The Icon and the Axe

Practically speaking, the philosophy of Schelling had a double effect in Russia. On the one hand many aristocrats rediscovered through philosophy something they had ceased to find in religion: assurance that there was an ideal, unifying purpose to life and history. In that sense Schelling's philosophy was one of reassurance and consolation, tending to encourage social and political conservatism. Thus, it is not surprising that a reactionary writer like Pogodin should try to enlist Schelling's aid in formulating the ideology of "official nationalism"; or that a future radical like Belinsky should find himself reconciled to reality and writing odes to tsardom under the impact of Schelling (and later, of Hegel) in the 1830's.

At the same time, Schelling's philosophy was the starting point for revolutionary thought in Russia. Under Schelling's influence the greatest biologist of Nicholaevan Russia, Karl von Baer, developed an idealistic theory of purposeful evolution which was to influence subsequent radical thinkers like Kropotkin and Mikhailovsky. More important, however, was the intoxicating effect Schelling's ideas produced on large numbers of thinkers who never acquired more than a confused third-hand knowledge of them. Frustration was drowned in philosophy as men saw themselves promised cosmic redemption, without being tied down to any predetermined scheme of how it would take place. Schelling encouraged men to think that profound changes might be forthcoming from the process of becoming, which was the essence of life itself. The belief grew that the previous generation's search for hidden keys to the universe, far from being chimerical, was merely immature and unrefined. The search for all-encompassing answers continued; and Schelling stands as a transitional figure from the crude occultism of Boehme and Eckartshausen to the ideological systems of Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Marx.

The Meaning of History

The most widely debated of all the "cursed questions" during Nicholas' reign was the meaning of history. In the wake of the Napoleonic war, Russians were more than ever anxious to know their place in history. The anti-Enlightenment had insisted that irregular, traditional patterns in history had meanings of their own; and Russians were not less determined to find out what these patterns were than romantic thinkers elsewhere. Their theology had been historically oriented, and their flight to philosophy led them naturally on to the philosophy of history.

The development in the romantic age of a broad, philosophical interest in history was to some extent the work of Baltic Germans who had been stimulated by contact with the Slavic world. Herder's broodings in Riga helped crystallize his idea that truth lay within history rather than beyond it; and that each culture was destined to grow and flower in its own way in the garden of humanity. Schlozer's long years of teaching and study in Uppsala and St. Petersburg helped him formulate his original plan for a "universal history." He pioneered in the use of Old Russian manuscripts for historical purposes, challenging the "Norman school" of Russian history and exciting his many Russian students at Gottingen with the idea that Russia had a unique role to play in the next stage of history. Throughout the Germanophile reign of Nicholas I, Baltic German writers continued to play a leading role in investing the distinctive popular institutions of Russia with a romantic aura of "higher truth": Haxthausen in his writings about the peasant commune (obshchina) and Hilferding in his "discovery" of the oral epics (byliny) of the Russian north.27

Meanwhile, the Russian interest in history grew rapidly. In 1804, the Society of History and Russian Antiquities was founded under the president of Moscow University. The defeat of Napoleon and the reconstruction of Moscow created a broad, popular interest in history, and Nicholas I contributed to it by encouraging the activities of a large number of patriotic lecturers and historians: Ustrialov, Pogodin, and others.28 Between Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1825) and Glinka's Life for the Tsar (1836), historical plays and operas dominated the Russian stage. Even in the underdeveloped cultural area of painting there was an abortive tendency toward monumental, patriotic canvases: climaxing in Briullov's "Fall of Pskov" and in his unfulfilled commission of the late thirties to provide Russian historical frescoes for the Winter Palace.20 Historical novels dominated the literary scene, as vulgar imitators of Walter Scott appeared even in the provinces.

M. Zagoskin started the long line of chauvinistic "Russians-and-Poles" novels with his Yury Miloslavsky of 1829, and his subsequent patriotic novels and plays enjoyed a spectacular vogue during the thirties. One scholar has counted 150 long poems on historical themes in the style of Byron and Pushkin written in Russia between 1834 and i848.so