played the hostile role of spies and detectives in the life of the people" (Pypin 1890: 1/418-19). Dal's dictionary, the huge success of his life, also invited many doubts and criticisms. Some ethnographers accused Dal of inventing entries; others glorified this dictionary as a monument to the richness of Russian language. This debate continued well into the twentieth century, when Vladimir Nabokov admired the dictionary and used it routinely, while Boris Pasternak ridiculed its artificial language. A Swedenborgian and a committed believer in spiritism who organized experiments with rotating tables and ghost apparitions, Dal converted to Orthodoxy before his death.
In 1848, Perovsky asked Dal to destroy his notes because keeping them at this anxiety-ridden time could be dangerous even for these high officials; Dal obeyed and burned hundreds of pages of precious material. The few pages that survive present him in a strangely melancholic light. He was pursued by suspicions and accusations; his only consolations were his domestic life, his irreproachable service, and his humility:
The generosity of the Minister of Internal Affairs secures my domestic needs. . . . Should I be listening with quiet humbleness to accusations that are insulting to the loyal citizen and subject? Should I give up the best part of my noble name, of my honor? . . . Our feelings and contemplations are hidden; a human being cannot reveal them before his judges. . . . But one finds humility in suffering. Humans are given patience and unshakeable faith in the future. (Dal 2002b: 262)
These unhappy musings sound as if they came from the memories of his Huguenot mother; it is surprising to read them in the notes of a highly successful imperial bureaucrat. If Dal had not destroyed his papers under the pressure of his chief, we might have had many more documents of this genre. Executing disciplinary power over the Empire, this quintessential intellectual wrote and thought under ceaseless suspicion from the outside and under doubt from within. Was he exploring Russians or inventing them? Was he legitimate in doing either of these things? Were he, his power, and his work real or merely spoken of? Adoring the language of the common folk and devoting his lifetime to writing down their words, he denied literacy to these same people. Embodying truly imperial, cosmopolitan skills and talents, he abused them for the sake of a gruesome nationalist message.
In mid-nineteenth-century Russia, sentimentality turned into the grotesque. This affinity was also a part of the imperial experience. It is exciting to reimagine Gogol's story, "The Nose," as happening in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with Kovalev asking Dal for the position of vice-governor, Dal interviewing Kovalev about his provincial dialect, and both anxiously guarding their disobedient parts.
System of Tenderness
An official of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a colonial administrator, a professor of oriental languages, and the chief censor of the Empire, Vasilii Grigoriev (1816-81) applied his orientalist knowledge to various tasks of imperial power. Promoting projects of external and internal colonization, he mixed them as he and his bosses saw fit. By training, Grigoriev was a typical nineteenth-century orientalist who graduated from a specialized department at St. Petersburg University, spoke several Asian languages, and wrote on issues ranging from archeology to linguistics to cultural criticism. In 1837 the young Grigoriev applied to the University Council with the syllabus for a new course, "History of the East":
The spreading and strengthening of Orientalist interests in Russia would give us more autonomy and work as a counter-balance to the Western elements which oppress our national development, and would support this development. . . . The best way to resist the influence of the West is to rely on the studies of the East. (Veselovsky 1887: 33)
Orientalism was Grigoriev's profession, nationalism his preoccupation. Russians needed to study the east because it facilitated a particular way of understanding themselves. As at other moments of his career, Grigoriev's positions seemed more hawkish than those of his superiors, and his program was rejected. From 1844, he served as a civil servant in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He helped Nadezhdin to edit the journal of the ministry and penned multiple studies on subjects as diverse as the condition of peasants in the central provinces, book-printing in Riga, and the newly discovered Judaic sects. In the Hasidic Jews, he saw "extreme ignorance, horrible illiteracy"; in the "sect of Talmudists," as he called the majority of the Jews, he saw "a major danger for Russia" and "the misery of human kind" (Grigoriev 1846). In 1847, Grigoriev and his friend, Pavel Savel'ev, who was also an orientalist, bought a St. Petersburg journal, The Finnish Messenger, which they renamed The Northern Review. Among others, this journal published Mikhail Petrashevsky who would soon go to Siberia; curiously, while Liprandi was implanting an agent into his group, Grigoriev was publishing essays and translations that were written by the same group. In this journal, Grigoriev started the propaganda of Haxthausen's views on Russia ([Anonimous] 1847; Seddon 1985: 267). In 1848, Grigoriev traveled into the central provinces with the commission to learn how the nobles and the peasants were responding to the rumors of revolution in Europe. In 1849, he inspected bookstores in Riga, confiscated 2,000 books, and fell sick as a result of the book dust.
Invited by Vasilii Perovsky, in 1851 Grigoriev left the capital for Orenburg, the actual east that had become a part of Russia. Until 1863, he served in the provincial governance of Orenburg and also as chief of the administration of the Kyrgyz frontier. Living the tumultuous life of a colonial administrator, he organized punitive expeditions and took part in military offensives. He mapped borders of the occupied territories and arrested rebels. He wrote laws, established courts, and ran investigations. He performed all these multiple tasks without any legal training or even military experience. However, he never stopped studying the "orientals" and never failed to miss any opportunity to refer to his background in academic orientalism. "As an orientalist, I, for my sins, understand Asia and the Asians, while those who control my actions know nothing about either," he wrote from Orenburg in 1858. "The Kyrgyz steppe is trembling before me. I arrest the sultans and catch the bandits but, extremely unfortunately, I have no power to hang them." Justifying his cruelty, Grigoriev did not hesitate to use his academic erudition. While the Kyrgyz unrest was developing, he wrote in a personal letter: "I invented a fine method . . . a deeply Machiavellian trick, and I did it because I read books and was not an official from the cradle. Long live books!" His method was another series of punitive measures. With much excitement, he positioned himself somewhere between Genghis Khan and Liprandi: "Now, Genghis Khan is nothing for me. I have purchased a beautiful Kyrgyz hat, have grown a beard, and in a glorious robe . . . run 16 investigations at once, a la Liprandi" (Veselovsky 1887: 134, 139, 118).
Grigoriev believed in his superiority over his bureaucratic colleagues because of his professional, orientalist knowledge: "What would happen to these gentlemen if something seriously dangerous were actually to occur on our borders?" In response, these colleagues, most of them military officers, saw him as an extremist and put restraints on his activities. When another rebellion began in the steppe, Grigoriev blamed the pliability of his superiors. "This system of tenderness brought the administration of the Kyrgyses to the same end that brought Russia its pliability in relations with Europe." Exoticizing the natives, Grigoriev presented them to the Emperor and the metropolitan public on the basis of racist preconceptions; he proposed sending to the coronation of Alexander II "several fine- looking figures in tall hats with golden embroidery and brocade caftans with galloons" (Veselovsky 1887: 140, 146). In the end, the orientalist became involved in a conflict with the governor-general, Vasilii Perovsky, and applied for retirement. His academic background made this linguist even more hawkish in colonial policies than were his military-trained colleagues. From Orenburg, he also managed to take part in literary debates in the capital. One of his essays, a long and disrespectful obituary of his former classmate, a historian of Europe, Timofei Granovsky, caused a scandal. On top of his gossip about Granovsky, Grigoriev tried to show that Russian scholars should turn their backs on western history and literature; only oriental studies could be useful for Russia and only in this field was Russian scholarship higher than European. "The dirtiest among dirty men," wrote the leading Russian liberal, Boris Chicherin, about Grigoriev (Pirozhkova 1997: 146).