he believed, describing a dinner that Catherine had arranged to bring together representatives of all the confessions of the empire: This meal, which does humanity so much honour, where universal Tolerance presided, might pass as unbelievable in some of Europe’s southern countries, had it not been witnessed by all of the North. It was Catherine’s destiny to perform such a miracle and to force Communions that have hitherto been 108 Le Mercure de Russie, 1786, January and February, 108. On the Mercure de Russie, see especially Kobeko, ‘Frantsuzskii zhurnal v S.-Peterburge’.

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so divided to join together to bless the most just, the most enlightened, the most humane, and the most glorious Reign that there has ever been.109

Salmorenc also made every effort to promote Russian literature in his journal – something that Tschudy had found it very difficult to do some thirty years before, because he knew of hardly any works of Russian literature other, perhaps, than those of Lomonosov and Sumarokov. ‘Before the reign of Peter the Great, which unravelled everything’, we read in another number of the periodical, there was nothing, with regard to Belles Lettres, that was worthy of attention [in Russia]. […] The Russian Nation, endowed with the most astonishing aptitudes, but so late to receive Enlightenment, which has been shining only for a short while, has advanced with Giant strides to Close so quickly the immense gap that separated it from nations that had become civilized such a long time before it.110

To substantiate his point about the birth of modern Russian literature, Salmorenc published in French translation several of Prokopovich’s works. He created a rubric ‘Literary History of Russia’ in the Mercure, which in itself amounted to a statement of a sort. He printed announcements about new Russian plays, including Catherine’s recent comedy The Impostor.111 By also analyzing a French translation of this play, he managed to underline the point that literary works being produced by Russians were worthy not only of the attention of a cultured domestic public but also of foreign lovers of literature who did not have Russian.112 Nor did he overlook Russian academic and scientific life. The Mercure announced competitions advertised by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences alongside news of the competitions of other European academies, such as the Académie Française, The Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen, and the Royal Society in London.113 Salmorenc thus created the impression of a continuous cultural space, without barriers, in which Russia would henceforth occupy a prime place. The propaganda published by this foreign adventurer on Russia’s behalf had a blatantly sycophantic tone. In a contribution to the Mercure on ‘the 109 Le Mercure de Russie, 1786, January and February, 131–132. 110 Ibidem, March and April, 1786, 5–7. 111 Ibidem, 21–23. The play (Obmanshchik, also translated as The Deceiver) appeared anonymously, but it was clear to the public that Catherine was its author. The Mercure also devoted an article to discussion of the play’s premiere in St Petersburg (ibidem, 51–68). 112 Ibidem, 29, etc. 113 Ibidem, 43–44.

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Progress of the Arts, Sciences, and Belles Lettres in Russia in the Reign of Catherine II’, for example, we read the following panegyric to Catherine: Tu sçais te partager entre Minerve et Mars; et, ce qu’avec raison, toute l’Europe admire, tout Art est citoien dans ton heureux Empire. Le Russe excelle en tout, et son essor étonne.114 (You know how to divide yourself between Minerva and Mars; / and what all Europe rightly admires, / [is that] all Art is a citizen in your happy Empire. / The Russian excels in everything, and his soaring flight astonishes.)

Similarly obsequious is an ode entitled ‘The Age of Catherine II’, in which the poet lauds Catherine’s endeavours as a law-maker and her foreign policy, especially her crusade against infidels.115 Like Tschudy, Salmorenc made no attempt to conceal his indebtedness to highly placed persons whom he flattered: it was clear that his periodical appeared ‘under the auspices of Their Imperial Highnesses Alexander and Constantine, Grand Dukes of Russia’. It is likely that the periodicals produced in eighteenth-century Russia in French were aimed primarily at a national rather than an international readership, including Russian subjects who had a better reading knowledge of French than Russian or simply preferred to read French. At any rate, we have no evidence to suggest that they were distributed outside the empire. Even their readership inside Russia seems to have been quite small. We are therefore inclined to think that the eighteenth-century Russian Francophone press did not have a clearly defined propagandistic function. Nevertheless, it was probably felt by the authorities to serve useful purposes. After all, the idea that the publication of such periodicals was to give ‘pleasure’ to the Russian people had already been put forward in the 1750s with respect to Tschudy’s Caméléon littéraire by the then president of the Academy of Sciences, albeit in quite vague terms.116 Moreover, the very existence of periodicals in French enabled St Petersburg, where the majority of such publications were based, to present itself as a European capital whose press 114 ‘Progrès des Arts, des Sciences, et des Belles Lettres en Russie, sous le Règne de Catherine II’ (ibidem, 110–113 ; quotation on 110–111). The verses were written by a M. Clarmonse. 115 ‘Le Siècle de Catherine II’, Le Mercure de Russie, August 1786, 113–120. The author of this ode was Gallien de Salmorenc himself. The title of the ode is a transparent allusion to Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV. 116 Popova, ‘Teodor-Genrikh Chudi i osnovannyi im v 1755 g. zhurnal “Le Caméléon littéraire”’, 24.

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used the language of Europe par excellence.117 Most importantly, these periodicals, like the French theatre at court,118 may have helped to convince the elite – who, together with foreigners living in Russia, were probably the main readership targeted – that the Russian monarchy had a civilizing role and that the elite did indeed have a European identity. In the nineteenth century, direct connections between Francophone periodicals and the Russian authorities would become more typical than they were in the eighteenth, even if it was not always acknowledged that such connections existed. The Journal du Nord, for example, was set up in St Petersburg in 1807 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to counter Napoleonic propaganda, although it did not admit to being an official organ. In 1813, this periodical became the Conservateur impartial (The Impartial Conservative) and passed under the control of Count Sergei Uvarov, the future president of the Academy of Sciences and minister of public education who was at that time the superintendent of the St Petersburg educational district. The Conservateur impartial invariably supported Uvarov’s plans. Similarly, the Bulletin du Nord, journal scientifique et littéraire (Bulletin of the North, a Scientific and Literary Journal, which came out in Moscow in 1828–1829) was published under the protection of a high-ranking official, the governor of Moscow, Prince Dmitrii Vladimirovich Golitsyn. It published essays on ancient Russian history, translations of Russian literature into French, and reports presented in Russian learned societies such as the Imperial Society of Naturalists in Moscow, thus demonstrating the ‘progress of civilization’ in Russia.119 Not that all nineteenth-century Francophone periodicals produced in Russia fulfilled such propagandistic functions. For example, the privately published periodical Le Furet (The Ferret, 1829–1831), which subsequently became Le Miroir (The Mirror, 1831–1833), served a more plainly cultural purpose as a bridge between Russian readers and the French press and probably also as a source of information about Russia to Francophone foreigners living there (Illustration 13). It accommodated selections of contemporary 117 It is worth noting, though, that the first regular Russian newspaper, which started to appear under the name Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti in 1728, was never published in a French version, although it did come out in German (which also for long remained an important language in Russia for commercial purposes). We are grateful to Anthony Cross for drawing our attention to these points. 118 On the court theatre, see the third section of Chapter 3 above. 119 See Rjéoutski and Speranskaia, ‘The Francophone Press in Russia’, 92–94. Dmitrii Golitsyn was himself fluent in French and the brother of a ‘Franco-Russian’ writer, Prince Boris Golitsyn. On the press in French published in Russia in the f irst third of the nineteenth century, see Speranskaia, ‘Periodicheskie izdaniia na frantsuzskom iazyke v Rossii’.

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French literature, including work by Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Prosper Mérimée, articles from French periodicals, and critical essays by its French editor, Charles de Saint-Julien (who would go on to take up a teaching post at St Petersburg University). There were also translations of Russian literary works and reviews of Russian books and theatre performances. The periodical even included sketches on St Petersburg high society in which members of the Russian beau monde were mocked for imitating the French and reproved for their preference for the French language over Russian.120

The promotion and translation of Russian literature In the Antidote to Chappe’s Journey to Siberia, Catherine explicitly referred to the emergence of Russian belles-lettres, citing the works of Prokopovich, Kantemir, Tatishchev, Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, and Sumarokov.121 In so doing, as Marcus Levitt has pointed out, she linked state and literature, ‘whose fates were to be so closely intertwined in the later tradition, both intellectually and institutionally’.122 At the same time, she was treating the condition of the nation’s literature – its scale, aesthetic quality, and vitality – as a measure of Russia’s cultural progress. In this respect, she was following a practice that others had already begun and which later Russian writers, also using French for this purpose, would continue to employ. Andrei Shuvalov, for example, had advertised Russia’s cultural credentials in his ‘Letter of a Young Russian Lord’, in which he praised Lomonosov for revealing the ‘riches and beauties’ of the Russian language, and in an ‘Ode on the Death of Mr Lomonosov of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences’ (1765).123 Kheraskov, the rector of Moscow University and a leading man 120 On this journal, see especially Rjéoutski and Speranskaia, ‘The Francophone Press in Russia’, 86–87, 89–90, 95, 97–98. 121 Catherine, Antidote, pt 2, 165. 122 Levitt, ‘An Antidote to Nervous Juice’, 50. 123 Shuvalov’s ‘Lettre d’un jeune Seigneur russe à M. De***’, published in Année Littéraire, vol. 7, 1760, is reprinted in the Slatkine Reprints published in Geneva, 1966, 94–95. For his ‘Ode sur la mort de M. de Lomonosof de l’Académie des sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg’, see Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk v XVIII veke, pt 1, 201–210, where the ode is published (206–208) together with an introduction and some of Lomonosov’s own poetry. Only one copy of the 1765 edition of Shuvalov’s ode on Lomonosov seems to have survived; it is kept in the Voltaire library of the Russian National Library. Shuvalov ends his introduction with the hope that ‘on aura de l’indulgence pour un homme qui écrit dans une langue étrangère’ (allowance will be made for a man who is writing in a foreign language). See also Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 83–86. On Andrei Shuvalov, see Kobeko, ‘Graf Andrei Petrovich Shuvalov’.

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Illustration 13 The first page of a number of the literary and theatrical journal Le Furet (The Ferret).

The periodical is held in the Russian National Library, who have kindly produced this image for us to use.

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of letters in the age of Catherine, continued the practice in a Discourse on Russian Poetry written in French for a foreign readership in 1772.124 (The discourse was published together with a translation into French of a narrative poem in five cantos that Kheraskov had written in 1771 to celebrate the Russian naval victory at Çeşme in the first of the two Russo-Turkish Wars fought in the reign of Catherine.125) Most notably, in 1797 Karamzin published a ‘letter’ in Le Spectateur du Nord. In fact, Karamzin uses the greater part of this quite long article to publicize a work of his own, The Letters of a Russian Traveller, through paraphrase, quotation, and commentary.126 In the earlier part of his ‘Letter to The Spectator’, though, he promotes Russian literature more generally. His argument is twofold. First, the Russians have belonged to European civilization since a time ‘well before’ the Petrine age, and indeed they have long since exemplified the modern European sensibility. Karamzin claims, for example, that the Russians have been cultivating poetry for ‘two or three centuries’. They have ancient songs (chansons) which provide simple but touching expressions of love and friendship and in which there reigns a certain melancholy, ‘a sweet propensity for sadness’ which expresses ‘the character of our people’. The Russian people, according to this characterization, are Sentimentalists avant la lettre. They also have chivalric romances (romans), the heroes of which are mainly generals of the Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir (Russia’s Charlemagne, Karamzin calls him). There is a twelfth-century oral epic that can be compared, Karamzin assures his readers, to the best pieces of Ossian.127 Secondly, the Russians are a people no less gifted than others. Admittedly, they keenly felt their inferiority after Peter the Great had torn down the curtain that separated them from the West. They then proceeded to imitate foreigners in everything from dress and mores to the arts, so that their literature became an ‘echo’ 124 Kheraskov, ‘Discours sur la poésie russe’, translated into Russian as ‘Rassuzhdenie o rossiiskom stikhotvorstve’ and published by P. Berkov in LN, vol. 9–10, 290–294. 125 Berkov’s introduction, ibidem, 287. The title of Kheraskov’s poem was ‘Chesmesskii boi’. Berkov adds that the poem was also translated into German, in 1773. 126 Karamzin, ‘Lettre au Spectateur sur la littérature russe’. Karamzin does not reveal to readers of The Spectator of the North that he himself was the author of these Letters, which arose out of his extended journey to the West in 1789–1790. There is a large corpus of scholarship in English on Karamzin’s Letters: see, e.g., the works by or chapters or parts of chapters in Cross (1971), Hammarberg (1991), Schönle (2000), Dickinson (2006), and Kleespies (2012). See also Chapter 3 in Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard. 127 Karamzin, ‘Lettre au Spectateur sur la littérature russe’, 54–55. Karamzin is referring here, when he mentions a Russian epic, to the ‘Lay of Igor’s Campaign’ (Slovo o polku igoreve), which has generally been accepted as genuine, although some doubts have been raised about its authenticity.

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and a ‘copy’ of those of the French and Germans.128 By the time Karamzin was establishing himself as an author, at the end of the eighteenth century, they had tried their hand at almost all the literary genres. They write only in bursts, Karamzin ruefully acknowledges, perhaps because they receive little encouragement and because they do not yet have a rigorous tradition of literary criticism. Nonetheless, they show no lack of sensibility, imagination, and talent.129 In sum, by addressing the educated European public in their lingua franca, Karamzin makes an elegant claim, bolstered by the knowledge and international literary connections of the anonymous author of The Letters of a Russian Traveller, that Russia already deserves a place in the European literary world. However, there was a further means by which Russians could promote their literary achievements to a European readership, besides making explicit statements that had to be taken on trust. They could also try to raise Russia’s standing in Europe by translating examples of their writings, or by encouraging translation of them. Catherine herself, of course, understood the political value of broadcasting certain writings in the languages of the West. Her Instruction to the delegates elected to her Legislative Commission was aimed at an international readership as well as a domestic one. Written in French, translated into Russian by Catherine’s secretary, Grigorii Kozitskii, amended in the light of advisers’ suggestions, and then published in four languages (French, German, Latin, and Russian), the Instruction proved that the Russian sovereign was conversant with the political and legal thought of the Enlightenment, particularly the ideas of Montesquieu and Beccaria.130 She also quickly secured the translation of her anti-Masonic plays into French (and German), intending them as a message to European Masons as a whole as well as to Russian Masons.131 Betskoi’s Plans and Statutes of the educational institutions established by Catherine were translated into French too, by Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc, and published with the assistance of the sympathetic Diderot.132 Above all, it was important to have belles-lettres translated, because the flowering of the arts, as we have already noted, was considered a mark of civilization. After all, peoples who had not cultivated 128 Ibidem, 56. 129 Ibidem, 57. 130 Nakaz Komissii o sostavlenii proekta novogo ulozheniia. For an English version with a useful introduction, see the edition by Dukes, Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 1767. 131 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 623. 132 Betzky [Betskoi], Les plans et les statuts des différents établissements ordonnés par Sa Majesté impériale Catherine II.

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the arts, Voltaire had warned, were destined to be unknown.133 We shall therefore dwell here on a few examples of attempts to represent Russia to a foreign public, and to raise its standing in western eyes, through literary translation.134 In the process, we shall point out what role the government, or people close to it, played in initiating or executing translations, in order to demonstrate that translating was not always undertaken entirely on the initiative of individuals; on the contrary, in some cases translation amounted to the implementation of a language policy in line with the official Russian foreign policy of the time. One of the first Russians to encourage and engage in literary translation was Kantemir, whom we have already encountered as a diplomat of the 1730s and 1740s. Kantemir translated various works from foreign languages into Russian, including Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.135 Most importantly from our present point of view, Kantemir – as a poet and one of the first Russian subjects to produce Russian literary works couched in secular western genres – aspired to make his own works known in European literary circles, an ambition that could only be realized through translation. His knowledge of French was evidently not such that he could translate his satires into French himself, but it did prove possible – Helmut Grasshoff has argued – eventually to produce a French prose edition via an Italian version done by Princes Aleksandr and Vladimir Dolgorukii.136 From this French edition, a German verse translation was also made, and published in 1752.137 The prominent German writer and literary critic Johann Christoph Gottsched wrote sympathetic reviews of both these editions of Kantemir’s Satires.138 Although Kantemir was Russian by adoption, his writings, his 133 Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, vol. 46, 468. 134 French was Russians’ principal target language, although a significant number of works were translated into German too. French also served as the main intermediary language, for instance, for British readers who wanted to familiarize themselves with works of Russian literature: see Alekseev, Russko-angliiskie literaturnye sviazi, 116. 135 i.e. Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, translated by Kantemir as Razgovory o mnozhestve mirov gospodina Fontenelia parizhskoi akademii nauk sekretaria (1730; it was not until 1740, though, that Kantemir’s translation was published, by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences). 136 [Cantemir], Satyres du Prince Cantemir. See Grasskhoff, ‘Pervye perevody satir A.D. Kantemira’ 103–105. The translation from Italian into French was published in 1749, after Kantemir’s death. It was done, Grasshoff contends, by the Italian priest Guasco with the help of a Russian diplomat based in Paris, Heinrich Gross. Nikolai Kopanev, taking Grasshoff’s work into account, argues that the French translation was done by Gross: Kopanev, ‘O pervykh izdaniiakh satir A. Kantemira’, 150. 137 Kantemir, Heinrich Eberhards Freyherrn von Spilcker […]. 138 Das Neueste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit, 1751, 259–261 (followed by the German translation of one of the satires, on 261–266), and 1752, 503–511 (followed by the German translation of

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acquaintances in foreign noble and literary circles, and the medium of literary translation thus helped to cast post-Petrine Russia in a favourable light. Guasco’s introductory outline of the poet’s life, moreover, contained no trace of the image of Russia as a barbarous country beyond the civilized world. It is therefore ironic that in the 1730s and 1740s the Russian court viewed Kantemir as what we might now call a dissident poet rather than a literary asset for the emerging empire. Future Russian writers and thinkers, such as Belinskii and Plekhanov, would look back on him as a harbinger of an indigenous literature that belonged to European culture.139 In his own lifetime, though, he was unable to publish his satires in Russian and in Russia and was therefore forced to disseminate them either in translation abroad or in Russian manuscripts in the adoptive homeland he zealously served. By the later years of Elizabeth’s reign, when Voltaire was writing his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, the Russian court was more clearly aware than it had been during the age of Anna that translation of works of Russian literature could advance Russian interests. This change was no doubt due in large measure to the advice of aristocrats who had become well versed in western languages and culture. It is notable, for example, that plays by Sumarokov, the leading Russian dramatist of this period, appeared in translation with a speed that indicated support for the undertaking in high places. His tragedy Sinav and Truvor, staged in 1750 and published in Russian in 1751, came out in 1751 in a French translation done by the Russian Prince Aleksandr Dolgorukov.140 On the basis of this French version, Gottsched wrote an approving review of the play in 1753, commending Sumarokov as an example for German writers to emulate, insofar as he demonstrated that writers need not confine themselves to translating from other literatures but could produce works in their own language.141 Another review of Sinav and Truvor appeared in an influential Enlightenment periodical, the Journal étranger (Foreign Journal) in 1755, confirming that Sumarokov’s reputation was spreading beyond Russia.142 Kantemir’s eighth satire, on 512–519). See Gukovskii, ‘Russkaia literatura v nemetskom zhurnale XVIII v.’, 383–384. 139 ‘Kantemir’, in Belinskii, PSS, vol. 8, 613–634; ‘Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli’, in Plekhanov, SS, vol. 21, 78–102. 140 Sumarokov, Sinav i Truvor. Tragediia Aleksandra Sumarokova, and Sumarokov, Sinave et Trouvore, tragédie russe en vers, faite par monsieur Soumarokoff et traduite par mr. le prince Alexandre Dolgorouky. Another of Sumarokov’s tragedies, Semira, was published in German in 1762 before it was published in Russian. For further details on these translations, see Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Translation and Propaganda in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’. 141 Das Neueste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit, 1753, 684–691. 142 Journal étranger, April 1755, 114–156.

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Nor was Dolgorukov’s version the only translation of Sinav and Truvor to be done at this time: a Frenchman, Antoine-Nicolas Lespine de Morembert, produced another, in verse. Morembert’s translation was not published, probably because its wordy rendering of the original showed Sumarokov’s work in a less flattering light than Dolgorukov’s prose version. All the same, Morembert’s project is of interest, inasmuch as it again reveals the probable involvement of Ivan Shuvalov in attempts to promote Russian literature abroad: as an actor in a court troupe in St Petersburg, Morembert was close to Shuvalov, in whose entourage Sumarokov moved too.143 Ivan Shuvalov certainly had a hand in the translation of a ‘Panegyric to Peter the Great’ that Lomonosov had delivered to a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in 1754, on the occasion of the birthday of the Empress Elizabeth. The initial decision to have this speech translated into French was taken by the then president of the Academy, Count Kirill Razumovskii. However, the translation had not materialized by the time the court asked Voltaire to write his history of Peter the Great, and so Shuvalov instructed his secretary, Baron de Tschudy, to translate the panegyric into French so that it could be sent to Voltaire. Tschudy’s translation was finally ready in 1759. (Not that it met with the satisfaction of Lomonosov, who tetchily wrote on the cover of a published copy, after the phrase ‘translated from the Russian original’: ‘but translated very badly and in the face of protests from the Author’.) Comparison of Lomonosov’s Russian original and Tschudy’s French version shows that although the translator did not substantially change the meaning of the text he did write in a style more likely to appeal to a contemporary French reader, altering Lomonosov’s heavy syntax and removing his archaic vocabulary. He also erased all Lomonosov’s references to Providence, probably because he thought that they would tend to diminish the historical importance of Peter and Elizabeth in western eyes.144 In a letter to Voltaire that accompanied Tschudy’s translation, Shuvalov set out to counter the negative impression of Russia conveyed by Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had claimed that the Russian nation was so barbarous that Russian had no words with which to express the notions of ‘honour’ and ‘virtue’.145 One of the leading figures at the Russian court, then, defended Russian literature against a powerful detractor. 143 Rjéoutski and Offord, ‘Translation and Propaganda in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’. 144 Rjéoutski, ‘Baron de Chudi – perevodchik M.V. Lomonosova’. 145 See Mervaud, ‘Introduction’, in Voltaire, Histoire de l’Empire de Russie, vol. 46, 117. For Frederick’s words, see Frederick II, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg, vol. 2, 77.

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By the Alexandrine age, Russia had a more substantial literary corpus to offer to a European public and French translations of Russian works proliferated, answering no doubt to an increased interest in Russia among western readers as well as to the political and cultural interests of the Russian court and literary community. In 1808, for example, a Frenchman, Honoré-Joseph Dalmas, who published a periodical in French in St Petersburg,146 produced a Franco-Russian edition of the tragedy Fingal (1805), written by Vladislav Ozerov, the most popular Russian dramatist of the early nineteenth century.147 Ozerov’s play was particularly suitable for presentation to a western readership because it was a reworking of material already well known to that public, ‘Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books’, which had been published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson in instalments from 1760 onwards and which belonged, Macpherson falsely claimed, to an ancient Gaelic bard, Ossian. At the beginning of his preface (also written in French), Dalmas alluded to several factors – the reforms of Peter the Great, imperial expansion, and the development of the arts – that were clearly linked in contemporary Russian consciousness: The civilization and enlargement of the Russian Empire is one of the most interesting periods in history. Only a century has been needed to raise this power to the high level of glory which leaves it with no rival to dread. It was under the rule of the last tsars that their power began to become stronger, but it was Peter the Great who was destined to regenerate this empire, to lend it the momentum that gives life to states, and to transmit his spirit and genius to his August Successors. It is to the voice of this immortal hero that the arts rushed to surround his throne. The most auspicious successes have exceeded his expectations. It is to make the progress of dramatic and poetic art known to foreigners that I offer them a translation of Fingal, in French verse, and the musical score of this tragedy.148

Again literary achievement is clearly linked to national prestige and imperial power, this time by a foreigner. Shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, another Russian aristocratic patron of the arts, Count Grigorii Orlov, oversaw the production of a lavish two-volume French edition of Krylov’s fables, embellished with a portrait of the author 146 On Dalmas, see Anne Mézin and Rjéoutski (eds), Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières, vol. 2, 212–213. 147 Ozerov, Fingal, tragédie en trois actes. 148 Dalmas, ‘Avant-propos’, in Ozerov, Fingal, tragédie en trois actes, v.

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and a number of engravings.149 This edition was a collective endeavour: Orlov assembled a large team of translators, each responsible for the translation of one fable. (The translations were therefore of varying quality.) Paratexts in the volume revealed its patriotic intent. In a foreword written and published in Russian, Orlov once more linked discourse about language and literature to Russian military prowess and achievement: Let foreigners, who have experienced the hardness and the strength of the Russian sword, know that this people, devout and devoted to their Fatherland and their Tsar, are not without graceful gifts either, that they have their Poets, their Historians, their Scholars, and that for this they deserve as much respect and esteem as for their glory and the victories that resound in their honour throughout the universe. Let them read these imitations of your fables and, as they do, let them feel a desire to understand them in their national language too […] Let this example make our compatriots want to follow us and to communicate the treasures of our literature to foreigners through pure and faithful translation.150

The publication of an exhortatory preface in Russian, without translation, would seem to be intended to affirm the autonomy of the native literary tradition, perhaps diverting attention from the fact that many of Krylov’s fables were versions of fables by La Fontaine and might therefore be regarded as unoriginal. A French preface was also provided, by Pierre-Édouard Lémontey, and while its tone was not as effusive as Orlov’s, it too spoke of Russia’s cultural awakening: A literary Russia has been born and is growing now. Not only is life manifested in it by original and varied productions; every week, every month, every year, papers and periodicals devoted to science, literature, and the arts have been set up to meet the new needs.151

The French editor of the volume endorsed the volume’s overall aim, which was to demonstrate that the Russians had noteworthy authors of their own and a language that would enable them to sustain their literary endeavours. The attempts of Russian writers and aristocrats to advertise the merits of their nation’s literature through translation were complemented by the production of the above-mentioned Russian Anthology compiled by Dupré 149 Krylov, Fables russes tirées du recueil de M. Kriloff. 150 Ibidem, vol. 1, v-vi. 151 Ibidem, x.

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de Saint-Maure, who had spent several years in Russia and knew figures close to the government. Dupré’s anthology, which contained translations of numerous poems by Russian authors, had a sycophantic air.152 In a dedication to Alexander I, the translator explained that his goal was ‘to make known in France some notable productions by poets who honour Russia’ and thus ‘to pay homage to its illustrious Sovereign and to the flourishing state of Letters and the Arts under his glorious rule’.153 As a Frenchman addressing French readers, Dupré would have been loath to claim that Russian literature was superior to that of France, even if he had believed it, but he did venture to say that the Russian language had such harmony, made such daring inversions, and possessed so many compound words that he had often felt that French was ill-equipped to render the ‘grace and energy of the original’.154 He concluded his lengthy introduction on the development of Russian literature thus: This short historical summary will suffice to give a fairly accurate picture of a literature too little known in Europe; the reader may share my feeling of wonder at the miraculous speed with which it took its place in the Republic of Letters. I do not think that there is an example of such a rapid growth at any period or in any nation.155

One is inclined to see Dupré as one of those literary mercenaries who were charged with singing the praises of Russia, its literature, language, and rulers, and who were particularly biddable, Michel Cadot has shown, in the 1840s and 1850s.156 Not that all those who continued to translate Russian literature into French in the nineteenth century had propagandistic goals or links with the Russian authorities; some were Frenchmen resident in Russia who had acquired a good knowledge of Russian and developed a genuine interest in Russian literature.157 152 Saint-Maure, Anthologie russe, suivie de poésies originales. We have used the digital version of this source at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9763877d. 153 Ibidem (dedication not paginated). 154 Ibidem, iii. 155 Ibidem, xxvii–xxviii. 156 Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française. On interest in Russian literature in France during this period, see 405–457, including information on translations of works of Russian literature into French on 408–433. 157 As attested by the translations of Ferry de Pigny: see, e.g., [Bulgarin], Ivan Wyjighine ou le Gilblas russe; idem, Pétre Ivanovitch, suite du Gilblas russe; [Bulgarin et al.], Les Conteurs russes, ou nouvelles, contes et traditions russes. Pigny’s interests were not exclusively literary; he also wrote about Russian history: see Pigny, Traits de la vie des Russes à l’époque de Pierre le Grand. Another notable translator was Hippolyte Masclet, who translated Khemnitser and Krylov.

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Chaadaev’s first ‘Philosophical Letter’ While continuing to have a propagandistic function that was already in evidence in the eighteenth century, French also became, in the nineteenth, a language of historiosophical polemic for Russians wanting to address both an external and an internal readership. That is to say, it served as a vehicle for the speculative philosophy of history. This was a field of enquiry to which nineteenth-century Russian writers and thinkers were strongly attracted. Deeply influenced from the late 1830s by Hegel and weighing up the evidence for providential design and human agency, they searched for pattern in historical development and for teleological explanations of national destiny. Of course, French was never the only vehicle for such speculation in Russia. Nonetheless, command of French enabled Russians to inform themselves about and to participate in an international debate in which the place of Russia itself in the European world featured more and more prominently. In any case, French was perceived as ‘la langue de l’Europe’ (the language of Europe), as Pushkin observed, quoting Voltaire.158 Its use for international debate about portentous historical developments therefore seemed natural, even if it raised questions about Russia’s cultural dependency.159 From the age of Nicholas I, then, attempts to analyze Russia’s relations with other European countries in a grand historical perspective supplanted the relatively limited and diffident pleas for cultural recognition that can be observed in various Russian writings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, Russian writers of the mid-nineteenth century, whilst they may have been more self-confident as a result of Russia’s role in the Napoleonic Wars, were just as deeply affected as their predecessors by resentment at foreigners’ disparagement of Russia or disdain for it. They had ample grounds for such sensitivity. Western Europeans who visited Russia after 1815, like earlier travellers, still indulged in negative moral commentary, portraying Russians as peculiarly obsequious, servile, cunning, deceitful, indolent, credulous, or venal. In particular, they continued to feed Russians’ anxiety about being an imitative people, sometimes using Russian nobles’ proficiency in foreign languages as evidence of a talent for mimicry. As Robert Lyall, who lived in Russia for several years towards 158 Pushkin, PSS, vol. 14, 187. 159 For an interesting discussion of language choice in the development of a philosophical culture in Russia, and the perception of French as ‘a more intellectually articulate language’, see Clowes, Fiction’s Overcoat, 21–27.

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the end of the reign of Alexander I, tried to persuade his readers: ‘their talent for imitation is universally allowed; they are fluent in languages’.160 Similarly, the French dramatist François Ancelot, writing in 1826 on the basis of a visit to Russia, contended that the Russians had been nothing but capable imitators from the moment when Peter decided to locate them in the European community: they seized upon the superficial achievements of western civilization and copied them like an intelligent, docile child.161 This imitativeness, Ancelot maintained, was particularly strongly felt in literature, which had been cultivated by men whose education was foreign and whose ideas, whose language even, was borrowed from France.162 Such perceptions still persisted among foreigners in the 1840s. ‘The Russians’, observed the English governess named Charlotte, on whose memoirs we have already drawn, ‘have decidedly much aptitude for taking up, and expressing, or executing the ideas of others, if they have not many of their own,’ and they ‘are content to imitate others’.163 Not that Russians themselves invariably dissented from this demeaning view: Vigel’, writing his memoirs in the age of Nicholas I, accepted that the ‘amusing, pitiful passion for imitation’ was still strong.164 By far the most damaging statement of the argument that the Russians were an imitative people was a text known as the first ‘Philosophical Letter’, which was written in 1828–1829, in French, by another Russian, Petr Chaadaev, who was a well-known figure in Moscow’s literary salons.165 The letter was published (in a poor Russian translation) in 1836, in the periodical 160 Lyall, The Character of the Russians, and a Detailed History of Moscow, viii. Lyall adds a further damning explanation in a note: ‘As they have the advantage of foreign tutors from their youth, this is easily explained, without supposing any unusual or miraculous talent for the acquisition of languages.’ 161 Ancelot, Six mois en Russie, 231–232. 162 Ibidem, 298–299, 380–381. 163 Anon., Russian Chit Chat, 106, 240; see also 181. 164 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 2, 6. 165 ‘Lettre première’, in Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma, vol. 1, 86–106. The letter was the first of a series of eight, but it was the only one to be published in Chaadaev’s lifetime. On the publication history of the letters, see Kleespsies, A Nation Astray, 198, n. 57. There is a large literature on Chaadaev. The first major Russian biography was Gerzhenzon’s (2000), which first appeared in 1908. The first western biography was by Quénet (1931). These works are superseded by McNally’s monograph (1971), which is now the standard work on Chaadaev in English. There is a rich article by Budgen on the long friendship between Pushkin and Chaadaev (1990) and a substantial and useful chapter on Chaadaev in Kleespies, A Nation Astray, 47–80. See also Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 81–91, and Clowes, in whose book Fiction’s Overcoat more attention is devoted than in most other scholarship to Chaadaev’s language choice (see 24–25, 28–29, 30, 32, 37–39, 54–56).

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Teleskop (The Telescope), having escaped the attention of a negligent censor, and it immediately had a profound impact. So unpalatable were Chaadaev’s views to the authorities that Teleskop was closed down by the government, its editor was exiled to a remote town in the north-eastern part of European Russia, and Chaadaev was declared insane. Herzen famously compared the letter to ‘a shot that rang out in the dark night’.166 The views that Chaadaev expressed in his ‘philosophical letter’ became a point of departure for arguments between Westernizers and Slavophiles.167 Writing from ‘Necropolis’, the city of the dead (that is to say, Moscow), Chaadaev argued that Russians are ‘neither of the West nor of the East’.168 Untouched by the universal education of mankind, they stand outside time, living ‘in the narrowest of presents, without a past and without a future, in the midst of a flat calm’.169 Lacking sound moral and intellectual habits, they are perpetually in transit: In our homes we are like visitors, among our families we are like strangers, in our cities we are like nomads, more nomadic than those whose animals graze on our steppes, for they are more attached to their deserts than we are to our cities.170

They have none of the vivid memories or fertile ideas that are cherished by peoples who have gone through periods of violent agitation, because they have no folk representatives of the sort – like the Celtic bards and Scandinavian skalds whom Dalmas had mentioned in his preface to his translation of Ozerov’s Fingal171 – who gave expression to their peoples’ experience through poetry and heroic legend.172 Chaadaev’s references to Russian nomadism were particularly chastening, for several reasons. First, Enlightenment thinkers had strongly linked civilization to a settled urban way of life and, accordingly, perceived pastoral peoples as primitive and ahistorical.173 Secondly, Chaadaev was 166 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, vol. 2, 516. 167 It should not be assumed, though, that Chaadaev held the same views in the mid-1830s, when the letter was published, or in the 1840s, when it was debated, as he had when he had written it: see Budgen, ‘Pushkin and Chaadaev’, 27–28. 168 ‘Lettre première’, in Chaadaev, 89. Our translations of quotations from the ‘Letter’ are taken from Leatherbarrow and Offord (eds), A Documentary History of Russian Thought, 67–78. 169 ‘Lettre première’, in Chaadaev, 91. 170 Ibidem, 90. 171 Dalmas, ‘Avant-propos’, in Ozerov, Fingal, tragédie en trois actes, vi. 172 ‘Lettre première’, in Chaadaev, 90, 95–96. 173 Kleespies, A Nation Astray, 176–177.

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plainly likening the Russians to the nomadic Tatars, from whose degrading domination they had suffered for so long in the late Middle Ages.174 Equally humiliating was his repeated comparison of Russians to children who have not learned to think for themselves.175 If they did manage to stir themselves from time to time, Chaadaev wrote, it was ‘with the puerile frivolity of a child who raises himself and stretches out his hands towards the rattle which his nurse offers him’.176 Russians’ lack of a moral compass and their perennial immaturity, Chaadaev claimed, were the ‘natural consequence of a culture based wholly on borrowing and imitation’.177 There were, no doubt, a number of reasons why Chaadaev chose French as the medium for his philosophical letters. Known for his command of both French and English,178 he may well have been more comfortable writing in French than in Russian, as Ingrid Kleespies has suggested, and in any case ‘French was considered to have a more developed philosophical vocabulary’.179 However, Chaadaev’s use of French also served to reinforce the message of his first ‘letter’: the use of the ‘language of Europe’ implicitly bore out his view of the derivative nature of the culture of his nation, or rather non-nation. In literary terms, this language choice suggests, in the words of Kleespies again, that the Letter has been written by a thoroughly Gallicized Russian, one who has internalized not only the language, but also the dominant French view of Russia. He is incapable of viewing Russia in any way but through the eyes of a Western observer. The narrator of the Letter possesses no other linguistic or cultural framework for analyzing his own nation than that of the philosophes, a fact that suggests Russia’s failure to create a philosophical context or language capable of articulating Russian nationhood. The very absence of such a philosophical framework lends credence to Chaadaev’s larger argument that Russia itself hardly seems to exist in relation to the nations of the West.180 174 ‘Lettre première’, in Chaadaev, 91. 175 Ibidem, 92–93. 176 Ibidem, 91. 177 Ibidem, 92. It may be that Chaadaev’s letter owes something to Ancelot’s Six Months in Russia, published the year before he wrote his letter, in which, as we have said, there are frequent references to Russia’s supposed imitativeness. 178 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 2, 162. 179 Kleespies, A Nation Astray, 56. 180 Ibidem. We do not discuss here Kleespies’s suggestion that it is possible that Chaadaev’s Letter was an ironic narrative rather than the ‘earnest cri de cœur’ it has always been taken for (ibidem).

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Russians, then, lacked the originality that was widely thought in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to distinguish peoples who had historical futurity, and Chaadaev’s use of French to broach discussion of the problem underlined the point.181 We should not underestimate the extent to which the shock administered by Chaadaev’s letter helped to galvanize members of the literary community, who would soon provide irrefutable proof of their nation’s linguistic and cultural independence through the creation of a corpus of literature and thought, written in Russian, that would itself profoundly influence other cultures.182 It is worth noting, finally, that Russians – including Pushkin – who had no strong objection to Chaadaev’s letter while it circulated in its original French version in the restricted world of the salon, as it did for several years, were scandalized, as Kleespies also points out, when it appeared in print in Russian. It was as if publication transformed this expression of private opinion, which had limited power, into an authoritative subversive text.183 Translation of the letter from French into Russian, we may add, took Chaadaev’s thoughts beyond the realm of the noble elite, who could express themselves quite freely, within certain limits, and placed them in a broader social domain, where an intelligentsia with relatively low-born elements hostile to noble culture was beginning to flourish.184 181 We should add that Chaadaev’s view of Catholicism as the force that endowed western civilization with the unity and purpose he felt Russia lacked was a further factor which alienated some of his Russian contemporaries. Chaadaev was much affected in the 1820s by the Christian apologetics of Catholic writers in the French-speaking world such as de Bonald, Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and de Maistre. 182 We shall trace the seam of linguistic Gallophobia in this corpus in our last two chapters. 183 Kleespies, A Nation Astray, 67–68. Mikhail Velizhev argues that Chaadaev’s letter took on a resonance in 1836 that it would not have had in the 1820s, insofar as Russia had become more isolationist: Velizhev, ‘Iazyk i kontekst v russkoi intellektual’noi istorii’. The promulgation of the doctrine of Official Nationality in the early 1830s also militated against the expression of views that seemed to belittle Russian historical and cultural achievements. 184 Although we have focused in this section, while dealing with the early part of the reign of Nicholas I, on the famous case of Chaadaev’s treatment of the relationship between Russia and ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’ as a whole, it is worth noting that Russian historiosophical debate in French was also beginning in this period to address the question of the place of the Russians among the Slavs. For example, Prince Petr Kozlovskii, a Russian diplomat and author of several pamphlets published in Paris and Ghent, used French to respond to a pamphlet entitled La vérité sur la Russie et sur la révolte des Provinces Polonaises, in which the Polish Count Adam Gurowski had proposed that all Slavs be united within the Russian Empire and that Russia should become the leader of the Slav world. It has been suggested, by Vera Mil’china and Aleksandr Ospovat, that Kozlovskii wrote in French because he did not intend his work to be published in Russia and because he expressed certain ideas which might not please the Russian authorities. See Mil’china and Ospovat, ‘Iz polemiki 1830-kh gg. vokrug panslavianskoi idei’. Kozlovskii’s

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Geopolitical polemics around 1848 We turn next to three bilingual Russian writers – Nikolai Turgenev, Fedor Tiutchev, and Aleksandr Herzen – who used French to further the debate about Russia’s relationship to the West that Chaadaev had helped to generate.185 French, for these writers, was a vehicle for transmission of a view of Russia and its destiny to both a Russian and a European readership, just as it had been for Chaadaev. They were engaged in an internal Russian polemic, as representatives of loyalist or oppositional political viewpoints (liberal Westernist, conservative nationalist, and socialist respectively) which were beginning to harden in the reign of Nicholas I. At the same time, they were reflecting on the grand narrative about Russia’s historical destiny that had preoccupied Chaadaev. Their views, moreover, had particular urgency at this historical juncture, in the late 1840s, against the background of growing political crisis in France, the development of socialist agitation in some parts of Europe, and the outbreak of revolutionary disturbances in France, the Austrian Empire, and various Italian and German states in 1848–1849. In the largest perspective, a geopolitical struggle between Russia and the major western powers was developing that can be seen in retrospect to have led to the Crimean War of the mid-1850s. The first of these three writers, Nikolai Turgenev, whom we have already encountered in other connections,186 was a man of cosmopolitan outlook and moderate political views, an opponent of autocracy and an advocate of constitutional reform. Born in 1789, he had been shaped in his childhood more by the ideas of the French Enlightenment than by the German counter-current to it that would steer the Russian literary community and intelligentsia of the age of Nicholas towards Romanticism and nationalism. He served for many years in the imperial administration, under Alexander I. Although he had gone abroad on leave in April 1824, ostensibly because of poor health, and was still outside Russia when the Decembrist Revolt broke out at the end of 1825, Turgenev’s earlier involvement in the secret societies the mutineers had frequented in the years leading up to the revolt attracted suspicion, and he was sentenced to death in absentia. (Nicholas pamphlet is published in Russian translation in the article by Mil’china and Ospovat, 171–174. See also our discussion in the following section of the views expressed by Nikolai Turgenev in his pamphlet Russia in the Face of the European Crisis. 185 We draw in this section on a chapter by Offord, ‘French as a Polemical Language for Russian Writers in the Age of Nicholas I’, published in 2017 in an earlier book in the series to which this monograph belongs. 186 In the fourth section of Chapter 4 and the penultimate section of Chapter 5 above.

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commuted the sentence to lifelong exile in Siberia.) Turgenev’s stay abroad therefore turned into permanent political emigration. In 1832 he settled in France and there, over many years, he wrote a three-volume work, Russia and the Russians, which was eventually published in Paris in 1847. In the first volume of this work, Turgenev described his government service up until his departure from Russia and the development of the political disaffection among the elite that culminated in the Decembrist Revolt. In the second volume, he examined Russia’s social structure, especially the institution of serfdom, and its political organization and various legal and educational matters. In the third volume, he set out his ideas on the need for reform and the types of reform required.187 Turgenev himself raised the question why he had written Russia and the Russians in French, since he had used Russian in all the writings he had previously published.188 In the course of the work he provided various answers to this question, explicit or implicit. The use of French enabled him, of course, to reach an international readership and to inform Europeans about things of which they were ignorant.189 In particular, Turgenev wished to publicize the extent of despotism in Russia. He wanted also to show that the Russian serfs were not as degraded as westerners generally thought they were.190 However, in choosing French, he by no means intended to ignore Russian readers. Indeed, it was to Russians, first and foremost, that the work was ‘truly and primarily’ addressed, Turgenev claimed, and he hoped it would have an impact in his own country.191 French, after all, was no less effective than Russian as a means of conveying unpalatable truths about Russia to compatriots of his own social stratum. It also served Turgenev just as well as Russian for protesting his personal innocence of the charge that he was complicit in the Decembrist Revolt: some two-fifths of his first volume is taken up with a Justificatory Memoir that he had sent to the Russian authorities after his conviction.192 French, then, was a language for a nobleman who wished to plead to his sovereign, albeit a language which the sovereigns’ subjects might have used with more hope of success when they addressed Alexander I than when they had to petition Nicholas. Russia and the Russians was a long and somewhat unfocused work, but the revolutionary disturbances that broke out the year after it was published 187 N. Tourgueneff [N.I. Turgenev], La Russie et les russes. 188 Ibidem, vol. 1, ix. 189 Ibidem, 407. 190 Ibidem, 20. 191 Ibidem, x. 192 Mémoire justificatif, in La Russie et les russes, vol. 1, 211–407.

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demanded a profession de foi that was more succinct and polemical. For this purpose, Turgenev resorted – as Tiutchev and Herzen also would – to a genre that had flourished in France itself since before the revolution of 1789, the political pamphlet. In his own essay in this genre, Russia in the Face of the European Crisis, Turgenev used French to defend his country (even though he had left it) against foreign invective directed at the so-called barbarians of the North and to clarify his position on the European political spectrum.193 He is a champion of free trade and a free press. He advocates the emancipation of the serfs and other humanitarian measures, such as the abolition of corporal punishment. However, he also fears ‘the revolutionary plague’ and deplores the socialist doctrines that were attracting such a following in Europe in the 1840s.194 Besides putting forward his essentially liberal political views, Turgenev made a further contribution in his pamphlet to discussion of the topical subject of the destiny of the Slavs in European civilization. He did not believe, as did the Slavophiles, Tiutchev, and to some degree Herzen, that Russia should define itself in opposition to the western world. In particular, he had no concerns about the extent of the influence that France had had upon his country and he would have no truck with Russian Gallophobia: The Russian people, for their part, are far from being driven by hostile feelings towards France; on the contrary, they live by its civilization just as it is; they draw sustenance from its literature, good or bad; they speak its language in preference to any other foreign tongue; they buy its fashions and objets d’art; they drink its wine; and, lastly, a certain class of Russian society regards France’s capital as an Eldorado which is the object of its sweetest dreams, another Mecca which all believers aspire to visit at least once in their lifetime.195

If Turgenev conceived of Europe as a bipolar world, then it was not because he was alienated by western forms of Christianity or because he rejected the principles that supposedly underpinned western civilization but because he believed Russia was isolated by its own political absolutism. Russia would be weakened, he thought, if it continued to set itself against the development of democratic states, and people would come to regard the continent as divided into ‘free and constitutional Europe’, on the one hand, 193 Tourgueneff, La Russie en présence de la crise européenne, 22–23. 194 Ibidem, 32. 195 Ibidem, 22.

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and ‘enslaved Russia’, on the other.196 If his nation was to be actively involved in the further progress of European civilization, as Turgenev hoped it would be, then it too would have to adopt a constitutional, representative form of government which operated in the interests of all classes.197 All the same, Turgenev did agree with conservative nationalists that Russia had particular racial or religious affinities with populations outside its borders – affinities which had almost always eluded European commentators, he thought, hence the unfairness of their judgements about his country.198 Russians’ fortunes, he argued, were closely linked to the fortunes of fellow Slavs or co-religionists, especially the Poles, with whom a rapprochement should be sought and whose harsh treatment by Russia was a major cause of European Russophobia.199 Despite his objections to Russian autocracy, Turgenev could not resist making a claim to Russian leadership in the Slav world, although he did try to convince readers that this leadership would be benevolent and protective, not dominant or oppressive.200 In the final analysis, then, Turgenev’s pamphlet was a further meditation on ‘Russian and Slav things’.201 Even though it was informed by the secular and constitutional values prized among the Decembrists, rather than by the Orthodox and Pan-Slavist dreams of conservative nationalists, Turgenev still had great expectations of his nation. No less than conservative nationalists, he is sure that Russia has been summoned by Providence to fulfil a lofty destiny and that ‘the Russian people have not yet said their last word in history’.202 And quite naturally, he too uses French as an international language of speculation about the Russian national mission, the destiny of the Slavs, and European wholeness or disunity. Unlike Turgenev, the poet and diplomat Tiutchev was a staunch supporter of autocratic government and a conservative nationalist who dreamed of the creation of an immense Orthodox empire that included the one-time stronghold of eastern Christendom, Constantinople. His contribution to the debate of the 1840s about Russia’s historical destiny was written, for the most part, inside Russia, to which he had recently returned after living abroad for more than two decades, from 1822 to 1844, mainly in Bavaria and Piedmont. 196 Ibidem, 37. Turgenev’s italics. 197 Tourgueneff, La Russie et les russes, vol. 1, vii, and La Russie en présence de la crise européenne, 39. 198 Tourgueneff, La Russie en présence de la crise européenne, 8. 199 Ibidem, 26–30, 39 ff. 200 Ibidem, 37–38, 42. 201 Ibidem, 38; Turgenev’s italics. 202 Ibidem, 37–38, 30.

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He produced three substantial articles about Russia’s relationship to ‘Europe’, responding in each case to developments in contemporary politics, in which he took a passionate interest. At least two of these articles were conceived as chapters in a larger work, Russia and the West, which was not completed but of which some other fragments, including the draft of an introductory chapter on ‘The Situation in 1849’, have survived. The first article, entitled ‘A Letter to Dr Gustav Kolb, Editor of The Universal Gazette’, was written in Munich in 1844. On one level, this article was a response to one of the most eloquent manifestations of the growing Russophobia in Western Europe, the unmitigated attack on Russian despotism under Nicholas I that was mounted by the French Marquis de Custine in his book Russia in 1839, which, together with Chaadaev’s first ‘Philosophical Letter’, gave fresh impetus to Russian cultural nationalism.203 Tiutchev explicitly condemned Custine’s book as an example of the moral and intellectual degeneracy of the age. However, the target at which he directed most of his ire was the German press, which breathed resentment at Russia’s policy of thwarting the desire for unification of the German lands. Germans, Tiutchev protested, ought in fact to have been grateful to Russia for liberating them from Napoleonic rule and for the long period of peaceful development that followed. This demand for gratitude was accompanied by a threat: the German states would be heading towards an abyss, Tiutchev warned, if they allowed relations with Russia to deteriorate.204 The second of Tiutchev’s political articles in French, ‘Russia and Revolution’, was written in April 1848 as a memorandum for Nicholas I. In this instance, Tiutchev was responding to the February uprising in Paris that had toppled the ‘July Monarchy’ of Louis-Philippe. Tiutchev detected an epoch-making struggle in progress between Russia and the forces of revolution that he associated with the West. The roots of the brewing European crisis, he alleged, lay in the French Revolution of 1789, which had suppressed the Christian virtues of humility and self-renunciation and translated the demands of the human ego into social and political rights.205 Tiutchev’s third programmatic tract, ‘The Papacy and the Roman Question’, was prompted by events in Italy in 1849, when Louis-Napoleon had intervened militarily to defeat the insurgency of 1848 and to reinstall Pius IX as Pope. Here Tiutchev marshalled conventional Orthodox arguments against the 203 Custine, La Russie en 1839. 204 ‘Lettre à M. le docteur Gustave Kolb, Rédacteur de la “Gazette Universelle”’, in Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 3, 11–28. 205 ‘La Russie et la révolution’, ibidem, 42–54.

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western churches. Protestantism, which was moribund everywhere except in England, Tiutchev claimed, elevated the human ego over the Church. The Church of Rome, meanwhile, had become a political power, rather than a community of the faithful, and the Pope led it as a temporal sovereign.206 It might be argued that Tiutchev’s choice of French as the vehicle for his political views merely illustrates a preference for that language among the Russian nobility of his generation. After all, Tiutchev was perfectly Francophone from childhood. ‘French reigned almost exclusively’ in the Tiutchev family, we are told by the poet’s son-in-law, the Slavophile and later Pan-Slavist Ivan Aksakov, ‘so that not only all conversations but also all the correspondence of the parents with the children and of the children among themselves, both then and later on, throughout their lives, were conducted in nothing but French’.207 Moreover, French remained Tiutchev’s main domestic and social language in his adult life. Neither his first wife Nelly, a Bavarian widow née Countess von Bothmer whom he married in 1826, nor his second wife, Ernestine Dörnberg, née von Pfeffel, a member of an aristocratic family from Alsace, whom he married in 1839, knew Russian. In King Ludwig’s Munich, to which Tiutchev was posted as a diplomat at the beginning of the 1820s, French was the language of the salons where the young Russian cut an impressive figure as a sparkling conversationalist. Even after his return to Russia, Tiutchev continued to use French for correspondence with members of his family and Russians of his class. Take, for example, a private and confidential ‘Letter on Censorship in Russia’ addressed in 1857 to Prince Mikhail Gorchakov, who had recently commanded the Russian forces in the Crimean War and was by now viceroy in Poland.208 And yet, the dominance of French in Tiutchev’s parents’ household did not prevent his mother, Aksakov also reports, ‘from adhering to Russian customs’; French ‘surprisingly coexisted with her Church Slavonic reading of psalters, books of hours, and prayer books in her bedroom and more generally with all the features of the Russian Orthodox and noble way of life’.209 Thus Tiutchev grew up bilingual and as an adult came to write Russian verse that was very highly regarded by his contemporaries, including Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoi. Indeed, he is remembered as one of the outstanding Russian poets, second only, in the eyes of some, to Pushkin. Nor was Tiutchev averse to expressing his nationalistic ideas in Russian political verse, of which he 206 ‘La papauté et la question romaine’, ibidem, 55–74. 207 Ivan Aksakov, Biografiia Fedora Ivanovicha Tiutcheva, 10. 208 ‘Lettre sur la censure en Russie’, in Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 3, 96–106. 209 Ivan Aksakov, Biografiia Fedora Ivanovicha Tiutcheva, 10.

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produced a prodigious quantity, amounting to almost one-sixth of his total poetic output, from the 1840s on.210 In a poem written in 1848, for example, Russia stands firm as an immovable barrier to revolutionary chaos, a cliff in the face of a turbulent sea.211 In another, written as the Crimean War raged, Russia’s enemies were ‘blasphemous minds’ and ‘impious peoples’.212 In ‘Russian Geography’, probably written in 1848–1849, contemporaneously with two of the French polemical tracts we have described, we see the immense extent of the empire of which Tiutchev dreamed: ‘From the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China, / From the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube…’213 This empire, Tiutchev exulted in 1849 at the end of a poem entitled ‘Dawn’, would amount to a realization of the universal triumph of Christianity in its Orthodox form.214 Faced with the perfect bilingual competence of this Russian nobleman, some literary scholars, as we have already pointed out, have speculated about the extent to which Russian biculturalism may have brought about ‘psychosocial dislocation’. This affliction, it is argued, produced a ‘compensatory nationalism’ that caused Tiutchev to reject the West, in which he was at ease, and to idealize Russia, in whose rural heartland he was bored.215 From the sociolinguistic perspective, it is more rewarding to reflect on the precise functions and benefits of Tiutchev’s choice of French in his political writings than to seek Freudian explanations of his ideas. The most obvious benefit, of course, was that Tiutchev’s use of French brought his prose tracts to a much wider readership than his Russian poetry could reach, including a foreign readership across Europe which Tiutchev seems – despite his well-known reticence about publication of his Russian lyric poetry – to have purposefully targeted. The letter to Kolb was submitted to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (the Gazette Universelle to which Tiutchev’s title refers), and when the periodical did not publish it, Tiutchev had it printed privately in Munich as a political pamphlet.216 The bulk of ‘Russia and Revolution’ 210 Gregg, Fedor Tiutchev, 108. 211 ‘More i utes’, in Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 1, 197–198. 212 ‘Teper’ tebe ne do stikhov’, ibidem, vol. 2, 66. 213 ‘Russkaia geografiia’, ibidem, vol. 1, 200. 214 ‘Rassvet’, ibidem, 218. 215 Conant, The Political Poetry and Ideology of F.I. Tiutchev, 10–11; Gregg, Fedor Tiutchev, 92–93, 145–146. 216 This work was later published in Russian, under the title ‘Russia and Germany’ (Rossiia i Germaniia), in RA, 1873, no. 10, cols 1993–2019 (French original on 2019–2042). On the history of the composition and publication of Tiutchev’s polemical works in French, see especially the authoritative article by Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’: in this instance, see 206–207, n. 6.

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was first published – without Tiutchev’s permission, it is true, and with a different title and within a hostile commentary on it – in a pamphlet by the French diplomat Baron Paul-Charles-Amable de Bourgoing;217 substantial quotations and paraphrased passages from Tiutchev’s memorandum were then reproduced in a ‘Diary of the Fortnight’ in the important Parisian periodical Revue des Deux Mondes (Review of the Two Worlds) in June 1849.218 The work also circulated in the diplomatic community in Munich.219 ‘The Papacy and The Roman Question’, finally, was published in full in the Revue des Deux Mondes, on 1 January 1850, this time with Tiutchev’s approval and thanks to the intercession of his then brother-in-law Karl Pfeffel.220 Whether Tiutchev had official permission to publish all these tracts abroad and whether, in particular, they amounted almost to a statement of official Russian foreign policy is open to question, for Tiutchev’s Pan-Slavism was at odds with Nicholas’s legitimist support for existing monarchic regimes. However, Tiutchev was believed in the West to have political influence in Russia, as Ronald Lane has shown, and his French polemical writings had impact there. His intellectual acuity, his command of the French language, and the excellence of his French style won praise,221 to be sure, but his antipathy to modern western civilization in general and to the Catholic Church in particular provoked much hostile reaction. His article on the papacy, for example, drew criticisms from the French anti-Gallican monarchist Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, whose objections are summarized in a work entitled The Papacy, a Reply to Mr Tiutchev, Adviser to His Majesty the Emperor of Russia, which was published in Paris in 1852.222 At the same time, it is important to remember that the readership of Tiutchev’s French political writings was not exclusively foreign, for they were also accessible to the Francophone Russian public in Moscow and St Petersburg. This public included the Slavophiles, to whom Tiutchev was 217 de Bourgoing, Politique et Moyens d’Action de la Russie. Only a very small number of copies of this work were printed, but they were sent to some important personages, including Louis Bonaparte, the former French prime ministers Adolphe Thiers and Louis-Mathieu Molé, and other influential political and journalistic figures: see Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’, 211, and Dewey, Mirror of the Soul, 305. 218 See https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Chronique_de_la_quinzaine_-_14_juin_1849, 1053–1056. 219 Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’, 211; Dewey, Mirror of the Soul, 305. 220 Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’, 213. The text from Revue des Deux Mondes, 117–133, is available at https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Revue_des_Deux_ Mondes_-_1850_-_tome_5.djvu/123. 221 Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’, 213–214. 222 Laurentie, La Papauté, Réponse à M. de Tutcheff, Conseiller de Sa Majesté. l’Empereur de Russie; see Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’, 219–220.

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close. It also included Nicholas I himself, who found his own views well expressed in the letter to Kolb223 and whom Tiutchev flatteringly described in ‘Russia and Revolution’ as a steadfast opponent of revolution.224 Shortly after the letter to Kolb had been published, Nicholas obligingly reinstated Tiutchev in the Russian Minstry of Foreign Affairs, from which he had been dismissed in 1837 after he had deserted his post in Turin, and in 1848 Tiutchev was appointed senior censor in the ministry. Thus, Tiutchev used his perfect command of French to make a loyalist case for Russian foreign policy in a turbulent period in European politics, and he enhanced his own standing in Nicholas’s eyes in the process. However, he also had ideas of a more metaphysical nature which demanded expression in the ‘language of Europe’. He was contributing to a debate which was both national and international about Russia’s relationship with the West, the wholeness of Europe (or the absence of wholeness in the continent), and the emergence of new worlds.225 The three French tracts we have described and Tiutchev’s extant notes for Russia and the West are strewn with propositions on these subjects that make up the staple diet of Russian Orthodox conservative nationalism. For instance, the human reason so prized by westerners, it is claimed, has serious limitations, and overreliance on it is dangerous. The western public have become ‘the people of individualism and negation’ and they hate authority.226 They have been infected by the spirit of revolution, for that is what ‘modern thought in its entirety since its rupture with the Church’ amounts to.227 Observers may therefore be witnessing ‘the bankruptcy of an entire civilization’.228 The Russian people, on the other hand, are apolitical and unrevolutionary. Deeply rooted in the Russian character is a capacity for renunciation and self-sacrifice.229 Most importantly, all three tracts affirm the paradigm dear to nationalistic Russian thinkers and many later students of them, according to which ‘Russia’ and some imagined entity known as ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’ are ‘two worlds, two humanities’ diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to one 223 Lane, ‘The Reception of F.I. Tyutchev’s Political Articles’, 210, n. 18; Dewey, Mirror of the Soul, 286. 224 Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 3, 45. 225 It is worth noting that the title of the review in which Tiutchev published his articles ‘La Russie et la révolution’ and ‘La papauté et la question romaine’, La Revue des Deux Mondes (founded in 1829), itself invokes the notion of ‘two worlds’, in this instance Europe and America. 226 Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 3, 80–81. 227 Ibidem, 76. 228 Ibidem, 77. 229 Ibidem, 42.

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another.230 The European West must realize that it is only ‘half of a great organic whole’ and that the solution to the apparently insoluble difficulties it faces lies in the other half of the European world, that is to say the eastern half of which western ‘learned men and philosophers’ have failed to take account.231 The soul of this other Europe, which has its own unity and lives its own ‘organic’ and ‘original’ life, is Russia.232 The West, Tiutchev warns in his letter to Kolb, must come to terms with this assertive new power. Like Gogol’, in a famous passage at the end of the first part of Dead Souls, published in 1842, in which the novelist transforms Chichikov’s troika into an image of Russia hurtling towards a momentous destiny while other peoples make way, Tiutchev raises the largest questions about the nation’s mission: What is Russia? What is its raison d’être, its historical law? Where does it come from? Where is it going? What does it represent? The world, it is true, has made a place in the sun for it, but the philosophy of history has not yet deigned to assign it one.233

Thus Tiutchev, pace Chaadaev, believes that as ‘the West’ collapses the Eastern land that has preserved Christianity in its pure form will sail up like a holy ark, bringing to an end a millennium of usurpations, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, and restoring a legitimate universal empire by reuniting the two Christian churches.234 Such messianic ideas, which concern the rise and fall of civilizations, were political, of course, but they also transcended politics. Moreover, their significance was pan-European and consequently, according to understandings of civilization at the time, universal. It was therefore quite appropriate that they should be expressed in French rather than Russian. Which language, after all, could have seemed more suitable as a vehicle for discussion of world history and for imperial pretensions than the language that had made the strongest recent claim to universality, most famously asserted in Rivarol’s prize-winning essay of 1783 for the Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts?235 Herzen, the last of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian writers whose French texts about the relationship between Russia and the West we examine 230 Ibidem, 58. 231 Ibidem, 82, 89. 232 Ibidem, 17–18. 233 Ibidem, 17. Our italics. 234 Ibidem, 54, 91–94. 235 Rivarol, De l’universalité de la langue française.

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here, had by 1848 come to preach a form of utopian socialism.236 Those works of Herzen’s that were published in French, like Nikolai Turgenev’s, were written in the West, where Herzen had arrived with his family on a Grand Tour in 1847 and where he would find himself stranded in permanent exile, since his support for the European revolutionaries of 1848 made it unthinkable that he could safely return to Russia. Although these works appeared at different times and in different places, they amounted to a coherent set of reflections on the historical role of Russia, as Herzen now viewed it.237 With the exception of ‘The Russian People and Socialism’, they were not written by Herzen in French, but French was the language in which they became best known to a readership outside Russia. Thus, French again serves as the vehicle for a form of Russian nationalism. In this case, the fact has particular poignancy, for all of Herzen’s writings from abroad are filled with nostalgia for his homeland – a yearning that was perhaps deepened by the cosmopolitan, multilingual character of the milieu in which Herzen found himself from 1847 onwards. Herzen organized his thoughts around the same opposition between Russia and the West that Tiutchev (and Chaadaev and the Slavophiles) had used. He too attacked the principles on which western civilization was based, although for him the roots of the evil in it lay in its economic, social, and political soil rather than in Catholicism, Protestantism, or spiritual bankruptcy. In his Letters from France and Italy, he condemned capitalism as an inhuman system driven by pursuit of profit, regarded the ascendant bourgeoisie as mercenary and vulgar, and dismissed parliamentary democracy as a system that enfranchized the ‘orangutans’.238 He agreed with 236 There is a very large literature on Herzen’s philosophical ideas and his social and political thought. Landmarks in this literature in English include Carr (1933), Berlin’s essays (written in the early post-war period) in his Russian Thinkers (2008), a chapter in Lampert (1957), Malia (1961), Acton (1979), and Aileen Kelly (1998, 1999, 2016). Little has been written on Herzen’s plurilingualism and language choice, as far as we are aware. On Herzen’s promotion of knowledge of Russia and his support for attempts to translate works of Russian literature into other European languages during the 1850s and 1860s, see Priima, ‘Gertsen – propagandist i interpretator russkoi literatury na zapade’. We draw in this sub-section of our present chapter on Offord, ‘The French Writings of Alexander Herzen’. 237 The essays in question, which outline what came to be known as Herzen’s ‘Russian socialism’, are ‘La Russie’, ‘Lettre d’un russe à Mazzini’, Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, and ‘La Russie et le vieux monde’: see Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 150–186 and 224–230, vol. 7, 9–132 and 271–306, and vol. 12, 134–166, respectively. On Herzen’s Russian socialism, see especially Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism; for a short summary of the doctrine, see Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard, 174–177. 238 Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 5, 7–224, especially 34–36, 58–64. See also SS, vol. 23, 111. For a discussion of the contents of the Letters from France and Italy, see Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard, 178–196.

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conservative nationalists that the West was moribund and that the Slavs represented a fresh force whose historical moment had arrived. For Herzen, though, the new civilization that would grow in place of the rotting old one would not be nourished by the Orthodox faith or upheld and protected by Russia’s autocratic government. It would be sustained instead by the instinctive collectivism of the Russian peasantry and the conscious socialism of the independent intellectual elite that was emerging in the age of Nicholas. The Russian peasant, Herzen argued in his writings published in French, possessed ‘so much strength, agility, intelligence, and beauty’.239 His dealings with his peers were honest and trustworthy, so that no contractual agreements of the sort to which people had recourse in western society were necessary in Russia.240 Most importantly, the Russian peasants had preserved a supposedly ancient institution, the village commune, which periodically redistributed the land allocated to the serfs by the landowner as the needs of families in the community changed.241 The powerful but dormant force of the Russian peasantry, which thus proved to be in harmony with ‘Europe’s revolutionary idea’, could now be harnessed by the intelligentsia, ‘the seed and intellectual centre’ of the impending revolution.242 In order to bolster the plausibility of his thesis, Herzen exploited an argument about the advantages of backwardness that Chaadaev had used in the repentant ‘Apology of a Madman’ (1837) that he had written (also in French) after the publication of his first ‘Philosophical Letter’.243 The embryonic intelligentsia, Herzen contended, could benefit from its late development. Russians were ‘morally freer than Europeans’, he supposed, and not only ‘because we are exempt from the great trials through which the West develops, but also because we have no past that controls us’.244 There was undoubtedly an element of self-promotion in Herzen’s defence of the Russian nation before a European public, as there was in Tiutchev’s. After all, Herzen himself represented the ethically exemplary intellectual elite, which was drawn above all, he asserted, from ‘the middle nobility, whose moral centre is in Moscow’.245 He also heroized himself as a Romantic exile. Once in the West, where he was literally a political refugee, he sacrificed everything for a noble cause, he claimed: he had left Russia ‘with the sole 239 ‘La Russie’, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 172. 240 Ibidem, 173 ; ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 7, 286–287. 241 ‘La Russie’ in Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 164; see also Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibidem, vol. 7, 129. 242 ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, ibidem, vol. 7, 281; ‘La Russie’, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 178. 243 ‘L’apologie d’un fou’, in Chaadaev, SS, vol. 1, 289–304. 244 ‘La Russie’, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 150–151. 245 Ibidem, 178.

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aim of making the free Russian word reverberate in Europe’.246 On another level, though, Herzen also aimed to bring to the attention of European readers aspects of Russia of which he thought they were ignorant. Thus in the ‘Farewell’ from Russia with which he prefaced his Russian masterpiece, From the Other Shore, he declared that it was time to acquaint Europeans with this neighbouring nation whose government and façade they knew but whose ‘mighty’ people were an ‘unfathomed mystery’ to them.247 In the process of educating westerners about ‘these Russians, these barbarians, these Cossacks’, Herzen would counter western Russophobia.248 In ‘The Russian People and Socialism’, he responds specifically to disparaging remarks about the Russian people that the historian Jules Michelet had made in a work of 1851 on Poland and Russia.249 He also delivers a riposte in this essay to the one-sided view of Russia that Custine had put forward in Russia in 1839: in justifiably assailing the official realm of the St Petersburg court, Custine had overlooked the unofficial realm of the Russian peasant. Herzen may even be seen as offering readers, in his French writings, an alternative scenario to that advanced by Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his own speculation on the old and new worlds had recently identified America as the site of the ascendant civilization.250 Besides his propagandistic purpose, then, Herzen too wished to inscribe Russia in the European world and to formulate a national mission, which he conceived in terms scarcely less soteriological than Tiutchev’s. The Slavs, he contended, were a strong, intelligent race who possessed ‘a great elasticity’, which enabled them to absorb and transcend the cultures of other peoples.251 They were peculiarly suited to the libertarian socialism to which Herzen subscribed: centralization was ‘contrary to the Slav genius’.252 Like Tiutchev again, and like Turgenev too, Herzen left readers in no doubt that it was the Russians who were hegemonic in the Slav world, not least because they had long lived under a strong, independent state.253 246 ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, vol. 7, 272. 247 S togo berega, ibidem, vol. 6, 17. 248 ‘La Russie’ in Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 154. 249 The version of Michelet’s work ‘Pologne et Russie: légende de Kościuszko’ to which Herzen was responding appeared in L’Avènement du peuple, in instalments, in August–September 1851. Michelet revised this work in the light of Herzen’s comments before the publication of it in book form (Paris: Librairie nouvelle) in 1852. For extracts from Michelet’s work to which Herzen takes exception, see Gertsen, SS, vol. 7, 271–272, 282, 284, 292, 293–294. 250 Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique. 251 Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 7, 68–69. 252 ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, ibidem, 280. 253 Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibidem, 27–28; ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, ibidem, 279, 281.

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Not that it was the Slav world alone that Russia, in Herzen’s scheme of things, aspired to lead; it was European civilization as a whole. Reversing Chaadaev’s linkage of Russia with death and Europe with life, Herzen suggested to his European readers that their dying civilization could be brought to life again by a people whom they barely knew and whom they should therefore study.254 Like Tiutchev again, Herzen is not averse to playing on western fears of the ‘threatening, hostile empire’ from which he came and its military might.255 Russia would pose a danger to western nations, he argued, if its autocratic regime remained unchecked by the revolutionary forces he represented: ‘oriental barbarians’ might overrun Europe and destroy western civilization.256 Herzen even appeals to supra-rational intuition to drive home his point. Just as Tiutchev, in a famous quatrain of 1866, would express the view that Russia could not be understood by the intellect, so Herzen claimed that there was some instinctual force ‘difficult to express in words’ which sustained the Russian people through all their adversities.257 For the sustained critique of the West which he expounded in the late 1840s and early 1850s in his essays From the Other Shore and in his Letters from France and Italy, and which were directed partly at erstwhile Russian allies in the ‘Westernist’ camp with whom he was now at odds, Herzen used Russian. (Herzen wrote Russian, incidentally, with a clarity and flair that few thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century intelligentsia could match.) For his idealized portrayal of the Russian peasant, his encomiums to the intelligentsia (the new intellectual and ethical elite of the nation), and his claims about Russia’s grand futurity, on the other hand, he chose ‘the language of Europe’, with which he could reach both educated Russian readers and a largely sceptical or apprehensive western readership as well. It is a piquant fact that for this secular ‘Westernizer’, as for the Pan-Slavist Tiutchev, French serves as the vehicle for the promotion of a nationalistic and even messianic view of Russia’s destiny.

Polemical writings in French after the Crimean War In the freer conditions that obtained after the death of Nicholas I and the end of the Crimean War, debate about Russia’s destiny was reinvigorated 254 Ibidem, 273, and ‘La Russie’, ibidem, vol. 6, 183. 255 ‘Le peuple russe et le socialisme’, ibidem, SS, vol. 7, 275. 256 ‘Lettre d’un russe à Mazzini’, ibidem, vol. 6, 225, and Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibidem, vol. 7, 113, 125. 257 Tiutchev, PSSP, vol. 2, 165; ‘La Russie’, in Gertsen, SS, vol. 6, 162–163, and Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ibidem, vol. 7, 16.

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and continued to spill out beyond Russia’s borders. The debate had many dimensions, religious, social, and political, as well as historiosophical. The new freedom of discussion, the opportunity for far-reaching reform, the interest of foreign statesmen and intellectuals in the outcome of this ferment – all these factors account for the spate of Russian writings in French that appeared, in Russia and abroad, in the decade after the Crimean War and for the polemical character and acerbity of many of the texts in question. It was not surprising, in view of the centrality of religious identity in the mental landscape of conservative nationalists, that Russians should have entered into theological dispute both among themselves and with foreigners, appealing to a broad European readership as they did so. The merits of Catholicism, for example, were propounded, in French, by the Russian Jesuit Prince Ivan Gagarin.258 Nor, of course, was it unnatural that even thinkers who deplored western influence on Russian culture should have resorted to French, if they could, to defend their credo. Thus the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov entered the international polemic that Tiutchev’s article on the papacy had generated, by responding to Tiutchev’s critic Laurentie with a French pamphlet of his own, A Few Words by an Orthodox Christian on the Western Communions, Prompted by Mr Laurentie’s Pamphlet, which was first published in Paris in 1853.259 Irrespective of its impact on western 258 Gagarin published a great number of works on Catholicism and Russia in French, some of which were translated into other languages. They include the following: Réponse d’un Russe à un Russe (1856); La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? (1856); Les starovères, l’église russe et le pape (1857); Etudes de théologie, de philosophie et d’histoire publiées par les pères Charles Daniel et Jean Gagarin de la Compagnie de Jésus (1857–1861); Sur la réunion de l’église orientale avec l’église romaine (1860); Tendances catholiques dans la société russe (1860); La primauté de St. Pierre et les livres liturgiques de l’église russe (1863); La réforme du clergé russe (1867); Les églises orientales unies (1867); and Lettre à une dame russe sur le dogme de l’immaculée conception (no date). He also produced an edition of the works of Chaadaev who, as we have seen, was sympathetic to Catholicism: Tchadaïef, Oeuvres choisies (1862). On Gagarin, see Pierling, Le prince Gagarine et ses amis. 259 Khomiakov, Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe sur les communions occidentales, à l’occasion d’une brochure de M. Laurentie. See ‘French writings’, in Khomiakov, On Spiritual Unity, 55 ff. Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe was the f irst of six works in French in which Khomiakov set out to explain the Orthodox faith to the western communions. The various French writings of Khomiakov, which included some of his most important statements on the Orthodox faith, were collected in a volume entitled L’Eglise Latine et le Protestantisme published posthumously in Switzerland in 1872. A much earlier defence of Orthodoxy through the medium of French, incidentally, had been mounted by the conservative Russian diplomat of Romanian origin, Alexandru Sturdza, in the first Alexandrine period: see his Considérations sur la doctrine et l’esprit de l’église orthodoxe (1816) and his Mémoire sur l’état actuel de l’Allemagne (1818). On Sturdza, see Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries; Ghervas, Alexandre Stourdza (1791–1854), and idem, Réinventer la tradition.

