Literary works ofCatherine's time include M. M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption ofMorals in Russia, ed. and trans. A. Lentin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Weiner, ed. Roderick Page Thaler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia: Oh, These Times! And The Siberian Shaman, ed. and trans. Lurana Donnels O'Malley (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998); Dramatic Works ofD. I. Fonvizin, ed. and trans. Marvin Kantor (Bern: H. Lang, 1974). Memoirs by late eighteenth-century Russian nobles: The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, ed. Kyril FitzLyon and Jehanne M. Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Gary Marker and Rachel May, ed. and trans., Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1758—1821 (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); Nikolai Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller, ed. and trans. Andrew Kahn (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003).
On eighteenth-century Russian literature: Irina Reyfman, Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the "New"Russian Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Amanda Ewington, A Voltaire for Russia: A.P. Sumarokov's Journey from Poet-Critic to Russian Philosophe (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010); V. Iu. Proskurina, Creating the Empress: Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011); Luba Golburt, The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Surveys include Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky, Russian Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2009) and Cambridge History ofRussian Literature, rev. edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pess, 1992).
Conclusion
Constructing and Envisioning Empire
By the end of the eighteenth century Russia's rulers and elite began to exhibit some introspection about identity—Russian identity, imperial identity. This began at the top—Peter I recruited hordes of scholars to classify and categorize his peoples and Catherine II thought and wrote about what the "Russian empire" was. Educated Russians—historians, playwrights, ethnographers, memoirists—also posed the question of how to think about the empire and about being Russian within it.
Early modern Russia did not develop the sort of discourses of "national consciousness" that emerged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, for good reason. In England, France, Italy, and Poland, these arose as monarchies, urban and noble republics, and national markets came into shape, as literacy and education embraced more of society, as vernaculars replaced Latin, as national Churches took shape in the storms of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as expansion across the continent or across oceans introduced Europeans to the world's diversity. From all these points of view European writers began to develop what historians call national consciousness, not nationalism but an important step towards it. In Russia none of these circumstances prevailed to such a degree, neither the shock of Reformation nor the stimulation of expanding literacy and printing, economic prosperity, social mobility, and national monarchies, nor the confrontation with an exotic Other that nurtured feelings of cultural and religious superiority.
Russia's expansion did not take it into lands of the unknown, like Columbus's three ships or Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation. East Slavs had lived side by side with peoples of different religions, ethnicities, and cultures since before the rise of the grand principality of Moscow; new trade routes, new resources, new people to subjugate were not separated by oceans but were contiguous; cross-cultural contact was constant. When Russians took control, they did so by controlling people: exchanging gifts, co-opting elites, hiring translators and fortress guards, taking hostages, bringing people to oath taking, collecting furs or other taxes. Accordingly, Russians did not express the sense of "wonder" and "discovery" of strange new peoples that Europeans encountering the New World felt. Despite its expansion in the sixteenth century, Russia did not develop a discourse of Russian- ness against foreigners or against its own non-Russian subjects. Certainly individual sources can be found condemning Siberian natives as barbaric, or Muslim subjects as infidels, but these were generally tropes of monastic history writing. Through the Muscovite period there was no conscious or coherent ideology of Russian national superiority or even great difference from other ethnic groups. Muscovite tsars, as Valerie Kivelson showed, reveled in the diversity of their many lands, proof of their power.
Peter I's cultural Europeanization of his elite prompted a complex process across the eighteenth century of assessing what it meant to be Russian and how Russians should relate to the West on the one hand and to their subject peoples on the other. As Yuri Slezkine, Elena Vishlenkova, Ricarda Vulpius, and many others have explored, Russian writers took pains to identify Russia with the Enlightened "civilization" of Europe. In "advice literature" from mid-century through Catherine II's time—polemics in journals, in plays, histories, panegyrics, and odes—Russians developed a confidence that their culture was equal to that of Europe, even while writers of the French Enlightenment were coming to regard Russia and its empire as "uncivilized," as Larry Wolff has chronicled.
As for its subject peoples, Russian authors and statesmen applied these concepts in the eighteenth century. As we have seen, the "well-ordered police state" model encouraged Peter and his men to assess the state's resources, and he and his successors began a century of scientific expeditions to map and collect. Displaying the dress, baskets, ritual artefacts, and tools of native peoples of the empire, as Peter did in collections still on display in St Petersburg's Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography alongside his Kunstkammer collection of natural history marvels, demonstrated the breadth of the tsar's power. Self-consciously comparing their empires with that of the Spanish in the New World and the Dutch in the Pacific, or looking with appreciation to the British suppression of the Celtic peoples, Russian writers declared that the tsar's non-Christian subjects not only needed the improvement of morals and discipline that Russian civilization would bring, but were capable of assimilating it. Significantly, they did not dismiss the empire's peoples as barbarian; they promoted a project of civilizing that raised standards of culture without condemning ethnicities per se. Even when in the nineteenth century Russians begin to develop a more nationalistic discourse of Russian superiority, they never developed the "racist thinking" so virulent in nineteenth-century Europe. Vulpius and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye argue that Russians themselves felt vulnerable in the category of civilization: they lacked some of its key attributes in contemporary Europe, after all, such as civil equality and political pluralism. So the degree to which they bring their "Asian" peoples to civilization affirmed their own Enlightenment.
Eighteenth-century attitudes towards the subject peoples were not perceived as "Russification" but as Enlightenment with a capital E, more integrative than hierarchical. As Vulpius cogently puts it, "This kind of civilizing mission, aiming at the full integration of the newly incorporated peoples, meant a deliberate fusion of the Russian core with the territory of the whole empire." Such an imperial approach maintained in some way age-old traditions of tolerance of diversity; cameralist impulses or even Enlightenment universalism prompted in the first half of the eighteenth century brutal campaigns of forcing non-Christians, particularly animists, to accept Orthodoxy, but by the end of the century Russian "imperial" thinking was consciously more inclusive.