Nevertheless, the two men could not have been more different: born in 1890, Trubetskoy was the scion of one of Russia’s most prestigious aristocratic lineages; Jakobson, born six years later, was of Jewish Armenian origin. Trubetskoy was an aristocrat straight out of one of Dostoevsky’s novels: forthright, earnest and monomaniacal. As linguist Anatoly Liberman put it in a biographical sketch: ‘His tact, restraint and excellent manners were not a mask, but rather an invisible wall, which, like every wall, served as a protection and a barrier.’8 At the same time he was ‘a passionate, irascible man, prone to depression and nervous breakdowns, often insecure and shy’. Tall and imposing, never seen without his grey double-breasted suit and well-trimmed goatee, Trubetskoy was nonetheless rather stooped, as if made for listening rather than speaking.
Before 1917, the name Trubetskoy was practically synonymous with the Russian Empire. Descended from a fourteenth-century Lithuanian nobleman who married the sister of a Muscovite prince, the Trubetskoys were the hereditary lords of Trubetsk, near the border with Lithuania, and their bloodline was among the most venerable of the Russian aristocracy – older even than that of the Russian royal family, the Romanovs.
The nineteenth century was riven by debate between the Slavophiles (who believed in Russia’s unique destiny and spoke out against westernizing reforms) and the westernizers (who believed that Europe was a model to be emulated). Intellectual seriousness of purpose was the order of the day – the Slavophiles wore traditional murmolka and zipum, peasant caps and coats, while westernizers were just as fanatical about dressing in the European style; the writer Alexander Herzen moaned in his memoirs about Russia’s penchant for foppish conformity as a symptom of a national disease: ‘If one were to show him the battalions of exactly similar, tightly buttoned frock coats of the fops on Nevksy Prospekt, an Englishman would take them for a squad of policemen.’9 The fights that raged with the new-born intelligentsia were brutal and totaclass="underline" ‘People avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of “all-embracing spirit” or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on “the absolute personality and its existence in itself”,’ wrote Herzen.
Nikolay’s father Sergey and uncle Evgeny were both philosophers, and some of the most famed intellectuals of their time. Evgeny was a famous scholar of the Orthodox faith, while Nikolay’s father was rector of Moscow University. Though they staunchly supported the monarchy and had a reputation as grands seigneurs, they had supported reform. Sergey, indeed, played a key historical role in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, when he addressed Tsar Nicholas II on the need for political reform. The rejection of that petition would ultimately seal the monarchy’s fate.
The two men, whom the young Nikolay idolized, epitomized the spiritual journey of their generation – a generation that would ultimately sire the Bolshevik revolutionaries. They questioned empiricism and idealism, searched for the place of faith in knowledge, and went through cycle after cycle of rejecting and then embracing the Orthodox Church. Uncle Evgeny describes in his memoirs growing up with a conservative Orthodox mother, and rebelling against that upbringing after reading French and English philosophers of positivism. Then, having absorbed German philosophy, which demolished the empiricism of the positivists, he at last conceded, reflecting the frustrations of his generation, that ‘all the formulae which I believed blindly and dogmatically were shattered… childish self-assurance vanished and I realized that I had yet to develop a philosophy of life.’10
This spiritual indecisiveness was not a sign of irresoluteness; quite the contrary, it was a measure of just how seriously this generation took the search for truth. The actual ideas were secondary in significance to something much more important: the rigour with which they applied philosophical teachings to daily life. The romantic ideal of the nineteenth century demanded that one live in total conformity with one’s beliefs; take the conclusions of those beliefs to the furthest extent possible; and apply those ideas in life, whatever the practicalities. Life demanded it, and anything less was a sign of moral cowardice. Philosophical ideas presented themselves to Russians of this period less as fanciful notions, and more as total programmes. Nikolay’s uncle Evgeny Trubetskoy, himself an acclaimed philosopher, wrote of this preoccupation with the metaphysical in his autobiography of 1920: ‘At some moment, a man possessed by a single thought, a single feeling, deaf to all else, infuses this single thought with a power of temperament and energy of will that knows no obstacles, and he therefore inevitably achieves his goal.’11
Russia, in short, was a country brimming with ideas and unique in its capacity to be totally carried away by them. Herzen encapsulated this tendency with typical sarcasm which tragically foreshadowed Russia’s twentieth-century fate:
‘We are great doctrinaires and raisonneurs. To this German capacity we add our own national… element, ruthless, fanatically dry: we are only too willing to cut off heads… With fearless step we march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the dialectic, only with the truth.’12
Nikolay was born into this cerebral world on 16 April 1890.13 His family lived in Moscow, in an apartment on Starokonyushenny Pereulok, off Arbat Street. They spent weekends and summers on their estate at Uzkoe just outside Moscow, its orchards and paths described lovingly by Boris Pasternak, later the Nobel Prize-winning author of the novel Doctor Zhivago, who was born the same year as Nikolay and was one of the prince’s best friends at university. Uzkoe was the basis for his 1957 poem ‘Linden Avenue’:
Serfdom had been abolished a year before Nikolay’s father, Sergey Nikolaevich, was born. But the old social order still dominated life on the estate, and it dominated Nikolay’s rather sheltered childhood. On 20 July, the day of celebration for ‘Our Lady of Akhtyrka’,15 the Trubetskoy children would receive the children of the local village and hand out sweets, according to Evgeny’s account, just as the ancient Trubetskoy landlords had always done.
Nikolay grew up amid the academic pageantry and prestige of his father and uncle; and just as they had delved into the intellectual currents of the day, so did he. Nikolay’s father served as rector of Moscow University from 1904 until his death in 1905. Pasternak devoted several paragraphs of his autobiography to the family:
The elder Trubetskoys, the father and the uncle of the student Nikolai were professors, one of jurisprudence while the other was rector of the university and a well known philosopher. Both were corpulent, and like two elephants, frock coats and all, without waists, would mount the rostrum and in a tone with which one might accost a deaf mute, in aristocratic burring imploring voices, delivered their brilliant courses.16