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public opinion, Khomiakov’s tract, which was translated from French into German and English before it appeared in Russian, had an inspirational effect on some of his like-minded compatriots, such as Anna Tiutcheva, who had been raised by Catholic teachers in Munich.260 Vera Aksakova, the sister of the Slavophiles Konstantin and Ivan, listening to a reading of Khomiakov’s tract, was prompted to express a misapprehension that seems to have been common among Russian linguistic Gallophobes (and that is no doubt common, mutatis mutandis, among linguistic nationalists everywhere). She was pleasantly surprised, she noted in her diary, to discover that ‘French was capable of expressing such profound thoughts’!261 It was as if the purposes to which French was put and the content of the utterances or texts in it with which a critic of its use was familiar somehow reflected badly on the language itself and even on the ethnos with which the language was primarily associated. Voluminous and wide-ranging descriptions of Russia and discussions of its destiny, perceived from different political standpoints, continued to be produced by Russians, in French, in the post-Crimean period. These included Nikolai Zherebtsov’s Essay on the History of Civilization in Russia (1858), which was written in a patriotic Slavophile vein, and Prince Petr Dolgorukov’s The Truth about Russia (1860), a survey of Russia’s society and institutions which was sufficiently critical of the existing order to win the approval of Herzen, who was by now editing Kolokol (The Bell) on his Free Russian Press in London.262 The greatest attention, though, was devoted to discussion of plans for the first and most important social reform set in motion by Alexander II, the emancipation of the serfs. Michel Niqueux has made a valuable study of the numerous projects composed in French on this subject by writers, both Russian and foreign, in the period from December 1857, when imperial rescripts instructing representatives of the nobility to prepare proposals for emancipation were published, to February 1861, when the edict abolishing serfdom was issued. Among the Russians who produced such texts there were both exiles, such as Nikolai Turgenev, who authored pamphlets on the subject in 1859 and 1860, and men still 260 The German and English editions of Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe sur les Communions occidentales were published in Leipzig by Brockhaus in 1855 and 1858 respectively. For a Russian translation, see ‘Neskol’ko slov pravoslavnogo khristianina o zapadnykh veroispovedaniiakh’, in Khomiakov, IS, 230–273. For Tiutcheva’s impressions, see her recollections Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov, 64–65. 261 Vera Aksakova, Dnevnik Very Sergeevny Aksakovoi, 54. 262 Gerebtzoff [Zherebtsov], Essai sur l’histoire de la civilisation en Russie; Dolgoroukoff, La vérité sur la Russie. See Niqueux, ‘L’émancipation des serfs en Russie’, paras 8–11.

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resident in Russia, such as Vladimir Orlov-Davydov, a deputy on one of the provincial committees set up to prepare the ground for the reform.263 These texts, which also represented many different political positions, dealt with the reasons why emancipation was considered necessary, the question of whether land should be allocated to the peasants and if so on what terms, whether compensation should be paid to nobles who lost land and if so by whom and over what period, and the possible consequences of the reform. There were various reasons, Niqueux points out, why so many texts (Niqueux examines almost forty that he has discovered in French repositories264) should have been written on this subject in French and published outside Russia, in France and other countries. For one thing, despite glasnost’, censorship remained in force in Russia and restricted what could be published there. By publishing abroad, Russians were able to widen the debate beyond the parameters permitted in Russia. In any case, they wanted to inform European public opinion and even hoped to put pressure on the Russian government.265 Furthermore, the belief evidently persisted for a while that authors might be allowed a greater freedom of expression if they wrote in French, ipso facto limiting their readership, than if they wrote in Russian, thereby making their ideas potentially accessible to all Russians who were literate. The cautious liberal Konstantin Kavelin, for example, who felt that Herzen’s criticisms of the regime from afar jeopardized the prospects for unprecedented reforms inside Russia, urged Herzen to replace Kolokol with a periodical in French, which would be accessible only to the educated classes and might therefore prove more acceptable to the government.266 Herzen himself seemed to share the view that the government might look with greater leniency on publications in French when he wrote to Dolgorukov in 1861, shortly after the abolition of serfdom: ‘You do very well to publish in French, they fear this like fire’. However, the notion does not seem to have been well-founded: Dolgorukov was deprived of his title and property for his temerity and was condemned to perpetual exile.267 As debate within the Russian educated elite intensified in the first half of the reign of Alexander II and a rift – which was poignantly recorded by 263 N. Tourgeneff [N.I. Turgenev], Encore un mot sur l’émancipation des serfs en Russie; idem, Un dernier mot sur l’emancipation des serfs en Russie; Orlov-Davydov, Réflexions préalables sur les bases proposées au mode d’émancipation des serfs en Russie. 264 See the 37 titles in the bibliography at the end of Niqueux’s article ‘L’émancipation des serfs en Russie’. 265 Ibidem, para. 6. 266 See Aileen Kelly, The Discovery of Chance, 393. 267 Herzen, SS, vol. 27, pt 1, 36.

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Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Children (1862) – opened up between moderate and radical camps, French continued to be useful for representatives of all shades of opinion on the political spectrum, as they strove to garner as much external support as they could. For the radical camp, French was an international language of socialism and revolution. Paris was the site of recurrent revolutionary disturbances (in 1789, of course, and in 1830 and 1848, and again in 1871). The thinkers and agitators who inspired Russia’s mid-nineteenth socialists – the Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Victor-Prosper Considerant, Louis Blanc, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – were French.268 The French-speaking world was still one of the main havens for political refugees. French was the language of many of the periodical revolutionary publications that were springing up, to which Russians contributed. For example, the utopian socialist Nikolai Sazonov, who had anonymously published a critical book on Nicholas I in 1854,269 briefly edited a weekly international, La Gazette du Nord (The Gazette of the North) in Paris in 1859–1860.270 Within this Francophone revolutionary tradition we may place the internationally renowned anarchist Prince Petr Kropotkin, educated in the Page Corps, a childhood companion of the future Emperor Alexander II and the author of numerous French articles, leaflets, and pamphlets from the 1870s on.271 At the same time, French remained a useful tool for loyalists, including the prolific Baron Theodor Fircks, a Baltic German nobleman from Courland who wrote under the pseudonym Schédo-Ferroti (a near anagram of his German forename and surname). Fircks trained as an engineer and wrote a work on railways in Russia,272 but his reputation (or notoriety) rests chiefly on the series of controversial Studies on the Future of Russia that he wrote in French over a period of some ten years from the late 1850s. These ‘études’ ranged over such subjects as the terms of the emancipation of the serfs, the nobility, the schism in the Russian Church, and the future of Poland after the revolt of 1863. His most incendiary text, and the text that is of the greatest interest from the point of view of language use and attitudes, is perhaps his Nihilism in Russia. 268 The views of Marx and Engels, as spokesmen for an industrial proletariat which Russia did not yet truly have, were not considered by many Russian socialists before the 1880s to have direct relevance to the Russian situation. 269 [Sazonov], La vérité sur l’empereur Nicolas. 270 Niqueux, ‘L’émancipation des serfs en Russie’, paras. 12–13. 271 See, e.g. the bibliography in Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 353–356, in which Kropotkin’s many contributions to the anarchist journal Le Révolté (1879–1885) and its successors La Révolte (1887–1894) and Les Temps Nouveaux (1895–1914) are catalogued. 272 Lettres sur les chemins de fer en Russie (1858).

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Fircks considers nihilism not a political doctrine or movement but a moral infirmity that contemporary Russian society has contracted. He defines it variously as a deification of the self-satisfied ego, the morbid stimulation of amour-propre, and a belief in one’s infallibility that is so firm that the nihilist regards bases of the social contract, such as religion, family, and government, as intolerable constraints.273 Nihilism has taken a much firmer hold in Russia than in other nations, Fircks claims. However, it affects only the Russian educated classes, not the merchant class or the peasantry, or even the Germanic elite of the Baltic provinces from which Fircks himself came.274 The causes of the infirmity are manifold, and several of them are explored in this diffuse work, but the root of the problem, according to Fircks, lies in the adoption of alien cultural ways by the elite and the principal solution to it lies in a change in the way in which noble women are educated. Language use is an important part of both the cause and the solution. Fircks presents an extreme version of the exceptionalist argument, according to which there is no country in the world where the dissimilarity between the educated class and the people is so marked as in Russia.275 In no other country, he contends, has ‘society’ separated itself from the rest of the nation to such a degree or taken such a ‘highly anti-national’ course in order to achieve this separation. Unlike the French elite, he believes, the Russian ‘civilized classes’ have denationalized themselves. Although they baulked at the reforms so rapidly introduced by Peter the Great, eventually they went with the current, imitating the forms and language of western civilization, attaching the lowest value to what smacked of Russianness, and abandoning popular customs, national costume, and ‘the language of the country’.276 For his polemical purposes, Fircks thus adopts the Slavophile notion of the separation between society and people. He also echoes the recent reformulation of this notion by Native-Soil Conservatives, such as Dostoevskii, whose vocabulary he seems to be appropriating when – several times – he uses the expression ‘soil of the country’.277 To cap it all, he presents himself as an advocate for the Russian common people, who are the most vigorous element of the nation and ‘the sole bearers of true Russian nationality’.278 It will be noted that he has also exploited the long discourse about Russian imitativeness and 273 Fircks, Le nihilisme en Russie, 2–4, 208. 274 Ibidem, 4–5, 171–172. 275 Ibidem, 10. 276 Ibidem, 72–73; see also 8. Fircks’s italics. 277 On Dostoevskii and Native-Soil Conservatism, see the last section of Chapter 9 below. 278 Le nihilisme russe, 84.

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that he recycles its vocabulary. He objects, for instance, to prostration before western models which it is thought necessary to copy.279 He deplores the morbid tendency to ape what is foreign.280 He offers a withering characterization of a young noblewoman he says he has met abroad: she is a ‘parrot’ which repeats nihilist clichés without understanding what they mean.281 Several features of Russian life seem to Fircks to explain the moral malaise he identifies, but a large share of the responsibility for it, he claims, is borne by Russian noblewomen. They have been distracted by the temptations of society from their duties as wives, mothers, and housekeepers and consequently have ceased to accomplish the mission civilisatrice that Fircks assigns to the Christian wife. In order to improve public and family morals, and thus to eradicate nihilism, it would be necessary, Fircks argues, to ‘raise the moral level’ of women and to ‘civilize’ them, by which he means developing in them a love of the family hearth.282 This domesticating goal – which radical contemporaries were bound to find repugnant, given the importance they attached to the emancipation of women, as attested by Chernyshevskii’s highly influential novel What is to be Done? (1863) – would be best achieved through changes in the type of education provided for young noblewomen. All girls’ institutes, Fircks proposes, should be opened up to day-pupils. This measure would ensure that young noblewomen who board in them would come into contact with children from a lower social milieu where pursuit of pleasure was not considered the only worthwhile goal of life and where talents could be cultivated for purposes other than to enable young women to shine in the beau monde. Foreign languages, including French, would continue to be taught in these institutions, but the highest priority would be to teach the girls Russian, with correct pronunciation. Colleges would also be established in all the main towns of each province to train Russian teachers and governesses who could be employed by families who wanted to have their children educated at home. Girls from noble families would no longer aspire to pass for Parisians; instead, they would be trained to find contentment in the home, where they would play the key role in forming each child’s character.283 Thus, a Baltic German baron who writes in French blames the plurilingualism of the cosmopolitan Russian upper class for the spiritual malaise 279 Ibidem, 100. 280 Ibidem, 96. 281 Ibidem, 219. 282 Ibidem, 193–194, 202–203, 225–226, 236–237. 283 Ibidem, 320–321, 327–329; see also 3, 168–169.

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that has generated political opposition in the Russian Empire! In order to explain the exquisite irony of the argument Fircks puts forward, we need to keep in mind the polemical intent of his remarks on language in Nihilism in Russia. Fircks is seeking to persuade readers that radical reform projects, such as ‘Herzenism’ and the ‘nihilism’ that is now supplanting it, have come out of the warped minds of members of the denationalized elite, who lack common sense or understanding of the particular genius of the Russian nation.284 His schematic picture of language use among the upper class, which exaggerates the degree to which members of this class refused or were unable to speak Russian, is designed to bolster his diagnosis of the causes of the alarming social, cultural, and intellectual fragmentation that he observes in post-reform Russia. Russian nationality, he hopes, is a banner around which elements of a now dangerously divided empire might be reunited.285 * One of the important functions of the French language in Russia, we have shown in this chapter, was to represent the empire and the nation to the European world of which Russia became a part and with which it competed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. French was a tool with which to promote a positive image of Russia and to counter, in various ways, the argument that Russians were an immature and imitative people. For example, French (and other European languages too, of course) could be used to promote the recent achievements of Russian writers, either through translation of their works or through reviews of them that would be accessible to educated westerners. It served as a vehicle both for political propaganda and for a distinctive Russian contribution to pan-European historiosophical debate. It also had a use for Russians as a medium for uncensored, or relatively uncensored, debate among themselves. However, the strongest counter-argument to the charge of imitativeness was the creation of a native literary culture couched in the vernacular. It is the creation of a literature, Hastings has claimed, that is the crucial factor in the development of a nation: when its vernacular possesses a literature, it seems, a society feels confident enough to challenge the dominance of outsiders.286 A literature serves as a repository for the beliefs, values, myths, 284 Ibidem, 84. 285 Ibidem, 106. 286 Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 31.

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self-conceptions, and shared memory out of which a sense of nationhood is constructed. And in the nineteenth century, literature did indeed become Russia’s principal nation-building tool.287 Paradoxical as it may seem, the knowledge of foreign languages that we have been examining was crucial to the development of the capacity to create such a literature. As national consciousness developed into nationalism, though, the value of bilingualism as cultural capital diminished in the eyes of the literary and intellectual community that was coming to speak for the nation. Accordingly, Russians’ use of French was persistently challenged, mocked, and discredited in various types of literary work to which we turn in our closing chapters.

287 The point is emphasized, as we pointed out earlier, in Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 286–311.



Chapter 8 Language attitudes

Language debate and its place in discourse about national identity Thus far, we have been concerned mainly with the social, political, and cultural history of Franco-Russian bilingualism. We have considered, for example, where and for what purposes French was spoken or written, how it served the interests of the nobility during the age when the nobility was aspiring to become a corporation of a European sort, and how the use of French by eighteenth-century monarchs and nobles helped to bring Russia into the sphere of European civilization. We have examined the use of French as a language of cultural propaganda and historiosophical or overtly political polemic as well as its incidence in various public and private literary genres. We have put Franco-Russian bilingualism in perspective by noting the use in Russia, at certain times and in certain domains, of foreign languages other than French. We have placed this examination of language use in the changing historical contexts of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and Russian worlds. We have also set our discussion within the frameworks provided by scholarship on the social history and cultural practice of the Russian nobility and by historico-sociolinguistic scholarship on such phenomena as plurilingualism, diglossia, language choice, and code-switching. We turn now to the dimension of our subject that lies primarily in the fields of intellectual and literary history. That is to say, we shall explore Russian perceptions of the bilingualism of the elite, describing the way it is presented in the nation’s mental landscape, whose contours were coming into view in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and thought. The Russian views on linguistic matters that we shall discuss are bound up with the larger debates about national identity and destiny that Russians conducted over the long period with which we are concerned. What effect, for example, did the status of French as a prestige language at court and in the Russian nobility have on conceptions of nationhood among the intellectual and literary elite? The influence of French culture and the French language on the nation’s elite lent urgency, we contend, to the search for national character before, during, and after the Napoleonic Wars and helped to direct that search. The topos of anxiety about contamination of Russian by French intensified the desire of many Russian writers to break free of western cultural models as

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Russia emerged as a major European power. Again, how were bilingualism and consequent biculturalism presented by writers who argued that the nation was fractured and that the educated class, by the mid-nineteenth-century, was rootless, like the ‘superfluous man’ of classical literature? In considering such questions, we are no longer concerned so much with the linguistic and social practice of Francophone Russians as with what Russians thought about the implications and consequences of their language use, both past and present. The debate about national identity, of which language debate was a part, began in the mid-eighteenth century, around the time that foreign-language use was becoming a useful accomplishment among the elite, and it intensified in the age of Catherine II, when French became a prestige language among the Russian nobility. It was sharpened by unease about the extent of foreign cultural influence on the Russian elite. From the point of view of the opponents of foreign influence, as Rogger observes, the French dancing master, the English carriage, the German tutor, the Russian Frenchmen, and some of the ideas they brought with them, became the despicable quintessence of the foreign as it appeared in Russia. And when in increasing measure the foreign seemed to corrupt the national essence, there occurred the first attempts to determine what that essence was.1

Misgivings about so-called Gallomania in particular gave rise at an early stage in the history of the westernization of the Russian elite to a fear that Russia was not autonomous and that Russians were by nature passive recipients of foreign culture, as many western observers encouraged them to believe. The anxiety is illustrated by the recurring image of Russians as ‘apes’ or ‘parrots’ in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse. Readers of Russian literature in the second half of the eighteenth century are keenly aware of concern about Russia’s cultural dependency on France. The concern is memorably expressed in the ‘letters from abroad’ written by the dramatist Fonvizin during a prolonged foreign journey that he undertook in the 1770s: from the perspective of a Parisian, Fonvizin remarked, Burgundy was a nearby province and Russia a distant one.2 It is reinforced by numerous 1 Rogger, National Consciousness, 43. 2 ‘Pis’ma iz vtorogo zagranichnogo puteshestviia (1777–1778)’, in Fonvizin, SS, vol. 2, 472. On this work, see especially Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard, Chapter 2. It is of some interest, as we chart the beginnings of the rise of national consciousness in Russia, that Fonvizin uses the word natsiia in his writings (SS, vol. 2, 433).

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negative portrayals of the foreign tutor, especially the poorly qualified, selfinterested, or immoral Frenchman charged with the cultural Gallicization of the Russian youth and the teaching of French to them.3 It is worth making a few general comments on the broad debate about national identity in Russia before we turn to the linguistic element within that debate. First, ironic as it may seem, the distaste for French culture, manners, and morals, and for the French language that served as the vehicle through which they were imported, was reinforced in the age of Catherine by other cultural currents entering Russia from the West, including the writings of French moralists themselves. 4 One such current was Stoicism, as represented in the ancient world by Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, to which Fonvizin, for example, was strongly attracted.5 Conceiving of the wise man as one who had mastered his passions and commending a simple, unaffected way of life, the Stoics cautioned readers against the vain desire for wealth and the flattery, the jostling for imperial favour, and the enjoyment of conspicuous consumption that seemed to characterize life at a magnificent court. Another influential current was pre-Romanticism, which drew inspiration from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, stimulated interest in the supposedly more coherent communities of pre-modern times, and encouraged the belief that a simple rural life was more authentic than life in the modern city – a belief reflected in the love of pastoral in late eighteenth-century European literature and in the early prose fiction of Karamzin in particular.6 Russian resistance to the culture of French high society and to use of the language that was the vehicle for it may therefore be seen as more than an expression of the rise of nationalistic sentiment. It was also part of a wider European disquiet about modernity and a reservation about urbanity, in its literal sense of urban life as well as its sense of refined courtesy.7 Secondly, the language attitudes we examine in this chapter cannot easily be disentangled from other matters, such as dress, fashion, and behaviour in the new sites of noble sociability, which also featured in the debate about 3 See Rjéoutski, ‘Le Précepteur français comme ennemi’. 4 Proust, ‘Les Lettres de France dans l’espace littéraire français’, 25. 5 See Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 232–233, n. 4; Offord, ‘Denis Fonvizin and the Concept of Nobility’, 27. 6 See, e.g., ‘Bednaia Liza’ and ‘Natal’ia, boiarskaia doch’’, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 605–621 and 622–660 respectively. 7 See the conclusion by Argent, Offord, and Rjéoutski in their co-edited European Francophonie, 440. On medieval and early modern critiques of royal courts, see also the first section of Chapter 3 above.

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national identity, modernity, and urbanity. Above all, they are informed by stereotypical conceptions of national character, for language attitudes, as John Edwards has observed, ‘are better understood as attitudes towards the members of [the] language communities’ in question.8 Thus we repeatedly find that criticisms of Russians’ use of the French language and essentialist criticisms of the French language itself are part of a critique of French personality. The negative traits in the conception of French personality that we shall encounter, incidentally, might turn out to be merely the obverse sides of traits which admirers of French civilization esteem. To a member of the latter category, such as Marc Fumaroli, for example, the dissimulation practised by the eighteenth-century French elite was a positive phenomenon, ‘a political and social necessity’, a type of behaviour ‘inseparable from propriety, which is a penetrating attention to another person and to his singularities as much as a sort of self-protection’.9 To opponents of French cultural influence, in Russia as elsewhere, on the other hand, dissimulation was a vice, a species of hypocrisy and insincerity. Likewise, the light-heartedness and gaiety in which members of French high society took pride could be construed as lack of seriousness, or even frivolity. Love of douceur de vivre and elegance in appearance could seem like extravagance and foppishness respectively. Moreover, the vices of the French, that is to say their virtues once they had been turned inside out in this way, could be contrasted to qualities that Russians were beginning to suppose they themselves possessed, such as straightforwardness and depth. Thirdly, anxiety about Russian cultural dependency on the West and Russians’ reluctance to be cast as mere imitators led, unsurprisingly, to the development of counter-claims about Russian historical development and national characteristics and potentialities. Some nineteenth-century thinkers, including Chaadaev, Herzen, and Chernyshevskii, detected advantages in national backwardness. Nations need not repeat the mistakes of others, they argued; Russia was fortuitously placed to receive the new forms of social organization that western thinkers had recently begun to imagine and then to proceed to higher forms of civilization without having to endure long periods of painful transition.10 Herzen and other writers, more ambitiously, started even to present Russian borrowing as indicative of exceptional receptivity (vospriimchivost’) to the ideas and cultures of 8 Edwards, Multilingualism, 89. 9 Fumaroli, When the World Spoke French, 195. 10 See, e.g., Chaadaev, ‘L’apologie d’un fou’; Herzen, Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii, in Herzen, SS, vol. 5, 26 (see also Herzen’s preface to the second edition of this work, ibidem, 13–14); Chernyshevskii, ‘Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenii protiv obshchinnogo zemlevladeniia’, in Chernyshevskii, PSS, vol. 5, 357–392, especially 382–384.

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other peoples. Russians – so the argument ran – were capable of creating a universal civilization, which would amount to more than the sum of its borrowed parts, transcending previous civilizations. This sort of claim is already apparent in the middle of the century in Herzen’s remarks on the ‘elasticity’ and ‘acceptivity’ of the Slavs who, ‘while consenting to external influences, preserve their own character’.11 The claim recurs, as we shall see in our final chapter, in Tolstoi’s War and Peace and finds its most prophetic expression in Dostoevskii’s so-called ‘Pushkin speech’ of 1880.12

The development of Russian language consciousness The language consciousness that is manifested in the resistance to French linguistic influence and French-speaking which we begin to trace in this chapter also found expression, in the second half of the eighteenth century, in a new interest in the Russian language. One indication of this interest was the growth of a native literary tradition stocked with examples of work in the main forms and genres that were utilized in European poetry and prose, including, of course, those forms and genres represented in the French canon. However, there were at least three other indications of increasing attention to the Russian language which we should briefly mention here, before we turn to Russians’ reactions to the adoption of the French language by the noble elite. First, attempts began to be made to systematize Russian grammar and lexis. That is to say, we see the beginnings of codification – a process typically associated with the rapid development of a print culture which disseminates standard linguistic practices.13 Lomonosov, having already written a treatise on Russian versification (another expression of the urge to classify),14 made an important contribution to the task of linguistic codification in the reign 11 Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, in Herzen, SS, vol. 7, 68–69. 12 Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 26, 136–149. On Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, see the last three sections of Chapter 9 below. 13 See the third section of our Introduction on this development. 14 ‘Pis’mo o pravilakh rossiiskogo stikhotvorstva’ (1739), in Lomonosov, PSS, vol. 7, 9–18. Other treatises on versification were produced in the first half of the eighteenth century (i.e. even before works on linguistic codification) by Trediakovskii and Kantemir in 1735 and 1742 (published in 1744) respectively: see Trediakovskii ‘Novyi i kratkii sposob k slozheniiu rossiiskikh stikhov s opredeleniiami do sego nadlezhashchikh zvanii’, in Trediakovskii, IP, 365–385, with appended examples of the types of metre described (385–420), and Makentin [part of a nom de plume which, in its full form, is a virtual anagram of ‘Antiokh Kantemir’], ‘Pis’mo Kharitona Makentina k priiateliu o slozhenii stikhov russkikh’, in Kantemir, SS, 407–428.

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of Elizabeth, when he produced the first descriptive grammar of literary Russian, published in 1755, in which he distinguished Church Slavonic and Russian elements and literary and dialectal material in the language.15 In another work, on the use of Church Slavonic elements in Russian, he proposed a hierarchy of linguistic ‘styles’ or registers (‘low’, ‘middle’, and ‘high’), identifying lexical forms and literary genres which he considered suitable for use at each level.16 Further grammars appeared in the age of Catherine. There was Nikolai Kurganov’s Universal Russian Grammar, of which ten editions appeared between 1769 and 1837.17 This was followed by Anton Barsov’s Short Rules of Russian Grammar (1771), Petr Sokolov’s Basic Principles of Russian Grammar (1788), and Vasilii Svetov’s Brief Rules for the Study of Russian (1790).18 At the same time, attempts were made to describe and systematize the Russian lexicon. In the 1770s, Petr Alekseev published an Ecclesiastical Dictionary.19 In 1785, Catherine instructed Peter Simon Pallas, a German naturalist, to compile a comparative dictionary. Nearly 300 Russian words were selected, many by Catherine herself, and at her behest equivalents of these words in as many European and Asian languages as possible were collected. The first volume of the resultant Comparative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Whole World was published in Latin in the 1780s, with an introduction in both Latin and Russian and an attempted transcription of the sound of each word in each language in Cyrillic.20 Most importantly, the Imperial Russian Academy, which Catherine had founded in 1783, produced a dictionary under the supervision of its first president, Princess Dashkova.21 This six-volume compilation, The Dictionary of the Russian Academy, defined 43,257 words. Its contributors included highly placed court officials, eminent writers such as Fonvizin and Derzhavin, scientists, mathematicians, and historians, as well as Dashkova herself, who collected and defined words 15 Rossiiskaia grammatika, in Lomonosov, PSS, vol. 7, 391–578. 16 ‘Predislovie o pol’ze knig tserkovnykh v russkom iazyke’, in Lomonosov, PSS, vol. 7, 587–592. 17 Kurganov, Rossiiskaia universal’naia grammatika […]. 18 Barsov, Kratkie pravila rossiiskoi grammatiki; Sokolov, Nachal’nye osnovaniia rossiiskoi grammatiki; Svetov, Kratkie pravila k izucheniiu iazyka rossiiskogo […]. All these works are cited by Rogger, National Consciousness, 119–120. 19 Alekseev, Tserkovnyi slovar’. 20 Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa / Sravnitel’nye slovari vsekh iazykov i narechii. The dictionary was compiled with the help of Russian officials in various regions of Russia, Russian diplomats, and foreign scholars, following a model written by Pallas in French in 1786 (Modèle du vocabulaire qui doit servir à la comparaison de toutes les langues). 21 On Dashkova’s own views on language use, see Lamarche Marrese, ‘Princess Dashkova and the Politics of Language’.

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denoting moral qualities.22 The Dictionary was conceived as a normative collection, and its compilers were perhaps less concerned with actual contemporary language use than was the case in other academy dictionaries of the same era.23 It is worth emphasizing that the foundation of the Russian Academy and the compilation of the Dictionary under its auspices coincided with continuing official concern about the high number of foreign teachers providing instruction in various subjects in a foreign language in Russian educational institutions. There was a perception that Russian students in those institutions had a poor command of Russian as a result. The concern was reflected in the educational reforms to which we referred in an earlier chapter.24 The reforms aimed to improve teaching in several key institutions (first and foremost, the Smolny Institute and the Noble Cadet Corps) and resulted in the dismissal of many foreign teachers, the recruitment of Russian teachers in their place, and the foundation of so-called ‘popular schools’ in which foreign languages were not supposed to be taught.25 A second manifestation of the emergent Russian language consciousness was the appearance of the topos of language pride in the writings of the secular literary community that was coming into being. Like the cultural currents such as Stoicism and pre-Romanticism to which we have referred, this topos was widely deployed in Europe. We have already encountered it in writings by French authors such as Le Laboureur and Bouhours that date from the period when classical French literature was beginning to flower. We find it in other Western European language communities too. For example, it informs an epistle published in 1614, ‘The Excellencie of the English Tongue’, in which Richard Carew hoped to ‘proove that our English language, for all, or the most, is matchable, if not preferrable before any other in use at this day’.26 It runs through the substantial works on the German language written by Justus Schottelius in the mid-seventeenth century.27 Similar pride in the vernacular is apparent in Russia from the middle of the eighteenth century, when the new sense of nationhood we have identified was developing and writers were beginning to express hopes and fears about 22 Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, vol. 5 (1794), 1. 23 Considine, Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800, 156. 24 See the fourth section of Chapter 2. 25 This reform was carried out with the aid of Janković de Mirijevo, who had previously helped to implement a similar reform in Austro-Hungary. The same urge to improve competency in Russian was manifested in a continuous debate which took place from 1760 about the introduction of Russian as a language of tuition in the University of Moscow. 26 Carew, ‘The Excellencie of the English Tongue’, 49. 27 Teutsche Sprachkunst (1641); Ausführliche Arbeit Von der Teutschen HaubtSprache (1663).

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Russia’s cultural relationship to her western neighbours. As early as 1747, Sumarokov contended, in a pair of ‘epistles’, that Russian was ‘beautiful’, ‘sweet, pure, and luxuriant and rich’, ‘capable of anything’.28 Still in the reign of Elizabeth, Lomonosov famously eulogized Russian in the preface to his grammar, making the following comments apropos of words attributed to the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who supposedly used to say that it was proper to speak Spanish to God, French to friends, German to enemies, and Italian to the female sex. But if he had been expert in Russian he would of course have added that it was seemly to speak it with all of those, for he would have found in it the magnificence of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, and the tenderness of Italian and, moreover, the richness and concision of Greek and Latin.29

A few years later, Trediakovskii asserted that nature had lent the ‘Slavenorossiiskii’ language ‘all the abundance and sweetness of the Hellenic tongue, and all the importance and gravity of Latin’.30 Catherine herself, according to Dashkova, opportunistically expressed similarly patriotic sentiments, asserting that Russian combined the energy of German and the sweetness of Italian and predicting that it would one day become the standard language of the world.31 Language pride evidently motivated Dashkova too: without a lexicon, it was argued in the preface to the first volume of the Dictionary of the Russian Academy, it would be impossible to prove the beauty, importance, and strength of a language.32 The notion that languages have innate qualities, which informs some of these expressions of pride in Russian, is quite at odds with modern linguistic views about the equal potentiality of all human languages and the role of political and social circumstances in combining to privilege one language or variety over others. In the eighteenth century, though, these Russian variations of a western topos sat comfortably in an international 28 ‘Epistola 1’ and ‘Epistola 2’, in Sumarokov, IP, 114, 125. 29 Rossiiskaia grammatika, in Lomonosov, PSS, vol. 7, 391. 30 Trediakovskii in the foreword to his translation of Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus (1766): see Trediakovskii, ‘Prediz’’iasnenie ob iroicheskoi piime’, li, quoted by Zhivov, Language and Culture, 254. By ‘Slavenorossiiskii’ Trediakovskii means, in Zhivov’s words, ‘the literary language [that] emerged as the union of Russian and Church Slavonic’, that is to say a language that ‘no longer opposed Church Slavonic [to Russian] but included it’ (ibidem, 228–229; Zhivov’ italics). We have retained the term ‘Slavenorossiiskii’, which is used in Marcus Levitt’s translation of Zhivov’s book, despite its awkwardness for the Anglophone reader. 31 Rogger, National Consciousness, 113. 32 Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, vol. 1 (1789), v.

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linguistic discourse about the intrinsic naturalness, multi-functionality, and superiority of the languages used by peoples who had a growing sense of national solidarity and who were beginning to glimpse a radiant future for themselves.33 The great writers of the classical period of Russian literature would subscribe to them too. As ‘material for literature’, Pushkin proclaimed in the 1820s, the Slavo-Russian language is indisputably superior to all [other] European languages’.34 Ivan Turgenev gave voice to similar linguistic patriotism in one of the short ‘poems in prose’ that he wrote towards the end of his life, in which he associated language with national essence and destiny in a moment of near despair, as politics took a particularly reactionary turn under Alexander III after the assassination of Alexander II: In days of doubt, in days of painful reflection about the fate of my native land [rodina], you [ty] are my sole support and buttress, O great, mighty, truthful, and free Russian language! If it were not for you, how could one not despair when faced with all that is happening at home? But it is impossible to believe that a language such as this was not given to a great people!35

A third manifestation of the new interest in Russian was a desire to protect the language from corrupting influences, especially from the Europeanisms that were entering it in large numbers in the eighteenth century as the court, the social and cultural elite, and the government adopted western practices, objects, and fashions.36 As Zhivov has pointed out, such purism 33 Alongside the topos of linguistic pride, one does encounter in eighteenth-century writings some expressions of linguistic diffidence or humility. Literary Russian was still felt at the end of Catherine’s reign to be immature and to lack the suppleness needed to express the sophisticated philosophical, political, legal, economic, and cultural concepts associated with the modern European polity, refined society, and the Republic of Letters. As late as 1824, Pushkin continued to express a concern of this sort in an essay on factors that he thought had slowed the development of Russian literature, where he argued that ‘Russian cannot be all that attractive for anyone’, because Russians still did not have a literature or books, ‘learning, politics, and philosophy still have not been set out in Russian’, and ‘we do not have a metaphysical language at all’: Pushkin, SS, vol. 11, 21. 34 ‘O predislovii g-na Lemonte k perevodu basen I.A. Krylova’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol 11, 31. 35 Turgenev, PSSP, vol. 13, 198. 36 On the introduction of French loanwords into Russian vocabulary in the eighteenth century, see especially Hüttl-Worth (1963) and May Smith (2006). Issatschenko (1983) includes a detailed list of borrowings during the reign of Peter the Great. The most diachronically comprehensive treatment of foreign loanwords in Russian can be found in Krysin (2004). The history of loanwords in Russian is better documented for the twentieth century; for a summary, see Comrie et al. (1996). For a dictionary of Gallicisms in Russian, see Epishkin, Istoricheskii slovar’ gallitsizmov russkogo iazyka.

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was encouraged by the French Classical thought from which Russian writers drew linguistic and stylistic concepts during the first stage in the normalization of Russian, up to the mid-1740s.37 As early as the age of Elizabeth, it became commonplace in Russian writings to revile borrowings from foreign languages.38 Purism seems to have informed Dashkova’s linguistic views too. One of the purposes of establishing an academy and creating a good dictionary, she claims to have told Catherine, was ‘to do away with the absurdity of using foreign words and terms while having our own’.39 Russian was borrowing too many foreign words, she declared in her speech at the first meeting of the Russian Academy. 40 The same sentiment is expressed in the preface to the first volume of the academy’s Dictionary, where it is stated that foreign words have been avoided wherever possible, particularly those that have been ‘introduced without need and which have Slavonic or Russian equivalents’. 41 Later, Pushkin evidently shared such disquiet about the effect of extensive lexical borrowing, unavoidable though such borrowing had been in the early eighteenth century: Russian began in Peter’s reign, he wrote in the 1820s, ‘to be noticeably distorted by the necessary introduction of Dutch, German, and French words’. 42 We should bear in mind at this point that purism is triggered not by a certain number of foreign elements in a language, but by a perception that there are too many; in other words, the position of the threshold beyond which the language seems corrupted is arbitrary. Furthermore, we must be careful to distinguish between overt reasons for stigmatizing certain usage, which may sound commonsensical (like Dashkova’s pronouncement that there are enough Russian words), and the underlying motivation, such as fear of foreign linguistic material (in the form of loanwords, lexical and grammatical calques, syntax, and so on) or concern about cultural decline.43 The development of such purist sentiments is just as unexceptional as the appearance of the topos of language pride, for linguistic purism is commonly associated with the sort of urge to standardize a language that we have 37 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 139–140, 143. 38 Ibidem, 239. 39 Dashkova, The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, trans. and ed. by Kyril Fitzlyon, 217. The Russian version of Dashkova’s ‘autobiography’ was first published in AKV, bk 21. 40 Dashkova, ‘Rech’ pri otkrytii imperatorskoi rossiiskoi akademii’. More generally, Dashkova accused foreign educators of preventing Russian children from learning their mother tongue well (‘O smysle slova “vospitanie”’, 120; first published in Sobesednik, 1783, vol. 2, 12–28). 41 Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, vol. 1 (1789), ix. 42 ‘O predislovii g-na Lemonte k perevodu basen I.A. Krylova’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol 11, 32. 43 Langer and Davies, ‘An Introduction to Linguistic Purism’, 5.

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described. Indeed, as Nils Langer and Agnete Nesse have pointed out, purism ‘is often used as an important tool in the creation of standard languages and for strengthening their status in the community’. At the same time, purism ‘presupposes the existence of a norm’, or ‘the perception of one’, since ‘the removal of undesirable elements can only really be effective if it is clear what needs to be cleansed from the language’. 44 A purist reaction against foreign linguistic elements may be strengthened, we should add, by insecurity and embarrassment when foreigners notice (and, possibly, frown upon or mock) the use of foreign words in a language. 45 The intention to normalize Russian; expressions of pride in the language; a desire to maintain its purity – these signs of language consciousness were the outcome of the intense transnational cultural enlightenment experienced by Russia’s elite in the eighteenth century, first as a result of Peter’s reforms and then, to a large degree, as a result of the nobility’s own initiatives. In particular, these phenomena were a response to a ‘situation of language contact’ in which, as Uriel Weinreich argued long ago, ‘people most easily become aware of the peculiarities of their language as against others’ and in which the ‘pure or standardized language most easily becomes the symbol of group integrity’. A perception of cultural inequality and a threat, actual or perceived, to the mother tongue fuel resentment at the linguistic manifestations of apparent inferiority, such as the need to borrow in order to fill lacunae in vocabulary or to use the foreign language for certain functions. Acceptance of the ‘superior’ force of the foreign language and accommodation with it, either by borrowing from it or by resorting to it in certain situations, may invite the accusation that native values have been betrayed. Perceived disloyalty in language use, then, may give rise to larger doubts about national allegiance.46 With all these considerations about language consciousness and language loyalty in mind, and remembering that purist debate has traditionally been strongest in literary circles,47 we now turn to the critique of borrowing from French and of Franco-Russian bilingualism which is such a marked feature of Russian literary discourse from the middle of the eighteenth century. It will be apparent from our examination of this critique that cross-linguistic influence invites condemnation just as much as bilingualism or diglossia, that is to say the use of a foreign language for certain purposes alongside the vernacular. This may be due partly to the fact that language-mixing can 44 Langer and Nesse, ‘Linguistic Purism’, 612, 613. 45 Thomas, Linguistic Purism, 45. 46 Weinreich, Languages in Contact, 100–101. 47 Thomas, Linguistic Purism, 102.

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so easily be ridiculed. No doubt, though, it is due also to the tendency of those who take pride in the vernacular and believe that there is a definitive, perfected form of it to regard any language-mixing as a dangerous deviation from the pure, fixed code that they value.

Linguistic Gallophobia in eighteenth-century comic drama Complaints about contamination of the Russian language by French are to be found in the satirical journalism that began to flourish in the age of Catherine, at least until Catherine grew afraid of the potential of such journalism as a medium for political opposition rather than mere comment on bad morals. Among the contemporary types mocked in Novikov’s journal Zhivopisets (The Painter), for example, we find a dandy using French slang and a rake whose speech is Gallicized. 48 In no element of the new Russian literary corpus, though, were language-mixing and code-switching more frequently stigmatized or more exultantly ridiculed than in comic drama, and in no other genre were the implications of foreign-language use in Russia so commonly and thoughtfully considered.49 The popularity of the comic theatrical repertoire suggests that the subject provoked mirth over a period of more than fifty years, from the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to the Alexandrine age, when Gallophobia was heightened by anxiety about the threats posed to the Russian polity by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The way in which Russian bilingualism and reception of French culture are treated does vary, of course, from one playwright to another. And yet, a negative tone predominates and stereotypical views of language and national character recur. Playwrights consistently engage with such matters as the perils of adherence to fashion, Russians’ alleged imitativeness, the supposed superficiality of French culture and those who admire it, and the need to assert cultural independence as the sense of Russian nationhood grew stronger. The first important landmarks in the dramatic repertoire that mocks Russian linguistic Gallophobia are Sumarokov’s three-act comedy Monsters (1750) and his one-act comedy A Husband’s Quarrel with His Wife (also 1750).50 48 W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov, 68, 71. On debate in the Russian periodical press about Russians’ use of French, see especially Chapin, ‘Francophone Culture in Russia’, 68–73. 49 We draw in this section on Offord, ‘Linguistic Gallophobia in Russian Comedy’. 50 Chudovishchi (originally entitled Treteinyi sud) and Ssora u muzha s zhenoi (subsequently entitled Pustaia ssora). As we have used online versions of these and other texts discussed in this section, we refer in our notes not to a page but to the act and scene in which a word, phrase, or passage occurs.

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Throughout the age of Catherine II, other playwrights would offer variations on the themes that Sumarokov had broached in the reign of Elizabeth. In a play that was probably written in the mid-1760s but has survived only in a one-act adaptation entitled The Russian Frenchman, Aleksandr Karin did attempt to treat the effects of the reception of the French language and French ideas and models of behaviour in a balanced way.51 In this play, Karin contrasts an empty-headed nobleman, Pustorechin, who regrets having to return from Paris to his homeland, with an exemplary one, Blagorazumov, who wishes to put what he has learned abroad to use for Russia.52 Undiscriminating reverence for foreign fashion, Karin tries to show, demeans nobles and weakens respect for their native land, but judicious use of the achievements of a more advanced culture could be of benefit to it. The majority of the dramatists who tackled the subject of Russian Gallomania in the age of Catherine, however, took a uniformly jaundiced view of francophonie. Many seem to have been influenced by another work that is no longer extant, Ivan Elagin’s Jean de Molle, or A Russian Frenchman (1764).53 Another notable example of one-sided treatment of Russians’ use of French was Lukin’s one-act comedy The Trinket-Vendor (1765), in which one of Lukin’s mouthpieces, Chistoserdov (Pure of Heart), brings a nephew from the remote province of Penza to a trinket-shop in one of the capital cities. The shop is frequented by men and women from various walks of life who exhibit the supposed vices of the westernized elite. After each scene, the virtuous characters in the play (the trinket-vendor himself, Chistoserdov, and his nephew) comment on the type (for instance, a former courtier, a bribe-taker, a conceited writer) who has just been paraded before the audience.54 The best known of all the comedies deploring the supposed linguistic and cultural thraldom of the eighteenth-century Russian elite to France is Fonvizin’s play The Brigadier, completed in 1769, in which two noble couples (a brigadier and his wife and a councillor and his wife) meet 51 On this play, Russkii frantsuz, see Stepanov, ‘Karin Aleksandr Grigor’evich’, in Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, and Pigarev, Tvorchestvo Fonvizina, 93. The title of the f ive-act original, Russians Returning from France, is given in Russian sources in various forms: Russkie [or Rossiiane], vozvrashchaiushchiesia [or vernuvshiesia] iz Frantsii. 52 As is usually the case in Russian comedy in the period with which we are concerned, the characters’ names underline the playwright’s didactic intent. The name Pustorechin suggests empty speech, whereas Blagorazumov indicates sound reason. 53 Zhan de Mole ili Russkii frantsuz. Elagin’s play was staged in Russia in 1765 (Pigarev, Tvorchestvo Fonvizina, 93). 54 Lukin’s play was a transposition to Russian conditions of an English ‘dramatic satire’, The Toyshop (1735) by Robert Dodsley, which Lukin knew through a French version published in 1756. On this play, see Ivleva, ‘The Locus of the Fashion Shop in Russian Literature’.

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to discuss the betrothal of their respective children, Ivanushka and Sof’ia (her name denotes wisdom). Each man flirts with the other man’s partner. The councillor’s wife and Ivanushka, her prospective son-in-law, also flirt with each other. After various misunderstandings and embarrassments, the failings of the two parental couples are revealed and good sense and virtue, embodied in Sof’ia and her suitor Dobroliubov (Love of Good), are duly rewarded.55 Complaints about the supposedly detrimental effects of Gallomania and of Russians’ preference for the French language over their own even found their way into comic opera. In Iakov Kniazhnin’s well-known example of this genre, Misfortune from a Carriage (1779), a Francophile nobleman, Firiulin, instructs his bailiff, Klementii, to sell some of his serfs to the army in order to raise money for the purchase of a new French carriage for himself and French hats for his wife. Klementii, who has designs on the serf-girl Aniuta, chooses the peasant she is about to marry, Luk’ian, in the hope of removing him from Firiulin’s estate. Luckily for Aniuta and Luk’ian, they have learnt a few French words from a former master and are able to address Firiulin and his wife as monsieur and madame respectively. This skill, combined with their ability to express their love in a sentimental way, persuades Firiulin to spare Luk’ian from military recruitment and to employ him as a personal footman, provided that he will promise never to speak Russian again.56 Instances of mockery of language-mixing (which, as we have seen, was – and indeed generally is – a commonplace phenomenon among bilinguals) are legion in these and other plays. Already in 1750 Sumarokov is exploiting the practice of code-switching and the influx of French loans in the first half of the eighteenth century for comic purposes. In Monsters, for example, Diulizh lards his speech with French exclamations, such as ‘Grand Dieu’ (Heavens!) and ‘Quelle pensée! Quelle impertinence!’ (What a thought! What impertinence!), and uses numerous Gallicisms, such as rival’ (rival), metressa (mistress), and amanta (lover).57 In A Husband’s Quarrel with His Wife, in which Diulizh reappears, lexical borrowing is again ridiculed, especially in a scene laden with loanwords, such as (in the order in which they occur) flatiruete, meritiruiu, remarkirovat’, distre, panse, emabl’, deessa, estimuiu, 55 Fonvizin, SS, vol. 1, 45–103. For an English version, see [Fonvizin], Dramatic Works of D.I. Fonvizin, 49–86. We can judge the extent to which The Brigadier struck a chord with contemporary audiences by the fact that it was performed over a hundred times in St Petersburg and Moscow during the fifty years or so following its premiere in 1772: see Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas, 240, n. 67. 56 Neschast’e ot karety, in Kniazhnin, IP, 563–590. 57 Sumarokov, Chudovishchi, I, 4–6.

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kalite, adorater, pardonabel’no, rezonabel’ny (you flatter, I deserve, to notice, absent-minded, thought, lovable, goddess, I esteem, quality, admirer, excusable, reasonable).58 A little later, a society lady, Diufiza, explains to Delamida, the daughter of the eponymous noble parents, why she thinks monsieur and madame should be used as terms of address in place of the Russian forms sudar’ (sir) and sudarynia (madam): Because people, you see, say la toilette rather than dressing-table, tapisserie rather than wall-paper, pardonnable rather than forgivable, étui rather than case. Not enough fine words of this sort have been introduced into our barbaric language. If we call a case an étui why shouldn’t we call a watch a montre in Russian? And why shouldn’t we say oui and non instead of ‘yes’ and ‘no’? Why do you think it would be difficult to introduce monsieur and madame?59

Thus neologisms, according to Diufiza, are needed not in order to express new concepts but simply so that Russian words can be replaced with words from a superior language. Ridicule of loanwords and code-switching reaches a climax in the macaronic final scene of the play, in which Diulizh threatens to break a servant’s nose (he coins the verb form kasiruiu from Fr. casser) and Delamida says she has the intention (intentsiiu) to put an end ( finirovat’) to her mother’s dispute (disput) with her father.60 Like Sumarokov’s Diulizh and his would-be salonnières, Lukin’s fop Ver’khogliadov (Superficial) condemns himself in spectators’ eyes by using a stream of Gallicisms, especially verbs derived from French with the aid of the Russian suffix -ovat’: abbesirovat’, batirovat’, definirovat’, divinirovat’, kontradirovat’, montrirovat’, ofrirovat’, posedirovat’, preshirovat’, prezentirovat’, prodiuirovat’, zhuzhirovat’ (to lower, to beat, to define, to guess, to contradict, to show, to offer, to possess, to preach, to present, to produce, to judge).61 Like Sumarokov, Lukin deplores the Gallomane’s disparagement of the Russian language and his preference for French terms over Russian ones.62 Opposing the practice of lexical borrowing and insisting on the use of words derived from Slavonic roots, the trinket-vendor espouses a 58 Sumarokov, Ssora, Scene 18. 59 Ibidem, Scene 21. 60 Ibidem, Scene 24. 61 For the sake of simplicity, we have given all these examples in the infinitive, although that is not the grammatical form in which all these verbs appear in Lukin’s text. None of these verbs established themselves in the Russian language. 62 Lukin, Shchepetil’nik, Scene 15.

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linguistic nationalism which anticipates that of Shishkov.63 Lukin himself endorses this attitude in his preface to the play: just as fops, according to Chistoserdov, ‘hate their language’, so the playwright himself loathes ‘the foreign words that disfigure [the Russian] language’.64 Even the position of the stress in a word may indicate language loyalty. In a stage direction, Lukin instructs actors playing the virtuous characters always to pronounce French words which have become established in Russian in the Russian manner, whereas the affected visitors to the trinket-vendor’s shop are to pronounce them in the French manner, placing stress on the first vowel of the suffix -iia in the word kompaniia (company), for example, rather than on the a of the stem, in the Russian manner.65 Fonvizin too saturates the speech of characters who cleave to imported gallant culture with Gallicisms and mixes languages in their utterances in a way that seems grotesque. Ivanushka, for example, constantly employs French terms of address, exclamations, oaths, other French expressions, including de tout mon cœur and avec plaisir (with all my heart, with pleasure), and Russian Gallicisms such as rezoneman, indiferan, and konnesans (reasoning, indifferent, acquaintance) which are incomprehensible to those among his seniors who are not Francophone.66 He despises his parents for not understanding French and uses it as a language in which to say things he does not intend them to understand, as when he tells the councillor’s wife that his father is l’homme le plus bourru, que je connais (the coarsest man I know).67 The speech of the councillor’s wife is similarly strewn with Gallicisms, such as komodnee, ekskiuzovat’, and kontradiruet (more comfortable, to excuse, contradicts).68 Since both Ivanushka and the councillor’s wife imagine that they will lead happier lives if they are surrounded by French people and have a partner with whom they can speak French, Ivanushka resolves to seek an occasion favorable (favourable opportunity) for them to elope to Paris.69 On one level, the sustained mockery of language-mixing in Russian comedy is an attack on the new fashionable society frequented by the galant homme or, in a more negative representation of him, the petit-maître or 63 On Shishkov, see the following section of this chapter. 64 Lukin, Shchepetil’nik, Scene 16, and his accompanying ‘Pis’mo k gospodinu El’chaninovu’, which can also be accessed at http://az.lib.ru/l/lukin_w_i/text_0050.shtml. 65 Ibidem, Scene 7. 66 See, e.g., Fonvizin, Brigadir, I, 1; I, 3; III, 3; IV, 3; V, 1; V, 2. Many other examples could be cited. 67 Ibidem, III, 3. 68 Ibidem, I, 4; II, 6; V, 2. Again, many more examples could be given. 69 Ibidem, II, 6.

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fop (R. povesa), of whom Fonvizin’s Ivanushka is an outstanding example. Sumarokov, for instance, yokes together language and fashion, establishing in the spectator’s mind a link between French-speaking and the cultivation of modish but false or trivial appearances. Diulizh, in Monsters, cannot believe that Infimena, whom he is courting, could prefer his rival Valer, and he invokes both language use and fashion to explain his incredulity: he’s got about twenty curled locks on his head, he carries a short little cane, a German makes his clothes, he takes snuff […] He’s not had a muff since he was born, he wears short sleeves, and what’s more he knows German. I don’t know how he’s learnt French.70

Infimena’s mother, Gidima, also associates the French language with fashion, as becomes evident when she is asked by her husband to explain what she sees in her daughter’s suitor Diulizh and replies: ‘he knows a little French, he dances, he dresses like a dandy, he knows a lot of French songs’.71 More generally, French is associated with a society in which people care more about the way they dress than anything else, discuss the merits of applying rouge and wearing an earring on one ear only, sprinkle themselves with perfume, carry pocket mirrors, and crave compliments.72 At a more serious level, the new type of social life that Sumarokov is mocking seems to carry a threat to family values, especially the institution of marriage and marital fidelity, which is not expected in the imported gallant world. Delamida will not marry Diulizh, she states, because she ‘esteems’ him; were he to become her husband, she reasons, she would cease to hold him in such high regard.73 Characters’ use of French in eighteenth-century Russian comedy tends to be presented as symptomatic of precisely that imitativeness which was indicative, in the eyes of Russia’s detractors, of Russian inferiority, the very flaw whose existence Catherine strove to deny in her riposte to Chappe.74 In Sumarokov’s Monsters, it is left to the servant Arlikin (who, like Molière’s maidservants, has better sense than his social superiors) to point out the flaw, using the familiar topos of aping: Diulizh, Arlikin tells the audience, is a ‘monkey, and not a local one’.75 Lukin echoes Sumarokov’s anxiety about the humiliating proclivity to imitation when he has his trinket-vendor describe 70 Sumarokov, Chudovishchi, II, 5. 71 Ibidem, I, 1. 72 Sumarokov, Ssora, Scenes 1, 6, 13, 21. 73 Ibidem, Scene 18. For the assumption that spouses will be unfaithful, see Scene 3. 74 See the second section of Chapter 7 above. 75 Sumarokov, Chudovishchi, II, 5.

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Ver’khogliadov as a ‘parrot’.76 Resistance to imitation is even implicit in Lukin’s practice as a translator of a foreign original. He has rendered the French version of Dodsley’s play ‘into our mores’,77 or has domesticated it, as we should now say. His version is an ‘adaptation’, if by adaptation we understand ‘a set of translative interventions which result in a text that is not generally accepted as a translation but is nevertheless recognized as representing a source text’.78 For Fonvizin, whose reflections on Russian cultural and linguistic borrowing from France led him to deeper conclusions than most of his contemporaries about social, personal, and national character, the tendency to mimic the French was symptomatic of a superficiality of character which made many nobles morally unworthy of their privileged social status. This failing, which was attributable, in Fonvizin’s opinion, to poor upbringing, manifested itself in a tendency to mistake external signs of worth, such as rank and wealth, for the essential qualities of character that constituted true worth, especially such Stoic virtues as moderation, mastery of the passions, and respect for the civic community. Ability to use the French language was one such misleading sign. Ivanushka and the councillor’s wife, in The Brigadier, are right in thinking that as nobles they should display merit, but they are wrong in believing that Gallicized Russian, French-speaking, and the mere fact that Ivanushka has visited Paris indicate it. They unwittingly reveal the error when they prefer the Gallicism merit to the Russian dostoinstvo to denote the concept of worth.79 The dramatists we have examined, including Fonvizin, are not members of the high nobility, and they did not share the views of aristocrats like Mikhail Shcherbatov, who wished the noble estate to be inaccessible to those outside it. They tended instead to speak for the middling nobility, who had more to gain from the application of the meritocratic principle when attempts to win recognition, status, or promotion were being considered. On the whole, though, they were less preoccupied in their plays with social identity than with national identity. They made a significant contribution, for better or for worse, to the development of a belief that linguistic choice in high society was a touchstone by which national allegiance could be judged, and that attraction to the French language was a sign not merely of shallowness of character but of national disloyalty. Already in Monsters, Sumarokov presents 76 Lukin, Shchepetil’nik, Scene 15. 77 Lukin, ‘Pis’mo k gospodinu El’chaninovu’ at http://az.lib.ru/l/lukin_w_i/text_0050.shtml. 78 See the entry by Georges L. Bastin in Baker and Saldanha (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3. 79 Fonvizin, Brigadir, III, 1; III, 3.

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the Francophone Diulizh as a man who has repudiated Russian nationality. Not only does Diulizh have no wish to know Russian laws; he would also prefer not to know the Russian language, for it is a ‘stingy language’ (skarednoi iazyk), he says, in which nothing good could be written. He rues the fact that he was born of a Russian father.80 In A Husband’s Quarrel with His Wife too, his alien character is emphasized. He has taken to billiards, bets on the outcome of the games he plays, and drinks wine rather than traditional Russian products such as mead and kvass.81 He does not regard himself as Russian and if anyone were to label him as such then he would consider it an insult to which he ought to respond with his sword (that is to say, according to an alien code of honour).82 To value Russian culture and use Russian in preference to French is incomprehensible to such Francophile characters: Diulizh, Delamida, and Diufiza disparage a lady of their acquaintance who chooses to sing Russian songs even though she knows French well.83 Fonvizin too creates the impression that nobles’ attachment to French culture poses a threat to Russia as a nation. Choice of the French language in The Brigadier implies identification with what is perceived as French national character. By enthusiastically mixing a foreign tongue with his native Russian, Ivanushka is consciously attempting to assume a foreign persona, which happens in Fonvizin’s opinion to be morally flawed. Ivanushka admits, for example, that étourderie (flippancy) is part of his character; indeed if he were not flippant, he muses, then he would not be truly imitating the French. He is also inconstant and is horrified by the prospect of having a faithful wife.84 The councillor’s wife, for her part, excuses Ivanushka’s reckless display of passion for her because she believes that caution would be comic in a young man, especially in one who had been to Paris. Ivanushka agrees: O, vous avez raison! [Oh, you’re right!] Caution, constancy, patience were praiseworthy when people didn’t know how one should live in society; as for us who do know what it is que de vivre dans le grand monde [to live in high society], anyone as rational as ourselves would obviously think we were very funny if we were constant.85 80 Sumarokov, Chudovishchi, I, 5 and I, 6. Diulizh uses the word natsiia when he regrets that he is of the same nationality as another character, Khabzei. This is an even earlier use of the term to denote the concept of the nation in Russia than Fonvizin’s (see n. 2 of this chapter above). 81 Sumarokov, Ssora, Scene 2. 82 Ibidem, Scene 16. 83 Ibidem, Scene 19. 84 Fonvizin, Brigadir, II, 6. 85 Ibidem.

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Fonvizin has thus translated the lightness and gaiety on which prerevolutionary French society did indeed pride itself into a negative topos combining superficiality, frivolity, promiscuity, infidelity, and deceitfulness. As an accomplished artist with a desire to generalize and identify what is typical, Fonvizin seems not merely to be suggesting that shallow devotees of French fashion are to be found in Russian society. Nor can he be altogether ridiculing the use of French in Russian society; after all, the private audiences by whom he was fêted even before his play was performed in the theatre included Francophone members of the court. Rather, he is challenging all those contemporaries who learn French not for the mere instrumentalist purpose of useful communication with members of another speech community and absorption of the best features of their culture but in order to immerse themselves in that culture. These Russians run the risk of losing their native identity. The integrative approach of these Gallomanes to language acquisition, as we might now put it, may be perceived as a rejection of native character or even as a form of betrayal. Or at least, that is the perception that Fonvizin encourages. Ivanushka and the councillor’s wife believe that Russians are inherently inferior to the French. Being Russian, Ivanushka believes, is a défaut (defect) which nothing can entirely efface, although his stay in Paris has lightened the burden of his first nationality by making him more French than Russian.86 The councillor’s wife similarly regards her nationality as a ‘terrible ruin’.87 The brigadier, obtuse though he is, seems to speak for Fonvizin when he questions whether such renunciation of one’s native state is right or even possible: Brigadier: Well what sort of Frenchman are you? I thought you were born in Rus’ [Old Russia]. Son: My body was born in Russia, it’s true, but my spirit belonged to the French crown. Brigadier: But you are more obliged to Russia than to France, all the same.88

Thus, Gallomania and the love of the French language which is its outward sign seem to Fonvizin to weaken the loyalty of the Russian nobility to the imperial state or the native land. Other dramatists whom we have mentioned took up the theme of nobles’ separation from Russia that Sumarokov and Fonvizin had explored. Again it is 86 Ibidem; see also III, 4. 87 Ibidem, II, 6. 88 Ibidem, III, 1.

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a non-noble character, in this case the jester Afanasii, who articulates the truth in Kniazhnin’s Misfortune from a Carriage: the rotten fruit of a Russian nobleman’s travel is disdain for Russianness.89 The theme is particularly pronounced in Dmitrii Khvostov’s three-act play The Russian Parisian (1783). Khvostov presents yet another stereotyped nobleman, Frankoliub (Francophile), who has become infatuated with France as a result of a long stay abroad. Frankoliub’s overriding ambition, when he comes back to Russia, is to acquire a French wife. (This he has arranged to do through third parties without having met or seen his prospective bride.) He reasons that if his children are at least half-French then the dishonour of their having a Russian father will be reduced.90 Once married, he will return to Paris, a promised land of social gatherings, shows, and potential riches.91 ‘I shall expatriate myself’ (ekspatriruius’), he says, and the expatriation will be both physical and spiritual. The notion of ‘expatriation’ must have seemed perverse at a time when the otechestvo (that is to say, patrie) was being held up as the principal object to which the nobleman should devote himself. In defiance of his uncle, the right-thinking Blagorazum, who advises him to cast aside his ‘passion for France’, Frankoliub plans to serve the King of France as a musketeer.92 His loyalty to France outweighs that to his Russian family.93 In fact, Frankoliub openly despises Russians in general, regards the term ‘Russian’ (rusak) as an insult, and would like all Russians to forget how to speak their native language.94 In accordance with the conventions of didactic comedy, he is duly punished, of course. He is abandoned by the coarse and fickle fiancée (a ‘scarecrow’, a ‘monkey’) who turns up at the end of the play, despite his undiscriminating reverence for her as a Frenchwoman. Nonetheless, he resolves to sell his wardrobe and set off again for Paris, the only place, he believes, where he can be happy.95 The merits and achievements of the French are not altogether overlooked in this play, for Khvostov’s mouthpiece Blagorazum draws attention to 89 Kniazhnin, Neschast’e ot karety, II, 5. Insofar as it deals with serfdom, Kniazhnin’s comic opera more clearly broaches the subject of the social divide of which noble francophonie is emblematic than the other works we have examined. In this respect, it anticipates the sharp contrast drawn between the bilingualism of the Russian nobility and the monolingualism of the Russian peasant in the writings of mid-nineteenth-century Romantic cultural nationalists such as the Slavophiles (see the last section of this chapter) and the novelists to whom we turn in our final chapter. 90 Khvostov, Ruskoi parizhanets, I, 3. 91 Ibidem, I, 8; II, 6. 92 Ibidem, II, 3; I, 2. 93 Ibidem, III, 3. 94 Ibidem, III, 5; III, 12. 95 Ibidem, III, 11–14.

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them.96 Nonetheless, the traits of frivolity, dissipation, and fondness for empty chatter are again strongly associated with them.97 Most importantly, Khvostov – like Fonvizin – challenges the assumption of Russian inferiority that is implicit in Russian Gallomania and vigorously defends the virtues of the ‘upright Russian’, who loves and serves his fatherland. The Russian Parisian may thus reflect a growing self-confidence among the elite of the burgeoning empire towards the end of Catherine’s reign, following victory in the war of 1768–1774 against the Turks and at the time of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea (1783). This confidence seems to undermine Frankoliub’s foolish Gallomania. Frankoliub ruefully detects the new spirit of independence in the homeland to which he has returned. Russians, he complains, now esteem the French no more than other foreign peoples. They have abandoned the French way of thinking and speaking and wish to think and write in Russian instead. They believe they can express all their feelings in Russian and that there is no need to mix French words into their vernacular.98 The sort of language attitudes expressed by eighteenth-century Russian dramatists in response to cultural westernization were by no means peculiar to Russia, nor was it only in Russia that comic drama proved a convenient vehicle in which to express them. Mockery of affected characters who flock to France, adopt French manners and dress, are prone to code-switching, and lard their speech with Gallicisms is commonplace, for example, in English Restoration comedy. John Dryden’s Marriage-à-la-mode (1673), Sir George Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676), Thomas Shadwell’s Bury Fair (1689), Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1696), and Sir John Vanburgh’s Relapse, or Virtue in Danger (1696) all attest to the vitality of this subject in late seventeenthcentury England, a century before it was in vogue in Russia.99 An influential variation on the same theme was produced in eighteenth-century DenmarkNorway by Ludvig Holberg, whose play Hans Frandsen, or John of France (1722) was the source of Elagin’s Jean de Molle, which was a free translation rather than an original work.100 In mid-eighteenth-century Sweden, the theme was taken up by Johan Stagnell and in the nineteenth-century Romanian lands by Vasile Alecsandri and Ion Luca Caragiale.101 Russian writers’ negative 96 Ibidem, I, 2; I, 6; II, 3. 97 Ibidem, I, 2; I, 5; III, 1; III, 4; III, 13. 98 Ibidem, II, 3. 99 See Schneider, The Ethos of Restoration Comedy, on these and further examples. 100 On the reception of Holberg’s play, Jean de France eller Hans Frandsen, in Russia, see Dillard, ‘Ludvig Holberg in the Russian Literary Landscape’; see also Vikør, ‘Northern Europe’, 110. 101 On Stagnell, see Östman, ‘French in Sweden’, 301–302; on Alecsandri and Caragiale, see Mihaila, ‘The Beginnings and the Golden Age of Francophonie’, 349.

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representations of francophonie, then, may be considered not so much the products of accurate social observation as adaptations of a common European literary topos: poking fun at people who seemed to be intoxicated with foreign culture was itself a form of imitation, albeit unwitting. However, to point out that playwrights’ criticism of the craze for French fashion and the French language was transported across national boundaries in a literary vehicle perfected by Molière in seventeenth-century France is by no means to deny that it also had particular resonance and took on new significance in certain places at certain times. Looking back over the Russian comic tradition of mocking Gallomania, we may see it as something more than a form of cultural translation. It was also a reaction to the importation of the social world of the galant homme and, at a still broader level, an expression of anxiety about national worth and autonomy. Dramatists clearly thought they had grounds for concern. Especially shocking in an age of imperial expansion, when the manly virtue of martial valour was prized above all others, was the supposedly feminine preoccupation with clothes, vestimentary accessories, and coiffure. Perhaps too there was an undercurrent of apprehension among the dramatists (all men, it should be noted) about the equality that women were beginning to enjoy, up to a point, in the new Francophone social world, with its polite conversational formulae, its terms of address, and its practice of paying compliments, all of which the dramatists mocked. It may be significant in this connection that in a number of plays (Sumarokov’s Monsters and A Husband’s Quarrel with His Wife and Fonvizin’s Brigadier, for instance) a forceful woman seems to be beyond the control of her husband, or nearly so. Moreover, the transformation of woman into an object of admiration appears to bring with it a sexual licence that is strongly associated with French character and culture and the speaking of French. Hence Lukin’s Ver’khogliadov, codeswitching profusely, commends what he calls a certain ‘seemly smuttiness’ which, if ‘uttered avec esprit [with wit], animates the company’ and which is regarded as a ‘marque de bon sens, très estimée in ladies’ cercles’ (a mark of good judgement, much prized in ladies’ circles).102 To advocates of traditional ways like the trinket-vendor, then, Francophone society promotes frivolity and promiscuity and undermines established gender roles. It would be simplistic to conclude that disparagement of French fashion in the popular branch of literature we have examined in this section implied a rejection of French culture tout court or that criticism of Russians’ 102 Lukin, Shchepetil’nik, Scene 15. The absurdity of these remarks is accentuated in Lukin’s text by the fact that the French words are rendered in Cyrillic script and the Russian words used for ‘animates’, ‘company’, and ‘ladies’ are all Gallicisms.

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indiscriminate use of the French language represented a denial of the need for Russians to learn French. Foreign languages, after all, were among the subjects that the trinket-vendor’s worthy father conscientiously taught his son.103 Nevertheless, users of the language of the new society, when they are seen through the lens of Russian comic dramatists, tend to appear not as admirably cultivated cosmopolitans but as superficial and frivolous men and women – some, but not all, of them social climbers – who are prone to personal infidelity and national disloyalty. In the last analysis, Russian comic dramatists themselves reflect the dilemma of westernization. On the one hand, they may be considered representatives of the Enlightenment: they were using French and other European didactic comedy to promote the development of western secular culture and the values of an urbane civic society in Russia. On the other hand, they were sufficiently ambivalent about the borrowing in which they were engaged for us to regard them in retrospect as forerunners of the nationalistic intelligentsia which in the nineteenth century would take a negative view of the language habits of the Russian nobility.

The linguistic debate between Karamzin and Shishkov The attempts to create order out of the collection of indigenous linguistic varieties that were used in eighteenth-century Russia, including the written chancery language, the spoken language, and Church Slavonic; the codification of Russian in grammars and dictionaries and the classification of literary registers; growing pride in the vernacular; the development of a secular corpus of letters in Russian and mockery of language-mixing in it: all these factors lay behind a dispute that broke out at the turn of the century between Karamzin and Shishkov and their respective supporters about the form that the evolving Russian literary language should take. This dispute was an important event in its own time, both because of the status of the leading participants in it (an authoritative prose writer and a patriotic statesman respectively) and because the onset of the Napoleonic Wars lent topicality and historical significance to discussion of Russia’s cultural relationship to France. It has also had lasting importance as a point of reference in Russian language commentary, for it was one of those debates that provide, as Jan Blommaert has put it, ‘stock arguments which underlie the construction of authoritative (folk as well as expert) rhetoric’.104 Nor was 103 Ibidem, Scene 1. On teaching and learning French, see Chapter 2 above. 104 Blommaert, ‘The Debate is Open’, in Blommaert (ed.), Language Ideological Debates, 10.

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its long-term significance confined to the linguistic and literary spheres, with which it was most obviously concerned. Perhaps language attitudes generally ‘stand proxy’, as James and Lesley Milroy have claimed, ‘for a much more comprehensive set of social and political attitudes’.105 At any rate, this particular Russian polemic was subsumed in the overarching debate about Russia’s standing on the international stage and its relationship to Europe that came to dominate Russian intellectual and cultural life in the nineteenth century. In this respect, it foreshadowed the mid-nineteenth century debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles, in which discussion of language use would again have a place.106 We shall begin by describing Karamzin’s and Shishkov’s contrasting views on where Russian writers should look for linguistic and stylistic models. We shall then show that, despite their differences, these two opponents explained the current state of the Russian language in a similar way and that their linguistic views, at bottom, were shaped by patriotic intent and a common desire to assert cultural autonomy. In general, Karamzin’s views are difficult to define both because they changed over time and because, as Herzen once remarked, Karamzin’s thought lacked coherence, an overarching idea, or deep conviction. 107 Karamzin may even hold apparently contradictory views at the same time.108 However, it seems reasonable to construe Karamzin’s linguistic views – which were for the most part scattered in works that were not devoted exclusively to language use – as part of a conception of Russia as a participant in the march of European civilization towards a single goal.109 The development of French culture provided a model for this process, but Russia had progressed so quickly since the age of Peter the Great that it was now able to compete for pre-eminence. Karamzin proudly explained his point to foreign readers, using French as a lingua franca, in his contribution to Le Spectateur du Nord, to which we have already referred:110 The French nation has therefore passed through all the stages of civilization in order to reach the point where it now finds itself. Comparing its long-drawn-out march to the rapid flight of our people towards the same 105 J. Milroy and L. Milroy, Authority in Language, 45 f. 106 See the final section of this chapter. 107 Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, in Herzen, SS, vol. 7, 60. 108 Uspenskii, Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 8. On the tensions in Karamzin’s historiographical writings, see Offord, ‘Nation-Building and Nationalism in N.M. Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State”’. 109 Uspenskii, Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 25. 110 See the fourth section of Chapter 7 above.

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goal, they say that it is a miracle; one marvels at the omnipotence of a creative spirit [i.e. Peter the Great] which, tearing the Russian nation all at once from the lethargic slumber in which it had been buried, launched it on the road of enlightenment with such force that within a few years we should find ourselves marching alongside peoples who had been making their way along it many centuries before us.111

In his Letters of a Russian Traveller, Karamzin couched the same point in terms that would become familiar in Russian discourse about national achievement and destiny over the following two centuries. Russia had managed quickly to get on level terms (sravniat’sia) with the West, he claimed here, and it was possible to imagine that in future it would overtake or surpass (prevzoiti) the West.112 It is tempting to suggest that Karamzin regarded the French language itself as a model to be copied and surpassed, a resource that should be studied, mined, and discarded when Russian superseded it. For one thing, French – and, of course, other European languages – had a lexical stock from which it was legitimate to borrow if one subscribed to the universalistic view of human culture that Karamzin seemed to express in his early writings. In his Letters of a Russian Traveller, Karamzin made it clear, both implicitly and explicitly, that the absorption of words from foreign languages was no disgrace. Not only is there a profusion of western loanwords in this patriotic work of Russian literature; Karamzin also observes in it that the English literary language remains strong and expressive in spite of copious borrowing.113 Karamzin is said to have used many Gallicisms – for example, imazhinatsiia (imagination), sentimenty (sentiments), tourment (torment), énergie (energy) – in his own speech, as well as in his early writings.114 His literary style was characterized, Viktor Vinogradov observed, by ‘RussoFrench phraseology’, a set of clichés, periphrases, and metaphors modelled on European semantics, first and foremost French, and befitting ‘the typical 111 Karamzin, ‘Lettre au Spectateur du Nord’, 62–63. 112 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 416−417; [Karamzin], Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 294. On the expression of national pride in the Letters of a Russian Traveller, see Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard, 96–100. 113 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 575, quoted by Uspenskii, Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 23, n.; [Karamzin], Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 433. 114 Kamenev, ‘Pis’ma’, in A.D. Galakhov (ed.), Istoricheskaia khristomatiia novogo perioda russkoi slovesnosti, vol. 2, 77. It will be seen that the author of this source, a poet who was a contemporary of Karamzin, does not distinguish between use of French loanwords and code-switching into French.

