Belinskii’s literary tastes and views pointed to the future in other ways. One of his early friendships was with Ivan Turgenev, again a writer of noble origins and some wealth. Turgenev had come to Moscow from his provincial estate and made acquaintance with the Stankevich circle that included Herzen and Bakunin, whom Turgenev came to know better when he studied in Berlin. On his return to Russia in 1841 Turgenev became close friends with Belinskii, a friendship that lasted until the critic’s death in 1848. Turgenev shared Belinskii’s support of Western culture and his critical view of Russia, if not the critic’s radicalism. The great event of Turgenev’s youth was his meeting with the Spanish opera singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot in 1843, who came to St. Petersburg as one of the stars of the Italian company that was to have a major effect on Russian opera. The passion seems to have been mainly on Turgenev’s side, but it unlocked his creative powers. In his middle thirties he found his voice, first in his play “A Month in the Country,” and then in his series of stories of rural life, A Hunter’s Sketches (1847–1852). The Sketches, with their portraits of eccentric and domineering nobles and their very human (but unsentimentalized) serfs, caused a sensation. Turgenev’s were the not the first attempts to describe the life of the peasantry, but they were both the most effective by far and under their mild surface they conveyed the poverty and humiliation in which the great mass of the Russian people, the peasants, lived. The son of a despotic and sadistic mother who mistreated her serfs as well as her children, Turgenev knew what it meant to live under arbitrary power. The publication of such work in the darkest period of the reign of Nicholas was a major act of civil courage, but ironically it was not the Sketches that earned him his first brush with the authorities.
In 1852, just as the publication of the Hunter’s Sketches was proceeding, Gogol’ died. Turgenev had been acquainted with Gogol’ but was not a close friend. As a fellow writer, however, he admired him intensely, and was so moved by his death that he quickly wrote a short essay about Gogol’ and his significance for Russia and its literature. In St. Petersburg the publisher was afraid it would not pass censorship for there were many conservative officials who did not share the tsar’s approval of Gogol’. Turgenev sent the essay to Moscow, where it was approved and appeared in print. Turgenev was then arrested for violating the censorship rules, a charge that was legally dubious, but convincingly presented to Nicholas by the Third Section. The punishment was a month in prison followed by exile to his estate, time that he used to write another novella. The incident only confirmed Turgenev’s oppositional attitude to the autocracy.
Turgenev was extremely sensitive to the trends of Russian society and thought and his stories of peasant life prefigured by only a few years the great debate over serfdom that erupted after the Crimean War. He was also aware of another trend in Russian culture, the turn away from philosophy, German or otherwise, toward a fascination with the natural sciences, a trend that would also come to the surface only after Crimea. This fascination did not grow in sterile soil, for the universities founded under Alexander I were fully equipped with faculties of the natural sciences. Until the middle of the nineteenth century they competently taught the achievements of European science adding nothing of importance to that body of learning, with one enormous exception: mathematics. In 1829–30, the same years as the publication of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Nikolai Lobachevskii inaugurated a revolution in geometry in a series of articles in the official journal of the University of Kazan’, where he taught and eventually became rector. Lobachevskii’s idea was very simple: all geometry since the time of Euclid had included the assumption that two parallel lines do not meet. Suppose you reverse the assumption: what sort of geometry would you construct? This Lobachevskii proceeded to do, a discovery so bizarre that it earned him no recognition in his lifetime. Europeans with similar ideas, Christian Gauss and the young Hungarian Janos Bolyai, had never developed them, for Gauss thought them too odd to publish. He did not want to risk his own reputation and discouraged Bolyai from taking steps to make his suggestions better known. It was left to Lobachevskii, in the obscurity of provincial Russia, to work out the notion. Unknown to almost everyone, Russia had its first major scientific discovery, but Russian science would not come into its own until the 1860s, and it would be Turgenev who would bring science and its implications to the public for the first time. The new fascination with the natural sciences also brought a new current of thought into Russian radical politics.
11 The Era of the Great Reforms
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War caused a tremendous political shock in the country. It was not the scale of the defeat but its revelation of the weakness of a political system that prized its unique conservatism on the European scene and its supposed military might above all. It was the autocracy that was defeated, all the more so because the long siege of Sevastopol demonstrated to many Russians that the army still had the spirit to fight, a spirit hampered by the backwardness of society and government. Russia’s backwardness was not only the result of the slow evolution of economy and society under the tutelage of Tsar Nicholas. The greatest problem was that the world was changing very quickly in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the most rapid changes were taking place in Great Britain, Russia’s primary imperial rival. Railroads were transforming the landscape in all of Western Europe and the United States, building on and stimulating the rapid modernization of iron and steel production, thereby raising output to new heights. Besides railroads, all sorts of machines came into existence – improved steam engines, telegraph equipment, and huge metal-hulled ships. Britain and other powers imported increasing amounts of food and raw materials from colonies and distant countries in the Western hemisphere, sending out masses of cotton and wool cloth, machinery, and innumerable consumer goods. Society evolved to support all this growth, with high-speed presses to produce daily newspapers and rapidly expanding educational systems to produce engineers, lawyers, politicians, and an educated public to use the new products. In this new world, Russia was lagging behind. The reformers in the government realized all this and saw that Russia needed the new production techniques and a new economy simply to survive as a major power. They also realized that technology alone was not enough: Tsar Nicholas had built railroads, but had not succeeded in transforming the Russian economy. Russia would need a new legal system, a modernized and expanded educational system, and even some forms of public discussion of major issues. What Russia could not stand, the reformers believed, was a new political system. Most of them admired the emerging constitutional regimes in Europe, but believed that Russia was far too primitive with its illiterate peasantry, outmoded agriculture, and thin layer of educated people. Such a society could not sustain a free, constitutional government. For the foreseeable future, it would have to remain an autocracy.
With the death of Tsar Nicholas in February 1855, a new regime came to power with his son Alexander. Alexander II would preside over the greatest changes in Russia since the time of Peter the Great – changes that brought the country into the modern world, hesitantly and only partially, but nevertheless across the threshold toward industrial capitalism and the beginnings of a modern urban society. The new tsar was as often against as for these changes, and had to be pushed all the way, but nevertheless he did allow himself to be convinced and to make the decisive moves. Ultimately the tsar decreed the reforms, but like the reformers he intended to preserve autocracy intact and keep society, even upper-class society, out of political decisions. This was a difficult and ultimately impossible goal, for Russian educated society emerged now for the first time as a force in the political and social process, even if it was a force of limited power. Its emergence, even if modest, was a revolution in Russian politics and a revolution with wide implications.