employed as poets and translators in the Academy of Science and court, or employed in military and civil service, there were limits, of course. The closer it got to political issues, the more "advice" was expressed allegorically, with the stress on the positive.
Writers, steeped in Orthodox morals and Enlightenment thought, focused on universal values and social conditions, proposing high moral standards for the ideal state, ruler, and individuals. By the end of the century some also began to explore a pre-romantic, sentimentalist focus on personal emotions and self-reflection, but commitment to social concerns never waned. To some extent, as Whittaker, Elise Wirtschafter, Elena Marasinova, and others who have studied the "psychology" of the nobility have noted, they wrestled with a tension inherent in their values and their political situation. They struggled to reconcile their belief in a transcendent natural order "created by God and protected on earth by church and monarch" with an Enlightenment commitment to human agency. Servants of the state with no legalistic tradition of political pluralism, few adopted a vocabulary of opposition and radical change (and when a few did in the 1790s, they were punished). Rather, when confronting freedom and justice, they sought stability and reconciliation through personal morality, rather than questioning fundamental structures and creeds.
Intellectuals prided themselves on their loyalty to the state and their personal connection to the autocrat. As Marasinova and Whittaker found, Russia's elite supported autocracy as the right form of government for Russia and considered themselves partners with the ruler. As we saw in Chapter 13, they construed imperial succession as a process that required their participation and affirmation, if not constitutional election. In an Enlightenment version of the Muscovite model of boyars as advisors to the tsar, they considered the legitimate ruler one who took their advice into consideration. They felt they had a personal relationship with the ruler as loyal servants. Over the century addresses to the ruler moved from high- toned baroque prose in odes by Trediakovskii and others to "humorous" and personal prose that Gavrila Derzhavin essayed in his poems of praise to Catherine in his "Felitsa" series. Catherine welcomed such an image of herself as personal patron and guardian. Perhaps the most poignant indication of this personal attitude between subject and ruler are the letters addressed personally to Tsar Nicholas I by some of the noble officers involved in the Decembrist Revolution in 1825, appealing to him personally as if he would empathize with their passionate convictions. A. Bestuzhev wrote: "Convinced that You, Sovereign, love the truth... I shall speak in full frankness ...for the duty of a loyal subject is to tell his Monarch the truth." His naive faith in the tsar's empathy did not save him from exile to the Caucasus.
Russia's intellectuals addressed social and political issues in terms of personal passions to be tamed, rather than institutions and laws to be changed. Plays praised good rulers for their judgment and magnanimity and allegorically skewered bad rulers as flawed individuals, leaving the institution of monarchy unchallenged. Judicial corruption was depicted as the moral fault of individual judges, not of the judicial system. Serf owners were praised for kindness and enlightened patriarchy, while the institution of serfdom was hardly ever questioned. Patriarchy within families was to be softened by love and filial duty. A particular theme of satirical literature, as in comic plays by Denis Fonvizin, for example, was rejection of Francophilia, construed as excessive luxury and moral weakness, and pride in Russian identity, construed as duty, service, and order. Modern nationalism was still in the future.
Eighteenth-century intellectuals were conscious that they were living in a "new" era that required conscious self-fashioning, and their versions of familiar Enlightenment genres reflect Russian specificity. Those who had turned to the lives of country gentlemen, including P. B. Sheremetev and Vasilii Tatishchev, penned handbooks for estate management, couched in terms of military discipline and moral control rather than improvement of crops, tools, and agrarian techniques. Diaries, from Catherine Dashkova's revealing memoir to Nikolai Karamzin's epistolary account of his travels in Europe, criticize the disorder and strife they perceive in Europe. Anna Labzina's memoir of her youth as a provincial noblewoman in the 1790s, written a generation later under influence of her husband's Masonic circle, depicts her as deeply pious, independent minded, and enlightened; Sergei Aksakov, in his family chronicle, provided the perspective of a satisfied country gentleman. Comic theater skewered abusive serf owners, foppish youth, corrupt officials, and ignorance in all forms. Historical works in all genres— Lomonosov's unfinished ode to Peter the Great (1760), Sumarokov's historical tragedies, Iakov Kniazhnin's Rosslav (1783) and Vadim of Novgorod (1793), Mikhail Kheraskov's Rossiada (1779)—used Russian history to build a national myth and allegorically to explore leadership and government.
Through the 1780s Russia's intellectual life was critical and lively. The theater in particular became, according to Wirtschafter, a forum in which "Russians selfconsciously imagined themselves as members of a social collective." The same was happening across Europe: in the revolutionary atmosphere of 1788-92 in Poland, for example, performances of Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz's Return of the Deputy in the provinces spread fervor for opposition. In Russia, theater did not inspire direct political discussion as much as moralistic paths to self-fashioning. In St. Petersburg theatrical performances occurred in the private theaters, noble homes, and imperial palaces. Empress Elizabeth sponsored a theater and opera troupe that found a resplendent home in Catherine II's beautiful Hermitage Theater (completed 1787). In Moscow the Great Stone Theater (1783) had a capacity of over a thousand. Theaters in major provincial cities in European Russia—Iaroslavl', Kaluga, Vologda, Tambov, Riazan', Tambov, even Irkutsk—and in noble estates (an estimated 155 between the 1760s and mid-nineteenth century) became focal points for provincial sociability. Intellectual life in the provinces also flourished in salons, clubs, and reading circles; in the last quarter ofthe century provincial presses in European Russia published the same range of materials as was popular in the capitals, with belles-lettres leading the way, followed by religion, history, geography, and philosophy.
Other institutions also engaged the literary elite. Masonic lodges served as centers of sociability and political discussion for foreigners and Russians alike, as did clubs, such as the English Club, founded in St. Petersburg in 1770 with a membership of Russians, English, nobles, professionals, and merchants. The government sponsored the Free Economic Society, where political discussion was more muted. As Colum Leckey shows, when the Society (under direct pressure from Catherine II) ran a competition in 1768 for proposals of reform in the peasant economy, the vast majority of entrants and eventual winner were foreign, and argued against serfdom on moral as well as economic grounds. But the majority of members of the Society—Russian nobility—opposed the winning entry and tried to stop publication. A sanitized version (omitting the most overt calls for abolition) was published with the Empress's urging. Only one Russian submission, by Aleksei Polenov, argued against serfdom (on the grounds of natural law) and proposed a gradual and voluntary emancipation of serfs through training and establishing of village welfare institutions. Polenov's empathy for serfs ran against the grain of noble attitudes; most regarded peasants as crude and in need of their benevolent, patrimonial care. Only under the influence ofsentimentalism in the very end ofthe century, exemplified by Alexander Radishchev's cri de coeur against serfdom of 1790, did an alternative vision ofpeasants begin to be expressed. Significantly, after the strident debate in the Free Economic Society over publications touching on serfdom, the Society abjured political themes, for the next century publishing in its Trudy only practical, technical studies of agrarian and economic improvement.