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cast of mind of a sensitive and gallant man of society, a man of the gentry who thought in a “noble” way and had a patriotic disposition’.115 As Uspenskii and Zhivov have also emphasized, Karamzin’s linguistic thought was much affected by French literary and linguistic theory. His classification of Church Slavonic as a language that was ‘hard’ (he used the epithet zhestkii, a calque of Fr. dur) and the new Russian literary language as ‘tender’ (nezhnyi, a calque of délicat), for instance, derived from French theories which contrasted unpolished Baroque language to neo-classical literary French.116 He adopted Vaugelas’s notion of bon usage and identified good society as the milieu where such usage was to be found.117 In urging prospective Russian writers to develop a literary language based on the language spoken in society, he was recommending what he supposed was the case in France. He believed, moreover, that women’s speech might serve as a linguistic model: just as French women, it was thought, tended to avoid Latinisms, so Russian women tended to avoid Slavonicisms, Karamzin claimed.118 However, acceptance of foreign tutelage – cultural, literary, stylistic, and linguistic – was a temporary expedient. Lexical borrowing would enrich the Russian language and the adoption of French linguistic ideas would help to guide Russian writers as they cultivated their language for literary purposes, but they were only means to an end. In due course, Russian would take its rightful place among the European languages by creating a literature that would contribute to the collective culture of the continent, Karamzin remarked in 1818 to the Imperial Russian Academy.119 It is notable in this connection that in Karamzin’s twelve-volume History of the Russian State, which also began to appear in 1818, lexical Gallicisms of the sort that abounded in his early Sentimentalist prose are largely absent.120 The relative dearth of foreign borrowings in this work of the post-Napoleonic period is doubtless due not only to the fact that the History concerns pre-Petrine Russia but also to the growing self-confidence generated by the epic story of national resilience that Karamzin tells in it. 115 Vinogradov, Iazyk Pushkina, 206. 116 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 137–138. 117 On the influence of Vaugelas on Karamzin and his supporters, see Uspenskii, Iz istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 61–65. 118 It is unsurprising that the association of a prestige variety of Russian with a social milieu in which the predominant language was French should have provoked resistance to Karamzin’s views in some quarters, particularly since that milieu was noted for the dandyism derided in the comic drama we have just examined. 119 As noted by Roger Anderson, ‘Karamzin’s Concept of Linguistic “Cosmopolitanism”’, 169. 120 Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo.

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Shishkov’s linguistic views, unlike Karamzin’s, are concentrated in dedicated writings. His best known pronouncement on language use was his Discourse on the Ancient and Modern Style of the Russian Language (1803),121 in which he responded in detail to Karamzin’s essay ‘Why is there so Little Writing Talent in Russia?’ and attacked writing in what he took to be the Karamzinian style. The following year, he responded to criticisms of his Discourse by publishing an ‘addition’ to it.122 During the period of patriotic outpourings that preceded the French invasion, Shishkov produced a further cluster of works on language, including a treatise on the ‘richness, abundance, beauty, and power of Russian’ (1811),123 a programmatic speech at the opening of the Symposium of Lovers of the Russian Word, a literary society he had founded in 1811,124 a Discourse on Love of the Fatherland (1812),125 and Dialogues on Literature between A and B (1812), in which he reiterated his principal beliefs.126 Shishkov took it for granted that Church Slavonic and Russian were essentially the same language or, at least, that Russian was a dialect of Church Slavonic.127 Furthermore, he believed – and this is where he differed most radically from Karamzin – that the only way to develop Russian was to study the Slavonic language in which Russian, he supposed, was rooted. It was the sacred writings in Church Slavonic that Russian authors should draw upon, not the writings of any Bonnets, Voltaires, Youngs, or Thomsons (that is to say, authors commended by Karamzin), if they wished to develop ‘the art of speaking well’.128 Shishkov attempted to demonstrate the excellence of Slavonic and its suitability as a source for the development of Russian by adducing numerous examples of it from translations of the Bible. He claimed merely to have used the first examples he came across, arguing 121 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge Rossiiskogo iazyka; NB the reference to this work in our bibliography is to a new edition published ten years after the work first appeared. 122 ‘Pribavlenie k sochineniiu nazyvaemomu Rassuzhdeniiu [sic] o starom i novom sloge rossiiskogo iazyka’, in SSPAS, vol. 2, 353–466. On contemporary criticisms of Shishkov’s views, see Argent, ‘The Linguistic Debate between Karamzin and Shishkov’, 112–113. 123 Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii sviashchennogo pisaniia i o tom, v chem sostoit bogatstvo, obilie, krasota i sila rossiiskogo iazyka i kakimi sredstvami onyi eshche bolee raspostranit’, obogatit’ i usovershenstvovat’ mozhno, in SSPAS, vol. 4, 22–107. 124 ‘Rech’ pri otkrytii Besedy liubitelei russkogo slova’, ibidem, 108–146. Members of the group had met informally for some years prior to 1811. 125 ‘Rassuzhdenie o liubvi k otechestvu’, ibidem, 147–185. 126 Razgovory o slovesnosti mezhdu dvumia litsami Az i Buki, in SSPAS, vol. 3, 1–168. 127 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 66, 90; idem, Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii sviashchennogo pisaniia, 24; Cooper, Creating the Nation, 54. 128 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 40. The English poet Young and the Scottish poet Thomson helped to inspire Karamzin’s early fiction in the Sentimental manner.

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that rich, expressive language was ubiquitous in the sacred texts.129 He also quoted passages from French and German translations of the Bible which, with no convincing argumentation, he deemed weaker than the Slavonic translation. Thus, the Slavonic sacred texts amounted to a linguistic canon, as Shishkov intimated at the beginning of his Dialogues on Literature: ‘A: Does our language have sufficient rules for writing correctly? B: Yes, entirely sufficient and firm rules. A: Where are they? B: In church books.’130 Nor could the linguistic excellence of Church Slavonic be separated from the merits of the Orthodox religion for which Church Slavonic was the vehicle. These merits were exemplified by the good morals of virtuous forefathers who ‘loved their fatherland, were firm in faith, revered the tsar and the laws’, and were worth emulating as both spiritual and linguistic mentors.131 There was even a parallel to be drawn between religious development and the historical condition of language: the state of Russian was quite unclear, Shishkov asserted, up until the introduction of the Orthodox faith into Rus’ in the tenth century, whereupon language ‘suddenly’ appeared alongside faith.132 In the last analysis, then, the Church Slavonic linguistic legacy, as Zhivov has pointed out, was bound up in Shishkov’s mind with national identity, and the Karamzinian reform seemed to him a break with national tradition, ‘a step on the path leading to the ruin of Russian culture’.133 It will be seen from this summary of the polemic that Karamzin – or at least, the Karamzin who in the 1790s and early 1800s came to prominence as the author of Sentimentalist prose fiction and the Letters of a Russian Traveller – can easily be presented as a ‘Westernizer’ avant la lettre, a man who is receptive to European civilization. This receptivity was manifested in tolerance of loanwords from Western European languages and recommendation of French stylistic and conversational models. Shishkov, on the other hand, can be portrayed as a forerunner of the Slavophiles and other conservative nationalists, for he associated the loss of traditional piety with moral degeneration and he comes across as a hide-bound opponent of European linguistic influence. The contrast seems to be confirmed by the association of the two writers’ respective followers with particular journals and literary societies that flourished in the Alexandrine age. Karamzin’s ideas, for instance, were well received in the Friendly Literary Society and the 129 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 86, 121. 130 Shishkov, Razgovory o slovesnosti, in SSPAS, vol. 3, 1–2. 131 Shishkov, ‘Pribavlenie’, ibidem, vol. 2, 458. 132 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii sviashchennogo pisaniia, in SSPAS, vol. 4, 22. 133 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 369–370.

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Free Society of Lovers of Literature, the Sciences, and the Arts, both founded in 1801, while some of Shishkov’s supporters frequented his Symposium of L­ overs of the Russian Word.134 The impression that the two sides in the polemic took diametrically opposite positions was strengthened by the fact that they traded insults, parodied their opponents, and were willing to misrepresent each other’s views.135 Although it suited Shishkov’s purpose, for instance, to allow readers to think that he had quoted examples of ‘bad’ Russian usage from Karamzin and various representatives of a Karamzinian school, almost all of his examples, it has been shown, were culled from one book by a minor writer, Aleksandr Obrezkov, whose style bore no resemblance to Karamzin’s and who was ridiculed by the Karamzinists, as Karamzin’s followers were known.136 The Karamzinists, for their part, invented many of the words, including the infamous mokrostupy for galoshi (galoshes), which Shishkov was supposed to have made up to replace borrowed French words in his futile attempt to stem the tide of linguistic innovation.137 The contrast was subsequently reinforced by terminology introduced in the 1920s by Iurii Tynianov, who described the Karamzinists as ‘innovators’ and Shishkov and his supporters as ‘archaists’.138 Nonetheless, the adversaries did have much in common, besides their conservative political views. Both Karamzin and Shishkov complained, for example, that Russian was not widely enough used or sufficiently respected. Thus, Karamzin regretfully stated in his essay ‘On Love of the Fatherland’ that it was Russians’ misfortune ‘that we want to say everything in French and do not think to work on the elaboration of our own language’. How different were the English, who ‘prefer to whistle and hiss in English even with those they love most tenderly rather than speak a foreign language which almost all of them know’.139 Shishkov, in his Discourse on the Ancient and Modern Style of the Russian Language, 134 See Argent, ‘The Linguistic Debate between Karamzin and Shishkov’, 105–106. The members of the Symposium, it should be noted, were not exclusively Shishkovian. 135 Ibidem, 105. 136 Proskurin, Literaturnye skandaly pushkinskoi epokhi, 22–26, 35–37, 44–46. 137 Al’tshuller, Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova, 58. 138 Tynianov, Arkhaisty i novatory. The label ‘archaists’ is misleading, inasmuch as Shishkov’s view of language as a cultural organism specific to a nation was in tune with Herder’s ideas about language, which were gaining ground at the turn of the century, and with the Romantic notion that enlightened peoples have a history that they need to respect: see Zhivov, Language and Culture, 374. 139 ‘O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti’, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 2, 286, 287; Karamzin’s italics. For similar remarks in his Letters of a Russian Traveller, where Karamzin’s holds women responsible, to a large extent, for this state of affairs, see the penultimate section of Chapter 6 above.

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also bemoaned Russians’ ignorance of their language.140 Both Karamzin and Shishkov, moreover, attributed this problem to Russians’ reluctance to read in their mother tongue. Karamzin admonished his compatriots for preferring French literature and neglecting their own.141 Shishkov echoed the point in his Discourse, insisting that it was only by reading books in one’s native language that one could enter the ‘temple of literature’.142 When Russians did read books in their own language, he predicted, they would ‘throw away the French language just as a child throws away its favourite wooden toy when it is shown the same one in gold’.143 Karamzin and Shishkov also agreed that it was dangerous, from both the moral point of view and the linguistic point of view, to entrust the education of Russian children to foreigners. Karamzin objected to an advertisement which aimed to attract Russian students to a boarding school in France, fearing that if they studied abroad then a foreign country would become their homeland.144 Likewise, Shishkov insisted that Russian children should be tutored by Russians, for foreigners could not instil in Russians a love for the fatherland that they themselves did not feel.145 Nor, he believed, could children acquire a good knowledge of their native language if they were entrusted to French educators from an early age; indeed, they would end up despising it.146 Most importantly from our point of view, evidence of Russian cultural and linguistic dependency on France offended the national pride of both writers, as if the worth of the empire that eighteenth-century rulers had built was being called into question by Russians’ readiness to imitate foreigners. Both expressed their indignation, moreover, by applying the perennial topos of aping or parroting to compatriots whom they perceived as responsible for this self-abasement. People with a smattering of French needlessly mangled that language in conversation with their fellow-Russians, Karamzin complained, because one was deaf and mute without French in so-called good society, and this habit was demeaning. ‘How can you not have national

140 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 301. 141 ‘O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti’, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 2, 286. 142 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 7. 143 ‘Primechaniia na pis’mo derevenskogo zhitelia v “Severnom Vestnike”’, in Shishkov, Sobranie sochinenii i perevodov, vol. 2, 402. These ‘Primechaniia’ make up one section of the abovementioned ‘Pribavlenie’. 144 Karamzin, ‘Strannost’’, Vestnik Evropy, 1:2 (1802), 57. 145 Shishkov, ‘Rassuzhdenie o liubvi k otechestvu’, in SSPAS, vol. 4. 146 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 164–165.

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self-respect?’ he wondered. ‘Why be parrots and apes at once?’147 Shishkov, in a similar vein, lamented that the French had taught Russians everything (‘how to dress, how to walk, how to stand, how to sing, how to talk, how to bow, and even how to blow one’s nose and cough’), placing language on a par with other cultural borrowing, and he too invoked apes and parrots to drive home the point.148 Imitation was bad enough in itself, but it was especially irritating to Shishkov that the people his compatriots mimicked were, in his opinion, so morally unsound. For one thing, many of the French people Russians encountered in Russia, Shishkov believed (echoing the thought of La Messelière half a century earlier), were there only because they had fled from the Parisian police. As for the French books through which Russians became acquainted with French culture, nowhere were there ‘so many false, seductive, unwise, harmful, and infectious thoughts’.149 Both writers also resorted, as a means of defence against the cultural and linguistic threat from outside Russia, to deployment of the topos of linguistic pride, explicitly or implicitly underlining the richness (bogatstvo) or eloquence (krasnorechie) of Russian in the titles of works they wrote150 (although in truth it was Church Slavonic, as we have pointed out, that Shishkov was praising). It is worth emphasizing just how insistent and persistent the topos was in the writings of Karamzin, since he can be perceived as the more ‘Westernist’ of the combatants, as well as the more eloquent. Take the following passage from The Letters of a Russian Traveller, in which Karamzin stealthily borrows an image from Bouhours: Honour and glory to our language, which in its native wealth, with virtually no foreign admixture, flows like a proud, majestic river: it roars and thunders, and all of a sudden, if need be, it becomes muted and babbles like a gentle brook and sweetly seeps into the soul, forming every metre that is contained within the rise and fall of the human voice!151 147 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 531; [Karamzin], Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 391. 148 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 8, 310, 337, 339. 149 Shishkov, ‘Pribavlenie’, in SSPAS, vol. 2, 369. 150 i.e. [‘O bogatstve iazyka’], in Karamzin, IS, vol. 2, 142, and Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii sviashchennogo pisaniia. 151 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 575; [Karamzin], Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 433; cf. Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 69, where we find the following passage: ‘Italian is like those streams that babble pleasantly over the stones, meandering through meadows full of flowers, yet sometimes swelling so much that they flood the whole countryside. But French is like those beautiful rivers that enrich every

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In fact, Russian is superior to French, Karamzin argues in his essay ‘On Love of the Fatherland and National Pride’, invoking various vague proofs for which he produces no evidence: ‘it is richer in harmony than French, more capable of outpourings of the soul in various tones; it offers more analogous words, that is words corresponding to the action being expressed’.152 The sentiment is repeated in the first volume of The History of the Russian State, where Karamzin confidently asserts that the language of the Russian people, ‘when governed by the talent and taste of an intelligent writer, can today bear comparison in strength, beauty, and agreeability with the best ancient and modern languages’.153 Fear of contamination of this superior language is more overt in Shishkov’s writings than in Karamzin’s; in fact, it is at the root of the differences that set the two apart in the historical record of language attitudes. Shishkov likens the product of mixing French and Russian to a ‘grey kaftan with lapels and collar’, that is to say an ugly garment which seems ‘even worse than real foreign dress’.154 Or again, he describes love of French as an ‘infection’ and stirs antipathy to foreignisms by using biblical imagery, comparing Russian words in a Francophone environment to seeds that have been trampled upon or that have fallen on stony ground.155 While he grudgingly concedes in the second edition of his Discourse on the Ancient and Modern Style of the Russian Language that it is useful for Russians to know French, he still regards language-mixing as a sign of disrespect for one’s mother tongue, even if speakers believe that the use of French words enriches Russian.156 And yet, Karamzin too is a purist up to a point. He agreed with Shishkov, as Zhivov has pointed out, that bureaucratic and dialectal lexis should not be used in the literary language.157 It is also notable that even in the early period of his career, when he was most closely associated with linguistic borrowing, Karamzin appealed, in the passage we have quoted from his Letters of a place they pass through; without being either fast or slow, their waters roll majestically and take a course that is always even’. 152 ‘O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti’, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 2, 286. 153 Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, vol. 1, 70. 154 Shishkov, ‘Pribavlenie’, in SSPAS, vol. 2, 386. 155 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, 48. Compare Luke, 8:5–6. It has been pointed out that metaphors tend to recur with striking similarity at different times and in different language cultures when languages come into contact and purist attitudes develop, for example metaphors of religious purity, nature, gardening, farming, health, and medicine. See Thomas, Linguistic Purism, 12, for a discussion of the imagery of linguistic purism, and also Langer and Nesse, ‘Linguistic Purism’, 607. 156 Shishkov, Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge, in SSPAS, vol. 2, 143. 157 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 368.

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Russian Traveller, to the purity of Russian, claiming that the language had ‘virtually no foreign admixture’. Their respective positions, then, as Zhivov has summed them up, were ‘modifications of one and the same basic doctrine of Classicist purism’. What they could not agree upon was what it was in the Russian language that was impure. For Shishkov, it was mainly the conspicuous foreignisms encouraged by Karamzin, even if they were only tools in the greater struggle for Russia’s cultural self-realization. For Karamzin, on the other hand, it was in part Shishkov’s beloved Slavonicisms.158 For all their disagreement as to which linguistic resources, foreign or Slavonic, would enable Russian writers to bring Russian to perfection, neither Karamzin nor Shishkov doubted that failure to cultivate and protect their language posed a risk to the nation’s moral fibre. Writing in the highly charged atmosphere of the Napoleonic period, they both treated language attitudes as indicative of the strength or weakness of patriotic feeling or ‘love of the fatherland’, as such feeling was at that time defined.159 Both intertwined language commentary with commentary on the character of peoples in a manner that is commonplace in metadiscourse, in which language use may be perceived as somehow bound up with maintenance or breakdown of moral order.160 Shishkov may have linked language and nation even more strongly than Karamzin, after the manner of Herder,161 but both inclined towards an essentialist view of language as an expression of the character of the people to whom it belonged.162

Rostopchin’s Gallophobia The Gallophobia which Shishkov’s linguistic views helped to fan was quite widespread in the Alexandrine age, when – according to Vigel’ – Russia, or at least St Petersburg, was culturally subjugated to Europe to such an extent that the sense of nationality (chuvstvo narodnosti) was felt only by the lower social classes.163 We encounter Gallophobia, for instance, in Krylov’s Fashion 158 Ibidem, 367. 159 On the notion of ‘fatherland’, and other ‘translations’ of ‘patrie’ in the Napoleonic period, see Dickinson ‘Otechestvo, Otchizna, Rodina’. 160 Cameron, ‘Out of the Bottle’, 313. 161 It is unclear whether Shishkov was directly or indirectly influenced by Herder in this respect: see Zhivov, Language and Culture, 370; Hamburg, ‘Language and Conservative Politics in Alexandrine Russia’, 123. 162 Gasparov, ‘Identity in Language?’, 132–134. 163 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 1, 176.

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Shop, a three-act comedy written in 1806, following Napoleon’s defeat of Austrian and Russian forces at the Battle of Austerlitz (1805). The shop is a metaphor for Russians’ indiscriminate acceptance of what is foreign, especially French (though English influence is also implicated). The play reflects a growing xenophobia, inasmuch as it presents foreigners as fleecing Russians and corrupting their mores. It is the language use of foreigners themselves, rather than Russians that is the chief object of the dramatist’s scorn, and much fun is had at the expense of deceitful French adventurers, who mix French and execrable Russian in their speech. However, Russians’ own use of French does not pass unnoticed: Krylov’s old-style provincial landowner, Sumburov, who has brought up his daughter to be a good wife, housekeeper, and mother, sees no need for her to be able ‘to prattle’ in that language.164 Pride of place among the linguistic Gallophobes, though, belongs to Count Rostopchin, that same Rostopchin whose witty French ‘Memoirs’ are a gem of salon literature.165 Rostopchin challenged the alleged obsession of some of his compatriots with all that was French and their habit of using only French language, practices, servants, and governors in a novella Oh, the French!, which was written in 1806 or 1807 but not published at that time. The folly of those who are prone to Gallomania is pointed up in the novella by Rostopchin’s portrayal of an idealized Russian family with traditional native values.166 However, the most successful example of Rostopchin’s virulent Gallophobia was a pamphlet of 1807 entitled The Russian Nobleman Sila Andreevich Bogatyrev Thinks out Loud on the Staircase of Honour.167 Seven thousand copies of The Russian Nobleman were sold – a very large number for a printed publication at that time – and the pamphlet reached a relatively broad social audience.168 Rostopchin’s eponymous hero is a provincial nobleman who comes to Moscow after the Battle of Eylau in order to seek news of members of his family who had been fighting in the 164 Modnaia lavka, in Krylov, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 304 (II, 9). See Ivleva, ‘The Locus of the Fashion Shop’, 375–377, on this play. 165 On Rostopchin’s ‘Memoirs’, see the fifth section of Chapter 6 above. 166 ‘Okh, Frantsuzy! Nabornaia povest’ iz bylei, po-russki pisannaia’, in Rostopchin, Okh, Frantsuzy!, 84–147. The work was first published posthumously, in 1842. 167 Rostopchin, ‘Mysli vslukh na krasnom kryl’tse rossiiskogo dvorianina Sily Andreevicha Bogatyreva’, in Okh, frantsuzy!, 148–152. Rostopchin’s title evokes pride in native vitality and tradition. The forename of his nobleman, Sila, literally means ‘strength’ and his surname, Bogatyrev, brings to mind the bogatyr’, the Herculean hero of Russian folklore. The ‘staircase of honour’ (krasnoe kryl’tso), to use Alexander Martin’s translation of this term, is the ceremonial entrance to old Russian buildings, in this case the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin. 168 Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 69–70.

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Russian army against Napoleon. Having prayed for his sovereign, Bogatyrev falls to musing about Russia’s enthralment by foreigners: My Lord, will this ever end? How long are we to be apes? Is it not time we woke up and came to our senses, offered a prayer, spat, and told the Frenchman: ‘Get lost, you diabolical apparition! Go to hell or back to where you came from, we don’t care, so long as you’re not in Rus’.’169

Russia, Bogatyrev thinks, has become a place to which foreign riff-raff come in order to make money and fatten themselves up. Barely literate French refugees who in their native land had been mere shop-keepers, government clerks, lackeys, or banned priests had only to call themselves princes or gentlemen to be accepted as arbiters of fashion or tutors to Russian children. Frenchified Russian nobles, of course, are also to blame for this state of affairs and are castigated for their gullibility. Had they studied history instead of reading worthless French romantic fiction, then they would have known that ‘in every French head there is a windmill, a hospital, and a madhouse’.170 As in so much Russian Gallophobic literature, such Russians are taken to task not only for employing the ignorant, lazy, or deceitful immigrants as tutors but also for their deluded view of what constitutes a sound education. ‘What do we teach our children nowadays?’ Sila asks himself. To pronounce French well, to turn their feet outwards and to tousle their hair. Only those [children] whom a Frenchman would take for his compatriots are [considered] intelligent and good. How can they love their country when they don’t even know the Russian language properly?171

And again, with particular emphasis on the alleged ascendancy of the French language over Russian: So who are these people who come to us and who do we entrust our children to! So long as they pronounce French nicely, they can do as they please: it’s just a disgrace. People learn French in all countries, but 169 Rostopchin, ‘Mysli vslukh na krasnom kryl’tse’, 148. Rostopchin’s use of the word ‘Rus’’ (Old Russia) at the end of the passage quoted is an additional means of stirring patriotic fervour. Ségur, in his biography of his grandfather, thought it prudent not to quote this passage in full for his French readership and broke off after ‘came to our senses’: see Ségur, Vie du comte Rostopchine, 150. 170 Rostopchin, ‘Mysli vslukh na krasnom kryl’tse’, 150. 171 Ibidem, 149.

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so that they can write, read, and speak comprehensibly. Now wouldn’t it seem strange to our nobleman if Russian became as fashionable in other countries as French [is with us]; if the kennel-boy Klimka, the cook Abrashka, the lackey Vavilka, the laundress Grushka, and the slut Lushka started educating noble children and teaching them what is right? But that’s been the custom here over the last thirty years, if you please, and sadly there is no end of it in sight.172

The sweeping statement that Rostopchin makes in this passage about the purely utilitarian purpose of teaching French in other European countries and his implicit assumption that Russia is an exceptional case are of course questionable, as we have argued throughout this book. What is of most interest here, though, is the fact that Rostopchin views Russian francophonie not as a means of facilitating the reception of useful concepts from a more advanced civilization but as demeaning and threatening to his own nation. As an antidote to Russian Gallomania, which has allegedly made Russian youth lose respect for their parents and their elders, Rostopchin has Bogatyrev commend Russia’s ‘merciful sovereign, magnanimous nobility, wealthy merchants, industrious people’ and her many great soldiers, ecclesiastics, ministers, and writers. All the illustrious Russians that Bogatyrev names as examples of native achievement ‘knew and know French’, Rostopchin claims. (As a matter of fact, the claim cannot be true, as Rostopchin has named individuals who flourished long before French language or culture impinged on Russian life.) None of these luminaries, though, ‘attempted to know it [French] better than Russian’.173 It is at first sight surprising that this scourge of the Russian Francophiles who were allegedly corrupting the nation’s youth by teaching them to abandon their mother tongue should himself have chosen French as his preferred medium for much of what he wrote, besides his ‘Memoirs’. The documents written by Rostopchin in French include a hostile account of 172 Ibidem, 149–150. The absurdity of the sort of cultural exchange that Bogatyrev imagines is heightened by Rostopchin’s use of diminutive forms of forenames (Klimka and so forth) which noble readers would immediately have associated with their serfs. 173 Ibidem, 150. Around the time that he produced The Russian Nobleman Sila Andreevich Bogatyrev, Rostopchin also wrote a comedy, News, or the Dead Man Lives, in which the now familiar character of Bogatyrev again berated the feckless nobility for their slavish adherence to French fashion and their lack of patriotism: see Vesti, ili Ubityi zhivoi, in Rostopchin, Okh, frantsuzy!, 157–205. The play was performed in a Moscow theatre in 1808 but its reception was mixed: not surprisingly, it offended francophone society: see RBS, vol. 17, 260, at http://dlib.rsl. ru/viewer/01002921717#?page=262.

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Russian Freemasonry and a long letter (in which he was highly critical of the French people) addressed to Alexander I in 1823.174 French was also the language of the voluminous correspondence Rostopchin conducted over many years with Count Semen Vorontsov, the Russian ambassador in London, whom he had befriended during a tour in the West as a young man in 1786–1788.175 Nor does he shy away, in this private correspondence, from those same concerns about the supposedly detrimental effects of bilingualism or multilingualism that he had expressed in his popular Gallophobic tracts. He complained in 1803, for example, that young Russians are worse than the French youth; they obey and fear nobody. One has to admit that while being dressed in the European manner we are still far from being civilized. The worst thing is that we have ceased to be Russian and that we have bought our knowledge of foreign languages at the expense of the mores of our ancestors.176

To the modern reader, armed with knowledge of the role that nationalism played in European history from the early nineteenth century, the continuing use of the French language by Rostopchin and other members of the Russian elite for certain social and cultural purposes even while they seemed to deplore such linguistic practice is puzzling, indeed hypocritical and bizarre. One plausible explanation of the apparent paradox is to suggest – as Gary Hamburg does – that their deep knowledge of French fostered in these aristocrats ‘a kind of “second identity”, to use the historian Richard Cobb’s term’: ‘the inner tension between their first (Russian) and their second (French) identities accounted for the final vehemence of their rejection of things French and their fervent embrace of Russianness’.177 However, there are other factors that we should also consider as we reflect on the apparent contradiction between Rostopchin’s language use and his rhetoric. First, we may wonder whether educated Russians of Rostopchin’s age were actually aware of the paradox that we now perceive, or at least, if they were 174 Published in Russian as ‘Zapiska o martinistakh, predstavlennaia v 1811 godu grafom Rostopchinym velikoi kniagine Ekaterine Pavlovne’, RA, bk 3, no. 9 (1875), 75–81. On this document, see Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 100–103. Substantial passages from the letter to Alexander I are reproduced by Ségur, Vie du comte Rostopchine, 296–306. 175 See AKV, bk 8. A further letter, probably also to Vorontsov, was published in RA, 1878, bk 1, no. 3, 292–298; the letter is also available at http://memoirs.ru/texts/RostPisRA78K1V3.htm. 176 AKV, bk 8, 307–308. 177 Hamburg, ‘Language and Conservative Politics in Alexandrine Russia’, 119–120. Hamburg is drawing on Cobb, A Second Identity.

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aware of it, whether the apparent paradox troubled them. Petr Viazemskii, in an essay he wrote on Rostopchin towards the end of his life, in the 1870s, contended that contradictions coexisted comfortably in Rostopchin and that Rostopchin was not exceptional in this respect in the Alexandrine age. Russians are by nature eclectics, Viazemskii argued, or at least they were eclectics at that youthful stage of the nation’s cultural and intellectual formation: there were several Rostopchins in Count Rostopchin. This sort of heterogeneity is quite characteristic of the Russian nature. We have few integral personalities; […] we are creations, or publications, which are encyclopaedic and eclectic rather than specialist. We are reference works rather than treatises. […] This sort of phenomenon is usually a property of civil societies which are young and which have not yet been rigorously divided by upbringing and education into clear-cut domains […]178

The disparate elements in this heterogeneous personality, the Russian and the French personae, were inseparable from one another in Rostopchin as Viazemskii portrayed him: Besides this receptivity and pliability which is characteristic of Russians, a peculiar multi-ethnicity [raznoplemennost’] was strongly in evidence in Rostopchin. He was a native Russian, a true Muscovite, but a thoroughbred Parisian too. In spirit, valour, and prejudices he was cast in a mould from which Pozharskiis and Minins might emerge at a certain moment; in mentality and wit he was the absolute image of a real Frenchman.179

We have here two co-existent topoi – the topos of the receptivity of the Russian people to other cultures and the topos of ‘multi-ethnicity’ – which seemed adequately to explain apparent contradictions in the behaviour of Francophone Russian nobles of the ages of Catherine and Alexander I without requiring them to view themselves as dangerously divided beings, as later writers and thinkers, conscious of belonging to a more mature culture, often assumed they were. Secondly, we should perhaps beware of taking all expressions of Gallophobia among Russians of the Alexandrine age at face value. In literary 178 Viazemskii, ‘Kharakteristicheskie zametki i vospominaniia o grafe Rostopchine’, 70; Viazemskii’s italics. 179 Ibidem, 69–70. Minin and Pozharskii were Russian national heroes of the so-called Time of Troubles (Smutnoe vremia) in the early seventeenth century.

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texts, critical reference to Gallomania, together with complaints about the contamination of the Russian language by Gallicisms, may often seem more like an irresistible reiteration of a successful stock theme than an expression of real concern about a contemporary problem. By the same token, critique of cultural fashions that prevailed in the highly codified world of the salon, including language use, may have been permitted and even admired, provided that it remained within certain clearly understood limits and did not infringe propriety, le bon ton. The society assembled in the salon still had sufficient social, political, and cultural power and self-confidence to withstand unpalatable truths about its members, provided that speakers of those truths did not overstep the mark. Thirdly, attitudes towards language use were in any case not the same among Rostopchin’s generation of the cosmopolitan cultural elite, in whom the values of the age of the Enlightenment had been inculcated, as they would be among slightly later generations which had directly or indirectly absorbed German Romantic ideas. For the former, brought up in the era before the development of nationalism, the use of French for social and cultural purposes among themselves did not really represent betrayal of one’s fatherland (patrie or otechestvo), which was understood as an empire ruled by an autocrat, whatever literary fashion might prompt them to say. For the latter, who had been persuaded that language and culture were, or should be, inextricably linked to notions of ethnicity, French might be acceptable as a vehicle for the reception of foreign culture and as a lingua franca for communication with foreigners but it would become unacceptable – in theory at least – as a means of communication with fellow Russians of any social stratum. This later, post-Napoleonic generation, or at least the literary contingent of it, was loyal to a cultural nation, whose authentic representatives were the predominantly monolingual, Russophone common people. Finally, the root causes of Rostopchin’s animosity towards France, and towards Russians who were intoxicated with French education and culture, were horror at the French Revolution and apprehension about its possible political, social, and military consequences for Russia. Over two or three decades, Rostopchin’s Sila Bogatyrev complained, the French had destroyed their government, desecrated temples, murdered their king, cut off heads like cabbages in the name of equality and liberty, and made war on other peoples.180 Nor was it certain that the destruction would be confined to France; it might befall Russia too, where memory of the great peasant revolt that had taken place in 1773–1774 under the leadership of Pugachev remained 180 Rostopchin, ‘Mysli vslukh na krasnom kryl’tse’, 151.

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fresh in the consciousness of Russian nobles of Rostopchin’s generation. From the perspective of a landowning nobleman who regarded the peasantry as an idle, brutish mob and who thought, his grandson observed, that ‘there was no middle ground between despotism and anarchy’,181 contemporary France posed an existential threat to his own, pre-eminent social class. (It is significant in this connection that Rostopchin refused to open up Moscow’s arsenal to the populace, even as Napoleon’s army was taking the city.182) However, Rostopchin never ceased to admire the culture of the aristocracy of France under the ancien régime that the revolution had swept away. It is within this complex framework of shifting conceptions of imperial and national identity, fear of political and social turmoil, class allegiance, and ambivalent feelings about both the Russian and the French nations that the apparent tension between Rostopchin’s expressions of Gallophobia and his lifelong use of French for many purposes should in the last analysis be understood.

Literary reflection on francophonie in the 1820s and 1830s The sort of indignation that Shishkov, Krylov, Rostopchin, and others had expressed in the early 1800s against those who seemed to be apologists for the French language and culture was understandably inflamed by the Napoleonic invasion. ‘Now I would like to shove their noses in the ashes’, Shishkov fulminated after the great fire of Moscow in 1812, with Karam­ zinists and Gallomanes in mind, and to ‘say to them loudly – “Is this really what you wanted?ˮ’183 It irked even the memoirist Vigel’, who moved in the more progressive literary circles, that in ‘the city which the French invasion had recently reduced to ashes, everybody was speaking their language’. It was particularly shameful, in Vigel’’s opinion, that Viazemskii, ‘who wrote Russian so wonderfully and expressed himself in it so marvellously in conversation, did not try to put it to use in Moscow society, where he carried such weight’, but persisted in speaking French instead.184 Many others, and not just conservatives, continued to underline the dangers of Russian francophonie or simply to denigrate the French language itself. 181 Ségur, Vie du comte Rostopchine, 91. 182 Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 129. 183 See Zhivov, Language and Culture, 370–371, quoting a work by Lotman and Uspenskii. 184 Vigel’, Zapiski, vol. 2, 34. Not that Vigel’ could impugn Viazemskii’s patriotism, for Viazemskii had ‘bravely fought against the French who were dear to him and was prepared to shed his blood for the fatherland at the glorious Battle of Borodino’ (ibidem).

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Ivan Murav’ev-Apostol, in 1813, conceded that there might be some honest Frenchmen but went on to deplore those Russians (fortunately their number was small) who esteemed France’s barbaric contemporary literature above all others and who preferred the corrupt morals of the French to the pure morals of their Russian forebears and the French language to their own.185 Sergei Glinka, for his part, claimed that there was ample proof that the foppish French language was barbarous.186 In a series of articles on Russian literature that were published in 1823–1825 and in which much attention was devoted to linguistic matters, the Romantic writer Aleksandr Bestuzhev also rued Russians’ continuing exposure to French after the Napoleonic Wars. The patriotic attraction to things Russian that had developed at the beginning of the war, he complained, had weakened as the Russian troops ‘returned with laurels on their brow but with French phrases on their lips’ and a ‘hidden passion for Gallicisms suddenly seized all estates more strongly than ever’. What particularly concerned Bestuzhev was the sense that this ‘cooling of the better part of society to their native language’ and to the emergent poets paralyzed literature in 1823.187 Indeed, Bestuzhev attributed the poverty of Russian prose partly to the fact that although their language contained treasures of its own Russians continued to use French and follow French models. He likened his compatriots to American Indians who bartered their gold for the gaudy knick-knacks they were offered by foreigners who came to colonize them.188 The immaturity of Russian literature, he reiterated in his third article in this series, was due partly to the fact that Russian writers had been brought up on French literature, which was not compatible with ‘the disposition of the Russian people or the spirit of the Russian language’.189 Unease at language-mixing in the 1820s was also captured, with his characteristic wit, by the playwright Aleksandr Griboedov, who has Chatskii, the hero of his masterpiece Woe from Wit, refer memorably to his contemporaries’ mixture of French with Nizhnii Novgorodian.190 185 Murav’ev-Apostol, Pis’ma iz Moskvy v Nizhnii Novgorod, 17. 186 Lupareva, ‘S.N. Glinka v spore o “starom” i “novom” sloge’, 141. 187 ‘Vzgliad na russkuiu slovesnost’ v techenie 1823 goda’, in Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 541; see also Frazier, Romantic Encounters, 190–191. 188 ‘Vzgliad na staruiu i novuiu slovesnost’ v Rossii’, in Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 536. 189 ‘Vzglaid na russkuiu slovesnost’ v techenie 1824 i nachale 1825 godov’, ibidem, 548. On Bestuzhev’s thoughts on the Russian language and French Neo-Classicism, see also Leighton, Russian Romanticism, 60–61. 190 Griboedov, Gore ot uma, Act I, Scene 7. Nizhnii Novgorod is a provincial city on the Volga, some 250 miles east of Moscow, and was famed for its annual commercial fair (that is to say, it was associated as much with merchants as with nobles).

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For Pushkin too, as for Bestuzhev, criticism of Russians’ dependency on French language and culture did not signify undiscriminating hostility to the French language or French culture; rather, it was bound up with concern about the need to develop an autochthonous literature unaffected by French literary models and imbued with the elusive quality of narodnost’ (‘nationality’ or ‘national distinctiveness’). Pushkin expressed this balanced view of the relationship between language use and patriotism in an unfinished historical novel, Roslavlev, which was published in part in 1836 but which had been written in 1831 as a riposte to and a rewriting of a historical novel by the staunch conservative nationalist Mikhail Zagoskin.191 The narrator of Pushkin’s Roslavlev is a woman who looks back to the winter of 1811, that is to say the year before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, when, at the age of sixteen, she had entered society. Her elder brother, Roslavlev, was at that time serving at the College of Foreign Affairs in Moscow and was enjoying social success there, ‘dancing and playing the fop’. He persuaded his sister to introduce him to a contemporary of hers, Princess Polina, with whom he had fallen in love. Polina had been deeply affected by French culture, having read voraciously in her father’s library, and in 1812 she refused to succumb to wartime Gallophobia, deliberately continuing to speak French in public places. Pushkin’s portrayal of Polina raises a question which had fresh topicality when Roslavlev was written, immediately after a further French uprising against absolute monarchy, namely the July Revolution of 1830. How were Russians, Pushkin is asking, to regard Polina’s sympathetic engagement with French culture? More generally, what attitude should members of the Russian literary elite, who were coming to see themselves as representing a young nation on the periphery of European civilization, take towards the literature that they were accustomed to consider central in their cultural world and for which French was the vehicle?192 Pushkin addresses this question explicitly: The fact of the matter is that we should be glad to read in Russian; but our literature would appear to be no older than Lomonosov and it is still extremely limited. It offers us some excellent poets, of course, but one cannot demand of all readers that they be lovers of poetry alone. In prose 191 Zagoskin, Roslavlev, ili russkie v 1812 godu. 192 For a discussion of the applicability of Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystemic theory about centre-periphery hierarchies to the Russian case (albeit in the mid-eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth), see Skomorokhova, ‘Plating “Russian Gold” with “French Copper”’, 51–55.

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all we have is Karamzin’s History; the first two or three novels appeared two or three years ago, whereas in France, England, and Germany books which are each more wonderful than the preceding one come out one after another. We do not even see any translations; or if we do see them, say what you like, I prefer the originals. […] We are forced to draw everything, news and concepts, from foreign books; thus we even think in a foreign language (at least, all those do who think and follow the thoughts of the human race). […] The eternal complaints of our writers about our neglect of Russian books are like the complaints of Russian market-women who are cross because we buy hats at Sichler’s [a St Petersburg milliner] and aren’t satisfied with what is produced by the milliners of Kostroma.193

So long as Russian literature was immature and Russians had difficulty expressing themselves in their own language, then, it was by no means unpatriotic to partake of the fruits of a more advanced culture (of which language and headdress were perennially emblematic). Respect for French culture, however, did not necessarily indicate servility. Pushkin is repelled just as much by shallow cosmopolitanism as by jingoistic patriotism. His heroine is therefore ashamed to think, at a social gathering attended by Mme de Staël during her visit to Russia in 1812, that the great French writer must have regarded the Francophile members of Muscovite society whom she encountered as ‘monkeys of enlightenment’.194 In any case, superficial Francophilia could quite easily turn into equally superficial patriotism. When Napoleon’s army invaded Russia and those patriots who deplored French cultural influence and French-speaking gained the upper hand in Moscow society, for example, drawing-rooms suddenly became filled with patriots: this person would empty the French snuff out of his snuff-box and start sniffing Russian snuff; that one would burn a dozen French pamphlets and another would give up Château Lafite and take to sauerkraut soup. Everyone swore they would stop speaking French […]195

In contrast to patriots of this frivolous kind, and in contrast also to Zagoskin’s treasonous character of the same name, who abandoned her Roslavlev for a Frenchman, Pushkin’s Polina is held up as an embodiment of true patriotism. 193 Roslavlev, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, pt 1, 150. Kostroma is a small and ancient provincial city to the north-east of Moscow. 194 Ibidem, 151. 195 Ibidem, 153.

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This patriotism is inclusive. It accommodates the Russian common people, for example, whom Mme de Staël had defended in response to a disparaging remark made about them by a noble member of high society. It also has a place for women, of whose feelings male patriots seem to take no account. ‘Do women not have a fatherland too?’ Polina asks indignantly, or is it supposed that they were born ‘just [to be] whirled around at balls in the écossaise or to be made to embroider little dogs on canvas at home?’196 Most importantly, Polina’s patriotism is based on the notion of self-sacrifice. Confined to her parents’ country estate while Napoleon advances on and occupies Moscow, Polina is persuaded by a French prisoner of war whom her father has agreed to billet that it is the Russians themselves who have set fire to the capital on Napoleon’s entry into it and that this ‘terrible, barbaric greatness of soul’ will spell disaster for the French army and deliver Russia from danger. She takes pride in this heroic act.197 Thus it is perfectly possible, to Pushkin’s mind, for members of the Russian elite to respect the achievements of French culture and to speak French but also to feel a loyalty towards Russia which is deeper than the chauvinism displayed by nobles who profess to spurn foreign-language use and make other empty gestures in accordance with current fashion. The use of French in high society continued in the 1820s and 1830s to be a feature of life in that milieu of which writers were bound to take account if they aspired to write in the realistic and critical vein that choice of prose was starting to require. Indeed, characters’ language choice began to be presented in the society tale, with which many writers experimented in the formative decades of classical Russian prose, in ways that implied a critical attitude towards that milieu on the writer’s part. In ‘The Queen of Spades’, for example, references to French culture and French-speaking not only lend authenticity to Pushkin’s depiction of metropolitan society; they also hint at its members’ cynicism. The Russian aristocracy, as Pushkin portrays it, rigorously observes the etiquette of Parisian society, where the aged countess, who holds the gambler’s secret that Pushkin’s German protagonist Hermann hopes to discover, had flourished in the age of Catherine II some sixty years before. Characters use French terms of address, such as ‘grand’maman’ (grandma) and ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle Lise’ (Good day, Miss Lise). They may affectedly refer to each other by French versions of their Russian forenames, such as Lise, in the previous example, and Paul. Pushkin conveys the flirtatiousness and insouciance that members of this society strive to display by prefacing the sections into which his text is divided with French 196 Ibidem. 197 Ibidem, 157.

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witticisms. ‘Il paraît que monsieur est décidément pour les suivantes’ (It appears that monsieur definitely prefers waiting-maids), jokes some noble lady. ‘Que voulez-vous, madame? Elles sont plus fraîches’ (How can I help it madame? They are fresher.).198 Or again: ‘Vous m’écrivez, mon ange, des lettres de quatre pages plus vite que je ne puis les lire’ (You write me four-page letters, my darling, more quickly than I can read them), and ‘Homme sans mœurs et sans religion!’ (A man without manners or morals and without religion!).199 This literary practice stands in sharp contrast to Pushkin’s use of Russian headings in his historical works The Blackamoor of Peter the Great and The Captain’s Daughter and in The Tales of Belkin, which deal with Russian provincial life.200 The practice befits the genre of the society tale, of course. It tends to suggest that ‘The Queen of Spades’, like Pushkin’s ‘Egyptian Nights’ (in which French headings also occur), is addressed to an exclusive readership consisting of those who are established in society’s networks, initiated into its rituals, complicit in its pretences, and well versed in its pursuits, such as card-playing and gambling. Other writers who produced examples of the society tale were more critical of the high social world than Pushkin, even if they too belonged to it. According to the prose-writer, memoirist, and journalist Ivan Panaev, the sites of noble society – the drawing-room, the ball-room, the cardtable – were distinguished by ‘scandal, pomposity, prejudice, caprice, [and] fabrication’.201 The habitués of such venues were also notable, we may add, for their preference for French over Russian and for the consequent association of that language with predilection for malicious gossip and preoccupation with social status. Salon society is tainted by its language use, for example, in Vladimir Odoevskii’s ‘Princess Mimi’ (1834), a tale whose eponymous central character orchestrates a whispering campaign that leads to the deaths of blameless people.202 Russian ladies, the narrator complains in a ‘preface’ mischievously inserted in the middle of the tale, eschew Russian 198 ‘Pikovaia dama’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, pt 1, 231. We have taken this translation from [Pushkin], Alexander Pushkin, ed. by Debreczeny, 517, n. 16. 199 ‘Pikovaia dama’, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, pt 1, 237, 243. 200 The Russian titles of these three works are Arap Petra velikogo, Kapitanskaia dochka, and Povesti Belkina respectively. The epigraphs used in The Captain’s Daughter in particular give the work a strongly indigenous character. They include extracts from Russian songs (see Kapitanskaia dochka, in Pushkin, PSS, vol. 8, pt 1, 286, 294, 307, 313, 321, 354), Russian proverbs (277, 327, 366), and quotations from the eighteenth-century Russian dramatists Fonvizin, Kniazhnin, and Sumarokov (279, 294, 299, 344, 360), and – at suitably martial junctures – from the epic poet Kheraskov (334, 338). 201 Quoted by Cornwell: ‘Introduction’, 3. 202 See Cornwell, ‘Vladimir Odoevskii and the Society Tale’, 16–17.

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and instead speak more or less impeccable French of the purest Parisian variety. One cannot catch a word of Russian in the Russian drawing-room: A novelist who possesses so much conscience that he cannot allow himself to pass off the Eskimo language as the language of society must have absolute command of this social alphabet, he must catch all those conventional words, because I repeat, it is impossible to invent them: they are born in the heat of polite conversation, and the meaning given to them at that moment remains with them forever. But where will you catch such a word in a Russian drawing room? Here all Russian passions, thoughts, mockery, vexation, the slightest motion of the soul are expressed in ready-made words which are taken from the ample French storehouse, and which French novelists use so skilfully and to which they are obliged (leaving aside the question of talent) for most of their success.203

French and Russian are again opposed, as are town and country, in another well-known society tale, Vladimir Sollogub’s slightly later ‘High Society’ (1840).204 As far as the emergent prose writers of the 1820s and 1830s were concerned, then, the French language reinforced the conventions that regulated the culture of the Russian drawing-room.

A Slavophile view of Russian francophonie: Konstantin Aksakov The contrast between two Russias – one represented by the French-speaking monde that was laid bare in the society tale and the other by all those elements that had been more or less untouched by Russia’s cultural westernization – was developed with relish in the mid-nineteenth century by the Slavophiles. According to the memoirist Anna Tiutcheva (the daughter of the poet Fedor Tiutchev), who married into the Aksakov family, these thinkers were the first to realize that Russia was ‘not just a formless and inert mass fit only to be cast in any form of European civilization and covered, as one wished, with an English, German, or French gloss’. They were also the first to dare to acclaim Russia’s cultural originality (samobytnost’).205 Unpalatable 203 Odoevskii, ‘Princess Mimi’, in Rydel (ed.), The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism, 301. 204 ‘Bol’shoi svet: Povest’ v dvukh tantsakh’, in Otechestvennye zapiski, 1840, vol. 9, no. 3 (March), sect. 3, 5–79. On this and other society tales by Sollogub, see Pursglove, ‘V.A. Sollogub and High Society’, in Cornwell (ed.), The Society Tale in Russian Literature. 205 Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatorov, vol. 1, 64–65. Tiutcheva’s memoirs were written in French. Her partisan claims are to be taken with a grain of salt.

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as they might have found the fact, the Slavophiles were participants in a pan-European movement, the nationalistic awakening that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century. They also gave full voice to the yearning already manifested in the debate between Karamzin and Shishkov at the turn of the century, when, as Zhivov has explained, thinkers were seeking ‘more organic bases for human society’ and ‘deeper sources of human culture’ than Enlightenment thought had seemed to provide.206 In the nationalist, organicist revival that the Slavophiles joined, patriotism took an ethnocentric turn and language was conceived, as Herder had thought it should be, as an expression of the character of the ethnos which spoke it.207 From an account of their childhood left by Tiutcheva’s husband Ivan, we gain an insight into the rabidly patriotic atmosphere encouraged in the Aksakov household by the children’s mother. When they found letters from their mother’s friends that were written in French, the Aksakov children, led by the eldest sibling Konstantin, would purloin them, stab them with knives taken from the pantry, and burn them, execrating them with a ditty composed by Konstantin about the swirling ‘smoke of damnation’. Unusually, for the well-to-do Muscovite nobility of the 1820s, French was not used at all in this household (except, it seems, in the mother’s correspondence!).208 Nor, evidently, did Konstantin – who, together with Ivan Kireevskii and Khomiakov, would play the leading role in the formulation of classical Slavophilism – relax this prohibition in later years, as we learn from the conservative historian Pogodin. ‘Dinner at the Aksakovs’, Pogodin noted drily in his diary in 1845; ‘they don’t speak French any more’ in Konstantin’s presence.209 Of all the Slavophiles, it was Konstantin Aksakov who took the greatest interest in linguistic matters. He wrote reviews of a Russian grammar by Belinskii and of Gogol’’s Dead Souls (the reviews were published in 1838 and 1842 respectively), and a long dissertation on Lomonosov. In these works, in the spirit of the Romantic age, he identified language as the truest expression of national spirit.210 He also produced one of the most schematic expressions of the thesis that eighteenth-century westernization had created two distinct Russias, not forgetting to include language use in his paradigm. 206 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 371. 207 Herder, ‘Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit’, 810. 208 ‘Ocherk semeinogo byta Aksakovykh’, in Ivan Akaskov, Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov v ego pis’makh, vol. 1, 19. 209 Barsukov, Zhizn’ i trudy M.P. Pogodina, vol. 8, 61. 210 Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism, vol. 3: K.S. Aksakov (hereafter Christoff, K.S. Aksakov), 205–208.

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In an editorial entitled ‘An Essay on Synonyms. Public and People’, which was published in 1857 in a short-lived Slavophile paper, Molva (The Rumour), he argued – to the consternation of officialdom 211 – that the aristocracy, which moved in a westernized social world, was idle, irreligious, addicted to Parisian fashion, and Francophone. On the other hand, the common people (the narod, by which Aksakov meant primarily the peasantry), who were confined to the village commune, or mir,212 were hard-working and pious, observed Russian custom, and spoke only Russian.213 In the same period, just as literary and intellectual life was being reanimated after the death of Nicholas I, Aksakov also published a two-act comedy Prince Lupovitskii, or Arrival in the Countryside (1856), which he had written some five years earlier.214 The play provides Aksakov’s fullest exposition of the contrast between society and people and one of the clearest implicit denunciations of noble language use by a Russian cultural nationalist. Its action begins in Paris, where Aksakov sets a prologue designed to call into question the outlook of Gallicized nobles estranged from their native land. It then moves to the Russian estate of the Francophile Lupovitskii, where Aksakov exposes the delusions of the eponymous prince and brings to light the moral qualities of the Russian peasants and the merits of their way of life, as they are perceived through the Slavophile lens. The play opens with a scene in the private dining-room of a Parisian café in which Lupovitskii is discussing his forthcoming visit to his estate with two friends, Count Dolonskii and Baron Saliutin. Two aristocratic views of the Russian people are presented in this prologue. Dolonskii and Saliutin, on the one hand, think of Russia as a nation of which nothing can be expected because it is ‘tout un peuple de mougikes’ (a whole people of muzhiks).215 In the opinion of noblemen of this stamp, the Russian peasant will change only if coerced by an iron hand, like that of Peter the Great. ‘Force brutale’, Saliutin opines, ‘est très nécessaire et très utile envers les brutes’ (brutal 211 Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 272. 212 The word also denotes ‘world’ in Russian, a concept with which the commune was in practice often coterminous for the enserfed peasant. 213 Konstantin Aksakov, ‘Opyt sinonimov. Publika–narod’, in Brodskii (ed.), Rannie slavianofily, 121–122. Aksakov takes no account of the swathes of the non-noble population of the Russian Empire who were not ethnically Russian and whose mother tongue was not Russian (see the last section of Chapter 1 above). 214 Konstantin Aksakov, Kniaz’ Lupovitskii, ili Priezd v derevniu. The play is briefly discussed in Christoff, K.S. Aksakov, 272–273. It is also discussed by Walicki as an illustration of Aksakov’s ‘folk-mania’, but without comment on language use or language choice in it (see Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 269–271). 215 Konstantin Aksakov, Kniaz’ Lupovitskii, 8.

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force is very necessary and very useful when dealing with brutes).216 The peasants, according to this view, are sub-human beings whose raison d’être is to provide the labour that sustains the noble way of life. Their role, in the final analysis, is to enable nobles like Dolonskii and Saliutin to live in Paris and dine at the Café de Paris, visit the opera, go to balls to which only a select few are admitted, and occasionally attend a lecture by some professor who is in vogue, in short to live ‘en homme civilisé’ (as a civilized man).217 Lupovitskii, on the other hand, considers the Russian people capable of understanding and accepting European inventions, discoveries, and ideas, ‘le progrès enfin’ (progress, in fact).218 Backward and uneducated they may be, but European enlightenment can be grafted on to them.219 It falls to the nobility to make them more fully human, in short, more like the nobles themselves.220 It is for this humanitarian purpose that Lupovitskii intends to visit his estate, after the manner of the ‘repentant nobleman’ whose literary ancestry can be traced to Radishchev in the late eighteenth century. From Aksakov’s Slavophile standpoint, Lupovitskii’s view of the peasants as potentially receptive to the aristocrat’s attempt to civilize them is hardly less flawed than his companions’ crudely dismissive view of them. The ‘civilization’ Lupovitskii wishes to bring to the peasants may consist simply in forcing them do differently something that they already do in their own time-honoured way. Lupovitskii accepts, for example, that the peasants are charitable, but he regards the alms-giving through which their charity manifests itself as a coarse habit. He would prefer them to raise money for the poor through philanthropic activity of a sort that a noble might be prepared to undertake. Admittedly, it would be impossible – Aksakov has Lupovitskii say, absurdly – to introduce the practice of arranging balls in the peasant milieu. All the same, Lupovitskii is confident that he will think of some equally decorous means of raising funds, and indeed he eventually proposes the setting-up of a ‘charitable choir’.221 Lupovitskii, then, represents the standpoint of the patronizing Westernizer who is under the misapprehension that the Russian people stand in need of other peoples’ values, practices, and cultural veneer. The scenes of the play that are set in Russia are designed to demonstrate just how misguided Lupovitskii’s project is. On arrival at his estate, where 216 Ibidem, 16–17. 217 Ibidem, 9–10, 11. 218 Ibidem, 7. 219 Ibidem, 13–14. 220 Ibidem, 12, 14. 221 Ibidem, 15. Lupovitskii’s proposal is rejected out of hand by the village headman (59–60).

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he owns some 800 souls,222 Lupovitskii tells his bemused peasants that he aims to transmit to them the ‘fruits of enlightenment, the luxuriant fruits of the sciences and the arts’, the ‘moral treasures’ and ‘intellectual seeds’ he has procured in Western Europe.223 He is disabused of his illusions about the usefulness of his plan as soon as he puts his suggestions for improving the ‘intellectual education’ and raising the ‘moral […] worth’ of the peasants to the village headman (starosta), who is Aksakov’s exemplar of simple peasant wisdom in the play. The peasants, the headman explains, are already religious and charitable, as Lupovitskii thinks they should be. They already know very well that they should not do the things (for example, carouse or tell lies) that they are enjoined not to do in the books Lupovitskii would like them to be able to read.224 Aksakov tries to demonstrate how unnecessary noble intervention in peasant life is in a further scene which contains a highly sympathetic representation of a meeting of the village assembly at which the peasants discuss selection of conscripts whom their village is required to send for military service, a task they perform with care and tact.225 The play concludes with Lupovitskii marvelling, when the deliberations of the village assembly are reported to him, at the wisdom and integrity of these simple people with whom he had hitherto been unfamiliar. The moral that Aksakov wishes spectators (or more probably, readers) of his play to draw is that the Russian nation has been fractured as a result of the estrangement of its Europeanized social elite and that it will be further damaged if Europeanization extends beyond the numerically small realm of ‘Russian Europe’. Lupovitskii is shown up as a foreigner in his own land. It becomes apparent, for example, that he does not understand the structure of Orthodox church services or know when Orthodox believers should be fasting.226 He is aware of the Russian peasant custom of khleb-sol’ (the offering of bread and salt as a sign of hospitality), but only because he has been told about it by foreign tourists who have visited Russia.227 His serfs immediately recognize him as a barin (landowning lord) when he appears 222 Ibidem, 32. Lupovitskii is therefore a landowner of the sort we have classified as extremely well-to-do. 223 Ibidem, 45. 224 Ibidem, 53–68. 225 Ibidem, 74–83. In his subsequent journalism, Aksakov would admiringly describe the mir, where the peasants discussed their collective affairs, as a ‘choir’ in which humans renounce their individual interest for the sake of the whole: Aksakov, ‘Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk zemskikh soborov’, in Brodskii (ed.), Rannie slavianofily, 108. 226 Konstantin Aksakov, Kniaz’ Lupovitskii, 55–56. 227 Ibidem, 44.

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before them, wearing a dandyish travelling coat and with a lorgnette on a cord, because ‘he is not dressed like a Russian and doesn’t speak like a Russian’, as one peasant observes, although they do not realize that he is their master, for they have never seen him before.228 It is possible, incidentally, that Aksakov wishes to imply through his choice of surname for this character who hopes to serve as a conduit through which western habits will pass to the Russian peasantry that Lupovitskii is himself of non-Russian lineage: the suffix -itskii suggests Polish (and therefore Catholic) ancestry.229 Above all, it is through language use that Aksakov underlines his point about the foreignness of the Russian nobility and calls into question the views his nobles express. French is the language in which they seem most comfortable in the prologue to the play. When at Lupovitskii’s request they switch to Russian, it is only for practical reasons of which Aksakov would not expect spectators or readers to approve. Lupovitskii, Dolonskii, and Saliutin do not want the French people in the Café de Paris (who are, after all, foreigners, Lupovitskii feels it necessary to point out) to understand their candid remarks about Russia. In any case, it would be useful for Lupovitskii to have some practice in Russian before he returns home. That is not to say that he thinks it is likely that he will have to say anything in Russian in Francophone St Petersburg, but he will need the vernacular for communication with his benighted serfs. His companions therefore agree to do him the favour of speaking Russian on this occasion.230 None of the three, however, can sustain their conversation without repeated recourse to French, and the prologue continues to its end to be a linguistic mélange, as Lupovitskii ruefully admits.231 Moreover, all three aristocrats in the play are cast as heavily Gallicized, and damned as such, by their habit of code-switching, which, as we have seen, had been used by Russian dramatists since the mid-eighteenth century as a stock means of ridiculing the practice of French-speaking among the Russian nobility. ‘Well, bon voyage’, Dolonskii wishes Lupovitskii in the prologue. ‘But do you know what? You’re just wasting your time; temps perdu, mon cher’ (a waste of time, my dear fellow).232 When Lupovitskii’s arrival at his country estate stirs patriotic feelings in him, he expresses them in French by singing: ‘La voici, la voilà, cette France chérie!’ (It’s here, it’s there, 228 Ibidem, 27–28. 229 The alteration of ‘b’ in the Polish surname Lubowicki to ‘p’ also introduces an association of the character with glupost’ (foolishness). 230 Konstantin Aksakov, Kniaz’ Lupovitskii, 8. 231 Ibidem, 15. 232 Ibidem, 7.

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this beloved France).233 When he comes to voice his love of Russia and the ‘good, intelligent Russian people’, he also affirms it in French. It is just a pity that he has to converse with his peasants in Russian: he would be able to explain things so much better to them in French.234 He turns to French once more to express his new-found admiration of the common people: ‘mais c’est sublime, c’est beau, ça!’ (but that’s sublime, it’s beautiful), he exclaims when he is told of the support afforded by the village assembly to an orphaned peasant.235 And again, at the end of the play: ‘Je vous estime, monsieur le peuple!’ (I esteem you, monsieur the people).236 It is apt, incidentally, that the Russian valet who serves Lupovitskii on his Russian estate, and to whom Lupovitskii has given the French name Jerome, can himself parrot a few words of French and other foreign languages.237 On one level, Aksakov’s practice of peppering characters’ utterances with French words and phrases is a comic device used, after the manner of the eighteenth-century dramatists we have examined, to mock foolish noblemen who worship what is foreign and are oblivious of native merits. At a more serious level, the prominence of French in Lupovitskii’s speech underlines the threat of cultural conquest by an alien force if the misguided mission civilisatrice that Lupovitskii has decided to undertake on Russian soil should prove successful. Aksakov drives home his point that the French language is the vehicle for Lupovitskii’s civilizing project by frequent use of the Gallicized forms sivilizovat’ and sivilizatsiia (with an initial ‘s’ rather than the affricate ‘ts’ with which the standard Russian forms of these words begin). Thus ‘civilization’ is being introduced to the Russian peasantry by seemingly alien beings whose judgements about Russia and Russians are expressed in French, as if that language were the only suitable vehicle for a definitive opinion on this or any other serious subject. The judgements themselves, moreover, are derived from foreign sources. Lupovitskii vows, in Aksakov’s prologue, to prepare himself for his trip by reading everything that has been written about Russia in French, because ‘foreign descriptions’ of his country are not only accurate but also provide a picture of ‘La Russie, vue du haut de la civilisation’ (Russia seen from the top of civilization). (Lupovitskii’s reading would include such hostile accounts, one assumes, as those by Masson, Ancelot, and Custine.) Finally, when he has fulfilled 233 Ibidem, 27. 234 Ibidem, 29. Lupovitskii repeats the point after he has first addressed the bemused peasants on his estate (46). 235 Ibidem, 84. 236 Ibidem, 88. 237 Ibidem, 42, 69.

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his humanitarian mission in Russia by turning his ignorant peasants into European human beings, Lupovitskii will go back to France, the country, as Saliutin reminds him, that Victor Hugo had called ‘the giant of the world’. Paris, the metropolis of the cultural empire to which such Russian nobles belong, is Lupovitskii’s natural habitat.238 Thus cosmopolitan Russian aristocrats, who have become convinced of their superiority over the Russian peasant mass, are engaged in an attempt at internal colonization, not of outlying swathes of territory in the Russian Empire but of the indigenous population of the empire’s rural heartland. The Russian peasantry, according to this Slavophile view, is a non-European other, the antipodes of the ‘Russian Europe’ represented by Lupovitskii and all other westernized Francophone Russian nobles who want to ‘civilize’ their nation.239 The writings by Konstantin Aksakov to which we have referred demonstrate how repugnant noble francophonie and the values associated with French social life (its secular refinement, its aestheticism, and its cult of douceur de vivre) would seem to those religious conservatives who encouraged the revival of Orthodox piety. However, distaste for the Gallicized social world of the nobility was not confined to the Slavophiles and like-minded cultural nationalists. On the contrary, it was widely shared in the post-Crimean literary and intellectual community, and indeed became a topic of major interest for all three of the great novelists who came to the fore in the age of Alexander II and to whom we shall shortly turn in our final chapter. * It is relevant at this point to return to the link between language and identity, which we broached in our discussion of the social identity of the nobility in an earlier chapter.240 However, we are now concerned not so much with the question of whether the use of French by the nobility was socially divisive as with the question of whether the practice was unpatriotic, for it was the 238 Ibidem, 18–20. 239 Aksakov’s thesis will seem to modern readers to anticipate the interpretation of the history of Russia offered by Alexander Etkind, according to which an elite that was culturally alien undertook internal colonization of the country (see Etkind, Internal Colonization). For a brief critique of Etkind’s application of Edward Said’s Orientalist paradigm to Russian history, see Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 13. We have made clear our own reservations about the highly schematic ‘two Russias’ paradigm that is entrenched in the thought of Russian cultural nationalists. 240 See the fourth section of Chapter 4 above.

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subject of national identity that was at the forefront in the various phases of the language debate we have been examining in this chapter. Were Russian French-speakers disloyal to their native land, or even morally flawed, as so many critics of Russian francophonie implied? It is important, first of all, to emphasize that there is no necessary correlation between speakers’ proficiency in a language or the pleasure they take in using it, on the one hand, and their attitude towards the people who speak that language as their mother tongue or towards the culture of that people, on the other. Nor can we assume that language use is indicative of sympathy with the contemporary social order or political system under which the majority of the native speakers of a language happen to live. In fact, Russian nobles commonly resorted to French to articulate opposition to contemporary French society, politics, or culture, rather than to express approval of them. Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov, for example, used French in a six-page note he wrote in 1831 expressing his worries about the current ‘revolutionary contagion’ which had rapidly spread from France.241 The use of French could indicate identification with the type of society that was associated with France under the old regime, as it did for Fedor Rostopchin, without implying particular liking for the nation in which the chief model for that society had originated. The point is well illustrated in a descriptive catalogue that Fedor’s son, Andrei Rostopchin, wrote – in French – for his private library in the 1860s.242 Andrei is highly critical of France and the French (and of other European nations and peoples) in this text, but his target is not the France of the ages of Louis XIV and Louis XV, which had profoundly affected Russian noble culture. Rather, it was the France that had come into being after 1789, particularly the France that had developed since the revolution of 1830, which overthrew the restored Bourbon monarch Charles X. This modern country, with its ascendant bourgeoisie and naturalistic writers, was just as abhorrent to the unrepentant aristocrat Rostopchin as to the libertarian socialist Herzen.243 We should therefore beware of construing a tradition of plurilingualism in a family or clan as indicative of disloyalty towards Russia. We cannot help but notice that some of the most conspicuously plurilingual families provided the Russian Empire with devoted and effective servants over several generations. For example, the Stroganov family, many members of which were broadly Francophile and in which there was a strong tradition 241 Quoted from an archival source in Tipton, ‘Multilingualism in the Russian Nobility’, 199. 242 RGB, Manuscripts Department, f. 183, op. 1, d. 1089. 243 See Offord and Rjéoutski, ‘Xenophobia in French’.

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of French-speaking, could not possibly be accused of lack of patriotism. Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov wrote a travel diary in French but still expressed ardent love of his country.244 His grand-son Aleksandr Pavlovich preferred on the whole to write in French rather than Russian but his emotional attachment to Russia was similarly intense.245 There are no good grounds, we maintain, for believing that Russian nobles’ use of French as a sign of social status and affinity with modern European culture indicated any lack of pride in national achievement, as if patriotism were an attribute to which only conservative nationalists who abjured multilingualism were entitled to lay claim. It might just as well be argued that bilingualism, or indeed plurilingualism, was an accomplishment that Russian nobles, as servants of an empire oriented towards Europe and keen to advertise its merits to peers across the continent, were obliged to display.246 After all, to master the languages of other peoples and acquire a deep and respectful knowledge of their literatures and thought was itself an attainment that reflected well on one’s own nation. Catherine II herself understood this and measured up to Voltaire’s view of the ideal modern European sovereign, who was multilingual (at least in European languages).247 Russians, then, were better prepared as a result of their linguistic achievement to make their own distinctive contribution to European civilization as a whole, bringing to bear the experience of their own nationality. Russian views on noble francophonie were affected, finally, by changing views about what it was, in the last analysis, that subjects (or would they imagine themselves as citizens?) owed allegiance to. So long as a speaker’s primary loyalty was to an imperial polity, the ‘fatherland’ (otechestvo), the use of French for internal purposes, as well as for communication with the external world, must have been regarded by many members of the elite as an entirely legitimate practice. Indeed, it lent cohesion to the empire’s multi-ethnic aristocracy, on whose performance and morale the 244 On the Stroganovs’ language use, see Rjéoutski and Somov, ‘Language Use among the Russian Aristocracy’. On Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov in particular, see 64–71; reference to his travel diary (‘Lettre à un Ami sur les Voyages’) is made on 68. 245 Ibidem, 76–77. 246 A comparison may be made with the situation among the Dutch elite, who in the late eighteenth century saw Franco-Dutch bilingualism as an ideal and among whom, in the nineteenth, multilingualism came to be considered a feature of national identity: see Van Strien-Chardonneau, ‘The Use of French among the Dutch Elites’, 171–173. 247 For a discussion of the integration of knowledge of Western European languages into a new notion of Russianness in the reign of Catherine II, see Bruce, ‘The Pan-European Justification of a Multilingual Russian Society in the Late Eighteenth Century’. For his reference to Voltaire, see 22.

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well-being of the empire to a considerable extent depended. It should be remembered, moreover, that the transnational interaction between courts and social elites in eighteenth-century Europe, which Russia was joining, took place in a climate of universalistic humanism which encouraged multilingualism. This universalism and a concomitant rejection of narrow patriotism are well expressed in a passage quoted approvingly by Nikolai Turgenev and attributed by him to Fénelon, who was much admired in eighteenth-century Russia. ‘I love my family more than myself’, Fénelon is supposed by Turgenev to have said, and ‘I love my country more than my family, [but] I love the human race still more than my country’. 248 Karamzin, in his more cosmopolitan moments, shared that attitude. ‘Anything national is insignificant before what is human’, his narratorial persona observes in the Letters of a Russian Traveller. ‘The most important thing is to be people, not Slavs. What is good for people cannot be bad for Russians’.249 The use of a foreign language for communication with compatriots seemed more suspect, though, when there emerged a literary community and intelligentsia which began to question the legitimacy of the autocratic state. This development took place in nineteenth-century Russia. A cultural concept, the native land (rodina), began to vie with the larger, more inclusive and more political notion of the fatherland. An ethnos, the Russian people, began to function in writers’ imaginations as the object to be served and the final court of appeal, and a more exclusive nationalism began to compete with the ideology of a unitary state comprising many parts.250 Thus the attitude towards nobles’ language use that had been adopted by the eighteenthcentury comic dramatists gained currency, at least in the nineteenth-century literary community, which claimed with increasing confidence to speak for the nation. In retrospect, those dramatists therefore look like harbingers of the mood that helped to inspire the great literary creativity of the golden age of Russian literature and thought. 248 See Nikolai Turgenev, La Russie et les Russes, vol. 2, 4, quoted by Grechanaia, Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski, 18. Starodum, Fonvizin’s exemplar of right-thinking in his play The Minor, speaks reverentially of Fénelon in Act 4, Scene 2 of his play. 249 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 418 (Karamzin’s italics); [Karamzin], Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 294 (we have in this instance used Kahn’s translation in the English version of a quotation from the Letters). 250 For brief discussion of a topical example of this sort of phenomenon, see the article by Michael Kenny in The Observer on 19 March 2017, 9, where the author alludes to the twenty-first-century rise of English nationalism in place of an outlook in which English identity had tended to be subsumed, at one time or another over a long period, within the British Empire, Great Britain, the Commonwealth, or the Anglosphere.



Chapter 9 Perceptions of bilingualism in the classical Russian novel

The rise of the novel and the expression of nationhood in it By the age of Alexander II, Russian prose writers – inspired by the example that Pushkin and others had set in the 1830s – had fully developed their own idiom. They, no less than Pushkin and other early nineteenth-century poets of the so-called Pushkin Pleiad, were responsible for the creation of a literature written in the vernacular which became the outstanding manifestation of Russia’s cultural maturity and the clearest expression of the new Russian nationhood. It was important to prose writers, as they strove for cultural autonomy, to free themselves from subservience to foreign literary models. It also helped them, as they tried to define their own nation and its mission, to look critically at another sign of Russians’ apparent subservience to foreign cultural mentors, namely the persistence of the phenomenon of French-speaking in nineteenth-century noble society. It is the continuation of debate about the semiotic significance and the effects of noble francophonie in the writings of Ivan Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Dostoevskii that we examine in this final chapter.1 To point out the shortcomings of prose fiction as a source of information on actual linguistic practice, as we did in our introduction to this volume, is not to deny that fiction may corroborate the evidence provided by nonliterary types of written source. The classical Russian novel is firmly rooted in byt (daily life), of which language practice was of course one element. This practice included bilingualism, code-switching, and choice of French rather than Russian to tackle certain subjects, to negotiate certain relationships and situations, or to indicate social identity. At the same time, the social or civic colouring of a work of fiction, which – as the literary historian D.S. Mirsky remarked – was ‘a general characteristic of the European novel of the mid nineteenth century, but [was] nowhere more apparent than in Russia’,2 made for a high degree of subjectivity in treatment of Franco-Russian bilingualism, as in other matters. For example, authors might have their 1 This subject, as far as we are aware, has usually been mentioned in major scholarship on the Russian novel only en passant, if at all. See, though, Vinogradov, ‘O iazyke Tolstogo’, and Lubenow, Französische Kultur in Russland (on Turgenev’s Nest of Gentry). 2 Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, 172.

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literary characters make linguistic choices or use language in particular ways in order to highlight personal traits or moral qualities which they wished their readers to find appealing or rebarbative and thus to underline some broader social or cultural point. Above all, it is by virtue of the metalinguistic discourse they contain, rather than their more or less accurate record of actual linguistic usage, that the novels of the age of Alexander II are useful to us here. The language attitudes that authors explicitly discuss or implicitly convey through the words of their characters (who, of course, should not be taken as necessarily and directly voicing their creator’s own opinions) can be placed squarely in the overarching paradigms or grand narratives created by Russian writers and thinkers for elucidation of Russian culture and destiny. These attitudes bear on the idea of Russian nationality, discussion of which is structured around the opposition between Russia and the West and between the ‘European Russian’ and the Russian common people. They may betray anxiety about dependency on and imitation of foreign culture or they may belong to a countervailing discourse that asserts Russia’s originality, positing a peculiar receptivity that enables Russians to absorb, reconfigure, and transcend the cultures from which they have borrowed. They may even reflect a yearning for some lost integrity (tsel’nost’), that ‘rather shadowy’ ideal of wholeness at which, Robin Milner-Gulland has argued, ‘Russian cultural consciousness’ ultimately aims.3 Before closely examining the prose f iction of Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Dostoevskii, we should also comment briefly on the historical context in which these writers produced their major fiction. Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, at the hands of British and French forces (as well as Turkish forces) operating at great distance from their homelands, had a profound psychological effect on the Russian political, social, and cultural elites. Admittedly, the defeat did not entail loss of territory, or imperil the tsarist regime, or threaten Russia’s status as a major European power, although the concern of western powers to curb an overmighty Russia was no doubt one of the factors that had led to the outbreak of the war. Nevertheless, the Crimean experience did puncture the sense of military invincibility that had developed in Russia in the age of imperial expansion under Peter the Great and Catherine II and that had been affirmed by the heroic defence of the fatherland in the war against Napoleon. It generated self-doubt and self-criticism. It gave fresh topicality to the century-old concern that Russia might be an uninventive, imitative nation and to the belief, which went back at least to Catherine II and Karamzin, that Russia 3 Milner-Gulland, The Russians, xiv.

