To be sure, Grigoriev's orientalism was non-traditional (Knight 2000; Schimmelpenninck 2010). With his knowledge, Grigoriev worked for the imperial domination over the eastern colonies and over the imperial nation itself. Immediately after his return from the Kyrgyz Border Administration, Grigoriev became a professor of oriental languages at St. Petersburg Imperial University. He also took part in several ministerial committees: for Asian trade, for taxation of the Kyrgyzes, for surveillance over university students, and for convict prisons. In 1872, he became a member of the "Jewish Committee" which considered proposals to abolish the Jewish Pale. Grigoriev's opinion was based on his "scholarly" knowledge of the issue. "All evil results from the fact that Jews do not want to work productively." To allow Jews to settle beyond the Pale would be dangerous to all the peoples of Russia, he wrote in another anti- Semitic memo. "Whoever once falls into the hands of the Jews will never be free of them" (Veselovsky 1887: 251).
At the end of 1874, Grigoriev was appointed Head of the Ministry's Main Directorate on Print, i.e., the highest censor in the Empire, a post he fulfilled while remaining a professor at St. Petersburg University. He controlled the opening of new publications and the curtailment of existing ones, the process by which they would pass through censorship, and the system of fines for those who transgressed. He was involved in various high-profile affairs. He authorized the publication of Dostoevsky's controversial A Writer's Diary without preliminary censorship, but the sick and disgraced Nikolai Nekrasov, known for his populist stance, had to plead for leniency on behalf of Grigoriev. When an unhappy journalist visited him in his high office to complain about the prohibition of his newspaper and received cynical treatment, this journalist wrote that he felt like a Kyrgyz whom Grigoriev had left to die in the steppes (Gradovsky 1882: 499). Grigoriev interfered in state policy on the Ukrainian language, which he preferred to call a "little-Russian dialect." In a long note, he explained that the ban he had imposed on Ukrainian publications was a response to the danger of separatism: "To allow the creation of an autonomous folk literature in the Ukrainian dialect would be to promote the separation of Ukraine from the rest of Russia" (Veselovsky 1887: 265). Almost at the same time, in 1876, he chaired the International Congress of Orientalists in St. Petersburg and opened it by giving his speech in French.
Grigoriev's career is broader than Said's concept of orientalism; probably the best concept for it is Saltykov-Shchedrin's term "Tashkent-ness" (see Chapter 1), the Russian version of the imperialist boomerang that applied the orientalist habits of rule onto the imperial nation. Moving from the university to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to a provincial administration in the east, and back to the university and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Grigoriev had an ambitious career as an imperial administrator whose variegated duties were based on his orientalist expertise. In St. Petersburg and Orenburg, his knowledge and attitudes were in demand by the highest powers, which was why he succeeded in making a grand career. What, indeed, was not the east in Grigoriev's Russia? The Kyrgyzes were definitely oriental and, thus, were subject to orientalist rule. But so too were Jews, and Ukrainians as well. And also convict prisoners on their way to Siberia. And also university students, who were restless and therefore, subject to Grigoriev's expertise. And of course, the writers in Petersburg and Kiev, who were trembling in front of Grigoriev like the Kyrgyzes in the steppe. For Vladimir Dal, internal colonization led to a positive version of orientalism, a stereotyped reasoning that affirmed the moral superiority of the exoti- cized subjects, Russians and Cossacks. For Vasilii Grigoriev, orientalism worked straightforwardly as discrimination and coercion, which, "extremely unfortunately" for him, stopped short of hanging the natives. But he did hang novels.
Through the High Imperial Period, Russia's internal affairs were intrinsically connected to Russian literature. Top officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs maintained close relations with well- known writers even after the illustrious Lev Perovsky, the man who wanted "Being, not Seeming," had departed from the ministry. Perovsky's successor, Sergei Lanskoi, married the writer Vladimir Odoevskii's sister. Lanskoi's successor, Petr Valuev (who was a prolific author himself), married the writer Petr Viazemsky's daughter. Some famous characters in Lev Tolstoy's novels, such as Ivan Ilich and Karenin, are described as officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The realist novel became the genre of nationalism everywhere in the western hemisphere (Anderson 1991). The same was true in Russia, but despite the nationalist motifs of many of its classical pieces,
Russian literature played an integrative rather than a divisive role. More than any other aspect of imperial culture, literature accepted the Shaved Man's Burden and carried it nobly. Throughout the enormous space of the Empire, the cult of Pushkin became a belief system for people who shared little or nothing else. In Dostoevsky's Idiot, two unusual friends, an impoverished prince and an Old-Believer merchant, spend time reading "all of Pushkin" together. A Russian rebel, Vladimir Lenin, studied Pushkin in the gymnasium, where his teacher of Russian literature was the father of his arch-rival, Alexander Kerensky; Lenin loved Saltykov-Shchedrin and, unexpectedly, Turgenev (Valentinov 1953). A Zionist rebel, Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, wrote in his memoirs that he knew "all of Pushkin," as well as Shakespeare in the Russian translation, from the age of 14; but he also wrote extensively about the imperial, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic motifs in Pushkin and other Russian classics (Jabotinsky 1989). A Polish rebel, Apollo Korzeniowski, the father of Joseph Conrad, self-consciously modeled his major play on Griboedov's Woe from Wit. When Russian populists, Zionists, and Muslim activists met in a tsarist prison, or later in the Soviet gulag, they discussed the great Russian writers up to Tolstoy. In the long run, Russian literature proved to be an extremely successful instrument of cultural hegemony. With its classics, heretics, and critics, it conquered more Russians, non-Russians, and Russian enemies than any other imperial endeavor. Standardizing the language, creating a common pool of meanings, and integrating its multiethnic readership on an enormous scale, this literature was a great asset. The tsars and the censors rarely understood or appreciated it. Thus, the Empire collapsed, but the literature outlived it.
Part IV
Shaved Man's Burden
Philosophy Under Russian Rule
"Grass is needful for the ox, which again is needful for man . . . but then we do not see why it is necessary that men should exist," wrote Kant in The Critique of Judgment. However, casting his thoughts to the north and asking the same question about "the Greenlander, the Lapp, the Samoyed, the Yakut, etc.," Kant gave an answer and it was negative: "[I]t is not clear why people should have to live in there at all. . . .It could only have been the greatest unsociability among men which thus scattered them into such inhospitable regions" (Kant 2007a: 155-61).