Kant also had important friends among the pro-Russian wing of the Konigsberg elite. Every biography of Kant describes Countess Caroline von Keyserlingk, a good friend of Kant's; over several decades, he taught her children, frequented her dinners, and called her his "ideal of a woman." However, their views on Russia, and probably on the Russian occupation, were diametrically opposed. It was 30 years later that their mutual friend recorded a dinner conversation from Keyserlingk's manor, which showed that Russia was still on their minds:
There was a political discourse in which the officers were very active. Kant, as did I, declared that the Russians were our main enemies. . . . The Countess [was] of a different opinion. . . . "If my husband was still alive, he would certainly have made clear to the king by means of a concrete deduction that his best ally is Russia." . . . I still did not believe that they did not have any interest in Eastern Prussia. . . . The Countess did not change her mind. (Kuehn 2001: 337-8)
Bolotov's memoir leaves no doubt that in 1759-60, von Keyserlingk was a mistress of the Russian governor of Prussia, Baron Nikolai von Korf, and that their liaison was public knowledge in the city (Bolotov 1986: 289). Von Korf was a Baltic-German aristocrat who spoke but did not write in Russian. He was close to the Empress; in Konigsberg, he was so important that Bolotov called him Vice-Roy. After his service in Konigsberg, von Korf was appointed chief of the St. Petersburg and, later, of all Russian police. Once again, the experience in external colonization was deemed interchangeable with the success in internal policing. A rich and flamboyant bachelor, von Korf used every occasion to throw balls or masquerades to honor the Countess von Keyserlingk. Luminaries attended these dazzling events, including Grigorii Orlov, a hero of the Russian-Prussian war who would soon become a powerful favorite of Catherine the Great. It is tantalizing to imagine a conversation between Kant and Orlov, whom one Englishman described as "colossal in stature but totally unimproved by reading" (Wolff 1994: 234). Kant was then in his "gallant phase," worldly, fashionably dressed, and in demand, if not at balls then at dinner parties. In his writings and lectures from this and slightly later periods, there are signs of his discontent with philosophy and intellectual life, a midlife crisis of a sort (Zammito 2002). Historian Anthony La Vopa discerns "an element of self-caricature, and indeed of self-hatred" in Kant's lectures during the occupation and his writings that followed the withdrawal of Russian troops (La Vopa 2005: 17). Among the explanations for this important though temporary crisis, one comes from the postcolonial tradition. Under a colonial regime, the local intellectuals often registered similar feelings of internal splitting, doubling, and self-hatred. Much of twentieth-century existential thought came out of these situations, in Algeria and elsewhere. Reinstating Kant in occupied Konigsberg helps us understand his relation to this tradition.
Apart from his teaching at the university, Kant also taught geography, applied mathematics, and pyrotechnics to the German-speaking Russian officers, people like Orlov or Bolotov (Gulyga 1997: 32). Presumably, he took money for this service. After the Russians left the city, Kant continued to give similar lessons to Prussian officers. Indeed, during those early years Kant was developing a kind of scholarship that he could teach equally well to the Prussians and the Russians. His published research during the years of occupation was very scant. During the almost five years of Russian rule, he published a few essays that all focused on a rather special theme, earthquakes. Geographically, earthquakes were very distant from the experience of Konigsberg; metaphorically, these inexplicable, senseless disasters were close to Kant's world. Voltaire, who spent part of the war in Berlin, combined the same crucial themes - the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Seven Years War, and theodicy - in Candide (1759).
Whether the reason was anxiety or trauma, the fact is that the occupation created a writing block in Kant. Immediately after the abrupt end of the occupation, in 1762-3, Kant's publications burst forth. "It is striking that Kant should have published so much in so short a time, in light of rather spare publications of the preceding six years," wrote John Zammito (2002: 61). It is no less striking that Zammito and other scholars have failed to attribute this dynamic to the most obvious reason, the Russian occupation and its end. Under Russian rule, Kant was a subaltern and he did not speak. To be more precise, he did not speak publicly about anything but earthquakes.
Bolotov
From Isaiah Berlin to John Zammito, research on Kant is of very high quality. However, these scholars invariably fail to detect the formative impact of Russian rule in Konigsberg on their hero, and neglect an important primary source: the memoir of Andrei Bolotov, which bore almost singular witness to the events. Many biographers of Kant mention Bolotov, though he has not been translated; they know about Bolotov from the only English-language biography of Kant written by a Russian author (Gulyga 1987). A major Soviet philosopher, Arsenii Gulyga, presented the Russian occupation of Konigsberg with a light touch, as an innocent affair with negligible results. Writing about Bolotov, he chose the episodes that showed his power over Kant and not his tortured relations with the Prussians.
Apart from his voluminous writings, which have remained largely unpublished (see Newlin 2001: 4), Bolotov was a typical figure of the Enlightenment: a modest officer, a dilettante naturalist, and a successful administrator who later in his life managed many thousands of the crown peasants near Moscow. His father, also an officer, commanded Russian regiments that were stationed in the occupied Baltic countries. There, Bolotov learned his German, which in Konigsberg sounded native. Mediating between Russians and Germans, collecting philosophical books, and drawing aquarelles, Bolotov was eager to become a good European, a feat that few Russian authors presented to their readers. He was in despair when his superior ordered him to return to Russia. Deeply influenced by his tenure in Konigsberg, he imposed some of his new skills and ideas on the peasants that he owned or managed. He created Prussian-style ponds and gardens in central Russia and was one of the first to introduce potatoes as an agricultural product there. Writing about his time in Konigsberg decades after it ended, he recognized the Germans' advantage over Russians in fashions, haircuts, cuisine, bookstores, schools, and much more. These feelings did not prevent him from being a loyal officer abroad and an ordinary master of his serfs at home. Filling many pages with exalted words about the Prussians, about the Russians he wrote with the impersonal brutality of an aristocrat: "the stupidity and the extreme unreasonableness of our mean folk was all-too- well-known to us" (1986: 604). Experimenting on his peasants, he subjected 1,500 of them to electric treatment, the results of which are unrecorded.