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needed to catch up with and overtake the West. 4 It also gave even greater urgency to the questions that ‘Westernizers’ and ‘Slavophiles’ had begun to ask in the 1840s about the nature of Russian civilization and Russia’s relationship to the outside world. Moreover, with the death of Nicholas in 1855 and the accession to the throne of his more open-minded son, Alexander, it suddenly became possible to debate such matters with a freedom denied during the reign of Nicholas, especially during its closing years after the outbreak of revolutions in Europe in 1848. Alexander II himself acknowledged the need for major reform, especially the abolition of serfdom. Journalism was reinvigorated, and there began a cultural and intellectual renaissance that is reflected not only in the luxuriant flowering of the novel but also in thought, music, and painting. We stress, finally, that the searching national self-examination that was stimulated by these developments was not merely synchronic. That is to say, writers did not confine themselves to an appraisal of the social and cultural condition of Russia in the second Alexandrine age, when the novel was coming into full bloom. The self-examination was also diachronic: writers were conducting an enquiry into how Russia had reached the critical juncture they were observing. This concern with a large perspective, indeed a search for a grand historical narrative, explains why so much time is devoted in the novels we examine, in one way or another, to the past. Novelists might achieve this historical dimension by setting their work, entirely or largely, in a slightly earlier or even much earlier period, as is the case with Turgenev’s second novel A Nest of Gentry and Tolstoi’s War and Peace respectively. Alternatively, they might provide substantial flashbacks, as does Dostoevskii in The Brothers Karamazov (which is in any case set more than a decade before it was first published). Again, they might enlarge their historical perspective by dwelling on the fact that certain characters, such as Stepan Verkhovenskii in Dostoevskii’s Devils, were formed in a period (in this case, the 1840s) long before the time at which the novel is offered to the public (in the early 1870s). It is the presence of a luminous element of historical evaluation that makes the novel of the age of Alexander II so rewarding for us as we stray in this closing chapter beyond the time span in which our study of language use in imperial Russia is mainly set. The novelists’ treatment of Franco-Russian bilingualism thus forms a coda to our study of language use over the preceding hundred years. Thanks to the beguiling power of the literary narratives in question, it has also provided 4 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, in Karamzin, IS, vol. 1, 416–418; Nikolai Karamzin: ‘Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790’, 293–294.

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a durable (though not necessarily a balanced and altogether accurate) view of bilingualism through the prism of cultural nationalism.

Ivan Turgenev Turgenev was a multilingual nobleman who spent much of his life abroad. He left Russia in 1856 to reside in Western Europe, first in Baden-Baden and then, from 1871 until his death in 1883, in Paris, where he lived with the opera singer Pauline Viardot, with whom he had formed an intimate attachment in the mid-1840s, and her husband. He was on good terms with many French men of letters, including Alphonse Daudet, Gustave Flaubert, the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. On the political spectrum of his time, he was a moderate Westernizer. He believed that the chances of social and moral improvement in Russia depended on the ability of members of the small Europeanized elite incrementally to inculcate in his compatriots the values of a more advanced civilization. He pinned no hopes on the Russian peasants and disapproved of the tendency of some contemporaries to idealize them as uncorrupted beings who lived in a truly Christian spirit (as the Slavophiles believed) or practised a primitive form of socialism (as Herzen contended) by sharing land and other resources. Because he refused to utter these shibboleths of cultural nationalists, Turgenev came to be perceived as unpatriotic and out of touch with Russia. Dostoevskii, for instance, famously advised him to purchase a telescope so that he could better observe Russia from afar,5 and then he mercilessly lampooned him in the figure of Karmazinov in his novel The Devils.6 And yet, Turgenev’s treatment of characters’ linguistic behaviour, especially their French-speaking, in many respects resembles that of more overtly nationalistic writers, leading us to wonder whether the famous rifts and quarrels within the mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary and intellectual communities may have been too easily allowed to obscure what writers in different camps actually had in common.7 Turgenev makes much reference in his prose fiction to the subject of Russian francophonie, treating it in some way in his first novel Rudin (1856), 5 Dostoevskii, letter of 16 (28) August 1867, PSS, vol. 28, bk 2, 211. 6 Besy, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 10; see e.g. 70 ff., 170. On Karmazinov and Dostoevskii’s quarrel with Turgenev, see Peace, Dostoevskii, 157–160. 7 On Turgenev’s major fiction, the definitive work in English remains the study by Freeborn (1960). For a broader literary and intellectual biography, see Schapiro, Turgenev (1978).

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his second novel A Nest of Gentry (1859), his novella First Love (1860), his fifth novel Smoke (1867), and his late novella Spring Torrents (1877). It is unsurprising that Turgenev should have had his fictional characters so often use French, either as the medium for whole conversations or for the expression of some of their thoughts within conversations conducted mainly in Russian. For one thing, he wrote primarily about his own social milieu, the nobility, and in that milieu, as we have shown, French (and other foreign languages, especially German and English) were widely used. For another, Turgenev was a writer in the Realist tradition who could plausibly claim, towards the end of his life, to have attempted ‘impartially and in good faith’ to draw the physiognomy of the educated class of his age.8 His astute observation of noble life and conduct corroborates things we know about language use from non-fictional sources. Furthermore, a considerable part of his fiction is retrospective. Many of his major works, or parts of them, were set not in the age of Alexander II, when they were published, but in the age of Nicholas I, when French-speaking was perhaps more widely valued among the nobility than it was in the post-Crimean period. Of the works we have listed, A Nest of Gentry and Smoke are particularly germane to our discussion of novelists’ reflections on language use in educated society, because it is in them that Turgenev’s references to FrancoRussian bilingualism are most closely interwoven with his examination of the problem of Russia’s relationship to Western European civilization. However, before we examine these two novels in detail it is worth making a few remarks about the references to French-speaking in the other works we have mentioned, for they illustrate some of the functions that we know French had in Russia in the age of Nicholas I. In Rudin, for example, French words and verbal etiquette are woven into the texture of the speech of Dar’ia Lasunskaia, the widowed owner of the estate on which the novel is set. Dressing simply but elegantly ‘à la madame Récamier’ (that is to say, in the manner of a renowned early nineteenth-century Parisian salon hostess),9 Lasunskaia is prone to use French terms of address and expressions of gratitude and Gallicized forms of forenames.10 As social practice in good society dictates, she also uses French as the language in which to make elegant compliments: ‘Il est si distingué’ (He is so refined), ‘Le baron est aussi aimable que savant’ (The baron is as pleasant as he is wise), ‘C’est un homme comme il faut’ (He’s a gentleman), ‘Vous êtes un poète’ (You’re a poet), 8 ‘Predislovie k romanam’, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 12, 303. 9 Rudin, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 6, 271. 10 Ibidem, 252, 255, 256, 279.

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‘un parfait honnête homme’ (a perfect gentleman).11 French may equally be used, in this supposedly polite society, as the vehicle for waspish personal criticism. ‘Entre nous… cela a assez peu de fond’ (between ourselves, it is quite shallow), Lasunskaia remarks of an article she has been reading, and again: ‘Voilà m-r Pigassoff enterré’ (That’s Mr Pigasov buried), when Rudin has disparaged another member of her circle.12 There is also a trace of the practice of using French as a language of confidence between noble peers: ‘N’est-ce pas, comme il ressemble à Canning’ (Doesn’t he look like Canning), Lasunskaia whispers patronizingly to Rudin when her ageing butler appears.13 French again serves as a secret language in which to say things one does not want one’s servants to understand in First Love, which is set in 1833. Here the mother of the narrator, Vladimir, complains in French to her husband about the affair he is conducting with Zinaida, the beautiful young daughter of their Moscow neighbours, although on this occasion the stratagem fails, because one of the family’s maids, who has lived in Paris for five years, understands very well what she is overhearing.14 Here too, French is a language of disparagement. Zinaida’s mother, Princess Zasekina, is ‘une femme très vulgaire’ (a very vulgar woman) who is involved in ‘des vilaines affaires d’argent’ (shady financial affairs), ‘une femme capable de tout’ (a woman capable of anything), says Vladimir’s mother, venting her anger at the neighbouring family in the process.15 French may also be used to conduct adulterous liaisons, like that between Vladimir’s father and Zinaida and that between Sanin and Mar’ia Polozova in Spring Torrents, which Turgenev also set in the mid-Nicholaevan period, in 1840. This function of French is quite in keeping with its association with such perceived vices of high society as knowingness, deceitfulness, and personal irresponsibility. Thus, it is with a French platitude – ‘Cela ne tire pas à conséquence’ (it’s of no importance) – that Polozova casually persuades Sanin to take a step that will in fact have a catastrophic consequence in his personal life.16 Rudin was notable for the fact that although the novel was set in the period around 1840, as we may glean from the cultural and intellectual content 11 Ibidem, 253, 255, 263, 270, 274. 12 Ibidem, 273. 13 Ibidem, 275. The reference is to George Canning, who served as British foreign secretary from 1822 to 1827. 14 ‘Pervaia liubov’’, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 9, 64. 15 Ibidem, 20, 44. 16 Veshnie vody, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 11, 135. On this occasion, the French-speaking character is not of noble origin (Polozova is the wealthy daughter of a tax-farmer), but she has acquired French in the course of her social ascent.

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of the discussions that take place in it, Turgenev wrote it in the mid-1850s, ‘when the Crimean campaign was in full swing’,17 and completed it in the climate of expectancy that characterized the early months of the reign of Alexander II. The novel therefore assumes historical significance as a review of an age that is coming to an end. The primary conclusion towards which Turgenev tried to lead readers in the protracted closing chapter and epilogue (the first of two that he wrote)18 is that Rudin’s idealism, while inspirational in the grim years when Nicholas was on the throne, was out of place now that there was a real prospect of significant humanitarian reform. However, we may also draw a secondary conclusion: the attempt made by the ageing Lasunskaia to replicate in her provincial drawing-room the Gallicized culture of noble social circles in the capitals in which she had once moved (presumably as far back as the 1820s) was also passé. Noble life in the idyllic manor house approached by its drive lined with lime trees would not remain forever untouched by changes in the clamorous world beyond. Or at least, that is how it would seem in the mid-1850s to an intelligentsia impatient for social and political change. Turgenev continued to reflect on the direction that noble life should take in A Nest of Gentry, which is set in 1842, but here his treatment of noble language use, besides enhancing the authenticity of his depiction of social reality, was more conspicuously woven into his consideration of personal and national identity than it had been in Rudin. The central character of this novel, Lavretskii, returns to rural Russia after discovering that his wife, Varvara, has been unfaithful to him while they have been living together in Paris. Believing on the basis of a newspaper report that Varvara has died,19 he begins to visit, and falls in love with, a young noblewoman, Liza Kalitina, only to have the prospect of happiness that he has glimpsed snatched from him by Varvara’s unexpected reappearance. As in Rudin, Turgenev uses a simple plot as a basis for exploration of the fate of the Russian nobleman of his own generation. Now, though, he views his protagonist’s personal destiny in the light of the debate between the Westernizers and Slavophiles, which had been reanimated in the post-Crimean period when the novel was written. The careerist Panshin, a rising star in the St Petersburg bureaucracy, represents Westernism, although only a shallow version of it. Russia, Panshin believes, lags behind Europe, because the Russians are only half-European, as ‘les meilleures têtes’ (the best heads) have long since realized. Taking the demeaning view of Russians as 17 ‘Predislovie k romanam’, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 12, 304. 18 Rudin, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 6, 342–368. 19 Dvorianskoe gnezdo, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 7, 213–214.

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an uninventive people, Panshin contends that Russia has no alternative but to borrow from other nations if it is to progress and catch up with the West. Lavretskii, on the other hand, sees Russia as a youthful, independent force and resists the arrogant view that bureaucrats could solve the nation’s problems by imposing on it solutions they had dreamed up without taking account of local realities. And indeed, as Panshin paces up and down the drawing-room in the Kalitins’ manor house, discoursing eloquently, a natural, poetic reality in the Russian countryside seems implicitly to undermine his superficial cosmopolitanism or at least to render it irrelevant. The first stars begin to twinkle in the pink sky over the motionless tips of the lime trees and in the dewy coolness of the night a nightingale starts to produce its ringing song.20 Against the background of the debate about Russia’s relationship to the European world, to which Panshin alludes when he mentions the Slavophile Khomiakov,21 Turgenev’s references to the linguistic habits and cultural attachments of his characters in A Nest of Gentry serve both as a means of characterization and a touchstone of nobles’ attitudes towards their native land. Characters whom Turgenev views positively on account of their sense of duty and altruism – the good-natured but unsettled Lavretskii and the pious and idealistic Liza Kalitina – eschew the use of French for dealings with their compatriots. Lavretskii does have a command of French, having been exposed to various foreign upbringings by his eccentric father who spoke French with Parisian pronunciation and wrote exhortatory letters in which he addressed his son as ‘vous’ (that is to say, using the formal, second-person plural pronoun) and ‘mon fils’ (my son).22 However, he never resorts to the use of French in the Russian heartland, where he aspires to learn to plough the land, to which he feels a strong attachment.23 This attachment is perhaps inbred, for although his father was a nobleman who imbibed the thought of the French Enlightenment, his mother had been a domestic serf. Similarly Liza, who is dismayed by Panshin’s contempt for Russia, has been unaffected by the French spinster whom her father had employed as her governess during the first ten years of her life. She has been profoundly influenced, instead, by an old peasant nanny, Agaf’ia, to whom Turgenev devotes several pages towards the end of the novel, as if to rectify an important omission about the cultural formation of his heroine.24 20 21 22 23 24

Ibidem, 231–233. Ibidem, 231. Ibidem, 162–163. Ibidem, 233. Ibidem, 239–244.

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The characters whom Turgenev views in the most negative light, on the other hand, self-consciously display or even delight in their command of French. For Liza’s mother, Mar’ia Dmitrievna, French-speaking is a means of maintaining her modest standing in local society. For Panshin, a creature of the westernized metropolis, it is indicative of his disdain for Russia and his lack of respect for native cultural achievement. Mar’ia Dmitrievna, for whom Panshin is ‘un jeune homme accompli’ (an accomplished young man),25 understands this, although she is not disconcerted by the realization or by the likelihood that Panshin’s outlook detaches him from native soil: ‘Une nature poétique’ (a poetic nature), she says admiringly, ‘of course, cannot plough…’26 As for Varvara, French is inextricably linked to the way of life around which all her thoughts revolve – her sexual conquests and adulterous affairs, the ruches and ribbons on her dresses, her mantilla from the Parisian Madame Baudran, her varnished fingernails, her soap à la guimauve (marsh-mallow), and the patchouli perfume she always wears. She effusively declares an attachment to Russia, but laughs at the people and buildings she observes from her carriage along the rural road to Lavretskii’s estate, quickly breaks her promise to remain on the estate by decamping to St Petersburg for the winter, and returns at the end of the novel to Paris, where she is in her element. The excellence of Panshin’s and Varvara’s French, and their choice of French as the language in which to conduct their flirtation and their shamelessly boisterous affair at the end of the novel, indicate a strong affinity between them.27 This affinity distinguishes them not only from Lavretskii and Liza but also from other members of their own class who do persist in speaking French but who have neither such mastery of the French language nor the power of dissimulation that Panshin and Varvara possess. Varvara strengthens her bond with Panshin by means of a disparaging witticism at the expense of Mar’ia Dmitrievna, who has interceded with Lavretskii on her behalf: ‘Elle n’a pas inventé la poudre, la bonne dame’ (The good lady didn’t invent gunpowder), she whispers to Panshin on their first encounter in Mar’ia’s drawing-room.28 For Panshin and Varvara, then, French is not merely a source of social formulae or a vehicle for light, animated conversation and seduction. Its use is also a sign of mutual understanding between individuals who are culturally and psychologically detached from their homeland and who are intent on fulfilling egoistic ambitions. 25 26 27 28

Ibidem, 259. Ibidem, 233. Ibidem, 262–267, 283. Ibidem, 265.

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The other novel by Turgenev that addresses the subject of Franco-Russian bilingualism, Smoke, is set in 1862, in the period immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, and is therefore more overtly concerned with the contemporary state of Russia than Rudin or A Nest of Gentry had been.29 The main action in the novel takes place in the German spa Baden-Baden, where Turgenev’s central character, Litvinov, finds himself during a European tour. In a tone that is not found in his earlier novels, Turgenev caricatures two sets of Russians who gather there and who crudely represent positions on the post-Crimean political spectrum to which he is hostile. One set, on which we need not dwell here, consists of members of the radical wing of the intelligentsia. The other set, which includes Irina, with whom Litvinov had been in love some ten years earlier, and the man to whom she is now married, Ratmirov, is made up of conservative, indeed reactionary, aristocrats. This set remains stubbornly Francophone and Gallicized: French language and tone envelop ‘ces princes russes’ (these Russian princes), all the ‘fine fleur’ (fine flower) of Russian society.30 Among its members there is a certain count who sings romances after the manner of ‘either a poor gypsy or a Parisian coiffeur’ and a social lion of the 1840s who still follows ‘“le culte de la pose” [the cult of the pose] (one cannot even say this in Russian)’.31 Members of the set know each other by Frenchified names (Princess Babette, Princess Annette, Princess Pachette) and assemble around what is known in Baden-Baden as ‘l’Arbre russe’ (the Russian tree).32 The fact that Turgenev has placed his characters – for the first time in one of his novels – in a foreign setting helps to strengthen the impression he wants to create that some members of the high nobility have indeed detached themselves from their native land. As when he was presenting Panshin and Varvara to readers in A Nest of Gentry, so in Smoke Turgenev uses their habit of speaking French among themselves as a means of damning the members of the conservative aristocratic set. Mocking the code-switching against which linguistic patriots had inveighed at least since the time of Sumarokov and Fonvizin, 29 On one level, Turgenev’s novel Smoke is a riposte to the so-called Native-Soil Conservatism formulated in Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (see the final section of this chapter). On the hostility to Winter Notes expressed in Smoke by Turgenev’s character Potugin, see Generalova, I.S. Turgenev, 322–326. 30 Dym, in Turgenev, PSSP, Sochineniia, vol. 9, 144. 31 Ibidem, 145–146. The words in English in this quotation are of course in Russian in Turgenev’s text. We continue the practice of translating the Russian elements of quotations into English in subsequent examples of language-mixing in this chapter. 32 Ibidem, 147, 144.

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he peppers every conversation conducted in this milieu with French terms of address and remarks, such as ‘J’adore les questions politiques’ (I adore political questions) and ‘C’est pour faire rire ces dames’ (It’s to make these ladies laugh).33 Their use of French reinforces the negative impression created by members of this set when they express attitudes that Turgenev expects readers to find repugnant. They are self-important people who are convinced of their own merit and their indispensability to the Russian state. They sneer at their social inferiors: ‘I’m not an enemy of so-called progress’, one of them unconvincingly insists, ‘but all these universities and seminaries, and schools for the common people, these students, sons of priests, raznochintsy, all this small fry, tout ce fond du sac, la petite propriété, pire que le prolétariat […] voilà ce qui m’effraie…’ (all these dregs, small property owners, worse than the proletariat […] that’s what scares me).34 They cannot come to terms with the recent loss of their right to own serfs: ‘le principe de la propriété est profondément ébranlé en Russie’ (the principle of property has been profoundly shaken in Russia), one member of the set has famously complained in a French salon.35 This is a world which lacks wit, intelligence, music, art, or poetry and which possesses only cunning and knack, Irina observes (although her involvement in it seems to weaken her right to criticize it).36 The practice of speaking French continues, then, to have a social cachet, but the grace and elegance with which francophonie had formerly been associated have been lost, so that only arrogance and social condescension remain, in this post-Crimean representation of the cultural – or one might say anthropological – significance of language use. It is a literary weakness of Smoke that the socio-political content of the novel is not only presented in a partisan way but is poorly linked to Turgenev’s main psychological and dramatic subject-matter, the reawakened love of Litvinov for Irina. And yet, in his handling of this romantic relationship too Turgenev makes use of the noble habit of French-speaking in order to convey meanings of the sort we have found in A Nest of Gentry. Irina belongs to an ancient but now impoverished princely family living in Moscow, the Osinins, who still occasionally use French as their domestic language in the early 1850s, when the reader meets Irina, then seventeen years old, for the first time. Because of Irina’s prowess in French, she had been due to recite some verses in that language at an important public function and the 33 34 35 36

Ibidem, 203, 205. Ibidem, 205. Ibidem, 144. Ibidem, 227.

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sudden withdrawal of that privilege by the principal of the institute at which she was studying is remembered as a traumatic event in her adolescence.37 Irina’s francophonie places her in a social and moral world that is different from Litvinov’s, and at three moments in the novel it intrudes into their relationship in ways that suggest that French, in this instance, is a language of rejection of a social inferior. First, Irina reproaches the young Litvinov, who has adoringly visited her house day after day, when on one occasion he arrives straight from the university, where he is studying, with ink-stained hands. He is not wearing gloves, Irina complains, and moreover, she says, ‘“You’re… a proper student […], vous n’êtes pas distingué”’ (you’re not a gentleman).38 Irina’s use of French sharpens her observation that Litvinov is not of the right social calibre for this scion of an aristocratic line. Next, use of French punctuates her father’s account of an episode that results in Irina’s removal from Moscow, and from Litvinov’s reach, and her introduction to the glittering social world of St Petersburg, where French is more habitually and knowingly employed than it is among the fading aristocracy of Moscow. Irina is invited to a ball organized by the Muscovite nobility as part of the festivities surrounding a visit to the old capital by the royal family. Despite her apparent resistance, she is persuaded to attend, but she will not allow Litvinov to accompany her. The following day, when Litvinov visits her house, Irina will not see him. Her father explains that she is indisposed but that she had enjoyed great success at the ball, adding in French that ‘C’est très naturel, vous savez, dans les jeunes filles’ (that’s quite a natural thing in young girls, you know), a remark which strikes Litvinov as rather odd.39 As Osinin describes the ‘happenings’ of the previous evening at which his daughter has made such an impact, the bilingualism of the metropolitan society she is about to enter becomes apparent. ‘Happenings?’ Litvinov muttered. ‘Yes, yes, happenings, happenings, de vrais événements [real events]. You can’t imagine, Grigorii Mikhailovich, quel succès elle a eu [what success she had]! The whole court noticed her! […] And old Count Blasenkrampf announced for all to hear that Irina was la reine du bal [the queen of the ball], and wanted to be introduced to her […] He’s very amusing, that count, and such an adorateur du beau sexe [admirer of the fair sex]! […] Irina 37 Ibidem, 180. 38 Ibidem, 185. 39 Ibidem, 190.

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danced avec tous les meilleurs cavaliers [with all the best partners] […] One foreign diplomat, when he found out she was a Muscovite, said to the sovereign: “Sire”, he said, “décidément c’est Moscou qui est le centre de votre empire!” [make no mistake, it is Moscow that is the centre of your empire] and another diplomat added “C’est une vraie révolution, sire” [This is a true revolution, sir], révélation [revelation] or révolution… something like that.’40

Prince Osinin is only dimly aware of the indications in the story he tells that he is a naïf in the eyes of the St Petersburg elite and that their attentiveness towards him is fuelled by lascivious interest in his daughter, but he does realize that his daughter’s impending social rise requires language shift. Finally, when Litvinov again meets Irina in Baden-Baden, references to Franco-Russian bilingualism punctuate their encounters and eventually help to expose both their incompatibility and – as Turgenev sees it – the hypocrisy of Russian Francophone society. Irina and her husband Ratmirov speak French to one another as much as Russian. 41 Irina’s disavowal of French-speaking and the society with which it has come to be associated is therefore a ploy to distance herself from her husband’s world and to revive her relationship with Litvinov. Explaining to Litvinov how she has come to know Potugin (the mouthpiece for Turgenev’s own views in the novel), she remarks that ‘you can speak Russian with him, bad Russian but Russian all the same, not that eternal sickly sweet, repellent Petersburg French!’42 It does not augur well, though, when Irina herself resorts to French as she wonders whether to abandon her husband and social circle for Litvinov: ‘I must warn you’, she tells Litvinov, ‘that all my money is in his [Ratmirov’s] hands; mais j’ai mes bijoux’ (but I have my jewels). 43 And indeed, when Irina decides, after much prevarication, that she cannot in fact abandon her husband and social milieu the letter she sends Litvinov to tell him this turns out to be written in French. Irina does honestly admit that she has made Litvinov ‘solemn promises’ which she cannot keep. At the same time, she invites Litvinov to continue to participate in a falsehood, by saying that she is Litvinov’s forever and that he may do with her as he wishes. 44 Litvinov, while recognizing his own guilt before his jilted fiancée, Tania, feels Irina’s letter is ‘again deceit, or no, worse than deceit, it is a lie’ which 40 41 42 43 44

Ibidem, 190–191. Ibidem, e.g. 220, 248. Ibidem, 217. Ibidem, 292. Ibidem, 306–307.

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reflects a ‘world of intrigues and secret relationships’. He will not go to live close to her in St Petersburg, as she invites him to do, to ‘share with her the corrupted melancholy of a fashionable lady who is oppressed and bored by high society but cannot exist outside its circle’. 45 Irina’s letter in French, then, is a vehicle for hypocrisy, a supposedly honest confession which is not entirely honest, an expression of seemingly absolute devotion which is not absolute. The reply with which Litvinov now ends their relationship, Turgenev pointedly tells us, is written in Russian. 46 The final rupture with Litvinov is not painless for Irina. While Ratmirov, as we learn in the novel’s closing paragraph, ‘moves forward quickly on the path which the French call the path of honours’, Irina becomes ‘une âme égarée’ (a lost soul), 47 torn between the Russian and the western worlds, as her ambivalence towards use of the French language has indicated. Litvinov, on the other hand, rediscovers his Russianness and sets about applying Turgenev’s ideas on how nobles should behave. Driven by the sense of duty that Turgenev values,48 he seeks forgiveness from Tania, whom he will marry, we are given to understand, and diligently occupies himself with the small deeds (malye dela) recommended by liberals in the intelligentsia, gradually improving the country estate he has inherited, settling debts, restoring its factory, and setting up a small farm with hired workers. 49 Turgenev’s careful description of the linguistic behaviour of the main characters in Smoke enriches his treatment of the central questions he addresses in the novel, namely the relationship of Russia to western civilization and the tension between cosmopolitanism and national exclusivity. Through Potugin – an unprepossessing chatterbox, but a man who is presented as wise and authentically Russian – Turgenev rejects romantic conservative nationalism. Potugin is scathingly critical of the Slavophiles’ denigration of the educated elite and of their idealization of the common people, symbolized by the armiak, or peasant’s coat of heavy cloth.50 In fact, the interest of cultural nationalists in ‘triple extrait de mougik russe’ (triple extract of Russian muzhik) reflects not authentic Russianness, Potugin believes, but the concern of high society, for whom this literature ‘en cuir de Russie’ (in a Russian skin) is produced, that it may have become entirely Frenchified.51 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibidem, 307–308. Ibidem, 310. Ibidem, 328, 327. Ibidem, 251, 252, 297. Ibidem, 319. Ibidem, 170. Ibidem, 236.

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Russians, then, cannot build only on indigenous foundations. They will have to borrow. However, they should not borrow indiscriminately; rather, they should select what they need, taking account of local realities, such as climate, soil, and national characteristics. Potugin illustrates his thoughts on borrowing with a linguistic example: Just take our language […] Peter the Great flooded it with thousands of foreign words, Dutch, French, and German: these words expressed concepts which needed to be introduced to the Russian people; without too much rationalizing or unnecessary fuss, Peter poured these words into our bellies by the bucket-full and the barrel-full. At first, it’s true, something monstrous came of it, but then the digestive process I was talking about began. The concepts caught on and were assimilated; the foreign forms gradually vanished and the language found something in its own depths with which to replace them, and now your humble servant, a very mediocre stylist, may presume to translate any page of Hegel… yes sir, yes sir, of Hegel… without using a single non-Slavonic word. What happened with language will happen, one must hope, in other spheres as well.52

Paradoxical as it may seem, the best way to create a strong, independent Russian nation, in Potugin’s (and Turgenev’s) view, may be to subject Russians to an education of a western sort. Thus, it turns out, on close analysis of Turgenev’s treatment of his characters’ frequent use of French, that even this most cosmopolitan and ‘Westernist’ of the great classical Russian novelists deplored the use of French as a prestige language for domestic social purposes. Turgenev attributes the greatest facility in French, and the greatest inclination to display it, to characters who are losing contact with their native land. Despite his reputation for objectivity and for an ability to take a nuanced view, he is even prepared crudely to associate Russian French-speaking with personal traits such as superficiality, deceitfulness, promiscuity, and infidelity. The noble men and women of whom he most approves, on the other hand, have the deepest attachment to the Russian land and the least desire to use French as a means of communicating with their compatriots or of separating themselves symbolically from lower social classes. In these respects, Turgenev proves to have a greater affinity than is generally thought to be the case with Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, to whom we turn in the following sections. 52 Ibidem, 171–172.

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Lev Tolstoi: War and Peace Whereas the predominant social milieu explored in Turgenev’s novels is the middling landowning nobility, Tolstoi’s characters – notwithstanding the huge range of social strata they represent – move primarily in the high aristocracy, to which Tolstoi himself belonged. The names of many of his major creations (Bolkonskiis, Kuragins, and Drubetskoi, in War and Peace, Oblonskiis and Shcherbatskiis in Anna Karenina) are only slightly altered versions of the names of well-known families whom we have already encountered in this book (Volkonskiis, Kurakins, Trubetskois, Obolenskiis, and Shcherbatovs respectively), and they would have immediately evoked the aristocratic milieu in the minds of Tolstoi’s Russian contemporaries. However, from an early stage in his career Tolstoi questioned the values and conduct of people in this milieu. After all, the Tolstoi of the 1860s, unlike the youth of the 1840s, spent almost all his time on his country estate at Iasnaia Poliana, in the province of Tula, shunning the urban, westernized social world favoured by his class and taking an interest in peasant life. He also came to view the state and all its institutions with distaste, eventually formulating a pacifistic form of anarchism which finds expression in his last novel, Resurrection (1899).53 As we have seen, Tolstoi’s antipathy to the aristocratic social world is already evident in Youth, where he castigates himself for the pride he had taken as a young man in his prowess in French.54 Shortly afterwards, in his novella The Cossacks, first published in 1863, he began to develop his treatment of the relationship between language use, on the one hand, and social behaviour and moral values, on the other. Francophonie, in this tale of a young man’s search for identity and meaning, is symptomatic of a shallow social world which the Russian aristocrat finds it hard to shake off. The officer Prince Beletskii, when he meets Tolstoi’s hero Olenin in the Caucasus, began in the mixture of Russian and French fashionable in Moscow, and he went on, interlarding his remarks with French words […] And faster and faster French and Russian words were bandied about, cascading from the world Olenin thought he had left for ever […]: it was as though 53 As a clear introduction to Tolstoi’s fiction, Christian’s Tolstoy (1969) is still valuable. For a brief outline of his fiction and thought, see also Gifford’s Tolstoy (1981). Morson’s Hidden in Plain View (1987), a study of War and Peace, has useful insights into language use, among other things. There are other major literary biographies by Troyat (1968) and Bartlett (2010). 54 See the fifth section of Chapter 4 above.

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the forgotten world from which he had escaped still had some irresistible claim on him. He was angry with Beletsky and with himself, and yet there he was against his will introducing French expressions into his conversation […]55

Aristocratic language practice goes together with a certain set of habits and attitudes. One such type of behaviour is profligacy: Olenin has squandered half his fortune before the age of twenty-four.56 He also has a patronizing attitude towards his social inferiors. When Olenin was fifteen, for example, he had taught his servant Vaniusha to read French (a useless skill for a serf). Vaniusha was very proud of this accomplishment, ‘and still, when he felt in particularly good spirits, he would come out with a French word or two’.57 Aristocrats might burnish their reputations, Olenin foolishly assumes, by transferring their own culture to those whom Tolstoi was coming to regard as bearers of a simpler, more authentic way of life, such as Caucasian peoples with whom the Russian frontiersmen were in conflict. Thus, Olenin dreams of possessing a Circassian slave girl whom he would educate during the long winter evenings: She could easily learn foreign languages, read the masterpieces of French literature and appreciate them. Notre Dame de Paris, for example, was sure to impress her. She can even speak French. In a drawing-room she would display more natural dignity than a lady of the highest society.58

The rudimentary metalinguistic comment that occurs in ‘The Cossacks’ swells into a powerful discourse in War and Peace (1865–1869), an historical novel of epic scale whose action takes place – like the action in Walter Scott’s historical novel Waverley – in a time some sixty years before the novel appeared. So conspicuous and widespread is the use of French in all the versions of War and Peace published in the decade in which the work was written that Vinogradov went so far as to call it a bilingual novel.59 Tolstoi 55 ‘Kazaki’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 6, 89–90. We have used the translation by Rosemary Edmonds in Tolstoy, The Cossacks, 263–264. 56 ‘Kazaki’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 6, 7. 57 Ibidem, 41; translation from Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks, 208. 58 Ibidem, 11–12; translation from Tolstoy, The Cossacks, 174. 59 Vinogradov, ‘O iazyke Tolstogo (50–60-e gody)’, LN, 35–36 (1939), 123. War and Peace went through many editions and these reflect vacillations on Tolstoi’s part over choice of language, French or Russian, as the vehicle for certain passages in the novel. The first published version of the early parts of the novel, conceived as a work entitled The Year 1805 (Tysiacha vosem’sot piatyi

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himself defended and pointed up the significance of his use of French in the work in an article, ‘A Few Words about the Book “War and Peace”’, which he published in 1868, in response to readers’ observations.60 By dwelling and sometimes commenting on the bilingualism of the Russian elite in the first Alexandrine age Tolstoi reinforced layers of social, ethical, and historical meaning in the novel. The most basic function of the passages of dialogue in French and the French remarks and phrases which are strewn about War and Peace is to lend the novel that air of historical verisimilitude for which the historical novelist is bound to strive. After all, French was both the mother tongue of Napoleon and many officers and soldiers in his Grande Armée and a lingua franca used by Russians to communicate with the aggressor. It was also a lingua franca for foreigners at the Russian court, such as the Polish aristocrat Czartoryski, who belonged to what Alexander I called his ‘comité du salut publique’ (Committee of Public Safety),61 and for some of the highest-ranking officers in the Russian army who – as Tolstoi emphasizes, not without a touch of xenophobia – were of non-Russian ethnic origin. Russians themselves, both historical and fictitious, have recourse to French in War and Peace for many purposes, even when no French men or women are present. French may serve, for instance, as a language of official communication, as when Alexander sends instructions to Count Rostopchin, the governor of Moscow god), which appeared in 1865–1866, and then the first two complete editions of War and Peace, both published in 1868–1869, contained large amounts of French, including conversations and letters as well as numerous isolated words and phrases. In the third edition, published in 1873, and the fourth edition, published in 1880, on the other hand, these passages were replaced by Tolstoi’s Russian translations of them. (Tolstoi had by now become concerned with the dissemination of his writings among the lower social classes, few members of whom knew French.) In the fifth edition (1886), preparation of which was overseen by Tolstoi’s wife, the French passages of the second edition were restored (and a translation provided at the foot of the page). In the sixth edition (also 1886), which was aimed at a wider public, foreign text was again replaced by Russian (this time from the translations provided in the fifth edition), as was also the case in further editions that were published in 1887, 1889, and 1897. (This information is drawn from the editors’ preface to Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 9, vii–xiv.) The f ifth edition, which incorporates the French conversations of the first two editions, was considered definitive by the editors of the ninety-volume so-called Jubilee Edition of Tolstoi’s complete works, and this is the edition we use here. It is not crucial to our argument to establish that Tolstoi’s defence of his use of French in the early editions of the novel is more authoritative than the decision to replace French with Russian in later editions. The most important point for our purpose is that by indicating by one means or another that many conversations in War and Peace took place in French and by commenting on language use Tolstoi conducted a metalinguistic discourse in the novel. 60 ‘Neskol’ko slov po povodu knigi “Voina i mir”’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 16, 8–9. 61 Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 10, 159. This is a jocular reference to the Jacobin institution of 1793.

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in 1812.62 It is even the language, ironic as the situation may seem, in which a Russian officer conveys to the Russian governor of the city of Smolensk on the route to Moscow the news that the city is coming under attack from Napoleon’s invading army.63 French is also the preferred medium for intellectual speculation or political or philosophical discussion, irrespective of whether foreigners are present. When Andrei Bolkonskii converses with his close friend Pierre about the purpose of his life, he switches into French as he becomes more reflective.64 Andrei again resorts to French as he outlines his political ideas to Speranskii, who served as Alexander’s adviser on internal affairs from 1808 to 1812. Andrei agrees with Montesquieu that ‘le principe des monarchies est l’honneur’ (the principle of monarchies is honour) and argues that ‘[c]ertains droits et privilèges de la noblesse […] paraissent être des moyens de soutenir ce sentiment’ (certain rights and privileges of the nobility seem […] to be means of maintaining this sentiment). Speranskii, for his part, responds to Andrei in French even though he is not at ease in it and speaks it slowly, since he is not a nobleman by birth but the son of a clergyman.65 There are many other reasons why Tolstoi’s nobles may choose French for communication with their peers, and the choice they make may clarify a mood or attitude or carry some social nuance. French is often used, for example, between army off icers, who, as noblemen, prize a witticism, an elegant compliment, or a piquant remark in a military setting just as much as in a social context.66 Outside the military context, Princess Mar’ia Bolkonskaia uses French to express her gratitude to the man who will eventually become her husband, Nikolai Rostov, when he rescues her from her mutinous serfs, thus ensuring a degree of formality that enables her to preserve her dignity.67 Nikolai’s mother, Countess Rostova, maintains a similar respectful distance by greeting her future daughter-in-law in French when she meets Princess Mar’ia for the first time. ‘“Mon enfant!” she said, “je vous aime et vous connais depuis longtemps”’ (I love you my child, and I have known you for a long time).68 On the other hand, when Mar’ia Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, a plain-speaking character with whom 62 Ibidem, vol. 11, 182. 63 Ibidem, 114. 64 Ibidem, vol. 10, 110. 65 Ibidem, 166. On Tolstoi’s judgement of the quality of Speranskii’s French, see also the penultimate section of Chapter 4 above. 66 Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 11, 250. Tolstoi’s italics. 67 Ibidem, 161. 68 Ibidem, vol. 12, 53.

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the Rostovs stay in Moscow, uses French to greet the Rostovs’ ward Sonia, Tolstoi tells us explicitly that she is by this means ‘pointing up her slightly contemptuous and condescending attitude towards Sonia’.69 Most important of all, French is the language of those imported cultural venues, the salon and the soirée, where the members of high society display themselves. It is in this milieu that the novel famously begins, with a substantial utterance in French by Anna Pavlovna Scherer (known to her acquaintances by a French form of her name, Annette), a maid of honour to the Russian Dowager Empress and a renowned hostess: ‘Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des pomest’ia, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y crois) – je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami […]’70 (Well, my prince. Genoa and Lucca are now just appanages, estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, if you don’t tell me that we are at war, if you permit yourself to go on playing down every infamy, every atrocity committed by this Antichrist (I believe it, on my word), I no longer know you, you are no longer a friend of mine […]) (Illustrations 14 and 15)

Anna’s soirées are attended, she boasts, by ‘la crème de la véritable bonne société, la fine fleur de l’essence intellectuelle de la société de Pétersbourg’ (the cream of truly good society, the finest flower of the intellectual essence of St Petersburg society).71 She introduces her guests to one another in French, and French is the language in which the guests praise or criticize each other as ‘un homme de beaucoup de mérite’ (a man of much merit) or, in the case of Tolstoi’s gauche hero, Pierre Bezukhov, ‘Un cerveau fêlé’ (an addled brain).72 Anna’s first interlocutor, Prince Vasilii Kuragin – Tolstoi takes the trouble to tell us in the opening scene of the novel – ‘spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but also thought’.73 In the rival social circle in St Petersburg that is led by Kuragin’s daughter and Pierre’s first wife, Hélène, Francophilia has a political dimension. This 69 70 71 72 73

Ibidem, vol. 10, 315. Ibidem, vol. 9, 3. Ibidem, vol. 10, 86. Ibidem, 87, 85. Ibidem, vol. 9, 4.

Perceptions of bilingualism in the cl assical Russian novel

Illustration 14 Title page of a copy of the first volume of the 1868 edition of Tolstoi’s War and Peace.

Kindly reproduced for us by the Russian National Library.

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Illustration 15 The first page of the text of the first volume of the 1868 edition of Tolstoi’s War and Peace.

Kindly reproduced for us by the Russian National Library. It is noteworthy that even in this early edition of the novel a Russian translation of French passages is provided. That is to say, by no means all members of the reading public who were interested in imaginative literature were Francophone.

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circle, the so-called ‘French circle’, desires alliance with Napoleon after his diplomatic accommodation with Russia at Tilsit in 1807 and entertains members of the French diplomatic mission in St Petersburg.74 The novel does, admittedly, reveal misgivings about the use of French in Muscovite society in the months following Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.75 Old Count Il’ia Rostov tells his wife to speak French less.76 The flighty heiress Julie Karagina starts to write to Mar’ia Bolkonskaia in Russian (but Tolstoi stresses that it is Frenchified Russian) because, Julie claims unconvincingly, she hates the French and their language and cannot bear to hear French spoken.77 One of the Golitsyns hires a tutor to give him Russian lessons because ‘il commence à devenir dangereux de parler français dans les rues’ (it’s beginning to become dangerous to speak French in the street).78 The old princess who lives in Pierre’s house claims that an acquaintance has nearly been killed by the populace for speaking French.79 And yet, the change of usage does not seem wholehearted or entirely sincere. It may not even be linguistically practicable. When Julie says of Nikolai Rostov that she is ‘un petit peu amoureuse du jeune homme’ (a little bit in love with the young man) and is threatened with a fine for her use of French, she asks how she might have expressed the thought in Russian instead.80 Nor does the change of heart extend from Moscow to St Petersburg, which is not at risk of attack by French forces and where social life seems unaffected by the invasion. In Hélène’s salon people continue to speak ecstatically about the great nation and the great man, disbelieve rumours about French atrocities, discuss Napoleon’s attempts at reconciliation and regret the rift with France, thinking the crisis should be resolved peacefully.81 French remains in use in Anna Scherer’s salon as well, despite its more patriotic orientation.82 74 Ibidem, vol. 10, 177–179. 75 It is conventional to characterize St Petersburg as a westernized city and Moscow as the heart of Russian tradition, and both War and Peace and Anna Karenina would appear to bear out this contrast. However, it may be that this difference in the cities’ character had little effect on linguistic practice in high society in them. As Anthony Cross has pointed out to us, the congregation of French émigrés in Moscow, especially in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period 1789–1815, ensured that French was a social lingua franca there, even if Muscovite Russians might otherwise have been more inclined to speak Russian than their compatriots in St Petersburg. 76 Ibidem, vol. 11, 83. 77 Ibidem, 105. 78 Ibidem, 84; see also 177. 79 Ibidem, 181. 80 Ibidem, 179. 81 Ibidem, 127–128. 82 Ibidem, 128–131.

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On one level, then, Tolstoi’s decision to render his characters’ speech in French helps him to provide an historically plausible account of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, in many instances where Tolstoi has real historical figures speak, in French as in Russian, he is merely using material, so he claims, from historical sources, of which he had accumulated a whole library.83 At a deeper level, though, Tolstoi’s allocation of French utterances to characters in War and Peace and his association of francophonie with certain types of behaviour and mindset imply some moral evaluation on his part. It is true that French is used in War and Peace even by characters whom Tolstoi views as quintessentially Russian and of whom he clearly approves. These characters include Kutuzov, Tolstoi’s favourite historical personage in the novel, as well as his two main fictitious male characters, Andrei Bolkonskii and Pierre Bezukhov. All the same, characters’ attitudes towards the French language, the ease and accuracy with which they speak French, their willingness to resort to it and, more broadly, their attitudes towards the French people and French culture – all these things may be touchstones by which Tolstoi would wish us to judge them. It is no coincidence, for example, that Hélène, ‘une femme charmante, aussi spirituelle, que belle’ (a charming woman, as witty as she is beautiful), ‘la femme la plus distinguée de Pétersbourg’ (the most refined woman in St Petersburg),84 is both effortlessly Francophone and one of the novel’s most morally repugnant characters. Nor is it to the credit of Anna Scherer that her command of French enables her to speak it with affectation when she wishes: ‘for some reason’, Tolstoi tells us, ‘she would say l’Urope [Europe] as a particular refinement of the French language which she was able to permit herself when speaking with a Frenchman’.85 Something similar may be said of Vasilii Kuragin, who speaks French ‘with the soft, patronizing intonations characteristic of a man of importance who has grown old in society and at court’.86 The careerist Boris Drubetskoi too has pure and accurate French, which he deploys at every opportunity and uses to conduct his courtship.87 Characters whom Tolstoi wishes to present in a more favourable light, on the other hand, may have reservations about the use of French, at least in certain circumstances, or they may even prize relative lack of facility in it, and they may reject French habits. The likeable Nikolai Rostov, for example, is shocked by the ease with which Russian officers of the high 83 ‘Neskol’ko slov’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 16, 13. For a few examples in the novel, see ibidem, vol. 11, 9, 25, 27, 32. 84 Ibidem, vol. 10, 178, 179. 85 Ibidem, 88. 86 Ibidem, vol. 9, 4. 87 Ibidem, vol. 10, 89, 138–139, 304.

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command, such as Drubetskoi, converse with French officers immediately after Alexander’s humiliating accommodation with Napoleon at Tilsit.88 Again, Andrei Bolkonskii, like all people who have grown up in society, Tolstoi suggests, took pleasure in things which did not have the stamp of society on them and was therefore attracted to Tolstoi’s favourite creation, Natasha Rostova, admiring her joy and shyness ‘and even her mistakes in French’.89 Natasha herself, a vital force whose intuitive Russianness is conveyed by her spontaneous dance to the sound of a Russian folk tune played on a guitar,90 refuses at the end of the novel to follow the golden rule of ‘intelligent people, especially the French’, who believe that married women should continue to pursue activities in which they excel (which in Natasha’s case include singing and dancing). On the contrary, she abandons society and conforms to Tolstoi’s Russian patriarchal ideal by devoting herself entirely to the bearing and rearing of children and to supporting the man she eventually marries, Pierre.91 This natural immunity or resistance to French culture among the Rostovs is indicative of Tolstoi’s relatively positive view of the Muscovite nobility who, by comparison with the St Petersburg nobility, are uncorrupted by the court and government service.92 However, the purposes that Tolstoi’s use of French in War and Peace fulfils extend beyond characterization, for at a deeper level French-speaking helps to point up general intellectual and moral hazards that plague Russia’s westernized elite. It is not just that for Russians of a certain class command of French amounted to cultural capital in the social market-place. Those Russians also had a French mode of thought ( frantsuszkii sklad mysli), as Tolstoi put it in the article about War and Peace that he published in 1868.93 French could, for instance, be a vehicle for spurious knowledge or dogmatic theory. Thus, we are bound to be mistrustful of the diagnosis of a French doctor who believes that the cause of Prince Nikolai Bolkonskii’s illness is ‘la bile et le transport au cerveau’ (bile and a rush of blood to the brain).94 Again, when what is said to be a standard rule of war – ‘Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison’ (The big battalions are always right)95 – is expressed in French we know that Tolstoi thinks the rule is mistaken. 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Ibidem, 140. Ibidem, 204. It is this episode which inspires the title of Figes’s book Natasha’s Dance. Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 12, 266–267. Vinogradov, ‘O iazyke Tolstogo’, 150, 157. ‘Neskol’ko slov’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 16, 8. Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 10, 302. Ibidem, vol. 12, 121.

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Above all, French is inextricably associated in Tolstoi’s eyes with the hypocrisies, ambitions, and stratagems of the social milieu in which it is spoken. It is a language in which speakers dissemble, play roles, and behave histrionically. Everyone in St Petersburg society, for example, knows that Hélène’s illness in the summer of 1812 is in fact a pregnancy and that an attempt is being made to terminate it. The word ‘angina’ is repeated with great pleasure, maliciously, in conversations where all those present know it is not angina that is ailing the countess, and the potential loss of her is described as ‘terrible’ only because of Hélène’s beauty: – On dit que la pauvre comtesse est très mal. Le médecin dit que c’est l’angine pectorale. – L’angine? Oh, c’est une maladie terrible! – On dit que les rivaux se sont réconciliés grâce à l’angine… The word angine was repeated with great pleasure. – Le vieux comte est touchant à ce qu’on dit. Il a pleuré comme un enfant quand le médecin lui a dit que le cas était dangereux. – Oh, ce serait une perte terrible. C’est une femme ravissante.96 (‘They say that the poor countess is very ill. The doctor says it’s angina pectoris.’ ‘Angina? Oh, that’s a terrible illness!’ ‘They say that the rivals have become reconciled because of the angina …’ […] ‘The old count is a touching sight, by all accounts. He wept like a child when the doctor told him it was a dangerous case.’ ‘Oh, it would be a terrible loss. She’s a ravishing woman.’)

French is also the language of seduction. It is in French that Anatole Kuragin (who, like his sister Hélène, usually goes under the French form of his forename) bewitches Natasha. He addresses her as ‘Natali’ and earnestly appeals in French for her attention: ‘Un mot, un seul, au nom de Dieu’ (A word, just one, in the name of God).97 He flatters her in French: what makes a city pleasant, he jokes, ‘ce sont les jolies femmes’ (it’s pretty women).98 Hélène, mischievously abetting the seduction and exploiting her ability to sound sincere and harmless, tells Natasha in French that her brother ‘est 96 Ibidem, 4. 97 Ibidem, vol. 10, 340. 98 Ibidem, 330.

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fou, mais fou amoureux de vous, ma chère’ (is mad, but madly in love with you, my dear). She tries in French to overcome the circumspection that Natasha’s engagement to Andrei Bolkonskii ought to dictate: ‘Si vouz aimez quelqu’un, ma délicieuse, ce n’est pas une raison pour se cloîtrer. Si même vous êtes promise, je suis sûre que votre promis aurait désiré que vous alliez dans le monde en son absence plutôt que de dépérir d’ennui.’99 (If you love someone, my delight, that’s no reason to enter a convent. Even if you are betrothed, I’m sure that your fiancé would have wanted you to go out into society in his absence rather than to waste away out of boredom.)

It is fitting that the purpose of the soirée at which Anatole almost completes his seduction of Natasha is to hear Mlle George (a real historical personage) recite some banal French verses and that society receives these verses with adulation, believing that what they have heard is ‘adorable, divin, délicieux’ (adorable, divine, delightful).100 Finally, the dénouement of this society episode, which takes place when Pierre confronts Hélène and Anatole about the failed elopement, is conducted in French as well, as Tolstoi twice makes clear. And it is because Pierre was speaking in French, Tolstoi confides in the reader, that he expressed himself ‘so artificially’ when he called his brother-in-law a scoundrel and wondered why he did not smash his head with a paper-weight.101 (The paper-weight itself is a French cultural importation denoted by a foreign loanword, presspap’e, from French presse-papiers!) Thus, like a passage from the work of the French historian Adolphe Thiers which Tolstoi quotes in his article on War and Peace, the French language may be associated with a ‘high-flown pompous style, devoid of any direct meaning’.102 Besides serving as a key to character and a means of exposing what seem to Tolstoi flaws in elite society and culture, Tolstoi’s treatment of francophonie in the early nineteenth-century Russian world invites reflection on broader questions concerning the nation’s integrity and identity that had resonance 99 Ibidem, 336–337. 100 Ibidem, 338. 101 Ibidem, 364. 102 ‘Neskol’ko slov’ in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 16, 13. We have used here the translation of this article by Louise and Aylmer Maude in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1312.

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in the 1860s. The xenophobic flavour of the novel and in particular Tolstoi’s treatment of foreign commanders in the Russian army 103 perhaps answered an emotional need following Russia’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Britain and France in the recent war in the Crimea, in which Tolstoi himself had fought. Tolstoi’s affectionate description of the family life of the Rostovs, especially their life on their rural estate, offered a nostalgic glimpse of a patriarchal community far removed from the western social, economic, and political models, with their bourgeois mores, capitalist enterprise, and parliamentary democracy, to which many Russians feared their country might succumb after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. His questing heroes, Andrei Bolkonskii and Pierre Bezukhov, who are dissatisfied with comprehensive rational explanations of their world, have much in common with the mid-century novelists, who challenge the confident certainties of the young radical, materialist, utilitarian wing of the intelligentsia that emerged in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Tolstoi’s portrayal of the peasant Platon Karataev (to whom we shall return shortly) exemplifies the attempt to discover the identity of the common people that was being conducted in Russian literature, historiography, ethnography, music, and painting when War and Peace was being written. Unlike the youthful Tolstoi, who used the French word ‘manants’ (‘peasants’ or ‘churls’) to indicate his contempt for people who were not comme il faut,104 the mature writer found himself in accord with a substantial part of the literary and intellectual community when he expressed admiration for the Russian common people. In his article ‘A Few Words about the Book “War and Peace”’, Tolstoi identified both the ‘habit of using the French language’ and the ‘predominant alienation of the upper class from other classes’ as key features of the character of the period in which his novel was set.105 In the novel, he brings the related problems of social division and fractured national identity to the fore through the historical figure of Count Fedor Rostopchin. As war with Napoleon in 1812 draws near, old Nikolai Bolkonskii advocates a firm foreign policy that might deter Napoleon from crossing the Russian frontier, and Tolstoi’s Rostopchin responds thus: And how, my Prince, are we to fight the French! […] Surely we cannot take up arms against our teachers and gods? Look at our youth, look 103 Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 11, 99–104, 202–203, 207. 104 Iunost’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 2, 194; see also 191. 105 ‘Neskol’ko slov’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 16, 8. We have again used the translation in Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1308.

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at our ladies. Our gods are Frenchmen, our kingdom of heaven is Paris […] French costumes, French ideas, French feelings! You’ve chucked out Métivier [Bolkonskii’s doctor] because he’s a Frenchman and a scoundrel, but our ladies go crawling to him on all fours.106

And yet, Rostopchin himself, although he is a jingoistic patriot who had demonized Speranskii as a Freemason (and therefore as an alien), seems also to inhabit a French world in his native land. He is indignant at the poor French style of a diplomatic note sent by the Russians, complaining to Pierre: ‘Mon cher, avec nos 500 mille hommes de troupes, il serait facile d’avoir un beau style’ (My dear fellow, with our 500 thousand men at arms it would be easy to have a good style).107 As a representative of conservative, Francophone officialdom, Rostopchin has nothing in common with the exclusively Russophone Muscovite populace, which he despises even as he cynically deflects its rage on to a hapless Russian prisoner who has been sentenced to death. ‘La voilà la populace, la lie du peuple’ (There’s the mob for you, the dregs of the people), he reflects, as he leaves the scene after abandoning the prisoner to the mob, ‘la plèbe qu’ils ont soulevée par leur sottise’ (the plebs they’ve raised up by their stupidity).108 It is in French that Rostopchin justifies his deed and then congratulates himself on it: he has acted for the ‘bien publique’ (public good), he thinks, and ‘je faisais d’une pierre deux coups’ (I have killed two birds with one stone), he concludes.109 The confused identity of the nation at its official level is brought out even more starkly by Alexander’s envoy to his own army, Colonel Michaud, a Frenchman – so Tolstoi would have us believe110 – who does not know Russian. Although he is a foreigner, Tolstoi ironically observes, Michaud is ‘Russe de coeur et d’âme [Russian in heart and soul], as he himself said about himself’. He reports back to the tsar in French, but in his capacity as ‘representative of the Russian people’. Tolstoi underlines the oddity of this situation by repeating Michaud’s words in a facetious tone a little further 106 Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 10, 306. 107 Ibidem, 304–305. 108 Ibidem, vol. 11, 345. See also 350. Tolstoi is alluding here to the fate of Vereshchagin, a Russian brought up by a foreigner, whom Rostopchin accused, on flimsy grounds, of being a traitor. Vereshchagin seems merely to have translated two French texts about Napoleon for his own use. On this case, see Zemtsov, 1812 god. Pozhar Moskvy, Chapter 2.1. 109 Ibidem, vol. 11, 350, 351. 110 In fact, the historical Michaud was not French but from a family originating in Savoy. He was born in Nice and served the King of Sardinia before entering Russian service. We are indebted to Marie-Pierre Rey for pointing out this fact, which illustrates Tolstoi’s willingness to take liberties with his historical material if it suited his purpose: see Rey, Alexandre Ier, 469–470.

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on.111 He thus confronts us with an inside-out reality. Not only are Russian nobles seemingly French, since they frequently use the language of the people who are becoming their mortal enemies, but with whom they continue to consort; the nation is also represented in dealings with its own sovereign by a Frenchman who has no Russian but considers himself Russian all the same. It is left to Pierre Bezukhov to overcome the dilemma of elite biculturalism and the problem of blurred identity which Tolstoi forces readers of War and Peace to confront through his depiction of bilingualism and cosmopolitanism at court, in high society, among conservative officialdom, and in the army. More than any other character in the novel, Pierre appears at first to straddle the French and the Russian worlds. He is an amalgam of identities, or rather his identity is at first indeterminate. His forename; his interest in Freemasonry; his sympathy for Napoleon before the invasion of Russia; his frequent recourse to French phrases and the bookish quality of his Russian: all these factors point towards an international or, more specifically, French identity. On the other hand, Pierre is out of place in Russian high society, despite his francophonie and the title and wealth that he inherits. He is illegitimate and socially ill-at-ease. He shows a meekness or humility (smirenie) that is not prized by the self-regarding nobility and is more closely associated with the Russian common people. As he proceeds on his odyssey of self-discovery, and in particular as the campaign of 1812 unfolds, a truly Russian identity comes to light. Such is his command of French, it is true, that Pierre finds it hard, when his house is taken over by a French officer during Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow, to disabuse the officer of the notion that he is French. In the eyes of this officer, whose life Pierre saves by overpowering a Russian servant who tries to shoot him, he becomes an honorary Frenchman. And yet, Pierre speaks French to the invader against his will. To the astonishment of the French officer he repudiates the title of Frenchman, which the officer sees as the ‘highest appellation in the world’. He prefers to remain Russian, even though he has lived in Paris for some years and is prepared to agree that Paris is ‘la capitale du monde’ (the capital of the world).112 As Pierre cools towards the French world he develops a heightened awareness of the Russian world. His progress is marked partly by his separation from the mannered Francophile Hélène (whom Tolstoi contrives to kill off in the year of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat) and by his marriage, after the war, to that quintessence of Russianness, Natasha Rostova. Crucially, this 111 Voina i mir, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 12, 10, 12, 13. 112 Ibidem, vol. 11, 365, 369.

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progress is also marked by Pierre’s attraction to the humble Russian peasant of sound mind and good sense, Platon Karataev. Pierre encounters Platon – that is to say, Plato, whose name, of course, suggests great wisdom – when they are incarcerated together by the French forces in Moscow and he then accompanies him with the retreating French army until Platon is shot by his captors. Platon is an idealized, Rousseauesque embodiment of the common people, whom Tolstoi imagines as unspoilt by modern civilization and as bearers of authentic Russian nationality. His language and linguistic habits, to which Tolstoi pays close attention, stand in sharp contrast to the French language and French linguistic practice in Russian high society. The French employed for official and social purposes by the aristocracy is fashioned, as we have seen, as a means of facilitating ostentatious self-display and dissimulation. It expresses a politesse that is indicative of only superficial respect. Platon’s Russian, on the other hand, is unpremeditated, artless, and unassuming. Replete with proverbs and popular sayings, it draws on a repository of collective folk wisdom, expressing all-embracing selfless love and a willingness to submit to an unfathomable cosmic purpose. Pierre has the ability to assimilate foreign languages and cultures. (It is telling that at one point he acts as an interpreter for two members of Napoleon’s multi-national army who cannot understand one another, because one is French-speaking and the other German-speaking.113) At the same time, he is able to experience an epiphany that gives him insight into the character of the Russian people, embodied in Karataev, who lives on in his consciousness. He thus seems personally to resolve the problem of national fragmentation and cultural dependency by developing a capacity to understand (intuitively and poetically, as well as rationally) the greatest intellectual, cultural, and ultimately spiritual achievements of other peoples and then to absorb and reconcile them in a transcendent synthesis. In this respect, War and Peace might be construed as a contribution to the prolonged discourse of Russian universalism and exceptionalism, according to which Russians are distinguished by a peculiar cultural receptivity, especially receptivity to the achievements of peoples to whom they had recently felt inferior. War and Peace, then, is on one level an historical novel whose veracity Tolstoi tries to enhance by assigning French utterances to his characters, as if those utterances were props that could evoke Russian life in the early nineteenth-century world. At another level, it is an expression of the mature Tolstoi’s disapproval of aristocratic society, whose artificiality, contrivance, 113 Ibidem, 371.

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and falsity are illustrated by the habit of French-speaking. At a deeper level still, it is a meditation on the fractured nature of the Russian nation as many members of the intellectual and cultural elite had come to conceive of it by the mid-nineteenth century. French-speaking, within this meditation, is a key element of the behavioural code of a gilded European aristocracy that has become separated from the native peasant mass. Nonetheless, the novel does offer hope that the problem of national fragmentation can be resolved through the integration of what is indigenous and what is alien. In a sense, War and Peace inherently achieves this goal by using and refashioning a foreign literary genre, the novel. Or rather, the work, Tolstoi defiantly declared, ‘is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle’; it is instead ‘what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed’. Not that Tolstoi claims to have been the first Russian to refuse to be constrained by the conventional artistic forms that had recently been imported. On the contrary, hybrid forms have already become the norm, he says: not a single significant artistic prose work published in Russia in recent decades ‘quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or story’.114 This assertion of literary independence, finally, is of a piece with the novel’s implicit celebration of Russian linguistic triumph in this most capacious of all the nineteenth-century explorations of Russia’s historical destiny. It is as if Tolstoi’s critical treatment of francophonie in Russia in the first Alexandrine age enabled him not only exorcize the spirit that had entered him personally in his youth, but also to complete the nation’s battle for liberation by carrying his ancestors’ military victory against the Grande Armée into the literary and linguistic spheres as well.

Tolstoi: Anna Karenina Unlike War and Peace, Anna Karenina, first published in 1875–1877, is an overtly topical novel. It contains references to numerous post-Crimean problems, developments, events, and subjects of debate, such as poor agricultural productivity after the emancipation of serfs, the responsibilities of the provincial nobility after the reform of local government and the judicial system, the development of a railway network, the colonization of Central Asia, the RussoTurkish War of 1877–1878, different models of education, and the emancipation of women. Despite the fact that Anna Karenina relates to a period some fifty to sixty years after the Napoleonic Wars in which War and Peace is set, noble 114 ‘Neskol’ko slov’, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 16, 7; Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1307.

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bilingualism is no less conspicuous in it, and Tolstoi’s treatment of the subject again serves both to broaden his observation of social behaviour and to deepen his discussion of the possible futures that the nation faces. Thus, on one level, Anna Karenina attests in fictional form to the persistence of French in various domains and functions with which we are familiar. Members of high society still use French terms of address, such as ‘ma chère’, and have French nicknames, such as the ‘enfant terrible’.115 There is a select St Petersburg social circle named ‘les sept merveilles du monde’.116 French expressions punctuate conversation at exclusive social venues, such as the Moscow ball at which the ground is prepared for Anna’s adulterous affair with Count Vronskii, to the dismay of Kitty Shcherbatskaia, who had been hoping for a proposal of marriage from Vronskii. ‘Pardon, Mesdames. Pardon, pardon, mesdames’, says the dirigeur and master of ceremonies as he steers Kitty to the group where he will leave her at the end of a dance.117 Kitty’s mother, Princess Shcherbatskaia, chooses French when she decides to give her daughter a lesson in social decorum at a German spa: ‘Il ne faut jamais rien outrer’ (one must never overdo anything), she tells her, as Kitty undergoes a spiritual transformation under the influence of an ‘engouement’ (infatuation) with people she has met there.118 French survives in the military domain, judging by the phrases – ‘Tout ça est une blague’ (it’s all bosh), ‘terre-à-terre’ (down-to-earth), and the description of a mistress as a ‘fardeau’ (burden) – which punctuate the speech of the highly successful and pragmatic young General Serpukhovskoi.119 It is still a vehicle for pithy personal criticisms in social circles: ‘il est un petit peu toqué’ (he’s a little bit of a crackpot), a landowner remarks of Levin, or ‘Au fond c’est la femme la plus dépravée qui existe’ (At bottom, she’s the most depraved woman there is), Anna says of Betsy Tverskaia.120 It continues to be used by members of the elite minority to conceal their thoughts from the servants or as a language in which to speak about the servants.121 It is unsurprising, given all this evidence of the persistence of French among the elite, that acquisition of the language should remain a priority in the upbringing of noble children. The Oblonskiis have employed a French governess – in fact, it 115 Anna Karenina, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 18, 141, 142. 116 Ibidem, 311. This is a witty pun which could mean either ‘the seven wonders of the world’ or ‘the seven wonders of society’. 117 Ibidem, 84. 118 Ibidem, 237. 119 Ibidem, 327−330. 120 Ibidem, vol. 19, 208, 213. 121 Ibidem, 27, 127, 242.

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is Dolly Oblonskaia’s discovery of her husband’s affair with Mlle Roland that leads to the family crisis with which the novel opens. When Anna arrives from St Petersburg in order to try to reconcile her brother and sister-in-law, moreover, she finds Dolly giving one of her young sons his French lesson.122 At a deeper level, Tolstoi’s interest in the continuing bilingualism of the Russian aristocracy helps to illuminate the overarching themes of Anna Karenina. The novel is constructed around various oppositions. First and foremost, Tolstoi juxtaposes metropolitan and rural Russia. On the one hand, there is the cosmopolitan and multilingual nation that is found in the aristocratic drawing-room, at the society ball, in the officers’ mess, at the horse races attended by the emperor, and in the government committee.123 On the other hand, there is the country estate, principally Pokrovskoe, the estate of Levin, who comes closest in the novel to echoing the moral views that Tolstoi espoused. There life proceeds in a timeless way in harmony with nature’s seasons: noble men and women – if they take an interest in rural affairs, as Levin does – instruct their bailiffs, inspect their cattle, tend their beehives, shoot, pick mushrooms, and make jam, while peasants mow grass, plough the fields, and gather in the harvest. A second opposition in the novel pits the high aristocracy, who occupy all important official positions, against the sturdy, self-sufficient gentry, who reside mainly on estates that have been handed down to them through the generations of their family. Levin, the gentleman-farmer, explains this social distinction to Oblonskii, who belonged to the ‘milieu of people who were, or who have become, the powerful ones of this earth’.124 A third familiar opposition is also in evidence, namely the contrast between St Petersburg and Moscow. It is in St Petersburg, where Karenin flourishes in the bureaucracy and where Oblonskii’s cares always vanish, that the most fashionable society is to be found. Moscow, which can be reached in a day from Pokrovskoe, is the city Levin generally visits, if he is compelled to spend any time at all in an urban environment. Moscow is also the home of the Shcherbatskii 122 Ibidem, vol. 18, 71. Anna Karenina, like Turgenev’s Smoke, also affirms the rise of English as a language that was fashionable in high society. The three Shcherbatskii daughters, in their childhood, all had to speak French one day and English the next (ibidem, 25). The Oblonskiis have an English governess for their children. Both Anna and Vronskii appear to speak English well. Anna, as she returns to St Petersburg from her fateful visit to Moscow, is reading an English novel (ibidem, 106, 117). Levin reads an English scientific treatise (ibidem, 102) and speaks broken English (ibidem, 282). Clearly too, English forenames (Betsy, Dolly) have come to be used as well as French ones. 123 This Russia may be replicated in the luxurious manor houses on the estates of the wealthiest nobility, like that on which we observe Vronskii and Anna (ibidem, vol. 19, 183–221). 124 Ibidem, vol. 18, 181–182, 17.

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family, whose members have a sounder sense than the Oblonskiis of what is right according to the rules of Tolstoi’s moral universe. The aristocratic, metropolitan Russia we have described is governed by a social code which Tolstoi finds superficial, hypocritical, and unauthentic. The whole aim of ‘civilization’, according to Oblonskii, is to make everything a source of enjoyment.125 Karenin, as Anna sees it, is motivated by nothing but ambition and the desire to advance in the official hierarchy.126 Self-centred and craving wealth and status, members of the overlapping circles of St Petersburg high society nourish themselves with gossip and scandal.127 At some level, they encourage marital infidelity; Princess Betsy Tverskaia, for instance, abets Vronskii’s affair with Anna.128 At the same time, society is obsessed with propriety and mercilessly condemns women’s departures from its formal code. Now, the mores of this refined but corrupted social world, which is so far removed from the simple rural milieu cherished by Levin, are alien and unsuitable for Russia, Tolstoi would have us believe, and the repeated, jarring use of a foreign language bolsters Tolstoi’s argument. Society’s defects seem to be encapsulated in a conversation between Dolly and one of her daughters about language use, a conversation Levin witnesses and on which he reflects: ‘Why are you here, Tania?’ Dar’ia Aleksandrovna said in French to the little girl who had just come in. ‘Where’s my spade, mama?’ ‘I’m speaking French, and you should as well.’ The girl tried, but she had forgotten the word for ‘spade’ in French, so her mother prompted her and then told her in French where to find the spade. And Levin found this unpleasant. Everything about Dar’ia Aleksandrovna’s household and her children now seemed much less likeable than it had before. ‘Why does she speak French with the children?’ he thought. ‘How unnatural and false that is! The children sense it too. Learn French and unlearn sincerity’, he thought to himself, not knowing that Dar’ia Aleksandrovna had already thought all this through twenty times, and nonetheless found it necessary to teach her children in this way, even if sincerity suffered as a result.129 125 Ibidem, 40. 126 Ibidem, 218. 127 Ibidem, 141. 128 Ibidem, 135. 129 Ibidem, 286.

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At many points in Anna Karenina, Tolstoi’s use of French underlines the insincerity and unnaturalness that Levin observes in the imported practices and values of aristocratic social life. Society’s hypocrisy and pretence are implicit even in the notion of the mariage de convenance (brak po rassudku), which sanctions the replacement of love by expediency and which characters knowingly discuss in a St Petersburg drawing-room.130 Again and again in this classic European novel about adultery, characters turn to French when their subject is relations between the sexes. People are saying, Vronskii’s mother tells her son, when he meets her off the train that has brought her to Moscow (at which point she thinks he is in love with Kitty Shcherbatskaia), ‘vous filez le parfait amour. Tant mieux, mon cher, tant mieux’ (You are made for one another. So much the better, my dear, so much the better).131 Much later, when her son comes to her box at the St Petersburg opera house on the evening Anna reappears in society, she resorts to French once more to reprove him for the scandal his affair is causing: ‘“Why don’t you go and faire la cour à Madame Karenin?”’ (court Madam Karenin). ‘“Elle fait sensation. On oublie Patti pour elle”’ (She is creating a sensation. People are abandoning Patti [the singer who has just bewitched the audience] for her).132 In general, the use of French between men and women is strongly associated with flirtation. Oblonskii, responding to Levin’s censure, sees nothing wrong if a man pursues his masculine interests: ‘Ça ne tire pas à conséquence’ (It’s of no importance), he pleads, in defence of his numerous liaisons.133 Preference for French helps to characterize Vasen’ka Veslovskii, a tiresome, boisterous, tactless nobleman introduced by Tolstoi at a late stage of the novel as if to bring high society into further disrepute.134 Veslovskii is overfamiliar with other men’s wives: ‘Il fait la cour à une jeune et jolie femme’, as Dolly explains to Levin, who is offended by his flirtation with Kitty and ejects him from his estate, to which Oblonskii had brought him as a guest.135 Use of French also enables characters to discuss marital or sexual relations with the formality that propriety requires when a relationship deteriorates. Karenin, finally convinced of Anna’s infidelity when he observes her horrified reaction to Vronskii’s fall from his horse in the steeplechase they attend at the St Petersburg race-course, tries to take her away from the social throng 130 Ibidem, 145. 131 Ibidem, 67. 132 Ibidem, vol. 19, 120. 133 Ibidem, 164. The same excuse was used, it will be recalled, by Mar’ia Polozova in Turgenev’s Spring Torrents. 134 Ibidem, 155, 158, 160, 190. Veslovskii also has excellent English (151). 135 Ibidem, 176.

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in order to limit the social embarrassment that her behaviour is sure to cause. Karenin, Tolstoi writes, ‘went up to Anna and politely offered her his arm. “We can go if you would like to”, he said in French.’136 Having eventually succeeded, at the third attempt, in leading Anna to his carriage, he begins the conversation he had been dreading. ‘“I am obliged to tell you that you behaved in an unseemly way today”, he said to her in French.’137 He turns to French again in the letter he writes to Anna when he has resolved how to react to Anna’s confirmation that she has been unfaithful to him. The difference in French and Russian pronominal usage, Tolstoi tells us, helps Karenin to avoid a complete rupture at this stage. Karenin wrote without addressing Anna by name ‘and in French, using the pronoun vous, which does not have the cold character that vy has in Russian’.138 All the same, Karenin’s letter, written in the bureaucratic register he has mastered, is icily formal: I hope to discuss all this in more detail at a personal meeting. As the summer-home season is ending, I would ask you to return to Petersburg as soon as possible, no later than Tuesday. All necessary arrangements for your move will be made. I ask you to take note that I attach particular importance to fulfilment of this request of mine. A. Karenin. PS I enclose money which may be needed for your expenses.139

The different nuances of pronominal usage in the two languages lead Vronskii too to prefer French to Russian. Once they have begun their affair, he always speaks French to Anna, Tolstoi explains, because the polite Russian second-person plural form vy would have been far too cold between them, while ty, the second-person singular form, would have been dangerously familiar.140 Thus French, while it is suitable for flirtation, may also serve to diminish commitment, introducing a certain emotional equivocation, irritation, or froideur in lieu of affection. Vronskii resorts to it, for example, when he tries to dissuade Anna from going to the St Petersburg opera, knowing that society will ostracize her. ‘Why can’t I go? I love you, and it’s all the same to me’, [Anna] said in Russian […] 136 Ibidem, vol. 18, 222. 137 Ibidem, 225. 138 Ibidem, 299. 139 Ibidem, 299–300. 140 Ibidem, 196–197.

