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 reconcili-
ation 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 asflawed 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
Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life 443