Neither his promotion nor his wedding nor, to be sure, going home made him as happy. It was his pleasure and his enlightenment, the camera that showed Europe upside down.
Discovered by Johannes Kepler in the early seventeenth century, the camera obscura was a common reference for Enlightenment thinkers. Hume often compared cognition to the dark room, partially and suddenly illuminated; to Locke, the camera obscura seemed to be the best metaphor for the mind (Abrams 1953: 57). The Pietist idea of the inner light, which brings truth into the soul without further mediation, matched the simple design of these obscure cameras. Within them, the Enlightenment became private, even idiosyncratic. At the same time that he was reinventing the camera obscura, Bolotov had to master the Cameralism system of governance. He was commissioned to work as a translator in the office, Kammer, that the Russian governor inherited from the Prussian administration and used for collecting taxes and fees from the province. Remarkably, Bolotov used one and the same non-Russian word, kamera or kamora, for both operations that he learned in Konigsberg: the optical device and the administrative system. Although he did not comment on the analogy or contrast between the two cameras, his description of the physical space where he was working suggest it strongly:
I had to sit alone and entirely solitary in a huge and dark camera, that was illuminated only by two smoky windows, with metal grids, and to sit not near the windows but at a distance from them, - sit like a bird in a cage, and spend the nesting time of spring there. (1931: 1/370)
Like many eighteenth-century Russians, Bolotov was a great fan of fireworks. In 1759, the Russian governor of Konigsberg, with the help of his Italian assistant, created an elaborate fireworks performance on the bank of the Pregel River to celebrate the Russian conquest of the city. Bolotov had never seen such a thing. Nor had the Prussians, who came in "countless numbers" and experienced "very great pleasure." Even when observing their Orthodox rituals, Russians in Konigsberg fired canons, which "all the dwellers watched with particular pleasure" (Bolotov 1931: 5/48). In 1763, Bolotov was present at the grand fireworks on the Neva in St. Petersburg, when Peter III was celebrating Russia's reconciliation with Prussia. Again, all the banks of the spacious river were crowded, and the fireworks were "blinding" (1986: 299; 1931: 2/149). Long before the era of television, fireworks were the closest analogues to the state-sponsored visual propaganda. Having his camera obscura for private pleasure, the dark Kammer for public service, and fireworks for mass communication, Bolotov entered the world of modernity.
Herder
Kant's early student, Johann Gottfried von Herder, was the first to use the term "nationalism" and to explore its peaceful, humanist aspects (Berlin 1996, 2000). A native of a Prussian village that was occupied by the Russians, Herder received unusual help from their surgeon, who operated on his eye and then financed his education in Konigsberg. This Russian surgeon wanted him to study medicine, but in August 1762, with the announcement of Russia's withdrawal from Konigsberg, Herder started his studies with Kant. One of his first pieces of poetry was his ode to Peter III, who brought the occupation to an end (Ergang 1966: 60-3). In the treatise that Herder wrote in Riga for Catherine II in 1764, "Do we still have the public and Fatherland of Yore?" he glorified the German spirit but ended with an ode to the Russian Empress, who was also German after alclass="underline"
Yes, fatherland, you, mother, to whom the wise
Will sacrifice the spirit's firstborn fruit . . .
Yours is this house in Catherine's shadow . . .
Here Russia's blessing, and there the sun's embrace. (Herder 1992: 64)
As Isaiah Berlin stated clearly, Herder's form of nationalism "remained unaltered" during his active life, which stretched from the Seven Years War to the Napoleonic wars (Berlin 2000: 180). However, Berlin, a great scholar of Russian thought and a native of Riga, did not focus on Herder's experience under Russian occupation, which was clearly important for his nationalism. It was there that Herder discovered the value of community and its autonomy from the state. For him, philosophy became a genre of public discourse, a way for people to understand themselves, like poetry or politics. There had to be as many philosophies as there were peoples. But when nations were at war or one people oppressed another, there could be no common understanding between them.
While distancing himself from Kant, Herder nevertheless shared with his teacher the great theme of self-determination. Though scholars derive this theme from Kant's and Herder's common spiritual tradition, Pietism, their experience under Russian rule was also important. For those who believed in self-reliance and an inner light, it was difficult to live under foreign rule. Hidden transcripts evolved into philosophy. The basis of the state - Russian and Prussian alike - is conquest; all wars are civil wars; the state robs men of themselves: in these inspired formulas Herder articulated a vision that was cultural, not political (Berlin 2000; Swift 2005). Though empires had "feet of clay," he worshiped the first and foremost Russian Emperor, Peter the Great, "the man and the marvel of our century," and Catherine the Great who finally stopped the war (Herder 1992: 62). Russian rule in Konigsberg and Riga did not tolerate political opposition but negotiated cultural dissidence. This decoupling of culture and politics explains why it did not instill in Herder a hatred of Russians. Later in life, he wrote sublime words about the beautiful fate of the Slavs in the world to come (Gesemann 1965).[7] More importantly, he called for the exploration of Slavic folklore, "the archive of the people." Herder's ideal of the right life was about people living in communities that are united by culture and organizing their own affairs independently of the state. One could speculate that Herder based this idea on his observations of Slavic village life, in Prussia or in Livonia. He was very popular among the Romantic, early nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, some of whom held surprisingly high positions in the imperial administration (Maiofis 2008). Focused on the Slavs, Herder's idea of anthropology competed with the Kantian, more scientific, and more orientalist ethnology that Schlozer and his colleagues developed at Gottingen (Knight 1998: 120). Later, these two projects collided with spectacular results. Herder's distant follower, Lucian Malinowski, a professor of Slavic who studied the folklore of northern Poland, was the father of Bronislaw Malinowski, a great anthropologist who went to the Pacific with the ideas of East European romanticism (Gellner 1998: 130).
The explosion of intellectual life, poetry, and philosophy is a common feature of postcolonial moments. The circle of Kant and Herder in Konigsberg experienced it for the first time ever. Observing the dramatic, unaccountable events that were caused by human will but which changed their lives like earthquakes, local intellectuals came to a new and revolutionary understanding of rationality, autonomy, and history. Two figures of their circle add to my argument,