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‘My feelings cannot change, you know that, but I ask you not to go, I implore you’, [Vronskii] said again in French, with tender supplication in his voice but coldness in his look.141

It is perhaps indicative of the change in Anna’s feelings towards the end of the novel that when Vronskii comes to her room for what turns out to be the last time she uses French to ask him what he wants.142 Tolstoi drives home his point about the unnaturalness of Russians’ use of French and of the mores he associates with this foreign language by describing an unsettling dream which both Vronskii and Anna have and in which, bizarrely, French is spoken by an unkempt peasant.143 ‘What was that awful thing I dreamt about?’ Vronskii asks himself on awakening. ‘Yes, yes. A peasant who was a beater in the hunt, I think, he was small and dirty, with a tousled little beard, and he was bending over and doing something, and suddenly he started saying strange words in French. No, there wasn’t anything else in the dream’, he said to himself. ‘But why was it so terrible then?’ He vividly recalled the peasant again and the incomprehensible French words the peasant had been uttering, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.144

Anna is troubled by a similar nightmare, in which a small peasant, also with a tousled beard, ‘is pottering about and all the while saying in French, very quickly, and you know, rolling his r’s: Il faut le battre le fer; le broyer, le pétrir…’ (We must hammer it, the iron; pound it, shape it).145 Tolstoi’s presentation of the flaws of high society is counterbalanced by a conception both of what is right in the conduct of human relationships and what is natural in Russia. This conception is realized in Anna Karenina chiefly through the character and actions of Levin, the author’s main seeker after truth and moral self-improvement. Levin shuns noble society, whose conventions and pretences he struggles to understand, let alone tolerate. He is revolted by sexual relations (including his own youthful experiences) for a purely erotic purpose and devotes himself to family life. As far as the problems of the nation are concerned, he is loath to accept universal solutions to them. 141 Ibidem, vol. 19, 115. 142 Ibidem, 329. 143 Browning, ‘Peasant Dreams in Anna Karenina’. 144 Anna Karenina, in Tolstoi, PSS, vol. 18, 375. 145 Ibidem, 381. The nightmare recurs the night before Anna kills herself (ibidem, vol. 19, 332).

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His careful observation of attitudes among the Russian peasants, whom he by no means idealizes, therefore leads him to introduce agricultural practices which he thinks will be compatible with native customs. He also takes an unconventional view of the causes of poverty in post-reform Russia: it is due, he believes, not only to the distribution of landed property and to ill-conceived policies but also to the abnormal way in which an external civilization had been grafted on to Russia. In particular, he is critical of the railway construction of the 1860s and 1870s, which had entailed ‘centralization in the towns’, the growth of ‘luxury’, and the consequent development of factories, a credit system, and a stock exchange, all of which, he thinks, had had a detrimental effect on agriculture.146 Russia, then, is sui generis, and should confidently go its own way, eschewing what does not suit it – for example, urbanization and the growth of capitalism, as well as the repugnant practices of high society. Levin’s attitudes towards the Gallicized culture of Russian high society, including his language attitudes, are a measure of his personal values, just as such attitudes are for characters who move comfortably in the grand monde. Levin is ill-at-ease in a fashionable Moscow restaurant to which Oblonskii takes him, where a Tatar waiter insists on repeating the names of the dishes Oblonskii orders in the French forms in which they are listed on the menu: soupe printanière, turbot sauce Beaumarchais, poulard à l’estragon, macédoine de fruits (spring soup, turbot in Beaumarchais sauce, tarragon capon, fruit salad).147 Like other noble characters in the novel, Levin does resort to French from time to time. He uses it, for example, to assert his social superiority over a merchant who has persuaded Oblonskii to accept an excessively low price for a forest he wants to sell and, on another occasion, to show temporary coldness to his wife.148 On the whole, though, he avoids using French. To the chagrin of Princess Shcherbatskaia, he will not even address his mother-in-law as maman, as most noble sons-in-law do.149 When two of Dolly’s children start fighting, he resolves never to put on airs and talk French with his own children, should he become a father. Not that they will be like Dolly’s, he thinks (smugly, we might say, although Tolstoi probably does not mean Levin’s thoughts to be perceived in this way), for all one has to do to ensure that children turn out delightful, he believes, is take care not to spoil them or distort their natures.150 At around the 146 Ibidem, vol. 19, 52. 147 Ibidem, vol. 18, 38. 148 Ibidem, 177, and vol. 19, 174. 149 Ibidem, vol. 19, 129. 150 Ibidem, vol. 18, 286.

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same point in the novel, he feels self-disgust because he finds that he is increasingly using foreign words in his speech as a result of his reading on agricultural matters.151 No less than War and Peace, then, Anna Karenina contains a discourse about Russian elite bilingualism, and again this discourse is interwoven with Tolstoi’s major subject-matter. The contrasts between town and country, St Petersburg and Moscow, the high aristocracy and the middling gentry, imported and indigenous culture, and the ways of life and morals associated with each element in these pairs – all of these subjects are illuminated in part through Tolstoi’s reflection on the continuing bilingualism of the Russian elite to which he himself belonged.

Fedor Dostoevskii Of the three novelists we examine in this chapter, Dostoevskii was the most conservative and overtly nationalistic. In his youth he had attended the Petrashevskii circles in St Petersburg, at which the ideas of utopian socialists, especially Fourier, had been discussed, and it was for his participation and role in these circles that he had been arrested and sentenced to death in 1849. (The sentence was commuted at the last moment to four years in prison, to be followed by exile in Central Asia.) By the time he returned to St Petersburg in 1859, though, Dostoevskii had undergone a profound religious conversion. He now began to propagate an outlook diametrically opposed to the materialistic, utilitarian, socialistic Weltanschauung then being propounded by the radical wing of the intelligentsia led by Chernyshevskii. Dostoevskii’s Native-Soil Conservatism (pochvennichestvo), as the doctrine that he elaborated in the early 1860s with the help of Apollon Grigor’ev and Nikolai Strakhov was known, stressed the rift that had supposedly developed in Russia between the small westernized elite (‘Russian Europe’) and the multi-million peasant mass. The solution to this problem, Dostoevskii believed, was to be found not in the drawing-up of social contracts or constitutions or in the development of political systems such as parliamentary democracy but in the establishment of a supposedly apolitical utopia in which the altruistic, self-abnegating Orthodox personality could find expression. The doctrine rested on the contrastive view of Russian identity that we have already described and included a vehement critique of the economic, social, and political bases of western nations, or more particularly France 151 Ibidem, 369.

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and England. It was most fully expounded in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, an account published in 1863 of Dostoevskii’s first visit to the West, which he had made in the previous year.152 Dostoevskii, who came from a poor provincial gentry background, does not focus his attention to quite such an extent as Turgenev on the noble stratum or on the aristocratic social sphere that Tolstoi’s novels illuminate. Consequently, there is perhaps somewhat less reference to noble francophonie in his writings, but the subject is by no means absent. We have a foretaste of his use of French as a means of mockery or disapproval of what is foreign in his Winter Notes. Here he facetiously coins Gallicisms such as epuz (i.e. épouse [wife]), gantirovat’sia (se ganter [to put on gloves]), and mabish’ (ma biche [my darling]).153 He also quotes French expressions, slogans, or dicta that convey concepts which he believes somehow reflect badly on French life and character.154 However, it is in The Devils, his third and most overtly political novel, first published in 1871–1872, that Dostoevskii most insistently presents readers with linguistic evidence that a certain section of the educated class has been afflicted by a loss of nationality which renders them effete and may lead ultimately to nihilism.155 One conspicuous symptom of such loss is the language-mixing which Russian writers had been ridiculing for more than a hundred years. It is tempting to see Dostoevskii, in this respect, as an heir of Fonvizin, who had mocked code-switching to such good effect in his Brigadier and whose ambivalent and often malicious treatment of the West prefigured Dostoevskii’s.156 The character most prone to language-mixing in The Devils is Stepan Verkhovenskii, the chief representative of the older generation of the intelligentsia, who had been formed in the 1840s. Stepan – who, it has been argued, 152 On Native-Soil Conservatism, see Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism. On Dostoevskii’s thought in general, see especially Scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker. The definitive work on Dostoevskii’s life and literary career in English is Frank’s five-volume Dostoevsky. For penetrating English-language examinations of Dostoevskii’s major fiction see the monographs cited in our bibliography by Peace (1971) and Leatherbarrow (1981), The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, edited by Leatherbarrow, and the collection New Essays on Dostoevsky, edited by Jones and Terry. The recent volume Dostoevsky in Context, edited by Martinsen and Maiorova, contains 35 essays on numerous aspects of the historical background to Dostoevskii’s writings. 153 Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 5, 75, 90–91. 154 e.g. ‘faire fortune’ (to make a fortune; ibidem, 77), ‘suffrage universel’ (universal suffrage; 86), ‘le tiers état c’est tout’ (the third estate is everything; 74), ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity; 78), ‘l’Etat c’est moi’ (the state, it is I; 86). 155 The Russian title of the novel (Besy) is also often translated as The Possessed. 156 See Offord, ‘Beware the Garden of Earthly Delights’, and idem, Journeys to a Graveyard, Chapters 2 and 7. Dostoevskii made references to Fonvizin in his Winter Notes.

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bears a certain resemblance to Chaadaev 157 – cannot conduct a conversation without resorting to some French locution. Indeed, Dostoevskii assigns over 250 French utterances to him in the course of the novel. As nobles of his generation were wont to do, Stepan uses French versions of other characters’ forenames (Lise, Nicolas, Pierre) and French terms of address, such as ‘ma chère’ (my dear), ‘ma bonne amie’ (my good friend), and ‘charmante enfant’ (charming child).158 His speech is filled with French phrases and comments. We find, for example, ‘mais distinguons’ (but let’s make a distinction), ‘c’est très curieux’ (that’s very curious), ‘tout de même’ (all the same), ‘tout est dit’ (that’s an end to the matter), ‘vous avez raison’ (you’re right), ‘tant mieux’ (so much the better), ‘J’ai oublié’ (I forgot), ‘quant à moi’ (as for me), and the ubiquitous ‘enfin’ (finally).159 Stepan uses French for stock conversational responses, exclamations, and interjections.160 Again, French provides him with a rich seam of conversational confidences, fillers, prompts, appeals, and affirmations: ‘entre nous soit dit’ (between ourselves), ‘vous savez’ (you know), ‘voyez-vous’ (do you see), ‘vous comprenez?’ (do you understand), ‘O, croyez-moi’ (Oh, believe me), and ‘vous me pardonnerez, n’est-ce pas?’ (you’ll forgive me, won’t you?).161 Equally, it offers phrases pointing in the direction Stepan wants a conversation to take: ‘parlons d’autre chose’ (let’s talk about something else), ‘passons’ (let’s leave this), ‘et brisons-là’ (and let’s end there).162 As we would expect from our study of elite language practice, Stepan shifts to French for the expression of judgements about other people. ‘Irascible, mais bon’ (Irritable, but good), ‘C’est un monstre’ (He’s a monster), or ‘C’est un homme malhonnête et je crois même que c’est un forçat évadé ou quelque chose dans ce genre’ (He’s a dishonourable man and I even believe he’s an escaped convict or something of the sort), he says of other characters in the novel.163 He also tends to switch into French, or mixes French and Russian, when he makes some self-critical or self-pitying remark. ‘On m’a traité comme un vieux bonnet de coton!’ (I was treated like an old nightcap [i.e. idiot]), he complains.164 Stepan’s shifts into French seem particularly inappropriate when he is pontificating, as he loves to do, about the Russian spirit, the Russian God, 157 See Budgen, ‘Pushkin and Chaadaev’, 36, n. 14. 158 See, e.g., Besy, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 10, 31, 49, 50, 51, 60, 61, 91, 99, 127, 151, etc. 159 Ibidem, 33, 47, 48, 75, 97, 98, 99, 100, 151, 171, 264, 377, 483. 160 e.g., ibidem, 49, 76, 98. 161 Ibidem, 33, 47, 49, 53, 101, 327, 332, 334, 388. 162 Ibidem, 99, 171, 263, 351. 163 Ibidem, 52, 98, 135. 164 Ibidem, 23; see also 53, 65, and especially 327–334.

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or the Russian peasant. If the allusion in French is complimentary, then it sounds patronizing, as when Stepan speaks of ‘notre sainte Russie’ (our holy Russia) or ‘cette Russie que j’aimais toujours’ (this Russia that I always loved).165 He also has the irritating habit of making poor French translations of Russian proverbs and sayings, which he considers witty and chic. He will always belong to Varvara Stavrogina, he says for example, ‘en tout pays’ (in any land), even ‘dans le pays de Makar et ses veaux’ (in the land of Makar and his calves). The Russian expression from which Stepan’s enigmatic remark derives, the narrator explains, is kuda Makar teliat ne gonial (whither Makar did not drive his calves)166 – that is to say, Siberia, a place of exile. What jars most of all is Stepan’s use of French as the vehicle for derogatory remarks about his native land, as in pronouncements of the following sort: Tous les hommes de génie et de progrès en Russie étaient, sont et seront toujours des card-players et des drunkards, qui boivent en binge [All these men of genius and progress in Russia were, are, and always will be card-players and drunkards who go in for binge-drinking].167 Oh my friend, would you believe I felt like a patriot the other day! But then I’ve always been conscious of being Russian… and a real Russian can’t be any different from you and me. Il y a là-dedans quelque chose d’aveugle et de louche [There’s something in there that’s blind and shifty].168

Dostoevskii’s overriding aim in his characterization of Stepan Verkhovenskii is to present the Westernist intelligentsia of his own generation in a negative light. Although Stepan, as a protagonist in The Devils, is a participant in provincial noble society in the post-reform period, Dostoevskii is careful from the early stages of the novel to establish that in his youth Stepan had been a leading Muscovite intellectual figure. Indeed, Stepan had a model in real life, namely the moderate Westernizer Timofei Granovskii, a professor at Moscow University who specialized in the history of Western Europe in the Middle Ages and a man of chivalrous demeanour with exquisite manners and a weakness for gambling.169 Now, Granovskii was indeed plurilingual: 165 Ibidem, 32, 499. 166 Ibidem, 25. 167 Ibidem, 53. 168 Ibidem, 171–172. 169 Ibidem, 8–9, 12. On the relationship of Stepan Verkhovenskii to Granovskii, see Peace, Dostoevskii, 143–144, 320–321 (nn. 5–9), Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals, 76–78, and idem, ‘The Devils’, 75–76.

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he developed an early fluency in French, had a good knowledge of English, and acquired German during a three-year spell as a student in Germany. However, we have no reason to think that either Granovskii – who wrote his scholarly works and lectured in Russian – or other leading figures in the intellectual circles in which Granovskii moved in the 1840s used such a mélange of Russian and French as Stepan during their animated discussions. In his portrayal of Stepan, then, Dostoevskii not only turns a distinguished scholar admired by contemporaries for a certain noble idealism into a vain and egotistical phrasemonger; he also mischievously identifies the habit of French-speaking that characterized high society with the Westernist literary and intellectual community as well. Following the well-established satirical tradition of mocking language-mixing, he thus creates the false impression that the linguistic practice of a section of the intelligentsia which he wished to depict as estranged from native soil coincided with that of the aristocratic social milieu, from which those writers and thinkers were in fact distancing themselves. During a ‘f inal wandering’ beyond the comfortable conf ines of his familiar social milieu, Stepan does eventually arrive at a new spiritual understanding and he finds salvation of a sort, confessing – in almost his last utterance in the novel – ‘J’ai menti toute ma vie’ (I have lied all my life).170 However, his redemption can only be partial, in Dostoevskii’s eyes, for his leaning towards a foreign culture, besides harming him personally, has created a moral vacuum which has been filled by nihilistic members of the younger generation that has come to maturity in the 1860s. The leader of this generation, in The Devils, happens to be the son, Petr, whom Stepan had fathered but forgotten, and who now turns up in the town in which the novel is set as a political conspirator and organizer of revolutionary cells and acts. Members of the younger generation, like their elders, may exhibit some linguistic symptom of the detachment from native soil. For example, Kirillov, another member of the underground, is devoid of sensitivity to his mother tongue and struggles to speak it.171 In this case, the absence of a firm identity rooted in native culture has an ontological consequence: Kirillov has come to the perverted conclusion that suicide, as a proof of self-will, is the ultimate expression of human freedom. It is relevant for our purpose that he prepares for his final act by polishing a 170 Besy, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 10, 489, 506. 171 Ibidem, 75, 94. The nihilist Lebeziatnikov in Crime and Punishent shows the same inability to express himself coherently in his native language: see Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 6, 307.

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suicide note that Petr Verkhovenskii, for his own revolutionary ends, has dictated to him: ‘“Vive la république démocratique, sociale et universelle ou la mort!..” [Long live the democratic, social, and universal republic or death]. No, no, that’s wrong. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort!” [Liberty, equality, brotherhood, or death]. That’s better, that’s better […]’ ‘Wait, a bit more… I’ll sign again in French, you know: “de Kiriloff, gentilhomme russe et citoyen du monde” [de Kirillov, Russian gentleman and citizen of the world]. Ha, ha, ha!’ He started roaring with laughter. ‘No, no, no. Wait! I’ve found the best thing of all, eureka! “gentilhomme-séminariste russe et citoyen du monde civilisé!” [Russian gentleman-seminarist and citizen of the civilized world]’172

Resonant slogans and self-description couched in French have become associated here not merely with detachment from native soil and with revolutionary attempts to break down the existing social and moral order but with human self-destruction. In a pair of short articles published in his Diary of a Writer in 1876, Dostoevskii mounted an even more explicit and characteristically acerbic attack on Russian French-speakers, who, he opined, fell into two categories: those who indisputably spoke French badly, and those (‘the whole of our high society’) who thought they spoke it like Parisians but actually spoke it no better than those in the first category. Although the topic had already been exhaustively discussed in Russian literature, it deserved further attention, for by kowtowing to the French language ‘Russian Parisians’ inevitably enslaved themselves to French ideas as well. They would never think independently if they spoke a ‘stolen’ language, an ‘alien jargon’.173 It was reasonable for Russians to learn French, Dostoevskii conceded in his second article, in order to be able to read French or to converse with French people when they came across them, but not for the purpose of conversing among themselves. To live a higher life and think deeply, Russians needed to speak their native language, but in fact, Dostoevskii argued, members of the upper class only learnt it artificially, after their infancy, by re-educating themselves. In fact, the expression ‘to learn a language’ (obuchit’sia iazyku) was very apt, he mused, invoking the doctrine of Native-Soil Conservatism, because the upper class had been ‘torn away from the people [narod], that is 172 Besy in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 10, 473. 173 ‘Russkii ili frantsuzskii iazyk?’, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 23, 77–80.

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the living tongue [iazyk] (the tongue is the people, in our language “tongue” and “people” are synonyms)’.174 The damage done by the fact that noble Russians did not grow up with their native language, Dostoevskii supposes, would be undone only when they coalesced with the common people.175 Indeed, he goes further, linking language and thought and asserting Russian superiority over other Europeans in a classic statement of the belief that Russian culture transcends others in its universal understanding. Foreign translations of Russian works of literature, such as works by Gogol’ or the seventeenth-century Old Believer, Archpriest Avvakum, Dostoevskii argues, would make no sense, because the European spirit may not be so multivarious [mnogorazlichen] as ours and is more introspectively peculiar [zamknutosvoeobrazen], even in spite of the fact that it has undoubtedly expressed itself in a more finished and distinct way than ours. […] at least one cannot but admit […] that the spirit of our language is indisputably multivarious, rich, multifaceted, and all-embracing, for in its as yet unstructured forms it has already been able to transmit the jewels and treasures of European thought, and we feel that they have been transmitted accurately and faithfully. And this is the ‘material’ that we deprive our children of, and for what? To make them miserable, for sure. We despise this material, we regard it as a coarse, downtrodden [podkopytnym] language in which it is not decent to express high-society feeling and high-society thought.176

Employing a bonne (French maid-servant) to look after a Russian infant, then, is to corrupt and weaken it morally, just as masturbation, Dostoevskii supposes, renders a child physically impotent. By speaking a dead, unnatural language, the Russian will think thoughts that are ‘stunted, light-weight, and cynical’ and his heart will be ‘depraved’. He might become a good ‘son of the fatherland’. (Dostoevskii invokes a concept from the cosmopolitan world of the Enlightenment.) He may be pleased with himself, especially when making speeches which contain foreign ideas and phrases and which are informed by ‘plus de noblesse que de sincérité’ (more nobility than sincerity). And yet, in the last analysis this ‘salon charmer and purveyor of 174 ‘Na kakom iazyke govorit’ ottsu otechestva?’, ibidem, 80–81. The lexical identification of language with tribe is not so exceptional as Dostoevskii seems to imply: see Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe, 161. 175 ‘Russkii ili frantsuzskii iazyk?’, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 23, 82. 176 Ibidem.

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bons mots [fine words]’ is likely to be ‘something without ground beneath him, without soil or fundamental principle [nachalo], an international intellectual mediocrity [mezheumok] swept about by all the winds of Europe’.177 Francophonie is linked once more to dangerous cultural and political currents in the opening chapters of The Brothers Karamazov, a novel written in the period 1878–1880 but set – Dostoevskii tells readers in his prologue178 – thirteen years earlier, that is to say in the late 1860s. Petr Miusov, a cousin of the first wife of Fedor, the depraved patriarch of the Karamazov family, belongs to ‘quite a rich and aristocratic clan’ who owned land adjacent to a renowned monastery in the provincial region in which the action of the novel takes place.179 Miusov has lived in St Petersburg for a while and has spent many years abroad, mainly in Paris, where he had long since settled.180 All his life he had been ‘a European’ and latterly he had been ‘a liberal of the forties and fifties’.181 It is not to his credit, in Dostoevskii’s code, that Miusov is litigious or that his motive for attending a gathering of the Karamazov clan in the monastic retreat of Father Zosima, the saintly elder (starets) of the monastery, may be to relieve his boredom.182 Most damningly, he is a ‘freethinker and atheist’, who may not have been to church for about thirty years183 and who has flirted with liberal and even revolutionary politics. He had come into contact ‘with many of the most liberal men of his time, both in Russia and abroad’, had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and was particularly fond of reminiscing about the Paris revolution of February 1848, hinting that he had almost taken part in the fighting on the barricades himself.184 His affection for Paris and his enthusiasm for European politics soon distract him from the responsibility as a guardian to a neglected child, Dmitrii Karamazov, which he had taken on during a brief return to Russia in the 1840s.185 Miusov, then, resembles Stepan Verkhovenskii in several respects, the most important of which, from our point of view, is that he is a further embodiment of the supposedly typical Francophone nobleman who has lost touch with native soil.186 It is also notable that by the middle of the 177 Ibidem, 83–84. 178 Brat’ia Karamazovy, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 14, 6. 179 Ibidem, 7. 180 Ibidem, 16. 181 Ibidem, 10. 182 Ibidem, 31. 183 Ibidem, 31, 32. 184 Ibidem, 10. 185 Ibidem, 11. 186 Miusov too has been regarded as a thinly disguised Chaadaev: see Budgen, ‘Pushkin and Chaadaev’, 36, n. 14.

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nineteenth century, Dostoevskii again seems to be suggesting, the allure of Paris was not so much social and cultural as intellectual and political. Fedor Karamazov, having climbed socially as a result of his marriage to Adelaida Miusova, also enjoys delivering himself of witty remarks in French in the course of the clownish and offensive speeches that he cannot resist making, to the embarrassment of his sons. His neighbour Miusov, he gibes, ‘likes there to be plus de noblesse que de sincérité’ (more nobility than sincerity) in his speech, whereas he himself likes there to be ‘plus de sincérité que de noblesse’ (more sincerity than nobility).187 In Fedor’s case too, recourse to French is associated with irreligion, but of a scandalous and shocking kind. Musing blasphemously on whether there are hooks suspended from the ceilings of hell, he quips that if there were to be justice in this world then ‘Il faudrait les inventer’ (It would be necessary to invent them), thus parodying the remark of Voltaire that Ivan Karamazov eventually quotes accurately: ‘s’il n’existait pas Dieu il faudrait l’inventer’ (If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him).188 Going beyond Fedor Karamazov and even further towards the demonic end of the moral axis that Dostoevskii creates in The Brothers Karamazov, we find that the uneducated Smerdiakov, who turns out to be the parricide, is also tainted by the attraction to the French language that seems to go with godlessness. As we learn towards the end of the novel from the doctor who treats him in hospital after his epileptic fit, Smerdiakov now spends all his time learning French words, using an exercise-book which he keeps under his pillow and in which someone has written out the words for him in Russian letters.189 Asked later by Ivan why he has been doing this, Smerdiakov says he is preparing himself in case one day he should visit ‘happy parts of Europe’.190 Finally, the devilish apparition who converses with Ivan after his last meeting with Smerdiakov, in the course of which Ivan’s moral responsibility for the murder that Smerdiakov has committed is conclusively borne in upon him, is a Francophone Russian gentleman who has fallen on hard times now that serfdom has been abolished but who still possesses sufficient social capital to be an effective sponger. From the 187 Brat’ia Karamazovy, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 14, 82; see also 122, 124. The recurrence of and play with the phrase ‘plus de noblesse que de sincérité’ points to a link between Dostoevskii’s polemical thoughts in his above-mentioned articles in The Diary of a Writer and his fictional treatment of the subject of francophonie in The Brothers Karamazov. 188 Ibidem, 23, 214. 189 Brat’ia Karamazovy, vol. 15, 48. We are grateful to Elena Grechanaia for drawing our attention to this point. 190 Brat’ia Karamazovy, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 14, 53–54.

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beginning to the end of Ivan’s nightmare, this seedy Satan, ‘“qui frisait la cinquantaine” [who was bordering on fifty], as the French say’, punctuates his flippant dissection of Ivan’s soul with French banalities and pleasantries: ‘c’est noble, c’est charmant’ (that’s noble, charming), ‘c’est chevaleresque’ (that’s chivalrous), ‘C’est du nouveau, n’est-ce pas?’ (That’s new, isn’t it?), ‘Quelle idée!’ (What an idea!), ‘Ah, mais c’est bête enfin!’ (Oh, that’s stupid !), and ‘Monsieur, sait-il le temps qu’il fait ? C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors…’ (Do you know what the weather’s like? One wouldn’t put a dog out in it).191 For good measure, the devil delivers himself of frivolous remarks that echo other characters’ interest in Cartesian or Voltairean speculation (‘Je pense donc je suis’ (I think therefore I am) and ‘Le diable n’existe point’ (The devil doesn’t exist), he quips).192 He even admits to delight in Catholic condonation of carnal sin, relating the story of a pretty Norman girl whom he has heard as she confesses her latest lapse with the penitent words ‘“Ça lui fait tant de plaisir et à moi si peu de peine!”’ (It gives him so much pleasure and causes me so little trouble) – and with whom her aged Jesuit confessor has promptly made his own assignation!193 Nor has the elder Zosima, who came from a landowning family and was educated in the Cadet Corps in St Petersburg, been unaffected by the imported French way of life. We are told that Zosima is about sixty-five at the time when The Brothers Karamazov is set, so we may deduce that the misspent youth that he recalls in his later years was lived in the 1820s, when he was a drunken, debauched army officer.194 More precisely, it was in 1826 that Zosima behaved in a way that he came to consider particularly shameful. He severely struck his batman and ridiculed an opinion someone had expressed about ‘an important event of that time’, which is obviously the Decembrist Revolt, thus provoking a duel.195 French-speaking is an aspect of this deluded worldly phase of Zosima’s life, as it is described in his recollections, which his novice, Alesha Karamazov, jots down after his death: I spent a long time, almost eight years, in St Petersburg, in the Cadet Corps, and with my new education stifled a great many of my childhood impressions, although I didn’t forget anything. In return, I picked up so many new habits and even opinions that I was transformed into an almost 191 Ibidem, 70, 73, 75, 84. 192 Ibidem, 77, 76. 193 Ibidem, 81. 194 Ibidem, 28, 268. 195 Ibidem, 269–270.

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savage creature, cruel, and absurd. I acquired a veneer of politeness and society manners along with the French language, but all of us, myself included, regarded the common soldiers who served us in the Cadet Corps as just animals.196

However, in Zosima’s case, the encounter with foreign culture is life-enhancing, in that it takes him to the moral depths which many of those characters in Dostoevskii’s novels who are most capable of salvation have to plumb before redemption can begin. The decision to cast off a false persona, with all the values and behaviour that signified it, including French-speaking, is a crucial moment in Zosima’s journey towards spiritual wisdom. Understanding of the social world in which Zosima passed his early adult years, with its French values and manners and the practice of Frenchspeaking, gives us deeper insight into Dostoevskii’s utopian prescription for a native solution to the profound crisis in which Russia found itself in the 1870s, as the revolutionary movement gathered pace. In Book 5 of The Brothers Karamazov, entitled ‘Pro and contra’, Ivan Karamazov had railed against injustice in God’s world and made a powerful case, in his ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’, for an authoritarian state that would rule over a compliant populace by reliably providing for their material needs.197 In Book 6, ‘The Russian Monk’, Dostoevskii counters Ivan’s arguments, not through continuation of rational disputation but through presentation of a seemingly random collection of Zosima’s teachings about the power of Christian love. Zosima envisages a true brotherhood in which each individual accepts personal responsibility for collective happiness, thereby laying the foundation for an age of universal harmony.198 Brotherhood thus conceived (bratstvo), as Dostoevskii had argued in his Winter Notes, was far removed from the brotherhood ( fraternité) advocated by the (mainly French) utopian socialists of his time, who were essentially concerned, Dostoevskii insisted, with egoistic rights.199 Equally, it was diametrically opposed to the imported ‘society’ of the privileged elite in which Zosima had revelled in his youth, for high society too – as Ivan Turgenev, Tolstoi, and other Russian writers agreed – was insincere, egoistic, superficial, cold, hypocritical, and vain.

196 Ibidem, 268. 197 For Ivan’s ‘Rebellion’ and ‘Grand Inquisitor’, see ibidem, 215–241. 198 Ibidem, 257–294. 199 Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 5, 78–81.

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Even the ambiguity of the Russian epithet svetskii, finally, indicated the incompatibility of high society with Dostoevskii’s Christian – and essentially Slavophile – vision of an ideal community. The Russian word svet (world) came in the eighteenth century to acquire the same secondary meaning as the French word monde, that is to say ‘society’ in the sense of the high social stratum or the refined and fashionable milieu (le grand monde and le beau monde respectively, terms we have used in this book). The way of life of this society may be described in Russian as svetskii. At the same time, svetskii may mean ‘worldly’ in the sense of ‘temporal’, ‘lay’, or ‘secular’; that is to say, it is an antonym of tserkovnyi (ecclesiastical) or dukhovnyi (spiritual). The consequent fusion of the conception of the high social sphere with the secular realm and the apparent exclusion of Russian spirituality from refined society help to explain the objections that Russian cultural nationalists of Orthodox persuasion, such as Dostoevskii, raise about the westernized mentality and the type of social life embraced by the Russian nobility from the eighteenth century. Only when the typical ways of Europeanized society, including its infatuation with a foreign language, were renounced, so they believed, could Russians begin to live the apolitical life of the spirit to which they were best suited. * In sum, treatment of Franco-Russian bilingualism in the classical Russian novel fulfils several purposes. Although the works of fiction we have examined cannot be regarded as entirely reliable sociolinguistic accounts of Russian life during the ages of Nicholas I and Alexander II, the very numerous instances of French words, expressions, and passages in the speech and letters of Turgenev’s, Tolstoi’s, and Dostoevskii’s characters enhance the social realism of their prose fiction. All these writers also use language practice as a means of characterization and moral evaluation. At the broadest level, their perceptions of the functions and effects of the use of French by the Russian nobility enrich the discussion of national destiny to which their works made such an important contribution. Writing in the post-Crimean age, when national pride had been wounded by military defeat and when the government was belatedly considering and implementing social, economic, judicial, and other reforms, these novelists draw on hackneyed views of French character (alleged superficiality, showiness, insincerity, hypocrisy, pretence, deceitfulness) in order to express reservations about the enduring influence of French language and culture in their nation. They continue the century-old debate about Russia’s relationship to

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Europe, expressing anxiety about the fragmentation of a supposedly organic national community at a time of modernization. In the last analysis, they also decisively overcome their nation’s cultural dependency by bringing Russian literature into full bloom. In the process, they render obsolete any concern about the imitativeness of Russian culture. Indeed, two of them, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, attribute to Russians an exceptional receptivity to other cultures, which is itself a sign of originality, they suppose, and which might enable Russia – so Dostoevskii famously argued in 1880 – to bring into being a new universal civilization.200

200 The locus classicus of this argument is Dostoevskii’s speech of 1880 during the festivities celebrating the unveiling of a statue to Pushkin in Moscow: see ‘Pushkin’, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 26, 136–149.

Conclusion The functions of French in imperial Russia We have sought in this book to illustrate the multiple functions of the French language in Russia more thoroughly than we think has previously been done in a single work. Broadly speaking, French – that is, the standardized variety of the French elite – was an instrument which helped to bring Russia much closer to Europe.1 It was a lingua franca through which Russians could engage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the world beyond the borders of their empire. Mastery of it helped them to absorb Europe’s knowledge, enjoy its artistic culture, follow its fashions, partake of its material comforts, and become acquainted with its intellectual achievements. A collection of French books was a staple element in a well-stocked noble library. It may have been particularly convenient for Russians sometimes to use French when discussing certain subjects, such as medicine, political affairs, and some cultural matters, and not only when foreigners who had no Russian were present. This was because texts that underpinned knowledge in many fields, from architecture to fashion, were written in French, or had been translated into French, which thus served as a vehicular language, and because French provided the lexicon with which to pursue the subject, at least until expertise in it had been acquired in Russia. French was also becoming the predominant diplomatic language in eighteenth-century Europe. Knowledge of it thus furthered the grand strategic aim of Russia’s eighteenth-century sovereigns to enter the European geopolitical arena and, indeed, to assert their new power on the international stage. French was a court language too: courtiers’ command of it added lustre to the image of Russia abroad, for the prestige of a great power was bound up with the impression made on foreign visitors by life at its court. It was a royal language, inasmuch as it was associated with the royal family. It was an imperial language as well, insofar as it served as a lingua franca among ethnically diverse elements of Russia’s social, military, and civilian administrative elite. For the nobility in particular, French had numerous functions. On a relatively trivial level, it could be used as a secret language, in which speakers might 1 Or perhaps we should say ‘to bring it much closer to Europe again’, for the Eastern Slavs may have had more fruitful contact with the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages, when Kiev was their capital, than in the early modern period that followed the centuries of Tatar domination in the Russian lands and the Renaissance in the West.

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discuss plans, opinions, and disputes without fear of being understood by their domestic servants or other social inferiors. Far more importantly, it was a vehicle for the polite conversation that distinguished members of the emerging beau monde from those whom the elite did not consider worthy to belong to that world. It thus functioned in high society – as it did elsewhere in Europe at that time – as a prestige language which supported nobles’ conception of themselves as self-respecting members of a refined international corporation. Command of it was a sign of social and cultural status, like a coat of arms, a library, a collection of paintings or objets d’art, the ability to dance, ride, and mingle with foreign peers, to be at ease in ‘good’ society – in short, an integral part of the social identity of members of the upper strata of the Russian nobility. To know French was therefore to possess weighty cultural capital. Hence the great attention devoted to the acquisition of it in the education of the children of the highest and most ambitious noble families. After all, if a language is seen as a commodity, then competence in it, Einar Haugen has observed, is ‘a skill with a market value that determines who will acquire it. The price of a language is the effort required to learn it’ (or to have one’s children learn it, we should add), ‘and its value is the benefits its use will bring to the learner.’2 Delving more deeply into the function of French in Russian high society, we can easily see that it was a language of politeness, richly stocked with compliments and other respectful formulae for every social occasion and contingency. Use of it was indicative of the change in social and personal relations, at least among the upper social strata, which occurred in eighteenth-century Russia as connections with western courts, aristocracies, and cultural and intellectual milieus multiplied. French-speaking was instrumental in the development of a new type of relationship between men and women, as Russians assimilated norms of gallant behavior, and learned, as Zhivov put it, how to speak about love. However, French was also a language of wit, the vehicle for conversation in which members of the social elite expected to be entertained, for it was one of the imperatives of noble sociability that one should never be dull. This function, we contend, produced an undertow that ran in the opposite direction to the surface current of politesse with which French was associated. That is to say, besides being a language of civility, French could also serve as a language of disparagement or even malice. The witticisms and sententious remarks in French with which such documents as the ‘memoirs’ of Fedor Rostopchin and the diaries of Valuev are strewn are redolent of a knowing and cynical world in 2 Haugen, ‘Language Fragmentation in Scandinavia’, 114; paraphrased by Romaine, Bilingualism, 322.

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which solidarity seems to derive not so much from human empathy as from common adherence to codes of dress, manners, conduct, and language use. It therefore seems quite natural that the subject of Russian francophonie would feature conspicuously in the case that was eventually mounted against the supposedly cold, soulless, frivolous, indeed licentious world of high society by cultural nationalists such as the Slavophiles and novelists such as Tolstoi and Dostoevskii when, in the mid-nineteenth century, a new cultural climate – to which we shall return shortly – began to prevail. French also served many purposes as a written language in Russia. Some of these purposes too were associated specifically with noble culture. French was a language of noble correspondence, which might be regarded as an extension of the social life that was conducted verbally in the drawing-room, the ball-room, the salon, and even the Masonic lodge. Carefully observing epistolary etiquette acquired through close study of this literary form, nobles used letters written in French to maintain family relationships and friendship with their peers, which was highly prized. Correspondence in French between parents and children, moreover, could reinforce the expected norms of social behaviour and help to cultivate a certain aesthetic taste, a sense of bon ton. The choice of an elite linguistic code, in correspondence as in conversation, fostered the noble’s sense of exclusiveness and refinement. French was also a vehicle for various types of amateur writing (the keeping of diaries, the recording of journeys undertaken, the compilation of albums, and so forth) which were valued as evidence of noble accomplishment and which provided material for discussion in noble social circles. In this function, French was widely used by women as a form of self-expression that was considered socially acceptable. It was often chosen for occasional poetry too and for treatises introducing subjects, ranging from music to mineralogy, that were relatively unknown to a Russian readership. It is significant, though, that French did not really prosper in Russia as a medium for literature of a more serious and professional kind, especially for the engaged prose fiction in which classical writers reflected with unsurpassed profundity and humanity on moral, psychological, social, and historical questions. The community that produced that kind of literature, for publication, was interested not so much in advertising its social status, enlivening social life, or even spreading knowledge as in building a corpus that would help to identify Russia as a nation and implicitly assert Russia’s cultural autonomy. As a written language in Russia, French also served important purposes besides those that are plainly associated with the cultivation and preservation of noble sociability and exclusivity. It had propagandistic and polemical functions, serving as a medium through which Russians could seek to improve the

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image of the empire in other European countries, or even transform the way in which Russia was perceived abroad. For example, Francophone Russians or their foreign associates might defend the government’s policies or advertise Russians’ cultural creativity, by such means as translation of the emerging literature in the vernacular. They might also challenge negative representations of Russia and its people. Sometimes sovereigns themselves encouraged such initiatives, as did Elizabeth, or even contributed to them personally, as did Catherine II. In other instances, they persuaded willing foreigners (Voltaire was the most notable) to undertake such tasks. The ability to reach a foreign readership depended partly on the establishment of extended networks with the European Francophone press and European publishers, a process which began as early as the age of Peter the Great and in which Francophone subjects of the Russian Empire played an important role. From the mid-eighteenth century, a Francophone press existed in Russia too, if not continuously. This press served various purposes at one time or another, promoting government policy, catering for a Francophone Russian readership hungry for information about the western world, or symbolically indicating the status of St Petersburg as a European capital. For the nineteenth-century literary elite and intelligentsia, ‘the language of Europe’ had yet another function: it was sometimes used – by Chaadaev and Tiutchev, for instance – as a means with which to engage in pan-European speculation on broad historical or geopolitical trends. When the Russian literary and intellectual community ceased to support the imperial state, moreover, French could just as well be used – as it was by Nikolai Turgenev and Herzen – to express oppositional opinions and to publicize them in Europe, thus carrying internal debate into the international arena. Having dwelt on the multiple functions of French in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, we should also strongly emphasize the limits of its use. While French-speaking undoubtedly did percolate down through layers of the noble estate below the aristocracy with which it was primarily associated, it was nowhere near universal in the Russian nobility broadly defined, pace some scholars who have commented on the subject. A large number of men and women who could be classified as belonging to the nobility lacked the means to acquire French, or at least to attain a level of proficiency in it that would hold them in good stead in society. Nor did French fulfil all functions even in the highest strata, in which users had the best command of it and in which it was most widely used. For example, etiquette did not permit the use of French to sovereigns in all circumstances or its invariable use with superiors or inferiors in the bureaucratic hierarchy. It was not always the language used in correspondence between Francophone nobles. Noble men and women who did conduct their correspondence in

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French did not all write to one another in French all of the time, or even keep to French throughout a particular letter. Furthermore, as extant correspondence amply demonstrates, the practice of code-switching was widespread, despite purists’ objections to it and the ridicule with which it was treated in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century drama. Again, French was of no use when a nobleman was giving orders to peasant labourers or peasant soldiers, in other words when he was performing roles – as gentleman farmer and army officer – that were fundamental to his conception of himself. Nor could it be used by noblewomen (who, it is often supposed, were peculiarly prone to express themselves in French) when they gave instructions to their domestic servants. Nor, finally, was it a language of worship in the Orthodox Church, which had a presence on most estates where there was a community of Russian peasants and to which many nobles remained deeply attached. In general, then, we resist the temptation to produce a schematic summary of language use among the Russian nobility as a whole or among those elements of that class who undoubtedly did have French, pleasing as such schemas might be.3 We are reluctant to conclude, for example, that there were clear-cut, long-lasting, and more or less inflexible rules that governed subjects’ choice of language when they addressed the sovereign or men’s and women’s preference for French or Russian when they spoke or wrote to one another. After all, choice so often depended on numerous variables, such as relative linguistic competence, individuals’ cultural disposition, or the current state of relations between speaker or writer and addressee, not to mention other well-known drivers of language choice, such as situation, subject-matter, or the purpose of communication. Nor should it be forgotten, as we consider the broad generalizations which are sometimes made about language practice in imperial Russia, that languages are used in social, political, and cultural contexts and that societies, polities, and cultures are dynamic. Patterns of usage, far from being static, are in constant flux.

The changing climate in which French was used Recalling the broad historical and cultural context in which we have located our study of Russian francophonie, we should pick out three factors, above all 3 For an example of such a schematic account, see Figes, who – basing himself on Lotman – writes that in the eighteenth century ‘the use of French and Russian had demarcated two entirely separate spheres: French the sphere of thought and sentiment, Russian the sphere of daily life’ (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 103).

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others, which prevented French, in spite of its importance in the functions we have just described, from gaining quite the dominance in the linguistic market-place and the hold on Russian cultural life that is sometimes attributed to it. These factors help also to explain the gradual fall in the stock of French vis-à-vis Russian in the long term. The first of these factors was the rise of national consciousness that accompanied empire-building, especially in the reign of Catherine II. National pride and self-confidence were fuelled by military success and, more generally, by the emergence of Russia as a major European power, which Karamzin celebrates in his Letters of a Russian Traveller and which subsequently inspired his History of the Russian State. They were particularly pronounced in the 1780s, after Russia’s victory in the first of Catherine’s Russo-Turkish Wars and the annexation of the Crimea. They found cultural expression in various ways, especially – to take those things that relate to linguistic matters – in quickening interest in the codification of Russian and in a purism which prompted opposition to lexical borrowing from French and to the mixing of French and Russian. It is no coincidence that it was in this decade that the Russian Academy was founded, new policies were introduced in the Academy of Sciences, and reforms were undertaken in educational institutions attended by the nobility, all of which had the effect of promoting the Russian language just as French was advancing in aristocratic society. These developments reflected the spread of European ideas to which Betskoi had already been attracted in the 1760s – ideas in the fields of pedagogy and psychology which postulated a need to educate children in their native language rather than a foreign one. They also facilitated assertion of the autonomy of Russian statehood and cultural tradition and recognition of Russian as a language of imperial administration. This perception of cultural and linguistic independence was important at a time when the Russian state was repositioning itself among the European empires. In this respect, the thrust of policy in the reign of Catherine anticipated the ideas on which thinking about language would be based in the early nineteenth century. We cannot rule out the possibility, finally, that the example of the Habsburg monarchy, where reforms aimed at strengthening the position of German in the administration and education were being implemented, 4 played a part in shaping the way in which the rising Russian national consciousness found expression in the linguistic and cultural domains. 4 On the position of German in the Habsburg lands, see Khavanova, ‘Multilingualism versus Proficiency in the German Language’, and Horbec and Matasović, ‘Voices in a Country Divided’.

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The second of the contextual factors we have borne in mind was the ascendancy, across Europe and over the period in question, of a nationalistic outlook which prized the culture of a specific ethnic group over a more cosmopolitan view of the world which sought rational and universally applicable truths and solutions to problems. Although the rise of modern Russian national consciousness began in the mid-eighteenth century, as Rogger showed long ago and as we have just reiterated, it is perhaps safe to agree with Zhivov that the ‘ideology of enlightened absolutism’, which was regnant in the second half of the eighteenth century, ‘was fundamentally universalist and was concerned with states, not nations’.5 By the turn of the century, though, the writings of Herder and Hamann and Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (and, in Russia, the writings of Shishkov and other conservative thinkers of the age of Alexander I) had advanced a conception of languages as manifestations of the unique character of peoples who had futurity. Fumaroli, lamenting the decline of French as the ‘universal’ language exalted by Rivarol, commented on this development: the French Revolution ‘had awakened the “genius” of nations, rousing in each the jealous love of its own language’.6 Much of the debate about language use that we have traced in this book takes place against the background of this rise of a cultural form of nationalism. Proponents of this type of nationalism, as Anthony Smith, for example, has defined it, leaned towards the view that a language expressed the distinctive essence of the ethnos with which it was most closely associated. As cultural nationalism gained momentum, spurred on by Romantic topoi about the superiority of feeling, naturalness, and sincerity as against reason, artifice, and pretence, so a negative view of the westernized social world as cold, cynical, duplicitous, and hypocritical came into sharp focus, affecting attitudes towards the use of the French language and the denizens of the monde where it was spoken. The Russian writers and intellectuals who expressed such views, moreover, often discarded the belief that the nobility was the fine fleur of a nation, preferring to think that it was the common people who represented a nation’s true spirit. The third factor that affected attitudes towards language use was the social and political development at which we have just hinted, namely the appearance in nineteenth-century Russia of a public sphere populated by educated individuals – writers, critics, scholars, journalists, editors, publishers, and so on – with an independent cast of mind. This literary community and intelligentsia could no longer be relied upon to support the 5 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 371. 6 Fumaroli, When the World spoke French, xxv–xxvi.

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sovereign and the imperial project as enthusiastically as many eighteenthcentury nobles had done. In any case, numerous members of it (Belinskii and Chernyshevskii, for example) were not nobles, or at any rate not high-ranking or wealthy nobles (Dostoevskii comes to mind), or if they were of noble origin then they distanced themselves from the values of the class in which they originated (as did Panaev and Lev Tolstoi). Whereas the eighteenth-century nobility had played the leading role in building and administering the empire and in return enjoyed social precedence, the nineteenth-century literary community and intelligentsia assumed an air of moral authority and staked a claim to leadership in the nation-building enterprise. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that this community revalued the assets typically prized by the nobility, such as wealth, rank in the state hierarchy, reputation in society, and royal approval, often setting greater store by simplicity, showing indifference to prosperity, and sometimes even relishing official disfavour. The diminishing prestige of knowledge of French in Russian cultural life from the mid-nineteenth century can be associated with this social change. Mastery of French had served the interests of the loyal high nobility, who enjoyed their golden age in the reigns of Catherine II and Alexander I. In literary and intellectual circles, in which men and women from the middling or lower strata of the nobility and from non-noble backgrounds were prominent by the mid-nineteenth century, the attitude towards French-speaking was different. Command of French (which in any case many members of the literary and intellectual community did not have, at least to the level required for conversation in high society) was no longer the valued attribute it had once been; indeed, public display of this attainment could be stigmatized. The contextual factors we have just reiterated affected the perceptions of language use in imperial Russia that have come down to us through the beguiling writings of authors of the nineteenth-century golden age of Russian literature. It is as well to bear these factors in mind as we attempt, finally, to account for the discrepancy between our findings about actual language use, on the one hand, and some of the assertions that have often been made about it, on the other.

Cultural borrowing and language use in grand narratives about Russian culture The subject of cultural borrowing and its implications and effects had a central place in the enormous corpus of pre-revolutionary Russian literature

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and thought. Since the adoption of a foreign language is one of the most demonstrative manifestations of cultural borrowing, the use of French by the Russian nobility naturally crops up repeatedly in attempts to interpret Russia’s past and in speculation about its future. As Lamarche Marrese has observed, it was the use of language – both native and foreign – that inspired educated Russians and foreign observers most profoundly to ponder the dilemma of Russian “exceptionalism” in regard to cultural borrowing and which gradually emerged as the focus of the debate over Russian national identity.7

How exactly, though, have the main assumptions about language use, the significance of language choice, and linguistic competence that we have encountered been woven into the influential grand narratives about Russian history and culture to which we have also referred? And to what extent do the findings we have presented about actual language use bear out the perceptions that emerge from the memoirs, polemics, and literary writings we have examined, perceptions which have been endorsed by some of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on Russian cultural history? One narrative, which dates back to the period in the mid-eighteenth century when French was just beginning to take hold among the Russian aristocracy, concerns the degree to which eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Russian culture was imitative. The acquisition of foreign languages by Russians and examples of their verbal and written facility in them are repeatedly invoked, by foreigners and Russians alike, as evidence of the rapid assimilation of Russia into ‘Europe’ and thus of the epically transformative effect of the reign of Peter the Great. At the same time, this achievement could be construed in a negative way, as a sign that Russians merely had a talent for mimicry. This inference was underlined by persistent use of the topos of apes and parrots. The topos helped foreigners to continue the critical western discourse about the Russian ‘other’, which had begun in Muscovite times, by disparaging Russians as superficial and unoriginal. For Russians themselves, the topos must have been particularly offensive in an age of empire-building, when martial prowess seemed to deserve recognition. It caused resentment at cultural subservience (which is already felt in Fonvizin’s writings) or self-doubt (which was eventually expressed most famously, in French, by Chaadaev). 7

Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 716.

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Another important narrative in which discussion of cultural borrowing by the Russian social elite features prominently is constructed around the belief that Russia is in fact exceptional, indeed unique. By the mid-nineteenth century, towards the end of the period on which we have concentrated, this ‘exceptionalist’ thesis had been made to yield a highly positive message. Russian civilization, it was argued, had bases – the Orthodox faith, the brotherly instincts or the communitarian impulses of its people, for example – which would enable Russians to build a utopia free of the flaws of the capitalistic, contractual societies inhabited by the egocentric and materialistic peoples of Western Europe. When marshalled by Dostoevskii, the exceptionalist argument had a millenarian dimension. Far from being apes or parrots, Russians were the one true Christian people; they would reunite the Christian world, absorbing the best of other cultures and transcending them in a new phase of human civilization. When applied to the heyday of noble francophonie in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though, the exceptionalist argument has frequently been put forward in a regretful tone. The unusual degree and intensity of cultural borrowing, exemplified by foreign-language use, to which the Russian noble class had been exposed is presumed to have had peculiarly detrimental effects, both on the nobility as a caste and on nobles (especially noblemen, rather than noblewomen) as individuals. Exposure to Western European culture supposedly created the so-called ‘superfluous men’ portrayed in Russian literature from the 1820s to the 1860s, that is to say enervated, alienated men living without a moral compass. No doubt, such individuals were to be found in reality. Chaadaev himself was thought to be a model for this literary type. However, as a generalization about the Russian nobility throughout the period with which we are dealing, the ‘alienation’ thesis does not seem tenable. We cannot safely say that a significant proportion of people in the higher echelons of the nobility that were most affected by foreign culture were paralyzed by anomie. As far as the undoubted disillusionment of many public-spirited, civic-minded, conscious-stricken nobles (and non-nobles) of the age of Nicholas I was concerned, we might just as well ascribe it to political oppression as to cultural borrowing. According to another strand in the ‘exceptionalist’ narrative, cultural borrowing split the Russian nation into two parts, namely a Europeanized elite, a ‘privileged and patented handful’ of a hundred thousand, on the one hand, and a mass of fifty million ‘simple Russians’, on the other.8 Proponents 8 The words quoted are from Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 5, 51.

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of this ‘two-nation’ thesis have viewed the rapid assimilation of western culture in eighteenth-century Russia as a kind of cultural colonization and have blamed it for the fracture that they observe, as well as for the supposed malaise of the nineteenth-century elite. However, one may wonder – if it is accepted that the nation was indeed divided – to what extent cultural borrowing and foreign-language use by the nobility were the causes of the gulf that separated Russian nobles from peasants. We have suggested that other social, economic, or cultural factors, such as the existence of the Table of Ranks and, above all, the survival of serfdom in Russia up until 1861, might just as plausibly be adduced to explain both the mentality of the social elite and its distance from the peasantry in the imperial period.9 We have also tried to read statements made by Russian writers who have considered noble French-speaking symptomatic of the supposed fracture in the nation in the light of our understanding of the particular viewpoint to which the writer in question wished to lead his readers in a given work. Sometimes the writer’s point of view could be vindicated by some form of the ‘two-nation’ argument. The little-known Fircks provides the most opportunistic example. In any case, we believe that claims about the exceptional nature and consequences of westernization and cultural borrowing in imperial Russia can only be pushed so far, although we do acknowledge that every national case is of course different. With regard to language use, it should be emphasized that the adoption of a code other than the vernacular used by the majority of a population has been a very widespread means of cultural and social differentiation. Norbert Elias refers to this phenomenon in his classic study of the refinement of manners in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe, in which he contrasts a nobility that was predominantly French-speaking and civilized on the French model with an intelligentsia of largely non-noble origin that used a vernacular.10 Stephen Barbour makes a similar point in the more recent volume he has co-edited on language and nationalism: in much of Europe, ‘traditional elites who, if highly educated, would have been schooled in Latin and Greek, or in French, contrasted with a new intelligentsia who were versed in the local language’.11 As for Russia, the country was not exceptional, as Lieven notes in his comparative study 9 The argument that the nation was destructively divided by eighteenth-century cultural borrowing presupposes the existence in pre-Petrine Muscovy of an organic community of the sort postulated by the Slavophiles, that is to say a community with a stronger sense of social cohesion than the post-Petrine imperial state. This presupposition seems utopian. 10 Elias, The Civilizing Process, 8–9. 11 Barbour, ‘Language, Nationalism, Europe’, 15.

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of several European aristocracies, in having aristocrats who spoke French as their first language and some of whom even regarded their native culture and tongue as ‘provincial and plebeian’.12 Indeed, French, as a leading student of the history of that language has observed, ‘became the badge of identity of the aristocracies of Europe’.13 Nor is there anything unusual about the sort of debate to which the use of French in Russia gave rise. Anxiety about the effect of French cultural and linguistic influence and satirical treatment of the use of the French language in preference to a vernacular were commonplace in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century European literature, as we pointed out in our examination of Russian comic drama.14 It suited proponents of the ‘two-nation’ thesis not only to create the impression that the use of French by those who were proficient in it was pervasive but also that Francophone nobles would not or could not deploy Russian. The incongruence between assertions about nobles’ ignorance of Russian and the actual language use to which primary documentary sources attest, like several other aspects of the Russian language situation to which we have drawn attention, has been well explained by Lamarche Marrese: observations on the inability of kinfolk and acquaintances to speak fluent Russian and lamentations about the quality of instruction in their native language became a common trope. Indeed such remarks were so common – particularly when read against the backdrop of the vast body of correspondence that nobles of both sexes composed in Russian – it is tempting to conclude that discussions of language in memoir literature were less a description of the real state of affairs than a means of calling attention to the 18th century as an aberration in Russian history and the problematic status of cultural borrowing.15

Our own evidence, from private noble correspondence to the entire corpus of literature published in Russian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Francophone nobles from Sumarokov and Fonvizin, through Karamzin, to Pushkin, Tiutchev, Ivan Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoi, also indicates that suggestions that nobles widely spurned the Russian language or had somehow 12 Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 2. 13 Lodge, French, 184. 14 It is worth repeating here that the exceptionalist argument, whatever its other merits or defects, is in practice impossible to substantiate, because it rests on an assumption of omniscience about societies in other places and times, in all of which the sort of phenomena observed in Russia must – if Russia truly was exceptional – have been absent. 15 Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 719.

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forgotten it should be taken with a large grain of salt. Even the tales we read in some memoirs about the petty punishments inflicted on noble girls for lapsing into Russian16 are telling in this regard. While they suggest a continuing determination on the part of mid-nineteenth-century noble families and the tutors to whom they entrusted their offspring to instil a good knowledge of French in young noblewomen, they by no means prove that noble girls were losing the capacity to use Russian. On the contrary, the tales would seem to suggest that noble maidens were all too liable to slip back into the language they had learned in infancy. What memoirists’ statements about ignorance of Russian may reflect, though, is a belief that a noble could only be said to be accomplished in a language when he or she was able to employ it in high society. The functional competence required to tell a serf to plough a field or a maid-servant to put on the samovar may have seemed to be of little worth. Or, to put it another way, the value of the less polished language in the repertoire of speakers whose bilingualism was asymmetrical may have been low. There is one further thread in the critical narrative about Russian francophonie to which objections may be made. Proponents of the arguments we have identified about the exceptional nature of Russian culture, the alienation of the Europeanized Russian nobility, and the rift brought about in the Russian nation by cultural borrowing from the West seem implicitly to accept an essentialist view of a language as a means of giving expression to the consciousness and spirit of a particular ethnos. They therefore make no allowance for the possibility that individuals may have multiple or hybrid identities, let alone that they may reconcile an outward-looking cosmopolitanism and plurilingualism with a strong sense of their own nationality, as Tolstoi’s Pierre Bezukhov is able to do. Once again, Dostoevskii’s writings can be used to exemplify an extreme form of one of the arguments put forward by cultural nationalists. In his early work, Dostoevskii likened people of cosmopolitan outlook to worn coins on which it was no longer possible to detect any image or inscription that would enable one to identify them.17 Or again, such people resembled homunculi, artificial creatures produced by some physician in a laboratory.18 In later work, Dostoevskii raised his argument about the threat posed to national 16 See, e.g., Lelong, ‘Vospominaniia A.K. Lelong’, 393, cited by Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 56; Figner, Zapechatlennyi trud, vol. 1, 77–78. 17 See ‘Knizhnost’ i gramotnost’’ in Dostoevskii, PSS, vol. 19, 29, and ‘Dva lageria teoretikov’, ibidem, vol. 20, 6; see also vol. 19, 149. 18 Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh, ibidem, vol. 5, 59.

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identity by cultural borrowing to an existential level. Characters such as Kirillov and Stavrogin in The Devils, from whom a sense of nationality has drained away and who express themselves mechanically and with difficulty in Russian, of which they have no instinctual understanding, end their days by committing suicide. Like other strands in the narrative about division in the Russian nation, the perception of bilingualism and biculturalism as liable to weaken attachment to Russia had a long history. In the eighteenth century, the topos of the disloyal Russian estranged from his native land by his Gallomania found expression predominantly in satirical representations of the fop who slavishly followed French fashion, larded his speech with French expressions and Russian Gallicisms, and denigrated his own language and culture. (The association of French-speaking with foppery and a society in which women were socially prominent, we have suggested, may have had particular resonance in an age of aggressive military expansion.) Then, in the midnineteenth century, the topos gained fresh potency. At first sight, this fact might seem surprising, for by that time Russian had established itself as the primary medium for education at all levels and as a literary language in which writers could express themselves in all genres as capaciously as they could in French. However, Russian francophonie had renewed topicality in an age when cultural nationalism was on the rise and non-noble individuals were participating in increasing numbers in the professionalized literary community and intelligentsia. French-speaking could now be perceived not so much as the folly of individual nobles deficient in patriotism but as a defining feature of an elite who had been separated by Russia’s eighteenthcentury westernization from the mass of their compatriots. And yet, cultural borrowing and use of a foreign language, we have argued, do not necessarily indicate identification with a foreign people or support for a foreign power. Russian nobles who spoke French among themselves in the first half of the nineteenth century were not betraying through their language choice some affinity with the French nation or allegiance to the France of the First Empire or the July Monarchy. We cannot even be sure that they were identifying themselves with France under the ancien régime. Rather, they were signalling that they belonged to a pan-European elite, whose Russian branch they represented (generally with national pride). We do not believe, then, that our examination of the use of French in imperial Russia indicates a widespread and destructive loss of attachment to Russia, whether Russia be conceived as an imperial fatherland (otechestvo) or native soil (rodina). Rather, we think it bears out the point made by Schönle and Zorin as they consider the similarities between Russia’s eighteenth-century

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modernization and the later westernization undertaken in Meiji Japan and Ottoman and Kemalist Turkey. In all three cases, ‘the imitation of the “advanced” West was marked by a specific constellation of admiration, love, envy, and animosity that did not in the least preclude a strong growth of patriotic feelings, but actually implied them’.19 Indeed, we may go further. The biculturalism and bilingualism of the Europeanized post-Petrine Russian nobility, far from being a source of disorientation and moral decay among the ruling class, might alternatively be seen as means by which the nation became enlightened, developed a highly educated public sphere, and created a distinctive literary and intellectual (and musical) culture of the first rank. Moreover, plurilingualism and the openness to other cultures to which it might lead could themselves become features of the identity of the patriotic, dutiful, and self-respecting Russian noble.20 We saw an idealized embodiment of a positive multilingual identity in Volkonskaia’s Russian Count Vladimir in her French tale ‘Laura’. Thus, it is just as reasonable, we believe, to say that Russian nobles were distinguished by multiculturalism, plurilingualism, and an attendant breadth of outlook and depth of humanity as that they were exceptional by virtue of the apathy and inertia of which the non-noble literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov spoke in his famous review of Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, a late portrait of the noble ‘superfluous man’.21 Because they stood ‘a little outside Europe’, Lieven has also argued, ‘educated Russians became immersed in all its national cultures’, many of which they could appreciate in their original languages. ‘The pull between national traditions and alien cultures created an elite more uncomfortable but also more creative than its English and German peers.’22 The cosmopolitanism with which their European education endowed the Russian nobility, Figes too has observed, accounts for ‘one of Russia’s most enduring cultural strengths. It gave the educated classes a sense that they belonged to a broader European civilization, and this was the key to the supreme achievements of their national culture in the nineteenth century’, many of whose outstanding figures ‘combined their Russianness with a European cultural identity’.23 It is possible, then, to view Russian multilin-

19 Schönle and Zorin, ‘Introduction’, 2. 20 In this respect, as in others that we have mentioned, the Russian noble was not exceptional in the European context, as noted by Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 720. 21 ‘Chto takoe “oblomovshchina”?’, in Dobroliubov, SS, vol. 4, 307–343, especially 314. 22 Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 19, 179. 23 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 54.

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gualism in quite a different – and much more positive – light than that in which it tends to be cast in discourse about Russia’s cultural borrowing. We also doubt, finally, whether the presence of French in eighteenth-century Russia had a retarding effect on the development of the vernacular there. ‘In some parts of Europe, from the Dutch Republic through the German states to Russia’, Peter Burke has argued, ‘the use of French by the upper classes probably delayed the rise of a standardized vernacular, since it was less necessary for distinguishing between people of high and low status.’24 We wonder, though, whether this claim is valid in the Russian case. It seems more probable to us that it was the late development of print culture, rather than the use of a foreign language by the elite, that delayed the standardization of Russian, which in fact began to take place (as attested by the production of grammars and the compilation of the Dictionary of the Russian Academy, as we have said) at the time, in the second half of the eighteenth century, when francophonie began to flourish among the elite. We are more inclined to think that the presence of French actually stimulated native language consciousness, the production of a literature in Russian, and the development of the Russian literary language. This it did partly by generating anxiety among writers (who did not all belong to the aristocratic elite) about cultural autonomy. Such anxiety was keenly felt, for instance, by Fonvizin.25 Equally important, French provided models, fulfilling an exemplary function of a sort that has been well described by Leonard Forster in remarks on the literary culture of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. The polyglot fashion that reigned among writers who could compose works in Latin, French, Italian, and other languages, Forster argued, by no means prevented them from paying the closest attention to questions of style and diction in Dutch, in which they produced works that are now among the classics of Dutch literature. Indeed, it was precisely their knowledge of other literatures that enabled these golden-age men of letters ‘to apply high critical and intellectual standards, and it was their practical acquaintance with problems of literary craftsmanship in other languages that sharpened their sense of what could be achieved in Dutch’.26 * 24 Burke, Languages and Communities, 108. 25 Marrese also comes to the conclusion that it was ‘the thorough assimilation of European cultural norms that prompted educated Russians at the end of the 18th century to embark on a prolonged search for “Russian tradition” and to indict their predecessors as “foreigners” in their own country’ (Lamarche Marrese, ‘“The Poetics of Everyday Behavior” Revisited’, 739). 26 Forster, The Poet’s Tongues, 41.

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The broad subject of foreign-language use, and in particular the use of French at court and among the upper strata of the noble elite in imperial Russia, is bound up, then, with major questions which preoccupied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian writers and thinkers. Was Russia qualitatively similar to the West, albeit backward, or was it sui generis? Was it part of Europe from a cultural point of view as well as geopolitically? Should Russia follow its own separate path? Should it borrow in order to catch up with and possibly even overtake the West? If so, should the borrowing be indiscriminate or selective? Did the nobility represent the flower of the nation? Or did the essence of the nation lie in the common people? What authority did the intelligentsia have to speak for Russia? Linguistic matters had a bearing on all these questions. Language debate, moreover, was punctuated by topoi – for example, about the character of peoples and the nature of high society – that were common in the broader debate about national destiny. It was said or implied, for instance, that facility in foreign languages proved that the Russian people were imitative or, on the contrary, that they had a peculiar ability to assimilate other cultures in a productive way. Again, the French were shallow, frivolous, and concerned only with appearances; Russians, who in their native settings were plain and straightforward people, risked corruption by developing their own Francophone social sphere on the foreign model. However, the findings of our investigation of language use cannot be conveniently mapped on to the frameworks within which Russian writers and thinkers debated the questions we have just outlined and which have also furnished ready-made paradigms for some scholarly interpretations of the history of Russian culture. According to some grand narratives about Russian cultural development, Russia was exceptional, indeed unique. It was a nation, many said, that was divided into two parts: the social elite who performed a foreign role in a highly theatrical way and the uneducated mass who were mere spectators at this masquerade. Eighteenth-century cultural borrowing from the West was largely responsible for this rift in the nation. After 1762, when Peter III issued his manifesto exempting the nobility from compulsory service, the Europeanized nobility became alienated from Russian life and in many cases from the state as well. Consequently, they suffered varying degrees of anomie. Foreign-language speaking exacerbated the rift, disorienting nobles who ceased to serve and dissolving their sense of Russianness. Undeniably, hypotheses of these sorts lead to stimulating insights. Often, though, they appear on close inspection to be false, misleading, or at least dubious. They are excessively schematic, tending to reduce a reality that was in fact complex, untidy, inconveniently variegated,

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dynamic, and inconstant to a static construct that can be imagined in simple binary terms. After all, it is not so unusual or unnatural for humans to be functionally bilingual as we might infer if we attach credence to the language attitudes expressed in some quarters at times of rising cultural nationalism, when plurality, diversity, or hybridity seem suspect and language comes to be regarded as a key attribute of nationality. It is also possible, pace the Slavophiles, Dostoevskii, and their ilk, for individuals to adopt foreign habits and practices without compromising their national identity, let alone experiencing ontological crisis. Indeed, the achievement of some new synthesis of cultural leanings and linguistic competencies may even produce a strong sense of self. This, we would argue, was a productive outcome of the tensions generated by Russia’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engagement with the world beyond its western border. Anxiety about the derivative nature of Russian culture, exemplified by the practice of noble francophonie, stimulated the production of a literature, in Russian, which represents the outstanding achievement of the cultural and intellectual elite of imperial Russia. The awakening which drove this project of national, social, and personal self-definition was in no small measure due to the diligent acquisition and widespread use of the French language in Russia for many purposes and to the absorption of the linguistic, stylistic, cultural, literary, and intellectual riches and the numerous and diverse concepts and values which the French language bore.

Bibliography Archival sources Any material in square brackets in some entries of this section of the bibliography is an interpolation of our own into the archivists’ descriptions of the contents of the file in question. In some other entries, our description of an archival document does not coincide in all respects with the description provided by the archive itself, because inspection of the document in question reveals some error in the archivist’s description. In round brackets at the end of each entry we give the date(s) of the file and the language(s) in which the material is couched. All file titles that are in Russian in the archives have been translated here into English, but titles that are in French in the archives have been left in that language and are in quotation marks (these are original titles of the documents). In the first entry of each collection (see e.g. F. 2 in AVPRI) we indicate in a shortened form the title of each collection. For the key to abbreviations used in this and other sections of the bibliography (as well as in the footnotes to our text), see pp. 29–31. AVPRI (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi imperii, Moscow) F. 2 (Internal college matters), op. 1, d. 936 – Correspondence of the College of Foreign Affairs with Austrian ministers and consuls in Russia on matters concerning subjects (1763–1771). F. 2, op. 1, d. 1457 – Memoranda of chancellors’ conferences with foreign representatives in Russia (1744–1745, Russ., Fr., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 238 – Rescript from Catherine II to Obreskov, the resident in Constantinople, with a printed manifesto appended (in Russian and German) about her accession to the throne and a copy of a note on same to foreign diplomatic representatives in St Petersburg (1762, Russ., Ger., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 348 – Circular letters to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad informing them of the visit of Catherine II to Kazan’, the dispatch of [Catherine’s] Instruction to the commission set up to draft a new legal code to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad, and other matters (1767, Russ., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 361 – Circular edicts and rescripts (1769, Russ., Ger., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 363 – A circular letter from Count N.I. Panin to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad about the disagreement between the Russian and French ministers in London and about Russian diplomatic representatives keeping their places at ceremonial occasions and not ceding them to French ministers (1769, Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 364 – Letter-book of circulars from the College of Foreign Affairs to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad (1769–1793, Russ., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 367 – Circular letter to Russian diplomatic and consular representatives in Spain and Portugal notifying them that Moroccan and Algerian vessels were sailing in the same waters during the voyage of a Russian squadron (1770, Fr.).

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The French L anguage in Russia

F. 2, op. 6, d. 376 – Circular letter to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad about the conclusion of a peace with the Ottoman Porte and an appended list of ministers awarded medals in this connection (1775, Russ., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 412 – Circular letter to Russian diplomatic representatives in London, Stockholm, and Copenhagen about the departure of Count Rumiantsev on a foreign trip (1779, Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 413 – Official circular to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad notifying them of the setting-up of a general consulship in Moldavia and Wallachia and the appointment of Sergei Loshkarev as the consul general there (1780, Russ., trans. into Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 418 – Official circular to Russian diplomatic representatives abroad about a visit by Catherine II to Mogilev to meet the Austrian emperor Joseph II (1780, Fr., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 477 – Official circular to all Russian diplomatic representatives abroad notifying them of the setting-up of consulates in provinces of the Ottoman Porte (1772, It.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 568 – Letter (copy) from Ivan VI notifying the British king of Russia’s declaration of war against Sweden (1741, Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 570 – Letter of credence (copy) from Elizabeth Petrovna to the Prussian king Frederick II about the appointment of Count Karl Hermann von Keyserling as minister plenipotentiary to Berlin (1746, Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 571 – Letter (copy and two translations) recalling the minister plenipotentiary in Regensburg and Berlin, Count Karl Hermann von Keyserling (1746, 1748, Ger., trans. into Lat.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 579 – Letter (copy and translation) from Catherine II in reply to a letter from the Saxon prince Charles about the death of his father Frederick Christian (1764, Fr., trans. into Russ.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 580 – Letter (copy and trans.) recalling the consul to the Crimea, Lieutenant-Colonel Nikiforov (1765, Russ., Tat.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 597 – Letter of recall (copy and trans.) from the Genoese Republic about the minister Stefano Rivarola (1784, It., trans. into Russ.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 601 – Letter (copy) from the Swedish king Gustav Adolph [Gustav IV Adolph] in reply to a letter from Catherine II notifying him about the wedding of Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich to Anna Fedorovna (1796, Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 602 – Reply from the Swedish king Gustav Adolph [Gustav IV Adolph] to a document from Catherine II notifying him that Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna had safely given birth (1796, Ger., Swed.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 603 – Letter of credence from Catherine II on the appointment of Major-General Budberg as ambassador extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary in Stockholm (1795, trans. into Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 604 – Letter of credence (copy and translation) from the Tuscan duke Ferdinand on the appointment of Baron Emmanuel Seddeler as minister plenipotentiary to Russia (1796, It., trans. into Russ.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 605 – Letter of credence (copy) from the Duke of Württemberg on the appointment of Count Friedrich Philipp Karl Pickler-Limpurg [?] as minister plenipotentiary to Russia (1797, Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 611 – Document (copy) about Austria joining a treaty of alliance concluded by Russia and Sweden in 1724 (1726, Lat., Russ.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 616 – Treaty (copy) between Russia, Austria, and Denmark about friendship and the mutual guarantee of lands belonging to them in Europe and defence of the Austrian succession by force of arms (Copenhagen, 1732, Russ., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 647 – Convention (copy) between Russia and Austria about continuation of the war with Prussia and a declaration about future steps regarding Prussia (St Petersburg, 1760, Russ., Fr.). F. 2, оp. 6, d. 652 – Treaty of alliance (copy) concluded between Russia and Austria and materials on this matter (1760, Russ., Ger., Fr.).

Bibliogr aphy

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F. 2, op. 6, d. 686 – Convention (copy) about renewal of the treaty of alliance of 22 May (2 June) 1746 between Russia and Austria and about Russia’s entry into the war against Prussia. St Petersburg (1757, Fr., Russ.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 687 – Deed (draft copy) from Empress Anna Ivanovna granting an amnesty to the city of Gdansk, a diploma guaranteeing rights and freedoms, and a receipt from Russia for a contribution of a million thalers, (1736, Russ., with trans. into Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 688 – Deed (draft copy) from Empress Catherine II about the renewal of the rights and freedoms granted to the city of Gdansk by Empress Anna Ivanovna (1764, Russ., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 696 – Treaties (copies) about the marriage of Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna to Charles-Frederick, Duke of Holstein (1724, 1727, Russ., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 701 – Treaty (copy) between Russia and Denmark about establishment of rules for exchange of ships’ salutes (text from the Danish side) (1730, Ger.). F. 2, оp. 6, d. 702 – Ratification (copy) by the Danish king Christian of a treaty on 30 October 1730 between Russia and Denmark on ships’ salutes (Copenhagen, 1730, Dan., trans. into Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 718 – Convention (printed) between Russia and Denmark about maritime neutrality (St Petersburg, 1800, 1801, Russ., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 733 – Declaration (copy) of renewal of the treaty of alliance of 6 (17) July 1733 between Russia and Poland (1733, Russ., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 745 – Treaty of alliance (copy) between Russia and Prussia, and papers relating to this matter. St Petersburg (1740, 1741, Russ., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 757 – Convention (copy) between Russia and Turkey on the establishment of borders between these powers in accordance with the Treaty of Belgrade of 7 (18) September 1739 and the ratification of this convention by Russia and Turkey (1739, Turk., trans. into It. and Russ.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 783 – Ratification (in print) by Elizabeth Petrovna and King [Adolf] Frederick of Sweden of the treaty of perpetual peace concluded in Åbo (1743, Russ., Ger.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 797 – Convention (copy) concluded in St Petersburg between Russia, Britain, and Holland on the conditions relating to the provision of 30,000 Russian troops to afford assistance to Britain and Holland (1747, Russ., Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 800 – Declaration (copy) to the effect that the use of French in the act associating Russia with the convention of 12 (21) March 1757 may not serve as a precedent for parties writing other international documents (St Petersburg, 1757). F. 2, op. 6, d. 806 – Treaties (copies) between Russia and Austria and Russia and Prussia about the first partition of Poland (1772, Fr.). F. 2, op. 6, d. 807 – Convention (copy) on matters relating to the third partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Ratification (copy) of this convention by Paul I and the Polish king Stanisław Augustus (1797, Fr.). F. 32 (Russian relations with Austria), op. 1, d. 702 – Letter-book of rescripts to the ambassador in Vienna, D.M. Golitsyn (1787). F. 133 (Chancery of the Russian minister of foreign affairs), op. 459, d. 1197 – ‘Campagne de France, Tolstoy E.’ (1805). F. 133, op. 468, d. 1943 – ‘Campagne de Turquie, Prince Prosorofsky, correspondance avec le prince Kourakine’ (1808, Russ., Fr.). F. 133, op. 468, d. 2014 – Correspondence of Admiral Chichagov, commander-in-chief of the Danube Army (Russ., Fr., 1812). F. 133, op. 469, d. 7699 – ‘Europe. Coup d’œil jetté sur l’Europe de l’observateur de St. Pétersbourg, octobre 1803’. F. 133, op. 469, d. 7701 – ‘Europe. De l’équilibre politique de l’Europe. Par le c-te Soltycoff en 1808’. F. 133, op. 469, d. 7714 – ‘Europe. Histoire politique de l’Europe (1740–1748) par le c-te de Besborodko’ [no date].

592 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 161 (St Petersburg Main Archive), op. 28 (England), d. 72 – Treaty on friendship and trade (1766, Russ., Fr.). F. 161, op. 28 (England), d. 98 – Agreement about reciprocal call-up of men liable for military service (1917, Russ., Fr.). F. 161, op. 28, d. 150 – Supplementary agreement to a Russo-Prussian postal treaty (1872, Russ., Ger.). F. 161, op. 28, d. 312 – Manifesto from the Russian tsar about an amnesty for participants in the Polish Revolt of 1830 and punishment of the leaders of the revolt (1831, Russ., Pol.). F. 161, op. 28, d. 347 – Agreement between Russia and Prussia about postal matters (1852, Russ., Ger.). F. 161, op. 28, d. 635 – Minutes of an international conference about seal-hunting (1911, Eng.). F. 167 (Russian embassy in Berlin), op. 509 (1), d. 8 – ‘Correspondance avec le prince de Repnin’ (1798, Russ., Fr.). F. 174 (Russian mission in Hamburg), op. 545, d. 15 – ‘Correspondance avec les consulats de Russie’ (1827–1837, Fr., Russ., Ger.). F. 180 (Russian embassy in Constantinople, 1798–1853), op. 1 (517), d. 4 – Rescripts from Paul I to the Russian envoy in Constantinople, V.S. Tomara (1801, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 8 – Rescripts from Alexander I to the Russian envoy in Constantinople, A.Ia. Italinskii (1803, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 18 – Instructions from Alexander I and the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nesselrode, to the Russian envoy in Constantinople concerning Moldavia and Wallachia (1816, Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 125 – Letters from the vice-chancellor of Russia, Nesselrode, to the Russian envoy in Constantinople, Butenev (1830, Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 127 – Reports to Vice-Chancellor Nesselrode from the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Butenev, from Bucharest and the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, P.I. Rickman [?] (1831, Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), dd. 557 (1800)–593 (1842) – [Correspondence with Russian consulates]. F. 180, op. 1 (517), dd. 2302–2341 – [Correspondence with foreign missions in Constantinople]. F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2697 – Correspondence of Russia’s chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Ozerov, with Colonel Kovalevskii about the situation in Montenegro (1853, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2704 – Letter of an official in the Russian Ministry of Finance, Doballich, to the chargé d’affaires of the Russian mission in Constantinople, Minchaki [?] (Odessa) about a change in the way money is to be paid to the Russian mission in Constantinople (1821, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2710 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Tomara, with the military governor in Astrakhan’, Knorring, about matters relating to trade and Russian protection of the Armenians (1801–1802, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2862 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Italinskii, with the military governor of Moscow, Tormasov (1815, Fr., Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2865 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Butenev, with the military governor of Moscow, Golitsyn (1838, Fr., Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2886 – Correspondence of the Russian envoy in Constantinople, Butenev, and the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Titov, with the governor of Novorossiisk, Vorontsov (1839–1841; Russ., Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2887 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Butenev, and the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Titov, with the governor of Novorossiia and Bessarabia, Vorontsov (1840, Russ., Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2891 – Correspondence of the Russian mission in Constantinople with Fabre, the head of chancery of the governor-general of Novorossiia (1842–1845, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2900 – Correspondence of the Russian envoy in Constantinople, Italinskii, with the governor of the city of Odessa, Richelieu (1811, Fr.).

Bibliogr aphy

593

F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2925 – Correspondence of the Russian mission in Constantinople with the governor of the city of Odessa, Mogilevskii (1827, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2928 – Correspondence of the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Rickman [?], with the governor of the city of Odessa, Bogdanovskii (1831, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2940 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Butenev, with the governor of the city of Odessa, Levshin (1836–1837, Fr., Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2943 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Butenev, with the military governor of Odessa, Gagarin (1840, Russ., Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2992 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Strogonov, with the military governor-general of St Petersburg, Miloradovich (1821, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 2995 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Titov, with the civilian governor of Poltava, Oznobishin (1848, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3005 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Strogonov, with the governor of the Crimea, Lavinskii (1816, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3123 – Correspondence of the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Tomara, with the minister of finance, Vasil’ev (1800–1802, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3124 – Correspondence of the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Tomara, with the president of the College of Commerce, Gagarin, about matters relating to trade (1800–1801, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3128 – Correspondence of the Russian chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Tomara, with the Russian procurator general, Bekleshev (1801, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3144 – Correspondence of the Russian mission in Constantinople with the ministers of finance Gur’ev and Kankrin (1822–1835, Russ., Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3147 – Correspondence of the Russian mission in Constantinople with the Russian ministers of education Golitsyn and Uvarov (1824–1843, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3154 – Dispatches from the Russian mission in Constantinople to the minister of war, Chernyshev (1833–1834, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3155 – Correspondence of the Russian mission in Constantinople with the Ministry of the Imperial Court (ministers Volkonskii and Shuvalov) (1833–1850, Russ., Fr.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3182 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Tomara, with the commanders of military vessels (1799–1802, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3187 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, Tomara, with Vice-Admiral Kartsev (1800, Russ.). F. 180, op. 1 (517), d. 3340 – Correspondence of the chargé d’affaires at the Constantinople mission in Odessa, Ozerov, with the commander-in-chief of Russian troops in Moldavia, General Gorchakov, and the Russian consul general in Bucharest, Kotsebue (1853, Fr.). F. 340 (Collection of documents belonging to officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), op. 811 (R.A. Saburov, ambassador in Berlin), dd. 1–3 – Saburov’s diary, written during his time in Berlin (1879–1884, Fr.).

GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow) F. 109 (Third Department of the Chancery of His Imperial Highness), op. 1a, d. 3 – Letter signed by Annette, to Elisaveta Alekseevna Suvorshchikova and other persons (1825–1826, Russ., Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 8 – Agents’ reports and notes on the investigation into the Decembrist affair (1826–1827, Russ., Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 35 – Remarks from the head of the Third Department to M.Ia. von Fock (1830–1831).

594 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 109, op. 1a, d. 37 – Note about the three Turgenev brothers: Aleksandr, Nikolai, and Sergei (1832, Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 39 – Unsigned letter to the Third Department about the arrival in Moscow of a box from Irkutsk with letters from Decembrists (1820s–1830s, Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 49 – Letter with information on the connection between Princess Volkonskaia and N. Veksel’ about the material circumstances of the Volkonskii family (1865, Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 54 – Agents’ reports on observation of students at the Institute of the Corps of Communications Engineers (1827, Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 122 – Letters from the chief of gendarmes, Prince V.A. Dolgorukov, to M.D. Gorchakov and memoranda of the Third Department about the activity of Polish émigrés and the assistance given to them by A.I. Herzen with regard to the revolutionary movement in Europe (1860, Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 134 – Agent’s memorandum about what the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows about Russian internal policy and the national liberation movement in Poland and what the London police know about the activity and intentions of A.I. Herzen (1862, Fr.). F. 109, op. 1a, d. 175 – Agents’ reports and a memorandum about the engineer V. Bossovskii who was living in St Petersburg and maintained relations with A.I. Herzen (1867–1868, Fr.). F. 279 (Iakushkins), op. 1, d. 69 – [Letters to I.D. Iakushkin from] Valerii Levashev (1844–1847, Fr.). F. 279, op. 1, d. 119 – Diary of Anastasiia Vasil’evna Iakushkina (no date, Fr.). F. 573 (Meyendorff), op. 1, d. 467 – Diary of Petr Kazimirovich Meyendorff (1816, Fr.). F. 601 (Nicholas II), op. 1, d. 1123 – Nicholas II to the King of Romania (no date, Eng.). F. 601, op. 1, d. 1145 – Letters from Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna (the wife of Grand Duke Paul Aleksandrovich) to Nicholas II (1883–1891, Eng.). F. 601, op. 1, dd. 1147a (no date), 1148 (1899–1914), 1149 (1915), 1150 (1915–1916) – Letters from Empress Alexandra Fedorovna to Nicholas II (Eng.). F. 601, op. 1, d. 1161 – Letters from the Prince of Baden, Maximilian, to Nicholas II (1886–1914, Eng.). F. 601, op. 1, d. 1196 – Letter from Victoria, Queen of Sweden, to Nicholas II (1908, Eng.). F. 601, op. 1, d. 1256 – Letters from Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna (wife of the Prince of Greece) to Nicholas II (1906–1913, Eng., Russ.). F. 601, op. 1, d. 1294 – Letters from Empress Maria Fedorovna to her son, Grand Duke Nicholas Aleksandrovich (1879–1892, Russ., Fr.). F. 601, op. 1, d. 1295 – Letters from Empress Maria Fedorovna to Nicholas II. There are letters from Empress Alexandra Fedorovna in this file (1894–1902, Russ., Fr.). F. 601, op. 1, dd. 1296 (1903–1909), 1297 (1910–1917) – Letters of Empress Maria Fedorovna to Nicholas II (Russ., Fr.). F. 632 (Bartenevs), op. 1, d. 54 – [Letters to P.A. Barteneva] from Nadezhda Arsen’evna Barteneva, her sister (1840–1864, Fr., Russ.). F. 632, op. 1, d. 55 – [Letters to P.A. Barteneva] From Nikolai Arsen’evich Bartenev, her brother (1850, Fr.). F. 643 (Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna, daughter of Emperor Alexander III, wife of Duke P.A. Oldenburg, then [wife] of N. Kulikovskii), op. 1, dd. 2 (1894–1895), 3 (1895), 4 (1896), 5 (1896–1897), 6 (1897), 7 (1897), 8 (1898), 9 (1898–1899), 10 (1899), 11 (1899–1900), 12 (1900), 13 (1900–1901), 14 (1901), 15 (1901–1902), 16 (1902), 17 (1902–1903), 18 (1903–1904), 19 (1903–1904) – Diary of Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna (Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, dd. 34 (1886–1905), 35 (1906–1914), 36 (1915) – Letters and telegrams to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from her mother, Empress Maria Fedorovna (Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, dd. 38 (1886–1889), 39 (1900–1903), 40 (1909–1914) – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from her sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Aleksandrovna (Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 45 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from her brother Nicholas Aleksandrovich (the Emperor Nicholas II) (1891–1915, Eng. with fragments in Russ.).

Bibliogr aphy

595

F. 643, op. 1, d. 61 – Telegram to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Grand Oncle Guillaume’ (1892, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 63 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘cousin Alix’ (1899, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 64 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Aunt Alix’ (Аlexandra, Queen of Great Britain) (1890, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 65 – Letter to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Alfred’ (1886, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 66 – Letter to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Andrew’ (1895, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 67 – Letter to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Henry Bate’ (1896, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 68 – Letter to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Ronnie Bоdley’ (1903, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 69 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Boris’ (1890, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 72 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from Victoria (Toria), daughter of Queen Alexandra of Great Britain (1888–1915, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 73 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from the King of Greece, George I (1891, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 74 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘George’ (1894–1900, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 79 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Ellen’ (1894–1900, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 83 – Letter of congratulation to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Charles’ (no date, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 91 – Letter to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna signed ‘Aunt Louise’ (no date, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 93 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from Marie Louise of [Hanover and] Cumberland (1898–1901, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 99 – Letters [to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna] signed ‘Nanna’ (no date, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 101 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from Iurii Olsuf’ev (1893–1900, Eng.). F. 643, op. 1, d. 119 – Letters to Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna from Irina and Sergei Sheremetev (1901–1903, Russ.?). F. 647 (Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, née Princess Charlotte of Württemberg, wife of Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich), op. 1, d. 20 – Notes of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna ‘Events in November and December 1825’ (1825, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 21 – Notes of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna about women’s education (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 22 – Notes of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna ‘Discourse about the French Revolution of 1789’ (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, dd. 23 (1838), 24 (1839), 25 (1849) – Diary of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 26 – Album of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Pushkin’s poem ‘The Commander’ copied out (1849–1850, Russ., Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 27 – Reminiscences of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna about her early years (1839 or later, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 28 – Notebook of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna for 1865 (1865, Fr. with fragments in Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 42 – N.M. Karamzin’s memoir ‘On Ancient and Modern Russia’ (1810) (no date, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 44 – M.M. Shcherbatov’s work ‘On Statistics in Discussion of Russia’ with a preface by Mikhail Zablotskii[-Desiatovskii] (1855, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 46 – Unsigned memoranda ‘On the Internal State of Russia’ and ‘On Civil and Social Improvements in Russia’ (1855, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 47 – Memorandum by Valuev ‘Thoughts by a Russian in the Second Half of 1855’ (discussion of the reasons for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and a critique of the system of internal governance) (1855, Russ.).

596 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 647, op. 1, d. 49 – ‘Register of Matters Examined in the General Meeting of the State Council for February 1857’ and a preliminary letter from the secretary of state V. Butkov to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (1857, Russ.) F. 647, op. 1, d. 50 – Memorandum by Petr Dolgorukov ‘On the Internal State of Russia’ (1857, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 51 – Memorandum by an unidentified author ‘Thoughts on the Newly Proposed Administrative Structure for Policing’ (1858, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 53 – Outline of N.N. Nezvanov’s ‘Thoughts of a Russian Citizen’ (on the need to carry out reforms in the way the state is governed and in education) with an accompanying letter from S. Taneev (1859, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 55 – Unsigned memorandum with plans for reform of the machinery of government (1850s–1861, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 56 – Memorandum by D. Obolenskii ‘Remarks on the Plan for a New System of Legal Proceedings in Russia’ (1862, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 58 – Memorandum by Zabolotskii about the need to Russify the western provinces (1862, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 59 – Letters to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna from ‘the chief leader and representative of the Karaites’, Firkovich, with a request for help to obtain permission for the Karaites to resettle from Lithuania to Çufut-Kale in the Crimea and a memoir about same from Firkovich to the governor of the Crimea (1863, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 64 – Memorandum by Waechter ‘Draft Law about Censorship in the Russian State’ (1864, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 71 – Memorandum by an unidentified individual on the history of the organization of governance in Russia (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 74 – Memorandum by an unidentif ied individual on the shortcomings of the structure of government in Russia (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 75 – Unsigned memorandum ‘Civil Legal Proceedings in Russia’ (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 76 – Unsigned memorandum with a description of reforms of government machinery in 1802 (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 77 – Memoranda by an unidentified individual about systems of urban government and the rights of town-dwellers in Prussia, France, and Russia (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 82 – Unsigned memorandum about peasant reform in Austria (1849, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 122 – Memorandum by Plater about the work of the editorial commissions [discussing the terms of the emancipation of the serfs] (1859, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 126 – Letters from Sergei Lanskoi to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna about the peasant reform (1860–1861, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 128 – Memoranda of Hofmeister Venevitinov with remarks about the draft of the editorial commission on peasant reform (1860, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 137 – Unsigned memorandum about the position of the peasants in the Ukraine after the peasant reform (1864, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 149 – Excerpts from a memorandum by the Duke of Mecklenburg with his proposals on the peasant reform (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 150 – Excerpts from a memorandum by Petz ‘On the Abolition of Serfdom in Russia’ with an outline of his plan for reform (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 155 – Unsigned memorandum ‘Official Information about Implementation of the Peasant Reform in the Provinces of Kaluga and Tver’’ (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 156 – Unsigned memorandum about a plan for peasant reform in the Ukraine with remarks by Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (no date, Fr. with fragments in Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 170 – Unsigned memorandum about the position of the enserfed peasantry in Germany (no date, Ger.).

Bibliogr aphy

597

F. 647, op. 1, d. 185 – Unsigned memorandum about the state of the Russian army (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 205 – Plan by de Roberti to set up a credit bank in Russia and a list of candidates for the bank’s administrative council (1863, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 211 – Memorandum by the German banker S. Simundt with a proposal for a loan to the Russian government, in lieu of the internal loan planned by the minister of finance von Reutern (1867, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 213 – Memorandum by Lobschtein about the financial state of Russia and the plan to set up a national bank (1857, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 219 – Unsigned memorandum about the number of German colonies in Russia (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 220 – Unsigned memorandum with an outline of the bases of the system of taxation and its shortcomings in Russia (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 221 – Memorandum by Leich [?] about the financial state of Russia and means of ameliorating it (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 224 – Unsigned memorandum about the general importance and role of credit papers, Britain’s national debt, and financial management in France (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 228 – Letter from F.V. Jeppe [?] to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna with a description of the state of animal husbandry in Rostock (1850, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, dd. 238, 239 – Memoranda by Balabin about the organization of two types of industry in Russia: production of albumen and cosmetics (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 240 – Memorandum by Johnson about the factors impeding the development of agriculture in Russia and the steps needed for it to develop (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 243 – Unsigned memorandum about the state of wine-making in Russia (no date, Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 246 – Unsigned memorandum ‘On the Russian Peasant Commune’ (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 247 – Memorandum by an unidentified author ‘On Agronomy’ (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 249 – Unsigned memorandum about the length of Prussian railways (1850, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 251 – Memorandum by Mal’tsev with a decription of a plan to build a southern railway line in Russia from St Petersburg to the Crimea (1853, Fr.). F. 647, оp. 1, d. 261 – A memorandum by A. von Nurisell [?] ‘The Russian Railway Network and Use of it in Practice’ (1864, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 272 – Memoranda by Gils about methods of teaching geography (1832, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 274 – Inspector’s report on St Peter’s School and the Princess Oldenburg Institute about the work of these educational institutions (1843, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 276 – Memorandum by an unidentified individual ‘On Philosophy Teaching at University’ (1849, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 280 – Unsigned memorandum with a reference for Professor Zabelin and a list of professors at Moscow University (1855, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 283 – Unsigned memorandum ‘Some Considerations on the Importance of Primary Education in the Russian Empire’ (1860, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 284 – Note about non-payment of a royalty to Mendel’shtam by the Ministry of Education (1860, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 285 – Report of the Russian Music Society for 1859–1860 (printed version) and memorandum [by Baroness Edith Fedorovna von Rahden] with a list of the society’s forthcoming activities (1865, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 293 – Statutes of the Northern Archaeological Society (1864, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 294 – Booklet – Five edicts from Alexander II relating to the organization of education in the Kingdom of Poland (1864, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 295 – Reports from M. Ol’khina to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna about the work of the Mariinskii Women’s Institute (1864–1865, Russ.).

598 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 647, op. 1, d. 297 – Unsigned report about an international congress that took place in Bern on the advancement of social sciences (1865, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 305 – Memorandum by Dr. Kurtman [?] ‘Letters on the Education of Women from the Upper Class’ (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 308 – Memoranda by Marianna Pekka [?] on the organization and methodology of teaching vocal arts (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 310 – Memorandum (by Colonel Rostovtsev) on the teacher’s responsibility for choice of assessment of pupils (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 311 – Unsigned memorandum about a plan to organize a rural commune consisting of detainees in Petropavlovsk harbour (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 312 – Unsigned memorandum about a plan to reorganize the Smolny Institute as a pedagogical institute (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 314 – Draft regulations for a Russian polytechnic institute (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 315 – Unsigned memorandum setting out a plan to organize a department of music in the St Petersburg Academy of Arts (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 316 – Unsigned memorandum about the University of Dorpat and its regulations (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 317 – Unsigned memorandum ‘On the Formation of a Faculty of Theology in the University of Danzig’ (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 320 – Unsigned memorandum on the question of how to improve education in schools (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 324 – Unsigned memorandum with a description of a concert in Moscow in which A.G. Rubinstein took part (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 341 – Memorandum by Major-General Tergengan with a description of the arrangement of carts for the transportation of the wounded (1855, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 352 – Memorandum by Professor Lefort on the arrangement of a medical service for the populace of Paris and an accompanying letter from Lefort to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (1864, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 353 – Memorandum by Friedrich August von Esmarch ‘On the Fight of Humanism against the Horrors of War’ (1864, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 359 – Unsigned memorandum with an outline of a plan for organizing a hospital for soldiers’ children living in barracks (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 365 – Reports from Augusta Schulze [?] about the work of the charitable ‘Society for Providing the Poor with Clothing’ (1860–1873, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 367 – Memorandum by S. Shipov about the work of the Moscow Committee for Care of the Poor with an accompanying letter from S. Shipov [to Baroness Edith Fedorovna von Rahden] (1862, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 372 – Regulations, statutes, and reports of German charitable societies (1866–1872, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 374 – Draft regulations of the Society for Cheap Refectories, reports by the president of the society for Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, and financial accounts (1872, Fr., Russ.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 380 – Unsigned memorandum about the schism in the Catholic Church (1846, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 394 – Memorandum by August Franz Ludwig Maria, Baron von HaxthausenAbbenburg, with an outline of a complaint by the pope about interference by the Russian government in the affairs of the Catholic eparchy of Chełm (1858, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 397 – Draft regulations of the ‘Ecumenical Society for the Promotion of Christian Unity’ with an accompanying letter from Abbé Guettée (1869, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 407 – Unsigned memoranda with a protest against the closure of the chair of theology at the University of Dorpat [now Tartu] (Ger., no date).

Bibliogr aphy

599

F. 647, op. 1, d. 418 – Unsigned memoranda ‘Hypotheses about the Fall of Lucifer’ (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 419 – Memorandum by Count Pozzi di Borgo presented to Alexander I regarding the internal organization of Poland (1814, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 421 – Unsigned memoranda about the need to alleviate Russian government policy in Poland and about the hostile mood of the Polish populace (1846 or later, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 423 – Memorandum by August Franz Ludwig Maria, Baron von HaxthausenAbbenburg ‘On the Establishment of Order in the Polish Regions’ (on the organization of education in Poland) (1856, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 424 – Unsigned memorandum on the need to introduce radical changes in the governance of Russia’s south-western provinces in view of the growing discontent of the populace (1860s, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 425 – Memorandum by an unidentif ied author ‘Thoughts of a Russian on the Latest Events in Warsaw’ (1861, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 426 – Unsigned memorandum ‘Information about the Actions of Revolutionaries in Poland in 1860–1861’ and about the programmes of nationalist parties (1861, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 429 – Excerpt from a letter by Tengoborski to A.M. Gorchakov about the spread of the idea of creating a Polish kingdom among the Poles and about the Austrian Archduke Maximilian Ferdinand and Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich as possible candidates for the throne (1863, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 430 – Letter from Baron Georgii Meyendorff to his brother Baron Aleksandr Meyendorff about events in Poland (1863, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 431 – Letters from Carring to Hilferding and Baron von Rosen about the sympathetic attitude of the Czech populace to the Polish insurgents [and] about the attempt on the life of Count Berg in Warsaw (1863, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 437 – Unsigned memorandum ‘A Few Words on the Polish Question’ (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 455 – Memoranda by an unidentified person about the difficult position of the peasant in Liefland (no date, Ger.). F. 647, оp. 1, d. 456 – Rules on the organization of schools in Liefland (no date, Ger., Russ.). F. 647, оp. 1, d. 457 – Unsigned memorandum on the procedure for conversion to the Orthodox faith in Liefland (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 458 – Unsigned memoranda on the need to grant Liefland freedom of religious belief (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 459 – Memorandum by an unidentified person with a description of a plan to link Lake Peipus with the port of Reval [now Tallinn] by a canal (no date, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 460 – Unsigned memorandum on the ethnography of the Baltic region (1860, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 462 – Memorandum by de Richemont [?] ‘The Political Situation in Europe and the Interests of France’ (1829, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 463 – Unsigned memorandum ‘An Individual’s Opinion of Talleyrand’ (1838, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 466 – Memorandum by Professor Mardi ‘A Historical Sketch of the Duchy of Schleswig and its links with Denmark’ (1846, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 644 – Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna to A.A. Abaza (1859, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 645 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (1828–1858, Ger. with fragments in Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 647 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to Prince Augustus of Württemberg (1871, Ger.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 648 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to her mother, the Queen of Württemberg (1828, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 649 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to her grandmother, the Queen of Württemberg (1816–1828, Fr.).

600 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 647, op. 1, d. 650 – Correspondence [of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] with Prince A.M. Gorchakov (1855–1863, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 652 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to Grand Prince Constantine Nikolaevich (no date, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 655 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to S.S. Lanskoi (1857–1861, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 656 – [Letters of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna] to Prince Łowicz (1823–1830, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 659 – Elena Pavlovna to Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess of Saxe and Weimar (1822–1858, Fr.). F. 647, op. 1, d. 661 – Elena Pavlovna to Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (1841, Fr.). F. 655 (Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, née Princess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin), op. 1, d. 70 – Letters of Senator Dmitrii Borisovich Neidgart to Maria Pavlovna on business of the Supreme Council regarding protection of the families of people called up for military service and also the families of men wounded or killed in action (1916–1917, Fr.). F. 655, op. 1, d. 197 – Letters from V.K. Erapkina to Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna about leave for her wounded nephew Koshkarev to visit his sick mother (1904–1905, Fr.). F. 672 (Nicholas I), op. 1, dd. 42 (1822), 43 (1822–1823), 44 (1823), 45 (1823–1824), 46 (1824), 47 (1824–1825), 48 (1825), 49 (1825) – Diary of Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich (Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 69 – Memoranda of Nicholas I about the procedure for calling up reservists, back-up troops, and men on indefinite leave, forming battalions for a home guard, writing rules for dragoons regiments, and drawing up commands for use with guns, sabres, broadswords, and standards (1831–1834, Russ.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 82 – Memoranda by Nicholas I about the procedure for bringing guards and army units up to full strength in the event of war (1841–1844, Russ.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 87 – Address by Nicholas I to officers of the life guards of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment at a bivouac in the village of Gur’evo (1845, Russ.). F. 672, op. 1, dd. 191 (1837–1838), 192 (1838), 193 (1838), 194 (1839) – Surveys of political life in France, Germany, and other countries compiled from foreign newspapers (Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 195 – Excerpts from foreign newspapers and journals about political life in France, Germany, and other countries (1839, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 202 – Letters from Karl Robert von Nesselrode to Nicholas I about the agreement of Britain (George Hamilton Seymour) to the proposal from Nicholas I about the need to discuss the Danish question (1850–1853, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 290 – Memorandum of a religious nature [by Prince A.N. Golitsyn] in the name of Nicholas I on the use of examinations to strengthen faith among the people and in the country (1831, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 339 – Nicholas I to his mother Empress Maria Fedorovna (1818, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 341 – Letters from Nicholas I to the historian N.M. Karamzin (1826, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 345 – Nicholas I to his brother Michael (1847, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 352 – Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich to Nicholas I (1825–1828, Russ., Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 353 – Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna (the wife of Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich) to Nicholas I (1847–1852, Russ., Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 354 – [Letters] from Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, the wife of Nicholas I, to Nicholas I and to her son, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (1833, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, dd. 409 (1822–1831), 410 (1823–1825), 411 (1825–1827), 412 (1828–1831), 413 (1831–1835), 414 (1835–1836), 415 (1836–1839), 416 (1839–1840), 417 (1840–1843), 418 (1843–1846), 419 (1846–1848), 420 (1849–1851), 421 (1851–1854), 422 (1854–1858), 423 (1858–1860), 426 (1817–1826) – Diaries of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (née Princess Charlotte of Prussia) (Ger., with some fragments in Fr. and Eng.).

Bibliogr aphy

601

F. 672, op. 1, dd. 428 (1829–1830, Fr., Ger.), 431 (1838, Fr., Ger.), 432 (1839, Fr., Ger., Russ.) – Notebook of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (Fr., Ger., Russ., Eng.). F. 672, op. 1, dd. 434–441 – Letters from Empress Alexandra Feodorovna to her brother, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, subsequently the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1807–1859, Ger). F. 672, op. 1, d. 460 – Letter from Grand Duke Nicholas Aleksandrovich to Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (1859, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, dd. 461 (1854), 462 (1855–1860) – Letters from Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (Fr., Ger., Russ.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 486 – Verses dedicated to Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna on the occasion of her birthday (1832, Ger., Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 489 – Exercise-book of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna with verses, songs, and dicta of a religious nature (1860, Ger.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 502 – Grand Prince Alexander Nikolaevich to his sister Olga Nikolaevna (1846, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 503 – Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna to her sister Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (1830, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 509 – Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna to Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (1837–1846, Fr.). F. 672, op. 1, dd. 572 (1823–1825), 573 (1832) – Album of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna with poems copied into it (Ger.). F. 672, op. 1, d. 574 – Album of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna with excerpts from various works (1834–1838, Ger., Fr.). F. 677 (Alexander III), op. 1, dd. 198 (1855), 199 (1856–1861), 200 (1858–1859) – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on the Russian language (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 201 – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on the Slavonic language [Church Slavonic] and Russian literature (1859, 1861, and later, no date, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 202 (1850–1860), 203 (1850), 204 (1861), 205 (1861), 206 (1862) – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on Russian language and literature (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 207 – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich with entries on logic and the history of Russian literature (1863–1864, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 208 (1855), 209 (1857), 210 (1857), 211 (1860–1864) – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on the English language (Eng.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 212 (1855), 213 (1855), 214 (1856–1860), 215 (1861), 216 (1862), 217 (1863–1864) – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on the French language (Fr.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 218 (1850), 219 (1855–1864), 220 (1860) – Exercise-book of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on the German language (Ger.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 221 – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on ancient history (1858, Ger.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 222 – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on general history (1860, Ger.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 223 – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on medieval history (1861, Ger.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 224 (1861), 225 (1862) – Exercise-books of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich on general history (Ger.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 226 (1860), 227 (1860) – Synopsis of ancient history written for Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (Ger.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 253 – Notebook of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich with poems by Russian poets copied out (1879, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 254 – Notebook of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich with a record of letters received and sent (1879, Russ.).

602 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 677, op. 1, d. 256 – Notebook of Alexander III with his notes about hunting, f ishing, etc. (1882–1894, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 257 (1861), 258 (1862), 259 (1863), 260 (1864), 261 (1865), 262 (1872), 264 (1876), 266 (1878), 267 (1878), 268 (1879) – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 269 – Notebook of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich with his records of dates to remember (1880, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 270 – Notebook of Alexander III with his records (1881, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 271 – Notebook of Alexander III with his records of dates to remember (1882, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 272 – Notebook of Alexander III with his records (1882, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 273 – Notebook of Alexander III with his records of dates to remember (1883, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 274 (1883), 275 (1884), 276 (1884) – Notebook of Alexander III with his records (Russ.). F. 677, оp. 1, dd. 278 (1885), 279 (1886), 280 (1886), 281 (1887), 282 (1887), 283 (1888), 284 (1888), 286 (1889), 287 (1890), 288 (1890), 289 (1891), 290 (1891), 291 (1892), 292 (1892), 293 (1893), 294 (1893) – Notebook of Alexander III with his records (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 295 (1861–1862), 296 (1862) – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 297 – ‘Camp Diary’ of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (1864, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, dd. 298 (1865–1866), 299 (1866), 300 (1866–1867), 301 (1867–1868), 302 (1868–1869), 303 (1869–1870), 304 (1870–1871), 305 (1871–1873), 306 (1873–1875), 307 (1875–1880), 308 (1880–1881) – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 370 – Report of the chief of the 12th Army Corps to Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (commander of the Rushchuk Detachment) about the actions of the corps against the Turks (1877, Fr.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 463 – Memorandum of General R. Fadeev ‘Secret Memoirs about the Eastern Crisis’ (1870s, Fr.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 900 (1884–1892) – Letters to Alexander III from his son, Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich (Russ., Eng., Fr.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 901 (1890–1891) – Letters to Alexander III from his cousin, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich (Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 902 (1865–1888) – Letters to Alexander III from his uncle, Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich (Russ., Fr.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 918 – Letters to Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich from his brother Nicholas Aleksandrovich (1859–1865, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 919 – Letters to Alexander III from Grand Duke Nicholas Aleksandrovich (his son) (1876–1894, Russ., with occasional letters in Fr.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 920 – Telegrams to Alexander III from Grand Duke Nicholas Aleksandrovich (his son) (1894, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 921 – Letters to Alexander III from Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich (1879 and no date, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 935 – Letters to Alexander III from Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna (1891, 1894, no date, Eng.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 936 – Letters to Alexander III from Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna (the Queen of Greece) (1866–1894, Russ.). F. 677, op. 1, d. 938 – Letters to Alexander III from Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (the Queen of Württemberg) (1866–1892, Russ., Fr.). F. 678 (Alexander II), op. 1, d. 2 – Marriage contract between Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich and Princess Marie of Hesse (1840, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 5 – Wedding ceremony of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich and Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt (1841, Russ., Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 11 – Description of the coronation of Alexander II (1856, Russ.).

Bibliogr aphy

603

F. 678, op. 1, d. 12 – Description of the coronation of Alexander II (1856, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 246 – Notes on the history of Britain made during his studies by Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (1834, Eng.). F. 678, op. 1, dd. 268 (1826), 269 (1827), 270 (1828), 271 (1829), 272 (1830), 273 (1830), 274 (1830), 275 (1831), 276 (1831), 277 (1832), 278 (1833) – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 279 – Excerpts from the diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (1833–1834, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 280 – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (1834, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 281 – Exercise-book of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich with entries like diary entries (1834–1838, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, dd. 282 (1835), 283 (1835), 284 (1835), 285 (1835), 286 (1836–1838) – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 287 – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich during a journey in Russia. With an instruction from Nicholas I appended (1837, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 289 – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich during a journey in Europe (1839, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 290 – Diary of Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich (1840, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 499 – Diplomatic dispatches from [Pavel Petrovich] Oubril, [Andreas Ludwig Carl Theodor von] Budberg, and Gorchakov in Berlin (1863, Fr., Ger.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 502 – Reports to Alexander II from Count Kutuzov in Berlin with appended information about the Prussian army (1867–1872, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 571 – Speech by Alexander II to the diplomatic corps in St Petersburg on the day of his accession to the throne (1855, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 700 – Alexander II to Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich (1878, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 701 – Alexander II to his mother, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (1830–1857, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 702 – Letters from Alexander II to Prince Bariatinskii (1857–1864, Fr., copies). F. 678, op. 1, d. 710 – Alexander II to Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich (1862, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 711 – Alexander II to Empress Maria Aleksandrovna (1867–1877, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 729 – Letters from Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich to Alexander II (1852–1873, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 731 – Letters from Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich to Alexander II, and telegrams to him from Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich, Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna (1871–1878, Russ., Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 732 – Letters from Grand Duke Alexander Aleksandrovich to Alexander II (1874–1881, Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 742 – Anna Pavlovna, Queen of the Netherlands, to Alexander II (1838–1865, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 751 – Letters from Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, to Alexander II (1839–1854, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 752 – Letters from William [III], King of the Netherlands, to Alexander II (1839–1854, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 754 – Letters from Prince M.S. Vorontsov to Alexander II (1847–1856, Fr., Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 761 – Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna to Alexander II (1834–1880, Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 770 – Letters from Count P.D. Kiselev to Alexander II (1865–1867, Fr., Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, dd. 771 (1835–1861), 772 (1858–1860), 773 (1862–1863), 774 (1862–1863) – Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich to Alexander II (Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, dd. 781 (1851–1856), 782 (1855–1871), 783 (1857–1862), 784 (1863–1864), 785 (1865–1866), 786 (1867–1868), 787 (1869–1870), 788 (1871–1872), 789 (1873), 790 (1874–1875), 791 (1874–1875), 792 (1875), 793 (1876–1877), 794 (1876–1877), 795 (1878–1879) – Empress Maria Aleksandrovna to Alexander II (Fr.). F. 678, op. 1, dd. 805 (1863–1864), 806 (1865–1868), 807 (1869–1876), 808 (1877–1880), 816 (1855–1879) – Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to Alexander II (Russ.).

604 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 678, op. 1, dd. 819 (1838), 820 (1839), 821 (1840–1845), 822 (1846–1853) – Emperor Nicholas I to Crown Prince Alexander Nikolaevich (Russ.). F. 678, op. 1, d. 823а – Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna to Crown Prince Alexander Nikolaevich (1841–1846, Fr.). F. 679 (Alexander I), op. 1, d. 18 – Two memoranda/instructions from Alexander I to the minister of appanages (no date, Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 42 – Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich to Alexander I (1820, Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 43 – Copy of a letter from M. Speranskii to Alexander I from Perm’ (1813, Russ.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 44 – Letter to Alexander I from the president and director of the Royal Philanthropic Society (Eng., no date). F. 679, op. 1, d. 45 – Copy of a memoir by Karamzin to Alexander I about the restoration of Poland (no date, Russ.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 46 – Copy of a letter signed by Alexander I to the vice-governor of Tomsk, Vedishchev, about the birth of his daughter Elizabeth (1806, Russ.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 47 – Copy of a letter from Pozzo di Borgo to Alexander I (1814, Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 48 – Copy of a letter from M.M. Speranskii to Alexander I from Perm’ (1815, Russ.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 49 – Brief biographical sketch of Alexander I from an encyclopaedic dictionary (1807, Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, dd. 51 (1802–1814), 52 (no date) – Letters from Alexander I to William III [of Prussia] (Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 76 – Empress Maria Fedorovna to Alexander I (1808–1810, Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 77 – Letter from the Danish king Frederick VI to Alexander I (1813, Fr.). F. 679, op. 1, d. 115 – Alexander I to Empress Maria Fedorovna, his mother (1810, Fr.). F. 967, op. 1, d. 4 – Diary of Krüdener V. (1801–1802 Fr.). F. 990 (Boris Pavlovich Mansurov), op. 1, dd. 31–36 – Letters from Boris Pavlovich Mansurov to his father, Pavel Borisovich Mansurov (1855–1862, Fr.). F. 990, op. 1, dd. 66 (1861–1884, Fr.), 67 (1864–1865, Fr.) – Letters from Nikolai Pavlovich Mansurov to his father Pavel Borisovich Mansurov. F. 990, op. 1, d. 68 – Letters from Nikolai Pavlovich Mansurov to B.P. and M.N. Mansurov (1873–1875, Fr.). F. 990, op. 1, dd. 70 (1880–1894, Fr., Russ.), 71 (1895, Fr., Russ.), 72 (1896–1898, Fr., Russ.) – Letters from Nikolai Pavlovich Mansurov to his brother B.P. Mansurov. F. 990, op. 2, d. 368 – Letters from M.N. Mansurova to her daughter E.B. Mansurova (1884–1886, Fr.). F. 990, op. 2, d. 409 – Letters from B.P. Mansurov to his grandmother M.N. Mansurova (1907, Russ.).

GATO (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tverskoi oblasti, Tver’) F. 103 (Collection of documents from nobles’ archives), op. 1, d. 1115 – Album belonging to Kutuzova (no date, Fr., It., Russ., Eng., Greek, CS). F. 103, op. 1, d. 1395 – [Correspondence of the Bakunin family] (1740–1861, Fr., Russ.). F. 103, op. 1, d. 3135a – Diary of one of the members of the Bünting family (1855–1859, Fr., Ger.).

IRLI (Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom) Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, St Petersburg), Manuscripts Department R. 1, op. 42, d. 76 – Album of a member of the Naryshkin family (f irst quarter of nineteenth century, Fr.). F. 196 (Miatlev family), op. 1, d. 18 – Petr Vasil’evich Miatlev, ‘Le Barbet scrutateur’, a comic newspaper of the Miatlev family (1820?, Fr.).

Bibliogr aphy

605

F. 196, op. 1, d. 19 – Petr Vasil’evich Miatlev, the diary of a journey from Znamenskoe to Lindolovo, beginning of a description (1819, Fr.). F. 196, op. 1, d. 20 – Petr Vasil’evich Miatlev, rough sketches of plays, letters, etc. (1820–1823?, Fr.). F. 265 (The journal Russkaia starina), op. 2, d. 1578 – Correspondence between F.N. Klichka, the governor of Orel, and I.I. Melissino, a tutor at Moscow University, about a search for a French teacher for a gymnasium in Kursk (1784).

RGA VMF (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota, St Petersburg) F. 432 (Naval Cadet Corps), op. 1, d. 5 – Examination lists of pupils (1762–1783). F. 432, op. 1, d. 23 – On examination and promotion of naval cadets (1770–1771). F. 432, op. 1, d. 70 – File about appointment of an aide-de-camp, teaching German, promotion and dismissal of officers from service (1773). F. 432, op. 1, d. 103 – Correspondence about setting up a theatre in the corps and allocation of the materials and things needed to equip it (1774–1776).

RGADA (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow) F. 1, op. 1 (Secret packages), dd. 3 (1798), 13 (1797), 14 (1786–1789), 16 (1790) – Grand Duchess, then Empress Maria Fedorovna, to her son Alexander, the future Alexander I (Fr.). F. 1, op. 1, dd. 10 (1812–1813), 11 (1807–1813) – Letters of Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna to her brother Alexander I (Fr.). F. 1, op. 1, dd. 15 (1788), 16 (1790) – Grand Duke Paul, then Emperor Paul I, to his son Alexander, the future Alexander I (Fr.). F. 1, op. 1, dd. 20–23 – Autobiographical notes by Catherine II (various years, Fr.). F. 1, op. 1, d. 24 – Notes by Catherine II, entitled ‘Extraits de lectures’, ‘La cour d’équité’, ‘La culture et la finance’, ‘Maximes d’administration’, ‘Réflexions sur Pétersbourg et sur Moscow’, etc. (undated, Fr.). F. 2 (Files relating to the imperial family), op. 1, d. 25 – Exercise-books used in education (probably belonging to Tsarevich Petr Alekseevich) (no date [1720s], Lat., Fr., Russ.). F. 4 (Correspondence between members of the imperial family and other highly placed persons), op. 1, dd. 114 (1787), 115 (1763, 1765, 1784) – Correspondence between Catherine II, Paul Petrovich, and Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna (Fr., Russ.). F. 5 (Correspondence of highly placed persons with private individuals), op. 1, d. 145 – Draft letters from Catherine II to Prince de Ligne (1781–1796). F. 5, op. 1, d. 152 – Correspondence of Catherine II in her own hand with Grimm (1764–1796). F. 5, op. 1, d. 153 – Correspondence of Catherine II with Mme Geoffrin (1763–1768, Fr.). F. 5, op. 1, d. 154 – Correspondence of Empress Catherine II with Voltaire (1765–1778). F. 5, op. 1, d. 156 – Correspondence of Empress Catherine II with d’Alembert (1765–1767, 1772). F. 5, op. 1, d. 157 – Correspondence of Empress Catherine II with Marmontel (1767). F. 5, op. 1, d., 158 – Correspondence of Empress Catherine II with Mme Geoffrin (1763–1768). F. 10 (Chancery of Catherine II and later sovereigns), op. 2, dd. 226, 227, 229–239, 245, 246 – Various notes entitled ‘Le pouvoir et les devoirs des juges de paix’, ‘Le seigneur représentant’, ‘L’échange des bleds contre l’industrie’ (Fr., undated). F. 35 (Russia’s relations with Britain).

606 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 44 (Russia’s relations with Hamburg), op. 1, 1705. d. 1 – Draft of document from the sovereign Peter I to the burgomasters of the city of Hamburg forbidding all places under their power to print anything libellous about the Russian state (1705, Russ., Ger.). F. 53 (Russia’s relations with Denmark), op. 4, d. 2 – Letter from the Danish king Frederick IV to Peter I recalling the ambassador Friedrich Hartwig von Nostitz; document from Frederick IV to Peter I about the recall of the ambassador Andrei Petrovich Izmailov and the appointment of Prince Vasilii Dolgorukov in his place (1707, Dan.). F. 53, op. 4, d. 3 – Letter from the Danish king Frederick IV to Peter I congratulating him on the occasion of the conclusion of peace with the Turks after the battles on the [River] Pruth; letter of credence for Ambassador Adjutant-General von Levenorn; letter about a proposed meeting between Frederick IV and Peter I for the purpose of coming to an agreement about continuation of the war with Sweden (1711, Dan., trans. into Russ.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 1 – Correspondence of the Chancery of Foreign Affairs with the Danish ambassador in Russia, Paul Heins, about Russo-Danish relations, the reception of the Danish ambassador by Peter I, and his submission to the tsar of a letter of 29 August 1699 from the Danish king Frederick IV about the death of the Danish king Christian V, about his accession to the throne, and about the maintenance of friendly relations between Russia and Denmark; about the dispatch of the Russian ambassador, A.P. Izmailov, to Denmark to win over the Danish king for war against the Swedes, about international relations, and the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession; about the arrival of the Danish courier Fabricius in Moscow with a letter to Paul Heins from the Danish king; authorization of a salary for Captain Simon Peterson working on ‘ship-building’ in Voronezh (1700, Ger., trans. into Russ.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 35 – Memoranda of the Danish ambassador in Russia, Paul Heins, to the Chancery of Foreign Affairs about the issue of money for provisions, the reply of the Danish government to the proposal by Peter I that Denmark enter the war with Sweden and mediate in the peace talks between Russia and Sweden, Russo-Danish trade through Narva and St Petersburg, and the hiring of sailors in Denmark for Russian service (1704, Ger., trans. into Russ.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 65 – Reply from the Danish minister Christian Sehested to the Russian ambassador in Denmark, A.P. Izmailov, about Denmark’s recognition of Stanisław Leszczyński as King of Poland and Denmark’s mediation between Russia and Sweden (1707, Fr.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 84 – Memoranda and letters from the Danish councillor Muller about the organization of trade between Denmark and Russia through Kola and Archangel (1708, Ger.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 85 – Correspondence of the Russian ambassador in Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, with the Danish minister Christian Christophersen Sehested about conclusion of a treaty of alliance between Russia and Denmark (1708, Fr., trans. into Russ.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 99 – Papers from the chancery of the Russian ambassador to Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, about negotiations with the King of Denmark and his ministers on concluding an alliance between Russia and Denmark against Sweden (copies of a treaty concluded in Copenhagen on 11 (22) October 1709; ratif ications of the treaty by Peter I and the Danish king Frederick IV (1709, Fr., Russ.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 121 – Letters from Danish ministers and generals, the Swedish general Magnus Stenbock, the Swedish secretary Neuhausen, and other individuals to the Russian ambassador to Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, about military matters, the visit of the Swedish king Charles XII to the city of Bender, and the exchange of Swedish prisoners (1710, Fr., Ger.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 122 – Letters from Major-General Friedrich Hartwig von Nostitz to the Russian ambassador in Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, about the garrison in the town of Elbing (1710, Fr.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 133 – Excerpt from the correspondence of the King of Denmark, Frederick IV, with the Danish resident in Hamburg, Hans Hagedorn, about the possibility of Denmark concluding a separate peace with Sweden (1710, Fr.).

Bibliogr aphy

607

F. 53, оp. 5, d. 146 – Records of negotiations (‘conferences’) between the Russian ambassador in Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, and Danish ministers about a plan for military operations by allied troops against the Swedes in Pomerania in the campaign of 1711; about the campaign of the Danish army in Pomerania for joint operations with Polish-Saxon troops against the Swedish corps; and about financial and military assistance for Denmark from the Russian government (1711, Fr., Russ.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 147 – Letters from the Russian ambassador in Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, to the King of Poland, Augustus II, and Polish-Saxon ministers thanking them for awarding him the Order of the White Eagle (1711, Fr.). F. 53, op. 5, d. 153 – Letters from the Danish ambassador in Russia, Adjutant-General von Levenorn, in Riga and Iavorov to the Russian ambassador in Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, and the secretary of the embassy, I. Veselovskii, about his meeting with A.D. Menshikov in the town of Kopor’e, about the preparations of Peter I for a journey from Moscow to Poland, and about a future meeting between Peter I and the King of Denmark, Frederick IV, in Iaroslavl’ (1711, Ger.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 157 – Letter from the Danish ambassador in Russia, Just Juel, to the Russian ambassador in Denmark, V.L. Dolgorukov, about the transfer of money to the latter in bills of exchange (1711, Fr.). F. 53, оp. 5, d. 164 – Agreement (‘concert’) between Russia and Denmark about joint military operations against Sweden in the campaign of 1711 and a memorandum about talks in Copenhagen on 6 June 1711 on the conclusion of this agreement (1711, Fr., Ger.). F. 53, op. 5, d. 174 – Letters of the King of Denmark, Frederick IV, to Peter I about the military operations of allied troops (Danish, Russian, and Saxon) against the Swedes in Pomerania and Mecklenburg, the operations of the Danish fleet, the capture of the fortress of Stade in the region of Bremen from the Swedes by Danish troops, and the defeat of the Danish-Saxon force at Gadebusch, and congratulations on the conclusion of peace between Russia and Turkey (1712, Ger., Russ.). F. 79 (Russia’s relations with Poland). F. 93 (Relations between Russia and France), op. 1, 1654, d. 1 – Files relating to the business of the courier Konstantin Machekhin, dispatched to France with notification of the beginning of war against the King of Poland and Sweden for the many vexations he has caused Russia (1653–1654). F. 93, оp. 1, 1667, d. 5 – Files relating to the business of the ambassadors Petr Potemkin and Semen Rumiantsov during their stays in Spain and France with notification of the truce concluded between the states of Russia and Poland for thirteen and a half years (1667–1669). F. 93, op. 1, 1704, d. 5 – Report on the condition of the Kingdom of France, with an appendix about the ceremonial with which foreign ministers are received there. F. 93, op. 1, 1713, d. 3 – Account of a book written by Wicquefort about ambassadors and their business and translated by the nobleman Postnikov who was in Paris. F. 150 (Files on foreigners’ journeys to Russia), op. 1 (1703), d. 1 – Arrival in Russia of the Swedish pastor Ernst Glück and his children who had been taken captive in Marienburg, documents about him in the Chancery of Foreign Affairs, and his setting-up of a public school in Moscow (1703–1705). F. 177, op. 1, 1739, d. 70 – Draft copies from the Chancery of Edicts to the Cadet Corps and reports from the director of the Corps, Tettau. F. 1261 (Vorontsovs), op. 1, d. 45 – M.S. Vorontsov (?), ‘Extrait de mon journal’ (in 15 booklets, 1854 and no date, Fr., Russ.). F. 1261, op. 1, d. 68 – File about the ceremonies that took place at the meeting, receptions, and departure from Russia of the Spanish minister, James Francis (Diego Francisco) Fitz-James Stuart, Duke of Liria (1727–1730, Russ., Sp., Fr.).

608 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 1261, оp. 1, d. 69 – Diary of the Russian ambassador in London, Kantemir, about events and facts of diplomatic life (1732). F. 1261, op. 1, d. 78 – Aide-memoire from the сhancellor Bestuzhev-Riumin and the vice-сhancellor M.I. Vorontsov to the British ambassador in St Petersburg, the Earl of Hyndford, and the envoy of the United Provinces, Schwarz, about the return of the Russian auxiliary corps from Germany, copy (Fr., 1740 [?]). F. 1277 (Samarins), op. 1, d. 144 – Travel diaries of Samarin from a journey in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy (no date, Fr.). F. 1278 (Stroganovs), op. 1, d. 5 – Rough drafts of letters from Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov to various people (1754 and later, Fr., Russ.). F. 1278, op. 4 (pt 1), d. 77 – Notes of Baron Aleksandr Stroganov about a journey (1752–1754, Fr.). F. 1289 (Shcherbatovs), op. 1, d. 517 – Exercise-book with letters from Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov to his son Dmitrii Mikhailovich Shcherbatov and his wife with an appended list of M.M. Shcherbatov’s writings (1725–1789, Russ., Fr.).

RGB (Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, Moscow), Manuscripts Department F. 19 (Princes Bariatinskii), op. 1, d. 284 (pt 2) – Princess Nina Bariatinskaia, childhood exercise-books on arithmetic, German, French, and Italian dictionaries, exercises, translations (1782–1785). F. 19, op. 1, d. 284 (3–4) – Princess Nina Bariatinskaia, childhood exercise-books on European geography (1785, Fr.). F. 19, op. 1, d. 284 (5) – Princess Nina Bariatinskaia, childhood exercise-books on the history of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, Russia (1782–1785, Fr.). F. 19, op. 1, d. 284 (6) – Prince Ivan Ivanovich Bariatinskii, childhood exercise-books on French, German, the history of the Middle Ages (1784, Fr., Ger.). F. 19, op. 1, d. 284 (7) – Stepanida Ivanovna Baranova, childhood exercise-books on arithmetic, German, French, the history of the ancient world and the Middle Ages (1781–1785, Fr., Ger., Russ.). F. 19, op. 1, d. 284 (8) – Praskov’ia (Parasha) Zelenova (Zelenina), childhood exercise-books on arithmetic, German, French, Italian, the history of the ancient world (no date, Ger., Fr., It.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 27 – Catalogue of Princess E.A. Bariatinskaia. Russian books read (late nineteenth century). F. 19, op. 5, d. 30 – Catalogue/inventory of Princess E.A. Bariatinskaia. Russian books read (late nineteenth century). F. 19, op. 5, dd. 31–32 – ‘Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque du prince W. Bariatinsky’ (no date, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 37 – ‘Catalogue des livres de français du prince Wladimir Bariatinsky’ (no date, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 38 – ‘Catalogue de la Bibliothèque du prince Wladimir Bariatinsky’ (1863, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 62 – ‘Catalogue de la Bibliothèque du Comte Czernicheff’ (no date, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 63 – ‘Catalogue de la Bibliothèque du Comte Alexandre Czernicheff St. Petersbourg’ (1840, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 65 – ‘Catalogue alphabétique de la Bibliothèque du Prince Czernicheff, St. Pétersbourg’ (1855, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 70, 71a – ‘Mes idées sur l’éducation de mon f ils.’ Pedagogical article by Iv. Iv. Bariatinskii (1815, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 72 – ‘Conseils à mon fils aîné, 1821, février à Marina, près d’Ivanovsky.’ Advice from Ivan Ivanovich Bariatinskii to his elder son (no date, Fr.).

Bibliogr aphy

609

F. 19, op. 5, dd. 93–98, 110 – [Notes about reading on various subjects] (various years, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, dd. 131, 132 – [Notes on reading] (various years). F. 19, op. 5, d. 132а – Discourse on the character of Bonaparte, original manuscript of Iv. Iv. Bariatinskii (no date, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, d. 133 – ‘Les aventures tragiques et comiques. Conte de fée. Autographe de Ivan Ivanovitch Bariatinsky’ (no date, Fr.). F. 19, op. 5, dd. 259–261 – ‘Catalogue général de la bibliothèque du Feld-maréchal Prince Bariatinsky’ (1873–1876, Fr.). F. 64 (Viazemy), k. 79, d. 11 – Prince Boris Vladimirovich Golitsyn, ‘La Vie de Marcus Porcius Caton surnommé d’Utique’, a childhood essay (St Petersburg, 1782, Fr.). F. 64, k. 79, d. 13 – Duvignau, governor, a play for the Golitsyns’ domestic theatre (1811, Fr.). F. 64, k. 83, d. 2 – Golitsyna, Princess Natal’ia Petrovna, letters to the Golitsyn children (Fr.). F. 64, k. 93, d. 43 – Prince Boris Vladimirovich Golitsyn, letters to Princess Natal’ia Petrovna Golitsyna (France, Vienna, Riga, 1789, Fr.). F. 64, k. 106, dd. 2, 3 – Cecile Olivier, letters to Princess Natal’ia Petrovna Golitsyna (1780, Fr.). F. 64, k. 113, d. 1 – Princess N.P. Golitsyna, ‘Remarques sur mes voyages’, diary of her journeys in Europe (1783–1790, Fr.). F. 64, k. 113, d. 2 – Prince Boris Vladimirovich Golitsyn, ‘De l’influence des événements sur la formation d’une Constitution’ (1790, Fr.). F. 64, k. 113, d. 3 – Prince Boris Vladimirovich Golitsyn, notes and documents connected with a journey in Italy (Fr., It., 1791–1792). F. 95 (N.D. Durnovo, P.P. Durnovo), no. 1457 – [Jean-Baptiste de Résimont], ‘Tableau des événements les plus remarquables de l’histoire de Russie suivi d’une description topographique de ce vaste Empire, S. Pétersbourg, année 1800’, written for Nikolai Dmitrievich Durnovo. F. 183 (Collection of manuscripts in Western European languages), op. 1, d. 286 – ‘Mémoire présenté à la Diète de Courlande en 1817 par Frédéric de Firck, marechal de la noblesse du Cercle de Goldingen’. F. 183, op. 1, d. 808 – ‘Grade d’Apprenti. Premier Grade Symbolique du Rite rectifié’ (1818, Fr.). F. 183, op. 1, d. 1083 – ‘Combat spirituel’ [belonged to Ol’ga Lanskaia, 1812]. F. 183, op. 1, d. 1089 – ‘Catalogue anecdotique, bibliographique, biographique plus chronologique qu’alphabétique et facétieux accompagné d’une vinaigrette de notes, la plupart mal-sonnantes, pour les morts comme pour les vivants, des livres de la bibliothèque du Comte André Rostoptchine’ (1861). F. 183, op. 1, d. 1486 (a, b) – Countess Théophilie Lubomirska, notebooks (1789–1819, Fr.). F. 183, op. 1, d. 1549 – ‘Recueil d’aires à la Princesse Natalie Kourakine’ (no date, Fr.). F. 183, op. 1, d. 1644 – Dmitrii Golokhvastov, ‘La Belle Olga’ [The Beautiful Olga, a Heroic Opera in Two Acts, Dating from Pagan Times. Words by S. Glinka, music by M. Kashin. Trans. from the Russian by Dm. Golokhvastov, 1809]. F. 183, op. 1, d. 1679 – [Various authors], ‘Souvenir’ (1838, 1840, 1842, Fr., Eng.). F. 219 (Orlov-Davydov), k. 60, d. 81 – Count Andrei Fedotovich Rostopchin, Letters to Count Anatolii Vladimirovich Orlov-Davydov (1888, Fr.). F. 347 (Shcherbatov), k. 3, d. 1 – Vladimir Alekseevich Shcherbatov [album] (1851–1856, Fr., Russ.).

RGIA (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St Petersburg) F. 796 (Chancery of the Holy Synod), op. 54, d. 349 – Senate authorization of 12 September 1773 with printed copies on teaching of German to young Russians and teaching of Russian to civilians in the Ostsee provinces (1773).

610 

The French L anguage in Russia

F. 899 (Counts Bobrinskii), op. 1, d. 37 – Short stories and plays (mainly comedies) written by Count A.A. Bobrinskii and unidentif ied authors, presumably for performance in the Smelianskii theatre on the Bobrinskiis’ estate in the district of Cherkasskii in the province of Kiev (1870s–1890s).

RNB (Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, St Petersburg), Manuscripts Department Fr., Q IV, no. 165 – [Jean-Baptiste de Résimont], ‘Tableau Chronologique – historique et géographique avec deux cartes de l’Empire de Russie. A Mr Alexandre Sabloukoff […], 22 octobre 1800’ [by J.-B. de Résimont]. Fr., Q XV, no. 38 – [Chevalier Desessart], ‘Voyageur moscovite ou Lettres russes’. F. 999 (Hermitage Collection), op. 1, no. 76 – Diplomatic correspondence of Prince Ivan Andreevich Shcherbatov (1720s–1740s, Russ., Fr., Sp., Eng.). F. 999, op. 1, no. 123 (1–2) – Copies of the correspondence of Prince Ivan Andreevich Shcherbatov (1725–1726, Russ., Fr., Sp.). F. 999, op. 1, no. 500 (1–2) – M.V. Priklonskii, director of Moscow University, ‘Most Loyal Report from the University of Moscow about the Progress, Outlook, Diligence, and Deeds of the Students studying in the University and the Pupils in Gymnasia on the Basis of the Examination in this Year 1776 from 2nd to 22nd’ (of June? Russ.). F. 999, op. 2, Fr. 32 – Bertin de Antilly, ‘Ode à Pierre le Grand, en commémoration de la fondation de St. Petersbourg et à l’occasion de la fete ordonnée en l’honneur de cette époque par S.M.I. Alexandre Ier’. F. 999, op. 2, Fr. 46 – ‘Fête donnée à Leurs Altesses Impériales Messeigneurs Alexandre Paulovitche et Constantin Paulovitche, Grands-Ducs de Russie’ (no date, Fr.). F. 999, op. 2, Fr. 105 – [Prince Ivan Shcherbatov], ‘Recueil de lettres françoises’ (1717 and later, Fr., Russ., Eng.). F. 999, op. 2, Fr. 115 – Loëillot, ‘Annales de l’empire de Russie, dédiées à S.M. l’Impératrice Elisabeth’ (St Petersburg, 1801, Fr.). F. 999, op. 2, Fr. 116 – Comte de Lubersac, abbé, ‘Discours sur l’utilité et les avantages des monuments publics et tous les genres etc., suivi d’une description de monument public dédié et consacré à la gloire de Catherine Alexiewna II. Avec épître dédicatoire et une lettre par le même auteur’ (no date, Fr.). F. 1059 (Cadet Corps, no classification of this archive as yet) – ‘Compliments du nouvel an. 1790’ (1790, Fr., Ger., Russ.).

SPbF ARAN (S.-Peterburgskii filial Arkhiva Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, St Petersburg) F. 3 (Committee of the Academy of Sciences), op. 9, d. 78 – File on examination of foreign teachers sent to gain certification at the Academy of Sciences (March to 20 August 1757). F. 3, op. 9, d. 80 – Authorizations from Councillor I.I. Gaubert [?] of the Chancery of the Academy [of Sciences] to conference secretary and Professor G.F. Miller with a proposal that foreign teachers presenting themselves at the Academy for certification undergo examination (1757–1758). F. 119 (Heinrich Huyssen), op. 1, d. 4 – Letters to Huyssen from Leibniz, Jablonski, Ludolf, etc. (1707–1731). F. 764, op. 4, d. 5 – Memoirs of Count Alexander Benckendorff (1825–1837).

Bibliogr aphy

611

SPb II RAN (Sankt-Peterburgskii institut istorii Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, St Petersburg) F. 36 (Vorontsovs), оp. 1, d. 792 – On the new situation or regulations and establishment of the Academy of Sciences.

Published primary sources Aksakov, Ivan S., Biografiia Fedora Ivanovicha Tiutcheva (Moscow: Tipografiia M.G. Volchaninova, 1886; reprinted by University Microfilms Int., Ann Arbor, MI, 1980). ——— Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov v ego pis’makh, 3 vols (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2003). Aksakov, Konstantin S., Kniaz’ Lupovitskii, ili Priezd v derevniu (Moscow: v tipografii L. Stepanovoi, 1856); available at http://нэб.рф/catalog/000199_000009_003563372/. Aksakov, Sergei T. (1955 [1856]), ‘Vospominanie ob Aleksandre Semenoviche Shishkove’, in Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955–1956), vol. 2, 266–313. Aksakova, Vera S., Dnevnik Very Sergeevny Aksakovoi, 1854–1855, ed. by N.V. Golitsyn and P.E. Shchegolev (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka Rossii, 2009; originally published by Ogni, St Petersburg, 1913). Alekseev, Petr A., Tserkovnyi slovar’ ili istolkovanie rechei slavenskikh drevnikh […] (Moscow, pechatan pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom Universitete, 1773). Alexander I, Alexandre I-er et le prince Czartoryski. Correspondance particulière et conversations. 1801–1823, published by Prince Ladislav Czartoryski with an introduction by Charles de Mazade (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, libraires éditeurs, 1865). Ancelot, Jacques Arsene François Polycarpe, Ode sur le couronnement de l’Empereur Nicolas I (Moscow: no publisher, 1826). ——— Six mois en Russie: Lettres écrites à M. X.-B. Saintines en 1826 à l’époque du couronnement de S.M. l’Empereur (Paris: Dondey-Dupré père et fils, 1827); available at https://books.google. co.uk/books?id=pP0EAAAAYAAJ. Anon., Russian Chit Chat; or, Sketches of a Residence in Russia. By a Lady, edited by her sister (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1856); available at https://ia801409. us.archive.org/13/items/russianchitchat00chatgoog/russianchitchat00chatgoog.pdf. Apostol, Petr D., ‘Dnevnik. (Mai 1725 g.–mai 1727 g.)’, trans. from French and with a foreword by A.L., Kievskaia starina, 50:7–8 (1895), 100–155. Ariane et Bacchus: Cantate qui doit être exécutée à St. Pétersbourg l’année MDCCCII, Mise en scène par Mr. Antonolini, et traduite en français par Mr. Dalmas, Acteur au Service de S.M.I. (St Petersburg: de l’Imprimerie impériale, 1802). Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh, 10 vols (St Petersburg: tip. Skorokhodova, 1901–1903). Arkhiv kn[iazia] F.A. Kurakina, bk 4, ed. by V.N. Smol’ianinov (Saratov: tip. Balasheva, 1893). Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova, ed. by Petr Bartenev, 40 vols (Moscow: Tipografiia A.I. Mamontova, 1870–1895). Arkhiv Raevskikh, 5 vols (St Petersburg: Tip. M.A. Aleksandrova, 1908–1915). Bakunin, Aleksandr M., ‘Osuga’, published by D.I. Oleinikov in Nashe nasledie (1994), nos 29–30, available at http://www.booksite.ru/usadba_new/world/fulltext/stihi/97.htm.

612 

The French L anguage in Russia

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Gertsen: see also Herzen Glinka, Sergei N., Zapiski Sergeia Nikolaevicha Glinki (St Petersburg: zhurn. ‘Rus. Starina’, 1895). Gmelin, Johann Georg, Reise durch Sibirien, 4 vols (Göttingen: verlegts Abram Vandenhoecks seel. Wittwe, 1751–1752). Gogol’, Nikolai V., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1940–1952). [Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Paul], Poésies d’un Russe (Moscow: à la typographie S. Seliwanowsky, 1811). Golitsyn, Boris V., ‘Aurore, Diogène et Glycère’, Almanach littéraire ou Étrennes d’Apollon (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1788), vol. 4, 1–6. Golitsyn, Dmitrii A., Traité ou description abrégée et méthodique des minéraux (Neuwied on the Rhine: Société Typographique, 1794; 2nd edn, Paris: A.A. Renouard, 1801). ——— Le Prince D. de G., De l’esprit des économistes ou les économistes justifiés d’avoir posé par leurs principes les bases de la révolution française […] (Brunswick: no publisher, 1796). Golovkina, comtesse [Ekaterina Ivanovna], Elisabeth de S, ou l’histoire d’une russe écrite par une de ses compatriotes, 3 vols (Paris: Chez Ducauroy, 1802). ——— Elisaveta de S***, ili Istoriia Rossiianki. Izdannaia v svet odnoiu iz ee sootechestvennits. Perevod s Frantsuzskogo, 5 vols (Moscow: v tipografii F. Gippiusa, 1803–1804). ——— Alphonse de Lodève, par Mme la Comtesse de G***, 2 vols (Moscow: no publisher, 1807; 2nd edn, Paris: F. Schoelle, H. Nicolle, 1809). Golovkine, Alexandre, comte, Mes idées sur l’éducation du sexe, ou précis d’un plan d’éducation pour ma fille (Mannheim: chez C.F. Schwan, libraire de la cour, 1778; London, 1778). Golowkin [i.e. Golovkin], Fedor, La Princesse d’Amalfi (Paris: Chez A. Chasseriau, 1821). Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, Œuvres posthumes de M. le chevalier de Méré (Paris: Jean et Michel Guignard, 1700). Grech, Nikolai I., Zapiski o moei zhizni (Moscow: Zakharov, 2002). Guazzo, Stefano, The Civile Conversation of M Steeven Guazzo, trans. by George Pettie and Barth. Young (London: Constable, and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925). Gurowski, Adam, comte, La Vérité sur la Russie et sur la révolte des Provinces Polonaises (Paris: Delaunay, 1834). Haxthausen, Baron August von, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions and Resources, 2 vols, trans. by Robert Faire (London: Frank Cass, 1856). Herberstein, Sigismund von, Rerum Moscoviticarum Comentarii, trans. as Description of Moscow and Muscovy, 1557, ed. by Bertold Picard, trans. by J.B.C. Grundy (London: J.M. Dent, 1969). Herder, Johann G., Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 10 vols (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1793). ——— ‘Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit’, pt 2, in Ausgewählte Werke in einem Bande (Stuttgart, Tübingen: Gotta’scher Verlag, 1844), 769–829. Herzen, Alexander, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968). Herzen: see also Gertsen Iakushkina, Anastasiia V., ‘Dnevnik Anastasii Vasil’evny Iakushkinoi’, Novyi mir, no. 64 (1964), 138–152. Iunosti chestnoe zertsalo ili pokazanie k zhiteiskomu obkhozhdeniiu [a compilation from various authors] (St Petersburg: printed on the orders of the tsar, 1717); available at http://www. runivers.ru/bookreader/book60565/?return=true#page/31.

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Index We do not refer in this index to material in the preliminaries of the book but we do refer to substantive material (as opposed to mere citations) in the footnotes. Hyphenated names are treated as whole words for the purpose of locating them in the alphabetical list of entries (e.g. ‘Golenishcheva-Kutuzova’ precedes ‘Golenishchev-Kutuzov’). Similarly, names beginning with the French articles ‘La’ and ‘Le’ (e.g. La Fontaine, Le Laboureur) are treated as if the article were joined to the following part of the name. Entries on St Petersburg are listed as if they were spelt with the full form ‘Saint’. There is no entry in the index on ‘francophonie’ as the term is ubiquitous in the book. For references to scholarly literature on the subject of francophonie, see footnotes 6 ff. in our preface. On use of the term itself, see also n. 25 in our introduction. In cases where we list a woman under her maiden name, we do not always indicate her married name as well. Abalduev family 256 abolition of serfdom, see emancipation of serfs absolutism, see enlightened absolutism Académie Française 413, 421 Academy of Arts (founded in Russia in 1757) 97 Academy of Sciences (founded in Russia in 1724, opened 1725) 68, 92, 134, 211, 280–281, 402, 403, 405, 418, 421, 430, 576 ‘Conference’ of 314, 315 language use in 312–323, 324–325 lectures at 316–318 public meetings at 314–315 regulations of (1747) 319, 325 ‘Russian Assembly’ in, organized by Trediakovskii 316, 325 school attached to 125, 139, 146 university attached to 146 See also Académie Française; Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts Acta Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae (Transactions of the Imperial St Petersburg Academy of Sciences) 318, 402 Acta Eruditorum (Journal of the Learned) 398 adaptation (in translation) 478 See also domestication address, terms of, see French, for terms of address. See also pronominal usage addressivity (Bakhtinian concept) 71 Adlerbergs 224, 310 Adodurov, Vasilii Evdokimovich (1709–1780) 316 advantages of backwardness, see national backwardness

aesthetic sensibility (valued by nobility) 165–166, 573 Ainesquin, Joseph (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Aksakov, Ivan Sergeevich (1823–1886) 444, 454, 508 Aksakov, Konstantin Sergeevich (1817–1860) antipathy to French-speaking 508 dissertation on Lomonosov 508 ‘Essay on Synonyms’ 509 on nobles’ language use 512–514 on peasant commune 511, 511 n. 225 Prince Lupovitskii 509–514 Aksakova, Vera Sergeevna (1819–1864) 454 Aksakova-Tiutcheva, see Tiutcheva albums 328, 348, 357–358, 369, 371, 573 language use in 357–358 types of 357 Alecsandri, Vasile (1821–1890) 482 Alekseev, Petr Alekseevich (1731–1801), Ecclesiastical Dictionary 466 Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’ (1717–1783) 82, 188, 322, 355, 411, 416 Aleppo 296 Alexander I (Aleksandr Pavlovich, 1777–1825; Emperor of Russia 1801–1825) command or use of French by 195, 195 n. 107, 340 n. 41 concept of honnête homme and citizen in education of 166–167 joins Napoleon’s Continental System 111 language use in correspondence of 202–203

662  language use at court of 195–196, 199, 202–203 policies of after 1815 113 taught geography and mathematics in French 143 not taught Latin 148 toleration of Masonic activity until 1822 227 use of Russian for conduct of government business 301–302 and Zinaida Volkonskaia 386 Alexander II (Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 1818–1881, Emperor of Russia 1855–1881) knowledge of Polish 206 language use in correspondence and diary of 206–207 marriage of 196 speech in French to diplomatic corps 301 use of French in diaries and personal correspondence 206–207 using French in society 200 See also Valuev, conversations with Alexander II; Valuev, correspondence with Alexander II in Russian Alexander III (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 1845–1894, Emperor of Russia, 1881–1894) knowledge and use of Russian 207–208 language use in correspondence and notebooks of 207–208 nationalistic mood in reign of 207–208, 212 n. 202 Russian at court of 199, 207 Alexander the Great (Alexander III of Macedon, 356–323 BC) 406 Alexandra Fedorovna, née Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, wife of Nicholas II (1872–1918) 208 Alexandra Fedorovna, née Princess Charlotte of Prussia, wife of Nicholas I (1798–1860) 196, 197, 198, 200 language use in correspondence, diaries, and notebooks of 205 Alexandra Georgievna, née Princess of Greece and Denmark, wife of Grand Duke Paul Aleksandrovich (1870–1891) 208 Alexandra Iosifovna, née Princess Alexandra Friederike Henriette of Saxe-Altenburg, wife of Grand Duke Constantine, son of Nicholas I (1830–1911) 200 Alexis I (Aleksei Mikhailovich, 1629–1676, Tsar of Russia 1645–1676) 90, 396 Alexis Petrovich (son of Peter the Great, 1690–1718) 399 manifesto on disinheritance of 399–400 Alfieri, Vittorio (1749–1803) 393 alienation, see estrangement allegiance (to class or nation) 118, 175, 220, 501, 516 language and 41, 60, 242, 252, 471, 478, 584 Allgemeine Zeitung (Universal Gazette) 443, 445

The French L anguage in Russia

Alliance Française 133 almanacs 329 Alsace 281 altruism 119, 526 Amable de Baudus (Marie Jean Louis Amable Baudus de Villenove, 1761–1822) 419 amateur literature 328–329, 330–331 n. 9, 359, 372, 376, 573 amour-propre 104, 104 n. 81, 457 Amsterdam, as place of publication 80, 398, 400, 404, 412, 413 n. 83 Amur region 275 Ancelot, Jacques-Arsène-Polycarpe-François (1794–1854) 435, 437 n. 177, 513 Anderson, Benedict 55, 123, 243 Andrássy, Count Gyula (1829–1890) 249 Andreevskii Monastery, language teaching at 267 Andrusovo, Treaty of (1667) 90 Anglomania (of Russian nobility) 97, 159 Anisimov, Evgenii 100 Anna, Empress (Anna Ioannovna, 1693–1740, Empress of Russia 1730–1740) German favourites of 98 manifesto of 1736 reducing term of noble service 102 preoccupation with splendour of her court 185 Anna Pavlovna (daughter of Paul I, 1795–1865) 206 Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier (1627–1693) 355 Année littéraire (Year in Literature) 409, 411 Annenkov, Pavel Vasil’evich (1812 or 1813–1887) 119 anomie 70, 252, 580, 587 aphorisms, see French, for aphoristic remarks aping (as topos in cultural discourse) 462, 491–492, 579, 580 Apostol, Petr Danilovich (d. 1758) 273 Apraksins 206, 223 Arakcheev, Count Aleksei Andreevich (1769–1834) 113 archaists (in Russian linguistic debate) 490 Arina Rodionovna (Pushkin’s nanny) 39 aristocracy, see nobility Arkhangel-Gorod 268 Artillery Cadet Corps (in St Petersburg) 200 assamblei (social gatherings in time of Peter the Great) 177 Athenæum 374 Athens 296 Augustus, i.e. Prince Friedrich August Eberhard of Württemberg (1813–1885) 206 Austerlitz, Battle of (1805) 110, 380, 495 Austria, or Austrian Empire as member of Holy Alliance 113, 383 as one of powers benefiting from partitions of Poland 91

Index

revolutionary disturbances in, during 1848–1849 115–116, 439 See also German, as language of administration in Habsburg lands; Habsburgs; treaties, multilateral agreements; treaties, between Russia and Austria; War of the Austrian Succession autocracy, as foundation of Russian statehood 58 Avant-coureur (Harbinger) 412 Avignon Courier, see Courrier d’Avignon Avramov, Pavel Vasil’evich (1790–1836) 230 Avvakum, Archpriest (1620–1682) 564 Babel, Tower of 64, 217 Bachaumont, Louis Petit de (1690–1771) 411, 412 backwardness, see national backwardness Bad Kissingen 224 Baden-Baden 522, 528, 531 Bakhmetevs 156 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975) 70–71 Bakunin, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1768–1854) 254 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814–1876) 119, 121, 254, 565 Bakunins 259, 345 ballads 360 balls (as sites of sociability) 94, 222, 230, 261, 506, 552 Baltic nobility 96–97, 115, 136, 155, 257, 265, 305, 310, 382, 392, 456 Baltic region, language practice in 257–258 scholars from 320–321 Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1850) 258, 424 Baratynskii, Evgenii Abramovich (1800–1844) 258, 386 ‘Barbet Scrutateur’ (family newspaper) 225 Barbour, Stephen 55, 581 Bariatinskaia, Nina (dates unknown) 163 Bariatinskii, Prince Aleksandr Petrovich (1798–1844), Some Hours of Leisure at Tul’chin 371 Bariatinskiis, Princes 140, 143, 145 n. 73, 153–154, 206 Barsov, Anton Alekseevich (1730–1791), Short Rules of Russian Grammar 466 Barta, Peter 327 Bartenev, Nikolai Arsen’evich (1830–?) 340 Barteneva, Nadezhda Arsen’evna (dates unknown) 224–225 Barteneva, Praskov’ia (Polina) Arsen’evna (1811–1872) 224, 340, 357 n. 118 Basargin, Nikolai Vasil’evich (1800 or 1801–1861) 230, 231 n. 65 Basargina, Ekaterina 321 Baten’kov, Gavriil Stepanovich (1793–1863) 149 Batiushkov, Fedor (Russian teacher of French) 128

663 Baudin, Rodolphe 337–338, 341 Bavaria 442 Baxter, James (Anglophone tutor in early nineteenth-century Russia) 159 Bayard, Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de (c. 1473–1524) 389 Bayer, Gottlieb Siegfried (1694–1738) 403, 404 Bazaine, Pierre-Dominique (1786–1838) 145 beau monde, see grand monde Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de (1732–1799) 374 Beausobre, Isaac de (1659–1738) 404 Beausobre, Léopold de (dates unknown) 404 Beccaria, Cesare, Marchese di Bonesana (1738–1794) 427 On Crimes and Punishments 427 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–1989) 393 Beirut 296 Belavin, Ivan Savinovich (governor of Nizhnii Novgorod Province from 1780 to 1796) 255 Belgorod 259 Belgrade 296 Belinskii, Vissarion Grigor’evich (1811–1848) on Kantemir 429 limited knowledge of French 119, 331 ‘Literary Reveries’ 330 as member of intelligentsia 117 n. 119 social background of 118, 578 use of term ‘literatura’ 330 n. 8 as so-called Westernizer 45 n. 41 Bell, see Kolokol Bellegarde, Jean Baptiste Morvan de (1648–1734) 161 Perfect Education 181 Belleville, Chevalier Romain de (Francophone tutor in late eighteenth-/early nineteenthcentury Russia) 221 Belliard, Jean Baptiste (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 255 Belosel’skii-Belozerskii, Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1752–1809) 363–364, 387 book on Italian music 364 Dianyology 367 epistle to Voltaire 363 epistles to the French 363–364 father of Zinaida Volkonskaia 386 Belosel’skiis, Princes 219 Benckendorff, Count Alexander von (1783–1844) 115, 303–305 use of French by 304–305 Berelowitch, Wladimir 335, 361 Beresnikov, Colonel (eighteenth-century nobleman in Vologda Province) 256 Berg, Fedor Fedorovich (1790–1874) 310 Berger, Jean (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Berlin as hub of Francophone society and culture 81

664  Masonic lodges in 227, 229 University of 404 See also Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts Berlin Academy of Sciences, see Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts Berlin, Isaiah 117 n. 119, 173 Bernoulli, Daniel (1700–1782) 322, 404 Bernoulli, Johann I (1667–1748) 322 Bernoulli, Johann II (1710–1790) 322–323 Berquin, Arnaud (1747–1791) 223 Bertin d’Antilly (1763–1804) 419 Besançon 227 Beseda (i.e. Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova), see Symposium of Lovers of the Russian Word Bestuzhev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (nom de plume Aleksandr Marlinskii, 1797–1837) 115, 502, 503 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Count Aleksei Petrovich (1693–1766) 286 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Mikhail Alekseevich (c. 1800–1832) 231 Betancourt y Molina, Agustín de (1758–1824) 145 Betskoi, Ivan Ivanovich (1704–1795) 150, 152, 153, 269, 410, 576 Plans and Statutes 427 Bezborodko, Prince Aleksandr Andreevich (1747–1799) 294 Bibikov, Aleksandr Il’ich (1729–1774) 226 Bibikova, Agrafena Aleksandrovna (1755–1812) 180 Bibikovs 206 Bible translations 488–489 Bibliothèque germanique (Germanic Library) 400, 402, 403, 404, 406 Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe (Descriptive Library of the Works of Learned Men of Europe) 404 Bielfeld, Baron Jakob Friedrich, Freiherr von (1717–1770) 186 Bilfinger, Georg Bernhard (1693–1750) 404 bilingualism 61–65, 70 additive 63 asymmetrical 583 as attribute of patriotic nobleman 516 benefits of 69–70, 251–252 Franco-Dutch 516 n. 246 Franco-Russian 35, 41, 47, 51, 63, 65, 121 individual or societal 62 maximalist and minimalist definitions of 62 primary or secondary 63 subtractive 63 supposedly detrimental effects of 63–64, 69–70, 85, 251–252, 498 symmetrical 62–63, 216 tutored and untutored 63 See also diglossia; plurilingualism

The French L anguage in Russia

Blainville, Henri-Marie Ducrotay de (1777–1850) 146 Blanc, Jean-Joseph-Charles-Louis (1811–1882) 456 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste (1805–1881) 456 Blommaert, Jan 484 Bludovs 206 boarding schools 100, 114, 125, 126, 127, 129, 140, 151, 166, 305, 491 attached to Moscow University 405 n. 45 Boborykin, Petr Dmitrievich (1836–1921) 117 n. 119 Bobrinskaia, Countess Anna Vladimirovna, née Ungern-Shternberg (1769–1846) 372, 373 Bobrinskaia, Countess Sof’ia Aleksandrovna, née Samoilova (1797 or 1799–1866) 179 Bobrinskii, Aleksandr (either Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 1855–1890, or his father, Aleksandr Alekseevich, 1823–1903; it is unclear which) 225 Bobrinskii, Count Aleksei Grigor’evich (1762–1813) 354 Bobrishchev-Pushkin, Nikolai Sergeevich (1800–1871) 230 Bobrishchev-Pushkin, Pavel Sergeevich (1802–1865) 230 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375) 178 Bogoroditsk 259 Bohemia, noble language use in 136 Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Déspréaux, 1636–1711) 82 Poetic Art 82 Boissy, Louis de (1694–1758), Frenchman in London 378 Bolotov, Andrei Timofeevich (1738–1833) 260 Bolshevik Revolution (i.e. October Revolution of 1917) 134, 135, 170, 325, 332 Boltina, Evdokiia Fedorovna (b. 1734) 378 bon goût (good taste) 80 bon ton (right tone) 219, 500, 573 bon usage (good linguistic usage) 487 bons mots (witty remarks) 234, 333 n. 19, 565 See also French, for aphoristic remarks; wit, or witticisms Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de (1754–1840) 438 n. 181 Bonaparte, see Napoleon Bonaparte Bonnegarde, Jeanne Marie de (French teacher in Russia) 256 Bonnet, Charles (1720–1793) 322, 488 Book of Royal Degrees 54 Borodino, Battle of (1812) 111, 501 n. 184 borrowing cultural 249, 250, 283, 437, 464, 478, 484, 492, 578–588 lexical or other linguistic 55, 68 n. 123, 91, 96, 287, 288, 288 n. 105, 289, 344, 469 n. 36, 474, 475, 478, 486, 487, 493, 533, 576 See also calques; French loanwords; loanwords

Index

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne (1627–1704) 82, 137 Botkin, Vasilii Petrovich (1811–1869) 118 Boudry, David (French teacher in Russia) 127, 128 Bouhours, Dominique (1628–1702) 84, 467, 492 Conversations between Ariste and Eugene 84 Bourdieu, Pierre 65, 99, 247 See also cultural capital; linguistic market-place bourgeoisie, or bourgeois society 119, 169, 515 Herzen’s view of 449 Lev Tolstoi’s view of 546 in Low Countries in eighteenth century 136 Russian bourgeoisie 133, 169, 170, 199 n. 119 in early Soviet Union 135 in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West 60, 119, 242, 515 See also tiers état Bourgoing, Baron Paul-Charles-Amable de (1791–1864) 446 Boussole de Terre (Compass) 420 bratstvo, see brotherhood Brevern, Carl Hermann von (1704–1744) 280 Briancheninov, Lieutenant (eighteenth-century nobleman in Vologda Province) 256 Britain 274, 278 Briullov, Karl Pavlovich (1799–1852) 386 brotherhood, conceptions of (bratstvo or fraternité) 568 Brunot, Ferdinand, History of the French Language 79, 273 Brunswick 275 Brussels 184 Bucharest 296 Buck, Christopher 314, 315 Buckingham, Earl of (John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, 1723–1793) 186 Budberg, Andrei Fedorovich (1817–1881) 310 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707–1788) 188 Bühren (Biron), Count Ernst Johann (1690–1782) 98 Bulletin du Nord (Northern Bulletin) 423 Bünting family 352 Burgundy 462 Burke, Peter 181, 586 Busquet, Anne (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Bussy-Rabutin (Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, 1618–1693) 181, 332 Butenev, Apollinarii Petrovich (1787–1866) 299–301 Buturlin, Count Aleksandr Borisovich (1694–1767) 298 Buturlina, Elizaveta Mikhailovna (1805–1859) 197 Buturlins, Counts 206

665 Cabet, Étienne (1788–1856) 456 Cadet Corps, see Noble Land Cadet Corps Cádiz 281, 282, 283 Cadot, Michel 433 Cairo 296 calques 68 n. 123, 289–290, 470 See also French loanwords; loanwords Caméléon littéraire (Literary Chameleon) 405, 409, 420, 422 Campredon, Jacques de (1672–1749) 284 Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de (1778–1841) 146 Capo d’Istria, Count (Ioannis Kapodistrias, 1776–1831) 297 Caraccioli, Louis-Antoine (1719–1803) 80–81 Caragiale, Ion Luca (1852–1912) 482 Cardel, Elisabeth (Huguenot governess of future Catherine II, 1712–?) 187 card-playing 176, 236, 506 Carew, Richard (1555–1620), ‘Excellencie of the English Tongue’ 467 Carmontelle, Louis Carrogis (1717–1806) 223 Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529) 181 Book of the Courtier 174, 175 catching up with the West (as Russian preoccupation or topos) 416, 486, 520–521, 587 Catherine I, née Marta Skowronska, second wife of Peter the Great (1684–1727, Empress of Russia 1725–1727) 284 Catherine II, the Great (Sophie-FriederikeAuguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, 1729–1796, Empress of Russia 1762–1796) acquisition of French in childhood from French governess 187 Antidote (response to book by Chappe d’Auteroche) 413–416, 424, 477 construction of image of Russia as European power 409–416 conversations with Diderot 82 correspondence in French with Grimm 187, 188 correspondence in French with other sovereigns 188 correspondence in French with Voltaire 82, 188 disapproval of Freemasonry 226, 427 encouragement of or pride in Russian literary development 94, 424, 574 encouragement of use of Russian in internal discussion of foreign affairs 294–295 foreign origin of 99 imagined as ideal sovereign 420–422, 516 Impostor 421 Instruction (Nakaz) 82, 96, 193, 415, 427 mastery of French 187–188 memoirs of 355–356, 355 n. 105 orchestrating cultural propaganda 409–424 praise of the Russian language 468 praise for translation of a work of popular science from French into Russian 378

666  pride in command of French 193 promotion of Russian as language of administration 335 purchase of Diderot’s library 411–412 rescript (1787) on language of diplomatic reports 294–295, 324, 326 in role of enlightened monarch 82 in role of honnête homme 355 Russian Academy founded by 466 as salonnière 188 statue to Peter the Great (the so-called bronze horseman) commissioned by 97, 417 use of archaisms 187 use of French by, as attested by Khrapovits­ kii’s diary 188–193 use of French for cultural propaganda during reign of 409–416 use of proverbial and idiomatic expressions 187 well-read in French literature 187 wordplay in French 187 as writer 329 written French of 187 n. 61 See also Charter to the Nobility; French, at court; Legislative Commission Catherine Institute (College of the Order of St Catherine, founded by Maria Fedorovna, widow of Emperor Paul, in St Petersburg in 1798) 132 Catholic Church 446 Catholic emigrants from France (who spread French in Russia) 86–87 Catholicism 48, 149, 371, 386, 449, 453 Cato, Marcus Porcius Uticensis (Cato the Younger, 95–46 BC) 365 Cauchy, Augustin Louis (1789–1857) 146 Cavender, Mary 42 Censeur, journal politique et littéraire (Censor, a Political and Literary Journal) 419 censorship 74 n. 136, 115, 357, 418, 455 Cerman, Ivo 329 Çeşme, Battle of (1770) 426 Chaadaev, Petr Iakovlevich (1794–1856) 227, 435–438, 439, 449, 464, 560, 574 ‘Apology of a Madman’ 450 command of French and English 437 first ‘Philosophical Letter’ 393, 435–438, 443, 450 Pushkin’s correspondence with 339 scholarly literature on 435 n. 165 as a ‘superfluous man’ 580 view of Catholicism held by 438 n. 181 See also national backwardness, supposed advantages of chancery language (prikaznoi iazyk) 484 Chancery of Foreign Affairs (Posol’skii prikaz) 124, 287, 323 language use in 265–273

The French L anguage in Russia

translators in 124, 266–268 See also College of Foreign Affairs; Ministry of Foreign Affairs chansons 360, 426 Chappe d’Auteroche, Jean-Baptiste (1728–1769) 413–416, 477 Journey to Siberia 413, 416 See also Catherine II, Antidote Charlemagne (742–814, King of the Franks from 768, Emperor 800–814) 426, 448 Charles II (1661–1700, King of Spain 1665–1700) 265 Charles Louis, Hereditary Prince of Baden (1755–1801) 196 Charles V (1500–1558, Holy Roman Emperor 1519–1556) 468 Charles X (1757–1836, King of France 1824–1830) 515 Charles XII (1682–1718, King of Sweden 1697–1718) 408 Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1735–1814) 99, 187, 188, 416 Charlotte (English governess in midnineteenth-century Russia) 217, 435 Charlotte, Princess of Prussia, see Alexandra Fedorovna Charlotte, Princess of Württemberg, see Elena Pavlovna Charmoy, François-Bernard (1793–1869) 145 Charter to the Nobility (issued by Catherine II, 1785) 103–106 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René (1768–1848) 383, 438 n. 181 Châtelet, Louis-Marie-Florent de Lomont d’Haraucourt, Marquis, subsequently Duc du (1727–1793) 292 chauvinism, see patriotism, jingoistic Cherkasskii, Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich (d. 1742) 286 Cherkasskii, Nikolai (eighteenth-century nobleman of Nizhnii Novgorod Province) 255 Cherkasskiis 268 Chernavins 225 n. 44 Chernyshev, Count Zakhar Grigor’evich (field marshal, 1722–1784) 298 Chernyshev, Count Zakhar Grigor’evich (Decembrist, 1797–1862) 114 Chernyshevs 219, 223, 259 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–1889) 464, 558, 578 What is to be Done? 458 Chichagov, Admiral Pavel Vasil’evich (1767–1849) 298–299, 356 Chicherin, Boris Nikolaevich (1828–1904) 234, 258 Chicherins 258 Chikhachev, Andrei Ivanovich (1798–1875) 260 Chikhachevs 225 n. 44

Index

China 275 Chinese 249 Choiseul, Étienne-François, Duc de (1719–1785) 418 Chotek, Countess Marie Sidonie, née ClaryAldringen (1748–1824) 329 Christina (1626–1689, Queen of Sweden 1644–1654), memoirs of 355 Chudov Monastery, language teaching at 267 Church Slavonic 466, 484, 492 in album of a noblewoman 358 study of advocated by Betskoi 152 study of by noblewomen 154, 444 taught at Noble Land Cadet Corps 141 See also Karamzin, on Church Slavonic; Lomonosov, grammar of Russian; Lomonosov, ‘On the Use of Church Books in the Russian Language’; Shishkov, on Church Slavonic Cibber, Colley (1671–1757), Love’s Last Shift 482 Civil War (in Russia, 1917–1923) 134 Clairaut, Jean-Baptiste (d. after 1765) 323 clarté, see French, clarity Clerc, Nicolas-Gabriel, also known as Le Clerc (1726–1798) 140, 145, 420, 427 clothing, see dress coats of arms 120, 243, 572 Cobb, Richard 498 code-switching 70, 74, 221, 252, 328, 342, 461, 519, 575 in correspondence 328, 342–345 in Dashova’s correspondence 343–344 in diaries and travel diaries 351–354 possible reasons for 73, 190, 309, 343–345 in Pushkin’s correspondence 341–342 in Radishchev’s correspondence 341–342 for reporting speech in the original language 307–311, 351 ridicule or stigmatization of 66, 512–513, 528–529, 559, 575 in speech of Catherine II 190 treatment of in comic drama in 472–484 in women’s ego-writing 351 codification (of language) 55 See also Russian, codification of coffee-houses 176 College of Foreign Affairs 286, 290, 324, 503 See also Chancery of Foreign Affairs; Ministry of Foreign Affairs colleges (government departments introduced by Peter the Great) 92 colonization, internal, see internal colonization comedy 94 comic drama, treatment of language use in 472–484 Commission for the Establishment of Popular Schools (1782) 127 common people, see peasantry

667 Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania 87, 89, 90, 91 Compass, see Boussole de Terre competence, see linguistic competence Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de (1714–1780) 416 Condorcet, Marie Jean Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de (1743–1794) 323 conduct manuals 177–178, 177 n. 20 Conservateur impartial (Impartial Conservative) 423 conservative nationalism, see nationalism Considerant, Victor-Prosper (1808–1893) 456 Constantine Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (1827–1892) 200, 205 Constantine Pavlovich, Grand Duke (1779–1831) 114, 143, 148, 200 Constantinople 282, 283, 285, 403, 442 Constantinople Embassy of the Russian Empire, language use in correspondence of 296–301 Corberon, Marie Daniel Bourrée, Baron de (1748–1810) 99 Corneille, Pierre (1606–1684) 82 coronations, language use in accounts of 210–211 Corps of Communications Engineers 128, 145 Correspondance littéraire (Literary Correspondence) 411–412 correspondence, see French, in nobles’ correspondence; French, in royal correspondence; French, scholarly literature on nobles’ correspondence in; letter-writing. See also sub-entries under Alexander I; Alexander II; Alexander III; Alexandra Fedorovna; Catherine II; Chaadaev; code-switching; Constantinople Embassy of the Russian Empire; Elena Pavlovna; English; Euler; Kantemir; language choice; Maria Pavlovna; Nicholas I; Nicholas II; Radishchev, Aleksandr; Rostopchin, Count Fedor; Russian; Valuev cosmopolitanism 75, 344, 354, 382, 386, 439, 449, 458, 504, 526, 548, 552, 583, 585 Cossacks 56, 451 costume, see dress coteries 329, 359, 376 Counter-Enlightenment 54, 88, 118 Courier of the Lower Rhine, see Courrier du Bas-Rhin Courland 257, 280, 456 Diet of 257 Courrier d’Avignon (Avignon Courier) 411 Courrier du Bas-Rhin (Courier of the Lower Rhine) 417 court, see French, at court; French theatre, at Russian court; German, terms for court roles derived from; Russian, rising status at

668  nineteenth-century Russian court; Spanish, at courts courtesy 80, 463 See also politeness Cracow 87 Crimea, Russia’s annexation of (1783) 91, 482, 576 Crimean War (1853–1856) 116, 439, 453–454, 546 effect of Russian defeat in 520 cuisine 95, 212, 354 cultural borrowing, see borrowing cultural capital 99, 104, 123, 165, 247, 259, 543, 572 See also Bourdieu cultural diplomacy 185 cultural nationalism, see nationalism cultural propaganda, see French, for cultural or political propaganda Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1790–1857) 443, 451, 513 Russia in 1839 443, 451 Cyrillic alphabet or script 225, 466 for Russian names and culture-specific words 343–344, 352 Czartoryski, Prince Adam (1770–1861) 195, 297, 298, 536 Czech 136 Dahmen, Kristine 139 Dal’, Vladimir Ivanovich (1801–1872) 121 Dallas, George Mifflin (1792–1864) 198 Dalmas, Honoré-Joseph (d. 1829) 431 Damascus 296 dancing, as aristocratic accomplishment 104, 170, 178, 236, 247, 261 dandies 168, 472, 477 See also dandyism; fops; petits-maîtres dandyism 487 n. 118 Danish 278–279 Danzig 275 Dardanelles 296 Dashkova, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna, née Vorontsova (1743–1810) and the Academy of Sciences 317–318, 325 code-switching by 343–344, 345 on her fluency in French 37 linguistic pride of 468 linguistic purism of 470 memoirs of 356 multilingualism of 217, 336 in praise of the Russian language 468 on her supposedly poor knowledge of Russian 37, 39 travel diaries of 353–354 work on Dictionary of the Russian Academy 153, 325–326, 466–467 See also Dictionary of the Russian Academy; Vorontsovs Daudet, Alphonse (1840–1897) 522

The French L anguage in Russia

Davydov, Count Anatolii Vladimirovich (1837–1905) 238–239 Davydovs 155 Decembrist Revolt (1825) 110, 114, 115, 150, 205, 242, 306, 439, 440, 567 scholarly literature on 114 n. 115 Decembrists 114–115, 220, 306–307, 344, 386 knowledge of Latin among 149 linguistic competencies of 114–115, 230–232 Deffand, Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du (1697–1780) 175 Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas (1688–1768) 323, 403, 404 Del’vig, Baron Anton Antonovich (1798–1831) 180 Demange, Jean-François (1789–?) 145 Demidov Lycée 128 Demidova, Elizaveta Petrovna (b. 1767) 378 Demidovs 107, 206 Demoiselle, François (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Denmark 279 Deran, Pierre (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 255 Derzhavin, Gavrila Romanovich (1743–1816) 109, 191, 329, 466 ‘Felitsa’ 191 odes 91 Descartes, René (1596–1650), Discourse on Method 82 Descriptive Library of the Works of Learned Men of Europe, see Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe Desessart, Chevalier Jean (Francophone tutor in mid-eighteenth-century Russia) 167 Desné, Roland 412 Destrem, Jean Antoine Maurice (1788–1855) 145 detachment from native land, see estrangement Devot, Antoine (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 255 diaries 71, 73, 74, 123, 145 n. 73, 154, 155, 202, 210, 216, 328, 347–352, 573 men’s diaries 351–352 types of 347 women’s 348–351 See also French, in diaries; Khrapovitskii, diary of; and sub-entries under Alexander II; Alexander III; Alexandra Fedorovna; Elena Pavlovna; Maria Pavlovna; Nicholas I; Olga Aleksandrovna; Valuev Dictionary of the Russian Academy 39, 68 n. 123, 153, 295, 318, 325, 466–467, 586 Diderot, Denis (1713–1784) 82, 97, 188, 410, 412, 413, 416, 427 diglossia 61, 65–66, 70, 345, 471 scholarly literature on 65 n. 112 See also bilingualism; plurilingualism

Index

diminutives, see Russian, in diminutive forms of names diplomatic terminology 287–290 disloyalty (in language use), see language loyalty or disloyalty Dmitriev, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1759–1798) 155 Dmitriev, Ivan Ivanovich (1760–1837) 155 Dmitrieva, Nina 339 Dmitriev-Mamonov, Count Matvei Aleksandrovich (1790–1863) 149 Dobroliubov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1836–1861) 118 n. 122, 585 Dodsley, Robert (1704–1764), Toyshop 473 n. 54, 478 Dolgorukaia, Princess Aleksandra Sergeevna (1834–1913) 216 Dolgorukii, Prince Nikolai Alekseevich (1713–1790) 167 Dolgorukiis 206, 268 Dolgorukov, Prince Aleksandr Sergeevich (translator of Sumarokov, dates unknown) 428, 429 Dolgorukov, Prince Iakov Fedorovich (1639–1720) 268 Dolgorukov, Prince Il’ia Andreevich (1797–1848) 227 Dolgorukov, Prince Ivan Mikhailovich (1764–1823) 167–168, 259 Dolgorukov, Prince Petr Vladimirovich (1816–1868) 454, 455 Truth about Russia 454 Dolgorukov, Prince Vasilii Andreevich (1804–1868) 309, 310, 311 Dolgorukov, Prince Vasilii Lukich (1670?–1739) 268, 269, 278, 279 Dolgorukovs 323 domestication (translation strategy) 478 See also adaptation Dorat, Claude-Joseph (1734–1780) 411 Dorpat (now Tartu), University of 320–321 ‘Germanism’ in 321 Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich (1821–1881) Brothers Karamazov 521, 565–569 Crime and Punishment 562 n. 171 as cultural nationalist 121, 573, 583 Devils 521, 522, 559–563 Diary of a Writer 563–565 fictional treatment of Russian francophonie 558–569 hostility to Ivan Turgenev 522 and Native-Soil Conservatism 457 novels of 74, 519, 520 ontological implications of poor command of mother tongue 562 and Petrashevskii circles 116 Pushkin speech 38, 465, 570 on Russians as the one true Christian people 580 scholarly literature on 559 n. 152

669 social background of 118, 578 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 559, 568 See also Native-Soil Conservatism; Petrashevskii circles douceur de vivre (comfort) 80, 81, 174, 464, 514 Douglas, Chevalier (Mackenzie-Douglas, Baron de Kildin, 1713–1765) 410 drama 74, 75, 212, 327, 331 See also comic drama drawing (as noble accomplishment) 104 drawing-room as social site 121, 182, 261, 329, 382, 552 presence of women in 183 See also French, in the drawing-room dress changes in from time of Peter the Great 94 of common people 120 language and 463–464 and social solidarity 573 See also fashion, language and Dreux du Radier, Jean-François (1714–1780), Dictionary of Love 179, 236 Dryden, John (1631–1700), Marriage à la Mode 482 Du Bellay, Joachim (1525–1560) 84 Du Puget, Baron David-Louis d’Yverdon (1765–1838) 143 dualism of Russian culture (according to Lotman) 48, 49 Dubert, Jean-Pierre (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Dubois-Descours, Louis, Marquis de la Maisonfort (1763–1827) 419 Dubuisson, Jean (eighteenth-century Huguenot merchant) 100 duelling 104, 237–238, 339 Dugourt, Antoine (French teacher in Russia in nineteenth century) 127 Dulac, Georges 187, 412, 417, 418 Dupaty, Charles Marguerite Jean Baptiste (Mercier-Dupaty, 1746–88), Letters on Italy 353 Durand, François-Michel, Chevalier, Seigneur de Distroff (1714–1778) 418 Durnovos 143 Dutch 94, 96, 267, 284 Russian loanwords from 96 n. 52 Dutch Golden Age 586 Duvignau (Francophone governor in Golitsyn family in early nineteenth century) 223 eclogues 360 Edel’man, Ol’ga 203 education 123–171 See also French, teaching or learning of; French-speaking tutors; governesses Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom (1841–1910) 209

670  Edwards, John 63, 64, 464 ego-writing 73, 74, 328, 332, 346–359 See also albums; diaries; French, in ego-documents; French, in travel diaries or journals; travel diaries Eikhenbaum, Boris 76 Ekaterinburg 126 Elagin, Ivan Perfil’evich (1725–1796) 226, 228 Jean de Molle, or a Russian Frenchman 473, 482 Elagina, Avdot’ia Petrovna, née Iushkova (Kireevskaia during her first marriage, 1789–1877) 179 elegies 94, 360, 371 Elena Pavlovna, née Charlotte, Princess of Württemberg, wife of Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich (1807–1873) language use in correspondence and other documents of 205–206, 302–303 position of in Russian royal family 196 plurilingualism of 206 n. 160, 302 Elena Vladimirovna, Grand Duchess, granddaughter of Alexander II (1882–1957) 208 Elias, Norbert 581 Elizabeth, Empress (Elizaveta Petrovna, 1709–1761 (–1762 NS), Empress of Russia 1741–1761 (–1762 NS)) command of French, and French at court of 97–98 description of coronation of 210 encouragement of cultural propaganda on Russia’s behalf 574 French theatre and culture at court of 184, 212 invitation to Voltaire to write history of reign of Peter the Great 407 Elizabeth Alekseevna, see Louise-MarieAuguste of Baden emancipation of nobility (1762) 102–106, 105 n. 86, 598 emancipation of serfs (1861) 441, 454, 521, 546, 550 emancipation of women 458, 550 emperor (title imperator) 91 empire-building 53, 91–92, 122, 576, 579 Encyclopaedia, see Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné Encyclopaedic Journal, see Journal Encyclopédique Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné 82, 166, 412 Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895) 456 n. 268 England 268, 276, 335 English 94, 97, 123 in high society, as affirmed in Tolstoi’s fiction 552 n. 122 increased use in correspondence of royal family from late nineteenth century 208–209, 214

The French L anguage in Russia

learned by early nineteenth-century noble families 159 n. 123 teaching or learning of 132, 158–160, 169 in women’s albums 357–358 in women’s travel diaries 354 See also Tolstoi, Count Lev, Anna Karenina; Valuev, knowledge of English English Literary Journal of Moscow 159 enlightened absolutism 577 Ental’tsev, Andrei Vasil’evich (1788–1845) 230 Éon de Beaumont, Chevalier d’ (1728–1810) 410 epic poetry 91, 94, 329 epigrams 360, 369 epigraphs, use of French or Russian in 506, 506 n. 200 Épinay, Mme Louise d’ (1726–1783) 175 epistolary novels 350, 382, 392 epistolary technique, see letter-writing, as educational exercise; letter-writing, linguistic formulae in Esprit des cours de l’Europe (Spirit of the Courts of Europe) 398 essentialist view of language 77, 85, 246, 464, 494, 577, 583 Estland 257 Estonians 121 estrangement (supposed alienation or detachment, of Russian elite from native tradition) 511, 527, 528, 562, 584 Etherege, Sir George (1636–1692), Man of Mode 482 ethno-nationalism 242 etiquette at court 80 epistolary 73, 339, 573 linguistic or verbal 66, 240, 333 n. 19, 341, 523, 574 in society 182, 390, 505 See also Bussy-Rabutin; French, epistolary etiquette in Etkind, Alexander 75, 514 n. 239 use of literature by as source for study of language use 75 n. 140, 244, 519 Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663–1736) 274 Euler, Johann Albrecht (1734–1800) 418 Euler, Leonhard (1707–1783) 322–323, 403 Letters to a German Princess 322 plurilingual correspondence of 322–323 Europäische Fama (European Fame) 398 Europeanization, see westernization Even-Zohar, Itamar 503 n. 192 Evstratov, Alexeï 184, 212 exceptionalist narrative about Russian culture 49–51, 50 n. 53, 51–52 n. 60, 457, 549, 579, 580, 582 n. 14, 587 Eylau, Battle of (1807) 110, 495 Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia, k pol’ze i uveseleniiu sluzhashchie (Monthly Works that are of Use and Entertain) 318

Index

fables 94, 360 See also Krylov Fabre, Jacques Alexandre (1782–1844) 145 fairy tales 121 Faizova, Irina 105 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice (1716–1791) 416, 417 fashion, language and 463–464, 477 See also dress fatherland (otechestvo), notion of, love or betrayal of, devotion to 105, 118, 129, 432, 482, 489, 491, 494, 500, 516, 564, 584 Fauche, Pierre-François (1763–1814) 419 Fedyukin, Igor 101 fencing (as noble accomplishment) 104, 178 Fénelon, François (1651–1715) 517 Adventures of Telemachus 82 Feofanov, Aleksandr 130 Ferdinand VII (1784–1833, King of Spain 1808 and 1813–1833) 115 Ferguson, Charles 65 Ferret, see Furet Fijałkovski, Antoni Melchior, Archbishop of Warsaw (1778–1861) 308–309 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814) 54–55 Addresses to the German Nation 54–55, 577 Figes, Orlando 76, 585 Natasha’s Dance 47 treatment of linguistic issues by 37, 68 n. 123, 575 n. 3 Fircks, Fedor Ivanovich (i.e. Baron Theodor von, 1812–1872) 456–459 on language use in different social strata or ethnic groups 248 n. 124 Nihilism in Russia 250, 456–459 as proponent of ‘two-nation’ argument 581 Studies on the Future of Russia 456 on supposed duties of noblewomen 457–458 on use of French as social sign 248 on women’s language use as supposed cause of nihilism 457, 458 Fircks, Georg Friedrich von (1780–1843) 257 fire of Moscow (1812) 111, 505 firework displays 211–212, 399 Fishman, Joshua 61, 66, 70, 327 flattery 181, 362, 463 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–1880) 522 Fletcher, Giles, the Elder (c. 1548–1611) 89, 95, 413 n. 82 Fleury, Jean (French teacher in Russia) 128 flippancy, see frivolity Florence 125, 268 Fock, Maksim Iakovlevich von (1782–1831) 303–305 folklorists 58 folk-song(s) 121 Fontainebleau, Edict of, see Revocation of Edict of Nantes Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de (1657–1757) 406

671 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds 428 Fonvizin, Denis Ivanovich (1744 or 1745–1792) attraction to Stoicism 463 Brigadier 75, 473–474, 478, 479–480, 483, 559 comic drama of 68 n. 123, 74, 75, 107, 473–484 contribution to Dictionary of the Russian Academy 466 didactic purpose of 329 on French as sign of social worth 244 Letters from abroad 353, 462 Minor 181, 517 n. 248 on pronominal usage 240 quotations from in epigraphs 506 n. 200 social background of 109 fops, foppery, or foppishness 353, 464, 475, 476–477, 502, 503, 584 See also dandies; dandyism; petits-maîtres Forceville, Claire-Aldegonde, née Delesalle (1756–?) 166 Foreign Journal, see Journal étranger Formalists (school of Russian literary theorists) 76 Formey, Johann Heinrich Samuel (1711–1797) 313, 418 Forster, Leonard 586 Fourcy, Louis Lefébure de (1787–1869) 146 Fourier, François-Marie-Charles (1772–1837) 456, 558 fracture in or fragmentation of the Russian nation, as perceived by nationalists 42, 43, 457, 459, 462, 511, 549, 550, 558, 563–564, 570, 580–581 Francœur, Louis-Benjamin (1773–1849) 146 Franco-femininity 341 Francomania, see Gallomania Francophilia (or Gallophilia) 504, 538 See also Gallomania Francophobia, see Gallophobia Francophone literature, see French, as language of literature Francophone press, see French, for cultural or political propaganda; periodical publications, in French Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) 133 Franco-Russian bilingualism, see bilingualism, Franco-Russian Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) 228 fraternité, see brotherhood Frederick II, the Great (1712–1786, King of Prussia 1740–1786) approval of the French language 85 French spoken at court of 81 on the German language as suitable only for speaking to horses 152 his negative impression of Russia 430 reform of the Royal Berlin Academy by 313

672  on supposedly detrimental cognitive effects of bilingualism 85 use of French in correspondence with Euler 323 Frederick William III (1770–1840, King of Prussia 1797–1840) 205 Free Russian Press (managed by Herzen in London) 454 Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts 489–490 Freemasons 226–230 scholarly literature on 227 n. 51 See also French, in Masonic lodges; German, in Masonic lodges; Masonic lodges French at Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg 312–323 in albums 226, 357–358 for amateur literature 71, 328–329 for aphoristic remarks 226, 233, 310, 333 n. 19 for architectural terminology 571 ascendancy of in eighteenth-century Russia 97–100 as badge or marker of social identity 214, 215, 243, 582 in the ball-room 551, 573 as booster for development of Russian literature and sense of nationhood 56–57, 587, 588 for ceremonial events 210–212, 214 clarity (clarté) of 84, 85 for compliments 232, 274, 477, 483, 523, 572 at court 61, 98, 183–214, 303, 315, 571, 587 for cultural or political propaganda 61, 395–460, 573 detrimental influence of (according to some) 41–43, 47 in diaries 73, 348–352, 573 in diplomatic ceremonies 274, 283, 284 as diplomatic language 61, 195, 263–326, 324, 326, 571 for disparagement 524, 527, 572 as domestic language 529 in Dostoevskii’s fiction 558–569 in the drawing-room 69, 225–226, 230, 311, 380, 504, 506–507, 525, 527, 535, 554, 573 in ego-documents 346–359 epistolary etiquette in 73, 233, 332–333 in the family circle 61, 143, 153, 155–156 in family or social games 222–223, 225 formulaic expressions in 163, 203, 232–233, 237, 246, 332–334, 332 n. 13, 344, 365, 483, 527, 572 génie (genius, spirit) of 85, 152 in high society 61, 214, 215–261, 326 as ‘intellectual’ language 338, 537 for intelligence gathering on Russian subjects 305–307

The French L anguage in Russia

as intermediary or vehicular language 159, 170 n. 149, 170, 428 n. 134, 571 for internal discussion of Russian foreign affairs 61, 290–295, 307, 309 as internal language for Danish diplomats 279 n. 68 as internal language for Russian diplomats 283–286, 295–296 n. 133 knowledge of among men close to Peter the Great 271 n. 20 as language of courtship 235, 542 as language of culture 131 as the ‘language of Europe’ 243, 339, 423, 434, 437, 447, 452, 574 as language of fashion 571 as language of flirtation, seduction, adulterous liaison 235, 236, 240, 338, 505–506, 524, 527, 544, 554, 555 as language of friendship, intimacy, or proximity 61, 123, 166, 170, 195, 214, 225, 573 as language of honour 339 as language of literature, broadly understood 61, 327–393 as language of nobility 35–36 as language of sociability 166, 173–183 as language of socialism and revolutionary propaganda 456 as language of tuition 61, 143, 146, 153–154 as lingua franca 61, 88, 124, 150, 157, 195, 214, 279, 297, 303, 310, 311, 364, 427, 495, 500, 536, 571 in Masonic lodges 228–230, 573 for medical subject-matter 191 n. 85, 344, 571 for memoir-writing 355–356 among middling or lesser nobility 253–261 in nobles’ correspondence 71, 73, 165–166, 233, 255 n. 147, 573 in official domains 263–326, 536 for oral discussion of government business 307–312 for polemical writing for an international readership 439–459, 573 for political or philosophical speculation 537 as prestige language or language of distinction 61, 88, 273, 311, 461, 462, 572 in provincial Russia 253–261 reaction against during Napoleonic period 111–112 for rejection of social inferior 530 in Republic of Letters 243 in royal correspondence 202–210 as a royal language 200–212, 214, 303, 571 for Russian forenames or nicknames 505, 523, 528, 544, 551, 560 in salons 131, 132, 444, 538, 573 scholarly literature on nobles’ correspondence in 338 n. 33

Index

as a secret language 178, 524, 551, 571 for self-fashioning 247 as sign of corporate exclusivity 243 for social differentiation 41–42, 71, 244, 250 for social solidarity 238, 573 in the society tale 505–507 spread of in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Europe 79–88 supposed qualities of 84, 85 teaching or learning of 123–171, 551–552 for terms of address 505, 551, 560 textbooks on 128, 130, 131 in theatre 131, 223 for theological dispute 453–454 in Third Department 304–307 in Tolstoi’s fiction 534–558 in travel diaries 352–354, 573 in treaties 273–278, 324 in treatises 365, 367, 573 in Turgenev’s fiction 522–533 universality (universalité) of 80, 84, 85–86, 88, 577 in Valuev’s diary 216, 221, 222–223, 223–224, 234–235, 248–249, 307–312, 572 as vehicle for spurious knowledge or dogmatic theory 543 women’s use of 303, 573 women’s writing in 376–393 See also allegiance; Catherine II, use of French by; correspondence; cultural capital; French loanwords; Frenchspeaking tutors; identity; libraries; periodical publications; Rivarol; Third Department; wit, or witticisms French Academy of Sciences, see Académie Française French character or personality, perceptions of 464 French education, or opposition to it 128–129, 265–266 French Gazette, see Gazette de France French loanwords resistance to 470, 576 ridicule of use of 472–484 scholarly literature on 469 n. 36 See also sub-entries on loanwords under Karamzin and Lukin French Mercury, see Mercure de France French Revolution (from 1789) 60, 79, 80, 180, 205, 364, 443, 456, 500, 577 French revolution of 1830, see July Revolution French-speaking tutors 39, 100, 109, 183, 255–256, 256–257 n. 154 , 333 See also Russian literature, representation of foreign tutors in French theatre 112 at Russian court 184–187, 212 and stature of monarch 185

673 Fréron, Abbé Élie-Catherine (1719–1776) 409, 410 Friedland, Battle of (1807) 111 Friendly Literary Society 489 friendship, see nobility, friendship valued by frivolity (as supposed trait of French character or character of Gallicized Russian nobles) 385, 464, 479–480, 482, 587 Froment, Abbé (French tutor in Russia in nineteenth century) 155 Fumaroli, Marc 79, 80, 464, 577 Funck-Brentano, Frantz (1862–1947) 133 Furet (Ferret) 423–424 Gagarin, Prince Ivan Sergeevich (1814–1872) 453, 453 n. 258 Gagarin, Prince Pavel Pavlovich (1789–1872) 310 Gagarins 206, 225, 259 galanterie (gallantry, i.e. attention or devotion to ladies), see gallantry Galiani, Abbé Ferdinando (1728–1787) 234 gallantry 173, 175, 178, 235, 476–477, 483, 572 See also dandies; dandyism; fops Gallicisms 475, 476, 478, 482, 486, 487, 500, 502, 559, 584 See also French loanwords Gallien de Salmorenc, Timoléon (c. 1740–after 1786) 420–422 ‘Age of Catherine II’ 422 Gallomania 75, 76, 111, 182, 462, 473, 474, 480, 482, 483, 495, 497, 500, 584 See also Francophilia, Gallophobia Gallophobia 111, 441, 494–501 during Napoleonic Wars 472, 503 See also French character; linguistic Gallophobia; stereotypes, or stereotyping gambling 236, 506 Garting, Ivan Markovich (1768–1831) 297 Gastaldi, Giambattista (dates unknown) 281 Gaston, Chevalier Marie Joseph Hyacinthe de (1767–1808) 420 Gatchina Orphans’ Institute 128 Gavriil, Metropolitan (Petr Petrovich PetrovShaposhnikov, 1730–1801) 126 Gazette d’Utrecht (Utrecht Gazette) 410 Gazette de France (French Gazette) 418 Gazette de Leyde (Leiden Gazette) 397 Gazette des Deux-Ponts (Zweibrücken Gazette) 418 Gazette du Nord (Gazette of the North) 456 Gazette littéraire de l’Europe (Literary Gazette of Europe) 412 Gazette of the North, see Gazette du Nord Gazette universelle de littérature (Universal Literary Gazette) 418 Geneva 148 génie (of language), see French, génie genius, as gendered literary concept 379

674  Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité, Comtesse de (1746–1830) 381 gentry, see nobility Geoffrin, Marie Thérèse Rodet (1699–1777) 175, 188 geography, taught through French 143, 154, 155, 169 George, Mlle, i.e. Marguerite Georges, née Marguerite-Josephine Weimer (1787–1867) 545 George I (1660–1727, King of Great Britain 1714–1727) 276 George I (1845–1913, King of Greece 1863–1913) 208, 209 George II (1683–1760, King of Great Britain 1727–1760) 280 Georgians 121 Germain-Hyacinthe de Romance, Marquis de Mesmon (1745–1831) 419 German as academic language or language of scholarship in Russia 320–321, 325 at Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg 96, 314, 315, 320–321 character of, according to Charles V 468 in competition with French, or relative value of, in imperial Russia 123 dialectal differences in Holy Roman Empire 265 in diplomacy 265, 272, 284, 285–286, 324 Fichte’s view of 54–55 as language of administration in Habsburg lands 295 n. 130 , 576 as language for use with soldiers and horses 81, 152 in linguistic repertoire of Catherine II 192–193 in Masonic lodges 228–229 as medium for Russian lexical borrowing 288 as medium for Russian propaganda 400 mother tongue of families from Baltic region 96 needed by Russians for education abroad 95 at Noble Land Cadet Corps 135–146 practical functions of in fields of mining, metallurgy, or medicine 96, 126 scorned by Voltaire 81 teaching or learning of 125–126, 131–171 terms for court roles derived from 183 n. 49 as vehicle for early Russian westernization 94–95 in women’s travel diaries 354 See also Valuev, command of German Germanic Library, see Bibliothèque germanique Gerngross, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (b. 1825) 310 Gertsen, Aleksandr Ivanovich, see Herzen, Alexander Girs, Nikolai Karlovich (1820–1895) 295

The French L anguage in Russia

Glagoleva, Ol’ga 259 glasnost’, first age of (1850s) 116, 455 Glinka, Fedor Nikolaevich (1786–1880) 358 Glinka, Sergei Nikolaevich (1776–1847) 502 Glinkas 254 Glück, Pastor Johann Ernst (1652–1705) 125, 271 Gmelin, Johann Georg (1709–1755), Journey through Siberia 413 n. 82 Gogol’, Nikolai Vasil’evich (1809–1852) 116, 118, 180, 198, 386, 564 Dead Souls 258, 448, 508 Goldbach, Christian (1690–1764) 322, 404 Goldingen (now Kuldiga) 257 Goldsmith, Oliver (1730?–1774), Essays 365 Golenishcheva-Kutuzova, Avdot’ia (Evdokiia) Pavlovna (1795–1863) 358 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Admiral Ivan Loginovich (1729–1802) 142 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich, see Kutuzov (i.e. Golenishchev-Kutuzov) Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Pavel Ivanovich (1767–1829) 369–370 Golitsyn, Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1723–1807) 335–336, 341 Golitsyn, Prince Aleksei Andreevich (1767–1800) 353 Golitsyn, Prince Boris Alekseevich (1651 or 1654–1714) 273 Golitsyn, Prince Boris Vladimirovich (1769–1813) 148, 154, 162, 353, 364–367 ‘Dedicatory Epistle to the Young Nobility’ 365 ‘On the Influence of Events on the Formation of a Constitution’ 365 Golitsyn, Prince Dmitrii Alekseevich (1734–1803) 367, 367 n. 153, 417–418 Golitsyn, Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich (1721–1793) 335 Golitsyn, Prince Dmitrii Vladimirovich (1771–1844) 38, 148, 162, 365, 423 Golitsyn, Prince Fedor Sergeevich (1781–1826) 218–219 Golitsyn, Prince Iurii Nikolaevich (1823–1872) 221 n. 27, 234 Golitsyn, Prince Mikhail Andreevich (1765–1812) 335–336 Golitsyn, Prince Petr Alekseevich (1660–1722) 269 Golitsyn, Prince Sergei Fedorovich (1749–1810) 126 Golitsyna, Princess Praskov’ia Ivanovna, née Shuvalova (1734–1802) 341 Golitsyna, Princess Natal’ia Petrovna, née Chernysheva (1741–1837) 148, 153, 158, 160–161, 165–166, 219, 223, 233, 254, 353 Golitsyna, Princess Sof’ia, see Stroganova, Sof’ia Vladimirovna Golitsyna, Princess Varvara Vasil’evna, née Engel’gardt (1752–1815) 378

Index

Golitsyns, Princes 107, 143, 155, 158, 206, 220, 254, 259, 268 Golovin, Aleksandr Fedorovich (1694–1731) 272–273 Golovin, Fedor Alekseevich (1650–1706) 272 Golovins 268, 272 Golovkin, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1731–1781), My Ideas on the Education of the [Fair] Sex 367 Golovkina, Countess Natal’ia Petrovna, née Izmailova (1768–1849) 382, 392 Alphonse de Lodève 382 Elizabeth, or the History of a Russian Woman 382 Golovkins 206 Golynskaia, Matil’da (Mariia) Mikhailovna (1824–1848) 155 Golynskaia, Praskov’ia Mikhailovna (1822–1892) 155 Gombaud, Antoine, Chevalier de Méré (1607–1684) 174 Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1812–1891) 116, 118 Oblomov 585 Goncharova, Natal’ia Ivanovna, née Zagriazhskaia (1785–1848, Pushkin’s mother-in-law) 339 Goncharova, Natal’ia Nikolaevna (1812–1863, married to Pushkin 1831–1837) 339 Goncharovs 107 Goncourt brothers, i.e. Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de (1822–1896) and Jules Alfred Huot de (1830–1870) 522 Goodman, Dena 175 n. 12 Gorchakov, His Serene Highness Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1798–1883) 233, 308, 309, 310 Gorchakov, Prince Mikhail Dmitrievich (1793–1861) 308, 444 Gorchakovs 206 gossip 241, 506, 553 Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700–1766) 428, 429, 430 governesses 100, 109, 255–256, 333 See also French, teaching or learning of; French-speaking tutors grammars, see Russian, grammars of Grand Embassy, see Peter the Great, Grand Embassy of grand monde (high society), or beau monde (fashionable society) 94, 119, 176, 182, 218, 221, 232–242, 245, 333, 384, 385, 424, 458, 479, 507, 557, 569, 572, 577 See also French, in high society grand narratives about Russian culture 578–586 Grand Tour (culmination of noble upbringing) 87, 104, 130, 131, 158, 227, 330, 353, 361, 449 Grande Armée (of Napoleon) 87, 111, 170, 536, 550

675 Granovskii, Timofei Nikolaevich (1813–1855) 118, 119, 561–562 Grasshoff, Helmut 428 Great Northern War (with Sweden, 1700–1721) 91, 136 Grech, Nikolai Ivanovich (1787–1867) 150–151 Grechanaia (also Gretchanaia), Elena 348, 349, 354, 355, 357, 364, 382 Greek 132, 143, 147, 267, 270, 581 Greek War of Independence (from 1821) 115 Greenleaf, Monika 355–356 Greig, Admiral Sir Samuel (1736–1788) 192 Gretchanaia, see Grechanaia Griboedov, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1795–1829) 227, 502 Woe from Wit 502 Griboedovs 254 Grigor’ev, Apollon Aleksandrovich (1822–1864) 558 Grimm, Baron Friedrich Melchior (1723–1807) 99, 187, 410, 411, 412, 416 Literary Correspondence 411, 412 Grundt, Georg (Danish envoy to Russia from 1705) 284 Guasco, Ottaviano (1712–1781) 428 n. 136, 429 Guazzo, Stefano (1530–1593) 174 Civile Conversation 174 Gur’ev, Count Dmitrii Aleksandrovich (1751–1825) 297 Gur’evs 155 Gurowski, Count Adam (1805–1866) 438 n. 184 Gustav III of Sweden (1746–1792) 81, 187, 188, 329 gymnasia (gimnazii, i.e. high schools) 131–132 Habsburgs 116, 183 See also German, as language of administration in Habsburg lands Hague, The court at 184 firework display organized by Russian envoy in 399 as place of publication 398, 400 Haller, Albrecht von (1708–1777) 323 Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–1788) 54, 577 Hamburg as place of publication 396, 419 Russian diplomatic mission in 296 n. 133 Russian pressure to muzzle journalists in 397 Hamburg, Gary 53, 54, 117 n. 119 , 498 Hammarberg, Gitta 358 Hanover 184 Hanseatic League, or Hanseatic cities 123, 273 Harbinger, see Avant-coureur Hastings, Adrian 55, 459 hats (as item of fashion) 504 Haugen, Einar 572 Haxthausen, August Franz Ludwig Maria, Baron von (1792–1866) 47

676  on language use 47 n. 45 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) 118, 173, 434, 533 heraldry, see coats of arms Herberstein, Sigismund von (1486–1566) 89, 94, 95, 413 n. 82 Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744–1803) 54, 494, 508, 577 Letters for the Advancement of Humanity 54 Hermitage (in St Petersburg) 53 Hernandez Philippe (editor of Francophone periodical in eighteenth-century Russia) 420 Herold, Kelly 356 Herzen, Alexander (Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen, 1812–1870) on advantages of national backwardness 464 as both creative writer and polemicist 117 on Chaadaev 436 code of values of 118–119 contribution to geopolitical polemics around 1848 439, 441, 448–452 as editor of Kolokol 454, 455 From the Other Shore 451, 452 on Karamzin 485 Letters from France and Italy 449, 452 as libertarian socialist 515 My Past and Thoughts 118, 357, 379 n. 192 noble values apparent in conduct of 119 preference for Muscovite nobility over St Petersburg aristocracy 108 on the Russian peasant and peasant commune 121, 450, 522 ‘Russian People and Socialism’ 449, 451 scholarly literature on 449 n. 236 self-representation as Romantic exile 450–451 social background of 118, 259 on supposed receptivity of the Russians to other cultures 464–465 use of French for international debate 448–452, 574 as Westernizer 45 n. 41 Herzenism 459 high society, see French, in high society; grand monde Historical and Political Mercury, see Mercure historique et politique Historical Letters, see Lettres historiques historiosophical polemic 434–452 history, taught through French 143, 153, 154, 155, 156, 169 Holbach, Paul Henri, Baron d’ (1723–1789) 411 Holberg, Ludvig (1684–1754), Hans Frandsen, or John of France 482 Holland as place of publication 399, 400 teaching of French in 124

The French L anguage in Russia

young Russians sent to study in 268 See also Low Countries; Netherlands Holstein 275 Holy Alliance 113, 383 Holy Roman Empire 91, 265, 273, 274, 275 homeland (otchizna or rodina) 517, 584 Honest Mirror of Youth (guide to conduct) 177–178 honnête homme, notion of 87, 161, 166–167, 166–167 n. 140, 178, 319 359 honour 104, 119, 238, 430 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus; 65–8 BC) 371 horse races 552 Hosking, Geoffrey 52, 53 Huc-Mazelet, Jeanne (1765–1852) 203 Hugo, Victor (1802–1885) 424, 514 Huguenots 86, 404 Hungarian Revolt (1848–1849) 116 Hunt, Miss (English acquaintance of Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov) 300 Husson, Pierre (1678–1733) 399 Huyssen, Heinrich von (1666–1739) 398–399, 403, 405 hypocrisy (of high society or, allegedly, the French as a people, or association with French-speaking) 119, 182, 464, 532, 544, 553, 554, 568, 569, 577 Iakushkin, Ivan Dmitrievich (1793–1857) 149, 349, 350 Iakushkina, Anastasiia Vasil’evna, née Sheremeteva (1807–1846) 349–351 Iaroslavl’ 108 Iasnaia Poliana 254, 534 identity contrastive 558 ethnic 77, 243 fluid 59 hybrid 59, 252, 583, 588 multiple 59 national 36, 41, 52, 77, 152, 232, 461–517, 525, 545–546 optional 59 primordialist 59 scholarly literature on language and 242–243 n. 107 second 498 situational 59 social 36, 41–42, 71, 123, 242–253, 572 See also allegiance; national character, language or language use as expression of image of Russia in Western Europe 396–409, 414, 417, 420, 429, 434, 459, 573–574 imagined communities 123 imitation (by Russians of West), or Russians as an imitative people 389, 415, 416, 434–435, 437, 457–458, 459, 464, 472, 477, 491–492, 520, 579, 585, 587

Index

See also Ancelot; aping; Chaadaev; Lyall; parrot; Russia and the West Impartial Conservative, see Conservateur impartial imperator, see emperor Imperial Russian Academy, see Russian Academy industrialization 46 infidelity (associated with high society or French-speaking) 553 innovators (faction in Russian linguistic debate) 490 Inokhodtsev, Petr Borisovich (1742–1806) 317 insincerity (of high society or, allegedly, the French as a people) 464, 554, 568, 569 Institut français 133 Institute for Noble Maidens, see Smolny Institute Instruction (Nakaz), see Catherine II instrumentalist approach (to language use) 60, 480 integrative approach (to language use) 59, 480 intelligentsia 58, 59, 77, 82, 221, 242, 311, 329, 330–331 n. 9, 452, 517, 525, 528, 574 claim to moral leadership of nation 577–578 definition of 116–117 nn. 119–120 emergence in reign of Nicholas I 182 estranged from native soil, according to Dostoevskii 562 knowledge of Latin among 150 liberal or moderate wing of 532, 561 nationalism in 439, 484 origin of the English word ‘intelligentsia’ 68 n. 123 populist wing of 248 n. 124 presence of raznochintsy (qv) in 110, 438 radical or utilitarian wing of 528, 546, 558 as revolutionary force, according to Herzen 450 role and definition of 116–122 in Romanian lands 60 n. 92, 87 scholarly literature on 117 n. 119 social background of members of 183 internal colonization 514 n. 239, 581 Ionesco, Eugène (1909–1994) 393 Irkutsk 242 Italian character of, according to Charles V 468 in correspondence of Formey (qv) 313 as diplomatic language 97, 265, 272, 275, 276, 285, 290, 296, 324 in domain of music 97 inferiority to French and Latin, according to Bouhours 84 Kantemir’s knowledge of 281 in linguistic repertoire of some nobles 97, 216, 217 qualities of, according to Bouhours 492–493 n. 151

677 teaching or learning of 154, 169, 267, 269–270, 271 n. 20, 273 in travel diaries of noblewomen 252, 354 in Valuev’s diary 216 as vehicle for early Russian westernization 94–95 in womens’ albums 357–358 See also Valuev, knowledge of Italian Italinskii, Andrei Iakovlevich (1743–1827) 298 Ivan III, the Great (1440–1505, Grand Prince of Muscovy 1462–1505) 92 Ivan IV, the Terrible (1530–1584, crowned Tsar of Russia 1547) 53 Ivashev, Vasilii Petrovich (1797–1840) 230 Iziaslav Province 256 Jablonski, Daniel Ernst (1660–1741) 403 Jacobins 113 Janković de Mirijevo, Theodor (1741–1814) 191, 467 n. 25 Jesuit colleges or schools 125, 139, 149–150, 305 Jesuits 87, 275, 453 jeux d’esprit (games of wit) 222–223 Jews 121 Jobard, Alphonse (French teacher in Russia) 128 Joseph II of Austria (1741–1790, Holy Roman Emperor 1765–1790) 81, 290 Journal de politique et de littérature (Journal of Politics and Literature) 363 Journal de Trévoux (Trévoux Journal) 399 Journal des dames (Ladies’ Journal) 411, 412 Journal des sciences et des arts (Journal of Sciences and Arts) 420 Journal du Nord (Northern Journal) 419, 423 Journal Encyclopédique (Encyclopaedic Journal) 362, 410, 413 Journal étranger (Foreign Journal) 429 Journal littéraire d’Allemagne, de Suisse et du Nort (Literary Journal of Germany, Switzerland, and the North) 402, 402–403 Journal littéraire de St.-Pétersbourg (St Petersburg Literary Journal) 420 Journal of Politics and Literature, see Journal de politique et de littérature Journal of Sciences and Arts, see Journal des sciences et des arts Journal of the Learned, see Acta Eruditorum journals, see periodical publications; satirical journalism July Monarchy (in France 1830–1848) 60, 443, 584 July Revolution (in France 1830) 456, 503, 515 See also French Revolution (from 1789) Kalmyks 121 Kaluga 108 Kankrins 224 Kantemir, Antiokh Dmitrievich (1708–1744) admiration of Peter the Great 406

678  command of Italian 281 language use in correspondence 280–281, 323 language use as diplomat and early cultural intermediary in London and Paris 279–281 satires by 107 as supporter of reforms of Peter the Great 406 his translation of Fontenelle 428 translations of his satires 428–429 treatise on versification 465 n. 14 verses in French by 369 n. 155 works of cited by Catherine II 424 Kapnist, Vasilii Vasil’evich (1758–1823) 367, 369 ‘Ode on the Occasion of the Peace Concluded between Russia and the Ottoman Porte’ 369 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766–1826) admiration of Peter the Great 406 affected by French linguistic and literary theory 487 article in Spectateur du Nord 426–427, 485–486 on Church Slavonic 487 complains of use of French in Russian society 40–41, 379 contribution to creation of Russian literary language and canon 251 disapproval of his professional literary activity 330 early prose fiction 463 as editor and translator 329 eulogizes Russian 493 on French or other western loanwords in Russian 477, 487, 489 historical tales 391 History of the Russian State 92, 167–168, 391, 487, 493, 504, 576 journalistic activity 329 language of correspondence with Nicholas I 204 Letters of a Russian Traveller 379, 426, 427, 486, 489, 492, 493–494, 517, 576 ‘On Love of the Fatherland and National Pride’ 490, 493 polemic with Shishkov 484–494, 508 remarks on monastic clergy 137 on the richness of the Russian language 492 social background of 259 sometime cosmopolitanism of 517 ‘Why is there so Little Writing Talent in Russia?’ 488 on women’s language use 379 See also Karamzinian school; Karamzinian style Karamzina, Ekaterina Andreevna, née Kolyvanova (second wife of Karamzin (qv), 1780–1851) 180

The French L anguage in Russia

Karamzinian school 490 Karamzinian style (‘new’ style’) 488 Karaulova, Varvara Aleksandrovna (1774–1842) 378 Karin, Aleksandr Grigor’evich (d. 1769), Russian Frenchman 473 Kassel theatre troupe 184 Kavelin, Konstantin Dmitrievich (1818–1885) 455 Kazan’ 108 Kelly, Catriona 379, 381 Kemalist Turkey (after dissolution of Ottoman Empire in early twentieth century) 51 n. 60, 585 Kenny, Michael 517 n. 250 Kern, Anna Petrovna (1800–1879) 39, 346, 349 Kerns 155 Khanykov, Vasilii Vasil’evich (1759–1829) 367, 369, 370 Khar’kov Province 254 Khemnitser, Ivan Ivanovich (1745–1784) 367, 369 Kheraskov, Mikhail Matveevich (1733–1807) 91, 180, 329, 424, 426 ‘Discourse on Russian Poetry’ 424, 426 quotations from in epigraphs 506 n. 200 Rossiad 154 Khomiakov, Aleksei Stepanovich (1804–1860) 453–454, 453 n. 259, 508, 526 A Few Words by an Orthodox Christian 453–454 Khotinskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich (1727–1811) 418 Khrapovitskii, Aleksandr Vasil’evich (1749–1800 (OS)) 226 diary of 188–193 translation of Dreux du Radier’s Dictionary of Love 179, 179 n. 29, 236 use of French in conversations with Catherine II 188–193 Khvoshchinskaia, Elena Iur’evna (1850–1907) 156, 200, 221, 222, 234 memoirs of 221 n. 27 views on pronominal usage 241 n. 105 Khvostov, Dmitrii Ivanovich (1757–1835), Russian Parisian 481–482 Khvostova, Aleksandra Petrovna, née Kheraskova (1768–1853) 179, 377–378 ‘Brook’ 377 ‘Hearth’ 377 Kiev 56, 90, 134 as centre of early East Slav state 571 n. 1 Kievan Rus’ 53 Kim, D. Brian 182 Kireevskii, Ivan Vasil’evich (1806–1856) 305, 508 Kireevskii family 159 Kiseleva, Sof’ia Stanislavovna, née Potocka (1801–1875) 198 Kiselevs 206

Index

Kleespies, Ingrid 56, 119, 437, 438 Kleinmichel, General Count Petr Andreevich (1793–1869) 310 Klement’ev (eighteenth-century nobleman in Vologda Province) 256 Kniazhnin, Iakov Borisovich (1742–1791) 377 Misfortune from a Carriage 474, 481 quotations from in epigraphs 506 n. 200 Kniazhnina, Ekaterina Aleksandrovna, née Sumarokova (1746–1797) 377 Knight, Delphine, née von Schauroth (1813–1887) 224 knout, debate about 412–413 Knutzen, Martin (1713–1751) 322 Koch, see Dahmen Kochubei, Count Viktor Pavlovich (1768–1834) 195 Kochubeis 155 Kolb, Gustav Eduard (1798–1865), see Tiutchev, ‘Letter to Dr Gustav Kolb’ Kolokol (Bell) 454, 455 König (Frankfurt book-dealer) 323 Königsberg 322 Koran, translation into Russian 270 Korff, Johann Albrecht von (1697–1766) 280, 314, 317 Korfs 310 Kornilovich, Aleksandr Osipovich (1800–1834) 149, 230 Kostroma 108, 504 Kozitskaia, Aleksandra Grigor’evna, wife of Laval de La Loubrerie (1772–1850) 180 Kozitskii, Grigorii Vasil’evich (1725–1775 (OS)) 427 Kozlovskii, Major (eighteenth-century nobleman in Nizhnii Novgorod Province) 256 Kozlovskii, Prince Petr Borisovich (1783–1840) 438 n. 184 Kozlovskiis 206 Krabbe, Admiral Nikolai Karlovich (1814–1876) 310 Kraevich, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1758–1790) 229 Krafft, Wolfgang Ludwig (1743–1814) 317, 322, 403 Krasnokutskii, Semen Grigor’evich (1787 or 1788–1840) 230 Kriukov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1793–1866) 230 Kriukovskii, Matvei Vasil’evich (1781–1811), Pozharskii 154 Krivtsova, Ekaterina Fedorovna, née Vadkovskaia (1798 or 1801–1861) 258 Krivtsovs 258 Kropotkin, Prince Petr Alekseevich (1842–1921) childhood companion of Alexander II 456 French articles, leaflets, and pamphlets of 456

679 Krüdener, Baroness Juliane von, née von Vietinghoff (1764–1824) 197, 382–386, 392 Valerie 383–385, 393 Krusenstiern, Aleksandr Ivanovich (Alexander Gotthard Julius von, 1807–1888) 310 Krylov, Ivan Andreevich (1769–1844) 110, 182, 501 fables 431–432 Fashion Shop 494–495 Lesson for Daughters 182 Kuchuk-Kainarji, Treaty of (1774) 418 Kurakin, Prince Aleksandr Borisovich (sometimes confused with Aleksei Borisovich; 1752–1818) 228, 297–298 Recollections of a Journey to Holland and England 353 Kurakin, Prince Aleksei Borisovich (1809–1872) 156 Kurakin, Prince Boris Alekseevich (1837–1860) 156 Kurakin, Prince Boris Ivanovich (1676–1727) 269, 273 Kurakina, Princess Elizaveta Alekseevna, née Naryshkina (1838–1928) 156, 196, 199, 223 Kurakina, Princess Natal’ia Ivanovna, née Golovina (1766–1831) 222, 353 Kurakins 156, 206, 259, 273, 323 Kurganov, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1725 or 1726–1790 or 1796), Universal Russian Grammar 466 Kursk 108, 126, 259 Kutuzov (i.e. Golenishchev-Kutuzov), Field Marshal Prince Mikhail Illarionovich (1745–1813) 111, 542 Labenskii, Xavier (nom de plume Jean Polonius, 1800–1855) 371 La Bruyère, Jean de (1645–1696), Characters 82, 181, 375 Labzina, Anna Evdokimovna, née Iakovleva (1758–1828) 260 Lacombe, Jacques (1724–1801) 406 Lacroix Sylvestre, François (1765–1843) 146 Ladies’ Journal, see Journal des dames La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, Comtesse de (1634–1693) 175, 381, 383 La Fontaine, Jean de (1621–1695) 82, 432 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis (1736–1813) 323 Laharpe, Frédéric-César de (1754–1838) 143, 148, 167 La Harpe, Jean-François de (1739–1803) 361, 412, 416 Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de (1732–1807) 323 La Loubrerie, Count Jean-François-Charles de Laval de (1761–1846) 180 Lamanskii, Vladimir Ivanovich (1833–1914) 321

680  Lamarche Marrese, Michelle 37–38, 104, 252, 334–335, 579, 582, 586 n. 25 Lambert, Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de (1647–1733) 175 Lambert, General Count Karl Karlovich (1815–1865) 310 Lambert, Henri Joseph, Marquis de St-Bris et Comte de (1738–1808) 419 Lamennais, Hugue Felicité Robert de (1782–1854) 438 n. 181 La Messelière, Louis-Alexandre Frotier, Comte de (1710–1777) 98, 100, 492 La Mottraye, Aubry de (1674–1747) 406 Lane, Ronald 446 Langer, Nils 471 language choice 61, 67, 70, 73, 77, 579 in ego-writing 348 in personal correspondence of nobility 332–346 reasons for 575 by Russian diplomats in mission in Constantinople 297–301 See also French, in nobles’ correspondence; French, in royal correspondence language consciousness, 55–57, 70, 465–472, 586 language contact 471 language debate, see comic drama; Karamzin, polemic with Shishkov; satirical journalism; Shishkov, polemic with Karamzin language loyalty or disloyalty 61, 66, 70, 471 language-mixing 76, 252, 472–482, 484, 512, 559, 562 See also code-switching language pride, see linguistic pride Lanskoi, Count Sergei Stepanovich (1787–1862) 308 Lanskois 206 Larin Gymnasium 130 La Rochefoucauld, François de Marsillac, Duc de (1613–1680) 82, 235, 363, 375 Latin at Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg 97, 312–323 in Bohemia 136 as diplomatic language 264, 265, 266, 272, 275, 285 disuse in treaties in eighteenth century 273–275 European elites schooled in 581 increased interest in during Alexandrine age 148–149 for inscriptions 97 insignificant role in noble education in age of Catherine II 152–153 as language of tuition at University of Moscow 152 as language useful for study abroad 95

The French L anguage in Russia

learned by children of raznochintsy 147–148, 150–151, 169 medieval poetry in 370 at Noble Land Cadet Corps 147 not regarded as sign of culture by Russian nobility 137 as source of dangerous political ideas 170 as subject only males could learn 149 taught at Leichoudes’ school 267, 270 teaching or learning of 123–126, 132, 146–151, 365 at Tsarskoe Selo Lycée 151 n. 95 See also Valuev, use of Latin expressions Latinate borrowings in German 55 Latvian 257 Laurentie, Pierre-Sébastien (1793–1856) 446, 453 Papacy, a Reply to Mr Tiutchev 446 Lavinskii, Aleksandr Stepanovich (1776–1844) 297 Law, John (1671–1729) 269 Lay of Igor’s Campaign (medieval Russian epic poem) 426 n. 127 Le Clerc, see Clerc L’Enfant, Jacques (1661–1728) 404 Lefort, François (1655–1699) 398 Legislative Commission (set up by Catherine II, 1767–1768) 82, 107, 140, 291, 412 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) 92, 400 n. 30 Leichoudes brothers’ school 267, 270 Leiden Gazette, see Gazette de Leyde Leipzig, as place of publication 398, 399 Le Laboureur, Louis (1615?–1679) 84, 467 Lémontey, Pierre-Édouard (1762–1826) 432 Leningrad 135 See also St Petersburg Lermontov, Mikhail Iur’evich (1814–1841) 116, 117, 118, 180 Hero of Our Time 43, 258 poems in French by 371, 371 n. 166 ‘Princess Mary’ 224 Leroux, Pierre Henri (1797–1871) 119 Leroy-Beaulieu, Pierre Paul (1843–1916) 133 Lespinasse, Jeanne Julie Éléonore de (1732–1776) 175 letter-writing as an aspect of noble culture 165 as educational exercise 160–166, 332 n. 13 language choice in 332–346 linguistic formulae in 332–334 manuals on 333, 333 n. 17 as a written form of the language of society 233 See also French, epistolary etiquette in; French, in nobles’ correspondence Lettres historiques (Historical Letters) 398 Levashev, Valerii Nikolaevich (1822–1877) 254–255

Index

Levashevs 259 Levesque, Pierre-Charles (1736–1812) 99, 416 Levitt, Marcus 416, 424 Levshin, Aleksandr Iraklievich (1798–1879) 301 Lexell, Anders Johan (1740–1784) 317, 321–322 lexical borrowing, see borrowing; calques; French loanwords; loanwords lexicographers 58 libraries 90, 144, 145, 571, 572 French books in 145 n. 73 Lieven, Countess Charlotte von, née Gaugreben (1742 or 1743–1828) 257 Lieven, Dominic 53, 104, 183, 581, 585 Lievens, Barons von 206, 257, 310 life-writing, see ego-writing Ligne, see Charles-Joseph, Prince de light-heartedness, see frivolity Likharev, Vladimir Nikolaevich (1803–1840) 230 Likhareva, Elizaveta Aleksandrovna (1778–1845) 378 Lilti, Antoine 175–176, 182, 233 lineage (as criterion for noble status) 107–108, 408 lingua franca, see French, as lingua franca linguistic borrowing, see borrowing; calques; French loanwords; loanwords linguistic competence 40–41, 62, 70, 216, 572, 579 of Russian nobility in French 35–36 of Russian nobility in Russian 36–41, 42 linguistic consciousness, see language consciousness linguistic contamination 461–462, 493, 500 linguistic diffidence 469 n. 33 linguistic essentialism, see essentialist view of language linguistic Gallophobia 454 as subject in comic drama 472–484 linguistic ideologies 61, 65, 67 linguistic market-place 65, 96, 576 linguistic nationalism 454, 476 linguistic patriotism 84, 132–133, 316, 326, 469 linguistic pride 467–469, 492–493 See also linguistic diffidence and subentries on praise of Russian in entries on Catherine II; Dashkova; Lomonosov; Pushkin; Sumarokov; Trediakovskii; and Ivan Turgenev linguistic proficiency, see linguistic competence linguistic purism, or purist discourse 66, 70, 469–470, 493–494, 576 metaphors in metadiscourse on 493 n. 155 Liria, Duke of (Diego Francisco Stuart Fitzjames, de Liria y Jérica, 1696–1738) 284 Literary Chameleon, see Caméléon littéraire literary community 55, 58, 59, 77, 82, 115–122, 310, 329, 330, 439, 517, 573, 577–578 male preponderance in 379 n. 192

681 social origins of 109–110 See also intelligentsia; Republic of Letters Literary Correspondence, see Correspondance littéraire Literary Gazette of Europe, see Gazette littéraire de l’Europe Literary Journal of Germany, Switzerland, and the North, see Journal littéraire d’Allemagne, de Suisse et du Nort literary societies 182, 379, 488, 489 literary sources, treatment of 43, 72–77 literary texts, types of 72–76, 327–332 literature, see amateur literature; polemical writing; professional literature; prose fiction; Russian literature Lithuania, see Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania Liubomirskaia, Princess Ekaterina Nikolaevna, née Countess Tolstaia (1789–1870) 353 Livonia 257 Lizogubova, Evdokiia Vasil’evna (1793–1815) 357–358 loanwords 66, 68 n. 123, 74, 287–290, 486–487, 533 See also borrowing, lexical or other linguistic; calques; French loanwords Locatelli, Muscovite Letters 413 n. 82 Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasil’evich (1711–1765) admiration of Peter the Great 406 advocating use of Russia for publication of research findings at the Academy of Sciences 318 contribution to Academy of Sciences 315, 317, 318 contribution to the development of Russian literature 94 contribution to the Russian literary language 68 n. 123 correspondence with Euler 322 delivering or proposing lectures in Russian at the Academy of Sciences 317, 417 eulogy to the Russian language 468 grammar of Russian 68 n. 123, 466 odes of 91, 94, 329 ‘On the Use of Church Books in the Russian Language’ 466 ‘Panegyric to Peter the Great’ 430 recommendation of French as model for those developing the Russian language 316 social background of 110 theory of ‘styles’ or registers 466 treatise on versification 465, 465 n. 14 works of cited by Catherine II 424 Lorer, Nikolai Ivanovich (1797 or 1798–1873) 230 Lotman, Iurii Mikhailovich (1922–1993) on dualism of Russian culture 48 on French as language of noble rituals 339

682  on function of French as sign of corporate exclusivity 243 influence of on scholarship on Russian francophonie 44 on knowledge of Latin in Russia 149, 150 on marginal significance of Russians’ literary work in French 393 on noble performance or theatricality 48–49, 247, 375 on Pushkin’s remarks on language-mixing and his actual practice in correspondence 342 on relationship between literature and reality 75 on Russian exceptionality 49–51 on Tolstoi’s view of Speranskii 243 Louis XIV (1638–1715, King of France 1643–1715 (subject to regency 1643–1661)) 79, 80, 85, 174, 185, 265, 270, 515 Louis XV (1710–1774, King of France 1715–1774 (subject to regency 1715–1723)) 515 Louis XVI (1754–1793, King of France and Navarre) 255 Louise-Marie-Auguste of Baden, known as Elizabeth Alekseevna after conversion to Orthodoxy, wife of Alexander I (1779–1826) 196, 197, 211 Louis-Napoleon (Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, 1808–1873, Emperor of the French 1852–1870) 443, 446 n. 217 Louis-Philippe (1773–1850, King of the French 1830–1848) 60, 443 Lovich family 206 Low Countries knowledge of French in 124 plurilingualism in 136 See also Holland, Netherlands Löwenwolde, Reinhold Gustaw von (1693–1758) 184 loyalty, see allegiance Lublin 87 Lubomirska, Countess Théophilie, née Teofila Rzewuska/Teofiliia Rzhevuskaia (1762–1831) 235–236 Lubomirskis 256 Ludwig (1786–1868, King of Bavaria 1825–1848) 444 Lukin, Vladimir Ignat’evich (1737–1794) 109–110, 473, 477–478 on French loanwords in Russian 475–476 Trinket-Vendor 473, 477–478, 483 Lunin, Mikhail Sergeevich (1787–1845) 149 luxury or luxury products 86, 386, 557 Lyall, Robert (1789–1831) 108, 434–435 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de (1709–1785) 416 Macpherson, James (1736–1796) 431 Madrid 87, 281 madrigals 360

The French L anguage in Russia

Magocsi, Robert 59 Maier, Ingrid 267 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, Mme de (1635–1719) 363 Mairan, Jean Jacques d’Ourtous de (1678–1771) 323 Maisonfort, see Dubois-Descours Maistre, Joseph-Marie, Comte de (1753–1821) 180, 438 n. 181 Makarov, Petr Ivanovich (1765–1804) 379–380 Makogonenko, Georgii 75 Mallet du Pan, Jacques (1749–1800) 419 manners 173, 463, 573 Mannheim 184 Mansurov, Boris Pavlovich (1828–1910) 336, 337 Mansurov, Nikolai Pavlovich (1830–1911) 336, 337 Mansurov, Pavel Borisovich (1794–1881) 336 Mansurov, Pavel Borisovich (1860–1932) 336 Mansurov, Sergei Pavlovich (1890–1929) 336 Mansurova, Ekaterina Petrovna, née Khovanskaia (1803–1837) 336 Mansurova, Mariia Nikolaevna, née Dolgorukova (1833–1914) 336, 337 Manzon, Jean (1740–1798) 417 Marasinova, Elena 105 Marat, Jean-Paul (1743–1793) 127 Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121–180) 463 Maria Aleksandrovna, see Maximiliane Wilhelmine Auguste Sophie Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt Maria Fedorovna, née Princess Dagmar of Denmark, wife of Alexander III (1847–1928) 208, 209 Maria Fedorovna (widow of Emperor Paul), see Sophie Dorothea Maria Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess, daughter of Nicholas I (1819–1876) 197–198, 205 Maria Pavlovna, sister of Alexander I (1786–1859) 205 language use in correspondence and diaries of 203–204 Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, Consort and Queen of Bohemia (1717–1780) 188, 285 Marienbad 198 Maris 121 Marmontel, Jean-François (1723–1799) 188, 412, 416 Marque, Annette (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Marrese, see Lamarche Marrese martial valour, see military prowess Marx, Karl (1818–1883) 456 n. 268 Mary Institute (in St Petersburg) 128 Masclet, Hippolyte (1768–1839) 433 n. 157 masculinization of literary culture in Alexandrine period 378–379 Masonic lodges 226–230, 261 See also Freemasons; French, in Masonic lodges; German, in Masonic lodges

Index

Massillon, Jean-Baptiste (1663–1742) 137 Masson, Charles François Philibert (1762–1807) 143, 513 materialism (love of worldly goods, as vice of corrupted nobility) 119 mathematics, taught through French 143, 154, 156, 170 Maturin Veyssière La Croze (1661–1739) 404 Matveev, Andrei Artamonovich (1666–1728) 176, 270, 399 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de (1698–1759) 313, 323 Mauvillon, Eléazar de (1712–1779) 406 Maximilian, Prince of Baden (1867–1929) 209 Maximiliane Wilhelmine Auguste Sophie Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt, wife of Alexander II, Empress Maria Aleksandrovna (1824–1880) 196, 206 Mazelet, see Huc-Mazelet Mazon, André 134, 135 medicine, see French, for medical subject-matter meditation (as literary genre) 94 Meiji Japan (1868–1912) 51 n. 60 Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg (Transactions of the Imperial St Petersburg Academy of Sciences; also Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk) 319, 321 Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts (Transactions on the History of the Sciences and Fine Arts) 399 memoirs 348, 355–357 See also sub-entries on Catherine II; Christina; Dashkova; Khvoshchinskaia; Rostopchin, Count Fedor; Vigel’ Menshekov, Colonel (eighteenth-century nobleman in Vologda Province) 256 Menshikov, Admiral Aleksandr Sergeevich (1787–1869) 297 Menshikov, Prince Aleksandr Danilovich (1673–1729) 273 Menshikovs 107 menus for ceremonial banquets 212 merchants, language use among 36 Mercure de France (French Mercury) 383 Mercure de Russie (Russian Mercury) 420–422 Mercure historique et politique (Historical and Political Mercury) 398, 400, 404, 412 Mérimée, Prosper (1803–1870) 424 Merridale, Catherine 37 Mervaud, Michel 412 Meshcherskii, Prince Elim Petrovich (1808–1844) 371, 380 Mesiachnye istoricheskie, genealogicheskie i geograficheskie primechaniia v Vedomostiakh (Monthly Historical, Genealogical, and Geographical Notes in Gazettes) 318

683 metadiscourse, or metalinguistic discourse 494, 520 virtual absence of in ego-writing 348 See also linguistic purism, metaphors in metadiscourse on metaphysical poetry 94 Meyendorff, Baron Petr Kazimirovich (1796–1863) 351–352 Meyendorffs, Barons von 155, 257, 310 Miatlevs 225 Michael Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (1878–1918) 207 Michael Mikhailovich, Grand Duke (1861–1929) 207 Michael Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (1832–1909) 200, 207 Michael Pavlovich, Grand Duke (1798–1849) 143, 196, 203, 205 Michael Romanov (1596–1645, ruled 1613–1645) 266–267 Michaud (General Alexandre Michaud de Beauretour, 1772–1841) 547 n. 110 treatment of in Tolstoi’s War and Peace 547–548, 547 n. 110 Michelet, Jules (1798–1874) 451, 451 n. 249 middle class, see bourgeoisie Mil’china, Vera 438 n. 184 military prowess 91, 390, 415, 579 Miliutins 206 Milner-Gulland, Robin 520 Milroy, James 485 Milroy, Lesley 485 mimicry 579 See also aping; imitation; parrot Minin, Kuz’ma (d. 1616) 499 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 295, 297, 300–301, 324, 326, 423, 447 See also Chancery of Foreign Affairs; College of Foreign Affairs mir, see peasant commune Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de (1749–1791) 228 Miroir (Mirror) 423 Mirsky, D.S. 519 mission civilisatrice 458, 513 modernity 463–464 modernization 45, 51 n. 60, 91, 92, 96, 101 n. 74, 122, 124, 246, 570, 585 Moldavia, Russian officers in 87 Molé, Louis-Mathieu, Comte (1781–1855) 446 n. 217 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–1673) 82, 181–182, 360, 483 Affected Young Ladies 182 Molva (Rumour) 509 mondanité 183 monde, see grand monde Monge, Gaspard Comte de Péluse (1746–1818) 146

684  monkeys, see aping Montard, Elisabeth (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 1689–1755) 427, 537 On the Spirit of the Laws 82, 416 Persian Letters 82 Monthly Historical, Genealogical, and Geographical Notes in Gazettes, see Mesiachnye istoricheskie, genealogicheskie i geograficheskie primechaniia v Vedomostiakh Monthly Works that are of Use and Entertain, see Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia, k pol’ze i uveseleniiu sluzhashchie Mordvinov, Admiral Nikolai Semenovich (1754–1845) 128–129 Morembert, Antoine-Nicolas Lespine de (1708–?) 430 Morkov, Count Arkadii Ivanovich (1747–1827) 343 Moscow as capital city or metropolis 56, 108, 126, 253 as city of the dead, or Necropolis, according to Chaadaev 436 contrasted with St Petersburg 108, 552–553, 558 ‘Moscow French’ 337 salons in 435 University of 126, 138, 147–148, 151, 159 n. 123, 168, 318 n. 219, 325, 405, 467 n. 25 See also fire of Moscow; Rostopchin, as governor of Moscow in 1812 Moscow Orphanage 130 Mounier, Jean-Joseph (1758–1806) 419 mrachnoe semiletie, see ‘seven dismal years’ Mukhanova, Elizaveta Aleksandrovna (1803–1836) 154, 155 Mukhanova, Mariia Sergeevna (1802–1882) 252 Müller, Gerhard Friedrich (1705–1783) 322 Muller, Marie (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 multi-ethnicity of Russian aristocracy 53, 499, 516 multilingualism, see bilingualism; diglossia; plurilingualism Muminzhanov, Azimzhan (early nineteenthcentury Bokharan envoy to Russia) 297 Munich 184, 443, 444 Münnich, Count Burkhard Christoph von (1683–1767) 98 Murav’ev, Count Mikhail Nikolaevich (1796–1866) 310, 311 Murav’ev, Nikita Mikhailovich (1795–1843) 37, 113, 149, 231 Murav’ev-Amurskii, Count Nikolai Nikolaevich (1809–1881) 234 Murav’ev-Apostol, Ivan Matveevich (1762–1851) 419, 502

The French L anguage in Russia

Murav’ev-Apostol, Matvei Ivanovich (1793–1886) 114, 231 Murav’ev-Apostol, Sergei Ivanovich (1795–1826) 114 Murav’eva, Aleksandra (Alexandrine) Grigor’evna, née Countess Chernysheva (1804–1832) 230 n. 64 Murav’eva, Sof’ia Aleksandrovna (1825–1851) 155, 353 Murphy, Emilie 252, 354 Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland 222 Murzina, Aleksandra Petrovna (poetess of 1790s) 377 Muscovy (pre-Petrine Russia) barbarism or darkness of 395, 402, 412 development of sense of nationhood in 53–54 imagined as organic community 46, 581 n. 9 languages in which westerners could communicate with 275 limited need for knowledge of foreign languages in 266 scant knowledge of outside world in 268 status of women in 94, 380 western visitors to 79, 89–90, 412 Myshetskii, Prince Iakov Efimovich (d. 1700) 268 Nakaz (Instruction), see Catherine II nannies, role in upbringing of noble infants 39, 251, 351, 526 Napier, Francis, 10th Lord Napier and 1st Baron Ettrick (1819–1898) 310 Naples 270 Masonic lodges in 227 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) 53, 110–112, 113, 448 invasion of Russia by, in 1812 36, 111, 380, 501, 503 Napoleon III, see Louis-Napoleon Napoleonic Wars 110–112, 113, 114, 115 confidence engendered by Russia’s role in 434 Gallophobia heightened by 472 patriotic upsurge during 170 reactionary climate in Russia after 227 relevance to debate about Russia’s relationship with France 484 Russians’ continuing exposure to French after 502 Tolstoi’s treatment of 534–550 narod (common people), see peasantry narodnost’ (nationality, Russianness) 58, 330, 503 Nartov, Andrei Konstantinovich (1693–1756) 281 Naryshkin, Lev Aleksandrovich (1733–1799) 189

Index

Naryshkina, Elizaveta, née Kurakina, see Kurakina, Elizaveta Naryshkins 107, 259, 268 Natal’ia Alekseevna, née Wilhelmina Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, Grand Duchess (1755–1776) 363 national backwardness (of Russia) 91 supposed advantages of 450, 464 national character 45, 367 n. 153, 389, 461, 464, 472, 478, 533 language or language use as expression of 54–55, 577 national consciousness 54–58, 77, 169, 242, 460, 462 n. 2, 576, 577 as distinct from nationalism 57–58 national distinctiveness, see samobytnost’ national identity, see identity, national nationalism compensatory 445 cultural, or cultural nationalists 51, 58, 59, 77, 443, 509, 514 n. 239, 522, 532, 573, 577, 584, 588 development of in nineteenth-century Europe 54 English in twenty-first century 517 n. 250 exclusive 517 language and 54–60, 67 n. 121, 70 Orthodox conservative 447, 569 political 58 relationship to language loyalty 66 scholarly literature on language and 67 n. 121 See also ethno-nationalism; linguistic nationalism; national consciousness; Native-Soil Conservatism; Official Nationality; Slavophiles nation-building 55, 56, 578 See also Russian literature, as nationbuilding tool Native-Soil Conservatism (pochvennichestvo) 250, 457, 528 n. 29, 558, 563–564 See also Dostoevskii; nationalism natsiia (nation), use of the term 462 n. 2, 479 n. 80 Naval Academy (in St Petersburg) 124 Naval Cadet Corps 127, 141–142 navy, created by Peter the Great 92 Necker, Mme (Suzanne Curchod, 1737–1794) 175, 188 Neledinskii-Meletskii, Iurii Aleksandrovich (1751–1828) 367 neologisms, see borrowing, lexical or other linguistic; calques; French loanwords; loanwords Nepliuev, Ivan Ivanovich (1693–1773) 283 Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 37–68) 398 Nesse, Agnete 471

685 Nesselrode, Count Karl Vasil’evich (1780–1862) 297, 301, 310 Netherlands as centre for book trade 87 exposure to French through presence of Napoleon’s army in 87 French periodical publications in 396 as refuge for Huguenots 86 See also Holland; Low Countries Neuville, Foy de la (late seventeenth century), Strange and New Account of Muscovy 398 New Germanic Library, see Nouvelle Bibliothèque germanique New Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (Novi Commentarii Academiae scientiarum imperiali) News by Hand, see Nouvelles à la main News Gazette, see Vesti-Kuranty newspapers, see periodical publications Nicholas I (Nikolai Pavlovich, 1796–1855, Emperor of Russia 1825–1855) attempt to raise status of Russian 199 n. 119 censorship under, and its effects 74 n. 136 exposed to French as language of tuition 143 language use at court of 196–200 language use in diary and correspondence of 204–205 multilingualism of 198 quality of Russian spoken by 199 sends Russian troops to crush Hungarian revolt 116 and Tiutchev 447 use of Russian in official correspondence of 302 Nicholas II (Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 1868–1918, Emperor of Russia 1894–1917) 202, 207 language use in correspondence and diary of 208–209 Nicholas Aleksandrovich, Tsarevich (1843–1865) 207 Nicholas Institute for Orphans 128 Nicholas Konstantinovich, Grand Duke (1850–1918) 207 Nicholas Nikolaevich, Grand Duke (1831–1891) 200 nihilism 250, 457–459, 559 Nikitenko, Aleksandr Vasil’evich (1804–1877), on French as sign of social worth 244–245 Nikon (i.e. Nikita Minov, 1605–1681, Patriarch of Russian Church 1652–1667) 90 Niqueux, Michel 454–455 Nizhnii Novgorod 255 seminary in 137 Nizhnii Novgorodian (i.e. provincial Russian) 502 nobility aristocracy contrasted with gentry by Lev Tolstoi 552, 558 confessional diversity of 109

686  cosmopolitan identity of 53 differentiation of strata in, from court aristocracy to odnodvortsy 36, 105–110, 159 education of 101 n. 74, 123–171 ethnic heterogeneity of 108–109 European cultural identity of 215 friendship valued by 123, 160, 161, 168, 573 lower-ranking or middling sections of 215, 259–261, 450, 478, 558 perceived difference between Muscovite and St Petersburg nobility 543 plurilingualism of 135, 146, 216–217, 218, 226, 228, 250, 261, 334, 352, 358, 458, 515–516, 583, 585 in provinces 253–261 role of in westernization of Russia, as defined by Schönle and Zorin 101 n. 73 scholarly literature on 102 n. 75 sites of noble sociability 222–232 size of, as proportion of population 35 n. 2 sociability, as activity and attribute of 123 as social corporation 79, 99 173, 239, 247, 572 social range covered by the term 106 supposed ignorance of Russian among 37, 39, 459, 583 supra-ethnic identity of 53 See also Baltic nobility; emancipation of nobility; French, as language of nobility noble estate (i.e. social class) 36, 62, 103, 105, 106, 109, 118, 259, 371, 478, 574 noble estates (i.e. rural landholdings) 37, 42, 108, 253, 254 n. 142, 258, 546 Noble Land Cadet Corps 68, 100, 130, 167, 317, 417, 420, 467, 567 language teaching at 125, 137–139, 140–141, 147, 153, 160, 257 sons of petty gentry studying at 259 noble manor house (usad’ba) 46, 253, 258, 525, 552 n. 123 nomadism (as topos in Russian culture) 56 Norov, Vasilii Sergeevich (1793–1853) 230 Northern Bulletin, see Bulletin du Nord Northern Journal, see Journal du Nord Northern Society (of Decembrists) 113, 114 nouveaux riches 107 Nouvelle Bibliothèque germanique (New Germanic Library) 402 Nouvelles à la main (News by Hand) 411 Novi Commentarii Academiae scientiarum imperiali (New Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences) 318 Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1744–1818) 226, 329, 377, 472 Novosil’tsev, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1761–1838) 195, 196

The French L anguage in Russia

Obolenskii, Prince Evgenii Petrovich (1796–1865) 114 Obolenskiis, Princes 534 Obrezkov, Aleksandr Vasil’evich (1772–after 1802) 490 obshchina, see peasant commune occasional verse 328, 360, 371, 573 October Revolution, see Bolshevik Revolution odes 91, 360 Odessa 115, 134, 135, 230, 298, 301 Odoevskii, Prince Vladimir Fedorovich (1804–1869) 180, 304, 506–507 ‘Princess Mimi’ 506–507 Odoevskiis, Princes 206 Official Nationality 58, 196, 371, 438 n. 183 See also nationalism Ogarev, Ivan Il’ich (eighteenth-century nobleman in Saratov Province) 256 Okenfuss, Max 146 Old Russia, see Kievan Rus’ Oldenburgs 310 Olearius, Adam (1599–1671) 89, 95, 412 Olga (d. 969, regent of the Grand Principality of Kiev 945–964) 392 Olga Aleksandrovna, Grand Duchess (1882–1960) 209 Olga Nikolaevna, daughter of Nicholas I (1822–1892) 198, 205–206 Olga, Queen of Greece, née Olga Konstantin­ ovna Romanova (1851–1926) 208, 209 Olivier, Michel (Francophone tutor in late eighteenth-century Russia) 365 Olsuf’ev, Count Iurii Aleksandrovich (1878–1938) 209 opera (as social venue) 230, 261 oral poetry 121 Ordin-Nashchokin, Afanasii Lavrent’evich (1605?–1680 or 1681) 90 Orel 108, 217, 259 organicism (in conception of supposed nature of pre-Petrine Russian society) 42, 46, 508 Orientalism (of Edward Said) 514 n. 239 originality, see samobytnost’ Orlov, Count Grigorii Vladimirovich (1777–1826) 354, 431–432 editor of Krylov’s fables in translation 431–432 Orlov, Mikhail Fedorovich (1788–1842) 149 Orlov, Count Vladimir Grigor’evich (1743–1831) 314, 323 Orlov-Davydov, Count Vladimir Petrovich (1809–1882) 455 Orlovs 107, 206 Ormanson, M. de (French teacher in Russia) 273 Orthodox Church 364, 402, 575 services in 511 Orthodox religion, see Orthodoxy

Index

Orthodoxy 45, 48, 56, 58, 344, 402, 443–444, 489, 580 among social elite 42 n. 30 Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, see Official Nationality Osorio-Alarcón, Cavaliere Giuseppe (1697–1763) 281 Ospovat, Aleksandr 438 n. 184 Ossian (Oisín) 426, 431 Fingal 431 Oster, Judith 252 Ostermann, Heinrich Johann Friedrich (1686–1747) 98, 284, 323 Östman, Margareta 329 otechestvo, see fatherland Ottoman Empire 91, 115, 194, 276, 585 Oxford, Masonic lodges in 227 Ozeretskovskii, Nikolai Iakovlevich (1750–1827) 318, 319 Ozerov, Vladislav Aleksandrovich (1769–1816) 371, 431 Fingal 371, 431, 436 Padua, University of 170 Page Corps 127, 130, 132, 456 Pahlens 206, 310 Painter, see Zhivopisets palace of ice (built by Empress Anna in St Petersburg) 403 n. 37 Pallas, Peter Simon (1741–1811) 322, 466 Comparative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Whole World 466 pamphlets in French 399, 454–455, 456 Panaev, Ivan Ivanovich (1812–1862) 120 n. 129, 506, 578 Panin, Count Nikita Ivanovich (1718–1783) 193–194, 294, 353 Panin, Count Petr Ivanovich (1721–1789) 353 Panin, Count Viktor Nikitich (1801–1874) 311 Panins 107 Pan-Slavism 442, 446 Paperno, Irina, contribution to scholarship on Russian francophonie 333 n. 19 Parain (French observer in Soviet Ukraine) 134, 135 Paris cultural pre-eminence in eighteenthcentury Europe 80 as diplomatic hub 265 as Mecca or promised land for Russians 441, 481 salons in 175–176, 233 as supposed centre of civilization or universal capital 510, 514, 548 Parma, Duchy of 87, 125 grand dukes of 81 parrot (as topos in cultural discourse) 458, 462, 478, 491–492, 579, 580

687 partitions (of Poland in eighteenth century) 91, 417 Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662), Thoughts 82 Pascault, Adolphe (1800–1863?) 149, 155 Paskevich, His Serene Highness Prince Fedor Ivanovich (1823–1903) 235 Paskevich, His Serene Highness Prince Ivan Fedorovich (1782–1856) 199, 325 pastoral 463 patrie (fatherland) 481, 500 patriotism after assassination of Alexander II in 1881 208 of cosmopolitan Stroganovs 515–516 ethnocentric turn in conservative nationalism 508 on eve of or during war with Napoleon in 1812 111, 112 exhibited by Petr Viazemskii 501 n. 184 not incompatible with Catholicism 371 jingoistic (or chauvinism) 504, 505, 547 lack of it criticized in writings of Fedor Rostopchin 497 n. 173 in Pushkin’s Roslavlev 504–505 rejection of narrow form of it 517 of Russian women 504–505 See also fatherland; homeland; linguistic patriotism patronymics, see Russian, in patronymic names Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, 1754–1801, Emperor of Russia 1796–1801) 110, 126, 193–194, 220, 257 attitude towards French language and habits 194 Paul Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (1860–1919) 208 Pavlishcheva, Ol’ga Sergeevna, née Pushkina (1797–1868) 346 Pavlova, Karolina Karlovna, née Jänisch (1807–1893) 372 peasant commune 46, 121, 511 n. 225, 509, 511 See also Aksakov, Konstantin; Herzen peasant custom or belief 42 peasant rebellions 121 peasantry as brutish mob 501 monolingualism among 37 as non-European other 514, 520 supposed nature of 44, 509–514 as true bearers of Russian nationality 457, 500, 509, 577, 587 See also Aksakov, Konstantin, on peasant commune; Herzen, on the Russian peasant and peasant commune; Tolstoi, Lev, admiration of the common people Penza 108, 112, 336 performance, in noble behaviour 48, 181, 247, 307 n. 188, 375 periodical publications 55, 94 in French 267, 396–406, 417–424

688  in Latin 267, 398 used to promote favourable view of Russia 396–406, 410–412 Perrault, Jules (French teacher in Russia in nineteenth century) 128 Perry, John (1670–1732) 412 Persia 296 Pestel’, Pavel Ivanovich (1793–1826) 114, 115, 231 membership of Masonic lodges 232 n. 72 Russian Law 113 Peter the Great (i.e. Peter I, Petr Alekseevich, 1672–1725, Tsar of Russia from 1682, sole ruler from 1696, Emperor 1721–1725) account of Russian victory at Poltava in 1709 399 admired by Voltaire 185 demands made by him on nobility 102 as driving force of westernization in his lifetime 100 edict on social gatherings (assamblei) 177 Grand Embassy of (to West, 1697–1698) 268, 270, 398 image of in western writings 406–409 killing of Tsarevich Alexis 399–400 reforms of 54, 90–94, 110, 431, 457 use of foreign press to improve Russia’s image 396–402 as viewed by Westernizers and Slavophiles 45–46 See also assamblei; modernization; Table of Ranks; westernization Peter II (Petr Alekseevich, 1715–1730), reigned as Emperor of Russia 1727–1730) 148, 284 Peter III (Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of HolsteinGottorp, 1728–1762), Emperor of Russia 1761 (OS; 1762 NS)–1762) 99, 104, 277, 410, 587 See also emancipation of nobility petits-maîtres 476–477 See also dandies; dandyism; fops Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) 178 Petrashevskii circles 116, 558 Petrine ‘myth’ 402, 406 Pfeffel, Karl Maximilian Friedrich Hubert (1811–1890) 446 philologists 58 philosophes 176, 413, 437 Piatigorsk 224 Pictet, François-Pierre (1728–1798) 410 Piedmont 87, 125, 442 Pigarev, Kirill 75 Pigny, Ferry de (dates unknown) 433 n. 157 Pirard (French teacher in Russia) 273 Pius IX (1792–1878, Pope 1846–1878) 443 Plato (c. 427–348 BC) 361 Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich (1856–1918) 429 Pleshcheev, Aleksandr Alekseevich (1778–1862) 370 plurilingualism 69, 70, 71, 119, 136, 461

The French L anguage in Russia

definition of 69 n. 125, 216 See also bilingualism; Elena Pavlovna, plurilingualism of; nobility, plurilingualism of Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich (1827–1907) 207 pochvennichestvo, see Native-Soil Conservatism Poggio, Aleksandr Viktorovich (1798–1873) 115, 230 Poggio, Iosif Viktorovich (1792–1848) 115, 230 Pogodin, Mikhail Petrovich (1800–1876) 118, 305, 508 Poland 87, 124, 125, 268, 273, 302, 308, 309 partitions of, see partitions See also Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania polemical writing 331, 439–459 Polevoi, Nikolai Alekseevich (1796–1846) 118 Polish 206, 266, 267, 305 as medium for Russian lexical borrowing 288 politeness 80, 123, 162, 163, 168, 170, 174, 176, 180, 232–233, 240, 241, 261, 356, 549, 572 politesse, see politeness political nationalism, see nationalism Polotskii, Simeon (1628 or 1629–1680) 90 Poltava, Battle of (1709) 91, 399 polysystemic theory (of translation) 503 n. 192 population of Russian Empire 35 n. 2 Poroshin, Semen Andreevich (1741–1769) 193–194 Porte (Ottoman government) 285, 296, 299 Posol’skii prikaz, see Chancery of Foreign Affairs Pososhkov, Ivan Tikhonovich (1652–1726) 110 Postnikov, Petr Vasil’evich (1666–1703) 269–271, 323 Potemkin, Prince Grigorii Aleksandrovich (1739–1791) 180 Potemkina, Tat’iana Borisovna, née Princess Golitsyna (1795–1869) 200, 221, 254 Potemkins 107, 259 Potier, Charles (1786–1855) 145 Powrie, Phil 327 Pozharskii, Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich (1578–1642) 499 préciosité (pretentiousness) 181, 360 pre-Romanticism 173, 463, 467 press, see periodical publications; satirical journalism prestige language, see French, as prestige language prikaznoi iazyk, see chancery language print culture 55, 586 Printing School, language teaching at 267 professional literature 329–331, 330–331 n. 9 proficiency, see linguistic competence Prokopovich, Feofan (1681–1736) 110, 421, 424 admiration of Peter the Great 406

Index

funeral oration on Peter the Great 408 promiscuity, as topos associated with adoption of French language and culture 480, 483, 533 pronominal usage (in second-person forms) 240–241, 241 n. 105, 345–346, 526, 555 See also Khvoshchinskaia, views on pronominal usage; Pushkin, (on) use of second-person personal pronouns propaganda (as a term) 395 n. 1 propagandistic writing, see French, for cultural or political propaganda; polemical writing prose fiction 74, 94, 501–507, 519–570 Proskudin (nobleman in Nizhnii Novgorod Province) 256 Protestantism 444, 449 Proto-Potockis 256 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–1865) 456, 565 proverbs, see Russian, in proverbs provincialdom 259 Prozorovskii, Field Marshal General Prince Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1732–1809) 298 public houses 176 public opinion 94, 396 publishing houses 55 Pucci, Vincenzo (dates unknown) 281 Pückler-Muskau, Prince Hermann von (1785–1871) 329 Pufendorf, Samuel von (1632–1694) 402, 402 n. 32 Pugachev revolt (1773–1774) 226, 417, 500 Pugachev, Emel’ian Ivanovich (1726–1775) 418 punishment, of Russian children for speaking Russian 583 purism, see linguistic purism Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1799–1837) access in childhood to domestic library with French books 145 Blackamoor of Peter the Great 506 Captain’s Daughter 506 contribution to creation of Russian literary language and canon 251 correspondence with Count Benckendorff, Nicholas I, family members, fiancée and future wife, future mother-in-law, and friends 339–340 disquiet about lexical borrowing 470 ‘Egyptian Nights’ 506 Eugene Onegin 38, 43, 75, 258, 334, 375, 380, 384 on Karamzin as honnête homme 167–168 learns Russian from his nanny, Arina Rodionovna 39–40 letters as literary experiments 341 n. 44 on mechanical nature of French linguistic formulae 333–334 noble conduct and values of 118–119 on perceived immaturity of Russian language 469 n. 33

689 poems in French by 369, 369 n. 156 in praise of the ‘Slavo-Russian’ language 469 on quality of Russian spoken by Nicholas I 199 ‘Queen of Spades’ 219, 505–506 reaction to publication of Chaadaev’s ‘philosophical letter’ in Russian 438 Roslavlev 112, 503–505 seminal role in Russian literature 116 social background of 118, 259 Tales of Belkin 506 (on) use of second-person personal pronouns 240–241, 346 as visitor to salons 180, 386 Pushkin Pleiad 258, 519 Pushkin, Lev Sergeevich, i.e. Pushkin’s brother (1805–1852) 339 Pushkin, Vasilii L’vovich, i.e. Pushkin’s uncle (1766–1830) 367, 369, 370 Pushkina, Ol’ga Sergeevna, i.e. Pushkin’s sister, see Pavlishcheva Quadruple Alliance (of 1745 between Austria, Britain, Netherlands, and Saxony) 285 Rabener, Justus Gotthard (1688–1731) 398 Rabow-Edling, Susanna 58 Racine, Jean (1639–1699) 82 Radiace, Julie (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1749–1802) 510 Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow 113, 341 language choice in correspondence with Aleksandr Romanovich Vorontsov 341–342 Raevskii, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1801–1843) 339 Raevskiis, use of letter-writing in French by 338, n. 35 Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de (1588–1665) 175 Ramsays 224 Raoult, Guillaume (French teacher at Moscow University) 151–152 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François (1713–1796) 416 raznochintsy (people of non-noble origin, but not serfs) 110, 118 n. 122, 137, 147, 148, 159, 331, 529 Razumovskii, Count Kirill Grigor’evich (1728–1803) 314, 315, 317, 323, 430 Razumovskiis, Counts 97, 107 real schools (real’nye uchilishcha, i.e. schools for modern studies, not classical studies) 131–132

690  receptivity to other cultures (as quality attributed to Russians) 464–465, 499, 520, 549, 570 récits de voyage, see French, in travel diaries; travel diaries Reclus, Onésime (1837–1916) 133 refugees (from revolutionary France) 86, 124, 219, 419 repentant nobleman (as literary or intellectual type) 510 Repnin, Prince Nikita Ivanovich (1668–1726) 273 Repnin, Nikolai Vasil’evich (1734–1801) 294 Republic of Letters 82, 96, 182, 312, 360, 361, 409, 433 See also French, in Republic of Letters Résimont, Jean-Baptiste de (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 143 n. 70, 256, 256 n. 152 Restoration comedy (in seventeenth-century England) 482 Reutern, Mikhail Khristoforovich (1820–1890) 308, 310 Review of the Two Worlds, see Revue des Deux Mondes Revocation of Edict of Nantes (1685) 86 See also Huguenots revolution(s), see Bolshevik Revolution; French Revolution (from 1789); July Revolution (1830); revolutions of 1848 revolutions of 1848 60, 116, 439, 443, 456, 565 Revue des Deux Mondes (Review of the Two Worlds) 446, 447 n. 225 Rey, Marc-Michel (1720–1780) 413 n. 83 Riappo, Ian [Jan] Petrovich (1880–1958) 135 Riazan’ 108 seminary in 137 Ribeaupierre, Jean-François (Ivan Stepanovich) de (1754–1790) 180 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761) Clarissa Harlowe 382 Pamela 382 Richelieu, Armand Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, 5th Duke of (1766–1822) 298 Richepin, Jean (1849–1926) 133 Riga 248, 280 as place of publication 399 Riumins 107 Rivarol, Antoine de (1753–1801) 152, 448, 577 On the Universality of the French Language 85–86 Rjéoutski, Vladislav 68 rodina, see homeland Rogger, Hans 57, 462, 577 Romaine, Suzanne 62, 64 Romania (or Romanian Lands) 87 Romanian intelligentsia 60 n. 92 Romanovs 183 Romanticism 182, 330, 379, 439, 500

The French L anguage in Russia

See also pre-Romanticism; Sentimentalism Rome 125, 386; Church of 444 See also Catholic Church Romme, Gilbert (1750–1795) 162, 228 Rondau, Claudius (1695–1739) 280 Roosevelt, Priscilla 39, 42, 92, 253 Rosen, Baron Andrei Evgen’evich (i.e. Andreas von Rosen, 1799–1884) 115 Rosenberg (Philipp Joseph Count von OrsiniRosenberg, 1691–1765; Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Russia 1744–1745) 285 Rosicrucians 228–229 Rosset, i.e. Aleksandra Osipovna SmirnovaRosset (1809–1882) 180, 196, 197, 198, 199, 325, 349 Rostopchin, Count Andrei Fedorovich (1813–1892) 238–239, 515 Rostopchin, Count Fedor Vasil’evich (1763–1826) as accomplished performer in society 234 command of French 40 correspondence with Semen Romanovich Vorontsov 498 criticism of Russian francophonie 111, 498–501 on Freemasonry 227, 498 as governor of Moscow in 1812 112, 501 identification with French society under the old regime 515 leaflets in Russian 40 letter to Alexander I in 1823 498 ‘My Memoirs’ 356, 372–376, 393, 495–501, 572 News, or the Dead Man Lives 497 n. 173 Oh! The French 495 opposition to French education 128 Russian Nobleman Sila Andreevich Bogatyrev 495–497, 500 treatment of in Tolstoi’s War and Peace 536–537, 546–547 Rostopchina, Countess Evdokiia Petrovna, née Sushkova (1811 OS/1812 NS–1858) 180 Rostopchins 206 Rotterdam 268 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) Confessions 82 discourse on corruption of morals 182 Émile 82 inspires pre-Romantic literary current 463 Julie, or the New Heloise 82, 203, 333, 382 Of the Social Contract 82, 416 praises Catherine II for purchase of Diderot’s library 411 Rousseau, Pierre (1716–1785) 362 Rousset de Missy, Jean (1686–1762) 404, 404 n. 41, 406 Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts 81, 85, 152, 313, 403, 448 Royal Society (in London) 421

Index

Royal Society of Sciences (in Göttingen) 421 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 313–314 Rubinstein, Anton Grigor’evich (1829–1894) 337 Rubinstein, Vera Aleksandrovna, née Chekuanova (c. 1844–1909) 337 Rumiantsev, Count Nikolai Petrovich (1754–1826) 298 Rumour, see Molva Rumovskii, Stepan Iakovlevich (1734–1812) 323 Rus’ (Old Russia), see Kievan Rus’ Russia and the West, debate on relationship between 44–52, 77, 447–448, 449, 485, 520, 521, 532, 569–570 Russian at the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg 314, 315 character of, according to Lomonosov 468 in civil service 302 codification of 465–467, 484, 576, 586 contrasted implicitly with French in Tolstoi’s War and Peace 549 for culture-specific material in correspondence and diaries 254, 343, 351, 354 dictionaries of 466–467, 484 in diminutive forms of names 343, 345 in education 123–171 grammars of 466, 484 ignorance of as sign of loss of identity 562 internal discussion of foreign affairs in 293–294 lexical borrowing in diplomatic parlance 287–290 among military men 302 nobles’ alleged ignorance of 153 in nobles’ personal correspondence 332–346 in official correspondence or as official language 214, 301–302, 576 in patronymic names 343, 345 perceived weaknesses of 195–196, 316, 469 n. 33 for polemical writing 331 for professional writing 329–331 in proverbs 345, 354, 506 n. 200 rising status at nineteenth-century Russian court 210 in royal correspondence and diaries 202–210 as secret language 204, 354 supposed qualities of 316, 433 teaching or learning of 151–160, 321, 458 in Third Department 303–304 for toponyms 343, 345, 351 as vehicle for literature 186 in women’s albums 357–358 women’s use of 334–335 as written language for conduct of government business 301–302

691 See also Academy of Sciences, language use in; Alexander I, use of Russian for conduct of government business; Alexander III, knowledge and use of Russian; Catherine II, praise of the Russian language; Catherine II, promotion of Russian as language of administration; code-switching; Dictionary of the Russian Academy; Karamzin, polemic with Shishkov; language consciousness; linguistic competence, of Russian nobility in Russian; Rostopchin, Count Fedor, leaflets in; Russian literary language; Shishkov, polemic with Karamzin Russian Academy (also Imperial Russian Academy, founded 1783) 153, 295, 318, 576 See also Dictionary of the Russian Academy Russian Chit-Chat (letters of anonymous English governess) 217 n. 12 ‘Russian Europe’ 46, 511 Russian literary language creation or development of 116, 370, 487, 586 Russian literature creation and development of 55–56, 94, 330, 459–460, 465 as indicator of national independence, maturity, or progress 424, 438, 519 as nation-building tool or mark of national identity 36, 120, 460, 570, 573 representation of foreign tutors in 463, 492, 496 Russian Mercury, see Mercure de Russie ‘Russian Parisians’ 563 Russophobia in Europe 443, 451 See also image of Russia in Western Europe Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790) 192 Russo-Turkish Wars (1768–1774) 87, 91, 415, 417, 426, 482, 576 (1787–1791) 87, 91 (1877–1878) 550 Ryleev, Kondratii Fedorovich (1795–1826) 230–231 Rzhevskii, Aleksei Andreevich (1737–1804) 314 Sablukovs 143 Said, Edward 514 n. 239 St Alexander Nevskii Seminary 137 Saint-Évremont, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, Seigneur de (1613–1703) 363 Saint-Julien, Charles de (1803 or 1804–1869) 127, 128, 424 Saint-Maure, Émile Dupré de (1772–1854) 370, 432–433 St Petersburg as capital city or metropolis 108, 126, 253 as centre of Russian francophonie 255 as centre for the social elite 108 contrasted with Moscow 108, 552–553, 558 as cosmopolitan or international city 108

692  as European cultural centre 187, 422, 574 founding of 92 French theatre in 112 as hub of Francophone society and culture 81 salons in 180 as seat of court 180, 253 supposed cultural subjugation to Europe 494 University of 127, 128, 145, 146, 321, 424 See also Academy of Sciences; court St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, see Academy of Sciences St Petersburg Literary Journal, see Journal littéraire de St.-Pétersbourg St Petersburg News, see Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernadin de (1737–1814) 99, 383 Paul and Virginia 382 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, Comte de Rouvroy (1760–1825) 456 salonnières 175, 179–180, 360, 362, 386, 475 salons aristocratic and literary types of 180 literary activity in 329, 359–360, 370, 372 in Russia 179–183, 500 as sites of sociability 81, 94, 173, 175–176, 222 Saltykov, Count Petr Semenovich (1700–1772 (OS)/1773 (NS)) 216, 298 Saltykovs 220, 223 Samara 108 Samarin, Fedor Vasil’evich (1784–1853) 155 Samarin, Iurii Fedorovich (1819–1876) 149, 155 samobytnost’ (individuality, distinctiveness, originality) 118, 330, 507, 520 Sanches, António Nunes Ribeiro (1699–1783) 323 Sand, George (nom de plume of Armandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baronne Dudevant, 1804–1876) 119 Sanguszkos, Princes 256 Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (St Petersburg News) 317 Santi, Francesco (also known in Russia as Frants Matveevich Santi; 1683–1753) 286 Saratov 108, 256 Sarti, Giuseppe (1729–1802) 211 satire 74, 94 satirical journalism 226, 472 Sazonov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1815–1862) 456 Schédo-Ferroti, see Fircks, Fedor Ivanovich Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854) 330 Schleinitz, Hans Christoph, Baron von (1661–1744) 400 Schönle, Andreas 49, 101, 330, 584–585 schools arithmetic schools 124

The French L anguage in Russia

cipher schools 124 Orthodox schools 123 See also boarding schools; gymnasia; real schools; seminaries Schottelius, Justus Georg (1612–1676) 467 Schumacher, Johann Daniel (1690–1761) 280, 281, 315, 322, 403–404 Schwab, Johann Christoph (1743–1821) 85 Schwimmer, Nicolaus (translator in Chancery of Foreign Affairs and teacher at the Academy of Sciences and Noble Land Cadet Corps, dates unknown) 271 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), Waverley 535 Scribe, Augustin Eugène (1791–1861) 223 Scudéry, Madeleine de (1607–1701) 175 Second Coalition (against Napoleon) 110 secret police, see Third Department Ségur, Louis Philippe, Comte de (1753–1830) 99, 180, 496 n. 169 Sehested, Christian Christophersen (1666–1740) 279 Semenovskii Life Guards Regiment, mutiny in 203 seminaries, language teaching in 137 Seneca (Lucius Annaeus, d. 65) 463 Sentimentalism 182, 381, 426 serfdom 250, 581 See also emancipation of serfs Servante, Anne (French teacher in Russia in late eighteenth century) 256 Seton-Watson, Hugh 37, 67 ‘seven dismal years’ (mrachnoe semiletie) 115 Seven Years War (1756–1763) 98, 211, 277, 410 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de (1626–1696) 82, 203, 332, 380, 383 Shadwell, Thomas (1642–1692), Bury Fair 482 Shafirov, Petr Pavlovich (1669–1739) 272, 284, 323 Shafirova, Natal’ia Petrovna (1698–1728) 272 Shakhovskaia, Princess Natal’ia Valentinovna (1825–1847) 155 Shakhovskoi, Prince Valentin Mikhailovich (1801–1850) 154 Shcherbatov, Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich (1760–1839) 157 Shcherbatov, Ivan Andreevich (1696–1761) 268, 281–282, 323 residence in London 86, 176 Shcherbatov, Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich (1733–1790) 140, 157, 206, 478 On the Corruption of Morals in Russia 157 Shcherbatov, Prince Vladimir Alekseevich (1822–1902) 225 Shcherbatovs 534 Sheremeteva, Sof’ia Vladimirovna (?) (1883–1955?) 209 Sheremetevs 107, 245, 254, 259 Shevyrev, Stepan Petrovich (1806–1864) 305

Index

Shishkov, Admiral Aleksandr Semenovich (1754–1841) ‘Addition to the Work called Discourse on the Ancient and Modern Style of the Russian Language’ 488 on Church Slavonic 488–489 Dialogues on Literature between A and B 488, 489 Discourse on the Ancient and Modern Style of the Russian Language 488, 490–491, 493 Discourse on Love of the Fatherland 488 on the language of the Bible 488–489 linguistic nationalism of 476 opposition to French education 128 polemic with Karamzin 484–494, 508 speech at the opening of the Symposium of Lovers of the Russian Word 488 treatise on the richness of Russian 488 See also Karamzin, polemic with Shishkov Shklovskii, Viktor 76 Shuvalov, Count Andrei Petrovich (1742–1789) 361–363, 364, 387 ‘Epistle to Ninon Lenclos’ 362–363 ‘Letter of a Young Russian Lord’ 409, 424 ‘Ode on the Death of Mr Lomonosov of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences’ 424 verses to Voltaire 361 Shuvalov, Count Petr Ivanovich (1711–1762) 211, 409 Shuvalov, Ivan Ivanovich (1727–1797) 168, 229, 405, 407, 409, 410, 430 Shuvalovs 97, 107, 219, 405 Siena 87 Simbirsk 108 Siniavskii, Andrei Donatovich (1925–1997) 117 Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy (in Moscow) 124, 267 Slavonic, see Church Slavonic Slavonicisms 487, 494 Slavophiles attitude towards Peter the Great 45 belief that cultural borrowing compromises national identity 588 belief that the essence of the nation is found in the common people 121 controversy with Westernizers 118, 436, 485, 525 criticism of in Turgenev’s novel Smoke 532 as cultural nationalists 58, 573 discussion of use of French 507–514 fundamental views of 45–46 links with Tiutchev 446–447 scholarly literature on 46 n. 43 Shishkov as forerunner of 489 tendency to define Russia in opposition to western world 441, 449 view of pre-Petrine Muscovy as organic community 581 n. 9

693 view of Russian peasants as uncorrupted Christians 522 See also Aksakov, Konstantin; nationalism; Native-Soil Conservatism; Russia and the West; samobytnost’ Slavophilism, see Slavophiles Slavs 121, 391, 438 n. 184, 441, 442, 450, 451, 465, 517, 571 n. 1 Smirnova, Evgeniia Sergeevna (Princess Dolgorukova after marriage; 1770–1804) 259 Smirnova-Rosset, see Rosset Smith, Anthony 58, 577 Smolensk 108, 254 Smolny Institute (Institute for Noble Maidens) 127, 128, 259, 417, 467 absence of Latin from curriculum at 149 staging of plays at 187 n. 62 teaching of French at 126, 132, 142–143 sociability, see nobility, sociability, as activity and attribute of society, see high society; French, in high society society tale 505–507 Sofronov, Mikhail (1729–1760) 322 soft power 133 soirées (as sites of sociability) 94, 182, 222, 230, 537, 545 Sokolov, Petr Ivanovich (1764–1835), Basic Principles of Russian Grammar 466 Sollogub, Vladimir Aleksandrovich (1813–1882), ‘High Society’ 507 Sollogubs 155 Solov’ev, Baron Veniamin Nikolaevich (1798–1871) 114 Somov, Vladimir 337 Sophie Dorothea, Princess of Württemberg, known as Maria Fedorovna after conversion to Orthodoxy, wife of Paul I (1759–1828) 130 Sophie, Grand Duchess of Baden, née Princess Sophie Wilhelmine of Sweden (1801–1865) 206 Southern Society (of Decembrists) 113, 114 Spain 296 Spanish character of, according to Charles V 468 at courts 174 as diplomatic language 265, 272, 284 inferiority to French, according to Bouhours 84 spas 224–225, 230, 261, 551 Spasskii Monastery, language teaching at 267 Spectateur du Nord (Spectator of the North) 419 Spectator of the North, see Spectateur du Nord Speranskii, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1772–1839) 196, 250, 537, 547 Spirit of the Courts of Europe, see Esprit des cours de l’Europe Stackelberg, Count Gustav Ernst von (1766–1850) 224, 297, 298

694  Staël, Germaine de (1766–1817) 370, 381, 504–505 On Germany 370 Stagnell, Johan (1711–1795) 482 Stählin, Jakob (1709–1785) 322 standardization (of language) 55, 66 See also Russian, codification of Stanhope, William, 1st Earl of Harrington (1690–1756) 280 Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783–1842) 391 stereotypes, or stereotyping 46, 81, 95, 244, 389, 464, 481, 569 Sternberg, Marie Augusta Franziska von (1793–1821) 329 Stockholm as hub of Francophone society and culture 81 Masonic lodges in 227 Stoicism 463, 467, 478 Storch, Heinrich Friedrich von (1766–1835) 143 strel’tsy revolt (1698) 270 Strakhov, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1828–1896) 558 Strindberg, August (1849–1912) 393 Stroganov, Baron Sergei Grigor’evich (1707–1756) 158 Stroganov, Count Aleksandr Pavlovich (1794–1814) 148, 154, 516 Stroganov, Count (subsequently Baron) Aleksandr Sergeevich (1736–1811) 148, 158, 161–162, 179, 227–228, 353, 516 Stroganov, Count Pavel Aleksandrovich (1772–1817) 148, 158, 195 Stroganov, Count Sergei Grigor’evich 311 Stroganova, Baroness Natal’ia Mikhailovna Stroganova, née Princess Belosel’skaia (1743–1819), wife of Baron Sergei Nikolaevich Stroganov 349 Stroganova, Countess Sof’ia Vladimirovna, née Princess Golitsyna (1775–1845), wife of Count Pavel Aleksandrovich Stroganov (qv) 148–149, 154 Stroganovs 107, 143, 155, 158, 223, 259 patriotism of 515–516 Sturdza, Alexandru (i.e. Aleksandr Skarlat­ ovich; 1791–1854) 453 n. 259 Stuttgart 225 Sumarokov, Aleksandr Petrovich (1717–1777) attitude towards women’s participation in literary activity 377 comic drama of 472–482 as early Russian man of letters 409, 421 epistles on the Russian language 468 Husband’s Quarrel with His Wife 472, 474–475, 479, 483 Monsters 472, 474, 477, 478–479, 483 Pushkin’s use of quotations from his works in epigraphs 506 n. 200 Sinav and Truvor 429–430

The French L anguage in Russia

translation of his works into other European languages 429–430 works of cited by Catherine II 424 Sumarokovs 206 superficiality (as supposed trait in French character, French-speakers, or high society) 472, 478, 480, 533, 553, 568, 569 superfluous man (Russian literary type) 43, 462, 580, 585 Suvorov, Field Marshal Aleksandr Vasil’evich (1730–1800) 419 Suvorov, General Aleksandr Arkad’evich (1804–1882) 311 Suvorov, Vasilii Ivanovich (1705–1775) 271 n. 20 svet (high society, secular society) 94, 569 Svetov, Vasilii Prokof’evich (1744–1783), Brief Rules for the Study of Russian 466 Sweden 91, 92, 124, 125, 136, 169, 273, 279 French writing in 169, 329 need for knowledge of French in 124–125 Swedish 267 Switzerland 367 Symposium of Lovers of the Russian Word 111, 111 n. 101, 488, 490 Table of Ranks (introduced by Peter the Great in 1722) 92, 106, 130, 219, 240, 250, 581 Tallement, Paul (also known as Tallemant, 1642–1712), Journey to the Island of Love 178–179, 360–361 Tambov 108, 258 Tatar khanates 89 Tatar language 290 Tatars 54, 437 Tatishchev, Dmitrii Pavlovich (1767–1845) 297 Tatishchev, Vasilii Nikitich (1686–1750) 126, 316, 424 teachers, see French, teaching or learning of; French-speaking tutors; governesses Teleskop (Telescope) 436 Temps (Time) 374 Tencin, Claudine Alexandrine Guérin de, Baroness of Saint-Martin-de-Ré (1682–1749) 175 Teplov, Grigorii Nikolaevich (1717–1779) 323 Tessin, Carl Gustaf (1695–1770) 329 theatre at court 184–187, 423 in noble households 176, 223 as site of aristocratic sociability 81, 112, 230, 261 Theroux, Paul 64 Thibaut, L. (teacher of French in Russia) 130 Thiers, Louis-Adolphe (1797–1877) 446 n. 217, 545 Third Department (of personal chancery of Nicholas I, i.e. secret police) 115, 303–307 scholarly literature on 303 n. 170 uses of French in 304–307

Index

Thirty Years War (1618–1648) 273 Thomson, James (1700–1748) 488 tiers état 348 See also bourgeoisie Tillot, Jean (French teacher in nineteenthcentury Russia) 127 Tilsit, Treaty of (1807) 111, 541, 543 Time, see Temps Tipton, Jessica 252, 336, 340, 345 Titov, Vladimir Pavlovich (1807–1891) 299–300 Tiutchev, Fedor Ivanovich (1803–1873) command of French 446 contribution to creation of Russian literary language and canon 251 contribution to geopolitical polemics around 1848 439, 441, 442–448, 449, 450, 451, 452 ‘Dawn’ 445 ‘Letter on Censorship in Russia’ 444 ‘Letter to Dr Gustav Kolb’ 443, 445, 447, 448 ‘Papacy and the Roman Question’ 443–444, 446 poems in French by 371, 371 n. 166 political verse in Russian 444–445 ‘Russia and Revolution’ 443, 445–446, 447 Russia and the West 443, 447 ‘Russian Geography’ 445 supposed ‘psychosocial dislocation’ as result of bilingualism 43 use of French as domestic language 444 Tiutcheva, Anna Fedorovna (1829–1889) 200, 454, 507 Tiutcheva, i.e. Eleonore (Nelly) Peterson, née Countess von Bothmer (d. 1838) 444 Tiutcheva, i.e. Ernestine Dörnberg, née von Pfeffel (b. 1810) 444 Tobol’sk 413 Tocqueville, Alexis Charles-Henri Clérel de (1805–1859) 451 Tolstaia, Countess Sof’ia Andreevna, née Bakhmeteva, Miller by first marriage (1827–1892) 222 Tolstoi, Count Aleksei Konstantinovich (1817–1875) 222 Tolstoi, Count Ivan Matveevich (1806–1867) 308 Tolstoi, Count Lev Nikolaevich (1828–1910) ‘A Few Words about the Book “War and Peace”’ 536, 543, 546 access in childhood to domestic library with French books 145 admiration of the common people 546, 549 Anna Karenina 221, 224, 534, 550–558 attempts to distance himself from his own class 578 belief that the essence of the nation is found in the common people 121 as both creative writer and polemicist 117 on Caucasian peoples, who have a simpler way of life 535

695 characters’ names bring to mind major aristocratic families 534 contribution to creation of Russian literary language and canon 116, 251 Cossacks 534–535 as cultural nationalist 573 fictional treatment of Russian francophonie 519, 520, 533, 534–558, 569–570 on his foreign tutors in Boyhood 168 historical verisimilitude in the historical novel 536 language use in different editions of War and Peace 535–536 n. 59 linguistic education of his children 156 noble values apparent in conduct of 118–119 opinion of Tiutchev 444 Resurrection 534 social background of 118 on use of French as a social sign 247 War and Peace 75, 112, 113–114, 224, 250, 465, 521, 534–550 Youth 247, 250, 534 See also Michaud, treatment of in Tolstoi’s War and Peace; Rostopchin, Count Fedor, treatment of in Tolstoi’s War and Peace Tolstoi, Count Petr Andreevich (1645–1729) 269 Tolstoi, General Count Petr Aleksandrovich (before 1770–1844) 298 Tolstois 107, 206, 254, 259 Tolz, Vera 56 toponyms (i.e. place-names), as indicators of Russian exceptionality, in Lotman’s view 50 See also Russian, for toponyms tragedies 82, 94 Transactions of the Imperial St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, see Acta Academiae scientiarum imperialis Petropolitanae and Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg Transactions on the History of the Sciences and Fine Arts, see Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts translation of works of Russian literature into other languages 427–433, 459 See also adaptation; domestication translators 95, 124, 316 See also Chancery of Foreign Affairs, translators in travel diaries (or récits de voyage) 71, 73, 155, 252, 328, 347–348, 352–354, 357, 359, 516 See also French, in travel diaries treaties, language use in Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) 274 Greifswald (1715) 276 multilateral agreements 276, 277 Nerchinsk (1689) 275 Nijmegen (1678–1679) 273 Rastatt (1714) 274, 275

696  between Russia and Austria (1757) 277 between Russia and Britain (1766) 277 between Russia and Prussia (1715) 276 between Russia and Prussia (1762) 277 Ryswick (1697) 274 between Sweden and Britain (1737) 274 between Sweden and the Ottoman Empire (1756) 274 Versailles, between France and Poland (1735) 274 Versailles (1919) 265 Vienna (1735, 1736) 274 Westphalia (1648) 272, 273, 294 Trediakovskii, Vasilii Kirillovich (1703–1769) Journey to the Island of Love 178–179, 360–361 occasional poems in French 360–361, 367 organizer of Russian Assembly in Academy of Sciences 316 in praise of the ‘Slavenorossiiskii’ language 468 social background of 110 studies in France 98 treatise on versification by 465 n. 14 works of cited by Catherine II 424 Trévoux Journal, see Journal de Trévoux Trinity Monastery of St Sergei 137 troubadours 178 Trubetskoi, Prince Ivan Iur’evich (1667–1750) 269 Trubetskoi, Prince Sergei Petrovich (1790–1860) 114, 227, 230 Trubetskois 534 Tsarskoe Selo Lycée 40, 127, 132, 160 Tschudy, Baron Théodore-Henri de (1724–1769) 229, 406, 409 n. 67, 421, 422 editor of Caméléon littéraire 405 translation of Lomonosov’s panegyric to Peter the Great 430 See also Caméléon littéraire tu and vous forms, see pronominal usage Tula 108, 254, 259, 534 Turgenev, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1784–1846) 306 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich (1818–1883) contribution to creation of Russian literary language and canon 116, 251 Fathers and Children 456 fictional treatment of Russian francophonie 519, 522–533, 569 First Love 523, 524 Nest of Gentry 521, 523, 525–527, 528, 529 opinion of Tiutchev 444 poems in prose, in praise of the Russian language 469 Rudin 43, 258, 522, 523–525, 528 Smoke 523, 528–533, 552 n. 122 social background of 118 Spring Torrents 523, 524 Turgenev, Nikolai Ivanovich (1789–1871)

The French L anguage in Russia

contribution to geopolitical polemics around 1848 439–442, 449 Justificatory Memoir 440 knowledge of Latin 149 pamphlets on the emancipation of the serfs 454 rejection of narrow patriotism 517 Russia in the Face of the European Crisis 441–442 Russia and the Russians 245–247, 440 surveillance of by Third Department 306–307 use of French to express opposition to Russian regime 574 on use of French by the Russian nobility 245–247, 249–250 Turin, as hub of Francophone society and culture 81 Turkestanova, Varvara Il’inichna (1775–1819) 353 tutors, see French-speaking tutors; governesses Tver’ 108, 254 two-nation thesis about imperial Russia 248, 250, 581, 582 Tynianov, Iurii 490 Ukhtomskii family 256 Ukraine 90, 91, 134, 140, 149–150 Ukrainian 243 n. 111 Ukrainian elites 273 Ukrainians 121 Ulybysheva, Elizaveta Dmitrievna (dates unknown) 372 Union of Salvation 113 Union of Welfare 113 United States of America 178 Universal Literary Gazette, see Gazette universelle de littérature Universal Gazette, see Allgemeine Zeitung universality of French language, see French language, universality (universalité) of; Rivarol universality as supposed characteristic of Russian literature and culture 57, 549, 570 universities, see Berlin, University of; Dorpat, University of; Moscow, University of; St Petersburg, University of Unofficial Committee (of Alexander I) 195 Urals region 126, 260 urbanity 249, 389, 463–464 urbanization 46, 557 Urusovs 268 usad’ba, see noble manor house Uspenskii, Boris 487 utopian socialism 116, 449, 456, 558, 568 Utrecht Gazette, see Gazette d’Utrecht Uvarov, Count Sergei Semenovich (1786–1855) 372, 423 Uvarovs 206

Index

Vacheva, Angelina 355 Vakul’skaia, Countess Anna Ivanovna (d. 1883) 248 Valuev, Count Petr Aleksandrovich (1815–1890) code-switching in diary of 74, 307, 309 command of German 216 conversations with Alexander II 307–308 correspondence with Alexander II in Russian 308 diary of, as a source on language use 220–221, 307 n. 188, 351 knowledge of English 216 knowledge of Italian 216 reflections on language use 248–249 as source on use of French in high official circles under Alexander II 307–312 symmetrical bilingualism of 309 use of French for aphoristic or caustic remarks, le mot juste, or witticisms 233–235 use of Latin expressions 216 n. 7 Vanburgh, Sir John (1664–1726), Relapse, or Virtue in Danger 482 Vasil’chikovs 206 Vasil’eva, Elizaveta (author of nineteenthcentury travel diary) 353 Vatican 265 Vatsuro, Vadim 357 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de (1633–1707) 271 n. 20 vaudevilles 220 Vaugelas, Claude Favre de (1585–1650) 487 Vel’iaminov, General Ivan Aleksandrovich (1771–1837) 297 Veliasheva-Volyntseva, Pelageia Ivanovna (1773–1810) 378 Venevitinov, Dmitrii Vladimirovich (1805–1827) 386 Venice 268, 269, 283 Vereshchagin, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1789–1812) 547 n. 108 Verhaeren, Émile (1855–1916) 133 Versailles, French court at 80, 185 versification, treatises on 465 n. 14 Veshniakov, Aleksei Andreevich (1700–1745) 282–283, 285 Vesti-Kuranty (News Gazette) 124, 267, 397 Viardot, Pauline (1821–1910) 522 Viatkina, Irina 370 Viazemskii, Prince Andrei Ivanovich (1754–1807) 251 Viazemskii, Prince Petr Andreevich (1792–1878) 180, 251, 251, 304, 346, 375, 386, 499, 501 Viazemskiis 224 Victoria of Baden, Queen of Sweden (1862–1930) 209 Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1819–1901) 208 Vienna 270

697 as hub of Francophone society and culture 81 Vigel’, Filipp Filippovich (1786–1856) on close association of French with Russian noble sociability 166 conceives of Russian nobility as a mongrel class 108–109 criticism of women’s supposed preference for French during the Napoleonic Wars 380 induction of as Freemason 229 irritated by continued Russian francophonie after Napoleonic Wars 501 on linguistic patriotism in 1812 111 as an outsider in the aristocratic world 220–221, 245 on Russians’ supposed imitativeness 435 on scarcity of Russian French-speakers before 1760s 127 his sense of nationality 220 supposed subjugation of St Petersburg society to Europe 494 value of his memoirs as a source on language use 74, 218–221 Villars, Claude Louis Hector, Duc de (1653–1734) 274 Vilnius 87 Vinogradov, Viktor 486, 535 Viollet, Catherine 348, 349 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC) 361, 365 Vladimir (c. 956–1015, Grand Prince of Kiev c. 980–1015) 364, 426 Vladimir (city or province) 56, 108 Vladimir Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke (1847–1909) 208–209 Vlasov, Colonel (eighteenth-century nobleman in Iziaslav Povince) 256 Voeikova, Ekaterina Ivanovna (1756–1824) 378 Vol’f, Ferdinand Bogdanovich (1796 or 1797–1854) 230 Volkonskaia, Princess Anna Mikhailovna (1776?–1827) 378 Volkonskaia, Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna (1777–1834) 378 Volkonskaia, Princess Mariia Nikolaevna, née Raevskaia (1805–1863) 242 Volkonskaia, Princess Zinaida Aleksandrovna, née Belosel’skaia (1792–1862) 382, 386–392 ‘Child of Kashmir’ 390–391 Four Tales 387, 390, 391, 392 ‘Laura’ 387, 389–390, 585 ‘Mandingo Husbands’ 390–391 prose tale on Princess Olga of Kiev 392 as salonnière 180 scholarly literature on 386–387 n. 223 Tableau of the Slavs 387, 391 ‘Two Tribes of Brazil’ 390–391

698  Volkonskii, Prince Grigorii Semenovich (1742–1824) 297 Volkonskii, Prince Nikita Grigor’evich (1781–1844) 386 Volkonskii, Prince Petr Mikhailovich (1776–1852) 297 Volkonskii, Prince Sergei Grigor’evich (1788–1865) 114, 115, 149, 227, 242 Volkonskiis 107, 259 Volkov brothers (Grigorii, Petr, and Boris, translators of time of Peter the Great; dates unknown) 271 n. 20 Grigorii also mentioned 397 Vologda Province 256 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) on the arts as mark of civilization 427–428 Candide 82 as European supporter of post-Petrine Russia and Catherine II 412, 574 Henriad 82 History of Charles XII 82 History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great 275, 406–409, 429, 430 Letters on the English 82 linguistic patriotism of 84–85 as member of Masonic lodge in Paris 228 Orphan of China 185 praise of Catherine II for purchase of Diderot’s library 411 recipient of flattering verses by Andrei Shuvalov 361–362 his remark on existence of God parodied by Dostoevskii 566 Russian view of him before he wrote his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great 407 n. 50 Socrates 378 on use of French at the Prussian court 81 Zaire 185 See also Catherine II, correspondence in French with Voltaire Voronezh 108 seminary in 137 Vorontsov, Count Aleksandr Romanovich (1741–1805) 196, 336, 341–342, 343, 356 Vorontsov, Count Mikhail Illarionovich (1714–1767) 286, 298, 336, 345, 410 Vorontsov, Count (subsequently Prince, then His Serene Highness) Mikhail Semenovich (1782–1856) 237, 251, 299–300, 351, 356, 515 Vorontsov, Count Roman Larionovich (or Illarionovich) (1717–1783) 336 Vorontsov, His Serene Highness Semen Mikhailovich (1823–1882) 237 Vorontsov, Count Semen Romanovich (1744–1832) 336, 343–345, 351 Vorontsovs, Counts 37, 97, 107, 206, 252, 259, 336, 405 vous forms, see pronominal usage

The French L anguage in Russia

Voznitsyn, Prokofii Bogdanovich (official active in foreign affairs from 1660s to end of seventeenth century) 270 Wallachia 87 Walpole, Sir Robert (1676–1745) 280 War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) 274, 286 War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) 274 Warsaw 87 Masonic lodges in 227 Weinreich, Uriel 66, 471 Weitbrecht, Josias (1702–1747) 403 Wells, Herbert George (1866–1946) 116, n. 119 Welsh, David 75 Westernism 45 n. 41, 406, 452, 525 westernization 88–94, 581 dilemma of 484 psychological effect on elite 42–43 Russian social strata untouched by 507 supposed fracture in nation caused by 508, 584, 587 See also Peter the Great, reforms of Westernizers 45–46, 45 n. 41, 118, 436, 485, 489, 510, 521, 522, 525 attitude towards Peter the Great 45–46 White Russia 91, 149–150 Whitworth, Charles, 1st Baron Whitworth (1675–1725) 283–284 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733–1813) 365 Wilmot, Martha (married name Bradford, 1774–1873) 217 Windischgraetz, Marie Josephine (1729–1777) 329 Winning, Alexa von 336 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling 106 wit, or witticisms 174, 189, 191, 222, 225, 233–235, 261, 361, 374–375, 495, 505–506, 527, 537, 542, 551 n. 116, 561, 566, 572 women ability to write Russian 334–335 education of 133, 458 ego-writing by 346–359, 382 as embodiments of Russian national spirit 38 discouragement of their participation in professional literary activity 328, 376–379 emergence in post-Petrine society 94 exclusion from professional spheres 263, 376 literary activity of 376–393 men’s prejudice against female authorship 378–379, 381–382 n. 202 peripheral role in literary circles 183, 379 prominence of in aristocratic social world 175, 176, 379 prose fiction of 381–392

Index

scholarly literature on writing by 376–377 n. 181 supposed difficulty of Latin for 149 supposed incompetence in Russian 38, 75, 334–335, 349 supposed responsibility for retarded state of Russian 379–381 as translators 378 verse written by 372 See also English, in women’s albums; English, in women’s travel diaries; French, women’s use of; French, women’s writing in; German, use of in women’s travel diaries; Italian, use of in women’s travel diaries; Italian, in women’s albums; Russian, in women’s albums; Russian, women’s use of Wortman, Richard 186, 214 Xenia Aleksandrovna, Grand Duchess (1875–1960) 209 xenophobia 246, 495, 536 See also French character; Gallophobia; linguistic Gallophobia; stereotypes Year in Literature, see Année littéraire Young, Edward (1683–1765) 488

699 Zaandam 268 Zagoskin, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1789–1852) 503, 504 Roslavlev, or the Russians in 1812 503 Zamboni, Giovanni (1683?–1753) 281 Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, see Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg Zeidler, Johann Gottfried (1780–1853) 242 Zherebtsov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1781–1832) 229 Zherebtsov, Nikolai Arsen’evich (1807–1868), Essay on the History of Civilization in Russia 454 Zhivopisets (Painter) 472 Zhivov, Viktor 70, 178, 179, 316, 469, 487, 489, 493, 508, 572, 577 Zhukovskii, Vasilii Andreevich (1783–1852) 180, 251, 370 influence of French on letter-writing by 334 n. 20 Zola, Émile-Édouard-Charles-Antoine (1840–1902) 522 Zorin, Andrei 49, 101, 584–585 Zotov, Konon Nikitich (1690–1742) 271 n. 20 Zubova, Mar’ia Voinovna (1749?–1799) 377 Zubovs 107 Zweibrücken 417 Zweibrücken Gazette, see Gazette des Deux-Ponts

Languages and Culture in History Series Editors: Willem Frijhoff and Karène Sanchez-Summerer Willem Frijhoff, Marie-Christine Kok Escalle, and Karène Sanchez-Summerer: Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural Identity. Northern Europe 16th-19th Centuries, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 061 7 Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau and Marie-Christine Kok Escalle: French as Language of Intimacy in the Modern Age / Le français, langue de l’intime à l’époque moderne et contemporaine, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 059 4 Karène Sanchez-Summerer and Willem Frijhoff: Linguistic and Cultural Foreign Policies of European States. 18th-20th Centuries, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 060 0 Mathilde Kang: Francophonie en Orient. Aux croisements France-Asie (1840-1940), 2018 isbn 978 94 6298 514 8 Rick Honings, Gijsbert Rutten and Ton van Kalmthout: Language, Literature and the Construction of a Dutch National Identity (1780-1830), 2018 isbn 978 90 8964 827 3 Vladislav Rjéoutski and Willem Frijhoff: Language Choice in Enlightenment Europe. Education, Sociability, and Governance, 2018 isbn 978 94 6298 471 4 Mathilde Kang: Francophonie and the Orient. French-Asian Transcultural Crossings (1840-1940), 2018 isbn 978 94 6298 825 5 Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent: The French Language in Russia. A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History, 2018 isbn 978 94 6298 272 7